How Do They Flip So Fast?

CL – Great follow up to yesterday’s post. Hope comments to this re-run will provide all pregnant chumps with real life suggestions.

Jackie,

The thing to remember is that Cheaters don’t have relationships with people …. they have relationships with things that are of use to them. They flip so quickly as they see no difference between deciding to ditch their spouse and children for a new shiny AP and deciding that the old washing machine needs replacing and going out and getting a new shiny one ….. and of course they don’t pause to reflect on how the washing machine (or indeed their spouse and children) is impacted by or feels about this sudden change.

LFTT

Play acting at life sums it up. . . .What I don’t think I will ever understand is how my FW was able to keep up this charade/mirage for about 25 years. I guess I was a very useful wife appliance, until I wasn’t? Then he “flipped a switch” (his exact words!) and decided he was “done” and that gave him license to lie, cheat, betray, etc., because he was “divorced in his own mind.” But what makes someone commit to the deception for so long in the first place?

I should note that these days, I am mostly interested in these questions from a psychological/social fabric point of view, because this worldview is so very different from my own values and ethics. I do trust that he sucks, I guess I’m curious as to why so many people give themselves permission to be the worst versions of themselves? I hope with CL/CN’s help that there is a cultural shift that recognizes infidelity as abuse, and takes more seriously the harm done by the lying, manipulation, betrayal, gas lighting, and other forms of emotional abuse involved.

The second pregnancy seems to tax the acting skills of some of the FWs. FW slipped his mask as I woke him up at 11 pm because I was in labor and responded not with kindness/care but with ‘Jesus effing christ. Why couldn’t you go into labor this morning like normal people?’
It continued with his never being involved with the second baby — no pediatrician visits, no changing diapers, no daycare involvement. But in front of anyone, he was the proud father of 2 children.
I asked him to move out when the second was nearly 1 year old. By that time, it became obvious that I had 3 children. I was running the household, the children, and all the bills. 2 children seemed easier.

Coming over for weekly dinners?????
That’s the literal translation of “ having your cake and eating it too”. Just that you get to make the cake for him in real life!
He’d be gobbling up some delicious kibbles there, “ do you mind if my gf joins us next week so she can meet our son?!”
No buddy,no.
You don’t get the happy little family life AND the gfs.
Keep moving by like the clouds,man
My ex wanted to divorce me after 38 years of marriage and then start dating me.( ?!?) I’d get to compete for his awesomeness with his harem of gfs.
Or he even suggested building an apartment onto our beach house for his mistress. ( ?!?) (That one was a scary look into his psyche.)
Their brains are greatly disordered, we try to imagine we are dealing with someone who thinks like us, cares and loves like us, but that is NOT the reality.
They view themselves as entitled and special and they truly believe they deserve that status.
Their brains have been hijacked by massive delusions they convince themselves are very real, it’s truly warped and frightening.
My ex spouse got so much worse once we started having kids. He would even tell me he had guilt sometimes about being jealous of his own kids and the attention and love that I showered on them.
Weren’t we doing this child rearing together and shouldn’t we both be loving the hell out of them as a team?! ????‍♀️
Something deeply off with a person who would deny their children love because they feel neglected. That’s a squadron of red flags waving in your future. It’s a road that will take you nowhere good.
Jackie, you don’t have a unicorn in your possession. He’s a FW with a carrot horn.
Absorb the sage and wonderful wisdom of our fearless leader, CL, who has Superwoman level X-ray vision and uncannily sees through BS like it’s her life’s mission to do so. ( I think it may actually be!!)
Good luck to you and your babies, there is peace on your horizon but not with this loser you need to lose yesterday.
Trust that he sucks.
“ He has an empty elevator shaft where his soul should be”.
That’s enough for you to know. Don’t drive yourself nuts thinking there’s more to get than that, you will never have the answers you would like to have.
( I also believe you’re going to kiss ass at motherhood, you are mighty enough to recognize that you deserve more and so do your kids!)
Best to you, you got this!

