Caring for yourself helps your relationships

When it comes to maintaining relationships or ending them, can we all acknowledge that it is very hard and often tricky? May I suggest that we all need to be doing our own work - self-care, accountability for our stuff, finding moments of respite, on and on.

This kind of focus on ourselves is not selfish, it is restorative. It is awfully hard to have healthy relationships with others if we do not have a healthy relationship with ourselves.

How are you doing with your own responsible living? Need to make any adjustments?

Suggestions for rebuilding trust

I’ve learned a few things from watching others rebuild trust, here are a couple of suggestions:

1. If you are the person who threw away trust, then find others (a trust spiritual advisor or a therapist) to talk about your frustrations with the yukky space of broken trust. Don’t complain to the person you broke trust with. Don’t ask them to make YOU feel better.

2. Over accommodate the person whose trust you lost. Ask for feedback as to how to regain trust. FInancial issues? Be so transparent in all your financial dealings that the other person cannot help but notice your change of heart. Cheating? Again. Over-comply with their desires for transparency. Give them the code to your phone. Hide nothing about your daily doings. As long as what they ask of you is not illegal, immoral or fattening, help them learn to trust you.

3. If you are the person who lost trust, be clear and specific about your needs. You deserve to have your wishes granted as trust is re-established.

4. Do NOT rush to say you have forgiven, although of course forgiveness is a thing. Demanding that you be a forgiving person before you have actually forgiving erodes trust in a different way.

5. If you and your partner/friend/business associate, cannot agree as to whether trust has or has not been broken, go to a trusted third party to hash out the details.

6. Finally - small acts of kindness and grace go a long way to rebuild trust on both people’s part. Try not to seek revenge; try not to burn bridges; try to seek compassionate ways to deal with your conflict.

Remember, we all break trust at one point or another. Let’s try to be gentle with one another.

Demanding trustworthiness does not work

I once knew a family that was dealing with infidelity. And the offender eventually grew weary of being the untrustworthy one. She wanted to know why her husband wasn’t being held to his Christian duty of forgiveness. Wasn’t he a Christian after all? Shouldn’t he forgive her like the good Christian man he is?

To which he replied - “I’m wondering the same thing about you. I’m wondering how you, a good Christian woman, cheated on me with my friend.”

Yikes. That’s a good question. Notice how easy it is for us to avoid talking about the issue at hand simply by pointing out each other’s hypocrisy.

This conversation is a trust eroder. Once trust is lost, it is very hard to re-establish.

So here’s a thought - could we work hard to build and maintain trust, rather than demanding others give it back when we throw it away?

Trust and grace

Love covers a multitude of sins. The Bible says so. But I think trust can certainly be helpful too, especially when we make a mistake, even a big one, in relationships. Am I the only person who has been inattentive in a relationship? Unkind? Selfish? I didn’t think so!!

Everyone has bad days, even horrible ones, that can cause deep cracks in the integrity of a relationship. Sort of like my friends who are having trouble feeling love for one another in their marriage. Both have made some mistakes. Trust has eroded.

If trust is in place, we have some wriggle room. Some grace.

Last weekend I made a mistake in a family relationship. I knew I was making the mistake even as I was making it, but we were in a group, and there was nothing to be done but carry on. I meant to talk about it as soon as the event was over, but I forgot. Later that day, one of my kids brought up the incident.

I was so grateful. What if I had forgotten to circle back and address the issue? I IMMEDIATELY agreed that I had messed up - because I had! This kid quickly extended me grace. We moved on to the next topic at hand.

Now, I think the reason my BIG mistake did not become a horrible relationship conflict was because there was some trust that this is not a pattern. If I keep making this same mistake, it will erode trust. See how that works? Trust helped.

How do we build trust? One teeny tiny step at a time. We can erode it that same way. What we cannot do is grand gestures that restore trust.

Are you building trust in your relationships by being trustworthy a reasonable percentage of the time?

Rebuilding trust

I have friends who are struggling with trusting one another. There is no reason for this, as far as I can see. There has been no infidelity; they share the same core values; they have a common and strong faith; they have a similar vision for family life and both desperately desire to build a strong family.

But they aren’t feeling the love.

Lately we’ve been talking about building trust. And they both are very confused about why this is the topic of conversation. Instead, they want to talk about conflict resolution or communication or maybe how I should get the OTHER spouse to change in this way or that. I’m not willing to play.

I am sticking to my guns. We need to talk about trust.

Realizing I am stubborn they stopped asking for 5 easy steps for communicating without conflict and chose a new path: can we please, please talk about intimacy? What they meant, we figured out, was vulnerability. They wanted to be able to be honest with one another without feeling like they were just providing ammunition for the other one to use in the next argument.

Nope. Trust. We are going to talk about trust.

“But we do trust each other!” they say. It turns out that they can agree on things if it means they are both united in disagreeing with me!!

If I’ve learned anything from the work of Brene Brown it is this: trust and vulnerability go together like peanut butter and jelly. If you do not have one, you lose the other.

Trust. It’s the antidote that can help with a lot of issues that might cause a relationship to end. Because let’s face it - we can all be knuckleheads when it comes to relationships.

To be continued…