I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode number 161: Betrayal and New Trust.

Hello and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast where courageous
women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal but to become the
boldest, truest, most decisive, and confident versions of themselves ever.
If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently living but
don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place. Stick around
to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks off. Is it
possible? It is, and I’m here to show you how. I’m your host, Andrea Giles.
Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Hello, my beautiful listeners. Thank you for being here today. Before we
jump into today’s episode, I just want to say thank you. Thank you truly,
genuinely, from the bottom of my heart for being here, for listening, for
subscribing, for sharing, for leaving reviews. My little podcast here in
the past four years has grown so much that it is now in the top 0.5% of all
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because of you listening, hearing, sharing, all the things. So thank you.
Thank you so much. If you have been listening and have yet to leave a
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you would prefer to be anonymous. Thank you so much.

Now for today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about betrayal and
trust, which is something that we talk about a lot here, but I’m going to
be sharing some tactical information of things to be looking for, things to
be thinking about. As usual, I’m going to give examples so you have a
little bit more of an understanding of what I’m saying, what it looks like
in real time, things like that.

So first of all, betrayal, and let me give you some background of why I
decided to do this episode. So I recently hosted my first online virtual
retreat. I did an in-person retreat earlier this year in Tulum, Mexico, but
this time I did a virtual retreat. I wanted to see how that would go, and
it was amazing, wonderful, and powerful, and the feedback that I’m getting
from people there is just so heartwarming, and it had a big impact on the
people that went. But in my preparations, I pulled up lots of different
things, lots of different research to just really hone in on how to make it
the most effective for everybody there. In my research, I came across
something that I’d read before, but that kind of struck me in a different
way. It is from Brené Brown’s book, Atlas of the Heart. You’ve probably
heard me reference that book before or reference work of Brené’s. I love
her. I love her work. I think she is a genius and has made major waves and
major impact in the work that she does.

In the book, Atlas of the Heart, go get your hands on it. It is truly like
an atlas of the various emotions that we feel as humans. The way that it is
categorized is at the very beginning, rather than having just a list of
emotions, and then you flip to that page, she has it worded in a way that’s
places you go when you are… Places where you go. One of the things that
is fascinating to me is that her portion of the book that covers trust and
betrayal, I want you to hear this. She has this categorized as places we go
when the heart is open, when the heart is open. When our heart is open, we
go to places of heartbreak, betrayal, loss of self-trust, and rebuilding
trust. That’s where we go when our heart is open. There’s other emotions
that she includes there.

The full list is love, lovelessness, heartbreak, trust, self-trust,
betrayal, defensiveness, flooding, and hurt. But the two that really, I
want to drive home here, places we go when our heart is open, heartbreak,
betrayal, rebuilding trust, self-trust. It means that we are not going to
have a broken heart. We are not going to feel betrayal if our hearts were
not open. One of the reasons why we feel hurt so much by betrayal is
because we dared to love. Please take that to the bank. If you didn’t love,
you wouldn’t care. It would not hurt. Suzanne Collins, the author of the
Hunger Games, she says this in the Hunger Games books, “For there to be
betrayal, there would have to have been trust first.” You’d have to have
some sense of trust first for there to be any kind of betrayal.

Okay. So first what we’re going to talk about is betrayal, and then we are
going to shift to talking about trust. In this portion of the book, she
gives some guidelines about trust that I think are really, really
important. We’re going to talk about that. So first, let’s talk about
betrayal. Betrayal, obviously at its core, is a violation of trust. It
happens in relationships in which trust is expected and assumed. So when
it’s violated, we’re often shocked, and we can struggle to believe what’s
happening. We often don’t want to believe it. It feels unreal. She says it
can feel as if the ground beneath us has given way. How many of you have
felt that?

Now, she says, when betrayal is a result of physical or sexual abuse
perpetuated by a trusted partner or family member, such as in the case of
domestic violence or child abuse, perpetrated by a parent, it is referred
to as betrayal trauma. Many of you listeners are in that camp. When we’re
injured by betrayal, we could suffer anxiety, depression, anger, sadness,
jealousy, decreased self-worth, embarrassment, humiliation, shame, and even
trauma symptoms. How many of you can raise your hand and say, “Yep, me. I
can check the box on all of those”? Probably most of you.

