We can move on to betrayal trauma.

The basic assumption of betrayal trauma is that trauma is independent of the reaction to trauma.

Betrayal trauma was coined and described by Jennifer Frey, ERYDY-D. I hope I’m pronouncing her name correctly, Jennifer Freid, maybe.

She introduced the terms betrayal trauma and betrayal trauma theory.

Long ago, in 1991, she made a presentation at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. It is absolutely to the discredit of the profession that betrayal trauma theory is not much more dominant and possibly the dominant theory of trauma. It definitely guides me in my studies.

And so Freet made this presentation. It was titled memory repression, dissociative states and other cognitive control processes involved in adult sequelae of childhood trauma. And it was August 1991.

And I want to quote from this talk that she gave.

She said, I propose that the core issue is betrayal, a betrayal of trust that produces conflict between external reality and a necessary system of social dependence.

Of course, a particular event may be simultaneously a betrayal trauma and life threatening. Rape is such an event.

Perhaps most childhood traumas are such events.

Betrayal trauma theory, she says, involved the psychic pain involved in detecting betrayal, as in detecting a cheater. It’s an evolved, adaptive motivator for changing social alliances. In general, it is not to our survival or reproductive advantage to go back for further interaction to those who have betrayed us.

However, if the person who has betrayed us is someone we need to continue interacting with, despite the betrayal, then it is not our advantage to respond to the betrayal in the normal way.

What she’s saying is we must distinguish two situations.

If we depend on the person, if we can go no contact, if we have to continue to be in touch with someone because we need him, then we deny the trauma. We deny the betrayal because it’s not to our advantage to confront him. We may lose him.

So for example, a child with mother, a child betrayed by an abusive, distant, dead, emotionally unavailable, selfish, narcissistic, instrumentalizing, parentifying, objectifying mother, such a child cannot confront that mother. He cannot get rid of that mother. He cannot go no contact with that mother. He cannot even think bad things about mother because he needs mother for survival.

And that’s a perfect example of denying the trauma, denying the betrayal trauma.

And then if you are not dependent on the person, you can just say goodbye. You can just walk away, but many people don’t have this option.

Instead, she says, if we are dependent on the person, if we can’t go no contact, if we can’t just walk away, instead, we essentially need to ignore the betrayal. If the betrayed person is a child and the betrayer is a parent, it is especially essential that the child does not stop behaving in such a way that he will inspire attachment for the child to withdraw from a caregiver he is dependent on would further threaten the child’s life, both physically and mentally.

Thus, the trauma of child abuse by the very nature of it requires that information about the abuse be blocked from mental mechanisms that control attachment and attachment behavior.

One does not need to posit any particular avoidance of psychic pain per se here. Instead, what is a functional significance is the control of social behavior.

Brilliant, brilliant on multiple levels.

First of all, she contextualized trauma within the realm of social interactions.

Anne Freud himself hinted to this when he said that the superego has relational mechanisms, mechanisms related to other people. And of course, in object relations theory, this already blossomed and flourished into a full fledged tenant and foundational concept.

But what she did, she recast trauma as a social interaction.

And her second major contribution is to say that we cannot not, it’s not always, we can’t always acknowledge the trauma, the betrayal and confront our tormentor and our abuser.

Because there are circumstances where what we need to do in order to survive is to deny the trauma to block the trauma.

So as to allow us to continue the attachment and the interaction with the abuser.

And so there’s this concept of betrayal blindness.

Betrayal blindness is the unawareness, not knowing.

You remember from one of my previous videos, the unthought known, unthought known, Bolas came up with this concept.

So betrayal blindness is the unawareness, the not knowing, the forgetting exhibited by people when they’re betrayed.

It’s in a way, one of the ways betrayal blindness comes into being is dissociation.

And so again, Fred introduced the concept of betrayal blindness in 1996, and expanded on it in 1999.

And then together with Birell, in 2013, they developed betrayal trauma theory, which I’m going to discuss in a few minutes and incorporated it in there.

Now, such blindness, we can, we see it, for example, in adultery.

Very often, the spouse or the intimate partner, they have all the proof, all the evidence, everything they need to realize that they’re being cheated on.

And it’s very, very traumatic.

And yet they suppress, they repress, they deny, they dissociate, they forget, they ignore, they lie to themselves, they refrain, they confabulate, just not to confront the trauma.

Same in the workplace, where you can’t afford to lose your job. And same in society, victims, perpetrators, witnesses, they all display betrayal blindness, in order to preserve relationships, or institutions, or social systems, because they depend on these.

There was a very important and interesting essay by Eileen Zurbrigen. Why do they have these names? I think they ended up in psychology because they have these names. It’s very traumatizing.

Zurbrigen, whatever.

So she wrote an essay, Betrayal Trauma in the 2004 election. And she used the theory to give a demonstration of something called institutional betrayal.

Institutional betrayal is when the wrongdoing, the abuse, is perpetrated by an institution. And it’s perpetrated on individuals that depend on the institution.

