Want Deeper Connection? Why Forgiveness Is the Hidden Key to Intimacy

Unlocking Intimacy Through Forgiveness: A Raw Conversation with Dr. Bruce Chalmer

Why Forgiveness Matters for Your Relationship and Libido

Dr. Diane: Hey everybody, this is Dr. Diane, your host of the Libido Lounge. I’m so excited about today’s guest, Dr. Bruce Chalmer. We are diving into some heavy but crucial topics today, and one of the most important is forgiveness. It’s really cool to have Dr. Bruce on the show because I’ve spent a decent amount of time myself researching forgiveness on Wikipedia and other platforms, trying to figure out what it is and how we define it. So many times, we get in our own way with forgiveness. We hold onto this energy, this frequency of anger, simply because we don’t understand it. It not only damages ourselves but also our relationships. I know there’ve been things in my past where forgiveness has been a real challenge, requiring a lot of personal energy to forgive people in my life. I’m really excited to dig into this conversation today. So, Bruce, thank you so much for being here with me.

Dr. Bruce: Well, I’m delighted. Thanks for having me on. It’s funny to say I love to talk about forgiveness because it’s a topic that involves all kinds of pain. You only need to forgive when you’re in a lot of pain, but I do find it’s an important thing to talk about. Let’s define it. Like you said, it’s a challenging thing. Due to society, upbringing, and religion, there are many different definitions out there of what people think forgiveness actually is.

Defining Forgiveness: An Inside Job

Dr. Diane: So, let’s start with what forgiveness is. How are you defining it?

Dr. Bruce: If you boil them all down, I’m sure I’m oversimplifying, but there are basically two ways to define forgiveness: the way I like and the way I don’t. I’ll start with the way I don’t like, though it’s a very common way of defining forgiveness. A lot of times, when people say they’ll forgive someone who’s hurt them badly, what they mean is they’ll restore the relationship. If I forgive someone who’s hurt me, I can perhaps trust them again. We’ll go back to where we were. It’s kind of like forgiving a financial debt, saying, “You know what? You don’t owe me the money anymore. Let’s just move on.” That’s one way of defining forgiveness, but I don’t like that way. Let me tell you the way I prefer. Forgiveness—and I didn’t coin this phrase, but I love it—is an inside job. I can forgive someone I don’t trust at all. I can forgive someone I have absolutely no intention of restoring a relationship with. I can forgive somebody I’m still going to sue, divorce, or prosecute in court. I can forgive all kinds of people who don’t, in any moral sense, deserve forgiveness. I can forgive people who have no remorse, who have no understanding of what they did. In that sense, forgiveness is all about that internal sense. I can get past the essential trauma. I’m not obsessed with it. I can think about it, have some perspective, and recognize, “Yeah, that happened. I wish it hadn’t. Maybe I understand why it did, maybe I didn’t. Maybe I had a part in it, maybe I didn’t.” But I can have perspective so I’m not freaking out. That’s what I mean by forgiveness. The reason I like that better is it’s empowering. You’re no longer at the mercy of someone else’s attitudes or whether they apologize. You’re not carrying around the hurt. I’d be remiss if I didn’t quote Anne Lamott, who so many people quote on forgiveness. I won’t get the words exactly right, but she said, essentially, to not forgive is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. As I like to point out, once you get the poison out of you, then you can worry about the rat. The rat might still be there and might still be a rat, but if you’ve got the poison out, you can think more clearly. You’re not distracted by panic.

Dr. Diane: I like that definition a lot because where people get stuck—and I know when I’ve looked up this definition, where I was getting stuck—was thinking it almost says, “Okay, that behavior or that thing was okay.” What you’re saying is we’re not saying whatever somebody did was okay. You could have been wronged, you could have been hurt, and it’s not saying their behavior is okay. It’s saying you’re changing your nervous system response to it so you can live a healthier life and still navigate, if you need to keep a relationship with that person, in a way your nervous system can handle better. Correct?

Dr. Bruce: Yes, exactly. If you think of it in terms of processing trauma, when you’ve processed the trauma, you’re no longer freaking out whenever you think of it. Your brain has learned that the memory of the events is safe. The events weren’t, but the memory is safe. You’re not distracted by it if you get reminded of it, which, of course, happens all the time, consciously or not. That’s how I like to think about forgiveness. It empowers you. It gives you the sense that, okay, I can actually do something about this. Then you can figure out if you can rebuild trust with someone, if you want to or need to maintain a relationship. That’s a whole different set of issues that’s not an inside job. That involves both people. But forgiveness is a really important first step.

