Elizabeth Earnshaw

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist

Elizabeth Earnshaw is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist.

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How do I rebuild trust in a relationship after it's been broken?
Trust is the foundational aspect of a relationship. If you think of a relationship like a house, trust is holding the whole house up. And when it gets broken, it's like when a foundation goes bad. If you start painting the walls to try to make that house better, but the foundation is broken, the house is not going to suddenly stand up and be more solid. So often when people have breaches of trust, they get really frustrated because they're trying to paint the walls. So they're going on more dates, they're trying to spend time with each other, and they've had some conversations. And the partner who broke the trust will often feel like, "What else am I supposed to do? I've told you you look beautiful, or I've I've been hanging around you more often, or I did X, Y, and Z," but really they've just been painting the walls. They haven't repaired that crack in the foundation.

When I'm working with couples, I often explain, when there's a crack in the foundation, it's so jarring to the relationship, it literally shakes that house, right? A lot more work has to be done to fix it, and you have to take extra steps and work harder. And so the number one thing I say to the person who broke the trust is you just have to kind of brace yourself for it to be a little bit of time where you're going to have to work a little harder than you would in a normal, healthy, happy, strong foundation relationship to fix that foundation. And the one goal that you have is that you are proving to your partner that you have their well-being at heart.

The partner who lost trust has to think about trust-building behaviors their partner can do, and they have to be able to be frank, honest, and fair about it. Like, “I want us to work and in order to do that, you will need to come home every night after work on time. That's something you can physically do to make me feel like you care about my well-being and so that we can move forward.” And they have to be able to share that.

The person rebuilding the trust then has to do those things consistently. They have to be honest about things. So if something else comes up that would be easy to lie about again, they have to actually tell the truth even if it's really hard. And they have to be willing to hear about it again and again and again for a certain amount of time because their partner is going to want to process it.

For the person who was betrayed, they also have to recognize they can't move the goalposts. What will often happen is that somebody's been betrayed, and they say, if we do all of this, then I'm going to be willing to start letting you in again. Their partner will do all those things, and then they'll say, well, no, I still don't think that's enough. Moving the goalposts is going to prolong the issue, and it's going to be really unfair to your partner, and your partner's going to give up. So you have to be very clear the whole way, the whole path along rebuilding trust, this is what I need, and you can't constantly change that on your partner.

To simplify, I’d say there are three phases people go through when they're building trust. One is atonement , that's the phase of saying,” I'm so sorry, I totally get how I impacted you. I'm going to say sorry a million times, and I'm going to ask you what I need to do. I'm going to do those things. I'm going to show you I care about your well-being.” The second is being able to be attuned to each other . So let's start actually figuring out what we missed about each other in the past, let's start listening better, let's start connecting, and spending time. And then the final phase is, hopefully, that you have that secure attachment again. But you're not going to have that secure attachment until you go through those other two things first.

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