Dear Mark,
I broke my spouse’s trust about six months ago. I know it deeply damaged my marriage, and I’m working to repair the relationship. It just feels like the progress I’m making is slow.
I want my spouse to trust me again, but sometimes all they can see are my old patterns. It can be frustrating to be doubted on a regular basis. I want to show them how I’ve changed and am committed to our marriage.
As someone who has been there before, what practical steps helped communicate to your spouse that you had made real change? How do you gain back your spouse’s trust?
– Wanting My Spouse to Trust Me Again
Dear Wanting My Spouse to Trust Me Again, I relate to your letter so much. Rebuilding your relationship after broken trust is no easy feat, especially if you are a repeat offender like I was.
Broken trust, whether it was due to infidelity, porn addiction, drug misuse, gambling, or something else, is a deep wound that can sometimes take years to fully heal. Even after I came back to our marriage, we still had a lot of work to do, and it took time to refill the bathtub of trust again.
After walking through the healing process, I can share some of the steps that, when used consistently, are crucial to repairing broken trust and building a healthier, happier, 2.0 version of your relationship.
Before we get into it, I have a special invitation for you. If you’re reading this, that means that you’ve made the choice to turn completely away from your old behavior and rebuild trust in your relationship. In just a few days, Jill and I will be hosting a FREE live Rebuilding Trust webinar designed for couples where both partners are committed to repairing.
Click here to sign up to join us! And if you’re reading this after October 22nd, 2026, you can still click this link to view the recording of our session.
Here are a few practical steps that will help you earn your spouse’s trust again after a big mistake:
1) Own Your Part of the Dysfunction
I may have broken Jill’s trust through infidelity, but the groundwork that led me to take those actions happened long before I ever cheated. It went all the way back to my childhood.
My core beliefs convinced me that I had already done everything I could and that there was no hope left for my marriage. What was really happening under the surface was that I believed my voice didn’t matter (from childhood). So I stopped bringing up things that would improve my marriage.
When I started doing the work to repair our broken trust, I also had to look at my core beliefs and own the dysfunction I was responsible for in our relationship. As we always say, before we could reach Mark and Jill 2.0, we each had to do the personal work necessary to become Mark 2.0 and Jill 2.0.
You can do this by working with a coach or counselor, which we highly recommend if you are serious about uncovering all the behaviors and beliefs that are causing you and your relationship to fall into unhealthy patterns.
2) Shut the Door Firmly On Your Old Behavior
If your spouse is struggling to trust you again, take a moment to consider if you’ve completely shut down that old behavior. It’s normal to struggle to stop “cold turkey.” Longings for our old vices can sometimes cause us to leave the door cracked “just in case.”
When I finally cut off my affair, here’s what I did to show my spouse I would never return:
- I broke off the other relationship.
- I blocked the person on social media, on my phone, on email, and any other way we were connecting.
- I never contacted this person for any reason again.
- I opened up my phone, my emails, and every part of my life to my wife.
If the way you broke trust is infidelity, those bullet points are good steps for you, too. In cases where trust was broken due to gambling or drug use, shutting the door could look like deleting people’s phone numbers who fed that lifestyle or avoiding locations where you know you will be tempted to re-engage in that behavior. If your broken trust was caused by porn, you might set permissions on your phone to only allow certain apps to be used or utilize monitoring software that sends a report to a mentor or accountability partner.
Whatever your betrayal may have been, it’s important your spouse knows you have taken steps to avoid that behavior in the future.
3) Be Ready to Answer Questions
When trust has been broken, your spouse is going to have questions. How you respond to those questions will make all the difference in the world. As we were rebuilding trust, I fully disclosed the truth of my actions to Jill, and in humility agreed to answer every question no matter how many times Jill asked it.
The early months of healing have the most questions. How you answer questions will either rebuild trust or break it once again. Understand that your spouse has to play catch up to understand what reality really looks like. They were in the dark to what you were doing. Now they have to come to grips with what was really happening. Give them the grace of catching up logically and emotionally.
Here are guiding principles for answering questions:
- No defensiveness. Stay in humility and own the hurt you caused.
- One person’s hurt at a time. When your spouse is communicating their hurt, keep the conversation about their hurt. Don’t insert your hurt into that conversation. (It’s ok to communicate your hurt in a different conversation.)
- Keep a calm, gentle, quiet spirit of humility.
- Reach out and touch your spouse if they are crying. Hold them if they will allow you to.
- NEVER say that you’re tired of answering questions. Or that you’ve already answered that question a million times. Stay steady and answer again, offering reassurance that you are all in.
4) Push Accountability
You can’t shortcut rebuilding trust. You dumped all the water out of your trust bucket, and you can only refill it one drop at a time. Pushing accountability is one key way to do that.
The last thing you want is to have your spouse “policing” you. That’s what will happen if you don’t learn how to push accountability. When you push accountability, you open up your life in such a way that there’s no need for anyone to police you.
I had always understood accountability as someone asking questions and you answering honestly. That accountability is dependent upon the other person asking the right questions. It doesn’t work.
When you push accountability, you are out front leading by opening up your life. You’re proactively communicating. You’re leaving nothing to be discovered or hidden. You’re giving your spouse a master key to your life. This is the way marriage should be anyway. You both need to have master keys to each other’s lives.
I found that pushing accountability was one of the best decisions I made in healing my marriage and my family. This put me in control; it reassured Jill, rebuilt trust, and laid the foundation for rebuilding a healthy relationship.
5) Seek Additional Help
If you were raised like me, it was probably ingrained in you that you never tell anyone what is happening inside the family. But the reality is that you can’t clean up broken trust very well on your own.
You need help.
First, you need the help of God. He will give you the courage, wisdom, and humility you need day in and day out. Restoring my relationship with God, I asked for His help and spent time most early mornings rebuilding my relationship with him.
Second, you need a good counselor or coach. After my U-turn, I made it a priority to meet with a much-respected counselor. We continued with those appointments for over a year after I came home. Healing from broken trust is a marathon, not a sprint. But it’s worth every effort you put into it.
Third, you need supportive friends who can help you stay on the straight and narrow. Even one good friend who helps point you to Jesus in the journey can make all the difference in the world. I had three men I met with who all helped me, encouraged me, and challenged me. Whatever you are going through, you don’t want to walk this alone.
Repairing trust is difficult. It takes time for your spouse to be able to trust and believe the “new you” is here to stay.
In my own journey, it took time to show I could love Jill differently. I had to heal from the trauma and rejection of my childhood. I knew I had to make different decisions and in surrender I trusted that God would lead me in those as long as I started doing things His way.
Trust comes with repeated behavior over time. If you’re ready to rebuild, our Rebuilding Trust Live Webinar is your path forward. In it, Jill and I outline our rebuilding trust roadmap and show you the 6 stops you and your spouse need to make along the way if you want to reach your destination. We want to help you move your marriage from hurtful to hopeful, and then from healed to happier than ever before!
P.S. The takeaways in this blog post were inspired by my book, I Really Messed Up. I really recommend this as a resource for the spouse who broke trust in their relationship—I wrote it to share all the lessons I had to learn the hard way.
