Hi Brooke,
I’m on my 4th month of SCS and generally loving it. So many insights on thoughts I never knew I was thinking and how they are causing my feelings (can’t wait for VIP…yay!). I’m struggling with thoughts and abuse, though. As both a child and adult I was victim of sexual and physical abuse. I’m doing a lot of great work on processing the past aspects of it. What I’m struggling with is how the Model applies to someone currently in the situation. I want to become a life coach and keep thinking of how I would have coached the person I was when I was in my abusive marriage and can’t figure out how the model works in that case. At the time, I was being physically abused by my husband to the point of him threatening to kill me if I called the police to report his behavior. During that time I’d tried to get help through marriage counselors at our church, and they told me that if I would just be a better wife, my husband would stop beating me. If I had a client in the same situation today, I am concerned about how the model would apply because as I’m currently seeing it, I think you’d say that it was just the thoughts that were making the abuse bad. That if she (I) understood it was supposed to be happening, she (I) would have made it mean that it was his problem, but that there would be no motivation to LEAVE the situation but rather the model would’ve suggested that she (I) would have just had to think differently about it and stay. This troubles me so much because I am enraged that smart women like myself could be so sucked into such abusive situations and have had the ability to rationalize them. And I can’t see how the model helps women escape from those situations. The way I’m seeing it right now is that the “correct” application of the model justifies them and would keep women in dangerous abusive situations. Help!

Love your work,
T