Trust is Essential
You can’t have a healthy marriage without trust
Trust is an essential pillar of every healthy relationship.
Trust is built and rebuilt in adult relationships—particularly in marriage and committed partnerships—through a continuous cycle of rupture and repair. How well partners repair is paramount to the future health of their marriage.
Drawing on Attachment Theory, Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy, the Gottman Institute’s Sound Relationship House, and Positive Psychology, I developed a framework called the Healthy Adult Attachment Cycle.
In my sessions with couples, I use this framework to demonstrate a positive vision for the inner workings of building (or rebuilding) trust.
You may have heard of Attachment
While the conversation around attachment has become part of popular culture, much of the focus has narrowed to identifying and labeling attachment styles. These categories—secure, avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganized—can certainly help people recognize patterns of insecurity in their relationships. But on their own, they do little to explain how secure attachment is actually developed, or what partners can do to foster it in real time.
To move beyond labels, we needed a framework that highlights the processes of connection, responsiveness, and repair. This is where the Healthy Adult Attachment Cycle offers a critical pathway that shifts the focus from static styles to the dynamic, ongoing process through which trust and security are built in committed relationships.
Four Parts Make up The Healthy Adult Attachment Cycle
The Healthy Adult Attachment Cycle unfolds in four interrelated parts: Need, Emotions, Relate, and Trust.
1. Need
Just as children have emotional needs—comfort, closeness, support, connection, and care—within the parent–child bond, adults carry similar needs into their intimate relationships. These are the kinds of needs that a primary attachment figure, such as a spouse or committed partner, is uniquely positioned to meet. In adulthood, this includes love and intimacy, sharing meaning, working toward common goals, offering comfort in times of stress, and being able to reliably lean on each other for both practical and emotional support. When partners consistently turn toward one another in this way, they not only strengthen trust and security but also deepen intimacy and lay the foundation for a healthy adult attachment bond.
2. Emotions
Emotions signal whether we perceive our needs as being met or unmet. Positive emotions often reflect that things are going well in the relationship—that partners are reliably meeting each other’s expectations for closeness and support, that both individuals can identify and express their needs, and that they work together to ensure those needs are honored. In a healthy attachment cycle, needs are met with consistency, and emotions tend to be positive, reinforcing trust and connection.
Negative emotions—such as frustration, anger, irritation, rejection, or abandonment—signal that an important need has gone unmet. These feelings are not the problem in themselves; rather, they point to where attention and care are needed.
How emotions are managed is essential to a healthy attachment cycle. When one or both partners struggle with emotional regulation, they may experience flooding, reactivity, suppression, projection, and other responses that escalate conflict, erode trust, and create cycles of insecure attachment—undermining not only their bond but also their physical and mental wellbeing.
3. Relate
Trust and healthy attachment require relational intelligence (RQ)—the capacity for clear communication, active listening, and genuine efforts to understand each other’s perspective. RQ also includes interpersonal skills such as collaboration, cooperation, validation, and co-regulation, all grounded in a neurobiological orientation toward physical and emotional safety.
How partners relate to needs and emotions is often the point where even intelligent, emotionally stable adults struggle to build trust and sustain a healthy attachment cycle. Many people learned unhealthy ways of coping with emotions and unmet needs. Instead of listening and validating, they may respond to discomfort with withdrawal, addictive behaviors, or fight-or-flight reactions—strategies that ease immediate tension but undermine long-term trust and attachment security.
When relating is going well, we see partners respond to needs and emotions effectively. We witness communication that leads to understanding and problem solving. We see the process of repair unfolding—wherein partners do make mistakes in how they relate to each other but ultimately have the skills to repair quickly and consistently.
Most importantly, we see a nervous system that tends to access the social engagement system rather than defaulting to the stress response system.
4. Trust
Trust is an ongoing practice of engaging with life and the uncertainty it brings. In committed partnership, trust means knowing your partner “has your back”—not only in the small, everyday moments but also in the larger work of building a life together.
A lack of trust in a relationship often reflects one’s broader orientation toward life itself. Without it, partners may experience unease, anxiety, and fear—fueling tension, worry, and even existential angst within the individual and the relationship. Trust is difficult because we look at suffering and wonder if life itself is trustworthy. Yet it is precisely this willingness to trust that enables vulnerability, reduces isolation, and fosters emotional well-being.
When partners successfully move through the first three stages of the cycle, trust is built and reinforced. This stage carries the core beliefs: I am good. People are good. Trust is maintained. Trust is never a static achievement; it is a dynamic process. With each cycle of need, emotion, and relating, the foundation of the bond is either strengthened or weakened.