How To Regain Trust

Be patient. Dishonoring someone’s faith in you shakes the premise on which your relationship was built in the first place. You don’t get on a boat if you don’t trust that it will float. In the same way, you don’t commit your deepest feelings to another human being if you don’t trust that they will honor and respect you. It will take time to regain trust, and you need to be prepared for this if you hope to get it back.

Be understanding. Validate your partner’s pain by actually agreeing with how they feel. Your empathy can go a long way to regaining the trust you lost whether by lying, cheating or lashing out. Show your loved one that his or her feelings have merit and that injured feelings are justified. Take this one step further by assuring them you will do what it takes to rectify the situation.

Reassure your partner. Then, reassure her again. Honor your word by being where you say you’re going to be when you say you are going to be there. Follow through on promises and commitments without wavering. Whether you like it or not, you have to prove yourself again, and it’s not easy. In the early stages of your relationship, a lot of trust may have been built on intuition and lack of any other precedence to the contrary. Accepting that it is twice as hard to re-establish trust than it is to win it the first time goes a long way to helping you dig your heels in until the damage is repaired.

Seek counseling. If all else seems to fail and you are committed to seeing your relationship work, then suggest counseling. Your partner may have insecurities that run deeper than whatever it was that caused the breach in your relationship. If that is the case, or he or she just can’t seem to get past the hurt, counseling will be your only viable course of action.