How to Get Over the Cruelness?

Dear Ready to Move On,
I can understand your confusion. You’ve been blindsided. Bamboozled. The person you trusted with all your heart, with the most important creation you could imagine (an innocent human life–your son) has shown you he is a selfish a-hole. I agree with all of CL’s advice about taking control of the bus, which is now headed toward a cliff because of FW’s BS. Do not rage text him. Document everything and write it down and when you feel any kindness or feelings of longing toward him, read over the evidence. It will remind you why he sucks. Go to therapy. Talk to your friends. Get your support squad up and running. I lived your story, but add on about 10 years. The good news is that he revealed his crap character to you now! He didn’t sulk for a decade and live a double life. At least you know the truth about him. He is a terrible person. Only a terrible person would do all the shit he is doing. If you accept that he is a terrible person, all the things he’s doing will make sense. Your brain is trying to make sense of all the craziness–cognitive dissonance. Once you reach logic: he is terrible and he has shown he will hurt me and his child….you can take action to protect yourself and your child. Good luck! My heart goes out to you! You can do this!!!!!

He said you were bad at sex. What he is too dense to see is that married sex is not bells and whistles but something better. It is what emotionally binds people together. So this new “love” of his is going to be just like what he had with you. It might take a couple of years. In the meantime you have moved on.

His moral depth got lost or never was. If he equates new sex to love you have been living with a lizard whose prefrontal cortex is missing.

It always breaks my heart when I read these letters from chumps who have children. It’s bad enough to abandon and betray another adult, but to do it to innocent children is beyond the pale.

I would so have this entitled ba$tard served in the most public place possible. By a big, burly deputy sheriff. Bonus points if you live in a fault state and serve the Schmoopie with an alienation of affection charge at the same time!
I had my FW served at his work and it was delicious!

Are you familiar with “Rose, Thorn, Bud”?

It’s a brief exercise which helps young children sort through their feelings. Good for afterschool or before bed. Rose: What’s something good that happened today? Thorn: What’s something uncomfortable that happened today? Bud: What hopeful opportunity that happened today?

Just a quick conversation which reminds both of you (!) that feelings pass.

Dear Ready,

Every one of us here who has never even met you actually cares about you and your child. This is the lifeboat. Come here daily or more, read, and gather strength and suggestions.

I can’t add anything to the invaluable
suggestions from Chump Lady, but there was one I did a little differently. I didn’t put on big girl pants or underwear. After I rallied the safe and trustworthy troops (trusted friends, lawyer, therapist, and Chump Nation), I put on my combat gear and laced up my shit kickers. I put on my thinking cap and donned my magic helmet. I put on that bullshit proof suit of armor every morning when I wake up and don’t take it off until bedtime when I put on my protective Kevlar pajamas.

I learned here how and when to mute myself and how to engage with the enemy (aka fraudulent spouse, Traitor Ex).

Cheating is a declaration of war. The cheater regards you as an opponent. They are NOT your friend. They are NOT on your side. They are NOT on your team. THEY ARE YOUR ENEMY.

Think and act and dress and respond accordingly.

If I had a genie that would grant me three wishes got for you, they would be

1) Do not let Ready ask, beg, or otherwise appeal to that evil MF AH to come back ever again.

2) Hook Ready up with a great lawyer and a great therapist and the rest of her army.

My third wish has already been granted. That you have found this place. I am so sorry for your loss and pain.

Welcome to the lifeboat. Get in and let us row you and your child to the far better life you deserve.

Chumplady called it as it is… do all these things. This guy is a plain vanilla version of all the cheating, lying, selfish, entitled narcissists that drove millions to this site. Trust he sucks. You don’t. Get that divorce started today. Go grey rock-
Yes
No
I’ll consider it
Noted
✅
👍
These are only words to use with the abusive fucker. Nothing more. And no talking on phone or in person. Email. And wait to respond unless a true emergency.
The relationship is over. Now act like it- you’ll feel better sooner if you do. It will take 3-5 years to be happy and at peace but you’ll get there— we all do if we follow Tracey’s lead. Is it hard? Hell yes! But living like you are is worse. Ask me how I know 🤦‍♀️😢

So the big motivator for me to get things in motion and file when my ex was the one to leave was:

Because he left – if I filed for child support – he would have a hard time getting primary custody (not that he wanted it) but that was the most important thing for me.

I know legally it’s different everywhere – but he had no claim even on little things like final say in extra curriculars ( you need that) or religion etc.

He’s not coming back, he’s cake eating. And he’ll continue to say mean and cruel things because he has no self awareness and is selfish.

I continue to receive garbage from her, I don’t even respond to it.

