Episode 26. No More Secrets: How to Sensitively Share Them With Your Partner
In this episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Ellen Drews, a compassionate expert who specializes in helping women impacted by their partner's sexual addiction. Ellen's journey started when she encountered women in the midst of betrayal trauma, feeling like their lives were unraveling. She also worked with women struggling with their own problematic behaviors and couples affected by secret violations in their relationships. Her heartfelt approach and deep understanding of the struggles these individuals face make her a guiding light in their path to healing.
Ellen's journey is not just about professional expertise, but a deep connection to the human experience, as she walks alongside individuals and couples, offering them hope and support in their darkest moments.
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Welcome to Marriage IQ, the podcast for the intelligent spouse. I'm doctor Heidi Hastings. And I'm Dr. Heidi Hastings. We are two doctors, two researchers, two spouses, two lovers, and two incredibly different human beings coming together for one purpose, to transform the stinky parts of your marriage into scintillating ones, using intelligence mixed with a little fun.00:00:35
Hello, lovers, and welcome back to Marriage IQ. Today we have a really special guest joining us. Back in episode six, we talked about integrity as the bedrock of our four cornerstones of a scintillating identity, intentionality, insight, and intimacy. And when we live a life of integrity, which includes honesty, reliability, and morality, it acts as a foundation for building trust in a relationship. Our guest today is an expert in nurturing and rebuilding trust.00:01:10
Please join us in welcoming Geoff Steurer, a licensed marriage and family therapist. He specializes in working with couples who want to rebuild their relationships in the aftermath of sexual betrayal. He's the co author of Love you hate the porn, healing a relationship damaged by virtual infidelity. He's also the co host of the podcast from Crisis to connection with his wife Jody, and he's the creator of Courageous together. It's an online couple's betrayal recovery program.00:01:44
Geoff has been married to his wife Jody since 1996, and they are the parents of four children. Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today, Geoff. Oh, yeah, you bet. It's an honor. Thanks for having me.00:01:57
From a more personal story, I hope you're okay with me sharing this. About three or four years ago, I was reading one of the books that Geoff had co authored while I was on a flight, and I was about to start my doctoral dissertation, and I had a lot of angst about the direction that I should go. So I found Geoff's email because I really liked some of the things that he was saying. I reached out and asked if I could chat with him by coincidence, or maybe not coincidence. I was headed to the city where he lives, and he answered my email right away and said, sure, come on over to our house right now.00:02:32
We're just sitting down for homemade tomato soup and bread. Do you remember that? Yep, I do. Yep. So I had a really wonderful visit with both Geoff and Jody.00:02:41
And, Geoff, you were so great at answering a lot of questions that I had and giving me great insight, as well as giving me the courage that I needed to move forward with this. And so I'm just really grateful for you. Oh, well, that's a treat for me. Cause I love not only the direction you've gone with this, but what you're producing and now sharing with the world, and it's just tell ya, it's just really satisfying to see the growth and the movement and the contributions and the friendship. It's fantastic, right?00:03:10
We run into each other every once in a while in odd places, and it's really great. Geoff. As you know, Scott and I've taken my research findings on women who've experienced sexual betrayal, whether it be virtual or emotional, maybe even physical, and tried to reverse engineer that to produce protective factors to help marriages before crises hit. One of the big findings in my research was the importance of trust and integrity. Can you tell us from your experience, like I said, you've become an expert in this area.00:03:44
Why is trust so important in marriages? We talk about trust a lot in this work because most people sort of instinctively sense what trust is. It's sort of like you know it when you feel it. But sometimes it's hard to quantify what makes somebody trustworthy versus somebody else. But at the core, we need to be able to count on, I would just say something, not moving out of place.00:04:09
You know, we trust that the handle on the roller coaster isn't going to break loose. Right. We trust that our brakes are going to work correctly or that the stoplight will change correctly. We trust so many things every single day that we don't even think about, but they make life ordered and stable. And so we have a sense of what we can and can't trust.00:04:33
But in relationships, that trust is really about is who you say you are, what you really are, who you are. Can I count on you to be there for me? Are you reliable? Are you dependable? Is my reality aligned with my actual lived experience with you?00:04:50
