2023 S.A. Lifeline Conference Q&A Panel – Part 1

Narrator: This is Pathway to Recovery, an SA Lifeline Foundation podcast featuring hosts Tara McCausland, who is the SA Lifeline Executive Director, and Justin B., a sex addict living in long-term recovery. We have conversations with experts and individuals who understand the pathway to healing from sexual addiction and betrayal trauma because we believe that recovering individuals leads to the healing of families.

Tara McCausland: Welcome to the Pathway to Recovery Podcast. I'm your host, Tara McCausland, and thanks for being here. If you're a regular listener, you know, we typically post on Tuesdays, but we just came off the annual conference that we had just this past weekend. And I wanted to share with you our final Q&A panel that we have at the end of every conference. And so this is a unique episode where you will hear from a number of people that presented at the conference, as well as people who serve in SA Lifeline and in our SAL 12-step program.

This Q&A session was about 45 minutes long, so we're actually going to divide the session up into 2 parts. So this will be the first half of our Q&A session from the conference. And our next Q&A episode will be the second half. We hope that this answers some of the questions that might be on your mind about recovery from addiction and trauma. And by the way, if you didn't register for the conference and you are wanting to listen to those presentations, uh, stay tuned.

We will let you know how you can access those presentations in the coming months. And that will be on salifeline.org. But again, thank you so much for being here. And here is the first half of our Q&A from our 2023 SA Lifeline Conference. This is often one of my favorite parts of the conference because I know that there are many questions on your minds, and sometimes we don't get as much time at the end of presentations to get to hear from our speakers.

And so I'm going to just remind you who these people are up here. So we had Jonathan, who was a part of our Personal Stories of Recovery. We have Ril Croshaw, Stephen Croshaw, founders of SA Lifeline. Jacob Hess, Josh Walpole, and Becky are with Circles of Grace. Todd had to leave, and so he, he designated them as spokesmen for Circles of Grace, both therapists. We have Jenny Brockbank, executive assistant of SA Lifeline. Kahi Winget, who is also a member of SAL 12-Step.

She is a leader in our 12-Step group, Women's Executive Director. And we have Jan Schmucker, also a Service Council Director of SAL 12-Step, and Justin, who is a Service Council Director. We're going to start with the top voted question there, asked by Aaron: What resources do you recommend for an individual in recovery who wants to understand how best to support their spouse who has been betrayed? He didn't designate who. Anybody want to take that one? Thank you, Becky.

Becky: I love that Jenny turned to me. She's like, you should answer this. So resources are a big thing that I think sometimes we look around and think, I don't— I can't find anything. I don't have any help. And so the great thing is when we go to 12-step group, when we meet with a therapist, that is what we get. We get resources. We get connections. One resource that a lot of people run into are podcasts. We know that SA has— SA Lifeline has an amazing podcast.

I have a podcast. It's Rise Up Restored, and it focuses on the betrayed partner, betrayal trauma specifically. And so there are a lot of resources out there, a lot more than there used to be. And so If you go to my podcast, this is not an advertisement for my podcast, at the end of each episode, there's actually a list of resources that helped that person. And I, I, we actually have a lot of addicts who listen because they wonder, how can I help my spouse?

You know, I know I've hurt this person. I know I've made some mistakes, but I, I see them hurting and I want to help them. And so, talking to each other. There's a reason why we heal better in groups, because we get support from each other. And someone may say, hey, this song really helped me. So then you listen to it and you're like, oh, that really helped me too. So healing in groups is really, really important.

12-step is where it's at. So that's just something that popped into my head. So yeah.

Speaker 4: I have a comment on that. The things that I have read the most that have helped me To what I believe, recognize the trauma that my wife has experienced. This sounds a little odd, but the more that I work my own recovery, the more sensitive I am to the trauma side. And so, and that work of recovery certainly does include education, but I think it includes a a willingness to recognize that my behavior has a direct impact on everything that happens in the relationship that I have with my wife.

