Chris Watts Intends to Marry Again

From what I’ve read and from my time working as an advocate back in the day, I think the whole prison groupie/hybristophilia thing smacks of general “compulsive reenactment” where someone with unprocessed trauma knee-jerkedlly cuddles up to the most dangerous person in any setting and reflexively does their bidding because doing so was the only way to grovel for amnesty from whatever dangerous abuser plagued them in childhood.

Most survivors of childhood abuse don’t “reenact” but some people don’t emotionally “survive” those experiences in reality and end up doing to others the worst things that were done to them, whether as direct aggressors or as enablers. As far as the enablers/proxies go, I think these people learn to automatically form triangles against designated victims as a sort of compulsive superstitious defense against becoming the victim themselves because, in zero sum environments, there are only three choices: victim, perpetrator or enabler to same. I’ve also noticed how serial enablers can sometimes eventually “graduate” in stages to the status of direct perpetrators.

Anyway, that’s one of the theories about “compulsive reenactment.” But I think the mistake that onlookers and theorists often make in these situations is assuming it’s only or mostly women who do this. Meanwhile, in my experience and from watching the “manosphere” clusterf*cks around individuals like Andrew Tate and other known predators, I actually think more men are prone to “cuddle up” for amnesty than women. Which would make sense because, within families under the reign of violent abusers, the most brutal and violent abuse of children tends to statistically land on male children. In any case, pregnant battered women reportedly face the most severe violence when the sex of the fetus is known to be male and male children are the most likely to be killed by abusers.

The above meshes with general homicide statistics where men are 8-fold more likely to be killed by other men than the risk women face of being killed by men. The equation would predict that, the higher the lethal risk an enabling type perceives due to past experience, the deeper the potential conditioning to “placate” and cuddle. This might further predict that the men who emerge from childhood abuse with unprocessed trauma would be more likely to gravitate to dangerous individuals and, even if they don’t grow up to be overtly violent or predatory themselves, might tend to enable and defend bigger aggressors. But when women play this side-kick role, they’re more likely to also have sex with aggressors which makes the cases stand out and adds a layer of weirdness. But it could still be pretty much identical to any form of compulsive enabling. It’s just that these women likely learned that sex is an additional tool to placate.

But all of the above only applies when enablers already have good reason to know that the individual they’re groveling to is a predatory aggressor. It doesn’t apply to all victims of these perpetrators. So in that way Shannan Watts doesn’t fall into the same slot as Chris Watts’ enablers like Nichole Kessinger or his current prison groupie who both knew who Watts was. For instance, despite the surprise Kessinger expressed to police that Watts would be capable of, Watts reported to police that he looked up the lyrics to the Metallica song Battery because Nichole recommended it to him right before he murdered his family:

Smashing through the boundaries
Lunacy has found me
Cannot stop the battery
Pounding out aggression
Turns into obsession
Cannot kill the battery
Cannot kill the family
Battery is found in me

Since Watts was still in the demented idealization stage towards Kessinger (he only threw her under the bus later in prison when she cut him off) when he said this to police, I don’t think he was lying. I think Kessinger had a gut sense of what he was. In this way, I think Watts’ fixation on Kessinger was also “reenactment” of the enmeshed relationship with his own enabling mother who not only fanatically defended Watts after the case broke but had just deliberately exposed Watts’ severely peanut allergic daughter to peanuts prior to his murders. All the same, these cheerleading enablers didn’t “make” Watts kill his family and it doesn’t make Watts the “proxy.” I just suspect that enablers like this intuitively pick up on the potentiality and dutifully flash green lights or preemptively facilitate what they sense individuals like this are capable of. Especially Watts’ mother showed signs of “graduating” from proxy to direct aggressor but it was still all likely in “service” to Watts.

Similar distinctions were made by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi when he described the “Moral Gray Zone” of how Nazis would inculcate victims into victimizing each other as the ultimate form of degradation. Though Levi details cases of victims who seemed to volunteer for this role, he still argues against blurring these lines when such a massive imbalance of power exists.