He Broke My Trust
Repair, Boundaries, and Forgiveness (Pratfall from Grace)
Special Thanks to Pamela Schacht for her striking original artwork @Pamschachtstudio (Description for the visually impaired: Canvas with crimson flowers that have fallen from sunkissed stems.)
This may be the most important piece I’ve ever shared. It’s my hope that because the material is so relatable (we’ve all been betrayed or had our trust damaged) that it can help a great deal of people. The post is too long for email but you can click “view entire message” to see it all. This piece has been two years in the making. It’s on the long side so I’ve recorded it for you if you prefer to listen versus read. Please click on the triangle icon to hear this story. I respect your time and appreciate your engagement. Thank you so very much for being here with me.
Buckle Up, Buttercup
Throwing stones from glass houses leaves us all in shards of broken pieces. The idea of repair in conflict resolution is foreign to many people. They may not even know there’s an option that exists between going back to the way things were or cutting someone off completely. This is a show and tell about what repair, boundaries, and forgiveness look like in a relationship marred by damaged trust, taken from an excerpt of the full-length story entitled, “Pratfall from Grace.”
Pratfall from Grace (excerpt)
Sass and Daniel have history; they’ve known each other over half their lives. They even lived and worked with each other for a short time, many years ago. Throughout Daniel’s children’s lives, Sass was present for their sport games, artistic performances, birthday parties, illnesses, and other significant moments. In fact, Daniel and his wife asked Sass and her husband to be the legal guardians of their children, should anything ever happen to them. Sass took that role to heart and would have given her life for any one of those kids. When someone trusts you enough to leave their children in your care, you’d think they’d respect you enough to communicate with you openly, when there’s an issue, and not go behind your back. Open communication takes courage and character- the ability to remain in one’s own integrity even when personally uncomfortable. Sometimes, out of convenience to themselves, people move in disrespectful shadows; which is what Daniel did to Sass. When people get too comfortable in relationships (or too uncomfortable) they can take their loved ones for granted and damage trust. When that happens, they must offer repair. Sass confronted Daniel in search of understanding.
The Confrontation
Sass: Why didn’t you just come to me directly in good faith? The issue wasn’t that big of a deal. You damaged my trust in you. Why did you feel you had to go behind my back and try to get my husband to hide something from me?
Daniel: Because I was scarred by a letter you wrote over 30 years ago.
Sass was shocked and didn’t know if Daniel was joking or being serious.
Sass: Are you kidding?
Daniel: No.
Sass: I’m sorry, she said, with a stifled laugh, are you seriously blaming your adult behavior in the present on something I did as a kid in the past? You’ve had over 30 years to talk to me about being “scarred,” and this is the first I’m hearing of it.
Daniel: I’m just realizing it now.
Sass: You’re just realizing now that you are “Scarred” from a letter you read over half your life ago? “Scarred” is a pretty serious word to use. Should I be worried about you? That sounds like a job for a therapist to help you process it.
Daniel: I don’t need to process anything. I’m fine.
Sass: Obviously, you are not “fine.” You broke my trust by saying one thing to my face and another behind my back the next day. It’s made me doubt your sincerity and question our entire history. All these years I chose to believe your words over your contradictory actions because you seem so sincere when you say things like, “I love you. I care about you. I miss you guys.” Yet, your actions have not demonstrated that. If you feel comfortable creating a secret text group, is there a secret email group too? Have you been lying all these years, pretending to love and care because it was easier than facing the uncomfortable truth that you don’t? I feel especially betrayed that you would try to get my husband to keep a secret from me. Is that the type of marriage you have, where you think it’s OK to keep secrets from your spouse? What the hell, Daniel?
How to Repair
Daniel: I’m sorry.
Sass: I appreciate that, and I accept your apology; but I don’t trust you at your word anymore, only your actions. An apology alone doesn’t provide me with any reassurance that this won’t happen again. You can’t just say, “I’m sorry.” You need to offer repair.
Daniel: What do you mean by repair?
Sass: Repair is not the performative gesture of saying, “I’m sorry.” Repair is a change in behavior to fix what’s been broken, because “History unacknowledged is repeated.” Repair is what taking accountability for your behavior looks like.
For example, if you hit someone’s car (intentionally or unintentionally), you’d take accountability by admitting what you did and paying for the repairs. When you hurt someone emotionally through lies, betrayal, or other harm (intentionally or unintentionally), you do the same. Repair is taking ownership for your own unresolved issues, judgements, and resentments that were used to justify disrespectful and hurtful behaviors.