Now, part of the issue here in the betrayal is that oftentimes our own
self-trust is just diminished. Depleted. We think, “Oh my gosh, how did I
not know? How did I not know?” Or, “I saw little things that were weird and
I discounted them. I dismissed them.” And we just feel like we can’t even
trust ourself, and we’re going to get into that in a little bit. She does
share some other kinds of betrayal. There’s institutional betrayal where an
institution causes harm by action or inaction to an individual who trusts
or depends upon that institution. This can be lots of different things. It
can be businesses. It can be religious organizations. There’s all kinds of
areas where we can have institutional betrayal.

Obviously, here we are talking about betrayal within an intimate
relationship. She says it’s possible to heal betrayal, but it’s rare
because it requires significant courage and vulnerability to hear the pain
we’ve caused without becoming defensive. She says the only way back from
betrayal is accountability, amends, and action. None of these things are
possible without acknowledging the pain and possibly trauma that we have
caused someone without rationalizing or making excuses. We’re also much
better as individuals and as a culture at shaming and blaming than we are
at actual accountability. That is part of the problem here, right? That’s
part of the problem is that we are so much quicker to go, “Not my fault.”
To point the blame or to take on shame. Take on shame.

At my virtual retreat last week, I asked my clients, I asked everybody on
that call, “How many of you experienced shame?” And every one of them
raised their hand, every single one in one form or another in one. Even if
it’s just a little bit, they all have taken on some kind of blame
themselves. It’s blame that you’re turning around on you. I am wrong. Part
of the healing from this is changing that narrative, opening up, and not
doing to ourselves either what others do to us. So when we want
accountability, when we want to be treated kindly, we need to give that to
ourselves as well. Accountability and shame are very different things.
Accountability can set us free to move forward, whereas shame keeps us
completely stuck.

All right, so you are no stranger here to what it feels like to feel
betrayed. You are no stranger here. But what I want to focus on now, I want
to shift. There was a little precursor about betrayal. I want to talk now
about the piece of building trust. I get asked this a lot. I get asked it
in Instagram DMs. I get emails about it. In my group, people want to know
how do I know if I can trust things like that. What I always say and what
I’ll say to you is that it’s not going to be this one sweeping thing like,
“Oh my gosh, I understand. I understand how much I hurt you, and I’ll never
do it again.” That’s not good enough. It is not good enough. It has to
come.

As Brené Brown said through many things. One of them is action. One of them
is action. We have to see the action that follows the words that follows
the accountability. Part of why it’s so hard is because none of us really
want to see ourselves. We don’t want to see the parts of us that are
painful, that have hurt other people, those parts of us that want to hide
from that we are embarrassed about, that we’re ashamed of. Who wants to
look at those? Not me, but in healing trust, they have to be looked at. It
has to be looked at.

So I’m going to go through a few things now about trust, and one definition
of trust is it’s from a book called The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential
Primer for Building Trust at Work. So this is about work. This is not
necessarily tied to relationships, but I think it’s the same. The author
Charles Feltman defines trust as choosing to risk making something you value
vulnerable to another person’s actions. How many of you are raising your
hand going, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I did. I made something I value
vulnerable to another person’s actions, and boy was that hurt. Boy did that
hurt.” And then he defines distrust as a general assessment that what is
important to me is not safe with this person in this situation or any
situation.

Trust is more of a cognitive assessment than an emotion. Please hear that.
I’m going to repeat it because it’s really important. Trust is more of a
cognitive assessment than an emotion. This is really, really, really,
really important. We think that it’s an emotional thing to trust another
person, and there is something to this in that we can feel it when we can
trust. There is an emotion, there is a safety, there is a sense of, “I can
breathe a little bit. I can see that this person is becoming more
trustworthy.” But before that comes, we got to collect data. We have to
know our numbers. We have to know the actual data, and we’re going to be
talking about that. I’m going to give you a little formula that Brené put
together that’s going to help you collect a little more data. We can have
emotions about the situation, about the data, but trust is something that
we can really kind of pen to paper go, “Is this somebody that actually has
earned my trust? Is this somebody that I should trust?”

