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June 5 - June 16, 2019
hope is a stubborn thing. Somewhere deep inside you, you sense a spark of possibility.
Maybe, just maybe, the terrible mistrust you feel isn’t the end of the relationship. Maybe trust can be restored. Maybe the relationship can heal.
People hurt each other. The more you love someone, the easier it is to get hurt.
The broken places are stronger where they heal
I know about the shame of an uncontrolled desire to snoop through his stuff in the hope of finding some painful, damning piece of real evidence I could believe in—like a love letter to her where he laid out every disgusting thing they’d done—rather than just hear the insubstantial assurances he gave me.
Many of the perfectly natural, normal ways I reacted caused incredible damage to our relationship.
These days, I don’t judge myself for having handled things so badly.
There were moments when I was convinced my heart would just shrivel up and die. And there were times when I thought the white-hot anger would engulf me in flames.
Blame is never the answer.)
him, I hated myself. I hated my rage, I hated my judgmentalness, I hated my fear. And I hated how miserable I felt.
Can love survive betrayal? I believe it can. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. Hell, if betrayal necessarily kills love, then love is too fragile to exist in the real world. Because the world is made up of imperfect people who make mistakes.
Because of our imperfect nature, because we’re imperfect people in imperfect relationships who hurt each other, there will be trust issues in almost every relationship.
Research shows that, depending upon how you define “trust issues,” between 40 and 70 percent of couples know they have significant problems with trust. At least 90 percent of couples will have a crisis of trust at some point.
you can’t have love without trust.
Having trust makes love come alive. Trust isn’t just the basis for a relationship; it’s the lifeblood that keeps a relationship healthy.
If you can’t be yourself because you’re not feeling safe, then even if the other person “loves you,” he’s really just loving a stranger, the person you’re projecting who’s not really you. And so how can you feel loved if it’s not the real you who’s being loved? And how can you keep on giving love if you’re not feeling loved?
But when you trust each other so that you can be yourself and be open, the roots of love grow very strong. They grow into your very being.
what I really wanted—and what I’m betting you want now—is for someone to lead me out of the terrible place I was in.
But if you want your relationship to work—and part of you must if you’re reading this book—then it is imperative that trust is restored.
A betrayal happens when you don’t take into account another person who is relying on you
Anytime we treat someone as if he doesn’t matter, he’s going to feel some disappointment and
betrayal.
First, he didn’t take me into account. Then, of course, I’m furious, and even if he recognizes that that’s justified, his being assaulted by my anger makes him feel like I’m not taking him into account. After all, he never meant to hurt me.
Now we’re at a fork in the road. We can turn toward dysfunction or we can turn toward healing.
In the dysfunctional route, things just get worse and worse, often surprisingly quickly, and pretty soon the relationship is blown out of the water, with both partners not taking the other into account.
the trust-healing process consists of finding ways to radically take the other person into account.
Instead of escalating impatience, there’s growing patience.
And so whether it’s one big betrayal or a bunch of smaller ones, it’s still all betrayal and it all destroys trust.
Trust is broken whenever someone we’re counting on fails to live up to our expectations.
And it feels intentional. Even if the other person swears up and down that it was just an accident, we believe that if that other person cared about us they wouldn’t have had that accident.
It’s not just what he or she did in itself that makes it a betrayal; it’s that we weren’t considered a priority. And that’s the key. Betrayal in any of its forms has a way of making us feel like we’re nothing.
Most major betrayals, though, are not about someone directly changing their identity. They’re about someone doing something that hurts you, scares you, leaves you feeling vulnerable.
Because a fundamental expectation has been violated, it is no longer possible for you to feel safe in your world.
Wherever it comes from, it’s exhausting: this feeling that you can’t count on someone whose life is woven into yours.
Mistrust doesn’t have to come about because of what the other person does. It can come from who he is. I’m talking about when there are significant differences between two people in background, personality, or preferences.
Trust means that two people take each other’s needs into account.
It’s hard to trust someone who is hidden.
The minute you have to ask someone, “What are you thinking?” the minute you even wonder what the other person is thinking, the seeds of mistrust have been planted in the relationship.
Maybe, you realize, it’s not the other person at all. Just because you feel incredibly suspicious and mistrustful, that doesn’t necessarily mean the other person has done anything to betray you.
It’s not that we think the person today will hurt us the way someone in the past hurt us. It’s just that we can’t help being aware that this might happen again.
if the relationship was a good one (putting the betrayal aside for a moment, although of course that’s hard), why wouldn’t you want to try to salvage it?
Most people who leave a relationship right after the betrayal have regrets if the relationship had been good before that point.
If the betrayal has changed who the other person is for you so thoroughly that you can’t imagine wanting to be with him—not even after your anger has died down, not even if you knew for sure he’d never betray you again—then trust isn’t the issue and you’ll be better off ending the relationship.
Well, what is forgiveness anyway? I think for most of us, forgiveness is a feeling in the heart. It’s a kind of softening and opening. Instead of our heart being hardened by anger and fear, it relaxes.
You might just realize that your anger is hurting you more than helping you. And then you see that you don’t need it anymore and you let it go.
Can I see the other person in a way that will let me move on from what happened? Can I better understand his motives? Can I better understand what he was having to deal with? Can I better appreciate his limitations?
If you can see your lack of forgiveness as a self-destructive act, if you can see forgiving as a life-affirming act, and if you can sense the realistic possibility that one day you might be able to forgive, it makes sense to work at healing this relationship. Otherwise, not.
If the other person doesn’t care about how you feel in the sense that he consistently hasn’t gone out of his way to do things to show his caring, then he will not be able to work with you during the trust-restoring process, and so it’s not likely to happen. Why bother trying?
without your partner caring about how you feel, rebuilding trust is impossible. With caring, anything is possible.
Rebuilding trust is something two people do together.
