Part 1 of a 12 Part Series
Praying for Rain When the House is on Fire: When The Efforts to Rebuild Trust Aren’t Working
So, your house is on fire, right? Your husband or wife had an affair, and your world has been turned completely upside down. The whole damn thing is ablaze, and you’re doing your utmost to put the flames out. Perhaps you’ve never been this desperate, nor worked this hard. And you’re not getting as far as you think you should.
If trying to rebuild trust has been your primary focus either on your own or in your infidelity counseling up to now, then maybe it’s time to consider a new approach. After a while, many couples feel like trying to rebuild trust is like praying for rain when the house is on fire. These folks are working their butts off, but they’re not succeeding. It’s not because they’re doing it wrong. It’s just that a house ablaze needs something other than a little rain.
Just like our little bug friend, we can’t stop a force that is bigger than us. Does that mean things are hopeless? Not in my mind. When we stop trying to force something bigger than us into submission, hope (and our marriages) actually have a chance. Trying to rebuild trust is like trying to take on something bigger than we are. It’s a hopeless endeavor…if we are trying to force it. When we can begin to look at it as a natural result of some other hard work we do, then we have a chance at resolving some of our marital problems. We’ll talk more about what that “hard work” is in Part 2.
Why Efforts to Rebuild Trust Don’t Often Work
Here are 7 reasons efforts to rebuild trust don’t often help:
- The last people we tend to trust are the ones really working to make us trust them. We tend to think of them as (and I love how many different ways there are to say this): kiss ups, brownnosers, ass kissers, bootlickers, doormats, flatterers, apple polishers, lackies, minions, and hangers-on. When someone is trying to make us trust them, we tend to trust them less in the long run…even if our hearts are hurting and are somewhat soothed by these efforts.
- The bottom line is trust is broken fundamentally. Period. And no matter how much a person might want it to be restored, the feeling that they can’t trust their spouse just won’t go away.
- Consider this ugly possibility (which is rare, but still possible): Efforts to rebuild trust can unfortunately, be a handy tool by which a spouse who is really dishonest and doesn’t give a damn can hide their cheating even more. Wave one hand over here (the hand that is doing-everything-it’s-supposed-to-be-doing-to-earn-back-trust) while the other hand can hide somewhere else and do what it pleases.
- Consider this mind bender: The cheating spouse trying to earn back trust is ultimately trying to get the non-cheating spouse to believe the cheating spouse more than they believe their (the non-cheater’s) own mind. (Read that one over again.) This can be uncomfortable for both parties.
- And then you have the cheating spouse who perhaps gives up under pressure (see our bug friend above), and who senses that they can’t ever really earn trust back anyway…so they don’t try very hard…not for long …and then they are considered to be non-compliant or not interested in the therapy, or worse, the marriage. When the very idea that was supposed to be helpful ends up binding them in a false dichotomy: Either I try to make my spouse trust me or I fail at therapy and lose the marriage. There are other ways folks.
- Working on trust in the manner it is usually worked on doesn’t quite address the issues of the integrity of the marriage and the emotional maturity of the individuals involved…the primary issues that lead to affairs in the first place.
- Working on trust tends to have the cheating spouse in a one-down-without-a-leg-to-stand-on kind of position, always having to make up for something. Not usually a good foundation for long term, substantive change, which is what these folks in this awful situation really crave.
Stay tuned for the next post about what substantive change means in the world of affair recovery and infidelity counseling. Until then, you can contact me with any private questions you may have or if you’d like learn more about affair recovery.
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