Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled (10 page)

It is instructive to consider our findings regarding physical abuse. Rates of exposure to physical abuse are about the same for men and women overall.
^11.
However, women report more physical abuse by someone with whom they were close in both childhood and adulthood.
^12.
These findings reveal that even for an event such as physical assault that appears to affect men and women at a comparable rate, women experience assault by people who are close to them more often than men do.

What about other groups of participants? We have now observed the high rate of exposure to betrayal trauma in numerous samples, including those with more ethnic diversity. With the collaboration of researchers at the Oregon Research Institute, Bridget Klest and Jennifer Freyd surveyed 833 members of an ethnically diverse sample in Hawaii.
^13.
Ethnic groups with lower socioeconomic status generally reported more exposure to both high- and low-betrayal traumas. Yet once again, we found that although men and women are exposed to similar rates of trauma overall, women report more exposure to traumas that are high in betrayal, while men report exposure to more lower-betrayal traumas.

Betrayal trauma theory gives us a framework for understanding betrayal and its effects. In this book, we draw on this theory to understand human reactions to betrayals that span the spectrum from everyday events to severe traumas. We have seen that betrayal traumas are frighteningly common. Next, we consider the impact they have on people who experience them.

Notes

1.
J. Tooby and L. Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds.,
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–136.

2.
Definition from
Encyclopedia Britannica
: Fight-or-flight response: response to an acute threat to survival that is marked by physical changes, including nervous and endocrine changes that prepare a human or an animal to react or to retreat. The functions of this response were first described in the early 1900s by American neurologist and physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon.

3.
L. S. Brown and J. J. Freyd, “PTSD Criterion A and Betrayal Trauma: A Modest Proposal for a New Look at What Constitutes Danger to Self,”
Trauma Psychology, Division 56, American Psychological Association, Newsletter 3
(1) (2008): 11–15.

4.
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.

5.
R. Goldsmith, J. J. Freyd, and A. P. DePrince, “Betrayal Trauma: Associations with Psychological and Physical Symptoms in Young Adults,”
Journal of Interpersonal Violence 27
(2012): 547–567.

6.
A. P. DePrince, L. S. Brown, R. E. Cheit, J. J. Freyd, S. N. Gold, K. Pezdek, and K. Quina, “Motivated Forgetting and Misremembering: Perspectives from Betrayal Trauma Theory,” in R. F. Belli, ed.,
True and False Recovered Memories: Toward a Reconciliation of the Debate
(
Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 58
) (New York: Springer, 2012), 193–243.

7.
R. Goldsmith, J. J. Freyd, and A. P. DePrince, “Betrayal Trauma: Associations with Psychological and Physical Symptoms in Young Adults,”
Journal of Interpersonal Violence 27
(2012): 547–567; F. W. Putnam, “Ten-Year Research Update Review: Child Sexual Abuse,”
Journal-American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 42
(January 1, 2003): 269–278.

8.
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; L. A. Kaehler and J. J. Freyd, “Borderline Personality Characteristics: A Betrayal Trauma Approach,”
Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 1
(2009): 261–268; S. S. Tang and J. J. Freyd, “Betrayal trauma and gender differences in posttraumatic stress,”
Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy
(in press).

9.
A. P. DePrince and J. J. Freyd, “The Intersection of Gender and Betrayal in Trauma,” in R. Kimerling, P. C. Ouimette, and J. Wolfe, eds.,
Gender and PTSD
(New York: Guilford Press, 2002), 98–113.

10.
L. R. Goldberg and J. J. Freyd, “Self-Reports of Potentially Traumatic Experiences in an Adult Community Sample: Gender Differences and Test-Retest Stabilities of the Items in a Brief Betrayal-Trauma Survey,”
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 7
(3) (2006): 39–63.

