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June 5 - June 16, 2019
You’re needing to talk to each other, to share information about what things mean to you. You’ve got to talk about things that are difficult to say and difficult to hear and do so without making each other miserable. You’ve got to share hurt feelings without creating more hurt feelings. You’ve got to listen when you’re itching to make yourself heard and make yourself heard when you’re tired of talking.
But you can solve this problem easily. Don’t attack. Don’t blame. Don’t call each other names.
Too often, “We need to talk” is code for “I need to talk.”
A good way to tell if the other person is willing and able to work on the relationship is this. What happens if you attack less and listen more? If that makes the other person more willing to work on things with you, then you’re in good shape. If it doesn’t make a difference, or if you can’t bring yourself to attack less and listen more, then you may not be able to go through the process of rebuilding trust.
if you went into couples therapy to deal with the betrayal, you’d end up spending good money to have someone get you to attack less and listen more, even though you’re the aggrieved party.
You can always leave. But once you leave, working things out stops being an option.
What do I have to lose by giving our relationship a chance?
If you can get to the point where you can say you have nothing to lose by giving the other person a chance, then it’s worth staying and working to rebuild trust.
Nothing can destroy real love between two good people in a good relationship.
This is a mistake we all make: to assume that now is forever.
nothing is as wonderful as it seems at its best, and nothing is as terrible as it seems at its worst.
it’s not the things we don’t know that hurt us the most. It’s the things we think we know that are actually wrong that cause the real damage.
When you’ve been seriously betrayed, the whole world feels shaky and treacherous.
Unfortunately, people aren’t perfect.
Not you. Not the person who’s hurt you.
Even if the person who’s hurt you is so sorry he can’t stand it, his imperfections will lead him to do things that will jostle your b...
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When you’ve been betrayed, it feels as if you’ve been stranded on a tiny barren desert island.
Mistrust can heal—it’s the anger that prevents it from healing.
Betrayal feels like a devastating and humiliating attack—even if it’s a relatively small betrayal.
Safety, for an animal—and for us—is everything. We can’t go along in our lives without feeling safe.
And that gets at the heart of how trust issues can go on to destroy relationships.
And because I can’t trust you, I don’t feel safe.
But the tragedy and the trap is that the things we do to make us feel safe won’t restore trust. They just damage the relationship instead of healing it.
And in fact focusing on safety works, if our only goal is to put up a wall that we can live behind.
Focusing on safety completely backfires if our goal is to restore trust and repair the relationship.
broken trust is hard to heal because we’re not even trying to heal it. We’re just trying to make ourselves feel safe.
Trust is what you do when you relinquish your need to feel safe.
you can only regain trust if you let go of some of your need for safety.
It’s a major betrayal when someone does something that breaks a fundamental promise or violates a fundamental expectation and does so in a way that significantly hurts your peace of mind.
How will I ever cope with this? Does the other person really care about me? Can the other person really see me and understand how his betrayal hurt me? Can our relationship survive? Can we make things safer and better between us? Can I forgive him?
The mistake Lorena Bobbitt made, and the mistake you should never make, is to do something you can’t take back.
It is just not true that the more pain you feel, the more that means your relationship is better off dead.
It’s not the size of the betrayal that kills a relationship. It’s the weakness of the relationship itself that makes it vulnerable when a betrayal occurs.
Sometimes people care about you but they go stupid.
But if the person who betrayed you can hang in there while you’re furious, he’s passed the do-you-care test.
If the betrayer can hang in there, you know that there’s a foundation of caring that can give you solid trust.
With time and patience and good collaboration, the two of you can tease out an understanding of what went on that led to the betrayal.
when you’re with someone who’s really angry you want to get as far away as possible. You might want to get so far away that you have nothing more to do with that person.
And so anger destroys relationships. And it doesn’t allow for trust to rebuild either.
The less anger we indulge in, the faster healing happens.
too much anger is toxic.
His knowing what you need to feel safe is something you need to collaborate on.
A RELATIONSHIP CAN’T FUNCTION WITHOUT TRUST.
The betrayer needs to understand all the ins and outs of how he’s hurt you so that he can appreciate the full measure of what he’s done.
We need to know that the other person knows the full impact of what he’s done.
The more anger in your voice, the less he hears your words. He just hears the anger. And the anger sounds like an accusation. So all he can think of to do is defend himself.
All you have to do is figure out what led to the betrayal and deal with it. If you can’t do that, not only will you never feel safe, you’ll never be safe.
It’s not your fault that you were betrayed. Period.
Blame is a fundamental mistake people make in trying to find forgiveness and restore trust.
Whenever there’s been a betrayal there are problems on both sides and both people need to take responsibility for the part they’ve played.
