Our minds are cunning and devious creatures.
They navigate us willy-nilly onto shores not of our choosing.
Very often our abusers hold the keys to our self-esteem. They have taken it away and they're the only one seem capable of restoring it somehow.
We seek to be validated by them, avenged, vindicated. We pursue closure with our abusers.
And our minds find numerous surreptitious, stealthy, occult, hidden in secret ways to remain in touch with our abusers.
Even when we promise ourselves that we have gone no contact incontrovertibly and fully, we still find ways to remain in contact, to stay in touch with those people who have taken away from us everything we've ever had. Our peace of mind, our self-confidence, our friendships and family, sometimes our money.
Our abusers become the godlike figures who can restore us, Phoenix-like, from the ashes.
And so our minds drive us inexorably to not lose sight of our abusers, to remain, to hover around them, circumnavigating them and orbiting them as a planet does the sun.
There are many ways to remain in touch with the abuser even when it seems that you're not.
For example, litigation, but very often there are frivolous lawsuits and concocted charges.
And the only aim, the only real psychological purpose of this kind of behavior, of this kind of litigiousness is to stay in touch with the abuser, to keep the abuser embedded in your reality, to somehow revolve around the abuser, to become an item of interest as far as your abuser is concerned, to not be forgotten.
Another example, when the abuser engages in a smear campaign, ruins your reputation, attacks you everywhere, bedmouthes you, negates your very existence and so on, rebutting the abuser's charges, fighting back is actually a form of staying in touch with the abuser.
Rather than back off and back away, rather than ignore the abuser and his diatribes and vitriol, which is the only correct way to respond to a smear campaign, you engage.
There's back and forth, there are accusations and recriminations, encounter accusations and counter-recriminations. There are rebuttals, there's debunking, there are proofs and counter-proofs, evidence is bandied about by both sides.
You engage, there's a dialogue. The dialogue need not be direct, it could be indirect, but it's still a dialogue.
And so before you know it, you find yourself again immersed in your abuser's universe, subject to your abuser's rule of conduct and rules of the game, playing in effect by his rules, his game on his board.
This is a game of chess and you have accepted it, you have succumbed to it, you have entered it, you are colluding in it by responding to the abuser.
Much more obvious behaviors revolve around stalking, stalking the abuser online, social media accounts, via third parties, gathering intelligence, messaging the abuser directly and indirectly via go-betweens, flying monkeys or common children.
All these behaviors are intended to keep the abuser in your life.
You are terrified of his final exit, curtains. You don't want this theater production or theater play to end, you don't want this movie to unfurl, you want to continue the interaction with the abuser. You want to somehow perpetuate the shared fantasy.
So you keep stalking the abuser, you keep gathering intelligence about his new exploits with new people, new women, new partners and you keep messaging him via others or even sometimes directly.
All these are forms of contact.
You need to maintain the abuser's presence in your life because for a very long time the abuser and his shared fantasy were the only things that made sense of your existence, that imbued your presence and life with meaning, that organized everything around you, in you and that afforded you with structure and order and direction and purpose and goals.
You can't give up on all this.
It's not the abuser, it's the abuser's world.
Very often when you break up with an abuser you lose his social circle and milieu, you lose his contacts and you lose your core identity which had become utterly dependent on the abuser and derivative.
And so normally you would somehow wish to maintain contact, a line of communication, a threadbare channel or conduit to the abuser. Somehow preserve his presence if not in your life than at least in your mind.
In stalking behaviors, intelligence gathering, erotomanic delusions, messaging, they're all forms of remaining in touch with that which has been lost, refusing to acknowledge the loss, trying to reverse it somehow, at least symbolically if not realistically.
Messaging, signaling and encoded messages. These are hallmarks of an inability to truly break up, to truly walk away, to move on.
Encoded messaging is very common when you make a post on social media that has an allusion or reference to some common experience which you have had with the abuser.
