How Do You Build Trust

Dillon and Megan came to me because their fights had persisted for so long that spending time together was painful.

Megan wanted to feel free to be with her friends, go to dance classes, see plays on weeknights, and go on camping trips on the weekend. Avoiding Dillon meant escaping their fights.

Dillon felt threatened by how much distance she wanted, so he alternated between clinging and attacking.

Megan would come home from a friend’s house at 10pm instead of 9pm and he’d grill her about why she was late.

“I thought you were just watching a show? That’s only an hour. Why were you gone 2 hours?”

His questioning made her want to spend more time away, which made him grasp even tighter.

By the time they came to my office, they were embroiled in rage, disappointment, and hurt. There was no closeness or intimacy between them.

How do you begin building trust when you see a couple like this?

One of the most important things you can implement is what I call:

Constancy of Contact. 

Here is how to do it:

1. Have the couple set up a time in the week they agree to spend time together.
2. They agree they won’t discuss kids, problems, or frustrations.
3. They can start with 20 minutes and increase the time later as they grow.
4. It can be inside or out of the house, daytime or evening. Examples are taking a walk or going for coffee.
5. Or, they each take turns deciding what to do.
6. Each partner promises to be accountable for showing up, so they can rely on their partner being there without asking.
7. If one needs to change it, they give the other notice and actively reschedule.

It may sound straightforward, but here’s the catch:

Typically one partner has an avoidant attachment and the other partner has an anxious insecure attachment style.

The partner with an avoidant attachment style often feels smothered by making an ongoing  commitment to show up at a particular time. When they feel controlled, their behavior becomes unreliable.

So you may need to take some time to help them understand why they’re doing it. They need to do it not because you’re making the demand, but because their participation is a good way to show their partner they can be trustworthy.

The insecure partner is likely to feel relieved by knowing they will have time together.

That’s because they often feel like they have to pull and coax and feel vulnerable asking. When rejected, they retreat or get resentful.

The reason Constancy of Contact works is that it’s reliable, and neither partner has to ask for it.

It takes away the dynamic of one partner always risking and then feeling hurt and rejected by the other one.

Then the focus shifts to what they do with the time and the quality of the time, rather than all the back and forth about how they will make it  happen.

Many couples won’t start out doing this reliably. You will encounter resistance and feigned  forgetting. You must check in week after week.

You’ll keep asking them, “Tell me a little about what you did and how the time was for each of you.”

Don’t forget about it and let their own avoidance mechanisms control what happens. Keep surfacing it until it becomes a reliable part of their lives or until they’re able to create time together easily.

When you’re setting it up, if you sense someone really is not going to do it, surface their resistance.

You might ask, “Is there one part of you that can see the value in what I’m suggesting but another part of you that says, ‘No way. I’m not going to do that. I don’t want to be controlled’?”

Sometimes acknowledging and accepting the resistance by giving it a voice can help move things toward success and reliability. And, you won’t be creating a homework assignment that is doomed to fail.

Be sure to tie this homework back to building trust and teamwork. “When you can count on each other to be reliable, then you are building a foundation of trust.”

This is a homework assignment I teach in my Developmental Model training program, and many therapists have found it incredibly useful.

They report that after several weeks of sticking to this exercise, their couples begin to relax and the intensity of their fights decreases. The therapists persist to be sure their couples implement this new behavior into their weekly routine.

When hostile angry couples aren’t reminded, they will stop being reliable. After they begin connecting regularly, it will be easier for them to take some other emotional risks.

Your clients do the work, while you lead like an orchestra conductor. Doesn’t that sound less stressful?

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