What DOESN’T Work to heal from betrayal and addiction

In this episode, Tyler and Brannon talks about the common misconceptions surrounding healing from betrayal and addiction, highlighting what truly doesn’t work in the recovery process. Viewers will learn about ineffective strategies that often lead to frustration and setbacks, such as avoidance, denial, and superficial coping mechanisms. By understanding these pitfalls, the video encourages a more honest and proactive approach to healing, emphasizing the importance of genuine self-reflection and support.

Transcript (Tap to Toggle)
what doesn’t work to heal from betrayal and addiction what’s up Brandon how’s it going man
dude I I’m I was just thinking I owe you an apology oh what’s that why you text
me and I just totally just you know ignored it when was that yesterday yeah I’m still
waiting to hear on that you ghosted me i know i’m sorry okay when I get a text
from you I really don’t want to ghost you because it’s really rare for you to be like “Hey bro hey bro how’s it
going?” So yeah well I I didn’t want That’s my
That’s my passive aggressive way of of Yeah taking a shot at you yeah well yeah
that’s your way of No you could throw it in my face that you did something wrong that’s called the flipperoo where you
blame me for doing for not responding back to my text because I don’t text you enough
Common Myths
thanks man i’ll walk away from this feeling more guilty no but I I actually hate when you text me because you got
those green texts that come through that it’s just like oh go can’t send any
video can’t send any you know just cuz you’re you’re holding strong hey isn’t it isn’t it true that like they’re
making Apple actually make it so that they can be more friendly with other devices now i don’t want to get in this
discussion with you yeah yeah but but but alls I know is Yeah i’m very happy to get texts from you even if they are
green but I’m happy to get texts from you so yeah well you still haven’t responded so you can you can text me
after we’re done here that sounds good um so
uh All right Tyler so we want to do something just a little different today um and hopefully as as we do this some
really good principles can come out of it um we’re Dude I I woke up with gout
today oh two days ago that’s a That’s a stress thing isn’t it i can’t hardly
walk oh man i’m sorry to hear that awful gout gout’s horrible um but the reason I
bring that up is because it just shows that we’re old we’re getting old and we got some
years behind us and we have some seasoning and um some experience uh how
how many hours of therapy do you think you’ve done you know I was It’s funny you bring this up today Brandon because
The Danger of Avoidance
I was out on my walk this morning and I graduated with my master’s degree in
2005 which means I started doing therapy in 2004 so I am I’m two decades into this
now in terms of like the work and and pretty much started specializing in
addiction right after graduate school and then kind of really started diving
into infidelity sexual addiction probably probably 5 years after
graduating so at least 15 years specifically in the world of infidelity and sexual addiction yeah and and and
I’m I’m similar i’m right there i right out of school I started getting
experience with addiction recovery and um right when I got licensed it was it
was right into um betrayal and sex addiction and um those type of things so
we needless to say we have a lot of hours spent sitting in the therapy chair
we have a lot of hours spent sitting in group work um worked with thousands of
people um we we’ve seen it all we’ve been in the trenches and but but
something interesting about it and this is really the discussion I want to have with you Tyler is um you know you often
say like you know 15 20 years from now we’ll probably look back at this time and be like god we had no clue what were
Denial and Its Effects
we thinking but but when we started way back in the day um we really didn’t have
a clue and we we got into this just you know we got trained we got experience we
definitely had the heart for it you know yeah we we I think both you and I got into it for the right reasons um but
little did we know that a lot of the um I’d say modalities and philosophies
behind the work that we were doing were were not good and not helpful and
um didn’t really help people move toward actual recovery and so I just you know I
want to have this talk with you to to talk about those things that didn’t work because I think a lot of people are
still trying to apply those same things um and trying to get good results but
it’s not working and so because of our experience I’ I’d love to out that a
little bit to talk about those things that didn’t work so start way back Tyler for you when you started working for
drug court treating addiction um I I can’t remember did you have much interaction with family members and
partners then yeah so they brought me on I I was fresh out of graduate school at
the time and I was trying to um I was trying to get a job as a professor
Superficial Coping
actually over at BYU Idaho that’s what I thought I was supposed to go to Idaho for after graduation and in the process
of that I I only got to teach adjunct classes up at the college there but I never got like a full-time job and so in
the meantime I was brought on to the drug courts of southeastern Idaho which
