Meeting someone who genuinely cares about you and matches your values and ethics can be wonderful, but overwhelming for many. When you do, you might try to pull back, especially if you’ve recently recovered from a breakup.
You might ask yourself, “What if they hurt me again?” or “What if they’re the wrong person for me?” You start dating but you’re constantly on the lookout for that “aha” moment when you’ll catch them doing something wrong.
But the truth is, you expecting them to mess up can lead you to sabotage your new relationship, because you don’t fully believe that it could work out in the first place.
Your constant overthinking, second-guessing or withholding pieces of your heart, is not going to help you have a thriving relationship, especially when this person hasn’t given you a reason to.
Here are two reasons why it’s so hard not to let the ghosts of your past affect your current relationship.
1. You Find It Hard To Let Go Of Past Hurt
It can take a long time to move on from your ex, and the amount of time it takes differs from person to person. Even when they’re amicable, breakups can leave us with countless unresolved feelings and it takes time to come to terms with them.
So, when you finally meet someone new, parts of you may be afraid to give in to that feeling of love again, as it’s also become associated with experiencing pain.
Especially when a prior relationship has made you feel emotionally unsafe, such as a previous partner telling you you’re “too emotional,” “too loud” or simply not enough, your nervous system learns to brace for impact with someone new.
After a heartbreak, opening up to someone again feels risky. You might hold back parts of yourself and find yourself constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, even in moments of calm or happiness, thinking, “What if they’re nice now, but turn out to be like my ex later?”
You likely tell yourself something along the lines of “Last time I opened up, I got hurt. I can’t go through that again.” However, no matter how much you try to avoid being vulnerable, the reality is that you have to let someone in for them to see you and accept you as you are.
2. Building Trust Takes Time And Evidence
When your trust in your significant other is shaky, it weakens the foundation of your relationship. While you have to take the risk of being vulnerable again to build a meaningful relationship, your new partner also needs to show they are trustworthy and supportive.
In a 2017 study published in the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, researchers found that many remarried people found it “very hard at first” to trust their new spouses. They needed proven examples to internalize that this marriage would be different than their last.
“When I got into my relationship with my husband it was difficult. I have since learned to trust him, but I initially brought all that baggage into the second marriage. It took him showing me that he was different for me to change my beliefs about him,” one participant explained.
Moreover, their fears and insecurities rose when participants’ perceived their current spouse responding to them in similar ways as their former spouse did.
“My last partner told me he was not sexually attracted to me because I had gained weight. When my current husband is not interested in me sexually, I seem to return to the fear that he also is not attracted to me,” another participant mentions.
This highlights the lingering impact of previous experiences and how important it is to have corrective emotional experiences with a new partner.
As a result of previous hurt, people develop what’s called an “attachment injury” and tell themselves that they will never trust anyone again. They keep second-guessing their choice of partners because of negative experiences with their exes.
“I thought the last person was good at first…Until they weren’t. What if I’m wrong again?” one participant says.
The truth is, we’ll never know for sure unless we let the other person in. Here’s what one participant in the study did to start rebuilding their trust in relationships again:
“(My current spouse and I) built trust by taking a chance being vulnerable with each other, talking things out more, (… and) bringing out different aspects of each other than were brought out in our previous marriages.”
Sometimes we don’t recognize emotional safety even when it is present because we’ve never known what it’s supposed to feel like. However, learning that your partner is a completely different person than your exes can make this process easier with time.
Many of us move on through our actions before we’ve healed emotionally. You might have left a relationship physically. You may have deleted their photos and blocked the number, but still carry the emotional weight of what happened. That unfinished grief, anger or confusion can show up unexpectedly in your new relationship.
When you’re used to chaos, inconsistency or emotional neglect, you treat newfound peace with suspicion, almost as though it must be the calm before the storm. You might even think that the safety and security a new partner offers you is boring. However, just as many remarried people have experienced, healing takes time, and it’s possible to love freely again.
Here are some ways to move on from the past.
- Take accountability for how you feel. Recognize that there are unresolved feelings holding you back. Once you realize that, you can make a commitment to yourself to gradually let go and prioritize healing.
- Go slow. You don’t owe anyone instant vulnerability. Let trust build at a pace that feels right for you.
- Name it gently. If you feel comfortable, you can share with your partner, “Sometimes I get scared to open up because of things from my past. But I want to try.” If they understand, they will try to help you through it. Chances are, if they’ve had challenging relationships before, they may need your help facing their fears too. You can help each other heal.
- Notice what’s different. You may have wanted a partner who is completely different to what your ex was like. But your brain might still seek patterns to overcome. Instead of only focusing on the negative, try to rewire your brain by writing down the ways this relationship feels safer, softer or more honest.
One way to get over fear-based patterns is to change what signs your brain is seeking. The more you seek out negative patterns, the more likely you are to see them even if they indicate something else. This can be understood through the lens of the “frequency illusion” or the “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” which occurs when something you’ve recently noticed, learned or thought about seems to appear to you more frequently than it truly does in reality.
We are shaped by what we have undergone in our past. So, it’s natural for it to come up again in future relationships. But we do not have to have to let paranoia overrule our chances of finding love. Your heartbreak may have been severe, but it is not permanently broken; let safer love in through those cracks.
Do you find it easy to open up to your partner or do you need to build more trust with them? Take this science-backed test to find out: Authenticity In Relationships Scale
