These tips, tools, and tactics have helped me build trust back in my relationship with Shelley as well as helped many other couples restore trust. Some guys have a tendency to think of these things as tasks or boxes to check off. Don’t use them that way! If you apply these suggestions in that manner, rather than building trust, you may actually diminish trust.
You must remember that you cannot expect your wife to always believe in the sincerity of your efforts. It will at times feel futile, and that’s okay. As we discussed, skepticism is normal and should be expected. Your job is to persevere and press on.
There should be a cumulative effect to your efforts, especially when you’re using these tactics. Not one of them really stands individually as very important, meaningful, or impactful. But if you put them all together, along with the rest of what we’ve discussed in this book, there will surely be mileage you can gain toward building trust.
This is very simple: your wife can call you at any time, night or day, and expect you to answer the phone or call her back within five minutes. During those five minutes your wife promises not to assume or presuppose anything about what you’re doing. But after five minutes of not hearing from you, she has the right to assume the worst—she is free to believe you’re engaging in whatever bad behavior got you into trouble in the first place. Your wife can and probably will feel like there has been another trust violation and thus accuse you of being insensitive to her pain and to the process. And truth be told, she has every right to feel that way. Do not commit to the five-minute rule if you cannot abide by it.
I’ll never forget the time when my integrity pertaining to the five-minute rule was challenged. I was working as a regional manager and had a meeting with several people, including my boss and the vice president of our department. I was on the hook to make a substantial presentation in the meeting.
As we entered the boardroom and got situated, I asked for everyone’s attention and announced, “I’m waiting on an incredibly important phone call from my wife. If she calls, I apologize, but I’ll have to step out and take it.”
It was difficult to make that announcement, especially since I wasn’t really expecting Shelley to call. I was just hedging my bets in case she did.
Then, not long into the meeting, sure enough her call came through. Everyone in the room looked at me as I checked the caller ID. I met the eyes of my boss, who had a stern and inquisitive look on his face, like he was questioning if I would really interrupt this important meeting for a phone call from Shelley.
You better believe I would! And I did. Being the man God was calling me to be meant answering my wife’s call and working to restore trust. No meeting was more important than winning back Shelley’s trust.
If you have an occupation that precludes you from abiding by this rule, you must make other arrangements. I’ve talked to clients who work in an operating room or who fly internationally for major airlines, and they sometimes cannot receive or make calls for several hours. If that’s true for you, I urge you to figure out another way to be available.
If you’re out of touch and unaccountable for blocks of time longer than about thirty minutes, you have one less opportunity to place any Legos on your trust sculpture. Make arrangements to touch base just prior to being unavailable and immediately following. Explain exactly what is to take place during the time you are unreachable, including the nature of your obligation, who will be present or involved, and the anticipated content of any conversations. Then, when you call after fulfilling your obligation, reiterate exactly what took place according to your setup conversation (revisit the section on travel in chapter 13). Be mindful of how you communicate during those times. Remember, in all likelihood your wife will be listening for keywords, reading your pace and tone, and trying to ferret out any inconsistencies. What you’re trying to do is reiterate that you’re doing, being, saying, and behaving exactly as you said you would. That builds trust.
There is one caveat to the five-minute rule: technology sometimes fails us. I can 99 percent guarantee you that at some point your spouse will try to reach you and your phone will not ring or you will not get the text. It happened to me one time when I was shopping, and I’ll never forget it.
Shelley called and the call didn’t show up on my phone. About ten minutes later, after I left the store, a message popped up from her. My heart sank. I’d committed a five-minute rule violation. I had to own it and not excuse it. It is so easy to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t have a signal” or some variation of that. While that sounds like a plausible explanation to most guys, to a hurt wife it sounds like a lie or an excuse. Just own it. I told Shelley I was sorry, I dropped the ball, and I could see how my actions contributed to her lack of trust. I recommitted to the five-minute rule and reassured her that I was not going to stop working at it. Still, a Lego was missed that day.
If technology betrays you on very rare occasions, you’ll be okay. But if it happens regularly, you need a new cell phone provider.
One sure way to build trust is to be accountable for all of your time. We’ve already looked at free time and how to use it in a manner that is helpful. This section is about your time as a whole. In the beginning of my journey to rebuild trust, I kept what I call a T-30 journal. You may want to do this as well.