You are my rock, CL. Thank you! I wonder if there will ever be a time when I don’t feel the need to come and sit for a while here with my fellow chumps. There’s no fog here. I can sit across from anyone in the group and connect immediately because we’ve lived it. We don’t need to defend ourselves or come up with long explanations here. This big squishy couch helps me get through the pain. And I get past the feeling of needing to tell my story to others who will never understand.

Why are cheaters typically so viciously cruel to primary partners? It’s the same as asking why batterers batter and, what’s more, the answer is pretty much the same. If anyone feels compelled to untangle skeins, untangling it in that direction would be the sobering choice, so here’s my extended spiel on it below. Please pardon how dry this sounds. It’s a lot to condense but there are links and authors mentioned if anyone wants to go to sources.

I think it would simplify chumps’ options if we were encouraged to view cheaters as would-be batterers. For one, as a former advocate for domestic violence survivors, I never encountered a DV survivor who wasn’t also cheated on in some way. That view of cheating is only slowly getting official recognition as a common component of intimate partner violence, either as a tactic typically used by batterers to paralyze and “coercively control” their primary partners or as a reflection of batterers’ underlying agenda or both. https://www.joplinlawyers.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FINAL-COPY-Infidelity-as-a-Consideration-in-Domestic-Abuse-and-Coercive-Control.pdf

As far as abusers’ agenda, personally I’ve started suspecting that battering is, at root, a protracted sex crime, the goal of which is to enforce sexual double standards (total sexual freedom for perps and none for victims). On that model, cheating would be a given. The sex crime concept doesn’t exempt female cheaters if it’s true that women most often express aggression indirectly or, you could say, “protractedly.” In any event, for an abuser to enforce this level of sexual hypocrisy isn’t easy to the degree that human beings probably departed from our “poly” ape ancestors to evolve as basically monogamous– even if this is expressed as a hypocritical demand that intimate partners be monogamous. One way to determine if a tendency is hardwired is that it takes terror and trickery to crush and divert hardwired human traits and preferences so, on that model, domestic abuse would be pragmatic and intentional because the only way to stymie and crush someone’s expectation of monogamy from an intimate partner is through abuse. That makes the abuse pragmatic and not an expression of mental illness. That doesn’t mean abusers always act and think in reality-based ways. Another thing that’s hard work and a full-time job is rationalizing abuse– typically at the expense of victims– in order for the perpetrator to unburden themselves of stigma and guilt so that they don’t “smell” guilty to bystanders and prospective prey, can evade detection and consequences and continue to perpetrate. The blame-shifting, particularly because it works best if the perpetrator can fully delude themselves that it’s true, is never grounded in reality and can sound “crazy” but serves a purpose, so is a bit more of a “crazy like a fox” type of crazy (click “download” for a free read of a paper on systems of criminal rationalization: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/9/2/46).

Anyway, this is why I think one of the things proving that cheating relates to domestic violence and that cheaters should be viewed through a “battering” lens is the typical cruelty involved. Cheating is rarely ever “just cheating” but mostly comes with a range of other escalating abuses– verbal, emotional, psychological, financial or physical. In one sense, cheating almost always involves physical abuse because, as CL points out, it potentially exposes victims to deadly STDs. The fact that the victim may be unaware of being put at risk doesn’t discount the chilling criminality of the behavior involved any more than it would if the perpetrator played Russian roulette with a loaded gun pointed at the victim’s head only while the victim was sleeping.

But even without the risk of STDs, the psychological abuse typically involved with cheating has every earmark of being an escalation towards violence and should automatically be viewed this way. Because the world is only starting to catch up to the concept of “coercive control”– an emerging category of criminal intimate abuse involving patterns of emotional and psychological entrapment and coercion that are listed by most survivors as the most paralyzing, damaging aspects of DV even beyond physical violence– most chumps don’t realize they’ve been subjected to IPV or intimate partner violence unless the abuse escalates to outright injurious physical assault. Even in the case of direct physical assault, victims may feel socially pressured not to label it as “battering” on a sort of demented sliding scale that has no bottom (“Well, you were shaken/pushed, not struck, so it’s not battering.”; “Well, you were struck, not stomped, so it’s not battering”; “Well, you were stomped, not shot, so it’s not battering” and on and on until the victim is dead). That demented sliding scale of minimization actually starts with the failure to recognize that coercive control is on the DV continuum. The failure to recognize or label certain behaviors as abuse– which sums up the profit model for RIC therapy and CSAT or “sex addiction” therapy when applied to coercively controlling partners– constitutes a failure to warn because survivors may be misled about their abusers’ MOs (which are inherently, categorically destructive), whether the abusers’ behavior can be redeemed or “fixed” (recidivism for battering is nearly 100%), and may not seek appropriate resources, support and therapy which can, in turn, lead survivors to minimize the damage they’ve experienced, internalize fault for it and, even more dangerously, be left unprotected against the statistical likelihood of escalation.

