In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with Dr. Debi Silber, founder of the PBT Institute, about the trauma of betrayal and how to heal from it.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome everyone to another episode of Broken Families where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today we are going to discuss betrayal and the trauma betrayal can bring. And who better to dive deep into this topic than our special guest speaker, Dr.
Barbara La Pointe: Debi Silber, the founder of the Post Betrayal Institute. Debi’s passion for helping people overcome betrayal was born from her own experiences, which led her to pursue her PhD in transpersonal psychology, which is the psychology of transformation and human potential. Debi has uncovered the pattern of symptoms betrayal, leading her to specialize in post-betrayal syndrome.
Barbara La Pointe: So without further ado, welcome. Welcome, Debi.
Debi Silber: Aw, thank you so much. Looking forward to our conversation.
Barbara La Pointe: Glad to have you here today. Just thought I’d share a little story with you before we get going. I had a woman in one of my groups, and I lead a couple of different groups, and she’d been married, beautiful woman on the inside and outside, for 20 years, and her husband cheated on her with her best friend. So yeah, I saw you nod your head.
Barbara La Pointe: So community of people betrayed her, ‘cause it involved her friends, and her family, and then her husband, and this new girlfriend. And they actually lived across the street from her, so there were so many levels of betrayal.
Barbara La Pointe: It was so deep on my heart last night, and then I watched your incredible TED Talk called... So I’m just wondering, how can she regain trust and heal from this type of deep, poisonous betrayal?
Debi Silber: It definitely takes a very specific protocol, and I know the pain because I’ve experienced it personally. It’s such a shock to the body, to the mind, to the heart, because this was the person or these were the people who gave us a sense of safety and security.
Debi Silber: So when this is the person, these are the people to shatter that very sense of safety and security, it’s terrifying. Think about it. If the ones we trust are no longer trustworthy, who do you trust? If the ones we run to when other people are causing harm are the ones causing the harm, where do we go?
Debi Silber: So it’s a very unique type of trauma, and this is actually my 30th year in business, and as life would change, so would business, and it was health, and mindset, and personal development. And then I had my own betrayal, and at first from my family, and I thought I did the work I needed to do to heal from that.
Debi Silber: And then my husband, and anybody who’s been through it, you’re shocked. You’re blindsided. You never saw it coming and so I got him out of the house, and I looked at both of those experiences and I said, “What’s common besides me?” And I realized I had never taken my own needs seriously.
Debi Silber: I was last on my list. Boundaries were getting crossed, and I was like, “You know what? It’s all gotta change.” So got him outta the house, and here I was, four kids, six dogs, and a thriving business, and I said, “I’m enrolling in this PhD program.” I didn’t know how I was gonna do it, how I was gonna pay for it, how I was gonna manage that along with everything else, but if nothing changes, nothing changes.
Debi Silber: So enrolled in this program in transpersonal psychology, the psychology of transformation, the human potential like you said. And then while I was there, I did a study, and I studied betrayal. What holds us back? What helps us heal? And what happens to us physically, mentally, and emotionally when the people closest to us lie, cheat, and deceive?
Debi Silber: That study led to three groundbreaking discoveries which changed my health, my business, my family, my life.
Barbara La Pointe: You talk about those three groundbreaking discoveries in your really riveting TED Talk. I loved it. What are they?
Debi Silber: Well, the first one was that originally I was studying betrayal and post-traumatic growth, and for those who aren’t familiar with post-traumatic growth, that’s if you imagine an upside to trauma, how that trauma, regardless of what it is, death of a loved one, disease, natural disaster, would leave you with a new insight, perspective, or awareness that you didn’t have before.
Debi Silber: Like let’s say you lose someone you love and you realize, you know what? Life is short. Something like that. And I had been through death of a loved one. I’d been through disease. I was in the ICU for 11 days. It’s a miracle I’m alive. Story for another day. But I was like, betrayal feels so different for me.
Debi Silber: I didn’t want to assume, so I asked all my study participants and I said, “If you’ve been through other crises, other traumas besides betrayal, does it feel different for you?” Unanimously they said, “Oh, it’s so different.” And it’s so different because it feels so intentional, so we take it so personally.
