The Goat Rodeo

Today, somewhere in America, a woman is going to meet her husband in the park for a walk around the lake. She is in the crosswalk now. Suddenly a car appears, as if from nowhere, and speeds down the street towards her, so fast she won’t be able to avoid it. She sees it only as it hits her, throwing her 15 yards down the road, breaking 6 ribs, a femur, multiple bones in her right hand, causing a concussion and profuse bleeding from a big tear in her scalp. After un untold number of seconds or minutes…time is passing oddly…she can see the driver. My God, it is her husband! How is this possible? In the distance she hears an ambulance. The pain…the unbelievable pain. Wait…why isn’t her husband trying to help her? She is close enough to see his expression, and that he is looking at her with glee, as if excited by what is happening. Then he starts to check his phone messages and adjust his tie…What is going on? Is this a nightmare? (Little does she know the real nightmare is just beginning.)

Then…thank God!…the ambulance arrives. The paramedics jump out and run over to her husband’s car. They check him from head to toe, speaking in reassuring and positive tones, have him lie down on a stretcher, and lift him carefully into the ambulance. As they leave, one of the paramedics leans in over the broken, battered body of the woman, yells out the name of the hospital her husband is being taken to, so that she can go make sure he is taken care of and his needs attended to. He assures her that her husband will have nothing but the best care from the best doctors. In the meantime, they affirm his right to drive however he pleases while in the throes of his Vehicular Violence Addiction. Then everyone leaves, and the woman starts to drag herself off the road, inch by painful, bloody inch.

This woman, of course was me. And if you are on this website, chances are it was you, too. And I have something to say about that.

The treachery and self-interest of my husband was surpassed by the treachery and self-interest of the professionals, by virtue of the fact that they have sufficient evidence to know better and from their professional duty to first, do no harm. This is the second betrayal and, to me, every bit as shocking as the first one. And it takes place in a social construct where we are also betrayed. So immediately, a woman is faced with three betrayals. The inner circle: her husband, the next: the professionals, the outer ring: society.

When I discovered my husband’s transvestitism (the tip of the iceberg of his secret sexual life) and my life exploded, our marriage counselor advised him to see a therapist who deals in sexual addiction. Off he went to weekly counseling sessions for the next 8 months. I was too shocked, too wounded, too agonized to figure anything out: at that point I trusted the professionals. I could not even see how wounded I was and that I needed help. My husband’s uncertified sex addiction therapist never contacted me for any information during this 8 month process, so my husband lied to his therapist. Now who could have predicted that a person whose life was based on lies would lie to his therapist? Why, any reasonable person! And yet for 8 months he went, we paid a lot of money, and I waited. At the end, I was called in and met the therapist. Who was the world’s sweetest person, whose email signature always included a quote from Winnie the Pooh, and who was completely unsuitable for the ugly, gritty world of narcissistic liars known as sex addicts. They presented me with a one -page summary of things my husband would try not to do. For example, he should “try to tell the truth before the lying took hold.” In a nutshell, the whole thing was pointless, useless, and damaging because it was fake work and fake progress masquerading as something real, while I was imploding emotionally and hanging onto false hope. This was the second betrayal.

Sometime after discovery, I think in the three days after, when I did not sleep, eat, drink or go to the bathroom, I called the suicide hotline. Not because I was suicidal, but because I was in so much despair I felt I might be going mad. When I called, I explained I’d just found out my husband had a secret sexual life and was a transvestite. No sooner did I utter the magic trans word than I was transferred to the LGBTQXYZ call center, where a person with a woman’s name but a man’s voice listed to my probably semi-coherent story and then advised me that “it was only clothing” and didn’t change who my husband was. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and howled FUCK YOU like a banshee into the phone, and hung up. This was the first of the social betrayals.

