Healing From Betrayal and Creating Safety
Welcome back to the grounded union podcast. On this episode, we're gonna be talking about healing from betrayal and creating safety. We're gonna really share about what Caitlyn's experience was like finding out that I've been lying to her, been dishonest with her, and we really wanna empower you. If you've been the betrayed spouse or you as a couple are healing through betrayal right now, we wanna give you validating your experience and give you perspectives and insights that would have been helpful for us that we picked up on that would allow the healing process to go smoother. So this episode is to alleviate any unnecessary suffering.
Brandon:When we enter into a relationship with one another, we come in with a level of brokenness and sometimes it does some carnage and we wanna, we wanna find out is connection possible after broken trust. And we wanna share with you what our experience was and offer you some hope in today's episode. Are one week away from our last event in The Mainland this year in San Diego, 08/22/2025. If you want to fly out to San Diego, there may be a few spots left. Or if you want to attend virtually, you can from the comforts of your home, anywhere in the world.
Brandon:You can click on the show notes. You'd like to spend two days with us through our grounded union workshop, rebuilding trust, rebuilding your connection, working through the things we talk about on this podcast. We're going to talk about the pain of betrayal. It's not a light topic and it's actually, I was the one that created the sense of betrayal, not the sense, the reality of betrayal, the magnitude of the pain that Caitlyn experienced in our relationship because I chose to lie and hide. So I would say there's two forms of betrayal.
Brandon:There's active betrayal and passive The active form of betrayal would be doing things that you have verbally or by default committed to not doing sleeping with somebody else, doing something consciously that you know is going to hurt your spouse. It's outside of your agreements with one another. The passive betrayal is committing to a life of loving each other and not giving love. So being passive, withholding the love that you committed to, that's a form of betrayal as well and anything in between. So that's what we're going to talk about right now.
Caitlyn:And this is one of the main questions that came in after we finished all of season one. If you haven't listened to season one, all of our episodes really build upon each other, creating a foundation, which is really the entirety of all of our messages, creating a foundation. And your union in our podcast models that. And so if you haven't listened to the first, you know, nine episodes in our original season one, I highly recommend that. From those of you who listen to all of that, we talk a little bit in each episode about healing from betrayal, and a lot of you, mainly women, wanted to hear a lot more in-depth on this topic.
Caitlyn:So we're gonna dedicate a whole episode to this topic of how specifically I healed from betrayal. We give this disclaimer in almost episodes, all of our workshops. We share from I get goosebumps every time I go to think about this. It's like, we share our story and our experience. Do you know how many people share their book knowledge and information and it's never an experience they've actually had?
Caitlyn:And that type of information can only take you so far because the person giving you that book knowledge or insight or maybe they might even consider it wisdom hasn't actually even tested what they're teaching you. They haven't actually maybe even experienced what your experience tried on a way of thinking, way of doing, a way of being to get to the other side and then tell you how it went. Our podcast, our courses, our workshop is our lived experience. It is our story. It what happened in our marriage before and after and all the steps in between.
Caitlyn:And so we don't teach you anything that we didn't first try. We don't share anything with you that we didn't first have an experience with, that we aren't now on the other side saying, hey, it works. Everything that we talk about is because we did it, we tried it, and we know it works. And so when it comes to the topic of betrayal, in our story, we're gonna talk about our story. Brandon lied and betrayed me.
Caitlyn:I was the betrayed spouse. If you're listening to this and you are both lying and hiding to each other, don't minimize what we're saying just because we're gonna share our story. And put everything we're saying into your circumstances, into your scenarios, and into your story. If you're the wife and you've been lying and hiding and your husband hasn't been lying and hiding, then you can hear everything we're saying and still apply it to you. Yeah.
Caitlyn:So we're gonna stay congruent to our story and you can listen to our story and imply the steps and tools that we teach to meet you exactly where you are. And so this was the number one question that we got, and it's something that we really wanna touch on. And I was the spouse that was betrayed, because I was the spouse that came into our marriage, that came into our union at 19. Yes. Very young.
Caitlyn:Very innocent in a lot of ways. And I came into it. I say this in our first couple episodes. I came into this with the idea that marriage is where we give ourselves to each other. There's nobody else anymore.
Caitlyn:And I thought that Brandon had that same perspective of marriage. Because based off of the conversations, like he said, based off of the commitments that we had made to each other, that's what I went into marriage thinking we were going to be achieving together. And about six to eight months in, I woke up to a completely different reality. And many of you have already heard our story and you already know this. I woke up to the reality that my husband, who I loved with all my heart, who I thought loved me with his actions and his words with all of his heart, was actually lying to me.
Caitlyn:Hiding things from me, keeping secrets from me, communicating one thing with his words, and then going against that with his actions. And so almost immediately in the first year of our marriage, I actually experienced immense amount of betrayal. And so then we went on the cycle for many many years of I catch Brandon lying and hiding. He says, I'm so sorry. I'll never do it again.
Caitlyn:And then he reads a couple books. We go to a couple counselors. He says, yeah. I'm good. I'm clean.
Caitlyn:I don't look at anything online. I don't have any addictions anymore. I've completely purified my mind. I've cleansed myself, he would say. Again, our story involves sexual brokenness.