I recently said something like, I have appreciated my wife to a much greater degree. She's a much neater person the more I'm in recovery. Maybe that's the best way to say it. The more that I work my recovery, the more that I understand my own need to surrender all challenges in my life to, to God as I understand God, the more I I appreciate the challenges that she faces. And so it really becomes an opportunity for me to appreciate her more through my own recovery.

And understanding trauma then is easier for me because I feel less shame in doing that.

Rhyll Croshaw: And I really appreciate it. It's amazing how that all works together.

Tara McCausland: All right, thank you. So Question, I have 4 adult daughters who have been affected by divorce and the effects of my addiction. What would you recommend I do to help them heal from the trauma I have caused? So I am the daughter of a recovering sex addict, and oftentimes people will ask me, what can I do to help my child so that they're not reliving my life? I often say, well, damage has been done, but today is a new day.

And today you can choose to be humble, honest, and accountable. I guess it was Roy Kim on our podcast who talked about this. Plug for the podcast. But he did say it's really critical for the one who has Done the betraying, to have a very humble posture about whether or not the people closest to them forgive them. To demand forgiveness, and more especially, to demand trust, is not okay. That comes in time. But how do you build that?

By being honest, humble, and accountable. Yeah. And that also looks like being reliable. Sometimes we can't trust the words, often we can't trust the words, but if you said you're going to be at the game, be at the game. If you're going to be at the dance recital where you said you were, be there. Show up when little Susie's having a hard day, or big Susie. Listen, be present. That's when I knew that my father was changing.

He was present, and he would engage in the hard stuff with me. So that question, be reliable and don't give people a timeline. Let them be where they're at. And in time, if you do the work, you're in recovery, that relationship will heal.

Rhyll Croshaw: It sounds like— thanks, Tara. I always say that when I work my recovery, I have more light, and light attracts light. Darkness will go away from— the darkness is repelled by light. And so, if I'm a woman, I have to say that initially, 18 years ago, Stephen and I— I chose to go with him on that day— sat down with each one of our adult children, and everyone had a very different reaction. Our boys— you saw one of our sons today— one of those— he was one of those red-faced, yelling, angry.

Yeah. at what his dad had been doing for 32 years, and even before, but through the marriage and in the family. But it was interesting that our boys and our daughters said, Dad, we love you. We want to trust you. We'll watch you. We support you in doing things to make changes. The thing that I needed to do— but we had one daughter-in-law who was really pretty bitter. And I thought, this is— I don't know that this is ever gonna change.

She did not wanna hear about it, but it's been really interesting to watch her process as she has watched, as I said in our introduction, she has watched her father-in-law and watched me work our recovery individually, and then in our marriage, work our recovery. And she is very much a fan of recovery from the outside. And so we've seen adult children, but I can't make them and I can't teach them. I just have to be. I have to work my recovery, humble, honest, and accountable, striving to have God at my center on a daily basis, not perfectly.

And as I do that, People see the change. They feel the change. And this is not an event. It is a process. And it may take a year or 2 or 3 or 4. It is what it is. But it can happen. And it has for us.

Tara McCausland: This is asked by Jeff— or excuse me, Josh. Should a full restoration of trust from the betrayed be expected? Anybody want to?

Speaker 7: Oh, Michelle's ready. I'll do it.

Michelle: My straight-up answer is going to be no. Because the reality is, is that potentially there was a higher sense of trust and dependency prior to betrayal that was potentially unhealthy. And so I say consistently, I don't know that I completely trust my husband, but I do trust God in my husband, right? And I trust my husband with God. And so I don't think— now, is forgiveness and healing and grieving a part of the journey? Absolutely. But for a betrayed partner, oftentimes that can be a really hard sense of saying, I'm going to give you everything back after you already busted my toy the first time.

It's really hard to say it's going to take a long, long time. But I think, I think honestly, for me personally, trust has looked very different. I had more of what I would probably label as blind trust prior to betrayal. And later, it was more, I have intention, and I know exactly what I'm trusting in you. So maybe that was not helpful.

