Choose Your Path Carefully, But Choose

It’s yours to choose.

Not mine. Not his. Not any treatment practitioner’s. Not your religion’s. Not your family’s. It’s your path to choose.

Over the last decade of being alongside women traumatized by their husband’s or boyfriend’s secret life of deception, endangerment, disrespect, financial theft and fraud, spiritual violation, emotional cruelty, sexual abandonment, physical harm, and psychological torture…phewwwww, that’s a long, ugly list and it’s going to make an even longer sentence. Let me shorten that. 

Over the last decade I’ve learned that each woman chooses her path for her own reasons. Not everyone leaves, not everyone stays, and nobody does either the same way. But all women can benefit from talking with someone who truly understands this experience. And then, if they want to get right back into the chaos…well….it’s their life. If that’s how they want to spend it, it’s their choice.

Others may realize they want their lives to be free of arguing with people whose commitment to lying and avoidance will never be overcome with “being right.” Those women often write me after they’ve extricated themselves from the scene of the crimes. Most are not wealthy or even solvent. But they find a new life away from the violent oppression of irrational thinking and treatment protocols that want them to just lie quiet on the altar of misogyny. Freedom is precious to those women.

For some women it’s all about the battleground of their lifestyle for which they worked hard and long and don’t believe they should have to lose. I understand this, too. It is a terrible loss and for those of us without enough time to turn that ship around financially, that consideration makes sense to me.

Still other women settle into a new kind of co-habitation with the CASRD man—compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man—Dr Omar Minwalla’s description.  (CASRD rhymes with “hazard” for those who are new to this term.) If it’s later in life, they consider that once he is in his 60’s and 70’s his libido drops, his sexual performance disappears, and his prostate usually acts up. It’s not as hard to keep track of where his penis is—not that most women want it anywhere near them. They just don’t want it out spending money on itself, participating in crime or bothering the neighbours. These men learn to keep to themselves in the house, but it’s also handy for the women to have another pair of hands for chores as well as the steady income they expected to be retiring on. There’s occasional conversation, even a joke now and then. Those women keep the lifestyle and do what they want with it. I get it. I really do.

Others have specific exit strategies that take time to execute. That’s understandable, isn’t it? I can support women as they put that plan together and work it through without any reference to whether it’s something I would do. It’s your choice. Always.

It’s your path to choose. My main job is to affirm your moral agency and power to decide what you are going to do with the rest of your life or at least the next few years of it. It doesn’t matter whether you are living a life I want to live. It matters that you are living the life you want to live from the choices you have.

In fact, the only time I feel I need to step away from a woman is when she begins to use me to justify what she’s doing, even though I’ve made it clear why I think it’s not going to help her achieve her goals. What she wants to do is something that I simply cannot bear to watch. 

That may be because they continue to position themselves for more harm in the choices they make. Often they get stuck in a loop of “someone will eventually realize they are wrong about this” and spend their precious time on this earth serving up “work product” to children, husband, therapists, other family members or religious leaders. These letters, documents, hyperlinks, books, etc., will always and only be used by these people to indicate her abusive nature and psychological instability. Abusers and abusive systems or models never do anything else with anything we give them. It’s all material used to justify the false narrative that keeps them in business, in denial, or both.

That does not mean that I won’t be there for them when they realize they are only more diminished in themselves, their family relationships and their bank accounts than before they started. I will. But I’m not going to attend the scene of the crime and be slimed with it, as if I had a hand in it somehow.

Unfortunately, there are always others willing to take their money and to enable them on these dead-end roads, so I step back and respect those choices. But I cannot participate in their self-harm. It’s another hideous thing to watch incredible women lose their way in their own story and wasting the precious life they could be living with creativity, wisdom, and new beginnings. 

Choose your own path through this sudden hell that none of us deserved. Change your mind anytime you want. Take responsibility for your choices and don’t involve others by trying to suggest they had a role in them when they did not. Don’t make others listen to you arguing about how wonderful your life is when it sounds like more hell to them because they are not you. I can be happy for each woman in the choices I know she made for herself. I can respect women who choose the best path for themselves even when it’s not one I would choose. 

Maybe one day we will have more choices. Maybe truth will have more of a role in treatment options, and covert abusers will not be catered to over the ones they abused. Maybe the abuse impact on the whole family will one day not be hidden away by practitioners who know it blows up the theories in which they were certified. Maybe courts will address violations of trust that harm women to the core, endanger minor children, and steal their financial security.

But those kinds of topics require courage and truth. Misogyny cares for neither. And how it loves to see women keep trying to change the minds of those who serve misogyny—as if abusers don’t really want to do what they are doing to women.

Dear readers, the whole point is that they do.

With you,

Diane.