About Support for Partners

About Support for Partners

Where did Support for Partners come from, and why did I do this? Those are great questions.

Being the partner of someone who was sexually abused as a child can be tough, and it can get more challenging as they work through the recovery process. It's made more difficult by the lack of readily-available information that partners can use to educate themselves about the effects childhood sexual abuse has on adult relationships. As secondary vs primary victims, partners often feel helpless and unable to affect change to improve things. Partners need avenues to talk about this, but support groups for partners are very rare. While every relationship has issues and tough spots, those difficulties are magnified by the effects of sexual abuse; so partners need extra help to improve their relationship skills. Multiply all this a few million times - because millions of childhood sexual abuse survivors are in partner-relationships - and the need for something to be done is pretty obvious.

So Support for Partners is an effort to address these issues - by providing a repository of information to help partners (the Library), a list of known support groups for partners and documents to help you start your own (see Support Groups), and an online forum for partners to use to share their experiences and provide some peer-support (the Forum). There are other sites and other groups that provide some of this already, and they are mentioned in the Library, but none address the whole concept, so I started Support for Partners. And this site is still a work-in-progress; if you want to help add to and manage the content or moderate the forums please let me know via the Contact form. Finally, I'm not a psychologist (although I've paid enough to put their kids through school). I'm not a social worker, and I don't have any license other than to drive. I'm just a guy; a guy who wants to spin straw into gold and be there with and for others. Support for Partners is my effort to do that.

-- steveb

"We are quite naturally impatient, yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability - and that may take a very long time." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin