This guest article from YourTango was written by Tammy Nelson.
Can you really ever trust someone again after they’ve cheated on you?
Marilyn said, “He says he doesn’t talk to her anymore. I want to believe him.
“But I am so suspicious all the time. I hate that about myself. Maybe I should just end it. It hurts to not trust him and he is sick of me asking him all the time if he’s seen her.”
Trusting someone isn’t easy after they’ve betrayed you. You want to believe what they say, but can you really ever know if they are telling the truth, once they have lied to you? The answer may be “Probably not.”
But the good news is: there is a way you can learn to trust again. Just not in the way you think.
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Love this article! As the wife of a recovering sex addict I know all too well about the issues with trust after your partner has cheated!!! And believe me, it SUCKS!
The very thing in a partnership that is supposed to feel safe and real is trusting your partner and not having to question their every move. Once they have betrayed that trust it is so hard to believe anything that comes out of their mouth! With me, I know I can even get anxiety at times when he is stuck in traffic somewhere. That is not good for either of us.
So, in my marriage my hubby and I are very honest with each other. If I am feeling anxious or I don’t believe where he is, I communicate those doubts to him. I try to talk about MY feelings and not tell him that I don’t trust him. That way he doesn’t feel like I am checking in on him . . . and frankly, I don’t trust him right now.
Once they have cheated, it does take time to develop trust again. And that is ok. As the article explains that it is really important to trust your “inner voice” . … if your partner is willing to understand those feelings than trust can be developed again.
Hi Mishka:
As a recovering Sex Addict, I would like to say thank you for your post. It is helpful to hear from others the impact my actions can have on people. My wife and I are currently in the place of restoring trust. Today I keep nothing from her. I work with my 12 Step Sponsor and attend as many meetings as possible. I can say for myself, I know this woman has my back and part of my work in restoring trust with her is having her back. It feels good to know that my attention and devotion are directed toward the one person who always deserved that. We are developing a new intimacy that we never had before. I wish you and your husband well.
Tom
I agree…it’s not about trusting your partner but it’s about trusting yourself. While this author talks about trusting your inner voice, which is important, I believe it’s also important trust that you know what you will do if your partner cheats again. Taking comfort in knowing your plan for a repeat attack can help you deal with the possibility.
I also loved this article, it has been a nagging doubt in my mind ever since I received a phone call from a woman telling me she had been living with my husband as man and wife for 4 years. He travels a lot! He has allways declared himself as a loving and trust worthy husband and I never doubted him. He does not want to leave but trust Is a huge issue. The whole experience has left me totally shattered the other woman was relentless in her pursuit of my husband and they still work together,
Reading comments from other people in the same situation is a great comfort and I like this idea of trusting your gut it makes sense thank you
My husband during our 6 years together got insulted if I made reference to anything that would suggest he would be interested in talking to someone else at length,the kind of talking that the wife is not supposed to find out about. By a mistake he made I did find out he not only was talking to his {just a friend}as he called her but they had been texting close to 1000 times,visiting,writing letters to each other and the texting was going on in the same room as I was in but he claimed it was a relative. I had put 100% into the marriage,if he didn’t feel like talking for a day or 2,fine, he’s the silent type, so I just kept quite, no sense talking with no response.
He actually said after I found out he wanted his life back, forgive and forget all the lying he did for months when I asked who was texting,who was calling in the middle of the night. He refused to talk about the whole mess like it never existed and I should just go in to the next day like nothing happened.Refused counceling. Prior to finding all this out he was so adament he was trust worthy there was not much need to doubt. That was my mistake.
Trust now? No! But I have moved forward in my life though we still are together. I don’t dwell on who he talks to, or if he talks to anyone. When I put 100% in before and got what I got I have changed myself to worrying about me and not whether he has his meals ready when he comes home, or if he had a good/bad day. For some people when trust has been broken by someone that made an emphasis on {acting} trustworthy, thats it, I don’t think the trust can ever really fully come back,if at all.
