The Couple Counselling Treatment Travesty
Let’s talk about the misbegotten money pit of couple’s counselling for wives and partners of men called sex addicts. First, I’m concerned about the damage it does those already traumatized women by pretending his covert abuse is a couple problem. But I’m also going to talk about the clinical neglect of traumatized children and stepchildren of every age group that goes along with a treatment focus on “coupleship.”
Wives and partners innocently and earnestly step into the couple session with their compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man. They want to roll up their sleeves and figure out how to end the nightmare of his covert abuse and recover the man with whom they fell in love from this cruel, selfish, and destructive presence who seems to have taken his place. They have yet to realize he was never really there in the first place. So, what they get is more likely to be the next scene in the same nightmare.
If you’re curious why I don’t recommend women enter couples counselling with their compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered men, then read on.
In my opinion, the clinical priority should be to provide real trauma care to the wife or partner who has been broken into pieces by discovery trauma. This means establishing safety in a therapeutic relationship and at home. Since her abuser is the man who has (at least) covertly abused her, the last thing she should be doing in her trauma recovery is “working” on an abusive relationship.
After making “too bad, so sad” noises and throwing her a weighted blanket or two (See blog “Who Are We?”) a practitioner who then defocuses off the traumatized woman onto fixing the traumatizing relationship is no longer acting in her best interests and puts her in harm’s way. So here’s how that goes:
Many covert abusers are highly skilled manipulators and see practitioners as a new challenge. They are eager to see how easily they are fooled by lies, tears, excuses, mimicked remorse, learned psychobabble responses, and charm. They often do very well.
Wives and Partners are retraumatized watching how easily he lies and how easily the practitioner believes him. As the “new couple” bond, she is left out once again, and can be triangulated by the alliance the practitioner makes with him.
When wives and partners try to address this with the practitioner she may be shamed, patronized, gaslighted and accused of being abusive, accusatory, and unforgiving. It’s very satisfying for the covert abuser—a two-fer—he cons the practitioner and gets to watch him/her abuse the wife or partner.
When wives and partners raise the kinds of covert abuse patterns in his behavior towards her, she may be asked how she has enabled this or triggered this, what about her illness “needs” him to do this, etc. (codependent rewind—this is not trauma care.)
Working in the betrayal trauma model, the practitioner will eventually raise the theory’s belief in her “betrayal blindness”, suggesting she really “knew” but pretended she didn’t, so she shares blame for the deception and the length of it (gaslighting and blameshifting—again, a codependent rewind)
When wives and partners raise the physical impacts of his covert abuse on her, it may be diminished, dismissed, or she may again be accused of being shaming and vengeful. This keeps the concrete evidence of abuse from being recognized and indicating what the proper trauma care for an abuse survivor should be.
Some practitioners are also compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered people who have a codependent relationship with the treatment model. Those practitioners do not investigate her trauma and identify abuse that has caused it. So the practitioner’s psychological allegiance will never serve her clinical needs as a priority.
Some practitioners don’t disclose to wives or partners that they are also compulsive-abusive relational disordered people. That means the wife or partner cannot determine for herself if she wants to work with someone like her husband or boyfriend. The practitioner has disenfranchised her without her permission.
In some cases, the practitioner may disclose later and successfully re-traumatize the wife or girlfriend, establishing control and the inequitable distribution of power in the triangle. This kind of covert manipulation bears witness to the kind of ongoing covert abuse she might endure from a “recovered sex addict.”
By not taking the wife or partner’s need for safety as the first and most critical priority in her care, the practitioner sends a clear message that her experience is not important, is not believed, and she will be sent back into the cycle of self-doubt and be vulnerable to the practitioner’s manipulation.
By not taking the wife or partner’s need for safety as the first and most critical priority in her care, the practitioner perpetuates and empowers the cycle of covert abuse by re-establishing the context in which it can thrive unchallenged.
By not taking the wife or partner’s need for safety as the first and most critical priority in her care, practitioners set her up to make decisions in a state of ongoing, undiagnosed and untreated trauma symptoms.
If you think I’m overstating this whole “safety” thing, let’s hear from Dr. Herman, speaking to the same clinical problem I’ve been identifying here: This resource https://endingviolence.org/files/uploads/STVBestPracticesManual.pdf includes observations about the challenge to some therapists in staying in the first phase of establishing safety. Under the section “Challenges of trauma counselling” on page 22, Judith Herman is quoted from her foundational book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Politcal Terror (1992, rev. 1997) about this very thing. Because the tasks of the first stage of recovery are arduous and demanding, patient and therapist alike frequently try to bypass them. It is often tempting to overlook the requirement of safety and to rush headlong into the later stages of therapeutic work. Though the single most common therapeutic error is avoidance of the traumatic material, probably the second most common error is premature or precipitate engagement in exploratory work, without sufficient attention to the tasks of establishing safety and securing a therapeutic alliance.
