Active Voice to Passive Voice: An Industry Special

This blog has always been about working on the topics my clients raised in their stories and working through them with a critical thinking approach that honoured the emotional, physical and spiritual truths they revealed. I’ve also spoken from the experiences I had in my own story of life with a compulsive abusive sexual relational disordered man and my brushes up against the treatment industry. None of the stories I heard or the stories I told were in passive voice. They were active voice.

There’s a long history of disappearing our experience or putting it into a place of no responsibility or accountability by using the passive voice. Some practitioners collude with a program that offers no publishable results to support anything they were now serving up. This includes a theoretical foundation that required mis-labeling traumatized women as codependent and offered a standard of care that did not treat her ongoing safety or exposure to life-threatening disease as their top priority. They also did not work with any awareness of the wider family harm perpetrated by a husband and father creating and protecting his secret life of sexual and sexualized activities as a priority over spouse and children. Even now, most do not acknowledge this. They are still pretending this is a localized problem of one primary relationship.

Let’s remember that the actual publishable research that proved we were not “codependent” also showed that about 70% of us were likely to meet the criteria for PTSD (with that remaining 30% enduring trauma symptoms as well). That alone ought to have meant practitioners still working the codependent partner game would be recalled for corrective re-training in partner care. But they were not. To the best of my knowledge and research, it appears a few new courses were added but no one had to change what they were doing at all. They could slap on a few sympathetic noises about partner symptoms (which were down-graded by some from trauma symptoms to “trauma-like” symptoms) and carry on doing exactly what they always did to partners.

Even now, in the field of “partner sensitive” treatment care the misogyny still leaks out. Last winter I received a link to a video of one of these partner practitioners weeping and anguishing over an evangelist (recently deceased) being exposed as likely sexual predator. Allegations from women were growing, including from the employees of a massage parlour business he apparently owned (no, I’m not making that up—this spiritual leader was in the massage parlour business where he could get happy endings on demand.) There he allegedly coerced employees to provide sexual services of various kinds to him. But the trail of allegations involved his spiritual followers, too. His family and evangelism organization eventually had to accept and acknowledge the facts. But this practitioner was desperately trying to whoop up some sympathy for him because apparently, he was an important spiritual leader to this practitioner.

As for his victims—well there were a few minutes of clucking about how much their experience mattered, too. But first the speaker carefully switched from active to passive voice. The language speaking to victims was that things “were done to them”. Things “happened to them”.  The speaker would not address the fact that it was this speaker’s revered evangelist who the victims said did this to them. Nor were any of those “things” named correctly. Suddenly the story became a bit of a mystery. We really couldn’t be sure anymore why this had anything to do with the dead and disgraced evangelist. “Things happened” to the victims but the speaker would not allow his name to be actively linked to their assaults and harassment (which also remained unspecific.) What victims said this evangelist/massage parlour owner had made them do, inflicted upon them, or the unwanted sexual advances his spiritual followers said he sent to them were now the work of an unnamed person. Things just “happened” to the victims. Out of nowhere and from no one in particular, unspecific “things” happened to them. And the speaker was so sorry about it.

Gee thanks.

The speaker’s allegiance to the perpetrator over his victims (remember that his own family and religious organization were not refuting the allegations) was a stunning lesson in how the “partner sensitive” care model now works. The man still will always be protected from the truth of what he does to his victims anyway it can be done. Adopting the passive voice to talk about them is an obvious but tried and true approach. Sexual offenders often adopt it in their non-apologizing apologies. They say, “I’m sorry about ‘what happened’”, not “I’m sorry about the harm I did to you, and the negative impact it had and will continue to have on your life”. It’s the same there. The practitioner never names the personally important spiritual leader/evangelist that the victims name, or the offences they say he did to them. It’s all placed in the bubble of the passive voice to distance his responsibility and accountability. In other words, nothing new here.

When practitioners hitch their wagon to this treatment industry to make a living and/or reinvent themselves they’ve made their choice. They and the sex addicts are in. You’re out. Victim, Schmictim. It’s the perpetrator who matters most.

As you look at your own experiences, how did practitioners distance the man who traumatized you and your children from that responsibility and accountability? Do you recall a lot of “passive voice” talking about things that “were done” or “happened” with no personal agency attached to the one who did them? Let me know if what the practitioner above did to protect the perpetrator was what your practitioner did to you, too.

And yes, your story is still safe here. In the active voice.

With you,

Diane