The Industry's New Ancillary Product Line

After decades of earnest counsellors and coaches telling us how our marriages could be “better than ever” there’s a new kid in town. And she/he/they’re hanging out on the new product line banner of many websites and FB pages associated with the “sex addiction” treatment industry.

And the new kid in town is called the  “divorce coach.” 

Yes, you read that correctly. Divorce coach.

Having spent several years being called a man-hater, a faithless woman, a lazy wife, an angry female, etc. because I talked openly about leaving these overt and covert abusers and also coached women going through separations and divorces, I find this development…interesting. Don’t you?

But let’s not imagine it’s any kind of epiphany about the absence of any statistics affirming any desired results after women spent thousands and thousands of dollars, hours and hours of their valuable time, and buckets of their emotional reserves playing “recovery” with the industry, its practitioners, and its promises. No, it’s not about the presence of incriminating facts about failure or the absence of affirming ones about success. It’s about making money out of a failed treatment model at the other end of the failure.

Dear readers, it’s just the ancillary product line.

So, once you’ve given them money to try and “save” the relationship and discovered it doesn’t work, you can now pay them money to get rid of the same relationship. It’s a one-stop shop. And the very thing used to shame and disparage people like me, is the new thing on which to make money for them.

The advent of digital life and social media means that the void created by the lack of recovery statistics and stories has become just too obvious.Practitioners who easily slimed their treatment pitch with allusions to dozens and hundreds of “success stories” can’t point to anyone in that category and the pitch is starting wear thin. 

The search to find those stories fails time and time again. Indeed, the few couples who talk about their recovery online paint a picture of resignation and labour-intensive reporting and monitoring (which if you did before you paid for industry treatment was called the woman’s codependence or controlling attitudes, but after they tell the woman to do it is called “recovery.”)

You often see a video clip of a man clearly living on a short leash and a woman with a kind of “manic happy” going on. God is often dragged into this nightmare and blamed for the tragic “success” you are watching. They both live on the edge of knowing the odds are always heading towards relapse and her re-traumatized life. Sometimes they even mention that experience. Oh yeah, we all want a piece of that! 

In the treatment industry’s emptying out of a critical thinking component for standard treatment protocols for trauma survivors, they nevertheless retain a strategic razor’s edge for making money. But let’s think about that for a moment. Is that where you are likely to find the person who is ever going to make you a priority, no matter how many ancillary product lines they roll out? In my opinion, they don’t do it now, and they never have.

Divorce coaches. That’s right. From the people who brought you “marriages that are better than ever.”

With you,

Diane.