Blog Post 13

The Cheetah Principle

When I finally realized how dangerously miserable I was in my second (!) marriage, I called a friend of mine and just told him the truth.  The truth about how I was being treated, about how trapped I felt, and how close to homicidal I feared I was becoming.

My friend didn’t mince words with me.  He insisted that there were a few things that I must do, one of them being to go talk to my priest.

Being at the end of my rope, and desperate, I followed my friend’s advice and made an appointment with the rector of the Episcopal church that I attended.  I didn’t expect much to come of this meeting, but it was worth a shot.  I figured that he would give me bland advice to pray for guidance and healing, or something along those lines.  Maybe he’d even tell me I needed to forgive.

I went to the meeting and was surprised at what the priest had to say.  His knowledge of marriage and of people gave me insight to my situation and validation to how I was feeling about my situation.

After I truthfully told him of my situation in my marriage, he simply said, “Your marriage is over.  There is no fixing this.”

I felt so relieved.  I didn’t have to keep trying.  I’d been the only one trying and I was exhausted.  When he told me it was a lost cause, it was as if a weight had been lifted off of me.  I could stop trying to fix the unfixable.

And then he explained the Cheetah Principal, saying that it was a term that his brother had coined, and that it applied to my situation.

He told me that he didn’t want me to feel bad, or like there was something wrong with me, but my husband had chosen me for a reason.  When a cheetah hunts, it chooses an animal in the herd that it thinks it can catch.  An animal that has some kind of weakness that it can exploit.  My husband had seen some sort of weakness in me that he could exploit, and then he had used it against me.  He had picked me deliberately, just as a cheetah chooses its prey.

Far from being hurt by this explanation, it made perfect sense to me.  My husband had figured out what I wanted and offered it to me.  He’d seen my lack of confidence in myself, instilled in me by my childhood that consistently told me that I wasn’t capable of taking care of myself, that I needed a man to do it.  I was easy prey for someone like him.

This realization was enlightening and empowering to me.  As soon as I realized that the beliefs that I held about myself were false, I could start the process to become self-sufficient.  I went back to college to finally get a degree so that I could be employable.  I did other things to feel better about myself.  I stopped caring what he thought about me.  I wasn’t going to need him for much longer.  I came up with an exit strategy.

My mother had been victimized by my father in the same way, I am sure.  He picked her because he knew she wouldn’t seek out a second (!) divorce.  He picked her because she had a dependent personality that allowed him to dominate her and to behave any way he wanted.  He picked her because he knew that she’d let him get away with his abusive bullshit.

I think abusive men pick nice women, because we think that if we’re just nice enough, he’ll be good to us.  This is how I was taught.  My father always told me that I didn’t love him enough.  I thought perhaps if I could give him the love that he needed, I could fix him.  My mother was like this; I became like this in my marriage.  It doesn’t work.

My mother never managed to leave my father, or to become self-sufficient.  I feel sorry for her.  I don’t think she got the life that she wanted.  I don’t think she had the courage to go against societal norms and just the inertia of her life to seek out her own self-actualization.

I know it’s hard because I did it.  I finally didn’t care what anyone thought of me.  (One of my worst problems, I swear, and another legacy of my childhood:  caring too much what people think of me.)  I did whatever I needed to better myself and to be true to myself.  I really rocked the boat.  That’s an understatement, for sure.  For the first time in a long time, I had real hope.

And over time, I became the animal that the cheetah isn’t even interested in.