Trust after cheating, is it possible?

This is a question many people ask. There are several factors involved. What are the facts? Why did those facts happen? What is the causal underlying mindset for cheating?

When your partner has cheated on you, you find yourself in an emotional ground-zero. You don't resolve this in a few weeks. What you can do in a few weeks, however, is gain insight into why this happened and how to strengthen your self-confidence.

Restoring confidence starts with yourself, your self-confidence, as crazy as that sounds. Giving yourself the positive feeling that you are worthwhile, that you are allowed to be there and allowing others to be there for you as well. You may realize this when talking about it, but it must also be put into practice.

Restoring trust after cheating obviously requires commitment and cooperation. But what if the anger, sadness and disappointment persists despite efforts to get back together?

Cheating is a killer for trust. The idea that your partner was intimate with someone else, most get over that. Marr the fact that there was a secret life with your partner, the shock of experiencing this, is harder to recover from. It can leave a wound, the bigger the lie, the bigger the pain.

We sometimes lie for our own good, and this is very human, usually to avoid confrontation, or to create unnecessary turmoil for the other person. Living a different or secret life that your partner does not know about requires inspiration, thoughtfulness with forethought, lies that must be maintained every day. It puts the "perpetrator" in limbo, he gets lost in his own emotional state...until it comes out.

So how do you re-establish the relationship?

Obviously, you both have to want things to get back on track, and you have to want to work at it. It's going to be important for both parties to very consciously do an introspection as to whether you still want this relationship. Personal introspection is also very important. Most people who want this succeed in it.

When the shock of cheating has been processed and your partner has not run, but supports you in your difficult days, the process can begin. This way you can be sure that no more bodies will fall out of the closet. It is important to be honest and open. If you get your partner's support to go for it again together, he will show that a line has been drawn under the secret relationship. In this way, trust can then slowly grow again.

Reason for mistrust?

First, ask yourself if you still have a reason not to trust your partner. Is he or she doing something that makes it clear that the cheating or cheating is still going on? Intuition or feeling is not enough here; it's about facts. Point is that associations with past events can bring up old pain again, even if those hurtful events themselves are in the past. If he or she now comes home later because of an innocent traffic jam, you may feel the pain again from the time he had to "work overtime" (but in reality went to his/her lover's house). However painful: emotion is not always a good counselor when it comes to trust. If you allow yourself to suffer solely because of your emotion, you run the risk of continuing to have trouble trusting again long after the cheating.

So the question is whether your lack of trust is based on real danger from outside or whether it has mainly to do with your own fear of being hurt again. The answer to that question is important because it determines your approach

Fear is a poor adviser to trust.

If it is mainly your own fear of getting hurt again that makes you have trouble trusting, then you need to focus on that now. Then stop aiming your arrows at your partner, because that is not where the solution lies. Indeed, you run the risk that a benevolent partner will not sustain the distrust and will eventually give up.

So then start working on yourself first. Look inward and examine your own pain. You can do that by enlisting the help of a coach, for example. Look without judgment at the difficulty you have in trusting again since the cheating. How sensitive are you to being hurt? Do you have healthy trust in others? Do you generally feel safe so that when you are disappointed you can bounce back or is it a shaky balance? Do you have a firm sense of self or do you need a lot of support and affirmation from others?

Secure attachment

The fact is that people differ in their basic sense of security and how easily they can trust. How secure you feel is partly genetic, but largely depends on what you were taught as a child. Parents who are emotionally available and can attune to their child's needs teach their child that the world is safe and that others are there for them. This is how you develop a secure attachment style, which also means that adversity doesn't bite as much later on.

But there are also children who grew up less secure. For example, their parents were absent or unavailable as they needed, or the parents' behavior was unpredictable. As a result, children may have more difficulty with trust later on.

Your relationship with your parents is important, but later experiences also leave their mark. If your previous partner was unsafe for you - for example, unfaithful, addicted, aggressive or unpredictable - your basic sense of trust and self-worth may suffer. You may then have more difficulty trusting in a new relationship.

Your self-confidence can grow through consciously creating positive experiences as you open up and allow yourself to be vulnerable again. And growing self-confidence allows you to open up more easily again and thus learn to trust. This can be exciting; after all, no one likes to be hurt. A therapist can help you with this.

"Restoring confidence begins with self-confidence."