Rebuilding Trust | 4 Big Issues
Trust violations in a relationship are complex and challenging to fix. In this article, I’m going to share four important issues to consider if you are coping with damaged trust in your relationship. In twenty-five years as a therapist, I’ve supported many individuals and couples in their processes of rebuilding trust. To get a satisfying outcome, you have to proceed carefully and be well-informed.
First, let me say that trying to recover from a trust violation in a close relationship is often so complicated that you will greatly benefit from professional support. In such a case, I often recommend that each of you get individual support from your own therapist while going to a third therapist as a couple. This may seem cumbersome. However, it is often the best scenario. This may be clearer after your read the remainder of this article. I also want to say that not all relationships are fundamentally safe. Your safety is more important than your staying in a troublesome relationship. Rebuilding trust is predicated on being in a relationship where you feel physically safe. If you are not currently safe, take care of that first before focusing on trying to improve your relationship.
Issue #1: You Didn’t Have Trust To Begin With
The biggest barrier to “rebuilding” trust is when it hadn’t been built in the first place. Having true trust means evolving in your relationship where each of you demonstrate the capacity and commitment to be trustworthy. There are two common scenarios where trust wasn’t there to begin with. First, many people have a sense of trust in the so-called honeymoon stage of a new relationship. This beginning stage is characterized by a predominance of pleasant feelings, thoughts, and shared experiences. There might be a pattern of closeness that either doesn’t provide opportunities to challenge commitment or lack of trustworthiness might be overlooked due to the idealistic and rosy view of the new relationship.
Sometimes lack of trust is baked into a relationship from the very beginning. This happens when a couple connects even though they are sharing as much chaos as they are stability. Sometimes the glue that binds a couple together has little to do with trust and more to do with mutual attraction, codependency, or desperation. Trust never shows up even though the couple becomes committed to each other.
When either of the above scenarios exists prior to a trust-related crisis, your project is to build trust not rebuild it. Why is this an important distinction? Well, for one thing, if a couple did have a period of true trust, then that’s proof of the capacity of each person to be trustworthy. When it has never apparently existed, sometimes that is because one, or both, of the people either lack the capacity or the willingness to be trustworthy. This can be a hard reality to confront. But it is worth taking stock. Otherwise, you might be fighting a losing battle.
Issue #2: You Don’t Agree That There Was A Violation
You can’t rebuild trust if you are not in relative agreement about whether the triggering event was actually a trust violation. This means both of you have to have agreement that one person violated one, or more, implicit or explicit agreements in your relationship. Let me share a couple of real scenarios of couples with whom I’ve worked in order to illustration this particular issue of lack of agreement. (Note: names and details of these stories are altered to protect privacy.)
Situation One:
Joe told his wife that he was heading out for a bit to go to the hardware store to buy some tools for a home project. He returned about ninety minutes later and, when his wife, Sarah, asked about his trip, he told her that after going to the hardware store, he also stopped at the sports store to buy something he needed for the next time he was going to go fishing and the grocery store because he remembers a couple of staples that they were out of. Sarah got upset with him for violating her trust about where he was going and what he was going to do since he had told her he was just going to the hardware store.
Situation Two:
Martha asks for help with her husband, Tom, having issues with her any time she talks with other men. Tom has told her that he gets upset even when she has a brief chat with the male clerk at their grocery store when he is ringing them up. He has explained that two of his past partners cheated on him leaving him devastated. Just a few days before Martha presents in therapy, she reports that she had had a work meeting scheduled at a bar to meet some new work clients and about half of that work party was male. Joe is upset with her for not calling her to explain who was going to be at the meeting and getting his permission to attend.
You can probably easily identify issues with both of these situations. Both lack a clear, explicit agreement about the boundary that one partner found to be violated. Neither Joe nor Martha had agreed with their partners go to exactly one store or call for permission to attend a mixed work meeting. And, had their partners asked for such an agreement, it’s likely that neither would have found such agreements to be acceptable. If they had agreed to those boundaries, they likely would have had red flags go up about potentially getting into toxic territory in the relationship. Each of these couples would have some work to do in regard to working out healthy boundaries and expectations.
Neither of these situations are simply about rebuilding trust. Instead, they need to negotiate the boundaries of their relationship. In both cases, one person needs to examine their expectations and, their partners need to figure out how to carefully support them while maintaining healthy autonomy. However, I want to caution you from thinking that this means that any time your partner is triggered by something you do that it’s all their issue. The point is that we can’t simply think that the opposite is true: any time your partner is triggered by something you do, it’s all about what you did. This is especially complex when the perceived violation was about something that was not clear (whether explicit or implicit) and fully acceptable to both people.
