After discovery, we can be confused about our trauma symptoms and by our trauma symptoms. Memory and concentration problems, self-doubt, numbing, intrusive memories, hypervigilance, and unexpected triggers are compounded by gaslighting, denial, lying, personal criticisms, silent treatment, rage, etc., from the man called a sex addict. Then, after a hard-fought battle to have our trauma symptoms correctly identified, we can still face practitioners who call us codependent and co-addict. But when “experts” talk up partner trauma to gain our trust, and then tiptoe backwards by saying our symptoms may “sound like” trauma symptoms, or that we have “trauma-like” symptoms…you’ve probably had about as much as you can take.
Research says when things look like traumatic stress symptoms, act like traumatic stress symptoms, and sound like traumatic stress symptoms—they’re traumatic stress symptoms. And in our case if they meet the criteria and last longer than a month, nearly 70% of the time they also indicate Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That means we need something a little more than “treatment-like” care. We need informed and competent clinical care. And yes, it also means we’re right back where we were—having to stand up for ourselves and demand a correct assessment of our real symptoms and a correct treatment protocol.
Read MoreTruman Burbank: Was nothing real?
Christof: You were real... that's what made you so good to watch.
Lines from the movie called “The Truman Show”, after Truman (played by Jim Carrey) learns that he was the only one in his life who wasn’t acting a part in a world that wasn’t real.
The Truman Show resonates with my discovery that most of my life had been absorbed into my husband’s ugly deception. The movie’s ending grips me—where, after Truman’s sailboat prow accidentally pierces the fake horizon, Truman climbs out of his boat onto a fake lake, and seeing a staircase climbs up to find the “exit” door. The show’s creator tries to keep him from going through it, and after they exchange some words (including the lines above) Truman takes his final bow and walks through the door into the real world—a dark unknown. What would he feel—fear, anger, hope, courage, grief, doubt? All these, but still he chooses to leave the fake life and hang onto himself—because he’s the only thing in his life he knows is real.
Truman hung on to himself. And that’s exactly what you need to do.
Read MoreIt’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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