Posts tagged telling the truth of your life
In My Opinion, Where Do We Go From Here?

Over the last ten years I’ve been pulling back the curtain on the strange and ongoing train wreck of treatment options for compulsive-abusive sexual relationship disordered men and their wives and families. In my opinion there is no evidence-based publishable research available to back up what was being marketed (I searched and searched and am still searching after ten years.) Religious-based versions soon sprang up around it and are now closely allied to it. “Believers” already enrolled in faith-based organizations may be seamlessly transferred into affiliated treatment programs that are easily shrink-wrapped in the religious propositions of the day. Once there, the theories and methods go unchallenged by women who are desperate, traumatized and already conforming to their religious community’s direction and authority.

As long as the compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man is reinstated as some version of the spiritual and authoritative head of the household, success is declared. The women and children are there to do what they are told. Meanwhile his true core values that actually run the show are never named or unseated. And in describing that situation I am reminded of a New Testament professor from seminary days (now in Glory) who used to say in his thick Irish accent “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus…vaguely in our minds.”

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therapeutic abuse, self-careDiane Stricklandtelling the truth of your life, tell your story, sex addicts are abusers, reality check, recovery ploys
Living Differently into These Hard Truths

After four weeks of examining how men call sex addicts harm their wives, partners, children and step-children, we need to hit the pause button, catch our breath and see what we’ve learned. So, in today’s blog I’m going to talk about how we live with the truths that we have found the courage to speak, face, hear, and validate.

Before I do that, I want to honor that remarkable courage! Your persistence in reading the blog and validating the hard stories shared over the last four weeks bears witness to your commitment to the value of your lives and your children’s lives. Please don’t lose sight of that! Keep it in front of you at all times. Say it out loud. Talk about it to yourself and to your children. Validate and affirm over and over again. The power of his fake life to make you all doubt yourselves and feel less than “enough” must be undermined by the power of your real lives as a loving wife/partner and loving children/stepchildren.

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Post-traumatic stress, making decisionsDiane Stricklandreality check, recovery for partners, adult children of sex addicts, telling the truth of your life, children's trauma care, sex addicts are abusers
What’s With Adult Children Turning Against Their Mothers?

For the last three blogs, we’ve been looking at family impact of the secret life of sexual and sexualized activities conducted by a father or step-father. In creating and protecting this secret life as his priority we have seen the devastating consequences to children and teenagers. It is clear that he abuses the whole family, not just the wife or partner. He does this with his deceit, misogyny, lies, blameshifting, gaslighting, denial, abandonment, humiliating behaviors—betraying the family unit as the primary priority for authenticity, intimacy, safety, respect, nurture, honesty and love. He violates the family’s core values multiple ways, multiple times, with multiple destructive consequences to the other members.

This week we are dealing with an outcome that is the second trauma for so many women. This is about adult children who turn on them while protecting and supporting their compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered fathers. Why does this happen? How does this reveal what is truly at stake for families? And what can wives and partners who are innocent victims of these men do to avoid becoming fresh victims of their misguided adult children? How much loss are wives and partners really absorbing?

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fake regret, Post-traumatic stressDiane Stricklandadult children of sex addicts, low bar for recovery, intimate partner abuse, telling the truth of your life, telling the truth about him, tone-policing, infantilizing sex addicts
The Whole Family. His “Addiction.” We're Soaking In It.

Hello again! I’m glad to be back posting after two weeks absence due to other professional commitments. As my earlier post said, I also was dealing with technical bugs at the same time.

But there’s always lots stewing on my front burner, and it took some time to decide where to begin. One of the questions I’ve been thinking about is whether the almost singular focus on the relationship between the man called a sex addict and his wife or partner is actually how everyone avoids facing the damage to the family as a unit and treating it. In so many cases there are children in the story. The whole family is affected by the man’s behavior, not just the relationship with the woman. Little is said about this. What do children suffer? What does their father teach them about family when he uses it to protect another secret life he values more than them? Is salvaging something of the family wreckage yet another task that falls to the woman, so that he can continue to present as “normal” instead of the deeply damaged human being that he is? What if he involves them in his “operations” of deceit and risk-taking? I’ve heard more than one story of how he used the children as “chick-bait”, securing coffee dates, play dates and shared rides to events. I know from my own experience that these men will blame porn on the computer on sons and quickly offer to have “the talk” with them.

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self-care, making decisions, expectations for recovery, fake regret, Post-traumatic stress, therapeutic abuseDiane Stricklandreality check, telling the truth about him, telling the truth of your life, therapeutic incompetence, the right thing for you
PART TWO: In My Opinion

It’s hard to write about misogyny. No one wants it to be real. No one wants it to be “involved” in what Compulsive-abusive Sexual Relational Disordered[1] men do, or how the sex addiction treatment industry protects them at the expense of wives and partners. But misogyny is a social default setting.  We grow up in it. We are shaped by it. We work around it if possible. We have to know what it means and how it behaves, because our lives are actually at stake.

In writing these last few difficult blogs, I received messages from women caught in the very topics I’m discussing. They remind me that nothing I describe is “imagined” and I am not exaggerating. Women tell stories of the diseases he gave them, the criticism he levied at them, how he acted like he was “better” than them, how he humiliated them, and how he lied every single day of their lives together. They are not allowed to raise those topics because he and his treatment team accuse them of shaming him. Women write to me in disbelief. Coming face to face with the reality of misogyny can leave a woman speechless. But not me.

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expectations for recovery, self-care, therapeutic abuse, making decisionsDiane Stricklandmisogynist therapy, telling the truth of your life, saving yourself, slips and lapses