By Daniel Wells | Living Wisdom | June 22, 2026 | 14 min read
Informed by personal experience and published research in relationship psychology, attachment theory, and couples therapy
How to fix a relationship is a question that carries a specific kind of weight — because it only gets asked when something real has broken, and something real still matters enough to try.
The relationship I’m thinking of had everything go wrong at once. Not just one thing — the compound version: trust that had been damaged by real betrayal, resentments that had accumulated through years of smaller injuries and dismissals that had never been fully addressed, and a gradual withdrawal from each other that had made the actual emotional distance between us much larger than the physical proximity would suggest. We had become people who shared a life but were no longer genuinely present in it together.
The anger made early conversation nearly impossible. Not just difficult — actually impossible, in the sense that anything that touched the real issues would escalate into something that produced more damage than it resolved. And underneath the anger, on my end, was something that was harder to admit: the fear of what genuine honesty might require. If I said what was actually true about what had happened and what I felt about it, there was no controlling what came next. Honesty, in that moment, felt like a kind of freefall.
What eventually moved things was a specific moment — one of us finally said something true rather than something strategic. Not a perfect confession, not a prepared statement, just a genuine acknowledgment of their own contribution to what had happened. That moment changed the temperature of everything. Not because it fixed anything instantly — it didn’t — but because it established that honesty was possible between us, and that possibility changed what the conversation could be.
What followed wasn’t quick or clean. Rebuilding trust took longer than either of us expected. Old patterns would resurface, sometimes when we thought we’d moved past them, and we’d have to address them again. The patience required was harder, in some ways, than the initial breakthrough.
What I understand now that I didn’t understand at the start is that fixing a relationship doesn’t mean returning to what it was before the damage. It means building something new on top of the history — something that includes the damage, honestly, and that’s stronger for having been genuinely worked through rather than papered over.
Learning how to fix a relationship is not about erasing what happened. It’s about developing the courage, honesty, and sustained effort to build something real out of what remains.
When Relationships Can Be Fixed — and When They Can’t
Before the nine steps, it’s worth being honest about this question — because not every relationship that is broken can or should be fixed, and attempting to repair one that can’t be is its own form of damage.
A relationship is worth attempting to fix when both people genuinely want to — not just want the comfortable version of the relationship back, but are willing to do the honest work of understanding what went wrong and changing what needs to change. When there is genuine care remaining on both sides, even underneath the damage. And when the relationship, at its core, is built on something worth preserving.
A relationship is significantly harder or impossible to fix when one person is unwilling to engage with the repair honestly, when the pattern of damage is so entrenched and repeated that it’s become structural rather than circumstantial, or when fundamental incompatibilities — in values, in what each person needs — have become undeniable.
The hardest situation is when you want to repair something that the other person doesn’t want to repair, or doesn’t want to repair in a genuine way. No amount of effort from one side can fix a relationship that requires both. Research by Dr. John Gottman at the University of Washington, who has studied relationship repair extensively, identifies the willingness to accept influence from a partner and to repair after conflict as among the strongest predictors of relationship success. Read more at gottman.com →
How to Fix a Relationship: 9 Honest Steps
Step 1: Create the Conditions for Honest Conversation
Before you can address what went wrong, you need conditions under which addressing it is actually possible. And those conditions rarely exist in the immediate aftermath of damage.
Attempting the difficult conversation before either person has enough emotional regulation to stay in it — before the acute anger has settled into something manageable, before there’s enough safety between you to tolerate the honesty the conversation requires — typically produces more damage than it resolves. The conversation escalates. Things get said that add to the injury. The repair becomes harder.
Creating conditions means giving both people enough time and space to reach a point where conversation is possible rather than explosive. It means choosing a time when neither person is exhausted, hungry, or otherwise depleted. It means agreeing in advance, if possible, that the goal of the conversation is understanding rather than winning.
How to deal with anger is directly relevant here — because the anger that accompanies relationship damage is real and valid, and it also needs to be in a manageable state before productive conversation is possible.