It’s arguably better for victims’ mental health to accept the DV association, not to mention safer. When it comes to anything carrying risk of bodily injury or death, “statistical likelihood” of escalation should be sufficient to take serious protective measures. It’s not overreacting, even if there hasn’t yet been any physical violence, partly because it’s a myth that most batterers are violent “all the time.” Leading experts on batterer psych like criminologist Donald Dutton point out that most domestic abusers operate on the “beat-by-need” basis, preferring less legally risky, less athletic methods of crushing their preys’ agency and self-esteem and reserving physical violence only as a last resort when victims resist. In other words, there’s really no point in taking the risk or making the exertion of beating someone down who’s already lying inert and face down on the ground. It’s only pragmatic if the victim is still standing and couldn’t be taken down by other means. This is one of the things that has called into question the old, debunked theory that victims of domestic violence necessarily suffered from pre-existing “low self-esteem” that “drew” them to abusers on some dysfunctional Voodoo tractor beam and prevents them from leaving because, on some mysterious level (“mysterious” because there’s no evidence this is true of most victims), they “need” to be abused. But the beat-by-need pattern suggests the severity of abuse typically reflects the degree to which the victim is resisting and resistance suggests existing self-esteem. The same goes for the abuser’s level of emotional abuse and cruelty. Why are they being cruel? Because you’re resisting on some level. Your basic self-esteem is thwarting their agenda so they campaign to divest you of that problematic self-esteem in any way they can. That’s battering in a nutshell, or at least the introductory stage of it known as “coercive control.”

If cheating is simply a manifestation of domestic violence, it has nothing to do with love by definition. People in the throes of actual love tend to turn into big hippies and will become more sensitive to the emotional states of other people. If that’s not the case, then what’s driving them isn’t love or even sex in the healthy sense. Someone motivated by love doesn’t viciously attack anyone who impedes sexual expression of that “love” but you know who does? Rapists and batterers.

It can be confusing for survivors of cheating to wrap their heads around the “rapey” aspect of abusers’ sexuality when the abusers’ shift their rapey MO to another target. For this purpose, I think “rapistic” sexuality could be described as sexuality devoid of empathy which objectifies both objects and obstacles and is capable of doing harm to both objects and obstacles if thwarted. You could even argue that rapists are sexually “needy.” They have “unmet needs” but it doesn’t make them sympathetic, it makes them dangerous. If you think of batterers as “protracted” rapists rather than stranger-danger rapists who brandish weapons from the get-go or leap out of bushes, batterers in the courtship stage of grooming new “objects” will try to conceal– at least from the immediate target– their underlying aggressive motives on the principle of catching more flies with honey. One way to do that is to split the agenda and separate aggression from sexual grooming, at least until the predator manages to hobble and entrap the second target. From that perspective, it would make sense that the underlying aggression would be diverted away from the newest target and channeled elsewhere, mostly towards the betrayed primary partner, both because the chump partner might impede the abuser’s agenda and because, like a dog with two bones, just because the dog has collected a second bone doesn’t mean they want other dogs to get the first. Short of being able to lock their primary partners in underground cells, one way abusers can try to prevent their primary partners from moving on to subsequent relationships is by enlisting the victim in their own entrapment: by convincing the primary partner that they can’t move on, that no one will want them, that they’re contemptible and worthless and, without the abuser, will die alone and unloved.

If you ask a cheater why they’re so cruel and abusive to chumps, few are going to answer “To keep them from moving on and having sex with other people.” That would be the last thing many abusers would admit because of another peculiarity of abuser mentality, something called “masked dependency.” Again, abusers don’t “love” in the sense most people think of it, but that doesn’t mean they don’t develop extreme, pathological, infantile dependency on partners. It’s been theorized that, in some ways, they never grew out of the infant stage of depending for survival on parental attention. In pop-psych, attachment disorders like this are often viewed as sad sausage traits worthy of sympathy. But criminologists would probably argue that there’s no human being more dangerous than a ambulatory, two hundred pound six month old raging for mommy’s boob. The abuser’s survival isn’t actually threatened by partner abandonment but, to abusers, it “feel” like this is true.

