Therapist Dismissive of Calling Infidelity ‘Abuse’

Reconciliation therapist Dr. Kathy Nickerson, who’s been thirsty for a Chump Lady smackdown, dismisses the idea that infidelity is abuse. In a video that I’m now giving eyeballs to, she says we should never “label” or “shame” cheaters.

Cheating is “complicated.” We mustn’t judge. Mustn’t shame. And gosh darn, your partner’s double life might be the best thing that ever happened to you! You’ll build back better! I see a unicorn…. yada yada… you all know the script. Perhaps you lost a lot of time and money on this kind of “help.”

In this video above Dr. Kathy Nickerson takes on certain unspoken opponents who have the Unhelpful Idea that infidelity is abuse.

Here’s the transcript.

Is cheating abuse?

So why wouldn’t we question people who stay with their abusers? Okay, let’s talk about this. When you say cheating is abuse, that removes all of the nuance and the details of the conversation. Not all infidelity is the same, right? A one night stand is very different from somebody who struggles with a smex addiction. 

I also think that labeling people like that judges them and isn’t very helpful. You know, if you say somebody is an abuser, Does this make them always an abuser? Is there the capacity for growth and learning and change? And if not, why not? And also, if you say that the abusee, the person who was abused, is a victim, well, I don’t like that label either, right? I experienced infidelity. 

I don’t wanna be known as a victim. I don’t even really wanna be known as a survivor of that. I wanna say that I am a person who recognized that that behavior had nothing to do with me and I don’t identify as being a victim of abuse. So for the most part I think labeling things this way is just shaming people and is judging people and is not really helpful at all. It’s supposed to be empowering I guess but putting a stamp on something like this really isn’t helpful because the truth is Deciding to stay or not once you’ve discovered an affair is incredibly complicated. You know, you might love this person. 

You may have kids with this person. You may have a very long, complicated life with them and not want to leave. You may be older and near retirement and thinking, I don’t want to start my life over. you might be thinking a wide variety of things and whatever you’re thinking it is your life and your choice and your decision and I don’t think somebody else should just come in, tell you it’s abuse and tell you that you’re an idiot or a fool for deciding to stay. So I would rather you not say this to people because it doesn’t help them in any way. 

And it doesn’t help the person who cheated do better. So there’s not a lot of value to saying this in my mind. I hope you’ll consider doing something else. 

All that waffle and she never actually addresses the main question. Okay, Dr. Kathy, if it’s NOT abuse — why isn’t it? Explain it to me like I’m in kindergarten, sitting on your big braided rug, eating graham crackers.

Curiously, her own website has lots of articles on betrayal PTSD and healing journeys and triggers and all the rest. Which begs the question:

How do you get PTSD from NON-ABUSE?

Did chumps make up the trauma? WTF?

That would be an interesting conversation. Instead, Dr. Kathy Nickerson gives us a bunch of straw man arguments and fallacies, that I’m going to dismantle. And your Friday Challenge is to tell Dr. K what you think of her video.

1. Straw man: “If you call cheating abuse, you’re calling the betrayed person a victim.”

Cheating is abuse → therefore the betrayed person is a “victim” → being called a victim is disempowering → therefore we shouldn’t call cheating abuse.

These things don’t logically follow.

You can describe a behavior as abusive without prescribing an identity to the person who experienced it. “I was subjected to abusive behavior” is not the same as “I am a victim and that is my identity.”

But victim shaming is a common way to shut people down who call out abusive behavior.

Just because you don’t self-identify as a “victim”, doesn’t answer the question whether the conduct meets a reasonable definition of abuse.

Dr. Kathy has substituted “Is this true?” with “Do people find this framing helpful?”

Those are different questions. Clearly, for her own reasons (my guess is the RIC model of send me money and I’ll affair proof your marriage) she thinks the abuse frame is “unhelpful.”

2. Appeal to personal experience / anecdotal reasoning

She says:

“I experienced infidelity. I don’t wanna be known as a victim. I don’t even really wanna be known as a survivor…”

Bully for you. That’s your preferred identity. But it isn’t evidence that infidelity isn’t abuse.

Your personal experience establishes:

I don’t find this terminology useful for myself.

It doesn’t establish:

Therefore infidelity shouldn’t be conceptualized as abuse.

That’s an anecdotal fallacy when her personal preference is being used to settle a general proposition.

Here’s a funny little mind*ck. She says, “whatever you’re thinking, it is your life and your choice and your decision,” while simultaneously using her preferred way of thinking about infidelity to argue against someone else’s conceptualization. Clearly, Dr. K is NOT okay with your choice and your decision to label your experience as abuse, decide it’s unacceptable, and leave.

3. Red herring: “Leaving is complicated.”

Her response:

People may love their spouse. They may have children. They may be near retirement. They may have a long history together. They may not want to start over.

None of those facts have anything to say about whether or not the relationship is abusive. It’s always difficult to leave.

A person can have:

• children with an abusive person,
• decades invested in an abusive relationship,
• shared property,
• retirement accounts,
• love for an abusive person,
• financial dependence,
• social ties,
• fear of starting over,

and still be experiencing abuse.

The difficulty of leaving does not determine whether something is abusive.

In fact, “Why don’t you leave?” is historically a terrible way of analyzing abusive relationships. It’s one way we shame women in domestic violence situations. The complicated reasons people remain are not evidence that the underlying behavior isn’t abusive.