And when all of that is in place, then we're actually now free to roam. We're actually free to relax. We're actually free to create and connect and engage. But when trust is not there, when we don't know if this thing's going to break loose or something's going to change or shift, or if what we're even experiencing isn't even real, all of our attention and focus and energy closes in on trying to figure out how to get that trust. So the consequences of broken trust, I think, are even very difficult to measure because it's basically, it traps us in a very narrow focus and diminishes our ability to connect, create, and just grow and expand because we're just trying to find our reality.00:05:38
We see this with children who come from broken or stressed out homes. They're worse students they perform more poorly because their brains are figure out safety and stability versus children who come from more stable, intact homes where they're just free to explore and take risks and be open and learn and grow. And to me, that is why we have to talk about trust and get that foundational piece in place so that we can just thrive as humans without it. We can't. We really can't.00:06:08
Yeah, that's not really a topic when we're teenagers or when we're in early marriage that we even think about. We just automatically make some assumptions. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think anyone really gives us a manual on relationships, raising children.00:06:33
I really liked what you said, though, about feeling safe as a child, at least in a home where there's a lot of trust. I think a lot of people desire that they just don't know how to get there. Oh, yeah. And we're grateful for people like you who have a formal system to kind of help move toward that. Yeah.00:06:55
And I think that's good. Yeah. Well, one thing, one thing you said, like, in the dating thing, you know, I look back on my own dating experience with my wife, and we had a courtship experience that I don't recommend to my own children, which was, you know, we met and married in less than four months and. Yeah. Yeah, right.00:07:13
I mean, it was really, it was really a rollercoaster. But we look back on it and thought, you know what, part of why I'm probably so good at the trust thing is because I had to learn the hard way and, you know, I've broken my wife's trust in her heart so many times just with the messiness of learning and starting over and trying again and trying to get it right. And I'm like, nobody gets a pass on building trust with somebody. Nobody gets a free pass where you aren't going to have to learn some of these lessons and step on each other's toes and figure things out. But in the courtship phase, I think so much of what we maybe think of as trust is similarities.00:07:49
Well, you go to this church. I go to this church. So I can trust that. Or your family grew up here. I grew up over here.00:07:55
So, like, that makes sense to me. I trust that. And really, the deeper sort of trust work only happens over time. You can't know that in four months. In our case, you can trust to a certain level, but there are so many other patterns over time that you just have to experience.00:08:13
And if they don't line up, then you do the work to line them up and hopefully the person who's broken the trust is willing to engage. I remember Doctor John Van Epp, he wrote a book, how to avoid marrying a jerk. I remember hearing him speak one time, how to avoid what? Marrying a jerk. It's a great book that catches my attention.00:08:32
Geoff. Yeah. So he came up with this relationship attachment model and people always ask him, well, what's a jerk? You know? And he says, a jerk is someone who's not open to changing.00:08:41
Ah. And I thought, okay, right. So if you're willing to change and open to change, and I would add a. Become a trustworthy person or do the things that build trust, then you're probably going to become a safe person. And you can become a safe person even if you've not been a safe person, thankfully.00:09:00
And if somebody's willing to take a risk on you or, or you're willing to take a risk on someone. And we do this as humans, we do tend to give people chances and we try and work through it. And healthy marriage is, in my view, are made up of people really carefully trying to build trust over the years. I think people that have married a really long time have a lot of just unspoken trust and security because there's been so many patterns that have stayed in place. They just know and they don't even have to look at it or think about it.00:09:33
Kind of like, again, like we drive our car, we don't think about the brakes, they just work. You just know they're going to work. But if you've ever had your brakes go out and you're going to think about breaks every time you push them. Right. For at least a while.00:09:44
Until there's a proven. Until there's a track record. Exactly. Yep. Yeah.00:09:48
Yeah. That makes me think about my own research. When you were talking about what trust is built on. So my own research of religious women who had been betrayed, I remember one woman said her husband had, for the first ten years of their marriage, traveled extensively, sometimes for a month at a time. And when he'd come home and he wasn't really interested in intimacy with her, she didn't even give it a second thought.00:10:17
She just assumed, he's a good guy, I can trust him. He goes to my same church with me when he's home and just made assumptions on that. So you talked a little bit about this, but one thing that she said was, I never questioned him. I just made assumptions that I could trust him. Do you have recommendations on what better criteria we can base trust on, feelings of trust on.00:10:45