Caitlyn:Your story might involve other addictions, other forms of lie, other things they might be lying about. Brandon actually used to lie about video games all the time. He used to lie about phone use. He used to lie about everything he could lie about because he had parts of him he wanted to keep secret. And so we went on this loop of lying, hiding, getting caught, me feeling betrayed, us going through all these steps that we were told we need to go through.
Caitlyn:Brandon saying he's all better. And we kept looping on this for years and years and years. I experienced years of being in a situation where I again was betrayed over and over and over again. And I message women this all the time because for me, what had to happen is I had to have my line in the sand moment. It's like, enough is enough.
Brandon:Yeah.
Caitlyn:I'm not gonna take this anymore. I'm not gonna be betrayed again. I'm not gonna go through this same cycle and this loop anymore. I can't take it anymore. I can't take it another day.
Caitlyn:And this is much different than threatening divorce. I am sure I threatened divorce many a times. I'm not saying that I was perfect. Oh, wait. Somebody messaged the other day and was like, my husband compares me to you in the sense that he says that, you know, Caitlyn's always so kind and nice when Brandon did things that upset her and how she talks about it and you're so mean when when you find out things.
Caitlyn:And it's like, I'm here five years later on the other side. Five years later after rebuilding our foundation, after experiencing deep union, connection, intimacy, love, all the things. That's why I'm composed right now. Yeah. I was not composed back then.
Caitlyn:If you think I was composed, you were so wrong. I was weeping, crying. Why are Brandon's videos so potent about the angry wife? I was the angry wife. I was the angry wife because any wife, any person who's undergone betrayal is upset, is angry, is devastated, is hurt, is wounded.
Caitlyn:And you can't be wounded and composed. Those two things don't go together. If you have betrayed your spouse, they're gonna be messy. They're gonna be wounded. They're gonna be in pain because they just found out that the person that they love the most, that they've committed to in becoming one has now betrayed them, has devastated their marriage.
Caitlyn:Sometimes people find out decades into their marriage about all these lies, all this devastation. You cannot be wounded and composed. You're going to be wounded and a mess.
Brandon:As Caitlyn said, the first five years of our marriage was a cycle where Caitlyn would catch me lying. I'd read a book, confess to us to a men's group, cry, tell her I won't do it again, and make some really big commitments. And I put honest effort forward because, actually, I wanna continue wounding my my wife, but I was still doing it. I wasn't breaking the cycle. That's why we talk so much about going to the foundation.
Brandon:Year five came, and we had had two years of so called freedom, where what that consisted of is I made a covenant with my eyes with my pastor that I had read from a book. Right? I made all these agreements before my pastor, before God, and before Caitlyn that I was not gonna do certain things anymore. I wasn't gonna go to certain websites. I wasn't gonna look at women a certain way.
Brandon:I signed that covenant and said, we're good. We're done. This chapter is closed. I'm free. Anytime Caitlyn had concerns or brought up pain from the previous cycles of lying, I shut her down.
Brandon:I said, look. I'm keeping to my eye covenant. We're good. You don't need to worry about it. What this did is gave a false sense of safety that it was actually her insecurities, her lack of trust that was creating her pain, not that she had valid concerns or intuition.
Brandon:So when you even leading up to finding the truth, there's years of pain that you could already be going through in a deceptive marriage where you're being told one thing and you're, you're being told to discredit your own intuition, your own concerns, and feel guilty for feeling pain. Do not feel guilty for feeling pain. If your spouse lied to you five years ago and it's hurting you today, it hurts you today. I am so big on my men's men's app, the grounded nation app to tell men, look, if she's still bringing up the pain, that means it's still impacting her today. This is the opportunity to heal leading up to our 2019 breakdown.
Brandon:I said, please stop bringing up the pain. I'm going to get you to stop doing that to be quiet because I don't actually want to really look at it. I didn't really want to go to the root and I was still lying and hiding and I didn't know what to do about it. In 2019, when Caitlyn caught me for the final time, she said that she drew the line in the sand. I could tell that her strength was gone.
Brandon:I could tell that she meant business and she was already a straight shot communicator. But this time I realized, oh, like, I can't use the same tactics of I'll say I'm sorry and we'll move on. This is like a we are not moving on from this. We're either getting to the root of this or our relationship no longer exists. I wanna take a second to highlight some of the bodily sensations that Caitlyn experienced through the pain of betrayal and trauma.
Brandon:And I want to validate any of these sensations that you may have experienced in your situation right now. So when Caitlyn caught me lying to her and was trying to say like, do you see how big this is? And I was giving her I was numb to her pain. There were a lot of beginning days and weeks and even months in, Caitlyn literally could not breathe. Caitlyn did not typically have very much anxiety on her day to day basis.
Brandon:She lived a very free life, but I watched my beloved gasp for air as she had panic attacks, trying to process the information of being lied to. I watched her legs shake and convulse when she was trying to fall asleep because there's so much she was trying to process, trying to understand, trying to get through to me while I was still numb and saying, I don't want to see reality For you to be fitted in the gap where you can see both sides, where you've been hurt, what's taken place, and you're the only one that can see it. And you're like, does anybody else see this as a big deal? It's to feel crazy. Even your counselor, your pastor, they can't actually feel what you felt.