covered pretty much the whole southeastern portion from say like St anthony or Rexburg all the way down to
the pretty much to the Utah border and um the reason they brought me on was
specifically to do the the family and marriage stuff for all of the clients who were in the drug court program so I
worked I worked a lot with partners I worked a lot with parents I worked a lot with u the family members of the people
who were participants and then I also ran individual sessions and groups for the actual participants as well so so
that’s where I started and and even inside of that when I started doing that kind of a work I had been trained
systemically as like a a marriage and family therapist but I was coming into a different system that was using kind of
a traditional um sort of
sobriety/12stepbased model at the beginning when I started and then over the course of the years that I worked for drug court our treatment
philosophies changed significantly over five or six years and really started to
really inform the way that I approached addiction and and the healing side for family members if we’re being honest um
Blaming Others
I mean psychi the the whole field of psychiatry is uh is new um and mental
health treatment counseling therapy like this is new stuff um we don’t have you
know hundreds of years to look at the efficacy of of the things that the the
interventions that we’ve done and and so like it’s interesting what you’re saying
is you I mean 15 20 years that’s not that’s really not that long Tyler and
yet what you what you were doing then you have changed you’ve had how many
iterations of changing how you actually approach this um and what I would guess
is you’ve tried to rely on academia and
evidence-based practices and those type of things but now for me at least I rely on
that a lot i love certain modalities but it’s also like just the experience that
I have of knowing what works and what doesn’t and a lot of those things that is just put in front of you as a young
therapist they just don’t work and so what what what wasn’t working Tyler as
as you were learning as you were shifting and and why did they change the way that you did the treatment yeah um
well and Brandon you can speak to this in fact you probably ought to throw in your your kind of journey as we go along
too so people can see how and why we might both see the way things the way that we do even though we’re slightly different on things sometimes too um
Quick Fix Pitfalls
what I what I recognized and this is something that I felt like I I felt like there’s a number of principles inside
the world of recovery that sort of swing like a pendulum from one end to the other back and forth as as you go and so
one of those things was um the principle let’s just take one
principle when I started like the number one principle in working with someone with an addiction especially in the
legal system was accountability accountability accountability accountability like you know um you’d
you’d have you’d have different groups that were basically just accountability groups or they’d call them call out
groups or they’d call them you know like confrontation groups where you’d be confronting people’s integrity and their
behaviors and you know it was really just to try to hammer them into saying you got to be accountable at all costs
right and that the truth is is that the principle of accountability at least in my mind is a
vital principle in the process of recovery but the modality of the way that it was being taught sometimes was a
little bit too far end of the pendulum swing h have you seen me run groups like
that do you remember you remember Brandon you were you gifted me the opportunity so
you were so I was working for the drug courts and then you got out of graduate school and you were working for a
Ignoring Pain
different place but then you started your own thing and you were running some online groups and you said hey Tyler why
don’t you come be a co-therapist with me in in a couple of these groups shadow this come be here with me yeah come be
here with me and and I think you were a little shocked like the first couple the
first couple of groups that you we ran I was like whoa Brandon like dude you
don’t have to you’re like a bull bulldog man like you’re you’re like chomping on everything like every single time a dude
says something or like you I’m like whoa like it’s all right man you can slow play this a little bit yeah you know
yeah i I uh I I love that you bring this up Tyler because I’ve been through this
um transformation myself it’s interesting because I think naturally I’m actually kind of soft-spoken and
um non-confrontational and when I got trained as a young therapist I was told
that if if you don’t grow some thicker skin a addicts and we called everybody
addicts addicts are going to eat your lunch um so you better toughen up and
you go into these groups and you are a bulldog and you get in people’s faces if you need to you hold them accountable
you get the group to hold them accountable like you lay it down and
um I got really good at that and
um I don’t think that was effective um I love accountability i
Lack of Support
love accountability but accountability is best served through love compassion
uh understanding and and then you can hold accountable it’s not best served through
attacking confrontation um triggering someone’s shame even more