Justin B.: But yeah. So I'm gonna come at this from the addicted side. I, and I still feel this way sometimes, will you ever trust me? And something my wife often says to me, about me, and also when I bring it to her from sponsees I work with, hey, what would you say in this situation? Her phrase is something like, I can forgive. I can always forgive, but I don't have to trust. And that's something— and we talked about this earlier, that forgiveness, I can't decide what my wife's timeline is on when forgiveness happens.

I can't make that decision. But as we talked about also, if I'm working my recovery, That forgiveness can happen, well, whatever timeline it happens on, but the trust may never be restored completely.

Speaker 10: So I may not be qualified to say anything, but I'm going to say this from the perspective of an addict. I also have to remember, if I did my step 1 correctly, I'm recognizing that I don't trust myself alone. I trust in my higher power. So it's not really reasonable to ask my spouse or significant other to just trust in me when I also don't trust in me.

Tara McCausland: Question: As you begin your journey to recovery, how do you deal with overwhelming feelings of shame and worthlessness?

Speaker 11: Because of your addiction, you're probably already sensing that. But in coming into recovery, sobriety, part of it is, is kind of turning and facing that and being able to to deal with that? Where has that shame come from? What was maybe the genesis of it? What trauma have I faced that has been unresolved or not dealt with? And is this a faulty core belief? And if it is, how do I restore that? How do I process that?

Because it can feel like a— it can feel like it's true, like it is my core values. The sense of shame is I am not enough. I don't have what it takes. And so, being able to face that, I would argue, is part of the healing process in dealing with that. And to kind of further go into that, it's a slow and gradual process. The opposite of shame is self-compassion. And self-compassion can feel like a foreign language if we're so used to belittling ourselves or shaming ourselves or never feeling like enough.

the process of stepping into self-compassion is really, really difficult. And we might need a good therapist or a good church leader or good support system resources to kind of tell us, hey, keep going, keep your head up, keep plugging along, because we may be one of the last ones to feel that. In my own experience, I felt like God and my wife forgave me before I forgave myself, because I was still battling through the shame and the unworthiness.

And so it was a process, but it eventually was rectified.

Speaker 4: It was very helpful for me to recognize that shame resulted primarily from my continuing to act out, continuing down the pathway of acting on the lust triggers that I had. And so I felt shame. strongly before I decided to get honest. I carried that shame with me all the time. And I believe that isolated me to be afraid to work recovery, to be afraid to look for where recovery might be found, because then I will be found out if I do that.

But what I did find out is that when I chose to get completely honest, and then stop the behavior, and not just kind of sort of think I was going to stop and then lapse and then have a period of sobriety and then lapse again. What really reduced the shame for me was to stop once and for all and not go back to the behavior. Then with complete honesty, I began to recognize that I'm really not this bad person that I had seen myself as when I was continually going back to the behavior.

So a real strong and important key Is I need to stop. I had to stop. I had to stop the behavior. And I couldn't go back to it periodically. If I was going back periodically, then I was still feeling great shame.

Justin B.: Yeah, I'd like to make a comment on that too. And I think it goes back to Step 1 for me also. You know, when I first came into the rooms admitting that I was powerless over anything, that my life was unmanageable, that was shameful to me. I cannot be powerless. But as soon as I embraced that and said, you know what, I am, I'm powerless, my life is unmanageable, I am imperfect, I can't fix myself. For me, the shame dissipated when I embraced my imperfections and said, you know what, I'm imperfect and I'm okay with that, especially when step 2 and step 3 come into it, that I have a power greater than me that is perfectly loving and all-powerful.

And I can start trusting that power greater than me. All of a sudden, I'm okay with my imperfections, I'm okay with the powerlessness, and I know that God loves me no matter what, even with those imperfections and powerlessness. And the shame dissipates at that point.

