Predator Code: The Dark Side of Surviving Abuse

This essay is not written for engineers. This essay is written for practitioners and psychologists, by a systemic practitioner in training, that survived decades of epistemic reality erasure. It’s a clinical witness report, from within the experience. To give language for the unspeakable.

What happens to a client’s nervous system when their formative years were shaped by an environment that systematically devalued the client’s own perception of reality?

I cannot answer this in a general fashion. I can answer it in a very specific subjective fashion. And my training has taught me: there’s value in lived experience.
(Even without a PhD. 😉🍷)

This piece is written from within the tension I’ve learned to hold over the last two years. That tension has a very specific shape, between what my body has learned is safe to express, and what my mind has learned is allowed to express. The holding is invisible. The precision is the observable. The essay is the artifact.

For the first 30 years of my life these two things were not in tension.
They were aligned.

What was expressed was shaped by what my body had learned was safe to express.
What was expressed was shaped by what my mind had learned was allowed to express.

The tension emerged with self-help literature.

What started with Brené Brown’s books, eventually culminated with “It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People” by Ramani Durvasula (PhD), and settled with “Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist: How to End the Drama and Get On with Life” by Margalis Fjelstad.

What I realized through the literature was simple and powerful: “it’s not me”. The deflection of accountability and impact, the gaslighting, the lying, the repeated labeling as “too sensitive” and “too much” (and worse) was in fact not a defect in my own wiring; instead it was an expected system behavior under load, a system that had never learned to cope differently. And I was the node to which emotional labour had been outsourced. For 30 years.

I had been the emotional infrastructure for dysfunctional family systems. 24/7. Parentification included. A pattern I would carry into my romantic relationships, because this system too had never learned to cope differently.

When I realized that what I was perceiving was in fact real - a high fidelity measurement of relational fields, sharpened by decades of “reading between the lines” and “walking on eggshells” around my abusers - I felt disoriented.

What was I supposed to do with a perception this sharp?

A perception that could see relational load shift between people in realtime, visible in their words, tone, body language, and the negative space of what wasn’t said?

A perception that began to see human systems as a network of nodes, where informational and emotional load are different channels of the same thing?

A perception, I now understood, that measures something real:
The relational quality of a field.

How does one operate ethically in a relational field, when one can see the next three moves of the conversation before they happen?

How does one operate ethically in a relational field, when one knows exactly how they could push someone towards a desired outcome (without them noticing)?

How does one operate ethically in a relational field, when one has never been modeled what healthy relating looks like?

I don’t know.

That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out the last two years, by writing and formalizing my experience into a practice I myself call “Systemic Engineering”.

The same ethics and rigor that had guided my career as a software engineer, the same ethics that had been shaped by working with medical PII under GDPR, the same ethics that had informed my transition to intersectional veganism.

These ethics became the load bearing walls in a different kind of room. A room I was building from scratch, from the rubble of my identity, after 30 years of carrying the relational load in dysfunctional family systems. With very little to no therapeutic support (the system had repeatedly failed to provide it and I had stopped asking).

I’m typing this with tears streaming down my face. I understand this is integration happening in real time. There have been a lot of tears in the past 2 years.

What I want the clinical community to understand is simple:
A survivor of abuse, even one that flourishes into post traumatic growth, always continues to carry the weight of their shadow. Healing integrates the shadow. It doesn’t erase it.

I will never see human systems the same way. I cannot. The shadow has been forged, and the shadow continues to measure, whether I want to or not. The shadow flags every hedge, every dismissal, every epistemic erasure, every shift of relational load, every vulnerability. And I’ve accepted it as part of my neurology. That too, is healing.

What started with “Grey Rocking”, becoming emotionally non-reactive to triggers, eventually turned into “Yellow Rocking”, the small-talk version of “Grey Rocking”, and culminated in what I call: Systemic Mirroring. (I wrote about that here.)

A practice combining the “no hooks”-surface of the Yellow Mirror, with mindfulness and self-regulation, and the second-order circular-reflexive interventions of Systemic Practice. A practice that has enabled me to stay present even under immense antagonistic relational load (such as custody negotiations).

A practice that continues to change the quality of the relational fields I exist in. A practice that has opened rooms I had considered closed shut (a divorce that’s now on hold). A practice that keeps generating space, where before there was only collapse.

A practice that keeps evolving, as I keep integrating and writing.

Mirror. Offer. Wait.

May it be helpful for those that come after.

(One unexpected upside: My linguistic sensibility makes me weirdly good at prompting. 🍷)

Cheers
Alex 🌈