telling them what a failure they are or how you know that that doesn’t get them to recovery doesn’t help um and so I’ve
definitely learned that but I was yeah I was trained that way like hey I’m not scared like let’s You want to You want
to go with me on a principle of your denial like let’s go i can I can slice
and dice your denial down to the point where you’re wallowing on the ground and
with your intellect and but but you know what it doesn’t work it doesn’t work so
the so so the challenge Brandon is is that and here’s where the pendulum starts to swing is is that we were kind
of trained in an era where it was accountability at all costs but the accountability was often paired with
with shame yes you know and shame would be like the personal attacks that you’d
add in to help bring about the the take the blinders off and help them see their
see their like the need to be accountable right which is crazy because the the underlying problem is the shame
so now we’re trying to use shame to help them heal we were using shame to help
Conclusion
hold them accountable which was then reinforcing the shame but now they were being held account and in drug court it
was like they had big-time consequences so now we’re coming and we’re trying to with good hearts like honestly like we
just think we’re speaking real to them right but there’s a difference in speaking real to somebody and and calling somebody up and
out yes rather than talking down to somebody to to bring them to
accountability absolutely right and so what would happen is is like and this is where the pendulum swings and sometimes
it’s going to swings too far and you can almost see it happening now in our world of recovery where certain people are still over there but now it’s swinging
all the way over to compassion love empathy that is the way and the problem
is is that that doesn’t have any accountability and and it’s lacking in
boundaries yeah and and somewhere in the middle is accountability paired up with
empathy and understanding and boundaries healthy boundaries that’s the middle
path that that’s where we both kind of have landed over the last several years well Tyler honestly um what I’ve learned
is the best intervention as a as a therapist that you can give somebody is
healthy attachment and when I’m in the middle of like a a dog fight you know
where it’s like hey I am making it about me i’m like showing them how strong I am
i’m showing them how I’m going to hold them accountable but when I differentiate myself from the client or from the
person then I can absolutely love them and be honest and I can absolutely hold them
accountable but hand it back over to them like if you want these consequences that’s up to you yeah yeah I’m just help
my job is just to help you see the reality here um but I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do
um but here’s the here’s like what you’re choosing um and and I love you i
see you i hope you don’t choose those consequences but you can kind of see the difference when I’m not involved when
I’m not so important I can do better therapy i think Brandon that’s something that
I’ve seen in you and I’ve felt in myself over over the course of our careers is
you know and anybody’s like this when you’re fresh out of graduate school and you have some passion you want to go
save the world most therapists get into therapy because they want to help other people and and they run the risk of
wanting to be the savior for other people right and over the course of the years I think both you and I have
realized that we’re not that no and and when we try to make it wholly about us
we’re actually not a very good resource for the people that are coming to see us um it doesn’t allow us it doesn’t allow
us the freedom to actually be as authentic if as if you can not take whatever’s
coming personally and not let your clients like have to tell you you’re amazing yeah then then you can then
actually be honest with them and say “Yeah that doesn’t seem to be working real well for you and here’s it’s your choice and here’s what your choices are
going to lead you to.” And you know even I could even be honest with you and say “My values don’t even align with what you’re choosing to do but if you choose
to do that like that’s up to you you get up to and you get to own it.” And that’s
something that I think is a principle that has really settled in with me over the years
is being able to surrender outcomes and prize there’s there’s a certain
principle that I prize above almost everything else in terms of what it means to be a human being and that is
every single human being is gifted the opportunity of their own choices
and choice choice trumps about anything else choice comes with consequences and
outcomes and and I I I tend to lean heavily on
making sure that everybody makes keeps choice in their own corner as much as possible yeah you’re not in the middle
of it um I want to back up just a little bit Tyler and give you a scenario here
of let’s say let’s say I’m 15 years ago Brandon right the bulldog and a couple
comes into my office and betrayal has happened recently there’s frustration
going on in the marriage um there’s discord and I just start laying into the
guy for what an addict he’s the one who’s been cheating and has the addiction yeah what an addict he is how
horrible he is this that whatever i’m holding him accountable and I’m doing it right in front of her um what does that
