Is Hypersexuality a Trauma Response to Betrayal?

Chumps and abuse survivors here and elsewhere always commend or even express a bit of admiring envy for those survivors who seemed to do an emotional 180 upon the first glimpse of abusive tendencies or betrayal by their partners and simply rejected the abusers with revulsion instead of having to fight initial impulses to “fix” the abusers or get them back (or have sex again). I think it seems admirable because the ideal isn’t really that common. Otherwise, as every high school girl usually figures out, playing hard to get tends to sharpen sexual appetite in our species.

Of course it’s far more boggling when a victim finds themselves yearning for contact with someone who harmed them. But is that because most victims of abuse had preexisting pathology? Statistics say this isn’t at all true, that victims don’t differ from the majority in any sense and that only abusers have predictable preexisting psychological issues.

So, from that vantage point and also prevailing evolutionary theory, I tend to think the inexplicable flare of desire for partners who just betrayed and/or abandoned is a combination of hardwired biological “FOMO” (fear of missing out) going back to the dawn of man coupled with captor bonding (Stockholm syndrome).

Of course the impulse has to be resisted but I think a line should be drawn at victims being shamed for what may be normal human traits and instincts, even if these instincts are frustratingly self-defeating at times. In the case that someone did have an issue with compulsive and destructively indiscriminate sexuality prior to an abusive relationship then there might be some problem to explore. But if an individual wasn’t sexually compulsive prior to a breakup (whether an honorable breakup or a traumatic one), I find it pretty victim-blaming to apply the codependency theory to what might just be a normal reaction, albeit one arising from “outdated” primordial wiring.

I think that’s because the horny FOMO bit makes a certain sense from an evolutionary “propagation” standpoint. Basically, the reason any of our bloodlines survived the ages is because our ancestors had that tyrannical biological drive to get back on that horse (the one they just lost) or, barring that, some other horse (doesn’t matter which) pronto so no breeding opportunities are missed.

For the sake of clarity, if you were anthropomorphise “Mother Nature” (i.e., the biological tyrant of breeding instincts), even if a woman is on her last good egg or a man has outlived his sperm motility, that tyrant still doesn’t want them to miss that last slim chance. And if the “horse” someone is instinctively driven to “get back on” is dangerous and abusive? Wouldn’t matter because sexual violence was a given among our ape and paleolithic ancestors (archeologists report skeletal evidence that paleolithic women show the same pattern of repeat and healed skull injuries as modern battered women, just moreso).

In other words, the tyranny of nature is that these instincts make sense from a species propagation vantage point though not necessarily from an individual survival standpoint. Anyone who’s watched a Great Dane trying to hump a dachshund and the dachshund actually putting up with it knows that not everything that comes naturally is advisable. What’s more, those instincts may have made sense back in our live-fast/die-young/leave-a-lot-of-spawn days when infant mortality and death before adolescence could exceed 50%, but the same instincts are outdated today.

The same goes for Stockholm syndrome/captor bonding. For one, among our ape ancestors, that was the standard bond between genders (as seen among modern chimps). Secondly, though the tendency to bond with abuser/captor actually does increase chances of survival in captivity because most captors/abusers are not entirely immune from being “touched” by a victim’s display of loyalty and devotion and are more likely to show a bit of mercy, the tendency to play possum to survive abuse outlives its usefulness once victims have an opportunity to escape.

That’s because neither our ape or paleolithic ancestors had laws against DV (as poorly enforced as they are), courts (as biased as they are), domestic violence shelters (as underfunded as they are), etc., not to mention the technical means to leave one’s local troop and move far away to escape (difficult as it is).

Anyway, back when I worked for an advocacy network, the program directors didn’t see the point of shaming victims to overcome outdated monkey impulses by framing those impulses as somehow “pathologically flawed,” especially when abusers are already so adept at shaming and crazy-baiting victims into paralysis and society is already so adept at shaming women for being sexual at all. Why not encourage victims to overcome natural but outdated impulses by just offering likely theories why they’re outdated and why they existed in the first place?

The service I worked for just encouraged survivors to utilize the human advantage of free will to overcome incommodious impulses without the pathologizing. And because we avoided the typical pathologizing that reigned in victimology at the time, survivors began opening up about ways in which sexuality had been employed to survive extremely dangerous situations. For instance, many survivors described how the choice to have sex or not have sex was never up to them but how, if they weren’t “into it,” it would hurt even more or even risk injury (uterine prolapse), they found ways to get aroused by pretending they weren’t being maritally raped.

We never would have heard accounts like this if the shame hadn’t been removed from the subject. I also think the general view that humans are saddled with some rather outdated apey impulses that we have to overcome for individual survival made the subject a bit humorous and that made survivors more likely to open up and talk about the struggle to individually “evolve” beyond our animal selves at times.

It seemed to be a bit harder for evangelical Christians to grasp the issue from that standpoint, especially women who were conditioned to deny even having sexual impulses. But, if Darwin and the bible agree on only one thing, “original sin” and “primal nature” are exactly the same. Furthermore, scripture (like evolutionary theory and even Freud) does not exempt anyone in this regard. Even the pope of Rome is supposed to be constantly vigilant about backsliding into selfishness, greed, cupidity, cowardice, false idol worship, etc., etc. Whether religious leaders are self-policing or not is another matter as the church sex abuse scandal and many financial scandals have shown. But according to theology, Darwin and Freud alike, we’re all equal and, give or take some individual differences, no one is transcendent.

As a side note on religion and victimology, I think most of the general confusion in victimology is when some pretend to be generally exempt in order to gain status and power over others. For instance, psychiatric authority has traditionally attempted to gain and maintain power over women by pretending normal and explicable responses to abuse– whether the tendency to captor bond or fight back or simply having difficulty escaping– are, in fact, pathological which is how “borderline personality disorder” ended up being weaponized against all battered women to keep them silent and keep them from rattling the societal cage. In order to do that, these authorities had to pretend to be exempt from normal human responses themselves. But, in technical terms, that would make psychiatry not merely a religion but a cultish one, not a science, since leaders are pretending to be inherently exalted and above lowly human flaws which not even formal church authorities are supposed to do. The pretense of “exalted leaders” is the mark of a cult whether existential or religious.