Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled (15 page)

Notes

1.
J. J. Freyd, A. P. DePrince, and D. Gleaves, “The State of Betrayal Trauma Theory: Reply to McNally (2007)—Conceptual Issues and Future Directions,”
Memory 15
(2007): 295–311.

2.
E. Bernstein and T. Putnam, “Development, Reliability, and Validity of a Dissociation Scale,”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 174
(1986): 727–735.

3.
J. J. Freyd, B. Klest, and C. B. Allard, “Betrayal Trauma: Relationship to Physical Health, Psychological Distress, and a Written Disclosure Intervention,”
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 6
(3) (2005): 83–104.

4.
J. R. Stroop, “Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology 18
(6) (1935): 643–662.

5.
J. J. Freyd, S. R. Martorello, J. S. Alvarado, A. E. Hayes, and J. C. Christman, “Cognitive Environments and Dissociative Tendencies: Performance on the Standard Stroop Task for High versus Low Dissociators,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology 12
(1998): S91–S103.

6.
A. P. DePrince and J. J. Freyd, “Dissociative Tendencies, Attention, and Memory,”
Psychological Science 10
(1999): 449–452.

7.
A. P. DePrince and J. J. Freyd, “Dissociative Tendencies, Attention, and Memory,”
Psychological Science 10
(1999): 449–452.

8.
A. P. DePrince and J. J. Freyd, “Forgetting Trauma Stimuli,”
Psychological Science 15
(2004): 488–492; A. P. DePrince and J. J. Freyd, “Memory and Dissociative Tendencies: The Roles of Attentional Context and Word Meaning in a Directed Forgetting Task,”
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 2
(2) (2001): 67–82.

9.
K. A. Becker-Blease, J. J. Freyd, and K. C. Pears, “Preschoolers' Memory for Threatening Information Depends on Trauma History and Attentional Context: Implications for the Development of Dissociation,”
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 5
(1) (2004): 113–131.

10.
G. E. Tsai, D. Condie, M. T. Wu, and I. W. Chang, “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Personality Switches in a Woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder,”
Harvard Review of Psychiatry 7
(1999): 119–122.

11.
A. DePrince, “Social Cognition and Revictimization Risk,”
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 6
(1) (2005): 125–141; J. J. Freyd, B. Klest, and C. B. Allard, “Betrayal Trauma: Relationship to Physical Health, Psychological Distress, and a Written Disclosure Intervention,”
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 6
(3) (2005): 83–104.

12.
R. Goldsmith and J. J. Freyd, “Awareness for Emotional Abuse,”
Journal of Emotional Abuse 5
(1) (2005): 95–123.

13.
Brian Murphy, “Molester Built Trust Slowly,”
Detroit Free Press
, September 3, 1998.

14.
I. L. Janis,
Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

15.
“China: Tiananmen's Unhealed Wounds,” 2009, Human Rights Watch,
http://www.hrw.org
.

16.
B. Glauber, “Trusted Doctor Found to Be a Killer,”
Register-Guard
, February 9, 2000, 7A.

17.
J. B. Stewart,
Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

9

Betrayal Blindness Is Toxic

We have spoken about the damaging effects of betrayal on many different levels. In this chapter, we examine the effects of betrayal in a more systematic fashion, looking at clinical and research data on the way betrayal affects all of us on three different levels, how those levels interact, and how this results in a toxicity that can permeate a society.

First of all, betrayal affects us individually. Those who have been betrayed develop a number of different psychological and physical conditions. Our research has confirmed that exposure to traumas that are high in betrayal (for example, assault by a person who is close to us) is linked to symptoms of depression, anxiety, dissociation, post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality characteristics (which is a syndrome that includes difficulties in relationships), and physical health problems.
^1.

The next level where we are affected is the level of relationships. Betrayal, especially in early life, can make it difficult for us to trust and form new, enduring, and enriching relationships. Relational health is as important as physical health in determining the health of a society, and relational health is a predictor of individual mental health, illustrating the continuing and ongoing interaction of these levels.
^2.

The third level on which betrayal affects us is the societal level. Betrayal undermines our basic ability to trust one another and our institutions, and lacking trust can feed back on our ability to hold together as a society.

Now let's follow the thread of betrayal from individual to relational to institutional effects.