Besides, as you said, just practicing over and over, correcting when we do things wrong. Are there any other criteria? I think you have to ask good questions if we're talking about a premarital process or a dating or courtship process, I think that there's a lot of banks of questions or groups of questions you can ask to start conversations and exploring and understanding how somebody thinks or feels about a variety of different areas. And you can just even google these kinds of things. I know that there's hundreds of them out there and there's books written on it.00:11:20
I think formally starting to ask these questions and not only just the content of what the person may say, but how they respond to it. Do they shut you down? Do they get defensive again? Are they open to being influenced and changing and moving and dancing with you? I think trusting someone again is really about over time.00:11:41
Is this person going to be kind? Are they going to be open? Are they going to stay connected? Are they going to attune and pay attention? These are the things that healthy relationships are built on, respect.00:11:53
And you can't know those things without having some of these more serious and challenging conversations. I don't know how you can build trust without talking or asking questions. You can observe a lot of things, but again, you can observe, like in your case, that you can observe someone going to your same church. But what if you had a conversation with that same person about their feelings, about their faith, or understood these kinds of things. Now, admittedly, I see there's a lot of betrayed partners.00:12:24
You can go through life and live parallel to somebody and still be totally betrayed because the other person did not want you to know. And that's control, that's coercion, that's manipulation and abusive. And that is never the fault of the betrayed partner, that somehow they didn't detect it or they trusted too much. That is not a failure of trusting someone. That is a failure of integrity on the person who broke the trust.00:12:53
And that's their responsibility to. And that's a really hard one to overcome. Because when somebody has done that good of a job, if you will, of covering up the truth and they look normal and healthy and integrated and they're religious and they're a good parent and all these other things, and they've got this secret life, it's hard to rebuild trust because it's not like they've gone from this monster into this really nice person. They've been a nice person this whole time. So I just mostly say that as a side note, to let betrayed partners know, if you were totally betrayed out of the blue like that.00:13:30
It's not because you didn't see something, they didn't want you to see it, and they did a really effective job of covering it up. But to answer your question around, what do you look for? I think you have to engage in conversations and then observe and pass through enough experiences where you're in different contexts. Some people even say, as a rule of thumb, it's good to pass through even like, a year of, like, holidays and family gatherings and experiences, and seeing how this person reacts and processing and talking and seeing if they can be influenced. Those kinds of things are hard to hide over time, right?00:14:08
So over 20 years of marriage, are there different types of things to do to build trust at that point, or different kinds of conversations to have, or the same types of things? If this is a couple listening who 20, 30, 40 years into marriage, hasn't really had these kinds of discussions, or maybe they don't know whether to trust or not trust, what do you say to those people? If there's a relationship? Like there's not been a major breach of trust, where it's just a couple who wants to increase their connection, their security with each other, then I would just say, continue to spend time together, talking about things that are honest, how you experience the other person, what you're experiencing, and just reflect that and allow your partner to respond to those things authentically instead of deciding that they can't handle it, or deciding that you shouldn't talk about that. And I'm not talking about just being rude or critical.00:15:10
I'm talking about sincerely saying, hey, this kind of a thing matters to me, or this thing really gets in the way of me feeling close to you, or I wonder if we could improve this area. Because a safe, trusting person is someone who's confrontable. Hey, that's good. It's someone who can take a feedback, and they can care about the impact they're having on you. That's a safe person.00:15:35
And when that person, over time, continues to say, huh, I hadn't thought about that, or, I'm curious about that, tell me more. Or there's an energy of openness, and John Gottman calls it accepting influence. Where there's. There's an energy of what you're feeling and thinking impacts me, it changes me. It shifts the way I see myself and others and you.00:15:58
And that's how a couple is going to deepen their trust for each other, because it's like, wow, you're really careful with my heart. You're careful with my thoughts and feelings. So maybe I'll pause there for a second. That's what I would say to a couple who's dealing with just garden variety day to day life and wanting to deepen their own connection and deepen their trust for each other. It's going to come through that type of honesty and what I would just say.00:16:26
