Repairing Trust Takes Time | Addiction Recovery
November 6, 2009
Early Sobriety
One of the consequences of drinking and drugging is that you destroy trust. To keep your addiction going you lie, manipulate, and maybe even steal. Sometimes in early sobriety it’s easy to get frustrated that people don’t trust you.
“Hey, I’m not drinking! I’m a new person! Give me a break!”
If you’ve been in and out of the program or you have done your fair share of rehab stints, it’s really no wonder people don’t want to trust just yet. It took a while to destroy trust. It will take a while to build it back up.
I’m a real believer in teaching by example. We all know how often we hear about this or that politician preaching family values or moral righteousness only to find out they had their hands in the coffers or were engaged to their mistress before the ink dried on the divorce papers from their second failed marriage. Nothing turns us off more than a lot of talk that isn’t backed up by action.
That’s how people work. We feel what’s called cognitive dissonance when we hear one thing but see another. It jars us and irritates us.
So if I want to teach someone they can trust me, I need to be trustworthy. And I need to be trustworthy for quite some time.
You know the saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me?” I think that’s the way a lot of people feel when they’ve been betrayed by someone they love. Obviously there are people who seem to have an infinite tolerance for relationship misery, but healthy people don’t like getting burned. The natural urge is to protect yourself from getting burned again, especially if your trust was broken over and over and over again.
I think it’s important not to take the distrust personally. Accept it humbly as a consequence of bad behavior. Making amends is just the beginning of building trust.
via Repairing Trust Takes Time | Addiction Recovery.