This is a private work in progress, one you might feel like you cannot share with your partner, and that is totally okay. You should be given the space to work on it, but it is important that you do not use this as an excuse to avoid working on the difficult work of repairing your relationship (at least, not if you are trying to fix it!). If you are working to regain your trust in the relationship, be brutally honest about what you need, and what your partner needs to do in order for you to repair the relationship. If you really decide you want to rebuild trust in your relationship, there are specific steps both you and your partner can take. When trying to restore trust in your relationship, you need to be ready to put the past behind you.
When you choose to give the relationship a second chance, you are also choosing to put trust back into the partnership. If you know that you can never fully trust your partner again, regardless of what he or she does, then generally, it is best to clarify that immediately, so that both of you can start moving on separately.
If you are looking to build up your confidence in your partner, you need to be extra careful to make sure that what you are saying is followed. You need to establish trust with yourself and have your needs confirmed, before either partner can share them and clearly interpret them with their partner. To solve problems in your relationship effectively, you must have confidence that whatever feedback your partner gives you is valid.
If your partner has made one or two mistakes during a long-term relationship, and they have owned them, working through trust issues might be the way to go. As long as love and commitment are still there between you, working on your trust issues only makes the relationship stronger. You might have made plenty of mistakes in the past, but hiding those mistakes from your partner now is not going to benefit your relationship.
Being able to forgive your partner for behaviors that you disagreed with will only strengthen this relationship. For those who had their trust cheated, it is important to recognize that you also have to feel compassion for your partner.
One of the most significant aspects to regaining your trust after being betrayed is communicating and starting work on your relationship.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate – This may be painful or uncomfortable, but one of the biggest aspects of rebuilding trust after a betrayal is talking with your partner about the situation.
Whether you are the offending partner or the betrayed, in order to restore your trust in the marriage, both of you need to recommit yourself to the marriage and each other. Once couples have committed to reestablishing their trust, they should commit to treating the relationship as though it is brand-new. During this stage, both partners need to make the commitment to talking about problems in order to begin working on reestablishing this trust.
Both partners should be open to seeking counseling so they can better understand what caused the trust to break down. If you are not able to regain your trust through talking with one another, if this behavior is repeated, or if the breach in trust involves infidelity, then you may need to get the assistance of a professional therapist who can help you to communicate as a couple, and to uncover what caused the issue. If you want to repair your relationship and not harm your partner in the future, you must come to a mutual understanding of what good communication looks like.
Commit to Clear Communication – In the immediate aftermath of trust-busting, you will want to honestly answer your partners questions, and you will commit to being fully transparent with them going forward.
The more each partner holds back during the trust recovery process, the more you will go forward in the future with the relationship lurching. In the end, trust can be rebuilt with a committed partner willing to invest time, energy, compromise, and the risk to begin again. The important thing to remember is that even if you or your partner has broken trust in your relationship, it does not necessarily mean trust cannot be rebuilt or that a relationship cannot be salvaged. Whether you are coming off of a major betrayal, or struggling through a series of smaller broken promises, you need to make a choice to trust again if you want the relationship to survive.
Reuniting with someone after experiencing a betrayal can be pretty traumatic and difficult, and one thing to realize is that this will take a whole helluva amount of effort on both sides from both you and your partner in order for the relationship to succeed this time around. If you are in denial, or have anger or unresolved trauma from your past, then you risk triggering problems in your new relationship when there are not any; or, alternatively, you will unknowingly attract an untrustworthy partner. When trying to restart a relationship, some partners struggle with communicating their feelings in person. Learning to restart love is one of the many situations, and as such, it is necessary that you learn to communicate effectively with your partner in order to revitalize the connection.
Withholding trust due to fear or anger will keep you from emotionally reconnecting with your partner. If trust issues arise, these will have to be addressed, as well as anger, sadness, etc. People who have had their trust broken might require that communications become more open, intentions be more transparent, and, if it is an infidelity, might even, understandably, want some degree of veto over which person from the opposite gender to whom they broke trust interacted. This could stem from fears about the effect some partners words will have on their partners, uncertainties about whether they will say things correctly, or limited beliefs about their own communications skills.
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