Infidelity - one partner cheating on the other, is one of the biggest causes of relationship breakups. Because when someone is unfaithful, the other person almost always feel like I can never trust him/her again.
That is a common refrain when cheating occurs. Trust is essential to close, intimate, real love. When it is broken, we feel like there is no hope for getting it back. Even if we loved much about our mate, if they cheated on us, we dont see how we could ever be happy again with them, how could we trust them after such a sense of betrayal.
For this reason trust is one of the largest problems in break ups. Your ex is wondering if they can ever truly trust you not to cheat on them again. Why get back together if there is just going to be more cheating? So when break ups happen due to cheating, on of the big issue on your ex’s mind is
Can I ever really trust you again?
I mean, if they rejected you because of some problem behavior, like cheating, or fighting, or not communicating with them, then they need to know BEFORE they let you come back that you wont keep doing the thing they left you about.
But the emotion, or feeling of broken trust is one of the most difficult for exs to get over. I mean, most of us feel like trust gets built up over a long period of time. And most of us feel, emotionally, when trust is broken, that our relationship is unfixable, right?
Broekn trust is a huge betrayal in the heart. Broken trust feels immediately like distance and separation, the very opposite of intimacy. So you have almost ZERO CHANCE of getting back with your mate until you deal with the feeling of broken trust.
You must understand this to see how you can get back together with your ex. If you cant deal with the feelings of betrayal and broken trust and the complete emotional distance that it causes, you wont be able to get back together. And, if you do somehow luck out and they give you another chance, it wont last, because without trust there cant be the feeling of closeness and intimacy we all really want.
So how can you deal with and repair trust issues? This is a large subject, but one thing that is easy to see is that in most break ups, we all try to avoid blame. So we tend to try to lay the blame elsewhere. We say things like “I cheated because I drank too much!” Or, “I cheated because you were cold and distant!” The natural way we react when big issues like cheating come up is to try to avoid the blame.
Give those kind of excuses to your ex and she or he will tend to think even less of you. What if you get drunk again, should your ex expect the same behavior? What if your mate is cold to you two weeks from now, will you do the same thing? So one of the first things you can do after cheating is to be an adult and to take full responsibility. Accept the blame and don’t give lame reasons for your poor behavior.
Instead of weak excuses, you can say something like “I know I broke your trust in me, and I’m so sorry that I did this and made you feel so hurt…”
This is an adult way to begin to repair the damage to their trust. Hearing responsibility being taken like that allows us to see that maybe they understand what they did wrong. It helps lay the foundation for forgiveness. Just like when you catch your kids screwing up, if they lie about it you just get more angry. But if they apologize and own it, you can more easily begin to forgive.
There are many other steps that need to be followed before you can truly begin to repair the trust, but this is a very big initial step!
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