How do partners learn to trust again?

How do partners learn to trust again?
S

Savannah

Registrant
This is my first post here, though I've been reading everyone's valuable posts for several months. I've gotten lots of great information and even more strength from all of you, partners and survivors alike.

My question is: Since partners seem to take the brunt of the survivor's pain, how do we learn to feel safe again with our spouse or significant other? My husband has pushed me away, run away himself, kept things from me, told me half-truths, and been unfaithful to me.

How can I learn to trust him, especially when he's ready to run at the first sign of trouble? I just don't want to be hurt again.

Thank you in advance for any words of wisdom.
 
Savannah,

I don't know if I have a lot of answers for you. But from what I have learned in the last few months is that he is going to hurt me. Not meaning too of course. But it will happen. Do I have to let him do that and just roll over? No. I don't think so. His abuse is not a license to hurt me or is your husband's.

As far as the unfaithfullness goes I don't think you have to forgive. Trust has to be earned, you know?

So how can I trust my partner when he does really bad things to me? At least in my case we have a long history and it was not always that way. So I have to hold on.

No one can tell you how to trust. Only how to hope. But if it is hurting you it cannot go on. I mean it. If my partner hurts me like it sounds you have been hurt, then he either faces it admits it, or I leave. Hard to say because I love him. But I don't do him any favors it I just sit back and take it.

I hope that you will take care of you. Whatever that takes.

Ian
 
Welcome to MS Savannah.

How can I learn to trust him, especially when he's ready to run at the first sign of trouble? I just don't want to be hurt again.
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Learning about how and why survivors find negative ways to cope helped me forgive my boyfriend, and gave me the reassurance I needed to trust him. Seeing him improve so rapidly where some of the little things were concerned also gave me confidence about the big things.

As Ian's said-- people are imperfect, they communicate imperfectly, and they are bound to hurt each other from time to time. The problem is that when you've been hurt many times, all the hurt runs together and it's hard to look at one thing in context. As people get honest with each other and move along in recovery it gets easier to sort it out rationally-- and each time you trust and he fulfills your trust, it gets easier too.

Take care
SAR
 
Thank you Savannah for initiating this very important question which has been on my mind for some time now. I don't really know if I can even answer to that now because I am separated from my love, and I have been for some time now.
I can forgive, I have already forgiven because I understand the patterns and because I love him. I am going through a lot of self doubt right now because if my love said we did not have a relationship, so what did we share ? Being a survivor myself I felt I had great courage taking the risk to open my heart and let myself be vulnerable again (meaning for the first time since the abuse). The worst consequences I experienced because of my love's anger, distrust, avoidance...is that I felt betrayed, used and let down right after I have trusted and confided in him. But I would also add that not knowing for sure what happened is even worse. Being left with such phrase so casually said as "I don't love you, I have never loved you" is just horrible because it doesn't make sense with the intimacy shared previously.
For me trust can only be regained on 3 conditions:
- both of us taking responsabilities for anything that happened that was dysfunctional (including all the verbal abuse)
- communicating in a very open and respectful way
- commitment to redirect violent behaviour away from the partner.

Thank you again for bringing up this topic on this board.
Caro
 
Many thanks for responding. Trust is such an important element in a relationship, without it, both parties feel badly. My survivor husband is struggling with his trust in me not to hurt him. However, whenever I feel betrayed, I do exactly that. When will the cycle ever stop?!?!
 
my cycle never stopped for years, good luck, but the more you try, the more they begin to think YOU are crazy with issues, so in all, if you figure out a solution, let me know eh, good luck, hang in there
 
How do partners learn to trust again? That's a hard one and a great question. I don't know the answer, but I have an idea about the direction.

I have to trust myself. What does that mean? To me, it means that I trust that whatever happens, I'll be OK.

You work on overcoming fears of abandonment, fears of intimacy, dependency fears, whatever fears you have. I do things, take little steps, that show myself that I am acknowledging a fear and working on bringing it down to a size I can feel comfortable handling.

You trust yourself to take care of yourself. To be in touch with your feelings and needs and know how to best provide them to yourself. For me this means making and keeping medical apointments, exercising, eating well, handling the basics.

You trust yourself to keep balance in your life. To keep up with friends, to pursue hobbies, to raise the kids or pursue a career, to keep in touch with family, to maintain a spiritual component,etc., as well as to work on your relationship. I have to remember not to put all my eggs in one basket ... the relationship. Because leading my own life will lessen the fear of abandonment. If I loose the relationship, I haven't lost everything. So really, it makes it easier for our partners to earn back our trust. We aren't so scared or defended. Because we aren't risking EVERYTHING.

We watch and listen and fight denial. If my partner is bad with money, maybe trusting financially isn't the place to start.

