Why Is He Copying Me?

FW and OW believed a judge would give them full custody of my three kids because OW used a bigger vocabulary in her fake-ass social media posts and had a full-time job or some shit like that. Anyway as FW was laying out his plan to dismiss me from my role in my whole own life, I asked him what I was supposed to do. He said, “I don’t know. Get an identity?” I thought at the time it was just a really mean thing to say but of course now I get that OW truly intended to take on my identity. Part of having my identity included being married to a drunk self-loathing narc and she figured that out fast. Plus I didn’t hand everything over and walk away, nor did I agree to let her call me whenever FW was drunk and violent. So she bailed as soon as it became work for her (within 3 months).

Stabby,

Do you share kids with this freak? If not, there’s no reason to keep any lines of communication open. Block his number so you don’t have to hear from him. While you’re at it, block his email(s) and all his social media.

If he’s ripping off your work, have a lawyer send him a mean letter about copyright infringement, if that’s what a lawyer says you should do.

>I hate the idea that he’s telling everyone that “I taught him everything he knows.”

Assuming he is (because he’s a narcissist, so I’d be surprised if he gives credit where it’s due) – anybody with 2 marbles rattling around upstairs will notice he seems obsessed with you while you don’t appear to know he exists, because you never acknowledge his existence. Who looks pathetic here?

I dealt with one of these freaks a few years ago. He was just a friend, but did incredible damage in the year we knew each other. He started shaking me down for professional favors, mimicking my personality traits, and parroting my ideas to other people while claiming credit for them. It was infuriating.

Thankfully he ghosted me to marry his next victim (a woman he described as a doormat, who he’d met months earlier). Last I heard through the grapevine, he’s hard at work destroying his life: crazy debt, burning bridges, about to be fired.

These people are parasites and don’t impress most people to begin with, but they really lose their luster once they lose their hosts. Block him so you don’t have to waste anymore time bearing witness to his chaos. You’ll feel better without his poison in your line of sight.

He is a vampire. He needs to feed off your self esteem, talent and power. The only thing I can think of is to shut down any way he can get to you. You cannot stop his thievery but you don’t have to see it…unless you want to sue if he has stolen material and not given credit.

Cmon, why is he not blocked? You have control over yourself and your phone. Serial cheaters never stop. Why are you allowing him any control over you?
Right now you are keeping yourself entangled in this. Move on or keep yourself stuck.

I hope we hear from the OP. I think the mirroring is part of the FW Cheater Manual (possibly under Annoying Options to Pursue to Aggravate the Chump chapter). I know mine is replicating the same vacations that we took together with Schmoopie. It annoyed me when I knew about it but since going NC, I don’t know and I don’t care.
Most cheaters are not known to hold onto a good persona for long. Their true colors eventually shine through and the masks drop. They cannot seem to sustain. It is just another useful tool for them to keep the AP dancing. As far as I am concerned, Schmoopie won the pick me dance. I am glad she did. I may only have won the set of luggage but I plan for it to take me places. My divorce becomes final in two weeks and I could not be happier!!!!!

A petty concern in the grand scheme of things, but falling to see my cheater ex’s FB profile claiming to like bands, movies, and public figures for which she showed outright contempt when we were married and I liked them. Either her post-divorce liking of these things on FB was fake, or her pre-divorce contempt for them was fake and she just wanted an excuse to show contempt for me.

Cheaters are all about the cake and the fake.

Snort! They mirror the shiny parts of everyone they come aross. Mine did it too and it was uber creepy to see him repeating funny things I’d said, observations I made (and also wearing my lingerie, but that is another story)…and then get a job in my field, about which he knew nothing but what I’d told him. These guys are good little parrots and mimicry is one of their few talents. But you need not worry that he is telling people you taught him everything he knows. Not at all! He is telling everyone that HE taught YOU everything you know. Ask me how I know that…

My ex faked being an avid reader, symphony goer, and art lover in order to hook me. After we got married he bluntly informed me that he didn’t want to hear any more about the books I was reading and he didn’t want to go to any more symphony performances or art shows. I would basically sit across from him at dinner and talk about the weather because he was suddenly a stranger to me and we had nothing in common. It was torture.

When mirroring is a sign of psychopathy.

On a forum for abuse survivors, there was a particular, often repeated tale of male abusers who show no signs of being gay but who, at odd times, flip into a “womanish” voice that can sound stereotypically “gay.” Advocates monitoring the page or leading groups heard the story enough that the trait ended up on a list of red flags for personality disorder and potential violence with careful qualifiers that it didn’t apply to openly gay or trans individuals who consistently speak in lighter tones as an expression of identity and group affiliation. It applies only to ostensibly straight men who flip into the voice at certain times and aren’t doing it as a send-up.

