Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled (13 page)

Sam had learned to be a “good girl” in her childhood. She was taught to be submissive and to serve others. Sam was taught to put others' needs, particularly men's needs, before her own. This kind of extensive gender socialization can put girls at risk for turning into exploited women should a dangerous man come into the picture; Sam had been taught no skills in conceptualizing or asserting her own rights. “It took me until the very end of our marriage to realize—I had this epiphany and I realized—wait a minute, here I am worried that he had this horrible life. And I stopped to compare the two, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, my life is worse than his is. He drinks. He beats me, and I'm fearful of him, and I cannot go to the jobs I want.' Even going to college, he said he was proud of me, but then he'd undermine it, like: ‘Are you going to be in class all day? What am I going to do? I have to work all week, and if I have to baby-sit . . .' He saw watching his own child as, ‘I have to do your job.' So he would do certain things to undermine my going to school, even if verbally he was saying, ‘I'm proud of you.'”

Liberation

Sam eventually escaped Mark, taking Rosalie with her. “It's really amazing when I look back. . . . I'm a grad student now, and I'm actually teaching. If somebody would have told me, even five years ago, that I would be teaching college as a grad student, traveling around the world by myself—I mean, I didn't even get my driver's license until I was twenty-five because that scared me, so traveling alone to different countries—India!—I would have just called them a liar. There was just no way on earth. Things that maybe seem like nothing to the average person . . . just to have made the psychological progress to even imagine myself in those places is astounding to me. If people knew that I was even fearful to leave the house, because even if nothing was happening, I just knew that he was thinking that something was happening, and that was all that mattered. So I let every decision I made be based on how he would think about it—even now, to some degree. I know if he is going to call at a certain time, I don't want to not be there because I'm going to have to deal with the consequences. He might be angry. . . . He still has a degree of control.”

Sam is on a promising new path, and her future is bright, but she knows she still has work to do. As she discloses her past to other trustworthy people and as she continues to achieve on her own, we believe she will become liberated from Mark. Basking in her energy, we believe the day will come when Mark no longer has any control over Sam.

Notes

1.
K. Rausch and J. F. Knutson, “The Self-Report of Personal Punitive Childhood Experiences and Those of Siblings,”
Child Abuse & Neglect 15
(1–2) (1991): 29–36.

2.
C. Boyd, “The Implications and Effects of Theories of Intergenerational Transmission of Violence for Boys Who Live with Domestic Violence,”
Australian Domestic & Family Violence Clearinghouse Newsletter 6
(2001a): 6–8.

3.
M. Platt, J. Barton, and J. J. Freyd, “A Betrayal Trauma Perspective on Domestic Violence,” in E. Stark and E. S. Buzawa, eds.,
Violence against Women in Families and Relationships
, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009), 185–207.

4.
A. P. DePrince, “Social Cognition and Revictimization Risk,”
Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 6
(2005): 125–141.

5.
T. L. Messman-More and P. J. Long, “Child Sexual Abuse and Revictimization in the Form of Adult Sexual Abuse, Adult Physical Abuse, and Adult Psychological Maltreatment,”
Journal of Interpersonal Violence 15
(5) (2000): 489–502.

6.
K. A. Becker-Blease, K. Deater-Deckard, T. Eley, et al., “A Genetic Analysis of Individual Difference in Dissociative Behaviors in Childhood and Adolescence,”
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45
(2004): 522–532; 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; 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.

8

Insights from Research

Samantha Spencer's experiences of pushing information about mistreatment out of her awareness are far from unusual. True, in Sam's case there was a lot of mistreatment to hide away and transform in her mind into something she could accept. Fortunately, not all people are exposed to so much personal mistreatment. Conversely, although Sam's experiences were severe, many others have had equally severe—or even worse—mistreatment. Some of those people have also managed not to know fully about the wrongs they experienced. Other people have committed wrongs or have observed wrongs that they have pushed out of consciousness. Indeed, all of us are confronted with reminders of mistreatment toward ourselves or toward others, reminders that we have a tendency to whisk out of consciousness. Sam was herself the victim of at least two kinds of betrayal by Mark: infidelity and abuse. One largely happened when she wasn't there to observe it directly; the other happened to her directly. She managed to push both types of betrayal out of her full awareness. The infidelity seemed well hidden in her own mind, the abuse well transformed into something forgivable. How can this occur?