If you didn’t want the kid, I hope you seriously thought about abortion. It wouldn’t be fair to bring them into a home where they aren’t wanted. I grew up in a home like that, where I was told I wasn’t wanted. It feels awful.

Yeah, I had one of those amazingly perfect “Husbands Who Care”… until he got tired of posing and ultimately dropped the act. If you’re not prepared for the Jekyll/Hyde conversion, it can be a shock.

I made one weekly dinner for my XW, the week she moved out (for the sake of the kids). I somehow thought that the dinner dynamic would be better – that since she wasn’t living in the house she’d behave as a guest rather than as an entitled FW. I was wrong. She blatantly texted her AP (in violation of our “no phones at the table” rule, also), refused to help set the table or clear the table (she was on Facebook while all the kids and I were washing dishes), and didn’t thank me or show any appreciation of the effort I’d gone to. Basically, she acted the same way she’d been acting for months in the marriage. It’s not behavior I’d accept from a guest (not that any of my dinner guests have ever been that rude, actually), so I never invited her into my house again.

This is just to say: don’t be under the illusion that your XH getting his way (no more family! 24/7 access to the AP!) will improve his attitude or behavior towards you. I advocate minimizing contact as much as possible, which is certainly not compatible with you being legally forced to cook for him once a week.

I hope Jackie is living her best life now. As for the question of why these people flip so quickly, I think CL is spot on. There’s no “there” there to begin with. That doesn’t mean they don’t have overpowering emotions or are total ciphers even if they appear robotic at times. It may even be that their raging, self-centered, infantile internal life is so intense that it blocks out the ability to feel anything else for anyone else (poor dears). But they’re just not who they seem to be on the surface. Furthermore, it could be more dangerous than we’re led to believe. If anyone still feels compelled to untangle further (but not in the direction of “forgiving” fuckwits, quite the other direction– understanding how potentially dangerous these freaks can be and running like your hair’s on fire), read up on batterer psychology. It’s all there give or take broken ribs and cracked skulls. That includes chumps dealing with female FWs. The syndrome might more often manifest in extreme ways in men but there are enough women who fit the profile or there wouldn’t be so many witting female side dishes who show their propensity through proxy abuse.

I recommend (as I usually do) Donald Dutton’s The Batterer. Also any of his other books and studies though The Batterer seems the most accessible. Dutton researched batterers in prison settings for decades without seeming to have identified with his subjects. He calls for stiffer punishments for batterers, arguing that it’s the only thing that statistically even slightly dents recidivism though the overall warning is that few ever significantly change. Unlike John Gottman (who shifted from writing about DV to becoming a RIC guru), Dutton doesn’t provide flashy “categories” for batterers though he describes different flavors in behavior and psychology between abusers which I think apply very well to types of cheaters. If I remember correctly (not a complete list) Dutton describes loose and overlapping categories of abusers like the heavily borderline types who are all sloppy emotions, overt infantile dependence on partners, possessiveness, self pity, tears, paranoia and chaos. There are coldblooded antisocial types who may be violent/criminal beyond the family and then what Dutton describes as the most statistically lethal type who display something called “masked dependency.” Gottman’s “Cobra” and “Pit Bull” classifications for batterers feel like cutesy, artificially delineated simplifications of the above that lack subtlety and don’t get as nitty gritty about coercive/psychological control as a chief component of DV as Dutton does. But then Dutton is drier and not that populist, basing arguments on (yawn) his own and others’ peer reviewed research and carefully distinguishing informed supposition (calls for further studies) from things that can be backed up with fact. Dutton also carefully squashes a lot of mythology surrounding battering, including the typical take that victims are all hot messes to begin with. He also nods to the existence of female abusers without tarring all victims under the “takes two to tango” view.