Debi Silber: So the whole self has to be rebuilt. Confidence, worthiness, belonging, rejection, abandonment, trust. These are gigantic topics. Those are shattered. They all need to be rebuilt. So I thought about it, I said, it didn’t quite qualify as post-traumatic growth. So if I were to give you an equation, it would be post-traumatic growth plus rebuilding the self equals a new term I coined called post-betrayal transformation.
Debi Silber: So the first discovery was healing from betrayal is very different than healing from other life crises. It’s certainly not to compare. They all stink. But betrayal is different in that it’s a shattering of the self. If we lose someone we love, for example, like I lost my mom, we grieve, we’re sad, we mourn the loss.
Debi Silber: We don’t necessarily take it personally. Betrayal feels personal.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s so interesting because she actually said to me that she felt like there was a glass in her heart that shattered, and all the shards were lodged in her heart. And it was such a metaphor that prompted me to start thinking about betrayal and the personal nature of it.
Debi Silber: That’s where it is very, very different. So the second discovery was that there’s this collection of symptoms, physical, mental, and emotional, so common to betrayal, it’s now known as post-betrayal syndrome. And we’ve had a quiz on our site, the post-betrayal syndrome quiz.
Debi Silber: We’ve had easily 25,000 plus people take the post-betrayal syndrome quiz to see to what extent they’re struggling. And what’s so interesting about it is we’ve all heard time heals all wounds. I have the proof when it comes to betrayal, it’s simply not true. There’s a question that says, “Is there anything else you’d like to share?”
Debi Silber: And people write things like, “My betrayal happened 40 years ago, and I can still feel the hate. My betrayal happened 35 years ago. I’m unwilling to trust again. My betrayal happened 15 years ago. I feel gutted.” So we know that when it comes to betrayal, time may soften it a bit, but it will not heal it. I actually pulled the stats.
Debi Silber: I’m happy to share them with you. Every few months, I pull the stats just to see where people are with the symptoms. Would you like me to share some?
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely.
Debi Silber: Yeah, sure. So this is every age is represented, both men and women, and just about every country is represented with these numbers.
Debi Silber: So 78% constantly revisit their experience. 81% feel a loss of personal power. 80% are hypervigilant. That’s just exhausting. 94% deal with painful triggers. The most common physical symptoms, 71% have low energy, 68% have sleep issues, 63% have extreme fatigue. So you could sleep all night long, you wake up, you’re exhausted.
Debi Silber: That means your adrenals have tanked. 47% have weight changes. In the beginning, maybe you can’t hold food down. Later on, you use food for comfort. 45% have digestive issues. That’s anything from IBS, Crohn’s, constipation, diarrhea, you name it. And think about what the gut does. It absorbs, digests, and processes food.
Debi Silber: Well, isn’t a betrayal difficult to absorb, digest, and process? Like, is there any wonder why the gut is acting up? The most common mental symptoms: 78% are overwhelmed, 70% are walking around in a state of disbelief, 68% are unable to focus, 64% are in shock, 62% are unable to concentrate. So imagine you’re unable to concentrate, you’re exhausted, you have a gut issue, and you still need to go to work, raise your kids, whatever it is you’re doing.
Debi Silber: That’s not even the emotional issues. 88% extreme sadness, 83% anger. So you just take anger and sadness and you bounce back and forth between those two, you’ll be exhausted right there. 82% feel hurt, 80% have anxiety, 79% are stressed. So here’s why I wrote the book Trust Again. Ready? 84% have an inability to trust.
Debi Silber: 67% prevent themselves from forming deep relationships because they’re afraid of being hurt again. 82% find it hard to move forward. 90% wanna move forward, but they don’t know how.
Andrew Folkler: That is riveting. I can’t even imagine. Just hearing all those statistics is incredible. And those are the kinds of things that you don’t see it until you hear about it, considering that I imagine a lot of these cases feel so isolating and you get lost in your own internal echo chamber without even realizing just how prominent this occurrence is.
Debi Silber: You’re so right. And here’s the thing. At a time where we need support the most, we’re the least likely to seek it, because there’s so much embarrassment. There’s so much shame. We’re in a club we never wanted to be in, and it’s really common for the person who’s been betrayed to protect the betrayer.
Debi Silber: Everybody may love that person. So we struggle and suffer in silence. That’s why I wrote Trust Again. I was like, you know what? If at the very least they had the tools in front of them if they can’t reach out for the right type of support. First of all, the wrong type of support does way more harm than good.
