Summary: Melinda, wife of a sex addict, recently wrote on BTR's website about how abusive men weaponize codependency language. She coined the phrase "weaponizing codependency language" and feels that her story and experience can help other women in this situation. <br> <br> Melinda states,<br> "My husband revealed that he had been having an affair and later on revealed that he has been seeing a sex massage and also abusing porn. We entered into a process of trying to figure out what was going on."<br> Co-Dependency Can Be Manipulated By Abusers<br> So many women face this issue alone and confused. Melinda goes on to describe,<br> "I understood that it was not my fault and that it was something I felt like we could overcome together. He struggled a lot with all of it and ultimately showed that he couldn’t meet me where I needed to be met so that I could recover from the betrayal. For a period of time, he entered into 12-step, and I also should say that he has been trained as a counselor. He’s not a therapist now, but he was trained as one, and when we entered into therapy after the revelations of his betrayal something kept coming up that was baffling to me and it was reinforced by our therapist."<br> Co-Dependency Language Can Harm A Victim<br> Anne, founder of Betrayal Trauma Recovery, see this dynamic and feels it is all too common. She states,<br> "A lot of the sex addiction therapists claim to know about betrayal trauma, but they do not actually practice it. They envelope codependency narratives into their scripts and therapeutic approach, but represent it as being informed in betrayal trauma and that is very dangerous. Sex addiction therapists do not really seem to understand it either. The best people seem to be abuse experts from what we’ve experienced in our years of work with abused women who are wives of sex addicts." <br> Melinda goes on to explain that their therapist insisted that she was responsible for the dynamic within the relationship. She says,<br> "Our therapist seemed to offer that as a reason of why my husband did what he did and was acting out in the way that he was. I was trying to wrap my head around it because I’m a person who takes a lot of responsibility for her own behavior and her own actions but I knew this did not make any sense. I also have done a lot of work professionally understanding trauma, so I was already under trauma orientation, thinking: “I’m traumatized. Why am I not getting understood here? Why does it keep coming back to something in my psychological makeup that’s creating this dynamic of his acting out behavior?”"<br> Abusers Will Use The Co-Dependency To Abuse<br> Melinda goes on to explain, <br> "My husband had a charming façade and playful façade, and he often would gaslight me as well. What I realized is that the codependency flame was a really great excuse for him to not take responsibility. I think throughout our relationship, we had had problems prior to this and the problems, in my view, were not taking accountability for his behavior. Other kinds of behavior and responsibilities, and when the word codependency or the concept of codependency came into our relationship it just became another tool to gaslight me and deflect and not be accountable. It was really confusing for a while because I am a person who wants to take accountability, but he was using it as a way to not actually address the harm he would cause."<br> <br> "I became a scapegoat for many, many things and this just allowed even more scapegoating. For example, his decisions to cheat and all the other stuff was part of that scapegoating. I didn’t quite understand why this was happening."<br> Eventually Melinda found the help she needed. She explains, <br> "It didn’t make sense to me until I started looking into what codependency tells people. It tells them to focus on themselves and not on others, which sounds great, but in the hands of an abusive and exploitativ...
