Are You Living With a Trust Assassin?

Dear Cruisin in Pain,

You want to know if there is any “hope,” and to answer your question, I need to know what you are hoping for. As General Gordon R. Sullivan once famously said, “Hope is not a method.”

I’m assuming you are asking if your husband will change, and in this case, we need to look at the behaviors of all Trust Assassin Husbands.

I call these behaviors “Trust Assassin Husband” patterns because they are a systematic dismantling of marital trust through calculated betrayals and psychological manipulation. Like a skilled assassin, these men methodically target the most vulnerable aspects of the relationship.

They begin with emotional affairs that create intimate bonds with others while maintaining plausible deniability. When confronted, they deploy gaslighting tactics, turning reality upside down by labeling their truthful partners as “liars.” They strategically humiliate their spouses in public. Then, they share intimate details that should remain private. They effectively weaponize the spouse’s vulnerabilities against them.

When their partners express legitimate pain, they dismiss these concerns with ultimatums like “get over it or get out.” Their spouse endures years of blame-shifting so that the Assassin can maintain control. Perhaps most destructively, they chronically prioritize others over their spouse, making clear through their actions (rather than their hollow words) where their true loyalties lie. This isn’t momentary thoughtlessness – it’s a persistent pattern that systematically destroys the foundation of marital trust.

1. A Trust Assassin Husband Lies.

In this case, he denies all charges and tells you you are the liar. That’s a pretty immature defense, but okay. By calling you a liar, he is lying. He doesn’t have to agree with you. It’s not the point whether he admits to lying or to being an assassin of trust. He lies and breaks his promises. That behavior has little value to a relationship.

2. A Trust Assassins Husband Ignores Your Wishes.

You ask him to avoid a woman you know he’s having an emotional affair with, and he ignores you and whoops it up with her all cruise long. Whether he places his own needs or the needs of others ahead of yours, he’s not treating you as someone whose needs he should respect.

3. He Talks About You to Other People.

Whether it is your illness, a secret, or just something you wish he wouldn’t discuss, a man set on corroding trust blurts out all of it. You are the object of the story. You are used in order for him to achieve his aims, which is sympathy, a laugh, a threat, or ridicule aimed at you. You are the “thing” he talks about, not the “person” he loves.

In your case, it’s particularly cruel that he shares them with his emotional affair partner.

If this happens after you divorced him, he’s defiled the relationship he’s had with you, and you can trust he’s done it during the marriage as well. You ended up in the right place. If you are tempted to dish it right back at him, you’ll be defiling the relationship, too.

4. A Trust Assassins Believe Other People, Not You.

I watched a show, “Con Mum,” (spoiler alert), in which a man’s mother shows up after 45 years. Yes, she’s his real mother. And yes, she’s a con. His wife was about to have a baby when Mommy Dearest showed up. Suddenly, his wife could no longer be believed. “You believe she is who she says she is. But she is a destroyer of lives,” his wife says in the documentary. Yes, there are many obvious psychological mechanisms at work with this man. But the fact is, he stopped accepting influence from his wife and paid for it with his marriage and 300,000 pounds.

I genuinely feel bad for this man; a skilled con artist clearly swindled him. But as a Trust Assassin, he systematically destroyed his wife’s bond. He showed her again and again that she couldn’t rely on him. He would no longer place the needs of his new family ahead of his own. Whatever his own vulnerability, mental illness, or attachment injury led to his action, his wife could no longer bear his unwitting efforts to kill her trust in him. It likely happened hundreds of times over the year that he was involved with the con instead of being home with her and their new baby.

She left because she repeatedly told him, “Don’t do it!” and he listened to someone else, in this case, his stranger mother. Ignore your mate and spend their money, and bad things happen. Mates aren’t always right. No, of course not. But you have to listen to them and trust them. This brings me to my 5th point.

5. You Cannot and Should Not Trust a Trust Assassin.

They lie. They ignore your wishes. They tell other people your secrets and refuse to be on your side. What is there to trust? In our assessment called The BIG BIG Book, we include Gottman instruments, including trust questions like these:

• My partner has been or is emotionally involved with someone else, which feels like a betrayal.
• My partner lies to me.
• I don’t feel that I am my partner’s first or even major priority in his or her life.
• My partner is not really loyal to me.

Sound familiar? It should. Trust is one of two “pillars” that hold up a relationship house. Without them, whatever else is going on is insignificant in comparison. So you both love golf or he is a great dancer, or you are proud of his career, or he is a “great Dad.” None of these matters to the relationship more than your ability to trust him. And here, I’m not talking about one affair, one lie, one betrayal. I’m talking about a characterological assassination of your trust over 13 long years.

