“My Past Relationship Is Ruining My Marriage”

Jonathan, a 40-year-old caller from Albany, New York, asks a question that stops the show: “How do I heal from past betrayals so my wife doesn’t feel like she’s paying the price for it?” He has been married only a short time, and already he and his new wife have had four or five fights about his distrust. The pattern traces back to high school, when girlfriends cheated on him with friends. In his twenties, he dated an alcoholic he tried to fix. Then something shifted: he started wondering what it felt like to be the betrayer, and he became one, cheating on a partner he loved until she left him abruptly—he came home one day to an empty house. The next girlfriend, after he told her about that trauma, gave him two weeks’ notice and moved out. “It just seems like no matter what I do, I can’t count on people to be there,” he says.

Dr. John Delony hears something underneath the story. “I hear a man who does not respect himself,” he says. Jonathan doesn’t respect himself for staying when he was cheated on, for having cheated on others, or for being forty and still haunted by high school. And when you don’t respect yourself, Delony explains, you outsource that need externally—hoping other people, achievements, or money will give you the respect you won’t give yourself. “It never ever works.”

The two-trigger rule