Has your world been turned upside down because the person you're supposed to be able to trust more than anyone on earth has betrayed that trust? Or have you been coping in a relationship or marriage where there is a constant undercurrent of mistrust because your partner regularly lies? If you answered 'yes' to either of these questions, I've got good news for you.
There is a way to rebuild the trust that has been shaken, battered, or destroyed by your partner. And in this article I am going to touch on part of the principles that are necessary for rebuilding the trust.
Trust is the foundation of your relationship. It's as important as love is. So if you want to rebuild your relationship or marriage and make it into the tender loving relationship you have dreamt of all your life, rebuilding the trust is one of the most important steps you can take.
In this article I am going to help you take that step, so you can save your relationship or marriage and turn your world right side up again.
A lot of people say love is the foundation of every relationship. And it would be foolish to question the importance of love in relationships. After all, you can't have much of a relationship if you don't have love.
But what I have discovered over years is that trust is at least as important as love is.
Those of you who have suffered from a betrayal of trust know why I am saying this. For those of you who may doubt it, let me explain.
If you can't trust your spouse, it impairs every single facet of your relationship. Communication becomes more difficult, because you start to doubt he is telling you the truth about anything. You start worrying whether or not you can trust him with your finances, your personal secrets, or even with the mundane details of your day-to-day life.
More important than all that, when the trust in your relationship has been shaken, it makes it hard for you to trust your spouse with your emotional safety. Being hurt so badly by someone tears apart the emotional connection you so desperately need to have a happy, healthy marriage.
And that means that when the trust is lost it can actually damage or even destroy the love.
So while a relationship can't survive long without love; trust is the foundations on which that love is built. A lack of trust makes it nearly as difficult to have a good marriage as a lack of love.
This means that if you are in a relationship right now where there are trust problems, you need to repair this damage if you are going to make your relationship or marriage all it can be.
I know that may sound like an insurmountable task to you right now. And that's because it IS difficult. However, I assure you, you can rebuild the trust if you know how.
I have some tools I want to share with you that will help you rebuild the trust that has been destroyed in your relationship or marriage. But before I get to those I want to describe two different typical scenarios in which trust is a problem in relationships.
Understanding these two different kinds of trust problems will help you become aware of exactly what you need to do to start rebuilding the trust in your relationship.
Your World was shattered: When the Trust has been Totally Destroyed
Jack and Eliza had been together for 15 years, and Eliza was convinced they had the perfect life...
That is until Jack shared an awful secret that virtually destroyed Eliza's reality.
Jack had been having an affair for a year and a half with a woman at his office.
When Eliza found out, she was almost drowned in a pool of overwhelming rage, frustration, sadness, resentment, and betrayal. But, perhaps worse than all this, was the feeling that her whole world had been torn to pieces right before her eyes. Eliza described it this way:
'When Jack told me about the affair, I felt hurt, of course. But the part that really ruined me was the feeling that I couldn't trust anyone or anything ever again. Jack was the person I trusted most in all the world. When he betrayed that trust it turned my whole world upside down.
I started doubting my friends and family. I began to wonder whether or not anything I had ever believed in was true. I couldn't even trust myself anymore. My personal thoughts, feelings, and perceptions all seemed like lies. I felt like everyone and everything was going to betray me the way Jack had.
Jack tore my world to shreds that day. My life was no longer my life. How was I ever going to heal from all this pain? How could we ever repair all the damage he had done?'
If you have suffered from the kind of betrayal Eliza is talking about you know how she feels. She went from trusting Jack 100%, and in a single moment, all that was taken away and she felt as though she couldn't trust him (or anyone else) ever again.
There is no way to describe how difficult this kind of feeling is. It's so powerful that people's worlds are literally changed by these kinds of events. It's as though everything you once knew and trusted has been ripped to shreds in a single moment.
Infidelity is one of the ways this happens. When the vow of fidelity is broken in your relationship, it has this effect of tearing your world apart.
But there are other ways a spouse might completely destroy the trust in a single moment this way.
Any action, like this, that takes you from a place of trusting your spouse completely to not being able to trust him at all, is liable to rip your world apart and it fits into its own special category of trust problems.
There are ways to heal this kind of damage, and I will get to those in a moment. But before we do that, let's turn our attention to the other category of trust problems.
I Haven't Truly Trusted Him for a Long Time: The Constant Undercurrent of Mistrust
In other situations there isn't a single incident that destroys the trust, but a constant undercurrent of mistrust that has haunted the relationship for a long time, perhaps since the two of you first got together.
There are a lot of ways a sense of constant mistrust can develop in a relationship. When one spouse flirts with someone of the opposite sex every chance he gets, goes out gambling from time to time and puts a big hole in the savings account, or is regularly involved in business situations that seem less than ethical, his wife may develop an ongoing concern about whether or not she can trust him.
In my experience ongoing trust issues of this nature often develop around addictions. If your spouse is addicted to drugs, alcohol, gambling, or anything else it can create a situation where you are never quite certain you can trust him.
I have seen relationships go on for a LONG time with this kind of constant undercurrent of mistrust. In some cases, people continue in relationships like this for years, and suffer from bouts of trouble with trust as well as other problems.
Based on my definition of a fully intimate marriage, I don't think a relationship where there is constant mistrust can be completely and fully intimate. You aren't going to be the best couple you can be if there is a constant sense of mistrust in your relationship or marriage. And that means that if you want to get to a place where your relationship is truly what you most want it to be you are going to have to face this trust issue as well.
Trust issues of this type can be healed using this 3-Step System for Rebuilding Trust, just as the trust issues described in the section above can.
However, I want to mention one final point before we get to that.
If you are dealing with a situation where there are problems with addiction, this issue has to be treated before you can truly start rebuilding the trust.
Having said that, I shall be coming your way with the concluding segment of this article. I hope you have been blessed by it? Feel free to leave a comment in the section below.
