Dr. Bruce Chalmer explores the transformative power of forgiveness after betrayal, sharing insights from his 30+ years as a psychologist specializing in couples therapy. He reveals a practical three-step forgiveness process that creates internal freedom and healing even after the most painful betrayals.
• Betrayal comes in many forms beyond infidelity, including financial deception and broken trust between family members
• Initial shock after betrayal requires triage-like care before making major decisions
• Forgiveness is “an inside job” that releases you from pain rather than excusing the betrayer
• Dr. Chalmer’s three-step forgiveness process: forgive yourself, forgive the person who hurt you, and “forgive God”
• Faith (religious or secular) helps us find meaning in suffering instead of despair
• Our tendency to blame ourselves for betrayal comes from a deep need for control
• Forgiveness doesn’t necessarily mean reconciliation or continuing the relationship
• Personal transformation often emerges from confronting our deepest pain
Remember Matthew 5:14: be the light. Head over to iTunes and subscribe, and post a review for a chance to win a $25,000 private VIP day with Sylvia Worsham. Visit ReleasedOutRevealPurposePodcast.com for Sylvia’s free gift.
Transcript:
Speaker 1:
If you’ve ever struggled with fear, doubt or worry and wondering what your true purpose was all about, then this podcast is for you. In this show, your host, sylvia Worsham, will interview elite experts and ordinary people that have created extraordinary lives. So here’s your host, sylvia Worsham.
Speaker 2:
Hey, lightbringers, it’s Sylvia Worsham. Welcome to Released Out Reveal Purpose, and today is Dr Bruce Chalmer and he’s going to be talking about. One of our favorite topics now is betrayal and forgiveness and why it’s so important to forgive, especially when you experience something as devastating and traumatic as betrayal, and I know most of us have been there. I know I’ve been there myself, and so when he reached out to me on Podmatch and said, hey, I want to be part of your show, to be honest with you all, I was extremely curious because I myself have questions to ask Dr Bruce. So, without further questions to ask Dr Bruce, so without further ado, welcome Dr Bruce to the show.
Speaker 3:
Well, thanks for having me on. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Speaker 2:
I’m looking forward to it even more, because I myself have experienced betrayal, and I can tell you that for years I stayed stuck in that rumination in my mind, and so I have a lot of questions for you, aside from the ones that we always ask on the show. But since I don’t know you as well, I would love it if you could introduce yourself the way you need to be introduced by sharing that amazing story of transformation.
Speaker 3:
Yeah Well, I am a psychologist. I’ve been practicing in private practice for a little over 30 years now and over the period of that time I’ve gotten more and more into doing couples. In terms of the story of my own personal transformation, I don’t know if folks are looking at me, but I’m happy to tell my age. I just turned 74 recently. So if you do the math, I was in my 40s already when I got into clinical work, which is not like right out of school, you know. So the story of my kind of career background I started out, ended up as a statistician actually a couple of years after college and got ended up getting a master’s degree in statistics, was doing that work for a while, didn’t get interested and ended up getting a PhD in psychology on the research side of things, not the clinical side, and that kind of fit well with my statistics background. But I didn’t get interested in clinical work until I bumped into issues in my own first marriage and there’s nothing like a marital crisis to force growth on someone and it ended up and the way.
Speaker 3:
I like to tell the story of my first marriage. I’m in a second marriage now. My now wife, judy Alexander, and I have been married for 21 years Actually, we’re coming up on our 21st anniversary at the end of this week, actually and what I like to the way I like to tell the story is that both me and my ex went on to marry really wonderful women and we’re both a lot happier. That’s basically that’s what happened, and I’m making light of it, of course. The journey through to my ex recognizing, oh, the problems we were having weren’t because there was something wrong with me or something wrong with her. The problems we were having is that she figured out she was gay, she was going to be with someone who needed to be a woman, and I did not qualify, did I? So I was playing for the wrong team. Nothing personal, you know.
Speaker 2:
I mean, we say nothing personal, but it’s a little hard not to take it personally.
Speaker 3:
Well of course, yes, and I mean it’s painful and we’ve been together for a very long time. So you know, that was all I’m minimizing the pain and telling the story. There was a lot of pain there and indeed nothing better than serious pain to get some, you know. And what am I? I am a. I am a your standard cisgendered heterosexual guy, which is to say I didn’t want any part of therapy. You know, I’m a guy, you know we don’t want that, but I, it got me into therapy and it got us into some, some couples therapy, some of which was good and some of which wasn’t, but that’s even beside the point.
