May 25, 2025
Healing Betrayal: The Path to Trust Again
Send us a text What if everything you thought you knew about couples therapy was wrong? Dr. Bruce Chalmer joins us to turn conventional relationship wisdom on its head with refreshingly practical insights gained from over three decades working with couples in crisis. The heart of our conversation centers on a radical redefinition of forgiveness. "Forgiveness is an inside job," Dr. Chalmer explains, separating the personal healing process from the decision to restore trust. This perspective o...
What if everything you thought you knew about couples therapy was wrong? Dr. Bruce Chalmer joins us to turn conventional relationship wisdom on its head with refreshingly practical insights gained from over three decades working with couples in crisis.
The heart of our conversation centers on a radical redefinition of forgiveness. "Forgiveness is an inside job," Dr. Chalmer explains, separating the personal healing process from the decision to restore trust. This perspective offers newfound power to those who've experienced betrayal, allowing them to heal regardless of whether a relationship continues.
We dive deep into why communication techniques alone can't save struggling relationships. As Dr. Chalmer provocatively states, "The problem isn't that they don't know how to communicate... The problem is what they are communicating." This insight shifts the focus from how couples talk to the fundamental connection between them.
The most fascinating segment explores Dr. Chalmer's framework of "stability and intimacy" as the twin needs all relationships must balance. When couples prioritize stability (comfort and security) at the expense of intimacy (authentic self-expression), they enter what he calls the "death spiral for passion." This pattern explains why seemingly stable partnerships suddenly rupture through infidelity or abrupt endings.
Everything culminates in his elegantly simple seven-word formula: "Be kind, don't panic, and have faith." This mantra, born from years of clinical observation, captures the essence of what makes relationships work. The "faith" component—believing there's meaning even in painful experiences—particularly resonates as a path forward for couples navigating betrayal.
Whether you're healing from relationship trauma, seeking to deepen connection, or simply curious about what makes partnerships thrive, Dr. Chalmer's compassionate wisdom offers fresh perspective on fostering true intimacy while maintaining stability.
Want to be a guest on Living the Dream with Curveball? Send Curtis Jackson a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628631536976x919760049303001600
00:00 - Meet Dr. Bruce Chalmer
08:20 - Betrayal and the True Meaning of Forgiveness
15:04 - Why Communication Isn't the Real Problem
22:48 - Stability and Intimacy: The Two Golden Keys
31:10 - The Death Spiral for Passion
32:50 - Seven Word Formula for Healthy Relationships
WEBVTT
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Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball, if you believe you can achieve.
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Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire.
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Where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire.
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Today, I am joined by psychologist, writer, podcaster and consultant, dr Bruce Chalmer.
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Dr Chalmer has worked with couples for over 30 years and we're going to be talking to him about all that he is doing to help couples and their therapists.
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So, dr Chalmer, thank you so much for joining me today.
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Well, thanks for having me on.
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I'm happy to be here.
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Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself, sure?
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Well, as you said, I'm a psychologist, I live in Vermont, I've lived here for well over 50 years now and I work mostly with couples.
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Now, now I started off doing both couples and individuals, but over the years I've really gotten more and more into working with couples.
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I just find that really inspiring.
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Uh, you know, people come to see me and they're dealing with really hard stuff and I it's.
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It's a great privilege to be kind of admitted into their lives that way and to sit with people and to to see what they're going through, to get that sense of the struggles they're having and, um, you know it's it's difficult, but it's also really, as I say, it's inspiring.
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And I noted over the years, the the more I've done it, the more I've learned from the folks I've worked with, and that's why I've written some books on the subject, because it just seems like I've learned a lot and I wanted to share that with other people.
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Well, what made you want to become a psychologist in the first place?
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You know I had, I think.
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I think this is true of a lot of folks who end up doing what I do.
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I had other careers.
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First I was for a while I was a statistician.
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Actually I worked at the University of Vermont as the resident statistician in their computer center and I had done my master's degree in statistics on a very psychological area, so that kind of got me involved with the folks in the psychology department.
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And then I did a PhD in psychology and it wasn't until I had gone through some difficult stuff in my own life that I really got into the clinical side of things and I decided, wow, this is a really powerful thing, I want to be part of it and I felt like this is something you know.
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It felt more like a calling.
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The other stuff I'd been doing was work I could do and it was fun, I was good at it, but this felt more like a calling.
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And so I got the clinical training and did my internships and that's how I got into being a psychologist.
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Okay.
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Well, let's talk about betrayal.
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You know, when couples are facing betrayal, whether it's one or the other, is forgiveness possible.