The Toxic Effects of Betrayal on Individuals

Cathy Turner is a vivacious woman in her mid-forties. She is eager to tell us her story, which began with severe childhood abuse. Cathy and her siblings were brought up in extreme poverty in a small town in Idaho. Cathy has lost track of all of her siblings and the rest of her family. Now Cathy is a student at a community college, where she is studying nursing. Short and blond, she bursts with energy, although that has not always been true. For many years after leaving home, she struggled not only with dissociation, but also with depression and panic attacks.

Cathy's interview took place in a cozy and comfortable office. Outside, lilacs bloomed on a sunny spring day. Cathy showed no indication that she even noticed her surroundings, so eager was she to help others by having her story told. We asked her to talk about what had happened in her life.

“When I think of the word
betrayal
,” she said, “I think of a lie, a pretense, whether it comes from family or society or whatever, of an expected norm, and when that gets skewered and manipulated and twisted. And, you know, for me . . . I was abused in many ways by many people in my family. The biggest betrayal for me was the normalization, that there's this incredible lie going on, that parents are supposed to love you and keep you safe, and in my experience those were the most dangerous people I've ever experienced in my life. Throughout my entire life, I have ridden with motorcycle gangs, I have lived with ex-cons, I have done incredibly stupid things because of that, but the dangerous people were the ones who were supposed to love me and were supposed to keep me safe. And, you know, that manifested in horrific physical abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, spiritual abuse.”

The lie for Cathy was that her father told her he loved her and then sexually abused her; he told her that she was smart and then punished her for using her brains. “And so, okay, I'm allowed to use my brain, I'm allowed to use my intuition, and then you're going to put me in a box for seven days, and try to break me. That's an extreme situation. . . . But at the same time you're nurturing me and teaching me that I can be this and then taking away any chance to do that. And not having the safe place to learn to develop those things. And learn to be myself and what that meant.”

Cathy will come back to the theme of safety and her lifelong search for it—how she never had the chance to grow in many ways because she had no safe and secure base to grow from. Instead, the verbal messages she got were that she was loved and supported, at the same time that she was given other messages that she was disposable. She became very confused and disoriented. “And when you take that away from a child—and children are incredibly, beautifully malleable. I mean, they have these very strong little spirits, you know; they're just these beautiful creatures. And you can nurture them and you can guide them, but . . . they're going to grow in their direction, they're going to grow toward the sun. So this message of ‘You're this beautiful, strong spirit and you can do all of these great things, and you're not like your sisters, and you're not like your mother,' and at the same time trying to destroy that . . .

“That was the lie. And . . . the betrayal of the conflict—to me, that was the betrayal. . . . ‘Which way is it?' Beautiful or so worthless that you can be betrayed over and over again?

We asked, “So, it left you very confused?”

“Horrifically confused,” she said. “And children automatically seek love and approval—everybody does, but especially when we're children—so you're trying to seek some approval and some support and trying to do what's right by the parents, by the role models, or whoever it is in your life, and yet they're eroding it at the same time. And going through life and having studied psychology and trying to go that route, you know, understanding ‘Oh, my father was profoundly mentally ill.' He had some profound psychoses, he had profound abuse; so I can analyze and examine it and set it aside, but . . . I can't deal with the betrayal of that four-year-old little girl, you know . . . Because I was also taught to deep throat at two years old and was praised for that, you know. That's messed up. There's no consistency, and it's always conflicting; and I think that's why, you know, I ended up with the ‘mental illness' that I ended up with. Because it was always conflicted. Always contradictory.”

Betrayal and Dissociation

Like Marnie in chapter 8, Cathy was also diagnosed with dissociative identity “disorder.” Yet Cathy looked very much different from Marnie. While Marnie had a few very distinct identities, Cathy's identities were much less distinct and more confused, most probably reflecting the confusion and chaos of her early years. Remember that diagnostic categories are just that—categories—and that people never fit neatly into the boxes the mental health system provides. That is why it is important to listen to the whole of people's stories. As you know, we become blind to betrayal in order to maintain important and necessary relationships. If a little girl (such as Cathy) is sexually abused at night, and during the day her family behaves as though nothing happened, the little girl must put that knowledge aside in order to stay in her family, especially if there is no safe person she can turn to, as was the case with Cathy. Yet the memories and the emotions that go with that knowledge come out in other ways. One part of the personality holds the memories of the betrayal, while other parts can go on. It is basically a life- and psyche-saving strategy.

Understanding the mechanisms of dissociation and the causes of this “mental disorder” in this way makes us begin to question whether it is a mental disorder or whether it is a normal and creative response to what
really is
the disorder: the betrayal of intimate and what should be loving bonds.

