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.
All the best,
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Real Help For Your Relationship
Lots of couples go through challenging times, but the ones who turn "rough-patches" into "growth moments" can come out the other side stronger and happier than ever before.
Working with an expert couples counselor can help you create understanding, empathy and open communication that felt impossible before.
Thank you very much for your words and advice. I enjoy listening to you .
Thank you so much Barbara, I’m glad this was helpful to you. LMB
Your voice is so calm and easy to listen to and this podcast was very informative. Thank you for making this information available for everyone to access!
Thank you for this. It validated all my feelings and thoughts about my relationship. One question in particular, you said trust broken in a big event can take years to repair, I’m curious about the situation of years of emotional trauma in terms of healing time. I’m the person who has had the wine glass stomped on.
Thank you
S
Sarah, this is a great question. Honestly, when trust has been shattered (and then stomped on, and then the pieces thrown out the window) trust may never be fully repaired. The hope that you can go back to not having any doubt at all may not be a realistic one, when you’re with someone who has demonstrated that they are capable of immense betrayal. In these cases, for a relationship to continue and be healthy, it is important for both partners to come to terms with what that means and have a sustainable, long-term plan to cope with it.
For example, your partner may need to know that you will actually *never* be quite the same after what you’ve lived through, and that from now on he has to work extra hard to help you manage the anxiety that you will feel in certain situations, consistently and with love. On your side, you may need to grapple with what it means to you to be partnered with a person who may never feel completely safe for you, and work towards acceptance of that, if your intention is to remain married.
Emotional trauma can be healed and trust can be repaired, but there will always be scars and flare ups. That does not have to be a major problem, as long as both of you understand that, and expect it, and have a plan to navigate those moments together when they do.
On that note: Have you listened to the podcast “Recovering From Infidelity?” Whether or not the betrayal you experienced was related to infidelity, this episode goes deeper into the trust repair process. I hope it’s helpful to you.
I will also say that it will be E X T R E M E L Y important for you to establish a relationship with a marriage and family therapist who practices a specific, evidence-based form of couples therapy called “Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy.” This is a type of marriage counseling / couples therapy that involves helping couples understand and respond to each other on emotional level, particularly around these types of feelings.
If you’re not already involved in this type of work, with a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes couples therapy, I hope that you consider it. I think it could really help you.
This is a hard road, but there IS a path forward. Wishing you all the best… Dr. Lisa
This all makes so much sense. My partner grew tired of providing patience for me to heal. He didn’t have the knowledge to do the things in step four. Very little validation, empathy is nonexistent. He replied with negative comments, wanting me to just get over it and saw me needing validation as a form of control. He didn’t see what he was doing to me by wanting me to “just get over it and move forward” like he did. I can not make him see what he doesn’t want to see and at this point he doesn’t want to hear it anymore because it’s always about me and how I feel. I am left having to now repair myself and our relationship, it has been six years after his wrong doings and he said he wanted a divorce because I was not improving. Now I am doing a 180 and giving him whatever he needs to feel loved because I apparently treated him poorly while he was trying to be patient and allow me to “get over” his affair.
Oh Krista, I’m so, so sorry to hear this. I’ve honestly heard similar stories from some of the individual therapy and life coaching clients I’ve had who are struggling in the aftermath of an affair, and with a partner who cannot or will not work them and respond with empathy to their legitimate hurt and anger. It’s exactly as you say: It feels like you need to suck it up and figure out how to be okay, in the context of a relationship where you are not getting what you need from your partner to be able to heal.
100% of the people I’ve ever worked with who have had their partner cheat feel angry, and need their partner to show them that they are safe before they can start to feel safe. You are doing nothing wrong by needing those things! At the same time, you’re right — a partner who has strayed can sometimes have limited capacity to handle this unless they get support in letting it in. (They’re often so flooded by shame and anxiety, honestly, they can’t even deal with it unless they have the help of a good marriage counselor or relationship coach).
Have you guys tried effective, evidence based marriage counseling to address this previously? Was it a real-deal expert marriage counselor competent in emotionally focused couples therapy and experienced in helping heal after an affair? I ask this because most practitioners of couples counseling are well-meaning but have almost zero formal training in it and can sometimes make things worse instead of better, due to their lack of understanding. (Check out “How to Find a Good Marriage Counselor” for more information / ranting on this topic).
Anyway, Krista, I think those are probably your choices: Suck it up and figure out how to be okay in this situation (when you are absolutely not okay and not getting what you need to be okay), try to get involved with really good, high quality marriage counseling with a couples therapist trained in EFCT and see if you can change this situation, or lastly, figure out if it’s time to call it quits and move on. [Yes, I have a podcast about that last one too, if you’re interested.]
I am sorry that you’re going through this Krista, and I sincerely hope that the outcome of this is growth and healing for YOU — one way or another.
xoxo, Dr. Lisa