Try this: Before attempting the repair conversation, honestly assess: can both of us stay in this conversation without it becoming destructive? If the answer is no, give it more time. The conversation matters enough to have it when it can actually be productive.
Step 2: Take Honest Responsibility for Your Own Part
This is the step that most people try to skip — or that they perform without genuinely doing. And it’s the one that, in my experience, changed everything.
Taking honest responsibility doesn’t mean accepting blame for things you didn’t do, or minimizing what the other person did. It means genuinely examining your own contribution to the state the relationship is in — not just the obvious recent events, but the patterns, the choices, the ways your own behavior over time has shaped the dynamic.
The person who made the first honest acknowledgment in my own experience — genuinely, without conditions, without “but you also” — opened something that all the strategic conversations before it hadn’t touched. It established that honesty was possible. That one authentic admission was more valuable to the repair process than weeks of careful, protected communication had been.
How to forgive yourself is often necessary here — because genuine acknowledgment of your own contributions requires facing things about yourself that are uncomfortable. Self-forgiveness, in this context, isn’t the same as excusing what happened. It’s what makes genuine acknowledgment possible without being overwhelmed by shame.
Try this: Before the conversation, write down your honest assessment of your own contributions to the problem. Not as a performance, not as a strategy — just as a genuine attempt to understand what you’ve actually done and what it produced. Let that honesty be available to you when the conversation happens.
Step 3: Listen to Understand — Not to Respond
One of the most common and most damaging patterns in relationship repair conversations is listening not to understand what the other person is saying but to prepare your response — to find the inaccuracies, to build the counterargument, to protect yourself from the implication.
This kind of defensive listening produces conversations where two people are talking past each other rather than genuinely encountering each other’s actual experience. Even if everything said is technically accurate, the conversation doesn’t connect — because neither person feels genuinely heard, and without feeling heard, genuine repair isn’t possible.
Listening to understand means allowing what the other person says to actually land — allowing their experience of what happened to register, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it differs from your own experience of the same events. It means reflecting back what you heard before responding. It means asking questions from genuine curiosity rather than from the desire to dismantle.
How to have a healthy relationship depends fundamentally on this capacity — because all the other elements of a healthy relationship depend on two people who can actually hear each other.
Try this: In your next repair conversation, practice this specific discipline: before responding to anything the other person says, briefly reflect back what you heard — “what I’m hearing you say is ___” — and ask if that’s accurate. This one practice changes the quality of the conversation significantly.
Step 4: Address the Patterns — Not Just the Incidents
Relationship damage rarely comes from a single incident. It comes from patterns — repeated behaviors, established dynamics, the accumulated weight of many smaller moments over time. Fixing only the presenting incident without addressing the underlying pattern is why so many repair attempts fail: the same pattern produces the same damage again, in a new form.
This requires stepping back from the specific events that triggered the current crisis and asking: what is the pattern underneath this? What has been happening in our relationship over time that this incident is an expression of? What do both of us consistently do — in conflict, in stress, in moments of vulnerability — that produces this outcome?
Signs of an unhealthy relationship provides a useful framework for this examination — because many of the patterns that damage relationships are recognizable once you step back enough to see the larger picture rather than only the most recent incident.
Try this: Together, if possible, map the pattern rather than only the incident. Ask: is this the first time something like this has happened? What does the longer history look like? What are we both consistently doing that contributes to this outcome?
Step 5: Rebuild Trust Through Consistency — Not Promises
Trust, once damaged, is not rebuilt through words — through promises, through declarations of intention, through verbal commitments about what will be different. It’s rebuilt through behavior, consistently demonstrated over time, that gradually provides new evidence against the damage.
This is one of the most patience-demanding parts of relationship repair — because the rebuilding is slow, the evidence accumulates gradually, and the person who needs to trust again often can’t control how quickly they’re able to. Demanding that trust be restored faster than it can genuinely be rebuilt produces its own damage.
The person doing the rebuilding needs to understand that consistent behavior over time is the only path — not the first weeks of changed behavior followed by a return to old patterns, but genuine sustained change long enough that the new pattern has genuine evidence behind it.
