When trust is damaged in your marriage, there’s a sudden realization that your spouse may not ‘have your back’. Whatever damaged the trust is bad enough.
When it happens you wonder about whether your spouse can be depended on. The sensation of your spouse not having your back leaves you feeling vulnerable.
They may not have engaged in something that was a 100% betrayal event. It may have been something where they only failed in one area. It may be an emotional affair or an event that damages the trust in your marriage.
With trust all it takes is for your spouse to fail in one critical area. A failure there means that all your trust is now at risk of falling apart. Some spouses have the mindset that once trust is broken, it’s gone.
You count on your spouse in many ways every day. The damaged trust now leaves you uneasy in those every day activities.
It’s not that your spouse has betrayed you in each of those areas. With what you’ve been through, you equate failure in that key area with them being untrustworthy in more areas as well.
Even though you’ve likely never talked to them about how you now see them as totally untrustworthy based on that one critical event, you continue holding them to that standard.
They let you down, and now your mind fears that it’s only a matter of time until they let you down in other critical areas as well. Your mind may even have a timetable of when that will happen.
They probably will disappoint you again in some area, but you’re not about to give them that opportunity. If you are one of those who wants to cut your losses before there are more trust issues, chances are there are traumas in your life that taught you some misleading lessons about trust.
You may want trust but not know if it can ever be there again or how to regain it. In the video, “How Can I Trust You Again?”, I address these concerns.
Instead of living in the anxiety of when they’ll do it again, and fulfill your negative thought, you can instead know how to rebuild trust in your marriage.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
