Welcome to the couples healing podcast where you’ll get the tools for him to overcome his addiction for her to find healing from the pain that it causes her. And for you to heal your relationship and come back together after porn addiction, I hope that you enjoy and subscribe. Hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the couples healing podcast. This is Sam Tielemans. And I’m excited for today. And I want to give you guys a specific strategy that you can use to help heal emotional pain. And this applies to whether it’s him who’s in pain or her who’s in pain because of any different circumstance or situation in their relationship or otherwise, want to give you a practical tip and a strategy that you can implement, like literally today to help very quickly shift this pain and create an opening for being able to continue to heal. So the point that I want to the main point that I want to make in this episode is the idea that we need to heal from stories, not events. So let me explain what I mean by that. So often, people when I work with them, they come in and they have so many people that I work with, there’s trauma in their background, whether it’s emotional, or physical or sexual, emotionally, like, we go through very difficult things as people, I remember being at a training once and the lady said that nobody escapes childhood unscathed. And I thought that’s a really good point because everybody has gone through something that affects them. And it can create a negative experience in their mind when they think about that old event. And I think there’s a misunderstanding, or I guess it’s something that I’ve been able to as I just kind of crystallized this idea, this has been fundamental to the work that I do with couples. Because it’s not so much the details of the event that we need to heal from. It’s the story that we tell ourselves about what the event means. So again, I want to explain this, this is such an important thing, because I think it can give you a lot of hope knowing you don’t have to go back and rehash all the details of an event. Sometimes I work with people where the husband doesn’t want to continue to go back into the past and talk about all the details and rehash everything that’s gone on. And it seems like they get into fights anytime something’s brought up from the past. And so I want to give hope, and some direction to help you understand that it isn’t the details. It’s the story. And when I say story, what I mean by that specifically is, is the meaning that we make from the event that causes the most pain. Now events, of course in and of themselves can be painful, the thing that really brings us to another level of pain is the story. So let me give you, as I am trying to explain this, I’m going to give you like three or four or five different examples of what I mean and then how you can apply this tool to be able to heal this pain. So I was working with somebody not too long ago. And she as well had a history of just of trauma and her parents were there was a lot of tension in the home than they divorced when she was young. And it created this sense of loneliness for her. She bounced back and forth between both homes. She didn’t have stability. And she was kind of like, I don’t know, how do I say this, like she was being used by both parents as leverage against the other one. Like they would try to pit her against the other parent. So it created just such a confusing and overwhelming it these interactions are so confusing and overwhelming for her because she just felt like, I don’t want to hurt the other person yet. I don’t want to let my mic the person that I’m like, if the mom is saying dad’s doing all this stuff, he’s bad. He does this. And she’s thinking like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to be mad at dad. But I don’t want to let mom down by saying hey, I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to talk about this stuff. She was just in a very difficult place. And so over her over the course of her teenage years, the depression got worse and worse and worse until the point there was just this break. And she went to a psychiatric hospital and was there for about eight days. And her experience there was very painful. She was very lonely. But the thing that made it worse, exponentially worse. infinitely more difficult for her was when she was there, her dad did not contact her at all. And she didn’t have anybody that she felt like she could turn to in that moment when she was in this place and her dad didn’t reach out to her so she carried with her the story that dad abandoned me.

