Loneliness does not always come from having no one around. Sometimes it comes from being surrounded by people while carefully making sure none of them gets close enough to see what is really happening.
That distance can become even more painful after you quit drinking. Connection and vulnerability are often described as essential parts of life without alcohol, but neither feels easy for someone whose honesty has repeatedly been dismissed, exposed, criticized, or used against them.
The desire for friendship may still be there, but the ability to risk being truly seen has vanished.
In this episode of the No Alcohol Needed podcast, Julie Miller and Steve Knapp are joined by therapists Teresa McLellan and Crystal Hamilton for a conversation about how to trust others again after being hurt. Together, they explore how distrust develops, the ways alcohol complicates connection, and why rebuilding trust in other people often begins with learning to trust oneself.
Watch the full episode here, or keep reading to learn more about what we discussed.
When distrust begins as protection
People rarely make one conscious decision to stop trusting everyone. Distrust is usually built gradually, through experiences that teach the mind – and the body – what may happen when someone is allowed too close.
For Teresa, those lessons began in childhood. “It wasn’t safe to be me, it wasn’t safe to ask for anything, it wasn’t safe to feel,” she said. The safest response was to keep everything hidden.
Crystal also learned early that belonging could be conditional. When she was four, her parents left her two older sisters behind after a family trip because the girls had rebelled against the family’s church. She did not have words for the meaning she made of that experience at the time, but the message stayed with her: failing to conform could mean being removed from the family.
Julie described a similar accumulation of smaller experiences. She learned that it was not safe to tell her parents how she felt, then discovered as a teenager that sharing something personal with a friend could lead to humiliation in the school hallway. Later relationships reinforced the belief that her feelings were excessive or unreasonable.
None of those moments had to produce the explicit thought, No one can be trusted. The lesson could take shape without words. Every painful experience became another reason to hide, perform, stay quiet, or run before you had a chance to be hurt.
Steve explained that withholding his real self became a form of protection. “If I removed trust, then I saved myself from being hurt.” Instead of showing up authentically, he developed a persona. Julie’s protection looked similar: she tried to become whatever version of herself would receive approval and avoid rejection.
Other people respond in the opposite direction. Teresa sometimes shared too much, too quickly, because she was desperate for connection. When the honesty did not create the closeness she hoped for, shame arrived and she pulled away again. Crystal shut down almost completely, relying on one safe person at a time.
Whether the pattern is oversharing, performing, or revealing almost nothing, the underlying goal is often the same: finding some way to connect without becoming vulnerable enough to be hurt.
Except that those two things are mutually exclusive. Connection can’t happen without vulnerability.
So what do you do?
Alcohol can create the appearance of connection
Alcohol can seem to solve that dilemma for a while. It lowers inhibitions, dulls fear, and makes conversation feel easier. It can allow someone to say what has been held inside without it feeling quite so risky.
For Teresa, alcohol numbed pain and served as a social lubricant, but it also removed her filter. The result was often more oversharing, followed by more shame and distance. Steve said it allowed him to disclose personal things without feeling the shame in the moment.
But of course, the next morning was different.
Julie came to see much of the connection alcohol gave her as an imitation of the real thing. Drinking made socializing possible during a deeply lonely period, but many of those relationships never developed beyond drinking and gossiping together. “Everything that I thought alcohol was giving me was fake,” she said.
Alcohol also contributed to the destruction of relationships that had once been really close. Steve noticed that the more he drank, the farther he moved from the friends he had in his twenties and thirties. Teresa recognized that her behavior pushed people away at the same time that shame caused her to withdraw from them. Crystal reflected that none of her friendships or romantic relationships during that period felt real.
This is part of why early sobriety feels so lonely.
Alcohol may have created fragile or temporary forms of connection, but removing it doesn’t automatically create the skills required for genuine intimacy. Without alcohol, the original fear is still there: if the real self is seen, what will happen next?
Trusting other people begins with trusting oneself
The central insight of the conversation was not that healing makes other people predictable. It was that learning to trust oneself makes their unpredictability less terrifying.
After someone has been betrayed, the loss of self-trust can be as damaging as the loss of trust in the other person. They’ll find themselves asking, “How did I miss those warning signs? Did I share too much?” The self doubt seeps in. Rebuilding trust requires learning to pay attention again without turning every uncomfortable feeling into proof of danger.
Teresa first had to learn what trustworthiness looked like. Drawing on Brené Brown’s marble jar metaphor, she described trust as something built through small, repeated moments: a person who is deserving of your trust remembers the things that matter to you, listens carefully, protects private information, and makes room for emotion. Rather than handing someone an entire life story, a person can share something small and observe what happens to it.
That gradual process also creates useful information. An eye roll, a sudden subject change, or an attempt to use the disclosure against someone may signal that it is time to pause. A thoughtful response, sustained attention, or just simple acceptance may show that the relationship can hold a little more.
Learning to notice those responses helped Teresa trust her own instincts. Crystal found another route through therapy, recovery support, and yin yoga. Slowing down enough to notice what was held in her body helped her know herself more fully. Teresa and Julie both found journaling valuable because it gave difficult emotions somewhere to go without immediately carrying them into a relationship. Julie described using the page to ask, without judgment, what feeling was present, where it came from, and what she could do with the information.
