How to Rebuild Trust after Infidelity
This article is broken down into two parts. The first part is directed to the person who didn't cheat, and the second part is directed to the one who did cheat. If your situation is more complex, try reading the whole thing.
About a third of the couples who come to see me are struggling with infidelity in their relationship. Most of them decide to stay together, but some of them decide to separate.
Infidelity is an indication that something is going wrong in your relationship. If you handle it well, it can mark the beginning of something wonderful and new.
I've helped hundreds of couples rebuild their relationships after infidelity. I would love to help you too.
I offer couples therapy in Roseville focused on recovering from infidelity.
Your first session is free. You can schedule it here
For the Faithful Partner:
Accept reality
Focus on the present
Don't be mean
Don't control
Don't ask too many questions
Try to see your partner as an equal
1. Accept reality
The first step to rebuilding trust is to accept what has happened and how you feel about it.
What do you feel in your body when you think about what has happened? Could you imagine feeling that feeling for half an hour? Give yourself permission to feel that feeling of intense discomfort, usually in your chest or your stomach, occasionally for the rest of your life.
Try saying this out loud: I give myself permission to feel this way, off and on, for the rest of my life. The distress you feel after you discover infidelity is a warning signal that is left over from childhood.
When you were very young, your brain was hyper-focused on making sure an adult was there to take care of you because you needed that for survival.
When your caretaker was mean or neglectful, you felt the distress that you're feeling right now. The person who's supposed to love you and care for you is not doing it properly.
When you were young, the single most important thing was to make sure that someone was there to take care of you. Your brain was organized around the reality that you were going to die if someone wasn't there for you.
When you discover infidelity, that warning system gets activated. You feel like your partner's behavior directly threatens your ability to survive. The distress you feel comes from a part of your brain that was designed to protect you when you were extremely young.
The best way to deal with this distress is to welcome it, embrace it, and comfort it the way you would comfort a very small child with love, tenderness, and complete acceptance. If you try to avoid the pain or push it away, it will only get more intense until you finally open your arms and welcome it into your life.
This pain and distress will not last forever. It mostly needs to be welcomed and integrated into your soul. If you are willing to really feel the things you need to feel, you will eventually move through the pain and distress and get to a place of okayness and peace.
2. Focus on the Present
Your brain is going to want to rehearse and rehash everything that you thought was real but wasn't real. There will be a temptation to ask a million questions of your partner, to want to know exactly what happened and when and why and how. This is a normal part of recovering from infidelity, but it doesn't really solve anything.
When your brain starts rehashing the past, it is actually trying to deal with the present in an ineffective way.
When you focus your attention on the past, you are focusing on something that cannot change.
Try to think about what will have to change to keep your partner from cheating on you in the future. Your partner may say that they will never cheat again. You will need to see this on a behavioral level before you will be able to trust it.
Infidelity requires two things: a lack of caring and a willingness to deceive. If your partner cared about you a lot more than they did, there would have been no infidelity. If your partner had not been willing to deceive you, there would have been no infidelity.
When your brain starts rehashing the past, it is probably responding to things that are still present in your relationship. You are subconsciously aware of your partner's lack of caring and willingness to deceive.
These things aren't going to change overnight. It takes a lot of effort to learn how to care more and to be less deceptive. The hardest part of your work is learning that you face similar challenges to your partner, Your own lack of caring and willingness to deceive cause problems in the relationship, even though you weren't the one who cheated
3. Don't be Mean
Like other mammals, we get aggressive when we feel threatened. That is exactly what happens when you discover infidelity in your relationship.
In the days and weeks after you find out about infidelity, you will be tempted to say that are designed to hurt your partner's feelings. If you care a lot about your partner, you will not allow yourself to do that.
You may find that you actually don't care enough about your partner to hold yourself to a standard of kindness and respect. In most relationships, there are similar levels of caring on both sides. Your partner's lack of caring led to infidelity. Your lack of caring might lead you to be mean. I've seen this play out a hundred times in my couples therapy office.
4. Don't Control
You may be tempted to prevent future infidelity by trying to control your partner's behavior. This is a bad idea for two reasons:
If your partner is going to cheat again, you want it to happen sooner rather than later. Your best bet is to give them complete freedom and watch what they do.
People hate being controlled. If you allow yourself to be controlling, you will nudge your partner towards rebellious behavior, which could include more infidelity.
5. Don't ask too many questions
You might want to ask a lot of questions in an attempt to understand why your partner did what they did. These questions are important, but in the end, you're going to have to figure out most of the answers for yourself.
Try answering these questions on your own:
What did your partner get from the affair? Validation is a lot easier to come by in a new relationship than in an old relationship. Affairs offer a kind of new relationship energy that is not easily accessible in mature relationships.
How did your partner justify the affair in their mind? This often involves some kind of victim positioning.
How much did your partner care about you when they were having the affair? The answer, of course, is not very much.
You will get better answers to these questions by figuring them out on your own than by trying to get the answers from your partner. You may find that you see your partner more clearly than they see themselves.
