The Mirroring Cheater: Who Is He Really?

Anyone remember the Woody Allen (I know, ew) film “Zelig” about a guy with no core character who simply turns into whomever he’s talking to? Frankly I think the film is kind of Allen’s first hand confession about abusive personalities. In the end they morph themselves so much to attract prey and evade detection that they become like onions. Except, rather than there being “nothing” or a total void underneath, I think what underlies the mirroring is something so scary and loathsome that it explains why they have to suppress and reinvent themselves to exist in polite society.

From what I’ve read regarding domestic abusers who “suffer” from something called “masked dependency,” their fear of abandonment is so intense, pathological and infantile that they tend to mirror those close to them, channeling an abnormal amount of psychic energy into image management. If the fakery seems real at first it’s probably because, at least at the start of relationships, the abuser is fully, passionately invested and even fear driven. They really, really want to be this thing they’re pretending to be. But eventually the disguises become so tight and suffocating that this leads to the other dueling terror that abusers “suffer” from: fear of “engulfment” (in turn explaining the infamous push/pull of abusers in manipulatively drawing victims close and then pushing them away).

This could explain why resentment and rage towards primary partners build up underneath the fakery. Precisely because abusers often sense their underlying infantile dependency is abnormal and unlovable and because they consequently mask this dependency from others and from themselves, they’re incapable of taking responsibility for their own mirroring/fraudulent self presentation and consequently begin to blame their partners for “forcing” them to suppress their “true selves.” It could explain the almost seamless transition from fear-driven fakery to deliberate and conscious deception– because the abuser, in blaming their partners for fostering this shameful dependency, has begun to build a case against the partner that makes the partner supposedly “deserve” betrayal or other forms of abuse. This in turn could explain why abusers (and cheaters) seem to periodically explode in righteous-seeming rage towards their partners and act like any abuse they dish out was “deserved.”

When I worked in advocacy back in the day, I started to suspect the above dynamic is at least part of the reason why virtually all abusers cheat. I think the main reason abusers cheat is because of “masked dependency” itself. Cheating is arguably a way to further “mask” the dependency by a) displacing jealousy/fear of abandonment/dependency onto a partner (as if the abuser is saying, “Hey I’m not the dependent, jealous, pathologically fearful one– my partner is!”) and b) diluting and spreading that dependency out among more than one partner; and c) a way to hedge bets against internally generated, pathological fear of abandonment by lining up a replacement. But there’s another built-in benefit to cheating for someone who presents a fraudulent self. Affair partners who know the abuser is married or committed are conveniently pre-screened to “embrace” part of the abuser’s hidden “true self”– the disloyal, lying, empathy-impaired, cheating, mindfucking, pathologically selfish self.

The relief of finally being able to let their freak flags fly after years and years of doing a kind of pick-me dance and pretending to be normal, moral, upstanding, honest, decent, caring, etc., is probably intoxicating. It’s as if abusers deludedly begin to think of themselves as members of a repressed class– like being gay in a violently homophobic culture or trying to pass for white in a racist one. They think they’ve at last found this person (affair partner or series of hookers, whatever) who accept them and they act as if what they’re doing is standing up for civil rights– coming “out of the closet” or declaring that “black is beautiful.” This tends to make abusers feel even more rage and resentment against partners who, for the purposes of this demented narrative, are cast as “bigoted oppressors.”

Of course the abuser’s traits that are being embraced and accepted by cheating partners (or other flying monkeys) are nothing like sexual identity or race but are essentially criminal in nature. I guess in the end that what abusers resent in partners is that partners wouldn’t accept that the abuser is, in fact, an abuser.

Anyway, just a summary of some of the better theories I’ve read on the subject of mirroring with a few of my own little suppositions thrown in.