The Three Steps to Forgiveness

Dr. Bruce: In the book I mentioned, I lay out three steps to forgiveness. Anytime anybody lays out three steps, it’s partly baloney because that’s not how life works. But having said that, I have my three steps. The first step is to forgive yourself because, inevitably, we blame ourselves when something bad happens, even if there’s no moral sense in which we should. It’s part of a survival mechanism. It gives me a sense I have some control, even if I don’t. So, I need to forgive myself. 

The second step is to forgive whoever hurt you. I claim that’s a fairly short step from forgiving yourself. If I’ve genuinely forgiven myself, if I’ve gotten to the point of saying, “You know what? I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I knew what I knew, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I guess I was doing the best I could. I’m not evil, stupid, or crazy. I just kind of blew it. That’s what happens when you don’t know enough.” I can apply that to the person who hurt me too. I’m not trying to say there’s no moral culpability. I’m just saying, “Well, I guess that’s what they came up with. Bummer that they did, but that’s what they came up with. They were doing the best they could too.” I don’t have to be angry about it. Now I can figure out what I want to do. 

The third step, I have a funny name for, and you don’t have to be religious to appreciate it. I call it forgiving God. What I simply mean by that is, how could we live in this world where we have this tantalizing sense that we’re in control of things, which is largely an illusion? We think we’re controlling some stuff. We do have influence, but stuff happens, and we got hurt by it. We need to forgive the fact that that’s the case, sort of forgiving the universe for that. That’s a really important step too because it leads to a mindset that says, “Wow, this whole reality business is actually good to be what it is, even if it’s painful sometimes.” 

I call that mindset faith, not necessarily religious. That’s what heals. That’s what gets people to see the meaning in it and not just freak out and say, “Oh, we just want to go back to how it was.” Because how it was won’t work. How it was is what got you into trouble.

Dr. Diane: That’s really helpful, and I like step three oftentimes too because it’s so easy, from the standpoint of losing power within oneself, to start projecting and say, “Well, this is the fault of God, the universe, that energy, whatever it is anybody believes in.” In doing that, we can lose some sense of power. So, even by forgiving on that level, energetically forgiving the universe or God at large, we begin to put that power back into ourselves. I think that’s a really important step that a lot of people haven’t talked about in this realm.

Rebuilding Trust After Betrayal

Dr. Diane: You bring up trust, and I think trust is a really important place to go next, especially since a lot of your work is with couples and relationships, which is what we talk about on this show. Many times, when we’re dealing with forgiveness, there’s a fundamental trust that’s probably been broken. That leads to so many people feeling unsafe in their relationships, maybe even unsafe in themselves. I don’t think it’s news to anybody that the loss of trust can be a pivotal turning point. 

If people want to reconcile their relationship and this isn’t addressed, it’s often a slippery slope downhill from there. So, where do people go? Taking the time to forgive oneself, forgive their partner—it sounds like this is done through a lot of self-talk or… actually, let’s take a step back. From the standpoint of forgiveness, what is that process? I understand the three steps, but if somebody’s trying to take that first step to forgive themselves, what exactly are they doing there?

Dr. Bruce: Here’s my gross oversimplification of that. How do you lead someone there? I don’t have a simple formula that says, “Oh, self-talk, say these affirmations, and everything will be fine.” I don’t tend to think that’s true. Affirmations aren’t bad, but they often follow from feeling better rather than making you feel better. It’s a bootstrap process, I suppose. I boil it back down to that one word: faith. 

If you can practice—and it is a practice, not knowledge you can learn, not something you can simply repeat to yourself—it’s a practice of faith where you recognize there must be some meaning here. There’s something important about this. That’s how you get to that place of forgiveness. 

Victor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, survived Auschwitz, one of the very few in his group who did, and found meaning in pure evil. He doesn’t deny it’s pure evil, but he was able to find meaning in that suffering. That’s the sense of faith I’m talking about. When you have that deep sense that, “God, this is painful, but you can learn from it, you can grow from it,” that’s how you get to forgiveness. It takes time, like any recovery from trauma.

