For New Sisters – Be Careful About Marriage Counseling with an SA

Clare,
That is insane, disgusting, degrading, and a huge disservice. It should be illegal while Im on a roll!!! This is a very interesting and well informed post. I’m sure it will help all of our new sister’s in some way.

I’m not new and I am divorced and long gone- and still it made me reflect back in my 17 year marriage (20 year relationship) Yep. Same thing. I even discussed getting fake boobs with one counselor. I am so glad I didn’t take those drastic measures- when now I know- all the beautifying in the world would not have made a bit of difference. None.

Yes, yes, and yes. The counselor we saw years ago had me convinced I was not meeting my husband’s sexual needs and that I did not express my appreciation enough for him. He had this counselor so wrapped around his finger. Of course, the next few years I thought I was to blame for his affair. I tried to be and do everything his girlfriend did – except suck his toes. I drew the line there.
What bull! I know the truth now. Don’t buy into it.

clare, i’m so sorry too, it’s criminal, what those therapists asked of you, so unfair and traumatizing, they should lose their licence. great post and a wise warning.

Wow, Clare. Thank you for that post. Its clear and concise and gave me yet another lens to see more clearly what I was trying to take responsibility for all those years. What a crazy statement … taking responsibility for someone else’s bad behavior. But he did tell the therapist the sad story of how I was too wrapped up in my kids (scuse me? 17 and 18 when we met, hardly adults that didn’t need attention) too suspicious and jealous (this is another crazymaker – while my first marriage wasn’t a big success in the end, I was never jealous or suspicious, we just grew apart after marrying too young) He told me and the counselor that I was unadventurous (that means not wanting to meticulously act out his fantasies no matter how much of a turn off they were) And all that time, I was worried I actually was all those things. As I have mentioned before, he was the worldly musician…all I’d done was raise two kids, teach for 15 years and participate in building and opening a liberal arts private school in my community. Jeez, a total bumpkin. I’m sooo relieved to both be free of it and to be able to finally shed that feeling of not being up to it or being at fault. I still go over those hundreds of moments from the new vantage point of understanding…now I can see the deception, the covering, the distractions, the blaming and shaming. Fucking incredible is what it is, but I think every time I remember another instance where I thought something was off or amiss and was assured I was paranoid or crazy or just wrong (literally, “You’re wrong!!”)
I get this wave of righteous empowerment. I was right all along – I can trust my gut as long as I listen to it. Most of my discovery came after I had already asked him to leave. Five years of crying nearly every day for the insanity and frustration was finally enough. Since then its been like peeling an onion and the hardest thing is to not seek revenge. Very. Public. Revenge. He doesn’t have $$$ I can take, just his precious reputation in the music industry. But I just can’t bring myself to get back down in the muck with him again. Thanks for sharing — its really helpful to share with people I don’t have to squirm and explain SA to. Love to everyone in the ‘hood.

This one I have to say is a kicker, because if you don’t know, you don’t know.

I flat refused marriage counseling when this stuff came out, can’t believe he even suggested it. In the journal he threw at me, he was in marriage counseling with his first wife WHILE WE WERE DATING!!!! (She had moved out several months before, but was in the area and they were talking about her moving back in and resuming the marriage) Before that, he was in marriage counseling with her while he spent over 10K on whores in 6 months. According to his journals he started his whore shopping on Escort.com about 3 years before their separation, for his business trips, all while they were in marriage counseling and took four religious retreats to “repair their relationship”. Before that, he was in marriage counseling with her while he was cruising 8 hookup sites with 40+ user names.

The creepiest thing EVER, he wrote about a counseling session “Sidney (the counselor) actually asked today if I had ever had a problem with pornography or sexual addiction, and I successfully redirected that.” The man had THREE whore appts that week, one with two whores at once. This after 7 YEARS of counseling with three different counselors. When I asked him what the hell that was about, how could he possibly engage in counseling about his marriage and NOT ADDRESS his sexual philandering, and he said, “That’s not what we were there to talk about, before that it never came up and I really didn’t think it was relevant.”

