How To Trust Someone After Being in a Relationship With a Narcissist
Okay, so here’s the thing: after someone’s been in a relationship with a narcissist, the concept of “trusting again” isn’t just emotional—it’s neurological, somatic, and deeply relational.
And if you’re anything like me (a very curious content nerd who’s spent way too many nights diving into trauma recovery rabbit holes), you’ve probably noticed this isn’t talked about enough in the mainstream OR expert spaces.
What I found fascinating is that survivors often don’t struggle with trust in the way we assume—they’re not just scared of others. They’re scared of themselves. One therapist I interviewed said, “They stop trusting their own ability to choose safe people,” which hit me hard.
They’ve been trained to override red flags, and their body confuses anxiety with attraction. Classic trauma bond setup.
Here’s what really stuck with me: trust doesn’t break in the moment someone is betrayed—it breaks in the tiny, repeated moments they gaslight themselves to stay connected.
That distortion doesn’t just go away because the narcissist does.
So in this post, I want to explore how trust gets neurologically rewired by narcissistic abuse—and more importantly, how we can help survivors rebuild it from the body up.
Let’s dig in.
What Narcissistic Abuse Does to the Trust System
Let’s talk about what really happens in the body and brain after prolonged exposure to a narcissistic relationship—because honestly, the damage isn’t just emotional.
It’s structural.
It’s chemical.
It’s patterned deep into the nervous system.
One thing that really stood out to me in my research is how narcissistic abuse reshapes the neurobiology of trust.
We’re not just talking about fear of vulnerability—we’re talking about changes to the brain’s predictive model of human behavior.
This is where things like polyvagal theory, neuroplasticity, and predictive coding get really interesting.
When someone is repeatedly love-bombed, then devalued, then blamed for the entire cycle, the brain starts adapting. The amygdala (already the body’s threat radar) becomes hypersensitized.
The prefrontal cortex, which normally helps with decision-making and self-trust, starts losing its grip under chronic stress. And the ventral vagal system—responsible for social connection and safety cues—can go dormant.
Translation? Survivors don’t just “lose trust.” Their entire body stops recognizing what safety feels like.
They might logically know someone’s kind, but their nervous system stays stuck in “defend or collapse” mode.
Here’s a real example I came across: A woman in her early 30s described how her new, healthy partner would say things like “Take your time” or “I’m here when you’re ready,” and her body would react with panic.
Not because he was dangerous—but because her nervous system had learned that “kindness” was the first step in a cycle of betrayal. Her brain had coded consistency as suspicious.
This is where predictive coding comes into play. The brain isn’t reacting to reality—it’s reacting to probability based on past experience.
So survivors often see red flags where there are none—or worse, miss them when they’re real, because the trauma has warped their internal signal system. Trust becomes less about who the other person is, and more about how safe it is to trust their own perception of that person.
Also—and this one blew my mind—some survivors aren’t scared of being hurt. They’re scared of what happens if they let their guard down and it feels good.
Because that feeling of “closeness” was weaponized by their abuser. This is why so many trauma experts talk about survivors feeling “numb” or “bored” in safe relationships. It’s not apathy—it’s a nervous system that doesn’t recognize healthy attachment as stimulating or safe.
And yet, this is where healing lives: in helping survivors rewire their internal trust system, not just rebuild trust externally. It’s about learning how to feel safety again—viscerally, not just intellectually.
So if we’re guiding someone through this, we can’t just tell them, “Trust takes time.” We have to understand that for many survivors, trust isn’t a timeline—it’s a biological repair process.
Therapeutic Interventions That Actually Work In Repatterning Your Trust
Now that we’ve looked at how narcissistic abuse hijacks the nervous system and rewires a survivor’s internal sense of safety, let’s get into what can actually help.
And I don’t mean the usual advice like “set boundaries” or “learn to love yourself first.” Those are great—but when the body still treats kindness like a threat, we need tools that work from the inside out.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the most powerful (and honestly under-discussed) approaches I came across—ones that help repattern trust not just cognitively, but somatically and relationally.
