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
Lessons Children Learn from Fathers Called Sex Addicts

Such a strong response to my guest blogger last week—thank you! She has provided a second piece which I am posting today. I have added some “lessons learned” from my family life and from clients. This may be difficult for some mothers to read but is not intended to inspire guilt. Rather it is a caution to those who assume preserving the “family” is the best course for children. It also makes it clear that men called sex addicts are not just abusing the wife or partner. They are harming their children and negatively impacting their development as human beings. The sexual and sexualized behaviors of these men are not just impacting their relationship with wives or partners. It is a family experience of harm largely unexamined by the treatment industry.

Thank you to last week’s guest blogger who is providing another important piece of this puzzle!  I am respecting her and her daughters’ need for anonymity. Here then, are her additional insights about the harm done to children of men called sex addicts.

 Also—important news about Tania Rochelle’s next retreat for partners—with an early discount opportunity! See details at the end of the blog!

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making decisions, expectations for recovery, Post-traumatic stress, self-careDiane Stricklandfamilies are priority, patriarchal assumptions, therapeutic incompetence
My Family, Eight Years Later

Last week’s blog generated significant response. Thank you so much for letting me know when topics help you validate your experiences and ongoing concerns. One reader sent me the following piece about her family’s trauma and how they lurched along together and ultimately chose to put themselves and each other first instead of the man who continued to lie, gaslight, blameshift, and deceive them all through his fake “recovery” years.

The author and her daughters require anonymity but the daughters, in particular, want other kids to know they aren’t crazy and they deserve better from him—and to ask for counseling trauma care support! Don’t count on the treatment industry to be proactive on anything that might suggest their men called sex addicts may have harmed the family so deeply that children should receive immediate and ongoing attention for trauma care. FYI: This not an account of any father sexually abusing children within his own family.

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expectations for recovery, fake regret, making decisions, Post-traumatic stress, self-careDiane Stricklandsex addicts harm families, sex addicts hurt women, sex addicts are abusers, sex addicts manipulate, partners are priority, families are priority
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