In this case, it might look like you saying, “I’m sorry I blamed my present disrespectful behavior toward you on something that happened over 30 years ago. If I had it to do over again, I would have worked through my past issues so that they were not coloring my present choices. I would have come to you directly instead of going behind your back. I would not have welcomed you to your face and then shut you out when you weren’t looking. I definitely would not have asked your husband to keep a secret from you.”
If an apology gets to the point that it needs repair, you might want to send some apology flowers as well, just sayin’. Broken trust is a fault line where no one feels safe living. Even if the people involved no longer want to live there, the “you broke it, you fix it” rule still applies. Your inability to simply pick up the phone and talk to me directly and everything that followed after that has lead to trust so damaged that it’s broken apart an entire unit of people- no one in my household trusts you anymore. Without repair, this only gets worse. The longer you wait the more irreparable the damage becomes.
Repair is not the act of mending a relationship that’s ended; it’s the act of mending the behavior that ended the relationship to avoid it from happening again with that person or another. What we fail to fix with the people we are at odds with now, we will likely repeat with the people we love the most in the future, like our children, in-laws, grandchildren, or partners. That’s because wherever we go, there we are, blaming others for our behavior instead of taking responsibility for our actions. As long as someone feels justified in blaming external circumstances for their behavior, they will continue to do so.
Repair is the necessary action between an apology and the final stage of conflict resolution: choosing to reconcile a new “normal” or choosing to walk away. Repair creates moist ground where new seeds of healing can take place organically or a dry place to build a stone garden.
Daniel: “I feel repair is not possible.”
Full Stop!
Sass was shocked and deeply saddened. In refusing to offer repair, Daniel was in effect putting the nail in the coffin of a 35-year-old relationship, not just with Sass, but with her husband and child as well. They all spent the next two years grieving a loss that didn’t have to be and learning how to navigate a new normal.
Sass could have asked why Daniel felt that repair was not possible, but to her, that would have been an act of disrespect to them both. She would have been disrespecting herself, because a “why?” at this point would feel like a plead, and no one should have to beg someone else for basic human decency. It would have been disrespectful to Daniel because, as every woman understands, “no” is a complete sentence. If someone is not willing to offer repair, it’s best to allow them to have the last word, because that’s all they will have after you walk away.
When People Can’t be Accountable
Daniel saw “repair” as synonymous with going back to the past. He had never been introduced to the concept of repair because up until now, few had held him accountable for his actions.
Daniel had been taught in his childhood that to admit to being wrong (as in, “made a mistake”) was equal to being wrong (as in “being a bad person”), and as someone who identified as being a “stand-up guy” he struggled to find the language to take ownership for his behavior without blaming outside sources for his choices. As a result, he did not know how to take accountability.
At some point, Daniel said to a third party, “Why does Sass want to repair things if she hates me so much?” To which the third party said, Sass never mentioned the word “hate.”
As an outsider, do you see what’s happening here? This is a common reaction when someone is called to take accountability for their behavior: One person speaks about how hurt they were by someone else’s behavior and all the other person hears is that they are hated. This is why we have wars in the world, because too few people truly know how to actively listen, hear, mirror and communicate effectively.
It’s helpful to get curious and ask why a person hears something other than that which is being said. Perhaps it’s internalized shame. The more Sass conveyed her sadness, the more Daniel internalized her feelings of hurt, as feelings of hate being directed toward him. Sass was sharing about her disappointment, and what Daniel heard was that he was hated. When we call people into right action by pointing out that we were hurt by their behavior and they interpret that as us hating them, we know we are dealing with a type of arrested emotional development. We can’t rationalize with someone who is being irrational. We can talk until we’re blue in the face; but if a person is so focused on being defensive to the lie that they are telling themselves, then they can’t possibly receive the truth being offered to them by another.
The bottom line is that no one is perfect but not everyone can face their imperfections. If a person can convince themselves that they are justified in treating another human with disrespect, they can’t convince themselves that they are in the wrong.
In the Absence of Repair
Without repair there is no equality, or equity; people will always be able to blame their current behavior on something someone else said or did in the past.
Without repair, there is an imbalance of power. One party, typically the offender, remains behaving as they always have, defending the harm they cause through DARVO which is an acronym for Deny, Attack, Reverse, Victim, and Offender (as in, I went behind your back because you wrote a letter over 30 years ago that scarred me so much -that I’m only realizing it now -but using it as a far reaching excuse to claim this is your fault, not mine).
