Fix It

April 8, 2026·41 min·3 clips

Bruce Chalmer's third step to forgiveness is forgiving God, which host Neil Matthews says spoke to his heart.

1. Other People's Shoes host Neil Matthews interviews Dr. Bruce, a 74-year-old couples therapist, podcast host, and author, on the topic of betrayal and forgiveness in relationships. 2. Bruce co-hosts the podcast Couples Therapy in Seven Words with his wife Judy Alexander, a retired educator; he trained as a research statistician before turning to clinical psychology. 3. The episode's core question is how people navigate betrayal and reach forgiveness without necessarily restoring the relationship. 4. Bruce's book, Betrayal and Forgiveness: How to Navigate the Turmoil and Learn to Trust Again, structures the conversation and is available in audio form narrated by Bruce himself. 5. He defines a betrayal as arriving at a door expecting something welcome — 'the pizza you ordered' — and finding instead something devastating and unexpected. 6. Bruce distinguishes two definitions of forgiveness: the common version where it means restoring trust and the relationship, and his clinical version where it is an internal process independent of the other person. 7. His three-step framework begins with self-forgiveness, grounded in the recognition that you could not have known what you did not know at the time of the betrayal. 8. Step two — forgiving the person who hurt you — he argues is a shorter step than expected once genuine self-forgiveness is achieved, because the same compassion applied to oneself can be extended to the betrayer. 9. He illustrates step two with the story of a woman whose ex-husband was in prison for domestic violence; she had fully forgiven him, felt no anger, and kept a gun by her bed with no intention of ever being near him again. 10. Step three is forgiving God, or the universe, for allowing the betrayal to happen — what Bruce calls the 'why do bad things happen to good people' problem that no theological answer fully resolves. 11. Bruce recounts that his first marriage ended when his wife realized she was gay; he describes the revelation as a relief rather than a wound because it provided an explanation of incompatibility rather than a story of inadequacy. 12. He notes his three children observed that both parents noticeably relaxed after the separation and adapted well to both new spouses over the following years. 13. Neil discloses that he was a licensed pastor whose 'eyes got off' his wife — describing emotional and spiritual infidelity without a physical affair — and that the church leadership asked his wife whether she could ever see him as a pastor again. 14. Neil's wife answered yes, which Neil says signaled forgiveness was possible; Bruce responds that pornography use should not disqualify someone from pastoral ministry. 15. Neil reveals that after a four-day fast during a period of church leadership conflict, he told his wife the main insight he received was that God was the number one name on his unresolved grievances list. 16. Bruce validates this directly, noting his third step (forgiving God) is the piece that most resonates with people of faith because the anger at God is often the most suppressed. 17. Neil names Kathy Sanders — a former guest whose grandchildren were killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — as the most striking example of forgiveness he has encountered, noting she forgave Timothy McVeigh. 18. The episode has a confessional and exploratory tone; Neil shares personal disclosures mid-conversation rather than in prepared segments, and Bruce responds as both a guest and an impromptu therapist. 19. Listeners processing betrayal in religious contexts, marriages, or family relationships, particularly those who struggle with anger at God or at themselves for not seeing betrayal coming, will find this episode directly useful. 20. Those seeking concrete therapeutic exercises or structured relationship advice will find the conversation more conceptual and personal narrative than instructional.

As heard by us

A tough-minded forgiveness talk that never asks anyone to excuse the damage.

This episode treats forgiveness and self-forgiveness with unusual plainness. It returns to a hard, practical idea: once someone has made peace with personal limits, it gets easier to see other people as flawed rather than monstrous, even when what they did was bad or immoral.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want forgiveness without the fluff.

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