Speaker 3:
I experienced the power of that kind of transformation, you know, to be able to be forced really to confront that stuff, and I found it really inspiring and that led to my feeling like, wow, I think I want to be involved with people this way. There’s something about it that just felt like a calling. My previous careers had been stuff I was good at, stuff I enjoyed. You know it was decent stuff to do, but this felt more like a calling. There was something that was. It was inspirational about it and I started getting clinical training and I ended up doing internships and going through the stuff of getting licensed as a psychologist, which I finally did, and that’s when I started doing private practice, so that was, say, about a little over 30 years ago.
Speaker 3:
And through that process I’ve worked a lot with individuals, but I’ve also, right from the get-go, worked with couples. And the more I worked with couples, the more I found that particularly inspiring. Because what couples are working with again, I’ve been through that sort of stuff myself what couples are working with is a lot of painful stuff that’s very immediately consequential in their lives, especially if they have kids. Should they stay together or not stay together? If they’re going to stay together, how could they do it? And over the course of all that work with couples which now I mean, I haven’t counted, but it’s probably in the thousands somewhere I noted that so many of them are dealing with betrayal of one kind or another. I don’t know again, I haven’t counted exactly, but it seems like close to half of the couples that I meet in a first session are telling some sort of story of infidelity or some other kind of betrayal, and it’s a very, very common phenomenon.
Speaker 2:
And I Can I stop you there for a second? Yeah, please, because I do want to know what other types would be considered betrayal in your training. Oh, yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 3:
So aside from like just you know cheating, in the sexual domain.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, often somebody is financially deceiving their partner or failing to tell their partner about something or actively lying about things like that. Often people are dealing with betrayals from other family members, not necessarily from their spouse Betrayals from close friends, betrayals from business partners. They’re often dealing with that business partners they’re often dealing with that. A lot of times that will have effects on a couple. Even if it wasn’t the spouse that betrayed you. In how they handle it, it can be. It can really stress a relationship badly. So there’s lots of different kinds of betrayal. The book that I wrote most recently, which is called Betrayal and Forgiveness, actually includes what is it? 12 couples. I guess they’re not all like spouses or or romantic couples most of them are but there’s also like a story of a betrayal between two friends who are also business partners. A story of betrayal between siblings you know adult siblings. Story of betrayal between a father and his adult daughter, things like that. So there’s lots of different forms of betrayal can take.
Speaker 2:
Oh my goodness. So yeah, there’s. There’s quite a few to to unpack, if you will. And I can tell you that I my first instance of betrayal was in college and I caught him cheating in the middle of the night and I since then.
Speaker 2:
My father then sent me to France and said you are not to see this boy. This boy is poison. And it was supposed to be six months and it turned into a year, which I’m very grateful for, because he really ended up being poisonous. And and then the second one was in my first marriage and it was a financial. He was hiding stuff from me and. I didn’t find out till after the divorce had been signed.
Speaker 3:
Oh, my ouch.
Speaker 2:
And I remember he said well, you’ll get over it. When I confronted him and I just thought to myself wow, and you’re right, it impacts your relationships moving forward, because then there’s this distrust. Now you don’t trust and you get anxious around financial situations and you tend to patterns of behavior can develop or magnify even more, like control patterns of behavior, and that happened to me in my finances and it just manifested very differently than what I thought it was going to manifest, and so I’m in complete agreement with you. I think there’s just so much to unpack here. Do tell us, like, how do you start moving from the betrayal? Because if people are in these dark chapters, I think what keeps people stuck and maybe you can help us a little bit more, since you’re a psychologist is that insurmountable mountain of that they see right before them, and it’s it’s really hard to start small. I think they think they need to do these big things to get out of it. Is there what tips would you give people coming out?
Speaker 3:
of it. Yeah Well, the first thing to note is what you said. It is difficult often and it’s it’s not difficult because there’s something wrong with you, you know it’s difficult because it’s difficult, it’s difficult for everybody. It’s difficult for varieties of reasons, depending on the particular things that happened. But in general, the first thing and of course it depends when I meet people depends on how far along they are.
Speaker 3:
When I meet people who’ve just found out, like the week before, that their partner had been cheating on them or something, some other kind of betrayal, they’re often still in shock and getting past that it’s really it’s. It’s sort of like. It’s almost like triage. You know it tends to the immediate like get yourself so that you’re not constantly in shock. It’s going to take you some time to to be able to think about it without immediately freaking out. So the early phases tend to be about just get through the shock phase. This is the time when people will often say if you’re at least physically safe, this is not the time to be making large decisions. It’s like you’re in freak out mode. It’s understandable. You need to be able to get hold of yourself and that takes as long as it takes. But if people are past the initial shock, then that’s where I get into the concept of forgiveness as being really important. And I have to qualify that carefully, because people use the word forgiveness a number of different ways, basically two different ways I like to say and there’s the way I like and the way I don’t like. So let me cover the way I don’t like first and again.
