– Building Trust in Your Marriage

Last Updated on October 5, 2015 by Chris Roberts

USING MARRIAGE COUNSELING IN NASHVILLE, TN TO HELP BUILD TRUST IN YOUR RELATIONSHIP

It’s never a fun thing to work on trust in your marriage. Marriage counseling in Nashville, TN can be just the place to jump start the engine for learning new ways to build trust, or discover different methods for rebuilding trust if there has been an incident that has lead to skepticism and doubt. In every relationship there are things that happen that cause partners to want to pull back and hide in their shell. We all have different ways of “hiding in our shell.” For some, hiding in our shell means lashing out with anger and frustration. For others, hiding means to physically leave and go be somewhere else for a while in hopes that things will be different upon their return. For others, hiding means shutting down emotionally even while staying in the same proximity and space as their partner.

For most people, when they are hurt, they use the old adage that the other partner must “earn back their trust.” Marriage counseling seeks to help couples find better ways of building or rebuilding trust besides just sitting back and hoping the offending partner passes the newly established trust test. Whenever there has been harm from one spouse to the other there will always be pain and fear. One spouse can harm the other by not having dinner ready when they said they would. There can also be harm when one spouse doesn’t come home until 2:00 in the morning and the other spouse doesn’t know their whereabouts. Of course, there will always be harm when one partner goes outside the marriage to get their needs met through an emotional or physical affair. These examples and more happen frequently within the couples I see on a regular basis. They are all recoverable situations. But, the patterns that were in place before the harm can no longer sustain the new dynamic that has been created by the harm.

Marriage counseling can help couples learn new patterns for investing love and care into their marriage so that the same type of harm doesn’t happen again and again. Many people are reluctant to give up their old patterns, even if they don’t work. We like our patterns because they are comfortable and predictable. When a harm has occurred that one partner feels they can’t just simply ignore, it takes a new and different effort to address the situation, but also to live life in a way that doesn’t allow the same situation to occur under the same conditions. What most of us want to do when we are harmed is to become a victim to the circumstance or the person. We want to sit back and cross our arms and say, “If you want me present in our relationship, you need to prove to me that you are different and you won’t harm me in this way (or any other way) ever again.” I would argue that we all want to do this, or at least have the urge to do this, every time we are hurt or harmed by someone close to us. This type of behavior falls under the old adage that the offending party must “earn back our trust.”

Marriage counseling asks couples to consider new ways of addressing pain and hurt. The spouse that is harmed will ultimately ALWAYS have to trust FIRST. The partner that is offended will at some point have to open themselves up to trust that the other partner is different and be willing to hurt again. This really is the only way for the offending spouse to “prove” they are different and working on being a better spouse. If the spouse that is hurt always remains in the arms-crossed position, they will never be able to truly experience that the spouse that harmed them has changed. I’m not in any way advocating for blind trust towards a partner that has just severely hurt you. That would be setting yourself for more unnecessary pain. I’m asserting that the position of sitting back with your arms crossed and waiting on your spouse to prove they have changed will not work, in the long term. We should be more protective and skeptical for a short time when we have been harmed. This time should be spent understanding what happened and creating a clearer vision of how you want your relationship to function in the future. Anytime there has been heartbreak or pain in your relationship, it will forever change the dynamic of how you function together as a couple. The question is whether is will ultimately draw you closer or move you further and further apart.

The best marriage counselors in Nashville won’t simply look to immediately make your marriage better and smoother. The patterns that caused the harm in the first place need to be addressed, but both partners will eventually need to find new ways to interact with each other and trust each other more. We are always moving towards trusting each other more or less. There is no neutral ground.

Marriage counseling, no matter how hard it may be in the short term, will always be focused on helping couples identify whether they want to be trusting their partner more or less and then helping them create what they want. If you have noticed a distinct lack of trust in your marriage, then marriage counseling in Nashville may be a helpful place to kick things back in gear and start moving towards the love and intimacy you deserve.

photo courtesy of: Tord Sollie via Unsplash