Cathy has accepted her dissociation and still lives with it. She reported that she still has problems with losing time (that is, not being aware of her surroundings for periods of time—a way of “checking out”), but it does not happen in the uncontrolled and scattered way that it used to. She now claims the defense that helped her survive her abusive childhood as part of who she is: “But I quit fighting me, and this is who I am. And I'm finally okay with that, you know, and to speak my truth.”

This hadn't been true thirty years ago when Cathy was pregnant with her first child (which did not survive full-term). That was a time of extreme confusion for her, when she learned the strategy of dissociation well: “I was taken from my father's home because I was pregnant at ten and a half years old and put into my sister's home, where her husband continued to abuse me. And that taught me, ‘Okay, this is going to happen. This is part of life. . . . This is my life; this is the way people are. This is just the way it's going to be. This is the way the world is. And so [I had] to learn to change it, own it, and rock it.' . . . And then, thank God, there was truly divine intervention, and I got pregnant with my first baby who survived full term and who arrived nine months later. So I had to make a choice to try and be a good person, but there were still these coping skills, there was still this tool of . . . shatter or disappear—well, I didn't have that option anymore because I had this beautiful, beautiful, perfect baby in front of me. I couldn't join them; I couldn't be one of the abusers anymore, I couldn't manipulate anymore. I had to be a good person. I had to teach my son something different. So I tried to leave the manipulation and the gang behind, tried to walk a good path. So if you're not going to be part of them, then you've got to seek something else out. And there was this constant seeking, of trying to find some safety. . . . That's why you go multiple or you dissociate or you check the fuck out or you do drugs, or whatever it is you do, because you don't have the surroundings to support that hope. So you scatter, at least in my opinion or in my experience. You know, adapt to whatever it could be.”

With a great deal of emotion, Cathy described the advantages of becoming dissociative. It was the only option for her in circumstances that could have destroyed her. She learned to check out from the extreme pain and confusion when her surroundings didn't support her. It was the only way she could find safety at the time. Later, we'll see how Cathy found safety in other ways and was able to bring those dissociative parts of her personality back together.

Dissociation is the disruption of normally connected aspects of our conscious experience. In the extreme, dissociation can make life difficult for people. Cathy learned to adapt to her circumstances by dissociating and creating other “parts.” In therapy, those parts were finally able to express themselves, and they gradually became more continuous parts of her, although she still uses that coping method in some ways to the present time.

Our research supports the idea that exposure to betrayal is associated with more dissociation than is abuse that does not involve betrayal.
^3.
Betrayal trauma theory explains dissociation as a way that people can keep away information that poses a threat to the individual's system of attachment. Cathy, as a young child, saw her options as “shattering or disappearing” in response to the betrayal. She did this in order to maintain the family and the emotional bonds that, difficult as they were, were all she had.

Researchers James Chu and Diana Dill compared people who had been abused by family members and those abused by non–family members.
^4.
They found a pattern of results that can be easily explained by betrayal trauma theory. As discussed, the Dissociative Experiences Scale is a test that measures the degree to which people dissociate. Chu and Dill found that childhood abuse by family members (both physical and sexual) was significantly related to increased DES scores in psychiatric inpatients, and abuse by nonfamily members was not. What this means is that there is more dissociation—knowledge isolation—when the betrayal is by people we are close to. Other researchers have found that the kind of dissociation that Cathy experienced is more common when the abuse is perpetrated by someone in the family rather than by someone outside the family.
^5.
This has been found whether the people being studied are juvenile delinquents or students.

Betrayal and Forgetting

Our response to betrayal needn't be as extreme as dissociation. It can be as simple as forgetting. Jack Lavino wrote about his experiences with betrayal and forgetting: “I was sexually abused as a child by a Catholic priest and other adults in a position of trust. My first memories of these experiences began when I was age forty-four. My initial reaction to these memories was denial. I did not want them to be true.

“Three years passed before the memories overwhelmed me. I sought psychotherapy. The rage toward my abusers slowly bubbled to the surface.”
^6.

Betrayal trauma theory predicts that unawareness and forgetting of abuse will be higher when the relationship between perpetrator and victim involves closeness, trust, and/or caregiving. It is in these cases that the potential for a conflict between the need to stay in the relationship and the awareness of betrayal is greatest and is thus where we should see the greatest amount of forgetting or memory impairment. In her first book,
Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Child Abuse
, Jennifer Freyd reported finding from reanalyses of a number of relevant data sets that incestuous abuse was more likely to be forgotten than nonincestuous abuse was.
^7.