Well, That's Not The (insert name here) That I Knew
I want to scream “Stop it!” every time I hear someone push an abuse victim away and pull her abuser closer with a line like the one above.
It’s the line drawn in the sand that is meant to chastise and isolate the accuser. If the victim is a woman she can expect to hear this line from both men and women. But it’s not just about chastising and isolating the victim, It’s also about the speaker protecting him or herself from the discomfort of truth, humiliation by association, or the work of justice as a whole.
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We CAN Heal. Here's One Way to Start.
We CAN Heal
We can.
Shocked, heart-broken, angry, terrified, confused, numb, desperate. Once we learn the first piece of information about our husband or boyfriend’s secret life, we can cycle through every one of those feelings in a nano-second. Sometimes it feels like we have all of them all at the same time. In the worst of it I remember wondering if I was actually dead. No matter how I tried I couldn’t find anything left standing on which I could base my life. That went on for quite a while.
But slowly, something emerged from the devastation of my husband’s handiwork and the sledgehammer of the treatment industry’s unleashed misogyny—something that was more real and trustworthy and valuable than any of them.
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Ways to Begin Working Hard for Yourself
There was blockbuster response to last Sunday’s blog. One veteran from the trenches of covert abuse reminded me about the important things wives and partners should know once they begin to move towards healing and protecting their own lives and their children’s lives as their first priority. So, this is a quick follow-up if you are wondering what to do next, and what not to do next!
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You Think “Recovery” is Hard Work? Try Surviving Covert Abuse When Your Abuser and His Treatment Group Deny He’s Doing It!
Have you ever read or listened to a wife who stayed with her compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man talk about how hard she has worked at his recovery and saving her marriage?
Believe her. I’ll bet it nearly killed her.
And it still might.
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When Your Brain Is Requesting Some Down Time
Many women who contact me are struggling with the symptoms of trauma and getting no qualified help to understand what’s happening. Their interactions with their compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man (CASRD man, rhymes with hazard man) only make things worse. He baits them into circular arguments, blameshifts, gaslights, insults, and accuses her of things she hasn’t done—all in order to keep her mind struggling to catch up and work these things through, while trauma symptoms also work against her.
She can’t win. It’s too much to expect of herself. And it’s not fair. Let’s talk about why it’s not fair with real information about the traumatized brain.
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