After infidelity, one question tends to take over everything: Can I trust this person again?
If you were betrayed, you may find yourself analyzing conversations, watching behavior, looking for inconsistencies, and wondering whether what you’re seeing is real. If you were the one who broke the trust, the question may sound different: How could I have done this? How do I know I won’t do it again?
Those are important questions. But I believe there’s another question that comes first:
Can I trust myself?
Rebuilding after infidelity is a lot like rebuilding a bridge. For the past several years, I’ve been studying an ancient Inca bridge in Peru that has been cut down and rebuilt every year for more than 500 years. I’ve traveled there twice now to witness the process firsthand, and the parallels between building that bridge and rebuilding after a relationship rupture continue to surprise me.
The work is physical. It’s emotional. It’s demanding. It requires enormous tension. And before the bridge can safely carry anyone across the canyon, the people building it have to know how much tension its cables can actually hold.
The same is true for us.
Stretching Into Yourself Instead of Past Yourself
At one stage of the bridge-building process, enormous handmade cables are stretched. Groups of men pull from opposite ends, creating the tension the cables will eventually need to carry the bridge across the canyon.
That image has made me think differently about the way we stretch ourselves in relationships.
Imagine the kind of stretch you give your body when you first get out of bed in the morning. It can feel wonderful. You’re stretching into your body. Now imagine stretching past what your body can sustain. At some point, stretching stops creating strength and starts causing injury. Emotionally, we can do exactly the same thing.
After betrayal, you may tell yourself you need to be more patient. More forgiving. More understanding. Maybe you need to analyze the situation a little longer, tolerate a little more uncertainty, or give your partner more time.
Sometimes that’s true.
But sometimes you’re no longer stretching into greater capacity. You’re stretching past yourself—past what you know, what you feel, what you value, or what you can currently tolerate. Learning to recognize the difference is at the heart of rebuilding self-trust.
What Do You Know About You
I once worked with a woman who had become consumed with figuring out whether she could trust her partner.
There were good reasons for her uncertainty. He hadn’t lied about everything. In many ways he could be loving, reliable, and present. That actually made things harder. There wasn’t a giant neon sign telling her what to do.
Instead, there were things that didn’t quite add up. Promises that didn’t become action. Conversations that reassured her temporarily, only to leave her with the same uneasy feeling a few weeks later.
She kept asking herself, Can I trust him?
Finally, I asked her a different question:
What do you know?
She immediately started telling me what she knew about him.
I stopped her.
No. What do you know about you?
And she knew.
She knew how much energy she was spending trying to convince herself she should be okay with something she wasn’t okay with. She knew she didn’t believe certain things he was telling her. She knew she was trying to talk herself out of her own disbelief because living with uncertainty was so uncomfortable.
That was the stretch.
Not forcing herself to decide whether he was trustworthy. Not gathering enough evidence to prove her case. The stretch was allowing herself to know what she knew without immediately knowing what she had to do about it.
Self-Trust Isn’t Certainty
This may be one of the biggest misunderstandings we have about trusting ourselves. We think self-trust means knowing the answer. It doesn’t. Self-trust doesn’t mean you’ll never misjudge someone. It doesn’t mean you’ll never make a decision you regret. It doesn’t mean you’ll always know whether to stay or leave. You can love someone and know the relationship isn’t working.You can desperately want something to change and know it hasn’t changed yet. You can have hope and still pay attention to reality. You can even decide to stay for a while—to watch, wait, gather information, and have more experiences—and still be trusting yourself.
Self-trust isn’t certainty. It’s the willingness to stop arguing with yourself about what you already know.
Sometimes what you know is simply: I don’t know yet.
And that matters too.
Hope Is Not the Same as Self-Abandonment
Hope is necessary when you’re rebuilding after infidelity. You’re trying to create something that doesn’t exist yet, so of course you have to imagine that something different is possible. The question isn’t whether you have hope.
The question is: What does your hope require you to do to yourself?
Can you remain hopeful while also saying, This is what I see. This is what I need. This is what’s happening right now. And I don’t know what will happen next?
Or does hope require you to keep moving your own line? To say something doesn’t matter when it does? To accept explanations you don’t actually believe? To convince yourself you can live without something you know you need? To keep waiting for tomorrow to make today okay? That’s where hope can quietly turn into self-abandonment. You don’t have to give up hope to trust yourself. You simply have to remain in contact with yourself while you’re hoping.
Self-Trust Matters for the Person Who Cheated, Too
There’s another crisis of self-trust that happens after infidelity, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough. If you’re the person who had the affair, you may be asking yourself: How could I have done this? How could I have lied to someone I love? And perhaps the most frightening question of all: How do I know I won’t do it again?
The temptation is to answer that question with a promise: I will never do this again.
But a promise alone isn’t enough.
Most people who have affairs didn’t begin by deciding to create a secret life. It happened through a series of smaller moments: noticing an attraction and dismissing it, deleting a message, withholding information, rationalizing a conversation, crossing one line and then moving the line. Eventually, you can become extraordinarily skilled at one thing:
Not listening to yourself.
That’s why rebuilding self-trust isn’t primarily about convincing yourself that you’re a good person—or condemning yourself as a terrible one. It’s about learning to hear yourself sooner. Can you notice when you’re beginning to hide? Can you recognize when you’re rationalizing? Can you tolerate the tension of disappointing someone rather than deceiving them? Can you say, I’m lonely. I’m angry. I’m attracted to someone else. Something in this relationship isn’t working for me? Can you tell a difficult truth before you’ve built a secret life around avoiding it?
That is self-trust too.
The Bridge Back to Yourself
In this sense, both partners are doing different versions of the same work. If you were betrayed, you’re learning: When something in me knows, I will listen. If you betrayed your partner, you’re learning: When something in me knows, I will stop hiding from it. Neither requires perfection. You notice. You tell yourself the truth. You tolerate the discomfort of that truth. And then you try to act in ways that don’t require you to leave yourself behind. And when you realize that you have left yourself behind?
You come back.
That’s how trust is built. Not through certainty. Not through promises that you’ll never make another mistake. Not by demanding that you know today whether your relationship will survive. You don’t have to know how the story ends. You only have to be willing to tell yourself the truth about where you are in the story today. The enormous cables of the Inca bridge in Peru have to hold tremendous tension. Eventually, they will carry the weight of the bridge and everyone who walks across it. But their strength doesn’t come from stretching them endlessly. Pull a cable beyond what it can sustain and it doesn’t become stronger. It breaks. Neither do you become more trustworthy to yourself by demanding that you tolerate more and more, know everything, never make a mistake, or guarantee what happens next.
Self-trust is different. Withy self-trust you say: I will listen to myself. I will tell myself the truth. I will notice when I’m rationalizing, hiding, explaining away, or moving my own lines. And when I realize I’ve stepped away from myself, I will come back.
Because before you build the bridge back to another person, there is another bridge that matters even more.
The bridge back to yourself.
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