Debi Silber: We have people coming in with therapy trauma, and all kinds of things where it was... You need a very specific type of support when you’re healing from betrayal. But at the very least they have tools in their hands to move through it. So that was the second discovery, and what people do is they have these symptoms of post-betrayal syndrome, and they struggle and they suffer and they’re going in this endless loop, and then they have repeat betrayals and they have more negative experiences and more health concerns, and that’s because they haven’t healed.
Debi Silber: So the third discovery, and this is why you’ll see why people haven’t healed. The third discovery was that while we can stay stuck for years, decades, a lifetime, and so many of us do, if we’re going to fully heal, going from that place of symptoms of post-betrayal syndrome to that fully healed space of post-betrayal transformation, we will go through five now proven predictable stages.
Debi Silber: What’s even more exciting about that is we know now what happens physically, mentally, and emotionally at every one of those stages, and we know what it takes to move from one stage to the next. Why is that good? Now healing is predictable. If someone is willing to do the work to move from one stage to the next, we have the framework.
Debi Silber: It’s predictable. So when this discovery happened, in the geekiest way, I thought my head was gonna fly right off my body. ‘Cause here’s now the proof that we don’t have to stay stuck, but so many people do. And I’m happy to share the five stages if you want me to.
Debi Silber: Okay. And they’re in Trust Again. It’s what we teach within the PBT Institute, but I’ll share them here. So stage one is like a setup stage, and I saw this with every study participant, me included. If you imagine four legs of a table, the four legs being physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, what I saw with everybody was a real heavy lean on the physical and the mental, and ignoring or neglecting the emotional and the spiritual.
Debi Silber: So what does that look like? Looks like we’re really good at thinking and doing, and not really prioritizing the feeling and being. But it’s in the feeling and being, that’s where our intuition lies, and we turn that down. Now, that’s not to say if you’re thinking and doing, it’s a setup for betrayal.
Debi Silber: It’s just what I typically saw. Anyway, if a table has two legs, easy for that table to topple over. That’s us. Stage two, shock, trauma, D-Day, discovery day. This is the breakdown of the body, the mind, and the world view. This is like when that person takes that mask off and you’re like, “That’s who they’ve been this whole time?”
Debi Silber: And that shock ignites the stress response. So now we’re headed for every single stress-related symptom, illness, condition, disease. The mind is in a complete and total state of chaos and overwhelm. You cannot wrap your mind around the information you just learned. This makes no sense. And your world view has just been shattered.
Debi Silber: Your world view is your mental model. These are the rules. This is how life works. Don’t go there. It’s the rules to prevent chaos. And in one earth-shattering moment or series of moments, it’s all been dismantled, destroyed. The bottom has bottomed out on you. It’s terrifying. But think about it.
Debi Silber: If the bottom were to bottom out on you, what would you do? You would grab hold of anything and everything you could to stay safe and stay alive, and that’s stage three. Survival instincts emerge. It’s the most practical of all of the stages. If you can’t help me, get out of my way. How do I survive this experience?
Debi Silber: Who can I trust? Where do I go? How do I feed my kids? Here’s the trap, though. This is the stage we get stuck in for four reasons. First, what happens is once we’ve figured out how to survive, because it feels so much better than the shock and trauma of where we just came from, we’re like, “Whoo, okay.
Debi Silber: Great. We got this. I’m okay, I’m okay.” We have no idea there’s a stage four and stage five. Stage four is where transformation begins, but since we think we better figure this out, this is where it ends, we do these four things. The first thing is we start getting these small self benefits from being here.
Debi Silber: You get your story, you get to be right, you get someone to blame, you get a target for your anger, you get sympathy from everybody you tell your story to. You don’t have to do the hard work of learning to trust again. Can I trust you? Should I trust you? Ah, forget it, I won’t trust anybody. And so you start planting deeper roots.
Debi Silber: You’re not meant to be here long, but you don’t know that, so deeper roots. Because you’re here longer than you need to be, now your mind starts doing things like, “Well, maybe you deserved it. Maybe you’re not all that great.” Maybe this, maybe that, so you plant deeper roots. Now because this is how you think, this is the energy you’re sending out, like energy attracts like energy.
Debi Silber: So now you’re calling situations and circumstances and relationships towards you to confirm this is exactly where you belong. It gets worse, but I’ll get you out of here. Because it feels so bad, but you have no idea there’s anything better, here’s where you resign yourself. You’re like, “This is as good as it’s gonna get, but it stinks, so I better figure out a way to be okay with this.”
