Who Are We?

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.

What we have in common is far more than being partner trauma survivors—although we are certainly that! The women I’ve met are all people of extraordinary depth, skills, heart, and character. That is true whether we went on to work together or not.

They are intelligent, courageous, committed, generous, loving, spiritual, hard workers, hilarious, life-long learners, multi-talented, trusting, responsible mothers, participants as opposed to onlookers to life, and motivated.

Most of all, they deserve so much more respect, care, advocacy and help than they get from the various outfits offering partner care. Many of those outfits pretend they are different now in treating partners, or insist they are the group that really gets it (without doing the heavy lifting of critical thinking about what that actually means.) It’s a tough time for wives and partners, still. And as Tania Rochelle said in the blog I linked in the last Mid-Week Gotta Share, it’s still everything but genuine informed and qualified trauma care that’s served up to us. It’s still geared to save the men, save the marriages, and throw the women a weighted blanket or two at the beginning.

The discipline of making the woman a priority for appropriate trauma care slips away as practitioners reach the end of their personal capacity to bear witness and provide the tools that offer comfort and help women heal and find their voice.

For people trained as traumatologists, or who have taken additional training to be qualified specialists to provide competent and effective trauma care, the answer begins by establishing what the correct basic tri-phasic model originated by Dr. Judith Herman should include. That model is about i) establishing safety, ii) remembering and mourning, and iii) reconnecting with others and participating more fully in life. The trauma model operates more as a spiral moving slowly forward than a simple linear movement, so that we return to phases previously engaged even as we progress. But the model always begins in establishing safety and does not move forward until that is truly established and the client knows it. This resource             

https://endingviolence.org/files/uploads/STVBestPracticesManual.pdf  includes remarks about the

challenge to some therapists in staying in the first phase of establishing safety. Under the section “Challenges of trauma counselling” on page 22, Judith Herman is quoted from her foundational book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992, rev. 1997) about this very thing: Because the tasks of the first stage of recovery are arduous and demanding, patient and therapist alike frequently try to bypass them. It is often tempting to overlook the requirement of safety and to rush headlong into the later stages of therapeutic work. Though the single most common therapeutic error is avoidance of the traumatic material, probably the second most common error is premature or precipitate engagement in exploratory work, without sufficient attention to the tasks of establishing safety and securing a therapeutic alliance. This is a real problem for appropriate trauma care for wives and partners of men called sex addicts—a real problem. Some therapists want to get right into processing experiences and poking around there, or clients do not want to identify the dangers and where they come from because… he has a name. The latter happens sometimes, and then those clients look for someone who doesn’t think safety is needed because…not really trauma care after all.

But for those who can for some time focus not on him but on what state they are in, for those who sit in their fears and facts and name the dangers, the opportunity unfolds to honour the value of their lives—the only life they’re going to get—and there is a future that opens up. It’s not one for which we planned. And boom—we’re grieving again. Yet we keep going and dreams we had long put aside can become active, reshaped and pursued. We engage hope that comes from our own lives being trusted, valued and honoured with safety. We understand that there is great power released when we accept ourselves, the whole truth of who we are right now, and keep going.

The life-editing continues as relationships change because we have changed. That may mean more grief. But with each step the profound alienation from our bodies, our feelings, our spirits and minds is slowly overcome. Our incarnation is authentic and we own it, again.

There are scars and diseases of adaptation to manage. There may also be physical and mental frailties that are further outcomes of being a trauma survivor. We learn to succeed differently because we also learn success can be different than we thought. We are changed. But we are alive and engaging the world on new terms. We may wish our abusers well in the end, or we may not. But we never pretend that they were something other than our abusers. We know we would never have been in a committed relationship with them, without being conned by their skills as a lifelong con artist. We know that we would urge our children to leave a relationship like the one we were in. And we know they may not follow our urging unless we have shown them they can do it with grace, courage, and the spiritual commitment to be a faithful steward of their one precious life. Parenting with integrity isn’t about how to spackle a relationship of lies that never stop, after all.

This week I was exchanging emails with long-time client. As with most of my clients there is much love that grows in what we go through together, even though the road is rough and we may disagree along the way. We don’t let go of each other. She is quite something, with a life story that is inspiring even before her dramatic escape from her abuser. She is now fighting for her life again with a recurrence of cancer and the chemotherapy that has left her crawling through her home sometimes. But even though her own needs deserve attention; our conversations are not all about her. She keeps me updated on her rescue dogs. She takes the ones that are blind and dying and loves them fiercely to the edge of the rainbow bridge and lets them go. She shares the news of other women we both know, one just graduated into a new career as a counsellor and another fighting end stage lung disease. She tries to share what she’s learned with old friends on the brink of disasters themselves. She thinks about her faith and works it over with care.

This remarkable and imperfect human being is just one of the miraculous gifts of this work I’ve been doing. Every client has been a gift. Every step into wholeness. Every act of honouring their lives. Every truth seen clearly without turning away. Every client who is able to dream again. There’s one who sends me videos of herself playing guitar and singing for an open mic night in her town. There’s another working every day in the dental office stronger in herself who sends me “a hug and a hot dog” that harkens back to her tear-soaked words one day telling me that’s all she wanted from her family but never got it. Now, it’s our code for the love passing between us. There’s the one who had always wanted to fly a plane. When we started talking she had the most basic qualifications. Against odds I may not have beaten, she now sends me pictures of the jets she’s flying into JFK as First Officer. There’s another who is still partially immobilized by trauma, and knows she overthinks as a way of avoiding whatever her next step might be. But I believe in her completely. She will get there. My job is to be there and bear witness and be safe for her. And I always tell her I believe in her. Every time. Even when the session sounds just like the last one. There’s a woman who is a real scrapper, too, and who deserves more respect than her family gives her. But she can’t stop scrapping now that her actual life is at stake! So we lurch through the ups and downs of her new life which is so full of courage and truth that my tears well up remembering her because I couldn’t let her go until her persistence taught me how to love her toward her own healing. All these and so many more. And most of them beaten up well by the treatment industry in ways too heinous to share, before washing up here.  

Who are we? All this and more. So, that brings me back to the woman I started out talking about—we had an email exchange last week, and this is a paragraph I wrote to her. After I did, I suggested I might give it wider audience because it was a wider truth. Here it is:

Thank you for your company on this road where no one really knows the way---just that we must grow and change our life, even though "I loved it the way it was", as you told me, tears streaming down your face…When I draw my last breath, I want to have told the truth with my life--the truth of how much it hurt, what the justice issues are in it, how I recovered myself and renewed myself, how I enjoyed loving myself for the first times ever, how I found joy in the midst of so much rubble, how other women like us shone like night stars on a northern lake, how we laughed and cried the best laughter and the best tears, how we refused to do what we were told by others who were cowards, how we would not participate in lies just to fit in, and how we still loved the world that needed love, and the creatures in it.

Thank you to everyone I’ve met so far, and “Welcome” to those still on their way. There is a better life to live. Not a life without trouble or change. Yet still a better life because you get to be real, not someone’s prop in holding up their big, fat lie.

This is indeed rich work. Not in money. Rich in you. Three decades of denominational ministry also was rich, but this work is the most challenging, the most satisfying, the most growth demanding, the most healing, the most awe-inspiring, the most sorrowful, the most spirit-growing, the most faith-defining, and the most believable work in which I have ever had a part. And as one of my oldest and closest companions on this road likes to remind me with wisdom from Ram Dass—“We are all just walking each other home.”

Just a few stray thoughts about who we are. And we keep going.

With you,

Diane.