I have about four blogs written that aren’t posted. It hasn’t felt the time to post any of them. Writing blogs for me is a lot like writing sermons. First, it’s a weekly discipline. But also, there’s nothing worse than feeing like your finished sermon is a sermon, but not necessarily to the one to preach that week! So, some blogs are set aside for when I discern their time has come. “No wine before it’s time” HA!

This week has been one filled with complex emotions. I was overwhelmed by a the return of some memories that I was longer even trying to recover. My PTSD has kidnapped so much of my life and held it hostage. The thing about memory loss is that sometimes you don’t know it wasn’t there unless you recover it!

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These aren’t easy questions. But they are important ones. I’ve asked them before in the context of other blog topics, but here I’ve gather them up in one place for you to have and use.

Take some time with each one, and jot down your thoughts. What feelings does each question elicit? What thoughts come to mind? Don’t be afraid of what your heart, mind, body and spirit are showing you in your responses. Pay attention to yourself. Take yourself seriously. Remember, this is your one precious life. Live it as if you think it’s precious, too. Teach your children theirs is precious and show them what that means. 

And always, Light for the journey.

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Let’s talk about the misbegotten money pit of couple’s counselling for wives and partners of men called sex addicts. First, I’m concerned about the damage it does those already traumatized women by pretending his covert abuse is a couple problem. But I’m also going to talk about the clinical neglect of traumatized children and stepchildren of every age group that goes along with a treatment focus on “coupleship.”

Wives and partners innocently and earnestly step into the couple session with their compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man. They want to roll up their sleeves and figure out how to end the nightmare of his covert abuse and recover the man with whom they fell in love from this cruel, selfish, and destructive presence who seems to have taken his place. They have yet to realize he was never really there in the first place. So, what they get is more likely to be the next scene in the same nightmare.

If you’re curious why I don’t recommend women enter couples counselling with their compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered men, then read on.

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From PoSARC’s Survivor Series—A Not-to-be-missed addition!!!

Lili Bee interviews Amy, a young mother trying to be the best mother she can be, a survivor of her husband’s covert abuse, and a survivor of the treatment industry!

Amy uses the metaphor of house to describe discovery, the so-called recovery process, her own experience, and more. When your house has secret rooms that only he knows, that only he uses, but that are destabilizing the whole house and spreading mold all through it—why are you being confined to one room and told the big problem is how you keep that room!

The smartest thing she did was stay on the hard journey of getting help until she found a true traumatologist as her therapist.

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Victim/Survivor/Heroine of her own life—Susan Kay—has penned a great piece reflecting on her personal experience of PTSD from discovery which was then compounded by treatment-induced trauma. It’s entitled “Lessons from the Captain” and works with the movie “Captain Phillips” to make her points more effective.

Follow this link to this Sweetwater Blog from last week: https://www.sweetwaterretreats.org/blog/2020/1/12/lessons-from-the-captain and find questions for reflection when you read more here (below).

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