Debi Silber: So right here is where you start using food, drugs, alcohol, work, TV, keeping busy, reckless behavior, anything to numb, avoid, distract yourself from where you are, because it’s painful to feel and face. So think about it. You do it for a day, a week, a month. Now it’s a habit. A year, 10 years, 20 years. And I can see someone 20 years out and say, “That emotional eating you’re doing,” or, “That drinking you’re doing,” or, “That numbing in front of the TV you’re doing, do you think that has anything to do with your betrayal?”
Debi Silber: And they would look at me like I’m crazy. They would say, “That happened 20 years ago.” Doesn’t matter. Do you see? All they did was put themselves in stage three and stayed there. That make sense?
Barbara La Pointe: They couldn’t really connect the dots.
Debi Silber: Exactly. So you want me to continue stage four and stage five?
Barbara La Pointe: Yes, please.
Debi Silber: Okay. So if you’re willing to let go of those small self benefits, grieve more than the loss, a few things you need to do, you move to stage four. Stage four is finding and adjusting to a new normal. Here’s where you acknowledge, “I can’t undo my betrayal, but I can control what I do with it.” And I always use the example of if you’ve ever moved to a new house, office, condo, apartment, whatever.
Debi Silber: Your stuff’s not all there. It’s not cozy yet, but it’s going to be okay. And when you’re in this mental space, you start turning down the stress response a little bit. You’re not healing just yet, but you stopped causing the massive and rapid damage you were causing in stages two and stage three.
Debi Silber: What’s interesting about stage four also is if you were to move, you don’t take everything with you. You don’t take the things that don’t represent who you wanna be when you step into that new space. And what I saw with everybody was if your friends weren’t there for you, right here is where you’ve outgrown them.
Debi Silber: That misery loves company crowd, you don’t take them with you. And people ask me all the time, “What the heck? I’ve had these friends 10, 20, 30 years. Is it me?” Yes, it is. You’re undergoing a transformation. If they can’t rise above with you, you let them go right here. Anyway, when you’re making this new mental, emotional space home, you’re making it okay, you move into the fifth most beautiful stage, and this is healing, rebirth, and a new worldview.
Debi Silber: The body starts to heal. Self-love, self-care, eating well, exercise. You didn’t have the bandwidth for that earlier. Now you do. Your mind is healing. You’re making new rules, new boundaries based on who you’re becoming, and you have a new worldview based on the road you just traveled. And the four legs of the table, remember in the beginning it was just the physical and the mental, by this point we’re solidly grounded because we’re focused on the emotional and the spiritual, too.
Debi Silber: Those are the five stages.
Barbara La Pointe: Is that what you’re referring to then, Debi, when you say that trauma can catapult a person into radical transformation?
Debi Silber: Absolutely. Because here’s the thing. When you’re in stage three, you have every right to stay stuck. You’ve been burned, you’ve been duped, you’ve been lied to, you’ve been betrayed.
Debi Silber: You have all of these reasons. But here’s what also happens. The old is dead and destroyed. There is a complete and utter death and destruction of the old. The beauty is that’s when the new can be birthed. And you watched that TEDx, Do You Have Post-Betrayal Syndrome, and I talk about the house, and I use that analogy of the house where here’s the difference between resilience and transformation.
Debi Silber: Resilience is bringing back, restoring. You need that for your everyday. So using an analogy of a house, let’s say the house needs a boiler, and you get a boiler. That would be resilience. Let’s say it needs a roof. You get a roof. That’s resilience. You’re restoring it. You’re bringing it back. Here’s trauma and transformation.
Debi Silber: A tornado comes by and levels the whole house. A boiler’s not gonna fix it and a roof’s not gonna fix it. But here’s the thing. You have every right to stand there at the lot where your house once stood and say, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened,” and you’d be correct. And you could even call over everybody you know and say, “Look at this. Isn’t this awful?” And everyone would agree. And you have every right to mourn and grieve the loss of your house for the rest of your days. However, if you choose to rebuild the house, you don’t have to, but if you choose to, why would you build the same one? There’s nothing there, right?