The devil is really in the details that the RIC/CSAT carefully leave out. Without the subtleties, it’s harder to see the overlap between subviolent abuse and physical violence. So speaking of cheaters who seem to suddenly flip, take the “masked dependent” type of batterer as an example. I bring it up a lot because there are so many stories of FWs who seem to suddenly shift from devoted partner to coldly or viciously abusive and discarding. Dutton describes this type as not typically displaying overtly traditional gender expectations like the sloppier or more generally antisocial abusers might. They might seem politically correct on the surface. They also don’t commonly express jealousy or possessiveness, but apparently this is what makes them particularly dangerous because it’s all boiling subconsciously under the surface until it explodes. My understanding is that, like the emotionally sloppy abusers, masked dependents harbor the same type of attachment disordered, internally-generated and shifting/dueling infantile terrors of either abandonment or “engulfment” by partners but they deny and hide these things (possibly from extreme shame over the “weakness” of dependency on partners) even to themselves and are even more dissociative. From working in advocacy for survivors, I started thinking of it as the “Manchurian candidate” syndrome. They were pre-programmed and waiting to explode like land mines but part of that training was to carefully keep all the aggression in the realm of the unconsious. The abuser is able to maintain and live out a projected image of themselves that they deeply believe in until something triggers the “flip.” They really don’t consciously know what they’re going to do until they do it and then show even less control of their actions than other types of abusers which may be why their explosions can statistically be more injurious or lethal. That could potentially be applied to sudden explosions of betrayal/psychological abuse: maybe this type is more likely to drive victims to suicidality. Dutton argues that this type also shows particularly poor recall of their own destructive behavior. They confabulate memories, can’t report what they do or why they do it, so Dutton appears to take perps’ self representation with a giant grain of salt and puts the pieces together from patterns and evidence rather than perpetrator narratives.

In pop-psych I think this kind of psyche is commonly described as “compartmentalized” which makes it sound kind of banal and maybe a bit sad sausage– because childhood trauma! Nevertheless, considering FOO issues can be interesting and provide a few clues for the sudden shift as well as the danger that implies. Take Chris Watts with his coke-head dad and denialist, victim-blaming mom who displayed what looked like covertly incestuous competition with Shanann to the point of endangering her own grandchildren (giving the allergic child peanut ice cream against Shanann’s explicit warnings). Watts had reportedly never been violent to his wife before. On the surface he seemed to support his wife’s career and be kind of feministy. It appears he cheated before but seemed not to have been as fixated as he became on Nichol Kessinger. To me it looked like a Manchurian candidate shift. Why? Did Nichol smell like mommy in some psychological sense? Was the fact that mommy had just begun a war with Shanann and seemed to be giving subtle orders to sacrifice Shanann and their children in that moment the trigger for Watts to replace Shanann with a mommy-scented Schmoopie who, the night before the murders, had texted Watts the thrash metal song “Battery” that included the line “killing the family”? This isn’t to go all Freudian and blame “mommy” or “damned wymins” for everything. Who knows if this doesn’t involve an exchange where formerly victimized individuals who’ve gone rogue intuitively know that green-lighting the aggression they sensed in other people around them is a way to stay on the “safe” side of that aggression. But I sense it’s a terrifying dynamic between extremely manipulative, unreflective people who each fear each other for different reasons so that it’s the dynamic or exchange that’s so “familiar” and compelling and can act as a trigger. I’ve heard stories of women being battered after a male friend of the abuser (due to daddy issues or homoerotic undertones?) felt threatened by time and attention spent on the victim. These women felt as if their abusers were responding to “orders.” Then advocates would try to point out that someone capable of responding to orders in this way is incredibly dangerous in their own right and can’t be absolved of their own conduct like the “agentic” study subjects in Milgrim’s experiment.