In contrast those two situations with ambiguous boundaries, consider this one:
Jack had a business trip planned in a fun, touristy area. His wife, Carla, knew he planned the trip. Shortly before taking the trip two things happened. The trip got cancelled by his company because the client they were dealing with backed out of their negotiations. About the same time, Jack’s former girlfriend from before his current marriage found him on social media and asked him if he would like to meet sometime for a drink. Before the trip had been cancelled, he had mentioned it to the former girlfriend, who offered to meet him during his trip. After finding out the business meeting was cancelled, he decided to keep his plans to take the trip in order to meet up with his former girlfriend. He took the trip, spent a large part of a weekend at restaurants, bars, and tourist areas with her. They didn’t have sex during their visits. He did not reveal to his wife that his business had cancelled the meetings or that he was planning on meeting up with his ex.
About a week after his return, he accidentally left his Facebook messages page open on his laptop at home and his wife inadvertently saw a message from his former girlfriend which mentioned their recent time together. At this point, Carla and Jack are in complete agreement with how Jack violated their implicit and explicit boundaries of their relationship.
In contrast to the two former examples, this is a situation in which the couple will need to rebuild trust that was violated.
Issue #3: Differentiating Phase One from Phase Two Strategies
If you are engaged in a process of rebuilding trust, you are more likely to succeed if you take care of more urgent needs first and implement long-term strategies later. This is because extra care needs to be taken to cope with the initial time after the revelation of the violation to be able to preserve the relationship enough to heal. And, the strategies you might employ soon after the revelation to start to rebuild trust are often not the same strategies you will want to commit to long-term in order to maintain, and continue to build, trust. The two needs which have urgency after a trust violation are:
Coping with the shock of the violation, and
Establishing accountability in order to regain a sense of trustworthiness.
Immediately upon the revelation of a trust violation, both of you are likely to have a rich mix of thoughts and feelings and reactions. There is often a mix of anger, shame, confusion, and a sense of victimhood. These can be overwhelming and can destabilize your relationship. If your goal is to try to keep your relationship from failing, you will need to cope as effectively with this shock as possible.
If the violation occurs after prior situations which have eroded trust, it could be the proverbial straw the breaks the camel’s back and whichever of you feels violated could bail on the relationship altogether. Or, you may want to bail but feel trapped (emotionally or financially or otherwise) in the relationship and emotionally check out or adopt a stance of vindictive anger. Both of those outcomes will kill mutually satisfying intimacy. If you are the person who committed the violation, you may feel shame and guilt and attempt to atone but lack a sense of how to do so. Sometimes shame and guilt become toxic and people often react to toxic shame with destructive behaviors. Those could also threaten your relationship.
The shock that comes soon after a revelation of a trust violation can be disorienting. It can be difficult for you to sort out your thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward yourselves and each other. Emotions will be strong and stress levels high. This can lead to additional behaviors that can further complicate the situation. Dysfunctional reactions out of anger and shame can lead to additional damage to the relationship. If you or your partner were already dealing with mental health or self-esteem issues or there were consequential, unresolved conflicts in your relationship, they can tip over the edge in a variety of ways. Alcohol and drug use will further complicate all of this. Sometimes when you reach out for social support, that support could be of mixed quality and may, or may not, help. To keep the possibility of working out the issues in the relationship and rebuilding trust, this shock must be dealt with as best as possible.
As you are coping with the shock of the situation, you begin to negotiate strategies to maintain and fix the relationship. It is important to understand the difference of strategies for the initial stage of rebuilding trust from those which will serve you later. This is partly because you need to get some traction on rebuilding trust. Also, you might not want to commit to some strategies in the long-term due to them being cumbersome and not needed.
The most important type of strategy to employ in Phase One is: establishing accountability. Without some clear mechanisms of accountability, trust will only return over a long period of time where there are not additional violations. But, that time span could be longer than you want. Let me share some examples of how couples used accountability to rebuild trust.
Situation One:
Mike mostly handled the finances in his marriage with his wife, Kim. They were both happy to have Jim manage their monthly payments as well as things like their savings and retirement accounts. This arrangement had worked well for them for the two decades of their marriage.
At one point, Mike got interested in day trading of stocks as a hobby and not really to generate a lot of income. For a long time, he had a few hundred dollars invested in this activity. However, he became fascinated with day trading strategies discussed in popular YouTube videos and eventually progressed to investing increasing amounts of money from their savings into his trading. He tried some strategies that he found interesting and ended up making a profit on his initial investments. So, over time, he started moving more money from their savings accounts into his trading activity without telling Kim. While for some time, even with ups and downs, he was maintaining a small profit on the investments. However, there was a shift in factors in the market related to the stocks he was invested in and in one day, he lost about half of the total value of the savings that he and Kim had built over their entire marriage. He knew he couldn’t hide this from her and revealed his secret financial transactions.
