#67: Betrayal and Forgiveness, with Bruce Chalmer

Love Is Us: Exploring Relationships and How We Connect

Today I talk with Dr. Bruce Chalmer, a couple therapist and author of a newly published book about betrayal and forgiveness - a book I highly recommend for anyone struggling with forgiveness. Carrying around anger and/or resentment toward someone is a heavy burden to bear that can sap your energy, detract from your relationships, and steal your joy for life. But how can you forgive someone who has betrayed you? Is forgiveness always possible? Listen in to learn more!

Dr. Bruce Chalmer is a psychologist in Vermont who has been working with couples for over thirty years. Through his teaching, consulting, writing, podcast, and videos about relationships, his ideas have helped thousands of couples and their therapists.

Dr. Chalmer is the author of "It's Not About Communication! Why Everything You Know About Couples Therapy is Wrong", published in 2022, and "Reigniting the Spark: Why Stable Relationships Lose Intimacy, and How to Get It Back", published in 2020. His latest book is “Betrayal and Forgiveness: How to Navigate the Turmoil and Learn to Trust Again.” With his wife, educator Judy Alexander, Dr. Chalmer co-hosts the "Couples Therapy in Seven Words" podcast, available at https://ctin7.com.

Books Bruce mentions in today’s episode:

Whole Brain Living, by Jill Bolte Taylor

The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt

Learn more about Bruce:

Book: Betrayal and Forgiveness

Website: https://brucechalmer.com/

Podcast: https://couplestherapyinsevenwords.com/

Learn more about Karin:

Website: https://www.drcalde.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theloveandconnectioncoach/

TRANSCRIPT

Intro:

Karin: This is Love Is Us, Exploring Relationships and How We Connect. I'm your host, Karin Calde. I'll talk with people about how we can strengthen our relationships, explore who we are in those relationships, and experience a greater sense of love and connection with those around us, including ourselves. I have a PhD in clinical Psychology, practiced as a psychologist resident, and after diving into my own healing work, I went back to school and became a coach, helping individuals and couples with their relationships and personal growth. If you want to experience more love in your life and contribute to healing the disconnect so prevalent in our world today, you're in the right place. Welcome to Love Is Us.

Episode:

Karin: Welcome all my listeners. Thank you for being here. Today we are going to be talking about forgiveness. Oof. This can be a really tough topic for a lot of people, no exception to this. But when we hold on to anger and resentment, to that hurt after we've been betrayed, it affects the other areas of our lives and it impacts our relationships, especially when it makes it so that it's hard to trust again, because trust is a fundamental part of our relationships, of healthy relationships, anyway. So I'm really happy to have Bruce Chalmer back. I had him on about a year ago, and he has got so much experience working with couples, and I love learning from him. I read his recent book that he just published. It's called betrayal and how to navigate the turmoil and learn to trust again. And I can say with 100% integrity that this really is a book, and I highly recommend that you read it if you are going through something like this. So I'm excited to have him on. This is a really rich conversation with great information. And again, I'm glad you're here. Here we go. Bruce, welcome back.

[02:18] Bruce: I'm delighted to be back. Thanks for having me on your program.

[02:21] Karin: Yeah, it's really great to have you back. Of course, you were on my show, I don't know, around a year ago or so, and you were talking about communication and couples. And then you had contacted me a few months ago about this new book that you have out, betrayal and how to navigate the turmoil and learn to trust again.

[02:43] Bruce: Yes, indeed.

[02:44] Karin: And you would ask me to read it, and I eagerly said yes and really enjoyed it. I thought it was just very clear, easy to understand and digest, and I really appreciated it.

[02:56] Bruce: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the really nice blurb that you wrote that appears in the book, actually on the praise pages in the beginning. You're in there. So thank you for that.

[03:06] Karin: I'm famous.

[03:08] Bruce: You are. Absolutely. And actually, as of the time, we happen to be recording this on the day after it is the official release. So now it's out there now. So you're getting more and more famous, at least I hope so.

[03:22] Karin: Excellent. So we're talking about forgiveness today. And there was a time when I worked in research down at Stanford, and I worked in doctor David Spiegel's laboratory. And so that name is probably not familiar to most people, but he's pretty well known in his field. He does a lot with hypnosis and altered states of consciousness in terms of dissociation. But also, he did this really famous study about how social support can extend your life, especially with a diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer. So that's what we were studying. But anyway, he would have these really big people come in, like, I got to meet Bessel van der Kolk and stuff like that. But one of the people he had come in worked just locally at Stanford, and I think he was kind of new at this time, and his name was Fred Luskin, and he came to talk to us about forgiveness. And I remember David Spiegel going, well, that's. And I hope that my memory is right. I hope I'm saying this accurately, but he kind of had enough of it. He was like, you know, I've worked with all these women who have had these terrible things done to them, and I am certainly not going to ask them to forgive. And I think that influenced me at the time. I was pretty young, but also, I don't think that I quite got it. And I was left with the question for a long time afterwards, like, what really is forgiveness and what is it not? And so maybe we can start there. Maybe you can talk to us about what it is and what it's not.

