Dating Profiles You Would Never Post

Your story doesn’t bore me it all. It triggers a million thoughts and makes me hate your ex all the more because she’s so familiar. It’s not just what she did to you but I suspect I know that type of woman. Shudder– lots of unfortunate brushes through work, lots of stories. And of course that’s the female version of what I experienced.

I also wonder how many other people she hurt because you couldn’t perform surgery on them due to the fact that stress didn’t help your recovery nor help you get through the battle with crap colleagues? Sending healing thoughts for your continued recovery. Sending very ugly thoughts at those former colleagues. It’s just more proof that level of education doesn’t confer ethics or humanity just like Elie Wiesel concluded. I tend to think enablers and collaborators might deserve even worse fates than direct perpetrators but maybe it’s a tie.

Your colleagues all sound like cheaters/abusers in their own rights or at least major enablers of victimization. Forgive me if I use the word “victim.” I think the term has been heavily spun to be a condemnation of those who encounter misfortune, but to me it’s just a neutral signifier for someone on the receiving end of perpetration, not a character analysis. Being a victim says nothing about the recipient otherwise and everything about the perpetrator. Anyway, I swear abusers and chronic flying monkeys can smell victims who might fight back (any victim of any offense) and they’ll knee-jerkedly pour more abuse on them.

Call it the universal abuser Omerta. They stick together to silence the victim POV even when they don’t know or like each other. I learned this first hand. Not to bore either but I was stalked by a coworker when working in media right out of school and there was this very weird, Manchurian candidate thing that happened to about half my colleagues when I cooperated with the prosecution. All of a sudden several people began siding with the demented stalker, even those who hadn’t previously respected the guy. His lies weren’t credible but some chose to believe them anyway in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary. That’s all on them.

Even in the midst of total chaos, I was curious about why this was happening and actually interrogated all the creepy bystanders individually about their childhoods. The bizarre thing is that they all barfed out their FOO issues as if in trances even though they had to know I wasn’t making warm and caring inquiries. It turned out that every negative bystander had grown up with domestic violence, family trauma and addiction, etc. There were a couple of borderline creeps in that office so their reactions weren’t that surprising but I was completely shocked that a close former friend and employee and another woman who was an avowed “feminist” (when it suited her) suddenly began leaning towards the bully cabal. It’s like they all went into an automatic boxer’s clinch with the perp. I guess the lesson they learned from childhood was that it’s safer to side with the most dangerous person (who could be anyone) in a standoff and it doesn’t pay to side with the victim (any victim). Fortunately the other half of the company were on my side (two who’d also had childhood traumas though *resolved* traumas). They formed a wall around me and probably saved my life. The prosecution won the case hands down but my career never recovered from the scandal. Many people don’t care who causes trouble, just that trouble seems to follow them.

I’m sorry that something similar happened to you but sadly I’m not surprised. The twisted Manchurian Candidates are all around us like moles just waiting for a coded trigger to switch into their secret enabler shithead training. My fondest wish is to detect them before they strike but I don’t know if that’s ever fully possible. Abusers and enablers are like viruses and use all sorts of strategies to evade detection and deny to themselves what they are.

I can name a few red flags. I wonder, did your ex also ruin special occasions almost ritually? Go into sulks on holidays, spoil birthdays, make your or anyone else’s misfortunes all about herself? I see she married the responsible, standup guy and secretly hankered after drunken knuckle-dragging creeps– the types that carry life-threatening cooties. Same here, just the female versions of it. Part of his inability to admit how blatantly creepy the AP was at first was that he had every reason to know he was putting my life at risk all along. Just ew. They seek their own destruction and compulsively draw others down with them.

I think it’s abusers who “manifest disaster.” I’m sure this isn’t true of most chumps. I know some neoFreudians and RIC acolytes would have a victim-blaming field day with it, but I was a victim of another crime at the tail end of FW’s affair. It creates bookends since I met FW while in the middle of criminal proceedings against the stalker (he played hero. That was his “in”) and then was attacked again at the finish. I was assaulted a week and a half before D-Day and FW still continued texting and banging the AP throughout. You know how the thinking goes: I must have drawn abusers to me on my Voodoo victim tractor beams!

But meh, I blame FW for that last one. I’m a wily city slicker and not easy to prey on– why I’ve always gotten away, even if by the skin of my teeth. But FW’s gaslighting and the chronic insomnia it caused wore me down so much that I didn’t trust my instincts at a key moment. I wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time despite a flicker of intuition. I ended up in ER with a twisted knee, bruises on my face and a shallow knife gouge in my back but didn’t report it to police that time because A) not only had I already been through the criminal process as a state witness, I was once a victims’ advocate and I know how the authorities can be about these kinds of things; B) I never saw the perp’s face, only his hairy hands and wedding ring; C) I thought one more drop of stress or jolt of cortisol and I was probably going to drop dead.

I was just glad I didn’t end up getting raped so I wouldn’t have to be poked and prodded and tested for HIV and everything else. Or so I thought. I ended up poked and prodded after D-Day. As a friend put it, the real danger came from within.

There’s only so much anyone can take. When the PI came back with the photos of FW’s car parked outside the APs pad only a few days after the attack, I felt my lifespan shorten. Even after hearing thousands of battering sagas, I couldn’t believe this kind of psychological cruelty was so common until I started hanging out with other chumps and hearing stories like yours. It was so shocking to think I’d lived with it for so long without realizing it. But I forgave myself for any denial or deferring the revelation because the revelation felt like it was causing irrevocable damage on some cellular level. I had this weird sensation of a tiny microchip (lol, not due to global tracking conspiracies) circulating in my blood stream and emitting a shock or burst of poison every time it passed through my heart. Who wouldn’t put that off for a bit if they could?

I also had a brief cancer scare literally the week before FW launched the affair. Maybe it turned out alright but, statistically, abused women tend to have higher rates of breast cancer. I’m thinking of having mine preemptively retired and removed to be on the safe side. I breastfed for six years running and they’ve done their job well. I’m just afraid that I’ve been through too much stress to keep getting off Scot free.

It’s certainly been proven that sustained stress and trauma can increase risk of cancer. You’re a doctor so maybe you’ve seen that researchers are still not clear on the link between cancer and STIs. It may not only be HIV and HPV that increase risk of certain cancers. Maybe abusers are so ready to blame their own victims because abusers sense on some gut level they’re responsible for more fallout and disaster than science even knows at the present time. And maybe abusers are all closet psycho killers who nurse murderous fantasies that manifest in oblique ways.

Oops, more skein untangling but these are things I’ve always found interesting beyond my own experience. The kids are always asking questions about why this or that infamous whoever did x or y horrible thing (so many questions about Epstein island, eek) and how you can tell a good witch from a bad witch. I don’t have any concrete answers but the kids can talk about this stuff for hours. I think it runs in the blood. Two of my uncles were published academic organizational psychologists who would muse about these things at the dinner table. The kids are at least the third generation of “human nature skein untanglers.” I’ll have to warn them that musing too openly about human iniquity risks “mirroring” and fake agreement by narcs and psychopaths.

Maybe the above could represent a sort of “Voodoo tractor beam” that attracts danger, but not because the victim sought punishment or harm but were just giving away their vulnerability. One of my uncles warned me from the time I was a kid that people without integrity often compulsively target people they perceive to have it because those without have a need to prove that their own lack of character was absolutely necessary for survival. It’s an ego defense. He was talking about business scenarios but this could obviously apply to everything else. If anyone thrives while having a little character, it’s taken as a standing accusation against cheats, liars, frauds, bullies, etc.