How to rebuild trust in a relationship addresses this specific process in depth — the specific mechanisms through which trust is gradually rebuilt, and the patience the process genuinely requires from both people.
Try this: Identify the specific behaviors that would, over time, rebuild trust in your specific situation. Commit to them as practices rather than as one-time demonstrations. Then be patient — and honest about the timeline that genuine trust-rebuilding requires.
Step 6: Expect Old Patterns to Resurface — and Have a Plan
This was one of the most important things I learned, and one that I didn’t expect: the old patterns don’t simply disappear because you’ve decided to repair the relationship. They resurface — sometimes when you think you’ve genuinely moved past them — and when they do, you need to be able to address them without treating their appearance as evidence that the repair has failed.
Old patterns resurface under stress, under fatigue, in situations that echo the original damage, in moments when defenses are low. This is normal. It’s what patterns do. The question is not whether they’ll appear but what you do when they do.
Having a plan — a specific, pre-agreed approach to how you’ll address pattern recurrence when it happens, rather than being blindsided by it — is what allows the recurrence to be addressed as information rather than experienced as failure.
How to rebuild trust in a relationship and how to deal with failure both address the specific challenge of returning to a commitment after a setback — which is exactly what pattern recurrence in relationship repair requires.
Try this: Together, agree on what you’ll do when old patterns resurface — before they do. Create a specific signal or phrase that either person can use to name a pattern recurrence without it becoming an accusation. Having the language ready changes how the moment is handled.
Step 7: Get Outside Support When You Need It
Attempting to repair significant relationship damage using only the internal resources of the relationship itself is often like trying to treat a serious injury without any medical help — possible in some cases, significantly harder than it needs to be, and sometimes genuinely not possible.
Couples therapy, relationship counseling, or individual therapy for one or both people provides perspective, structure, and tools that are difficult to generate from inside the relationship. A skilled therapist can help identify patterns that are invisible from inside them, facilitate conversations that escalate without external support, and provide evidence-based approaches to the specific challenges the relationship is facing.
Seeking this support is not evidence that the relationship has failed. It’s evidence that you take the repair seriously enough to use the best available resources.
Try this: If the repair conversations consistently escalate, if the same patterns keep resurfacing without resolution, or if either person feels unable to fully engage in the repair process, consider therapy — not as a last resort but as a resource that’s appropriate for the size of the challenge. Find a therapist at psychologytoday.com →
Step 8: Accept That the Relationship Will Be Different — and That’s Not Failure
This was the most significant reframe in my own experience — and the one that made the repair feel like genuine progress rather than an attempt to restore something that couldn’t be restored.
The relationship before the damage cannot be fully recovered. Not because the repair isn’t genuine, but because both people now have knowledge and experience they didn’t have before — of what happened, of each other’s capacity for hurt and for honesty, of their own vulnerabilities and contributions. That knowledge changes the relationship, and trying to pretend it doesn’t produces a performance of the old relationship rather than a genuine continuation of it.
What is possible is something different: a relationship that includes the damage honestly, that has been genuinely worked through rather than avoided, and that is in some ways more real and more resilient precisely because it has survived something serious and come out the other side still intact.
How to practice gratitude for what remains — for the relationship that’s possible now rather than grieving only the relationship that was — is part of what allows the repair to be genuinely embraced rather than only reluctantly accepted.
Try this: Together, acknowledge explicitly that you’re not trying to return to exactly what the relationship was before. You’re building something new on top of the history. Name what you want that new thing to look like. Let the vision of what you’re building be as concrete as possible.
Step 9: Maintain the Repair — Relationships Require Ongoing Attention
Relationship repair is not an event — it’s a process that requires ongoing maintenance. The relationship that has been repaired is not then fixed forever. It needs the same ongoing attention, honest communication, and repair of small ruptures that all relationships require — and perhaps more, because the patterns that led to damage the first time can be reactivated.