do what does that do to her a lot of times well it actually feels really good to her
it’s like it’s like oh finally because what it does is it validates her experience and says okay somebody sees
this like my pain is legitimate because of these things that this this that this guy has done to me right
um and it feels good to have somebody who’s willing to speak so straight right
yeah yeah like finally like all this pain that I’ve been feeling someone seeing why I’m feeling it and they’re
going after him for hurting me right yeah um and so and this is the this is
the trick that Jodie used all the time and what she taught me which isn’t healthy or good is you do that and you
lock the client in to therapy for a while because it’s like “Oh good finally like somebody who’s going to hold you
accountable.” Um the problem is is you’re still using that shame um you’re you’re also
um really kind of putting somebody in a oneup one down position
um which doesn’t work um another thing way back then Tyler and I’m sure you’ll
remember this was was the codependent model was you know you take the partner
and you say “Okay like yeah they’re an addict.” And you’re a codependent you’re a co-addict
that that that term was used often you’re a co-addict you’re a codependent
um and so that’s how we were first trained is like stop enabling
um have have like tough love hard boundaries and stop enabling um and read
codependent no more so go do that and have your boundaries and don’t enable um
and so it was this kind of weird thing of like blame the addict for all the
horribleness but in a in a like almost passive aggressive way blame the partner
for creating how the addict is right this is so effed up this is so not good
for recovery for anybody um but I hate to say it this was the model like this
was the model that I was taught for both drug addiction and sex addiction yeah yeah well I think the challenge to that
Brandon and this is is what you just described is is that inside of both sides of that you can see that there’s some true
principles laced into it but the way that it gets taught and dispersed is where the problem lies yes right so
someone who’s been betrayed and maybe is in a relationship where there is some level of you know tendencies towards
codependency not being able to stand on my own two feet or set my own boundaries or whatever they’d be called the
co-addict and then they’d be say say hey it’s all your your fault you need to do this this this and this when we when you
look at like the actual true principles inside of that there is like yeah we do need want you to grow into understanding
who you are more fully living in your own authenticity stepping into your own boundaries owning your own strength and
goodness like we want you to do all of that because that hasn’t because what
you’ve been doing hasn’t been feeding that at all right but but the way that was dispersed was with shame and blame
and blame And and yet the principles some of the principles underneath it are true and
they actually resonate with a lot of the people that we work with and the same would be true for the the addict side is is like look you know you do need to
have somebody there to kind of be some structure for you to see your own denial
but we can help you do that and this is where I think you and I both changes we can help you do that by treating you in
your humanity and by being firm with certain boundaries without having to get
make it cutting and personal right the the it’s interesting where it went Tyler
you talk about pendulum swings so from codependency we swung the pendulum right
over to betrayal trauma and you know Barbara Stefins wrote her book and it
kind of spurred the whole thing and it was like “Don’t you dare blame me um for for your addictions and things like
that.” And and what you and I talk about a lot we talked about it last week on an episode um is how if if you swing over
to the betrayal trauma side of things um there’s a danger there too which is you
then don’t take accountability there’s no accountability for your own healing as the partner um and you are completely
justified to stay stuck in a victim stance and um but but when this happened
in our field Tyler when you know Barbara Stephins is speaking at conferences and
there and there’s all you know Omar Minwalla and all these people are talking about it and you got your I’m
not going to list more people at these conferences but the same people were speaking every time and these were the same people touting codependency three
years earlier are are now like Oh it’s all betrayal trauma and multi-dimensional trauma and this and
that and all this stuff um what it what it did was it set up an
unhealthy system for recovery um uh can
you speak to that Tyler as to why yeah well again if you look at the pendulum swing what it was was music to the ears
of the person who had been blamed for stuff they hadn’t done before and it felt really absolutely that feels good
it felt good and it was and there was some validity to it you know there’s some empathy there there’s some like understanding there’s some like hey look
you don’t have to take all the pressure on yourself to fix this because not all of it is yours right that was the that
was the goodness in what came out of the pendulum swing when say you know I think the name of the book was your sexually
