Trust Issues: Where They Come From and How EMDR Helps

Trust issues are a learned pattern, not a flaw: a nervous system braced for betrayal because something, often a childhood caregiver or a past partner, once taught it to expect betrayal. Research links early relational wounds to how much adults trust others later. You can safely settle today’s triggers with bilateral stimulation; deeper wounds are safer with a trained therapist.

Maybe it shows up as rereading a text three times, hunting for a hidden meaning that probably isn’t there. Maybe it’s quieter than that: someone is doing everything right, and some part of you is still waiting for the moment it falls apart.

You’ve probably tried to just decide to trust more. It rarely sticks, because trust was never really a decision in the first place. It’s closer to a prediction your nervous system makes automatically, based on evidence it collected a long time ago, sometimes before you have any clear memory of collecting it.

This page looks at what trust issues actually are, where the pattern usually comes from, and what research on attachment, betrayal, and EMDR actually shows. Then it walks through a careful, go-slow bilateral-stimulation practice for the moments distrust spikes, and honest guidance on when this calls for more support than a self-guided practice can give.

What exactly are “trust issues”?

“Trust issues” isn’t a clinical term, and it won’t appear as a diagnosis on any chart. Psychologist Julian Rotter, who built the first widely used measure of the concept, defined interpersonal trust plainly in his 1967 Journal of Personality scale: a generalized expectation that another person’s word can be relied on. He treated trust as something learnable and measurable, not a fixed personality trait you either have or don’t.

That framing matters. If trust is a learned expectation, a low one was learned somewhere too, usually for a real reason. “Trust issues” describes a spectrum: mild wariness after one disappointing friendship on one end, a pervasive sense that nobody is safe to depend on at the other. Most people land somewhere in between, for reasons that made complete sense at the time they formed.

It’s also worth separating this from healthy discernment. Being slow to trust someone who has actually given you reasons for caution isn’t a wound to fix; it’s your judgment working correctly. This page is about the pattern that persists past the evidence, when caution shows up even with people who have consistently earned something different.

Where do trust issues usually come from?

Three overlapping roots tend to show up, both in the research and in people’s actual histories.

A caregiver who couldn’t be relied on. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory describes what happens when the people a child depends on for survival, most often a parent, violate that dependency through abuse, neglect, or chronic unpredictability. Freyd’s core insight was that betrayal by someone you need gets processed differently than harm from a stranger: your mind has a stake in staying attached to a caregiver it can’t survive without, even when that same caregiver is the source of harm. Our childhood trauma page goes deeper into why this specific root calls for a trained therapist’s pacing.

An insecure attachment style formed early. A landmark 1998 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that securely attached adults felt more trust toward their partners than people with anxious or avoidant attachment styles. They also recalled more positive trust-related memories and coped with trust violations more constructively. A much larger 2022 meta-analysis in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, pooling 53 studies and more than 45,000 people, confirmed the link and found avoidant attachment was more strongly tied to lower interpersonal trust than anxious attachment specifically. Our attachment wounds page covers this broader pattern in more depth.

A specific betrayal later in life. Infidelity, a friend’s lie, a boss who took credit for your work: any of these can install the pattern on its own, even after a securely attached start. A 2023 study in Frontiers in Psychology looked at how adult attachment style, a parent’s divorce, and a past broken relationship relate to trust in a current relationship. It found that anxious attachment eroded trust mainly indirectly, by feeding negative beliefs about relationships, while avoidant attachment had a more direct effect on trust itself. If a specific betrayal is what brought you here, our pages on betrayal and infidelity and emotional abuse recovery go deeper into those particular wounds.

These roots aren’t mutually exclusive, and they compound. A wary start in childhood can make one adult betrayal land much harder than it otherwise would, which is part of why the same event can flatten one person and barely register for another.

Why is it so hard to just decide to trust someone?

Because the belief isn’t sitting in the part of your mind that makes decisions. EMDR’s Adaptive Information Processing model holds that distressing experiences can get stored with their original beliefs still attached: “people always leave,” “everyone lies eventually,” “I’ll get hurt if I let my guard down.” Those beliefs can stay largely intact for years, still shaping reactions in the present, even with people who’ve never actually given you a reason for them.

There’s a striking, literal demonstration of this. A 2019 study in Psychological Medicine had 32 people with PTSD from interpersonal trauma, alongside 22 people without it, play a multi-round “trust game”: a simple exercise where, each round, you decide how much of a small stake to hand over to a partner who can return it fairly or keep it. People with interpersonal-trauma PTSD extended measurably less trust, even to partners who had already played fairly, and the gap widened the more severe their trauma was. The researchers suggested that trust itself, not just symptoms, could be a specific target for future treatment.

