“When will I stop feeling so awful?” “Will I ever be normal with friends again?” “How long does it take before you don’t care what people think?”

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Families, communities, and whole countries are wrestling with the consequences of losing their “normal”. They adapt, innovate, respect, assist others in need, resist, protest and defy it.

For wives and partners of men called sex addicts, however, it’s a whole second piece of that experience. We already had the rug pulled out from underneath our personal lives in our primary social unit of family life. The most important reality frame for our primary relationship was blown up by catching a glimpse of his secret life. And now, everything beyond that is destabilized and shifting, as well.

How’s that working for you?

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Managing trauma symptoms is a great challenge for most wives and partners of CASRD (compulsive abusive sexual-relational disordered) men. They ambush us at awkward times and in awkward places. They accompany the processes and necessary interactions we have with him, his treatment group, our friends, families and communities of faith. In the moment it can be so disorienting that we will try to think our way out of the confusion of feelings and facts. And it never works.

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Living in these pandemic days adds another layer of “surreal” to the lives of wives and partners of CASRD men (compulsive abusive sexual-relational disordered) men. Our own trauma symptoms are beginning to be normalized simply by a more common circumstance of real risk, isolation, and a sense of powerlessness.

No, this is not the “something so wonderful” to which the title refers. But for those of us who are working on how to recognize the signs of real hope in our lives (see last week’s blog video link) this can seem like a strange time of terrible anxiety and blinding wonder, both.

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I’ve written about “hope” before on this blog. I’m a firm believer it.

But hope isn’t hopium. Neither is it just the cloaked way we express our real fears.

Where are you going to find yours?

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