Narrator: To add to that, betrayed partners also experience shame a lot, a lot of it. And for us, it's like, I'm not enough, or I'm too much, or— and then we get into these control things, you know, of maybe I should look sexier, I should do all these things to fix this situation, to fix me. And so for me, the more that I could learn about addiction, sex addiction in particular, because it hits women at the core, you know, of who we are sometimes, the more I could learn about it.

And to learn for me that Actually, they're after a hit of sorts. It's a chemical thing. They're looking for a chemical hit, and this is their drug of choice. And that was helpful for me to realize, actually, I'm enough. I'm enough to God. This is an addiction. This isn't really about me. And to be firm in my worth with God was so helpful.

Speaker 10: Beautiful answers. Certainly, God doesn't want any of us to feel overwhelming shame. But I'm not persuaded that God is as concerned about eradicating shame as some people in American culture today. There's sort of like a war on shame in the moment when America is in some ways shameless about so many things. So I like what's being said about how shame is connected to other things. that we can focus on. I also wanted to say about trust really quickly.

I think it could be discouraging if people believe that a restoration of beautiful trust is just not even possible. So what I heard from your answer was sort of like, it's a different kind of trust. It's not that beautiful trust and confidence can't be reestablished. It's just a different kind. Fair.

Tara McCausland: Thank you. Okay. Question, what traditions— this is asked by Ellen— what traditions or hacks have you been doing in your family that make it easy and comfortable to talk about healthy sexuality?

Michelle: So, I draw pictures at a very young age, and my children hate it so much. And Daniel said in his talk, when they start to hate it, you know you're doing a good job. And so, I would say, The idea of sexuality is a conversation we've been having from the very, very beginning. Sexuality is really about— it starts with our anatomy and then morphs into relational aspects of sex, right? And so we've been doing it from the very beginning.

There's not a question that shouldn't— like, my kids know their anatomy, they know each other's— not— I mean, well, but in an appropriate way, right? And so we're talking about it all the time. So as a What did it ask for, a trick? Hack. Hack. The other thing I do often is, actually, with my girls, they're not as— the beautiful thing is you have to know your own family. You have to know your children and know how they're each going to take in information.

And so, with my girls, I've bought particular books that I respected and appreciated and brought them to them. The one daughter will never read that book on her own, and so I have to force her to sit and have conversations with me. The other one will. intercede it in the mailbox, take it to her room, read the whole thing, and come back with an essay and want me to explain all the information. So it's understanding and knowing your kids enough to be able to meet them in the space that they're at.

But what I typically tell any mom is, you're just gonna have to talk about it. And I'm even— I mean, you guys can imagine I'm kind of goofy about it. I'm like, gosh, this is uncomfortable. I'm sweating. Are you sweating? And they're like, we're sweating. And I'm like, we're all sweating. And we just keep doing it, because there's a gal that I learned a lot from who does a lot of work with children, and she said that the first person to tell your kids about anything becomes the expert.

I want to be the expert. I don't want a classmate to be an expert. I don't want what they find online to be an expert, right? And so, I want to be the one that's potentially even— I mean, there's been moments where I'm like, am I having this conversation too early? And then I'm like, you know what, somebody's going to have it with them. And so I'll be the one to have it too early versus somebody else.

So.

Speaker 7: Okay. I feel like most of the hacks or traditions that I use are mindset changes for me. Sexuality was not talked about in my house. And I've come to believe that everyone's preaching something. And if you're not talking about it, then you're preaching that it's not a topic we talk about. But like she said, somebody's talking about it. Lots of people are talking about it. So early on in recovery, it was suggested to me that I should talk to my kids about healthy sexuality, pornography use, all of that, like I talked to them about making breakfast.

So I literally started talking about it at breakfast time. Like, I'm making breakfast. In the beginning, I wouldn't look at them, because that was weird. It was just awkward for me. So I was just, like, rattling stuff off, like, did you know? Did you— have you ever thought about this? And that morphed into, you know, the kids and I talk about a lot of things, with my husband as well. Nowadays, I think one of my hacks has been that I have a boundary with myself, that if I have a question or a concern about one of my kids, If it pops in my head, I'm going to ask it.