11.
J. Briere and D. M. Elliott, “Prevalence and Psychological Sequelae of Self-Reported Childhood Physical and Sexual Abuse in a General Population Sample of Men and Women,”
Child Abuse and Neglect 27
(2003): 1205–1222.

12.
L. R. Goldberg and J. J. Freyd, “Self-Reports of Potentially Traumatic Experiences in an Adult Community Sample: Gender Differences and Test-Retest Stabilities of the Items in a Brief Betrayal-Trauma Survey,”
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 7
(3) (2006): 39–63.

13.
B. K. Klest,
Trauma, Posttraumatic Symptoms, and Health in Hawaii: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Context
, doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon, 2010.

6

Knowing and Not Knowing

We have seen that betrayal is common and that very often, people respond to betrayal by not fully seeing it, by not knowing about it. We have discussed why this is often an adaptive strategy: by remaining blind, victims or bystanders protect their place in the world, in society, and in relationship to others. By not seeing betrayal, victims are not motivated to disrupt the status quo. This is
why
people remain blind, but what about
how
? What are the mental and social mechanisms that allow one not to see something that is right in front of one's nose?

Part of the answer to the “how” question resides in social factors—how people can deceive others; how perpetrators groom victims to be blind; how governments hide their own betrayals; how society conspires to turn a blind eye. Another part of the answer to the “how” question is psychological—how people can deceive themselves; how the individual human mind can put on blinders to filter out incoming information; how the individual mind can channel information out of awareness; how people can forget.

In this chapter, we examine the “how” question by focusing on one particular account: the story of Samantha Spencer. In chapter 7, by following Samantha further, we see that not knowing one sort of betrayal can contribute to not knowing about a broader range of betrayals. Then, in chapter 8, we explore the issues further, considering a range of experiences and research findings.

Samantha's Story

Samantha Spencer—Sam, to her friends—was happy. She was happy to be at this fine restaurant with Mark, her husband of eleven years, and Rosalie, their infant daughter. They didn't get out often; money was tight, and recently their daily life had been dominated by Mark's recovery from alcoholism.

Mark had been in treatment for his drinking problem. Treatment was hard work for all of them; even Sam had to attend sessions for wives of alcoholics. Yet that night Sam was feeling hopeful. Things felt as if they were finally on the right track, and to Sam, this evening out promised a new beginning. Things were going to be okay. Even Rosalie was being an angel, turning her head from Sam to Mark and back again as they discussed the food. Roast duck. Sam's favorite. Mark had insisted that they splurge a little. The dimly lit restaurant and Mark's easy smile suggested romance. Sam smiled, too.

Years after that evening, Sam told us what she was thinking at the time: “He's treating me nicely. He wants to make things good.” They were a family together, a happy family, enjoying the evening out. Sam felt good. They ate and ate and talked about new beginnings and bright futures. Mark reached across the table to brush away the freckles from Sam's face, like the old days.

After blackberry pie, Mark excused himself to go to the men's room, and Sam began packing up Rosalie's toys: a cloth picture book, her yellow rattle, a well-chewed stuffed bunny. The waiter brought the check, and Rosalie began to fidget. Sam realized that the whole evening had been charmed, but now it was late and Rosalie was tired. Soon she might start to fuss and cry. So Sam, a good mother and a polite diner, knew it was time to get Rosalie out of her highchair and then out of the restaurant while things were still so nice. She decided she'd pay for the meal and meet Mark when he exited the restroom. As she headed toward the register, Rosalie on her hip, she glanced at the bar.

Sam explained to us, “There he is, having a shot of tequila at the bar. I am just horrified because I have this desire always to believe what he says.”

He was standing—half-turned toward Sam, half toward the bar—and when he saw her, he set the empty glass on the bar and rushed toward her.

“So now you are spying on me!” Mark yelled.

“I can't believe you are drinking!” replied Sam, as she pulled Rosalie close to her chest.