Here’s a comical example of DARVO brought to Sass from her child who said, “This video made me think of you (on the right- doing all the work) and Daniel (on the left- justifying past behavior by something said in the present).
https://youtube.com/shorts/TpmXl6lMNGg?si=GMHb44X-e-xw07t7
DARVO is used by people in power to deflect blame and avoid taking ownership for their actions. The other party is expected to allow the harm and disrespect they experienced by staying silent, or “moving on,” which is often code for: this will happen again; and there’s nothing you can do about it. This is why offenders often prefer shallow, surface pleasantries, as it maintains their comfort level without asking them to maintain their integrity (that their actions match their words) and their character (having ethical principles and a strong moral compass that isn’t swayed by the nuisance of direct communication).
Radical responsibility, which is covered in Sage Words Freedom Book One, demonstrates the empowering choice we have in a situation such as this. If we’re not doing anything to stop the absence of repair, we’re doing something to encourage it. We have a choice in what we allow in our lives.
Boundaries
Daniel refused to offer repair, which meant there was nothing more for Sass to say. It’s not until people learn how to take accountability that they learn to change. If someone refuses to repair what’s broken, they are in essence giving themselves permission to cause harm again.
When we hold others accountable for their behavior, they experience the natural consequences of their actions. When we don’t hold others accountable, we experience the natural consequences of their actions; and that’s not fair.
What self-respecting woman would agree to engage, on any level, with a man who hurt her, who was unwilling to offer repair?
Civility in the Absence of Conflict Resolution
Without repair, civility is still required for mature engagements. However, one should not be expected to betray themselves with the paper cuts of polite pleasantries to engage with a person who damaged their trust. Why, in the name of decorum, do we expect women to protect the feelings of the men who hurt them? That’s outrageously asinine and ludicrous! Besides, that’s all that Daniel desires: polite pleasantries as a form of civility, which would honor and serve Daniel while dismissing and not serving, Sass. Is that fair?
Too many women are expected to “go along, to get along,” to make others comfortable at the expense of making themselves uncomfortable. This is one of many ways that society accepts and perpetuates women accepting less than they deserve. It will never change unless we collectively choose to expect more from each other as respectful human beings capable of care and compassion.
Besides, we have the concept of “civility” all wrong. As the InstituteForCivility.org writes, “Traditional applications of civility that emphasize manners and behavior over meaningful engagement and shared understanding have led us to a fatal misunderstanding of how to resolve our differences. Forced politeness that conceals authentic human feeling only fosters resentment and drives agendas underground.”
Sass will not betray her integrity by concealing her authenticity to make any person who causes harm comfortable with continuing to do so. She can, however, forgive with repair; but without that basic human respect, she will remove herself from any engagement whatsoever and will continue to call out the harm done. When you’re an open, loving person, it’s too easy to get run over by careless behavior. Boundaries are like speed bumps on the street of your being. They slow the roll of recklessness in others and allow you to watch who respects them versus who tears over them and bottoms out.
Standards
Some people can still maintain phony exchanges in the aftermath of conflict without resolution. Sass is not one of those people; for better or worse, you always know where you stand with Sass. She didn’t become the woman she is by being indecisive, mousy and submissive. The exact same traits that made Daniel love, trust and respect Sass in the first place: her heart, her integrity, and the strength of her character, are what were pushing him away now. People respect your standards until they can’t manipulate you because of them.
Breaking generational trauma required Sass to learn to regulate her emotions, level up her communication skills, and surround herself with people who do the same. She replaced toxic coping skills, like “ruinous empathy,”1 (coined by author Kim Scott) with more clear forms of effective communication, like radical candor, which is to “care personally and challenge directly.”
She offered as much grace as she could to both Daniel and herself—which meant keeping her commitment to protect herself, by following through with the boundary of not engaging without repair.
Daniel, by contrast, was born with an inherent privilege of being a healthy white male, into an upper middle-class home with two loving parents, supportive siblings, a respectable education, and no generational trauma to overcome. When you take a woman who has self-respect despite being taught to apologize for everything from the time that she was a young girl and place her in a situation with a man who was never expected to apologize with repair for anything, you can get the same reaction in person that you might from adding baking soda to vinegar. There is nothing inherently wrong with baking soda or vinegar on their own; but when mixed together, the result can be explosive.
