Rebuilding Trust

Honesty, Lies and Your Spouse

If your spouse had an affair, whether it happened once or multiple times, lies are still involved. The cheater told deliberate lies, omitted truths or combined the two in order to carry out the affair. You may already be trying to work on your marriage and forgive your spouse, but honesty, lies and your spouse’s trustworthiness still lingers in your thoughts. Read on to explore the effects brought on by lying about an affair and the dimension of trust you can work on to try and save your marriage.

Post-Affair Pain Avoidance

You may start to doubt your judgment about honesty after your spouse’s infidelity because you can’t believe that you have been deceived or that you ignored your gut feeling until it was too late that the truth already came out. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Marriage is built on trust, and naturally you trusted your spouse that there wouldn’t be lies involved. You kept simply kept your faith that he or she was telling the truth. Your deception was not your fault.

Having your faith or trust in someone broken by their lies and action may lead to self-doubt. You end up doubting your ability to discern a lie from the truth, but remember, you are not alone. There are so many who have been cheated on and they also had faith on their spouse. They feel just like you do. Any person, no matter how impeccable their judgment is, can be fooled by a liar, especially by a seasoned one. Think of all the con artists who can easily get their way, the scams that rip money off people. Even those who get involved with a married person are also being lied to. Some of them do not even know what their situation is, while some are just given false promises.

You may have already accepted your spouse’s infidelity, but you still would like to make sure that it wouldn’t happen again, that you can protect yourself through pain avoidance. You want your spouse to be trustworthy again and know that his dishonesty is done for good.

Critical Dimensions of Rebuilding Trust

Although there are no guarantees when it comes to honesty, it doesn’t mean that you can’t trust your partner ever again. Rebuilding trust within a marriage will take some time and you and your spouse need to work on two critical dimensions of rebuilding trust.

1. Assurance of Transparency

Even if your spouse is being impatient about your lack of trust in him or her, he or she has to act in trustworthy ways. The commitment or assurance of transparency is important, especially because it wasn’t there before. Transparency is a good way of gauging honesty and rebuilding trust. Explain to your spouse that you need to see that he or she is open and transparent about everything. Consistent behavioral patterns helps assess honesty and rebuild trust.

2. Mistrust Triggers

You and your partner should define and help each other understand mistrust triggers, or actions that lead to doubt. The affair victim especially needs to be clear and specific about this and give examples, such as:
“When you don’t call me when you can’t get home by dinner time, I can’t help but wonder what is going on.”
“When the details of what you’re saying are inconsistent.”
“When you take phone calls on your phone and you suddenly leave the room when I’m there.”
“When you are constantly texting someone but don’t say who it is.”

The spouse who cheated should also analyze their actions in the past and own up to them. Both partners should be truthful in order to define the mistrust triggers and eradicate them. Rebuilding trust and honesty in a marriage is a process of growth and involves both spouses to make it work. The two of you may need to change the way you act and communicate with each other because trust and honesty is crucial when you’re trying to save a marriage

Filed Under: Rebuilding Trust Tagged With: is my spouse lying to me, my spouse is lying, rebuilding trust in a relationship

How Much Do You Trust Your Cheating Spouse

By Adrienne Mansfield Leave a Comment

It’s safe to assume that your answer would not be 100%. Affairs have devastating effects, not just on your feelings, but also on the foundations of your marriage. Nothing breaks a person’s trust like an affair, and you know that without trust, there’s no way of saving a marriage. But, what if you would find out that you could trust your spouse again? Let’s say 25%, 50% or 75%. How would that impact your feelings about the possible success of saving your marriage? Read on to learn about the three forms of trust in a relationship, so you can find out how much you really trust your spouse.

Post-Affair Emotions Impacts Trust

The days that come after discovering your spouse’s infidelity seem like hell and you have a whirlwind of emotions. You still can’t fully believe it but the pain you go through is indescribable. Over time, you realize that you have to heal yourself and try to save your marriage. You work on most aspects of your marriage but sometimes you still ask yourself if you can trust your partner. Reestablishing trust may be difficult, but it is not impossible. There are different forms of trust and there is no “one correct way” of trusting people. Unlike what most people believe, trust isn’t black and white.

Three Forms of Trust

There are areas in your relationship where trust still exists, even after your spouse’s affair. Understanding this can help you feel better. All is not lost and you can work on building up the trust you have left. Despite the infidelity, it is possible to have some trust left because there are different forms of trust in a relationship. There is potential in rebuilding your trust from each of the forms.

1. Physical Safety

If you have, and hopefully never will, experienced, domestic violence, then you may not have appreciated this form of trust. You trust that your spouse will never physically harm or threaten you, and in case of emergencies like earthquakes or fire, you trust that your spouse will keep you out of danger.

2. Financial Security

Financial partnerships naturally exist within marriages. Whatever your agreement is on your income and expenses, whether you pool your income together or each shoulder particular expenses, having this agreement is a great sign that you still trust each other. Financial security means that you trust your spouse to do the responsible thing with the money you. Trusting each other that each of you will do their share in keeping a roof over and putting food on the table, is a definite sign that you still trust each other.

