Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled (11 page)

Sam's words resonated with our core theoretical premise about betrayal blindness: people remain unaware of betrayal when the unawareness helps them stay in a relationship they believe they need for their own survival. Sam felt totally dependent on Mark. She simply didn't know how to live without him. Her own survival, and that of her daughter, seemed dependent on staying with Mark. The empowered response to perceiving infidelity is to leave or challenge the unfaithful person, but Sam didn't consider leaving to be an option. She didn't know how to live on her own. Leaving was out, but what about insisting that Mark change? Confronting Mark with ongoing distrust and demands for accountability would likely have rocked the boat and perhaps even have caused Mark to want to leave. Indeed, Sam reported that for the first few weeks after his confession in the restaurant, she did withdraw from Mark, and he began to complain. His complaining likely scared Sam; perhaps he would leave her. We believe that Sam found a way to overlook Mark's infidelity because she felt as if she needed Mark for her survival, and awareness of the infidelity would threaten a relationship that felt absolutely necessary to Sam.

Sam stayed with Mark for five years after the restaurant confession. During those five years, she acknowledged no further infidelity. Sam found out about Mark's long-term affair with Liz only after the divorce. Even now, she had trouble seeing Mark as deceptive, and she struggled with reconciling her image of Mark: “I don't think he's a particularly clever person, so I don't see him as necessarily trying to be deceptive to me, and at the same time I think if he was doing this for years, he must have . . . I don't know . . . been living in fear that I'd find out. . . . I don't think he's really someone who feels cocky about things. He's sort of a humble person. But I don't know. He made it like: ‘It was a one-time thing' . . . but, yeah, obviously he had been with Liz, so I don't know if this was a different woman, or this was just a story he concocted, or if that had happened and then he had ended up with Liz.”

Sam believes she began to think about leaving Mark only after
he
told her he was thinking of leaving—a few years after the restaurant event. “He told me about two years before I actually left that he had decided he was going to leave. I was devastated because I had never actually had to think about what I would do if I was on my own. We fought all the time, and it had always been an unstable marriage, but that was the first time I had to really think seriously about developing strategies. At that point, when I figured he was leaving, I thought, ‘Well, what will I do? Well, I will go to college because I was going to the Ohio State extension program, and my dream would be to go to Columbus and get the degree that I want.' So, boy, from that point on, when I had to develop strategies for being on my own, I just started slowly . . . not even consciously planning, but unconsciously thinking, ‘This is what I want, this is my dream.' It took two years just to get to the place emotionally—I was going to counseling; I was talking to friends; every strategy imaginable just to get myself to the point emotionally that I could leave, and even so, it was so difficult.”

When Sam understood that Mark might leave her, she was forced to think about a way to survive without the relationship. She had already been doing her part to keep things going by not seeing the infidelities, but now it wasn't working, so further unawareness wasn't likely to help Sam. Thus, Sam began to realize that her survival might depend on her ability to function independently. This dawning awareness represented a fundamental shift in Sam's strategy. The shift allowed Sam to move away from unawareness into awareness, and this shift encouraged her growth as an independent adult.

“I think from about the point where he said he was going to leave, I think from that point, we were living in the same house . . . and I was not even consciously planning to leave at that point. . . . It still took me a little while longer to really start plotting, saving money, figuring out bank accounts, separating my stuff out. I even figured out a budget for him and how things would be okay for him and what bills he would have to pay and how he would be okay with the income he had, so that I could decide what to go ahead and agree to for spousal support. So we actually lived together. . . . I filed for divorce that May, and we still lived in the same house for the next four months. I said, ‘I'm going to leave, I'm going to leave,' but I don't think he really believed I was going to leave until I actually left. Even after I filed. I think I even wondered if I would have the courage. It's one of those things that is very stressful, but I wanted it a lot. It was so painful just to have to leave somebody, to hurt somebody like that. I realized I'd rather be the person who gets hurt and has to deal with things than be the one who really dumps this on someone else. It was a long emotional process, not even the physical move, it was more the emotional. How can I extract myself, take my daughter away from her dad, leave this man who is alcoholic and drug-dependent, everything else, with nothing? It took a long time to get myself to the point where I believed that was okay to do.”

As Sam told us how desperately she wanted to leave Mark, yet how hard it had been to actually leave, we felt an increasing sense of foreboding. We sensed something dark in Sam's past. Dared we shine a light on that darkness now?

7

Mental Gymnastics

There on the floor of a young girl's cheerful bedroom, amid the stuffed animals and the little-girl toys, surrounded by the gentle breeze and the fall sunlight, we asked Sam about the unthinkable: “Did you have to worry about your physical safety?”