So when Brené put together this little formula, she said she worked on it
for years and finally put it together. She said, “We’ve spent the past 10
years trying to figure out exactly what constitutes trust.” What are the
behaviors we’re talking about when we talk about trust? Seven elements of
trust emerged from our data, and we use the acronym BRAVING. BRAVING. The B
in BRAVING is for boundaries. You respect my boundaries, and when you’re
not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. You’re willing to say
no. Boundaries. This is really important. You respect my boundaries, and
when you’re not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. Okay, so I’m
going to give you an example that was a question that somebody asked in my
group.

She has a different idea in her mind about what appropriate relationships
can be outside of the marriage, what kind of friend relationships are okay,
which are not. She has a different idea than her spouse does. His is much
looser. She came and asked about this and asked what I thought. Really,
what it comes down to is them going together and being collaborative and
coming together on what they are going to respect from each other.

Part of that for her is knowing what her own boundary is like, “I am not
okay with you going to lunch alone with a woman. I’m not okay with that.
That is a boundary of mine.” And making that clear, and just because
somebody doesn’t agree or somebody doesn’t have the same boundary as you,
they might not care if you do. The trust was broken, which means that you
are going to have more concerns than if she would’ve gone to lunch with
somebody. The trust has already been broken, and so the need to repair that
is crucial, showing, “It matters to me what your boundaries are, and I’m
willing to respect that. And I’m willing to ask you and say, ‘Hey, what are
you comfortable with here?'” That’s a big deal.

Next, reliability. You do what you say you’ll do. At work, this means
staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise
and are able to deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities.
That’s Brené’s words, but I would say she doesn’t talk about this, but I
will. At home, this means doing what you say you’re going to do, getting
home when you say you’re going to be home, checking in, not being
unavailable for hours at a time where your spouse doesn’t know quite where
you are or doesn’t know when you’re going to be home, doesn’t lead you
wondering, leaves you worried. Reliability is checking in and communicating
and talking about schedules, following through with what you say you’re
going to do without constantly needing to be reminded of it. This is a big
deal, like, “You matter enough to me that I’m going to prioritize this
thing that we talked about and make sure that I follow through.”

Next, accountability. You own your mistakes, you apologize, and you make
amends. Accountability, and you know what? This is not a one and done. It’s
not, “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry that I blew up our life. I’m sorry, and now
it’s over and done, and now let’s move forward and build back our life.”
That’s not enough. It’s not enough. Sometimes owning your mistakes is what
may seem like endless conversations about it. Maybe it’s multiple
apologies, like, “I can see that I really, really hurt you. I’m so sorry.”
As much as it takes, as much as it takes. That’s what accountability looks
like. The person who has offended doesn’t get to set the terms, like “I
apologized once and that’s all I’m going to do.” For trust to be built, we
need to know that they will apologize as many times as needed. We might
need to hear it again. It’s okay.

All right, next step is vault. This one’s really important, vault. You
don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. I need
to know that my confidences are kept and that you are not sharing with me
any information about other people that should be confidential. Vault,
you’re protecting the relationship. You’re keeping what is sacred to the
relationship, sacred to the relationship with many of you. You have come to
learn that your spouse talked about you to other people. Maybe they built
themselves up by tearing you down, by diminishing you. Of course, this is
hurtful. Part of this rebuilding trust in this vault piece is knowing that
that is not happening anymore. That if there’s a problem that they have
with you, that they come to you directly, that they learned the skills to
come to you, to confront, to talk, to communicate, to have conflict,
willing to have conflict, to be safe, to keep it within that vault.

