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Relationships
9 Ways to Get Others to Confide in You
In important relationships, you want people to comfortably open up to you.
Updated September 4, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- To encourage others to render themselves more vulnerable with you, first show your vulnerability to them.
- If you don’t regularly follow through on your promises, you won’t be demonstrating yourself as trustworthy.
- Don’t inquire about others’ thoughts and feelings to the degree that it begins to feel like an investigation.
- Routinely making yourself available can assure others you won’t share their confidences with anyone else.
Safety is the name of the game. And what enables others to feel safe in their relationship with you is that you’ve already established rapport with them.
Interpersonal Security and Trustworthiness
Such rapport—or feelings of interpersonal security—requires trust, so in your dealings with others, you need to demonstrate trustworthiness.
If then, in relationships you deem important, you want people to open up to you, ask yourself:
- Can they experience you, if not completely non-judgmental (which is probably impossible anyway), as caring and at least only mildly and infrequently judgmental?
If they fear that anything they share will be sternly, starkly, or stridently evaluated by you, they’ll naturally shy away from intimate sharing.
After all, observing your proneness toward negative opinions and evaluations will foster an environment too threatening for them to feel comfortable enough to expose their deeper thoughts and feelings.
Many individuals enter therapy mainly because only in such a professional setting can they feel safe sharing things that might raise the eyebrows of those with whom they have a personal relationship—as in, critically, "You did what?! "
- Do you allow yourself to be vulnerable with them?
Most people prefer relationships to be reciprocal. If, spontaneously, you can share your personal feelings and life experiences, they’ll be inclined to respond in kind. And that will make you privy to aspects of their life usually kept private.
It can rightfully be asserted that a two-way relationship is far more trustworthy than a disproportionately one-sided relationship.
- Do you keep your promises?
Unless you follow through on your promises, you’re not manifesting yourself as reliable. Additionally, when circumstances are such that it’s impossible to do what you said, it’s crucial to explain why—and promptly.
- Are you excessively inquisitive?
If you’re perceived as intruding yourself in others’ business, then your nosiness will be a deterrent to their going public with what generally they’d prefer to keep private.
Unless they’ve volunteered personal information without your first having to ask them, it’s best not to inquire about their thoughts and feelings—certainly not to the degree that your questioning begins to feel like an investigation, or “inquisition.”
- Are you generally seen as diplomatically closed-mouthed—willing and able to safeguard predominately secret information that’s disclosed to you?
Some people simply can’t keep secrets because they’re unable to resist the temptation to publicize sensitive information learned in private. This may especially be the case if they believe (whether consciously or not) that such disclosures could offer them various interpersonal benefits.
Reliability and Trustworthiness
The criteria enumerated above cover what’s essential to make others experience their relationship with you as safe enough to disclose their innermost self to you.
Still, making yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally available can also be vital in assuring them that you won’t betray anything they divulge that potentially could compromise their standing with others. Consider that they’ll be more comfortable confiding in you if you:
- Spend a fair amount of time hanging out with them.
- Respond to their communications (email, text, phone, et cetera) with validation, understanding, and empathy—and do so promptly.
- Assist them both in addressing their concerns and solving bothersome issues.
- Encourage them to communicate openly with you by modeling the more intimate sharing behavior you’d like them to trust you with.
In the not-very-likely event that you’ve approached the individual as I’ve characterized and, over time, they defensively continue to resist opening up to you, then what?
You pretty much need to assume that they’re plagued with unresolved trauma, which prevents them from having a closer relationship with you (and probably others as well).
Consequently, all you can do is patiently support their reluctance, so that somewhere down the line they’ll no longer experience you as an existential threat to their safety.
© 2024 Leon F. Seltzer, PhD. All Rights Reserved.
