When Can I Trust My Husband Again After Addiction?

Dear Jeff and Debra:

My husband has been sober for four months after years of drinking and lying about it. He is doing well and keeps asking why I still don’t trust him. I feel guilty because I know I should encourage him, but I still check the bank account and wonder where he is if he’s late coming home. How long am I supposed to feel this way?    –Still Wary

Dear Wary:

You don’t need to feel guilty. Four months of sobriety is wonderful, but it is also a very short time compared with years of broken promises. One of the realities of early recovery is that sobriety begins immediately, but rebuilding trust after addiction takes time. People in early recovery sometimes want to oversimplify the process. They say: “I’ve stopped drinking. You should trust me now.” Family members see things differently: “You’ve told me countless times that everything was fine when it wasn’t. How do I know this time is different?”

Both people may genuinely want the relationship to heal, but they are living in different realities. The real question isn’t whether you should trust him. The real question is about what he must do to regain your trust.

Trust is something we extend to another person. No one can make a person trust them. Trustworthiness is something we earn through our own actions, which is something we can control. For the recovering person, trustworthiness means staying sober today, following a daily recovery program, telling the truth, admitting mistakes, and so on.

As Debra writes in It Takes a Family: Creating Lasting Sobriety, Togetherness, and Happiness, 2nd ed. (Hazelden, 2021), “Alcoholics and addicts must realize that they no longer have the right to ask, ‘Do you trust me?’ The only question they can properly ask is ‘Am I being trustworthy today?’”

That shift—from asking for trust to practicing trustworthiness—is one of the most important changes in early recovery. And trustworthiness becomes easier to see when recovery has structure. Families no longer have to become detectives.

But trustworthiness isn’t only an issue for the recovering person. Family recovery has its own responsibilities. Constant interrogation, surveillance, and suspicion won’t create happiness, but neither will pretending that years of negative experience have magically disappeared. That’s why family members need their own program of recovery.

We recommend that families approach the first year of recovery together, with a structured plan. Family members can have their own Twelve Step meetings (Al-Anon), sponsors and recovery activities, while also meeting regularly as a family to talk about how their individual recovery plans are going. This helps everyone move in the same direction without making the recovering person the center of every conversation.

There’s another side to this story, too. Addiction can make the whole family less trustworthy. Family members sometimes make threats they don’t keep, hide information from one another, or make secret deals with the addicted person.

One parent says no while the other quietly says yes, and everyone gets pulled into the chaos. So family recovery asks the same question of everyone: Am I being trustworthy today? That is a much more useful question than, “Do you trust me yet?”

Your husband’s four months matter enormously. Celebrate them, notice what he is doing right, and tell him when you see evidence of change. But neither of you can force trust to happen faster than it naturally does.

Trust is a little like a savings account. Addiction makes withdrawal after withdrawal until the account is empty. Recovery starts making deposits. At first, the balance still looks pretty small. But if the deposits keep coming—day after day, month after month—the balance grows. One day, you realize you haven’t checked the bank account lately. You didn’t need to.

This article originally appeared in the Grosse Pointe News.