Brandon:Oftentimes women are given a door shut in their face. They're saying, I hope it gets better. Forgive your husband. Let go. I'm here to tell you if you're having nightly panic attacks, if your body's shaking, if you're convulsing, you have so much anxiety, so much ink, so much sorrow, that there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing abnormal about you having that heightened of a visceral experience in your nervous system because this information is not meant to set in.
Brandon:It's not meant to be your normal experience. So I want to validate any of you experiencing health problems, chronic illness, pain, emotional swings that you haven't known what to do with. It's time to one accept that that's where you're at. And two, I want you to know that we are not going to cast a stone and say, feeling so deeply, just get over it because that won't help you heal. And it's a disservice to the person that was acting on addiction because they need to know the magnitude of your pain so that you two can heal together.
Brandon:Otherwise you don't, you don't have a future together. You cannot create safety if you don't know what you're healing from.
Caitlyn:Mhmm. Yeah. People say, Caitlyn how did you deal with all of the pain? Well, I dealt with the pain in the sense that I, like Brandon said, I embraced and accepted exactly what I was feeling. So if I felt deep anxiety and pain, I casted no shame upon myself.
Caitlyn:I didn't try to cope. I didn't try to put a band aid on it. I didn't try to get over it. I embraced what I was feeling. I let myself feel.
Caitlyn:This is actually what a lot of us were never taught to do when we were younger. We were never taught to feel our feelings, our emotions, to label them and put a name on them, and then to know what to do with them. And so as I was in the midst of deep betrayal, I would feel whatever emotion was hitting me at the time. I would embrace that emotion. I would put a name to that emotion.
Caitlyn:And then I had my ways of working with and through the pain, the emotion, and the feelings. And I have shared all of these things in the past, and I'm gonna put them all here in one place. And it's probably gonna be very different advice than you've ever been given on how to heal from betrayal. I remember I heard one quote and I loved it. I'll share it here.
Caitlyn:I forget where it comes from, maybe pure desires, but it's a quote that's, if you are the wife who's been betrayed, it's essentially the same as being the passenger of a car crash. You didn't choose to be a part of that car crash. You weren't driving that car, yet you're actually still injured. And so you still also need to tend to yourself. As your husband, as your spouse, whatever spouse has been hiding and lying and acting addiction is beginning to heal and grow and develop.
Caitlyn:Those of us who have betrayed and mistreated also have an opportunity to heal and grow and develop in a different way and together. And I remember I went to a small group specifically for women who had experienced betrayal. And the gal that was leading the small group had been in a marriage that had had continuous betrayal, just like what Brand and I had experienced, where we just kept looping and looping and looping. Yet she hadn't come to the other side yet. She hadn't had an experience and tools and a path to take anybody on.
Caitlyn:And I remember sitting there, this is why we talk about this a lot wondering, why do so many of us go get marriage advice from people who don't have marriages that reflect what we're working towards, what we're wanting to move into. And so in my season of betrayal, similar to our entire season of navigating into sexual wholeness, I actually had to find my own way of healing. And what I discovered to be extremely healing for me in that season was getting outside. Mhmm. We were in the spring and summertime, and we would go outside, we would wake up in the morning, we had two kids at the time, and I would go outside and lay out a blanket.
Caitlyn:We had a house that had a giant backyard, a play structure, a bunch of grass, a table to eat at outside, and we lived out there. We lived outside. We would go lay the blanket out and let the kids play. We'd eat. We'd be outside.
Caitlyn:We were a mess. We were in tears at night. We were staying up till two or three in the morning trying to figure out how to rebuild our foundation and then we'd wake up tired. Eyes were red and swollen and I would get outside. I would get my face in the sun.
Caitlyn:I would put my feet on the grass. I would lay out and let my body reset out in nature because creation around us actually has living revitalizing energy to offer us. The sun has revitalizing energy to offer us. And so oftentimes when we're in pain, we we try to grab a screen, oh, try to cope with the pain. We try to turn on the TV to try to cope with the pain.
Caitlyn:We try to go have a really dramatic negative conversation with somebody because maybe that would help me feel a little bit better if I could complain about my spouse to my small group, if I could post something negative on social media, if I just took my negative energy and threw it on somebody else, it would not help me feel better. And what I found is if I took all of that anxiety, that depression, that angst, that negativity that was in my body, and I went and laid it on the actual earth. I found that the earth held space to revitalize me. And if you're Christian listening to this, you can know, yes, we are Christians. We've been Christians our entire life, and for some reason in the church, there's all of this taboo around the earth and it makes no sense because the earth is the creation of God.
Caitlyn:So absolute there's so much healing in every detail of everything that he created. It has purpose and it has meaning and it has healing for you. It has abundance and it's actual life for your being. And so go outside as much as you physically can. I don't care if you're listening to this and it's raining or snowing.
Caitlyn:We have lived a life in our marriage of ten years where we go outside every single day. If you are in pain, do not try to cope and flush your pain away with screams, with food, with addiction. That's actually what's brought you to this point is your spouse has betrayed you, has been coping through their pain, through their emotions with addiction. Yeah. So if your spouse has been betrayed, don't turn to something and begin an addiction for yourself.