Every thirty minutes I would log where I was and what I was doing. Then at the end of the day, I would go over the journal with Shelley. Sometimes she would quiz me on it, asking my whereabouts at a randomly picked time in the morning.
The point with the journal is not to be able to prove where you were or what you were doing, but to make a good faith effort to be accountable for your time. If you can show, day in and day out, where you are and what you are doing, your wife is more likely to believe you when she asks later. As I mentioned earlier, wives don’t want to be private investigators, so a time journal helps to alleviate the need for interrogations about details.
It’s worth mentioning that husbands and wives alike ask me, “How can anyone trust what is written in the journal?” Good question. If in the past you’ve lied about your whereabouts or whom you were with, nothing written in a journal is trustworthy. But that is not the primary reason for keeping the journal. The point is that you want to be accountable for your life, your calendar, and your use of time. Keeping the T-30 journal is another way to increase accountability.
An example journal day can be found on this page.
I can’t count the number of times wives say this is a stupid exercise and that it means nothing, does nothing, and is a waste of time. Then, some weeks or months into the process, they look at the journal. There was a moment, out of the blue, when they decided to see if their husband was actually doing it. Want to guess how it goes when she sees that he hasn’t been following through with the journal? Alternatively, can you imagine how it goes when she sees that he has been doing it? Many of those wives who called the exercise stupid eventually find a little bit of trust built because they’ve seen their husband’s consistency and follow-through. They end up grateful for it.
Another sure way to build trust is to be accountable for your money. I talk about this every month at an Every Man’s Battle Workshop, and every month I ask for a show of hands of men who have:
• a bank account their wife doesn’t know about
• credit cards their wife doesn’t know about
• cash stashed somewhere their wife doesn’t know about
• business accounts their wife doesn’t know about
Each month multiple hands are raised, and you can see the effects of a lack of integrity touching other parts of their lives. As I stated earlier, a lack of integrity in one area often indicates a lack of integrity in all areas.
Another important reason to be accountable for money is that it’s tangible. So much of trust building is about intangibles and things that are vague, ambiguous, and subjective. When there is something unambiguous and objective, like money, you have to capitalize on its trust-building potential.
Again, you can’t prove what you aren’t doing wrong, but you can certainly prove what you are doing right. There are a couple of ways to go about this. One way is to shift all your spending to a credit card. That’s what we did. I still put everything I can on a card, from a pack of gum to a thousand-dollar payment. I still carry very little, if any, cash. As I write this I have a single one-dollar bill in my wallet. So nearly every penny spent can be tracked on the credit card statement. This is very helpful for trust building.
Having everything itemized on a credit card statement also makes it easier to research a discrepancy or transaction that could potentially jeopardize trust. The only qualifier I will put on this method is that if you have difficulty spending on credit and thus amass excessive debt, it may not be so helpful.
I talk with many people who follow Dave Ramsey’s method of managing money and employ the cash envelope system. If this works for you, then an alternative way to maintain accountability is needed. Perhaps you can get receipts for all your purchases. Because I am not detail oriented or very responsible, that method would have been a disaster for me. Keeping receipts is tedious, but if you can keep up with hundreds of slips of paper, then be my guest.
Another idea is to take pictures of receipts with your phone and keep them that way. An app called Genius Scan can be helpful for that. Maybe you want the paper receipts and you always have an envelope on hand or you put them in a particular place in your wallet. Here’s the thing, though: if even one receipt is missing (especially if it is a large dollar amount), you run the risk of missing a trust-building opportunity. However you do it, diligence is imperative.
If you have a family budget, it’s key for you to stick to it. You can build trust by spending only what you’ve agreed to spend. If you consistently bust the eating-out budget, you aren’t following through on what you said you’d do.
If you can’t keep your word about a budget item, how can you be trusted to keep your marriage vows?
Sound like a stretch?
It’s not.
Every wife needs to decide if she wants ongoing disclosure of sexual acting out. Some wives simply don’t want to know. They would rather live in denial than accept the truth of their husband’s struggles. Alternatively, if a wife does want to know, she shouldn’t have to play the detective role we mentioned earlier in the book. And she shouldn’t have to live with fear and anxiety of finding out. There needs to be a twenty-four-hour disclosure rule.
