"Trust issues" is one of those phrases that sounds like a verdict and is actually three different things. Some people cannot extend trust in the first place. Some extend it and then watch it like a hawk. Some trust everyone fine and just never let anyone close enough to matter. They feel the same from inside — guarded — and they need different things.
What is usually going on
You were burned, and the system rebuilt itself higher. Someone specific did something specific, and the part of you that noticed too late has been reconfigured to notice sooner. Now it notices things that are not there. This is the most common shape, it has a date attached, and it responds to being named: this is about them, not about the person in front of me.
You watch. Trust is extended, technically, but it is monitored — the phone, the story that did not quite match, the tone. The watching is exhausting, for you and for the person being watched, who can feel it even when nothing is said. This is vigilance, and it is a separate dial from whether you trust people at all.
You are fine at a distance and closed up close. You trust colleagues, friends, strangers on trains. What you do not do is let anyone see the unmanaged version of you, and you call that privacy. It is the quietest form of a trust issue and the one people least recognise in themselves, because nothing visibly goes wrong. Nothing gets in, either.
Someone is actually untrustworthy and you are being told it is you. Occasionally the guardedness is correct. If the person you are supposed to trust has a pattern — not a moment, a pattern — of things not adding up, the issue is not yours.
What to do tonight
- Find the date. When did the guardedness start? If it has a start, it has a cause, and the cause was probably not the person you are guarding against now.
- Pick the smallest possible act of trust and do it once. Tell one person one true thing you would normally handle alone. Not a crisis — a Tuesday-sized thing. See what happens.
- If you watch, stop watching for one week — not as trust, as an experiment. Notice what the watching was doing for you. Usually it was doing nothing except keeping you tired.
What it depends on
Which of the three dials is turned up decides what helps. A person who cannot extend trust needs a different practice from one who extends it and then monitors, and both are different from the person who trusts everyone and lets nobody in. Most people are certain they know which one they are. Most are wrong about at least one dial.