Power Struggles Between Men and Strong Women
Women are expected to endure a tremendous amount of emotional labor and patience with patriarchal standards. They are tired of teaching the same lessons over and over and as a result, they are learning how to walk away from any work-life imbalance that’s void of respect.
In order to grow beyond social standards that did not serve her, Sass took radical responsibility for her behaviors so that she could create healthier relationships and interactions with others. As a result, she raised her standards and relationship expectations for conflict resolution and began to attract people into her life who were doing the same, while allowing those who did not to fall away.
Without repair, relationship dynamics will revolve around power struggles. One person takes the liberty to behave however they desire without any accountability to change no matter who they hurt. The other person then must choose to either engage with the person who has harmed them through disrespect, betrayal, or other abuses, or to walk away.
Sass cannot force Daniel to take accountability for his behavior, and she will not acquiesce to the archaic standards that would expect her to engage with a man who refused to offer repair. Yet, they remain in the same community. Daniel has convinced himself that he didn’t intend to cause harm and therefore the harm Sass and her family have experienced is unmerited. Can you imagine if the justice system agreed? To return to the car analogy, picture a person hitting your car and exclaiming, “I didn’t mean to hit it. Therefore, I’m not at fault; and I refuse to offer repair.”
Unintended Harm
When people say, “I didn’t intend to hurt you.” Sometimes, they are in effect also saying, “I didn’t intend not to hurt you.” Careless people, care less, and injury can happen with or without care or intent. Breaking trust is causing harm because trust is the foundation of everything.
If we’re at a gun range, we trust that other people won’t shoot us. However, if our intention is to hit the practice target that we’re aiming for but our bullet lands on an innocent bystander, we cause harm, even if it’s unintentional; and we have to face the natural consequences of our actions, which may mean paying reparations and losing access to that person until we can offer repair.
Side note: As I was writing this, an instagram reel popped up of that very same scenario. The actress, Christy Romano, was shot in the face at a clay pigeon shooting range (she’s healing fine). What’s even more odd is that I met her years ago, when my husband worked with her as a music producer while she was on the TV show Even Stevens which my brother-in-law also worked on. When these sorts of “coincidences” just pop on our phones, it feels more spooky than serendipitous. Even with my microphone off, and protective settings in place, the amount of biometric data our apps collect to customize our social media feeds is an invasion of privacy, to say the least. In 2019, I wrote an article for the magazine BLUNTMoms about this topic entitled Privacy Protection in the Aftermath of the Great Hack of Facebook, and it’s eerie how evergreen and prescient that piece turned out to be.
Getting back to this piece on damaged trust and on to the topic of…
Forgiveness
Forgiveness doesn’t mean we hand the gun back to the person who shot us. Forgiveness simply means we stop wishing they’d been shot too.
Some people mistake boundaries for grudges or a lack of forgiveness. They equate forgiveness with giving people endless chances to continue to hurt us, partially because of the Bible verse that says we should forgive someone “seventy times seventy” (that’s 490 times for curious non mathematical minds), essentially, endlessly; but forgiveness is not the acceptance or allowance of offensive, disrespectful, or abusive behavior.
Forgiveness is the act of no longer resenting someone for what they did, no longer lamenting how things could have been different. Forgiveness is making peace with what is by modifying our behavior to change what’s in our control and accept what isn’t.
Boundaries in the Absence of Accountability
Sass forgave Daniel, but not without the collateral damage of broken trust and relationships lost that extended well beyond Sass and Daniel. Sass doesn’t have to agree with someone to love them; she just wants to know who they really are behind the social mask they wear. Sass wants to have honest communication when she engages; to know she can trust Daniel to say what he means and mean what he says, which is to trust him to act with integrity so that she can trust his character, his word. If we can’t trust people at their word, where is their character?
We may not wish to continue in a relationship with someone who has hurt, betrayed, or disrespected us; but we may still need to engage with them because we remain tied to each other through work, family, or shared community. In this case, we’re looking for repair in order to trust the person enough to know that they won’t do what they did again; and if they do, we can at least, hold them to the word they gave to be accountable for it.
One of the goals of repair is to encourage each person involved to remember their integrity, the commitments they make to themselves to be true to the things they say, to words and actions which are in alignment with each other. We avoid the act of self-betrayal by living up to the standards we set for ourselves. Often, all we need to prevent betraying another is to honor our own integrity.
Conflicting Communication Styles
The following is an excerpt of a piece I wrote in 2023 entitled Accountability 101 which can be found on my Substack for those who’d like to dive deeper.
