3 Reasons AI Cheating Is As Stupid As Analog Cheating

I think you’re right. I’ll just repeat the textbook answer to the question: the childhood trauma roots of domestic violence apparently long precede substance abuse.

But this isn’t to grant amnesty to poor sad sausage abusers because they endured trauma in childhood since humans have free will and most people with traumatic childhoods don’t grow up to be abusers (even if they succumb to substance abuse. In other words, not all addicts are abusers). I think the ones that become abusers didn’t actually “survive” the experience in an emotional sense but are more like emotionally dead poltergeists who grow up to torment the “emotionally living.”

Since recidivism for domestic abusers is about 98.5% even with jail time and therapy, most are intractable and will never change regardless of other changes in their lives such as quitting substances. In advocacy, we used to joke that there’s no such thing as Assaholics Anonymous for those permanently addicted to being assholes. AA is notoriously filled with people who stopped drinking yet still commit abuse.

Regarding the compulsion to repeat dysfunctional family patterns, if you read Dutton and Golant’s The Batterer (which I think applies perfectly to most cheaters as well even if they aren’t overtly violent) which is based on decades of prison studies of incarcerated abusers, domestic abusers are often borderline, “suffer” from reactive attachment disorder and are typically reenacting the types of abuse they witnessed or endured in childhood. But, instead of reenacting their original role of helpless victim, they occupy the role of powerful perpetrator. You can read about “reenactment compulsion” on the web. Apparently it’s a means of replaying events to create different outcomes as a maladapted means of resolving trauma.

The abuse experienced in childhood can apparently include physical or coercive control. Because coercive control is described by most DV survivors as the most paralyzing and unendurable aspect of abuse even more than violent assault and because coercive control is a better predictor of eventual domestic murder than even history of violent assault, it’s possible that Dutton and Golant are correct that an individual who experiences extreme emotional abuse/humiliation and coercion in childhood could also grow up to be violent even if they didn’t directly experience or witness violence within their family of origin.

It’s only very recently that resources on domestic abuse occasionally include cheating as either a motive for abuse or form of abuse. Personally, I think it’s about time since when I worked as an advocate for survivors, I never met a survivor who hadn’t also been cheated on in some way. But because victims who admitted this were often accused by legal authorities and bystanders of fabricating other forms of abuse out of “jealousy,” most tend to shut up about it to avoid having their cases dropped or losing bystander support. In any case, I think this is why cheating by abusers is so rarely mentioned in the literature on domestic abuse. It’s unfortunate because I frankly think that most battering is motivated by the brutal enforcement of one-sided monogamy. This also perfectly fits the reactive attachment disorder theory and something called “masked dependency” that The Batterer discusses.

If I oversimplify it, many abusers have an infantile, pathological dependency on primary partners but, due to catastrophic shame over their own vulnerability, tend to “mask” this both from themselves and others. One way to deny the dependency is to paranoically imagine their partners are deliberately fostering this dependency (trying to emasculate them) which would explain the inexplicable rage or contempt and vengefulness that abusers often have towards their victims. It would also explain attempts to “dilute” this dependency by spreading it out among more than one partner while also hedging bets against their chronic, pathological fear of abandonment. Finally it would explain the need to “displace” pathological jealousy onto the victim by cheating on the victim (out of paranoia that the victim will beat them to the punch).

Displacement is another “weird science” concept that gets mentioned in application to abusers and serial killers. Because these individuals grew up in zero sum game environments where someone had to be scapegoated, they may develop a kind of superstition that the only way to avoid being a victim is to victimize others because one is either one or the other and nothing in between. And by making another person experience the trauma, terror and pain the abuser felt in childhood, the abuser may irrationally and unconsciously believe that they’re “ridding” themselves of those negative feelings.

From reading things like this, I started to suspect that sadistic behavior may even be akin to a superstitious ritual like the way individuals with OCD might feel compelled to switch a light on and off a certain number of times in order to feel “safe” from looming disaster. In any event, the general rule of sadism seems to be that sadists typically subject others to the types of abuse that the sadist fears most themselves which suggests compulsive displacement.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, the above is a hash of concepts that I’ve picked up over the years that make the most sense.