Before You Can Be Betrayed, You Have to Trust — A Conversation with Kathy Kinghorn

I've said more than once on this show that the conversations I didn't know I needed are usually the ones that stick the longest. This was one of those.

Kathy Kinghorn runs Therapy Utah, and she came on to the podcast at the recommendation of her son Jeff, who has been telling me for a while that I needed to sit down with her. Jeff doesn't oversell things, so I took that seriously. What I didn't anticipate was how directly the conversation would land for the kind of man this show is built for.

We started with betrayal trauma; and I want to be clear about what that actually means, because Kathy's framing changed how I think about it. You can't be betrayed until you've trusted. Which sounds simple. But when you unpack it, it reframes the whole conversation. Betrayal trauma isn't just about dramatic ruptures. It's the specific kind of wound that happens inside a system of trust — a marriage, a friendship, a partnership — when something you counted on breaks. And the reason it's so disorienting is because the very foundation it hurt is the foundation you'd need to heal on.

She drew a distinction I think a lot of men miss: the difference between betrayal trauma and ordinary relationship friction. Everyday conflict often stems from the collision of two completely different upbringings, communication styles, and beliefs, is not the same thing. Her own marriage example made it land. She grew up with one set of rules around hard work. Her husband had another. She walked in one afternoon and found him laid out watching golf in the middle of a yard project, and her internal response was to double down on the work until he could see what a "real" hardworking person looks like. She laughs about it now. But she also says it took serious unpacking to realize she didn't even know she held that belief until someone held a different one.

That's the thing about the beliefs we carry into our relationships: most of them are invisible until someone bumps into them.

The defensiveness piece hit close to home for me personally. Kathy's line was this: "we only defend when there's an enemy in the room". That's it. No enemy, no defense. So the next time you find yourself getting defensive with your wife, the question worth sitting with isn't "why is she doing this?" — it's "how did she become the enemy in my head, and when?" That reframe has practical teeth. It slows things down. It redirects the energy.

I brought up the Arbinger Institute book Leadership and Self-Deception and Kathy went right to it. That framework and what she described map directly onto each other. We operate from a box. We make the other person the problem. And then we recruit evidence to justify the story we've already decided is true.

The Internal Family Systems piece was the part of the conversation that I'll probably be processing the longest. The short version: we're not one unified self. We're a collection of parts. There's the part of you that wants to kill it at the gym. There's the part that's still wounded from something that happened at 14. There's the part that overreacts to your wife's feedback because somewhere in the wiring, it sounds like criticism from someone else. IFS doesn't ask you to silence those parts. It asks you to get curious about them, give them some space, let them step back, and then operate from something steadier.

Kathy connected it to Rollo May's line about freedom being the ability to pause between stimulus and response and choose. That's not a soft concept. That's a high-discipline move. And men who develop that muscle operate differently in every relationship they're in.

Her closing challenge was the one I'll remember the longest. Find something you can fail at together — stargazing, calligraphy, trying to light a fire with flint and steel — something with zero stakes and zero relevance to your real life. And then notice what shows up. Do you get rigid? Hyper-efficient? Do you turn it into a project? Or can you stay present and loose and just let it be what it is?

How a man handles failure with his partner, when nothing is on the line, tells you a lot about how he'll handle it when everything is.

If your relationships are feeling thin right now, or you're carrying something you can't quite name, this episode is worth your time.

🎧 Full episode: https://youtu.be/NwC84AozAJQ