“Yeah, in fact, he . . . I was trying to figure this out because we lived in Alabama shortly after we were married for two years. I was isolated from my family. That period was really the most abusive. I didn't have friends. I didn't live near anybody. There was quite a bit of abuse. . . . I don't think there was that much physical abuse for [our first years after our move to Ohio], but during the last six months to a year, there were a few times he hit me. . . . I have to say that the primary thing that pushed me to the point where I could leave was that I had a daughter, and I realized I didn't want him to repeat . . . because his [Mark's] dad had beat his mom, and I realized even if I don't matter, I do not want my daughter to develop these same qualities. I used my daughter as an excuse to leave. At least two times, he did. He hit me or grabbed me by my hair. He was doing a lot of drugs toward the very end. He was taking crank, doing a lot of crank [a type of methamphetamine, or ‘speed,' that is smoked], and becoming almost delusional. He'd wake me up in the middle of the night in my room and say, ‘Did you just get here? I heard a car door in the street.' It's like two o'clock in the morning, and he's just whacked out, and I've been in here sleeping, and he thinks I'm out running around.

“So the last six to nine months were really stressful. I don't think he had hit me for years, and suddenly it sort of escalated. So yeah, I was just very worried. In fact, there was one incident where I was trying to leave with our daughter, who was five and a half then. I have her in my arms, and he's trying to pull her out of my arms as I'm trying to get in the car, so we are fighting and yelling for all the neighbors to hear, and she's crying. So it did even get to the point where she was in the midst of these struggles. I think that actually helped me, though, to really have conviction to leave. Because if it had just been me, I don't know if I would have ever got to the point where I would have said, ‘Okay' . . .”

“When you were struggling with your daughter, was that when you were actually leaving him?” we asked.

“It was the summer before I left,” Sam replied. “And I think that was just an incident when I think he had even hit me, and I was just like, ‘This is not going to happen, and we are leaving.'”

“So it's like you were running away.”

“Yeah, so I'm like: We are leaving, and you are not taking my daughter!”

Now we understood: Sam was a battered wife. This husband was dangerous: alcoholic, drug-addicted, and emotionally and physically abusive. By the time Sam left, Mark's infidelity was less significant than his reign of terror. Staying with her husband was becoming a risk to her safety and her daughter's well-being.

So the inevitable questions arose about the many years of abuse she endured before she finally left: Why did she stay? Listening to the tape later, remembering our thoughts during the interview, we chastised ourselves: Why did we first question her motivations, rather than his? Why didn't we ask ourselves, “Why did
he
do it?”

Now we are still probing: Why did she stay, and how did she justify things in her mind to make it okay to stay? Just as Sam could whisk away evidence of infidelity, she found a way to transform the abuse into something not so terrible. Why? How?

Even when Mark was not physically abusive to Sam, he was often emotionally abusive. Thus, emotional abuse likely played a part in Sam's inability to envision herself as capable of living independently. At the end of her relationship, she enrolled in an extension program. “I started taking courses through the college and just realizing I did have a brain. For years, he had said, ‘You're stupid,' and I really had to build up this knowledge that I was intelligent, that other people did like me, that I did have worth, that I needed self-worth. I probably still have lower self-esteem than most people.”

Mark's emotional abuse helped keep Sam trapped. She did not believe in her own competence. Without competence, she was dependent on Mark for her survival.

Once more, we asked Sam to tell us about her marriage, and this time she connected her ability to overlook evidence of infidelity with her disregard of emotional mistreatment.

Again, we asked her to review the signs of Mark's infidelity that she had ignored at the time. Sam began, “He never wore his wedding ring, but I thought—” Sam interrupted herself at this point, as she often did while talking to us. Later we learned that Sam explained the lack of a wedding ring to herself by attributing Mark's behavior to his dislike of the style of the ring itself. Sam told us that she had picked out the wedding ring, and Mark let her know that the style was too ornate. Probably Mark didn't wear the ring because a wedding ring is an inconvenience when philandering. His excuse put the blame on Sam (for choosing the wrong ring), and Sam accepted this version of reality.

Sam continued, “He liked to tell me stories of women hitting on him, and him as this innocent victim being tried and true . . . as far as other things, it was the fact that he would periodically stay out all night. I have memories that come back to me now of before we were even married, memories of how he was supposed to meet me somewhere, and he'd never show up and me waiting for hours, listening to every car that went by, thinking, ‘Oh, that must be him!'

“Looking back, it's chilling to realize that there were things that happened before we were even together that I did to protect the relationship. I remember my friend telling me a couple of years ago about a time when we were in high school: ‘Yeah, I remember coming over one day and thinking you never get out anymore. You are always with Mark, and you never do things with us.' She came over to my family's home, and I remember feeling resentment toward her because I just instinctively knew he would be angry. I remember thinking, ‘How dare you come over and want me to go out running around?' He's going to think, ‘Why do they want her to go partying with them?'

“So I remember transferring the resentment to them, instead of toward him, and then forgetting it altogether. Always compensating for his behavior. And throughout . . . I never would tell anyone that he hit me. I could never go anywhere because if I went to the grocery store, and I took an hour when I was supposed to take forty-five minutes, he'd say, ‘Where did you go?'”

Sam explained to us that she was living in fear, yet she believed her friends viewed her as upbeat. She told us she had not wanted anyone to view her as someone who was abused or who lived a sad life. “I feel like I have this characteristic where I want things to be all right, so I'll do what I have to in my mind in order to justify or fix things. I think I did that a lot with my husband. I wanted so badly to have a good marriage.”

