How To Build Trust In a Relationship

Trust in a relationship

What’s Trust?

Trust is the belief that someone will always be loyal and love you. To trust someone implies that you can rely on them and feel safe confiding in them. Trust is the foundation of relationships because it allows you to be vulnerable and open up to the person without having to defensively protect yourself.

Why Is Trust Important In A Relationship?

Trust is essential for a happy, healthy relationship that is built to last.

Just as important as those three little words, ‘I love you,’ being able to say “I trust you” is critical for lasting love.

“Trust means that you believe what your partner says,”

“You don’t question that they are ill-intentioned or trying to hurt or hide something from you,” they say. “And if you get hurt by an action or words that they say, you don’t believe it was intentional. You trust it was an accident, thoughtless, or unintentionally causing harm.”

“Honesty requires that you be true to yourself and your partner by putting everything on the table without hiding. Openness requires you to share the vulnerable things that feel hard to talk about and hold the space for your partner to share. Transparency requires that you’re in tune emotionally with what’s being said, felt, heard, and understood,”

“Trust is essential in a relationship because it allows both parties to feel safe and accepted, and free expression leads to deeper connection and a greater understanding of one’s self and partner, which leads to growth and expansion”

Impact of Lack of Trust

A healthy relationship is built on trust. Broken trust in relationships leads to depression, anxiety, and insecurity. The relationship may suffer from a lack of intimacy. A lack of trust in a relationship opens the door to a slew of other issues that, if left unresolved, may destroy what is left.

Lack of trust can impact your relationship as it may create many problems. A lack of trust can also affect your mental health like…

Depression:-

Distrusting a partner in a relationship can lead one or both partners to feel depressed. Once the trust is broken in a relationship one partner begins to question the entire relationship. A partner who feels the relationship has been a lie can then become depressed.

Anxiety:-

Increased levels of anxiety occur following a break in the trust in a relationship and you will constantly question whether your partner is lying or being deceitful.

Insecurity:-

In most cases, a lack of trust results in relationship insecurity. As a result, you will constantly doubt what your partner tells you and may react by becoming more controlling. Paradoxically, the behaviours designed to gain control usually push partners further away. For instance, incessantly calling or texting your partner to keep tabs on them can drive them away.

Decreased Intimacy:-

When a relationship lacks trust, intimacy suffers. When your partner is deceiving you, you will most likely want to emotionally and physically distance yourself from them.

Negativity:-

When you feel wronged by your partner, you may become fixated on this feeling, which will cause you to withdraw from them while also filling you with rage. This has the potential to suffocate connection and closeness.

Rebuilding Trust again in a Relationship

If trust has been damaged in a relationship, there are things that you can do to help rebuild your trust, intimacy, and connection. Steps you can take:

• Have a willingness to work on the relationship
• Openly apologize
• Reflect on the experience
• Create new memories
• Remember that people can be trusted
• Ask for what you need
• Be willing to be vulnerable
• Reignite the connection
• Focus on the future
• Never mix money with your love. Keep both separate from each other
• Acknowledge and take responsibility for mistakes made, apologize for the harm done, and be clear and specific about how things will be approached differently in the future

Patience is also necessary. It may take some time to rebuild trust, but working on improving your relationship can help you eventually mend those broken connections.

The bottom line

I’ll be honest. Rebuilding trust after it has been broken is difficult, and depending on the severity of the breach of trust, it often requires some additional help. I have seen people try to handle it all on their own, and often it ends up more like a band-aid without actually addressing the deep wound.

The importance of trust in successful relationships cannot be underestimated: It’s the cornerstone of every healthy relationship. It’s not always easy to build trust, though as this article has shown, there certainly are steps you can take to build trust in any kind of relationship.

Probably the basis of all trust is honest communication. As soon as we are caught in a lie, our credibility plummets. Above all else, to build trust in relationships, be honest.