How Forgiveness Improves Intimacy

Dr. Diane: Just a quick break to let you know that 80% of women do not have orgasms from vaginal intercourse alone. So many people are not having the type of sex that is healing, that brings them closer, more connected, full of pleasure and passion that can build bones, reduce stress, help serotonin, bring happiness, lower anxiety, improve sleep, and build a better connection with your partner. That’s what hot and modern monogamy is—modern monogamy that brings in all that passion, desire, closeness, and healing. That’s what you can get at the Modern Libido Club. If you’re interested and I can help you, please go to modernmonogamyclub.com. Now back to our show.

Dr. Bruce: I was trained and did a lot of work before I focused almost exclusively on couples. Many years ago, I worked quite a bit with trauma survivors. I’m trained in EMDR and hypnosis. All the therapies that work with trauma basically invite you to go there in your mind without freaking out. If you can go there without freaking out, that’s what works. 

Then you have a shot at your brain learning, “Oh, these memories are safe,” and you can recover from it. The forgiveness process, from a therapy standpoint, is a lot about going to those places. What the therapist provides, more than any fancy techniques, is faith. We’re saying, “Wow, this whole thing can be meaningful. You can learn from this.” 

I’ve had many people go through that process. I’ve never had anybody say to their partner, “Hey, thanks for cheating.” Haven’t heard that one yet. But I’ve heard lots of people say, in effect, “Thanks for precipitating that crisis because we’re so much better off now.” That’s what I mean by that sense of faith. If you go in with the sense that, “Boy, this is painful, but I’ll bet we can grow from it,” that’s what lets you get to that place of forgiveness.

Dr. Diane: That’s so well said. In oversimplifying things, it’s really finding the silver lining, right? Through trauma, finding a silver lining is a daily practice and daily work when there’s so much pain and hurt. I like that a lot. It’s not as simple as EMDR or other therapies you mentioned. Like you said, all they’re doing is bringing that processing to the prefrontal cortex, where we have reasoning, so we can think and process without emotion. We’re still, in many ways, doing the same thing—just a different way of helping our brain find that silver lining so we can let go of the trauma.

Dr. Bruce: Absolutely. Rebuilding trust works a lot better if you can think clearly to see if you even want to try that with a partner. If you do, if you have good reason to want to do that—and of course, being a married couple or people who’ve been together a long time, especially with kids, gives enormous reason to want to do that. Even if they decide to divorce, they have enormous reason to work together as parents. Building trust can’t happen if you haven’t had some level of forgiveness because you’re too distracted by panic. Even if you’ve forgiven, rebuilding trust is about reaching a level of understanding sufficient to say, “Wow, I can imagine a person I could rebuild trust with having done what they did. I understand it enough. I see where it came from, and I also see from them.” 

As you say, this involves both people. I see from them that they understand it enough to reassure me they wouldn’t do it again—not because we’ll go back to how it was, that’s nonsense, but because they’ve learned what they needed to learn. Often, the trust thing works both ways. It’s surprising. In an infidelity situation, the person who was cheated on often feels, “How can I trust this person not to cheat?” The person who cheated, if they’ve forgiven themselves and their partner, needs to trust their partner too. 

They need to trust their partner won’t keep hating them or keep them in a permanent villain or probationer role, where their partner becomes their probation officer. That’s not how people want to live. To get past that requires both parties to have a real sense that they’re made whole again and appreciate what they went through to get there.

Deciding to Stay or Go

Dr. Diane: Do you have anything in your process—because I’m thinking about a situation where somebody’s been cheated on, and a common thing in infidelity or any major trauma is the question, “Do we actually want to continue together?” There’s a ton of work that goes into everything we’re talking about here. Reparation on both sides can be major and can take weeks, months, even years to fully repair. Do you have a part of your process that helps individuals within the context of a couple go through and ask themselves questions or do any processing around what’s the right step after this? Like, do I actually want to continue, or do I want to do something else? How do you guide people that way?

Dr. Bruce: There are zillions of different approaches to this. My favorite way is I don’t tend to make that a binary question, certainly not early on. It’s an implicit question right from the get-go. They’re wondering, “Okay, how’s this going to turn out? What are we going to decide to do?” I absolutely respect that from day one and recognize that it’s often not a simple decision. 