So, there’s that.
Let’s not overlook the obvious clinical problems with putting the traumatized wife or partner into couple’s counseling with her covert abuser:
By providing him with extensive one on one care, advocacy, and protection, but not providing her with the same standard in real trauma treatment, and then starting her in couple’s therapy, the treatment industry acts within a basic frame of misogyny first in diminishing her value as a human being and what she has endured. Then it continues by affirming an attitude that sees her identity as primarily derivative of his, thus making the relationship a priority over her needed trauma care.
Further, by focussing on the “coupleship” they successfully affirm the treatment posture that this is a problem in the relationship, not a problem that originates in and is created by the covert abuser.
There is nothing the victim of any abuser can do to diminish or end the abuse except to remove herself. The underlying theoretical driver of couple’s counselling is just the opposite—two people created the problem and two people need to fix it.
In focussing attention on the primary relationship which will be an all-consuming enterprise of uselessness, the treatment industry successfully sidesteps the real truth that it is the whole family that has been traumatically impacted by his covert abuse.
He doesn’t just put his wife or partner at risk. He puts them all at risk.
He doesn’t just abandon her. He abandons them.
He doesn’t just make her insecure. He makes them insecure.
He doesn’t just steal her time with him. He steals their time with him.
He doesn’t just squander the attention she deserves. He squanders the attention they deserve.
He doesn’t just spend the shared assets of the marriage. He spends the financial assets of the family, often including their education funds, their savings, their inheritances.
He doesn’t just betray the core values and boundaries of their relationship. He betrays the core values and boundaries of their family.
He has brought harm to what are often critical years in their formation as human beings. It doesn’t matter whether they learn it as it is happening or learn it later. The harm is done. In my opinion this may even more damaging and dangerous than what he does to his wife or partner.
Additionally:
I hear stories of discovery that happened right around the conception or birth of children, forever creating a shadow over what should be a time of joy, care, and protection.
I hear stories of terrible anxiety over pregnancies living under the fear of STD’s/STI’s.
I hear stories of children asking mothers about strange things they see dad doing while he doesn’t realize they are there.
I hear stories of children at school being told about their father’s affair with another student’s mother.
I hear stories of sons and daughters or stepchildren who know about their father’s porn use and are distraught and ill over having to keep that secret from their mother because they are afraid they will break them up if they tell. It will be their fault, they think.
I hear stories of fathers who are incapable of intimacy with their mate but begin grooming daughters and stepdaughters as surrogate wives and turning them against their mothers.
I hear stories of established covert incest between fathers and children or stepchildren
I hear stories fathers using children as excuses to be with their affair partners from the school or volunteer settings.
I hear stories of fathers who actively enroll children and stepchildren in their deceptions and lies, keeping truth from the mother and even using bribes or threats to do it.
I hear stories of children of every age stumbling upon their father or stepfather’s porn on phones, tablets and computers, his messages with sex trade workers, his penis selfies that he sends out online, his messages with his affair partners making arrangement to meet once he can get away from the family.
The treatment industry needs to stop pretending this is not a whole family violation of covert abuse that can have lasting impact—even when adult children learn the truth about their childhood family life. I’ve heard these heinous facts too many times over the last ten years to pretend, as the treatment industry does, that it just doesn’t matter. And I seem to be the only person writing about this online.
Couple’s counselling is a red herring. It suggests she’s not in a relationship of covert abuse, and that children and stepchildren are not harmed by their experience of his covert abuse. That seems to be the way the industry wants it, and so they designed a model for it. But I don’t like it one bit. Do you?
My life is worth more than that. My children’s lives are worth more than that. And if we don’t’ show our children what that means and how to live that out, we can expect many of them will put up with more of that covert abuse in their lives and pass on the legacy again. Epigenetics tells the tale in our DNA of the trauma we inherit and the trauma we pass on. We need to shut this down.
Couple’s counselling is one of the ways others ensure you take all the risks, all the time. hat’s why I called my risk assessment resource “Stop Taking All The Risks.” On the resource page in this site, scroll down and you can view an intro video on that resource: https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/new-index
Before you invest more money, more time, more energy in couple counseling, why don’t you give yourself real trauma care from someone who knows what that is. The right care is a gamechanger. You only get one life. Stop giving it away.
With you,
Diane