Cheater Is Rewriting Their History

From the time I worked in advocacy for survivors of domestic violence, I admit I became a bit of a skein untangler. It was necessary to support survivors in recovering from not only the abuse itself but the “second injury” of domestic abuse, which is when survivors are victim-blamed/shamed by both the public as well as helping professionals. To the extent that victim-blaming assumptions were built right into many of the then-prevalent bs theories about how and why abusers abuse (which frankly sounded a lot like today’s cheater apologism), the entire mess had to be sorted so survivors could cut the ballast of blaming that weighed them down and slowed escape or recovery.

Untangling skeins is typically frowned on if it’s about providing abusers with sad sausage psychobabble alibis or blowing hopium at victims by implying abusers are somehow “fixable.” But, considering the nature of the information available in the DV arena (forensic theories on the psychology and behavior of domestic batterers), the skeins I usually mess around with only untangle in one direction, which is “run for your life.” This is especially true since there appear to be multiple overlaps between typical cheaters’ behavior and that of batterers– give or take skull fractures, organ damage and broken bones.

So, in case this helps get Trapped past the “wtf just happened” stage of paralysis, I’ll rattle on about a few crossover theories that might fit though I would never insist. It’s all just food for thought. Keep what works and throw anything else away. But first I should probably clarify my concept of domestic abuse. Evan Stark– the late, great forensic expert on coercive control and domestic violence and one of the earliest spearheads of the battered women’s shelter movement in the US and abroad– concluded that most abusers don’t have to take their hands out of their pockets to paralyze their prey through psychological and strategic coercion and control. Even those abusers who periodically resort to violence tend to operate on a “beat by need” basis, mostly preferring less athletic and less legally risky methods of terrorizing and controlling their prey and only bringing out the “big guns” of physical abuse as a last resort in proportion to victims’ resistance.

What Stark learned over the course of his 50 year advocacy and research career was that even victims who experience periodic assault at the hands of partners still overwhelmingly cite psychological abuse and coercion and control as the most devastating and paralyzing aspects even beyond the physical abuse. In other words, just because a victim was never directly physically assaulted doesn’t mean the abuse wasn’t “terrifying/destructive enough” to induce captor bonding, aka “Stockholm syndrome.” The validity of victims’ gut fear of the potential risks involved is illustrated by the statistical fact that roughly 40% of domestic murders were not preceded by prior reports of violence, meaning the final lethal attack was probably the first and only. In fact, of all the factors involved in domestic abuse, the only thing which statistically predicts the potential for lethal domestic violence is a preceding pattern of coercive and controlling behaviors– why coercive control has been called the “golden thread” of domestic homicide prediction in forensic research.

As a side note, personally I think that whatever risk associations turn out to be statistically true are probably also hardwired into human lizard brain risk management faculties. In essence, if certain behaviors have always historically signaled increased risk of death, then humans will be hardwired, even if merely subconsciously, to fight/flee or fawn/freeze simply upon seeing any of those behaviors in others.

I bring up the above because Stark’s mission for the past twenty years was to correct legal and public and even victims’ misperceptions that, for behavior to be considered domestic abuse and for it to be considered sufficiently terrifying to entrap victims as well as representing an alert to authorities that risk of murder loomed, it has to involve fists, fire arms and tire irons. In Stark’s view, waiting for fists to be involved is already too late to more effectively offset risks to victims which is why he also spearheaded the criminalization of coercive control, a campaign which was successful in the UK and Scotland and has so far inspired civil protections for victims in at least four US states.

Anyway, I’m guessing that a few different, possibly related scenarios may be going on in Trapped’s situation: One possibility is that Trapped’s state of feeling plagued with “misty watercolor memories” of the marriage is illusory because she hasn’t been out of the abuser’s orbit long enough to fully emerge from captor bonding and that lingering captor bonding may be making it hard to remember and identify some of his more coercive and controlling tactics over the past decade or so. In other words, this ex’s behavior might not have been so loving and Trapped may feel trapped because she’s been psychologically hobbled and hogtied in subtle but coercive ways from the beginning of the relationship. Another possibility is that, due to some particular life trigger (maybe death or illness of a parent or job loss or promotion; or sudden onset of mortality fears due to accident, illness, substance abuse or stress; or even the AP’s psychological and/or actual resemblance to some abusive role model from this ex’s childhood) the ex is like a “Manchurian candidate” who’s childhood training in abuse quite suddenly kicked in and caused him to drop his apparently very credible good guy mask and radically return to “factory setting.”

Either way the skein is untangled, it argues that the dye was cast and this guy was factory set as an abuser way back in childhood whether he was actively controlling and conditioning Trapped for years by playing on her fears in subtle or unsubtle ways or because he’s radically compartmentalized and, for a long stretch of time, actually fully invested in this loving-seeming, non-abusive persona.

Speaking of hopium-free skein untangling, the latter theory of radical compartmentalization has been applied to not only batterers but– extra yikes– serial killers, sometimes referred to as “cubing” because of the BTK serial killer’s descriptions of his own mental processes. The concept has been speculatively applied to a broad range of serial offender and can be helpful for victims, advocates, the public and law enforcement to understand since the theory potentially explains why these types of offenders are so seamlessly credible– because the best liars, like method actors, believe their own lies.

