Trust Archives ⋆ Mike and Susan Dawson

Build and Maintain Trust: Essential to a Great Marriage

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:13:04+00:00Trust|

We’ve been talking a lot over the past few blog posts about how important trust is in a marriage. It creates safety, openness, vulnerability, love, and all those other feel-good vibes that make living life with the person you love that much more special. We have also talked through how anger in a relationship erodes trust and makes trust extremely hard to build. Without trust, there’s no way any of us can expect our relationship to survive. But just because you and your spouse trust each other today doesn’t mean it will naturally be that way forever. Trust is earned over time, and then we must build and maintain it [...]

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How to Build Trust in my Most Important Relationship

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:13:05+00:00Trust|

It is my personal belief that no two people are perfectly suited only for each other. I know that’s not what most people like to think; after all, we hear and say things like, “We are perfect for each other,” and “There couldn’t be two people more perfectly suited for one another” all the time. But there isn’t “one perfect person” out there in the universe that we must “find.” Rather, by learning skills, developing tools, and doing the right things, any two people can come together as a couple and have a satisfying relationship. So, if I’m correct in my belief, why then do some couples learn these abilities [...]

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4 Ways To Repair Broken Trust In Your Marriage

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:14:16+00:00Relationships, Trust|

Married couples put so much time and effort into building and maintaining trust in each other that you’d think they could withstand anything life throws at them — including when one spouse’s trust in the other has been broken. But the reality is that even in the strongest of unions, trust is fragile. And once it’s broken trust is difficult to repair. There are many ways for trust to be broken in a marriage. Some are big, and some aren’t. Yet they all feel massive. One spouse is caught continuously lying to the other A constant string of broken promises Infidelity or emotional cheating Not being there for your [...]

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Trust in a marriage: How to build a friendship that lasts

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:14:44+00:00Friendship, Trust|

We hear people who are deeply in love say all the time, “My spouse is my best friend!” Great! That’s the way it should be. We should be best friends, from the very early “puppy love” stage of our relationship all the way through our gray-hair years and beyond. Friendship is one of those core things necessary to build trust in a longterm, committed relationship. In our previous two blog posts, we touched on what trust is and how trust can be built and maintained — which includes exhibiting deep friendships. The goal of this article is to expand on the friendship conversation. There’s a lot packed into this post, [...]

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5 Ways Trust is Built and Maintained in a Marriage

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:14:44+00:00Relationships, Trust|

So, you’ve been together with your significant other for six years and decided last October to get married. Things are going great, and both of you feel like you have the trust game down pat. Trust is the foundation of any marriage, after all, so that must mean problem solved, right? Well, yes and no. While it’s great that you trust each other, it doesn’t happen once and for all. Trust is built and then maintained in a marriage. Last week, we laid the foundation for a series of posts on trust by answering the question: what is trust in a marriage? Now that we know what trust should [...]

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What is ‘trust’ in a marriage?

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:14:45+00:00Safety, Trust|

My wife, Susan, and I trust each other. Granted, she may not always be able to trust me to take out the trash, and maybe I can’t necessarily trust her to pick out a television show we both want to watch on a chill Friday night at home. But when it comes to the important stuff in our marriage — what makes us both feel safe, connected, honored, valued, and loved — we trust each other implicitly. I trust that she’s there for me, and she trusts that I’m always there for her. This is a small snippet of what counselors like me mean when we talk about trust in [...]

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