I spent thirty years helping people heal their marriages and their lives. And then mine fell apart completely. What I learned in the wreckage changed everything I thought I knew about trauma, relationships, and what healing actually requires.
This is The Wounded Healer Podcast. Every season is a focused teaching series on the things that keep people stuck. Marriage. Trauma. Recovery. Faith. The patterns you keep repeating even when you know better. I teach from thirty years of clinical experience and from a life that has been broken open and rebuilt from the ground up.
No performance. No toxic positivity. Just the real stuff, from someone who has actually lived it.
If you have ever looked at yourself and thought 'I know better than this, why can't I do better than this,' you are in exactly the right place.
Publisher
Michael Smalley, Ph.D.
Category
education · kids & family · religion & spirituality
A man goes looking for a phone charger in his wife's car and finds a phone he has never seen before. Then he closes the glove box, goes inside, and says nothing for two days.
If that sounds insane to you, be grateful. If you just felt a chill, this season is for you.
Welcome to Safe Again: Hope and Healing After Betrayal. Betrayal trauma is the wound only someone you trusted can give you. It shows up as an affair, as abuse, as a parent who did not believe you, as a church that protected the wrong person. Different rooms, same wound.
In this first episode, I give that wound its name, and I show you the research that proves the checking, the 3am replays, and the way your heart jumps when a phone buzzes at dinner are not you being crazy. I also do something nobody in this space seems willing to do: I tell you honestly when something is NOT betrayal. Not every hurt is a betrayal, and pretending it is will not help you. And I tell you about the day a woman rated the worst moment of her life a five out of ten, and the friend who looked at her like she had lost her mind.
Spoiler: she had not lost her mind. She had lost her scale.
Plus, my three-year-old grandson reviews my reading glasses. It goes better than you would expect.
Read the article this season is built on: https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/blog/betrayal-trauma-the-wound-only-someone-you-trust-can-give-you (https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/blog/betrayal-trauma-the-wound-only-someone-you-trust-can-give-you)
If you are standing in this right now and want help sorting out what is really happening, my three-hour trauma coaching sessions are built for exactly that: https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/offers/goEWbYPo/checkout (https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/offers/goEWbYPo/checkout)
If you are in physical danger, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or visit thehotline.org.
Text me at (303) 435-2630 or visit www.smalleyinstitute.com (http://www.smalleyinstitute.com)
11 Sept 2026
Progress, Not Perfection
This is the last one.
Seven weeks ago I told you that everybody already knows what to do, and that the failure point is never the path, it is the price. Then I spent six weeks naming my own half measures out loud, on air, in front of you. Today I tell you what happened to them.
Some of them moved. Some of them did not. I am going to be honest about which is which, including the one I am literally doing right now while I record this, and I am not going to clean it up to give you a better ending.
But I want to start somewhere else. A few nights ago, around ten thirty, I opened my garage door and the heat hit me like a wall. If you have been with me since Episode 5, you know what that heat did to me a few weeks ago. It got me spiritually twisted up. I argued with an artificial intelligence about a weather forecast, which is about as dumb as it sounds.
This time, standing in the exact same spot, in the exact same heat, something completely different came out of my mouth.
That is what this episode is about. Not arriving. Not being fixed. Standing in the same place you always stood and finding out you are not the same person.
We are also going to talk about how "progress, not perfection" gets misused, because it is the single easiest phrase in recovery to turn into a hall pass, and I would know.
If this series stirred something up in your marriage, come do an intensive with me. Two days, just the two of you and me, tools that work the day you get home. Details at https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/intensive (https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/intensive)
You can also get the full Whatever It Takes series in audio and transcript, and support this podcast, at https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/offers/jysNpzhW (https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/offers/jysNpzhW)
Text me at (303) 435-2630 or visit smalleyinstitute.com
3 Sept 2026
Go Make It Right
For five weeks we have been working on the inside. Willingness. The thing you are protecting. Telling yourself the truth. Humility. Surrender. All of it has been internal, and all of it has been leading here.
Today it goes outside your own head, and it gets concrete. Today we talk about the people you have hurt.
This is the episode with the most teeth in the whole series, and it is the one that changes things fastest. It is also the one people skip, because everything up to now could be done privately, and this cannot. This one requires a phone call. A conversation. A sentence you have been avoiding for years.
I am going to tell you about the time I earned my way out of my own son's life. I said careless things about him on a phone call, he heard every word of it, and then he shut the door and I could not even get access to apologize. It took years. I am going to tell you exactly how I got back in, and what I did with the invitation when it finally came.
Then we are going to sort through the counterfeits, including the one that does more damage than never apologizing at all. I am also going to give you the step most people skip, which is asking permission before you own something, and I am going to be honest about the people you do not get to approach at all.
And there is a second half to this that almost nobody teaches: what do you do when somebody comes to make it right with you, and you are not sure you want to open the door? I have one of those in my own life right now, and I have not landed it.
If this series is stirring up your marriage, come do an intensive with me. Two days, just the two of you and me, tools that work the day you get home. Details at https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/intensive (https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/intensive)
You can also get the full Whatever It Takes series in audio and transcript, and support this podcast, at https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/offers/jysNpzhW (https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/offers/jysNpzhW)
Text me at (303) 435-2630 or visit smalleyinstitute.com
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