It’s not, “Well, obviously we have to split up,” or, “Obviously we’re going to stay together.” You have to tolerate the anxiety. One of my favorite phrases—my wife and I do a podcast, and we said if people did a drinking game every time I said “tolerate the anxiety,” they’d be drunk by the end of the podcast. I say that a lot. It’s about tolerating the anxiety. If you can sit with not knowing for a while, I have such sympathy for people who can’t stand it. I’m not judgmental about that. I understand. 

The only certainty you have early on in this process is you can file for divorce. In all states in our country now, I think it’s true, either party can file for divorce, and they’re pretty much all no-fault now, as far as I know. You don’t have to concoct some scheme proving abuse or infidelity. You can simply say, “I want out,” and you get to get out. That gives you some sense of power. You can end it. But if you don’t want to end it, you’re going to be stuck with some uncertainty for a while as you go through the healing process. I don’t have a black-and-white approach. Having said that, I want to mention, with respect, there are folks who do. 

I’m forgetting the buzzword they use, but some will say, “We’re going to meet for six weeks, and the focus will be solely on whether you want to continue the work or split up.” I respect that, but I don’t want to work that way because it feels like it’s making things too black-and-white when they may need to be fuzzy for a while. That’s not exactly a scientific argument, so I respect that approach, but it’s not how I like to work.

Dr. Diane: I think there are lots of different types and ways for different couples. That’s what’s amazing about the work of many in the world—we get to choose the right thing, the right approach for us in any situation in life or relationship. This thing you’re talking about, tolerating the anxiety, is so important. It’s a rare thing in life that we’re taught, especially at a young age, to tolerate discomfort. In a world where comfort is one of the key motivational drivers for people, being uncomfortable, in pain, and anxious leads to this tendency to say, “What do I have to do to get rid of it as fast as possible?” That’s natural, that’s normal. I feel that too. But from the standpoint of fixing things, choosing things, processing things, and making decisions—not making decisions in that intense nervous system state, which isn’t always the best decision—tolerating that is really important.

From Plain Old Sex to Sacred Sex

Dr. Diane: I want to move us on since we only have a certain amount of time today, although I feel like we could talk forever. One of the things you talk about in your work is the difference between good sex and sacred sex. I wanted to talk about that, especially since libido and sex are what come up most from our listeners. Can you differentiate between those?

Dr. Bruce: I actually have three levels: plain old sex, good sex, and sacred sex. The title of the chapter in my book Reigniting the Spark was “Sex, Good Sex, and Sacred Sex.” Plain old sex is anything you think it is. If you think it’s sex, it’s sex. I’m not fussy about how I define that. It’s whatever you think of as sex, broadly or narrowly. 

Plain old sex simply requires that you more or less not be freaking out at the very prospect. People who’ve gone through sexual trauma, which is unfortunately very common, need to recover from that to even have plain old sex without it being horrible. For plain old sex, you just need to not be in a state of panic. It also helps to have some basic knowledge of anatomy and physiology—what goes where and what does what. For many people, and I’m not trying to mansplain, but for a lot of women, that’s a particular issue: “What’s down there, and how does my body work?” 

Usually, men aren’t unsure about what’s down there and how it works. I want to put in a plug for your most recent podcast with Matt Sturm, talking about non-ejaculatory orgasm, which I’ve often talked about with folks. It’s incredibly important if men can learn that. Anyway, that’s plain old sex. Good sex is when it’s not just sex—it’s intimate. By intimate, I don’t mean it’s necessarily quiet and romantic. It could be loud, rough, whatever people want. But it means you’re present, actually present in your body. I define intimacy broadly as when you are present and honest with yourself and each other. Nobody’s that way 24/7. I’m not always present with myself all the time—I’m distracted a lot. Damn smartphones, you know, but whatever. There are all kinds of ways life distracts us. 

Couples need those moments of intimacy as much as they need stability. For good sex, you need to be present. That’s a lot about tolerating the anxiety, being willing to say things to your partner that you’re worried they’ll think are weird, like fantasies. To be able to talk about stuff, whether it’s politically correct or not, and say, “This is a fantasy. Even if we don’t enact it, this turns me on.” 

That’s intimate sex, or good sex. Sacred sex is really more about the sacred than the sex. You mentioned tantra in that podcast I heard. You probably have more familiarity than I do. I’ve read what I’ve read, and we’ve interviewed several tantra folks on our podcast. I love it. It’s about the sense that the sex isn’t just about the couple anymore—it’s joining forces that are much bigger. That’s more about the sacred than the sex. Sex is just a good example. 

