UBT: I Am Not In Control

I agree that reading between the lines in this situation can be a matter of life and death. I also don’t blame the author of the post for her instinct to get rid of the AP because I suspect the typical mentality of affair partners is clinically akin to gang mentality. In other words, an AP who was directly invested in enabling abuse of a chump needs to be viewed as potentially malignant and dangerous in real ways– either because the AP harbors violent capacity or because they may enable it– whereas whoever takes up with a cheater after separation/divorce may not be as invested.

A case in point is Nichol Kessinger sending Chris Watts the Metallica song “Battery” the day before he slaughtered his family. Sample lyrics:

Crushing all deceivers, mashing non-believers
Never ending potency
Hungry violence seeker, feeding off the weaker
Breeding on insanity
Smashing through the boundaries
Lunacy has found me
Cannot stop the battery
Pounding out aggression
Turns into obsession
Cannot kill the battery
Cannot kill the family
Battery is found in me
Battery
Battery

Was Kessinger giving a set of instructions in that whoopsy-I-didn’t-really-mean-that-but-I-did way? While knowing that Shanann was carrying a male fetus, Nichol had told Watts that she wanted to give him his first son. How was that going to happen unless Shanann died or was induced into miscarriage? Then the song. Or was Kessinger trying to pretend she didn’t understand threats that Watts may have made towards his wife behind his wife’s back? As in “Oh, here’s a song that relates to the thing you said the other day which I’m pretending was just a harmless philosophical discussion. And by the way, don’t actually kill them, just, you know, get rid of them another way. Maybe crush up birth control pills in Shanann’s breakfast bowl so she miscarries…”

Since both Watts and Kessinger were prolific liars, no one may ever know what that text exchange really signified but it’s obvious it wasn’t accidental. The idea of murder was in the air.

Then there’s my impression that affairs seem like the polar opposite of actual love in that they seem to hinge on affair partners being in a dependent, trance-like and suggestible state where they can induce each other to do horrifying things that people genuinely filled with the spirit of love wouldn’t be capable of doing. It’s un-love. It’s the filling of voids that don’t exist in normal people.

I can get all science-y about it. Because I had to read mountains of books and studies on domestic violence, perp psychology, captor bonding, etc., when I worked as an advocate for survivors, I can’t shake the sense that cheating and DV are first cousins or at least on the same spectrum of attachment disorder. If calling it attachment disorder sounds like a plea for amnesty for poor pitiful perps, I always add that serial killers are arguably on the same clinical spectrum.

For one potential overlap between cheating and DV, criminologist and DV researcher Donald Dutton described battering as possibly related to mob violence in the sense that the abuser seeks to enter a state of “deindividuated” (infantile) violence where, like a baby whose identity is melded with mommy, they lose themselves, their identity and any responsibility for their actions within the mob. If I remember correctly, Dutton inferred that batterers’ acute sensitivity to cultural cues regarding DV (signs that the culture approves or disapproves their behavior towards partners) and tendency to collect “palliative comparisons” (say, cases of famous sports figures who beat their wives but maintain celeb status) makes the crime a social one because the abuser is, in their demented minds, gathering an imaginary mob that dilutes their responsibility for their own actions. More evidence of this is that battering rates rise and fall exponentially according to state response. In countries without enforcement against DV, rates can rise as high as 67%. It’s not just consequences but the active, official disapproval that impacts rates.

This is where I go off on my own personal theories. I think the above could imply that triangulation in affairs also serves as a means of “deinviduating” as if within a mini-mob. The cheater and affair partner– both of whom have been found to harbor more “dark triad” traits than average– get to exercise their internally generated destructive impulses while in a deindividuated regression/trance that, by its nature, makes them feel less responsible for the harm they do because they’re doing it as a gang. If cheaters are fundamentally hostile, this could be one reason why primary partners may “lose” the pickme dance if the victim doesn’t commonly help the perp exercise aggression and victimize others (s/he won’t be Bonny to his Clyde or vice-versa) while a witting affair partner is defined by their willingness to serve this function.

