How Do I Know When I’m Done?

You know you’re done when you think more of yourself than to allow another person to reign contempt, disrespect and destruction upon your life. Poof! They’re gone.

BVC,

I know that this is a rerun, but I think that the answer to your question lies in the perspective that you take. Being “done” isn’t about being able to fully visualise the detail of your post-cheater life and the path that you take to get there; it’s about knowing that the life that you visualise should you stay with your cheater would not be acceptable to you …. and reading your words, I think that you are there already.

And as regards exposing him and the OW publicly, I would advise patience; it is likely that your cheater (and the OW) won’t want that information out there, which gives you leverage to get a better settlement. I’m not saying “don’t do it” – although I subscribe to CL’s “if it feels good, then don’t mantra – rather, I’d suggest that this is something that you deploy selectively to gain advantage.

You’ve got this.

LFTT

I started reading a book that really helps—Soul Broken: A Guidebook for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief by Stephanie Sarazin. I’m about halfway through. The author is a chump, and although the book also talks about other kinds of ambiguous grief (such as losing a connection with a family member who is still alive), it’s especially informative and (I think) accurate about some of the reasons it’s so difficult to get to Tuesday, meh, and be Done with a FW. She talks about two different kinds of hope – – external hope, where you huff the pipe and your dreams for improvement in the future are hooked to the possibility that FW will change and you can “fix” things, and internal hope, the hope that recovery requires, where you pin your hopes on yourself and your own possibilities and only the things that you do you have power over. The author offers some exercises for getting into that kind of hope.

As a big hopium addict, with dad issues and anxious attachment, something about this framing has helped me see my desperate frantic hope with FW as connected to addiction/lack of health. The book’s also good on discussing the lingering grief that comes with betrayal trauma.

My FW is an absolute genius at DARVOing and blameshifting. He’s skilled at somehow reaching right past my intellect, my adult humanity, my basic logic and common sense, and my reliable intuition and speaking directly to the little two-year-old inside me who’s still hunched on a mattress somewhere, crying and begging my dad not to leave and to please come back. (And when he speaks directly to her, he’s like, “this is your fault because you don’t deserve to be loved.”) He “wins” arguments and keeps me hooked by doing this—if he didn’t ruthlessly hunt for my weak spots and activate my attachment disorder, he would probably “lose” those same arguments with me because he’s just so wrong by any standard of adult ethics or logic. The author of Soul Broken does a lot of work to start really imagining a happy life for herself that is not contingent on anything in particular happening (or not) with her FW—-this is also a hugely valuable part of ChumpLady’s message.

I was waffling. I knew how hard it was going to be (spoiler: it was worse!). I wanted to hang on 2 more years for my high school son. Then college freshman daughter came home for Christmas break. She told me, “If you don’t file for divorce, I’m never coming home again.” That was an easy choice.

People who don’t do monogamy have no empathy, and they are very unlikely therefore to tell the other person they aren’t dong monogamy, because it’s nice for them to have each person they sleep with dedicated and exclusive to them. Polyamory is a myth, everyone can love more than one person. The only time people practice ‘ethical’ polyamory is if they actually don’t mind, or get off on, their partner sleeping with other people. The very nature of it is an all-about-myself attitude. I have loved more than one person in my life – most of us have. I dedicate myself to a man in a relationship to foster a safe environment where they are not pitted against other men because that destroys self worth and I would’t do that to THEM. It’s not because something about having more variety or more dates repulses me. It’s out of love and caring for someone else, putting myself in their shoes and agreeing mutually we won’t give each other competition and will embrace each other as we are and foster intimacy. The whole play that polyamory is ever okay is stupid, because if you weren’t gaslighting some sucker into a lopsided commitment you would be single and you wouldn’t try to market your singleness as some type of ‘relationship’. That’s just a total gaslight if someone is sleeping with someone other than you, they are single but want more from you. Make no mistake.

I think doing a “180,” by definition, is when you leave or change the locks and have them served without personally explaining anything. It’s removing all kibble and contact (getting a parenting app if there are children in common) and ceasing to “JADE” (justify, argue, defend, explain). Anything else is “80” or “360.”

I also had to deal with that feeling of not being “done” but realized that, in situations of abuse, the abuser has put a dagger through your shoe via a systematic fostering of dependency that will only come out in sharp relief once you’re out of range and clear of the constant mindfucking. “Done” comes much later because that’s the spellbinding nature of abuse– to make you distrust your own survival instincts. Though it’s unlikely that any cheater “only” cheated and was otherwise a loving, supportive and wonderful partner who didn’t also engage in a pattern of destructive gaslighting and other forms of insidious emotional abuse, I think it would be theoretically easier to leave someone who’d been wholly positive and supportive up until the moment they betrayed than it is to leave an emotional abuser because emotional abuse is weakening and fosters doubt in oneself.

