By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
Few things wear a relationship down like being told one thing and finding out another. A promise to change that is not kept. A small lie about where you were, what you spent or what you agreed to. Then a bigger one, and the feeling that you can no longer rely on anything you are told. If you are searching for how to rebuild trust after broken promises and lies, you may be the person who has been let down, the person who has done the letting down, or both. This article is for all of you. Trust can be rebuilt, but it usually asks for more than an apology.
Article Summary
Repeated broken promises and lies rarely come from nowhere. In my work there is nearly always a longer pattern underneath, often built on avoidance.
Trust has two parts. One is reliability, and the other is knowing who your partner is right now and whether you can depend on them to be that person.
Rebuilding starts by agreeing what trust means to each of you. It then needs reliability, honesty, and openness with no filters and nothing hidden.
The partner who has been let down often needs to understand why their boundaries loosened, and build the strength to set them while staying open to trust.
The partner who has lied needs to understand what sits underneath the behaviour, including the stories they tell themselves and whether the relationship has felt safe for the truth.
Therapy offers a contained space where all of this can be explored without it turning into another fight.
What It Feels Like When Trust Keeps Breaking
For the person who has been let down, the experience is often one of constant low level alertness. You listen for inconsistencies. You check, then feel ashamed of checking. You ask the same question in several ways, hoping for an answer that finally feels solid. Some people feel anger, some feel numb, and many feel foolish for having believed it before. The deepest hurt is often not any single lie. It is the sense that you cannot rely on your own judgement of your partner.
For the person who has broken promises or lied, the experience is rarely what the other person imagines. There may be shame, a dread of the conversation, a hope that it will blow over, and a sense of being trapped in a story that gets harder to correct each time. Some feel resentful that they are never allowed to put it behind them.
If you are at the stage of wondering whether you can trust your partner at all, my article on not trusting your partner anymore may help. If the breach was an affair, my articles on whether a relationship can survive an affair, why people cheat and rebuilding trust after infidelity cover that in more detail. This article is mainly about the wider pattern of broken promises and lies that are not affairs.
Why Broken Promises and Lies Happen
In my experience, repeated lies and broken promises sit on top of an older pattern that has usually been going on for a long time. The conflict tends to have themes. The same subjects come up again and again, and they end in the same place.
Very often, this is about avoidance. One person wants to speak about something and the other does not. Or both people are colluding in keeping silence on certain things, because the conversation feels too risky or too tiring. Over time, what is not said becomes what is hidden, and what is hidden becomes what is lied about.
There is also a boundaries element. If someone has been let down or lied to repeatedly, their boundaries can become more flexible, and in some cases they do not exist at all. The person who continues the behaviour may then be operating with a sense that there is no real consequence to what they do. Neither person sets out to create this. It builds one small accommodation at a time.
Research on wrongs between partners shows how common and wide ranging these experiences are. A study of 275 couples in Canada asked people about a transgression by their partner, including infidelity, lying and broken promises. People who saw their partner as responsive to them reported lower levels of unforgiveness, while people who saw their partner as insensitive reported higher levels. It was a snapshot in time and most wrongs were of moderate severity, so it cannot show cause and effect (Yilmaz et al., 2026). It fits what I see. When you feel responded to after a breach, repair becomes more possible.
My article on conflict avoidance in relationships describes how silence can build into this kind of pattern.
How Lies and Broken Promises Affect a Relationship
When trust erodes, a relationship changes shape. The person who has been let down becomes watchful, and the person who has let them down becomes defensive or withdrawn. Questions feel like interrogations. Honesty feels dangerous. Each person starts to protect themselves, and closeness drops.
Trust is not fixed from day to day, either. In a 14 day daily diary study of 110 couples in Canada, people who had lower trust asked for reassurance more often, and for some people, asking for reassurance was linked to lower trust the next day. This depended on attachment style. It was related to lower next day trust for women with an anxious attachment style and men with an avoidant attachment style (Evraire et al., 2022). The couples were all heterosexual and mostly white, so the findings may not apply to everyone. Still, it suggests something familiar. Repeated checking can keep the worry alive instead of settling it. That is no criticism of the person who checks, since it is a natural response to being let down.
