Learning To Trust Again

When we have been the victims of treachery or adultery in love, the loss is not just of the person we once adored but of a broader capacity to trust human beings going forward.

We think: if we missed the signs here, we will miss them everywhere. If they declared that they would be loyal and faithful to us until the end, if they looked up at us with doe eyes and called us their precious one, and then began drifting away, flirting with others online and staying out too late at parties, how can we ever recover our faith in anyone?

We need a strategy to allow us to rebuild a future.

1. Self-forgiveness

We didn’t miss the betrayal because of any gross personal deficiency. Our suffering is the result of emotional maturity. This is what may legitimately happen when we have learnt what many people will never master: how to love someone wholeheartedly. We were let down because we overcame our fear of intimacy, because we finally acquired the art of relaxing our defences, of being grown up enough to cry in someone else’s company, of believing in tenderness and loyalty and of perceiving the innocent and wounded child inside an adult partner. We were not foolish; we were doing what true, evolved love asks of us.

2. We must not generalise

The problem, when we are in despair, lies in our temptation to generalise. In pain, we lose the power to discriminate. We cry out simply: everyone is awful, everyone is a traitor. It is highly understandable. But it is also a form of catastrophic exaggeration that doesn’t reflect reality – and that we can ill afford.

We need to get more precise. There were specific reasons why this person betrayed us and – rather than sighing cosmically – we need to become fast experts in what these might have been.

Many people are treacherous, but many more are not. And those who are tend to have certain defined characteristics, which can be identified, isolated and absorbed so that we can detect them more readily and more accurately next time around. For example:

— A resistance to conflict and evasiveness. The great betrayers tend to be those who cannot bear confrontation. It sounds almost sweet (close to shyness and modesty), but the results are anything but. To what extent can a partner break difficult news? Can they find their tongue when it’s needed? This tends to require some questions about their childhood. Were they the cowed, quiet and ‘good’ child because father was raging and mother was dismissive? (The great liars tend to have had very angry parents.) Did they develop their own personality, or were they chiefly made to facilitate those of others? We should learn to be vigilant around people-pleasers who, in terror of upsetting us, might destroy years of our lives.

— To what extent does a partner like themselves? Those who hate themselves are at far greater risk of disbelieving in your love, and of destroying it when it starts to threaten the isolation on which they have learnt to depend for their sense of safety.

— How awful was their childhood and how well do they know it? It’s hugely attractive to try to fix someone’s wounds. But we should be highly aware of the risks of trying to do so. Maybe we should learn to leave our ambulance at home on the next date. An underloved child doesn’t grow cleanly and simply into a grateful and predictable adult. They develop into someone who thinks they want love and then is highly likely to become overwhelmed and engulfed when it arrives. They will swerve and sadistically punish anyone who does, in fact, try to love them, giving them a direct sense of how badly they were treated.

— How good are they at expressing anger? Betrayal is frequently a form of rage that hasn’t found a more direct way to emerge. When they are disappointed, are they able to let you know in good time? Are they able to tell themselves – let alone you – when something is wrong?

— Do they go cold in bed without knowing how to account for their withdrawal? Do they flirt with other people and then apologise, without seeming to know why they behaved as they did? Sex tends to be the bellwether and leading indicator of trouble.

— We should be on the lookout for honesty around minor letdowns. Can they admit to making a stain on the bedroom floor or inadvertently scratching your desk? Or was it always a mystery or someone else’s fault? How much can they cleanly declare that they forgot to get dinner, blocked the drains or got too interested in a film to remember to do the garden? Can they take ownership of their actions and feelings? The full structure of a betrayal is almost always already present in the handling of so-called details.

3. We must be vigilant

We tend to create a false dichotomy: either we trust, or we are vigilant. But there are ways to love someone while always keeping one eye open for disaster.

It is entirely possible to enjoy immense peace and cosiness while also – as it were – remembering where the exits are. Flight crews do it all the time. We can be thrilled at someone’s kind gestures and warm words and know that these might still not be wholly solid. We can be hugely optimistic – and yet know that nothing is ever entirely certain. And that’s OK for a human being.

4. We know we will survive

The greatest lesson we can take from a breach of trust is the knowledge that we can, in fact, whatever it may feel like on dark days, overcome any breach of trust. It won’t be pleasant, we may weep for many weeks, but we will solidify, grow stronger and eventually go on. Summer will return.

This makes complete trust less important than it might seem to someone who has never gone through a betrayal. The betrayed may paradoxically – if they interpret the event correctly – eventually come to place less emphasis on total trust, and become more sanguine about its lapses.

Of course, we want to believe that our new partner (who has already said some very encouraging and beautiful things) will be kinder and more solid than the last. The signs are good – we might be planning the holidays and have talked about what it would be like to share a home. But we won’t know the full state of play for a while, and it is no proof of undue cynicism to say so. We can believe them, admire them and even love them quite a lot – and yet know, as life has shown us already, that we can get it very wrong. And survive.