This means that within twenty-four hours of a slip in sexual integrity, there will be a conversation, initiated by the husband, to share what happened. He should be able to talk about why it happened, what led to it, and the precautions he’ll take in the future, and he should reiterate his commitment to the rule.
The twenty-four-hour disclosure rule serves two purposes. First, it lessens a wife’s anxiety. Wives consistently lament how difficult it is to wait for the other shoe to drop. Much like the cycle of domestic violence, there is a honeymoon period following disclosure. Then, some number of days after the revelation, anxiety begins to mount. It is subtle at first, barely showing up during any given week. Then it increases in frequency, gravity, and duration. Fear and worry become daily occurrences, and for some wives, their anxieties can hijack days in a row. They live with the worry that today will be the day they will stumble across another porn site, a suspicious phone number, or some other clue that sexual boundaries have been breached. Further, some wives report not only anxiety about the revelation of sexual acting out but also being in the painful position of having to choose to stay in the marriage or not, forgive or try to forget, enable or fracture the family. Understandably, they resent being put in this predicament, and it only serves to increase their anger and extend the length of their healing journey.
If you’re walking the path toward sexual integrity, you should consider your commitment to the twenty-four-hour disclosure rule not just as a tool or tip but as a requirement and responsibility. It shows dishonor, disrespect, and arrogance to hold on to this information any longer. It is another form of self-preservation and cowardice. And it promotes insecurity for your wife.
The second function of the twenty-four-hour disclosure rule is to add another layer of accountability. There is, of course, no guarantee that this rule will be respected. But if you will submit yourself to it, there can be an added motivation toward integrity. Knowing you are on the hook to let her know you’ve violated her heart again can be a good motivator.
And the twenty-four-hour disclosure rule applies to accountability partners too. You need to fess up to them during the same time period. This rule is one of the best things you can do for yourself. I talk with too many men who, once they’ve acted out and broken sobriety, go on a binge. They soon despair and lose mental clarity. Their assessment of their situation is skewed, and they begin to believe their lies all over again: You aren’t good enough, God has given up on you, and You should get it all out of your system since you’ve already broken sobriety. What might have been a brief slip with pornography and masturbation can turn into a week-long bender. It might combine daily pornography use, multiple instances of masturbation per day, and sometimes a massage or visit to a strip club. Don’t buy the lies! If you slip, practice the twenty-four-hour disclosure rule. The likelihood of bingeing will be drastically reduced. Not only can your accountability partners talk you off the ledge of acting out again, but they can also help dismantle the shame that comes with a break in your sobriety. You don’t have to live in a funk hating yourself again. You can experience freedom, perhaps for the first time, from the negative messages that plague you on the heels of willful sin.
To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of this tactic because technology can fail us. Much like the five-minute call rule, there will be times when technology comes up short or malfunctions completely. With GPS tracking, the risk is the same.
Some wives want to be able to pinpoint their husband’s whereabouts. This is possible with apps like Find My iPhone. The feature is also available for BlackBerry and Android devices. You simply install the app on the phone and log into a website to view its location via GPS coordinates.
Even as I write this, I’m sitting in my office and testing the service, and this experiment proves the validity of my hesitation. When I zoom in on the map as much as possible, it shows my cell phone to be in the building next door. Now, mind you, this is only about twenty feet off, but I’m not sitting where the application says I am. Granted, it’s pretty incredible to get that close, but when it comes to trust building, twenty feet could be the difference between security and subterfuge.
Say you are building trust with your wife and you’re eating lunch with a friend. The restaurant happens to be next door to a hotel. Or a strip club. Or a sex shop. Or anything that is a trigger for your wife. She logs onto the website to find your phone and verify your whereabouts, but the location is off by twenty feet. You see where this is going.
If you use this feature as a tool in trust building, you should pair it with other ways of verifying your location. That may be taking a picture of where you are and sending it to your spouse. It may be having your acquaintance for lunch verify your location. You decide. Don’t let flawed technology sabotage your efforts to build trust. Again, remember, it needs to be a cumulative effect, not solely reliant on any single tactic.
