Why I Do This Work

by Tania

Whenever I’m on my mountain bike, I have to remind myself: “Don’t look where you don’t want to go.” It’s a simple rule, and one that can save me from a lot of pain. If I look at the saplings next to the trail, I’ll hit one and fly over my handlebars; if I concentrate on the bulging root halfway up the hill, I’ll bounce against it and slide back down. If I look at what I’m trying to avoid, I will hit it every time. So it’s best to look ahead on the path, to where I want to go.  Not just while biking, but also in life.

A friend of mine who’s an artist and designer, uses a wood burner to make art on everything she can find: guitars, crucifixes, boots…Yeah, boots. She offered to burn a pair for me and asked if there was a quote I loved. What better quote for a pair of boots, I thought, than “Don’t look where you don’t want to go.” I bought some Frye’s and handed them over. I wear them year-round. They might be the only non-living things I’d save if my house caught fire.

I’m five years out of my twenty-year life with a so-called sex addict. My days are filled with teaching college freshman and sophomores, and with counseling people recovering from all kinds of trauma. I love my work. I love my family, including my dogs. I love riding my bike. Life is pretty swell. Some days, I try to stay as far away from the subject of so-called “sex addiction” as possible. Sometimes, I think about getting out of the “partner” business altogether, because, for one thing, it’s a reminder.

Other kinds of trauma are not so hard on me. People are trying to process it and move forward. War veterans are not talking with me for an hour and then going back to the front lines. Rape victims are not doing EMDR while their rapists sit in the waiting room. Classic domestic violence victims expect me to help them gain the strength to leave their abusers. They don’t leave my office angry and go look for another counselor who will help them stay.

The retreats have brought me a lot of joy, but they, too, have been difficult. I see the beautiful, weary, hopeful faces of the women who are staying in their marriages, and I want to whisk them off to a safe, sunny island, where they and their children can be free from the grossness and darkness that life with a sex addict brings. I see the women who have left their husbands and are getting ever closer to healing and wish I could wave a magic wand to speed the process. In all of the women, I see glimmers and flashes of who they used to be—who they really are—under all the shock and harm. I see myself in all of them.

Five years out. Maybe I shouldn’t look at the women and their world of sex addiction, shouldn’t look where I don’t want to go. I denounce that pain and darkness, that doom-cloud of ugliness and perversion. I denounce the men who create it, who have shown themselves to be capable of such treachery. Every once in a while, I get really close to choosing only the light. I gaze at the glowing, curious face of my granddaughter, Maggie, or watch my goofy dogs tripping over each other in the yard, or discover my 20-year-old daughter, Lola, waiting for me outside my World Lit classroom between her own classes at KSU; I think, this is the only where I should be looking. 

Then someone sends me a book called Prodependence, or an announcement for a workshop for Braveful Women drops in my inbox, or I notice the term “sex addict,” which already hedges responsibility, has been down-graded to an absolute milquetoast “sexual struggler”; I get bat-shit crazy mad. I remember that, 30 years later, wives and partners are still at the mercy of an industry founded by a sex addict, that is manned by a contingent of sex addicts, who are trained in a model developed by sex addicts. I see that the industry continues to grow through a tangled web of “former sex addicts” who become CSAT’s or coaches or pastors and have the audacity to promise better-than-ever-marriages. 

For over three decades, this industry has shape-shifted and transmogrified; it has sped ahead and doubled back; it has coined new words and built new models. And none of this has served wives and partners. What it has done, though, is made its practitioners a shit-ton of money. Meanwhile, some of us are over here, screaming into the void, spending our own money to make sure women can hear us. We’re here to say that you do not have to participate in your own abuse. We’re saying, don’t let the industry abuse you even more. Don’t let them prop up his treatment on your back. 

While the sex addiction treatment industry is touting its next bigger, better mousetrap, adding whirly gizmos and neon lights, we’re learning as much as we can about trauma, and earning trauma certifications so that we can better treat partners for what is actually wrong with them. And it doesn’t require new words or new models, because the model already exists. 

So-called sex addicts aren’t some super-special breed of mutant traumatizers. They’re exceptional liars, yes, but the emotional and physical harm women experience at their hands can be treated with the same trauma treatments used for war veterans, rape victims, murder witnesses, or anyone who has experienced the myriad other awful causes of post-traumatic stress. Effective trauma models are researched and studied. They’re proven.

Proper trauma treatment does not require a partner’s involvement in her husband’s therapy. She is not asked to create “boundary" or “safety” lists; she does not have to work on her “trust” or “intimacy” issues. We don’t call her “braveful” or invite her to live “bravefully,. She is B-R-A V-E. She’s not codependent or prodependent. She shouldn’t have to pick up her little “sexual struggler" and brush off the knees of his pants when he falls. And chances are good, he’s going to fall. 

So. I look where I don’t want to go. And then I look farther up the road. Because I want to help you get there.

I’m planning retreats for 2020. Please let me know if you’re interested.