addicted spouse is what it was called by Barbara Stefins right and and even us Brandon we’re reading this stuff a lot
of principles of truth there i’m going amen like this is true this is true this is true but then where it ends is it
goes and it gets stuck a little bit over there at least in my mind a little too far which is now and until your partner
does this this this this this and this then you should stay mad
at him and you should be totally cut off from him and keep your boundaries they call it boundaries yeah yeah yeah right
and um and then it’s like but then we’re working with our clients and I’m like something isn’t quite working here
because now what we’re setting up and and we’re we’re using your example is okay good now the betrayed partner is
feeling supported understood validated but it’s really easy to capitalize on
the earlier stages of the grieving process of the shock the trauma and the
anger right and now we’ll fuel the anger right and we’ll call this other per
partner now the other partner has now not just become the person who betrayed or the person who’s who’s addicted
they’ve become the abuser the abuser the addict they’re like not human they’ve
become the abuser and now everything that they do including some of the healthy stuff that they have to do to
climb out of the hole of their addiction is now abuse yeah so so like one of the healthy things that we teach our like
say the guy that we’re talking about in the example is hey you know what you showed up not authentic you showed up
small you showed up not actually showing your true opinions you showed up with no boundaries in your relationship you’re
going to have to learn how to step into being more authentic and having boundaries in your relationship and the minute that they start to do that
they’re slammed down for being abusive right because they have an opinion or because they set a boundary right tyler
let me play devil’s advocate here and argue BTR’s side here a little bit um
aren’t they abusive aren’t Aren’t they like gaslighting and emotionally abusive
and manipulative and I I don’t believe Well I do believe that there’s such
thing as that but there is but I don’t believe that everybody struggling with this is that i think that’s the hard
part Brandon is is that in the past Yes like I have been abusive i have been
gaslighty i have misled i’ve lied it was all in a form of self-p protection but yes the outcome on you has been that
it’s been abusive right and if I’m going to try to change course I’m going to
have to learn how to have a voice set some boundaries step into my own authenticity and allow you to choose
whether or not you’re going to want to be with me right yeah i think I think the key here
Tyler is like if I can explain this let’s say that the person struggling
with addiction is doing some manipulative things and some I’ll I’ll even say abusive things
um the the and this this is really
hard but if you can look at your partner is doing the best that they possibly can and let’s say that’s even being
abusive that that’s what they’re doing it’s then up to you to say “Here’s my boundaries around that.” And when we say
boundaries we don’t mean it in the way of controlling them we mean it in the
way of you need to protect you and and if you can see them as doing the best that they can you’re not stuck in a
state of blame you can actually see them through a lens of love but when you go
to treatment and they stick a lens of they suck and they are the problem what
they’re doing is helping you resonate in a state of grief in that anger state of
of grief and so you’re not moving forward along the stages of grief you’re just staying stuck right there and
you’re not getting better um and so it feels like treatment because here you
are feeling empowered to feel this energy of anger and holding these quote
boundaries but that’s not healthy treatment that’s not helping you move beyond that and actually seeing your
partner with compassion and love and understanding with where they’re at
yeah i think I think the boundaries are messy you know and sometimes you maybe set them a little again pendulum when
you set them when you haven’t set the right boundaries you swing a little bit too far sometimes and then eventually
you nestle into the right ones but right healthy boundaries include and this is why I think the perspective you said is
when I can see my partner on either side as doing the best they can it doesn’t absolve me of then making choices but
now because I see the this is their best response therefore I need to do this
this and this for myself yes yes and I can still I can still care about them
love them even though I might even have to take emotional space or distance from them as a result of their choices that
they’re making right right but that’s different than um than making the
boundary based off of resentment vindictiveness anger
um that judgment because because then what happens is the heart stays at war in the person who’s actually setting the
boundary and it also doesn’t help things go right because most most partners if
they’re actually staying in a relationship trying to figure out whether or not to stay or go what they really want is they want their partner
to start stepping into a space of being honest authentic accountability
accountable empathetic yeah um all of those things yeah and where where I