Speaker 3:
It’s a very common way of using the term forgiveness. People will often say, well, if I forgive that person, aren’t I saying, oh, I guess it wasn’t so bad after all. Or aren’t I saying, oh, I’m, you know, I’m just going to overlook it, I’ll forget about it, which is ridiculous, of course. If you’ve been badly hurt, you better not forget about it. Or does forgiveness mean I’m going to restore the relationship? That means, okay, I forgive you, so I guess we’ll be okay, we’ll stay married or we’ll stay in whatever the relationship was. And I’m saying, well, that’s a way people often use forgiveness. That’s a way I don’t like. Here’s the way I like, and again, I didn’t make this up. That’s a way I don’t like. Here’s the way I like, and again, I didn’t make this up. The way I like is to recognize that forgiveness is an inside job. In other words, forgiveness has almost nothing to do with the person you’re forgiving. It has to do with getting the pain out of yourself.
Speaker 3:
And here I love to quote Anne Lamott. Lots of people quote Anne Lamott on this. She’s a novelist but she’s written a lot about forgiveness issues in her own life and she said probably paraphrasing, but she said something like this To not forgive is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. Wow, which I love that concept because it’s recognizing yeah, you’re poisoning yourself. Whether or not it affects the other person, you’re poisoning yourself. And what I always like to point out when I quote her is that, yeah, once you can get the poison out of yourself, once you’re no longer in that sick phase, then you can think about the rat. You still got a rat to deal with, perhaps, but you can think clearly about it without freaking out. So the recovery phase involves that kind of forgiveness.
Speaker 3:
Now it’s early on in a relationship when you’ve just found out somebody’s betrayed you. It may not be a good time to forgive. If you need that anger or that obsession, or whatever you want to call it, to get yourself safe, to stop being continually hurt, if you’re in a kind of relationship where somebody is repeatedly betraying you in one way or another or abusing you in one way or another, that anger, that panic feeling is. You know it’s necessary. It’s the message from your body saying get out of this. This is not good. But if you’re in a situation where it isn’t about immediately, you know like again, classic situation somebody like your partner’s cheated on you. They’re feeling bad about it. They’ve said they’re going to end the other relationship, they want to restore it.
Speaker 3:
Now you’re confronted with that question Well, can you do that? Do you want to do that? Is it possible? That’s where that notion of forgiveness becomes really primary. So you can’t even think clearly about that until you’ve gotten past that immediate obsession, you know, until you can say, okay, wait a minute, I have to accept that this happened. I wish it hadn’t. Okay, wait a minute, I have to accept that this happened, I wish it hadn’t not. Be in total panic mode about it and say, all right now, what do we do about this? That kind of forgiveness is I like to call it. It’s a three-step process and when I tell people about this I always like to point out anytime you have some clever author, or author who thinks he’s clever like me. You know, I think I’m so clever. Well, no, I’m not really. You know, anytime you have a clever author saying, oh, it’s three steps, yeah, no, it isn’t.
Speaker 2:
It’s way more than three steps. It’s way more than three steps.
Speaker 3:
Yes, it’s not just one, two, three. And you know Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her stages of grief. Even she said yeah, it’s not that simple. You know, it’s not just one after the other, but it’s a way of sort of organizing your thinking about it. So I like to talk about three steps to forgiveness. So step one I think invariably step one you have to forgive yourself.
Speaker 3:
And you know people sometimes say what do I have to forgive myself for? They’re the jerk who cheated. You know, yeah, but we always have to forgive ourselves for not stopping it, you know, for letting it happen. It’s like we think we are in some, you know, we think we ought to be able to protect ourselves and so we’re angry at ourselves for failing to. And you know there’s good reason for that. Even if it’s unfair to ourselves, we blame ourselves.
Speaker 3:
I’ve worked with adults over the years who are, let’s say, sexually abused at the age of three, who are still blaming themselves. They’re saying I should have stopped it. I mean, they know that’s not rational. There are three. What do they expect? But there’s this little kids will blame themselves because it’s better than the alternative, which is to recognize that the world is just completely unsafe. So if you blame yourself, at least you have the illusion that maybe you could do something about it. It gives you some sense of power and it’s often horrible because you end up being really down on yourself. But you know, blaming ourselves tends to be part of the deal. How could I have been so stupid as to not see it coming? You know, why didn’t I stop it when I could have stopped it? Why didn’t I see it coming?