The human mind is marvelously convoluted. Sam almost surely knew about her husband's betrayals, in some sense of the word
knew
, even as she didn't let herself “know” in some other sense of the word. Betrayal blindness requires this convolution, so that one can be in the dual state of simultaneously knowing and not knowing something important.

Although we started this interview with the intention of focusing on Sam's blindness to Mark's infidelity, our conversation took us into the difficult territory of domestic violence. In Sam's case, the infidelity, the emotional mistreatment, and the physical abuse became one big swamp of betrayal. Yet for Sam, each element demanded a separate strategy. Sam found a way to be blind to each part, and the blindness for one betrayal type reinforced her blindness for each of the others. In the case of infidelity, Sam chose not to believe Mark's confession and to overlook the overwhelming evidence the rest of the time. In the case of emotional mistreatment, Sam considered it evidence of her inadequacies, so instead of withdrawing from Mark or confronting him for his meanness, she swallowed his judgments as if she deserved them. In the case of physical abuse, she made excuses for Mark and minimized the severity. Yet we suspected there might be more that she did with the knowledge of physical abuse in order to be able to stay with Mark.

Blindness for Battering

We have long wondered about the role of betrayal blindness in physically abusive relationships. Although much of the action of infidelity happens outside the immediate vicinity of the person being betrayed, battering occurs
to
the person being betrayed. Overlooking the
signs
of infidelity seems an easier task than overlooking the
experience
of being physically abused. Yet it seems that Sam did find a way to remain less than fully aware of the battering. How? Pondering this, we returned to the idea that we can know and not know something at the same time. Part of our knowledge may be consciously available, but part may be hidden from awareness most of the time. Thinking about conscious knowledge, we asked Sam, “How much did you
know
he was hitting you?”

“I still struggle with that. Even now, if I see
Oprah
, and she is talking with abuse victims, I can definitely look at their situation and say that was not mine. They profile the guys: this guy is psychopathic, and this guy is more remorseful after the fact. There are different kinds of batterers. I look at them and go, ‘No, he wasn't like that.'”

Sam tried to explain why Mark wasn't like the batterers on
Oprah
. She claimed Mark was always remorseful after he hit her. This seems like no distinction at all, because Sam had just told us that some of the men on
Oprah
were remorseful. Then Sam told us she felt she had some power because she knew Mark would feel so bad afterward. This strikes us as not much power at all. Sometimes the dance of unawareness leads otherwise rational people into remarkably convoluted claims!

Sam went on, explaining the typical battering episode: “I wouldn't fight back. He wasn't trying to kill me. I could see that because he had been a state-champion football player. He could easily have hurt me badly. I could see he held back. He was just really angry with me. I knew because I'd be bruised.”

Sam was bruised by Mark's attacks, yet Sam still feels that Mark is different from the men on
Oprah
. Did Sam believe her bruises were minor? As she continued with her story, she provided evidence that the physical injuries were sometimes severe. One scar runs the length of her collarbone. Still, she continued to struggle with accepting that she was a victim of domestic violence. “One time in Alabama he kicked me in the back. I thought he bruised a kidney. I could hardly walk for two weeks, it was so painful. Then another time when we lived there, he broke my arm. In the hospital, the nurse said, ‘Oh, my God.' It's really strange to me because a part of me doesn't feel as if I was really battered. . . . I think I classically fit the profile of the type of person who would be with somebody like that . . . but at the same time, I don't like to see myself as a victim, and that's why I didn't ever tell anybody. I didn't want my friends to say to me, ‘What the hell are you doing with this guy?' I was protecting him, and I was protecting myself from that type of judgment, but at the same time I feel like I was one of those people who always wanted to be happy. So after an incident, I'd go right back to thinking, ‘Poor guy, he saw his mom get beaten.'

“There were only two times I really feared for my life. Two different times, he put his hand over my mouth and my nose. He would say it was because I was screaming, but I was scared for my life.”

Sam had experienced severe battering on more than one occasion, yet she still felt her experience wasn't like that of the other battered wives on
Oprah
. The human mind is amazing.

Keeping Secrets Supports Betrayal Blindness

We wondered about Sam's history with disclosing the abuse. From her pattern of telling others, we figured we might gain insight into her own awareness over time. If she had explicitly reported Mark's violence as battering, it would be evidence of her conscious awareness of his wrongdoing, which we doubted Sam really possessed at the time. If she had casually mentioned the violence to people, it might indicate that she really didn't know it was wrong. On the other hand, complete secrecy would show that on some level, she knew there was something too awful to tell. “Did you ever report his hitting?” we asked.

“Finally, at the time I was going to leave. I have one friend (whom I became friends with fairly recently) who talked about her ex-husband and how he used to beat her, so I did start telling her. Then I had another friend who actually asked me, when I described his jealousy, ‘Did he ever hit you?' It caught me off guard, so I said, ‘Yeah.' Those were the only two from back then.”

Sam did not tell others until the very end, when her friend's question caught her off guard. She kept it a secret for sixteen years. This strongly suggests Sam knew on some level that the battering was very wrong. Even at the end, Sam didn't tell her family. Her need to keep the truth from her parents was powerful.