Cheating Wife Blames Poor Communication

Start looking up resources on coercive control (particularly the work of Evan Stark) and you might find it opening up forgotten memories of certain eerie gestures and tactics that your abusive partner was doing all along. Some of it can be very subtle messaging but we’re all permeable in that sense and can be boiled like frogs.

For one example, when I worked in advocacy, I often heard survivors describe how their abusers can use “social abuse” to control victims, such as accusing the victim of some terrible, exaggerated offense and then insinuating– subtly or unsubtly– that the abuser will then frame the victim in this light to their employers, families, friends, etc., essentially threatening Dickensian level “social ruin.” I think this kind of weird threat tends to shock people’s primitive lizard fear centers because, back in our paleolithic days, being driven out of the tribe meant sure death so it’s a very potent thing to threaten any homo sapien with. And in modern reality where social nets are thinner and thinner, the same threat can mean job loss or loss of reputation, loss of support or even loss of child custody so these are not idle menaces. I bring up the latter because I’ve seen she-abusers level this particular weapon as regularly as men.

Anyway, the point is that, the more you read up, I think the more you’ll start to see that coercive control is the typical go-to facilitator used by cheaters. Then bear in mind that individuals convicted of coercive control can be punished by up to 14 years in Scotland, 5 in the UK, can lose custody of children in Hawaii and California and get victims an order of protection in Connecticut. In other words, it’s not just whimsically but officially considered abuse, full stop.

Even if hetero men are less frequently injured or killed in domestic abuse, men can frequently be victims of emotional abuse since women are especially apt to use psychological and emotional approaches to coercing and controlling partners (and other women– I know the type, shriek). A real problem for men who are victimized is that most victim resources are geared for women or based on feminist theory and it can be confusing trying to piece together what happened within a context that seems to be based on gender inequality despite the fact that men’s and women’s traumatic responses are going to be quite similar.

A big problem for survivors of both genders is that only very recently has there been a movement to bring attention to coercive control– the subviolent emotional, psychological and often financial abuse that tends to statistically precede violence. Back when I worked in advocacy, resources were all about broken bones and gunshot wounds which left victims of emotional frog-boiling terror campaigns wandering between wagon circles with nowhere to go for support (the network I worked with did offer that support). But fortunately there are more and more resources out there focusing on CC so therefore more that will also address male survivors’ needs and questions.

As far as the feminist theory behind domestic violence, when I worked as an advocate, I started to realize that male victims of domestic abuse were not actually a complete contradiction to feminist theory because, almost without exception, female abusers in these cases would turn out to be something called “male directed.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean they behaved in an overtly masculine manner. Sometimes quite the reverse– hyper feminine and exaggeratedly childlike or “helpless” on the surface- almost as an overcompensation or mask for covert dominance and aggression. The term “stoop to conquer” comes to mind.

A lot of women feel the need to be somewhat wily in dating simply because of safety factors but actual abusers take things to an entirely different level. What’s theoretically “male directed” about these types of abusers is that they had generally internalized abuse from a male abuser from childhood. And by internalize, this meant that, in the “kill or be killed” dynamics they grew up in, emulating the perpetrator and “killing” so to speak seemed a safer bet than emulating the victim and being “killed.”

So if creepy daddy was abusive to partners, daughters who internalized the negative role model would also be abusive to partners– sometimes in a violent way though, statistically, mostly in terms of psychological coercion and abuse. If daddy cheated (as all violent abusers tend to), the daughters who internalized would cheat as well. I don’t know why female abusers typically had abusive male role models rather than especially abusive mom figures except that it may simply take more overt violence in childhood to turn a girl into an adult abuser and, statistically speaking, 80% of overtly violent domestic abusers are male.

But, except for tending to be less overtly violent than male abusers and more apt to use emotional coercion and control, the rest of the syndrome plays out pretty much the same for male or female abusive personalities. Kids who- rather than survive and heal from childhood trauma– internalize the negative model will also do this compulsive reenactment of their own past traumas in an effort to maladaptively resolve them. And as I mentioned before, one sick and twisted way of “resolving” those past tragedies is to reverse victim/offender roles. Then the formerly traumatized individual eventually becomes the adult perpetrator.

It’s more common for female children raised in abusive family dynamics to “freeze and fawn” and have a passive response than to go into “fight or flight” just like, among chimpanzees, female juvenile chimps will treat sticks like dolls while male juveniles will usually run around whacking things. Vive la difference. But not everyone’s the same even within the same gender. Some kids are naturally more dominant and, unfortunately, this can become a liability within abuse dynamics in terms of adult outcomes. It can sometimes happen that a child with dominant personality traits will throw themselves into the fray to protect the victim parent and consequently gets beaten and injured in the process, therefore more traumatized, therefore more prone to be violentized.

In many ways it’s tragic. If the same people who became abusers of whatever stripe as adults had not been “violentized” or transformed by abuse in childhood, some might have been leader types or athletes or people who expressed that dominant energy positively (saving orphans, rescuing endangered species, working on the bomb squad, etc.). But the drive to compulsively reenact is so intense in people with this kind of disorder that this is why most DV experts view this personality type as basically incurable and intractable. Stick a fork in them, they’re cooked in 98.5% of cases. I imagine that recidivism is probably worse for violent offenders but, to the degree that coercive control statistically presages violence in many cases, I don’t imagine that coercive controllers have a much better recidivism rate.
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