Speaker 3:
So step one is to forgive yourself, and that all that means but I say all it means it’s a big step. What it means is to be able to recognize, you know, sort of back away from the panic, recognize. You know what I knew, what I knew, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. That’s who I was. If I had known differently, I might have acted differently, but I didn’t. That’s who I was. If I had known differently, I might have acted differently, but I didn’t. That’s just who I was. I’m not crazy, I’m not stupid, I’m not evil, I’m just human. I only knew what I knew when I knew it. So I guess I can let go of being angry at myself If you can actually get to that point. That’s what I mean by forgiving yourself Again, not just snap your fingers, but if you can get there, that’s what sets you up to go to step two.
Speaker 3:
Now, what is step two? Well, forgive the person who hurt you. That sounds not so easy, does it? But I’ll tell you what I claim. And you can quibble with this claim and you’d probably be right, but here’s my claim.
Speaker 3:
Step two, forgiving the person who hurt you, is a pretty short step from forgiving yourself. Why do I say that? Well, I just said about, you know, forgiving yourself. If I forgive myself, I’m saying you know what? I was doing? The best I could. I wish I’d known better, but I didn’t. I was doing the best I could, the forces that where I was working with, that’s what I came up with. I missed it. So I got hurt.
Speaker 3:
Well, on some level, I can say the same thing to the person who hurt me. They were, even if they were doing bad things, they were doing the best they could. You know, if you all things considered, they were influenced by the influences, the context that was happening. You know, they were having, maybe, thoughts I wish they hadn’t had, but they were thinking, they were angry at me and they were thinking that I, you know I’m not providing them and they’re entitled to intimacy somewhere else. And why shouldn’t they do that? You know, or they’re who knows what was going on. Human beings are like that. It’s not that I’m condoning it, I’m not saying it was fine. I’m not saying it wasn’t immoral. Yes, it was immoral if they cheated on me. But people do things like that because that’s where they’re coming from. All things considered, I guess they were doing the best they could do. That’s what forgiving the person who hurt you was.
Speaker 3:
And so, again, not a simple step, but if you can start to wrap your brain around that, it’s like okay, I don’t have to be angry anymore, I can accept what happened, not condone, but accept. Now we can figure out. All right, where do we go from there? There is a step three that I think is equally important, and this one has a funny name, and you don’t have to be religious to appreciate this. If you are religious, you might, but you don’t have to be religious to appreciate it. I call step three forgiving God. Now, what does it mean to forgive God? It means, okay, we live in a universe where stuff like this can happen, even if we don’t deserve it on any moral level.
Speaker 3:
You know why can’t I prevent myself from getting hurt all the time? Well, you know what? I can’t. I don’t have that much power. There’s something right about the fact that I don’t have that much power. I can’t prevent the lightning strike from happening. I can take precautions, but I can’t completely prevent. I can’t prevent the tornado from showing up in my town. I can take precautions, but I can’t totally prevent it. I can’t prevent my partner from doing something I wish they hadn’t done. It’s just the way the world works and it’s probably just as well that it’s that way. That’s what I mean by forgiving God. And another word I use that’s pretty much equivalent to forgiving God is faith, and again, not necessarily religious faith, but acceptance, that reality. Even when it’s painful, there’s meaning there. It’s right to be that way, even if I wish it weren’t. It’s right to learn. Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:
I learned a humongous lesson from that first betrayal.
Speaker 1:
And.
Speaker 2:
I looked back when I wrote my book. What was the lesson God taught? Me from that experience.
Speaker 2:
And then it was like I persevered past a very painful period and I moved to a country and I was in my 20s, such a young person. I was talking to my husband about this now and I’m like I don’t know how I did that, how much strength I needed to have to fly across the pond and land in a country that doesn’t really like Americans quite well and in those years it was really pronounced in those years and and my I was heartbroken I mean I’ve caught the guy in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2:
It was like one o’clock in the morning and there was like no denying he was at this woman’s house and his clothes were wrinkled and I mean like it was very obvious. And so it’s the lessons and I’m faith-based.
