I recently stumbled across a site called sisterhoodofsupport dot org . I’m not going to link to it because you can find it yourself if you want to after reading this. I am actually speechless. If you all knew me in real life you would understand how monumental that is. I literally argue for a living.
I don’t know the woman who runs the site, but someone clearly peed in her Cheerios at some point. She claims “By 2011 my [old] website marriedtoasexaddict dot com was bursting at the seams. Tens of thousands of women visited the site each month and were asking for a private place to discuss their experiences. They needed a place away from the prying eyes of the public and their families. A place where they could feel safe sharing the most intimate details of their ordeals with others who understood. In February of 2011 The Sisterhood of Support was Launched.” Hmmmm… “tens of thousands of readers” (a claim she states more than once) yet only a few comments and no substantive back and forth discussions on posts. And, in spite of the name of her old site and the mission of her new site, she flat out denies that sex addiction is real.
I’m actually marginally okay with the addiction deniers. There are crazy people everywhere and as long as they don’t force me to join them, they can do as they please. I am, however, indignant when someone with no applicable expertise tries to pass themselves off as an expert. The author/host backs up her opinions by stating “Because of my medical background I also bring a vast amount of scientific research.” Oh really? She was (is?) a nurse. Nurses are awesome. My mom was a nurse. I love nurses. I am, however, unaware of any RN degree that comes with a psychiatry or psychology degree, or even a deep dive in the DSM. According to the site her medical background seems to have been in hospice care. There is no peer reviewed research on her site. None. And yet she makes proclamations like this:
It’s one thing to tell a Partner “Hey, nothing is for certain. He might relapse. He might not.” That would be fair. Telling someone to bail upon the discovery of their spouse’s acting out because “long term change simply does not happen” and using one’s “medical background” as some indicia of authority or expertise??? That is seriously screwed up.
I’m 25 months out from my first DDay. Had I found that site back then? Holy crap. And sadly, the few stories that accompany the blog posts are heart breaking. Partners are reaching out, looking for facts and support, and what they are getting is nothing more than doom and gloom. She somehow manages to make ChumpLady look like Little Suzie Sunshine by comparison. I’m surprised she doesn’t accept ads from divorce lawyers.
To be clear, I don’t think that any partner of a sex addict should be hoodwinked into any assurance that their spouse will recover or that they will stay sober. I also don’t think anyone should put all their marbles in the “my marriage is so much better post-affair” hopper. Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t be. It all depends on what it was truly like beforehand and how much work both parties put in post-discovery and every day of your life thereafter. To me it is also true that there is a sex addiction industry blossoming that includes a number of questionable practitioners and methodologies. That said, the mantra of “Abandon hope, all who enter here… [insert wailing sounds]” seems a bit hysterical. And like sour grapes.
I agree with her that there is a lack of peer reviewed research on sex addiction and the benefits (or lack thereof) of certain treatment methods. Her position that data can’t come from surveys or statements from the addicts themselves, however, would invalidate almost all studies of psychological and psychiatric issues, including those regarding betrayed spouses. There is no objective, observable measure of my trauma, for example. You have to ask me about it and I have to tell you or describe it to you. A researcher would need to depend on me to be truthful and/ or build in a margin of error to account for untruths. The author/ host simply can’t have it both ways: citing Dr. Minwalla on one hand (whose own research involves partner interviews), and yet undermining and invalidating addict interviews on the other.
I fully and freely acknowledge that my own husband may fall flat on his face and our marriage may end. Only time will tell. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t think Handsome knows for sure either even though he would bet the farm that he won’t relapse. That being said, this “expert” certainly doesn’t know – or have any legitimate basis to know – and is in no position to make these absurdly definitive proclamations.
I have found a lot of balanced and well-researched info by listening to, and reading books by, Dr Robert Weiss. He has a lot of training and professional experience (PhD, MSW, clinical sexologist and practicing psychotherapist, an expert in the treatment of adult intimacy disorders, including sex/porn/relationship addictions along with co-occurring drug/sex addiction.) He would never tell a spouse to leave. In fact, he estimates that 80-85% of couples stay together. He also would argue (based on professional experience) that many addicts break free of, and are able to stay fee of, a sexual addiction. It isn’t easy but it is possible.
I really enjoy his podcast. He gets a lot of great, intelligent guests and he’s willing to learn from them. I believe that 80-85% number is likely high (in the various groups my husband attends the number seems to be more like 40-50%) but maybe the SAs who seek out individual and intensive therapy fare better than those who just do 12 step.