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It is possible and, of course, partly it depends on how you define the term forgiveness, and I think I do write about that quite a bit.
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You know there are people use the word forgiveness in at least two different ways and they're all you know.
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They're common ways of using it.
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A lot of times when somebody says, well, I forgive somebody who hurt me, what they mean is, I can get past it, I can restore my relationship, I can trust them again.
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I can just either I mean nobody ever forgets about it.
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Really Forgive and forget is sort of nonsense.
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That's nobody forgets it if they've really been hurt, but they can kind of wipe the slate clean and start over.
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And that's often what people mean by forgive and that's not what I mean by forgive.
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I mean a much different or a much maybe a narrower understanding Forgiveness when I'm talking about it and I didn't make up this phrase, but I really like it Forgiveness is an inside job.
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In other words, I can forgive somebody by letting go of my anger, letting go of my obsession about it, you know, so that I don't have to freak out whenever I think about it.
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And I can do that with somebody that I don't trust.
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I can do that with somebody, I still intend to divorce.
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You know I've met folks who have forgiven people who've been horribly violent to them, and you know they still have a restraining order out on them but they nevertheless can say well, I can get past the anger.
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I don't trust them, but I can still get past the anger.
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Forgiveness is more about healing from the trauma yourself, and the reason I like to define forgiveness that way is, first of all, it means you have the power to forgive, even if the other person doesn't deserve it and you have no intention of restoring the relationship.
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It gives you more power and it also means that if you can do that, if you can heal that way, then you can think more clearly about what you want to do about the relationship.
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Because when you're you know, when you're in a panic, when every time you think about it, you sort of go become really angry or become really panicked or become really upset one way or another, you can't think clearly.
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You can't understand all right.
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Well, what do I want to do about this relationship?
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Think clearly, you can't understand all right.
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Well, what do we want to do about this relationship?
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You really need to get to that place of healing, so that you can then say all right now, let me think about what do we do about this relationship?
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So what I've written about in my most recent book, which is called Betrayal and Forgiveness how to Navigate the Turmoil and Learn to Trust Again, the learning to trust again part, that's not just an inside job, that takes both parties, but it's hard to do that unless there's some level of forgiveness.
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Okay.
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Well, in one of your books you also talk about how relationship problems are almost not due to communication.
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But you know, you hear everybody talk.
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They say communication is communication.
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So you go against that.
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And why is that?
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I do, and it's that particular book.
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It's a pretty snarky title.
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It's not about communication, why everything you know about couples therapy is wrong, which is a pretty snarky title.
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I recognize what I mean by that, of course.
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You know people come in, and it's a large majority of the couples that come in in the first session and they're telling me they need to communicate better, and I think I know what they mean by that.
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You know what they mean is, every time they try to communicate about anything that they disagree even a little bit about, they end up in a big fight or they end up in a deep freeze or, you know, it just doesn't go well.
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And so what they're looking for is give us some tools to communicate better so that, you know, then we won't get into big fights.
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And the reason I say well, it's not really about communication.
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At least for the vast majority of people, it's not really about communication, because the problem isn't that they don't know how to communicate.
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In fact, they are communicating, usually very, very effectively.
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The problem is what they are communicating.
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If what they're communicating you know, if a couple is communicating to each other basically is love and respect and honor and you know just kinship.
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They're communicating the fact that they really experience each other as kin and they have a bond, even if they disagree and they can figure out how to get through it.
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They're communicating that very effectively.
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The problem is, if what they're communicating is disrespect and contempt and anger and mistrust, they're communicating that very effectively too.
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And no matter how many clever techniques we teach and you know there's all kinds of books and all kinds of people who will be happy to teach you active listening, and you know different ways of different procedures.
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For you know, first make sure you understand what the other person said and then say it back to them till they agree that, yes, you've got what I said, and then you can say your part.
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You know, a couple that is functioning well sort of does that.
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They don't do it formally, but they sort of do those things.
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A couple that is functioning well sort of does that.
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They don't do it formally, but they sort of do those things.
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A couple that is not functioning well, it doesn't matter if they do those things, they're still not functioning well.
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You know what I compare it to?
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It's the reason couples that are functioning well more or less follow those communication rules, maybe informally.
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The reason they do that is because they're functioning well.
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They're not functioning well because they do that.
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They are doing that because they function well.
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Just teaching people to follow the communications rules won't make them function well.
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And you know, my favorite, probably pretty silly analogy is if you think about tennis players, you know, like think about.
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The one that comes to my mind is Rafael Nadal.