Speaker 2:
As you know, you’ve heard some of the episodes on Release, doubt, reveal, purpose and and yes, I mean betrayal is it’s a big one and it can really keep you there. But I do agree with you on how, when you forgive yourself, it’s so much easier to forgive others. Yeah, forgiving ourselves is really difficult because, you’re right, there’s a lot of guilt. We guilt ourselves Like how could? Like? I remember thinking how could I not have seen this earlier?
Speaker 2:
Everyone knew at the college that this guy was cheating on me, and not just with this one woman, with multiple women, and I was the last one to find out. I was humiliated. So I think part of it is that humiliation piece that really some people. It’s part of that shock and that rumination. It’s just the thoughts. Don’t leave you alone. And I have OCD so you can imagine how many thoughts were going through my mind. But you’re so right when you forgive yourself yourself, it’s so much easier to forgive others. It’s kind of like the concept of love god first love.
Speaker 2:
When you love god first, you’re loving yourself, because yes, because yeah, I can’t, I don’t separate those I can’t separate them either, and then we’re able, because he loves us so freely and so beautifully in that abundance of love, that overflow is the flow that we can then give to others, and I see forgiveness in the same space. He has forgiven us. We’re total sinners, we constantly sin against them, and he just forgives so openly. And so if you are faith-based, that’s the concept that you can also use to then say, okay, he’s forgiven me and I don’t deserve it, and he’s giving me mercy, you know especially.
Speaker 2:
I would add to that I mean that’s.
Speaker 3:
I even added to that there’s a piece of that concept that the world is designed so that we’re not perfect. Do you know what I mean? That’s part of the deal, and if it weren’t, it would be awful. And you know what I’m saying. It’s like, yeah, the whole basis of our having a sense. You know, this is what theologians will talk about in answering the basic question.
Speaker 3:
I think they call it theodicy how can a good God let bad things happen to good people? Well, the alternative would be we wouldn’t have free will. Yeah, would be we wouldn’t have free will. Yeah, and that’s what people forget. Yes, exactly, darn that free will thing. Yeah, that means people can betray people, and often do, unfortunately and comes with the territory. So, yeah, that’s that concept of faith is central. And it’s interesting because, again, I’m not talking about necessarily religious faith, I’m not talking about any sort of fundamentalist faith. Uh, I have met religious people that seem to me, according to how I define faith, are lacking that, and I’ve met people who aren’t religious, who have plenty of it. It depends on how you see the world.
Speaker 2:
See, I think faith and religion are two separate topics.
Speaker 3:
Yes, that’s so right.
Speaker 2:
My husband always said well, you’re religious. I said, no, sir, I am not.
Speaker 1:
I’m faith-based. There’s a difference.
Speaker 2:
I talk a lot about relationship with him. You can belong to the Catholic Church, you can be Jewish, you can be whatever you want. My question to everyone is always do you have a relationship with him? Because he really doesn’t care about the religions he cares, he has relationship with you or not. When you have relationship with him, that’s when you can turn inward those answers that pool, like that calling that you felt it doesn’t just come.
Speaker 2:
It doesn’t come from the outside, it comes from inward, that purpose that we all have that drives us to step into these roles. After major change, you had betrayal. I had a health crisis that took me from corporate to the space I’m in now, but I think it was God’s way of saying okay, you don’t listen to me, I’m going to use your choice, I’m going to wake you up and I’m going to shift you to come this way, cause this is where you’re really meant to go.
Speaker 2:
This is where your your skillset and your gifts are really meant to serve humanity and that’s why you know, when we go through those betrayals and it’s meant for us to wake up and to say, okay, do I really want to stay here or do I want to move where I think my soul is kind of guiding me?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that’s what.
Speaker 2:
I felt like when you were talking, that’s what it felt like to me.
Speaker 3:
Oh, yeah, to see it as meaningful is that’s again I put that in the same category as faith to see that, okay, there are messages here that I can find meaning in, I can decipher somehow. Again, not necessarily to say, oh, I know exactly what God’s plan is to me, that I mean, I’m Jewish and from a Jewish perspective it’s like we’ll argue with God. Sometimes, you know, like in the Bible, it happens quite a bit. You know and yet also recognize yeah, we go to the sort of denouement of the whole Job story. It’s like come on, you don’t understand the big picture, you’re just going to have to accept. You don’t get the big picture, but there’s something right about it, you know. That’s kind of where that comes down.
Speaker 3:
That’s what I mean by faith. So that sense of being able to recognize okay, this is painful, this betrayal that just happened, or this health crisis that’s just happened or whatever, it’s incredibly painful. I’m going to find it as meaningful rather than simply give up and despair. You know a classic example of that, a very inspiring example. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. He was a psychologist in 1930s Vienna, jewish psychologist in 1930s Vienna, and ended up in Auschwitz.
