I’m grateful for Tania Rochelle for so many reasons. This evening she posted this blog and I want to join my voice with hers. Please read it. Thanks.

https://www.sweetwaterretreats.org/blog

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I arrived in Yellowknife, the capital city of the Northwest Territories. Here’s a map of where that is: https://www.britannica.com/place/Northwest-Territories   It’s north of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and to the east of Alaska, once you get past the Yukon. I’m here to serve a congregation of the United Church of Canada, from now until Christmas day, when I fly back to Calgary. They’ve been without a minister for about a year now and have been doing most of the services themselves. So, here I am, having another adventure! And I feel privileged to be with them for this special season in our faith story. That’s also why the blog is late!

But nothing’s simple, is it? The week leading up to getting on the plane left me badly shaken. It wasn’t just all the things I had to get done, it was facing all the self-doubts about myself again and coming close to how thoroughly my ex-husband had shattered the integrity of everything that held me together. I was up all night worrying about how I would manage the logistics of the trip, the housing, the work, the people, and the unexpected curve balls that ministry always has in store. My confidence was gone. I’m in the thirty-second year of ordination and I was a blubbering idiot. And I wouldn’t have my partner, my family, my friends or my old dog to hold me steady. Anxiety grew each day. I was crying over things that worked out and things that didn’t.  I had forgotten how much it took to do my job and get through each day in those early years after dday. Here I was, over ten years later, shaken to the core, again.

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This week readers shared two spectacularly awful blog/articles with me. Neither one even pretends to hide the misogyny at work in the lives of these treatment personality authors—one a man and one a woman. These practitioners know that no one will stop them. No one will hold them to account. They have permission from their professional cohorts. I choose not to drive traffic to them by naming them. And the more they write in that confident arrogance, the more wives and partners can see not just what practitioners say, or what they do, but how they truly think about us.

By reading and listening to the ramblings of the industry trying to alternately defend, camouflage and then accessorize the misogynist underpinnings of its story, I am also aware that there are individual practitioners who do better than this. But with the various and uneven ways people get into this business and present themselves as specially trained to treat men called sex addicts and sometimes their partners, too, I’m not seeing a clear winner in that department. Are you? It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast.

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As wives and partners make our way after discovery, we are putting ourselvves back together as best we can.  We strive to live a life in which we can recognize ourselves again, but along that journey, many of us will become acquainted with what I call “the trapdoor experience.”

This experience unfolds as you are moving along in your healing and beginning to step out again into life after the worst of PTS is passed. Just as you are getting traction in a new job, or at school, or even in a new relationship, something happens that seems to undo all your hard work. In that moment, it feels like a trapdoor opens suddenly under your feet and down you go.

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Getting the right care for wives and partners is a slippery slope. Some of us fought long and hard to dislodge the therapeutic abuse tradition of weaponizing our trauma symptoms against us and labeling us as codependent, co-addict or co-sex addict. But misogyny is resilient. It re-invents itself with new branding and fools many. We need to take a closer look at what “betrayal trauma” is actually selling us. Is it another cloaking device?

You may be surprised to learn that it’s not just two words that try to make sense of what men called sex addicts do to us. It’s an idea that became a theory that, in my opinion, became a containment strategy to keep the lid on the full picture of harm these men perpetrate upon us. So, let’s review some basics and follow the breadcrumbs.

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