Posts tagged tone-policing
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
Therapists and Tone Policing

Last week I listened to some podcasts that a male “sex addiction expert” produced. They feature some of the more progressive female voices in the still-prevailing mainstream of partner care. This particular male “sex addiction expert” is re-marketing himself as an advocate for women and the partner experience. But he still can’t help but complain about wives and partners who present "angry."

    Is this starting to sound or feel familiar? We're too angry? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it with therapists who default to tone policing when you finally share what your husband or boyfriend did to you and the destructive impact that has had on your life. This therapist, like so many of these cookie cutter treatment practitioners, uses our anger as his excuse for not hearing the story we tell—a story that might compromise the assumptions that keep that misogynist treatment model humming along making money. So, instead, when faced with the reality and the potential for women’s anger, sex addiction therapists become the “tone police."

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therapeutic abuse, Post-traumatic stress, self-careDiane Stricklandtone-policing, therapeutic incompetence, telling the truth of your life, tell your story, misogynist therapy, patriarchal assumptions