When Your Relationship has Taken a Hit
You’ve been with your partner for ages. You love them. You’ve had some hard times in your relationship. And then something happens. There’s hurt. There are tears. The trust between you two has been broken.
Once the dust settles a little, you both decide that you want to be stay together, but you have no idea where to go from here.
When I experience couples in this situation, I find that the first instinct between couples is to rebuild trust. They’re missing a giant step and that’s where we’re going today.
This has historically shown up in the research around infidelity and affair recovery, however I find it super applicable to any kind of relational trauma- The Safety-Trust-Confidence cycle.
When a relational trauma occurs, the system is thrown into chaos. You may be questioning your relationship and your partner and wondering if everything you experienced up until then was a lie. The confidence you had previously has been lost. This is when you enter this cycle. Before you can even think about trust, a couple must establish safety in the relationship.
**I’m referring to emotional safety. For issues around physical safety please see my previous posts around physical abuse in relationships.
Couples can establish safety through a variety of ways. Primarily, I find that it involves a lot of reassurance around whatever the trauma was. For example, if the relational hit came from an inappropriate relationship with someone else, reassurance may look like sharing phone passwords and social media accounts and overcommunicating where you will be. This level of reassurance providing should not be forever. If left unchecked, in can develop into a relationship hierarchy that is not sustainable. This is to manage a crisis. Creating safety also means creating a dynamic where fears and concerns can be shared and partner can be vulnerable. This can be particularly difficult after a relationship breach when all parties are more likely to put up walls and attempt to protect themselves. It can also be where working with a skilled therapist comes in handy. This level of vulnerability may look like sharing with your partner the way that this breach has now made you question your relationship and your fears that your relationship will never feel as solid again as it once did. For the person responsible for the breach it may be taking responsibility and acknowledging their fears that they may have ruined something beyond repair.
Once safety has been established, then a couple can move into trust building because trust cannot be built without some level of vulnerability.
What builds trust looks like is a bit different couple to couple, what has been the common thread in my experience and training has been consistency and follow-through. It’s valuable for both partners to take stock of the behaviors that build trust for them and share them with one another. It sounds cheesy and may even feel awkward at first, but just as asking for what you want tends to get you more of what you want, when you share what helps you to build trust and feel trusting you’re more likely to get those behaviors.
**Another note here, most couples are not trying to ruin one another. When couples want to work on their relationship following a breach, there is often some base level of desire to feel good in their relationship again. Sharing what helps build trust is not setting you up to be played – and if you’re feeling like it is, it’s likely that emotional safety has not actually been established and it’s important to go back to that part of the cycle.
Confidence comes once trust has been established and those behaviors have continued over time. You will know you are in the confidence stage when you do not feel like you have to question the motivation of your partner’s behavior anymore and a new paradigm has been established between the two of you.
If your relationship has taken a hit and you’re struggling to establish safety so that you can build trust and move into new confidence, please give me a call. I would be happy to help.