In one embodiment, a turbo equalizer has an LDPC decoder, a channel detector, and one or more adjustment blocks for recovering an LDPC codeword from a set of input samples. The decoder attempts to recover the codeword from an initial set of channel soft-output values and generates a set of extrinsic soft-output values, each corresponding to a bit of the codeword. If the decoder converges on a trapping set, then the channel detector performs detection on the set of input samples to generate a set of updated channel soft-output values, using the extrinsic soft-output values to improve the detection. The one or more adjustment blocks adjust at least one of (i) the extrinsic soft-output values before the channel detection and (ii) the updated channel soft-output values. Subsequent decoding is then performed on the updated and possibly-adjusted channel soft-output values to attempt to recover the codeword.