Dear Readers,

Many of you know that my training and experience includes working in post-disaster settings and responding to critical incidents. Wearing those hats, I have been creating resources to inform, equip, and support people as we go through this pandemic together. My partner also has offered his equipment, software and expertise to do these together for free as well.

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Well, here we are in another unimaginable situation together. First, he blew up our lives. Now, there’s a pandemic.

Washing our hands. Self-isolating. Working from home. Sheltering-in-place. Home-schooling. Lockdowns.

But what are we supposed to do with him???????

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He has fragmented your life with newly discovered lies, deceit, harm, hurt, cruelty, disrespect and contempt. For a while, you can’t believe this is your life. It can feel like you are looking at someone else’s life, and you aren’t where you were the last time you looked, at all.

Trauma symptoms keep adding to those feelings as you lose skills and traits that have always been your fingerprints on life. When we don’t recognize ourselves and don’t recognize the life we seem to be in, we can become terrified and immobilized. Trauma is real, and it does layers.

But you are still in there.

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If you haven’t been watching Lili Bee’s Survivor Series—there’s several to keep you company. In each one Lili talks with a woman like us who has survived discovery, the worst of the treatment industry, her husband’s ongoing covert abuse, and got herself to safety. Sometimes that includes children too.

These brave women talk about their victories and their defeats. They share the insights had helped them save their precious lives. They are painfully honest about the mistakes they made along the way. They bear witness to our capacity for love and the hard decisions that became necessary to survive.

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It happened again.

I was listening to a podcast where the speakers were carefully introducing the word “abuse” to describe what Compulsive-Abusive Sexual Relational Disordered men (CASRD men—rhymes with hazard) do to wives and partners.

Now, I identified that activity as abuse about ten years ago. I was called hysterical, accused of having a victim mentality, ridiculed and labelled with the greatest and deepest offence a woman can do in society—being angry. So, ten years later, when someone else decides to use the word abuse, I pay close attention. And when the conversation is happening with known players in the treatment industry, some that I value and respect, I pay closer attention.

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