How to Rebuild Broken Trust in Your Relationship

This video is about rebuilding broken trust and this is something we sometimes have to do in our relationships so I'm going to give you five things you can do if you're the person who broke someone's trust and I'm going to give you five things you can do if you're the person whose trust has been broken. I'm Stacey Rockline and I help people create deep meaningful relationships with exceptional communication. So trust can be broken in a lot of different degrees. There are some very big things that break trust like having an affair. A partner has an affair with someone that's a big deal. That's a massive pull the rug out from the other person from underneath the other person. But sometimes it's smaller. It's smaller ways that we break trust. When there's been a really bad fight and some ugly things were said that can make you not feel emotionally safe anymore. Or let's say your partner you find out that your partner told a friend about something that you thought they were going to keep between you and it made you look bad and now you kind of just feel like geez I'm not safe here. I just assumed that was going to stay behind closed doors. So those little betrayals also break trust and we need to rebuild it and you have to have a plan and some actions you can take because when we talk about someone earning back trust it's pretty vague. That's not really a plan for doing it and there are actually small things that help you rebuild trust. So let's dive into those today. If you're the person who broke trust in doing that you you put yourself on the hook. You've got some responsibility now for fixing this situation and there are some some things that you can do. So first one you can have one-sided conversations. What this means is that when your partner comes to you to talk about something, talk about their feelings, maybe talk about what happened, you just listen. That's all. You don't defend yourself, explain, justify, anything like that. Make sure that you have a turn. Talk about your own hurt feelings. Sometimes you have to just rebuild trust by only listening and that lets them know, oh I'm safe. I don't have to worry about now defending myself because this person's just gonna listen to me. So you can do that. Second thing, apologize without hesitating. Like don't make the other person have to to pull an apology out of you. If you've hurt someone's feelings own up to what's yours quickly and apologize. Apologies are this amazing tool we have to help us rebuild trust by creating safety. We're gonna make mistakes so when we acknowledge them and we acknowledge the hurt feelings of the other person, that helps us build that trust back up. Three, if you need to take time to process, promise to come back and revisit the conversation. A lot of times, most of the time, if we're super triggered, we need a moment to calm our nervous system down. We need to get centered. We do not want to go into a conversation triggered or stay in a conversation when we're triggered because we are going to create more problems. So if you need to take a time out, you just let the person know but you have to promise to come back. When we exit a conversation, that can cause a lot of anxiety for the other person and especially if there's been broken trust, anxiety could be running very high in this relationship. So you have to promise to come back if you need to take some space. Okay, four, what happens in the conversation has to stay in the conversation. You have to honor what they tell you. When someone is sharing with you vulnerably or telling secrets that they believe are going to stay here between you, you have to, have to, have to honor that. It's really important for rebuilding trust that they know that anything they say is and the fifth thing is to tell the whole truth. We can sense when we're being told a partial truth or a half truth by someone. Like it doesn't feel right. Something feels off and that is, is not good for rebuilding trust. So if you're talking about something that happened, tell everything. Tell the truth. Don't make the person have to pull it out of you. Just let them have it up front and right away because when we just do partial truth, that other stuff comes out later and that will further break trust. So those are your five actions if you're the person who did the trust breaking. Now let's say you're on the other side of it and someone has broken your trust. There are still things that you can do to help rebuild this. It is their responsibility but you can like massage this along. So number one, reinforce the behaviors that you want to see, right? When they show up and listen, when they show up and let you have a one-sided conversation, let them know that you appreciate that. We have to, to encourage people when they do the thing that we want them to do. When they meet our expectation, we have to encourage it and sometimes when they fall really short of an expectation, we don't want to say thank you for that because it's not where we want it to be. But to get them there, you've got to encourage them a long way. So if they're showing up in conversations and they're doing things that are helpful, let them know so they keep doing those and are inspired to do more. The second thing is don't give up when things are failing. Rebuilding trust is a process and it takes a lot of conversations where safety has been built. Safety has been built. Safety has been built. If you have a conversation and it doesn't go awesome, don't throw in the towel on your relationship if you want to stay in it. Keep at it. Try again. Try to figure out what went wrong. What can you tweak? But don't give up on this. Three, tell them what role you want them to play. Like we are going to be at default usually. I'm a problem solver so I'm going to come and try to solve problems in the conversation. Some people are cheerleaders. They're going to cheerlead you. If you need them to do a certain thing like you need them to validate you or you need them to answer questions or you need them to just listen, let them know. Let them know what role you want them to play because that sets them up for success. You don't have to read your mind and they're not going to read your mind. So you can tell them this is what I need in this conversation and let them show up for you the way you need. Fourth, start with small things. If you have had a major breach of trust, it's going to take a while before you're willing to go back in with a lot of vulnerability. So take a vulnerability step. Like what's a baby vulnerability you could talk about? And then when you see that that is met and held and honored and cherished and you're safe, then you can do another small thing. Pretty soon you can do the big thing. So if you're not ready to go in both feet, go in with some small vulnerabilities so that you can just build that trust a little bit at a time. And the fifth thing, the last thing is you've got to leave the past behind you. We have a tendency when something bad has happened to bring this up over and over and over and there are reasons that we do that and that's for a different video but what's happening is in the moment something has happened and it's triggering the feeling from the past. So we are tempted instead of to stay on target or on topic with what just happened to bring up the past. When you bring up the past, what you're doing is you're triggering the shame response in the other person. They know they hurt you. They know that was terrible. And when they have their shame response triggered, they can't stay present and listening because they're going to go into their fight, flight, freeze response. So try to stay focused on what's happening right now. What is the current experience that you need to talk about and stay out of the past so that you guys can communicate and build trust in this moment. So these are just some actions you can take so that you don't have to like elusively try to rebuild trust again. There are actually things that you can do right now to work on that because this relationship is important to you. And if you would like some more tips, some more resources, I've got a free Facebook group called Remarkable Relationships with Stacey, and you can come join us for more ways to strengthen and level up your relationships with some tools and strategies. So I'll see you there.