He Dumped Her While Pregnant

Dear Ultimate Winner,

Your ex is a domestic abuser, full stop. Domestic abusers of every shade have a recidivism rate of about 98.5% even with jail time and anger management therapy. Without those two things, recidivism is about 100%. So please put it out of your mind that your ex is fixable or that he’s actually capable of course-correcting and having some wonderful relationship in the future. For all his current image management and pretense of waltzing off into the sunset (typical manipulative abuse tactic), it’s simply not possible.

If you untangle the skein of his fuckedupedness as CL puts it, I think it’s a much safer bet to untangle it in the above direction. Sociopath, psychopath, narcissist, all the above– sure, but I think it’s advisable to file him under the most important heading: criminality. To quote a police investigator, not all criminals are abusers but all abusers are criminals. Even if he hasn’t yet technically broken any law, his behavior and especially his system of rationalization fit the general profile.

Regarding your ex’s rationalizations, here’s a paper on something called “neutralization” or the mental trick by which a range of serial offenders manage to rationalize their offenses at victims’ expense: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/9/2/46 I think you’ll recognize several elements of it. Basically the paper describes how repeat offenders have an “off switch” for empathy that both quells guilt or a sense of stigma for past ill deeds and paves the way to commit future offenses. And the process is generally progressive.

It’s actually the mental tricks to reduce empathy– the “off switch”– which shows that your ex is dangerous and possibly capable of much worse, though it’s pretty hard to top what he’s already done (as I’ll get into in a bit). He may not be in the fist-swinging stage yet and may never graduate to it but that’s neither here nor there since, for one thing, domestic abusers tend to operate on a beat-by-need basis, usually preferring less athletic and less legally risky means of crushing the agency out of their prey. The most skilled abusers may literally never need to lift a finger to keep their partners under their thumbs.

For another thing, Evan Stark, the late veteran domestic violence researcher and spearhead of the movement to criminalize coercive control (please read everything he’s written– brilliant and humane) noted that rates of severe coercive control (subviolent forms of psychological abuse and coercion) were increasing in inverse proportion as rates of severe domestic assault and murder were going down and that this shift was happening in response to increasing legal punishments towards domestic assault. In other words, abusers, like all criminals, are self interested and prefer to avoid consequences so that many of yesterday’s fist-swingers and bone-breakers are today’s psychological torturers.

Like viruses mutating to evade updates to human immune defenses, abusers generally adapt their methods to evade updates in justice response or in response to more people becoming aware of telltale red flags for abusers (for instance, if a history of childhood trauma becomes a widespread red flag for potential abusers, many abusers might start to pretend they had idyllic childhoods, etc.). But Stark’s argument isn’t that this statistical reduction in overt forms of violence is such a great improvement since abuse survivors almost universally report that the psychological coercion and torture involved with abuse are far more devastating and paralyzing than even violent assault. Furthermore, Stark’s years of research show that it’s a history of coercive control more than a history of violent assault which is actually the most statistically predictive of eventual domestic murder.

You didn’t elaborate much on the mean-spirited/cold behavior you described but, if you did go into more detail, I have a feeling it would start to form a noticeable– if subtle– pattern that pointed to covert coercion and control and systematic isolation. Like did he go into this “cold” behavior (i.e., the “tension building” stage of the abuse cycle) or mean behavior whenever you were about to socialize either together or by yourself or go out to do something fun? If this sounds familiar, consider the idea that this was meant to crush the charm, joy and social expansiveness out of you to prevent you from attracting friends and potential supporters (who might help you to resist his bs) or even new suitors.

Consider that he always followed you to the bathroom because he knows from his own sneaky behavior that this is where people usually text their secret paramours. By the same token, consider that his spotty work history or general economic irresponsibility was so he could spend more time keeping an eye on you. Again, he was cock-blocking.

Virtually all domestic abusers are ferociously monogamous but only hypocritically so– i.e., sexual freedom for them and none for victims. Like dogs with two (or more) bones, they may chew everything edible off the first bone and then bury it in preference for a new bone but they’ll still paranoically guard the burial site of the first bone to prevent any other dog from getting to it. Or, if they’re highly skilled and wily abusers, they’ll simply destroy the self esteem of the first bone to the point that the first bone may never again try to unbury themselves.

When abusers perceive they’ve gotten their victims into the latter inert state, they’ll feel freer to “discard” and replace victims and will often do a kind of sadistic victory dance about it as if reveling in the “defeat” of victims and as if this rejection is an act of revenge. If so, it probably relates to something called “masked dependency” whereby many abusers conceal their infantile dependency on partners, related pathological (and unfixable and self-fulfilling) fear of abandonment by partners and consequent seething resentment of the “power” that partners have to abandon them. Precisely because this is often expressed only covertly, it can be hard for survivors and bystanders to put two and two together and identify erratic behavior and abuse as little more than cock-blocking/mate guarding and systematic isolation. For more on the phenomenon of “masked dependency,” read Susan Golant’s and Donald Dutton’s The Batterer (caveat: Dutton turned out to be a douche later in his academic career so I suspect Golant is the real mind behind the important theories in the book).