And the meaning that she made out of this was dad abandoned me when I say story. I mean meaning Bernie Brown, I use this word story because I take it from Bernie Brown. So she’s an author and she talks a lot about shame and helping people heal from the inside. So she uses this word story. So what I mean by that is, again, it’s the interpretation of the event. So the story that she says is my dad abandoned me, I’m not important to him, maybe I’m not important. I just, I feel like I’m worthless. She developed this story or this, this way of describing this event, which haunted her for decades. And so now I’m seeing her, and she’s in her 50s. She recently had a conversation with her dad about two weeks ago, she went home, had a visit with him hadn’t spoken with him in a long time. And somehow this event came up. And she told him, which was huge for her, how she felt about what happened. And the dad when he heard this, when he heard that she went to the hospital, that she felt like he abandoned her. He started to become emotional and said, I’m so sorry, that I didn’t contact you. The truth? Is that what you’re telling me right now is the first time I’ve ever even heard that you were in the hospital. I didn’t even know you’re there. And so when the when the my client, this woman who I’m working with, hears this, she’s like, What do you mean, how could you not have known I was there. And it was in a period of time when the mom and dad weren’t speaking. And again, the mom was using the child as leverage to try to keep the dad like just causing him pain. So she withheld the information from him. And it just really wasn’t talked about, between him and her moving forward. And how that was the case, I don’t know. But when the dad finds out that she was actually in a mental hospital for eight days, and he didn’t even know she was there, he immediately apologized, because their relationship has improved. He immediately apologized, and tell and tells her the truth, the reality of I didn’t even know you’re there, I’m so sorry, had I known, I would have wanted to reach out to you. You’re my daughter, of course I care about you. This one shift instantly changed how she felt about the event. This is what I mean, going back to the point of this whole podcast is that we need to heal from the stories or the impact that the stories have. Not really, in particular, the details of the events. People are very resilient. And we can go through some amazingly difficult things. And then we have the capacity to heal and reconcile and make sense of things. But the place that we get stuck is when we tell ourselves a story that keeps us in this really dark place. The story is the crucial part in terms of our healing. Now, so often, I’ll hear people say, this idea of well, he needs to do his own work, she needs to do her own work. And there’s this separation. And if you follow me for any length of time, and another podcast is relatively new, I think it’s like three or four months old. But I’ve been beating the drum of couples coming together have such, there’s so much power in a relationship to help us heal not only within the marriage or the relationship, but us as individuals. And so when I hear people say, Well, no, you shouldn’t be able to, you know, you shouldn’t come together, he should do his stuff, she needs to do her stuff, they need to be separate and work through things before they can come back together. I just think you’re missing out on such a tremendous opportunity to leverage the power of connection. And again, if you follow me for any length of time, you know that, as we’ve talked about in the podcast, connection is fundamental to who we are as human beings. We are social creatures, we cannot get away from that. Nor nor nor do we want to. And this is the reason why people feel betrayal is because of the bond that’s there because of how much we value and prioritize and cherish the bond between us and the person that’s close to us. So of course, when something happens, and it breaks that bond, we feel betrayal. And that’s again, evidence of the value of the bond in the first place. And so the tool that I want to offer you guys

is, as we have framed it in this way, that it’s the stories that we really ultimately are trying to the impact of the story that we’re trying to heal from not so much the events and but again, the events can cause pain in the in and of themselves. But the story is so huge. And one of the most overlooked strategies or tools for people to be able to heal from stories is our marriage or our significant relationship. And so when we get stuck and interpret an event in a certain way, and we keep it to ourself, it often just we ruminate and we stew on it and we rehashing all the details in our mind, and it, it amplifies how badly we feel. But as soon as we open up and talk to somebody, and I’m sure all of you have had this experience before, where you’re having a hard day, something’s going on an event happened that caused you pain, and you tell somebody else about it. And then they support you. And they understand you and they get it and they offer comfort, it creates such a different experience for us, that we can feel differently in the moment that it happens. While they can’t undo what happened. Again, we can’t go back into the past and change the details or prevent the event from happening, it happened and it hurt. But when we tell somebody else about it, we’re not alone anymore. In our brain, it’s like it creates a feeling of safety for us knowing that we’re not alone. So I think the most overlooked strategy for for us to be able to heal and to be able to do our work is to share how we feel and how we’ve been affected by an event or an experience. So I wanted to use this example, I’ll share a handful of more handful of more experiences just again, so we can really make this as clear as possible, because I want you to be able to put this into action right away. The same you can you can use literally any example we have to make meaning out of everything, we as human beings, our minds just try to make sense of things. So an event happens. And we have to tell ourselves something about it. So I was I was having a