Did Your Cheater Pretend to Hate Cheating?

The way that duplicity was explained to me by the consulting psychologist for the advocacy network I worked with is that abusers tend to be so compartmentalized that they have “semi-split” personalities.

Something else that was explained to me is that this level of f*ckedupedness isn’t “fixable” so if we’re untangling skeins here, it’s not because we’re knitting a unicorn lol.

Anyhow, I’ve given this spiel before so forgive the redundancy. From what I understand, the schism isn’t quite on the level of dissociative personality disorder where you could imagine floor-to-ceiling “walls” between personae so that one personality doesn’t know of the existence of others. It’s more like “office partitions” with one central, evil, organizing personality orchestrating all the “personalities.”

In other words, this isn’t the same as mental illness where the individual doesn’t have control of what they do but more a criminal disorder because each personality knows of the others and the individual organizes this in self serving ways. But, hypothetically, there’s still the tendency for the person to deeply invest in each different “character” they’re “inhabiting” at any given time– a process dubbed “cubing” by BTK serial killer Denis Rader. The latter might explain the experience of many victims that their partner had been abducted by aliens or had a brain tumor.

What’s more, from what many abuse survivors describe, these different personalities can also come with their own differing memories, perspectives, tastes, politics or even handwriting. But it’s still akin to method acting which, while very absorbing, doesn’t mean the individual isn’t aware that they’re being manipulative and duplicitous on some level.

One misleading personality “fragment” that all abusers apparently carry around with them is their former “victim self” which even the abuser themselves may believe is a genuine part of them so that, when they’re in that “mode,” they think it’s a fixed and permanent state of their core personality even though they will typically trot out the “victim self” in moments when it would serve them to seem disarming or use pity ploys to evade consequences.

To the extent that the victim self was once genuine and to the extent that abusers almost kinda sorta think it’s their true self, it can seem very credible to bystanders. This individual might cry buckets at chick flicks or over, say, lost puppies in the pound or landmine victims half a world away. But that’s only because the abuser might be momentarily projecting themselves onto other victims, not experiencing actual affective empathy.

From the explanation I was given, it sounds like this victim self is more like the light of a star reaching earth millions of years after that star died. Unlike real survivors who would be loath to subject others to the suffering they once endured, abusers are more like poltergeists who go around tormenting the living by subjecting them to the worst of what the ghoul once suffered when “alive.”

The latter is sometimes called compulsive reenactment. I don’t know if anyone understands what drives it so still it’s up for conjecture. Personally I think it might be driven by a deranged superstition that develops in the zero sum dynamics of abusive homes where children are conditioned to unquestioningly believe that they can either be a helpless victim or a dominant perpetrator but nothing in between. Consequently, dominating others and causing helplessness and suffering in others become a kind of calming ritual because only by being an active perpetrator can they quell the constant haunting terror of being victimized.

To me, that compulsive need to induce powerlessness and suffering bears a little resemblance to OCD– the need of obsessive compulsive people to, say, touch a doorknob fifty times before leaving the house to ward off some imagined misfortune. But it’s obviously a lot darker than OCD and much darker than addiction even if it also sort of resembles process addictions like gambling. For one, most addicts only progress to being callous to others as their compulsions escalate but most didn’t start out that way. Meanwhile, the “addiction” to dominating and causing suffering obviously depends on callousness right out of the gate. Obviously bottles, pills and poker chips don’t display palpable pain when “consumed” but human victims do. And, again, inducing that suffering may be largely the point of committing abuse.

Again, sorry to repeat this stuff but maybe some newbies will find it interesting.