Caitlyn:You might even have an addiction to gossip. Don't turn to gossip. You don't actually have to tell a single person about what your spouse did to you. That's not gonna provide you healing right away. Yep.
Caitlyn:Going to your small group and complaining about your husband is not gonna get you a solid foundation in your union. It just won't. Yeah. You might hear about a lot of other people that have really messy unions too, and how is that gonna get you anywhere? That's not gonna get you anywhere.
Caitlyn:You need to get outside. I nourish my body Yep. With food and hydration. I nourished myself with proper sleep. If we again, we had two kids at the time.
Caitlyn:If we stayed up late, I slept in as much as my children would allow. I didn't stay up late and then get on my phone until I passed out. I didn't watch TV until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. I got proper sleep. You need proper sleep to be able to heal, to be able to integrate and feel your emotions.
Caitlyn:I journaled. I have over 400 journal entries from our season in 2019 because I journaled at least once every day, if not multiple times a day. They could have been short paragraphs. Some of them will never be read to anybody else because they are rude. They're so angry.
Caitlyn:They are my raw emotions about my husband, about what he was doing, about my life, about how I felt. Instead of taking all that negativity and throwing it up on anybody else, I put it on paper. I took pen to paper. A lot of things that we even share now, these frameworks, these ideas, these ponderings, those are all things I began to journal, I began to write down. They were the cry of my heart, will my husband ever change, I used to write.
Caitlyn:Will he always lie to me? Will I ever trust him again? How will I know if I'm supposed to trust him again? All of these things I began to pour onto the paper as I was outside, as I'm nourishing myself, as I'm taking care of myself. We moved a ton.
Caitlyn:Movement is a staple of healing. Mhmm. Because when you have emotions inside, you need to be able to move them through. You need to be able to get them out. If you have anxiety, you need to go for a walk.
Caitlyn:If you have depression and angst, and if you feel a heavy burden on your chest from all the painful information, go outside. Go for a walk. Go for a hike, go walk to a waterfall Yeah. And swim and come back home. You can walk a lap around your neighborhood.
Caitlyn:You can walk in your cul de sac in circles. The point is to move. Yep. To move your body so that things can move in you and through you and out of you. Whatever doesn't belong in you is moving out of you, moving through you all the way.
Caitlyn:These were the staples of how I healed. And you might think, well, how in the world were you able like, those things don't go together. Brandon is lying to you and you're just going and laying out in the sun. It's a yes. Yeah.
Caitlyn:Because those are the things that sustain you in the deepest, darkest seasons of your life.
Brandon:And a lot of you that if you've been through betrayal, you're you might have thoughts of how can I get my spouse to change? We get that a lot. And although you cannot do the work to heal for your spouse, one thing that inspired me was Caitlyn's resolve to live in the present moment. So all healing takes place in the moment. It takes place now.
Brandon:And as Caitlyn already encouraged you, if you're walking through Don't go create a life of addiction to deal with the results of addiction, the pain of addiction that was done to you. So don't go create drama in your life. Don't neglect taking care of yourself because something wrong was done to you. So seeing Caitlyn's resolve to say, I'm still going to love myself, my children, my body. I'm going to live life to the fullest.
Brandon:Are you coming with me? Are you staying here? So in the, even in my numbness, which we'll talk about in a moment, to break free from being an addiction, being numb. Even as I was numb, I looked at Caitlyn and was like, I want to live like that. Even though it's there's pain, I could see that there was life even in the mess, even in Caitlyn's response to the pain.
Brandon:So you cannot do the work for your spouse, but you can inspire through the way you're living and you also can hold the standard for what you are okay with and not okay with. Caitlyn's like, look, we're not moving on. I'm not living. I'm not gonna settle for this lesser way of relating to you. This is how I take care of myself.
Brandon:This is how I treat myself. This is I treat my children. This is how I'm gonna treat you. Are you coming to that level, or or is our marriage over? I'm gonna continue to take care of myself.
Brandon:And I knew Caitlyn, she didn't need my permission to take care of herself. What she was curious about is, are you going to love me and commit to healing at the root level so we don't have to go through this again? If you've walked through betrayal, it has made you feel powerless. It has taken your power away because what now it puts you in this place of, do I stay in the marriage for money, stability, just for the kids' well-being? Do you just stay married until your kids are 18 and then you get divorced?
Brandon:Do you just stay married because you are a stay at home mom and your husband worked and you don't know what you do to restart your life? Your power is still your power. To stay just because of these logistical things, which are real financial stability is real. Having your kids, having a perception of stability. It's a real thing.
Brandon:That's important to you. What I would say is by drawing the line in the sand, Caitlyn chose to do, I knew she wasn't going to stay because of money, which I wasn't really providing much. I was in ministry. I knew she wasn't going to stay for my financial provision and I knew she wasn't going to stay just so the kids would be around me and not have to walk through a difficult time. She was going to put herself and our children in the best situation for survival.
