Your client stopped the porn.
Ask what took its place.

He can tell you the date. He installed the filter before you suggested it, he does the between-session work, and he is not lying to you — which matters, because everything else depends on it. By every measure you were trained to use, this is a good outcome.

And the work has stalled anyway, and nothing in the frameworks explains it, because the frameworks assume a behaviour that has now stopped.

Read the free guide

What’s here

Free. A twelve-page guide — what the pattern migrates into, and three questions for your next session.
$297 CAD. Working Beneath the Behaviour — the full guide, in seven chapters.

Nothing to attend and nothing to complete. It is a guide.

A room you have already been in

What he has not told you, because he has decided it does not count

None of the following will appear on any measure the two of you agreed to track. None of it will come up unless you ask a question specific enough to reach it. And every one of them is the same system that was using the screen, now using the world — which is free, endless, always open, and leaves no evidence at all.

He watches reels. Not pornography — he would never call it that and, technically, he is right.
He goes to the ten-past-six class rather than the seven o’clock one, and he could tell you why if he let himself.
He has a route through the supermarket.
There is a woman at work he is warmer with than he is with anyone else there. Nothing is happening. He has thought about it.
He ranks a room within about four seconds of walking into it.
And he compares his wife to women he has never spoken to.

He did not stop. He changed supplier.

The other person in the story

She is usually the one who noticed first.

Years before any of this reaches a clinician, she has been reading it — and being told she is imagining it. By the time she appears in your room, or in his account of your room, she has often already been described to you as anxious, insecure, or unable to let something go. Those descriptions arrive ahead of her, and they are difficult to unhear.

What she has actually been living with is set out on the partner-facing site, betrayaltrauma.ca. It is written for her rather than for clinicians, which is what makes it worth your time — you get her account in her own register instead of filtered through his.

Useful in couples work, and a useful corrective whenever his is the only account you have heard.

A way of listening

Five layers

Not a category to place someone in, and not a scale. A way of organising what you are already hearing, so that when the work stalls you have somewhere specific to look.

Behaviour

The acts. The only layer with evidence attached. Work only here and you get compliance, and you miss the migration.

Attention

The scan, the ranking, the brief private scenario — and what the loop is for. Usually not about sex at all, but the most practised way this nervous system leaves an uncomfortable state.

Permission

The private deciding — what counts, what she doesn’t need to know. How a man conceals for a decade without ever experiencing himself as a liar.

Secrecy

What the deciding carries out: the ongoing management of her access to her own life. The most durable part, because it needs no behaviour to run on.

Belonging

What the structure was standing in for. Leave it and he recovers into a vacancy, which is when people build something new.

Free · twelve pages · PDF

The porn stopped. The concealing didn’t.

What the pattern migrates into once the pornography stops, the five layers as a way of listening, and three questions for your next session — starting with the one I find most useful of anything I have written.

Send me the guide

The full guide · $297 CAD

Working Beneath the Behaviour

A guide, not a course. There is no quiz and nothing to complete. It is written to be read once through and then kept somewhere you can reach it on a Tuesday afternoon when a session has gone sideways.

Written the way I would explain it to a colleague, not the way I would write it for a journal.

What’s in it

Seven chapters

The client who looks like a good outcome
Five layers: a way of listening
Quiet, or just better at not being seen
What he needs that most approaches don’t give him
What she needs, and the order it has to come in
Couples work: when it helps and when it hurts
Monday — three things to try this week

What this establishes, and what it does not

This is a way of organising what you are already hearing when the work has stalled. It is not a method for arriving at a conclusion about anyone. There are no indicator lists here, no checklist and no scoring, because a framework that produces a finding about a person who has not consented to being assessed is a different and much more dangerous object than a way of listening.

Nothing here establishes what occurred in any individual case. Your clinical judgement, your client’s own account, and your own regulator’s scope govern that — not a framework you read on a website. If anything here conflicts with any of the three, go with yours.

What this is, and what it isn’t.

This is professional education. It is not supervision, not consultation on a particular case, and not clinical or legal advice. Reading it doesn’t create a professional relationship between us. I’m a Registered Social Worker; identifying conditions and applying diagnostic labels is outside my scope and it is not what this teaches. Nothing here is a way of arriving at a diagnosis and nothing here should be used as one. You remain governed by your own regulator, your own scope, and your own judgement.

A note on language.

Throughout, the person with the pattern is “he” and the partner is “she.” That reflects the configuration in which I’ve most often seen this operate and cause harm. The substance applies across all relationship configurations.

If you or someone you’re working with is in immediate danger, call 911. In Canada, the 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline is available 24/7 — call or text 9-8-8.