You Think “Recovery” is Hard Work? Try Surviving Covert Abuse When Your Abuser and His Treatment Group Deny He’s Doing It!
Have you ever read or listened to a wife who stayed with her compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man talk about how hard she has worked at his recovery and saving her marriage?
Believe her. I’ll bet it nearly killed her.
And it still might.
The Hook of Hard Work
Desperate wives and partners of men called sex addicts respond to hearing that his recovery and saving their marriage is possible, but only if they are willing to work harder than they’ve ever worked in their lives!
That’s because the women these men look for as partners are the hardest workers they can find. They need hard-working women so they don’t have to worry about the business, the family, the house, the holiday plans, the social relationships, the meals, etc. They need to be free to keep their energy and focus on protecting and growing their secret lives of emotional affairs, anonymous sex, porn, voyeurism, flirting, sexual affairs, exposing themselves, and the all-important impression management.
Men like this can’t afford the distraction of their decoy lives limiting their real lives cultivated and enjoyed in secret. They can’t afford women who hang around lying on the couch and eating bonbons all day. Too many possibilities for mistakes to be noticed. Too much need for personal attention. Too much potential for unnecessary questions and conflict.
So, right from the start these men look for hard-working women. These are women who don’t hesitate to do more than their share every single day, investing in the people and causes they value most. This is exactly who he needs, and that’s exactly who he chooses.
Hard work? Honey, that’s your middle name. When it calls, you answer.
The Industry Knows Your Middle Name, too
Men who called themselves sex addicts instead of covert abusers designed the “recovery” models widely used against traumatized wives and partners. The ranks of practitioners include many covert abusers, as well. The “hard work” angle with partners is an industry first choice, too. Yes, even after his secret life is discovered, he and the industry can turn our same work ethic to new advantage. All they have to do is dangle the challenge of “hard work” in front of us and we roll up our sleeves. After feeling utterly disempowered as victims, the industry paints the picture that we can work our way out of this nightmare, but that only the “best” workers will make it. And….that’s what a lot of women want to prove—that they are the best of the wife appliance victims[1] in the pool. Of course, first they have to set aside everything single thing they and their children might need more which is to:
· achieve safety,
· get real trauma care from a real traumatologist,
· have our experience validated and understood,
· have a full physical examination,
· focus on what we need in order to heal,
· learn the truth of our life with this man,
· assess our best options,
· review the research in treatment recovery stats (that won’t take long since there isn’t any),
· use a risk assessment process to make our decisions as we go along.
But, Wait A Minute. I’ve Already Been Working Hard!
Welcome to the “working hard” gaslighting schtick of his “recovery.” You have already been working hard. You have put yourself heart, mind, body and soul into this relationship. You have been picking up his slack for years in the parenting department, in facilitating social relationships, in staying connected with family, in making ends meet, in organizing his chaos and absence into something out of nothing. But you thought it was a partnership, and you did those things because you never imagined he was using you as his unpaid staff facilitating his secret life. You trusted that he was working as hard as you were, just on different things that needed to be done. This was your life together. It was hard work, but it was going somewhere. Shouldn’t we talk about that dynamic being in this relationship already?
The industry has no interest in your hard work invested so far. It doesn’t exist to them. It doesn’t count. You have to forget all that and start over. They will tell you when you are working hard!
WHOAHHHH, Nelly! Not So Fast Rolling up Your Sleeves, Wives and Partners!
When I was writing this blog I wrote a full page on the hard work I had already done in this relationship—work that I did freely in what I thought was an honest and mutual life partnership. Now, I know my hard work just facilitated his secret life and made me and our children less of an “energy drain” from his greater priorities. So, before you start doing “their” work, take some time here and describe all the hard work you now recognize you were already picking up in parenting, household cleaning and upkeep, shopping and cooking, managing social and family relationships, financial planning and responsibilities, driving, school and extra- curricular activities, supporting his career, paying off his debts, making sure he had the best of everything while you and the children wore discount or consignment clothes, protecting him from children’s needs, excusing his absence from their lives and social events, playing games with them, brokering other relationships, organizing vacations or outings, and more.
Don’t let them gaslight you by making the work you have already done invisible. Don’t forget your efforts to deal with conflict, sexual abandonment, emotional desertion, facts in his story that weren’t adding up, etc. Start a list. Keep adding stuff. Write it all down. Right now.
What is the hard work you have already done in this relationship?
After you have done that, consider how so much of your hard work has been unacknowledged for so long you’ve stopped counting it yourself. It’s the emotional labour of the relationship the industry carefully sidesteps. It’s the concrete daily work of family life. It’s the nuts and bolts of running a home. I believe your hard work should be brought to the table and named before you pick up the shovel again for him. Your hard work also tells the story of his pattern of neglect, risk-taking, abandonment, deception, stealing, gaslighting, blameshifting, criticizing, and cruelty. It reveals his strategic and purposeful covert abuse. So the next questions is:
What is the hard work he has already done in this relationship?