I agree with you, blackacre, that the number seems high. I would put have it closer to 40-50% too. I wonder if it’s because he works with a particular group where the spouse has already decided to stay, if the partner changes and does the work required. Not everyone is up for that level of therapy for a start, and not everyone wants to continue with a partner who has betrayed them – even where the partner wants to/ is committed to change.
WordPress may be cutting out the screen shots from the website. Grrrrr… 😡 I’m trying to fix but they do seem to be available when viewing the post in Reader or by going into my site.
Agree, my friend. I have seen this site and it is really nothing more than a place to bash…They bash professionals who have helped so many partners, they bash the addict who is not in recovery, they bash the addict who IS in recovery, they bash the partner who is working so hard to heal and stay married…they seem to be nothing but negative. Word to those who are really trying to heal on a deep level: Steer clear of this site and its toxicity!
It’s very sad. She’s completely discouraging partners from even trying to see if the relationship can be salvaged. Her position seems to simply be that all SAs are irredeemable liars. No doubt some are, but it’s not reasonable to paint them all with the same brush.
❤️
Sour grapes is exactly what she is about. I don’t believe I have ever mentioned her or her website on my blog, and that is by design. I found her website right after dday, but she still had both sites… she was just transitioning over to the new site so the old stuff was still there. It sort of presented a both side situation, but then she deleted the old and made the new one for a fee!!! I have actually cautioned wives from going to her site, but it somehow makes them want to go there more, so I don’t mention her at all.
From my memory, the story goes that this woman was married to a sex addict. She threw everything into her blog to HELP wives of sex addicts learn to live within the system of recovery for sex addiction and she believed in recovery. She was positive and her website had a lot of good feels and then her husband relapsed. He cheated (may have even left her, I can’t remember) and she went all crazy. She changed the theme of her blog/website completely. She became an evil sex addict hater and has never looked back. She literally bases her entire “research” on her own husband. It’s so strange and unfortunately, just like with Chump Lady, there are a lot of women/people who feed off the negative energy and somehow turn it around to be useful. I personally do not get it and obviously have written about Chump Lady numerous times. Chump Lady does seem helpful compared to the SOS lady.
When Blue Eyes was at Omar’s intensive, he became close with one of the guys in the seminar. A younger married man with two small boys. The wife was back home in NY while her husband was with Blue Eyes. Their youngest was just a couple weeks old when he left for LA. She was threatening to leave him while he was at the seminar. She was hysterical. Blue Eyes felt so bad for the guy that he offered up me/my phone number to talk with the wife since I seemed to be handling things okay (Trish went berserk when she found this all out). Anyway…. when I talked with this young woman on the phone, she had already found the SOS website and within two days the women on the site had convinced her to leave her husband. When she talked with me on the phone she didn’t want to talk about her husband, or their future, or what she was doing… she wanted to convince ME to leave MY husband. She said I was being duped by Omar and my husband and that there was 0% change that he would succeed at recovery. I was dumbfounded by her evangelical zealousness after TWO DAYS talking with these women from the site.
Now what is even CRAZIER… is that Omar has this site listed on his resources page… at the very bottom. I noticed it a couple months ago. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was going to contact him about it but completely forgot until reading this post. Maybe if we both contact him he’ll delete it? I’m confused as to who talked him into putting it there in the first place.
xoxo
I know about Omar’s site. That’s so very crazy to me too. (Full disclosure … it’s how I found the site.) He can’t possibly have read it, right? I mean, it’s patently nuts and fear mongering. I know he has the “I don’t necessarily endorse these providers and sites” caveat, but hers just does not seem to be in keeping with his philosophies. At all. Why run intensives for addicts if they’re all hopeless?
I can imagine being bitter and resentful if Handsome relapsed or left me. On the other hand, I would hope that I wouldn’t paint all SAs with the same brush.
❤️
I had an instinct you were going to say you found it through Omar’s site. I definitely don’t think he’s read it. From my experience Omar doesn’t necessarily focus one way or another on whether couples should stay together or not and his tactics are to light a fire under the addict so they realize how serious their situation is. Omar is super sensitive to the betrayal trauma but I don’t think he would condone such hate and bitterness towards the addict. It does seem so counterintuitive to healing for either the addict or the spouse. Omar knows they are not hopeless and I know he wants to have such an impact on the addict that they are sort of “scared straight,” if you will.