[05:18] Bruce: Yeah. In writing a book, betrayal and forgiveness, clearly, I am more than implying, I'm saying very explicitly, forgiveness is a really important part of healing from betrayal. But, of course, what we mean by forgiveness, it really depends on how you're using that term. And I wrote a fair amount in the book about what, at least the way I use the word what forgiveness is not. And I think there are. I suppose I could boil it down. There's two different ways of understanding the word forgiveness, and I go with one of them. And let me. Let me give you the one that I don't go with. A lot of times when someone says, okay, I forgive someone who hurt me, what it means is they've restored their relationship with them. So if somebody has been, oh, even let's say the case of a married couple and somebody is sexually unfaithful, and the person who was the offended party says, well, I forgave them. Meaning when they say it, they're saying, okay, I restored my relationship with them. We got past it. We're going to continue on with our marriage, or whatever it was. That's one way of understanding what forgiving is. I use the word forgiving in a different way, certainly not that rarer way either. But the way I use the word forgiving is it has almost nothing to do with the person you're forgiving. It's only about yourself. It's an inside job, which is to say, forgiveness is when you give up the preoccupation with the anger, the shock, the trauma stuff, when you've healed from the trauma enough so that you can think about it and be reminded of it and not go into a panic. That's what I mean by forgive. You've let go of that shock reaction. And that doesn't mean that you're going to restore the relationship with someone who betrayed you. You may, but what it means is you can think clearly about it. And that's why I say, well, forgiveness is a necessary part of healing, because you're, before you've forgiven, you're feeling this inner sense of pain. One of the people I quote, and many people when they talk about forgiveness, will quote Ann Lamotte, the novelist, and I think she writes essays as well. And one of her famous quotes, is something to the effect that to not forgive someone is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. And as I point out, yeah, what you need to do is get the poison out of you, and then you can worry about dealing with a rat. And from that perspective, you can forgive. The way I'm defining forgiveness, it's possible, at least in theory, to forgive anything, no matter how heinous it is, no matter whether or not the person who hurts you has any remorse or deserves any kind of forgiveness in the former sense. So forgiveness is something you can do for yourself to get past the panic phase, and then you can think about moving on. It's very different from trust. You can forgive someone you don't trust. You can forgive someone that you would still take to court. You can forgive someone that you would still divorce. I even say, you can forgive someone you would go to war against, even though it's a tragedy to have to go to war. But you might feel like, well, this is the only way that we can defeat some sort of horrible thing that's happening. But you don't have to. You don't have to be in shock over whatever it is that your enemy did to you. You can work with them. That's how people are able to make peace after wars. They're able to have a sense that, okay, I don't have to be angry anymore. I can have a sense of mutual understanding.

[08:45] Karin: And I love that. It's really about the person who had been betrayed. It's really about, primarily about their healing so that they can move on.

[08:54] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And of course, usually if it's something, someone who has an ongoing relationship with someone, they're in a marriage or a couple hood or they're in a member of the family or something like that, usually the person who did the betraying wants to be forgiven if they've acknowledged that they've hurt someone. But that doesn't determine whether the person who was hurt is ready to forgive them. And that's something only the really, only they can determine. And lots of people will urge someone because of the very things I was talking about. It hurts. Before you've forgiven someone, you're carrying around a real painful burden. And forgiveness, you give up that burden. So anybody who loves that person is going to want them to forgive if they can, but that doesn't mean that they're ready to do so. Sometimes we are not ready to forgive. Sometimes we need the anger.

[09:48] Karin: Yeah. And sometimes it takes a lot of time to get there.

[09:51] Bruce: Absolutely.

[09:52] Karin: Yeah.

[09:53] Bruce: Yeah. And appropriately, you know, it does for good reason. We have the anger for good reason, and it takes a while to get over it for good reason, because it's, you know, it's part of our brains trying to protect us.

[10:06] Karin: And I would think then that would also mean that the size of the hurt or perhaps the closeness of the person who betrayed you might determine how long it actually takes.

[10:23] Bruce: If it was someone, you would think that, wouldn't you? And I say that by way of saying I'm often surprised in both directions. It's funny, just earlier today, I was meeting with a couple where, and I think it was my third session with them, so I've known them. I dont think weve been meeting weekly, but ive known them for maybe a month or so. And its amazing to me how far they had come in such a short time from some really painful stuff. And conversely, ive met folks who seem to be harboring really painful grudges from an offhand comment 25 years ago. So it is often surprising to me the nature of the betrayal or, or the closeness of the person, it isn't perfectly correlated with how long it seems to take.