This is a great article and I also got a lot from the comments. I also have been hurt from what I thought was the love of my life. This happened like 4 or 5 years ago and I still suffer from the loss and effect it had on me. It sent me on a, let’s just say, very dark time. I have trust issues now and still after all this time, can’t comprehend what happened. I asked why she had to always have some other guy friend. Now I identify each place we lived with which dude she was with.
After 7 great years together, we got married and then about a year later she started hanging out with a guy way too much.. he started out as her “gay” friend, then he was “metrosexual”, then he was a player.. all along I asked what’s going on, for years she denied it. This had a severe effect on me being able to trust my senses. Even after I caught her in the act, not physically, notes, phone calls.. I still couldn’t believe it or I was just suffering from severe denial. All the reasons she told her parents and whoever else.. that I was at fault for our separation, this was a major blow to my honor and yet I never told them the truth. questions I get are why didn’t you fight for her. she told People he parties too much with his band.. bet she didn’t tell them how, I had to pick her up drunk from the guys house at 3a.m. or went with him on “work trips” or the constant disrespectful attitude when going out, a couple drinks, and she was off talking to some other dude. Or your friend comes and tells you that he, “saw your wife at the movie theater with some black dude”, I tell him, “she says there just friends”, he says, “they didn’t look like just friends”… In my opinion, there was no going back for me once I found out, we were done. Anyway long story short, My point is trust your instincts. You are not being paranoid. It’s hard to believe that someone you love more than anything in the world could be such a coward and just hurt you soo bad with blatant disregard.. someone who has such low self-esteem that they constantly need strangers to have sex with to feel self-worth. My Opinion also is, first time you catch them cheating, probably, it’s just the first time that they got caught. And I strongly believe, that staying together cause of kids or staying together for financial reasons is wrong. Don’t live a lie. I wasted so many years of my life even though my gut told me to get away and not marry her. Trust your instincts. There is a better life out there for you. I know a coward like this man who wined and dined my wife away, who also denied me the truth when I asked him man to man, this type of man couldn’t take his medicine, I know without a doubt he would call the cops. I still feel a desire to beat the dude up or worse.. something I feel most people could relate to, but, I should be thanking him.
p.s. we did go to therapy a couple times, but, in order for that to work, the cheater has to stay away from the guy they’re cheating on you with.
you are absolutely right…why try to fix what can’t be fixed and keep wasting time.I was in denial even after 3 times she cheated…this is my 1st year of accepting that all she said & did where lies anfter 4 years together….. there is so much out there to just give up on life for one single person…I’m still recovering from all that happened but these passed months I have learned to love my self more than I ever did…have more self respect and live happier than i have ever lived, I still don’t understand how a person can be so heartless and hurt their partner in life like that, I have forgiven her…but deep inside my self I still don’t think i would ever do that to somebody I love…I live in a small town so its hard not to bump into each other frequently, but when I see her all i feel is a feeling of relief that im not with her anymore… but for some reason I feel bad seeing her sad, I wish i could help her even after all the damage she caused. I still miss the good times but I know that those good times will never happen again, but will always cherish the good and delete the bad…I live every day thanking god I survived it all……..
My boyfriend and I moved across the country together, a month after we got out here I found out that he had been living with someone else the whole time we were together before we moved, I had no idea. He swore it would never happen again, he wanted to be with me out here in our new life. A couple months later I noticed he started texting a phone number 16 hours a day, we fought and fought about this woman, who I had never met or seen, he told me I was acting like a highschool kid and I had jealousy issues. My friends and family told me to get rid of him, and yet I stayed, he convinced me it was all in my head so much so that I had a complete breakdown. A few weeks later I figured out the password to his ccell phone only to open up the texts to naked pictures of them texting back and forth and sex talk. I waited, didnt say anything till the next night after he got home from work and now a week later he says he has ended it with her and he wants to be with me. I have been given no answer’s, no apologies, nothing. He works in an industry where he can be gone 8 hours or 10 days we never know and he has a phone in his work vehicle that his employer tracks the calls for. I love him, and want to stand by him and work this out but I don’t know how to take the steps to do that. She lives 3 blocks from my home and we are in a pretty small town, it doesn’t help that she works part time at his place of employment either. Any ideas on how to go about fixing the damage, how do I start building trust when he basicly just expects me to believe him because he says so.