Speaker 3:
That I did know about his life yeah and survived it, one of very few people who went with him, who survived actually, and wrote about how he could find meaning in that suffering, in the midst of what was just pure evil. I mean, it was simply pure evil, and yet he wasn’t condoning it, but he was saying there’s a way you can find meaning in that, and his whole approach to life was about finding meaning even in the worst suffering. And so that’s again what I mean by faith the extent to which someone can go through what they’re going through and somehow find something important in it. Some meaning.
Speaker 3:
Rather than just simply a meaning, simply rejecting it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, some purpose, because I’ve been asked in interviews did you blame God when you nearly lost your life? And I said no because I made a choice.
Speaker 3:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
And I understand the concept of free will. And did I blame God when my father got a brain tumor that ended up taking his life last year? No my father made a choice.
Speaker 2:
And we actually asked our dad before he passed away would he choose differently? And he said no, I would not. Knowing now what happened, I would not choose differently. I would choose the same because I wanted to come to this country and I wanted to provide my family with the best life possible, and I’m willing to sacrifice, do the ultimate sacrifice, because he ended up going to Vietnam as a surgeon.
Speaker 2:
But because he was exposed to Agent Orange, because they were in that, he got sent in 1969 and was over there during the time that all that happened, and so every time he opened up soldiers’ bodies, well, of course he’s going to get exposed to everything they were exposed to and those guys.
Speaker 2:
All of them ended up with meningiomas or Parkinson’s disease, all of them and I supremely documented, like the government has had, like you know, case upon case with these, these guys. But it boils down to that question of free will and I’ve always kind of said job is a really good example in the bible of this man was righteous and yet look at everything that happened, because there’s always there’s also evil in the world. Just like there’s good, there’s also evil.
Speaker 2:
And yeah I have found, more often time than not, that people are more willing to listen to the devil than they are to because it’s doubt. It’s easier, like we’re, we’re conditioned to look for the negative and stuff. It’s really you have to. This is something I learned from my therapist. You really have to focus your mind on the positive, because there’s just so much in media and in all around us in our environment. That’s why it’s also important that when you go through major change like this, to watch what is influencing you, because all of it matters your mind is always listening yeah, and there’s good reason why we paid.
Speaker 3:
You know we’re we’re kind of designed to pay more attention to the negative than the positive, because the negative can kill you. The positive is just nice and again, I like the positive.
Speaker 2:
Don’t get me wrong I mean, I like it too, but you gotta yeah, we’re oriented that way.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I mean we focus your mind on it you do and you know because we are indeed dealing with natural tendencies to will survive, will survive better if we are careful about the negatives. Yeah, you know so in in terms of how things proceed in in, uh, evolution, and you know the way, the way we’ve come to be, how we are. We’re the folks you mentioned, ocd. It’s interesting, you know. We are the folks who descended from people who panicked too much rather than too little. Our tendency is to panic too much rather than too little, because those of our ancestors who panicked too little did not become our ancestors. They got eaten first before they could reproduce. That’s kind of how that works. So there’s definitely a bias toward panicking too much, definitely a bias toward noticing the negative before we notice the positive. They’re all there. They’re there for good reason and yet, as you point out, indeed, to recover from. That’s that’s why I note that faith is not something you can just learn by reading about it or something. It is an active practice. It’s something that requires practice and ideally, you, you want to put yourself in. You want to talk to people who are manifesting that, rather than talk to people who are simply manifesting despair. So it is, you know, that’s what I often say, and if it comes up like what’s the therapist? Do you know what? There’s a zillion different schools of thought.
Speaker 3:
You can find literally hundreds of different therapeutic modalities out there, and lots of them I don’t know them all, there’s hundreds of them, but you know, I’m trained in a bunch of them actually and they are and they’re all, at least the ones I like all have good ideas. Don’t get too attached to them. If you get too attached to them, they turn into ideologies instead of ideas and they do harm rather than good. They become a caricature. You stop listening to people because you keep trying to fit them into your favorite box, you know. But they all have good ideas.
Speaker 3:
But the one thing I think the therapist offers, regardless of which of those many modalities you’re using, is faith. It’s like okay, I’m starting off with the assumption that the people I am working with are valid to be who they are. They are valid human beings. They are not crazy, evil or stupid although we all have those tendencies at times but fundamentally they are valid to be who they are and if that’s what they’re getting from me, we are apt. First of all, I’ll be able to listen better instead of freaking out instead of my freaking out, and I’m manifesting that faith and inviting them to manifest it as well, and that’s, if anything cures people, that’s what it is.
