The Blogs That Mattered Most to You in 2019
On the first blog of 2020, a little hindsight may be in order!
Last year we covered a lot of ground “From my life to yours, with love.” There was some straight talking that generated even more straight talking with you and on the forums and listserves on which the blogs were shared. So, my first order of business in the new year is to share which blogs were the most read blogs of 2019. You may have read them already. If so, maybe they are worth a second viewing.
The #1 blog is “The Big Boundary Bluff”
You can find it here: https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/2/9/the-big-boundary-bluff
Your response to this February blog was fast and intense. Women resonated so deeply with the fallacy that treatment practitioners had tried to sell them about “boundaries.” They recounted how after doing due diligence with everything they were told to do, boundary violations continued and the fault was now squarely placed on their responses. His accountability had been eliminated by her participation in the “big boundary bluff.” At the same time, the women were urged to forgive, to not be reactive, to excuse “slips” and “lapses”, to accept that their husbands had absolutely no way of knowing that a boundary for not viewing porn on phones and computers also meant they couldn’t use ipads or someone else’s phones or computers. “But your boundary never mentioned ipads.” “You never said I couldn’t use my work phone.” Sigh. Yes, it’s as stupid as that. You, the readers, asked me to talk more about it. So three weeks later I did. That blog was #5 on the “most read” list. Here’s that blog link:
https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/2/23/you-asked-for-more-boundaries-and-consequences
The insistent blather from the treatment industry that these men abuse us because we don’t have boundaries is truly a repugnant example of blameshifting and gaslighting tarted up and masquerading as “partner trauma care.” It is particularly gross because when women assert their boundaries with practitioners, seeking truth, safety, justice, and understanding, they may get even more blameshifting and gaslighting. Men who have spent their whole lives lying about who they are and what they do are always going to better at lying than we are at figuring it out. The key word in these men creating and protecting a secret life is “secret.” Women don’t know anything at all, or know very little—and never enough to imagine or believe the scope of abuse coming their way.
The bottom line here is that we have boundaries. They are formed with core values that are real in our lives and faked in his. We expressed them in marriage vows, other promises given and kept, work ethics and professional policies and oaths, as well as the stewardship of our power, authority, privilege, service and opportunity in all our relationships. These men know our boundaries, our values, and they count on them every day to protect them from discovery, while they secretly violate those same boundaries.
It seems that practitioners don’t want to address this truth. It indicates a more sinister and complex deviant behaviour from these men that is all about power and control—the hallmarks of abuse and the primary personality traits of abusers. The treatment industry would rather defocus by serving your need to believe there’s something you can do to change his behavior. And there isn’t. Not a damn thing. Anyone who knows anything about domestic abuse and domestic abusers knows this. What a travesty for any practitioner to ignore the abuse, and tell a victim of it that if she just changes her behavior he won’t do it anymore. The big boundary bluff.
And they’re still playing that song.
The #2 Blog is “How Men Called Sex Addicts Abuse Their Wives and Partners
You can find that blog here: https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/3/23/how-men-called-sex-addicts-abuse-their-wives-and-partners
This March blog took a simple approach to empowering readers to identify, validate, and observe their own experience at the hands of these men. I created a list of abuse tactics men called sex addicts use against their wives/partners. I started with 97 items. I invited readers to send anything they thought I had missed. I stopped adding items at 108.
A feature of this blog was naming categories of abuse we experience at the whim of these men: “We experience physical, spiritual, emotional, financial and psychological harm that no one seems to name.” I would add here that I forgot “social.” Most women, like me, counted dozens and dozens of abuse tactics that had been expertly visited upon us by the one person to whom we had pledged our love, honour, and faithfulness until parted by death. That man intended to see that vow fulfilled to the ultimate degree for his self-serving pleasure.
