Building Trust After Your Relationship Takes a Hit
If you’ve been following along, you know that over the past two weeks, I’ve been sharing information around repairing your relationship after a significant breach. While most of the time these breaches are framed as infidelity, however it does not have to only be in the context of infidelity.
As a quick recap, repairing this relationship follows a specific cycle that starts with emotional safety and ends with confidence. Last week we spend time discussing building emotional safety. Today we’re moving into the middle section of this cycle that involves building trust and specifically building trust after trust has been lost.
Before trust can be built, a couple has to establish emotional safety. You will know quickly if you’re not ready to move into this stage because you’ll find that you still need to put up walls or still want to engage in punitive behavior toward your partner. When you feel like you’re able to take responsibility, be vulnerable, and reassure one another with regularity, then you’re prepared to start to rebuild trust.
Two of the major components of trust building involve consistency and follow through. While the specific behaviors that you will be consistent around or follow through with will differ from couple to couple, these two pieces will build that trust.
When I say follow through, I literally mean doing what you say you’re going to do. If you’re going to get up to eat breakfast with your partner, then get up and eat breakfast with your partner. While follow through is important all the time, it’s especially important when you’re in the process of rebuilding trust after a significant breach. If you remember way back to the emotional bank account, following through adds a bunch of deposits to the emotional bank account, while not following through during this time is a major withdrawal. A lot more meaning becomes attached to the behaviors that you do or do not follow through on. (There is also a message in here about being honest about what you can and cannot do rather than telling your partner what you think they want to hear because you have done something that created a breach).
Consistency refers to being predictable in your behavior. Oftentimes a breach in a relationship is a perceived departure from who you are in a relationship and what your behavior is assumed in the context of your relationship. For example, when you’re being consistent, you will always be in the place that you say you will be and if you cannot be there (because life happens) you give as much notice as humanly possible.
When it comes to these specific behaviors, I definitely encourage couples to share some examples of specific behaviors with one another that build trust for them. Because this is so personal, it’s valuable to share with your partner to ensure that you’re getting the results that you want. Your partner may be thinking they’re building trust with you, but it’s behavior that just doesn’t matter as much for you.
If you’re finding yourself struggling with building trust and you live in New York, send me a message and we’ll get you moving down the road to recovery.