Problems Wives and Partners Experience with Treatment Industry Practitioners
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 seem to know that no one will stop them. No one will hold them to account. They have tacit 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 some practitioners say, or what they do, but how they truly think about us.
By reading and listening to the ramblings of an industry trying to alternately defend, camouflage and then accessorize the misogynist underpinnings of its storyline, I am also aware that there are individual practitioners who do better than this and want 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.
Today’s blog discusses one problem that I and others have identified before. I hope by talking about its dynamics you can recognize this problem in your experiences and you will be able to protect yourself from harm that is a main purpose of misogyny acting on your life. Any way you look at the mixed brand lot of industry practitioners, it’s crucial for wives and partners to be informed about how things go terribly wrong.
Problem #1
The Practitioner is, him or herself, a Compulsive-Abusive Sexual Relational Disordered Person
Often these “people called sex addicts” have declared themselves “all better” (with no apparent requirement of demonstrated and accountable “sobriety” for any length of time.) In my opinion they should not be near any clients, never mind the group of women abused by people like them. But some have been able to ride the crest of “oh well he’s been there so he’ll understand” from desperate people. They thus avoid any specific questions about his/her “recovery”, the current state of his/her most recent victims, and how he/she views wives and partners.
Indications:
Practitioner has a codependent relationship with the treatment model and cannot be honest about the fact that there are no credible research results to indicate that it works. The model cannot be critiqued.
Practitioner overtly or covertly directs his/her abuse at the wife or partner of the client in order to satiate the abuser aspect of his/her character under the guise of “treatment” or “advocacy” for his/her “sex addict” client.
Practitioner is hiding his/her ongoing sexual and sexualized activities behind his practitioner role. This often means he/she gives the “sex addict” client preferential treatment and benefit of the doubt while ignoring the continuing destructive impact on the wife or partner. He/she may do this because that’s the indulgent response (without accountability) that he wants for him/herself.
Practitioner diminishes and ignores his/her client’s abuse of the wife or partner. He/she will not name or treat her trauma. This, at least in part, may reflect his/her need to diminish and ignore those trauma outcomes as they exist in their own wives and partners. In other words he/she interprets and expresses the model in the direction that most clearly affirms his/her goals for avoiding naming how he abused his/her own victims.
Practitioner diminishes or ignores criminal sex offences of his/her client in order to protect the model’s deficits from being revealed and to protect the client from arrest and/or criminal prosecution. Victims are thrown under the treatment bus. He/she also protects himself from any similar investigation or charges.
Practitioner’s main treatment imperatives for wives and partners is “control” and “manage.” Tools used against wives and partners include tone-policing, humiliation, patronizing, blameshifting, gaslighting, threatening, critiquing, secret-keeping, lying, bullying, dismissing, and spiritual abuse. So, he/she treats these women the same way he/she treated his/her own victims.
Practitioner openly employs sexist and misogynist caricatures of women in order to diminish the value of their humanity, their experience, and their truth. They then can set wives and partners aside. For example, women are described as hysterical and/or screaming. Men, in contrast, are calm and argue their positions. Women “let themselves go” while men age without any diminished physical appearance or performance loss. They remain as “vigorous” and “virile”. No one mentions their sagging man breasts or bottoms, belly bulge and hair loss (except for what’s going on inside their ears), and how they “let themselves go” without even an excuse that their bodies created, birthed, and fed human beings and sometimes that takes a toll.
Practitioner behaves like the “other woman” and actively pursues inappropriate intimacy with the man called a sex addict. He/she actively “defends” his needs over any needs or rights of the wife or partner. Again, as in the point above, there is usually an insulting characterization of the wife or partner, presenting her as unreasonable, shallow, selfish, sulking, unattractive, etc. This practitioner likes to contrast him/herself with that caricature to show greater commitment to and love for the client. In other words he/she’s not just a better practitioner, he/she is a better spouse or partner than the one the client has---namely, you. It is classic “other woman” behavior right out of a case study. Some of these practitioners are also very seductive in manner, need to demonstrate physical intimacy with the client (especially in front of the wife or partner) and quite often dress themselves seductively. This means women practitioners will wear low cut, tight tops, thigh high “pleather” boots in dominatrix style, and toss their hair around in flirty fashion, giggle, and even bat their eyes at the client. These are often the practitioners telling you that you have no boundaries, while they violate every boundary of professional integrity and conduct. It’s not that they have no self-awareness. It’s that the treatment industry and its cohort of practitioners gives them permission. Self-regulation seems never a goal for the client or the practitioner.
