These aren’t easy questions. But they are important ones. I’ve asked them before in the context of other blog topics, but here I’ve gather them up in one place for you to have and use.

Take some time with each one, and jot down your thoughts. What feelings does each question elicit? What thoughts come to mind? Don’t be afraid of what your heart, mind, body and spirit are showing you in your responses. Pay attention to yourself. Take yourself seriously. Remember, this is your one precious life. Live it as if you think it’s precious, too. Teach your children theirs is precious and show them what that means. 

And always, Light for the journey.

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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.

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From PoSARC’s Survivor Series—A Not-to-be-missed addition!!!

Lili Bee interviews Amy, a young mother trying to be the best mother she can be, a survivor of her husband’s covert abuse, and a survivor of the treatment industry!

Amy uses the metaphor of house to describe discovery, the so-called recovery process, her own experience, and more. When your house has secret rooms that only he knows, that only he uses, but that are destabilizing the whole house and spreading mold all through it—why are you being confined to one room and told the big problem is how you keep that room!

The smartest thing she did was stay on the hard journey of getting help until she found a true traumatologist as her therapist.

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Victim/Survivor/Heroine of her own life—Susan Kay—has penned a great piece reflecting on her personal experience of PTSD from discovery which was then compounded by treatment-induced trauma. It’s entitled “Lessons from the Captain” and works with the movie “Captain Phillips” to make her points more effective.

Follow this link to this Sweetwater Blog from last week: https://www.sweetwaterretreats.org/blog/2020/1/12/lessons-from-the-captain and find questions for reflection when you read more here (below).

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Hundreds of women have passed through my life since I began to advocate for, inform, and support the trauma survivors of compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered men (CASRD—rhymes with “hazard”). Each one of those women has been remarkable, whether we went on to work together, or not. As my late father would say, “There isn’t a dead-ass in the bunch.” HA!

Many of those women I have known for years now, supporting them in grief, fear, and the call to a new life of dignity and possibility. We lurch through the stops and starts of respecting the damage we have sustained and also the greatness that remains ours alone. We learn what it means to be right, and then what it means to more than that for ourselves and our children. We learn to be wise. We learn how to accept the ways we have been changed by the deep trauma of covert abuse, and to move through those lingering potholes with new strategies or to work around them entirely.

My clients are stay at home moms, women who provided unpaid critical operational and managerial services to their husband’s businesses and practices, professionals in every field, artists, musicians, students, writers and actors, administrative staff, sales people, celebrities in various categories, educators at every level, coaches and counsellors, sex addiction treatment practitioners, small and large business owners, entrepreneurs, activists for worthy causes, non-profit workers, and ministry professionals like me.

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