Just something I started suspecting while working as an advocate. I think that some abusers/cheaters (virtually all batterers cheat, so…), even those who may have had previous but not very intense affairs or “indiscretions,” might not totally “flip” to overtly discarding or attacking their primary partners until they encounter a particular type of “supply” that reflects unresolved childhood whatever, likely smelling of the right melange of psychopath/narcissist. In a strange sense, these cheaters/abusers could be captor bonding with someone they sense is dangerous in the same way as an abusive or incestuous adult from their past had been. It may be compulsive reenactment in which they try to replay past events with the hopes of finally achieving a better outcome. It could explain the sudden, hateful disloyalty to partners, as if these abusers were reporting for duty to a higher authority and that fear could be underlying the motives to offer the new supply the scalp of the former. What I thought was poetic about this idea is that victims have traditionally been accused of “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” and reenacting childhood dysfunction but what if it’s really abusers who are the most prone to doing this? What if abusers themselves periodically get burned by pursuing relationships in which they’re reenacting past dysfunction and then, while licking wounds, view chumps as a departure from the pattern (then get bored and go back to factory setting)? Maybe I just like ideas that mess with victim-blamey traditional assumptions but I with there were studies on this.

In any case, did anyone else notice how banal and trancey (“compartmentalized”) Watts seemed even in videos taken before his affair and the murders of his family? I would wonder if he had conscious idea what he was capable of before he did it. He had that same air of suddenly standing it attention like a trained soldier and “following orders.” I also suspect that Dutton’s analysis might apply in that Watts obscured to police what may have been the real reason he killed his wife and children: because Shanann had just threatened to leave him, flipping him from his terror of engulfment back to terror of abandonment. Typical of a masked dependent, Watts would have hidden, even from himself, his own pathological dependency on his primary partner even to the point of admitting the more heinous MO of killing her and their children to get them out of the way of an affair. It kind of fits.

Anyway, I suspect that once anyone sees the overlaps between domestic abuse and cheating/sexual aggression, they can’t be unseen even by people in the throes of desperately dosing with hopium. Equivocating battering to cheating has a bonus of cutting past the RIC’s bullshit (including the degree to which sex addiction/CSAT therapy involves itself in reconciliation) because the RIC is all about obscuring the association by changing the definitions of what constitutes abuse just like abusers are all about obscuring the association by changing the definition. If confronted with the incontrovertible evidence of what they’ve done, the psychological torturer says, “But I didn’t cheat on him/her.” The cheater says, “But I didn’t hit him/her.” The hitter says, “But I didn’t punch him/her.” The puncher says, “But I didn’t stomp him/her.” The stomper says, “But I didn’t shoot him/her” and on and on until the victim is dead. The big, dangerous lie is that it’s not all on the same continuum and so there’s no possibility of sliding from one to the next.

To quote Holocaust survivor and historian, shifting definitions could be seen as a “precious service rendered to the negators of truth.” Any kind of truth in whatever sphere. I think it has political ramifications beyond the interpersonal.