[11:12] Karin: That's super interesting to me.

[11:14] Bruce: Yeah.

[11:15] Karin: And it also makes me wonder if it has something to do with past betrayals that somehow triggers and brings up for people that that could be. I wonder why, if that's sometimes why it can be harder in some circumstances.

[11:29] Bruce: That's a great point. You know, I don't know. It's an interesting possibility. I don't know that anybody's done specific research on that. You know, everybody's been hurt one time or another in their life to one degree or another. If you've lived long enough, you've probably been badly hurt by someone you love again, one way or another, not always the same ways. And so we all have something of a past, probably. If you're over the age of 20, you've had some past of being, having your heart at least bent, if not broken, to use a silly metaphor, that phenomenon that it's based on past betrayals wouldn't be surprising. I wonder, actually, in terms of what you're saying, I wonder if some of this is like generational. Generational trauma can play a role in this kind of thing as well. It's not just what happened to you as an individual, but the things that your culture is carrying as well can also play a part.

[12:23] Karin: Yeah. Yeah, I would believe that, too. And how is it empowering to forgive somebody?

[12:31] Bruce: Well, I'll answer that a bit and expand on it. That it is indeed empowering to forgive somebody in the sense that it relieves you of that burden. In the Anne Lamott sense, it's like using her metaphor. It gets the poison out of you so that you're no longer walking around with the sense that anytime you're reminded of whatever happened, you freak out or descend into panic. So it certainly is empowering in that sense. The reason that I like to define forgiveness as an inside job is precisely that. It's because that's empowering. To define forgiveness as dependent on what someone else does or doesn't do is disempowering. So when somebody says, I can never forgive this person who did this terrible thing for me, and they are, anytime they think about it, there's this clutch in their stomach and they can't be in the same space with them. And it's like it renders parts of the world unholy ground where they can't foot because that person is there. And that's disempowering. It seems to me it's much more empowering if you're able to say, boy, that really sucked, but I can get past it. And here we are. And there's somebody else I quote in the book is Carl Pillimer, who is a sociologist at Cornell who wrote a book a few years ago called Fault Lines, where he talked about family estrangement. And what he found was, it was very relevant to the stuff I was writing about. He found that, I think it was, it was interesting research. I think he was able to estimate about 25% of Americans currently are going through some sort of major estrangement from a close family member. And he's not talking about divorce. He's talking about other kinds of estrangements and that. And it's always painful. Thats one generalization he could make its way. Everybody expressed pain about it. And he found that the people who at least tried to reconcile, which was just a subset of them, but he found a subset that tried to reconcile. And everybody who tried to reconcile was glad they had tried. And not all of them succeeded. Some of them realized, okay, this just isnt going to work, and they kind of had to give up on it. But the ones who succeeded often, and I found this fascinating, the way they succeeded was they gave up on what they thought they needed. They thought for a long time, estrangements. People think, I need the other person to admit what they did. I need them to apologize. I need them to acknowledge the pain that they caused. I need them to understand where I was coming from. The folks who were able to reconcile often gave up on that beforehand. They just said, you know what? It's been in some cases like 25 years in some of his examples, it's been a long time or a short time, whatever. Let's just see where we're at now. And often when they would do that and reestablish contact and the walls would come down amazingly, then the apology would happen in one direction or both directions. Somebody would say, I've been meaning to say, I'm really sorry about that, what happened all those years ago. I really feel bad about how I reacted. And the other person, who's apt to say, you know, I am too, I think we both kind of lost our cool, and there they are, and it's fine. So I find stories like that inspiring. Stories like that are why I would write a book on betrayal and forgiveness.

[15:57] Karin: Yeah, indeed. So you say in your book that you can't go back to how things were. So I love this concept of being able to accept what has happened, has it happened. But also not wanting things to be different. Can you talk to us about that?