Brandon:Like we weren't going to survive as a marriage, so she knew that the kids weren't going to be in a good environment if we just stuck together. So if you've been wrestling with, okay, do I just kind of work through this, forgive him, you know, Jesus forgave me, so I'll forgive him for, you know, just to not rock the boat too much more. We're saying rock the freaking boat. Draw the line in the sand. Say, look, I'm not staying in this marriage with you unless these things change.
Brandon:And you have full permission to do that. And you don't need to feel guilty about thinking about how will I take care of myself? Well, you're not going be able take care of yourself right now. And you're probably going to live with chronic illness because you're willing to settle for a toxic relationship. And we're not willing to give you that message or give you that encouragement.
Brandon:Hold to the standard of what healing feels like for you and acknowledge where the pain is. Don't ignore the pain so that you can stay in a miserable relationship.
Caitlyn:Yeah. And we're not pro divorce. We're actually pro union, hence the name of this podcast. The thing here is that if you are in a union where your spouse is actively lying and hiding and betraying you and not choosing to step into a season of healing and growth, then you don't have marriage. You don't have union.
Caitlyn:You might not be divorced on paper, but you're divorced. Yep. You're not actually living in a marriage that's one anymore. Yep. Your spouse, maybe even both of you are actively choosing to separate your union every single day.
Caitlyn:And that's what I used to feel and I used to say to Brandon is, this isn't I'm gonna divorce you if you change. It's no, you're divorcing me with your actions. I'm not doing this. I'm just saying here's the line of the sand. You choose me with your words and your actions or you've chosen.
Caitlyn:You've chosen to separate our union and we're not married anymore. And I'm not gonna play the game where we live in the same house and pretend like we're married even though we hate each other. We hate each other with our actions, with the lying, with the hiddenness, with the betrayal. I'm not doing that. And a lot of you are like, okay, well I've told my husband I need him to to change.
Caitlyn:It's like, well, do you mean it? Because when you have your line in the sand moment, it's not your words, it's your energy that's felt. It's I mean it. I mean that we need to come together and we need to heal. Yeah.
Caitlyn:Because we're moving towards being married and united and having a union. We're not gonna play this game anymore where we're hiding and lying from each other and just pretending like we're gonna keep floating by until there's a big combustion and then we get divorced. It's like you're either together or you're not together. There's not really an in between. Like you're in love in your union or you're not.
Caitlyn:And if you're not, then you need to be on the same page moving towards healing. And if you're not, you need to be able to draw the line in sand and say, hey, I'm not going on another day longer without us actively choosing healing together. Well, what does that look like? That doesn't look like your spouse just saying, yeah, sure. I choose you.
Caitlyn:I choose in healing. No. Looks like Active. Diving into the healing process. Yep.
Caitlyn:Which we talk a lot about in Brandon's app, in our courses, in our workshops, in our original season of the podcast. That looks like something. It's not words. It's actions. And actually choosing to live in intimacy.
Caitlyn:Into me, you see. The foundation of our core message, what we found that unlocked the intimacy in our union is getting out all the secrets and all the hiddenness. And this is why this question comes up a lot because when somebody comes into our space and they begin to go on this journey where they begin to actually now share all this hiddenness, all these secrets, whatever they've been keeping from their spouse, the betrayed spouse is like, how do I handle this much? How do I keep hearing these lies? How do I keep hearing this?
Caitlyn:And it's like, you can't. You can't handle it. I can't sugarcoat that. That's why Brandon said, I people sometimes message, I'm weeping every day. I have to take days off of work.
Caitlyn:Yes. Yes, you do. And they might say, well, why would I wanna go through that then? You're already in pain. You're already living in that reality.
Caitlyn:You just don't know it. That's why you feel worlds apart from your spouse. Yeah. That's why you don't feel in love. That's why you feel like you're on the verge of divorce.
Caitlyn:That's why you don't feel like your spouse is your best friend. You maybe didn't have words for it. Yeah. You maybe didn't know why you didn't like your spouse. And now you have words for it and it feels painful, you have to remember you were already in pain.
Caitlyn:And the only way to get to the other side is to know what's been separating the two of you. You have to be able to get everything out on the table and see what's actually really there to move through that and heal through that. Will it be painful for both? Absolutely. Will there be tears?
Caitlyn:Absolutely. I cry to sleep almost every single night when we were in the throes of this in 2019. When I found out that I've been living years of lies and deception and manipulation. There was deep pain and wounding. And on the other side, as we celebrated our 10 together last weekend, I am married to my best friend, madly in love and so safe and connected.
Caitlyn:There's absolutely nothing that could separate us. There's nothing I'm scared of. I'm not scared of Brandon being attracted to anybody. I'm not scared of him noticing anybody. I'm not scared if Brandon's on his phone.
Caitlyn:I'm not scared of what he might see, of what he might not tell me. I have no fear. I have ultimate trust in my union. And I didn't have that five years ago. I had nothing.
Caitlyn:I had nothing but tears every single night. And what got me from tears every night to this ultimate safety was seeing and knowing the truth. It's so worth it. It doesn't matter how painful it is in the moment. You will see to the other side if you get everything out onto the table.
Caitlyn:You will make it to intimacy and connection. You can't have intimacy if you don't see everything. You can't have this type of connection if you don't know what's in between you. You can't. They do not go hand in hand.
