Book
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
John Gottman
Relevant when the exercise identifies a partner relationship as an area you want to work on.
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Tool 88 · Develop yourself
I broke the trust. Can it be rebuilt?
This exercise will not help you win somebody back, and it will not promise you that the relationship survives.
A guided 25 to 35 minute conversation, here in TAIU. You can also take it away and use it elsewhere.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
What have they still not been told?
A decision made on half the story is not their decision.
You can do this well and still lose them. That is theirs.
What you'll explore
- 01What you did
- 02How it came out
- 03What has been said since
- 04What is still not told
A note from Mark
The people I have watched get through something like this were not the most eloquent. They were the ones who told the whole thing once, early, without being caught into it.
What is hard to accept is that trust is not a mood. It is a forecast somebody makes about what you will do next, and forecasts move on evidence. You cannot argue somebody into a forecast.
I would also be honest about the part nobody wants to hear. You can do all of this properly and still lose the relationship. That is their right, and if your behaviour depends on keeping them, it was never the repair you said it was.
Read my full view ↓
The test I use is simple. Would you still be doing this in a year if they had gone? If the answer is no, then what is happening now is persuasion.
What you'll get
You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.
01
What was actually broken
02
What is yours
03
What still has not been told
04
What rebuilding would require
+
Your TAIU handover, a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What you actually did
- 03What was broken
- 04What is yours
- 05What you are handing to something else
- 06What it may have cost them
- 07What has already been told, and what has not
- 08What rebuilding would actually require
- 09What is not yours to decide
- 10The rival reading
- 11What deserves protecting
- 12The credible alternative
- 13What, if anything, should change
- 14What remains unresolved
- 15Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
This session works on you rather than one part of your life, so nothing is rated. At the end you are asked, once, which part of your life it touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this for you. Keep the sheet, print it, or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
What was broken, described as the thing they can no longer rely on rather than the rule you broke.
02 · Test it
Write down what they still do not know. Not to send. To see the size of it.
Explore this further ↓
Before you talk to them
Disclosure and apology are different conversations and doing both at once usually protects the person doing the talking. Work out which one is owed first.
If there is fear, control or violence anywhere in this, in either direction, this page is not the right instrument and support matters more than an exercise.
What I would do
- 01
Say what happened plainly. Almost every account of this arrives with the sharp edges already sanded off.
- 02
Separate the six instruments. Apology, disclosure, restitution, transparency, consequences, changed behaviour. People do the cheapest one and call it repair.
- 03
Look hard at what is still not told. A decision made on a partial account is not their decision.
- 04
Accept the consequence rather than negotiating it. That is the part they can actually see.
- 05
Stop treating their staying as the measure of whether you have done this well.
Test it
- 01
Read your account and remove every sentence that positions you well. See what is left.
- 02
Ask whether you would still be doing this if you knew they were leaving. If not, it is a strategy.
- 03
Ask what they would have to see, over what period, before predicting you differently.
The alternative
The obvious reading is that you are sorry, you will prove it, and in time this will be repaired. Each part can be wrong. Sometimes the remorse is real and the account is still incomplete, which means nothing has yet been repaired. Sometimes what you broke happened long before the thing you are here about, and the affair or the lie was the visible end of it. Sometimes you have done the work and they are going to leave anyway, and that is not a failure of the work. And occasionally the honest finding is that you would like to be forgiven considerably more than you would like to change.
Think about this
- What you actually did, in words you would use if you had to say it out loud.
- Whether they found out, or you told them.
- What they still have not been told, and why.
- Whether this is the first time, or the first time it came out.
- What you have already changed, and how long it has held.
Take this to Ask Mark
You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
The conversation I keep not having
If something still has to be said
Further thinking
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
John Gottman
An exploration of the structure of effective apologies
Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin and Robert Lount
The Investment Model of Commitment
Caryl Rusbult
Explore the thinking ↓
Article
An exploration of the structure of effective apologies
Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin and Robert Lount
The study tests apology components separately and finds that acknowledgement of responsibility does most of the work, while the expression of regret that people tend to lead with does the least. If you are drafting something difficult, it tells you what to put first.
Article
The Investment Model of Commitment
Caryl Rusbult
Rusbult separates satisfaction, alternatives and investment, which is why people stay in relationships they are unhappy with and leave ones they are not. Three questions instead of one verdict.