There are many different scenarios in a relationship that can lead to broken trust. Maintaining trust in marriage boils down to the ability to remain transparent, honest, and consistent in your marriage as well as maintaining integrity as an individual. Integrity, meaning that who we are in our marriage is who we are when we are alone or with others and who we are when we are alone or with others is who we are in our marriage.
So what happens when transparency, honesty, and consistency have been thrown out the window and integrity is lost? What happens when maybe it feels the trust that was once there was taken advantage of in an attempt to hide actions that hurt and betray? What feelings and experiences are even normal to have in response to a spouse or partner who has broken trust? In this blog I want to help normalize some of what you might experience when trust is broken and a couple ways to respond to yourself.
It is normal to grieve, even if you both decide to stay together: When trust is broken, you have to navigate a perspective shift; the person you once placed so much trust in, may now be someone you trust the least. This can change how you think back on memories together and your beliefs about your spouse and the relationship. You may likely find yourself grieving the relationship you once had, realizing that it may have not always been what you believed it was. This is incredibly painful! It is okay to grieve and you might feel emotions such as, but not limited to, anger, shock, denial, sadness, numbness and depression. This is a very normal and human response to broken trust.
It is normal to experience grief for A WHILE after trust is broken: Just like we wouldn’t expect a severe laceration to heal overnight, we can’t overwhelm ourselves and place an impossible expectation on ourselves that we can emotionally heal overnight after broken trust as well. Just like with a wound we need to be gentle with it, clean it, re-bandage it, and take necessary steps and precautions to help it heal. We need to do the same for ourselves emotionally; be gentle with ourselves and allow space and room to experience our emotions so that we can heal and ‘clean’ the wound. Our emotional wounds will take time to heal and that’s healthy and okay.
Give Space to Understand Your Emotions: When we are in crisis and in immense pain after broken trust, we often want to be out of our pain immediately. It can be hard to even approach the parts of us that hurt. However, it is so vital to your personal healing, and the healing of the relationship to give space to understand the 'why' behind these uncomfortable emotions. These uncomfortable emotions we often want to avoid are typically bearing witness to what we value and hold dear to us. Take the opportunity to understand yourself in a new way. Because you are feeling these uncomfortable painful emotions highlights your character as a person that you value healthy intimacy and connection, you value trustworthiness and integrity, and because of that of course you are going to have these intense and painful feelings when those core values have been violated by someone who has been so important to you.
Be Gentle with Yourself: So often we can get really down on ourselves or frustrated that we can’t just trust again, get over it…or simply just feel good again. Sometimes we might internalize this as being weak, or being someone we don’t want to be. However, a key to healing and feeling whole again, isn’t in exiling the parts of you that feel pain right now, it’s in partnering with every part of yourself with gentleness. I encourage you and challenge you to be gentle with every part of yourself, understanding that it is likely coming from a place that bears witness to and wants to preserve the kind, loving and loyal person you are.
Building trust in relationships and marriage is something that takes a considerable amount of time, but very little time to break it. The fact that healing and rebuilding trust takes a lot of time and effort exemplifies just how valuable it is. For trust to be rebuilt with minimal effort or time would minimize and make small the kind of value and weight trust carries in relationships. Because of this it is so important to honor the effort and time it takes to heal and rebuild after trust has been broken. It is okay and actually healthy that these things take time. So I encourage you to be gentle with yourself and your spouse in this season of rebuilding trust together.
If you find yourself in this place of broken trust today and need help personally healing or looking to rebuild trust in your relationship together I would love to help you. You don’t have to walk this out alone. Feel free to contact me by phone (860-791-4688), by email (elizabeth@plumeriacounseling.hush.com), or by booking a FREE 15 minute consultation.
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