Infidelity, Divorce, and Cancer: The Suck Trifecta

I agree with Sarah that that there has to be a high level of disorder in FWs– disorder as in “run for your life,” not “get them therapy and fix it.”

To me, the “run for your life” prescription is built into the fact that the FW pattern is recognizably “batterer lite.” At least as long as it remains “lite” and doesn’t progress to all out violence which I believe it likely does far more than average because the sick thought patterns– if not always the literal thoughts themselves– of cheaters and batterers are identical.

Of all the research on abuser psych I’ve read since the early aughts when I worked for a DV survivor resource org, I always thought Stephen King nailed the internally-driven masked dependency/reactive attachment disorder “push/pull” cycle of rumination best in The Shining.

The abusive character in The Shining needs no actual provocation to be triggered into abuse. It’s essentially anti-victim-blaming, a theme that King has explored any times.
But because the abuser character falsely blames negative external influences for the toxic rot at the core of his abusive personality, abuser dad character arranges to live with his wife and child in total isolation (pull). But the uninterrupted intimacy triggers him to retreat into demented, unprovoked “rebellious” and resentful thoughts towards his wife (push) whom he sees as having entrapped him though, of course, it was he who trapped her.

The haunted hotel is just a symbol for how abusive personalities will always sway to destructive social influences however faint or imaginary, like a compass pointing north. Even without others to triangulate with against his family, the abuser will triangulate with ghosts against victims. This fits with certain theories that batterers, when engaging in intimate violence, enter a state of “deindividuated rage” exactly like participants in mob violence who seek to lose themselves and reexperience the infantile state of deindividuation by joining collective action. No batterer acts alone, in other words, even if they’re just carrying the mob in their heads though most will try to triangulate.

In that view, abusers’ triangulation is essentially the formation of a bully mob in which to lose themselves and lose any sense of responsibility for their destructive actions. I always thought that might explain why I never met a DV survivor who wasn’t also cheated on in some way. It’s a form of triangulation, a mini bully mob in which to “lose” themselves and externalize responsibility. In any event, in The Shining, the abuser’s transition to murderous violence is complete when he starts hooking up with ghost hookers.

Most abusers would rather avoid jail and other consequences of overt violence and the most skilled might never resort to overt violence towards partners but can rely on psychological, financial and emotional tactics to paralyze their targets. This is why there’s currently a global campaign to criminalize coercive control.

What this brings to mind is that, in the case an abuser can’t manage to sublimate all violent urges, one of the many aggressive purposes of cheating may arguably be the attempt to steer what might otherwise be demented violence towards a partner in another direction. In other words, cheating may be what an abuser does to avoid actually killing their victims. Why? Because, according to certain compelling theories, the whole syndrome is infantile psychopathology in which the victim’s very agency feels like a threat to the survival of the giant psycho baby who, being so catastrophically ashamed of their own mewling dependency, paranoically blames the victim for “causing” that agonizing state of insecurity.

Could anything say “run for your life” more than that? And what does it do to the mind and health of a person living in close proximity with someone who secretly, cyclically ruminates about punishing and harming them out of some demented, internally driven psychosis? All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…