I was really struck by the OP’s statement that she couldn’t yet detect the past patterns/red flags that forewarned of her STBX’s ultimate betrayal and abuse. But, no matter how smart someone is, those clouds only typically clear once you’re in the actual POST-traumatic stress stage and not currently enveloped in *ongoing* traumatic stress and continuous mindfucking.

The mindfucking can take many forms but I think one standard tactic is what psychotherapist Susan Forward dubbed “FOG” or “fear, obligation, guilt.” If the boring details of my case can help someone else recognize patterns, here goes: In my situation, much of this was done through “gesture warfare” and what I call “rhapsodizing.” It started slowly and progressed over the course of the marriage until FW constantly and excessively dramatized even the tiniest inconvenience as though it were life threatening. He didn’t scream or punch walls while doing this which would have been more identifiable “domestic terrorism.” Mostly he hissed and murmured or periodically acted like he was on a hunger strike for an important cause. But he couldn’t just stub his toe while making coffee and say “ouch” like a normal person. It had to involve hissed curses and hopping around in a way that would fill the room with tension and undefinable dread. I ended up getting steeped in that “undefinable dread” for years to the point I couldn’t even identify the chronic sensation. It began to seem normal and there are always other things going on in life that might explain it– kids’ health and education, personal health issues, aging family elders or, I don’t know, vague gnostical jitters. In any event, I was frog-boiled. If he couldn’t do his share of housework because of a work deadline, this was never communicated neutrally and with promises to make up for it. Instead he was always on the verge of losing his job or about to keel over from sleep deprivation and the burden of work. If he was rudely abrupt with me or the kids, it was always because he was “held together by chewing gum” and on the verge of collapse. And when he wasn’t using words to describe his dire state, there were the gestures. He had a way of walking through the room with ominously furrowed brow as if going to put out a fire instead of just going to to the fridge for a snack. Or he’d suddenly pose in tragic pensiveness when he knew this would be seen.

At times when he’d be abrupt and callous with me and the kids and would rhapsodize the excuse that he was so stressed from trying to keep the family from drowning, I’d call him on it. Then would come the lovebombing or, better put, the “random reward” part of his “operant conditioning chamber” (Skinner box) to complete the cycle of the random punishments. There were promises to change, odes of love, temporary displays of earnest helpfulness, and– really mindbending– self effacing jokes about his own behavior. But he’d inevitably go back to factory setting and endlessly repeat the same pattern of behavior. In that way, it was like a low key version of the cycle of abuse: tension building, explosion, remorse and on and on and on until I was lying inert on the electrified Skinner box floor (“learned helplessness”) and too bamboozled to keep resisting.

Because FW’s mindfuckery got so much more extreme during the affair while the “lovebombing/remorse” became less and less frequent, I realized after D-Day that the rhapsodizing gesture warfare behavior was “unconsciously” (FW’s favorite alibi, yawn) to both “FOG” me– keep me constantly unsettled and sensing that I had some obligation to ease his terrible burden and some guilt in causing this– as well as (here’s the key) to convince *himself* how “hard” his life was and what a victim he was.

The process of falsely convincing oneself of one’s own innocence and entitlement has a name in criminology: “neutralization” or the way in which a range of offenders spellbind themselves into believing that they’re justified for committing various crimes and that their victims deserved it to the point that they feel no remorse (https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/societies/societies-09-00046/article_deploy/societies-09-00046.pdf?version=1560246670). “Neutralization” is short for “neutralization of guilt” or “neutralization of self punishment.” For each self-message that his life was hard and I was kind of/sort of the cause, it was as if FW dropped a little token into a blame bag until he “earned” enough tokens to cash them in on an epic betrayal and to do so with little remorse because– tada– he was the world’s biggest victim and was entitled. Whatever remnants of guilt hadn’t been successfully “neutralized” by his self-spellbinding inner narrative were squelched with buckets of booze. FW went from a few glasses of wine a year to drinking his lunch and, in a really short time, developed a massive secret drinking problem during his affair with a more practiced alcoholic. In domestic violence research, it’s thought that, rather than abusing because they drink, abusers drink so that they can abuse.