[16:17] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. You know, the scenario that pops in my head when you ask about that is the one where there's been infidelity, where there's been an affair. I see it a lot in my practice. And so, you know, a couple comes in and in the first session very often, I did a kind of seat of the pants guests a few years ago. I think it's like 30 or 40% of the couples I work with in the first session are saying, yeah, what they're there for is because there was infidelity. So a lot of people dealing with that. And some folks will come in and usually by the time they get to my office, the person who cheated has admitted to it. Usually that's the case by then. And theyre very sorry. Theyre really upset, theyre sorry, theyre full of guilt, theyre wanting to be forgiven. All totally understandable. The person who was the one who was cheated on is usually feeling really hurt, angry, confused, shocked, all of the above. And sometimes what they will say is especially the person who did the cheating will say, I just want to go back to how things were before. We had a good relationship before. Lets go back to that. And sometimes the partner will agree and sometimes they won't. But what I do point out, as you're asking about, you can't do that because that was the situation that led you into the problem. And in order to do that, you'd have to somehow manage to forget all the pain you just went through. And you can't really do that. I mean, human beings aren't going to do that for good reason. That's another evolutionary protection we remember when we, so if the couple is going to survive as a couple and want to stay together, they're going to have to learn to not to forget about it or go back to how it was, but learn from it, to integrate it. You're going to say, wow. And this is something I have heard numbers of couples say after a considerable amount of work, they'll say something like, wow, that was really painful, but I'm so glad we went through that because look how much better off we are now. So. And, you know, sometimes they'll say that together. Occasionally they'll say that separately. They'll say, well, we, you know, it looks like we, we were heading for a breakup and this is really what precipitated it. So grateful it happened and here we are and we can take care of the kids if we're okay with each other. Again, we can take care of the kids. Or again, sometimes they'll say, well, we're so glad we can stay together and our love for each other is so much cheaper because we've been through this.

[18:47] Karin: Together and it will be different.

[18:50] Bruce: And it will be different. Yeah. Yeah. That's, you know, Esther Perel points that one out. Lots of folks who've written about recovery from affairs. I think Janice Spring points it out. I have an endorsement from her on the front cover of my book and she's a bestselling author, so I'm psyched about that.

[19:07] Karin: Nice.

[19:08] Bruce: Yeah. But lots of folks will point that out. You're going to have a new relationship, not entirely new. You're still the same people, but you're going to have a relationship that has been, you could say, transformed or enriched by going through a crisis together and coming out the other side and having such a better understanding of each other and of yourself or having gone through it.

[19:34] Karin: Great. And the piece, I think that really stood out to me the most in the book was the piece on self forgiveness.

[19:44] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. I talk, as you saw in the book, I talk about how do you go about forgiving when you are ready to forgive? How do you do it? And I have a oversimple, no doubt, over simple way of describing it in three steps. The first step is indeed forgive yourself because pretty much, maybe I'm over generalizing, but pretty much anytime we get hurt, we tend to blame ourselves, at least in part. And that's true even if there's no rational way in which we could be blamed. I know of adults who had been sexually molested as kids at a very young age, like three years old or something, and as adults, they'll still say, I feel bad, I should have stopped. I mean, really, any adult knows, if you've ever seen a three year old, come on, it was an adult doing the molesting. You couldn't possibly stop it. You could possibly understood to stop it. And yet there'll still be this part of us that blames ourselves. And there's a good reason for that. Even though it's painful, even though it's unfair, there's a good reason for it because it gives you some illusion at least of control. Well, if this is because I'm bad, then maybe if I'm not so bad, I won't get hurt so much. And so that tends to be true pretty much universally when we get hurt. The first step, we need to forgive ourselves so that we're not beating ourselves up over what happened. And usually I think that tends to be the hardest part. And what I say is, when you can do that, when you can accept. What do I mean by forgive yourself? It's basically saying, you know what, I did the best I could under the circumstances. And that last part is important. Under the circumstances. Well, what were the circumstances? Well, I knew what I knew, and I didn't know what I didn't know, and I had the understandings I had, and I, you know, I didn't. I didn't know about stuff I now know about. So if I had known those things, I would have done things differently, but I did. And, you know, I. Who knows what else was going on. A confluence of circumstances, when you can recognize that, okay, well, given what was happening, I guess that's the best I could come up with. I just have to accept that as the human condition. That's what it feels like to forgive yourself. Then you don't have to be overwhelmed with self flame. And then I think it's a relatively short step to forgive whoever hurts you, even though it's like, okay, come on, there's clearly blame there. There's clearly moral. You know, there's. I don't. I don't dismiss morality as unimportant. It's very important. And yet I can accord the same understanding to whoever hurt me. I could say, well, I was doing the best I could under the circumstances. I suppose you were, too. I sure wish you had thought differently. I wish you had been oriented differently in terms of whatever biases and prejudices and bad thoughts you had running around. But that's what you had going on, and so you did what you did. And it doesn't mean I can trust you, but I don't have to be angry at you. I can say, well, I guess that was the best you could do at that point. So that's what lets you forgive someone else again. It starts with forgiving yourself. If you can appreciate that idea that you're doing the best you could under the circumstances, it's very hard to extend that.

