Therapists and Tone Policing
Last week I listened to some podcasts that a male “sex addiction expert” produced. They feature some of the more progressive female voices in the still-prevailing mainstream of partner care. This particular male “sex addiction expert” is re-marketing himself as an advocate for women and the partner experience. But he still can’t help but complain about wives and partners who present "angry."
Is this starting to sound or feel familiar? We're too angry? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it with therapists who default to tone policing when you finally share what your husband or boyfriend did to you and the destructive impact that has had on your life. This therapist, like so many of these cookie cutter treatment practitioners, uses our anger as his excuse for not hearing the story we tell—a story that might compromise the assumptions that keep that misogynist treatment model humming along making money. So, instead, when faced with the reality and the potential for women’s anger, sex addiction therapists become the “tone police."
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The Victim Problem
A repeat from Feb, 2018, by request.
I’ve listened to many wives and partners of men called sex addicts give passionate speeches about how they most certainly are not victims. Realizing you are one can be one of the most demoralizing and humiliating moments of your life. And I’ve read lots of articles (especially since #metoo) written by women wringing their hands over the prospect that with so many women telling the truth about what men did to them, the female experience is being too closely aligned with victimization. Then add in another bunch who like to blameshift by suggesting women like to be victims. There’s nothing easy about the idea of a female victim, or the real possibility that you might be one.
Here’s the definition that pops up first when I google “victim”: “a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.”
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What Do I Remember? (Reposted from the Resting Archives)
Even now, eight and half years after dday, my memories are not integrated in a chronological sequence. They come as they come. When I try to think back to the earliest memories, this is the scene that always overtakes me:
I am in the spare room on a single bed my mother gave us, with my childhood dresser beside me, under a quilt my grandma made, with my now adult sons’ baby clothes hanging in the open closet. It is about three in the morning. I haven’t slept. I am sobbing hysterically from the deepest part of me, almost throwing up the grief and the fear that possess me. I am tortured knowing the man I married used me and every good thing I gave him to make his false self more believable to others. I am terrified by the suspicion he must want me dead now that I know who he is and am no longer useful. So, sleeping is the most dangerous thing for me to do. Eventually, from sheer exhaustion, I sleep for an hour or two. I remember that this went on every night for weeks and weeks and weeks.
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The New Year Question (revised from original post on December 28, 2017)
It was the last days of 2009 and the thought of leaving the year behind me was both everything I wanted and what I feared the most. That was the year I uncovered my then husband’s highly developed and covertly abusive secret life. From September to December I barely existed—just pinning myself together enough to go to work and come home. I cried all night long every night, living on just a few hours sleep. He was enjoying the new freedom of his arrogance and contempt for me being out in the open. My 29 years of marriage were ripped out of my life and put through the shredder. I wanted to die and every morning I was still alive.
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