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He's one of many who do this, and you know, when they're playing tennis at the top level, when they're hitting the ball, they're grunting loudly.
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They're making a big, huge, loud grunt.
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And so if somebody said, well, okay, if you want to learn to be a top tennis player, all you have to learn to do is grunt really loud, because that's what the top tennis players do, well, that wouldn't work very well because the grunting they're not top tennis players because they're grunting.
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They may well be grunting because that's associated with being a top tennis player, but that won't make you a top tennis player.
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It's the same thing.
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Teaching communication rules won't make a couple function better.
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They have to function better in order to follow the rules and then you don't need the rules.
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So that was kind of the whole idea of that book.
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It's not about communication.
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I actually had.
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I have a bunch of other stuff in that book too about.
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You know, if the therapist thinks that rigidly following these rules is going to get people any place, they're probably doing harm, not good, and that I extend that idea pretty broadly.
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You know, if we all have ideas and ideas, ideas are good things to exchange and people often disagree, and when they can actually hear each other disagreeing about their ideas, then both parties are learning something and maybe being challenged, but certainly their knowledge is being deepened.
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If people's ideas harden into ideologies, in other words when it's no longer about exchanging ideas, it's about defending your side, then they don't hear each other anymore.
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And that happens with couples and that happens more broadly.
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It happens in politics, it happens in relationships in the world.
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And when ideas harden into ideologies, they're no longer good ideas, they become caricatures of themselves, and so that happens a lot with couples and it happens a lot with therapists.
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Unfortunately, therapists will sort of fit people into their favorite boxes and it doesn't work well.
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So that's kind of what that book was about as well.
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Well, I know you also talk about how instability and intimacy is the two golden keys.
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Talk about what you mean by that and why tolerating anxiety is a key to intimacy.
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Yeah, yeah, that's.
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You know, when I work with a couple in the first session, my first sessions are pretty structured.
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At least the first part of my first sessions with couples are pretty structured.
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After that it's more like improv theater.
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You sort of follow where the meaning goes.
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But the first session I almost always give a little mini lecture on the two needs that we're trying to fulfill by being in a couple.
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You know why do we human beings pair up the way we do?
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You could say well, you know, we're mammals and that's how we reproduce.
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We reproduce sexually.
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So you need one of each.
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Yeah, that's true, but obviously that doesn't account for all the relationships people have where they're not having kids.
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It doesn't account for people who are past the age of childbearing but still want to pair up.
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You know why do we want to pair up?
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So there's a lot of reasons why people want to do that, but among them, what I say is we're trying to fulfill these two sets of needs and I call them stability and intimacy, and they're both really important.
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But the reason I talk about them separately is the skills you need for stability are very different from the skills you need for intimacy, so I I'll talk briefly about each one.
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If you think about what does it take for a couple to be stable, first of all, what do we mean by stability?
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I just mean in a pretty simple way I just mean if it's stable, it's not shaky, so you're not worried about it much.
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It's about the anxiety level.
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You know if, if somebody's in a stable relationship what I mean by that is neither party is terribly worried about it.
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They're thinking well, we're doing good, so we're fine.
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And of course, in the first session, nobody, ever, no couple, has ever consulted me just to tell me how stable everything was.
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You know, if it's that stable, what do they need a couples therapist for?
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So I realized there's always some degree of instability happening or they wouldn't be consulting me.
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But many of the people I would say most, pretty substantially, most of the couples that consult me, they're pretty good in the stability department in the sense that, you know, maybe they've been together a long time.
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Just that itself speaks of stability.
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They're probably.
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I almost always say this to every couple in the first session.
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There have been very few exceptions over 30 years where I will note about 20 minutes and I'll say well, I can tell something about the two of you now that we're old buddies because I've known you for 20 minutes.
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Neither one of you is totally crazy and they will usually laugh and look.
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I don't mean to make fun of serious mental health issues, because again, every once in a while I haven't said that because somebody is maybe having a manic episode or somebody is having a psychotic break or something like that.
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But most of the folks I work with aren't crazy and they're not evil and they're not stupid.
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So they're usually pretty good in.
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You know, those are those, especially the part about you know being fundamentally not crazy.
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That helps with stability.
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So typically they're pretty good at stability.
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But intimacy is a whole different thing and you know, if you think about stability, all the skills of stability are about keeping the anxiety level relatively low.
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Intimacy I mean something different, and here I better define my terms because I don't just mean sex there.
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What I mean is more generally.
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Intimacy is when you show up with yourself, you know, honest with yourself and honest with each other in the relationship.
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And you know no couple is intimate 24-7 in that way.
