Sorry’s Not Good Enough: How To Repair Trust in Your Relationship
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby is the founder and clinical director of Growing Self Counseling and Coaching. She’s the author of “Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to Your Ex Love,” and the host of The Love, Happiness & Success Podcast.
Trust: It’s the glue of secure attachment that holds a marriage together. If it’s broken, everything changes. How to you repair trust in your relationship once it’s been damaged?
If you’ve been through an experience that has seriously harmed your trust, like infidelity or lying… Sorry just isn’t good enough. Dismissing fears as being “in the past” only makes it worse. Rushing back into trust, or demanding to be trusted again only creates more conflict. What to do?
Many couples, in the aftermath of infidelity or betrayal, only argue and blame. While they may both desperately want the relationship to work, they may both be doing things that make it nearly impossible for trust to be healed, like minimizing the damage, getting defensive, or assuming that the person who’s been wronged should “get over it.”
All of these imply that there may be a genuine lack of awareness about how trust is repaired. What you don’t understand, you can’t fix.
How do you repair trust in your relationship? That’s the question we’re tackling today on the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast.
Listen, and you’ll learn what trust really is, and genuinely understand the process of healing. You’ll also learn the worst mistake you can make if you’re trying to repair the trust in your marriage. I’ll also teach you the five action-steps you must take to mend trust for real.
Your Relationship Questions, Answered.
Today, we’re answering your relationship questions in order to give you some direction, and real help for your relationship. Here are some of the relationship questions I’m answering today:
Ms M asks, “How do I know whether my relationship is worth saving, or if I should let this go and move on?”
- We discussed signs of a healthy, normal relationship, how to tell if a relationship can be fixed or not, what a committed relationship looks like, as well as warning signs that a relationship is probably not going to work out. We also talked about whether or not you’re settling in a relationship. Here are links to some of the resources I referenced: How to Recover From Infidelity, Repairing Your Self Esteem After a Breakup, Are You Addicted to a Toxic Relationship, and breakup-recovery.com.
Lisa asks: “Should I stay friends with my Ex?”
- We discussed the pros and cons of staying friends with your Ex, and how to decide whether or not you should. We also talked about how to cut the cord with your Ex, if the time is right. A resource shared was, “Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love”
Mr. T asks: “I’m shutting down with my partner. How do I stop?”
- We talked about the different reasons that someone might have trouble dealing with conflict in relationships, and reasons why people might shut down and withdraw in relationships (as well as the path to repairing them). Resources mentioned included, How to Communicate With Someone Who Won’t Talk, Self-Awareness and Self-Discovery: The Path to Personal Growth, Creating Self Confidence, and Communication Problems And How To Fix Them
Ms. K asks: “I’m afraid that my boyfriend is emotionally unavailable due to his own issues. What do I do?”
- We talked about the realities of having a partner with unaddressed emotional issues, and who is not interested in working on themselves. We discussed her points of power, and her opportunities for changing the situation, as well as how to move forward with a partner who is unwilling. Resources mentioned included, What to Do When Your Partner Has a Problem.
Do you have relationship advice for these questioners or personal experiences that you can relate? Perhaps you have your own relationship questions, self-improvement questions, breakup questions, or career questions for an upcoming episode of The Love, Happiness and Success Podcast? If so, please leave them in the comments!
All the best,
