Alpine Divorce: When Narcissistic Abuse Turns Physically Dangerous

Have you heard of an Alpine Divorce? 

During a listener’s two-year marriage to a psychopath, her husband took her hiking and then left her clinging to a rock in gale-force winds while he filmed her terror and laughed. This is what’s commonly called an "Alpine Divorce." 

It is also an example of malignant sadism.

In this episode, Dr. Kerry unpacks one of the most chilling tactics in a dangerous personality's playbook. 

Learn how some abusers engineer life-threatening situations to trap their victims in forced dependency. Also, learn how environmental gaslighting (the weaponized use of weather, terrain, and wilderness) gives these dangerous individuals plausible deniability.

If you or someone you know has experienced this: 

▸ Be sure to preserve the photos and videos as digital evidence of criminal behavior 

▸ Consider seeking out a CPTSD-specialized clinician 

▸ And the only safe path is total severance  

Submit Your Question 

If you'd like Dr. Kerry to answer your question on air, email it to clients@kerrymcavoyphd.com or use this link. 

Resources

• ReclaimYou: Dr. Kerry's AI-powered coaching app
• The Complete Recovery Collection: Narcissistic abuse resources
• First Steps to Leaving: Online self-paced digital course
• Toxic-Free Relationship Club: Live coaching & community support

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Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D, a retired psychologist & author, is an expert on cultivating healthy relationships and deconstructing narcissism. 

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This podcast/video is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, counseling, or professional mental health advice. If you are in crisis, please call 911 or your local emergency number.

Transcript

What Is an Alpine Divorce?

Dr. Kerry 0:00

Have you heard of an alpine divorce? Most of us think that danger is a heated argument or a slam door. But what happens when your partner puts you in a dangerous situation like in the middle of a mountain blizzard or hanging off the edge of a cliff as a weapon to deal with their aggression and anger with you? Abusers will use uncontrollable factors like weather and terrain to mask their intent. They know it's dangerous. It's a setup for danger. He didn't save you. He trapped you so that he could watch you struggle. You're the one who survived despite him. Today, a listener writes in with a question about Alpine divorce, which her husband put her in deliberately in life-threatening wilderness situations, including the two I just mentioned, Blizzard and a Cliff's Edge, to induce acute terror. And then he filmed her distress, mocked her, and framed himself as her savior in order to establish total psychological and physical dominance. So let's break down what happens. And I don't want to capture this as encapsulating and understanding and unpacking all alpine divorces, but let's break down what might be happening in this alpine divorce situation. Unfortunately, there are people who suffer from sadism. They delight in our pain, or it actually gives them a form of arousal. It's exciting. Some of them gets turned on by it, in fact. And what happens in this is some of them like the hero script in which they create life and death situations and then go about solving it. When they do this, it kind of puts the victim in the position of force dependency. And unf the weird thing about this, and there's been a lot of research around this, it does create an intense connection with the person. In fact, they've done dating studies in which they had dates that occur under kind of pleasant situations and dates that occur under scary

Filming Terror as Dehumanization

Dr. Kerry 2:00

situations. You know, of course, these are arbitrary ones. These are not like really threatening ones, but they found that people who had dates during a scary situation tended to bond closer to each other than the ones that were in a pleasant situation. So some people use the hero's script not only for their own aggrandizement of being the hero and the savior, but they also use it as a way to increase dependency between them and the victim. Here's the other piece about this that was so strange that filming the victim is that is a key component to this story. By recording her terror to show other people, he was turning her suffering into a performance that he then had for his amusement. It turned it into a spectacle, which is a form of dehumanization. So, in other words, if you pull the lens way back, and I'm used to losing the camera analogy, but if you were to really like look at it from another level, this person, this man, didn't see his wife or partner as a real person. He didn't personally connect with the terror. He delighted in it and he saw her as almost like a prop. He was manufacturing the situations, putting her in it, and then recording it for his later entertainment. That's a great example of that. You're often not a real person to these people. You're simply an instrument, you're a tool, something that they keep around, literally like a prop that you might, one of those plastic dolls at a clothing store that you just shape in a right form so they can show off the clothing that you have. So that's what this person was experiencing. And often, here's this other thing is that there is such a thing that we again don't talk about a whole lot, is environmental gaslighting, where abusers will use uncontrollable factors like weather and terrain and maybe even foreign, unfamiliar hiking paths or ski routes as a way to mask their intent. They know it's dangerous, it's a setup for dangerousness. But if the victim

When Sadism Becomes Predatory

Dr. Kerry 4:00

complains, then the abuser just dismisses it as, oh, you don't know how to have fun, or this is a big adventure. Don't you like to have adventures? And if something goes wrong, then it's an accident and they didn't know. They can kind of claim ignorance to the situation or they can accuse the partner of being weak. I think about a recent one where the partner took his girlfriend, I think it was his girlfriend, up on a trail without adequate clothing in a bad situation. And then when she got into trouble because she gotten cold, he left her. He'd even leave her with uh the right, he could have like given her a blanket. I guess there was some kind of like a lining, like a solar light, some kind of a certain kind of, I'm see, I you can tell I don't hike or I don't mountain climb. But there was a certain instrument that he had, kind of like a comfort that he could have left her to help keep her warm and he didn't. And then she ended up passing away. I also think of the incident I heard about over on the Appalachian Trail, in which a teenager was going up on one of the mountains, and I think it was in Georgia with her dad, and it was really rainy and it was a usually not always a very safe terrain, but especially when it rained, and this girl, I think she was writing blogs and she said how scared she was, but her dad like reassured her is going to be okay. So often abusers will mask their intent, knowing this is harmful, in a way that's a form of environmental gaslighting. And then there are forms of abuse that's actually malignant sadism. This is not just somebody who has poor impulse control. This is not somebody who just accidentally harms you and then gets a kick out of it. This is somebody who, in a predatory way, plans, sets up the moment, and then executes it in order to find the visceral thrill of watching the other person be in total terror. So that's a very malicious form of sadism. So I want to kind of give you some perspective here. I want, first of all, to validate the nature of what you experienced. This wasn't just a marital strife situation or a