Steve needed trustworthy experiences outside himself before he could create that safety internally. He needed people who could hear his shame without commenting, rolling their eyes, or confirming that he should have stayed silent. “I needed the opposite to show up in my life so I could turn around and begin to rewrite the story,” he said.
Those experiences helped him develop resilience. He became more deliberate about where he placed his vulnerability, but he also became less afraid that a painful response would destroy him.
Julie identified that resilience as the heart of learning how to trust others again. The goal is not to find people who can never disappoint, reject, or misunderstand. The goal is to develop confidence that pain can be felt and survived.
“I trust myself to handle hurt, to handle pain, to handle rejection, to handle disapproval,” Julie said. “I have those skills, I have that strength. I can depend on me.”
One practice she recommends is creating an evidence bank: remembering previous experiences that hurt and noticing that life continued on the other side. That history becomes proof that another painful outcome would not mean permanent collapse.
Trust does not have to be all or nothing
The conversation also challenged the idea that every meaningful relationship should offer the same kind of closeness.
Teresa described different layers of trust. One person may reliably keep an appointment or follow through on a promise. Another may be a wonderful companion for a walk and a good conversation but lack the capacity to hold someone’s most vulnerable emotions. Recognizing that difference does not make the relationship false.
“I may not necessarily tell you some of the deeper stuff, but I also don’t have to hide it,” Teresa said. “I think that’s the key, is I’m not ashamed of it.”
Julie called that distinction “earned wisdom.” A person does not have to choose between complete exposure and total separation. Different people can be trusted with different parts of a life, based on what the relationship has shown it can hold.
That realization changed several of the speakers’ family relationships. Crystal spent years wanting her parents to offer a kind of emotional support they could not provide. As her self-esteem and self-trust grew, she became more able to set boundaries and limit their access without removing them entirely from her life. Julie and Teresa described similar experiences with their mothers. Acceptance grew when they stopped demanding that those relationships become something they had never demonstrated the capacity to be.
Expectations can damage trust when they replace the attention you give to the relationship that is actual reality. A parent, sibling, spouse, or longtime friend is not automatically capable of holding every feeling simply because of the role that person occupies. Trust becomes more realistic when it is based on evidence rather than titles, wishes, or obligation.
When someone hurts the trust that was offered
Even carefully chosen people will sometimes respond poorly. They will misunderstand, become defensive, speak harshly, or fail to offer the support that was hoped for. One disappointing interaction does not always mean the relationship is unsafe.
Teresa suggested beginning with a direct acknowledgment: “Ouch, that hurt.” The size of the breach matters, as does the history of the relationship. Some hurts can be addressed in the moment. Others may need time, journaling, therapy, or support before a conversation is possible. An important question remains: is the relationship worth bringing the hurt back into?
Julie looks at the broader evidence. If someone has responded with care eight times out of ten and misses the mark twice, those two moments do not automatically erase everything that came before. They may call for an honest conversation rather than a new wall.
Teresa offered a useful example from a conversation with her mother. Instead of assuming she understood the meaning behind a painful comment, she asked, “Is this what you meant? Is this what you’re saying?” Her mother’s explanation did not make the delivery helpful, but it changed Teresa’s understanding of the intention behind it.
That kind of clarification creates room for repair. It also requires both people to tolerate discomfort. Steve noted that receiving criticism about personal behavior is part of trust, too. If someone cannot say, That hurt me, without being punished, dismissed, or met with immediate defensiveness, the relationship cannot become safer.
“As soon as I get defensive, I lose curiosity,” Steve said. Once curiosity disappears, productive conversation usually disappears with it.
Repair depends on both people remaining willing to ask what happened, own their contribution, and consider what would help next time. Sometimes the conclusion will still be that a person is not trustworthy. Personal responsibility does not mean accepting mistreatment or pretending everyone is safe. It means deciding what to do with the information instead of remaining powerless inside it.
Connection is worth learning to risk again
Walls can prevent some pain, but they also prevent joy, intimacy, shared experience, and the feeling of being known. Sobriety removes one unreliable route to connection. Building something more genuine after you stop drinking requires courage, discernment, practice, and time.
Teresa described the work as opening enough to remain “in relationship with the world.” Complete openness is not required. Participation is.
Crystal offered a simpler reason for continuing the work: “Life is about growth and love and sharing that with other people.”
Trusting again does not mean returning to naivety. It means sharing in smaller pieces, noticing how those pieces are received, setting boundaries when necessary, and allowing trustworthy behavior to accumulate. It means accepting that some relationships will remain limited and that some breaches can be repaired. Most importantly, it means building enough confidence in oneself that another person’s mistake – or even another betrayal – does not have the power to erase everything that has been learned.
There is no shared life without some degree of trust. The risk never disappears completely. But neither does the possibility that this time, something vulnerable will be met with kindness, compassion, and empathy – and a different story can begin to take shape.
Watch or listen to Episode 202: How To Trust Others After You’ve Been Hurt, for the complete stories and conversation. Find it on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify.
Meet our special guest from this week’s episode:
Crystal Hamilton, LMHC is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and founder of Redefine Family, LLC drawing on 20+ years in the behavioral health field and personal healing journey to help others recover from religious trauma, addiction, and mental health issues.
Check out Crystal’s Linktree
Crystal Hamilton, LMHC
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