After everything that was done to me, trusting again felt like the most dangerous thing in the world. I was terrified of people. And if I'm honest, I was terrified of God too. What if He let me down again? What if I misread things again and ended up in the same place?
Nobody warns you about that part. Everyone talks about healing like it ends with being able to love again freely, trust again openly — as if one day a switch flips and the fear is just gone. But that's not how it works. And if you're sitting in that fear right now, I want you to know something: the terror you feel is not a character flaw. It is not a faith problem. It is not evidence that something is broken in you beyond repair.
It is evidence that you survived something that was designed to destroy your ability to trust.
When Trusting God Feels Impossible
I remember sitting in church not long after I left, hearing someone talk about trusting God, and feeling this surge of rage I didn't know what to do with. Trust God? I'd been praying for years. I'd been asking God to fix things, to change him, to help me — and nothing had stopped the destruction. I'd trusted Scripture that was weaponized against me. I'd trusted people in leadership who looked the other way.
So when it came to trusting God again, I was terrified. Not because I didn't believe He was real. But because trust had become the most dangerous thing I owned. I'd given it freely, and it had been used to hurt me. Why would I do that again — to anyone, including God?
What I didn't understand yet was that I had confused trusting God with trusting the version of God I'd been handed. A God who enabled abuse. A God who required me to submit to my own harm. A God who was more concerned with the appearance of my marriage than the state of my soul.
That was never God. That was someone's theology weaponized as control.
What Proverbs 3:5-6 Actually Says
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight."
I used to read this verse and feel pressure. Trust. With all your heart. What does that even mean when your heart is in pieces?
But I've sat with this differently in healing. The verse doesn't say trust people with all your heart. It doesn't say make yourself vulnerable to anyone who claims to speak for God. It says trust the Lord. There's a specificity there that I missed for years.
And the second part — "lean not on your own understanding" — this is often preached as a rebuke to women who finally said this doesn't feel right. Don't trust yourself. Don't trust what you're seeing. I was told this verse meant I should stop questioning what was happening to me.
That is a grotesque distortion. This verse is written to a person navigating a complex world, not to someone justifying staying in harm's way. It's about trusting that God's wisdom is deeper than our own anxiety about the future — not about silencing the part of you that knows something is wrong.
Learning to Trust God Before You Can Trust People
Here's what I've come to believe: rebuilding trust after abuse has to start with God, not with people. Because people — even good, safe, well-meaning people — will still fail you in small ways. They'll forget to follow through. They'll misunderstand. They'll say the clumsy wrong thing when you needed something else.
If your trust is being rebuilt entirely through human relationships, it will fracture every time a human acts like a human. And that will feel like confirmation that trusting was a mistake.
But when your trust is rooted first in God — in the God who is actually consistent, who actually does not change, who actually knit you together and knows every hair on your head — then the imperfections of human relationships stop feeling like proof that trust is dangerous. They become just what they are: people doing their best.
God's consistency becomes the ground under your feet. People become guests on that ground.
What Rebuilding Trust Actually Looks Like
It is slow. That's the truth nobody likes to say out loud.
It looks like sitting with God and telling Him exactly what you're afraid of. Not the sanitized prayer version — the raw one. I'm terrified. I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if You're who I thought You were. Help me.
It looks like letting Him show you, slowly, what safe actually feels like. Not telling yourself to believe people are safe — but letting experiences build a different kind of evidence over time.
It looks like learning what safe people actually do. How they act when you set a small boundary. Whether they get curious when you're hurting or get defensive. Whether they can say sorry without punishing you afterward for needing the apology.
It looks like recognizing that the hypervigilance you carry — the constant scan for danger, the way you read every room — is not paranoia. It is protection your nervous system built to keep you alive. And you can honor it while also slowly, gently, teaching your body that not every space is the one that hurt you.
The Courage It Takes
I want to be direct with you: choosing to trust again after what you've been through is one of the bravest things a human being can do. It is not naive. It is not weak. It is not ignoring what happened to you.
It is deciding — in full knowledge of how much trust cost you — that you refuse to let what was done to you be the last word about who you are.
That's holy. That's genuinely holy. Not in the saccharine, inspirational-quote way. In the way that actually costs something. In the way that stands in the rubble and chooses differently anyway.
God is not asking you to pretend the wound isn't there. He is not asking you to white-knuckle your way into vulnerability before you're ready. He is asking you to let Him be the first safe place — to come back to Him with everything that happened and let the healing begin in relationship with Someone who cannot lie, who cannot change, who will not weaponize your tenderness.
From that place, trust in other people can grow. Slowly, with discernment, with wisdom, with the help of good counselors and honest community. But it has to start somewhere.
Start with Him. He can hold all of it.
You don't have to do this healing alone.
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