You know what nobody talks about after divorce? The fact that the hardest person to trust again isn't your ex-wife, potential new partners, or even your kids. The hardest person to trust is the one staring back at you in the mirror every morning.

I learned this the hard way, brother. After my divorce, I had to make a decision that terrified me: whether to launch a series of personal development workshops called The Berlack Method. The doubt was crushing. Who was I to think I could build something that mattered? What if it didn't work? What if I was just fooling myself?

But here's what really kept me up at night: If I couldn't trust my own judgment about my marriage—something I'd invested decades in—how could I trust myself to make any important decision?

That question haunts divorced men everywhere. You thought you were doing everything right. You provided. You showed up. You tried. And somehow, it still ended. Now every decision feels loaded with the weight of that failure.

The Science of Selective Trust

Here's where things get interesting. Researchers at UCLA just published a study in January 2025 that reveals something fascinating about how we evaluate trustworthiness after betrayal. They discovered that people don't judge someone's trustworthiness based solely on whether they've betrayed others in the past. Instead, we judge based on whether their betrayal helped or hurt us personally.

The study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, examined how people evaluated trust in friendships, romantic relationships, and professional contexts. Participants consistently rated people who had betrayed others as untrustworthy—except when that betrayal benefited them. In those cases, participants viewed the betrayer as just as trustworthy as someone who had never betrayed anyone.

Think about that for a minute. We're willing to trust someone we know is capable of betrayal if we think their disloyalty serves our interests.

This has massive implications for divorced men trying to rebuild their lives. When your marriage failed, you learned something painful: people can betray commitments, partnerships can dissolve, and good intentions don't guarantee good outcomes. But here's what that UCLA study reveals—you're now carrying a twisted filter for evaluating trust. You're likely to mistrust people who might be genuinely reliable while potentially trusting people who simply happen to benefit you in the moment.

No wonder you feel confused about who to trust.

The Trust Equation After Divorce

Divorce damages your trust in others. Even more devastating? It damages your trust in yourself. The equation looks something like this:

Failed Marriage + Shattered Assumptions = Paralyzed Decision-Making

You replay every choice that led to the divorce. The business decisions. The relationship decisions. The financial decisions. The parenting decisions. Each one feels like evidence that you can't trust yourself with anything important.

Research from the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage identifies this pattern as "decision paralysis"—a state where the fear of making another wrong choice becomes so overwhelming that you stop making choices altogether. You get stuck analyzing every option, second-guessing every instinct, until opportunities pass you by.

I remember the first woman I asked out after my divorce. We met at a coffee shop where I was working on my laptop. She was intelligent, accomplished, showed genuine interest in conversation. When I finally worked up the courage to ask for her number, she said yes.

I should have been excited. Instead, I spent the entire drive home analyzing every word of our conversation, looking for evidence that she wasn't really interested, that I'd misread the signals, that a woman like her wouldn't actually want to date a recently divorced man who was still rebuilding his life.

That internal dialogue revealed something I hadn't fully acknowledged: my divorce had fundamentally shaken not just my confidence in relationships, but my basic trust in my own judgment.

The Real Problem

Here's what's actually happening: you're trying to make all future decisions based on avoiding past pain instead of moving toward future possibility.

You're wearing a rearview mirror as glasses, constantly checking what's behind you while trying to move forward. Eventually, you're going to walk into a wall.

When I was deciding whether to launch The Berlack Method, I had two choices. I could stay stuck in the analysis of everything that went wrong—proof that I couldn't be trusted with big decisions. Or I could acknowledge that while I'd made mistakes, I'd also successfully coached men for over 30 years. I'd created workshops that transformed lives. I had knowledge and experience that could genuinely help people.

The decision to trust my vision over my circumstances, to trust that my mess could become my message, to trust that sometimes you have to build your solution while you're still living your problem—that became the foundation for everything that followed.

It was terrifying. There were moments when I questioned everything. But I learned something crucial: trust requires evidence of your capabilities and the courage to act on that evidence, even when the outcome remains uncertain.

Rebuilding Self-Trust

You can't rebuild trust in others until you rebuild trust in yourself. Here's how:

Start with small promises. If you tell yourself you're going to work out three times this week, do it. If you commit to calling your kids every Tuesday and Thursday, follow through. Every kept promise to yourself rebuilds your confidence in your own reliability.

Separate failure from identity. Your marriage failed. That doesn't mean you're a failure. It means you had a relationship that didn't work out. Those are fundamentally different things. One is a circumstance you can learn from. The other is a lie that keeps you stuck.

Trust your track record, not your recent history. You're more than the last three years of your life. Look at your entire history. Where have you succeeded? What have you built? Who have you helped? That evidence matters more than your most recent pain.

Make decisions toward possibility, not away from pain. Every choice you make should be evaluated on whether it moves you closer to the life you want to build, not whether it protects you from repeating the past. These are fundamentally different motivations and they lead to fundamentally different outcomes.

The Trust Component of Faith

I can't write about trust without addressing faith. I'm not going to tell you what to believe, but I can tell you what faith meant to my journey: it was the bridge between what I could control and what I couldn't.

I couldn't control when opportunities would appear. I couldn't control how quickly my business would grow. I couldn't control whether women would give a recently divorced man a chance. But I could control my daily actions. I could control whether I showed up for my kids. I could control whether I kept developing my skills and serving others.

I placed my trust in my ability to keep moving forward, one day at a time. That's where faith and self-trust intersect—in the daily commitment to keep showing up even when you can't see the full path ahead.

The View From Here

Since launching The Berlack Method workshop series years ago—which evolved into the Broadcast Your Inner Champion Coaching System, led to The Rebound last year, and what I'm building now with Inner Champion University—I can tell you this: the decision to trust myself again was the most important choice I made in my recovery. Not the most comfortable. Not the easiest. But the most important.

Every divorced man faces this choice. You can stay paralyzed by the fear of making another mistake, constantly second-guessing yourself, analyzing every option until opportunity passes you by. Or you can acknowledge that while you've made mistakes, you've also made countless good decisions throughout your life. You've solved problems. You've helped people. You've built things that mattered.

That UCLA study reveals something crucial: we're all operating with imperfect filters for evaluating trust. We make judgments based on incomplete information and self-interest. That's human. Perfect judgment doesn't exist. What matters is developing the courage to make decisions based on evidence of your capabilities rather than fear of repeating your past.

Your divorce taught you painful lessons about trust. Those lessons are valuable. But they're only one chapter in your story. They don't define your entire capacity for judgment, relationships, or building something meaningful with your life.

You will make mistakes. We all do. What you can't do is let the fear of making mistakes stop you from making the moves that could transform your life.

Trust yourself enough to take the next step. You've got more wisdom, resilience, and capability than you're giving yourself credit for. The man you're becoming is worth trusting.

Your move, brother.