Next, the I here is integrity. You choose courage over comfort. You choose
what is right over what is fun, faster, easy, and you choose to practice
your values rather than simply professing them. Something that my clients
hear me say a lot is that one of the things that we need to know is why
they overrode their own integrity in the first place, why they did this
thing that it’s really not in alignment with their values to do? What was
so compelling that you overrode your own integrity to do it? With this
integrity piece, we are learning if they can value courage over comfort.

We’re learning if they can learn restraint, if they can choose what’s right
over fun, fast, or easy, that quick hit, that dopamine hit, that
validation, that can feel intoxicating. We need to know that they are
willing to learn how to do those things so that we can trust them. You
choose to practice your values rather than simply professing them. It’s
really easy to say, “Oh yes, I value integrity.” It’s very easy to do that
until you are placed in a situation that might be very, very tempting and
feel very, very good, and suddenly that goes out the window because
something else felt more compelling in the moment. We need to know that
you’re willing to say no in the moment to honor your values, to honor your
commitments, and to have the courage to do so.

The N in braving is non-judgment. I can ask for what I need, and you can
ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. We
can ask each other for help without judgment. Oh, this is a big one, and
you know what? I think it takes incredible vulnerability to do this. I
struggle with this one even sometimes. I struggle to ask sometimes because
there’s this very independent part of me that I’ve always been a pretty
independent person. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll take care of myself.” That
kind of thing.

The problem though is that you can only get so close in a relationship when
you don’t ask for the things you need, when you can’t communicate it, and
then feel kind of empty. So the more that we can grow our trust in the
other person, that we can bring things to them, that real intimacy is born
here, that we can say, “Hey, I really need from you to validate me and to
say it this way when I bring up an issue. I need you to listen. I just need
you to be there and to hear me, and you don’t even need to say much. Just,
‘I am here. I love you. I’m here. I understand that I have hurt you and I’m
here to help repair it.'”

Learning to communicate these things and then learning to trust that
they’re going to be met with non-judgment is massive. It’s massive. Too
many of my clients are not there yet. Right now, many of them feel like
they are judged. They feel like they are made to feel like they are being
extra dramatic or taking it way too personally, and so they struggle to
bring it up because they’re afraid they’re going to be rejected. What I
will say to them, what I do say to them, what I’m saying here is that the
thing is, you don’t want to be in a relationship. You do not want to be
there. If this piece doesn’t change, you do not want to be there. It’s not
going to be something that you’re going to thrive in if this piece does not
change. This is worth standing up for.

The last one, and I have to interrupt this by saying I apologize if you
hear machines in the background right this second. We have tree trimmers at
our house. We had a huge storm recently and had some damage, and the tree
trimmers just cranked up their motors, so I apologize if you hear that in
the background. But the last one, the G, generosity, you extend the most
generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of
others. Again, that can feel difficult, especially after being betrayed. It
can be very difficult for my clients to do this, to offer generosity.

Right now when your partner is building trust, when the trust has been
broken, them offering that to you is huge, offering you generosity that
this person loves me and is sticking around right now trying to fix this. I
also want to add one more thing here about this whole BRAVING acronym. Some
of you are not staying. Some of you had your partner leave, and I want to
shift this conversation a little bit to something that I think is even more
important, and that is the self-betrayal that you have felt, the
self-betrayal that can be even more painful, like, “Why did I settle? Why
did I drop my own standards for myself? Why did I not speak up?” All the
stories that come up.

Brené Brown talks about this a little bit. She says, “Self-trust is
normally the first casualty of failure or mistakes. We stop trusting
ourselves when we hurt others, get hurt, feel shame, or question our
worth.” I know many of you are questioning your worth. I know this. She
said that she’s been sober for 25 years, and what she’s learned in her
sobriety is that she can now trust herself and her actions when it comes to
protecting what she values. She knows that she will have her back, and so
she flips the acronym a little bit to work with self-trust.