Start a list. See how that goes. Take all the time you need.
Gee, that was quick, wasn’t it?
There’s a reason why you are exhausted before you even start with the “hard work” of recovery. You’ve been working incredibly hard already, and no one wants to acknowledge that truth, the “why” behind it, and the care and support you need right now before you do ONE MORE THING!
And that brings us to another truth. It ain’t ONE MORE THING. It’s dozens of work orders ahead for you. All to benefit him. As if he hasn’t received everything you have to offer, already! But how do those work orders really “work?”
“Working Hard” in “Recovery” Is Just Another One-Way Street
I just reread some of those partner “to-do” lists this week from several popular vendor websites for hopium dealers, although with my gag reflex I had to pace myself.
Over and over again, I read lists of duties we are to take on, services we were to offer our covert (and sometimes overt) abusers. We were to serve up unconditional love, patience, service, trust and acceptance, as if this was all new for us!
But there are even more hideous things to consider about your work orders. Never once was there any suggestion that this was a two-way street. On these sites, the man they call a sex addict owes us none of that. The to-do list is only directed at us. Let’s consider what that ends up meaning and doing.
Since you have already given him all of these things, and he used all those gifts used to facilitate his con, the idea that you need to do more of that is actually asking you to be an enabler of a disordered person, your covert abuser. There are no conditions to be met before you do this all over again. He’s just entitled to it.
Since all these things on the list are things that he did not give you, they need to address this deficit and possible incapacity as part of his work, not yours.
Since he used all these same gifts to facilitate his secret life, you are handing him everything he needs to do it again.
This is a set-up for your ongoing role as an abuse victim.
So, you were once a survivor, but now they want you to go right back into the victim role. Further, you get more jobs keeping track of him, monitoring devices and meeting to talk about his circle violations, etc,--all kinds of activities that before you meet his “team” were all considered examples of your “controlling” nature, your need to be a “detective,” etc. And those observations were not made as affirmations, but as examples of what was wrong with you. But now that his “team” wants you to start doing all this stuff again, it’s just part of your hard work orders.
Reasonable Response and Appropriate Care Imperatives
The thing is, unconditional love, patience, service, trust and acceptance, are the very things you need to be receiving from your CASRD man. But you are never on the receiving end of anything except new “work orders.” The only way to shut this shit down, is to take that list as your work orders for yourself. Not for him. Not for the relationship. For you. First.
Your appropriate treatment should be a sabbatical from the hard work you’ve invested in him and your marriage. It should be a time devoted to making up the critical deficit of those things being invested in you!
And that’s the REAL hard work for women like us. Making ourselves visible in the relationship, in the treatment program, and to ourselves, is the hardest work we have to do. And it’s the most important work our children need to see us doing.
Just think about it. What if you could spend a whole year tending to your needs, your wounds, your diminished sense of self, your trauma care, all with your moral agency turned toward faithful stewardship of your own life? What if just for one year you could put yourself first instead of him? How much more could you then offer your real children instead of spoon-feeding the toddler-man? Doesn’t that make sense? Aren’t you the victim of years or decades of his covert abuse? Shouldn’t you be the priority for trauma care and recovery. Is this really the time to be handed more work to do for him? Why would you expect to get better if no one cares for you including yourself? What would happen if you gave yourself even half the hard work you gave him?
I think you’d get better.
But that’s not a treatment industry priority. So before you sign up for the “hard work” of recovery, before you fill out endless notebooks of busy work, before you agree to “discovery” designed to serve and protect him, before you empty your savings into camps and retreats for him that have no real result of lives changed on which you can build a future with him, before you pick up even more work at home and with parenting so he can go to more meetings and appointments and events, before you search for movies and shows and vacations that won’t “trigger” his penis into activities that traumatize you again or endanger your children or their friends, before you agree to have weekly debriefings about his circle violations, before you endure being retraumatized by his ongoing or even escalating covert abuse (since the industry doesn’t identify it, he’s never accountable for it), before you are retraumatized by dribble disclosures from the past and new discoveries of his sexual and sexualized activities, before you let his penis near you with the hopes it won’t infect you or a pregnancy or a nursing child with disease, before you roll up your sleeves yet again and set aside your life as if it doesn’t deserve any hard work, please stop, look at yourself in the mirror, say out loud
“It’s my turn, now. I deserve to be safe and whole. I need to be healthy in the only life I have. My children need me to be healthy, too. I am making my needs for healing a priority.”
And then, go out and get yourself a real trauma therapist. Roll up your sleeves first for yourself. Work hard for your own life’s worth. And find you can be an even better parent for your children.
With you,
Diane.
[1] Chump Lady originated this term for wives used in utilitarian ways by husbands.