Re-learning Trust as Someone With C-PTSD


Trigger Warning: Discussing C-PTSD & trauma triggers from a firsthand perspective.

Trust is such an important facet of any healthy relationship – especially in relationships that practice Ethical Non-Monogamy (ENM). As I further my own practice in cultivating long-term partnerships while simultaneously retaining Relationship Anarchy ideals, I regularly come back to the concept of trust and how it fits in to various aspects of authentic relating.

I find one of the hardest parts about building and maintaining healthy, lasting relationships is my hypervigilance around betrayal. Throughout my life I experienced “betrayal trauma,” which is specific trauma that is caused by another person, typically by someone we are close to. For me, it was a combination of growing up learning that trusting others was dangerous, and experiences in adulthood I had with deception and betrayal in close, intimate relationships.

These past traumas find their way into my system at various moments in my core partnership, sometimes triggered by an external circumstance, but often they show up unannounced, unwelcomed, and without context.

For me, this makes it hard to uphold the Relationship Anarchy Manifesto’s principle: “Trust is Better.”

What is Trust?

I decided to research how trauma affects one’s ability to trust, and provide strategies for navigating healing from relational trauma, learning to trust again, and re-building skills to branch trust outward.

I started by examining the definition of “trust,” and looked at some studies that focused on the relationship between one’s level of betrayal trauma and one’s ability to trust.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), trust can be defined as:

            “(n) reliance on or confidence in the dependability of someone or something.”

APA defines trust further in a relational context as:

            “…the confidence that a person or group of people has in the reliability of another person or group; specifically, it is the degree to which each party feels they can depend on the other party to do what they say they will do...”

I find it important to acknowledge that by this definition, trust does not refer to a person’s inherent goodness, but refers to the consistency of a person’s behavior patterns. For me, taking ethics out of the equation and focusing on behavior helps me navigate my own patterns and issues with trusting without a lot of self-judgment.

When Trust is Damaged

In a 2013 study at the University of Oregon, Gobin & Freyd examined how betrayal trauma might impact a person’s ability to trust in a “Trust Game” environment. In the Trust Game, participants were asked to transfer money to another person, in exchange for getting the same amount of money back. The recipient was actually a computer system which was programmed to return $1 regardless of the amount received. The study used self-report survey measures to gauge the participants’ general and relational trust, and the Trust Game task measured differences in choices between those with and without betrayal trauma.

The study found that the more severe the betrayal trauma was, the less likely a person was to report high measures of general or relational trust. The researchers were surprised to find that participants with high betrayal trauma were no less likely to participate in the Trust Game than the participants with low betrayal trauma.

Another 2018 study examined the relationship between trust and participants with PTSD, using a similar “Trust Game” set up. In this study, Bell et al. noticed that the participants who suffered from PTSD made lower-risk choices than the control group, but still made effort to participate, nonetheless.

These studies reflect aspects of my own experience as a person living with C-PTSD. I struggle to trust deeply, but my desire to try and build trust is also strong.

PTSD and Interpersonal Trauma

Betrayal Trauma Theory (BTT), first coined by Jennifer Freyd in 1994, states that those who suffer from betrayal trauma are likely to dissociate from the trauma in order to preserve the relationship, usually for survival purposes. When betrayal trauma happens in childhood, usually with a caregiver, this dissociation is likely to affect adulthood relationship choices. Those with more severe childhood betrayal trauma are more likely to struggle with recognizing trustworthiness or -unworthiness in others. This causes the survivor to experience more trauma in adulthood.

As someone who lives with C-PTSD, trust is one of the hardest things for me to navigate. In earlier years, I struggled with trusting the right people. My sense of “safe” and “unsafe” were so skewed by years of adapting to dangerous environments that I continued choosing friends and partners who reflected this instability. This only led to more traumatic experiences.

When I finally decided to take my healing seriously, I allowed myself to recognize that I could not trust myself when it came to knowing who was healthy or not. I dedicated time to reflect on past friendships and relationships to find threads and signals I could have recognized earlier in getting to know them. I started paying attention to how my body reacted around certain cues and situations.

I came to the revelation that more times than not, my body knew the right choice about someone right away. It was my mind that stopped trusting my intuition. When I started intentionally listening to my gut reactions, I noticed that I started making better choices in friends and beloveds. Seeing this change in my community inspired me to feel safe enough to begin exploring deeper levels of trust with others again.

Rebuilding Trust

After “recalibrating my sensors,” I began developing loving, healthy relationships with trustworthy people. During this time, I discovered Relationship Anarchy and began internalizing it as a core part of my relating philosophy.

I started this practice with a Solo-Poly structure because I needed to focus on myself as “primary.” Even though I am now cohabiting with a partner, I still believe that I am my own first priority. Taking on this perspective, and living alone at the time, helped me learn how to trust and confide in myself, first.

This went well for a while, and I felt strong and secure in my ability to trust and love until I began cohabiting with my core partner. For me, cohabitation is a huge source of trauma triggers as my most traumatic events happened with people I lived with.

Although my core partner is an amazing and trustworthy person, my nervous system activated at the slightest things. This is one reason we have taken a “time out” on outer relationships, to stabilize and ground together without extra distraction or activation.

This experience is teaching me that trust has many layers. I can completely trust my partner to be transparent with me, to treat me with respect and love, however, I still struggle to fully trust that my home is stable and safe, now that I’m not in full control of that environment.

So, this is where my next area of trust focus is. Again, I am starting with myself – feeling safe in my space within the home, feeling safe within myself in our shared spaces, and feeling that this is *my* home, too. Only after fortifying myself, do I then lean into trust exercises about my partner.

Helpful Strategies to Re-learn Trust

Something I’m learning as I continue to deepen with my core partner is that rebuilding trust skills takes a lot of time and work. I must teach my nerves that I’m safe in my new home. Safety outside of aloneness is an unfamiliar sensation for me, so it takes constant reminding for myself, a lot of transparency, and co-regulation with my core partner.

Rebuilding trust after betrayal trauma requires community and safe space. Here is a list of things that help me during this process:

  • Guided Meditation – Tara Brach

  • Taking time to learn someone’s patterns (instead of decided to fully give or deny trust immediately)

  • Learning how to recognize and trust my intuition (for me, it’s a body feeling)

  • Learning how to reflect on where I have been right and wrong in trust-giving in the past WITHOUT JUDGMENT

  • Healthy co-regulation with my core partner and/or trusted friends/beloveds

  • Safe space to be transparent about feelings that are coming up for me in a moment

    • Ex: my bedroom is a safe space

  • Seeing a therapist who specializes in PTSD/C-PTSD treatment

    • For me, EMDR therapy specifically

  • “Quieting” the environment by taking away extra factors that cause triggering

  • Developing solo rituals that I enjoy to calm my nerves

    • Ex: taking a bath, drinking tea & reading a good book, etc.

  • Allowing my process to take its time (not rushing things)

Healthy co-regulation with my core partner or trusted friends helps me learn skills to internalize into self-regulation during moments of activation. Sometimes I find it helpful to think of myself as a friend or client that I’m giving advice to.

Hopefully some of these strategies and insights are helpful for you, or someone you love. Sending wishes to you all!

— written by Amelia Lichtenberg