I want you to hear this. Boundaries. This is in light of self-trust. Did I
respect my own boundaries? Was I clear about what’s okay and what’s not
okay? Reliability. Was I reliable? Did I do what I said I was going to do?
Accountability? Did I hold myself accountable? Vault. Did I respect the
vault and share appropriately? Integrity. Did I act for my integrity?
Non-judgment. Did I ask for what I needed? Was I non-judgmental about
needing help? Generosity. Was I generous toward myself? Oh, isn’t that
beautiful? Backing up to the non-judgment, was I non-judgmental about
needing help? Did I not judge myself for needing help? Isn’t that huge that
it’s okay to need help?

This piece of self-trust often supersedes trusting somebody else. We often
don’t feel like we can trust them until we work on our own self-trust.
These things are things that we work on day in and day out inside my
program. We have to learn to get back into ourselves, back into our
strength, back into our wisdom, back into trusting ourselves, before we can
hand that back to somebody else. Why? Because we have to know at the end of
the day we have our own back, that we are wiser, that we know more, that we
see more, and that we are going to operate at a higher level based on a
really high standard for our life and for what we will accept and not
accept. When we do that, it sets a foundation to be able to ease back into
trust. If we are terrified, it’s going to be very hard to ever trust
anybody again. When we learn to trust ourselves more, we know that we have
our own back, and we know that it’s in our best interest to start trusting
when somebody is becoming trustworthy.

So for those of you listening who were the one who betrayed, look at areas
that you strengthen your own trustworthiness. Do you follow through? Do you
listen to the boundaries? Do you honor them? Do you respect them? Can she
non-judgmentally ask for what she needs? Do you extend generosity,
kindness, even if it feels threatening to you? For those of you who have
been hurt, these are some things to pay attention to. These are some of the
things to stand up for. These are some words to put to what it is you’re
looking for. I’ll never do it again is not enough. You need to see action,
day-to-day action.

I’m going to give you just one tiny example of something that happened last
week. It’s a very small example, but it just warmed my heart and helped me
to just remember that I can trust my husband. Last week, it was in the
morning, and it was a chaotic morning, and I had a lot going on and I was
about to get on. It was the day of my virtual retreat, and my daughter, my
little daughter, who’s almost three. Of course, she was extra needy that
morning. She was extra needy, and I was frustrated that my husband hadn’t
stayed around to help. He had left and I was trying to get her ready and get
things situated before the nanny came, and then I would be getting right
onto this call, this seven-hour retreat, and I texted him and just said, “I
wish that you could just see the need and just stick around and take care of
her so I can do what I need to do.”

Now, in hindsight, I could have asked for that, and I didn’t. I could have
said, “Hey, can you stay longer this morning so I have extra time?” And I
told him a couple of things that would’ve been very helpful for him to do
to help with, and that I wish that he could see the need on his own rather
than me having to ask for it.

Now, there’s some problems in that, because we do need to ask, and it was
kind of after the fact that I’m like, “Ah, I totally could have just said,
‘Hey, can you stay?'” But what I sent was that, and his response back was,
“I love you, and sometimes I just need the reminder, thank you.” And the
lack of defensiveness, the kindness, the generosity, the hearing me, that I
just need him to pay a little more attention sometimes, that was perfect.
It was perfect for me to know that he would hear me, that we could just
move past it, that I could give some feedback and move past it and have him
here. It’s little moments like that that help me to feel safer, to help me
to know that he can be trusted, and that helped me to know that he cares
about me and my wellbeing. That’s just one small example, but that’s what
it looks like in real time. We are going to make mistakes. We’re going to
get it wrong, but can we go back and correct? Can we go back and talk about
it? Can we ask? Can we repair?

All right, my beautiful friends, that’s what I have for you today. I hope
you found this useful. I hope you pulled out a notebook and pen and took
some notes. The applications to join my program are open. If you are
accepted, you’ll be sent an email with next instructions. It is the most
amazing group with the most amazing women that are changing their own lives,
taking very seriously their own healing so that they can live a big life
again. They do not want to shrink anymore. They don’t want to shrink their
own life. They want to live large. Really knowing who they are, really
feeling grounded in who they are, and claiming what is theirs, whether in
the relationship they’re in or elsewhere. I invite you to apply, and I will
talk to you soon. All right, bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast. If you would
like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcast
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