[23:23] Karin: Yeah. And I think that it might not be obvious to everyone right away. It really might take some digging and some soul searching to really recognize that there's a bit of self blame. It might be. How could I have let that happen?

[23:41] Bruce: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's always something like that going on. And I've talked with so many folks where some horrible thing happens years ago with a woman whose husband committed suicide before I met her, and she was blaming herself horribly, even though there was no. It was one of those very strange circumstances. There was no sign, no sign at all that he was likely to do that. He just was saying, I'm going out to the store, you know, the kind of classic, and went out to the store, never came back. Well, instead of running away, he ended up killing. But she had no clue that this was even possible. And yet she kept saying, I should have gone with it. I should have known. Well, how could you have known? And it was a struggle. I understand. It was a struggle for her to accept that something like that could happen. And actually, that gets to the third step. I mentioned three steps. The first step is forgive yourself. Second step is forgive whoever hurt you. The third step, I give what I claim is sort of a funny name for it. I say, forgive God. And I say, you can think of that even if you don't believe in God. It's not about whether you believe in God as usually described or not. It's about forgiving. The fact that we live in a world where that sort of thing can happen, where you can get hurt so badly and not know it beforehand, not know how to stop. And that's really what faith is about.

[25:07] Karin: Yeah. And that reminds me when I've, especially when I lost my brother a couple years ago, it was, you know, how. How could this. And the world's not supposed to work that way. And so it's like this real, this real shift in how you see, you know, especially if. If you're not particularly religious or don't believe in God, but you probably still have a sense that this is how things are supposed to go.

[25:35] Bruce: Sure.

[25:36] Karin: And so recognizing that piece of it. And. Yeah, like you said, forgiving that this whatever it is that was somehow responsible for making this happen.

[25:49] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. And that forgiveness is trickier, I think, because, again, I use the word God because there's lots of folks that I will be reading this and I work with who are religious again, but you can approach this even from a non religious standpoint, that notion of forgiving God, it's not so simple as to say, well, I guess whatever God was, God was doing the best God could under the circumstances. Well, wait a minute. That is the circumstances that can't be true. It's really about the way I define faith, actually. It's about accepting that reality, even when it's really hard and painful. There's a basic rightness underneath all of it, even though we can't quite understand it all. It's a mindset that reality is essentially right to be what it is. And that's how you get through that. It's like, well, I can't possibly understand it all. I don't have a God's eye view of the universe. I haven't got all the data all the time and all the understanding, but I can accept that this whole business, even death itself, it's baked into the notion of life, and yet that's really sad. It's the basic set to lose your brother. What an awful thing. Sorry to hear that happen. And too young, right? I don't know how old your brother was, but you must have been too young. It's a very sad thing. And yet death itself is part of the nature of life, and somehow we have to accept that that sort of thing can happen, even though it's so painful when it. That mindset is how you get through that kind of stuff.

[27:23] Karin: Why doesn't constant checking work to heal the relationship? So, of course, I'm thinking particularly of situations when there's been a betrayal and the person being betrayed wants to check their partner's phone, ask where they're going, have them check in all of those types of things. Why does that not work?

[27:48] Bruce: Yeah, this is one of those moments where, if I didn't know that Zoom, which is what I use for my telehealth sessions, was hippa compliant, I'd worry that you were eavesdropping on one of my sessions a couple of days ago. But you weren't. I know you weren't. No, because we were just talking about that very thing. It comes up fairly frequently. Yeah. And especially in the context of infidelity. That's the one that's kind of the classic there. It doesn't work because. A couple of reasons. First of all, you can check your partner's iPhone all you like, and they can still cheat. And you know that. And they know that. I'm not saying they want to or you want them to. I'm just saying it doesn't actually protect you. Moreover, what it does is says that, okay, and sometimes people seem to need this for a period of time, but what it establishes is that one of them is the villain and the other is the, you know, the offended party. Well, there's an element of that that's true, but constant checking doesn't reassure you that they're going to be okay. All it does is sets up constant hostility, because if they want to cheat, they can cheat. If they want to hide it, they can probably hide it. And how long are you going to keep on doing that by continuing? It reminds me a little bit of not a little bit reminds me quite a bit of how people who work with folks who have OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, that compulsion to check the partner's phone is very much. I mean, I imagine if you put somebody in a MRI scanner, they would see pretty much the same brain patterns as when somebody's dealing with an OCD compulsion. And giving into it doesn't help. What do they call the gold standard? Treatment for OCD is long exposure ERp.

[29:35] Karin: Exposure.

[29:35] Bruce: Exposure with response prevention.

[29:36] Karin: Response prevention, ERp.

[29:38] Bruce: And you have to be exposed to it and get through it without giving into it enough that your brain starts to learn, oh, that thing that felt so compulsive really isn't as compulsive as I thought.

