Hundreds of women have passed through my life since I began to advocate for, inform, and support the trauma survivors of compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered men (CASRD—rhymes with “hazard”). Each one of those women has been remarkable, whether we went on to work together, or not. As my late father would say, “There isn’t a dead-ass in the bunch.” HA!

Many of those women I have known for years now, supporting them in grief, fear, and the call to a new life of dignity and possibility. We lurch through the stops and starts of respecting the damage we have sustained and also the greatness that remains ours alone. We learn what it means to be right, and then what it means to more than that for ourselves and our children. We learn to be wise. We learn how to accept the ways we have been changed by the deep trauma of covert abuse, and to move through those lingering potholes with new strategies or to work around them entirely.

My clients are stay at home moms, women who provided unpaid critical operational and managerial services to their husband’s businesses and practices, professionals in every field, artists, musicians, students, writers and actors, administrative staff, sales people, celebrities in various categories, educators at every level, coaches and counsellors, sex addiction treatment practitioners, small and large business owners, entrepreneurs, activists for worthy causes, non-profit workers, and ministry professionals like me.

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I say this to many clients many times. “Don’t help.”  I’ve suggested they write it on the palm of the hand, on a sticker they put on the mirror, their computer and the dashboard of their car, and key it into their phone notes. “Don’t help.”

Wives and partners of men called sex addicts are wired for helping. It’s part of the reason these guys picked us. They like having help—especially when it’s not paid help. Helping keeps wives and partners busy, so we don’t see too much or think too much about our situations. It’s a good avoidance strategy. But mostly it keeps us hooked and invested. As long as wives and partners are still helping, we are still imagining that their man called a sex addict is invested in the same goals and aligned with the same core values that we are. But these men have different goals and different core values.

Don’t help.

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Did your “favorite” make the cut? Let me know if you don’t read about it here. It may have been pretty close to these ones! Meanwhile, it might be good to re-read the ones that rose to the top, or catch-up if you missed them.

Happy New Year, readers!

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For many of you, it’s awfully hard work to push through the season. And sometimes it’s impossible to feel at home in your life after your abuser steals so much from you through overt or covert means. There’s no “soft place to fall” as Dr. Phil likes to describe a loving, healthy primary relationship.

But time is marching on. The years pass. We begin to see that what might have been the most catastrophic experience of abuse in our lives is of little or no interest to the people we thought cared about us. To most people it’s just a marriage break-up, and to others it’s their opportunity to say unkind and untrue things about you and get away with it. The rush to defend and befriend the man who abused his children and his life partner can be breath-taking. The world of “alternative facts” and those who choose to believe them comes home to our most intimate experience of life.

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Being in Yellowknife for a month has been enlightening. (And after writing that I can’t resist telling you I’m writing this blog on the longest night of the year where sunrise today is 10:07am and sunset is 3:04pm).

Yes, it’s been mind-numbing cold at times (-50 Celsius with windchill) and hard to get around by foot. But it’s also true that thirty thousand international tourists will pass through here in the next months to see the Aurora Borealis against the northern night sky.

As strange as this place may sound, I meet people well-settled here, some raising children and grandchildren, building careers, planning retirement, and celebrating their life. Most came from somewhere else “for a few years” and ended up staying-for decades. They feel at home here.

But I have been on countdown, thinly veiled as a Christmas countdown of “how many more sleeps.” This is new for me. Today (Saturday)  I measured out four more breakfasts and four more sleeps. I will fly home Christmas morning. Usually I come and go without any clock ticking away to when I can get back home. What’s going on, and why?

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