I want to know how to distinguish between intuition and fear. I get tremendous amounts of anxiety–physical symptoms, and ended up ending the relationship with the bf even though I loved him very much and found no indication of him cheating any longer. How do I trust myself again so I can be in another relationship?
The truth is some one can talk a lot about how to trust the inner voice until it really happens to you. the fact is once you believe that some one has cheated on you and if that some one turn out to be the one you love and some how if you let them stay in your life that will be the biggest mistake any one can possibly make.because once that line is crossed its never going back. trust me… i have tried i billion ways… this is what i believe. let me know if there is anything which would change my mind..
Trusting your own instinct and intuition is indeed the most important!
The other person has likely got away with these infractions by playing into your very fear.
My SO definitely played into my fears.
–If I asked him a question about a girl who texted, he would blame ME for being paranoid (“it is your own insecurity making these things up!”)
Not until I found the truth out WITHOUT his help and confronted him did he admit PART of it (the absolute minimum he thought I might know)
He still wants to blame me for not building trust up quickly enough after these emotional affairs (“It has been 2 months since you’ve caught me texting those 5 girls!! How long do I need to prove to you I’m done with that!?”)
–I still have trust issues with him, and I know that I need to take care of me first and foremost.
We’ve agreed that we want to work things out, and that we WILL rebuild trust. But I promise myself, my own health and sanity have to come first from now on. I put HIS needs before mine for the first 2 years and I see what I got from it. Now I take care of me as number one….
That sounds just like my partner of 14 years, she rarely answers a question directly, tries to make me feel like it’s my problem when I ask her why she does things. I have seen first hand the way she manipulates and lies to others and I realised it was pathological in that she did that with everyone whether they were friend, family or stranger and she had been that way for as long as i could remember. When I found out that I was nothing special and she did the same with me I also realised that she was likely not going to change, she doesn’t feel that it is her issue and that the world is against her. I’ve always felt quite sensitive and able to read people’s moods and emotions well, and had a good idea when people have been telling the truth or not. Over the years I had let her convince me that I was mistaken when I thought she wan not being truthful, so much that I stopped believing that part of me. Now I know that I wasn’t wrong. Trust your intuition! Good luck.
I am having issues distinguishing between my intuition and paranoia of my husband betraying me again. I have always had extremely accurate, and almost weirdly strong intuition. (I freak people out sometimes with the things that…I just know).
My husband has done all the steps he is supposed to do – sincerely apologized, stopped the relationship, gone to counseling, being transparent…etc. He spoils me rotten…really…other couples are jealous of how wonderful our relationship is…(as I think if they only knew).
Trouble is…that was the way our relationship was BEFORE the betrayal. He was ALWAYS a wonderful, romantic, doting husband. And I truly believed him…that he loved me as much as he says. Now I just feel stupid.
It is almost a year later, I can’t look at him and not hear his words to the other woman, when he takes his phone into the bathroom, I still have panic attacks and physically my heart hurts and I start shaking. I try to only check his emails, texts and phone records randomly (and find nothing). But a simple deleted email, one that I saw, and then he deleted…even from the “trash”…has made me a complete wreck. I can’t stop obsessing over why he deleted it…all the way through out of the trash. (It was a notice that someone sent him a “postagram” to his work address, with no name.) I can’t ask him – he will be so hurt that I am still don’t trust him.
How do I discriminate between the feeling (fear or intuition) that he is hiding things again? It is so strong. And I feel guilty…because there is no (new) reason. He probably doesn’t even know he did it. The feeling of guilt now is worse than the not trusting.
Help.