Mark and Sam threw accusations at each other, back and forth, back and forth. Rosalie began to cry. Then Mark said with a sudden surge of anger: “By the way, I'm required to tell you . . .” Mark blurted out a new confession, claiming his treatment program insisted that he confess as part of his “coming clean.” Mark then told Sam, at the end of their nice evening, that he had had an affair with another woman.

“It was like being hit by a train, because I had no clue.”

Sam said these words a decade after the events of that confession-in-the-restaurant evening. She was visiting her old friend who lives in our town. Her old friend is our new friend. Our now-mutual friend had told Sam about our interest in betrayal, and Sam, visiting for a few days from Ohio, offered to tell us her story.

So there we sat on the bedroom floor belonging to one of our young children on a lovely October day. The bedroom offered us privacy. Outside, the maple trees had recently turned brilliant fall colors, and the sunlight entering the bedroom was saturated with red and yellow tree light. We opened the windows wide; the gentle breeze was spiced with autumn leaves.

A tape recorder sat between us, preserving Sam's story. Sam often spoke in the present tense about long-ago events: “He is treating me nicely; I have a desire to believe what he says.” Yet she felt very present, too, very grounded in the here and now. It's as if she were in her past and in her present, both at once. Sam is a striking woman with a mane of fiery red hair and a warm smile. Quick to say she has low self-esteem, she seemed to be outgoing, talkative, and full of joie de vivre. Although we offered to set up chairs for the interview, she indicated that she was happy sitting on the floor. With her legs casually tucked under her long flowing skirt, she did seem comfortable. We were grateful for that; we preferred the floor, too.

Sam is now a graduate student at a fine university in Ohio. After she divorced her husband, she managed to complete college and enter graduate school—an accomplishment we came to admire deeply as we replayed the audiotape and considered the story of her sixteen-year marriage. Many years have passed, but Sam brought the past to life as she told her story.

“It was like being hit by a train, because I had no clue,” she had told us. No clue? Did Sam really have no clue that Mark had had an affair? As Sam talked, she complicated the picture: “Now, looking back, I think, ‘How could I have not had a clue?' He went to bars all the time, and I couldn't even go out to a movie with my girlfriends without him saying, ‘I know that is not where you are at.' He didn't like any of my friends, and ‘every man was flirting' with me . . . and still he could go to bars. There was really a huge double standard.”

We learned more as Sam talked to us. We discovered that Mark hadn't just “gone to bars all the time”—Mark often spent the whole night out “at bars.” Mark was also intensely jealous and possessive of Sam, apparently projecting all of his own betrayals onto her. Sam's friends easily put two and two together. They witnessed the obsessive and entirely misplaced jealousy, they were aware of the all-nighters, and they knew what was going on. Sam told us that her friends at the time were warning her: “Your husband is not to be trusted. He is spending nights out.” Something was not right, but Sam wouldn't accept the evidence or the warnings.

How could Sam have failed to see what was so obvious? We knew from what Sam already told us that the affair Mark confessed to that evening at the restaurant was not his only infidelity.

Sam had found a way to repeatedly ignore evidence of Mark's betrayal.
How
did she do this?

How
Did Sam Remain Unaware of Mark's Infidelity?

Of course, part of the answer to Sam's ignorance resided in Mark's deception. Yet Mark really wasn't that good at deception, and Sam's friends saw what was going on. Sam's unawareness of Mark's betrayals must go beyond Mark's limited ability to deceive. Sam was doing something in her mind with the evidence: what?

Consider Sam's answer to our question: “When he confessed, did he say it was still going on, or did he claim it was over?”

“No, he said it was a one-time thing. One night in the bar he was really drunk, and this woman just talked him into going home with her. He was like, ‘I couldn't even get it up.' Almost like it really didn't happen, like it was an aborted attempt. So I ended up after the fact feeling almost sorry for him. And being angry at the woman and angry at [the treatment program].”

