Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Trust and Faith

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Trust is an essential part of loving someone. Once it’s gone, once that trust has been breached, it can be hard to regain. In some instances, losing trust in a partner can spill over into your future relationships. When this happens, finding love, the kind of love where you and your partner can flourish and grow becomes difficult to attain.  On this Language of Love Bite, we’ll discuss the issue of trust, how it can conjure up old wounds and the importance of getting to the root of a betrayal. Falling in love is a wonderful thing, but trusting the one you love makes it all the more incredible. If you’ve been betrayed and find yourself looking to put the pieces together and want to start down the path of trusting and loving again, this episode is for you! In this episode, we’ll discuss: Why we tend not to want to lose whoever it is we fall in love with A past that is filled with abandonment and the role it plays in love and trust How to rebuild trust once it’s been broken The importance of understanding and healing the why behind the breach Why rebuilding trust is a team effort Resources and Links Dr. Laura Berman Language of Love Podcast Laura Berman Instagram – Dr Laura Berman Facebook – Dr Laura Berman Youtube.com – Dr Laura Berman  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the last 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Bites, where I tackle your most asked questions and requested topics. These episodes are designed to be fun, quick and to the point. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. in this episode we're diving into the issue of trust and how to choose trust when to choose

trust in a love relationship especially when you've been hurt in love and at the end of this episode I'm going to give you the key question you have to really ask yourself and make a decision around if trust is really going to be found in your love life. One of the most common issue that individuals and couples bring to me in my clinical practice is difficulty trusting, right? Trusting love. And it makes sense because when you love something, you don't want to lose it. And for many of us who have had abandonments or losses in our life or betrayals, it's extra hard to trust because we bamboozled, right? One too many times. And so now we're vigilant and we have a hard time trusting people. And it's also hard to trust when that trust has been breached in a relationship.

So if your partner has cheated on you or has behaved in ways that go against your agreement, or maybe there's been financial infidelity or some other betrayal, right? Then trust needs to first be rebuilt. And then we'll get to the choice in a moment. But in order for trust to be rebuilt, a couple of things have to happen in the relationship. First, the person who breached the trust has to be willing to go inside themselves. And by that, I mean they have to find the why. It is not enough for them to say, I'm so sorry I did this to us or to you or to our relationship or to our lives or whatever. I'm not going to do it again. I'm so sorry. Please trust me. That's not enough, okay? They have to, preferably with the help of a therapist,

do some real introspective work where they start to understand the why behind it. Maybe because of something in the relationship, but usually it's something inside themselves like low self-worth or self-esteem or feelings of inadequacy or anxiety they were distracting themselves from or soothing themselves with these behaviors that led to a breach of trust, right? So they have to be willing to go into the why, and then they have to be willing to heal the why, to do the work to heal themselves or what happened so that they can move forward in a more conscious way and can be capable of being trusted again. And finally, they have to, both of you, because it's not just the person that breached the trust but the person whose trust has been breached you have to work

together to rebuild the relationship rebuild the connection and rebuild trust and when there has been a betrayal in a relationship that is when the rubber ultimately meets the road right because the person who has been betrayed struggles to trust totally normal you've been hurt you've been bamboozled. You've been gobsmacked. It's scary. Well, who's to say it won't happen again, right? That's our fear. And this can happen even in a relationship where there hasn't been a breach of trust, but you've had trust breached in other relationships so many times that now you're vigilant and unwilling to trust because you're too scared it's going to happen again, right? And then this is where the choice comes in. Because if your partner either has never given

you a reason not to trust them, does what they say they're going to do, shows up when they say they're going to show up, is consistent and honest with you, or if they have breached trust and have really been doing their work and can really articulate with the help of the therapist the why as well as the how they are doing that healing work and they're really moving beyond that and doing the healing and the therapist is acknowledging that they've really made that progress. At that point, the person who's been betrayed or afraid to trust has to make a choice because the relationship can't fully heal and you can't create the love and the connection you most desire until you are willing to open your heart and you can't open your heart until you are willing to trust. as most of you know for the past several years i've been on a pretty intense grief journey and

it's been a path of healing i've shared lots of that healing with you and lots of the healing resources that i found and i am so thrilled to announce that i am doing my first ever retreat for grieving mamas so if you or someone you love is a mama who has lost a child in any way, at any stage, at any age, I would love for you to come join me at 1440 Multiversity in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz, California, for four amazing days of beautiful, uplifting community and healing. We've got David Kessler. We've got Paul Selig.

We've got Catherine Woodward Thomas. We've got me. We've got body work. We've got organic food, beautiful rooms. Go to 1440.org. Check it out. It's right there on the homepage. I really hope you can join us.

and what trust is is essentially faith because the truth is and i say this to couples all the time where i'm helping them repair after an affair for instance i will say at some point after we've really done the work look can i guarantee they won't cheat again absolutely not like i don't know what's going to happen none of us know what's going to happen five minutes from now, much less six months or a year from now, right? None of us, bad things happen, like we don't know. We can safeguard our relationships with the work that I'm talking about doing, right? But in the end, there are no guarantees. So trust is actually an act of faith. What is faith? It's in believing in what can't be proven or can't be guaranteed or can't be seen. That's what faith

is, right? It's a choice. Faith is a choice and trust is a choice because trust is a form of faith. And part of what I find makes it really helpful to step into trust, especially for the one who is having a hard time doing that, is to recognize and remember how freaking strong you are, how powerful you are, that you've survived everything that you've survived. And if your heart is broken again, if your trust is betrayed again, that would be devastating and heartbreaking. And you would curl up into a ball for a while and you would feel horrible. And then guess what? Just like the phoenix, you would rise through the flames. You would dust yourself off. You would be stronger and wiser for having faith and having love, even love that's been lost. And you will

have learned from that, and you will heal, and you will move forward stronger than before. So even if the worst thing happens that's leading you to be scared of trusting again, trust and the choice for trust comes from knowing that even if you get heartbroken again, you're going to survive it, and you're going to thrive through it, and you can't predict the future beyond the safeguards that I mentioned to you. So the question is, are you willing to open your heart to love? Because love, whether it's the love of a mate or even the love of a child, is a risk. Because when you open your heart fully to someone, you also are risking heartbreak, right? But nothing risked. In all things in life, nothing gained. So if you want true and abiding

heartful love, you must be willing to have your heart broken. That doesn't mean that you're stupid about it. That doesn't mean that you trust someone who doesn't deserve your trust or hasn't done their work, right? Or who has repeatedly shown you that they can't be trusted. But it does mean that when someone is really showing up for you and doing the work and willing to heal and committed to healing, that you have to make the choice to open your heart again. Let me know what you think of that. And if you want more information on this topic or anything else, know me. I'm always here helping you learn to love and be loved better.