Steps to Protect Yourself and Preserve Evidence

Dr. Kerry 6:00

constant discord. This person was attempting to harm and torture you. So let's use the correct language here. This was sadism and endangerment. That's the first step in taking away the shame from yourself. Secondly, if you or somebody you know is finding themselves in this kind of situation, and if you still have access to the proof, like the photos or the videos, please store them on the cloud or with a trusted party, like an attorney, so that your partner can't delete that they took those photos. They're not just videos and photos, they're digital evidence of criminal behavior. And then I want you to go out and find specialized trauma therapy, standard talk therapy or couples counseling, which actually, by the way, is very dangerous in this situation. It is definitely not the mode of help, but you need a clinician who's trained in complex PTSD. In other words, it's often called C PTSD. You want somebody who's a narcissistic or psychopathic abuse expert who understands the biological impact of being hunted by somebody. And when you've experienced living with a personality type that finds joy in your near-death experiences, there's no middle ground with this person. You can't go back to being friends with this individual. Total severance is the only way to really ensure your safety and really work to reframe the savior complex that he tried to set up. He didn't save you, he trapped you so that he could watch you struggle. You're the one who survived despite him. I really relate to this. I didn't experience an alpine divorce in the sense of I was not taken up into a dangerous situation, but my partner did dangerous things that risked me. I was just sharing about one recently on an upcoming episode that's going to be, I think, aired in late June, early July, in which I was having an asthma attack. It could have been a life-threatening one, and mine didn't get me help, but instead engaged

My Own Experience With a Dangerous Partner

Dr. Kerry 8:00

in an altercation with other people. Literally chose to argue with other people while I'm having an asthma attack in the car. He pulled over and just sat there while I'm having an asthma attack. I hoped that I was gonna make it. I did. We finally did get to a pharmacy and I got the right kind of medication. And then I don't know if others of all of you know, but there was a strong likelihood that my ex was poisoning me. So he was actually saying how much he loved me and then slipping something very, very toxic into my food or drinks that was really, really harming me. Unfortunately, I can't prove that, but I had all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. So it's scary to have to really reframe that this is not a loving person. This is a dangerous person. You survived somebody who is extremely dangerous. They're not safe under any condition. So I really hope you've taken the step to protect yourself, protect your physical and psychological safety. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about the alpine divorce. I think it's something we need to bring more attention to. I think it's something that men tend to do more often to women. I don't have the research about this to say that, but I do think that this is something that we need to start to recognize that there is a level of evil. In fact, there's been some work by Dr. Ann Campbell and Dr. Michael Stone where they looked at instrumentalized aggression and malignant narcissists, and they found that there is a subtype of a malignant narcissist where they like to harm other people. They will use instrumentalized aggression, like premeditated situations in order to cause distress because they get a kind of sense of high off of it. It really they like the sense of omnipotence that it gives them. So this is something that we have looked into, but we need to look into more. And with the recent cases that have been coming to the public's eye, I think we really need to take this very, very seriously. These individuals know that they're putting you in harm. They claim that they didn't know when they know, and there's even warnings about these places as being risky. They know,

Reclaim You: Support When You Need It Most

Dr. Kerry 10:00

they just don't care, and they kind of get off on seeing how upset they can make you. We need to distance ourselves from those individuals and take this risk seriously. So thank you so much for this listener's question. I deeply appreciate the trust. If you'd like me to answer your question on air, please send it to client C L I E N T S at CarrieMakavoyphd.com or use the link that I've provided below in the description, and I would love to be able to address your biggest concerns. And thank you so much for the privilege and the trust. It's 2 a.m. again and you're replaying that whole conversation over, and you're wondering to yourself, was it really that bad, or maybe I'm just being dramatic? So you start to draft that I'm sorry text again because the guilt that you're feeling or the confusion you're experiencing is just unbearable. And you know this loop because you've been there before, but I want you to know that you're not alone. I'm Dr. Carrie McAvoy, I'm a retired psychologist, and for 25 years I've been helping people untangle exactly what toxic relationships do to your mind, how they create the confusion, the self-doubt, and that trauma bond that keeps pulling you back in. Here's the truth: recovery isn't about getting more information, it's about having the right support in the exact moment you need it. That's why I've created Reclaim You. It's a private, always available coaching app built from my work and my content, organized into an extensive library that you can actually use when you're triggered. Inside it, you'll get five-minute lessons when your brain can't handle a deep dive, check-ins that meet you exactly where you are, whether you're feeling strong, shattered, or numb. Boundary scripts that help you say no without overexplaining, rounding tools that work fast when you're activated, and progress tracking so you can see proof you're healing, even on days when it feels like you're not. There's no appointments, no waiting, no judgment, just practical support right when you need it. Reclaim you, real hope, in real time, right in your pocket. And it's a coaching support, not therapy or emergency care. Learn more at studio.com forward slash Dr. Carrie. So start your healing today and reclaim you.