This Is the Blog Post that People Read Most

https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/3/23/how-men-called-sex-addicts-abuse-their-wives-and-partners

I couldn’t help but wonder why the thing that over the years the treatment industry and its practitioners have seemed (to me) to tip-toe around, deny, redefine so it doesn’t really count as “real,” is suddenly something they are talking about. I hear one may have started a new “institute” dedicated to it while qualifying the definition (not necessarily with reference to any research, facts, or dictionary) so that it is distinguished from the domestic abuse we already understand is real. In my opinion, we are special, but no kind of abuse is. It’s just abuse.

Maybe wives and partners are looking for framing of their experience that actually lines up with it. Maybe they are tired of having their money sucked out of their pockets while nothing actually changes that would be worth what they invested financially, emotionally, spiritually, time-wise, physically and psychologically. Maybe wives and partners want their lives to be their own again, instead of being tied to someone else’s life that is mostly false, deeply damaged, and even more damaging to those who try to love them. When you see that he lies about who he is, what core values undergird his life, and how he treats you and children like “life appliances” (Chump Lady prefers and coined “wife appliance”), it’s pretty hard to un-see it. But even harder for him to admit it.

Abuse is abuse. Yes, there are all kinds of it. And our experiences are examples of it.

https://www.yourstoryissafehere.com/blog/2019/3/23/how-men-called-sex-addicts-abuse-their-wives-and-partners Have another read. I wrote this FOUR years ago. I’ve been saying for about 12 or 13 years (lost track of when I started because I had no idea I’d still be talking about it in 2023.) But now that a few treatment practitioners (from the various treatment models with no publishable research to indicate they make a statistically significant positive difference in recovery) are acknowledging abuse (however they try to soften the reality of it) is a fact of experience for most wives and partners, it’s also a fact that they are WAY BEHIND the rest of us in supporting these women. And most don’t seem to have the courage or the integrity to apologize for what harm they may have done, to return the money they took, to train themselves as specialists to treat domestic violence, or to take leadership against the misogyny of past models, resources, and practices that enabled more abuse.

And their behaviour, readers, is what they call codependence. Not ours.