This blog helped readers to see the absurdity and the seeming complicity of a treatment industry that sets these “dozens” of abuse facts aside or just never asks how he treats the wife/partner because they do not know enough to do so. They may not be not well-trained or experienced in recognizing or treating victims of domestic abuse. Additionally so many of them have a similar history in their own behavior as compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered men (but now calling themselves “recovered” sex addicts”) that there is great deal at stake in keeping those questions of abuse un-asked. Those are just a few possibilities to understand this treatment deficit. What other possibilities do you think are in play?
It probably was shocking for each woman who read that list and watched it change into a mirror reflecting her own life with a man who was being called sex addict, but not an abuser. No wonder it ranked this high on the list of most read blogs.
The #3 blog is “Lessons Children Learn From Fathers Called sex Addicts”
This July blog was the third in a series in which I explored the impact of compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered men on the whole family, specifically addressing children. Here are the six blogs included in that series:
The Whole Family. His Addiction. We’re Soaking In it.
https/www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/6/23/were-soaking-in-it
My Family, Eight Years Later
https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/6/30/my-family-eight-years-later
Lessons Children Learn From Fathers Called Sex Addicts
What’s With Adult Children Turning Against Their Mothers?
Living Differently Into These Hard Truths
https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/7/21/living-differently-into-these-hard-truths
In My Opinion, Where Do We Go From Here?
https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/7/28/in-my-opinion-where-do-we-go-from-here
Most of these blogs were in the most-read blogs of 2019. The second and third blogs were written primarily and anonymously by a mother and her two teenage daughters about their lived experience. It was a difficult series and a game-changer for many women, although I don’t think of our lives devastated by these men and/or their treatment industry as a game at all. I hope this series makes that clear.
The “game-changer” element I mean is my challenge to the strategic industry focus on “sex addiction” as part of a troubled primary adult relationship. They then draw an artificial line of quarantine around the children as if they are not involved in the devastation at all. Practitioners don’t routinely assess them for trauma (perhaps they have no training in that, either.) Children are the collateral damage that are made invisible. Adult or minor children who stumble onto the father or stepfather’s secret lives (and they do) receive little or no appropriate assessment or care because most often no one asks them. They quite often blame their mother or stepmother because that is the only adult left whose love, honesty, and commitment is something on which they can count. They also blame themselves, wondering what they did to make him look for another family. If they engage the truth of their discovery, a key element of their formation as human beings is lost. If they are minors, their security is gone. If they are adults, they may lose the whole history of their lives and what they thought it meant. As wives and partners, we lose a lot, but it’s not the very foundation of our formation as human beings. Think about that for a minute. There is so much at stake for children of every age in the discovery of his secret life. They may have been drawn into it. They may learn their mother’s milk has passed on diseases that have already compromised their health. They may have adapted to his core values of narcissism and lost themselves along the way. They may have learned to lie. They may have learned to participate in misogyny and normalize its power in society. Their presence in society may hold a toxicity with long term repercussions for society as a whole. On the other hand, they may hold the damage within themselves and suffer in countless ways that cripple their lives. It’s hard to imagine more than few living a long life without this shadow affecting them. I hope you will reread, or read for the first time, all the blogs in this series.
So, this was the series that cracked the nut of the entrenched blindness of a treatment industry to the price a family and its members pay for having a man called a sex addict as a father or stepfather. This is the industry that has no publishable statistical results to indicate anything they offer makes a successful outcome possible. It’s not just about husbands and wives. It’s about the whole family taken down and sacrificed to serve one man’s penis.
Today’s blog has had a lot of links in it to other blogs. I’m hoping you will work through and read them all this week. I know it’s a lot to expect but sometimes it’s good to remember where we’ve been and affirm our sanity about this nasty business into which our husbands and boyfriends manipulated us. Yes, it’s a new year. How we carry this information and these questions forward in it may determine whether this year is any different, after all. Remember, I believe in your life and your capacity to heal yourself, parent well, and live a life of joy and freedom.
Thank you for reading. And for rereading. You are worth every moment I spend writing.
With you,
Diane.
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