Happy to be collaborating with Function Health because it has been transformational in my personal health journey! When you understand your health, you can take better care of yourself and have more time on this earth with the people you love.
I love Function Health because it gives me access to 100+ lab tests and detailed insights from licensed clinicians. This helps me make better choices to support both my mind and body. Click here to try Function.
Rebuilding Trust After it’s Broken
Trust is one of the main foundations of all relationships. A groundwork of trust permits us to open up and be vulnerable, allowing us to share our full, complex selves with another person. Trust means we won’t feel judged or threatened when we admit a shortcoming or fear. Trust allows for humans to be imperfect beings and feel supported in the process of growing and making mistakes.
Trust also means we can feel sure of our partner and their commitment to our relationship. It allows us to relax and feel at ease in our home and our lives. Trust creates space for more to be possible, more creativity, more growth, more joy, more contentedness.
But trust needs to be built and earned step by step in a gradual process shown by actions, rather than just words. As your relationship grows and builds, so should your trust in each other. There are so many ways to build trust, but the main one is to consistently show up for your partner in a caring and loving manner. To give them your attention, to listen to them, to accept them fully as they are, and to be there for them.
Opening up to your partner with vulnerability is another way to build trust. When you can open yourself up to your partner despite the fear and tension it may bring up in you, this is a huge opening for your relationship. Consistency is key to building trust.
Following through with what you have committed to do is essential. Being honest and not hiding things from your partner is paramount. This is important to establish early on in your relationship and applies even to small white lies. If you find yourself holding back or lying to your partner out of fear of hurting their feelings, you are actually hurting your bond more by not allowing full trust to develop.
When trust is absent or broken, it creates a dynamic of fear and insecurity that can cause tension and harm. This robs a relationship of its comfort and threatens the long-term viability of a partnership. If you cannot trust your partner, intimacy is lost and replaced by disappointment and fear. I have seen many great relationships end when trust is broken. It is good to have boundaries and not allow yourself to be mistreated, but at the same time, you shouldn’t expect your partner to be perfect and never make mistakes.
I believe in many cases trust can be regained and rebuilt if both partners truly want this and work toward it patiently. If responsibility is taken for the transgression, which often needs to happen a few times. If open and honest communication is reestablished. If you get to the root of why trust was broken, rather than just the surface level of what happened. If you can hold your partner with compassion and understanding, while not sanctioning their misdeeds. If you can see your partner as a beautifully complex and imperfect being who makes mistakes, but who owns up to them and learns from them.
All of these conditions can lead to building an even deeper and stronger trust. But it will take time. It is not a weakness to give your partner a second chance with accountability. Though in some cases, especially when both partners do not want to put in the work, or the transgression is too deep, the relationship will not be salvageable.
If your trust has been broken in the past, this may cause you to have your guard up around others and expect them to hurt you in the same way. This pattern needs to be acknowledged and faced, communicated openly with your partner, and treated gently and patiently.
This is an excerpt from my new book How to Love Better, which is temporarily 49% off the original price on Amazon. You can also get a copy in bookstores everywhere.
Had to add this to my self-care routine
I noticed that I needed to take better care of my skin and have started using Wild Roman daily. The difference it has made has been incredible! I liked the results so much I ended up getting some for my brother, my best friend, and my cousin. My two favorites are the face serum and the face moisturizer. I love how simple the ingredients are and how they feel on my skin. Use the code DIEGO10 for 10% off. Click here to check out all their offerings.
Ready Together
My new app for couples Ready Together is now available on iPhone and Android!
Ready Together has a lot of new useful updates that can help you and your partner elevate your emotional intelligence and love each other better. Sara and I are really enjoying using it. One of the best parts of Ready Together is getting to appreciate each other in more thoughtful ways than normal.
The questions you can answer as a couple are thought-provoking. I’ve noticed that after Sara and I both check in and can see each other’s responses, it usually strikes up a nice conversation where we talk more about our answers.
I love hearing how so many of you are enjoying using Ready Together with your partner!