[29:51] Karin: Right. And the checking actually can feed it and make it worse. Make you want to check even more. Yeah.

[29:58] Bruce: Because it makes you feel like, oh, there's always something. And then what do you do when you find that there's nothing? Well, that rarely makes people feel better because they're still wondering, when's it going to happen? Or am I missing it? Or last time they hit it. Well, are they hiding it again? It just doesn't help. Having said that, I will note how amazingly understandable it is that people want to do that, but it tends not to help in practice. A related phenomenon that tends not to help in practice is, okay, let's establish all sorts of conduct rules. You know, you're not allowed to do any texting after 08:00 p.m. you're not allowed to go out to the bar unless I'm with you. You know, things like that, again, all understandable, but none of them actually help restore trust. Maybe, you know, again, maybe it gets you through while you're getting over the shock or something gets you through a little bit. But eventually you're going to have to decide, and I'm talking to the party who's been cheated on, they're going to have to decide, do you want to risk trusting or don't you?

[31:02] Karin: Right.

[31:03] Bruce: And that is never an easy question.

[31:06] Karin: Right. And it really does take a leap of faith. It's that decision to trust. And it's so hard after you have been betrayed.

[31:17] Bruce: And you know what I find interesting? What? People, just broadly speaking, people who do well, you know, sort of what distinguishes the folks who do well. It's not that they decide that, well, okay, now I know I can trust you because I know you're not going to betray me again. It's not that. It's that I sure hope you're not going to betray me again. I'll be very hurt if you do. But I know now that I won't be destroyed by. I know if that happens, okay, we'll probably split up. It'll suck, but it's probably okay when somebody's there, then they have some options. Then they've got a little bit of room again. That's what it feels like when you're past the trauma part or another way of saying it. That's what it feels like when you forgive. And it's like, okay, well, I don't have to be furious at you every time I think about you. Anyway, I'd like to be able to trust you. I'm willing to give it a shot. And look, you have to trust me, too. And that's another thing I point out in the book. If you want to heal a relationship with someone who is betrayed, if somebody betrays me and I want to heal a relationship with that person, they're also going to have to trust me. Now, I can be saying, well, wait a minute, they're the ones who did the dirt. And I was just reacting. True in terms of justice. But if my reaction was angry, which it is apt to be when you're betrayed or cold or any of whatever those things were, I was essentially treating that other person quite badly, understandably, but nevertheless badly. And they're now they've been hurt by me. And if we actually want to restore a relationship to one where we both feel good about being in it, they're going to have to learn how to trust me as well. And that involves my doing some soul search. How was I part of the context that was. That existed when they did the betrayal. I'm not saying I'm to blame for somebody cheating on me, but I was part of the context. I better look at that. And that's always a delicate one. Again, I go back to infidelity being the classic example there. It's always a delicate one because you don't want to give the impression to the person who was cheated on that they somehow caused it. Well, you weren't giving him enough sex, and so that's why he cheated. That's not a justification. But if the relationship was lacking in intimacy and they were both participating in that and hadn't done anything about it, that's part of the context. It's not an excuse, but it's like if you want to get back to a good or get to a good relationship where that doesn't happen, you're going to have to deal with that.

[33:58] Karin: Some getting to that part about the betrayed and having them talk about and accept that they had a part to play in this in some way, that's really tough stuff. That's tricky. And not, like we said, not something to rush. And yet, if you're going to get to this new place in the relationship, that's rewarding for both people. That needs to be part of the work, too.

[34:27] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. And it is indeed very tricky because it does. It sure seems like a thin line between justifying bad behavior and on the one hand, and saying, no, wait a minute. But you're both involved in your relationship and yeah, you can't do that until people are ready to do that. But when they are, that's the work of restoring trust. That's the work of saying, wow, can we make this relationship better than it was? And both really want to begin. And when it works well, I find it very inspiring because it takes an enormous amount of courage for people to look at that and not completely freak out.

[35:08] Karin: Yeah, yeah. And what role does compassion play in all of this?

[35:14] Bruce: Well, it's kind of key, you know, compassion, you know, I guess I tie that to that concept of faith. You know, one of the things I tell almost every couple I work with in the first session, and I mentioned in the first session that I tell almost every couple of this in the first session, is that I can already tell we're old buddies because I've known you for 27 minutes. So I can already tell neither one of you is crazy. And I don't mean to make fun of serious mental health issues. And look, the reason I say I tell it to almost every couple is that over 30 years, every once in a while I have met a couple where I wouldn't say that because somebody is psychotic, somebody said some kind of serious delusion, but usually not. The folks who come to see me typically aren't crazy, and they're not evil either. And usually they're not cognitively impaired. They're intelligent and they're decent and they mean well and they're not nuts. So that basic sense of validity, that's how you can. I think that attitude itself is one of compassion. It's like, wow, you know, we all got to be the way we are for is the sum total of lots of forces that we can't quite all understand, but they're all valid. They're all part of the deal. It's like, yeah, it's kind of how life works and we have to work. So I think compassion is really central. You know, that for the therapist to show that compassion is critical, I think. And for that to invite the couple to show that to themselves and each other as well, that's another way of saying, yeah, that's what faith is, and that's how they're going to heal.