I asked, “So you thought that was irrelevant to all the problems you had in a 25 year marriage?”

His response…, “Yes.”

He wrote regularly that the counselors all agreed that the problem with the marriage was that his wife was “Too controlling, and needed to be more sexually receptive!!!”

I just wonder what was going on in that woman’s mind, and how she might have been wildly grabbing for some control because whether she empirically knew it or not, by the time she was considering moving back in, her husband was screwing someone else at least every 3rd or 4th day. If you count whacking off to porn he was probably screwing someone else every time he shut the bathroom door. My take is that she KNEW things were spinning out of control but had no proof to support it. He is the gaslighter from hell, too. She’s a bitch now. I’d bet she didn’t start out like that, and in that scenario, who wouldn’t be?

Well, you KNOW he didn’t tell me about all that before we were married. He had a marriage counseling session with his ex the week before he proposed to me. He was accepting nude photos of one of his whores on his phone while walking up the steps to get me on the day he proposed. He had a “lunch” date with his favorite whore the day after he proposed. His wife sent an email saying she was ready to come home the week after we were married.

You can imagine what THAT makes me feel like.

Marriage counseling was a game to him, obviously. And he played it really, really well. I watched him manipulate two CSAT sessions he wanted me to attend to “support him”. Well one as an introductory session to meet the counselor to see if I “approved”of him. The first counselor my SA saw after discovery was a joke. But at the time, I didn’t have all this information and didn’t know what that poor counselor was up against. One session I attended afterwards was a “disclosure” the SA obviously manipulated, and then I attended a second attempt at “disclosure” which he tried to manipulate and I walked out saying I wouldn’t be subjected to this ever again. CAST agreed.

Counseling with someone that entrenched is indeed torture.

AMEN to all the above. Lili ( from PoSARC) calls it TIT….trauma induced therapy. It almost killed me.

That’s what I meant. I knew the gist of it. It’s so traumatizing that I can’t dwell on it very long. I could have at least gotten the phrase correct 🙂

I wonder how many couples’ therapists actually say to themselves, If the wife suspects he’s cheating…he probably is.

I was looking for info on debinca and found this post. It’s awesome and deserves revival. Every marriage counbsellor should probe for SA with any discovery of an “affair”

Wow…that was mostly my experience, except my counselor is also our marriage therapist and she wasn’t entirely fooled by him because she knew a lot about him and our situation before we went to her as a couple. Still, he lied left and right throughout the sessions and blamed everything on me, and when I called him on it he pointed to me as “a bully and abuser” and that’s why he moved out. The joint therapy was complete TORTURE, just slam and punish sessions, and he said the most egregious, ridiculous lies and waited for me to become unhinged so he could point at me again. He even told the counselor that I was “rewriting history to make myself look better” and that I was a liar. Eventually it got to the point where the counselor said “we’re at an impasse because you have two different versions of history” and that we couldn’t move forward until we established what in fact was true, and he just said “yes exactly, and we can’t do that because she’s a liar.”

I asked my counselor about the SA angle and compulsive lying, and she said marriage counseling was not for handling SA and that the SAH needed to get help on his own to deal with it…that HE needs to own his problems and none of it is my responsibility to carry around or to deal with. Problem is, the SAH won’t admit that’s what he is, and still hasn’t owned up to the hooker calls/texts/visits. I initially thought he’d get sheepish and defensive in counseling sessions, but he got viciously insulting and offensive, blaming me for everything and taking zero responsibility for ANY of his behavior. We have a session coming up next week and I’m already nauseous and phobic about it. Last year I had gone to some sessions with him and stopped going because it was too stressful to just sit there like a punching bag while he threw one insult and lie after another…and if I opened my mouth it was the same thing…”she’s an abuser.”