We Grew Apart

In his convulsive post-d-day confessions, FW admitted he was being coached on what to say to me during the big DARVO/gaslighting stage by the AP. It seems the AP did the usual bait and switch about six months into the affair, stopped pretending to be in it for a casual no strings fling and began throwing histrionic confrontations pressuring FW to divorce and punishing him if he didn’t follow through. He would respond with the usual excuses and she would counter with coaching– “Just tell her you’ve grown apart!” etc. She also apparently originated some of the bizarre accusations and aspersions on my character that FW started flinging around.
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It solved the mystery of why FW– who’d never been a self-help reader and never typically used soap opera-y language like this– kept spouting all these cheesy cliches that didn’t fit the circumstances and sounded suspiciously like they’d been formed by committee. It explained why he seemed utterly unprepared to do the things that would obviously follow these statements like separate and divorce and seemed totally shocked that I drew that inference. It also solved the mystery of why many of accusations and aspersions were so cartoonish and inaccurate that a lot of them left me scratching my head and worried for his sanity even more than being hurt. Like the idea that I would accidentally-on-purpose try to get pregnant (me, who– after three kids– begged him to get snipped for years???) to further “trap” him in the marriage. That had also come from the AP when she was haranguing him to stop having sex with me– on the grounds I would try to get pregnant. And, no surprise, it’s exactly what she attempted to do herself when all other tactics failed to expedite divorce.

I wasn’t that mystified by some of the other things FW spewed at me during the gaslighting stage because I knew these were things that came verbatim from his mother who was his original triangulating “abuse coach.” The interesting thing is that he’d always complained about his mother’s emotionally incestuous history of attacking and competing with everyone he’d ever dated. He’d actually cut contact with his mother about a year before the affair because that behavior had completely spun out of control and turned into a smear campaign that was isolating all of us from extended family and old friends. But it seemed that, for all his objections and rejections of his mother’s attacks on me, he’d stored up all those jibes and psychobabble condemnations and then began barfing them on me during the affair. And when I would say, “Wow, you sound just like your mother” he would look suddenly confused as if he truly believed these were his original thoughts. He even forgot he’d repeated to me the things his mother had said.

I know it sounds like I’m wandering into the trap of blaming women for male abuse but I actually see it as much scarier than that. FW basically turned into Norman Bates during his affair. Hitchcock fans will remember that Bates actually killed his own mother for taking a lover (thwarted dependency) and then sort of “framed” his mother for his own aggression by expressing it in mommy-drag. Hitchcock’s counter-Freudian twist was that it was Bates who– while at first appearing to be in thrall to his dead mommy’s legacy of hate and under its spell– was driving all of it. By the same token, the second FW broke contact with his mother and lost the sacred triangle and mommy-beard for his own aggression, he ran out to find an exact replica of his mommy to feed him ammo, taglines and cliched rationales.

I’d never previously realized that FW’s mother and other women who compulsively triangulate like this might actually be performing what they believe is an expected service or pickme dance for relevance in men’s lives– by, say, using their “insider knowledge” of what is particularly hurtful and crushing towards women (which a self absorbed narcissist dude might not have the insight to formulate on his own) in order to help men more effectively abuse women. If the proxy abuse is believed to be only competitive, it misses how people trained from birth to expect men to be abusive to women might knee-jerkedly try to divert male aggression to other scapegoats.

CL calling these types “Vichy women” really nails it because, after all, the Nazis were really in full control of the situation. It’s the attack dog’s owner who’s held liable for dog maulings. It’s the farmer who overfed the prize winning 800lb pig who gets sued when the massive thing plows through hurricane fences and kills the neighbor’s kid or livestock.

Not that the “pigs” and collaborators are innocent by any means. Something I noticed about my ex-MIL and heard about the AP that might be relevant to male chumps who’ve dealt with nastiness from she-FWs is how exMIL and the AP would brutally mock and disparage men who weren’t abusers or didn’t cross ethical lines. Some people kind of grow to love their monsters and disparage non-monsters. It could explain why many female FWs end up rejecting loyal good providers in favor of creepy knuckle-dragging thugs.