How to Rebuild Trust in the Aftermath of Betrayal

If you’ve faced betrayal in your marriage or long-term relationship, you know the devastation that broken trust creates.  Trust can be broken through affairs or infidelity, either sexual or emotional.  Sex and love addiction is a major factor that comes up in destroying trust in relationships.  Other addictions, secrecy around financial decisions, or secrecy around work can create similar experiences of broken trust.  But a common factor in all these cases is deception.   

Trust requires safety, and if your perception of reality is influenced by the lies or insincerity of another person, it becomes unsafe.  You might ask yourself questions like, “How will I ever know if my spouse is telling the truth?” or “How could I have fallen for their lies?” 

Shame also comes up for the betrayed partner.  You might be wondering if it’s your fault, blaming yourself for not being able to see the warning signs of the deception.  You might feel embarrassed and like a fool.  You might also be struggling with loneliness, as issues such as sex and love addiction can be difficult to share about with friends, or you can be protecting your spouse’s privacy.  Regardless, this shame is based on a distorted view of reality put forward by the partner who deceived. 

What should I expect in rebuilding trust?

Rebuilding trust is an incredibly slow process, and it requires patience and time to heal.  Usually, I notice impatience in couples who come into my office feeling stuck.  The partner who committed the betrayal is recovering more quickly than the betrayed partner.  They might be feeling relief due to the fact that they are no longer carrying the burden of the secret addiction, and they can finally get the help they need.

Meanwhile, the betrayed spouse is wrestling with the new information he or she has received.  They are trying to integrate this new truth into the months or years of deception that have taken place, rewriting the narrative of their lives.  They are trying to re-evaluate and re-integrate their whole world with this information.  At the same time, they are faced with making decisions about the future of the relationship.

How do we rebuild trust?

Have you ever built a sandcastle?  Some professional sandcastles can be beautiful, with turrets and sculpted carvings.

Think of your marriage like a sandcastle.  When the betrayal was discovered, it’s as if a giant tidal wave came and destroyed it.  Rebuilding trust involves moving sand back to rebuild that castle.  Some days it involves moving just one grain at a time, and other days you’ll move shovelfuls.  Sometimes, if the foundation is shaky or the wind from outside blows in a certain way, parts of the castle may crumble or topple and need to be built up again.

You likely won’t be building the same exact castle over again.  You’ll change parts of it to make it new and better.  Having learned from your previous experience, you’ll likely make a stronger foundation and more beautiful or intricate carvings.  You’ll consider how you will approach the marriage after the betrayal, which involves moving into a new phase that will be decidedly different from the pain that now colors the first part of your marriage.  

Rebuilding trust requires that both spouses have an active role in this process.  It is impossible for just one of you to be doing all the work.

THE DECEIVER’S ROLE

For the individual who has betrayed their spouse, the simplest way to rebuild trust is to continually match your words up with your actions.  The first step involves honesty.  You will need to be more truthful about your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors than you ever have before.  Allow your spouse access to private accounts and information.  Some spouses need this level of transparency and others don’t, but your willingness to offer it regardless of whether it’s needed or not rebuilds trust. 

Particularly in the case of sex and love addiction, formal disclosure of acting out behaviors is a major step in rebuilding trust.  In order to establish a foundation of trust before you move forward in the relationship, you will need to have a formal disclosure of all your behaviors with your spouse.  This is a major step of honesty that will lay the foundation for the other rebuilding actions to stick.

Each time you are honest about your behaviors in the future, you will move some sand back into that sand castle.  Every time you carry out an action you said you would, you build more trust.  When you are honest about difficult, negative emotions and responses, that builds trust even stronger, as it allows your spouse to see you take ownership of your feelings and actions. 

THE BETRAYED PARTNER’S ROLE

While it may seem that the action of change rests in the hands of the deceiver, the betrayed partner actually has a significant role in the trust-rebuilding process.  In order for trust to be built, the partner be willing to take the risk to trust.  You will (understandably) be self-protective and you won’t be ready to fully trust for quite some time.  In fact, if you were ready to trust immediately after discovering the betrayal, I would caution you against it!  But the long-term goal is to help you find ways of offering trust as the two of you heal.

When you first find out about the deception and broken trust, you ought to spend some time building up your network of support individuals and self-care so you can practice kindness toward yourself as you heal. Establish safety for yourself that isn’t dependent on your spouse’s behaviors, as they will certainly not be able to meet all your expectations at first.  Create boundaries as a way of seeing if your spouse is willing to change and adapt.

