What Did You Replace a Cheater With?

For the DV survivors my service worked with, cheating was almost always the “last straw”– either that or a severe or near fatal assault that led to arrest and prosecution.

At the time, state sponsored services, run of the mill shrinks and DAs viewed battering survivors who escaped after being cheated on as yet more proof of the then-reigning theory that battered women are drawn to abusers or draw them to themselves, blah blah. Consequently most survivors learned to clam up about that aspect of abuse in order to avoid more shame/blame or having their cases dropped.

Meanwhile, the organization I worked for had a much different view of this as I’ve mentioned before: that, instead of being some masochistic impulse, the timing was all about self-preservation and survival of children. It seemed to be just basic common sense that, when victims perceived their main or only value to abusers was as sexual appliances, being sexually replaced by abusers signaled that the gloves were probably going to come all the way off because abusers had fewer remaining incentives to allow victims to live.

What ignorant bystanders or incompetent helping professionals would see is that victims are only motivated to leave by “jealousy/territoriality” not all the abuse that came before. What we understood is that the sudden steep increase in the danger of staying often suddenly “liberated” victims from Stockholm syndrome– meaning that, the moment the option of leaving became the safer choice, victims would quite suddenly become flooded with all the backlog of clarity, rage and rebellion that had long been suppressed during times when it was much safer to suppress those emotions and impulses and stay put.

In other words, cheating only triggers an abatement of the pacifying anesthetic effects of captor bonding and suddenly the victim becomes pissed off and rebellious towards all the abuse, not just the cheating. And the reason this happens is because the brilliant, ancient, uncanny lizard brain risk assessment faculty decides that the victim needs to be triggered into “fight/flight” rather than “freeze/fawn” as the best strategy for survival.

Because this happens virtually autonomically, even victims can be confused by their own motives but there’s enough study data at this point to understand that victim behavior– like every other living creature on earth– is geared towards survival, not Freudian blah blah psychobabble masochistic self-destruction.

I know you’ve heard this spiel before but I thought I’d repeat it for any newbies who are lurking around. The general rule of DV and coercive control survivors is that they only leave when the danger of staying finally exceeds the very considerable statistical danger of leaving.