Practitioner doesn’t want to talk about the sexual and sexualized activities of the man called a sex addict as connected to sex trafficking, child pornography, criminal elements, drug addiction, racism, misogyny, lying, parental role modeling, financial insecurity of the family, breach of family trust (not just spousal trust), the shame and embarrassment for children who learn of his activities with their friends, their friends’ parents, people from church and/or work, teaching sons to use females as sex objects, teaching daughters that they are meant to be used as sex objects, etc. Practitioners do not address the harm done to children in the home through the discovery of his secret life, or the harm done to society by participating in the things listed above. Practitioners will always keep this as a spousal relationship issue because that makes the wife or partner responsible for it and responsible for fixing it. It also makes invisible the large landscape of abuse and violence done to whole families and society as a whole.
So keep alert for these signs. When they appear, protect yourself. Do not co-operate with or participate in your own disempowering.
If the language or behavior of a practitioner doesn’t sound or feel quite right to you, resist every attempt to pull you along in the farce. You might want to try some of the following responses if they fit with your experience and needs:
It’s good to know how you interpret this. I need to know that.
You will understand that I may need to think more about it.
What is the research I can read that demonstrates reasonable expectations for any recovery, and what that recovery actually looks like?
I don’t recognize my reality in your description at all. But I’m listening.
I thought you used a trauma model for partner care. I’m still waiting for you to help me establish safety for myself and my children. That’s step one in standard trauma care.
You talk like you are one of his affair partners. Are you having an emotional affair with my husband?
When you talk about betrayal trauma, please include the various kinds of trauma I endure and how you will treat them. For example, how do you address the past, present and future harm to my body caused by this trauma?
Tell me about your specific training in trauma care. How does it line up with the standard of tri-phasic care set in Dr. Judith Herman’s ground-breaking work?
Why do you think he doesn’t lie to you?
What does domestic violence include? Where exactly does that definition come from?
Exactly what is your knowledge about and experience with domestic abuse?
Are you going to address his participating in sex trafficking, and misogyny and how that affects role modeling for our children and the wellbeing of society?
You seem very proprietary with my husband. Should I be concerned about your relationship with him since he is, as you call it, a sex addict? Are you one, as well?
Do you know what an emotional affair is? How would you recognize the signs of that in your relationship with a client?
I’m worried about the toll this trauma is taking and will yet take on my body, especially if I have to endure more of this. Would you please discuss the physical harm that I should be watching for?
What genetic diseases markers are particularly of concern with respect to trauma’s impact?
So, you can’t show me any published research about recovery data? Well tell me about the statistic records from your own practice. I’m not asking for names. I’m asking for recovery statistics from your practice that you must surely have, since it’s what you do.
Isn’t it a sad state of affairs (every kind) that wives and partners have to deal with practitioners for whom these questions are necessary? You can imagine why some practitioners characterize wives and partners who ask these question (and expect answers) as hysterical, screaming women who have “let themselves go.” Sigh. And the time when that is most likely to be hurled is when critical rational thinking accurately describes what is going on in this industry, or we brush up against a darker truth even than the misogyny of practitioners. Something even more terrifying than that. Something like the deepest fear that without a scapegoat, there is no future. An ancient lie that continually rebirths itself.
Practitioners, do not be afraid. You do not need to make a scapegoat out of wives and partners. There is a future more powerful in light, life, and joy, than your fears and the lies you think might keep the worst at bay. Success cannot be built for long on the backs of wives and partners with the harm done to us. We will not be quiet about it. Our lives are wondrous even in the ruin of so much. We still love into being things beyond our imagining. We laugh at life’s events from the belly laugh of the Goddess at creation. We endure hardship without losing our dignity. We hear lies and never long to be a part of that chorus. We invest in our children knowing full well we will make mistakes. But we have to be all in and they have to know we are. We clean up after daily living and care for others who need to be seen and heard and washed and fed. We read and work and sing the song the birds keep in our hearts. We see Mystery busy around us making something out of nothing, beginnings out of endings, and strength out of weakness. And we set ourselves to the same work. We do not need secret lives. We walk weeping away from death and still carry love’s purpose forward as a light for the path on which we do not know the way. We do not know the way. But still we keep going. For it is not only we who will find we have all that we need inside us, after all. It is also true of you, sad, broken, cruel and farcical practitioners who are so very afraid that without a scapegoat, there is no future.
There is.
And listen to me—screaming, hysterical—just another woman who let herself go and couldn’t keep her man interested.
But today, the wonder of the Alberta chinook wind blew round the cul de sac and all over my city. In mere hours we moved from below zero into the warm thawing of ice still fresh from freezing. I felt it on my face and in the wet snow I tossed into the air for the old dog to try and catch. Coats open and gloves shoved quickly into pockets, I am a woman who trusts what creation tells me. Life can turn on a dime. Misogyny is vile and cruel and pays very well. But we are more. And we will always be more.
If you need to talk to someone who believes in you, your story is safe here.
With you,
Diane