[36:56] Karin: And then also self compassion and the importance of the betrayer showing themselves some self compassion as well.

[37:06] Bruce: Yeah, yeah. I have a chapter in the book about what if you're the one who did the betraying? And it really does start with that concept. It's like, you know, if you're just stuck in guilt, guilt again, it's appropriate when you've done something, you know, if I do something that is against my moral values and I know it, I. Of course I should feel guilty. It's a sign I have consciousness. But if I get stuck there, it doesn't do the person I hurt any good. It doesn't let me make an actual effective apology. Not to say that apologies are always available or even always necessary or useful, but they can be really helpful helping both parties heal, but only if they're genuine and only if they're not coming from a place of, oh, my God, I'm apologizing so that. So you'll forgive me. So I don't feel so bad. It has to be about, wow, I'm apologizing because I've learned this and I want to express my sorrow to you and in hopes that that'll help you feel better to whatever extent it will, and invite you to tell me about how it affected you so I can understand it more. That's what effective apologies tend to do. And I give some examples in the book about classic non apology apologies.

[38:26] Karin: Right. Yeah. I think that's really important because if you're still beating yourself up and you're so buried in your own shame, then it's going to be really hard for you to reach out to your partner and really understand their pain and acknowledge that, because it would just be too hard. But if you can show yourself some self compassion and recognize that you are a human being and you are a flawed because you are human and you are going to make mistakes, then it's going to be much easier for you to then deal with what's really going on.

[39:08] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. You can actually show up rather than dissociate from yourself, you know? Yeah. And actually be there. And then you can be responsible and accountable and you could address it with some. And it's interesting when someone can get to that because there someone else I was just working with the other day where they're in a situation where, yeah, they made a misjudgment, but it's a man and his wife, and the man misjudged. He didn't tell his wife about something. He should have told her it wasn't anything to do with infidelity or something like that. He should have told her some financial detail. She was shocked to hear about it. A few months later. She considers it a betrayal. And he feels terrible because indeed, had he been asking me beforehand, should I tell my wife about this, I would have said, well, of course he didnt tell her because he didnt want to upset her, which is kind of classic, and it came back to bite him later on. But that phenomenon of if he initially, all he was doing was just apologizing more or less for existing, and that really wasnt doing either one of them any good because when he gets hold of himself, he can say, well, no, youre absolutely right. I should, I should have told you. I feel really bad about that. It was a mistake. It was a misjudgment. There was a context for that which is important in our relationship. The context for him was his wife had on many occasions, just freaked totally over very small things. And so that was the context. And so, again, you could say, well, that doesn't justify it, but it helps you understand it. And if he's apologizing for everything and, you know, any insult she's ever thrown him, if he's taken to heart and apologizing for it, first of all, he's going to have his own resentments. That won't work because he'll come to resent that, and it won't actually help her understand what's going on either.

[41:02] Karin: Yeah. Yeah. So if there's one thing you'd like people to walk away with after listening to this today, what would it be?

[41:10] Bruce: What a great question. Wow. I suppose that, you know, that we're living in fractious times. We're living in the world is, I guess I'm in my seventies now. Could I have said this 50 or 60 years ago? Of course, the world was messed up then, too, but it just feels like there's such polarization going on, such difficulty, people understanding each other when they, when they sense somebody's in whatever the other tribe is. And I guess what I want people to take away from it is that actually it's possible to forgive someone who's doing something that you just initially can't understand. You know, that's what betrayal is. It's based on a relationship. Somebody's done something you can't imagine they would have. You couldn't imagine they would have done. And I think that idea extends out to understanding wherever somebody is in the political spectrum, understanding what somebody on the other side, how they think without thinking them evil. To me, it feels like sacred work to do that. It's all about making the world better.

[42:21] Karin: Yeah. Beautifully said. Yeah. And I usually ask people at this point, what role does love play in the work that you do? But I already asked you that in our last interview.

[42:34] Bruce: Substitute the word love. Well, in the last interview you did and what we were just talking about, about compassion. I mean, love is everything. You know, I think you said that last time, too.

[42:44] Karin: So instead I'd ask, what are some of the books that you love to recommend to people?