Debi Silber: Why not make it better and more beautiful, giving it everything the old house didn’t have? That’s the beauty of betrayal, and I know people say to me, “What the heck, Beauty? Are you crazy?” No. Everything has been leveled. So rebuilding is always a choice, whether you rebuild yourself and move on, and that’s what I did with my family.
Debi Silber: It wasn’t an option to rebuild with them. Or if the situation lends itself, if you’re willing, if you want to, you rebuild something entirely, and I’m talking entirely new, with the person who hurt you, and that’s what I did with my husband. So as two totally transformed people, we married each other again.
Debi Silber: New rings, new vows, new dress, and our four kids as our bridal party. And I can promise you, never in a bazillion years would I have even considered anything remotely like that if he wasn’t radically transformed and if I wasn’t either. So betrayal lends itself to creating an entirely new identity.
Debi Silber: You take the parts you love, and here you get to leave behind everything that no longer serves.
Barbara La Pointe: I have to admit, at the beginning of this podcast, I was wondering what would the gifts of betrayal be. And now you’re revealing them to me. If we could just back up to resilience.
Barbara La Pointe: ‘cause I think for me that’s a term we hear a lot when we’ve got wounding or we’re looking to recover from abuse or betrayal. We use that word resilience. But it seems like we never make it past resilience to transformation in terms of what we collectively hear out in the world, out in books and social media, and that’s where I think the hope comes in, is when you talk about the possibility of transformation.
Barbara La Pointe: We can still be resilient and work on our resiliency, but transformation is when you get to become your greatest self... Would you say, is that true, Dr. Debi?
Debi Silber: You are absolutely right. And that’s the thing. That resilience you need to just weather the hard times in life, you need that.
Debi Silber: But transformation only happens because of that death and destruction of the old, because of that dark night of the soul, because of that fear of losing everything, and then everything is open to you. And here’s the thing. People who reach that state of post-betrayal transformation, who move through the stages.
Debi Silber: I didn’t do anything anybody else couldn’t do. What’s happened is they look at their old selves, their old scenario, and patching it up simply doesn’t work. It’s simply not an option. So they just put their heads down and said, “I’m not picking my head up till I’m out the other side of this. It’s got to be better than this.”
Debi Silber: And really I say to people all the time, “You’ve been through the worst of it already. Keeping the pain going... And you need to make sense and meaning out of the experience, right? But keeping it going is just now punishing yourself further. You owe it to yourself to do something good with something bad.
Debi Silber: When you do, it’s trauma well-served.” I’m certainly not saying I would want anything remotely like this ever again, but for me, it just wasn’t an option. I would’ve felt even worse if I was just the recipient, and the poster child for betrayal. Think about it.
Debi Silber: I had a great story. Most important people in my life all betrayed me. I could’ve gotten sympathy from everybody, but at the end of the day, that’s all you get. And I remember as I was moving through the experience and moving through the study, the injustice was eating me up alive. Integrity is my highest value.
Debi Silber: I’ve lived every day of my life with the simple rule of if it’s gonna hurt someone, just don’t do it. And I think everybody else lives by that rule and I’m always shocked and amazed when that’s not the case, right? And this is gonna sound really selfish, it wasn’t even enough to heal myself.
Debi Silber: And just because of how deeply this impacted me on every level, and I remember moving through this saying, “If I heal, if I can heal from this, I’m taking everybody with me.” That’s the only way. That’s the only way I can ever do something like this and feel okay about it.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s very inspiring.
Barbara La Pointe: That really is, that you took that and now you’re impacting the greater world around you. ‘Cause we know that 50% of marriages end in divorce, but there must be so much betrayal that happens in our world on a daily basis.
Debi Silber: It’s awful. And betrayal isn’t just relational. It’s a family member, a partner, a friend, a coworker, self.
Debi Silber: We can even be betrayed by companies. There’s this, I think it’s love turns to hate principle, something like that. I remember when I was doing the research for my study, it was about companies, and I found it so interesting. We would rather knowingly do something, buy a product we know is bad for us, cigarettes, alcohol, whatever, than purchase a product that we think or we’re told is good for us and find out it’s not.
Debi Silber: That’s when the love of that product turns to hate real quickly. We don’t wanna be duped. We don’t wanna be lied to. We don’t like that shock to the system. We want predictable.
Andrew Folkler: You mentioned something earlier that I wanted to follow up on, which was how the victim of betrayal might even rationalize and try and protect the betrayer.
