Oh heavens, this is so hard but so often the reality is that we do experience broken trust in our marriages. I realize that this is a heavy-laden topic. Trust is a foundational cornerstone of our relationships. For our marriage to have intimacy we must have trust. We can’t grow in oneness when we can’t trust. Because trust is so critical to the heart of our marriage when it is broken, we must deal with it.
There are of course different levels of trust being broken. But, regardless of the depth of the break, we still have to repair it. I am certainly not attempting in a short blog to talk about some of the deepest levels of trust being broken. Those will require not only forgiveness, but work to move toward reconciliation. Most of the time this involves needing a counselor to wisely help you move through the process of rebuilding trust and restoration of your marriage.
I am thinking about the fact that even at the most superficial levels we can and probably will all be thinking or feeling that trust has been broken. It can be everything from thinking your spouse is not being totally open with you or maybe withholding information. What about if they tell you a lie or they do something that you are not ok with? What if they are “secretive” and seem to wall off parts of their life from you? Every one of these things and a thousand more can break our trust.
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You are to forgive, even if they don’t ask you to, because unforgiveness for a believer is a sin
(you are the one that will be in bondage).
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What do we do when this happens? Again, I am going to make some general recommendations knowing that this will not apply to every type of trust violation. The first place I think we start is by recognizing and acknowledging when we think or feel that trust has been broken. How we approach this is really important. I think this is where an “I” message is critical. You want to share from your heart how the event/situation has made you feel. When you share what the situation is and then how it made you feel, you want to give your husband a chance to “feel” or get what you are saying. The goal is that your husband might have empathy toward what you felt when that situation occurred. We want to try and approach it this way, because if we attack them, most of the time they will go into a defensive mode (we all do). They may want to try and explain or defend what happened. It is not that you can’t have that discussion later, but for now, the point is: “This is how it made me feel.”
Once you have shared how it made you feel, then you need to be willing to forgive the offense, the wounding. You are to forgive, even if they don’t ask you to, because unforgiveness for a believer is a sin (you are the one that will be in bondage). You want to forgive. You don’t want to hold a grudge. You want to be free! Now, this does not mean that trust is immediately repaired. Reconciliation and restoration of trust may take time and involve some practical steps. What you want to do is be free to say, “God I have forgiven; I transfer this to the cross” (Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and not ours only but for the sins of the whole world.) 1 John 2:2 NIV. God I am not holding my husband in my debt. I am going to allow You to help rebuild my trust.
~Carla
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