Over time a cycle forms. One partner raises a concern, the other feels attacked and avoids it, and the first feels more unheard. My pieces on how to stop arguing with your partner and blame in relationships look at ways out of it.
Rebuilding starts by agreeing what trust means to each of you. It then needs reliability, honesty, and openness with no filters and nothing hidden.
First, Agree What Trust Means
To rebuild trust, you need a shared understanding of what trust is. This sounds simple, and it is often the missing step. Two people can both say they want trust and mean quite different things.
In my work, I describe trust as having two parts. The first is reliability, which means doing what you say you will do. The second is knowing who the other person is, and how far you can depend on them to be who you know them to be. A partner who is reliable about small things but whose inner life is closed can still feel untrustworthy. A partner who is open about their feelings but regularly forgets what they agreed to can feel the same.
So the first task is often to align on what trust means for the two of you. What would you each need to see, over what time, to feel it returning? Then comes learning about each other as you are now. People change, and after a period of broken trust you may be relating to a version of your partner from years ago.
What Helps the Partner Who Has Been Let Down
If you are the person who has been lied to or let down repeatedly, a good deal of the work is about you, and I say that with care. It is not that the behaviour is your fault. It is that you are the one who can decide what you will and will not accept going forward.
A first step is understanding why your boundaries loosened, or why they were never formed in the first place. Often there is a history. Many people grew up with an idea of what a relationship is supposed to look like. Trust is supposed to be unwavering, and partners are meant to be supported no matter what. These blueprints can make it feel disloyal to hold a line or to say that something is not acceptable. Looking at where they come from can loosen their grip.
Then it helps to think about the future. How would you like to be in this relationship? What do you want to be true in a year? The aim is to become more self supportive and stronger in your convictions, so that you can set boundaries and still rebuild loving trust from a place of strength and vulnerability combined. These can sit together. You can be open and also clear.
Being settled in yourself matters here. A study of 591 adults in Spain found that people with higher differentiation of self, which is how steady you stay in yourself under relationship stress, regulated their emotions better after an offence and judged its severity more realistically. People with lower differentiation experienced more emotional distress (Kasprzak et al., 2025). The offences were of many kinds, so it is a general pointer.
In a small study of 11 people who stayed after an affair, participants described learning to trust themselves again, for example by choosing not to check their partner's every move (Mitchell et al., 2026). It was about infidelity and very small, so it is an illustration only.
What Helps the Partner Who Has Lied or Broken Promises
If you are the person who has lied or not kept your word, the most helpful thing I can offer is curiosity about why. Not as an excuse, but because understanding what sits underneath the behaviour is what makes lasting change possible.
You may have your own blueprints. Perhaps you learned that honesty brings conflict, that other people's disappointment is unbearable, or that the safest way to keep the peace is to say what people want to hear. Looking at these can be uncomfortable, and it is where the work starts.
There will also be stories and narratives you tell yourself. Justifications are common. It was only a small thing. They would have overreacted. I was protecting them. These need to be worked through, gently and with care, because they allow the pattern to continue.
It is also worth looking at what has been happening in the relationship. If every honest conversation has led to a row, there may be little sense that the truth is welcome. You may have come to feel that you do not need to be truthful, or that there is no space for truth and honesty in the dynamic. That is not an excuse for lying, and it is useful information. Sometimes there is a fear of honesty, and sometimes a partner is not receptive to the truth. Both need to be explored.
If avoidance is part of your pattern, that is a place to work too. The aim is to become able to say difficult things sooner, before they become secrets. Accountability matters throughout. A clinical paper on trust in couples therapy describes trustworthiness as growing from acknowledging each other's contributions, taking responsibility in how you act, and keeping a fair give and take (Daneshpour, 2025). It is a discussion of a therapy model and not a trial, but it describes well what repair asks of the person who broke trust.
What Helps the Two of You Together
Rebuilding trust together has a few strands.
The first is reliability. Doing what you say, in small things, over time. It needs honesty and a lot of answering of questions. If your partner asks, answer, even when it is uncomfortable, and answer without defensiveness where you can. Questions at this stage are not an attack. They are part of how trust is rebuilt.