I'm learning to set boundaries. Learning when to say no or enough. This one's particularly hard for me. Learning how to protect my boundaries, to protect myself is important in trusting myself.

I think the more I know that whatever happens, I'll be OK, the more trust I place in myself and the more trust I can give to others. It's a process!

Emerald
 
I am not sure you can begin to trust someone, unless they are actively working on restoring your trust. Actions have consequences.

I put up with a lot of things. Then I made a decisions and walked away since there were no signs of remorse and no committment to change things. Maybe it would have been different, if we were married.

But for me, after cheating started, it was all over. That was my boundary.

Best of luck to you. THis is a tough one but I do not think you can restore trust on your own.
 
Hi Savannah,

This is a good topic for me and one that comes up frequently in my personal life, but also in my work, my faith community and with my family of origin.

A dear friend of mine who acts as my listening ear/bare-knuckles advisor has this to say:

"You CAN trust them: You can trust them to keep doing exactly what they have been doing all along."

Something to ponder. I've chewed on it for a few years now.

Regards,
 
Hi Savannah

I'm new to this site too and know exactly where you are coming from. I've been with my husband for nearly six years. Two weeks ago I was convinced he was having an affair after finding some explicit text messages on an old phone he was giving away. After confronting him and showing him the door - the truth came out about his abuse. For two weeks now I've been asking myself how could I not know? His abuse has caused his other condition of OCD to spiral out of control - he has been obsessed with sex and porn since before we met. He explained that he has searched women out on the internet and by randomly texting and then striking up conversation before turning the conversation to explicit things. When I 'caught him' he was in contact with three other women.
Although he hasn't actually had sex with these women, its the thought of his mind having always been elsewhere. He swears that his intrusive thoughts were too disgusting to discuss with me which is why he sort out the others but it hurts so much. He wants to stop and has given me compete access to all his online phone bills and emails so I can watch his calls etc for 'unknown numbers' - so at least he is trying, but I still see those stray texts in my head and feel like my heart is dying.
I know he is trying so hard to reassure me but I wonder if the trust will ever be there again. I am helping him all I can with talking about his past and holding him when he needs me - I want to do all I can, but I still hurt. I want to be angry at him like I should be able to. I want to scream and rant and rave but I know its not completely his fault - the lying is, but he's been doing it since 6 years old and in his words "its hard to stop when its all you know".
All I know is that I WANT to trust. I WANT us to make it. He's worth fighting for so I will - but as the earlier post said I'm not going to let his abuse be an excuse for everything I can't let it be. It sounds callous but I wish it had just been his abuse that was the secret - I could've dealt with that. The fact that his abuse has caused lies and hurt for me makes it hard to be strong for both us but in these early days I know I have to be.

Please take comfort in the fact that the people on this site are wonderful. You can ask advice, ask for a shoulder or just rant and rave for a bit. You're not thought of any less - and you go away with a slightly lighter head.

Take care

Starbuck xx
 
Starbuck

I've been with my husband for nearly six years. Two weeks ago I was convinced he was having an affair after finding some explicit text messages on an old phone he was giving away. After confronting him and showing him the door - the truth came out about his abuse.
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This is similar to the way my boyfriend disclosed to me, we'd also been together for about six years.

Between his self-destructive behaviors and my discovery of his acting out, I was ready to end things too.

He only told me about his abuse when he felt that there was nothing left to lose-- because he was so certain that if I knew, I'd leave him-- and he didn't want me to leave, so he never told. But he wanted me to know, so when he felt sure I was leaving anyway, he told.

That seemed absurd to me-- still doesn't make much sense-- but he was so certain about it that I had to believe it was true FOR HIM. Learning more about male sexual abuse survivors helped me accept that it wasn't so absurd.

I suspected on my own that he'd left the trail of his acting out for me to find-- old letters from a girl he'd stopped corresponding with years ago-- that it was on some level an attempt to tell me what he was too scared to say. I would not have assumed that developing some secret online relationship was related to childhood SA-- this also seemed strange to me-- but it was literally impossible for him to come clean about the letters without also disclosing the SA. It was plain to me that this too was very real to him even though I didn't understand it.

Sometimes we just have to trust that our partners have different realities-- and that they might not be able to make sense of them any more than we can.

We also have to trust ourselves to look at each day as the beginning of something new. My boyfriend is not who he was when he was getting those letters and it would only hurt our relationship not to open my eyes to all of who he is today because I am overwhelmed by the past.

SAR
 
Thank you SAR for saying:

"Sometimes we just have to trust that our partners have different realities-- and that they might not be able to make sense of them any more than we can."

