How Quickly Did You Fall Out of Love After D-Day?

It’s very rare that anyone outside the home is going to see the true faces of these abusers which I think adds to survivors’ sense of disbelief. But every once in a while, the “cubing” mechanism seems to go haywire and the mask drops for others to see. When that happens, victims may finally experience the healing powers of social consensus. In that sense, justice is probably the best cure for PTSD going.

But, unless victims live in one party consent states regarding secret recordings and manage to capture abusers at their worst and show others, consensus is generally only going to happen in cases where the forms of abuse are criminalized. For instance, before I began attending court in support of various survivors, the director of the advocacy network warned how these “seamless” or Teflon types of abusers can sometimes surprisingly lose their sh*t while either being sued for abuse or criminally tried. I was told it would usually be at moments when victims would go on the stand and recount gruesome details about the violence they’d endured and/or describe twisted aspects of the perpetrators’ sexuality. Sometimes the meltdowns would be elicited by a witness to assault or an expert describing injuries.

The cases I saw were all lawsuits because domestic batterers are rarely given full jury trials and, on the off chance they’re even charged, usually plead out for a slap on the wrist. Anyway, true to form, I saw a few lose it when their former partners testified about the abuse they experienced. One normally smooth operator suddenly turned so purple he looked like he was going to explode (like the villain in Dune) and began twitching and audibly mumbling. Another sparkly charmer put his head in his hands and convulsively began scooting his chair back and forth on the stone floor which produced these really loud farting sounds until his embarrassed lawyer hissed at him to stop.

It was both fascinating and frightening because the whole courtroom would become tense. I think judges are trained not to show reactions but the marshals guarding the court would shift their hands closer to their guns. Then members of the jury who might have been blaming victims/siding with perpetrators up to that point might look especially spooked or downcast as if they suddenly realized that they have no danger radars.

The reactions were clearly such a “thing” that I imagine very high net worth perps would hire the kinds of white shoe lawyers who would coach and prepare them for this pivotal moment but the cases I saw ranged from middle to upper middle class. I also think that, up to those moments, their own lawyers invested in clients’ seeming innocence.

What I perceived about these mask drop moments and what the director of the program described is when perpetrators find themselves having to listen to descriptions of events they’d managed to deeply convince themselves and others either didn’t happen at all (victim injured themselves to frame them, etc.) or happened differently (victim provoked assault, etc.). Basically they’d repeated the false narratives so often that they’d come to invest in the lies and were actually caught off guard by the truth— otherwise why wouldn’t they be expecting their former victims to describe what actually happened?

I later learned the terms “neutralization” or “guilt reduction strategy” to describe how many serial perpetrators manage to self-spellbind with false and distorted renditions of events and distorted characterizations of their own victims or anyone who would negatively judge them (https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/9/2/46).

Because this mental trick of mesmerizing self talk is so ingrained, apparently many offenders aren’t even conscious that they’re doing it. Yet obviously perpetrators have some awareness since, if their victims contradict these “reality rewrites,” offenders will often respond with violent rage. So, like in cubing, perpetrators both know and deny the truth simultaneously and both invest so deeply in lies that they nearly believe them but yet still recognize the truth enough to preemptively discredit victims and use coercive tactics to suppress the truth.

To me, one of the really interesting things about the neutralization mechanism is that it demonstrates that these individuals actually have residual consciences because, otherwise, why would they have to engage in such elaborate mental gymnastics in order to snuff any sense of guilt or negative stigma? Since even supposedly “zero empathy” serial killers like Bundy and Dahmer were observed utilizing this mental tactic, it suggests that, rather than being actually devoid of empathy, these offenders have developed an on/off switch which would explain why these individuals were often long able to evade detection or even suspicion and why some of their victims didn’t sense danger.

Furthermore, the tactic is apparently learned– probably over many generations in dysfunctional clans– which therefore displaces (wildly pursued but never proven) genetic concepts of “zero empathy” psychopathy/sociopathy as an explanation,, at least making the awkward and suspiciously eugenic “crime gene” theories unnecessary.

Because these types of perpetrators typically turn out to be emulating abusive role models from childhood (who, at least in the cases of serial rapists and serial killers, are also generally male) and usually also abusing these perpetrators’ female caregivers/mothers, what this suggests is that domestic violence is like an assembly line producing these supposedly born “psychopaths” which means the remedy is to rescue children from these circumstances before they succumb to the generational vampire bites and that’s generally going to involve protecting their mothers.

So it’s actually society itself that’s producing these monsters by refusing to protect women from abuse and continuing to allow men who abuse their partners to have access to children. So, to me, these dubious “genetic” theories seem like an attempt to deny that the above is true and to defend the status quo of coddling abusive men on the grounds that they “just happen” and can’t be stopped from happening.

Anyway, the basic takeaway is that blaming victims for not “detecting” red flags in time to protect themselves is part of the problem because there may actually be nothing functionally and inherently wrong with these perpetrators’ brains or beings. These abusers generally “smell” completely normal to normal people… at least when the empathy/conscience switch is in the “on” position. And the fact that bystanders presume these abusers are normal robs victims of the kind of consensus survivors need to really heal.