This little trick originated with my own counselor, Bryan Atkinson. At some point, he said, “Jason, operate in a way that if Shelley were watching, she’d be proud.” Simple and profound. Hence, “wifecam” was born.
What would I do and how would I operate if Shelley could literally watch a television or computer monitor showing every move I make? She could pan and tilt to see any angle. She could watch in slow motion or fast-forward. She could listen to every word I say. She could even watch a little ticker scroll across the bottom of the screen that details my thoughts. YIKES! Can you imagine? Would that change the way you go about your life? Let me give you a couple of examples where this has made an impact on my life.
• While standing in line at a Starbucks, there are attractive women near me. I might be tempted to do a double take. If Shelley saw me take more than one look at any of those women, though, how would she feel? Yuck.
• As I’m checking into my hotel for an Every Man’s Battle Workshop, the female desk clerk is overly nice. If Shelley were watching, what would my posture look like? Would I be standing back from the counter a little or would I be leaning in? What would Shelley hear? Me simply going through the logistics of getting into my room or some friendly small talk and my issuing her a compliment?
• Say I’m in my office, waiting to see a couple for counseling. The wife comes in, but her husband hasn’t yet arrived. How do I interact with her? Is it all aboveboard, or is there something that Shelley might hear or see that would hurt her heart?
See how this works? Silly as it may sound, this little trick has helped me tremendously. This is partly due to the fact that I didn’t want to lose my wife. I really, really wanted to save my marriage. If I could see life through her eyes, I thought, I’d be less inclined to hurt her. It was and still is a helpful exercise.
This tool also was helpful because it allowed me to have a fresh perspective on myself. When I’m in my head, viewing life through my selfish, myopic eyes, I sometimes miss some of the subtleties of my behavior. This trick helped me to see myself from a different perspective.
It probably goes without saying, but if you’re a follower of Jesus, you probably have already extrapolated wifecam to Godcam. The whole thing about someone knowing your thoughts and seeing your actions isn’t a fantasy; it’s a reality with him. In the beginning of my journey, God’s watching my every move meant little to me. I knew God could see my every move, but I was angry that he clearly didn’t care about my next bad one. To me this added insult to injury; he knew my next hurtful step and could stop me, but he refused to do it. Thus, he didn’t care for either Shelley or me, or he was content to punish me through my consequences, including self-hatred. Godcam wasn’t a difference maker.
Today, it’s a different story for me. I do try to keep in mind the reality of God’s omniscience, and that helps. If we operate in a way that God would be honored by our thoughts, words, and behaviors, we can trust our wives will be honored too!
This section is the result of input from my clients. Almost every guy I work with hits a point where the whole trust thing goes south. Every word he says is wrong, doing empathy is possible but not probable, and stringing together enough coherent thoughts to communicate something meaningful to a hurt, angry wife seems impossible. Hitting this point usually results in the husband clamming up, shutting down, or lashing out with anger. He doesn’t want things to fall apart, but the powerlessness he feels seems overwhelming.
If you get to this place, one of the first things you should do is take a break. A short break—not an overnight kind of thing. It is okay to ask for a few minutes to process what you’re experiencing. Sometimes those couple of minutes can be enough to acknowledge shame, set it to the side, engage empathy, and thus enable yourself to be fully present in the conversation. If the break you ask for is too long, it will appear manipulative and look like you’re pulling the rip cord on the conversation. That won’t go well. If you genuinely need to come up for air from the flood of emotions, it is acceptable to ask for a break. But there are good and bad ways to ask for it. Here are some examples (taken verbatim from my office) of the wrong way to ask for a break:
“Would you just relax for a second and give me time to breathe?!”
“Stop talking for a second! I can’t get a word in edgewise. I can’t answer one question while you’re asking another!”
A better way to ask for a break:
“Honey, I want to answer your questions. I want to do empathy really well. Can I just take two minutes to jot down a couple of things so I can focus and breathe?”
“I can feel myself tensing up, feeling angry, wanting to be defensive. I don’t want to live this way anymore and you deserve better. I need about five minutes to talk myself off this ledge and come back to our conversation and hear your heart. Can I have five minutes?”
If you take too much time or do not initiate the reengagement, this will not end well. If you ask for a break, and she has to say, “Are we gonna finish our conversation?” she’ll only be more hurt. Stalling makes you look irresponsible and careless. It gives the impression that you are ambivalent about the whole process, her emotions, and the pain you’ve caused.
