And the Saddest Sausage Goes to…

I completely agree. Have you had any exposure to Don Hennessy’s books or talks? He’s a DV advocate in Ireland and until I found his work, none of this – not the DV and not the cheating- made sense to me. Centrality works, sure, but there’s so much other cruelty and twisting of the knife that isn’t needed for centrality (or that even works against it). Reading his “How He Gets Into Her Head” was the most eye-opening experience of my life. There it was – the explanation for all of it.

I can’t recommend his books enough if you’re a reader. Life changing.

I think this is very true and tracks to the experience that many of us have had regarding cheating as abuse. The irony in my life is that the OW is a DV advocate and relatively high up in my state’s DV prevention organization. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

It wouldn’t really be cognitive dissonance if this OW worked in an institutional system that specializes in some form of victim-blaming which, unfortunately, is true of many state-run apparatuses. You could say that the system she works might have already bridged the dissonance for her so that she doesn’t have to experience any psychological discomfort for being a flaming hypocrite.

And to quote famous FW Jean Paul Sartre, “Everything is permitted the hero.” He was saying it of himself. In my experience, helping professions and advocacy attract only the best and the worst and little in between. Given typical abuser psychology of playing “rescuer” for the sake of image management, it’s not surprising that perpetrators of every stripe hide out in helping professions, some of which harbor the highest rates of batterers (psychologist, psychiatrist, policing, etc.). Because abusive people are the most aggressive operators in any system, they tend to spread toxicity until whatever system they’re tainting resembles themselves. That was my experience.

I worked for a grossly underfunded independent advocacy organization because the institutional system at the time stubbornly adhered to various victim-blaming approaches or what you might call “split blame” approaches to DV. Many people have tried to change this. Read veteran advocate Evan Stark’s “Coercive Control” or his book written with his wife Anne Flitcraft, “Women at Risk” for the long and shocking history of the “official view/approach” to victims. Traditionally it was assumed something had to be wrong with both parties in a dysfunctional relationship. At least that’s what the (often creepy) politicians and corporate sponsors controlling budget preferred to believe and the effect was a trickle down in terms of who would be appointed to important roles in the system and what those appointees would expound. If that system is like anything else in politics, I’m sure there’s a lot of literal or figurative lap dancing for advancement. Maybe even more than in other spheres because nothing draws hypocritical abusers more than issues related to “saving” victims from sexual abuse of power. Think of Ted Bundy aiding a university panel that was studying serial killers before he fell under suspicion.

Never mind that the split blame approach to DV has long been debunked, it lives on according to internal critics. For instance, take “misapplication of contingency”: First responders and helping professionals encounter victims in their worst states– confused, exhausted, frantic or numb. So it’s easy to assume that the state of the victims post-abuse explained how they ended up becoming victims in the first place regardless of who victims had been before abuse. Also it’s not like abusers are approaching services seeking help for being abusers so by default it was always victims falling under the microscope and being scrutinized. Who is most scrutinized in a dynamic implies– also by default– who is being viewed as “responsible.” It’s also expedient to blame victims “a bit” because it appears on the face of it that it’s the victims who are costing public resources. A bit of blame justifies underfunding. A bit of blame justifies siphoning off slated money for private gain. A bit of blame also keeps the public from caring that much and lobbying for an improved system which they would do if they understood all the ways in which DV damages society.

In any case, a lot of what the independent service I worked with did was detoxing survivors from their encounters with the official system. The most direct way to do that was to share with survivors the most cutting edge writing and theory on DV and let them decide for themselves. It was a process of “radicalization” in a way because part of healing was inviting survivors to become critical of the status quo and institutional policy and to become experts on their own experiences. The alternative service cranked out a lot of newly minted activists as a result. I saw one survivor I interfaced with on Nancy Grace kicking ass several years after she’d approached the service as a teen.

Institutional systems don’t seek to “radicalize” for obvious reasons. Some of the early shelters in the 70s did this and that trend was “discouraged” and shut down over time as shelters received public funding. At intake for state-run services, survivors would typically be asked why they felt they “deserved to be abused.” Forget about survivors arguing that this wasn’t the case in their situations– if you wanted help you had to hang your head and take your medicine. Heads of shelters, while hardworking and clearly traumatized themselves from being on the front lines were probably the least toxic individuals in the state-supported apparatus but mostly seemed to expound on the “psychological deficiency” approach to victims because that was the view at the top at the time and they didn’t want to lose their jobs. They could be quite cynical about why victims “went back,” never considering that improper triage might have a lot to do with it. Institutional systems are resistant to change and resist blaming themselves for failure so the failure to extract victims from abusive situations was automatically doubled back on victims. I think there’s also a name for blaming patients for therapeutic failure but I can’t remember it.

Back when I was involved, I think a lot of us wanted to believe in the myth of human progress and hoped that the new science and statistics and theories that were proving effective on the ground would naturally change the official approach. But I’m not sure how much progress there’s been since then other than fits, starts and backsliding. Evan Stark is still out there fighting to get coercive control statutes added to domestic violence protections. He and other advocates have had a degree of success but his decades of lobbying for better laws and policies are kind of a catalogue of frustration.

Depending on how toxic the network she works in may be, that OW might fit like a pea in a pod. That field abounds with “Mrs. Jellybys” (from Dickens’ Bleak House). I know Dickens was a FW himself but Mrs. Jellyby is still a classic archetype for those who enjoy patronizing “obscure little faraway victims” and taking power over people in dire circumstances for self gratification while ignoring the misery happening in front of them and the misery they cause in their personal lives. All in the spirit of “helping” (retch).

HOAC, thank you so much! Your insight is amazing. In my neck of the woods victim blamey therapists are rampant. Sadly, advocacy agencies and groups are looking at them for direction.

True. Not all my cheaters battered. But my batterer cheated.

p.s. All this is to say that cheaters’ abiding need to victimize is a definite overlap with batterers. Another overlap is serial killers. Call it a spectrum.