How can a therapeutic full disclosure facilitate true healing, and where do couples go wrong that leads to secondary trauma?

Gosh, you know, there's a right way and a wrong way to do full disclosures.

[laughs] And so remember, what is a full disclosure for? In the betrayal world, everybody was telling me, and when I say everybody, I mean all the books and...

I was reading and the p- all of those millions of rabbit holes, I was down.

For three years I was in that.

I call it betrayal hell.

And it was always about this full disclosure, that I needed the full disclosure, right? But that never sat well with me.

He is 2.0. Jacob is Jacob 2.0 nowadays." Why do I still hurt?

Mm-hmm.

But in that moment, they feel a sense of relief in their nervous system because they're not holding that secret anymore.

So when you mention that the betrayed partners kind of get stuck, the unfaithful partners are moving on, and a lot of times they're moving on in a much better space because they're not harboring that secret anymore.

Now, for a reconciliation to happen, this is really what I want betrayed partners to know, you cannot reconcile with the same version of your partner as the partner that hurt you.

Okay? And I'll say it again in a different way.

You cannot heal from the same version of the person that hurt you.

What do I mean by that? I'm gonna give you the end of the story first.

Please keep going

Okay.

So I did.

My husband, um, ended up having, you know, some infidelities in our marriage that of course I knew nothing about.

Uh, and when it, when I found out I did what most people do, which is you start googling and you go to marriage counseling, and, and all of those things, all the articles I would see-

Yeah

... trauma.

Cheating is one type of betrayal.

You know, because people will say to me all the time, you know, "My partner does this," or, "My partner does that," and I'm like, "Okay, well, do you know about it?" "Yes." "Do you agree with it?" "Yes." "Okay.

She's an historian and author of a book called The Reagan Reversal, where she writes about a drastic shift in Ronald Reagan's attitude towards the Soviet Union, and listeners, that shift has very interesting timing.

I was doing my doctoral research, and it was on US foreign policy, and I was going through a lot of speeches from the Reagan administration, from the early '80s.

Beth says that Reagan's speeches were pretty consistent from 1981 to about October 31st, 1983, just before Able Archer.

The Reagan administration was pretty confrontational.

They charged that the Soviet Union was immoral.

They lied, they cheat, they were the greatest source of international insecurity.