Because for a long time, I didn't ask. And I don't feel like that served me or my family. So if I have a question pop into my head, I just— that's my boundary. I ask. And I try to have that conversation. And that has been really helpful for my family as well.

Steven Croshaw: It's interesting to watch, because with our family, we're a highly functioning dysfunctional family. Truly. We really were. And it was— it is so fun, if I can use that word, where addiction is in the picture, to watch our children, especially our daughter that has our 4 grandchildren. There is nothing that is off limits to them. Now, of course, she keeps it age-appropriate. Her youngest is 3, the oldest is 14. So there's quite a bit of difference there in the way they're talking to the 14-year-old is completely different than they're talking to the 3- and 4-year-olds.

So, but to watch this in action when we open our mouths and speak truth, because the bottom line is truth. That's a big thing in my life now, because I lived with lies for most of my life. And the minute I turned that to truth, all of a sudden, things change. And it has been so heartwarming to see this change in my grandchildren, that they know they're learning healthy sexuality. Is it perfect? No. But it's happening.

And one household at a time, one word that we speak to our children or our grandchildren is all it takes to start the ball rolling. Go for it, jump in, be honest, and just go for it. It's hard, I know.

Becky: But okay, that's it. Sorry.

Tara McCausland: Great responses there. Yeah.

Speaker 10: So when I was a kid, I was at the grocery store with my dad, and we were checking out. You know those really terrible magazines along the side with aliens and celebrities? My dad knelt down next to me, pointed to them, and said, even I have to work to turn away from that stuff. I just want you to know. It was a very small moment that he just thought to stop And he taught me something, and it made a huge impression on me knowing that my dad also noticed those really weird, strange magazines with people partially clothed, and that he, my idol, worked to turn away from them.

And I sometimes think the lack of discussion about healthy sexuality is just a time issue. We're booking it so fast, we don't have time to talk about the world at all. So are we making time to pause the movie and saying, Let's talk about this. That thing that they just mentioned, we need to have a conversation. Or do we just kind of, oh, I'm tired. I think there's lots of moments that come up without us trying to bring them up that we could just pause our life and say, we need to have a conversation about this.

Speaker 4: One thing I have that is so important for me to remember, and that is to be in the game. And in order for me to be in the game of teaching my children, to be able to be present to teach my children, and not on the sidelines, I have to be living the truth, not a lie. If I'm living a lie, I'm on the sidelines, and I am unwilling to teach because it brings too much feelings of shame and hypocrisy.

If I'm teaching my children a principle of morality, and I'm immoral, then I really find myself filled with shame. So I won't do that. But if I am working to live a life in recovery, and in my case, that's That's what I work to do. I'm in the ballgame with my kids and my grandkids. And so this morning when we were— when our grandkids so graciously and our children so graciously came to participate in this conference, they all knew where we were coming.

They all knew what was going to be discussed here and that we were in the ballgame together, every one of us. And so I congratulate this group for coming and being part of this example of recovery because we're all in the game. What a huge and great blessing that is to be in the game so that we can kneel down with our son or daughter in the grocery store and say, even I need to turn away from this.

And so know that it can be a struggle for not just you, but for me as well.

Tara McCausland: Thank you for listening to the first half of our 2023 SA Lifeline Conference. Q&A panel. You can listen to the final portion on our next Q&A episode. Thanks for being here with us.

Narrator: Thanks for joining us. We invite you to subscribe to this podcast so that you don't miss new episodes. And while you're at it, will you please leave us a 5-star rating and review to help us spread the good news that healing from sexual addiction and betrayal trauma is possible? We invite individuals who are struggling to join our virtual or in-person trauma-sensitive 12-step meetings. Meeting times and locations can be found at sal12step.org. You can find quality education at salifeline.org, and we hope that you will follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

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