I believe this is true and I should not forget it because it is at the core of my love's profound despair and powerlessness. The experience of abuse is a time when the child has been plunged into a twisted reality, into insanity. My love has been abused by his mother, that is so insane, so unthinkable, so horrible. How can he make sense of the experience ? He survived believing he was guilty, that he did not deserved to be loved. That was his only way of coping with the insanity. Now that this explanation is gone (thanks to therapy) the insanity is back.
I am thinking about the survivors of the death camps saying that the worst was the insanity they experienced that carried no sense.
I will try to remember that my love is struggling every day with that insanity.
Love
Caro
 
SAR

I so know where you're coming from - everything you wrote is exactly how I've been thinking and how my hubby has spoken. He too felt that if he told me, he thought I would be repulsed by him and would leave him. Something that didn't even enter my head when he told me the truth! And how I found it difficult to relate the porn etc to his SA but the more I read posts here the more I see how it connects.
In a strange way its comforting to know there are people out there whose heads are working the same way mine is! How long has it been since your partner told you his secret? To date its exactly 3 weeks for us so everything is still very 'now' but I have been reading your posts along with others of course and you seem to be not so confused as some us newbies.
 
In a strange way its comforting to know there are people out there whose heads are working the same way mine is!
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I think so too, but the first time I said as much to my boyfriend he said, "oh, you mean it's nice to know that your experience is nothing special?" :rolleyes:

I found letters an online "friend" had sent him a little over 18 months ago. The letters were all 2 and 3 years old at that point-- we were in the process of moving and as I said I think he left them for me to find while unpacking.

He disclosed to me about six weeks after I found the letters. I think it was motivated by both his feeling that I was getting ready to leave him, and by how I'd listened and believed the truth in some other conversations we had during that six weeks.

Most of those other conversations were about other ways that he, and our relationship, had changed in the 2 years since those letters-- I have to say, if I'd found them at the time, I don't know if either of us or the both of us together were healthy enough to handle disclosure OR fixing the relationship. But when he spoke about how he'd been trying to take care of himself, cut down on his self-destructive behaviors-- a look at the immediate past proved to me that he had realized something was wrong, and that he'd been working on it already. The old, bad past came out at the right time-- a strong time-- coincedence? Who knows?

If I'm less confused than I was before, it's not because things have gotten simpler! Most of it is due to my VERY terrific partner and to the learning and support right here at MS.
 
Trust. That is a big question. It has been a year and 1/2 since my husband of 19 years broke me the news that he was receiving oral sex from a man for three years.

I have given him the benefit of the doubt.... That his childhood trauma (3 years from 10-13) caused such wacky behavior.

He has declared total insanity.

My question: How can someone do such a thing and then expect 'forgiveness' and 'trust'.

His explanation: I am now free. I have let out my dark secrets that I have been living with and going crazy with in my mind for all of my life.

My fears: People don't change in a day...You don't spend 30 years in a certain thought pattern and then all of a sudden change because you have shared your forbidden past.

I truly believe my husband is living and wants a 'clean' life, but how does someone go from such &^%$# to a 'normal life'.

Do I risk contracting AIDS and investing my remaining life with a undependable soul?

Are these soals repairable? I don't know if I will ever know the answer.

Yours truly,

1.5 years and holding
 
April,

Of all the words in your post, the one that jumps out at me is "expect."

I'm with you, I don't know how a person can expect forgiveness. It seems to me that forgiveness and trust have to be given freely--more that that-- it seems to me that any demand or expectation of forgiveness indicates that the person asking isn't really looking for the gift of forgiveness so much as they are looking for an easy way out of guilt.

I'm pretty sure that my boyfriend didn't *expect* to be forgiven... he wanted to be forgiven, badly, but if anything I think he expected that I wouldn't forgive him.

I don't know if I would have been able to forgive if he'd acted as though I should, or that I could in a day.

SAR
 
April
I was giving blowjobs, and my wife found out just after our 25th wedding anniversary. We've just had our 30th.

I expected 'certain death' at least, life as a homeless bum was the good option. I expected NOTHING.

But although I had some hard time, 'we' got past it.
She helped me to raise my expectations by not pulling my head off my shoulders, she actually made a huge effort to understand the complexity of my my situation, at the same time as keeping her options open to making me a bum on the streets.
I had to earn my place back in our marriage by doing some damned hard work in therapy and involving her in my healing.

I can't begin to imagine the distress she endured, or the level of understanding she has shown.
But quite possible I've shown the same degree of effort in bringing about the changes that have stopped me acting-out.

It's not easy, and if you see a future together then the present has to be worked on together as well.
We both made compromises, and we both made extra efforts along the way, but it's been worth it because despite what I did I always loved her.

Dave
 
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