What Fresh Hell Is This?

Dan Drake means well. I met him at the very first APSATS training in Dallas. I’d scrimped and saved to attend the $875 training, plus airfare, plus hotel, believing that I would learn new ways to help partners, while also being part of a revolution in partner treatment. (I always mention the money, because it still pisses me off that I wasted it.) Unfortunately, politics being what they are, I found APSATS pretty disappointing. I’m not sure you can accomplish much for partners when, as always, sex addicts are part of the leadership. But here I’ve gone way off topic. I wanted to comment on Dan’s recent APSATS blog post, to illustrate how even well-meaning sex-addicted therapists can’t seem to get it right. He links to a Ted talk on lying, endorsing it as beneficial to partners. It’s a short blog entry, condensed–kind of like a Shrinky Dink, a big ugly plastic picture shrunk down to a small ugly plastic picture. He begins by stating a universal truth: Sex addicts lie. Then he gives us reasons they lie–to conceal their behaviors, to keep partners in the dark. He suggests that the first person they learn to deceive is themselves, which I question even before he contradicts himself by telling us that lying is a coping mechanism they develop in childhood, because “Lying helped them to survive in a world or in a family that wasn’t safe for them to fully be themselves.” Sex addiction therapists always feel the need to explain why these grown men lie. We did a lot of things as children until we learned better. We wet our pants and picked our noses. We stole crayons. We carried dirty raggedy old blankets or teddy bears in order to feel safe. I know countless men and women who were abused or neglected as children, who also had to find ways to survive–and yet they never lied and lived secret lives or squandered their children’s college funds on hookers. Every day, I talk to kind-hearted, decent survivors who never defrauded anyone, never betrayed anyone in such egregious ways. CSATs cannot ever talk about the abusive behaviors of the addicts without qualifying or making excuses. That might cost them clients. Next, he recommends the video–with its awesome lesson on the linguistic patterns of liars–for partners who are trying to rebuild trust. I interpret this as: ‘Here’s a way to catch the sex addict when he lies. I mean, he’s gonna lie.’ If lying is one of the many ways SA’s abuse spouses, and the generally accepted attitude is that they’re going to continue doing it until they have a certain amount of recovery…and if the kinds of things they lie about put partners at risk for sexually-transmitted diseases, financial devastation, and emotional trauma…then WHY WHY WHY don’t they tell partners the same thing they would tell any woman whose husband abuses her in ways that leave physical scars: He is dangerous; get yourself and your children away from him. But instead we get, “…here are some ways you can look at language to better rebuild trust in the truth.” I think instructing the partner of a sex addict about how to spot lies is akin to teaching the victim of domestic violence how to dodge a punch. Better to help her find her way to safety.