3. Emotional Predictability

You know your spouse well enough to trust him or her to be somewhat predictable in expressing their emotions, and you might have taken this for granted. Imagine if your spouse’s emotional response was unpredictable. You wouldn’t be able to trust that he or she wouldn’t do crazy things in public, like throw things at you because of some random reason. You wouldn’t be able to know how your spouse would react

How Much You Trust Your Spouse

Now that you’ve learned about the different forms of trust, try to rate each of them to find out how much you trust your spouse. Rate your level of trust for each of the three forms of trust on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest level of trust, meaning you trust your spouse 100% to give yourself an idea of how much you still trust your spouse. If you have discovered that you do, on some level, trust him or her, then you still have the foundation to rebuild trust and let it grow once more. This could be the glimmer of hope that your looking for in saving your marriage.

Filed Under: Rebuilding Trust Tagged With: getting over an affair, how to trust again, rebuilding trust in a relationship

How To Rebuild Trust In A Relationship

By Adrienne Mansfield 15 Comments

After your spouse has lied to you while carrying out an affair, whether it was once or many times, it is hard to know whether or not he or she is ever telling the truth afterwards. Whether or not the cheating spouse deliberately lied or lied by omission, or both, it does not matter. Once the trust has been lost, it can be hard to get back.

Now you may be trying to save your marriage and reconcile with your spouse who cheated on you. But this can be very difficult when you have to constantly wonder if he or she is lying or telling the truth.

This article discusses what happens after one spouse lies and the two important elements you need to have to regain the trust and honesty in your relationship so you can get over the affair and save your marriage.

You Try To Avoid Pain After Your Spouse Cheated

After you find out about the infidelity, you will start to doubt whether or not you will ever be able to tell the truth from lies again. It can be a blow to your self-esteem to know that somebody lied to you and you believed it. Or even worse, if you had a feeling something was off but you went against your instinct and chose to believe the lies until they were too obvious to ignore.

First of all, you should stop being so hard on yourself because you are not to blame. Marriage is based on trust and you rightfully chose to trust your spouse. Just because you were deceived does not make you at fault in any way. This just means you are the victim of somebody else’s lies. It is natural to believe your spouse when they say they were working late or just having drinks with people from work.

Once your trust is broken by a cheater, you may be overrun with self-doubt and even start to lose trust in yourself and your capability to know the truth from a lie. It may help to know that you are definitely not alone. Just think of all the other people out there who have been cheated on and also lost trust in their spouses. Most people naturally wonder how they possibly could not have known what was going on.

People get lied to every day and they believe the lies easily. Just think of all the scams people fall for and end up losing a lot of money. Or more relevant to your situation, think of the other men and women who get involved with a married people. In many cases, they were lied to by the cheaters as well and had no idea that they were married. They may have foolishly believed they had a future with the married person. Or if they knew the other person was married, the cheater may have lied about how bad things were in the relationship and made it seem like they were separated already.

Knowing all of this, you still want to make sure you can protect yourself in the future and make sure you never fall for the lies again. This is known as pain avoidance. Even though you want to be able to trust your spouse again and think that the dishonesty is over, but you are looking for a guarantee.

Crucial Elements To Regaining The Trust

You should be aware that you will never get a guarantee that your spouse is not lying to you right now or that he or she will never lie to you again in the future. This does not mean that you will not be able to trust your spouse again. However, it does mean that regaining the trust in your spouse will be a process that takes time. Following these crucial steps will help you move forward to rebuild the trust in your marriage.

Element 1: Commit to Transparency

Is your spouse getting impatient and wondering why you cannot just get over it and trust them now? It is definitely not that easy. First of all, you spouse needs to start acting like somebody who is trustworthy. This means committing to transparency in you relationship, something that was most likely lacking before the affair.

It will help rebuild the trust to see your partner making an effort to be open and honest about their actions. That is why transparency is so important. When your spouse is consistent in their behavior and is continually transparent with you about where they are going and who they are with, you will start to rebuild the trust that you lost.

Element 2: Define Mistrust Triggers and Remove Them

You should talk with your spouse and identify what triggers feelings of mistrust for you. The partner who was cheated on should give specific examples of what scenarios make them feel as though they are being lied to again.

An example could be:

“When you come home late but don’t call to say you are running late, it leaves me wondering why you haven’t come home and what is going on.”

“When you answer phone calls and leave the room, I get suspicious about who is on the line.”

“I see you texting on the weekends, but you never tell me who you are texting, and I am left to wonder who it is.”

Another crucial aspect of this is that the cheating spouse needs to look at their actions in the past and own up to what they did. We all know when we are lying to somebody. This will help identify the triggers of mistrust and remove them.

Once you identify the mistrust triggers, you should communicate better to remove them. If your spouse texting was a trigger, then he or she needs to start telling you who is on the receiving end.

Regaining the trust in your marriage is a learning and growing process. You will need to change the way you and your spouse conduct yourselves, and also learn to to communicate better.

If you have experience with losing trust in a relationship and are trying to rebuild it, please leave a comment below to share your thoughts. If you were the victim, has your spouse made any effort to be more transparent? How has your spouse changed his or her actions? What mistrust triggers can you identify in your marriage? If you were the one who cheated, what did you do to keep the affair a secret? What are you now doing differently to be more transparent and gain back the trust of your partner?