I think if Blue Eyes relapsed or left me, I would be very very sad. Mostly because he would be too weak to be the person he wants to be. He would be giving in to the addiction and I know he doesn’t want that. I have mostly healed from the betrayal and I know further betrayal would not have the same affect. I have truly separated myself from the awful addictive behaviors BE participated in. I would be sad and lonely that I would have to give up on a relationship I worked so hard for. I would never give up on him though. I would always want him to succeed whether he was with me or not.
I think sex addiction is very similar to other addictions and it is not about the drug, but in fact about the underlying situation that caused the addict to need the drug in the first place. We know there are recovered alcoholics, drug addicts, etc… and there are sex addicts with decades of sobriety and recovery behind them. Regardless though, painting the addict as evil and without value is really unattractive human behavior.
xoxo
Oh, and by the way that young wife up and left her husband while he was still at the seminar… I think with the help of some of the women on the site, actually. She moved all the way from NY to Colorado with the babies. She divorced him immediately. He eventually moved out west and has visitation. They never reconciled.
Wow. That’s… amazing. Sad, but amazing. The spouse of the guy Handsome went to Omar’s with was also unhinged. She took control of their finances and refused to give him more than $10 each morning (b/c there are $20 hookers in Hollywood???). So Handsome would buy his lunch each day and then the poor guy had to take the receipt home and she would give him the money to reimburse Handsome. And she apparently called Omar screaming and crying multiple times a day too and at some point it got so bad that Omar had to tell the guy he was concerned for his safety. I can empathize with her angst, but I feel for the husband too (and for the young husband BE went with too). It can’t be easy to confront and try to heal from your addiction when you have such turmoil at home. 😬
Well, that’s nuts. I mean I do totally understand the trauma and the frantic ways in which we behave post discovery, but we don’t own this other person. The controls we put on them will NEVER keep them sober. They have to want to do it for themselves.
Ha, I thought I was being difficult by asking Omar to give BE two short check-ins with me a day. We were less than 6 months post discovery and diagnosis. I never would have thought of calling Omar, even when BE missed his check-in that second day and I was so upset. Trying to control the other person, although very very tempting, will never ever work. We have to give them the space to figure it out on their own or it will never stick long term. I learned this the hard way. I finally just gave up trying to have things my way, and that is actually when BE realized I could be gone in a second. Once I stopped caring about what he was doing, he was in trouble. Me backing off ended up forcing him to deal with his own emotions and goals. A real wake up call for him since I handled everything with the kids, the house, the families, events, holidays, vacations, even major parts of our business… so when I backed off, it scared him. He always had his addiction to cope with difficult things… and when he didn’t have the luxury of the knee-jerk reaction of his drug, he actually had to deal with portions of his own life he had never dealt with before, and that led to some emotions he had never dealt with before. It’s so freaking easy for them to depend on us or to blame us. They have to be forced into reality sometimes.
Anyway, I have not been to the SOS website for 5.5 years and I don’t intend to, but I think I will send an email to Omar. Thanks for the post! <3
Kat – “It’s so freaking easy for them to depend on us or to blame us.” So true. I get it.
BA / Kat – I found the SOS site right away after my husband confessed, called 911 and was in a psych unit. (Not an optimal situation for me at all.) It tainted me at 1st for sure. Poison would be a good word. I’m glad I read other things too. I’m also glad I chose to try to help him. I visited him in the hospital. You both know the story (I think) – but he wasn’t stable when released and he was home a few days, got an awful, threatening call from the state medical board’s attorney (my husband self-reported that he was ill with depression and in the hospital – he had broken no laws, harmed no one and wasn’t abusing substances or anything – but he was required to report. The morning after he got that call, he almost killed himself. He would have been successful, but I acted fast enough. If I would have listened to the women on that site, he’d be dead. How is that a good thing?
One more thing – in case anyone else reads this – a woman named Diane was also (somehow?) part of the SOS site when I first checked it out. She is now out on her own (Your Story Is Safe Here – if people want to find it – they can). I don’t want to read her stuff, b/c I know from history where she is coming from, and it doesn’t help ME see MY truth, and some of this “stuff” can be very harmful, b/c it isn’t relevant to our situations. We have similarities, for sure, and understand betrayal trauma, etc., but we do have our own stories and our own lives. Many hugs to you both!
Yep. I’ve seen Diane’s site too. I agree with her assessment of sex addiction as a form of intimate partner abuse, but she lost me after that with the same doom and gloom as the other site. She just masks that somewhat better on her site. I’m sorry her husband turned out to be a lemon, but it doesn’t mean that all SAs are incapable of change.
xo
Agreed re: term “intimate partner abuse” – Minwalla uses that (I think). Also agree w/ your general appraisal of her site. I wonder if either of those “professionals” believe an alcoholic can recover? It’s not easy, for sure!
