Relapse Plans Are for The Abuser, Not the Abused
If you want to see my head explode, start talking about relapse plans for a woman who has been abused by her counsellor or pastor. In fact, it still gives me anxiety to think about it.
One of the most difficult weeks of our affair recovery program was the week focused on creating a relapse plan. I felt like it was the chapter my husband had been waiting on for weeks. He was fully invested in figuring out how he could make sure I did not “cheat” again.
During the time we were going through this session, I was months from understanding the true nature of the abuse that I had experienced, but even without having yet been schooled in the topics of power imbalance and abuse, I knew something was wrong. I knew deep down that what they were asking was not only unfair of them to ask, but impossible for me to do.
Relapse Plan for an Unfaithful Spouse
In our affair recovery sessions, I learned that a relapse plan calls on you to anticipate that you will fall back into your ‘acting out’ behaviour, whatever it is: substance abuse, sex addiction, cheating on your spouse. The unfaithful spouses in our group were asked to look back during the time when we were “acting out” and take note of what was going on in our lives.
Had there been a major life change? Did we just lose a job? Were we feeling lonely? Working late at night with a co-worker? Whatever the environment was that proceeded our ‘acting out’ was to be considered as high-risk and we should include them in our relapse plan as items to avoid - or at least have an accountability partner in certain situations.
We were also alerted to the idea that sometimes you make a decision that does not seem to hold much importance but could wind up directing you back to a place where you are more likely to act out again.
Great advice and exercise if you’ve had an affair. If your counsellor took advantage of you then it’s the kind of thing you want to run away from as you scream loudly and pull out your hair.
Sometimes I think that would have been the better alternative to the degradation I endured at the hands of “experts” of affair recovery who should have known better. They let me down.
The fact that we often call it an affair, circumvents many of the deeper issues that have allowed the abuse to occur and, probably most damaging, it invalidates and blames the victim for what happened and allows an abusive person to continue in ministry.
David K Pooler (from his article entitled, “It is Not an Affair: It is Abuse”
Sure, I’m a big talker now, posting all my crap on an anonymous blog, but I like to think that if I could go back in time armed with what I now know, that I would demand to be heard; demand to stop attending affair recovery sessions and run from everything “affair-related”.
However, the truth is that my husband was also a victim and his head was reeling from the discovery and he was not in the mindset that he would have understood this information coming from me.
He had been betrayed by my counsellor and felt betrayed by me. Walking away from affair recovery would not have been helpful for him or our marriage, because there was no alternative program that could address both of our needs. I hope to one day change that.
From Day One My Husband Was Obsessed With Relapse Plans
I can see why he was scared. He thought I had chosen someone else over him – even as we had just begun to reconcile our marriage after years apart. In his mind, a relapse plan would help him feel safe while ensuring that I did not ‘reoffend’ with some other man.
I now understand why, from the very beginning, talk of a relapse plan made me crazy (remembering it still does). In the beginning, I tried to stuff it down and thought my negative reaction to the relapse plan must be a result of pride. It must have been that I didn’t want to admit that I needed a plan to avoid any possible ‘relapse’.
As I began to create the plan, I became incredibly anxious and it showed up as frustration towards my husband who talked about things like social media being dangerous for me, implying that I was a loose cannon and could not be trusted with such things. He still thought of it as an affair.
And yet to be clear, I had never in 23 years of marriage privately messaged a man on social media. The first time was when my counsellor sent me some GIF about 3 months into our sessions. I had never had coffee or a meal out with another man. I had never worked out or hung out at the gym with another man. I had never over-shared with another man nor complained about my husband to another man. I didn’t communicate with men other than at work and even then, I had no male “buddies”.
There was no evidence in my life of inappropriate communication or really any communication with men until my counsellor started talking to me about things other than scripture and my mental health.
Yeah, I Got Defensive
At one point later on, I would desperately declare to my husband: “Here’s my relapse plan: Maybe I should not have gone to counselling to get healthy and then I would never have got entangled with an unethical Christian counsellor with incredibly poor boundaries who used the imbalance of power to take advantage of my vulnerability!”.
Obviously, that didn’t go over well and it was not fair to have said this to my husband but it was how I felt in the moment. If I’d known the information that I would discover in the months ahead, I might have refused to do that exercise (for my own mental health). As it was, I did do it because it was important to my husband. I can’t remember what I wrote down. I’d go back and look in my notes but it would just make me angry all over again.
Who Needs a Relapse Plan? The Abuser
As clients or congregants, we lay down our safeguards in order to trust a professional who promises to protect, safeguard and make every decision in our best interest. When the professional exploits the relationship in any form (in my case it was sexualized via texts and phone calls after he confessed his love for me) that is abuse and the only party who needs a relapse plan is the abuser – regardless of intent.
The betrayal did terrible damage to my husband. The relapse plan and the whole process of affair recovery did major damage to me. Affair recovery type programs need to “get” this. Their leaders need to be able to identify this type of abuse so that couples can be directed to a better place for help, or at least navigate through certain exercises in a different manner.
I remember after connecting with a mentor from “The Hope of Survivors” a few times, I expressed my anger and confusion at having to do this relapse plan. She advised me to stop with the affair recovery and seek out someone to help my husband and I recover from the abuse that had been enacted upon the both of us. She called us co-victims.
In fact, my mentor told me that it was very important to view my past counsellor, not as an ex-affair partner (which had been drilled into my head for months), but as an abuser. She said that we should call him “abuser” to remind us that an affair cannot occur between a professional and a client.
I Don’t do Affair Relapse Plans
I no longer have a relapse plan. It was an unfair exercise to ask me to complete.
I was faithful to my husband for the whole of our marriage, even when he was neglectful towards me. It was only when I sought out help with a professional, with the goal of reconciling the marriage did I miss every red flag known to humankind and become emotionally entangled with my counsellor.
I trusted him immensely, as I should have, and I became easily attached because in addition to doing his job of supporting, encouraging and speaking good things into my life, he crossed boundaries and created a dual role for himself that muddied the relationship making it easy for him to take advantage of me.
I Repeat: I Don’t Do Affair Relapse Plans
You cannot create a relapse plan for a behaviour that didn’t happen in the first place. What can we create? An environment that can help a husband and wife heal safely, individually and together in the knowledge that they are co-victims of the same crime, but where both need different supports in place to heal. Wow! I wish we’d had that.