Nobody sees the bland, trancey, compartmentalized ones coming but they should. Humanity has received warnings, which also shows how obfuscation of the link between psychological abuse and overt violence and the scuttling of red flags and definitions by trendy pop psych outfits like the RIC/CSAT is even politically dangerous in a sense. Bland, banal and compartmentalized are also the way in which political philosophers like Hannah Arendt describe certain Nazi participants in the Holocaust. Arendt has such contempt for “banal” functionaries of evil that she doesn’t concern herself with discussions of FOO issues and sexual manifestations of political perversion. But Nabokov and Kafka do (at least for aspects of sexual/political perversity) and current filmmaker Pablo Larrain seems to have made the exploration his life’s work. People are probably more familiar with Larrain’s English language biopics of famous, subtly-victimized women like “Jackie” and “Spencer.” But his more balls-out, Spanish language explorations of the political significance of sexual betrayal and violence really expand on Arendt’s theory of the compartmentalized/banal functionaries of tremendous evil. I hope I’m not doing Larrain an injustice by summarizing his overall gist: that if you want to know how your friends and neighbors will behave in the case your country is overtaken by a violent dictatorship, thou shalt know them by their secret sexual aggression and perviness. In Post Mortem, Larrain focuses on a banal, shy, wormy assistant coroner who, just moments before Pinochet’s violent military coup in Chile, develops a sudden, flash-of-lightning fixation on the showgirl who lives across the street and then immediately and cruelly dumps his lover/coworker. It’s interesting that the wormy protagonist accuses the spurned lover of being a floozy since the showgirl is numbly promiscuous and doesn’t seem capable of loving anyone or anything. Spoiler alert: the way in which the wormy coroner incrementally relies on state terrorism as a means to entrap and control the showgirl overlaps with the way he incrementally betrays his coworkers seems to be an illustration of how terror regimes take and maintain power– because wormy little compartmentalized nobodies see their chance to let their sexual freak flags fly. Larrain’s “The Club” follows a similar arch but in the context of church sexual abuse facilitated by dictatorship. “Compartmentalization” runs thick in the latter film as the bland, banal central characters are slowly exposed as monsters and enablers. In his first film “Fuga,” there’s another association made about pedophilic rape and political opportunism among functionaries of terror states with an added note of how childhood victims can become perpetrators. The latter sort of relates to dissociation and compartmentalization.

That there’s my thinking on the “sudden flip.” Very, very scary. People should know just how scary. Obviously I’ve been mulling it over for a long time so forgive the length of this.

“I think people like this just play act at life. He did the role of Supportive Husband and now, for an encore, he’ll spout a few lines like an old hack playing King Lear…He’d like to do some encore production numbers for your son on Skype in Daddy Who Cares!”

I am so glad I saw this post today because I needed this clarity so badly. My FW has professionally supervised visits with our daughter. In addition to cheating on me, FW watched porn in front of our baby when she was 6 months old, was playing interactive, pornographic games with lolichan and incest themes, and had a Google search for “Teen Dating app” in his phone. He only moved across the street when we separated, so there’s this constant pressure from him when I run into him for me to just let him come over while I’m home so I can supervise and he can see his daughter and “assure her I haven’t abandoned her”, as if its my job to help him with navigating any of that. He’ll also occasionally say patronizing things to me like “I hope what I’ve done doesn’t break you forever, mowmow. You deserve to be happy and healed someday.” (while he gets therapy on my health insurance because the divorce restraining orders keep me from booting him off entirely. So infuriating!!) Its all play-acting…he didn’t give two figs about how his actions would impact my happiness when he was hiding them from me. When we first separated, he was telling all our neighbors that my taking custody from him was a sign that I’ve become just as overbearing as my mom, which hurt like hell because my mom has been stalking me for 6 years now, following me to every apartment or house I’ve moved to and moving either right next door or within a block or two of me to “prevent me from cutting contact with our family”, as she has admitted to me. Consequently the neighbors all think I took our daughter away from a “good” father and are giving him advice on how to get custody back from me and “that crazy family” (as one of them said, never mind that for the last 4 years it was FW himself who refused to let me sell the house and move the hell away from her.) My therapist told me to pay less attention to his pleas to see his daughter and more attention to what he’s actually doing, which is doing image management with the neighbors by downplaying his actions and smearing my name, and short-changing his daughter by not paying the full amount of his court-ordered child support (and requesting that the courts lower the amount entirely!) He’ll drop off $30 worth of groceries at my house when he feels like it, but it’s not like I get the option to just choose when I feel like going grocery shopping for my daughter like he does, or to only spend $30 at a time. I know I’m rambling but seriously I am so glad I saw this post tonight because sometimes I start gaslighting myself and asking if I went too far with the professional supervision. The courts would have told me I was reaching too hard if that was the case though. I have to tell myself that California is a 50/50 State by default and professional supervision isn’t just handed out like candy on Halloween here. I needed this clarity so badly. Thank you!!