In the previous chapter we explore
why
people become blind to betrayal. In this chapter, we focus on
how
blindness occurs. We examine several internal and external psychological processes that make betrayal blindness possible. There is nothing stupid or irrational in how we become blind to betrayal. This process arises from normal mechanisms that serve us well most of the time.

Meta-Cognitions

When people are blind to a betrayal, hiding away the information from their own awareness, do they have any mental experience at the time that might later indicate that something peculiar was going on? A conscious awareness of one's own mental process is called
meta-cognition
—a cognition (or a thought) about another cognition (or thought). Learning more about such a mental experience at the time that it occurs may eventually help us unravel the mysteries of the
how
question. Numerous individuals have told us stories of betrayal blindness, and we have asked them about their experiences at the time of being confronted with evidence of betrayal. Some can remember briefly feeling that something was “odd” or “weird” but then not allowing themselves to dwell on the oddness.

Another woman we interviewed told us about not knowing her husband was having an affair. In her case, the truth came out when her husband left her for the other woman. The woman told us that she was sure she hadn't known about the affair. She felt she hadn't even had an intuition about the affair, but then she said, “My soul knew.” She explained, “One night, a week before he left, I went upstairs to this apartment that I have, and I slept up there. . . . I remember thinking, ‘That's weird,' yet it was also sort of like my soul wanted to get away from him.” Maybe her soul wanted to get away from him, but the rest of her apparently did not. She didn't see the affair until her husband left her and told her about it.

A man we interviewed told us a similar story of discovering his wife had been having an affair for at least a year. He said he was shocked and devastated by the discovery. When we asked him whether he might have overlooked evidence of the affair, he told us about accepting his wife's almost total “avoidance” of him “in the night.” He also accepted his wife's claim that it took her three or four hours every day to clean her office after the five o'clock closing. Although this man did not consciously admit to himself that these behaviors were suspicious, he does remember feeling an occasional “worry” that something was “in the air.” The need to trust is a powerful agent, a blinding force.

Attention and Memory

Basic cognitive processes involved in attention and memory most likely play an important role in people being able to dissociate their explicit awareness of betrayal traumas. In several studies, we have found evidence for the relationship between dissociation and what we call
knowledge isolation.
^1.
Knowledge isolation includes acts such as forgetting and not being aware—the very abilities one needs for betrayal blindness.

In order to study knowledge isolation in the laboratory, Jennifer Freyd and her students have often used a psychological test called the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES).
^2.
This test assesses how often people have gaps in awareness, which can range from being lost in the moment (such as missing important landmarks on a familiar drive) to a complete forgetting of events to not feeling real or connected to one's surroundings. In a clinical setting, people with high DES scores are considered candidates for additional testing for dissociative disorders, such as multiple personalities. In a research setting, people with high DES are often classified as “high dissociators.” We and other researchers have found a relationship between DES scores and trauma exposure: the more exposure to trauma, particularly betrayal trauma, the higher the DES score is likely to be.
^3.
We understand this in terms of betrayal trauma theory—that dissociation serves to support betrayal blindness, so people who have had considerable exposure to betrayal trauma develop stronger abilities to dissociate.

In a line of research in our laboratory, we have asked individuals with high DES scores (“high dissociators”) to complete various tasks using basic cognitive mechanisms that are involved in memory and attention. We compared their performance to people with low DES scores (“low dissociators”) to see what we could learn about the cognitive mechanisms underlying betrayal blindness.

Using this approach and a laboratory task called the “Stroop task,” Jennifer Freyd and her colleagues discovered a fascinating result.
^4.
The Stroop task is very simple and very powerful. Participants see a word printed in a particular color, such as the word
potato
in blue ink. The participant's task is to say out loud the name of the ink the word is written in. In the case of
potato
written in blue ink, the correct answer is “blue.” This condition, sometimes called the neutral condition, can be a bit difficult because it requires suppressing the desire to read the word and say, “Potato.” The most difficult version of the Stroop task involves incongruous color terms. In this case, the word
red
is printed in a different color, such as blue. The participant's task is to say, “Blue,” because that is the ink color, but it is very difficult to suppress the desire to say, “Red,” when that is the word. You might want to try this with someone you know. First, write some neutral words, such as
bridge
, in different-colored inks. Then write some color terms in conflicting colored inks, such as the word
green
using blue ink and so on. Ask your friend to name the ink colors out loud, and compare the time it takes him or her to name the color of the neutral words to the time to name conflicting color words. You'll find that it takes people much longer to read the conflicting color list.

