Winter Newsletter

Cassie's our Meme-Master, spending time creating inspiring social media quotes, images and phrases that are empowering, sometimes snarky, but always thought-provoking. Thank you, Cassie!

eBook Set for Partners

From the enthusiastic responses we've received about our books, we are grateful they have had a positive impact. Readers have e-mailed us telling us that their reality-bending experiences with betrayal trauma have finally made more sense to them, allowing them to make decisions grounded in more clarity. Others expressed they were helped to reflect on why it always felt like it was their responsibility to stay partnered with chronic cheaters and all of them wanted to work on breaking that burdensome pattern as it no longer served them.

One of our goals with these ebooks was to provide information and resources to women who characterize their experiences within their infidelity-ravaged relationships as being beyond frustrating and demoralizing. (And some partners will feel satisfied enough with the relationship they're in, so the rest of this newsletter may not be a compelling read for them...if that describes you, please feel free to skip over it.)

Some time ago when we posted our video on Why Do I Stay? The Biochemistry of the Loyalty Bond, the sheer number of comments and private emails we received in response surprised us. What most of those messages pointed to was the consensus amongst almost all of them: women reported feeling stuck in a type of paralysis caused by the pressure to stay with their cheater and "stick it out" despite the constant chaos he was causing.
Some of this pressure to stay with him was internally-generated through religious conditioning, internalized family messages, fear of being alone or starting over, fear of being stigmatized, financial insecurity and more. The women who wrote to us were astute (and brave) enough to be able to recognize this pressure on themselves, no small feat; there are so many unseen forces working against women considering a change-up of the status quo that it takes vast amounts of courage to call out even blatant injustice in their close relationships.

Then there is the external pressure. Even when these women who felt trapped had finally reached their limits on the number of lies, so-called "slips and relapses", trickle-truths and his anger/resentment that they could accept from their mates, often their therapists, clergy or recovery coaches would counsel them to stay longer before making any decisions about their futures.
Unsurprisingly, for most of them in already spirit-breaking relationships, the proverbial quicksand just got deeper and stickier. Abusive relationships do that.

Making the decision to cut ties with a man perpetrating Intimate Partner Abuse in order to regain one's own sanity and self-respect is never an easy decision - we want women who feel stuck to know they have more options than they think, or that they've been told they have by others who may have an investment in them continuing to stay.

Better yet, we'd like to demonstrate what un-stuckness looks like. Because without seeing examples of actual women just like them who have liberated themselves from this slow torture and often, treatment-induced-trauma, they can't see a path through. And without the ability to see other survivors who are actually experiencing some happiness again in their lives post-relationship, women who feel trapped cannot even imagine a freer life.

We asked ourselves: what can we do to help these trauma-entrenched women so they're not doomed to suffer in limbo forever? What would we have needed to help free ourselves when we were in the same situations? What did help those who emancipated themselves?

Sharing the Survivor Series here is a way to help women envision a pathway out of feeling so ensnared in the nightmarish loop playing out in their relationships, month after month and year after year, even long after many have enrolled their men in "sex addiction" treatment and 12-step programs that can offer no better than the approximately 5% success rate of any addiction recovery.

While everyone hopes their man will be the exception to the dismally high failure rate, it isn't prudent to tie our well-being and identity to whether these men succeed or not; that's entirely up to them.
As partners, bypassing that fact is a recipe for serious depression, anxiety or worse. We need to keep ourselves in reality at the same time as we keep one eye open for whether anything substantial is changing at home within a reasonable period of time.

In the meantime, if you feel mired down in your own situation, unable to see a way through to some peace on the other side of this, we hope to inspire you with our new video today: