Rebuilding Confidence in Your Partner

From: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

At this point, we have established that there are no assurances in life, a truth of which you were probably already aware. While there is no way to know for certain whether your partner will betray you again, there are ways you can rebuild confidence in your partner, and come to a place where you are relatively certain that you can trust him or her again.

However, this isn’t going to happen overnight. Rebuilding your confidence in your partner is a process, just like forgiveness. Your partner might have done something that shut off all your confidence in a single stroke, but you can’t turn the confidence back on the same way. It requires time and it patience.

What’s more, it requires some specific things on the part of the offending party. The way you will be able to tell whether your partner has made the necessary changes to stack the odds against repeating the offense is by listening to what he or she says and by observing his or her actions.

If you can communicate how much pain you are in to your partner and you become confident over the course of this communication that your partner truly understands the full ramifications of what he or she did, knows how the offense happened in the first place (in other words, accepts full personal responsibility for the offense without hedging and without excuses), carries an appropriate level of guilt for the offense, and is honestly committed to making the necessary changes to assure it won’t happen again, then you will slowly start to regain confidence in your spouse.

One of the main points of this exercise is for you to be able to feel, inside yourself, that your spouse understands you and that the two of you can confidently move into the future together.

If your partner is fully committed to the success of your marriage, he or she will be willing to continue working through this process. This is not an absolute necessity, but it is a pretty strong indication of a commitment to success. Your partner will probably think it is a royal pain, but should be willing to do it anyway.

When you get to the other side of the infidelity, if you can look back and see that your relationship wasn’t so great before the affair happened, there is some work you can do to improve your confidence that this won’t happen again.

In this case, one of the things you can do to create some assurance for your future together (remember, there are no guarantees, but this might help in terms of rebuilding your confidence) is repair your relationship. It only takes one person to do damage to a marriage. But it takes two people to really patch it up. It takes both of you working hard to get the relationship to a place where it is better than it was before, better than it ever was, in order to fully repair it after an affair.

If you have these two components, they will add to your confidence and trust that you will be able to repair your marriage.

It won’t happen overnight. Remember, building confidence takes time. But it can happen.

Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years.

For more information about forgiving your partner and working through the past, please visit http://www.howyouforgive.com/

Site map