I know the “enforcement of one-sided monogamy” model doesn’t seem to fit with the current situation where he’s abandoned you. But beware that the fat lady may not have sung yet in this situation and you may be in for more post-separation abuse, especially if you commit to no contact, cut off his access to financial perks, etc. Another mark of abusers is the toddler-ish push-pull behavior. CL nailed that one on the head. Abusers will viciously devalue and discard (like toddlers running away from mommy on the playground and screaming in rage if mommy follows) yet still fully expect to come back at any later point to find their victims still curled up inert in the fetal position crying the abuser’s name and unable to move on. If you dare to move on, you may find him almost telepathically circling back around to reboot the fear and control program.

Also, did you find yourself changing plans or curbing ambitions over time? And, over time, did you start feeling an increasing sense of spooky, vague anxiety every time you left home and, because of this, found yourself cutting plans short or hurrying back without knowing why? If so, these are classic marks of a psychological hostage situation and coercive control.

In short, I don’t think it’s any accident that you ended up “mothering” him through his supposed depression or that you came back from your break to cook dinner for his family. I even think his hobosexuality was a form of control. I think you were frog-boiled, conditioned and trained over time to cater to his whims in order to avoid the vague “doom signals” that he was emitting whenever you showed too much independence.

The toxic Redpill/manosphere cult is infamous for codifying this system of doom-signalling control of partners. The tactic is called “dread games” or “dreading” but it’s really a matter of followers consciously mimicking the behaviors that pathological abusers will commit without putting any thought or effort into it since it’s typically learned from infancy in abusive families of origin and polished over many generations. It’s one of the reasons abusers are so intractable and incurable– because, for a cradle-trained and practiced abuser it’s all about being able to commit the harm and benefit from the control while simultaneously remaining luxuriously blind to their own pathetic or aggressive motives and the harm they do, therefore unburdened by conscience and self reflection and free to abuse again and again and again and again ad infinitum, ad nausea or, worse comes to worse, ad mortem.

The spooky consequences of displeasing him in previous years may not have been clear to your conscious mind but I think your gut obviously accurately sensed what he was capable of because, with his current behavior, he just proved what he was capable of– a staggering, dangerous level of callousness. If you found yourself feeling gradually paralyzed over time and found your life getting smaller and more confined, it’s no wonder.

In this situation the callousness manifested as abandonment of you in your most physically and emotionally vulnerable state and callous abandonment of an unborn child. Because evidence based research finds that coercive control and emotional abuse can increase risk of miscarriage and other adverse pregnancy outcomes, I strongly suspect the shock and stress his behavior caused contributed to pregnancy loss.

So that’s likely why your previous “servility” and spackling was fear based and not necessarily due to any preexisting psychological issues you have: because, bottom line, this is a person capable of contributing to fetal death. That’s fucking terrifying. I’m as pro-choice as they come but I believe that abusers who contribute to the death of wanted unborn children are a species of murderer.

Again as far as his “happy ending” with someone else, in years to come as he ages and his options to latch onto another passing body and play his push-pull dread games with future partners start to wane, that callousness could show itself in even more terrifying ways. With any grade of abuser, it’s always a game of Russian roulette.

I hope you stick around this forum and seek other forms of support but I would warn against therapeutic victim-blaming because it can make the trauma worse and longer lasting. Make sure any therapist (or personal supporter) is versed in PTSD and coercive control and doesn’t operate under the old-timey, debunked “psychological deficiency theory” of domestic abuse victims. Even if you have a history of being too conciliatory to users and takers and would like to resolve this, it’s still not why this happened to you. Listen to CL’s recent podcast with coercive control expert Dr. Emma Katz who argues the same thing can just as easily happen to strongest people with great boundaries too.

Personally I believe this is because, for everyone alive on earth, there’s a predator out there who knows how to get past our individual radars, “hack” our defenses and gradually frog-boil us into states of learned helplessness and captor-bonding. Educating ourselves on how these predators operate and how they turn victims’ strengths into liabilities is one step towards self-protection. What’s more, the greater your understanding of these things, the more you’ll be able to extrapolate the principles to “macro” or political forms of abuse and the more in common you’ll have with other people who have squared off against various forces of ill in the world. It’s an exciting point of bonding with other genuinely constructive people. Studies even show that survivors of trauma can sometimes end up with more fulfilling lives and relationships because of this revelatory process.

All the same I would never thank evil people for this “learning curve” because it’s in spite of them and in defiance of them that anyone overcomes. It may not seem like it now but you’re on your way to joining the worldwide, groovy, amorphous “resistance movement”. Come to the dark side, we have cookies. I wish you strength in your resolve and hope for a far better and creep-free future.