conversation with one of the people, one of the therapists on my team, we do like a weekly, I guess, supervision meeting or a consultation meeting, where we come together, and I just I share feedback on cases. And so as I’m, as one of my, one of the people on my team, they come to me and say this is what I’m struggling with, you know, this is I’m stuck in this place. And this is the point that I made with him as well is that it’s the story that we’re trying to help change, not the event. And he’s kind of wonder, okay, well, what do you mean by that? And I said, Well think about you take any event. And I use a pretty extreme example, of something that does happen far too often. And the example that I used was a sexual assault. And I wanted to use something as painful as this to illustrate the point of this. So in and of itself, that event is very, very painful. And it’s heavy. And it hurts somebody when they go through that. The thing that I think causes even more damage to them in a long term way, is the meaning that they make or the story around the event. And what I told him was, you think about it like this, you’ve got this assault that takes place, how are you going to look at it. One person might look at this event and say, I’m broken, I’m powerless. I’m unworthy. There’s something wrong with me, the world is unsafe. Let’s say that’s the story that they make out of that event. You take somebody else who creates a completely different story. And she says, God protected me because I’m still alive. I could have been killed in this instance. But God protected me. And he loves me. The fact that he protected me from dying is evidence that he is watching over me. And he cares about me. And yes, while this thing was horrible, and I don’t wish this upon anybody, and I don’t want it. I never wanted to have gone through this myself. But I can look back on that event. And I can think about God’s hand in my life. And I’m alive. The same event has such a completely different meaning. And those two people will live completely different. They’ll feel completely different moving forward, based on their meaning. So again, you can apply this to another example. Let’s say a wife says, My husband struggles with pornography. And the story that she said tells herself is that means I’m not good enough. I’m not doing this, right. I’m not attractive enough. I’m not fill in the blank enough, because of my husband turns to these, this material, then that means like, this is me on some level. I’m falling short.

So that’s one way of looking at that. I think it’s completely inaccurate. I’ve never met some I’ve never worked with somebody where they say well, I turned to pornography, because my wife just you know, isn’t isn’t very attractive. Or my wife isn’t, again, fill in the blank with something. Now, in the moment when somebody is struggling with their addiction, and they blame their wife, they might say those things. Well, we never have sex and so this is why I go ahead and do this. But the reality of the truth is that that’s that’s a way to put the blame on somebody else. But as I do the work with people in dig Underneath that, it’s always because of their own stuff. So this is the other alternative to this, this is the other story that you can tell, instead of saying, I’m not enough, the wife can say, he’s struggling with his own things, this is his individual issue. This has nothing to do with me. This is his way of dealing with his pain, and it’s ineffective, and it’s hurtful. And I don’t want this to be a part of our marriage. But I know this isn’t about me. Now, that’s still going to be a painful event and experience for her for her husband to be looking at images of other people. Again, this goes back to this idea that we’re, we are wired to connect with our spouse and our partner. So when their attention goes to somebody else, especially with this kind of content, it hurts. And there’s a sense of betrayal there. The thing that is so critical, though, is to not take that on herself and say this is my fault on some level, because I’m not fill in the blank enough. Another way to look, another example, is with regard to intimacy in a marriage. So the husband, let’s say, if the wife doesn’t want to be intimate with her husband, the husband can, he’s going to create a meaning out of that same example, that that event, just like we all do about any event, as we’ve been talking. So the meaning there’s two different ways you can look at this, the first meaning is there’s something wrong with me, or my wife doesn’t love me, I’m not important enough for her to to be intimate, this is the way that I can connect with her. And she’s not doing this, therefore, I’m not like she doesn’t care about me, or I’m not attractive, or any number of negative stories that he can tell himself about himself and the situation. The other alternative is to say, Okay, if my wife isn’t wanting to be intimate, what could be contributing to this to this situation? Does she not feel safe enough? Maybe she feels disconnected from me. And she doesn’t want to put herself in a position to connect with me in this way. Because I’m not because that we don’t have this like sense of emotional connection. If she doesn’t feel like I’m present with her does she feel like I’m that I care about her? There’s so many different questions that you can ask to start to challenge this old story of this is me, and she doesn’t care about me. And we get stuck in that narrative. I remember speaking with a woman once where this was the case, she did not want to be intimate her husband, the husband is having a very hard time with this, because that was one of the primary ways that he knew how to connect with her. And a part of the work that I do with people is we want to expand the way in which somebody can connect. So yes, while sex is such a powerful way to do that, there are many other ways that people can get a sense of connection. So not only do we want to heal some, we want to heal the pain and the trauma that the addiction has caused heal the addiction, but we also want to give them additional ways and tools to be able to connect. And so as a part of this process of re evaluating the story,