It felt politically touchy to even discuss such a thing so I coined the term “abusosexual” to make it clear we weren’t open to pathologizing homosexuality or any gender preference or identity. Instead, the idea was that, in order to have a gender preference or identity, someone would need a soul first and abusers are more or less soulless. To quote Red, the Morgan Freeman character from Shawshank Redemption, when asked whether the prison rapists were homosexual, Red answers, “No, they’d have to be human first.”

No one could nail down exactly what this behavior signified. People came up with all sorts of theories about it. But reading today’s post just gave me a big revelation: The one thing we didn’t consider is that abusers are such empty vessels that they’ll mirror anyone they wanted something from or fixated on and that some of the people they emulate might be the opposite sex. In other words, if an abuser is attracted to someone, some take it a step beyond simply aligning views and tastes to the target. On some level, they almost try to become the target, “wear their skin” in a sense. When this is really extreme, they may even take on behaviors of the opposite gender without realizing it. And they tend to collect these emulated personalities over time like a collection of useful masks they pull out on various occassions.

It might explain a lot, like today’s post on ex-cheater copycatting. But it could also explain why abusers eventually develop so much resentment towards their victims: because they tend to emulate and “wear the skin” of whoever they’re lovebombing, when that “skin” gets too “tight”– when the traits of the partner (like morals and boundaries) start to make the copycat feel constrained in the things they want to do (like cheat, lie and embezzle), they feel “engulfed” and begin to blame the partner for “forcing them to be someone else.” Never mind that the partner likely had no idea that the abuser was mirroring and emulating in such a frantic way, the abuser will blame their victim for the abuser’s own fraud. This in turn could explain the “push-me/pull-you” behavior of batterers who, due to internally driven freakiness, shift back and forth between fear of abandonment and fear of “engulfment” by a partner.

And here’s another thing it could partly explain– why cheaters’ personalities change so radically during affairs. In a sense, in putting on the skin of an affair partner, they may also take on any hatred, resentment and jealousy the affair partner feels towards the “rival” primary partner. Of course the other big reason for cheaters’ sudden hostility is that guilt is ugly and they need to demonize partners in order to justify defrauding them. But some of it could just be “deep mirroring.”

The revelation I had about mirroring today doesn’t discount some of the other theories and ideas that advocates drummed up back in the day which might still apply in different cases. It got very interesting. We consulted with psychologists who explained the phenomenon of “cubing” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/202201/the-serial-killer-btk-and-the-concept-cubing) or partial split personalities of psychopaths. While each separate personality within someone with full-blown dissociative personality disorder will be completely unaware of other separate personalities– as if there were floor-to-ceiling partitions between personae– someone who “cubes” is aware that they trot out different personalities in different circumstances depending on agenda. It’s as if the walls between personae are short “office partitions” and the whole collection of personalities are controlled and orchestrated by a central, evil, organizing persona. This isn’t mental illness so much as a criminal disorder because the perpetrator knows enough to switch into “rational and credible” mode to convince cops and bystanders of their innocence and “credibility” when it suits them– common in batterers as well as serial killers. “Cubing” is described as akin to method acting except, from my experience working in media with the occasional method actor, it sounds far freakier than that and that psychopaths invest far more deeply in each different “face” they show to others. The different faces might even have differing tastes, opinions and memories.

There were speculations that the vocal flipping was actually a kind of pathological age-regression that only accidentally sounds womanish as a grown man strains to raise his vocal pitch to that of a child. If the age-regression happens in the context of sex, it could potentially indicate the person was sexually abused as a child and this is the “mode” they flip into when “re-enacting” past trauma. There are women who do this too– abruptly flip from normal adult voice to “sexy baby voice” in certain circumstances (there was a lot of hoopla about reality TV personality “Jessica” from Love is Blind doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZKKlFC_Yys ). Or it could indicate something much worse. Since many pedophiles actually believe they’re “trans-children”– children in adult bodies– a pedophile who tries to “get down to the level of children” as part of the grooming process might put on a childish voice and demeanor and more or less believe their own act. Or it could indicate someone so sexually compulsive and boundary-less that even if they’re wired to prefer sex with the opposite gender, in a pinch they’ll have sex with anyone– something cops call “trysexuals” to identify certain rapists because they’ll literally try anything. Unfairly, trysexuals give actual bisexuals a bad name. It’s not at all the same thing.

Anyway, thanks for the lightbulb post today and everyone’s insights.

One thing I learned with my ex is that these phony fucks didn’t fool as many people as they think, or that YOU think.

My ex is as phony as they come but in the months and years after I left i heard comments that confirmed that a lot of people had his number but didn’t want to speak up.

So definitely ignore him…I ignored my ex and it drove him crazy….but keep in mind that a whole lot of people have his number and think he’s a weirdo.

You can fool some people some of the time, you can fool some people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Vote early and vote often. 😉

It’s true that FWs have no identity. That’s why they mirror others. They mirror their APs and friends as well as their chumps. This is to be expected. They need to pretend they have a personality in order to get by in life.
Going so far as to steal the chump’s work is next level, though. If my FW was making money off my work, I’d sue his ass for every dime.