If breaks don’t help, and you’re unable to pull out of the tailspin, you might be tempted to think the better option is to simply walk away. Not true. Walking away is as much an affront as blaming and defensiveness. Rather than saying hurtful things or shutting down and walking away, sometimes all you can do is cry and groan.
Seriously. We all have moments when words are inept and nothing in our vocabulary can accurately capture what is happening in our heart. The apostle Paul describes a situation in which words are inadequate: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26).
Sometimes wordless groans say enough. Perhaps they say even more than articulate, verbose language. Strangely, we know the profundity of groaning amid pain. We have an innate comprehension of what someone is expressing when, at a funeral, a loved one groans through tears.
When I finally started to open up to Shelley, I wanted so desperately to tell her that I understood how badly I had hurt her, but I couldn’t. I would freeze up. My shame and the reality of the pain I had caused would paralyze me. As much as I wanted to say the right thing, the words eluded me. Then one evening, as Shelley expressed how badly she was hurting and how infuriated she was at what I had done, I broke. I started to cry, then sob. As I opened my mouth to say something, I had nothing. I tried to force myself to speak, but no sound would come out. Then I started to feel the pain well up inside me, like an elephant sitting on my chest. I could hardly breathe.
The tears kept gushing. I tried to fight them back, fearing she would think this was a pity party or that I was trying to manipulate her. I also feared she would think I was weak. But I couldn’t stop crying. A well was tapped that evening that I can’t begin to explain. I ended up on the floor in a fetal position, heaving and sobbing. Between my groans I was able to mutter the words, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
I have no clue how long it lasted—it felt like forever. I don’t know what Shelley was doing while I was weeping on the floor. She was probably freaked out because I was inconsolable.
Unknown to either of us, this, too, was part of our healing. I needed to purge my well of regret and shame. She needed to see deep brokenness and hear groans that expressed pain beyond anything my words could express. I had to revisit that well multiple times too. There were more moments like this to follow, albeit never to that depth again. I learned that sometimes I needed to feel her pain and let myself express it. At times she needed an audible response, and at times she needed a visible one.
How to build trust with extended family is difficult to address because every family dynamic is unique. I feel a little hesitant to give much input here, but some guidelines may be helpful. Some people come from a strict religious background, and others come from a more “anything-goes” amoral background. It looks different to rebuild trust with your father-in-law who officiated at your wedding versus a dad who didn’t even attend the ceremony. Winning back the trust of the family can be a completely different journey, depending on whether or not you committed adultery with someone in the family, for example. (That can be really messy.)
Another factor that plays into the equation is whether or not you’ve done this before. If on a previous occasion the truth came out, you got help, forgiveness was granted, and the relationship was restored, then everyone sighs in relief and it seems like Care Bears and rainbows fill the sky. When you do it again, however, the family is often hyper-reluctant to go on the roller coaster again. It is going to be extra difficult to rebuild their trust.
Given all the variables, I want to share a couple of assumptions and keep this section short in terms of guidance. First, this section is focused on rebuilding trust with a wife’s extended family—your in-laws. I understand sometimes the in-laws are outlaws, but your commitment must remain the same, which leads to my first assumption: As the husband, you must be 100 percent committed to the process. I’m assuming you aren’t going to shortchange it, that you’re in it for the long haul. And it will be a long haul.
Second, I’m assuming you have done full disclosure and your wife knows everything. If she is questioned by her family and realizes she doesn’t have all the facts, you’ll tear down the trust sculpture with both her and her family.
Third, I’m assuming you have or will forgive extended family members for wrongs they may have committed against you. You can’t rebuild trust while holding grudges. The bitterness of your heart will overflow from your mouth and in your attitude. Would you trust someone who smiles at you through gritted teeth and whose attitude seems disingenuous? Unlikely. Why would they be any different?
Now, with these assumptions out of the way, I’ll offer some guidance on rebuilding trust with extended family. To begin, you need not give them all the gritty details. Family members don’t need to know what kind of porn, how many affairs, how many prostitutes, the amount of money spent on indiscretions, and so on. They only need to know generalities about your indiscretions. I believe a wife has a right to decide what she wants her family to know. But my advice to her is to only share generalities. For example:
• There are sexual integrity issues.
