What Happens When Someone You Love Breaks Your Trust

When someone breaks your trust, it isn’t easy to handle the fallout. Even though you want things to remain the same, one little mistake can change your entire relationship. It can make it hard to be around this person, to talk to this person, to believe this person. Here are a few things that happen when someone you thought had your back ends up breaking your trust:

Any progress you’ve made disappears.

It doesn’t matter how much you trusted them in the past, because all of that trust goes out the window the second you realize they’ve been lying to you. It doesn’t matter if they swear they only lied about this one thing because you have no idea if that’s true. After all, if they fooled you once, what’s stopping them from fooling you again? You start wondering what else they’ve been lying to you about, what other secrets they’ve been hiding. You start rethinking your entire relationship. And you start doubting every word that comes out of their mouth.

You feel like a complete idiot.

You feel like you should have seen this coming, like you should have picked up on the signals. Even though the fact that you trusted this person is a good thing that shows how open you are to love, in the moment, you’ll hate yourself for being so trusting. You’ll wish that you kept your guard higher. You’ll be annoyed with yourself as well as this other person because you feel like they shouldn’t have been able to get this past you. You never want love to make you stupid – so you feel like you failed yourself.

You need time and space.

You aren’t going to be able to look at this person the same way for a long time. Maybe forever. Sometimes, having your trust broken spells the end of the relationship. But either way, it’s impossible to go back to the way things were before. It’s impossible to trust them the way you did in the past because they have shown they’re capable of (and willing) to hurt you. It doesn’t matter if they feel guilty or have sworn to make it up to you because what’s done is done. They can’t change the past. They can’t make you forget that they can’t actually be trusted. They don’t actually have your best interest at heart.

You might fall back into bad habits.

You don’t want to be a cynic, but it’s hard to remain optimistic after someone you love breaks your trust. It’s hard to allow yourself to stay vulnerable and drop your guard when you’re still healing from this heartbreak. Your instinct is to protect yourself, to put distance between yourself and everyone else so they don’t have the potential to hurt you. Even though you might want to love openly and fearlessly, you’re probably going to be hesitant for a while. You’re probably going to have trouble believing any kind words you hear because there’s always a chance you’re getting played.