Speaker 2:
And also because, since we touched on the subject of OCD and I totally agree with you there is what I find one of the tools that I use is to come back to the present moment, because OCD puts you in the future, or it’s ruminating in the past too. It just depends on where your mind is going, and so I always kind of guide myself to come back to the present moment, and that’s where God is. He’s not in the future and he’s not in the past.
Speaker 2:
He’s right there with you, and so, if you’re faith-based and that’s something that can calm you down, that is one way to always come back to that present moment, through breathing exercises or the five senses, or focusing on a good memory, your happy place in your mind that’s another thing that I’ve concentrated on because I have I’ve had a lot of therapy.
Speaker 2:
I had a lot. I had big team growing up. I had a big trauma that occurred when I was seven and it really set me up on a different course, and it was trauma with my father, and so our relationship was really strained. But in 2020, god was very persistent let’s put it that way for me to write my first book, and now I understand why because he made me reflect on that trauma, and so the first chapter starts off with the trauma and the last chapter talks about forgiving my father and what the joy I received in forgiving him and how I released myself from that cage. And it was so beautiful because it it helped. It, the gift of forgiveness. In my opinion, it’s humbly. My opinion is it’s a huge gift you give yourself oh, absolutely versus oh, absolutely, because my father didn’t remember how bad this was.
Speaker 2:
I mean, obviously he he did it out of like uh conditioning he came from an abusive household and my father made the mistake of saying that if my sister died and we were on vacation because I had, I was seven years old and I had insisted going up the summit.
Speaker 2:
We were outside of Mexico City by the dormant volcano Popocatépetl, and so we started to climb and my mom started to feel like dizzy and we were with extended family because the entire family’s from Mexico, and so some of them went back down, but I insisted on continuing to climb and so my father gave in to my seven-year-old whim you know, and all of us continued, and my two-year-old sister was with us and my brother and stuff and cousins and whatever, and my sister tripped and fell and because of the altitude we were coming from South Texas, which has we’re at sea level and then at Mexico City altitude, you could imagine what that was doing.
Speaker 2:
Well, his whole surgeon, vietnam, anxiety, anxiety. He was very anxious, kind of kicked in and he looked at me and he said if your sister dies it will be your fault oh my god and no one, not one um adult came to tell me hey, your father’s just scared, he that he doesn’t mean that you know.
Speaker 2:
So I don’t realize the trauma. Until I’m 21 it totally blocks it. But from that point on I I stopped being a kid I start controlling my siblings. He basically, as you know you’re a psychologist transferred his response parental responsibility over to me without realizing it, you know and I took it on, and then I started to treat my siblings like my kids oh yeah, and I grew up overnight isn’t that something?
Speaker 3:
the the power of that one comment? Yeah, it just is so long lasting, yeah holy moly.
Speaker 2:
And so, when 2020 rolled around and god’s like I I need you to write this book. I need you to reflect on what you’ve learned.
Speaker 1:
And.
Speaker 2:
I need you to do it now, of course, because God sees what’s coming Right, he sees the future, to a degree, right Choices, and he knows my dad’s going to die in four years. I don’t know that.
Speaker 1:
And.
Speaker 2:
I’m obedient and I write a book and I’m so glad I did, because I released myself from that cage and the minute that lifted our relationship I mean people were shocked.
Speaker 3:
How did you I mean, if I may ask, how did you release yourself from that cage Like, how would you describe that process for yourself?
Speaker 2:
For me it was really sitting with the anger and understanding and accepting much like the steps that you talked about is accepting that I was a little kid, I didn’t, you know, I wasn’t at fault for this Like pretty much dispelling that lie within me that lie that becomes a belief system, because the belief that formed at that moment of trauma was I don’t trust myself to make the right decisions.
Speaker 2:
That was the belief that formed and that’s the belief that for years controlled me, and I didn’t know it because it’s at the subconscious level. So I’m like you, just feel doubt. And anytime doubt showed up, that belief kicked into full gear and I had a pattern of behavior that had attached itself to controlling controlling my finances. It actually manifested in my finances that way where I wouldn’t invest, I was too scared, I was anxious. And so it’s understanding and feeling dispelling that lie and and realizing kind of mapping out my subconscious. And I’m a life coach. I I got my certification years ago, but in in 2020 I was like, okay, let’s put my life coaching to good use and let’s look at, like, what belief systems and what patterns of behavior are attached to this thing. And the more I did it, the more I dispelled those lies within me, the more the cage started to kind of like release, like it started to lift.
