I agree that you need to trust yourself to be ok, no matter what but at some point you'll want to trust someone else again. How do you do that, especially coming from an A relationship where a lot of lies were told to you?
It's not easy.
But I think you kind of get to a point where you feel like the fear of being burned again is less important than the opportunity to really gain a meaningful relationship?
I'm still learning. I'm remarried, and I trust my husband completely. And yet, I get those moments of astonishingly stupid distrust -- like when he volunteers to run to the store at 11 pm because we're out of orange juice and the thought appears in my head: "He's probably meeting some hot chick at Walmart at 11 pm." Yeah, likely? Ha!
But for me, it's important to acknowledge those thoughts and hold them up to the daylight so I can see that it's just my brain creating problems based on prior experiences.
My therapist likes to remind me that experiences build pathways in our brains to teach us what to expect. So if we've been cheated on or lied to, we tend to expect that from people
until we have built up enough evidence to the contrary. So part of it is just time, putzing along with this thing called life and gathering enough evidence to trust.