Andrew Folkler: And I wanted to ask you more on that as far as why would they get into that head space?
Debi Silber: It’s an interesting phenomenon because think about it. Let’s take a marriage, and let’s say the husband has an affair. And let’s say the group of friends, let’s say the couple’s been together 20, 30 years.
Debi Silber: They have their group of friends. Everybody loves the husband, right? Now, the betrayer’s thinking, “Oh my gosh, if I tell my family, if I tell my friends, I’m gonna create havoc with all of this,” even though it was the affair that created the havoc, right? But the betrayed person says, “It’s just gonna create such a shakeup with everybody I know.
Debi Silber: Forget it.” And they just protect the betrayer. And I’ll tell you, there were three groups in the study who did not heal, and it reminds me of a story. I wanna share it with you. The first was the group where they just weren’t having it. They were not accepting their betrayal. So that would be the equivalent of the person standing over the house that’s been destroyed and just kicking and screaming and yelling and crying endlessly, right?
Debi Silber: The second group was the group who were numb, avoiding, distracting. So maybe they ran to the doctor who put them on mood stabilizers or anti-anxiety medications, or they started drinking or emotionally eating, and it may have made the day a bit easier to get through, but not without a price. And the third group was the group where the betrayer had very little consequence.
Debi Silber: So whether it was out of financial fear, religious reasons, that was a big one, not wanting to break up a family, whatever it was, they just did all they could just to put it behind them, look the other way, try to move forward. I only saw two things with this group. The first was a further deterioration of the relationship, and the second was by far this group was the most physically sick.
Debi Silber: Your broken heart can’t handle that. But that’s what people do. We just wanna patch it up. It’s like taking that house and patching it up, patching it up, patching it up, where you know what? Sometimes better off it’s just leveled, and then rebuild something magnificent.
Barbara La Pointe: The stats that you shared earlier really outline the consequences of not healing from a betrayal.
Debi Silber: Absolutely. And then think about it. That’s that person who’s stuck in that stage two, and then eventually that stage three, and then they’re focused on the symptoms. They don’t feel well physically. They don’t feel well mentally. They don’t feel well emotionally. And then it’s this downward spiral, and they don’t realize the actions they’ve taken have gotten them maybe to a safe space, safe enough where they can breathe, but they’re just surviving.
Debi Silber: That’s all they’re doing. They’re stuck, and they’re so rooted in that one place. And it’s only when they say, “Okay, you know what? What actions now do I need to take to actually let go of this? Even though I have my great story, if I let it go, I have a much better story. If I let go of the pain, I can move towards forgiveness or at the very least acceptance.”
Debi Silber: So there are so many things that we can do, but I see the majority of people just sticking around in that stage three. I get it, but that’s where they stay.
Andrew Folkler: One group that I know of quite well that’s often caught in this is the parents that are suffering from parental alienation.
Andrew Folkler: Basically where their ex has poisoned and brainwashed their kids to turn against them. And what would you recommend to those parents who are not only dealing with that sense of betrayal from their ex, but may even feel that sense of betrayal from their kids, even though maybe consciously or logically they know it’s not their fault?
Debi Silber: It’s so painful, and we see this a lot. So here they are, for example, maybe the reason why the divorce happened in the first place was because of a betrayal, and now there’s a betrayal because the kids are being poisoned by the mind, right? By all the things that are being said and everything else.
Debi Silber: So of course, there are so many layers. And then the more people who jump in on that and agree, right? Now they’re feeling betrayed by this person, by that person, by the other person. And so that person will go through that stage. You could see why they would be in that stage two and then how they’d land in that stage three, and they’re completely justified.
Debi Silber: People are not treating them well. They’re being wronged. Life isn’t fair, and that’s the hardest part of this. Cognitively, it all makes total sense because it’s all so wrong. It’s like forgiveness. Forgiveness says, “Even though someone did something hateful, harmful, hurtful, for your sake, forgive anyway.”
Debi Silber: You’re like, “What?” Because we’re using the wrong tool for the job. So it really has nothing to do with the mind. It’s a heart job. So that person who is stuck in there, at some point it serves them best to realize, “I can go through this 100 million more times, coming out of it no better than the last thousand.
Debi Silber: And for my sake, and eventually the sake of everybody within my care and reach, I’m gonna do my job to heal.” That’s it. Without any expectation. And I know how hard that sounds. I know how hard it is. But when you do that, it’s like when I kicked my husband out of the house, here I was. I was a single mom.
