He Pushed Me Toward a Cliff as a Joke. Why Can't I Get Over It? (Reader Asks)

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Reader question: My Boyfriend Joked About Pushing Me Off a Cliff. Why Am I Still Terrified?

"I went hiking with my boyfriend about a month ago and he knew I have a fear of heights, but he encouraged me to step closer to a ledge in order to see a view that I couldn't miss, according to him. I did so reluctantly and then he jokingly pushed me towards the chasm. I don't think I was in a lot of danger because he was also close enough to be able to pull me back if I actually fell but I got SO scared that I had a full-blown panic attack with ugly crying and I can't get over it since then. My boyfriend initially apologized and said that it was just a joke, and lately he keeps telling me that I'll never get over my fear of heights if I'm not willing to experiment a little and that he was just trying to help. I have to say that he's otherwise a good enough boyfriend that never gave me reasons to fear him, but I'm now unable to move past this, increasingly triggered by his attempts to repair this and about the fact that he changed his explanation about why he did it. Can you please explain to me if I'm overreacting or if this is just PTSD / hypervigilance related to some past trauma?”

My answer: The Problem Isn’t Your Fear of Heights, It’s What He Did With It.

I don’t think you’re overreacting, and I also wouldn’t rush to diagnose your reaction as PTSD or hypervigilance from some past trauma. (Although please note that I’m not a therapist, so it’s not within my area of expertise to diagnose you either way.)

You were standing next to a chasm while knowing you were afraid of heights, you reluctantly moved closer because your boyfriend encouraged you to, and then he deliberately pushed you toward the edge. Whatever the exact physical risk was, he created a moment in which your brain had very good reason to believe you were in danger. He knowingly made you experience something very unpleasant.

The fact that he was close enough to potentially pull you back doesn’t make the experience harmless. If anything, that’s part of what makes this so disturbing: he knew exactly how frightening the situation was and chose to make it more frightening for you.

And I’d really like you to stop letting him turn this into a story about your supposed failure to overcome your fear. You weren’t doing exposure therapy. You weren’t participating in some mutually agreed experiment designed to help you become more comfortable with heights. You were hiking with your boyfriend, told him you were afraid of heights, and he decided that the appropriate response was to move you closer to a potentially dangerous drop and pretend to push you over it. Then, when you reacted exactly as a person who believes she’s about to fall off a cliff might react, he initially called it a joke and later decided it was actually an intervention for your fear. Those are two completely different explanations, and neither one makes his behavior better.

In fact, that change in explanation is one of the things I’d pay attention to most. A genuine apology sounds something like: ‘I scared you terribly. I meant it as a joke but I realize now that I shouldn’t have done that. I understand why you don’t trust me around heights now, and I’m sorry.’ It doesn’t require a theory about why you needed to be scared. It certainly doesn’t require him to explain to you that you’re still traumatized because you’re insufficiently adventurous. Once the person who frightened you starts telling you that your continued distress is actually evidence that you need more of the thing that frightened you, we’re no longer talking about repair. We’re talking about him trying to regain control of the story.

There is also a wider phenomenon I think is worth talking about here, because I don’t think women are always encouraged to recognize how different certain situations can feel once you’re outside the ordinary safety net of everyday life.

I’ve seen this described informally as ‘alpine divorce’: the moment on a hike, climbing trip, camping excursion or other remote setting when you suddenly discover that the man you’re with has a very different relationship with physical risk, and that his greater confidence, strength or knowledge of the environment gives him enormous power over you. You’re no longer standing on a street where you can simply walk away, call a taxi, get on public transportation or find another person.

They like being the person who knows which trail to take, who isn’t afraid of the drop, who can climb higher, carry more, navigate the terrain or remain calm when somebody else is frightened. There’s nothing inherently sinister about competence outdoors, obviously. The problem begins when a man uses that advantage to make a woman feel how much more vulnerable she is compared to him. The environment itself becomes part of the power dynamic. He knows she’s more dependent on him than she normally would be, and instead of using that knowledge to make her feel safer, he uses it to scare her.

That’s essentially what happened here. You told him that heig