[real] (5/21/2024) Oonagh’s Response

Well, I heard back from Oonagh last night in response to the letter I sent to her and John about Clive’s abusive behavior toward me. I was hoping they just wouldn’t respond and I could peacefully move on with my life. But, Oonagh sent a response cc’ing John. Unsurprisingly, she was defensive, clearly in denial, and did the whole DARVO (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender) routine. She clearly was trying to find reasons to dismiss the things I said, and so she accused me of disclosing Clive’s private information, slut-shaming Clive, and being insufficiently understanding of neurodivergence. I just ignored the silly ad hominem nonsense, said I understood that neither of them had been through my experiences and naturally it would be hard to be objective in hearing my story of how Clive treated me, but I still hoped that speaking the truth of what happened could ultimately help, even if it might take them a while to process it. And I wished them well.

From growing up Mormon, I am very familiar with all the mental gymnastics people go through to cling on to untrue beliefs that seem to give stability to their lives. It’s the kind of thinking that keeps people in cults and toxic relationships, or lends itself to enabling and shielding abusers. It’s always sad to see it in action, but at least it isn’t even slightly mystifying to me at this point in my life in terms of how it operates.

So Oonagh is definitely an enabler, which is good information for me to know so definitively. I know that abuse thrives in silence, and abusers depend on their victims’ silence to enable them to continue being abusers. From Oonagh’s perspective, me speaking to her and John about Clive’s intimacy issues was a worse crime than Clive ignoring my consent and duping me into unwanted sex. She didn’t address the consent or emotional abuse issues at all, but said Clive wanted his friends to be happy, and if his attempt to make them happy didn’t work out, he was hurt. So, essentially, if Clive hurts someone, both Oonagh and Clive consider Clive to be the injured party and in their eyes, he is the person deserving of pity, instead of the person that he hurt. That was also his attitude - he viewed my grief as an injury to himself, which I think is pretty solidly narcissistic.

She kind of implied that Clive is on the autism spectrum and this is the cause of his communication difficulties, but that the difficulties were largely my fault - apparently I was supposed to magically know that he was autistic and magically be enough of an autism expert to understand him, and him being autistic also excuses lying to me to dupe me into sex and breaking up with me by telling me he’d never cared about me and was just using me the whole time. As if I hadn’t bent over backwards trying to understand him, and as if my efforts towards understanding hadn’t been largely one-sided.

It’s a pretty dizzying level of twisted illogic. Who knows if he is really autistic? That might explain some things, but so far as I understood, he has never had a diagnosis, or therapy, or professional help or treatment of any kind for his issues, despite the clear and undeniable fact that he has a long history of hurting women because of them. Definitely he is some type of neurodivergent, but behaviorally it looks more like pathological narcissism or even mild high-functioning nonviolent psycopathy.

And, if he really were autistic, why not just tell people that he is on the autism spectrum? Isn’t it a bit weird to be secretive about it, and yet expect people to just know, and to adapt to him, and accommodate him, and suggest that he doesn’t need to take responsibility for whether his behavior hurts others?

Yep. These people are a mess. And I am well shot of them.