think we kind of when we swung from like call out shame culture all the way over to like you know validate partnner’s
pain there’s no responsibility on your part what we started to do is we started to create and this I don’t know if you
see this or not Brandon but we started to create this place where there were now a bunch of relationships
where the betrayed partner finally feels safe enough in their boundaries but they
still resent their spouse and they still it’s like a oneup one down position the relationship gets worse and then and
then the betraying partner has learned okay but if I just hurry and jump every
time I’m told to jump how high and if I just make sure my partner’s Yeah Mr nice guy my partner’s always feelings are
always taken care of and my partner never feels any bad things and it’s all my fault for that then what ends up happening is is that that fuels the
shame of the person who’s trying to climb out of the hole of their own shame and addiction at the same time that it doesn’t really provide safety and
structure in the relationship because there’s no authenticity in that yes um but it feels
kind of safe in on on both sides it’s like have you seen it just came out like
this week uh have you seen the the new JP Awakens skit that he’s kind of making
fun of the lady who just went viral for saying she wanted to divorce her husband even though he’s like an amazing guy um
oh man yeah it it kind of made me cringe inside when I watched the video because I was like oh I think a lot of the like
say the men that we’ve worked with in the past probably would relate to the to
the figure in the skit of like oh this is what recovery should look like interesting and and it doesn’t really
look that way at least anymore the way that that we try to teach it in terms of healing what we’re trying to heal is both partners’ hearts into their own
authenticity so that in their authenticity they can offer themselves to the relationship and either it will
work or it won’t that you just right there kind of kind of finally hit on it
i feel like we’re running out of time and there’s a whole other segment there’s a whole other
progression into what we believe and what we do now and you kind of said it
there where you know and it’s honestly Tyler it’s the way that we approach treating trauma now um where we focus
more on your individual healing um finding peace within yourself inside um
healing your heart um trusting yourself knowing yourself being conscious
um understanding your power um those type of things when you’re grounded like
that and you do that work and you desensitize a lot of the trauma triggers
and know that your trauma doesn’t define you then all of the things with the relationship start to naturally get
better as a result um because as as an individual each partner can show up uh
with strength with integrity which then leads to trust which then leads to
things like intimacy and things like that so I just tried to fly through that but
um yeah our approach has shifted more into that hasn’t it yeah and it seems to
be you know again Brandon we’ll be talking about this 10 or 15 years from now and we’ll probably be making
adjustments as we go you know I was thinking when you said that earlier today if I were to go back to like a
decade ago and talk to some of my clients who actually really did get better and they looked at how I do
things now versus then they’d say “Wow Tyler you’ve made a lot of adjustments like you do things really differently.”
Even though I think at the core the principles that helped them get better then would be the same principles that
help now it’s just it’s just a matter of the way that they’re being taught and um
and reinforced is probably a little bit different than it was or a lot different than it was in the in the past i cringe
when I think of some of the some of the stuff I’ve done in the past and and I’ll admit to that and and I thought I was
doing the right stuff i I really Yeah good intentions right yeah and and I I just think
of when I when I wasn’t the greatest therapist I still had clients just
thrive and do well and get better and and to me if anything that proves that
um kind of that inner inner work and that that drive and that willingness
that self-determination um I might have been a crappy therapist and those people they still used me to
help themselves get better um that in spite of me they were determined to help
themselves change the outcomes of their life and um and it’s actually kind of
kind of awesome to think about and and and I think Tyler we’re more kind of I
wouldn’t say kind of we’re we’re more um we’re we’re big- time assets for
people to step into um who they are now and and um and so
yeah we’re we’re instruments and tools to help people do that but ultimately it
that is within themsel the power the power is already within every single individual which is really encouraging
to me when you think about that yeah so Tyler good discussion i think we
could go on and on we kind of scratched the the beginning the surface of our
journey we talked about like the first couple of years um there’s been definitely been some changes over the
years so so you guys thanks for listening um hopefully this got you thinking if if
nothing else and uh until next time keep on keeping

What DOESN’T Work to heal from betrayal and addiction

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