6. Try to see your partner as an equal.
It's tempting to see your partner as inferior since they are the one who cheated, not you. Realistically, there are probably things that you do on your side of the relationship that are just as damaging as what your partner has done.
There is a cultural norm that cheating is the worst thing you can do in a relationship. But in reality, it's just one of the many ways that we hurt each other. If you want your relationship to succeed, it's just as important for you to change your behavior as it is for your partner to change their behavior.
If your relationship has been impacted by infidelity, couples therapy can help.
For the Unfaithful Partner:
Earn your own self-respect
Focus on behavior, not words
Reveal your mind
Learn to care more
1. Earn your own self-respect
It's going to be a while before your partner approves of you. That gives you an opportunity to learn to rely on your own self-respect instead of needing your partner to approve of you.
When you wake up in the morning, ask yourself, what kind of a partner do I want to be today? What matters most is how you handle yourself today, not how you handled yourself in the past. This is what therapists call self-confrontation—the ability to look at the difference between who you are and who you want to become.
At the end of the day, look in the mirror and ask yourself how you did today in your relationship. Be honest, and be kind.
It's normal to feel anger, resentment, disappointment, and even hatred towards your partner. What you are trying to do is to help your brain move towards caring and kindness as a way of living.
That process starts by exercising caring and kindness towards yourself. If you feel overwhelming waves of shame, grief, and guilt, practice exercising kindness and caring towards those feelings. See if you can find where the feelings appear in your body, usually in your chest or in your stomach.
Offer kindness and caring to your distress the way you would calm and comfort a very small child. This is this is how you develop a quiet mind and calm heart—the ability to manage your own anxiety without relying on your partner to soothe you.
When you handle yourself well in your relationship, give yourself credit for what you have done.
Be honest about how your partner is behaving. If they are being mean or controlling, acknowledge that fact without trying to change it. Try to imagine your circle of okayness. How much of your partner's behavior lands within that circle of okayness? If they continue to treat you the way they are treating you now, are you still going to be okay?
It's normal to crave your partner's approval. When you don't get it, notice what you feel in your body and offer kindness to that feeling. Write down a summary of how you want to handle yourself in your relationship and then hold yourself to that standard.
When you fall short, be kind to yourself without making excuses.
2. Focus on behavior, not words
You may be tempted to try to make things better by talking to your partner, but there's not much you can say that will actually help. Before you speak, think about what your intention is. Are you trying to gain your partner's approval? Are you trying to make your partner feel better? What emotional impact will your words have? Every time you promise to behave a different way, your partner has to face the fact that they can't trust you.
If your partner is asking a lot of questions, do your best to answer them, but only once. If you've already given your best answer to a question, just say, "I've already given you the best answer I have to that question." Your partner would be upset at that. It's best to not engage in the fantasy that there's something you can say that's going to make them feel better.
If your partner asks you why you did, you can say “I did it because it felt good," or "I did it because I wanted to get validation." You could also say something like, "I did it because I didn't care about you enough to not do it." But none of these answers are going to really satisfy your partner. Don't answer the why question more than once or twice. If your partner keeps asking, say, “You're asking me a question that doesn't have a satisfactory answer.” Think about why your partner is asking these questions. They might be imagining that there's something you could say that would make them feel better. They might be asking you questions that are designed to make you feel ashamed and guilty.
3. Reveal your mind
Infidelity requires you to hide your thoughts and feelings from your partner. After the infidelity has stopped, that pattern of hiding and masking will still be in place.
Ask yourself several times a day, "What am I thinking that I'm not revealing to my partner?" Does it make sense to reveal some of that to my partner? Think about the effect it will have. Will it make your partner feel bad? Will it be difficult for them to hear? What reasons do you have for not revealing it? What do you stand to lose?
This is a delicate process because revealing thoughts and feelings can be used as a way to manipulate your partner. Think through your intentions and the impact you are going to have before you reveal things.
Eventually, your partner will trust you more if you reveal things in your mind that are not pleasant to hear. If you're willing to be authentic with your partner, you will regain their trust more rapidly than if you carefully guard your thoughts and feelings.
4. Learn to care more
The foundation of a better relationship is to learn to care about each other more than you have in the past. This isn't about showing care, it’s about actually changing the way your brain works so that you become more interested in your partner's well-being.
It's not a yes or no question, it's an infinite spectrum.
Infidelity happens in relationships where two people don't care about each other enough to not cheat. Even if you're the only one who was unfaithful, your partner's level of caring is probably similar to your own. Their lack of caring would be revealed in things other than infidelity. When I talk to my clients about caring more about their partner, they usually say something like, "But I do care," and that is true. I'm talking about learning to care more than you already do.
Caring is built on a foundation of personal strength and okayness. If you were standing on a snowy hillside and your partner asked for a hand, you would set your feet first to establish a firm foundation before you offer to support your partner. Caring works the same way. Your ability to care about your partner is limited by your ability to feel like you are going to be okay. This is what differentiation is all about—becoming strong enough in yourself that you can be truly close to another person.
If your relationship has been impacted by infidelity, couples therapy can help.