Should I Sleep With My Ex?

One word. With no sugarcoating.

Manipulative.

And I don’t want to be manipulative. I don’t want to manipulate someone into a relationship with me. Not to mention that cheaters are the Olympic gold medalists in the sport of manipulation, and I don’t want to compete in a game. Which is exactly, and only, what a “relationship” with a cheater is.

I want to be voluntary, clean, clear, and conscious in all my relationships. I want to protect myself, not re-traumatize myself.

That being said, I did engage in some post DDay sex. My number one regret. Because I realized what I said above too late. 😪

My preference is for sex as an expression of love, for myself and the person I am with, and that the feelings are mutual.

The OP forgot to mention why she lost the weight: The Trauma Diet. It’s bigger than keto and paleo combined! RIC should make it a side line profit niche of their therapeutic approach. If you follow their protocol, you’ll end up a glamourexic bag of bones no matter what you eat and right on point for the resurrection of low rise jeans. You’ll get the coveted “worried look” from your doctor and close friends! Adult blood pressure cuffs will fall off your arms. For a nominal fee, you can also try the RIC brand Abu Ghraib Sleep Deprivation Program(TM) for the full heroin chic look.

I had sex with my ex post-dday. I don’t think I regret it. I have no desire to ever do it again, but it did kind of provide reassurance that the OW wasn’t special. Not even the depth of his twu wuv for his SOULMATE could keep him faithful. He’s just trash, and he’s about him — the OW and I are just NPCs in his story. He didn’t pick her over me, she’s not better — we’re both just accommodating holes. It kinda helped my state of mind, tbh — further evidence that this has nothing to do with ME.

There’s also hearing later on about how he has told everyone you know that he’s such ‘grade a beef’ that you can’t keep your hands off of him. 😟 I believe most of them call it a mercy f•ck, which they then also use to keep the new schmoopies in line.

If you end up doing what an abuser wanted you to do all along– basically fulfilling the central agenda of intimate abuse– it’s hardly a victory for the victim. If the victim has any gut sense that the abuser could be dangerous, it might be the way of assuaging an abuser’s rage but it’s not an expression of independence for the victim.

If seen through the lens of battering, infidelity is one of several tools of generating a power shift in an intimate relationship in moments when abusers sense they’re losing power. The power that abusers seek to wield over their victims tends to be sexually themed so it makes sense that the means of regaining control or “gaining victory” over the victim would also be sexually themed. In any case, infidelity is increasingly being viewed as a form of intimate partner violence: https://www.joplinlawyers.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FINAL-COPY-Infidelity-as-a-Consideration-in-Domestic-Abuse-and-Coercive-Control.pdf

“The feelings of powerlessness generated by infidelity marks a shift in the power balance and enables maintenance of dominance within the relationship, contributing to the ability of an individual to assert control over a victim. Extra marital can be used to hurt a person. Infidelity alters sexual and psychological dynamics in the relationship and may result in a victim being more vulnerable to sexual coercion as a way to maintain the relationship with the offender.

“Christine Murray, co-founder of the organisation ‘See the Triumph’, has researched the experiences of women who had experienced sexual abuse within relationships. Murray identified it was common for the participants to report their partners had been unfaithful more than once throughout the course of their relationship.15 Despite their infidelity, the abuser continued to control the victim, monitoring and tracking their whereabouts and isolating them from friends and family. Those participating in affairs often blamed the victim for their behaviour, further diminishing self-worth and contributing to a distorted sense of self and reality. Denial of affairs was also common, regardless of whether victims had evidence or not. The deflection of responsibility may further exacerbate the feelings of self-blame present from
other forms of abuse. How blame is perceived can impact a victim’s response to the affair.16 Ongoing infidelity can form part of the abuse cycle, with the offender at times demonstrating some remorse and guilt but then continuing to participate in the behaviour. In addition, the National Domestic and Family Violence Bench Book, providing examples of social abuse, cites the experience of victims where their partner threatened to have an affair.17 Lying and deception is often used to conceal acts of infidelity, victims reporting gaslighting by partners engaging in infidelity.18 Gaslighting has previously been recognised as a form of psychological and emotional abuse. Infidelity contributes to humiliation and belittling of victims, undermining self-worth. In all, the shift in power created by infidelity enables greater coercion and control within the relationship.”
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From the above perspective it makes perfect sense that infidelity, like other forms of abuse in the abuser repertoire, might be “set off” by seemingly contradictory events such as a chump’s illness or following childbirth or some kind of success in the chump’s life– job promotion, widening circle of friends, etc. Any of these things may trigger extreme fear of abandonment in an abusive personality (victim is somehow made less sexually interested or available) or loss of control of a partner to an abuser. Even if, statistically speaking, abusers tend to be male and victims female, this isn’t always the case and the same principles apply to female abusers except female abusers might go to greater lengths to conceal aggression and campaigns for dominance because the latter are socially viewed as even more abhorrent or abnormal in women.

The concealed agenda of abuse is the tricky part. Abusers often resist identifying both the trigger (partners becoming less available or experiencing circumstances that might make them less available in the future) and the resulting feeling (thwarted dependency, fear of abandonment) and will go to great lengths to conceal cause and effect even from themselves. DV expert Donald Dutton, not all abusers are cartoons of overt jealousy and possessiveness. Dutton describes many batterers as “masking” their own infantile dependency on primary partners out of a pathological sense of shame for feelings of vulnerability. In other words, when asked why they abuse, a batterer would typically invent some story whereby the victim did something “bad” that “made” the abuser devalue them as a distraction from the truth and the abuser themselves might even have difficulty identifying the actual trigger. That’s where cheating comes in handy as a potent means of masking dependency. By the same distorted logic, along the lines of concealing/altering the “shameful” chain of events and “shameful” feelings, abusers might engineer a reversal of this sense of infantile dependency, basically displacing the distressing fear of loss, abandonment and rejection onto victims through betrayal. In the distorted view of abusive perpetrators, making victims feel the abusers’ feelings provides momentary relief from those feelings. The abuser can reenact painful events but with victim/perp roles reversed in order to turn feelings of helplessness into feelings of omniscience.

An affair is also arguably a way of diluting dependency on a primary partner by forming dependency on an outside party as well as a way of hedging bets in case of loss by lining up a replacement. Abusers may even manage to shift most of their allegiance to a third party but the giveaway that the process at least began as a means to mask dependency is a) the weird “victory dance” that many abusers do in discarding their victims and declaring a new allegiance (as if the abuser were enacting revenge); and, b) how panicked or enraged many abusers become when their victims aren’t begging for another chance.