Adult Clergy Sexual Abuse

Not the Other Woman.

There are two purposes to this website: one is a safe place for me to write, rant and reflect on my journey as I came to learn that I’d not had an affair with my Christian counsellor. Instead, it has been abuse. The second is to bring awareness about the abuse of power and position within the church and greater Christian community.

Everything I write about applies to anyone in a position of power over another. I am specifically addressing relationships in the Christian community such as pastor/congregant, Christian or biblical counsellor/client and any male in spiritual authority over a woman - especially when they enter into a counselling/advising type role.

For a year of my life, I was told and treated like the other woman, but now I know better.

This blog is part of the messy process of emptying the dirty sludge of the past two years so that I can reassemble my life into something good that gives God glory. This blog is my response to over a year of Christian counselling that ended in a sexualized relationship with my counsellor after he told me he loved me.

This blog demonstrates the damage that an abuse of power and position can have on a woman and her husband. And finally, this blog will discuss the lack of understanding and ignorance that both. Christians and affair recovery programs demonstrate when they do not recognize the difference between an affair and abuse. This blog may be for you.

It was seven months after my husband discovered that I was emotionally entangled with my Christian counsellor that I stumbled upon a website that changed the trajectory of my recovery. I learned that I had not had an online emotional affair with my Christian counsellor. I had been a victim of abuse.

As I continue to recover, not just from the warped relationship that developed with my counsellor but also the damaging after-effects that affair recovery programs left on me, I have come into a new understanding of the power imbalance that creates an environment ripe for abuse when safeguards are not kept in place and tight boundaries kept.

Thanks to my current counsellor and two non-profit organisations: The Hope of Survivors and the Therapy Exploitation Link Line, I am slowly finding my way, dragging myself and my memories out of the pit of affair recovery that I was wrongly dropped into.

Sometimes I’m angry.

I’m angry at my Christian counsellor for every choice he made and continued to make as the abuse went deeper and deeper. I’m angry at the ignorance of people around us who did not recognize his abuse once the relationship came out into the light. I’m angry at wasted months of affair recovery which did not address the full narrative of my experience. I am rightfully angry and am using this anger to fight an injustice - not just for me but for future women who find themselves in this mess.

Even though he too is a victim, I’m also frustrated that my husband still is unable validate my experience of abuse the way my counsellors and mentors at the above organizations have been able to.

Mostly I’m tired.

I’m tired of seeing my husband in pain. I’m tired of being in pain. I’m tired of feeling violated by a professional that I trusted. I’m tired of searching, reading and educating myself because there has been no one to protect and defend me and I’ve had to do it on my own. I’m tired of memories from the year with that Christian counsellor; memories that he once told me, we would be able to access fondly forever but have now become a curse.

An affair with a friend

If I’d had an affair with a friend or co-worker, there would be no content for this blog and I would no longer be in counselling. Over a year ago, I accepted the title of the “unfaithful wife” who took accountability for having a long-distance sexualized affair days after my husband found evidence of the relationship. In the months following and in the words of my husband, I went “above and beyond”, taking the steps as advised via affair recovery programs to show remorse and empathy and basically make our marriage a safe place for my husband to heal.

They taught me how to “recover” as an unfaithful wife.

I happily gave up my phone and computer passwords, got rid of clothing and changed vocabulary that had become a trigger for my husband. I called my counsellor’s wife and confessed and apologized for having an affair with her husband (You can read the post I wrote about it here). I did all the things that an unfaithful wife is to do. All the while and deep down, knowing that this was somehow not addressing the reality of what had happened to me. I even swallowed the pain of my husband’s past neglect that I had yet to fully recover from so that I could focus on him and his healing. I learned what an unfaithful wife needs to do and I did it. I suppose we are still married now because of that.

They didn’t tell us that it was abuse.

If we had understood that it was abuse from the beginning, it would have been more of a team approach to healing. My husband and I, the victims of my Christian counsellor’s abuse, both supporting each other heal differently from the same abuse.

I still would have offered up my phone and passwords, let my husband know where I was during the day and answered all his questions, but I would have done it for a different reason: because I love him and want to help him navigate through this mess, not because I was the cause of this mess.

How are things going between me and my husband now? He has supported me as best he can and partially understands that this was abuse and not an affair. I have been the one to educate him as I learned myself. It is common for victims of this type of abuse to have to do engage in education and battles while trying to heal.

My husband still thinks I had a role to play in it and I don’t think that will change for him. And even though he does understand the abuse on one level, I often feel that emotionally at a deeper level he sees me in a way that I don’t want to be seen. He sees me as his wife who did something 'to’ him rather than his wife whom something ‘done to’. I will add that his recognizing that this was abuse has not magically eliminated his triggers, feelings of betrayal nor his struggle to trust me.

And so here I am, recovering and moving in a different direction than I thought I’d be a year ago. And even with the added effort needed to unpack this new understanding of abuse, I’m still grateful that I know it. Grateful to know that this was not a result of a lack of character on my part - even though that’s how I was treated for months. Hence, I continue to pull myself up out of the pit of affair recovery, clean off the residue and move forward with new, empowering and freeing information.

This Blog is Not…

This blog is not a professional effort to educate you on therapy abuse or clergy sexual abuse of adult women but I suspect it will partially accomplish that. As I share, there will be pieces of information that I’ve gleaned from others and my own experience that will come out in my writing.

This Blog is…

This blog is one place that is all mine, my story, my experience and my struggle to heal. Posts are written from my subjective experience and my new objective understanding of what abuse can look like in a setting where there is an imbalance of power. I am still learning.

I won’t share too much about my husband. His journey is his own to share with whom he chooses. The past year has stolen a lot from him…from us. He continues to work on himself, his triggers and his healing. I’m grateful for that.

And finally, this blog will inevitably show that God can bring good out of what was meant for evil. He can take our vulnerable, hurt and wounded hearts and mend them. None of this was His plan but I’m trusting Him to make something good out of it. He’s already begun.

Meanwhile, I will write in this blog. Not as a woman who knows everything but as a woman who has suffered some things and now knows some new things. Maybe, you see yourself in part of my story and it helps you to understand your own story better.

I am not other woman.

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If you are a victim of ACSA (adult clergy sexual abuse) or have been sexually abused by anyone who was in spiritual authority over you, you might consider joining Restored Voices Collective, a community which I co-founded with other ACSA survivors