Caitlyn:You have to be willing to experience the pain that's already there. Your spouse is gonna put words to it, and then you're going to go lay outside in the sun. Brandon would tell me lie after lie after lie, things he was hiding. He would tell me when he was objectifying women outside, oh, I noticed her breasts, I noticed her waist. And we would go through the four r's.
Caitlyn:We talk about those in the first season. We talk about those in our course. He would go through the four r's and then I would go lay outside. And I would let the earth revitalize me. And I would go for a walk.
Caitlyn:And I would lay with my kids. And I didn't know, I didn't have anybody to tell me that we would get to the other side if I tried this painful route. I just knew that the route of not knowing anything was just as painful. The route of my husband finding everyone else attractive and living in sexual brokenness was just as painful as actually hearing it, that I knew it was worth it to try to see what I could experience on the other side. And in clearing and getting everything out and clearing through all of the lies and the hiddenness, we were able to create intimacy.
Caitlyn:Into me, you see. Where we could fully know and fully see each other, fully be satisfied and alive and in love and fully safe.
Brandon:If you're the spouse that has created the pain in the relationship and you're listening to the depth that Caitlyn's sharing and you're maybe even experiencing the emotion that your wife, husband could be sharing with you, and you're like, I want to go to that depth. I want to partner with my wife on the healing process, but I shut down. I detach, I get anxious. I get angry. I minimize, I defend.
Brandon:Even though I know what my spouse is sharing is valid. Why am I still shutting down? Even when my marriage is at stake, my family's at stake and there's all this pain on the line. How do you actually create safety? How do you actually choose into that process?
Brandon:When Caitlyn was weeping a lot of these nights, I just looked at her with a blank, a blank face, a blank stare because my nervous system was so shut down from all the months and years of numbing out on my phone of living in the fantasy world of shutting down at this, at the moment of discomfort, would detach from my reality and zone out and go into my own world. You can't take that route anymore if you're going to heal. And so that's why I talk about a lot in my men's community app grounded nation. I talk about starting an embodiment routine. It's not woo woo.
Brandon:It's a mix of doing some breath work, doing some exercises to get back into your physical body, where you feel emotion and begin to master emotions again. To unthaw from being numb. Some practical things you can do is if your wife's been crying and weeping and you can't feel anything, go take a cold shower. There were nights where I couldn't feel anything, but I wanted to. I wanted to feel so badly.
Brandon:I could see her crying. I'm just like, I can't cry with you. I'm so locked up. And I would go take a a cold shower, and I the feelings of panic that I was avoiding for years, the feelings of anxiety would just hit me. And I'd have, a full blown panic attack where I was just shaking in the shower.
Brandon:I just wanted to feel something. I needed to break through the layers of ice. Do whatever is necessary without harming yourself or without harming others to get back into your body. Turn your TVs off, turn your phones off, take a cold shower, do some strength training, go for a run, do some breath work. One night I called five different men in my life and the first one I called like, look, man, I don't get it.
Brandon:I'm numb. I want this I wanna see I wanna open up. Still was feeling numb. I called another guy. He's like, I wanna open up.
Brandon:I gotta see this. Called another guy. I called, like, five guys in one night to say, man, I want to break. I want to see. So if you're numb, you probably are because if you've lived in addiction, you're trying to numb out the pain.
Brandon:Mhmm. What I'm telling you is don't ignore that you're numb. Don't stop activating your nervous system, reengaging your emotions until you can sit in the pain and be in the pain and be in the presence of your wife while she's weeping while you can weep with her. I tell so many men, you will never offer empathy or validation to your wife until you offer it to yourself. Until you grieve what you lost through your addiction, you will never grieve with your wife.
Brandon:So get alone. Look yourself in the mirror and say, what has my addiction brought me to? What has it cost me? What has it taken away from me? What pain am I in right now?
Brandon:Until you can hurt from all the things you've done, you'll never sit in the hurt that your wife has. You'll just look at her like, you must be on another planet. I can't go there with you. It might feel safe to minimize, to defend, to rationalize your behavior, but what that communicates to your wife, the betrayed spouse, whoever whatever your situation is, is it tells her, I must amp I must level up my pain. I must get louder and louder because he still does not see it.
Brandon:How could you minimize this thing that is literally costing me all of my life, my health, and my well-being, you're telling me it wasn't a big deal? This is my entire awareness right now is what we're working through. This is a massive deal. So if you're saying, look, I'm ready to activate my nervous system. You can click the link in the show notes for additional resources on that.
Brandon:But if you're like, what do I do after I'm saying yes to that magnify your wife's pain, magnify the impact of your behaviors. You will never go wrong in explaining the reality of something you did by using more explicit, clear language. One of the biggest gifts you could give your spouse when you've lied to them is not to say, yeah, I did it a couple of times. It's to say, no, I probably did it way more than I'd like to believe it was way more frequent. It was way longer than I've told myself.
Brandon:When your wife begins to see you, the betrayed spouse begins to see you actually waking yourself up and be like, oh, wait a second. When he's not trying you're not trying to convince yourself it wasn't a big deal, then they're like, oh, thank God. Thank goodness. I don't have to be the driver of this. When you make the betrayed spouse the driver to do your recovery work, to look into your story, double exhausting.