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You know I get distracted from myself, we all do, but when a couple can actually be in each other's presence, both letting themselves know what they think and feel and letting each other know what they think and feel.
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That's what I mean by intimacy.
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That can happen in a conversation, that can happen sexually, that can happen all kinds of ways.
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So intimacy is every bit as much of a need as stability.
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And if you think about it, I mentioned stability is all about keeping the anxiety level low.
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The chief skill of intimacy is to tolerate anxiety rather than avoid it.
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To tolerate anxiety without totally freaking out.
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And why do I say that?
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Well, because if you think about what intimacy entails, you know when it's a lovely encounter, when you're having a lovely conversation or having great sex or something like that, that doesn't involve anxiety.
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But think about other things that involve being honest with your partner.
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What if you want to just complain about something?
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What if you just want to say, hey, I wish you wouldn't do X, y or Z that you're doing, or I wish you would do more of X, y or Z that you're not doing?
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You know that's going to raise anxiety.
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It's not fun to hear a complaint from somebody.
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So since you know it's going to raise anxiety, that's probably going to raise your own anxiety as well, and especially if a couple has had difficulty with conversations that raise anxiety.
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A lot of times that's what goes off the rails and they get into a fight or, you know, they get into a deep freeze or something like that.
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Then that's going to raise anxiety even more because they you know they have a history of that not working out well.
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And the problem is, if they avoid that and so people will start to do that, they they worry about you know they don't want to rock the boat too much because they want things to be stable.
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They worry about you know they don't want to rock the boat too much because they want things to be stable, so they won't bring up things that they need to bring up, and over time that builds up and people get into a fight about anything or nothing.
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So, basically, my favorite metaphor about stability and intimacy is if you think about a plant, a seed, that gets planted in fertile soil, and what will it do?
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It'll germinate, it'll sprout, it'll start to grow, and then somebody comes along and paves the sidewalk over it.
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Now, why would anybody pave a sidewalk over it?
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Well, they put in sidewalks because it's more stable.
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That helps with stability.
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Well, what's that seed going to do.
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It's going to try and crack the sidewalk or it will die trying one or the other.
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It won't just sit there, and that's what I point out.
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If you think about that plant, the roots provide stability, but intimacy is the energy for growth and we all of us are living organisms and a couple is a living organism, more than just the two people in it.
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And living organisms want to grow.
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They want to interact with their environment and grow.
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And it feels really dead if you don't.
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And what happens is if intimacy gets compromised because people aren't able to be, or willing to be, honest and honest with themselves and each other.
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What happens over time is somebody tries to crack the sidewalk.
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Metaphorically.
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Now, what does that look like in a couple?
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Well, when a couple tries to crack the sidewalk, it will look like something like, for example, infidelity.
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It'll look like an affair.
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Sometimes It'll look like somebody getting very depressed.
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It'll look like somebody all of a sudden, you know, without warning, just saying I'm out of here, I'm leaving you, I'm done, you know, sort of blindsiding the other person.
00:17:26.548 --> 00:17:28.711
All kinds of possibilities.
00:17:29.352 --> 00:17:34.859
But often those things are the symptoms, if you will, of lack of intimacy.
00:17:34.859 --> 00:17:37.611
So a lot of the work I do with couples.
00:17:37.611 --> 00:17:42.852
You know I orient people to this because it seems like it's really helpful and people keep telling me it's helpful.
00:17:42.852 --> 00:17:53.032
A lot of the work with couples is helping them tolerate that anxiety so that they can then actually be honest with themselves and each other, and then they can get someplace.
00:17:53.032 --> 00:17:55.231
Then they can actually start to hear each other.
00:17:55.231 --> 00:17:58.451
Even though it's scary, they can start to hear each other.
00:17:58.451 --> 00:18:02.155
And when they do, that's when you know, that's when the magic happens.
00:18:02.155 --> 00:18:04.673
It's not really magic, but that's when change can happen.
00:18:07.185 --> 00:18:12.057
Well describe the death spiral for passion and how that actually happens.
00:18:12.965 --> 00:18:15.454
Well, it's kind of related to what I was just talking about.
00:18:15.454 --> 00:18:17.631
So what happens with couples?
00:18:17.631 --> 00:18:28.837
You know, a couple gets together, they fall in love, they get together, maybe they get married, maybe they have kids, and having kids tends to really up the ante on stability.
00:18:28.837 --> 00:18:37.237
You know, stability is really important, especially when you have kids, and so they perhaps start to avoid rocking the boat.
00:18:37.237 --> 00:18:39.874
And that's what I mean by that death spiral.