In addition to working out the shock of what Mike had done, one thing that he and Kim did was change how they were involved in their finances. They shifted so that Kim was now actively involved in paying monthly bills which meant she now learned more about how to sign into their accounts (which she had not been doing at all). They also agreed that once per week they would sit down and open all their financial accounts via a laptop and look at the recent transactions together. While Mike had verbally agreed with Kim to not do any further secret financial transactions and he seemed truly committed to following through with that plan, they were engaging in a clear mechanism of accountability to give them both evidence of trustworthiness. Could they rebuild trust without doing this? Perhaps. But, you can see how it could serve to give them better traction on trust sooner.
Situation Two:
Kayla and Rick had been together for six years when Rick discovered that Kayla had had two seemingly brief affairs with other guys. They went to couples therapy to try to save their relationship. Rick stated that he would only continue if Kayla committed to being monogamous and she stated that she was very much of the same mind. Kayla and Rick agreed that Rick would have access to Kayla’s phone and email and that he would take a look at her messages and call log at least once per week.
In each of these two situations, the couple adopted strategies to have clear accountability in order to have solid trustworthiness. But, it’s important to note that these strategies are unlikely to be satisfying or acceptable long-term. The openness and type of collaboration essential to accountability is different from their prior arrangements. They also are not the types of boundaries people naturally keep in relationships. Privacy is a healthy component even in close relationships. Therefore methods of accountability must be crafted carefully and why they are time-limited strategies to be implemented in the short-term and renegotiated once trust starts to re-emerge. But, if you resist these Phase One strategies because they don’t fit with what you want in general, your ability to get good, early traction on trust will be diminished.
In the first scenario, Kim really didn’t want to keep up with such active and frequent involvement with their accounts and wanted Mike to go back to mostly managing the finances. About four months, they reduced the frequency of the check-ins and shifted back to their original arrangement. They were able to do that because they had established trust. In the second scenario, Kayla admitted to Rick that although she was keeping her agreement to be monogamous, she had urges to break the boundary. They kept the checking of messaging in place for many months in order to rebuild their trust. Kayla reported that being held accountable helped her maintain her agreement with Jim.
So, to summarize: when rebuilding trust, if you only look at the big picture and only negotiate shared strategies that both of you would find acceptable long-term, you will likely avoid some short-term strategies which could be highly valuable for the long-term health of your relationship. By allowing that some strategies are useful for accountability even if cumbersome or constraining, you can get traction on have a solid sense of trustworthiness. You start with a plan to revise the plan after you are no longer in crisis mode. For many couples, this will take a few months.
Issue #4: Renegotiating your relationship
Usually soon after a major trust violation, couples are focused on making the disruption of the trust go away so that they can return to whatever their sense of connection was prior. But, not long into the process, couples realize that they are now in new territory. They are negotiating a new relationship which will be different from how it was before. This doesn’t necessarily mean a compromise and a reduction of quality, although it may seem that way for a bit. In the long run, many couples improve the overall quality of their relationship through their process of communication and negotiation.
Adjustment to a new relationship can be stressful even when the changes are desirable. Your closest relationships make up a large part of your identity. What you do in and through those relationships makes up your life. When your primary relationship goes through a period of significant changes, this may feel destabilizing. You may feel frustrated to have to grow when you just wanted things to continue along as they were.
You are going to become a new you as you rebuild trust. Your partner is doing the same. You two are crafting a new relationship that will feel different than what you have shared before. There is uncertainty but also possibility. Be open and honest with yourself and your partner about how you want to be. It can be scary to sit with the possibility that you will renegotiate your relationship and the outcome could be that you decide that you will end, or radically alter, your relationship. But, the only ways to completely avoid this existential stress is to either go ahead and end it, or pretend that nothing really needs to change. Often neither of those are satisfying and, so, you need to give yourself some grace and have courage to proceed even when you have some fear and you’re not certain how it will go.
All of these issues are complex and consequential. I recommend that you consider getting individual therapy for each of you and that you go together to a competent couples therapist. Be aware that you may not like the first therapist you see together. You may have to try a second if the first doesn’t work out. I have an article about encouraging your partner to go to therapy HERE. Another article gives some information about what to expect in your first session HERE. I have a PLAYLIST devoted to relationship topics on my YouTube channel Wellness with Jon. Check those out!
Good luck and much courage to you!
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