Sometimes this can be viewed as a four letter word, but I don't think it is, which is really confrontation, confronting things that perhaps are easier just to avoid. Yeah, I really like that I'm just sitting here thinking about over the course of a lifetime, we all change. Yeah. And we all like, I wasn't the same person I was five years ago, ten years ago. Oh, yeah.00:16:53
Or even 28 years ago when we first got married. It's like, this is something that I think we have to continually work at. I trust my wife implicitly. However, she's a human, like me, and she's not the same person as she was when we first got married. And it's something that I'd like to think that I can put on cruise control, and largely, I can.00:17:28
I got really, really lucky by marrying someone who just wants to be married to me. I know it's shocking, but she doesn't want to be married to anyone else or be interested in anyone else. And that's really comforting to me. I know, though, that, like, just by being humans and the human nature, that life has a way of throwing curveballs. Yes.00:18:00
And I like what you were saying about just keeping this overall, this mentality in a relationship of openness. And I, as you mentioned, curiosity, being vulnerable with each other and not shying away from potential conflict in healthy ways. And, yeah, I really like that if we go back into the physical realm, you know, if I don't stress test something because I don't think it can handle it, I'm gonna go easy on it all the time because I don't have the confidence that it can handle it. It can be, you know, a board on the floor or something where I just, instead of confronting that and saying what needs to happen so that this can be stronger, because I think what happens in a marriage if you feel like you're sort of drifting apart or you're starting to, like, become more avoidant, to me, there's a lot of trust issues there. There's a trust issue of, I don't think you can take it.00:19:00
I don't think you can take my internal reality. I don't think that what I think or feel is something you can handle. Tolerate, care about. And the only way to really know that and then trust it and deepen that trust and intimacy is to stress test it, is to bring it up and talk about it. And let's say that it goes poorly, well, then you've discovered a compromised area.00:19:22
You've discovered a vulnerability that needs to now be addressed. And I think couples live way beneath their privilege. Going into, like you said, you could set a lot of things on autopilot and maybe some things, it doesn't matter. But in areas where you're avoiding topics or you're scared to bring it up, and even though maybe you're not fighting all the time and things appear peaceful on the surface, there could be an underlying mistrust that your partner can really handle your internal reality, that maybe they aren't somebody you could bring something really big to, that you might have to bypass them. And to me, that's living beneath your privilege.00:20:00
Going against the design of what I think marriage is for. That's awesome. I like that we think of our couples councils that we recommend having every week. That would be a good place to be talking about these kinds of ideas, these kinds of concerns, these kinds of vulnerabilities over and over. And if it doesn't go well the first time, come back at it again, not from a place of contention where we think our partner is bad, but from a place of we see this differently.00:20:34
Let's keep talking about it. Yeah. Heidi, I don't think you have to worry about me just pulling the rug over a problem. No. I'm faulted way too far on the other side, which is a blessing.00:20:51
Well. And occurs sometimes. I mean, sometimes it's probably good to just let things roll for a while. And I'm still learning about that. You know, that's something I'm still learning about.00:21:06
But what comes up for me with that is one element of trust is him showing up all the time. Right. I know. Whether he says things right or doesn't say things right, he's showing up all the time. I know I can count on him.00:21:22
That's a good point. And that talk about showing up is like 50% of the solution, right? Oh, yeah. So that's a good point. Even if I did nothing else but just show up.00:21:35
Yep. Show up. Invested. Right. Show up.00:21:39
Wanting my best, having my best interest at heart. Yes. Investment is on top of showing up. Right. And showing up.00:21:46
And by doing what you say you're going to do. Yeah. Those are all other ways to build trust, right? Absolutely. Yeah.00:21:54
Sue Johnson in her research with emotionally focused couples therapy. She broke it down into, you know, we trust through our partner being accessible to us, which means they're easy to get to. So they're around proximity, responsiveness, which is kind of what you're talking about, which is like, okay, so I say this, and now you respond back. That's the kind of call and response or reciprocity and then engagement, which is the long term sense of, will you be there for me? Can I count on you coming back?00:22:20
So, you know, in a more concrete example, if a partner brings something up and says, this is really important to me, then the accessibility would be somebody puts down what they're doing and is right there, and they're responding. They're engaged with it. But then let's say it's not a good time or they need to come back to it. They can trust that. They'll come back and circle.00:22:45