This above is the place where abusers get pretty close to stark raving. If you’re around one long enough, you’re going to get glimpses of that crazy abyss. If it weren’t for all the clever, systematic, organized strategies that adult abusers coldly engage in to serve this agenda, they might be certifiable but they’re just too effective and selective and skilled at image management to qualify for a “crazy” exemption, even if the syndrome typically begins with being victimized in childhood and may involve underlying “vulnerability.” According to Dutton again, because many abusers were emotionally stunted by abusive environments in childhood and may have developed deep shame over their own feelings of vulnerability, including feelings of dependency on others, many abusers will go to great lengths to conceal this dependency from others and even themselves. Dutton doesn’t speculate further but I think cheating would be a logical way to hedge bets and “dilute” an abuser’s infantile dependence on a primary partner by spreading that dependency out on more than one. They learned as children that they can’t depend on mommy’s boobs or attention to be available when needed so, as adults, they may go out and find alternative wet nurses as backup (again, this doesn’t exempt she-cheaters even if their psychosis seems to be aimed at male victims. We all had mothers). At some point the abuser may transfer more of that loveless and secretly desperate dependency to the “wet nurse” and/or the primary partner may become suspicious and threaten to leave, at which point the giant baby’s abandonment fears will be triggered along with the impulse to hobble their primary partner by whatever means necessary, not excluding murder.

Depending on the length of the primary relationship, even abusers who successfully transfer some of their wormy dependence to a new target would still probably feel greater pathological dependence on the longer term partner and therefore greater rage if the primary partner escapes. There may also be a built-in bias in the case the secondary target is a knowing “side piece.” The abuser may not invest in or depend on a “side piece” as deeply as they would a primary partner because the witting affair partner, by showing willingness to cheat and deceive, wasn’t seen as reliable or trustworthy to begin with. This brings up another note about batterers’ infantile dependency which could explain the tendency of cheating abusers to be particularly cruel to primary partners. DV research Dutton theorized that adult abusers typically witnessed their mothers being systematically abused by another adult and, while recovering from injury or trauma, these mothers would be less available to their infants, whether physically or emotionally. That doesn’t mean the maternal figures might not have been abusive or withholding in their own rights but, to an infant, simply being rendered less available makes a maternal figure seem unreliable and dangerous no mater how well intended or devoted the mother might have been. The infant may also equate the maternal figure’s injured state with lack of availability/abandonment so that signs of emotional pain and vulnerability in future partners might trigger extreme rage as much as cues that the primary partner is preparing to escape. So abusers’ cruelty is self-fulfilling. An abuser might be cruel to a primary partner because they fear the victim will leave and move on or simply because the cruelty is causing pain and pain in the victim itself signals potential unavailability. If the same abuser is showing selective empathy to an affair partn3er it could arguably reflect lower investment. In any event, that exemption will only last as long as the secondary partner remains secondary.

If you ask most domestic murderers why they killed their partners, some aren’t going to admit to a possessiveness or jealousy motive. They may admit to any other motive, even ones bringing stiffer penalties, rather than expose their shameful dependency. In fact, because abusers who mask dependency are statistically more likely to commit extreme or lethal violence against partners (Dutton again), it makes sense that most who kill their partners would have difficulty admitting to thwarted dependency as a motive. This is why I didn’t think police should have taken at face value Chris Watts’ claim that he killed his wife and daughters solely to get them “out of the way” of his affair. The bigger motive may have been that his wife had discovered the affair and was threatening divorce. The cold-blooded killing of his own children may simply have been to get rid of witnesses or might have been, as academic feminist John Stoltenberg argues, because abusers view children as “symbolic penises” competing for their mother’s attention. The same could be true of Scott Peterson. In both cases, the victims were pregnant and the leading cause of death for pregnant women worldwide is domestic murder, second only to car accidents. The perpetrators didn’t want other dogs– or even their own offspring– to get their first bones.

Going back to the issue of cheating as coercive control and as a red flag of potential violence in itself, in the case of Watts and Peterson, there had been no reports that either were violent to their wives prior to murdering them and neither Laci Peterson nor Shanaan Watts were officially listed as victims of domestic violence. But, as many chumps know, cheating alone might strongly suggest both victims were previously subjected to forms of coercive control as a facilitator to cheating. As more is understood about coercive control, one day evidence of cheating might be enough for victims to take serious safety measures without having to defend their actions to apologists.

Speaking of cruelty! My shtbx emailed all our friends (without telling me) to say that we had split up! Also to say that he had reconnected with the love of his life – his high school gf who he had been humping behind my back for at least 6 months. He concluded by telling them that I was “very angry”. A friend who didn’t approve told me about it. When I asked shtbx why he did it, he said that he was getting even for me ringing my family and his to tell them about it privately before going public. What a jerk!