Reddit reviews Why Good People Do Bad Things: How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy

I cheated once with a girlfriend I genuinely loved. /u/RunAMuckGirl has a good checklist.

But to supply a bit details on what I discovered in the period where I tried (and partly failed) to rebuild that trust I learned a lot.

Firstly, I knew that I had to figure out why it happened, and deeply change that, to even be able to start about continuing a relationship.
Among the things I found was:

• I learned by witnessing the consequences of betrayal that it is one of the worst things possible and started really believing that it is among the worst things to experience.
  
• I found the main culprit that caused it to happen was lying. Or specifically, willingness to lie was what made be allow the betrayal to begin with. One great book i read back then was Lying by Sam Harris - I think I re-read it 10 times.
  
• Another great thing I deeply learned was that I was a composite of good and bad sides, and that there was an ongoing battle concerning whether my good or bad side win. Especially I got this from the book Why do good people do bad things. It's essentially the lesson from Cain and Abel and the hostile brothers.
  
• Another important simple reason was just alcohol. Deciding to drink too much alcohol is itself a decision to possibly betray the people you love the most. So that meant that I stopped doing that.
  
• Lastly is belief. Having a strong moral foundation with some connection to the divine is a great insulator.
  
  Learning and over time integrating these learnings into myself started to give me the faith in myself that if given the opportunity in the future, I wouldn't take it. For my gf the journey is in some ways just as hard, as it is as important to her to learn how to avoid this happening again in the future - whether with me or someone else.
  
  Secondly, I knew I had to start rebuilding trust. And this was incredibly difficult.
  
  
• The most important part in human relationships that last is to build and maintain trust.
  
• You build trust by being open, honest, speak from the heart and sharing your emotions. You also build long-term trust by being reliable, consistent, managing your emotions and displaying loyalty.
  
  In practice this means many open and honest conversations. It means to get through the process of revealing past lies, and getting to a fully honest starting point. And then it means to continue doing that, and being strong enough to keep raising difficult topics and trying to find a new equilibrium.
  
  At some point, my partner did forgive me, but our relationship was over by then. However my efforts did pay off in a way, and today she is a close friend. But more valuable to me personally was that in this process I became a much better person, which is paying dividends now and probably will far in the future.
  
  I think forgiveness is a good thing to do yourself to others, but I don't think you can rely on forgiveness alone as a cop-out for yourself, but instead build yourself into the kind of person who will wouldn't do it again, and the take the investment required to rebuild trust over time.