[42:52] Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you the ones that tend to come up, because I'll say this in sessions with folks. I'll say, oh, you know, do you know the work? One of the ones that comes up a lot is Jill Bolte Taylor Bolte, spelled b o l t e. I think that's how she pronounces it. She is a neuroscientist who in her, I think it was in her thirties, which is pretty young for this to happen, had a massive left hemisphere hemorrhagic stroke and lost the use of most of her left hemisphere functions for quite a few years and healed up and, you know, got back to being able to do things like give TED talks. And she gave a viral TED talk back in the, I think, what, 2008 or something like that called my stroke of insight. And the reason that I keep mentioning Jill Bolte Taylor to folks is not based on that first book, but she wrote also a book called my stroke of insight. More recently, I think, three, four years ago, she wrote a book called Whole Brain Living, which I love to recommend. First of all, it's a fun read. Her basic thesis is that based on our neuroanatomy, we're all four different people walking around. And she talks about the different brain structures involved, left and right hemisphere and then sort of upper and lower respectively, like midbrain and the cortisol perspective. So you get four different characters and she gives them funny names for herself. I forgot what she called her names. She suggests that we should all give our own four characters funny names, too. I asked my wife about this when I was reading the book. She hadn't, hadn't read the book, actually, but I asked her, hey, I've been reading about these, you know, I explained a little bit about what it was about what would you call your four characters. She immediately said, john, Paul, George and Ringo. And, you know, there's something to that. You know, that idea that we're, we're all multiple people and kind of the Beatles, you know, they put together these four very different personae and they made this amazing whole, you know, we're all different people walking around. So that when somebody says something really nasty, what Jill Bolte Taylor would point out is, oh, that's character two. That's the one that freaks out. That's the left hemisphere limbic, freaking out. And the other parts are available, too, especially if you haven't had a stroke. The other parts are available, too. And you can learn, what she talks about is you can learn to do a brain huddle. You can get the four parts together and kind of, you know, let them take care of each other so that that one that's freaking out doesn't have to freak out by itself. And so, you know, if she has a whole chapter in the book, as I recall, about how these four characters interact in relationships, you get two people's character, two going at it, and it's not going to go well. And so that's one of the books I like to recommend. Another author to recommend, and I've read a couple of his books, is Jonathan Haidt. I think that's how he pronounced it. H a I d t, who? The first book of his that I read, and this must be about 212 years ago or so, was the righteous mind. And he, if you want to understand how so many different people in the world can think so differently about things, you'd never think we could think so differently about, you know, it explains political polarization or fragmentation. It explains cultural differences. He has a really fascinating theory called moral foundation theory that he and some other folks have worked on. And I find it so useful in understanding how a couple can differ and how, you know, something that someone would do, another person would experience as a betrayal when the other person is thinking, well, this is just normal behavior. And so I also like to recommend.

[46:35] Karin: John, that sounds like an interesting one. I might get that. So thank you. And I'll put those in the show notes as well. So you told us about where to find your book, but I also know you have a podcast and a practice. How can people learn more about that?

[46:52] Bruce: So if my website, you know, my name is Bruce Chalmer. If you go to Bruce Chalmer.com, you will find there's a books tab there where you can find all about my books. Bruce Chalmer.com takes you to my practice page. So if you have any interest in seeing me, I do all my work on telehealth at this point. You can do that for Bruce Chalmer.com and our podcast. It's called couples therapy in seven words. And you will find that you can find information there as a link to it from my, my website as well. But you can get there directly by going to CT in seven, the number seven, CTn seven.com therapy, Ctn seven.com. or you can spell out the whole words, couples therapy in seven words. You know, write the whole damn thing out. And that works too. But I grabbed the website CTN seven a few months after we got into it, and that will CTN seven.com and that'll get you any of our podcasts. And I hope people will do that because we have a lot of fun as you do. We have a lot of great guests and have a lot of interesting conversation.

[48:03] Karin: Wonderful. Well, Bruce, it was really wonderful to connect with you and talk about this topic. It's a really good one and I highly recommend people go out and get your book.

[48:15] Bruce: Well, thank you very much. It's been delightful to be on again. Best wishes with your podcast and your practice.

[48:22] Karin: Thank you.

Outro

[47:27] Karin: Thanks for joining us today on love is us. If you like the show, I would so appreciate it if you left me a review. If you have questions and would like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Instagram, where I'm the love and connection coach. Special thanks to Tim Gorman for my music, Aly Shaw for my artwork, and Ross Burdick for tech and editing assistance. Again, I'm so glad you joined us today, because the best way to bring more love into your life and into the world is to be loved. The best way to be loved is to love yourself and those around you. Let's learn and be inspired together.