Coldplay Cheater Says It Wasn’t an ‘Affair’

I think it’s basically calcified Stockholm syndrome for a lot of people– the only format they’ve ever known for relationships.

In the same way that lovebombing is a critical component in causing paralysis in victims, the small perks given by perpetrators are simply fleeting reassurances that the recipient isn’t currently on the target list. But the rest of perpetrators’ conduct– their aggressive micro-gestures, mood swings and unjustified scapegoating sprees– is a reminder that this list is subject to random change.

Meanwhile, if victims of a particular perpetrator (the losers in any standoff) offered the same bystanders even larger perks it would not inspire loyalty because the carrot doesn’t come with a serious stick and these perma-captor-bonded types require the stick to have any respect for others.

For what it’s worth, I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: traditional victimology always generalized this mentality to all victims– the codependency concept that victims are drawn to dangerous individuals who remind them of abusive and/or unavailable parental figures. But this turned out to be statistically unfounded or, as Dr. Emma Katz called the theory, “Rubbish” since victims don’t differ in any way from the general population. That means some suffered abuse in childhood but no more or less frequently than the non-abused population.

What’s always struck me as curious is how the codependency theory is, in fact, universally true of abusers themselves and victim-blaming bystanders. I think it’s a very literal form of DARVO if not psychopathic projection but done under the guise of clinical aid. Victim-blaming shrinks are essentially tarring victims with bits and pieces of typical of abuser psychology if not the whole abuser syndrome which, due to generational cycles of abuse and violentization, is basically calcified Stockholm syndrome in a nutshell and all these characters have ever known of love.

I also don’t relate to how people can sell themselves so cheaply. I’m not saying I’m a saint or perfect but at least the bumbling attempt to maintain integrity is how I sleep at night (I really like sleep). I could argue that it’s entirely self-serving and selfish to keep one’s nose clean.

I’ve never seen much written on the idea of “petrified/calcified” captor bonding but I think it could explain why garden variety abusers show all the classic signs of attachment disorder, can so radically turn on people whom they claim to love, always seem to suspect that others’ love for them isn’t real and have no real empathy when they break partners’ hearts. I suspect it’s because the higher order of love and loyalty simply don’t exist in their minds so they project on others the fact that, for abusers, love and loyalty are only ever coerced,fear driven and transiently self-destructing.

Of course this becomes a self-fulfilled prophesy since, through abuse, coercion and control, abusers make themselves effectively unlovable, leaving captor bonding as the only form of “wuv” that victims can experience or display at the end of the day.

In fact, because captor bonding is actually the furthest thing from love, it’s no shock that it can completely disappear in a puff of smoke after victims have escaped and are assured of safety. Most survivors report being surprised at how little human feeling remains for former partners they once felt hopelessly devoted to.

A lot of science needs to be done to investigate these questions before anything conclusive can be said but one thing really stands out in this mess– which is that, when humans go “bad,” they typically act like apes.

I don’t mean they act like apes in a cartoon sense but that they literally show the same specific behavior patterns of our closest ape cousins and, by extension, ape ancestors (because chimps are among the most slowly evolving mammals on earth so it’s assumed they haven’t changed much in the course of umpty-thousands of years).

Anyway, if you untangle all the skeins, “petrified captor bonding” seems to be the main form of bonding among our regular chimp cousins and rapey ape ancestors. That is, aside from the rather transient and unstable mother-child bond among chimps (transient because all females leave their native troops and their mothers at adolescence and unstable because the standard adolescent rite of passage for chimp males is beating up their own mums to demonstrate dominance within the troop).

But chimps really don’t do “love” in the most elevated human sense. They might affectionately groom each other and show real grief at the loss of someone to whom they were (currently) close. But that “closeness” could change in a heartbeat. For instance, allegiances between chimp males are very changeable since beta apes may violently overthrow the alphas to whom they appeared touchingly, affectionately loyal only moments before. Allegiances between chimp females are basically nonexistent since, according to field research, they never form coalitions in the wild to protect each other. In captivity, chimp females can apparently form very weak protective coalitions with each other, possibly because zookeepers become the main “alphas” who protects females from chimp males. In any case, apparently chimp females show a bit more tendency to cooperatively stand up to male abuse in captivity.

I guess you could say chimp female behavior in captivity shows a tiny little seed of “bonobo-ishness” since– aside from evolutionary temperament– one of the rarely stated reasons that male violence is so rare and relatively mild among bonobos is that bonobo females form very strong coalitions and will cooperatively kick the ass of any male who steps out of line and send him into painful temporary exile.

This conditioning actually seems to start in infancy because even infant male bonobos can reportedly show more bullying tendencies than females. If they do, any female in the troop might punitively chomp on him a little or give him a whooping and set him straight.

You’ll never hear those humans-are-nonmonogamous-because-we-evolved-directly-from-bonobos people mention the above facts. Bonobo females seem to maintain peacey-groovy-peace through pretty impressive (though never lethal) aggression. But, however bonobos manage to form these less violent societies, it does seem to inspire deeper, more human-like and enduring bonds between troop members. But just because bonobos show similarly stable (if not monogamous) loyalty and intimacy doesn’t mean humans directly evolved from bonobos. Instead it seems like this capacity evolved in a parallel way but manifests quite differently.

For one example of parallel-but-different evolution, human females can stay extremely close to their mothers (not all of course) all their lives whereas bonobo females, like chimps, always leave their native troops and moms at adolescence. Also all bonobo females are strongly bisexual, even seeming to prefer recreational sex with other females while human females run the full merry gamut from intractably hetero to bi to fluid to seasonal exclusively gay. And also humans have an obvious hard-wired preference that partners be monogamous even if some individuals have no intention of living by the same principles.

Oh look at the time. I just used my coffee breaks to completely geek out. Back to the grindstone I go. 😉