It wasn’t so easy for FW to squelch his guilt over what he was doing to the children because he couldn’t engineer it in his mind that they “had it coming.” So his solution was to start to falsely frame me as a bad parent to make his terrible parenting (which cheating is) look good in comparison. Doing this represented a sudden uptick in the emotional coercion and shook me out of my paralysis because I took this as a custody threat. It was so terrifying that I finally reached out to a lawyer friend for feedback. This is typical of abuse survivors: they usually think about leaving only when the danger of staying exceeds the statistically considerable danger of leaving. Around the same time, I got an anonymous email from two workplace whistleblowers who reported the affair. I secretly retained a lawyer and hired a PI to get admissible evidence.

FW made the mistake of coercion-overkill because the not-so-veiled threat against custody woke me up out of my daze. For another survivor, that activating “penny drop” moment that they’re in serious danger might come in another form. It could simply be the threat of socially isolating and socially destroying the victim via the abuser spreading their bs narrative about the relationship to others. The threat of being “pushed out of the tribe” spelled certain death back in the caveman days and some part of that visceral fear probably remains in the deeper regions of our lizard brains. It’s a potent underhanded way to shock a target into a state of frozen fear. Because I’d moved around a lot for work and had already rebuilt my life several times, the threat of social condemnation might not have been enough to paralyze me. I think this is why FW went the extra mile to play on what he knew to be my worst ever fear– loss of my children.

Even after D-Day, I think it would have taken me much longer to shake off the “FOG” and figure out how FW had systematically emotionally hogtied me during the marriage except I’d previously trained as an advocate for survivors of domestic violence and had some awareness of abuse cycles, abuser psychology and “captor bonding/learned helplessness/Stockholm syndrome.” Because, again, FW hadn’t been punching walls or threatening direct violence and, at least until he’d launched into his secret bangfest and the blame shifting became outrageous, had been mostly indirect and “hinty hinty” about blaming and shaming, I made the common mistake that forensic social worker and veteran DV advocate Evan Stark points out as a hazard in his book, “Coercive Control”: I set the bar for what constitutes “abuse” at extreme violence and missed the less technicolor forms of “coercion and control” which Stark describes as the most devastating and paralyzing aspects of DV. That’s why Stark wrote the book: most people make that mistake and miss the fact that “lesser” forms of abuse are still distinctly on the battering continuum and can result in all the things this association suggests: victim’s developing trauma related health problems and paralysis/Stockholm syndrome/captor bonding, etc. This is why Stark has also spearheaded the movement to add coercive control laws to existing domestic violence statutes: to enable victims to get orders of protection against “mere” emotional abusers, both because the impact of emotional abuse is “bad enough” to warrant it and because of the scarily elevated statistical risk that certain forms of emotional abuse may too often progress to violence. In Scotland, engaging in coercive control against a partner can get an offender up to 14 years in prison. In California and Hawaii, the pattern of behavior can lose the offender visitation rights of children. In the latter two states and Connecticut, victims can get orders of protection against offenders.

The combination of the affair and dissipation of assets (financial abuse/control), the text evidence of gaslighting and blame-shifting and the terrifying implied threats against my custody of my children might have technically met the legal standard of coercive control. Even in places where cheating itself isn’t criminalized, many of the behaviors that typically attend it and facilitate it may one day be universally viewed as criminal conduct. And even though my region hasn’t yet enacted those laws and even if there’s a huge variance in how these are presently enforced, it was sobering to realize that, at least in theory, FW was guilty of it and if, say, this had happened in Scotland or the UK, he might be in prison.

I think it helped me to get past the “not done” feeling to realize that my indecision was not so much out of love for FW but more insidious fear of him that had been carefully conditioned over years and years. Hello, Stockholm syndrome. He was on the batterer spectrum and I was on the battering victim spectrum and if I felt paralyzed and inert and dependent after years of this treatment, no bloody wonder. At first I felt foolish for not putting the pieces together right off the bat. After all, I’d been trained to be aware. But of course FW knew I’d been trained so, like most abusers (and viruses), he adapted his methods to suit the target. After D-Day and during the lamentable RIC stage, FW conceded that framing me as a bad parent was outrageous bs but he stopped short of admitting that he consciously did this as a terror tactic to keep me in my box: too afraid of the consequences of leaving him to escape and too blinded by confusion and fear to get in the way of his affair.