The second is openness and vulnerability. This is the part that surprises people. Reliability alone is not enough. Trust returns when each of you shares who you are at this moment in time, without filters and without hiding elements of yourself from the other. That means saying the thing you would normally keep back, and receiving it without punishing it.
The third is making it safe to be honest. If the truth is met with an explosion, people stop telling it. Both of you can agree to receive hard things calmly, and to come back to them when you are less activated. My article on repair after a fight offers practical steps.
The fourth is working through what happened together. In three longitudinal studies, people who reflected together on a wrong, which the researchers call co reflection, were more likely to report that the relationship had grown afterwards, even after accounting for how good it was at the start (Quinney et al., 2026). The wrongs were varied and the follow up short, so it does not promise growth. It suggests that how you handle the rupture matters.
Be realistic about time. Trust that took years to wear down will not return in weeks. Look for direction, such as honesty getting a little easier and setbacks being repaired faster.
If it would help to work on your pattern in a structured way at home, I have written a workbook for partners who want to look at their cycle side by side. Working With Your Attachment Styles Together (£3.99) includes a structured dialogue for hearing each other. It can help you start, and it does not replace therapy when a pattern is strong, old or tangled up with hurt.
When Trust May Not Be Rebuildable
Sometimes, after a real attempt, one or both partners conclude that trust cannot return. The same lies continue, there is no ownership, or one of you no longer wants to try. That is a legitimate and sometimes wise conclusion. My articles on how to know when a relationship is over and staying together or breaking up may help you think it through.
If lies are being used to control you, or you are afraid of your partner, this is not a trust issue to work on in joint therapy. Please speak to a specialist service. In immediate danger, call 999. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline is on 0808 2000 247, free and open 24 hours a day. My article on coercive control and conflict explains the difference.
How Therapy Can Help
Rebuilding trust is hard to do alone, because every attempt can feel loaded. A question becomes an accusation, and an answer becomes a defence. Therapy provides a contained space where all of this can be explored without it turning into another fight.
I start by helping each of you feel heard, and by working out together what trust means for you. From there, we look at the longer pattern, including the avoidance and the history behind it. The partner who has been let down can work on boundaries and on feeling strong while staying open. The partner who has lied can understand the why, work through the stories and fears underneath, and practise saying difficult things sooner. I do not tell couples to stay or to go, and I work with people of every background and relationship structure.
If you are wondering whether therapy could help you and your partner, I offer a free 30 minute consultation, in person in London or online. You can ask anything, and there is no obligation to continue.
About the author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist, and the founder of Rise and Grow Therapy, a private practice offering couples and relationship therapy across Kensington, Pimlico, and Angel, Islington in London, as well as online consultations. His approach draws first on Imago Relationship Therapy, alongside integrative relational, attachment based, Gottman, and systemic approaches. Mark works with couples of every background and relationship structure, as well as with individuals working through relational issues.
References
Daneshpour, M. (2025). Couples therapy and the challenges of building trust, fairness, and justice. Family Process, 64(1), e13072. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11786296/
Evraire, L. E., Dozois, D. J. A., & Wilde, J. L. (2022). The contribution of attachment styles and reassurance seeking to trust in romantic couples. Europe's Journal of Psychology, 18(1), 19 to 39. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8895702/
Kasprzak, A., Martínez Díaz, M. P., & Giráldez, C. A. M. (2025). Forgiveness in romantic relationships: The moderating role of differentiation of self in the relationship between offense severity and post offense distress. Family Process, 64(4), 1601 to 1627. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12582876/
Mitchell, E. A., Brown, K. S., Spencer, J., & Harris, K. (2026). Staying together after infidelity: An exploration of the decision making process of recovery from the perspective of the injured partner. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 52(1), e70110. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12745057/
Quinney, B., Wenzel, M., Okimoto, T. G., Thai, M., & Woodyatt, L. (2026). Transformative moral repair following interpersonal transgressions: Post transgression relationship growth. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 52(9), 3017 to 3031. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13392185/
Yilmaz, E., Jean, M., Brassard, A., & Péloquin, K. (2026). Could partner responsiveness be involved in the unforgiveness process following a relational transgression? Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 52(1), e70109. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12719928/