This means maintaining the practices that made repair possible: the honesty, the willingness to take responsibility, the repair of small injuries before they accumulate, the genuine attention to each other. A relationship that’s repaired and then neglected doesn’t stay repaired.
How to have a healthy relationship — the ongoing practices that healthy relationships require, not just the dramatic repair moments — is what the maintenance looks like.
Try this: Establish one regular practice that maintains the repair — a weekly check-in, a specific time for honest conversation about how things are going, some structure that keeps the honest communication alive rather than allowing it to be displaced by the business of daily life.
How Relationship Damage Affects Your Mental Health
The psychological effects of unaddressed or in-progress relationship damage are significant and deserve direct attention.
Anxiety. The uncertainty of a damaged relationship — not knowing whether it will survive, whether the repair is working, whether the other person is genuinely committed to the process — produces chronic low-level anxiety that consumes cognitive and emotional resources.
Depression. Relationship quality is one of the strongest predictors of overall wellbeing. A significant relationship in crisis — particularly one that feels unresolvable — is one of the most reliable sources of depression and low mood.
Reduced self-confidence. The damage that relationship crises do to self-perception — the sense of having failed, of having contributed to something painful, of being uncertain about your own worth in the relationship — can significantly reduce self-confidence in ways that extend beyond the relationship itself.
Overthinking and rumination. Relationship crises generate intense rumination — replaying what happened, anticipating what comes next, analyzing what was said and what it means. This rumination is exhausting and often counterproductive, consuming the cognitive resources needed for the actual repair work.
Difficulty with loneliness. One of the most painful aspects of relationship damage is that the person you’d normally turn to for support is the person the difficulty is with — which produces a specific, acute form of loneliness that is qualitatively different from ordinary social isolation.
Difficulty trusting your own judgment. Relationship crises — particularly those involving betrayal or significant conflict — often shake confidence in your own perceptions. You may doubt whether you saw things accurately, whether your reactions were proportionate, whether your instincts about what happened can be trusted. Rebuilding self-trust alongside the relationship repair is often essential — because the decisions the repair process requires depend on a self whose judgment you can rely on.
Nighttime overthinking about the relationship. The most exhausting symptom of an ongoing relationship crisis is often the nighttime replay — the hours spent going over what was said, what it meant, what comes next. Addressing this nighttime rumination directly is one of the most important self-care interventions during a repair process, because the sleep disruption it produces compounds every other difficulty.
How Relationship Stress Affects Your Physical Health
The physical health effects of sustained relationship stress are among the most extensively documented in health psychology.
Cardiovascular effects. Research consistently links relationship conflict and relationship stress with elevated cardiovascular risk. The physiological stress response that relationship difficulty activates — elevated cortisol and adrenaline — produces sustained cardiovascular strain when the stress is chronic.
Immune suppression. Sustained relationship stress measurably suppresses immune function — increasing susceptibility to illness and slowing recovery. Studies of couples in distress show measurably different immune response compared to couples in stable, supportive relationships.
Disrupted sleep. The rumination and emotional activation that relationship crises produce significantly disrupts sleep — through difficulty falling asleep, nighttime waking, and sleep that doesn’t feel restorative even when adequate in duration. Stopping the nighttime overthinking about the relationship is one of the most practical physical health interventions during a repair process.
Physical tension and pain. The chronic stress of relationship difficulty is held physically — in muscle tension, jaw clenching, headaches, and digestive discomfort that often doesn’t get connected to the relationship stress producing it.
Appetite and energy effects. Significant relationship stress commonly affects both appetite (reduced or significantly increased, depending on the person) and overall energy levels — through the mechanism of chronic stress activation that affects both metabolic function and the motivation for basic self-care.
Frequently Asked Questions About How to Fix a Relationship
Can a relationship survive cheating? Some do, and some don’t. Research and clinical experience both show that relationships can survive infidelity when both people are genuinely committed to repair, when the underlying conditions that contributed to the betrayal are honestly addressed, and when adequate time and support (typically including professional guidance) are invested in the process. It is not impossible. It is also not guaranteed, and both people need to be honest about whether genuine repair is what they both want.