I mentioned in the book, why sacred sex as opposed to sacred dishwashing? Some would say there is such a thing as sacred dishwashing if you’re present in that sense of sacred. The forces of sex are so amenable, so awesome, literally awe-inspiring. The first time anybody has an orgasm, if it wasn’t unpleasant—and I know there are trauma situations where that happens—it’s often awe-inspiring, like, “Oh my God, where did this force come from?” That’s very amenable to the sense of being joined with the universe in much larger ways than just the people involved.

Dr. Diane: I love it. Thank you for explaining that. One of my favorite things is that what happens in the bedroom, or wherever we’re intimate, is a reflection of what happens outside the bedroom. We can take basic things, like meditation and mindfulness, that, when people go deeper, are ways of connecting to the divine, to the feeling of awe. I’ve done 36-day meditation retreats, gone very deep into the meditation world. One of my favorite things to say is, “I think sex is better than meditation.” When we’re in that sacred sex you’re talking about, connected to something greater, cosmic, and beautiful, and we’re 100% present in our body, it’s a big practice. Do you, in your work or in your book, help couples or individuals learn how to tap into these different types of sex and start exploring them?

Dr. Bruce: If I were to talk about what I’ve written and what I discuss with folks, I talk about the distinction. I don’t lead workshops on how to get to sacred sex. I mostly talk about the intimate part. A lot of the work I do with couples—the vast majority, I think—is with those not having stability issues but intimacy issues. Good sex is all about that. We’re often talking about both sex and intimacy more generally. 

I talk a lot about ways to get there, again, all about tolerating the anxiety. I don’t talk much about specific practices to invite you into that sacred mode, other than saying, “Hey, read up on that stuff.” But the more you get into it, I do have a sense that this is true of peak experiences in general—it’s not something you can engineer, it’s something you can lay the groundwork for. 

You engage in practices, no different from daily prayer or meditation practices. You might have the occasional experience of astonishing unity with the divine, but you can’t make that happen in a given circumstance. You can simply get good at it, and then it can happen. I think that’s true of sacred sex as well. I don’t have workshops on tantra, but I mention it to people.

How to Connect with Dr. Bruce Chalmer

Dr. Diane: I know we’re about out of time today. I want to make sure people know how to get a hold of you, how to get your book, and any other offerings. I know your betrayal and forgiveness book is the new one. I also want everybody to know we’re offering part two of this interview with Dr. Bruce. In part two, we’re talking about stability and intimacy, these two forces that almost seem contradictory to people. How can I feel safe and stable in a partnership and still do all these things that cultivate intimacy? Sometimes they feel like opposite things, sometimes the same. That’s my experience. I’m going to talk to Dr. Bruce about that more in part two. Make sure you look in the show notes to understand how to access that, coming out soon. So, Dr. Bruce, tell us, how do people get a hold of you? How do they get your books, all those goods?

Dr. Bruce: The best bet is to go to brucechalmer.com. That has links to whatever you might need—my practice, if people are interested in working with me. I do all telehealth, so that’s doable. There are links to my books, which are widely available pretty much anywhere you can get books. I almost hate to do it, but I’ll put in a plug for Amazon because the more people get on Amazon, the more people find out about it. That’s how it works these days. If you go to amazon.com and search for Dr. Bruce Chalmer, you’ll find all my books, including the one I wrote in 1986 on statistics, which is still available, which is kind of hilarious. That’s another story. You’ll find links to that. The podcast my wife and I do, Couples Therapy in Seven Words, is available on all podcast platforms. You can search for that or go to our podcast website, ctin7.com.

Dr. Diane: We’ll have all those links in the show notes from today’s episode. Thank you everybody so much for tuning in. Please, please, please do me a favor: share this with your friends and family. This topic of forgiveness is such a big conversation that I think we’ve been trying to figure out as humans for centuries, for eons—how to do this, what it means. We can’t get this information to enough people. So, please share this with friends, family, anybody you think could benefit from this information. Thank you so much, Bruce, for being here with me today.

Dr. Bruce: Thanks for having me on.

Dr. Diane: Everybody, we’ll see you real soon for another episode on the Libido Lounge. Take care. Thank you for listening to the Libido Lounge. Please don’t keep me a secret. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, and check out our Modern Libido Club for so much more!