They'll think about it. It'll be important to them. That pattern of call and response. I call, you respond. That's how babies form attachments, and attachments are based on trust.00:22:57
That's how we do that thousands of times with little babies who are pre verbal. And they get it. They see that we keep picking them up, we keep showing up, we're earnest and we're messy. And truly, in most, I mean, parent child, mother infant relationships, we get it wrong more than we get it right. It's oftentimes through the process of trying to get it right that we build the trust and the security.00:23:21
So building trust isn't doing everything perfectly. It's just the willingness to keep trying to do it perfectly and get it tuned in, get it dialed in, and it builds a lot of goodwill and security because you're like, this person's going to stay with me, they're going to keep trying. And thankfully it has. It's that way. I'm glad it's not based on getting it right every time because I'd be up a creek.00:23:43
I really. I like that you said that builds trust. When you see your partner, when they mess up, they get it wrong and they're trying so hard. Yeah. To get it right.00:23:54
You're like, oh, man, I got to give some space for this person because person cares. I see what they're going through, like, as opposed to hiding it or nothing to see here, blaming, deflecting. Now, I recognize, of course, there are some blinds that just can't be crossed again. I mean, if I'm trying not to cheat and I'm just constantly having affairs and I'm trying to not do it. I mean, most people aren't going to be able to tolerate that very long and need to protect themselves.00:24:24
There are some behaviors that fall in the realm of abuse, addictions, affairs, abandonment, things like that, that just are so destructive even once that staying with somebody while they're trying to unlearn that, um, for a lot of people, just. That can be really hard. Yeah, it's. That's a. That's kind of another category.00:24:44
I'm talking about just all the other stuff that drives us crazy about our partner and even about ourselves. That stuff that we wrestle with. What does Neil Jacobson call it? Like, a set of unresolvable problems that we'll grapple with for the rest of our lives. They're just things that are part of being human.00:25:01
Two imperfect people, two different people trying to get it right. A lot of the trust comes from being open, caring about how you affect your partner, being respectful, trying again, apologizing, being sincere, charting your progress. I mean, that builds a lot of resilience in marriages versus just avoiding or giving up or blaming. So I'm very optimistic about, you know, what's possible in rebuilding trust. And again, I'm very frank with people.00:25:32
Look, I understand a lot of this stuff because I've had to learn it. We just didn't have time in our courtship to really build a lot of deep trust, so we had to do it while the plane was in the air, and it's not easy. Yeah. So the bulk of your professional work is on rebuilding trust when there's been specifically sexual betrayal? Yeah, those kind of four big ones I listed.00:25:56
That's the bulk of where people are coming in and getting therapy. They're coming in because it's really tough. Yeah. So can you share with us some of the most important things that you've learned about how to effectively rebuild trust in those circumstances? I think the tendency for helping professionals, loved ones, church leaders, other people that are trying to support couple that's dealing with a major betrayal is that they oftentimes will do what we would call mutualize it, meaning that they put equal responsibility on both people for the problem.00:26:32
I think that's one of the most damaging things that can happen for a couple, is to mutualize, because essentially what that says is that the betrayed partner now carries responsibility for creating this betrayal, which is cruel and not only untrue, but just. It's cruel. It's just. It just is. So it's like, let's add insult to injury now and say that you created your own betrayal.00:26:54
It's just not true. So you have to get out of the mutualizing and put the responsibility square on the person who broke the trust. There is a responsibility for the person who broke the trust, who faced that reality, to have accountability, to then have compassion for the impact they've had and clearly start changing and making things look different. And then the care for the betrayed partner is to help them clarify what they need, have self compassion, take care of themselves, regulate their emotions, get support. And that process early on is probably like a cast for a broken bone.00:27:34
It's not going to be a permanent way of doing things. The couple's not going to be in this one up, one down type dynamic. But there is a need to restore that power difference. If I've been keeping secrets from my wife, if I've been living a secret life, I'm in the one up power position. I have information she doesn't have.00:27:54
And then I did get discovered, and all of a sudden now it's basically revealed that this has been a very unfair relationship. So the person who's broken the trust has a responsibility to restore that balance of power, which is to be an open book and to acknowledge and admit that they have done tremendous damage to this person. I find that couples that struggle to heal, it's when the person who's broken the trust tries to mutualize this and say, well, I'm not the only imperfect one. You've done things to hurt me, too. Or let's just do marriage counseling.00:28:30
