31. How to Rebuild Trust after Infidelity

Transcript:

If you recently found out that your partner has cheated on you, this video is for you. I'm going to talk about the three components of rebuilding trust after infidelity, and I think of these as three legs on a three-legged stool.

The first leg is that your partner needs to stop cheating. They need to start behaving in a more trustworthy way. Trust is something that is lost quickly and regained slowly. You will need to observe your partner being trustworthy over an extended period of time, and your trust in them will gradually increase as a result of that.

The second leg is about your ability to accurately read your partner and to assess how trustworthy they are. When your partner cheated on you, you lost trust not only in them, but you also lost trust in your ability to not be deceived because you thought that they were being more faithful than they actually were. So there are two components of trust that were lost here: the trust in their behavior being within the normal limits of monogamy, but also your trust in your ability to accurately see what is going on in your relationship. How much does your partner care about me and how faithful are they?

Your partner needs to change their behavior, and it's just as important for you to learn to accurately perceive: Is this person being deceptive? Does this person care about me? How important am I to my partner? This loss of trust in your own ability to perceive your partner accurately is just as devastating as your loss of trust in their behavior itself.

The third leg of the stool is building trust in your ability to take care of yourself no matter what your partner does. This is critical because you had a certain level of confidence in the solidness of your relationship, that your partner was going to be there for you to a certain extent, which fed into your idea of, "I'm going to be okay." When your partner cheated on you, they broke that agreement. Now, you have to reassess, "Am I going to be okay?" and "What am I going to do to make sure that I'm okay?"

When you get cheated on, your brain often goes into an abandonment panic, which is a survival circuit left over from childhood that was designed to keep you from being abandoned by your parents. If you're three years old and you get abandoned by your parents, that becomes a survival situation. It's really important for you to maintain a close and emotional connection with your parents. You need someone to really care about you when you're young or you're not going to survive. So when your partner cheats on you, it activates this abandonment panic circuit.

But the difference is that as an adult, you can't really be abandoned because you will never abandon yourself. One way of thinking about this is, what if your partner decides to leave you for somebody else? Are you going to figure out a way to create a life that is rich and rewarding for yourself despite your partner's choices? You have a choice to stay or go, but they also have a choice to stay or go. After infidelity, they've made it clear that, hey, this is a choice that they're considering.

You have to face the fact that your future well-being is mostly your responsibility. Obviously, we all want someone to care about us a lot. I want my wife to be devoted to me just like everybody else does. But in the end, it's mostly my responsibility to take care of myself and to ensure that I have a good, rich, and rewarding life. That's up to me.

One way you can do this is you can imagine, "Let's say my partner does leave. What does my life look like one year after they leave me? What do I do to take care of myself? How do I manage my living situation? Where do I live? How do I get money? How do I care for my children or whatever other responsibilities I might have? And what am I going to do about trying to create the kind of relationship that I want to have in my life, whether that's with my current partner or, if they leave, maybe with someone else?"

This third leg helps you shift out of an attitude of victimhood towards an attitude of, "I'm a person who is powerful. I'm a person who can take care of myself. I'm a person who has choices, and I've decided to choose to try to build something special with my current partner. That's not my only choice; it's just the choice that I'm making." I realize that my partner also has that same choice, and they can choose to leave me basically whenever they want. That's a terrible truth, but it is true. So what I'm facing is that I have a choice about whether or not to stay in this relationship, and my partner also has a choice about whether or not to stay and about how faithful they want to be.

So those are the three legs of the stool, and I want to come back to the second leg, which is improving your ability to accurately discern how faithful your partner is. The best indication of that is how much this person cares about you.

I want you to think about two different kinds of relationships. The kind of relationship where infidelity happens, and the kind of relationship where infidelity doesn't happen. In the second kind of relationship, you have two people who care about each other a lot more than they do in the first kind. The first kind of relationship I would call a "normal" relationship because most relationships are prone to infidelity, both emotional and physical. Then over here, you have the lucky few who have built relationships where there's so much caring going back and forth that neither one would really consider cheating. It's just not on the agenda because "I care about my wife so much that I'm not really interested in trying to get validation from someone else."

I've focused all my efforts on: What does it look like for me to do what I can do to build a better relationship, to have the kind of relationship that I want to have? And what power do I have to change my energetic input into the relationship so that it makes it easier for my wife to be the kind of partner that I want her to be?

If infidelity has forced you to face the terrifying reality that you don't have control over your partner, can you find a way to make peace with that reality? Can that be okay? Can you start down the path of doing what you can do to improve your relationship while also remembering the fact that your partner gets to make all of their own choices and they can abandon you for someone else if they really want to?

One unfortunate outcome of infidelity is that the person who got cheated on often tends to retreat into a victim place where they start to see themselves as an innocent victim. "I didn't really contribute to the problems in my relationship at all. I'm just a victim and I have no power, and all I can do is try to make my partner behave in a better way or maybe try to punish my partner for what they did." All of those things make it harder for the relationship to recover.

So, if I was in the position of being cheated on, the best thing for me to do would be to focus on what I can do to be a better partner and what I can do to improve my ability to accurately assess how much this person cares about me. And paradoxically, one of the things that I can do is ask, "Can I learn to care more about my partner?"

When I focus on what it looks like for me to care more about my wife than I do, it makes it easier for my wife to do the same. That is the pathway towards building a relationship that is not susceptible to infidelity.

So I'm going to end this video here. If you watched all the way to the end, thank you. Go ahead and subscribe if you want to, and if you have any questions, put them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.