“Sometimes relationships end not because the people are incompatible but because their communication styles are incompatible. Your directness might be off-putting to their passive-aggression. If they expect you to read between the lines of everything they say, they might project that same expectation onto you and create content and meaning from your words that simply does not exist between the lines of what you say. They may interpret your sincerity as sarcasm and your direct communication may be treated as confrontation. Sometimes, we can’t win for losing.
Truth does not have to be aggressive; perceptions make it so. It’s possible to maintain gentle diplomacy with radical candor; but it takes prioritizing honesty above ‘polite lies,’ and that can take some people a lifetime to learn or unlearn as the case may be. We are born honest, we are taught to lie in the name of keeping the peace; and it’s the lies which actually create the wars and destroy our peace. Take heed to not hold too tightly to the ‘polite lies’ when a kind truth may be the key to creating understanding.
Just because someone believes their way of doing things is right for them, doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone, or morally right for anyone. We can honor differences while maintaining our integrity. We do not need to make ourselves less than in order to make others feel equal to. It’s a simple fact that if we continually find ourselves being the bigger person, we will grow tired of being around those who are comfortable remaining small.”
Fallout: Writing from the Scar not the Wound
While the rumor mill tilled for years, Sass chose not to try and tell her side of the story. Instead, she adopted the saying, “Silence cannot be misquoted.” She had come to learn that people who listen to rumors are not discerning of the truth, for if they were, they would search out both sides of a story independently before drawing their conclusions.
Golden handcuffs tend to produce the most effective smear campaigns against scapegoats and truth tellers. Sass, with her unadorned wrists, took comfort in her grandmother’s words, “Truth is like oil, it always rises to the surface.”
There are three main forms of currency in the world: money, status, and character; only character is priceless and can’t be bought, so be careful not to lose it on your way to money and status.
If you’d like to hear more of the story, Pratfall From Grace, please leave a comment or send a message and let me know and perhaps I will make the full story available on my website. Thanks for reading.
Quick Summary of the concept of Repair
Repair is a simple two-step process; but it requires accountability, self-reflection, and the ability to admit when we were wrong, and all of us are wrong sometimes.
The offender says, “This is what I learned from the hurt I caused, and this is how I would do things differently to not cause hurt again.”
It’s as simple as two statements:
1. I learned…,
2. and this is how I would do it differently if given the chance…
Repair is taking accountability for your actions and implementing change to your behavior. It just takes two statements to offer reassurance, to begin to regain trust, to illustrate that a lesson has been learned so that the same mistake isn’t likely to happen again.
Why We Need Repair
Repair isn’t always necessary. Sometimes a simple “I’m sorry” is all it takes to move on; but when trust has been broken the situation requires repair. It creates respectful neutral ground where authentic engagement can still occur in relationships that are broken. It acknowledges the harm caused and the lesson learned. This demonstrates to the person who was hurt that this offense will not be repeated.
Sage Justice © 2022, 2025 www.SageWords.org This concept/theory/poem is original to Sage Justice. If you use it, please give credit and link to original work. Thank you.
Relationship Support
Here’s a helpful list of related links on the topic of healing conflict resolution while protecting yourself with boundaries in the process:
Description for the visually impaired-Photo of Sage Justice, wearing poet’s black while sitting outside near a patch of lavender in France, at the Writers and Artists-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux.
Sage Justice is an award-winning poet, author, critically acclaimed performing artist, and intensely sincere, bold humanitarian activist.2
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Radical Candor: Kim Scott coined “ruinous empathy” in her book, Radical Candor. An example of ruinous empathy would be to see somebody with toilet paper on the back of their shoe but say nothing, so as not to embarrass them, thereby causing the even more embarrassing result that 15 more people see them that way. This is ultimately not “nice,” even though that was the intention. You can learn more about this topic at RadicalCandor.com
Photo of Sage Justice by Margot Hartford at MargotHartford.com IG @MargotHatfordArt
You are so brave to put your heartache out in the open and before that, go straight to confront the root of the hurt with an open mind, ready to understand and forgive. But never to be someone's door matt. I hope many read your words of wisdom and learn to deal with conflict with honesty and integrity.
This is amazing! I finally had the time to sit down and read it slowly. This is really tough stuff, and you handled it so thoughtfully and bravely.
Lots to quote from, but I think this is my favorite:
"It’s a simple fact that if we continually find ourselves being the bigger person, we will grow tired of being around those who are comfortable remaining small.”
I wonder how many relationships die just because of that alone.