.... was facilitating with a couple I will call Alice and Eric. Alice had had an affair, now over, and Eric had recently found out about it. Their purpose in therapy was to restore their relationship—that is, to rebuild trust. The therapy had been making it clear to all of us that it was extremely difficult for Eric to trust his wife again, even though she had voluntarily ended the other relationship and had made a sincere commitment to fidelity and to working things out. Enough time had elapsed so that it did seem reasonable—to all three of us—that Eric could at least begin to trust Alice again. But that was not happening, even after some rather intense therapy sessions. During a particularly poignant moment, Eric was crying and I suddenly realized that his issue was not about trusting Alice. It was bigger than that. It was about his inability to trust anyone fully. Eric’s grief in that moment was for all the betrayals in his life from childhood until now. His tears were about how each one had shut him down so that now, when trust was appropriate, he just could not summon it up. The fear that is natural in all grief had, for him, become more like a phobia. [ya]
For Alice it was a history of not being trusted—what became our next focus—in Eric’s presence. When a partner is sitting silently in the room where our personal work is being addressed and processed, we feel accompanied by her, and intimacy progresses in abundant ways. Within each session, I turned to the other partner and asked how she or he was feeling and what she or he saw in the work the partner did...The work for this couple was so primal, so basic, that it was like starting the whole relationship over again, not just recovering from the recent infidelity. I wondered how many couples are at that ground-floor level and don’t realize it...We all found out that the real starting point was opening the wounded trust from long ago and working toward healing that too. ~Daring to Trust, by David Richo, author or How to be an Adult in a Relationship
(The wife's truster was cracked and his was kinda fubar entirely.~from There are No Safewords in Real Life, by Wantdogski)