The social betrayals continued. I quickly learned that, living in a large, liberal city, that because my husband was a transvestite and also gay-interested, that he was a heroic, marginalized creature, a poor, oppressed minority whose voice had been silenced since time immemorial, and whose every trans and gay interest must be validated. Looking back, I think therapists are terrified that they might appear anything less than sympathetic to trans/gay life and be walloped with an enormous lawsuit, or doxed to death. So, nothing but support for the dear boy, and nothing but nothing for me. I also found (with difficulty) a group composed of women whose husbands were secretly transvestite, gay, or bisexual and met up with them. These meetings, and the group itself have to operate in the shadows because the women…lied to by their husbands and betrayed sexually and in every way…are targeted as a hateful group for not supporting their husband’s new life and for being hurt by it. Even though the group never gay-bashes, and the issue is not the gayness but the fact that these men lied to us, conned us, and married us under false pretenses. But somehow, WE are the issue. (I also want to note for the record, dear sisters, that the women I met were beautiful, smart, strong women with high ethical standards. That may be part of our appeal and why these deceivers seek us out: we are the perfect disguise.)

Then I found out about the Carnes (spit on the ground) and their approach. They seemed to have tons of experience but the whole co-dependence model, still out there on the net, on YouTube, and worst of all, in clinical practice, like a damn virus, is offensive. Do these therapists never consider that when they meet us OF COURSE we are crazed individuals, snooping through email and distraught, BUT WE WEREN’T BEFORE. Before, we were normal, loving women, committed to our marriages and families, responsible, ethical and grounded. My hatred of Patrick (paaTOOEY) Carnes and his spawn of Satan daughter (double paaTOOEY that she is a woman and betrays women) are based on the fact that I think they do know this. And carry on their mega-corporation on the backs of broken, desperate women for financial gain.

Then, it was Doug Weiss and the whole sex addict/intimacy anorexic model. I’m still in this one, but not for long. Because I’ve come to a realization, over the past few days, that what he is describing is covert narcissism. I don’t think there is any cure for that, and likely much suffering by the partner and family for, at best, small improvement. My husband attends a recovery meeting every week, and with 11 men, only 1 (9%) has not betrayed his wife sexually in the past 3-4 years. This is not recovery, in my view. I would never get on a plane with a 9% chance of landing. Yet here we are.

This is not even to discuss the effect of porn. I used to think it was harmless, but now I see it is not. It rewires men’s brains for perversion, violence, and the objectification of women, and even children.

My professional life is clinical research. Anyone bringing a new drug or device to market must do so following accepted clinical practice, publish their data, and prove their case. For SA, I see very little data, and so little recent. My husband, as a transvestite, and with fetishes, is considered to have DSMV-diagnosable illness. But the research becomes very sparse starting in the late sixties, when society began to accept an anything-goes approach to sexuality, and now anyone publishing on it is doxed as a hater. And of course now transvestites have become the much-friendlier-and-more-benign-sounding cross-dressers. I have tried, for 16 months to find data on the recovery rates for sexual addiction. It is not a medical term, but there are certainly loads of treatment centers out there which will happily take your money and tell you hopeful things, yet don’t seem to have actual “recovery” data.

The violence done to women and children breaks my heart. I am obviously hurt by having to go through it myself, but what crushes me is that it is so prevalent, socially supported, and we are betrayed again, multiple times, by those from whom we should expect support and help.

What these men do to women is abuse. Not abuse-ive, or abuse-like. But clear-cut abuse. 100% of us with at least some depression and PTSD symptoms, 70% with full-blown PTSD, 60% with discovery-triggered eating disorders. This is not “small-T” trauma either, it is capital T.fucking.TRAUMA. I was once stalked in the woods and shot at, and my experience is that was small-t trauma compared to the large-T trauma of intimate betrayal.

I had a dream a few nights ago. I was in Iran on a pleasure trip with a bunch of other women, all Western women. (A pleasure trip to Iran is no crazier than marrying my husband and expecting a happy and principled life, though I didn’t know who he was at the time.) Anyway, we were at a restaurant having dinner, all of the women smart, funny and pretty, and all of us careful to keep our hair tucked behind our hijab, not to show our ankles, or say anything offensive. But none of that mattered to the morality police. They stormed into the restaurant and dragged one of the women outside, beating her with truncheons into unconsciousness. I ran out after her, but they were so fast and good at brutalizing women, that by the time I caught up, she was lying facedown, covered in blood, and had wet herself. I was scared to move her for fear her back was broken. And I thought to myself: “My God, we have all got to leave this country immediately.”