When the theory of radical compartmentalization has been applied to batterers, there’s another theory that occasionally crops up in attempts to explain the underlying MO and some of the more mystifying contradictory behaviors of domestic abusers called “masked dependency.” The concept of masked dependency was first applied politically by social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm to explain the universal psychological and emotional dependency of oppressors on their subjugated victims, a dependency that’s also accompanied by a catastrophic sense of shame and consequent efforts to overcompensate for those intolerable feelings of vulnerability through snowballing hostility and brutality against victims.

Masked dependency could obviously have potential application to domestic abuse– the idea that abusive personalities, because they were typically raised in dysfunctional “kill or be killed” home environments in which vulnerability was punished, end up feeling deeply ashamed of their (more exaggerated than average) infantile emotional dependence on primary partners and begin to resent the power they paranoically imagine their partners wield over them. This sense of shame regarding dependency could arguably lead to overcompensation by being increasingly abusive and “discarding” towards partners, all while “masking” the underlying reason for this, which is an intolerable feeling of vulnerability due to fears the partner might abandon or betray them.

I always thought “masked dependency” also fit cheating very well since cheating is arguably one way to “mask” internally driven fears of abandonment/betrayal by a primary partner. For one, cheating could be an “end around” to someone with a “kill or be killed” mentality and paranoid fear of betrayal– meaning they betray before they’re betrayed which helps mask their own sense of vulnerability by displacing all that pain, shock and fear onto the partner (displacement is apparently a thing with a lot of cluster B disorders– making others feel one’s own negative emotions as if doing so would spare one from those negative emotions). Cheating might also help mask dependency by diluting it– spreading the emotional dependency out among more than one partner– as well as hedging bets against abandonment by forming Plan B backup relationships.

Regarding cheating as a “dilution” strategy to mask dependency from themselves and others, the fact that some cheaters appear to eventually shift a lot of their emotional dependency away from primary partners and onto affair partners could potentially explain why some act like dogs attacking their former “masters” on the orders of new masters. But the pathological nature of dependency in abusers could suggest that the shift in fealty/loyalty/dependency from one partner to another is never complete so the same cheaters who appeared to discard and emotionally bash their partners as worthless might still feel enraged when victims manage to escape of their own accord and, worse still, move on to subsequent happier lives and relationships.

In other words, masked dependency could explain or even predict post-separation abuse. Like a dog with two bones, abusers may still bury the one they’re tired of chewing on to prevent other dogs from getting it and growl maniacally if any dog comes close to the burial site. The “burying” could be proverbial and involve attempts to crush victims’ self esteem or reputations as means of causing social isolation or, worse, could involve literal burying as in cases of cheaters like Chris Watts, Scott Peterson and Fotis Dulos.

Unlike dogs, even a not particularly brilliant human abuser has enough intellectual wherewithal to deny and disguise their true motives for doing this to the point that it can be very confusing for not only victims and bystanders but also law enforcement and FBI profilers. For instance, I never quite bought Chris Watts’ explanation to police about why he killed his wife and angrily dumped her body face down in a shallow grave. Watts said that he was enraged at Shanann for being in the way of his affair. But he also contradicted this by admitting that he’d killed her after she’d threatened him with divorce upon discovering the affair. By the same token, he may also have killed his own children rather than seeing them eventually raised by another man. But depending on how deep his need to mask his own shameful dependency was, it would fit the theory if Watts actually risked harsher criminal sentencing by copping to the more cold-blooded motive of getting his wife and kids “out of the way” rather than the more pathetic and wormily infantile sounding motive of making sure they could never replace him.

According to the theory of masked dependency, abusers like this will always conceal from themselves and others the real reasons they abuse partners and will offer instead an array of nonsensical “red herring” excuses and alibis for brutal behavior.

Some of the alibis for cheating might appear designed to make the abuser seem more “morally justified” in abusing a partner while others may make the abuser look even more cold-blooded. But the giveaway that all of it may be intended to conceal actual motive is that, if you think about it, it really makes very little sense that someone who wants to separate and be free to form another relationship wouldn’t do everything they could to encourage their original partners to do the same, including building up that partners sense of self esteem and hopes for the future. Yet cheaters instead mostly seem to do the reverse– emotionally cripple their chumps (to the point of seeming to commit emotional forms of FGM or castration) with attacks on self esteem as well as socially isolating them through smear campaigns. It’s all just the snarling of a dog with two bones that hadn’t entirely given up ownership of the first bone.

What I’m suggesting is that the reason Trapped’s ex’s rewriting and post-separation smear campaigns make no sense is that they may be both a distraction for the true underlying reasons for cheating and post-separation abuse as well as a campaign to emotionally cripple Trapped and socially isolate her to prevent her from moving forward towards her fabulous abuser-free future. It could also be predictive of future escalation so that’s all the more reason to go as gray rock as possible and even implement certain security measures.