Once you’ve decided to move forward, take small risks to trust.  Acknowledge or praise your spouse when you see their actions and words lining up.  Choose to focus on the progress more frequently than the past betrayal, as it can be easy to lose sight of positive changes.  However, if the deception is still going on or if you haven’t seen actions on the spouse’s part to substantiate their commitment to rebuild trust, tread cautiously.

As mentioned earlier, rebuilding trust requires that both spouses take an active role.  But even if you do, you might feel like you keep hitting roadblocks that set you back.  When you are stuck and need a way to move forward, seek out couples counseling.  In counseling, you’re able to further discuss those areas of conflict in a way that creates change.  You’ll set goals together and consider how you’ll approach this new season of your marriage. 

This article was originally posted under the title of “How Do We Come Back From This? Rebuilding Trust in a Broken Relationship” on November 29, 2018.

What Does It Mean to Be a Man or a Woman?: How Messages About Gender Have Shaped Your View of Sexuality

In your experience, what does it mean to be a man or a woman?  How do you define masculinity and femininity?  In a time when we’re having more conversations about gender and identity, these questions are more in focus than they have been in our cultural past.  We look at the classic 1950s American housewife and scoff at this repressive stereotype of femininity.  We cry out against the misogyny we see in our culture.  But where do we come to understand our own perceptions of gender and sexuality?

Many of our ideas about masculinity and femininity are formed as a result of our upbringing and how gender roles were on display in our families or childhood.  Often, our families leave gaps in understanding of sexuality that we then fill through observing outside influences.    Two of the biggest influencers of our view of sexuality are the media and churches/religious institutions. 

Influences from the Media

In my undergraduate studies, I took a developmental psychology course where we completed a project focused on messages adolescents receive about sexuality from the media.  We reviewed three popular TV shows and coded stereotypes about men, women, and sexuality.  What I learned from this project was how sexuality and gender roles are closely tied to sexual intimacy, rather than masculinity and femininity.  These shows gave plenty of messages about men and women: dominance of men over vulnerable women, men as obsessed with sex, women judged for sexual behavior, women as objects whose only aim is to please men sexually, and expectations of women’s body shapes and sizes.  What the shows left out, unfortunately, were answers to major questions that adolescents are faced with, including what it means to be a man or a women. 

Pornography also has a strong effect on masculinity and femininity.  Expectations for sexual relationships are influenced by the images and behaviors of the actors.  Aggressive imagery in pornographic images affects men’s perceptions of women and can lead to increased aggression in both men and women and/or mistaken beliefs about women and sexual assault.  Women who view pornography may become desensitized to the violent imagery and view themselves as objects in the way they are portrayed in sexual scenes.

Influences from Churches and Religious Institutions

What about church or spiritual influences on your views of maleness and femaleness?  In general, church culture can give confusing messages about what it means to be a man or a woman

For men, church cultures can emphasize masculinity as involving leadership, whether in a pastoral role at a church or as a husband and father in a family.  This pressure to lead can cause men to feel overwhelmed by carrying the weight of stress and decision-making in the family or church, while women are expected to submit to their husbands’ or pastors' leading.

For women, a common message involves dressing modestly in order to not “tempt” the men, married or otherwise, in their lives.  This implies that women are responsible for men’s purity.  It is assumed that men are visual creatures who react to the sight of a woman’s body, while women are more relational and therefore aren’t affected by seeing men’s bodies.  (Funny how the popularity of films like Magic Mike may tell us something otherwise.)  In extreme, this belief can contribute to a culture that blames women for such things as sexual harassment or assault.

Distortion of ideas about men and women can lead to dissatisfaction in marriages and inaccurate expectations about sexual intimacy.  It can affect how women or men view themselves and can lead to lower self-esteem or self-worth.

Take some time to think through the messages that you received about masculinity and femininity and how that has influenced your perceptions about yourself and those around you.  Ask yourself some of these questions:

• What are some of the early messages you received about what it means to be male? To be female?

• What messages does the media give you about what it means to be a man or a woman?

• What messages do the church and religious institutions give you about what it means to be a man or a woman?

• If you are a man, what about you feels masculine? What aspects of your personality fit into your concept of masculinity? On the flip side, where do you struggle to feel like a man?

• If you are a woman, what about you feels feminine? What aspects of your personality fit into your concept of femininity? Where do you feel less feminine?

Men and women are different.  Both bring unique strengths and weaknesses to the table.  And there are a multitude of ways to be masculine or feminine.  You bring a uniqueness to your personal identity that isn’t bound by stereotypes or cultural ideas that have been suggested to you about what it means to be male or female. This is a big topic, but my hope is that taking these questions and starting to think about them for yourself or talk about them with others will lead you into a greater understanding of your own ideas surrounding masculinity and femininity.