Trouble Trusting Others in Adults: Causes, Symptoms, and Support

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re working with someone who struggles deeply with trust. To help them, you’d first need to understand what’s fuelling this mistrust, but this is rarely straightforward. There’s no single event that always leads to trust issues. 

For example, two people can live through the same experience and walk away with completely different responses. One child may grow up after feeling abandoned and learn to distance themselves emotionally, while another may appear unaffected, carrying on as if nothing happened.³ Sometimes, a person might not even recognize an event as harmful at all, yet still carry its weight subconsciously into later life.⁴

Uncovering the roots of trust issues can take time and patience. There’s often a lifetime of experiences shaping how a person trusts or, in this case, mistrusts. Because of this, therapists explore many different areas of a person’s life to understand where the patterns began and what continues to keep them alive.

The following are some of the potential causes of mistrust that therapists often consider.

Relationship Betrayal Trauma

Betrayal in a relationship can cause many rippling effects, with research describing infidelity specifically as a traumatic event that disrupts a sense of emotional safety. It can create what’s known as an “attachment injury,”⁵ a deep rupture in the belief that love is secure and dependable. Therefore, after betrayal, many people struggle to trust future partners and may develop a persistent fear of abandonment.⁵

The same review highlights how betrayal trauma can make emotional regulation difficult, leaving the person highly alert to rejection and expecting betrayal even in safe relationships.⁵ Here, we can see just how difficult it can be to overcome betrayal trauma.

Childhood Maltreatment

A 2025 study that considered 1,850 adults found a consistent connection between childhood maltreatment and insecure attachment styles in adulthood.⁶ Emotional neglect, psychological mistreatment, and physical or sexual abuse were all linked to difficulties forming lasting bonds later in life.⁶

When the neglect or abuse happens repeatedly, it teaches a child that care is unpredictable and that people who should protect them might also cause harm. This uncertainty can evolve into a deep mistrust of others.⁶ As these children grow up, their early coping mechanisms could morph into anxious, avoidant, or fearful-avoidant attachment styles, shaping how they relate to partners and friends in adulthood.⁶

Low Self-Esteem

A 2024 cross-sectional study of 1,090 undergraduates explored how meaning in life, self-esteem, and interpersonal trust interact.⁷ The researchers found that self-esteem and trust share a close connection: The way a person sees themselves directly shapes how they view others. When self-esteem is positive, people tend to interpret others’ actions more kindly and feel safer forming connections.⁷

On the other hand, low self-esteem can distort these perceptions, making others seem untrustworthy or unpredictable. When this mindset takes hold, it could feed a total lack of trust in others.⁷

Mental Health Issues

The following mental health conditions have also been connected to trust issues in adults:

Borderline Personality Disorder 

A systematic review that focused on trust processes in BPD found that people with the disorder may be more likely to view others as untrustworthy. They might even judge faces as less trustworthy than control participants, showing that preconceptions play a part in a lack of trust.⁸ 

Even in experimental trust-game tasks, they were more likely to break cooperation and struggled to repair ruptures once trust was lost.⁸ These patterns could suggest that BPD involves behaviors that gradually weaken trust.

Social Anxiety Disorder 

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) can make trusting others feel unsafe, often because of how people read social cues. Research shows that those with higher social anxiety tend to see faces as less trustworthy, which makes forming connections harder.⁹ A long-term study also found that teens with lower trust in others were more likely to experience anxiety in early adulthood. This may show how mistrust and anxiety can build on each other as life moves forward.¹⁰

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

A review of interpersonal factors in PTSD found that survivors of trauma may become very mistrustful of others as their condition worsens.¹¹ Intimacy may also become harder to maintain, and even ordinary relationships can start to feel unpredictable, largely down to the lack of trust.¹¹

Further, those with pre-existing issues, such as insecure attachment or childhood abuse, who also experienced trauma appear more prone to developing these interpersonal wounds, as the trauma deepens pre-existing difficulties with trust.