Download it and use it for free on iPhone and Android. Hope it serves you well!
I’m so thankful you’re putting this counsel out into the world. I’m sure so many people are hungry for it, as I was, for years. As a person in my 50s with experience on both sides of broken trust and recovery of it, I would like to emphasize one point in this excerpt:
The person who broke trust needs to be listened to by the person whose trust was broken. If that person doesn’t want to explain their action, you will want to come to clarity about why they won’t. If they try to explain, but you sense that they are not being truthful, you will want to come to clarity about why.
In both cases you must recognize that they don’t have a strong enough relationship with themselves - their own truth - to be truthful and honest with you.
And here’s something key: you are responsible for your awareness of reality, and then responsible for your response - your choices that follow. If you develop wisdom and act accordingly, you will not be playing the victim. (I’m talking about relative reality, not spiritual reality - for some, this can become confused, as it did for me. IYKYK!)
If you don’t see their behavior for what it is - if instead you choose to stay (stubbornly) in a space of denial or illusion (a cozy space, until you see it isn’t the coziness you projected onto it), you will be a victim — not of them, but of the circumstances — of your own choice. That is wishful thinking, not reality.
Have faith that you can and will experience goodness in reality and it will feel natural and easy!!
When I needed all of this counsel 15 or so years ago, and needed it for years, it seemed nowhere to be found…in any retreat or by any writer. I looked far and wide. (Of course it was out there! Maybe I needed the journey!)
At last, along came Esther Perel, who sang a song I’d never heard: she insisted on giving voice to “the transgressor”. She explained in no uncertain terms why the unpopular custom of silencing the transgressor does not help a couple to restore trust. (Recommended reading, “The State of Affairs” if the broken trust issue in your relationship is infidelity, though the teachings can be applied to all kinds of broken trust circumstances.) Go to her for the explanation, but let me assure you this works desired change, which is to point out to you the way forward.
YOU MUST OPEN YOUR MIND, HEART, EYES - you must open up! - to LISTEN to the breaker of trust! It doesn’t mean you must accept. It means you must find a point of compassion from which you can understand what they did. Then you are free to make your own choice about how to respond. BUT IN THAT LISTENING IS THE WINDOW OF POSSIBILITY OF TRANSFORMATION - of a new beginning, whether in that relationship or beyond it. All the actions of which YP wisely speaks will make more of a difference if that window is open. Otherwise, the person can try and try to prove themselves but your closure (resentment, etc) - YOUR REACTION - can actually prevent healing.
The other point I feel someone should be broadcasting is that we may suffer for giving our trust to someone blindly, NOT HAVING WAITED TO SEE ENOUGH OF THAT PERSON TO GRASP REALITY and then whine and wail that “they broke my trust”! Did they really? Or were they just being them (who they are at this current state of evolution)?
My experience has taught me that if you don’t take responsibility for YOUR CLARITY OF SELF - which enables you to see others clearly - you will repeat patterns in relationships. This responsibility is not a harsh thing to take, it’s an EMPOWERING thing to own. CHOICE!
Ok, that’s my big two cents that I would like to add out of love and deep sympathy for those reading who may be really suffering in their relationships. I came to these views through my own suffering, and eventually I came to what feels like the “science” of it, and it has served me so well - unfailingly! - in my relationships since. I can’t even believe the sense of peace and security I have in relationship…sort of unconditionally…because my trust is not a victim.
How to arrive at clarity? YP has all the guidance for you on that! Meditation, writing, slowing down, stillness, community. Esther Perel gave me the key to compassion for myself. After I’d lived with more compassion for myself I found Yung Pueblo’s terse but nutrient-dense writings on Instagram, and my whole world view began to shift away from victimhood and towards wisdom. I am so deeply grateful to these two teachers and others. Find your teachers. Cry to the universe and know that you will have answers. You found your way here. Follow the light! Peace and joy belong to you! 🙏
Rebuild trust with yourself and no one else. The rest of the field will organize around you when you do.