Let's just work on our communication. We're just terrible communicators. Or they'll try and find something that pulls in equal responsibility for the other person. Couples that heal, there's been a prolonged period of time where the person who's broken the trust stays in that position of contrition, of accountability, of rebuilding the safety and the trust long enough to where the person who has been betrayed can move over. And even though it may feel risky, it's not as big of a risk as it could be if the other person hadn't done that work.00:29:05
So it's like they've created conditions where it's easier for the betrayed partner to say, I'll put my life back in your hands. Slowly I'll start to give you another chance. There's honestly no other way to do that. If you mutualize it or you put it on the couple relationship or do nothing, then the couple's going to just limp along forever, if they even survive. I hear some betrayers say it's been six months.00:29:33
I've been trying so hard for six months. Why can't she get over this now? What kind of a timeframe do you usually see? Or is there one or is it different for everyone? There's definitely not a timeframe.00:29:46
And I find that the people who are measuring the time are generally going to extend the time and the willingness is. I love how Doctor Mark Lazer put it once. He said, are you willing to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes? Like that kind of mindset, throws out the calendars, throws out the comparisons, gets rid of the scorecards. And again, because that comment, it's been six months, that's the mutualizing.00:30:13
That's the sense of like, hey, you've got a responsibility in this too. But I'm telling you, if I'm really truly a safe person and I'm living in a way that promotes safety and I'm tuning in and I'm curious and I'm doing all the things, more often than not my betrayed partner is going to come over to me and want relationship because we're wired for relationship. This was never plan a for the betrayed partner so that they want to restore back what was taken from them. And if you're offering them that, you won't have to demand that they trust you. If you're having to demand that your partner trusts you, you're probably in most cases not trustworthy.00:30:55
Now are there some exceptions where a betrayed partner is so frozen or so stuck? Absolutely. And that happens where couples can go on for years and generally at that point, this is where you have to start asking some really good questions to the betrayed partner to understand their own suffering. Because they are suffering. Right.00:31:16
Right. There's reasons that they're probably stuck. Pre existing traumas. I mean, some of your research points to some of the belief systems and other things like that that can keep somebody stuck and make trust difficult to rebuild. And, you know, you would hope that a betrayed partner could open up to their own experience and understand how they're moving through the healing process.00:31:36
But in most cases, again on a bell curve, in most cases, the majority are going to heal and restore trust within a year or two. That's pretty typical if we're going to put a time frame on it, but it's a lot longer than six months, it's a lot longer than a few weeks. And these patterns generally were created over years anyway and often predated the marriage. And so it's going to take a long time to become a new creature, a new person, new ways of thinking and seeing and experiencing the world, learning how to be connected, learning how to do relationship, getting rid of the competing attachments. There's just a lot of pieces that have to happen in the process of rebuilding trust that go beyond just not doing the one thing you were busted for.00:32:27
That's really great. Yeah. I was just sitting here thinking, like, I. I can think of. Well, I guess typically a guy who for years can live a double life, right.00:32:42
And be a loving husband outwardly and have all these behaviors that appear trustworthy, and then when it comes crashing down and he never admits to it that she finds out something. I mean, I just don't see how that can be unlearned very quickly. Right. Like, those are behaviors for years that he's done, that she trusted. And gonna take a long time for both of them, too.00:33:15
Yeah. For her to be able to change, to look at those same behaviors now with a different lens and maybe cross check and make sure he's doing them for the right reasons and that he's invested emotionally in this whole thing, because anyone can do anything, as we know very well, and not be emotionally invested. It's a totally different outcome. To your point, Scott, I find that when somebody is really serious about rebuilding trust, they are not putting any pressure on the betrayed partner. They're not trying to hurry them up.00:33:59
They are deep in their compassion. They're deep in their accountability. They'll say things like, now, of course you'd be hesitant about me going to that whatever thing or whatever because of what I did. It makes perfect sense. Of course you would feel that way.00:34:16