Brandon:Magnify the reality of where the pain is. Magnify and get curious about what actually transpired and communicate it clearly and boldly. And that's that actually will kickstart the healing process alongside getting back into your emotions, back into your body.
Caitlyn:Mhmm. When we started this process, like Brandon said, he was completely numb. He couldn't feel anything. And as we look back, there were things like what he shared that were able to completely wake him up. This is for both of you, maybe, all about learning what you're feeling, maybe for the first time.
Caitlyn:What is it that you're feeling? What is it that you're experiencing? What is it that you're needing? For those who have been living in addiction, like Brandon said, you most likely learned to cope from an uncomfortable feeling from way long ago. This probably goes all the way back to your childhood when you felt some sort of uncomfortable negative emotion.
Caitlyn:You didn't wanna feel it, so you learned how to cope. And then you've been coping your whole life. Maybe it's even been intensifying. Maybe it's been staying the same. Maybe it's been spreading to a bunch of different avenues.
Caitlyn:For Brandon, he learned to cope when he was little. And he numbed himself from so much. And that impacted our marriage because then when I found out all these lies and hiddenness, he was numb. So here I am weeping from what he did and he couldn't even see me. He couldn't validate me.
Caitlyn:He couldn't even express any emotion or empathy because he was completely numb. And then he began to wake himself up. He began to do the things just as he was sharing, take a cold shower, journal, movement. It's the same things I'm doing to revitalize myself from betrayal. He's doing to unlock and wake himself up.
Caitlyn:He's getting outside, he's nourishing himself, he's getting sleep, he's putting away the phone, the TV, the everything. We made this, we're gonna make a whole episode on this, but we made this the priority of our life because this is everything. Your union is everything. This is the life force from where everything you will ever create, your children, your work, your mission on the earth, it starts right here in this union, in this connection. We put everything on hold so that we could actually rebuild our foundation and our union.
Caitlyn:So he began to get back online emotionally. And I wanna share what it looks like. We're both gonna share. Brandon will take a lead. I wanna share what it like if you get back online and you now have emotional capacity as the spouse who's been acting out, who's been lying and hiding, you're the one who's been betraying.
Caitlyn:I wanna share what it looks like to now make space to validate. Because a lot of people will say, well Caitlyn, how do you know when you could trust Brandon again? I'm about to tell you because he went from numb, staring at my face blank while I'm weeping because he'd been lying to me. And then he began to wake up and thaw out. And then he began to see me.
Caitlyn:You can't fake this stuff. How do you know when you can trust your spouse? When he's doing things he can't fake. When Brandon began to look at me as I'm weeping and say, tell me more. Tell me more about the pain that you're in.
Caitlyn:We cry because it's so real to us. And he used to look at me and say, I wanna see you and I wanna hear. I wanna make space for you. I wanna hear how what I did impacted you. You can't say that when you're numb.
Caitlyn:You can't fake feelings if you don't have them. You can't pretend. Everyone in the room would know if you're pretending. Everybody would sense it. Everyone would feel it.
Caitlyn:How did I know when I could trust Brandon again? Because he became a trustworthy person. He became a completely different human because he became alive. If you've been numbing out living in addiction and secrecy and lying, you're not alive. You're surviving.
Caitlyn:You're a zombie walking in your just human flesh. You're not alive. You're not thriving. And as you begin to wake up and come back alive, this is about you. It's about your spouse.
Caitlyn:It's about your union. It's about your purpose here on the earth. As you become back alive, your spouse will automatically know. If you've been betrayed, you will automatically see differences. You will automatically feel seen, validated, heard, known, embraced, loved, comforted, all of these things that you maybe once didn't feel because they were lying and hiding and acting and all of these betraying actions.
Caitlyn:Now you see a different It's not remorse. It's not, I'm so sorry, I'll never do it again. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I'm so sorry. And it's not self pity.
Caitlyn:It's not shame. It's not, I'm so gross. I'm so bad. How could I ever do that to you? Those are victim y ways of viewing this.
Caitlyn:And that's honest, it's a cowardice way of approaching it. A victor's way is, I did that to you. I truly This is a powerful approach. Chose that, and now I'm gonna choose to see you, and I'm gonna choose to see you through this, and I'm gonna choose to heal with you. So you're not going into self pity, self loathing, you're going into powerfulness.
Caitlyn:You're going into, yes, I am going to wake up, and I'm gonna heal, and I'm gonna see your pain, and we're gonna move into this together, and we're gonna experience intimacy and our union probably for the first time ever.
Brandon:When Caitlyn said that she was able to begin trusting me again, I wanna make a clear distinction. This was not a certain moment in time. This was an ongoing progression. For those of you that have been betrayed and feel the pressure to say, okay. You're back.
Brandon:Good. Or for those of you that betraying a partner that caused pain and you're trying to get back on the good side to get the stamp of approval. She trusts me again. No, no, no. When you take that route, actually skip over so many crucial components of the healing process, which is lift the time timeline altogether.