I asked him, I said, Well, how do you take this, if she doesn’t wanna have sex? How do you take this and that’s where he went, she doesn’t care. I’m not important. My needs don’t matter, all of those things. And so I checked in with her, I said, so help me understand for you What’s actually happening on the inside for you, when he approaches your initiates intimacy, what’s going on for you on the inside? Because she puts up a wall, and she doesn’t want to engage, or she’ll make an excuse for something about like, no, not tonight because of this. And he gets so frustrated, but they had never really gone deeper and had a conversation about why. And so when I asked her what’s happening for you in those in these moments, and we spent some time talking and unpacking all this, but eventually it got to her saying I feel very uncomfortable with how I look. I just I don’t like how I look, I feel self conscious. And so anytime he initiates intimacy, I cringe and I freeze up, because I’m just so self conscious about how I look. Now, when he heard that, again, like when you hear when you can change the story, instantly, it changes the feeling because instead of him being resentful, he started to feel compassion towards her. And this urgency of him wanting to be intimate. It reduces or eliminates the urgency because now there’s a sense of compassion and understanding for how his wife was feeling. And now he wants to work with her and say, Well, how can I help you with this? Can I want to reassure you that I think you’re beautiful. You’re so important to me. A reason why intimacy is so special for me is because that’s a way that I can connect with you and I can feel close in that moment. And so I it’s hard for me to hear that you don’t think so highly of yourself because I see you is so beautiful, and so he can reassure her and support her Which again, this is the idea of coming back together to help change the story. So, as we started the episode, as we recap this, the goal is to be able to heal from the story or change our meaning that we’re making about it. And one of the most important and powerful ways we can do that is by opening up and talking with our partner, to help them change the story with us. So instead of him saying, I remember listening to a podcast, I might have mentioned this early early on in this in our podcast series. I remember listening to another podcast where the wife felt like she wasn’t very attractive to her husband. And anytime she saw an attractive woman, that she would point her out of the crowd, and turn to her husband and say, do you think she’s attractive, and the husband would freeze and think like, I do not want to step on this landmine, I don’t want to cause a fight. I don’t want to, I don’t want to say something that I know is gonna just like blow up the good evening that we’re having. So he wouldn’t know what to do. And so the podcast host, as he was describing all this said, she needs to go back to her her group and do her work with them. And when I heard that, I remember saying out loud, no, she should not. The goal is for her to be able to number one get clear about what’s really happening, which is the primary question that she’s trying to ask is, am I attractive to you? Am I beautiful enough for you? Where do I stand in your eyes, because of course, we want to, we want to, in a relationship, we want to feel like we’re doing a good job. We want to feel like we’re measuring up for our partner that they’re happy with us that they’re, they’re happy in their relationship. So there’s a sense of being enough as an individual. And we want to feel like we’re doing a good job or being enough in the relationship. And so for her, she says, am I attractive enough? That’s the primary question, she’s not going to get that answer. That’s going to really solve that dilemma from her group, it can’t come from her group, because it’s within the relationship that she has the insecurity. And so the tool is to be able to turn to your spouse and say, this is where I’m stuck. I feel like I’m not very attractive. And this is painful for me, because I of course, I want you to be attracted to me. Of course, I want to connect with you. Because of course, I want you to be happy with me as a person. I’m happy with me. But I also want us to be happy. And I want you to feel like the relationship is good and you to be happy with me. And again, this isn’t that’s not a codependent thing at all. Like we want to be in a relationship where our partner feels happy. And that we feel like we’re we’re contributing to a positive and healthy relationship. This is, again, where we’re trying to untie these things, we want to be enough in our relationship. And so the process the tool, and the strategy would be for her to turn to him and say that, and for him to say, of course,

I think you’re beautiful. I’m so happy with you. Yes, I yes, I want to have a good relationship with you as well. Yes, you’re enough for me. And when you turn to your spouse and get support from them, it can instantly and very powerfully help you change the story that you’ve created. Now, some stories are so deeply ingrained that it takes lots of conversations to help change them. But as we do open up and be vulnerable and share with our partner what’s going on for us, it gives them a chance to support us, and to help us move through this stuck place. Now, even as I say this out loud, I can hear the objection or the concern, well, what if my husband’s doing something or my wife is doing something that isn’t working, that I’m not happy with that is causing me pain? Well, you still can have these conversations and say, Yes, I want to have a good relationship. No, I don’t think that you’re a bad person. But these actions don’t work. For me. This causes me pain when you do or say this thing. Do I think you’re an awful person? No, I don’t. But I think there’s a long I think there’s a lot of work that we need to do to get into a different place. And these XYZ actions caused me a lot of pain. So if his story is, I’m a failure, I’m a loser. I’m an awful person, I’m a horrible person, I’m worthless. He can go to her and say I’m really struggling with this.