Debi Silber: I wasn’t counting on that. I had no expectation. My only expectation was to heal, and just to be there for my kids, my clients, my dogs. That was it. But I find with people that when the intention is to heal, the body follows, the mind follows, the emotions follow. So even though they have every reason and every right to be angry and frustrated and resentful and bitter and everything else, it will eat them up alive, and they deserve more than that.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s beautiful. I guess that’s something perhaps all three of us observe in divorce, and I also observe this in parental alienation, betrayal, is that people are not healing. They’re staying stuck in their pain, and that the more I observe, the more I see that. What advice might you give or how might we begin to rebuild trust?
Barbara La Pointe: ‘Cause it seems to me if we can’t trust ourselves, we can’t trust another.
Debi Silber: And in Trust Again, and we teach within the community, I teach a four-step trust rebuilding process. I’m happy to share it here. So you think about it. In betrayal, something like betrayal, what happens is trust is completely and totally shattered.
Debi Silber: We certainly don’t trust our betrayer, and we don’t trust ourselves, because we’re like, “I’m a bright person. How did I not see? How did I not know? Where did this come from?” Right? We lose trust in everything and everyone. So we have to start from the very foundation again, and the big mistake I see is that it’s so awkward and uncomfortable not to trust, so we rush to trust again, and it backfires every single time.
Debi Silber: We need to rebuild it on a strong, solid base. So here’s what I always teach and what I recommend. You build from the very foundation first with the simplest of things that are such a no-brainer, and I’m talking will the sun rise? I don’t even know. I don’t even have trust that the sun will rise anymore.
Debi Silber: So you check. You go out and you check every morning. What do you know? There it is. Can you trust it? I’m not sure. Check it again. Check it again. And what you’re doing is you’re recreating a foundation upon which to stand. Once that’s in place, I’m talking really we start at the very basic.
Debi Silber: Once that’s in place, you go to the next level, and that’s trusting in your wise inner guide, your intuition, your highest self, which is always trying to speak to you, we just don’t listen or pay attention. So with that, what you wanna do is you wanna get a sense, a felt sense of what trust feels like for you.
Debi Silber: So what does that feel like? So maybe you have an example of, you see two babies laughing. Or your dog wagging his or her tail. Whatever that looks like for you. Get a sense, how does that feel? How does your body feel? What’s going on in your head when you feel that, right? That’s what trust feels like for you.
Debi Silber: It’s different for everybody, so I can’t say what it is. And then you think back to D-Day, discovery day, or when you looked at someone and they were lying to you right to your face, and you get a felt sense of what that feels like. Is your body tight, closed, constricted? Like, what did it feel like, right?
Debi Silber: What was going through your head? What emotions? How did your body react and respond? That’s what a lack of trust feels like. So now having these two examples, you move through your day and you check in. Does it feel more like this, the two babies laughing, or does it feel more like this, D-Day?
Debi Silber: Which does it feel closer to? And you trust that. You trust it. And what you’re doing is you’re strengthening your BS meter. And you feel like you have a little bit of an invisible bodyguard, right? And now, once that’s established, you have that foundation upon which to stand, you strengthen your intuition.
Debi Silber: You feel a bit of a sense of safety building. Now you have to relearn to trust in yourself. So to do that, you need to give yourself little tasks and do them. So maybe you say, “I’m gonna drink that glass of water,” and then you do. “I’m gonna go to the gym,” and then you do. “I will not call my ex,” and then you don’t.
Debi Silber: Whatever it is for you, right? And what you’re doing is you’re teaching yourself, “I’m trustworthy. If I say something, I mean it. My word is law.” So now think about it. You have that foundation. You trust your wise inner guide. You trust your gut. You trust your intuition. You trust yourself. You could feel that sense of safety and security around you.
Debi Silber: Only from that space do you now carefully and cautiously start to trust others.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s life-changing. That really is because so many of us... anxiety is such an epidemic in our world, and I think even if we could build that trust momentum that you’re describing, we wouldn’t be so fearful, anxious, and wounded in the world in which we live.
Debi Silber: And we really don’t spend the time strengthening ourselves, and that’s when we have options where... And one option I typically see is we put the big wall up. We’re like, “That’s it. That hurt way too much. No one’s getting close to me again. Been there, done that.”