Brandon:There became a moment where I was like, man, I'm not going to get her to change the subject matter. She's not going talk about something else. This is what we've walked through. And when I finally hit this point where I was like, wait a second, I don't need her to move on from this. I am okay with us talking about this every night until we die.
Brandon:I want to know how this impacted her. So if you're like, how do I validate my wife's pain? You sit in the pain. You ask questions about the pain. Like Caitlyn talked about a simple flow.
Brandon:I teach in my men's community is to listen all the way through when your wife's sharing instead of interrupting her, correcting facts, just listen, you just hear her heart. You can sit with an open body posture. You make eye contact. You lean toward her. If you guys are in a place where there's safety, you might even grab her hand.
Brandon:You let her finish sharing when she's done sharing. So you listen, that's the step. That's the first step is you listen without correcting facts. The second part is you reflect back what you heard her sharing. That's just as important for you as it is for her, for you to both know, okay, I'm hearing that this is how it impacted you.
Brandon:This is what you felt. You pick out the emotions you heard that she was sharing. It felt like this and you experienced this and you're still confused about this. And then you ask, you listen, you reflect and you ask, is there anything else you'd add to that? Is there parts I'm missing?
Brandon:And your wife will share again. And you listen and you reflect back what you heard her sharing. And you ask again, just live in that place. You're not doing it to turn your wife's intensity down, to turn her pain down. You're doing it because you want to heal, because you want to live in a place of connection.
Brandon:And so when you lift the timeline, when you lift the pressure from when are you going to trust me again from I'm willing to sit with you in this for as long as it takes. And it's not for as long as it takes, it's we are going to continue to be on a healing progression until we pass on to the next phase of whatever life after we die. Some of are like, will she ever get over this? If you're still asking that question, you've never gotten into it. If you're asking, when will my wife be get over this?
Brandon:You're asking the wrong question. It's how can I get into this pit with her? How can we have a party in her pain? A guy messaged me recently. I think you're in, I think you're in the grounded nation.
Brandon:And you said my wife's counselor said that she was pain shopping because she wanted to know the details. Pain shopping. We're not pain shopping. We need to actually let's go pain shopping. Yeah.
Brandon:We need to get out all the pain. We need to talk about the pain until you are comfortable in the pain with your spouse. It's hurting. It's not going anywhere until you're willing to face it, ferment in it, see it for what it is and say, okay, I did that. I did this.
Brandon:I made a mess of this woman. I took away her strength. I took away her beauty that she feels. I may hear questions so many things. I did that.
Brandon:And when you can look at her and say, these actions are true. What we're talking about, I take full ownership for that. Nobody else is to blame. That's when you get your power back, and that's when the betrayed spouse goes, oh my gosh. I'm not married to a victim that's gonna be tricked back into living this way again.
Brandon:I'm married to a man that's willing to take radical ownership. Fight for me. Fight for himself. And that's how you rebuild at the root level.
Caitlyn:Right. And most people see the mess of what they've created, and they're terrified to look at it and clean it up. And they think, if I just leave that mess there, it's messy, but it's better than trying to clean it up. And we're here to share. If you see the mess that you've made in your marriage, if you clean it up, there is beauty and bliss on the other side.
Caitlyn:I can guarantee it because we did that. We looked at the mess. We looked at the fire. The fire of what felt like would consume us of pain, and we didn't know if on the other side of that there was anything good. And we walked through it.
Caitlyn:We walked through the fire together, committing to heal and to see each other and to know each other. And on the other side, what we've created is so connecting and so beautiful. It was worth all of that pain. It was worth all that pain. And if somebody could have told me that, I would have felt ready for the journey.
Caitlyn:And I'm here to tell you that you can be ready for the journey because the other side is good and I'm not making it up. I'm not making it up. I don't care to make it up. I don't care to make these podcasts or these videos. All I care about is people experiencing true authentic love in their marriage because I've tasted and seen of it.
Caitlyn:It's so good and so real and it makes life so abundant. And I'm here to be the person that I wish I had to say it's worth all the pain you'll experience when all the lies come out. It won't be easy. It won't be easy maybe for a long time but there will be a day, months to maybe a year later where you'll stand on the other side and be so grateful you never gave up. You'll be so grateful you dug it all out and cleared it all out and walked through the fire because it's so good on the other side.
Brandon:And I'm here to say, be willing to do the work. If you have a spouse like Caitlyn that's saying she wants to heal, she wants to work through the pain. In the relationship, do not drag her along if you have no intentions of actually healing at the root level. If you betrayed your spouse, would be kinder to part ways now if you have no intentions at taking ownership or healing at the root level. If you are one of those men that's like, or women, of seeking the man as a man.
Brandon:If you're a man that's like, I'm ready, then stop making excuses. Stop pointing a finger at anybody else and accept that you can heal at the root level, and it's time it's time to do that. We wanna thank you for joining us for this episode on healing from betrayal and creating safety. We have a lot more to to offer you guys in this second season. For those of you that are coming to San Diego or attending online, we look forward to to being with you in person.
Brandon:And, for any additional resources or support on your healing journey, you can check out the show notes for how we can help you. Thank you so much for being here. And Caitlyn, thank you for sharing your story about betrayal. Love you so much.
Caitlyn:Love you.
Brandon:Thank you for listening.