How To Build Trust in A Relationship After Cheating

This post is about rebuilding broken trust, and this is something we sometimes do in our relationship. I’m going to outline five things you can do if you're the person who broke someone's trust and five things you can do if you're the person whose trust was broken.

Trust can be broken in a lot of different ways. There are some very big things that break trust like having an affair. if one’s partner have an affair with someone else, that's a big deal. However, sometimes trust is broken in smaller ways. For example, when there's been a bad fight and some ugly things were said, that can make you or your partner not to feel emotionally safe anymore. These betrayals can break trust and we need to rebuild it to ensure that we bring back the trust. 

In rebuilding trust, one must have a plan and some actions to take because earning back trust especially after cheating can be a daunting task to surmount. So, what are those things we can do to build trust in a relationship after cheating? 

If you're the person who broke the trust, you've now got some responsibility in fixing the situation. First, you should have one-sided conversations. What this means is that when your partner comes to you to talk about something, like their feelings or about what happened you just listen. That’s all! Don’t try to defend yourself, explain or justify, just make sure you listen and then take your turn to talk later. Sometimes rebuilding trust can be done by just listening and that lets your partner to know that he or she is safe by giving a listening ear. 

Secondly, apologize without hesitating, don't make the other person have to pull an apology out of you. if you've hurt someone's feelings, own up and quickly apologize. Apologies are amazing tool that we have that are vital in rebuilding trust. We're sure going to make mistakes in life however, when we acknowledge our mistakes and we acknowledge that we have hurt the feelings of the other person, that can help us build that trust back up.

Thirdly, if you need to take some time out to process the situation, promise to come back and revisit the conversation. A lot of times, if the situation overwhelms us, we need a moment to calm our nerves down. We do not want to go into a conversation triggered as this can end up creating more problems. So, if you need to take some time out, let the person know but promise to come back. When we exit a conversation, that can cause a lot of anxiety for the other person and especially if there's been broken trust. Always promise to come back if you need to take some space.

Fourthly, what happens in the conversation have to stay in the conversation, you have to honor what your partner tells you. When someone is sharing with you their vulnerability or telling secrets, they believe it’s going to stay between the both of you. Honoring your partner’s vulnerability is really important for rebuilding trust since they assume that anything they say is safe with you.

The fifth thing is to tell the whole truth. Most often people can sense when they are being told partial or half-truth. Holding the whole truth back is not good for rebuilding trust. If you're talking about something that happened, tell the whole truth, tell everything, don't make the other person have to pull out information from you. Just let them have it up front and right away because when we tell partial truths the other stuff comes out later, that will certainly further break the trust.

So those are the five actions to implement if you're the person that did the trust breaking.

Let's say you're on the other side of the spectrum, and someone has broken your trust. There are still things that you can do to help rebuild the trust. Even though it is their responsibility to bring back the trust, you can massage along.

The number one thing to do is to reinforce the behaviors that you want to see. When your partner shows up and listen or when he or she show up and let you have one sided conversation, let them know that you appreciate that. We have to encourage people when they do the things that we want them to do or meet our expectation.

When our partners fall short of an expectation, we don't want to say thank you for their wrongdoing because it's not where we expected them to be, however, to get them there, we've got to encourage them along the way. So, if they're showing up in conversations and they're doing things that are helpful, let them know so that they can keep doing those things.

The second thing is don't give up when things are failing. Rebuilding trust is a gradual process, and it takes a lot of conversations where safety has been built. If you have a conversation and it doesn't go accordingly, don't throw in the towel on your relationship if you want to stay in it. Keep trying to figure out what went wrong or what you can tweak but don't give up on it.

Thirdly, tell your partner what role you want them to play. If you need them to do a certain thing like validate you, or to answer questions, or to just listen to you, just let them know.

Fourthly, start with small things. If you have had a major breach of trust, it's going to take a while before you go back in fully. Take a vulnerability step and when you see that your partner has met or honored his side of the deal in trust building process and you feel safe then you can take another big step. If you're not ready to go in with both feet, go in with some small vulnerabilities so that you can build that trust bit by bit.

Lastly, you've got to leave the past behind you. We have a tendency of bringing the past to future when something bad has happened us.  Most times we are tempted to bring the past over and over instead of staying on target or on current topic or situation. When you bring up the past, what you're doing is triggering the shame response in the other person. They know that they hurt you, they know that you were terribly hurt and when they have their shame response triggered, they can't stay present to listen because they go into their fight flight freeze response. So, try to stay focused on what's happening right away and leave the past behind so that you and your partner can communicate and rebuild the trust.