That’s a point for another discussion– that survivors should consider that *whatever* it is they’re doing– whether it’s hesitating to leave, socially isolating, giving up the activities they formerly loved, making their lives very small in order to focus 100% of their attention on the problem of the abuser, believing you’ll never find love again, etc.– that this reflects the agenda of the abuser. Whatever confusing thing you’re doing or feeling, it’s what they want you to do and feel and have been training you into from the beginning. Since many domestic abusers tend to mask their own dependency on victims (big long explanation of abuser psychology and shame over attachment to others borne in abusive childhoods, etc., etc.), they may not come out and say “quit your job, ditch your friends, stay where you are, give up your favorite things, view yourself as an unlovable drudge who’ll never attract another partner and focus all your attention on me 24/7,” this can be confusing for survivors who are still captive. But intimate abuse is much like punching one of those vintage Bobo dolls. Abuse and systematic attacks on a target’s self esteem are like the sand in the bottom of the blow up Bobo, weighting the victim down so they don’t fly away when punched. An abuser who masks their dependency on victims relies on having weighed the victim down so that, when the abuser pushes the victim away, the victim just bounces back up in place. That way they get to “push”– to say, in effect, “I don’t need you!” (cheating is one way in which abusers attempt to “dilute” dependence and convince themselves they don’t need their primary partners) while also ensuring that you’re not going anywhere. In reflecting on past abuse and how one came to be hesitant and paralyzed in an unacceptable relationship, think back for signs of the “Bobo” effect. How did they insinuate and hint that there might be ugly consequences if you leave while simultaneously seeming to do whatever it took to chase you away?

As far as this threatening and controlling behavior and “Bobo weighting” being “unconscious” on his part, I now see this as the cherry on top of FW’s giant self-serving cake: not only could he do these terrible things for his own selfish ends, he was so adept at neutralizing guilt that it had become an unconscious process. Another one of his signature gestures was the slightly-raised-eyebrow “Huh?” look of maligned innocence when confronted over behavior he’d previously and explicitly agreed to stop doing a thousand times. In other words, the “cherry” was that he could do all that and feel innocent of it to boot. Wow, cool trick. And his sense of his own entitled, justified innocence was part of what made the progressive abuse so incredibly spellbinding.

He believed his own bull. It made him look very authentic and sincere while in the middle of spewing bald-faced lies. And therein lay the added threat: his total commitment to his narrative would also potentially be spellbinding to other people and bystanders… like the judge in dependency court or family or friends or people I depended on to educate my children or my career network, etc. In effect his faux innocent act held the message that he could, if he felt like it, potentially take my kids, destroy me socially and professionally. And the lie of it was also a threat: if someone has the sheer gall to do this to another person– falsely frame them as a terrible person without cause– what’s to stop them from picking up a tire iron and taking the victim’s head off? Once someone’s dehumanized another person in one sense, what’s to stop them from taking the next logical step in the progression? Not that every abuser would have the stomach to do so but the risk of that would be enough to make the mind spin and induce paralyzing fear.

The OP wrote, “For the record, I haven’t been able yet to see his entitlement or mistreatment of me before D-Day.” If the frog-boiling process is gradual enough, most people would get so accustomed to dread that they’d no longer be able to identify it or the tactics that induced it. It becomes like the noise of the refrigerator. That’s why it’s only after getting away from the source of the fear is it even possible to take full stock and identify fear as fear. Then it’s another step to piece the past back together and understand the coercive tactics by which the fear was instilled.

And here’s the real kicker. I think each of us is endowed with gut instincts. Our brains process an estimated 100 billion bits of data every few seconds. There are ancient parts of our brains that are solely dedicated to calculating risk and analyzing behavior in others to assess our relative safety. Think of it as a kind of human geometry that factors every cue, expression, gesture, tone of voice, etc., and then compares it to other samples to put together a relative risk profile for each person in our midst. So, in the absence of clear memories of coercive things an abuser had been doing along to condition and brainwash, if you want proof that you were being conditioned by fear/coerced into a certain role long before whatever big, overt, terrible deed that someone else committed against you, just look at the nature of the big, overt, terrible deed. Consider that your inner “risk management faculty” had long been guessing that that other person was capable of delivering the punishment they ultimately did, that this was intimidating, that– without being able to name the fear– this might have caused you to try to stay on the abuser’s “good side” as a safety strategy. That’s one reason I really appreciate Stark’s campaign to get recognition for coercive control. Not only can it change laws, it can also warn individuals that captor bonding/Stockholm syndrome may by a lower threshold of abuse than previously believed.

The above is not the same as saying that someone “ignored red flags” at their own peril (out of “codependence” or being a “glutton for punishment” or whatever) because it puts the onus for the confused reaction on the deceptive tactics of the abuser. Abusers live and die by their ability to cross the wires of their targets. Some get very good at it if not much else.