The following is respectfully quoted from “Surviving a Stalker” by Linden Gross:
Stalking is like a long rape. The stalker’s objective is to force you to surrender. Victims respond not with a single reaction, but with a progression of emotions akin to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of loss: denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, and then acceptance. But because you participate, however unwillingly, in the crime, you also experience depression, anxiety and fear.
Put yourself in the place of a stalking victim. Whether you’ve just split up with a mater who refuses to let you go, or attracted to the unwanted of a co-worker or stranger, what would your first reaction be? “This can’t be happening,” you’d say to yourself. “Things like this happen to other people. Not to me.” Then you’d assume that you must be imagining the whole affair. “I’m just overreacting. I’m paranoid.”
By doubting your own reality, you’ve begun to doubt yourself. In one quick step, you’ve put yourself at a disadvantage.
When you finally realize or accept the fact that you are being victimized, you try to bargain with your stalker. If you can just appease him by giving in to some of his wishes, then maybe he’ll leave you alone, you figure. “Okay, fine,” you tell him. “I’ll meet you for coffee.” But the demands escalate. And now that you’ve established a precedent, the stalker expects you to respond in similar fashion.
Anxiety sets in. Never knowing when or where he’s going to turn up or what he’s going to do next, you can think of little else. You don’t feel safe at home, at work, or anywhere else. The more frightened you become, the more debilitating your anxiety. In trying to cope with the situation and manage your emotions, you basically start to short-circuit. “You’re using so much mental energy that you begin to eat up your supply of neural transmitters,” explains Dan Coler, a Richmond, Virginia, psychotherapist. “At which point the synapses of your brain start shutting down and large parts of your brain just stop functioning. Suddenly you can’t concentrate. You feel like you’re an ant struggling to carry a matchstick. Little things that never bothered you before are major catastrophes. ”
Exhausted, you have no resources left.
That’s when the depression hits, so profound that you feel like you’re in a deep dark hole that you can never climb out of. Your self-esteem begins to disintegrate. You can’t function normally. Recurrent nightmares, sleep and eating disorders, and a growing sense of apprehension about everything afflict you.
You begin to wonder why this has happened to you, what you did to encourage it. Should you have said yes to him? Should you have said no more firmly? If you had just walked the other way, taken another job, or married someone more suitable, none of this would have happened, you reason. Then, as if to cement those notions of culpability, the stalker goes after someone close to you. Maybe the person you’re dating. Or your mother. “You can’t control what he does,” says the therapist you’ve started to see. It doesn’t help.
With time you begin to realize you’re not to blame. As with the rapist, the stalker’s act is what counts. You just happened to be there. The more fully you acknowledge how little the situation actually has to do with you, the harder it is to countenance the impact the stalker has had on your life. You get angry–so angry that you’re ready to do almost anything to get him out of your life.
Finally, you accept what your life has become. And while you mourn the innocence, trust, and insouciance that you’ve lost, you can finally start to deal with your situation objectively. Which means that you can finally limit your ongoing role in the obsessive interaction.
If you’re a stalking victim, you certainly can’t be blamed for the harassment to which you’re subjected. But you may have inadvertently contributed to the problem. Most stalking cases–those that don’t involve public figures–aren’t lightening strikes or shark attacks. “There is something about who the stalker selects and where he finds his encouragement early on,” says Gavin de Becker. “Stalkers, like all predatory criminals, circle around the victim and test her a little bit. With a jab here and look there, they try to figure out whether their target is going to hurt them, or whether their target is going to play into their scenario.”
Once a stalker has selected someone he suspects won’t assert herself, he’ll most often manipulate his victim through fear. But guilt also serves as a valuable weapon for establishing a power base.
In the fall of 1988, entering freshmen Theresa Esquibel met Ted Miller, a resident in her college dorm. The two clicked well and soon started sharing the intimate details of their lives. He talked of the problems he’d had with his parents and of an early attempt at suicide. And he helped boost Theresa’s self-esteem, which a serious car accident and long recovery had shattered.
Midway through the fall quarter, Theresa began to realize that her new confidant might want to be better than her friend. A discussion just before the holidays relieved her concerns about his interest. “I love you as a sister, nothing more,” he told her. “But that means a lot to me because I’m an only child.” Later that night, after they’d spent hours talking, he began to hold her. Although the contact wasn’t sexual, the physical closeness made her uncomfortable. But she said nothing, hoping she was wrong. The Bible that Ted gave her for Christmas however, clearly betrayed his true feelings. On the inside cover, in tiny print, he’d carefully written the word I love you over and over again, line after line, covering a page and half. “That’s so you’ll always think of me,” he told her.
Theresa returned from the holiday break feeling stronger and more ready to deal with the mental and emotional rigors fitting into college life. Of course, investing more energy into her classes and reaching out to new people meant that she had less time for Ted. He took it personally. “You never come by my place. I always have to come find you,” he would say. Or, “I left two messages on your machine, and you’ve been back from class for five minutes.”
He began to monitor her arrival in the dorm, and show up at her door immediately upon her return. When she told him that she needed some time alone, he accused her of not being a true friend. T hostility increased when she began to date someone steadily. Theresa tried to maintain their friendship, but that was getting harder and harder. “It was like I was his wife and not treating him fairly.”
Unable to contain his jealousy, Ted would pepper Theresa with questions about her relationships with other men. Then he’d sit on the dorm landing and chronical her comings and goings. One night as she and Joe, her boyfriend, left for a dinner date, he heaved a book against the wall just as the elevator doors shut. When Theresa later questioned the violence of his reaction, he told her that he wanted to make a point to them before they went out, in a way that would give them no time to react to him.
Life had begun to close in on Ted. Upset about his father’s plans to remarry, devastated by the news that a close high school friend was fatally ill, he couldn’t bear the notion of losing his main source of emotional support. In an effort to hold onto Theresa, he became controlling and domineering. “Don’t you ever reveal anything I tell you,” he said to the increasingly intimidated young woman. “I’ll be able to tell you have just by looking at your face.”
As the weeks passed, Ted’s anger grew. He accused Theresa of betrayal, and tried to intimidate her with allusions to the kinds of violence of which he was capable. “I have so much anger, I could kill anyone who wrongs me, and I would if I ever lost control,” he told her at one point. Another time, he threatened to kill Joe.
One night he called her room. “Good-bye,” he said into the phone in a quivering voice. Afraid of the message’s implications, Theresa raced to his room. When he finally agreed to let her in, she found him sitting at his desk, his eyes expressionless, his lips pressed tightly together. Lined up before him were six bottles of prescription medications.
Theresa spent the night trying to dissuade him from killing himself. He responded by trying to get close physically. “You are responsible for my life, I have no one else to count on,” he told her while caressing her face. “Don’t leave me. You are the only one who can help me.”
As the weeks went by, Ted continued to monitor Theresa’s activities and try to control her actions, especially with regard to Joe. “Did you fuck him?” he asked upon the couple’s return from an impromptu trip to San Francisco. “I’ll find out anyway,” he said when she refused to answer. “Word will get out. I’ll know.”
By the time Ted dropped out of school later that year, he’d succeeded in making Theresa feel responsible for his decline. Four years later, she’s finally coming to terms with the idea that he was emotionally and mentally unstable. But his face still haunts her dreams.
Society encourages women to be soft and loving, and to use their sexuality–in the guise of smiles, flattering clothes, and gentility–to deal with the world in general and men in particular. To a potential stalker, those traits can be interpreted as receptiveness and malleability–usually, all the encouragement he needs.