Speaker 3:
Well then you were. I mean, you were then able to think about okay, where was my dad coming from? You know what you were able on, you had enough distance from it, you weren’t freaking out about it. You could then start to understand.
Speaker 2:
oh, he comes from an abusive household. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
He’s coming from an abusive household. There’s a background for this, yeah.
Speaker 2:
And I actually start the chapter talking how bad the abuse was in his home. To understand when you understand their background and their own trauma and where they’re coming from. Understand that he has no idea. Like that was an automatic response it was not something that was methodically thought about it was a reaction. What?
Speaker 2:
do we what happens when we have a big feeling. As human beings, we react to it or we act on it, depending on the feeling, like if it’s a loving feeling, we’re acting on it, if it’s a negative feeling, we’re reacting to it, and it’s going to give us the results we currently have in our life, like the relationships that we have with these people. And and so the more I saw my father as a child who had also been verbally abused and who had witnessed his mother being physically abused in front of him the more.
Speaker 2:
I had compassion for him and I’m sorry I may get emotional.
Speaker 3:
You don’t apologize. You’re really feeling it. It’s really emotional yeah.
Speaker 2:
Because I want for people to understand that this is such a freeing thing because, I’m so grateful. I listened to God and I wrote my book and I sat with this and I reflected and I went through, I I took the journey into my fear and out of my fear into the space of joy, where then god can, like, really work with us and really transform our heart you know, from a heart of stone, like ezekiel says, to a heart of flesh, where now we can view these people that have hurt us so, so deeply.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, uh, the way he views them as as his kids. He he views my dad as his own kid. So I’ve got to like really step in that role, and so that’s how I did it. But it you know, I took a good um, I’d say a good six months of like working through these things, approximately where I started to feel a lift, right, and that’s in those moments that some people will like give up and stop working on it, and what I suggest is just keep going.
Speaker 2:
Allow God to take you where you need to go with this, because only he sees. He sees all the wounds, he sees everybody’s wounds and he understands our thoughts and our hearts. And only he can guide us into that space where we’re going to feel this immense joy and I mean I I really can’t describe it. It’s really hard to describe in words, it just does no justice.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, well, you said a cage lifting. You were freed from that kind of bondage, which makes sense, and we became friends.
Speaker 2:
The last four years of my father’s life were the best years of our relationship, and it’s because I forgave him. I released myself from that, and so I. My goodness, I could sit here forever and speak to you, dr Bruce. I really could. This is your purpose. You tell me, this is your calling. This is not a seasonal thing for you, right?
Speaker 3:
Correct, this is not a seasonal thing. You know, I’m in my mid-70s and I’m still doing it because I love doing it, and I think I love doing it because it is my calling. It really feels like, yeah, this is what I’m here to do.
Speaker 2:
And it’s so effortless when it is your calling, I think when people don’t realize how effortless this is. When we step into our what I call the divine purpose, the reason why we were created in the first place and we all have that purpose it’s just the discovery. I always think the journey of life is the discovery of that purpose and then really stepping in there and being the best that we can be to contribute to humanity. You know.
Speaker 2:
Frankl did it through his books. You’re doing it through your books and your counseling sessions. I’m doing it in various ways too, because I wrote books myself. I’m an author and I have the podcast and we can share our light with others. Any last minute things you want to say to the listeners of Released Out Reveal Purpose?
Speaker 3:
You know the thing I would end with is those seven words I think I mentioned earlier. If I’m remembering right Be kind, don’t panic and have faith. That’s the seven words of the podcast my wife and I do couples therapy in seven words. Well, those are the seven words Be kind, don’t panic and have faith. Have faith so that you cannot panic, not panic, so you can really sense that essential kinship with whoever it is you’re talking about.
Speaker 2:
Love that. I so love that, and I’m going to look forward to hearing your interview on Dr Debbie’s and vice versa because. I think both of you speaking on betrayal it’s going to be dynamic, dynamic, dynamic. So I’m looking forward to that and to the listeners that released that reveal purpose. Remember Matthew 514, be the light. Have a wonderful week, Stay safe. Love y’all. Bye now.
Speaker 1:
So that’s it for today’s episode of Release Doubt Reveal Purpose. Head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on iTunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 private VIP day with Sylvia Worsham herself. Be sure to head on over to sylviaworsham.com and pick up a free copy of Sylvia’s gift and join us on the next episode.