"How can I ever trust him again?" The bad news, you can't. The good news? You don't need to

 It's one of the questions I'm asked most often, along with, "when will I stop feeling so much pain" and "should I stay or go?". 

How, so many of you ask, can I ever trust him again.

Usually, this question is asked within the context of a marriage that has remains somewhat intact. He says he'll change, he says it's over, he says he wishes it had never happened. 

But we're aware that it didn't just "happen". He made it happen. He chose it.

And that not only hurts like hell, it makes it very very hard to believe that it won't happen again. As Dr Phil has famously said, the greatest predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.

I wish I could tell you that there was some formula for success. That if he did this thing or that thing, then you could be sure he'd never cheat again. But there isn't. I know of people who cheated once, their spouse didn't know, and they never cheated again. I know of people who said they couldn't promise they'd never cheat again but who (so far!) have never cheated again. And consider this: I have this site where I've spent more than a decade talking to all of you about healing from infidelity and I have no idea if my husband will cheat on me again. It's impossible to predict what anyone will do. Consider also this: How many of you came here with the words, "I never imagined that my husband could do this." Yep, me too. Never in a million years.

And yet, here I am. Here we are. 

There are things we can pay attention to if we're considering rebuilding a marriage with someone who betrayed us. For a start, I wouldn't consider (nor would I encourage you to consider) giving a second chance to someone who's refusing to do the work of digging through his own shit: If he always minimized what he did, if he refused to break it off and insist on No Contact, if he refused to talk about it, if he refused to let me see his e-mails/texts/apps on his phone... Those, to me, are huge waving red flags that are telling me that he might not be packing his bags but I should be. 

Which brings me to the point of this post and, I believe, the most important thing we can do in the wake of D-Day: Learn to trust ourselves. 

I know how vague that sounds. And I know how confusing it feels. What difference does it make if I trust myself if I can't trust him? He's the cheater.

Yes. And trusting yourself is not the same as ensuring that you will never be hurt again. Nobody can promise that. 

But trusting yourself is about taking care of yourself. It is about ensuring that you are not tolerating anything in your life that makes you uncomfortable or compromises your value system. That's part of the collateral damage of infidelity. So many of us can look back and see that we knew something wasn't right. Maybe we didn't know he was cheating, but we knew there were times we couldn't reach him. Or we knew he'd suddenly detached from our family, or we felt unseen or unheard. We told ourselves that all marriages go through rough patches, that maybe he was stressed, that we needed to be patient. We made do with a situation that didn't feel enough for us.

Trusting ourselves is about never doing that again. Trusting ourselves is about never saying "it's okay" when it's not. It's about insisting on what we need to stay in the marriage. It's about refusing to trade our voice for his presence. Trusting ourselves is knowing that we are worth fighting for, and that fighting for ourselves is an inside job.

I was hard for me to understand what trusting myself meant until I felt it. And yet, I knew women who trusted themselves, though I might not have put it that way. Women who moved through the world with a certainty of their worth. Not arrogance at all. Assurance. 

And that's what trusting ourselves provides. Not a guarantee that he will never cheat again. But an assurance that, no matter what others do, we will not lose sight of our own North Star. That no matter how hard the winds blow, we will not topple.

Despite how you're feeling right now, regardless of how miserable you feel, let me remind you that you have not toppled. We have survived this. And since the greatest predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour, that's a pretty good indication that we would survive if it happened again. We think we wouldn't. But let's not confuse feeling deep deep pain with being annihilated. We can feel that pain and move forward anyway. And that's all we need to know.

My husband might cheat on me next week (though this pandemic means he's pretty much around 24/7 so he'd have to work  hard at it!). I cannot control what he does. I never could. But I know now that I can trust myself to respond in a way that is rooted in self-honor and respect. 

And, as it turns out, that is enough. It had always been enough.