Episode #448 Men of Peace Opertunities for Wives

One of the most dangerous dynamics in domestic abuse ministry is giving a wife false hope.

How is the support for wives structured in men of peace so you prioritize safety? and the reality over claims of progress and change.

So that has been a struggle for us for many years.

I mean, how do you actually provide that? So we encourage shepherding teams to include an advocate.

And we make recommendations, you know, for advocacy services and so on.

But It is generally up to the wife to invite an advocate on the journey, somebody who can speak for her, help her process the information, and so on.

This past Men of Peace group, we added a couple layers.

And as you can imagine, the more layers we add to Men of Peace, the more people we involve, the more structure, the more cost.

But this year we did add an advocacy component where we provided an entrance interview and an exit interview.

We found that those were beneficial but probably needed a little bit more to help.

We also provided a series of webinars this year.

This is the first time we ever did this at Men of Peace, but our current group participants' wives were invited.

Of course, there's no requirement, no forced, complete, you know, voluntary.

They were invited to participate in a series of webinars.

where my co-lead and I simply talked about the men of peace process.

This was tremendously beneficial, and I'll tell you why.

I think the temptation with direct services to victims and survivors, and I've seen this in both secular groups and in men of peace, The temptation is that access can lead to the temptation to control or to bombard.

And I don't mean that in a negative way, but you can see how if you're desperate for your husband to change and he's in an accountability group and you have direct access to the facilitator, The temptation to email every day, to call every day, to give updates or try to inform what's happening in the group, that's a real temptation.

And so we want to eliminate that.

We don't want to put people in a place where they feel like they need to control the process.

But we also want to do a better job at having space where partners can be heard, where their voice can be shared, and where they can be informed.

And I think that's something we can do a much better job at Men of Peace.

And we started doing that this year.

And so those webinars gave Sandy and I an opportunity to share, here's what we're learning.

Here's where we're at.