And while she doesn’t have to condone any negative behavior, she can still say I don’t think you’re a bad person. I just think we need to work on this thing, or I think that you need to address this thing. And if you did this thing differently, I would feel so different. So this is where we’re separating out again, our self The story we’re telling ourselves about ourselves from actions and decisions that we make. And so the more that I would encourage you to, I hope that this has been helpful for you guys, this is honestly been a concept that’s been so huge for me when I work with couples, because now we don’t need to rehash all the details for the rest of somebody’s life, we can go back to an event, and talk about the impact that it had, and the story that we’re telling ourselves, and then we can help make sense of that in a different way. So when you when, just like I shared with this example, of the wife, who was having a hard time being intimate, or any other example that we’ve shared, again, like her, or the wife feeling on attractive, and then being told to go back to her group, while Yes, group is such, I guess, I want to clarify one thing as well. group can be such a powerful for those who pursue that path, it can be such a powerful way to connect with other people. And I think that’s huge. So I’m not disparaging that, I don’t want people to think like groups a bad idea, you should never go. That’s not what I’m saying at all, I think group is a very helpful thing for many, many people. And it gives them a network of support, which is massive. And I’m a huge fan of that. The thing that I keep bringing up with regard to groups, is that going to a group won’t change the dynamic between you and your spouse. If you’re having communication breakdowns with your partner or your spouse, going to a group isn’t going to change that dynamic that needs to be done within the relationship. So I just think it’s crucial, because I just think it’s the right tool for the right job. So if you need support, I think group is massive. And I would encourage people to get a network of support, whether that’s a formal group, or a friend or a family member, getting that support is key. The point that I wanted to make with the group is that it’s very important to recognize that the group tool is different, it’s on a different level than what needs to take place within a relationship with your partner. So again, as we recap this, the more you can open up and share with your partner how you’re struggling, and how you’re making meaning of things, and how you interpreted certain significant very painful events from the past. That gives your partner a chance to clarify and process through that event, and help you make the the meaning different, which can then change your experience and your your, and how you feel as you reflect on the event. So I hope this has been helpful. And I know that this is sometimes difficult to do. And this is again, a part of the process. I love being able to do this with people where I can help them unwind to these stories, because sometimes we get stuck. And sometimes we don’t know how to make sense of this in a different way. And it causes a lot of gridlock and pain. I just wanted to reassure you and help you guys understand and give you some tools for you guys to practice this, that this is the path. This is the goal and the outcome in mind. Helping people change the story make sense of things in a different way to be able to help us feel differently about the event. So I hope this has been helpful. If so I would love to get your feedback. And if you leave it in the form of a rating and review, it’s massively helpful, because it helps me to get this information out to more people. And truly It is my goal to be a positive influence in this process, because I know it can be very overwhelming. And people can feel lonely and feel like they’re struggling on their own. So thank you again for being with me. I look forward to speaking with you guys next week. And I hope that as you practice this tool, that you can see some change in your relationship in a short amount of time by changing these stories. Okay, thanks, guys. We’ll talk to you soon. Wait before you go, I’m offering free access for my podcast listeners to a course I created. So make sure you go to couples healing.org so you can get some tools to start the healing process individually and in your relationship for if you want even more support and you’d like to work with me directly. You can contact me with the info that’s on that website as well. I’m excited for you to make progress on your journey.