Debi Silber: And we think it’s coming from a place of strength. It’s not. It’s coming from fear, and that’s not fair to you. It’s not fair to you that someone’s actions causes you to not feel the love, the intimacy, the trust that you deserve. So it’s worth healing, and you can heal from all of it.
Barbara La Pointe: And for sure we can’t heal anything without bringing awareness to it.
Debi Silber: Absolutely. Awareness is the absolute first step, and I know what a shock betrayal can feel like. You never saw it coming. You were playing by the rules, and without your awareness or consent, someone chose to break those spoken or unspoken rules, and it’s absolutely devastating.
Debi Silber: And having said that, it’s the most painful work you’ll ever do, and the most transformative. The people we see within the PBT Institute coming in, shock, trauma, or just coming in stuck, and then moving through the stages to that place of post-betrayal transformation, I have never seen stronger, more confident, healthier, happier people than the ones willing to move through that to get to that space.
Barbara La Pointe: Very empowering.
Debi Silber: That’s why we do it. I looked at the research and it was just a no-brainer. All we teach there is what’s been proven to work, what the 25,000-plus people say they needed, and then I saw what wasn’t working. And what I saw was a lot of support is the ain’t it awful club.
Debi Silber: Like, “This happened to me.” “Oh, you think that’s bad? This happened to me.” And on and on it goes. That doesn’t really support you. It keeps you stuck. When you heal, you don’t belong. That doesn’t belong. And then I saw people numbing, avoiding distracting, or I saw people going to therapy, and if that therapist isn’t very skilled, that’s doing more harm than good.
Debi Silber: So I said, “Well, what would happen if we bring the research-based proven model, our signature programs, to move you through the stages, our certified coaches that are trained in the stages, plus bringing in all their expertise, the right type of support?” I don’t know, and that’s what we did. That’s the PBT Institute.
Barbara La Pointe: Fantastic. Amazing. You also offer a, on the website, a post-betrayal symptom quiz. Is that something audiences, or our audience, might tap into?
Debi Silber: Well, I recommend everybody take that. That’s the post-betrayal syndrome quiz, and you’ll see to what extent you’re struggling. You can just find that at ThePBT, as in Post-Betrayal Transformation, ThePBTInstitute.com/quiz.
Barbara La Pointe: Think I’ll take it myself. Any other pearls of wisdom, we don’t like our guests to leave anything unsaid. Anything you’d like to share, before we close today?
Debi Silber: I just, I know how painful it is, and I know how personally we take it and if you have to say this 100 million times to yourself, it’s worth it.
Debi Silber: Ready? Even though it happened to you, it’s not about you. It’s not. It’s just not. And when you move through the healing, you’ll get to that place where you don’t believe it at first, but then you do.
Barbara La Pointe: Even though it happened to you, it’s not about you.
Barbara La Pointe: Very empowering. An amazing, amazing hour with you.
Barbara La Pointe: Thank you.
Debi Silber: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
Andrew Folkler: Debi, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way for them to learn more about you or contact you?
Debi Silber: The best way would be to take the quiz, which they can find at thepbtinstitute.com/quiz. What they can also do, if they wanna get Trust Again, so they’re not ready for, they just want a book in their hands or they want the Audible, I’m the one who read it, so they can hear my voice, or the Kindle version, don’t go to Amazon and get it.
Debi Silber: Get it from me because then you get all kinds of goodies too. So you could find that at thepbtinstitute.com/trustagain. Trust again.
Andrew Folkler: All right. Well, you guys, it looks like that’s all we have time for today. Once again, thank you for taking the time to be with us. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or through our podcast or the various podcasting platforms.
Andrew Folkler: Don’t forget, we take everything we’ve talked about, and all those statistics will be put in a downloadable document below. It’ll be on Barbara’s website at barbaralapointe.com/podcast. It’ll help you with dealing with trauma as well as the betrayal and all of that. Don’t forget to also take that quiz.
Andrew Folkler: And Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: Reach out anytime at barbara@barbaralapointe.com.
Andrew Folkler: And if you wanna email me, you’re free to reach me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. And as always, thank you for taking the time to be with us at the Broken Families podcast, where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships.
Andrew Folkler: Have a wonderful day, everyone.
Barbara La Pointe: Bye-bye. Thank...