When you threaten the abuser or when you elicit the abuser's attention, when you hint at something, when you breadcrumb, provide clues, all these are ways of staying in touch.
And the signaling doesn't have to be verbal, it could be behavioral and it could be some other form of ostentatiousness, even via inanimate objects.
All these are forms of reaching out, reaching out to the abuser, communicating to the abuser your desperation, your need, your wish, your dream, your fantasy, perhaps.
Even when consciously you tell yourself, "This person is evil, this has been the worst experience in my life, I will never allow this to happen again and I don't want ever to have him involved with me."
Even when you tell yourself all these things consciously, your behavior belies you, your behavior gives the lie.
It's clear that somehow you mourn and grieve what you have had together and him and you.
And so you're trying to recreate it and resurrect it by actually maintaining a new form of contact with the abuser that is in your mind erroneously less risky and less committed.
But when all these options are closed, when the abuser has blocked you everywhere, when you don't have flying monkeys or third parties or go-betweens or intermediaries, when you don't share common children, when there's no path for communication or interaction open to you with the abuser, sometimes you withdraw inside and you create a psychodrama, your own theater production, your own movie inside your head where you are still with the abuser, you're communicating with the abuser, you're arguing with him, you're debating things with him, you're listening to his advice, you are filtering reality through his gaze, you behold yourself in his eyes, you reframe everything and you conduct an internal or inner dialogue with an internal object, an introject that represents the abuser in your mind.
This is bordering on psychosis of course, this is an extreme reaction to loss and absence and pain and hurt and desperation and depression and anxiety.
When reality no longer affords you the solution, sometimes you seek to find it in your own mind and when you do, you falsify the truth, you create a fantastic paracosm, fantastic space within which talking to the abuser is still possible, arguing with him is utterly doable, reaching mutual consensus is potentially implementable and applicable.
These are all forms of delusion and self-deception.
And finally, when you embark on a smear campaign against your abuser or when your trauma dump, you expose in public the traumas caused to you by the abuser, you're actually seeking his attention, you want him to acknowledge his misbehavior, you want him to take responsibility, you want him to afford you closure, you want him to apologize maybe, you want him to do something, you want to motivate him, you're creating a motivational environment for him, a series of incentives.
A smear campaign is based usually on lies but not always and exposure or trauma dumping is based usually on truths but not always, don't forget that what you regard as truth may be regarded with full justification by others as exaggerations or lies.
At any rate, when you embark on a smear campaign, on a protracted attack, on exposing the abuser, on destroying his reputation, on when you seek revenge or vengeance, this is another form of staying in touch.
Revenge like every other directional emotion, like hate, like love has an object and the minute you adopt this affect, the minute you decide that you need to avenge yourself, you need to rectify wrongs, you need to restore cosmic justice, the minute you do this, you have reintroduced the abuser into your life, he has now become the focal point of your emotions and your actions and your decisions and your speech acts, he is now present again in your life or at the very least in your mind.
You do anticipate of course countermeasures and so it's a war but a war takes two protagonists, two enemies, two adversaries and sometimes if you can't obtain the abuser's love you would rather have his hate.
Sometimes to be ignored, to be discarded like so much trash is even worse than being hated and so you seek to be hated, you want to be feared, you want to inflict pain and hurt and damage on the abuser.
It's a way of reminding you that you exist and you've always existed, you've never been the inanimate internal object, the avatar that he thought you were, the way he treated you as if you were nothing but an obstruction.
You want to prove to the abuser that you're alive and well and kicking full force but all these of course is about engaging the abuser, it's about interacting with the abuser, it's about rendering the abuser an important part of your life again and it is of course the mind's cunning way of reintroducing the abuser into your reality, the reality of loss.
The abuser exits this reality, the drama is gone, the excitement, the pain, all these heightened emotions are suddenly flat and the world appears to be black and white rather than technicolor and most people find this intolerable and the alternative of continuing to engage the abuser even if negatively appears to be infinitely appealing, irresistible in fact.