They're the ones holding the context of the betrayal in their hearts. They're the ones that are coming in contact with it on a regular basis instead of making their partner do it. If it's always just like, hey, I've moved on, and I'm great, and I'm a good person. And so many people think I'm a great person. Why don't you think I'm a good person?00:34:33
Then the betrayed partner has to dig up the betrayal, which is usually right on the surface anyway, but they have to come in contact with it and then present it and almost build a case for why they're not crazy. And in some ways, that's a form of gaslighting for the person who's broken the trust to act like there shouldn't be any triggers anywhere after a certain point. And it's crazy making, because then the betrayed partner's like, don't you remember that you live this secret life for x amount of years. So the. The ability to stain compassion and basically look at it from a place of everything that my partner who's been betrayed by me feels is rooted in some kind of truth, probably somewhere.00:35:16
And it's their job to find the connection. It's their job. The burden of proof is on them to look at it and say, on the betrayed, on the unfaithful partner to prove to themselves, why would my partner feel this way? Oh, it's because of something I did. That kind of attitude, extended out over years, will more often than not rebuild trust.00:35:35
I mean, it just will, because they're the ones that are holding that line. And it's going to make it less likely that they'll mess up again. Richard Rohrer talks about male initiation, and he writes a lot about this. And our culture doesn't have a lot of great rites of passage for men, initiating boys into manhood. But he says that cross culturally, throughout history, rites of passage, initiation for men has always involved some level of solitude or isolation, exile and sacrifice or pain.00:36:16
And I think about when a guy's rebuilding trust, if he can embrace that space that now exists between him and his partner and the pain and hold those places, he will initiate himself into a new person. Because that's what it rites, the passage, are about. They're about moving from immaturity to maturity. And someone who's kept a secret life is extremely immature, and they're basically acting like a boy. And this willingness to move from a childish or immature response into a mature manhood type response, that rite of passage, or that initiation, will come through the trust building process, what it requires, which is often distance and pain.00:37:04
And that's the one thing most guys fight against. Wow. I love just that vision of seeing it as a rite of passage. Yeah, it's an opportunity for guys to grow up and most guys, you know, they want to bypass it, which is what children do. And so I want men to see the bigger vision of this, which is, you know, you.00:37:28
You need to be someone different. She's not going to feel safe with the previous version of you. Not going to happen. You tell me that I always acting like a boy. His humor is like a twelve year old.00:37:42
Have I not gone through that solitude yet? Sounds like there's a rite of passage coming for you. I can book you a ticket. One way ticket to Antarctica, right? I don't know.00:37:56
That's awesome. This has been so great. You can see now why he's the expert on trust. Yeah, that's great. I love it.00:38:05
It's just some really good, practical information for a lot of people. Right. So, Geoff, I know a lot of people listening to this are probably going to want to know where they can learn more. Tell us. Besides the books that we talked about in the beginning, where can they find you?00:38:21
The quickest access is just my podcast. I'm also a podcaster. My wife and I do a podcast called from crisis to connection, and so you can find us there. And also I have a couples recovery community program called Courageous Together. And you can find that@courageoustogetherprogram.com.00:38:42
and that's, that's a couples recovery process that takes couples from the crisis all the way through long term healing and has them work their separate paths. So it's an online course, and couples can work with me, and they're, I'm in there coaching and supporting weekly calls and in the forum and just giving couples a lot of customized support and guidance in that process. And then, yes, I do work with couples in my state of Utah here, where I'm licensed as a marriage and family therapist. So there's lots of ways I can help people all over the world who want help with these very complicated things. Yeah, it's a courageous together program.com.00:39:21
right. Courageous together is all three pieces, his recovery, her recovery in the couple, all together in one process with an app and a community and calls and support to help them navigate this process. That's great. Yeah. Well, thank you again so much for taking your time to be with us on marriage IQ and for the wonderful information that you're able to share on trust building.00:39:46
Thanks for having me. And remember, the intelligent spouse knows that to change from a stinky to a scintillating marriage first requires a change in themselves. Thank you all for tuning into Marriage IQ. We hope today's episode has sparked some valuable insights. If you get the chance, we'd love to have you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.00:40:11
It really helps us get the word out about marriage IQ, and we appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. Keep exploring and we'll catch you next time on another exciting episode of marriage IQ.