So one thing Sam could do in her head was change the story around. Mark became the victim, not the responsible party. Mark didn't have a real affair, just an aborted attempt. Sam felt anger at the woman and the treatment program for making Mark confess to something that hadn't even really happened.

After the restaurant fight and Mark's quasi-confession, Sam found a way to stay with Mark. She found a way around the promise she'd made to herself to immediately leave him if he ever cheated on her. To do this, she needed to believe Mark didn't have a real affair, and she also needed to ignore any evidence of continued infidelity. Sam pulled it off: “So I stayed for another five years after that.”

Sam told us about her friend's attempts to warn her during those years. “She told me, ‘No, he goes to the bars all the time. My friends see him. You don't know him. He's always flirting with women.' And he was. He went to bars all the time, stayed out all night, and for some reason I just didn't want to believe it because he told me, ‘Oh, no, I don't do that, it was a one-time thing.' And I saw him as so incapable of being conniving. He's one of those—you know—doesn't have a poker face, doesn't really even plan things. So he just would go to the bars, and I think I just decided, ‘No, I need to believe him, he's just drinking because he's alcoholic.' But my friend said, ‘No, you don't know what he's doing.' And I remember defending him to her. Like, ‘Well, I know, he told me.'”

Yet of course, Sam's friend was correct about Mark.

“So I find out about two years ago about this girlfriend he had had. And I said, ‘Oh, I hear that you were with Liz before we were even divorced, which I think is pretty crappy.' I said, ‘Two years before we were divorced.' And he said, ‘No, we were actually together before Rosalie was born,' which would have been nine years ago, and at that point I felt completely betrayed because not only had he been going out on me, but I had been defending him to my friends, so it was almost a betrayal of my notion of who he was. I just didn't even know who he was! That really shook me, because I felt that I had at least had a concept of a person.”

Betrayal blindness involves not seeing what is there to be seen. Like Dorothy's ruby slippers, the information is there the whole time. As Sam realized later, she had all of the evidence she needed to see the sad truth: “Looking back now, I can think, ‘Well, he was going to bars all the time, he was staying out all night, my friend was telling me these things . . .'”

Sam had given us some clues about how she managed to transform the evidence in her mind. She denied the obvious to herself. She ignored her friends' warnings. She looked the other way time and time again. Perhaps, similar to others who have talked to us about their betrayal blindness, Sam even forgot unpleasant facts about Mark when that forgetting helped her remain unaware.

Sam and Betrayal Trauma Theory

Let's revisit betrayal trauma theory for a bit. Now that we know the basics, we can begin to see Sam's reasons for not knowing.

Why did she overlook Mark's infidelity? Sam dropped some clues. First, she told us that before Mark's confession in the restaurant, she had told Mark that the only way she would ever leave him was if he “went out on her”—Sam's words for infidelity. In fact, Sam gave Mark an absolute ultimatum: if he went out on her, she
would
leave him. Sam remembered the crisis this created for her after Mark's confession of the supposedly “aborted affair.”

“Here I am with this baby, and what's going to happen? I am going to have to go out and get a job and put my baby in day care and live on my own, which I had never done in my life. I went from living with my parents to getting married and being with him, so I was unable to even envision myself living alone. So I was just devastated for weeks. I felt at the time it was for what he had done, but I think I was most devastated by the notion of having to change my life and figure out how to be on my own. . . . How was I supposed to manage? . . . So I ended up putting my stuff aside and saying, ‘Okay, we'll be fine as long as you never do this again.' Of course, he convinced me it was a one-time deal, he couldn't even actually have sex with her because he couldn't get an erection, and she had come on to him at the bar when he had been out having a drink. I look back now, and I think I almost turned it around. He was seduced; he was in this position; it was a one-time thing. So I ended up deciding, ‘Okay, it was a one-time thing, and we'll work on things.' I realize now it was more important for me to continue to stay home and be with my daughter—live in the home we bought together, instead of creating this huge upheaval in my life.”