Like the hair on your head, you only tend to notice trust when it’s gone. But when it’s gone, it’s really gone.

Which makes being able to trust again a critical step on the road after divorce. Losing that ability, that willingness to trust makes everything incredibly difficult.

How do you build your new life if you can’t find anybody else to trust?

Simply, you can’t.

I mean, you can, but it’s incredibly difficult and isolating and there’s no guaranteed success down that path. It’s also, from what I’ve seen, a corrosive and consuming path. A life without trust is a lonely, unhappy life.

But losing that ability to trust is also a completely natural part of many relationship breakdowns.

Without getting into the specifics around why some relationships breakdown, I’m sure you can easily think of three or four acute problems that could poison trust and destroy a relationship.

And I think it’s worth mourning that loss.

Having people you can rely on, feeling the empathy another feels for you, feeling safe – these are tremendously important parts of life. Losing that – or having someone rip that away – is awful.

So it’s important to remember that rebuilding that trust – if you choose to (and I encourage you to) – is going to take time and it’s going to take effort. 

And I’ll leave the ‘how’ to the qualified experts helping as counselors, therapists and psychologists.

But as you’re coming out of a relationship breakdown and looking to the future, I encourage you to work on rebuilding that ability to trust.

It’ll take time, and it won’t be easy, and it should be done carefully, but it’s an essential step in rebuilding your life after a divorce.