How long does it take to fix a damaged relationship? There is no fixed timeline. Minor damage in a generally healthy relationship can be addressed relatively quickly. Significant damage — particularly involving trust violations or long-accumulated resentments — typically takes months to years of sustained, genuine effort to repair. The timeline is determined by the depth of the damage and the consistency of the repair effort, not by how much you want it to be done.
What if only one person is trying to fix the relationship? One person cannot fix a relationship that requires both. What one person can do is clearly communicate their commitment to repair, create the conditions for the other person to engage if they’re willing, and be honest about what they need from the process. If genuine effort from one side produces no reciprocal engagement over time, the honest assessment is that the relationship may not be repairable in its current configuration.
Is it possible to fix a relationship without professional help? Yes, in some cases — particularly for relationships with less severe damage where both people have reasonably good communication skills and emotional regulation. For more significant damage, professional support significantly improves the odds of successful repair and reduces the time and additional damage that purely self-directed attempts often produce.
How do you know when a relationship is worth trying to fix? When both people genuinely want to — not just want the comfort or familiarity of the relationship back, but are willing to do the honest work. When there is genuine care remaining on both sides. And when the fundamental incompatibilities, if there are any, are not so significant that repair would only delay an inevitable ending.
What if the trust is completely gone? Trust that is completely gone is very difficult to rebuild — and the process, when it’s possible at all, is long and requires sustained behavioral change over time rather than verbal reassurance. If trust is completely gone, professional support is particularly important — both to assess whether rebuilding is possible and to provide the structure that self-directed attempts often can’t sustain.
A Final Word — You’re Not Restoring What Was. You’re Building What Can Be.
I want to end with what eventually became clear — and what changed my whole understanding of what repair actually is.
For a long time, I thought fixing the relationship meant returning it to what it had been before the damage. Restoring it to the version that had existed before the trust was broken, before the resentments had accumulated, before the distance had grown. That version felt like the goal — as if repair meant moving backward to a time before the problems began.
What I eventually understood is that this isn’t what repair is or can be. Both people have knowledge now that they didn’t have before. The damage happened, and it happened to real people who are now changed by having experienced it. You cannot unknow what you know. You cannot return to the innocence of before.
What you can do is build something new on top of what happened — something that includes the history honestly, that has been genuinely worked through rather than buried, and that is in some ways more real and more solid precisely because it has survived something serious and come out the other side still intact.
That is not a diminished version of a relationship. That is what genuinely tested relationships can become — something that knows it can survive difficulty, because it has.
— Daniel Wells, Living Wisdom
Further Reading on Living Wisdom:
- How to Rebuild Trust in a Relationship
- How to Have a Healthy Relationship: 9 Honest Keys to Try
- Signs of an Unhealthy Relationship: 10 You Should Never Ignore
- How to Trust Yourself: 9 Honest Steps to Build Self-Belief
- How to Stop Overthinking at Night: 7 Ways to Finally Sleep
- How to Set Boundaries: When You Say Yes but Mean No
- How to Forgive Yourself: 7 Honest Steps to Finally Let Go
- How to Deal With Anger: 9 Honest Ways to Finally Stay Calm
- How to Be More Assertive: 7 Honest Steps to Finally Speak Up
- How to Practice Gratitude: 7 Simple Ways to Change Your Life
Medical Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It reflects the author’s personal experience combined with published psychological research. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing significant relationship difficulties or mental health challenges, please consult a qualified professional.
Sources & References:
- Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books.
- Johnson, S. (2008). Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown and Company.
- Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden Publishing.
- Perel, E. (2017). The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. Harper.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Gottman Institute. Relationship repair. gottman.com
- Psychology Today. Relationship repair. psychologytoday.com
- Psychology Today. Find a therapist. psychologytoday.com
- Greater Good Science Center. Relationships. greatergood.berkeley.edu
- Mind. Relationship difficulties. mind.org.uk
- NHS. Relationship problems. nhs.uk