Also – good title for your article, BA!
I read Chump Lady fairly regularly. She’s completely wrong about the existence of what she calls “unicorns” and she completely cherry picks the letters that she lampoons, but some of the snark is still funny, and it’s good bathroom reading. Her die hard fans are completely brainwashed, though, and not capable of independent thought any longer. Believe it or not, Ive gone to several of their meetups in my area and I made one friend out of it that I keep in touch with. All the attendees with the exception of my new friend look at me like I’ve lost my mind still being with my husband but I attend 1) to offer support to other betrayed people and 2) to try and change their minds about sex addicts. The majority will just think I’m a pitiful, delusional, sad little person but I don’t care. Let them think what they want. Maybe one day I’ll change a couple of minds. Maybe.
And one other Hing I for got to mention….Chump Lady was only married for six months. I mention on my blog that I have condiments in my refrigerator older than that.
As for SOS….I’ve seen it too. The term “sour grapes” is perfect. If things didn’t work out for her, then she can’t deal with the fact that they may work out for someone else.
Six months? Wow. Cheers to her for making a 2nd career out of that brief moment in time.
The difference I see between CL and SOS is that CL relies on opinions derived from personal experience. (“This is what happened to me and a ton of my readers so… .”) SOS, on the other hand, tries to claim actual medical expertise she doesn’t have, using phrases like “because of my medical background” to support her bitterness and anti-recovery positions. That’s deceitful and manipulative at best, and destructively unethical at worst.
Xo
They have meet-ups?? 😳 I had no idea. Those must be fun. I laud you for making a stand for the SA/ partner tribe.
Xo
This makes me sad, after finding out about an affair, you feel so lost and so alone. You search for some explanation, some comfort and reassurance. This woman’s website is taking advantage of that and imposing her own opinions on others without the training or knowledge.
It is exactly that CMB. I wish it didn’t exist. ❤️
I adore Jo Ann and Diane and have for 11 years since my first D-Day back in 2008. I am also still married to the “SA” in my life. So if Jo Ann is so wrong, where are those peer reviewed studies on SA recovery rates?? I certainly have not seen them and my H has been in treatment with Robert Weiss, Dr. Minwalla and many, many others. Heck, he’s been continually in treatment for more than a decade now. He’s been “sober” for 2 months this week. His longest stretch of “sobriety”? Two and a half years. In a few years, y’all might sound more like Diane & Jo Ann. Guess what, even if my H became that rare unicorn 🦄 that “recovered” from SA, I would still have mad love & respect for Jo Ann & Diane because I respect ALL of my sisters who have been through this kind of hell. I remember when they both supported their husband’s recovery and felt hopeful. Why on earth you would bash other partners is completely beyond me. So sad. 😭😭😭 I am a feminist and stand by other women. ✌🏻
Hello Maya. I appreciate your comment but, respectfully, I simply disagree with you. I do not believe that having an extra X chromosome buys someone an automatic pass from anything. My issue isn’t that the person who runs the site doesn’t believe there is any hope for recovery from sex addiction. Everyone is absolutely entitled to write from their own perspective. My issue is that she zealously cloaks that opinion in an air of professional authority and knowledge that she simply lacks. I find it misleading and manipulative. (In my own state those representations could be grounds for an investigation by the Board of Nursing.)
I believe you missed my sentence “I agree with her that there is a lack of peer reviewed research on sex addiction and the benefits (or lack thereof) of certain treatment methods.” It would be wonderful if there was a deeper pool of research to validate or to invalidate various treatment modalities and programs. That would benefit both SAs and partners alike. (Why waste time on treatments that don’t work?) Suggesting that any study that uses addict interviews is inherently bogus, however, is fairly absurd.
I don’t believe that I have ever, anywhere in my blog, suggested that someone can recover from SA. My personal belief is that recovery is a state of mind and conduct that needs to be perpetual. When I write about being “in recovery” or “healthy recovery” that isn’t to say that any spouse in such a state is no longer an addict.
If you have found solace and solidarity on the site, I’m happy for you. I simply feel tragically sad for any spouse who seeks positive and uplifting support only to find that resource first. You must have a degree of faith in your husband to have hung in there with him for as long as you have and to have spent the time and money on things like Drs. Minwalla and Weiss. I doubt you would have done that if you truly thought it was all as hopeless as that site portrays.
I wish you and your husband the best. ❤️
“She somehow manages to make ChumpLady look like Little Suzie Sunshine by comparison.”
Huh. That is saying something.