I’m Too Old to Leave Him

I was thinking the same thing CL described– that that level of “void” is generally caused by abuse. Abusers are like spiders who, aside from winding prey up in their web, also inject a poison that slows the prey down and makes it harder to escape the web.

I don’t have enough information about Toni’s situation to know if any of the following applies. It applies to a lot of people so take whatever helps and discard the rest:

From the time I worked as an advocate for domestic abuse, I learned that one of the ways victims caught in the web of domestic abuse describe the effects of that abuser/spider “poison” is a feeling of profound psychological isolation and that life is merely a meaningless trudge to the grave. A nihilistic “void” by any other name.

I’ve heard it argued here and there that this sense of nihilism has its origins in how abusers feel deep down, almost as if one of the aims of abusers is to “transfer” their own twisted, hopeless and terrifyingly empty world view to their victims, either as a sick way of “sharing” or as if they believe they can be free of those feelings by unloading them on someone else. The idea of this kind of despair-displacement can be helpful to survivors if they can recognize that a lot of the crushing emotions they’re feeling in the wake of abuse were artificially injected– aren’t really their feelings but simply a reflection of the abuser’s subconscious suicidality and despair. This hasn’t only been applied to the context of domestic abuse but other forms of political abuse. For instance, civil rights activist and poet James Baldwin applied it to racism. He called it the “politics of sexual despair.”

Whatever the reason for this, the overall point is that abusers are worse than spiders in that they mean to keep the victim alive to continue feeding from them, using them and getting whatever tf they get out of entrapping and abusing for as long as possible. And they do this by playing fireman to the fire they set or, for another analogy, the only one with an antidote to the poison they inject– the only person the victim can turn to with those artificially instilled feelings of despair and isolation. Eventually the victim is convinced that there’s no life beyond the abuser and that they can’t survive “out there.”

That “poison” can come in the form of a million little barely perceptible but chilling gestures, words and tones or it can come with periodic “fear maintenance” tantrums where they kick the kitchen cabinet that dared to get stuck or scream at the coffee grounds they spilled on the floor. With or without fists and broken bones, whether it’s all done in whispers or whether or not that rage and punishment are even aimed directly at victims or instead take the form of remote, secret betrayal (affairs, hookers, etc.) , it will all usually follow the age-old cycle of abuse: tension building/explosion/reprieve.

I think it’s no accident that cheating and all the subviolent emotional abuse that’s usually involved with it typically follow the same cycle as traditional domestic violence since, as it turns out, the violence may have been overkill all along and it’s really that cycle that paralyzes victims more than anything else. The late forensic psychologist Evan Stark who was the veteran advocate and researcher who spearheaded the criminalization of coercive control, repeatedly sounded the alarm to policy makers that the statistical decrease in rates of injurious domestic assault over the past few decades brought about by increased legal enforcement against it (because abusers hate consequences) would be accompanied by an equivalent rise in extreme forms of emotional abuse and coercive control. He recognized that, if they were robbed of their traditional mode of instilling terror as the consequences got too stiff, many abusers would change tactics and opt for less athletic or legally risky forms of abuse in order to achieve the same goal– which is basically to crush the agency out of their victims to create human marionettes.

There’s a growing view in social research that the main agenda behind most domestic abuse is to enforce one-sided monogamy– crush the victim into such an inert puddle that they can’t even consider forming another relationship– have no hope of a better future relationship– while the abuser exercises unilateral sexual freedom. But whatever the MO behind crushing victims’ agency, I think the “cycle” alone achieves this because, due to our species Clockwork Orange violent history, we’ve all evolved with a lizard brain sense that “tension building” is a harbinger of mayhem. Throughout our species’ evolution, it says something very, very bad might be about to happen.

Tension building is also like a roulette wheel which could land on any number of horrifying outcomes. Abandonment? Betrayal? Broken bones? Murder? Round and round she goes and where she stops, nobody knows because humans, throughout evolution, especially those who generally signal a kind of empathy impairment, can become suddenly murderous out of the blue. The crushing power of it is its ambiguity and how this plays on humans’ evolutionary hard-wired fear of where that roulette wheel can land. Like an operant conditioning chamber in a Pavlovian random punishment experiment, the cycle itself can induce “learned helplessness” over time.

How’s that for modern innovation? Coercive control is like domestic violence 2.0. New and improved. I have a suspicion that, as social research on coercive control continues to advance, cheating may turn out to play a distinct role in it.

In any event, victims of abuse report finding the tension building stage so unbearable that they simply want to get to the reprieve part as soon as possible, but that can’t happen without some kind of explosion, whatever that entails. As Stark warned, simply because the “explosions” within abuse have become statistically less lethal doesn’t mean the effects won’t devastate, crush and paralyze victims. Some survivors may even find themselves compulsively provoking the explosion earlier to get the tension building stage over with, a bit like taking the lid off a pressure cooker to prevent the steam from fully building up to fatal levels. Once this happens, it’s like a “gotcha” since victims are then vulnerable to the false charge that they’re “fully part of the problem” and “instigators.” They’re not equal instigators but that’s what it may look like on the surface which can lead poorly trained helping professionals to assume the relationship suffers from two-way dysfunction. The ultimate “gotcha” is when victims start to believe this themselves.

I think the whole thing is like a protection racket because part of the irony of what makes people so terrified of being alone and so doubtful of their ability to survive in the world is the chronic fear that’s instilled in abusive relationships.

Whether or not any of the above fits, I still think it can be helpful for survivors to consider that their feelings of hopelessness and emptiness may not be their true feelings at all but more like a kind of communicable disease passed onto them by abusers’ own bleak “void.” Whatever the case, the “cure” is social distancing– getting away from the disease vector and survivors– with the help of supportive people– regaining and repairing their own fractured perspectives, emotions and world views.

I’d also like to point out that feeling “old”– aside from being potentially another case of artificial “transference” from an abuser who themselves feel “old”– could almost be viewed as a form of self-soothing denial of a much worse specter: living for another several decades or more while entrapped with an abuser. Longevity would not be welcome in those circumstances so the circumstances must be changed.