"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. 

Can "I'm Sorry" Save Your Marriage After Infidelity?

"For every woman still waiting for an apology," are among the first words you'll read when you open Eve Ensler's book The Apology. Ensler suffered abuse from her father for most of her childhood and youth. Her father died without ever uttering anything resembling an "I'm sorry". Ensler felt caged by the lack of apology and so she found the key to free herself. 
A whole lot of us find ourselves in a similar situation, with a spouse or an ex-spouse who either can't or won't take the necessary steps to apologize to us. I'm not talking about an apology spat out, or one that's really a plea for forgiveness. But a true apology, one that offers a full accounting of the harm done and a genuine reckoning. One that leaves the apologizer unwilling to ever do that to another person again because they cannot, they will not be that person. 
I'm often asked why I stayed with my husband after the harm he caused. Year after year of cheating, lie after lie. And when I look back at those early weeks and months after D-Day, there are a few moments that stand out. Including the day that he told me, whether I stayed with him or left, he was committed to getting emotionally healthy. He could not, he would not remain the same person who could betray someone he loved. 
A genuine apology is a rare thing. In part, as Ensler says, we are not taught to apologize when we are children. I cringe when I hear a parent admonish a child to "say you're sorry", followed by a sullen "I'm sorry" that carries not one iota of self-reflection or genuine remorse. 
And to apologize for breaking someone's trust, their heart? Where to even begin? And so the harm is minimized. It's part cowardice, part survival strategy. As one of our Twitter tribe, whose wife cheated on him, noted after his wife read this post, she felt like a "monster". But then, he added, the next day she wanted to read it again.
Because within that admission, that willingness to confess the monster's sins as your own, lies liberation. If we don't exorcise whatever is driving us to behave in ways that cause harm to those we love, then we will continue to be controlled by it. There are three stages through a genuine apology, Ensler tells us. The first is a willingness to look at what drove the behaviour, to "self-interrogate," she says. Not excuses but understanding. "What made you a person capable of [inflicting such harm]." The second is a "detailed accounting" of the harm. "Liberation only comes through the details," says Ensler. 
Though Ensler is speaking primarily to sexual assault survivors, her words hold true for those of us abused via betrayal. "Survivors," she says, "are often haunted by the why." What we need is not justification but explanation. I often urge women on this site to let go of the why, in part because the cheater so often is baffled himself. He doesn't know why he risked everything that mattered for someone who, ultimately didn't. His job, of course, is to find out. But know this: The 'why' is rarely what our culture tells us. It is rooted in the cheater's own dysfunction, his own wound. Hurt people hurt people.
And the third – a stage few reach – is liberation. An unshackling of the apologizer. A release for the apologized to. 
That's what I got in those moments that I can remember so clearly after D-Day. Those were the moments when my husband made clear that he was committed to becoming a man who could not, would not do that again. When he said to me that he never wanted to see such pain in my eyes again and know that he had created it. When he showed up at his 12-step groups, when he worked with therapists. It wasn't so much an "I'm sorry" in words (though there was that, as well) as an apology in action. I saw his "I'm sorry" more than heard it. 

But what if he won't apologize? 

What are you seeing? Are you seeing someone interrogate themselves (ideally with the help of a trained therapist)? Are you seeing someone willing to go through the shame and discomfort of examining why they hurt someone they claim to value?

If not, can I ask you gently why you're continuing to live on crumbs? If not, why do you have any expectation that things in the future will be different than the past?

If so, can you be satisfied with an "I'm sorry" in actions not words? If so, are you confident that the future will be different from the past because the future him will be different than the past him?
And if you find yourself left, without an apology, without a marriage, then what? Then you unshackle yourself. You can do what Ensler did and put yourself in your ex'es shoes and determine what made him incapable of healthy, generous love. You learn to pity him. Or you accept that you might never know and instead focus your energy on self-care, self-compassion, self-love. 

An apology can create space for compassion. Without it, you will have to create that space for yourself. You can learn to forgive yourself for not knowing, for not having seen it, for having trusted someone unworthy of your trust. And then, you can move forward, liberated. 

Can You Ever Trust Him Again? It's a Trick Question

"I will never trust him again," I wrote in my journal. Over and over. In blue ink and black. "I will never trust him again."
You've probably said it too. Written it in your own journal. Said it to your therapist, your friends, yourself. To him.
A woman was recently asked on Twitter whether she believed she would ever trust her husband again after he'd been unfaithful. Her response? "I intend to spend the next 50 years finding out."
It sounds flip.
But what she's saying in the absolute uncomfortable truth.
You trusted him before and it turns out he was untrustworthy. So whether we trust him or not doesn't change his behaviour at all. It only changes us.
There are nuances, of course. I'm not advocating for total and absolute trust of a man who's revealed himself unworthy of trust. But I am pointing out that we don't really know who's trustworthy or not until they either betray us, or they don't.
And I'm making the case too that whether or not he is to be trusted is the wrong question. The right question isn't about him at all. It's personal:
Can I trust myself?
Because whether or not we feel safe in the world has far more to do with that question than whether others are trustworthy or not.
And learning to trust ourselves is something we have far more control over than others' actions. Trusting ourselves is about paying attention to what feels right or wrong, safe or unsafe, true or untrue.
Trusting ourselves is about personal integrity. And when we live our own lives with personal integrity, we'll be far more selective about those we share our lives with. We'll become impatient with the friend who gossips about other friends. We'll stop simmering in resentment with those who are consistently late and instead prioritize our own time. We'll notice when our guts or our hearts or our brains – our motherboards – set off alarms (whether barely perceptible or blinding red lights) in certain situations.
Trusting ourselves isn't like some sort of emotional armour that shields us from any cons, grifters, gaslights or garden-variety cheaters. But it does, nonetheless, offer protection. When we trust ourselves, we notice things. We pay attention to our inner pilot lights. We know who we are and what we stand for. And we know what we won't stand for. Trusting ourselves isn't hyper-vigilance. That's rooted in fear. Trusting ourselves is rooted in self-respect and the clarity that comes with knowing where the line is drawn and what we will do when that boundary is violated.
I don't know whether or not your husband will cheat on you again. I don't even know whether my husband will cheat on me again.
But I know this.
If anyone betrays me – whether the betrayal is large or small – I trust myself to respond in a way that honors and respects me.
And approaching my life – my marriage, my relationships, my work – from that place is far more predictive of joy than whether or not I can trust him. Whether or not he's trustworthy remains to be seen. So far, so good. And I have the rest of my life to find out.