6. A Trust Assassin Husband Projects Their Issues Onto You.

He finds fault with you because he doesn’t respect you. By chronically finding fault, he can keep you running to “fix yourself” while he continues his “relationship disaster” moves. Notice that he will complain about something of little value while your complaints are about high-value issues. His are about your housecleaning (how much does he do?) and your “complaining” while yours is about his faithfulness and lies. Which are more significant problems in the larger scheme of things?

The more you scurry to improve yourself, the more he ducks out of the spotlight. The more he calls you a liar, the more you get caught in a round robin of “No, YOU lied!” Don’t bother.

Ignore What They Tell You If They Repeatedly Lie to You.

Look, some honest men and women occasionally lie. They say “no” when you ask, “Are you having an affair?” But by and large, when you take the entire relationship as a whole, you can trust them. In contrast, Trust Assassins make promises to “blow you off” and get you off their backs. Many give lame excuses and don’t sound sincere. That’s how little you mean to them. But some are great actors; they do sound sincere. If you provide some value to them, they make some effort for a short time until you lower your guard. Then, when you begin to have hope or stop planning your breakup, they return to baseline.

How Do You Get a Trust Assassin Husband to Understand and Respect You?

You can’t. A chronic liar lies. A person who violates your secrets violates secrets. Someone who ignores your wishes feels entitled to ignore your wishes.

The next thing I am going to say is important, so listen up: Characterlogical features are idiosyncratic, which is a fancy way of saying, “It’s baked in the cake.” In other words, it works. It’s congruent with how he sees the world and you.

In order for him to change, he has to WANT to change, and that’s a big ask for characterological change. Even with the motivation, it’s hard and trying work. It takes YEARS of consistent effort with a very skilled therapist he has to trust implicitly. Most people will bail on therapy at the exact point when their worldview is challenged. It might happen in a month or a year, but they will often say some BS reason why they left the therapy.

Ignore what he says. Focus on what he does. Not to try to change his behavior, but to record it for your own deprogramming. Like the Wizard of Oz, he hides behind the curtain and projects power because he has none. He wants to control you because he can’t control himself or own up to who he really is, so he lies and projects an image. Controlling yourself and telling the truth is a first step toward maturity. The second is the capacity to put another person’s needs as equal to your own. Chances are, this Trust Assassin does neither.

What To Do About a Trust Assassin?

Here is the really hard part: You have to start trusting yourself and listening to yourself. Stop believing that some fairy dust will appear and magically change a man who is characterologically unsuited to being a good mate. Stop putting labels on him. Stop focusing on him at all. Focus on yourself and what you want.

Focus on what you want that you can get. That’s anything you have direct control over, which is yourself. You can’t change him. If you want to stay with him, stay with him. But decide you are going to do that knowing nothing will change in him that is under your conscious control.

Talk like a 5-year-old in explaining his behavior. It would go something like this:

“You are not a good friend. You call me names. You lie to me and tell me that I am lying. You put someone else ahead of our friendship. We go to have fun and you ignore me. Be with her if you want to be with her. But you have to choose because I want to be your good friend and now I’m not feeling it.”

The beauty of working with a skilled couples therapist is that they tell you both the truth. Unless there is an underlying threat of violence, we can safely outline to your Assassin exactly what they are doing. Some people wake up. Some of them pretend to, at least for a while. But ultimately, it’s helpful to know the difference between someone who offers value versus someone who offers no value to your marriage. Then, you can decide what you want to do with that information.

Break Free from the Trust Assassin Pattern: Our Couples Therapy Retreats Rebuild What He Destroyed

Is your relationship suffering under a Trust Assassin’s systematic betrayals? Don’t waste another decade hoping for change. Our specialized couples therapy retreats provide the structured environment needed to confront these destructive patterns and rebuild genuine trust. With evidence-based techniques and guidance from experienced therapists, couples can learn to identify these patterns, establish firm boundaries, and rebuild emotional safety—even after years of damage. Space is limited as each intensive couples retreat is private. Schedule your confidential consultation today.

In Closing

Relationships damaged by Trust Assassin behaviors rarely heal through conventional weekly therapy alone. These patterns run too deep and are too resistant to casual intervention. After 30+ years of working with couples trapped in these devastating cycles, I’ve found that the immersive environment of an intensive couples therapy retreat provides the necessary circuit-breaker to disrupt entrenched patterns. Whether you choose to rebuild with your current partner or reclaim your dignity while planning your exit, professional guidance makes all the difference. The journey toward healing begins with naming the pattern for what it is—not to label your partner permanently, but to identify behaviors that must change if the relationship is to survive. The question isn’t whether these behaviors are destructive—they absolutely are—but whether both partners are willing to do the difficult work of transformation. That answer determines whether hope becomes reality or remains merely wishful thinking.