It Took Me 9 Years to Leave

Dear Chump26,

You deserve a homecoming parade. As the smoke clears and you get used to your new freedom, you’ll begin to understand the enormity of what you’ve accomplished. But I think the moment of real healing starts when chumps stop beating themselves up as so-called “cOdEpEnDeNts” and start viewing themselves as survivors of domestic abuse who got out by the skin of their teeth.

These short letters from survivors rarely include some of the darker scenes involved with cheating, namely the coercive control that it took their abusers to move them around their diabolical chessboards in order to 1) keep chumps out of the way of affairs; and 2) ensure chumps don’t “do unto” cheating abusers what cheating abusers “do unto” chumps. In other words, cheating, at root, is the “brutal enforcement of one-sided monogamy”– the precise same MO of the most violent domestic batterers and spouse-unalivers (Scott Peterson, OJ, Chris Watts, Fotis Dulos, etc., etc., etc., etc.– all cheaters btw) and, in a certain light, serial killers (who have often confessed that analiving victims is a manner of ensuring that no one else can ever have them).

Try to think of it from that perspective: he didn’t just manipulate you so that he could cheat. Paramount on his agenda was doing so without the viable consequence of you leaving him and getting romantically involved with someone else. In fact, if you read forensic research on the psychology of abusers like Dutton’s and Golant’s The Batterer, the entire impetus for cheating strongly correlates with abusers’ pathological, infantile, self-generated terror of abandonment so that cheating could conceivably be characterized as an attempt by deeply paranoid, intractably attachment disordered individuals to beat their own victims to the “punch” by betraying first while simultaneously hedging their bets against abandonment (that they, deep down, know they deserve) by latching onto a plan B (or many plan Bs) and also attempting to dilute their secret shameful, mewling dependency on primary partners by spreading it out among many.

In short, cheating serves a multi-pronged purpose of 1)revenge for the imagined crime of betrayal primary partners likely didn’t commit but technically could commit; 2) insurance against abandonment; 3) recruiting “proxy-abusers” in the form of affair partners who will both validate the abuse of primary partners as “justified” while also mirroring back to abusers a falsely idealized image of themselves (rather than what they are, which is creepy mutant abusers); 4) a manner of “masking” infantile dependency so that the abuser does not have to face their own catastrophic instability and psychologically deficient status and can pretend they are, in fact, stable and normal and even exemplary adults, while; 5)(very importantly) displacing/projecting/shifting their own chronic existential angst, terror, self doubt and insecurity to their partners as if making someone else live their hellish internal state frees them from it.

The latter is where the sadism– whether overt or covert– actually serves a purpose: seeing victims suffering in confusion and self doubt is an assurance that the “hot potato” of victim status has been successfully passed to another person which, in the zero sum mentality of abusers, assures abusers that they have dodged that victim status. But that reassurance only lives as long as the victim is still clearly and intensely suffering so cheating abusers must keep refreshing the pain and fear program over and over and over.

As a side note, according to Dutton and Golant, the warped zero sum perspective of abusers that there are only victims and perpetrators and, if you’re not one, you’ll be the other is typically internalized from traumatic family of origin dynamics. But, if that sounds like a sad sausage plea for amnesty for abusers, the fact that this dynamic is on the spectrum of spouse-unalivers and serial killers and the fact that recidivism for domestic abusers is 98.5% even with therapy and prison time tend to pull that “amnesty” up short. Statistics show that, no matter where they fall on the ghoulish spectrum, individuals who “suffer” from this particular syndrome do not change, cannot be fixed and, statistically speaking, there’s always a high risk that a formerly covert, non-assaultive abuser can progress to domestic homicide. In fact, the “golden thread” in forensic science that best predicts eventual domestic homicide better than histories of physical assault is coercive control, with or without histories of physical violence (for example, there’s no evidence Chris Watts assaulted Shannan prior to unaliving her).

I worked in advocacy more than twenty years ago, before the late, great Dr. Evan Stark wrote his ground-breaking, reality-correcting Coercive Control in 2007 and shifted his already stellar trajectory as the spearhead (along with his wife Anne Flitcraft) of the domestic violence shelter movement in the US and UK and acted as part of the team (with Flitcraft again) who authored the research that once and for all trounced the moldy old pseudo-scientific victim-blaming “psychological deficiency/codependency” theory of abuse survivors that RIC and CSAT (“sex addiction”)therapy stubbornly continues to repurpose for survivors of sexual exploitation and violations of sexual consent (“rape by deception” by any other name).

Stark’s and Flitcraft’s work was the cornerstone of the training I went through and what we jokingly called “The Book of Stark and Flitcraft” was gospel to the network I worked for. But, because coercive control was not yet a legal much less social science concept back then, we were running by the seat of our pants trying to account for the fact that victims of non-assaultive abuse (coercive control) were often just as or even more devastated than victims of physical violence because the latter sometimes managed to secure TROs and a bit of justice while victims of coercive control didn’t even get social validation for having endured abuse (in fact, quite the opposite). Consequently, we had to cobble together our own “take” on why emotional abuse was so catastrophically devastating in the era before Stark and others statistically proved that survivors of abuse almost always cite the psychological and emotional abuse and control as more damaging than even physical assault. Also, back then, there was zero science supporting our front-lines observations that every single survivor had also been cheated on in some way or other.

Not that the science has fully caught up to what we observed back in the day but at least now there is a trickle of peer-reviewed research correlating chronic infidelity with domestic abuse and coercive control. It’s also now possible to assert this in a piecemeal way by combining research on high rates of psychopathy among cheaters and so-called mate poachers and the fact that battering survivors face massively elevated risks of STD and AIDS infections.

It’s always difficult for survivors of coercive control to get a birds-eye view of the maze of control they were living in while entrapped in abusive relationships, much less escape them. This is made more difficult when so-called experts and the culture refuse to see the maze for what it is and to identify all the many devious and hard-to-identify methods that abusers engage in to entrap their partners. Sometimes it can be as subtle as “hacking” victims’ intuition with the smokescreen of a fabricated crisis that may appear on its surface to just be a ‘sulk” or “panic” or momentary disruptive behavior on the part of the abusers. But the intent behind these “subtle” forms of coercion and control is still extremely dark and carries inherent mortal risks to victims and any children involved (to our ancient monkey brains, being in proximity to an empathy impaired, covertly hostile partner is correlated with threat to survival) and victims may find themselves wondering why their nervous systems are going into high alert haywire and they stop sleeping or functioning from sensing the underlying primal danger and then blame themselves for ‘overreacting.”

The overall effect of living with this eerie, dysregulating disconnect is ultimately catastrophic ego collapse which is part of the reason the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture includes coercive control among recognized forms. In any event, understanding all this can be a bit of a slog since we’re still in an era of reckoning that not all (or even most or even the worst) abuse involves broken bones, black eyes, bullets and tire irons. But the information is out there for those who look and I think the pursuit is fully worth it for the “aha!” revelations and sense of exoneration that many survivors of entrapment feel for not having “left sooner.” The more survivors learn about the methods that were used to keep them entrapped, the more they will understand their own brilliance (as Evan Stark termed it) in having survived it.

Anyway…there’s my long explanation for why I think you deserve a parade. I wish you peace, strength and joy moving forward out of the fog of war. I hope you stick around here and help others with your “double PhD in escape and survival.”