4. Non sequitur: “It’s complicated” → “therefore it’s not abuse”

Let’s try to follow the unicorn think here:

1. Infidelity varies considerably.
2. People’s circumstances vary considerably.
3. Therefore, calling infidelity abuse is an unhelpful oversimplification.

Lots of things that constitute abuse have enormous variation in severity, frequency, context, and consequences. He only cheats on me on Tuesdays. Wednesday through Monday, he’s terrific.

“Abuse” isn’t necessarily a claim that every instance is identical.

Why doesn’t she address this distinction? She could argue “not all cheating is equally harmful.” I wouldn’t disagree. There’s finding out your fiancee is on dating apps and there’s paternity testing your children after 20 years of marriage. There’s inappropriate sexting and there’s losing a pregnancy to a husband’s wandering dick and STDs.

I agree it’s not all the same. But that’s different from:

“Therefore cheating cannot be abusive.”

Those aren’t equivalent propositions.

5. False dichotomy: either “cheating is abuse” or “all cheating is exactly the same”

The “one-night stand versus seggs addiction” example sets up an implicit binary:

Either every instance of infidelity is identical, or the category “abuse” is invalid.

False. A category can contain behaviors with different severity.

Physical abuse is an obvious analogy: a shove and a prolonged beating aren’t equivalent experiences, but that doesn’t mean “physical abuse” ceases to be a meaningful category.

The better question would be what characteristics make particular conduct abusive, not whether every instance of infidelity is equally destructive.

6. Appeal to complexity / “nuance” as a substitute for an argument

“There’s nuance” sounds sophisticated, (are you freebasing Esther Perel?) but nuance isn’t itself an argument against a behavior being abusive.

We routinely make categorical distinctions while acknowledging nuance.

Someone can have mitigating circumstances and still have committed harmful conduct. Someone can have the capacity for change and still have done something abusive.

“Nuance” needs to tell us which fact changes the classification and why. She never does that.

7. Appeal to consequences: “The label isn’t helpful, therefore don’t use it.”

Why isn’t it helpful? What label do you prefer? A sad sausage who is going to see the error of his ways? Wayward?

She repeatedly argues that calling cheating abuse:

• shames people,
• judges people,
• isn’t empowering,
• doesn’t help the betrayed person,
• doesn’t help the cheater change.

Even if every one of those claims were true,(that calling infidelity abuse shames cheaters) they wouldn’t establish that the classification is false.

That’s an argument from consequences:

“This label has undesirable consequences, therefore the label is wrong.”

But truth and therapeutic usefulness aren’t identical concepts.

You could have a legitimate therapeutic discussion about whether, when, and how a therapist should use the word “abuse.”

That’s a different question from whether the behavior can objectively constitute abuse.

8. Equivocation between “abuse” as a behavior and “abuser” as an identity

She asks:

“If you say somebody is an abuser, does this make them always an abuser? Is there the capacity for growth and learning and change?”

Why should I care if this person is harming me? (Oh shut up Tracy, chumps don’t matter compared to the exquisite potential of a maybe repentant cheater.)

There is a difference between:

“This person engaged in abusive behavior.”

and

“This person has an immutable identity as an abuser.”

She moves from a claim about conduct to a claim about permanent identity and then argues against the latter.

Again, that’s a straw man.

Someone can do something abusive, acknowledge it, change, and never repeat it. That doesn’t retroactively make the conduct non-abusive.

9. Begging the question about what constitutes abuse

Dr. Kathy Nickerson seems to assume that calling infidelity abuse is merely “putting a stamp on something.”

But that’s precisely the point. The question is whether particular features of infidelity can satisfy meaningful definitions of abusive conduct.

Infidelity can involve:

• deliberate deception,
• sustained manipulation,
• coercive control,
• exploitation of a partner’s trust,
• financial deception,
• exposure to sexual health risks without informed consent,
• systematic gaslighting or reality manipulation.

If those behaviors meet a definition of abuse, simply saying “don’t put a stamp on it” doesn’t refute that.

She needs to explain why they don’t constitute abuse.

She doesn’t.

10. Appeal to intent — without actually establishing it

Her framing also seems to presume that “abuse” means something like deliberately intending to abuse someone.

But many discussions of abuse focus on the nature and effects of conduct, not simply whether the perpetrator consciously thought: “I’m an ogre! I’m abusing my partner!”

A person can engage in coercive, deceptive, controlling, or dangerous behavior without thinking of themselves as an abuser.

11. She conflates “victimhood” with helplessness

There’s also a philosophical assumption underneath her argument:

victim = powerless, passive, defined by what happened to you.

That’s not what “victim” means.

A person can accurately identify that they were victimized by someone else’s conduct and simultaneously have extraordinary agency about what they do next.

You don’t cease being the victim of a robbery because you subsequently rebuild your finances.

You don’t cease having been assaulted because you become psychologically resilient.

Likewise, someone can say: “My spouse abused me with his double life, and I chose to leave, and rebuild my life.”

The second half doesn’t negate the first.

12. Staying in a relationship with a cheater doesn’t make it NOT abusive.

For all the flutter about chumps have choices, Dr. K seems to tar people who leave and describe their experience as abuse as bitter bunnies who aren’t being helpful to their own healing.

But the fact that someone chooses to remain in a relationship does not tell us whether their partner’s conduct is abusive.

Relationships can endure. It doesn’t mean they’re healthy.

That’s all the skein untangling I have for Dr. Kathy Nickerson today. Your Friday Challenge is to give me your own review.

TGIF.