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Rebuilding trust after it has been broken is the hardest thing you may have to go through. Thinking to yourself, “Why me, why did this happen to me, what did I do to deserve this?”
How do you repair trust in a relationship? How to rebuild trust in a relationship after you have lost trust in the relationship? The first thing you need to know is that rebuilding trust is a process, one that requires patience and hard work.
In most cases, there’s an accumulation of hurts and betrayals, lies and uncertainties, that gradually over time eroded your partner’s trust.
What happens when trust is broken in the relationship
Trust and relationship go hand in hand. The stronger the trust, the better the relationship. When there is no trust in the relationship or when trust is gone, it can be detrimental for the partners. Here’s how:
– When trust has been broken, it’s difficult to handle, and you feel like your life is falling apart. The hardest part is trying to figure out where you went wrong or if you did something.
– When trust is broken, you have so many emotions, and you find yourself crying one minute and the next feeling sad, frustrated, and disappointed. You even ask yourself, “how could someone who says she/he loves me treat me this way?”
– When trust has been broken, you feel trapped, you can’t eat or sleep, and you have knots in your stomach for days. It’s hard to imagine that someone who you love so much would do something that hurts you to your core and cause you to see them differently, and make you want to walk away from the relationship.
– The absence of trust causes your mind to wander, makes you paranoid, causes you to become controlling, and you doubt everything that’s being said to you.
– The lack of trust causes the relationship to be unstable, makes you feel and think that your mate is not who you thought they were, makes you doubt if you were ever loved, and if the relationship was built on a lie.
– The biggest question you have when trust has been broken is, “why didn’t I see this coming”, in which there’s no way you could have known that what happened was going to happen.
After your trust is broken- Should you stay or leave
How to trust someone again after a bad relationship? How to trust after a toxic relationship?
Should you decide to stay in the relationship and move forward, it will take a lot of work, commitment, and both you and your mate’s willingness to work together, especially if you are learning to trust again after a bad relationship.
It’s not impossible to rebuild trust, and knowing what to do will help you get to a place where you feel secure again, where the relationship is stable, and where the feelings of uneasiness and anxiety will decrease and you and your mate can have a loving, secure, healthy, lasting relationship.
How to rebuild trust in a relationship
Now that trust has been broken, what are your next steps? What do you want to do? Is the relationship worth saving, and if so, how do you move forward?
You can’t expect to regain your partner’s trust overnight; but, by taking these next seven steps, you can make strides in restoring and strengthening your partner’s capacity to believe in you and your relationship.
There are several ways of how to rebuild trust in a relationship when trust has been broken in your relationship, and although it’s a hard process, it’s necessary for the success of your relationship.
Check out these steps to rebuilding trust in a relationship if you want to learn to trust again:
1. Be forgiving
Forgiveness prepares and opens your heart to receive, to listen, and to hear what your mate has to say. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you will forget. It means that you’re open willing to accept your mate back into your life with the possibility of starting over.
2. Create boundaries
You must set boundaries around the areas where relationship trust has been broken. Boundaries create structure and consistency and help bring stability back to the relationship. Without boundaries, everyone does what they want to do, which is how trust was broken in the beginning, so setting boundaries create an atmosphere for you to be able to trust your partner again.
3. Be accepting
As a solution for how to rebuild trust in a relationship, your partner must be willing to acknowledge their actions, for what they do, for where they go, and for what they say.
Accepting will help you become secure in the relationship. Although your partner may feel uncomfortable letting you know these minute details, it’s important that they do to gain someone’s trust back and so that the feelings of insecurity in the relationship can decrease.
Also read: Giving Up On Your Relationship? 15 Things To Do Before You Decide
4. Be patient
One of the ways to rebuild trust in a relationship is that you must develop the ability to be patient. Rebuilding trust doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t happen in a week, two weeks, three weeks, or even a month.
The timeframe in which learning to trust in a relationship occurs varies, and it depends on many factors, and one is the level of hurt that you experienced in the relationship.
Usually, people who want to rush the process and want everything to be over immediately and expect their partners to get over the hurt and automatically trust; but that doesn’t happen, it takes time, and time equals patience.
According to Sheri Meyers, Psy.D., the author of Chatting or Cheating: How to Detect Infidelity, Rebuild Love, Affair-Proof Your Relationship, “rebuilding trust means rebuilding your credibility”. When trust has been broken, be open and don’t try to fix it on your own, be willing to seek counseling to gain understanding, clarity and to talk about what happened.
Remember, trust is about feeling safe with your mate, and it’s about commitment to your mate and the relationship.
5. Be honest with each other
As a tip for how to rebuild trust in a relationship, establish whether you and your partner are ready to be honest. Just because you may have turned a new leaf by coming clean about your relationship issues and starting over, there may be old hurts or betrayals that need addressing.
In order for you to have a productive conversation, you and your partner need to be willing to be open, honest, and vulnerable about your feelings in relation to your relationship and relationship history.
6. Take responsibility
You need to take responsibility for what has happened as a solution for how to rebuild trust in a relationship. This requires both honesty and humility in admitting that what you did was wrong and that you are seeking your partner’s forgiveness.
This is not the time to play the victim or make excuses about your behavior. Accepting responsibility for your choices and actions as they contributed to the issue is a critical step in rebuilding your partner’s trust.
This may also be a good time to acknowledge the error on your part, show respect to your partner and say sorry and ask for forgiveness.
7. Ask your partner what they need from you
The injured partner in the relationship needs to be able to set the tone and expectations for the next steps moving forward— assuming you both agree that you want to move forward together. One of the best things you can do to rebuild your partner’s trust, then, is to ask them what they need from you. For example, they may want to:
- Articulate some new boundaries in your relationship
- Clarify their expectations of you
- Revisit your relationship goals with a view to ensuring they’re in alignment with your partner’s
8. Reassure your partner you hear them
As an answer to how to rebuild trust in a relationship, reassure your partner that you’ve heard them, understand their requests and will do your best to honor those requests.
One of the ways you can reassure your partner that you’re listening to them and respect their wishes is to repeat back to them what you’ve heard, asking them if you’ve heard them correctly. If the requests that your partner makes are within your power to fulfill, you can also reassure your partner that moving forward, you will honor these requests.
9. Demonstrate by your actions that you will keep up your promises
Demonstrate by your actions and behaviors that you’re serious about honoring your end of the commitment moving forward. This may seem like a no-brainer but remains worth mentioning.
Actions do often speak louder than words— maybe most especially in this department of rebuilding broken trust.
Do what you need to do in order to keep your word. This may mean, for example, encouraging positive connections with your partner on a regular basis.
It also may mean finding a close accountability partner and attending therapy. Leaning into your own support network can help you keep doing the next right thing in relation to your struggling relationship.
10. Keep open lines of communication
So, how to rebuild trust in a relationship?
Last but not the least, good communication is one of the best ways to insulate your relationship from the secrets and dynamics of mistrust that addiction breeds. Ultimately, regular and honest communication isn’t just good for your relationship: it’s good to regain trust in a relationship, so make it a priority.
Check out this video on how you can build relationships based on communication:
Remember that healthy communication can be taught. If you and your partner are having trouble communicating with each other in positive and constructive ways, consider seeing a licensed marriage and family therapist who can facilitate your interactions and give you some helpful communication tools.
The lesson: Even after years of eroded trust, it’s possible to renew the marital bonds of trust that hold you together.
