Ep 85 - Why You Haven't Rebuilt Trust Yet
Healing Broken Trust In Your Marriage After Infidelity
Brad and Morgan Robinson
4.6 • 737 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
In this podcast, we break down a powerful research-based model for how trust gets rebuilt after it's been broken—and why "just apologize" often isn't enough.
The research we reference explains trust repair as a two-way, back-and-forth process between the person who was hurt (the trustor) and the person who caused the damage (the trustee), where repair happens when efforts to prove trustworthiness outweigh the injured person's need to protect themselves.
You'll learn the three questions people move through after a breach—Did you do it? (guilty vs. innocent), Why did it happen? (you vs. the situation), and Can you change? (fixable vs. fixed)—and how different repair attempts land differently depending on which question is still unanswered.
We'll also cover why integrity-based betrayals are harder to repair than competence mistakes, why mixed messages (denial + apology) backfire, and what "stuck" patterns like avoidance, escalation, or hardened mistrust look like—so you can map what's happening and take smarter next steps toward real trust repair.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, you ready? |
| 0:07.0 | Hi, welcome to Healing Broken Trust. We're Brad and Morgan Robinson. |
| 0:24.6 | And today we are talking about the process of repairing trust. And we just want to jump right |
| 0:30.6 | in. So Brad, let's talk to them about repairing trust. |
| 0:33.6 | Yeah, there's a pattern that researchers have identified or a process that researchers have |
| 0:38.7 | identified that helps couples repair trust. And it's a research-based model. It explains why |
| 0:46.3 | just apologizing often doesn't do the work, the deeper work that people need to build trust. |
| 0:53.4 | And the big idea is that trust repair is not a one-time |
| 0:56.2 | one, or excuse me, trust repair is not a one-person project. It's not just up to one-person |
| 1:03.5 | ever build trust. It's actually a two-way back-and-forth process between two people. That's what |
| 1:08.9 | they discovered. And like we've talked about before, |
| 1:12.0 | there's research on what they call the victim perpetrator dynamic. One person gets wronged. The other |
| 1:17.8 | person did the offense, but it's up to both people to repair trust. So on one side is the person |
| 1:25.4 | who was hurt and whose trust was violated. |
| 1:28.3 | In the research, they call this the trustor. |
| 1:31.3 | We're just going to kind of, we're going to use our normal language around that instead of saying trustor. |
| 1:36.3 | But it's the person who was, so on one side is the person who was hurt and whose trust was violated. |
| 1:40.3 | And then on the other side, Morgan, is the the trustee that's the person who caused the damage |
| 1:46.2 | or is accused of causing it so you have the truster the person who broke the person who was injured |
| 1:52.5 | whose trust was violated and then you have the other person obviously who caused the damage or is at the |
| 1:57.7 | very least has been accused of causing that damage. And what this model says, |
| 2:02.8 | this process says is that it says something really important. Trust gets rebuilt when the person |
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