• Infidelity has occurred.
• We’re dealing with sexual sin in his life and our marriage.
I’ll never forget when Shelley and I sat down in her parents’ living room and I had to look them in the eye and tell them I had been unfaithful to their daughter. I told them it was more than once and that I had struggled with pornography as well. I told them my failures had been pervasive and had gone on before I met her and throughout our marriage. I told them I’d been a liar from the start.
Frankly, this was the second toughest conversation I’ve had in my entire life. And I never want to have either one of them again!
Next, if you want to restore trust with your wife’s family, you must take full responsibility for what has happened. And it wouldn’t hurt to take responsibility for things that aren’t yours too. Don’t make excuses and don’t insinuate in any way that your actions were a response to something your wife did or didn’t do. Absolutely, under no circumstances, should you indict her character in front of her family, especially her parents. If you somehow give off a vibe that your sexual integrity issues are a response to some character defect in her, you are by proxy indicting her parents. In effect, you are saying, “Since you guys dropped the ball while raising her, you’ve given me license/reason/probable cause to act out and hurt her.” No parent would graciously receive such a message!
Further, be sure when you’re taking full responsibility that you don’t bring in marital issues. Communicate that you are working on fixing you and the wrongs you’ve committed in the marriage.
Husbands in my office have recounted how they told their in-laws they were in counseling to work on marital issues. That’s not the truth. Nor is it appropriate. If I hear a man say this, I suggest he go back to the in-laws and clarify that he is in counseling to deal with his issues and how his issues have blown up the marriage (assuming the wife is okay with this level of detail). Anyone married for long knows both parties cause issues and marital discord, but this is not the situation or time to point out your wife’s contribution.
While on the subject of taking full responsibility, I urge you to communicate your commitment to restoration. In the same conversation about how you’ve blown up the marriage, talk about how you’re going to put the pieces back together. Explain your role in that effort, not what you think they need to do. I was able to tell Shelley’s parents that we had a plan and I was committed to working it through counseling, accountability, getting right with God, and no longer living a double life.
Another aspect of trust building with extended family is to ask for forgiveness and to practice being forgivable. If you are genuinely working on your healing and recovery, it’s appropriate to ask for their forgiveness. You cannot place a time line on it, though. Saying that one day you hope they can forgive and trust you again, based on what they will see in your changed heart and behavior, is a valid part of the conversation. Just like with your wife, make it as easy as possible for them to forgive you. Work on being humble rather than haughty around them. They, like your wife, are watching your words, tone, and actions to see if anything is different. Give them something to see and hope in. Live in such a way that in a private conversation between your wife and a family member, she can report that things are different and better. It would be fantastic for your wife to say, “Mom/Dad/Sister, I don’t know if it’s fake or true, if it will last or be short-lived, but he is very different right now. It is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced with him.”
Lastly, remember that members of her family are on their own journey. If one of them has experienced something similar and there was a marriage casualty, it may be a longer, more arduous process for you to regain their trust. Likewise if they had parents who were involved in sexual sin. Give them grace just as you want grace extended to you. If you walk the walk, they’ll likely come around.
I can tell you firsthand that it was a special day, about six years after my total disclosure to Shelley, when my in-laws sat in church while I shared my story from the stage. This was the first time they had heard the story since that painful conversation in their living room. For me, especially, it was a moment of terrifying yet beautiful redemption.
INSIGHT FROM STEPHEN ARTERBURN
Serve
Since the beginning of the recovery group movement, service to others has always been part of the healing process. Whether it is coming to a meeting early to make coffee or inconveniently staying behind to talk to someone, all of us have opportunities for service to others. We are to be the hands and feet of Jesus. When you take your eyes off of yourself and focus on the needs of others and then move to meet those needs, you are rewarded with an indescribable satisfaction. And the very area you have struggled with may be the area where you can help someone the most.
God wastes nothing, and all of the pain you have been through is redeemed when you use your experience to bring hope to someone else by meeting a need or helping to heal a wound. Of course, this service needs to start with your wife. You serve her and make her the focus of your deeds, and you will experience the reward of watching her become the person God has intended her to be.