1. Dyadic Regulation Exercises
Let’s start with something deceptively simple: co-regulation. The idea here is that the nervous system doesn’t just heal in isolation—it rewires through safe, attuned interactions with others.
In practice, this might look like guided eye contact, mirroring breath with a therapist, or using voice tone as an anchor.
These exercises can seem awkward at first, but they help rebuild the ventral vagal connection, which is the foundation for social engagement and trust.
For example, one trauma-informed therapist described sitting across from a client and simply breathing together in silence for 60 seconds. It sounds basic, but over time, the client reported feeling less “hijacked” in real-life conversations. Her body began to associate presence with safety again.
2. Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT)
MBT isn’t new, but it’s especially powerful in the context of narcissistic abuse recovery. Survivors often lose their ability to mentalize—or to understand their own and others’ behaviors in terms of thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
Why does this matter for trust? Because without mentalization, survivors often project past patterns onto present people, assuming harm even when none exists. MBT helps retrain the brain to pause and consider, “What else could be going on here?”—which interrupts the trauma loop of distrust.
It’s also great for repairing empathic overextension (you know, when survivors habitually over-identify with others at their own expense). MBT brings the focus back to self-other differentiation, which is a cornerstone of healthy trust.
3. Attachment-Focused EMDR Modifications
Standard EMDR is already well known, but for survivors of narcissistic abuse, traditional protocols often miss the mark—especially if there was no stable attachment figure in childhood.
That’s where attachment-focused EMDR comes in. It includes resourcing with idealized “nurturing figures”, integrating parts of the self that got frozen in trauma, and repairing the internal attachment map before reprocessing the trauma.
One practitioner shared a case where the client couldn’t access any sense of safety—not even in imagined scenarios. So they spent weeks just building an internal “safe haven” with a fictional protector figure before touching the trauma at all. That work laid the foundation for real-world trust later on.
4. Consent-Based Relational Experiments
I absolutely love this one because it’s so practical. Many survivors equate trust with compliance—they were conditioned to believe that saying “yes” kept them safe, even when it didn’t feel right. So, trust becomes tangled with people-pleasing and fear.
Consent-based relational experiments flip that script. In therapy or group settings, survivors practice saying no, negotiating boundaries, or changing their minds mid-way through an interaction—with zero consequences.
A coach I spoke with described how powerful it was when a client finally said, “I actually don’t want to keep going with this role-play,” and they stopped immediately. The client cried—not out of fear, but from realizing that “no” could be honored without punishment. It was a massive trust milestone.
5. Narrative Reprocessing Through Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS is another favorite of mine because it works on a deep level without pathologizing. Instead of seeing survivors as broken or stuck, it sees them as having parts—some wounded, some protective, all trying to help in their own way.
Here’s where it gets juicy for trust: many survivors have parts that still love or miss the narcissist, and other parts that shame them for feeling that way. There are also parts that don’t trust anyone, including the therapist. IFS allows space for all of them to be heard without judgment.
One client reportedly told their therapist, “There’s a part of me that wants to sabotage every relationship, because it believes loneliness is safer.” Instead of being told to “try harder,” that part was approached with compassion and curiosity. Over time, it softened, and the client began to take small, authentic risks in connection—with a sense of internal consent.
Start With Micro-Trust, Not Macro-Trust
One thing I noticed across all these modalities is that healing trust doesn’t start with “big leaps.” Survivors don’t go from fearing connection to falling in love overnight.
Trust has to be rebuilt through micro-moments: texting back later without guilt, speaking up in a session, noticing a good vibe and not running from it.
It’s these small acts—when done intentionally, repeatedly, and in safe relationships—that create the new neural grooves of trust. The work isn’t flashy, but it’s real.
If you’re a practitioner reading this, I hope this gives you some new angles or tools to bring into your work. Survivors aren’t just trying to think differently about trust—they’re literally trying to feel safety in their bodies again. And that starts small, slow, and in connection.