00:18:39.874 --> 00:18:49.538
Because what happens is if you avoid telling your partner how you feel about something that's important to you, you know, I mean, people can let stuff slide all the time and it's not a problem.
00:18:49.538 --> 00:18:51.185
If you can just laugh it off, it's no big deal.
00:18:51.185 --> 00:18:58.928
But if it is a big deal but you don't do anything about it, over time that builds up and that's what happens.
00:18:59.288 --> 00:19:04.669
What happens is if people start avoiding saying how they feel, that is what.
00:19:04.669 --> 00:19:06.634
What follows from that is lack of intimacy.
00:19:06.634 --> 00:19:08.397
They lose touch with each other.
00:19:08.397 --> 00:19:14.627
They sometimes lose touch with themselves, and a couple that has lost touch with each other doesn't stay stable.
00:19:14.627 --> 00:19:31.891
Uh, as I say, somebody is going to try and metaphorically crack the sidewalk, and so that's that's what I mean by the death spiral for intimacy and it, you know, and I say a lot of the folks consulting me, I did for one of my books, I did sort of an informal guess.
00:19:31.951 --> 00:19:41.010
It really wasn't a count, but I did an informal guess about what percent of the couples that I see in the first session are dealing with infidelity or a similar kind of betrayal.
00:19:41.010 --> 00:19:42.634
And it's close to half.
00:19:42.634 --> 00:19:45.327
Close to half dealing with infidelity per se.
00:19:45.327 --> 00:20:01.569
And often not always, but often infidelity is all about that sense of you know they've gone through that death spiral for passion and it feels dead and somebody you know, one or both of them, are tempted by somebody else because they are so missing that sense of feeling alive.
00:20:04.115 --> 00:20:29.704
Well, let's talk about your seven word formula, describe it and tell us how that came about go.
00:20:29.724 --> 00:20:31.829
I was in a consultation group meeting with a bunch of other I don't know five or six other therapists.
00:20:31.829 --> 00:20:35.846
We get together to meet and talk about our work and it just gives each other feedback and helps us out.
00:20:35.846 --> 00:20:36.709
It helps us learn.
00:20:36.709 --> 00:20:40.238
And I don't remember what we were talking about that day.
00:20:40.238 --> 00:20:56.789
We must've been talking about couples therapy because we were getting up to leave and one of the other therapists, who was a friend of mine also, we were walking out the door and he turned to me and he said how do you do couples therapy anyway, which is kind of a silly question to ask?
00:20:56.789 --> 00:20:59.587
We've just had a whole meeting on it and we both had years of training in it.
00:20:59.587 --> 00:21:01.192
And like, how am I supposed to answer that?
00:21:01.192 --> 00:21:01.875
Walking out the door?
00:21:01.875 --> 00:21:10.292
But I had actually been giving it some thought over the time I'd been in training and the time I'd been doing it in private practice.
00:21:10.292 --> 00:21:18.316
And if you really boil it all down this is what I was thinking initially If you boil it all down, what am I really trying to convey to the folks I work with?
00:21:18.746 --> 00:21:23.336
I'm trying to convey basically be kind and don't panic.
00:21:23.336 --> 00:21:27.499
And what I mean by be kind is simply don't.
00:21:27.499 --> 00:21:37.829
I don't just mean be nice I mean, yes, we should all be nice to each other but I mean be recognize that you are kin, you are family, you are a team, you know You're in the same tribe with people.
00:21:37.829 --> 00:21:46.364
Recognize that sense of kinship, because that's what keeps a couple wanting to stay in a couple when they feel that sense of kinship strongly.
00:21:46.364 --> 00:21:50.723
And I, if you're in a panic, you can't be kind.
00:21:50.723 --> 00:21:59.329
If you're in fight or flight or freeze mode, it's very difficult to feel that sense of kinship if you're really feeling at risk.
00:21:59.329 --> 00:22:04.567
So a lot of the work of therapy I was realizing was about helping people not panic.
00:22:04.567 --> 00:22:10.387
It's like, well, we teach these techniques that maybe you can manage to avoid panic.
00:22:10.387 --> 00:22:12.540
So be kind and don't panic.
00:22:12.540 --> 00:22:14.382
That's five words, not seven.
00:22:14.494 --> 00:22:21.224
And I started sharing that with some of the folks I worked with and they would tell me wow, that's a really interesting idea.
00:22:21.224 --> 00:22:26.066
I get why, in order to be kind, you need to not panic.
00:22:26.066 --> 00:22:27.259
Now what the problem is.
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