For another overlap, virtually all batterers cheat. Cheating is a means of diluting their shame-inducing, irrational-hate-triggering, infantile, pathological dependency on primary partners by spreading the infantile dependency out among more than one partner. Cheating is also punishment and stealth expression of rage and physical abuse (because the victim has the power to abandon) since the victim may be exposed to STDs and resources that should go to a partner/children are instead given to others. Cheating can be part of the push-pull of battering psychology where the batterer has rapidly cycling dueling fears of being abandoned by the primary partner (in which case cheating hedges their bets) or of being suffocated (in which case cheating creates certain distance). When the batterer succeeds in pushing the victim away to relieve fear of envelopment, they may shift back into abandonment terrors and make efforts to draw the victim back in close, either through temporary and empty displays of remorse and pleas or through coercion (threats, violence, financial control, holding children hostage, etc.). When the batterer succeeds in drawing the victim back in, the fear of envelopment is triggered anew and they go back to “push” (violence, verbal abuse, cheating, etc.).

Basically the only thing that allays a batterer’s internally generated fears is for the victim to be completely paralyzed and drained of all agency and cheating works better than violence in that sense. The myth is that batterers are violent all the time and that violence is the primary means to paralyzing victims into an inert state while most victims report that “coercive control”– involving subviolent forms of abuse and psychological torture– is the key. In any case, forensic psychologist and criminologist Donald Dutton reports that most batterers operate on a “beat by need” basis and would prefer to paralyze their prey through less legally risky and less athletic means.

Cheating checks all the subviolent boxes, at least until it’s discovered. I haven’t seen any studies on it but I’ve heard many stories of how cheaters can become violent for the first time when their victims attempt to leave. I think that was actually the case with Chris Watts. He described throwing Shanann angrily face down in a shallow grave and led investigators to believe that his rage was based on her “being in the way” of the affair. But if Watts was a typical batterer who was masking his shameful dependency on his primary partner, he would have continued to mask it for police and it’s just as likely that his murderous rage towards Shanann was because she had discovered the affair and threatened to leave.

Anyway, I think there’s grounds to wonder if Kessinger was tempted to use the power she’d been handed to induce Watts to kill his family if he were so prone (which he obviously was). And there are many cases of affair partners murdering spouses either with or without the direct assistance of Fuckwits. I think it’s no surprise because of the nature of affairs and the types of people who get involved in them. The risk should be taken seriously by all newly minted chumps.

This is exactly why I always tell people it is a CHARACTER issue! It’s the lying, the sneaking around, the theft of family funds that is always involved in an affair whether it is with one person or sex workers. Lying, sneaking and theft are all character issues. That’s why once a cheater, always a cheater because they don’t/can’t change their character. It’s who they are.

So agree with this eloquent statement. I so wish I had know than when I discovered the first deceptions; as you note, I focused on the sexual dimension… and my now-ex was actually better off that I did… just took things further underground. Finally came to my senses when I realized he lied to EVERYONE: me, our kid, his family, his counselors, our 4 marriage counselors, his AP, on and on and on. DONE.

All of this… spot on. I took a screen shot of these words. You wrote exactly what I have thought for so long.

Fully agree. And I’m not underscoring how awful the sexual aspect of it is with the possibility of STDs and unplanned pregnancies and paternity tests. But some new chumps get stuck on their partner never cheating again as the only criteria to stay married and some people who cheat aren’t serial cheaters but they’re still assholes. From my own experience, the RIC emphasizes that the chump shouldn’t weaponize the affair and always lord it over the cheater moving forward, but I think the opposite happens more often: the cheater keeps their spouse always proving themselves by reminding them (subtly, of course) that they can and will easily drop them for someone else. That sort of selfishness is not easily fixed.

I was hesitant about sending it in. But then I just thought… he doesn’t deserve the protection. He doesn’t deserve me sitting pretty and being ‘good’ and just taking it.

It’s not bitterness. It’s justified anger, and long overdue self respect.

They say weak men are the most dangerous. Couldn’t be more true. One story for schmoopie. Another for chump. They think they have it all figured out.