There is a black-and-white version of the Stroop task that you can also try. In this case, your task is to say out loud how many characters are on each line. For instance, if you see “C C C C,” The answer is “4” because there are 4 C's. Try it for yourself:

Your answers should have been: 4, 3, 2, 5.

Now again try to say the number of digits on each row:

Your answers should have been: 2, 4, 3, 5.

Most people find this last task with the incongruent digits difficult, and they find the incongruent color version of the Stroop task
very
difficult. That incongruent color task is called the “conflicting color” type of trial. It is difficult because it is hard to overcome the automatic reading of the words and the activation of the meaning of those words, just as it is difficult not to read a sign on the back of a cereal box or on a highway billboard.

Using this basic Stroop task, Freyd and her colleagues found that participants who scored high on the Dissociative Experiences Scale showed greater Stroop interference than did individuals with low DES scores.
^5.
This suggests that the high dissociators had more difficulty with this
selective attention
task than low dissociators did. Selective attention is the ability to focus on just one thing and ignore everything else. In this case, the one thing to focus on is the ink color. The fact that high dissociators show more interference from the word's meaning suggests they may have difficulty with selective attention, perhaps because their skills in attention were damaged by years of having to keep betrayal information out of awareness. Although perhaps they are in this way damaged, high dissociators might also have developed special skills in order to keep information out of awareness.

In a follow-up study, Anne DePrince and Jennifer Freyd explored whether high dissociators might perform better than low dissociators under the right conditions. They used both a selective attention condition, as in the first study, and a divided attention condition. The selective attention condition was just as before—participants were instructed to say only the ink color and were given no other task. Yet the divided attention condition was different—in this case, participants were instructed to say the ink color
and
remember the word itself for a later memory task.
^6.

The results were fascinating. As before, high dissociators had more difficulty with the selective attention task, indicating their inability to focus their attention at will. However, high dissociators had less difficulty in the divided attention task when compared to low dissociators. This suggests that dissociation interferes with selective attention but not with divided attention. In fact, it seems that perhaps dissociation improves the ability to divide attention. We believe that dissociation and therefore betrayal blindness involve some ability to divide attention across multiple aspects of the environment as a way to control the flow of information that is coming into conscious awareness and memory.

To see how this could work, first imagine a young boy who gets molested by his father at night in secret. During the daytime, his father, the primary breadwinner in his family, meets the boy's needs fairly well. For instance, his father provides food, clothing, and even positive attention. This is a classic betrayal trauma situation, because if the child withdraws from his father, he risks losing the good things he gets. So the boy has a very good reason to develop betrayal blindness. This means that during the day, he must interact with his family as if everything is okay, which means he must basically believe it is okay, too. In other words, this young boy has every reason to maintain betrayal blindness. Thinking now about the research on divided attention we just discussed, we can see how this might help the boy. When his father walks into the room while the boy is eating his breakfast, if a little thought starts to form in the boy's mind about the molestation, if he can instead focus his attention on something else in the room, such as his mother's activity at the stove, he can better keep the threatening information out of his awareness. That is divided attention.

In our laboratory research, we also tested people's memory for the words they saw. We included some words that were highly emotionally charged for survivors of betrayal trauma—words such as
rape
and
incest
. We found that the dissociative participants recalled more neutral and fewer trauma-related words than did less dissociative participants.
^7.
Consistent with betrayal trauma theory, this supports the argument that dissociation may help keep threatening information from awareness. Continuing the example of the boy in the previous paragraph, this memory ability would mean he could remember the color of his mother's clothes (neutral) and forget the look on his father's face (charged).

In two follow-up studies, Anne DePrince and Jennifer Freyd used a
directed forgetting paradigm
(a laboratory task in which participants are presented with items and told after each item or list of items whether to remember or forget the material).
^8.
Both high and low dissociators remembered words they were told to remember better than words they were told to forget, but what about their memory for different types of words? In both studies, highly dissociative participants recalled fewer charged and more neutral words, compared with less dissociative participants, who showed the opposite pattern for words they were instructed to remember when divided attention was required. As before, this evidence suggests that divided attention helps with betrayal blindness—a way for people exposed to a lot of betrayal trauma to keep that information out of awareness. Also, consistent with this interpretation, we found that the high dissociators in our studies reported significantly more exposure to trauma in general and betrayal trauma in particular.