Trust, in other words, isn’t just a belief you hold. It’s a behavior your nervous system recalibrates after a real breach, and it does so in a measurable, testable way.

This connects to your window of tolerance, the zone where you can feel emotion without being overwhelmed by it. A trust-related trigger, like a partner being vague about their evening, can narrow that window fast, because your nervous system is scanning for the same warning signs it learned to watch for once, whether or not they’re actually present now. That scanning is a form of hypervigilance: a nervous system staying on alert for a threat that, this time, may not be there.

How common are trust issues, really?

More common than they probably feel in the moment, at every level researchers measure.

At the broadest level, generalized trust in other people is close to a coin flip in the United States right now. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 9,544 U.S. adults found 55% said most people can be trusted, while 44% said they can’t. That’s trust in strangers and society broadly, a wider construct than the relational trust this page focuses on, but it’s a useful reminder that struggling to extend trust by default isn’t rare or strange.

Closer to the relational roots described above, a large share of adults carry at least one of the early experiences linked to adult trust difficulty. A CDC analysis covering 2011 to 2020 found 63.9% of U.S. adults reported at least one adverse childhood experience, like abuse, neglect, or an unstable household, and 17.3% reported four or more. Not everyone with a difficult childhood develops trust issues, and not everyone with trust issues had one, but the overlap between the two is well documented.

Whatever combination of roots brought you here, you’re describing something well studied and common, not a rare defect in how you’re wired.

What do trust issues look like day to day?

The research explains the mechanism. Here’s how it tends to actually show up in your week.

The stress-test. Picking a small fight, going quiet, or creating distance to see whether someone will stay anyway, a way of chasing proof that words alone don’t seem to provide.

The evidence file. Cataloging small inconsistencies, a changed story, a vague answer, as confirmation, even when any one of them has an innocent explanation on its own.

The wall. Staying vague or guarded about your own inner life, even with people who’ve earned more, on the theory that what people don’t know about you can’t be used against you later.

The pre-emptive exit. Ending things, or pulling back hard, right as a relationship starts to feel real, so you’re the one who leaves instead of the one left.

The over-checker. Needing to verify: a location, a story, a phone left face-up on the table, because “probably fine” doesn’t feel like enough information to relax into.

The good-news skeptic. A flicker of dread when things are actually going well, like waiting for the catch on an offer that seems too straightforward to be real.

None of these are character flaws or signs you’re “too much.” Each one made sense as a response to something, once. The goal isn’t to shame the pattern out of yourself; it’s to give your nervous system enough new, safe evidence that it can update the prediction.

If your version of this looks more like a specific fear that people will leave than a general wariness about being lied to, our fear of abandonment page might fit closer. If it shows up as repeating the same painful relationship shape over and over, our page on toxic relationship patterns picks up that thread.

Where this connects to earlier roots

A vague answer, a canceled plan, a slow reply: each one can land as fresh proof for a belief that was formed long before this particular relationship existed. Settling today’s trigger, one at a time, is genuinely connected to that older root system. You’re working it from the reachable edges inward, not avoiding the deeper material. If your caution traces to a childhood that felt genuinely unpredictable or unsafe, our childhood trauma page goes further into why that root specifically calls for a trained therapist’s pacing.

Does EMDR help with trust issues? What the research shows

Here’s the honest picture, worth stating plainly before anything else: no published trial has tested EMDR for trust issues by that name. The research below comes from closely related populations and from the theory behind the technique. Both are worth knowing about; neither is quite the same as a dedicated trial.

A small trial found real movement in a directly related population. A 2024 randomized controlled trial in Frontiers in Psychiatry compared EMDR with trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy in 19 women survivors of childhood sexual abuse, delivered in small online groups. Both approaches significantly reduced symptoms across most measures, including the interpersonal-sensitivity domain, a cluster of self-consciousness and discomfort in relating to others that sits close to what people describe as trust issues. It’s a genuinely encouraging signal. It’s also 19 people with no dedicated trust measure, which makes it suggestive, not conclusive.

Researchers studying trust directly have proposed it as a treatment target. The trust-game study described earlier didn’t test EMDR, but its authors explicitly suggested that a specific focus on cooperative, trusting behavior could become a target for future interventions, precisely because they’d shown trust could be measured and moved. That’s a reasonable direction for bilateral stimulation to head in, not evidence it’s already there.

The theoretical case involves the beliefs the pattern is built on. As described above, EMDR’s Adaptive Information Processing model holds that beliefs like “people always leave” or “I can’t trust anyone” can stay attached to old, unprocessed experiences, still driving reactions in the present. That’s a plausible reason a technique built to help old beliefs update might be relevant here. Plausible isn’t proof, especially for a pattern this specific, but it’s a reason for real hope rather than a substitute for more research.

Put together: if you’re drawn to EMDR for trust issues, there’s a real and growing case for it, alongside an honest gap where a dedicated trial hasn’t been run yet.

Before any protocol: go slow, and know your stop point

Trust-related material sits in a more careful category than ordinary daily stress, so please read this before trying anything below.

Stabilize first. Before working with any trust trigger, spend a minute somewhere calm. Picture a real or imagined calm, safe place, or use simple grounding: feel your feet on the floor, name what’s actually true right now, slow your exhale. Don’t start already activated.

Pick one small, recent moment, not the whole pattern. Work with a specific trigger, like today’s vague answer, not “every person who’s ever lied to me.” One narrow target at a time is safer, and more workable, than trying to process a lifetime of broken trust in one sitting.

Know your stop point. If your distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and doesn’t settle back down, stop. Use grounding, and consider working with a professional rather than pushing further alone.

A bilateral-stimulation practice for a present-day trust trigger

With that preparation in place, here’s a practice for the everyday version of the pattern: the spike of suspicion after a vague answer, or the urge to test someone instead of asking them directly.

• Name the trigger. What actually happened? “They gave a short answer about their evening,” not “they’re definitely hiding something.”
• Rate the distress. On a 0–10 scale, how activated do you feel right now.
• Bring it lightly to mind. The moment, the feeling in your body, the thought that came with it. Touch it; don’t dive into the worst-case story.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes smoothly left and right for 20 to 30 seconds, alternate tapping your knees left-right, or use an app with alternating tones.
• Pause and notice. Stop. Breathe. Notice whatever shifted, without forcing anything.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking your distress number between each one.
• Re-rate, and close with something steadying. A grounding phrase, a slower breath, or one piece of real evidence about this specific person, not people in general.

If the practice pulls up an older memory instead of staying with today’s trigger, gently note it and set it aside for a therapist or a smaller, later pass, rather than following it down in the moment.

Where EmEase fits

EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, is a general wellness product built around bilateral stimulation, the core technique used in EMDR therapy. It doesn’t diagnose trust issues or replace the work of a trained therapist, especially where the pattern traces to real childhood harm or a betrayal that’s still unresolved. What it can offer is a private, structured space to practice the technique above on today’s version of the pattern, the suspicion, the urge to test or withdraw, between the moments that call for a person: a partner, a friend, a therapist. If a private practice space for the everyday version of this sounds useful, you can start a free trial at app.emease.com.

When this isn’t enough

Please consider working with a licensed therapist, ideally one trained in attachment-focused or EMDR approaches, if:

• Your caution traces to abuse, neglect, or a childhood that felt genuinely unsafe, not just imperfect.
• It’s tangled up with hopelessness, a sense of unreality, or thoughts of harming yourself.
• It colors nearly every relationship you’re in, rather than flaring around specific people or moments.
• During the practice above, your distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle.

Our answer on whether self-guided EMDR is safe goes further into where the self-guided and professional lanes diverge. EMDRIA’s therapist directory lets you search by location for EMDRIA-member clinicians if you want someone trained specifically in EMDR.

If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please treat that as more urgent than anything on this page: visit our crisis resources page or call or text 988 (in the US) to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

The honest bottom line

Trust issues are common, well studied, and not a character flaw. Roughly two in three U.S. adults carry at least one early experience linked to adult trust difficulty, and even broad, generalized trust in other people is close to a coin flip nationally right now. Attachment research and betrayal trauma theory both point to real, specific roots, and a large meta-analysis confirms the link between insecure attachment and lower interpersonal trust at scale.

EMDR’s evidence for trust issues specifically is early: a small trial in a related population, and researchers elsewhere proposing trust itself as a treatment target, alongside a plausible theoretical mechanism. What you can do on your own, safely, is settle today’s trigger, the vague answer, the urge to test, one at a time, going slowly and knowing your stop point. The deeper pattern, especially where it traces to real childhood harm or an unresolved betrayal, is worth bringing to a trained therapist who can hold that work the way the research says it needs to be held.