So failure to prevent a catastrophe, like a pandemic, a response that supports wrongdoing, suppression of rights, abuse, infringement, encroachment, coercion, rings a bell in today’s circumstances.

Or for example, in sexual assault, where the system actually pathologizes and re-traumatizes, re-victimizes the rape victim, not the rapist.

So these are all institutional forms of institutional betrayal.

And again, institutional betrayal is a part of betrayal trauma theory.

And I refer you to Platt, Barton and Fritsches, 2009, Smith and Fritsches, 2011, several papers, Medrano, Martin and Fritsches, 2011. And the core book is Blind to Betrayal, highly recommended, Freid and Birell, 2013.

I want to quote a sentence from Freid. She wrote in 2008, betrayal trauma occurs when the people or institutions on which a person depends for survival significantly violate that person’s trust or well-being, childhood, physical, emotional or sexual abuse perpetrated by a caregiver are examples of betrayal trauma.

And then we come to betrayal trauma theory.

And the earliest paper that had dealt with this, the best of my knowledge, is a paper by Sivers, Schuller and Freid from 2002. And there they wrote that betrayal trauma theory is a theory that predicts that the degree to which a negative event represents a betrayal by a trusted, needed other will influence the way in which that event is processed and remembered.

Now that sounds simple, but it’s absolutely one of the most revolutionary approaches to trauma and to the consequences and sequelae of trauma. I will read it again, more slowly this time. Pay attention.

Betrayal trauma theory is a theory that predicts that the degree to which a negative event represents a betrayal by a trusted, needed other, that degree will influence the way in which that event is processed and remembered.

The more you depend on someone, the more you need someone financially for survival, to raise the kids together, whatever you could be rendered homeless, you could be rendered destitute, you could lose your children, you could use your job. The more dependent you are on someone, the less you will perceive that that person is abusing you, tormenting you, taunting you, violating your boundaries.

And throughout the 1990s and in a seminal article published in 1994 and in the book in 1996, Fraid, together with others like the Prince, Gleaves, expounded on that.

And so she gradually refined the concept of betrayal trauma. And she said it is trauma perpetrated by someone with whom the victim is close to and reliant upon for support and survival.

And so betrayal trauma theory, the first appearance of this phrase was in 1994 by, of course, Jennifer Fraid.

It’s situations when people or institutions on which you rely, you’re relying for protection, you trust for resources and survival. These people violate your trust, well being, break your boundaries.

And sometimes statistically and egregiously betrayal is the core and dissident of many, many mental health manifestations.

For example, when you use betrayal theory, you have perfect explanation for dissociation. You know, because dissociation is intended to preserve the relationship with a caregiver when you can’t go no contact. And the child dependent on the caregiver for support will have a higher need to dissociate traumatic experience from conscious awareness.

In other words, you can begin to regard the false self that the child creates as a form of dissociation. It’s like a repository. It’s like the child says, okay, I’m exposed to abuse, I’m exposed to trauma by, for example, mother, but I can’t be conscious of it.

Because if I become conscious of the abuse and the trauma, if I develop negative emotions, if I get hurt, then I won’t be able to attach to mommy. I won’t be able to bond with mommy and I won’t be able to receive from mommy what I need in order to survive. That’s a dangerous path.

So exactly as Melanie Klein suggested, the child splits.

But in a pathological dysfunctional family environment where the mother is a dead mother, the child doesn’t split the mother into good and bad because there’s no good. There’s only bad.

So the child cannot split the mother. Instead, the child splits himself.

Healthy, normal children split mommy into bad mother, good mother, bad breast, good breast. That’s Melanie Klein.

Children, when they develop, when they grow between the ages of six months and two years, their mommy sometimes is good, sometimes is frustrating, sometimes is there, sometimes is absent. So the child learns to separate these aspects into a good mother and a bad mother.

And later on, by the way, the child annexes, appropriates the bad aspects so that he can idealize mother.

But it’s always clear that there’s a unitary child and a kind of disjointed mother.

The need to split mother is critical in development. The child who later develops into a narcissist made a wrong turn.

Instead of splitting the bad and good aspects of mother, he splits his own. His personality fractures and fragments in a dissociative process.

And that gives rise to the false self. He cannot split mother into good and bad because there’s no good in mother.

So he splits himself.

Betrayal trauma theory also integrates evolutionary processes, mental moduli, social cognitions, developmental needs, and even ethics.

Because there’s a violation of trust, it’s highly unethical. There’s a question of foundations of morality we know, and it’s common and accepted and orthodox thinking that empathy underlies morality. It’s not possible to be a moral being or an ethical being without empathy.

So in such situations, ethics, the development of morality is challenged.

All people from a very alleged age react to injustice. We have two years old reacting to injustice in numerous studies.

So we realize when there’s a violation of the social contract, we realize when our trust is betrayed, we realize when our boundaries are breached, they are cheat detectors.

And so in the context of abusive relationships, you want to escape. That’s your first urge. Your reflex is to run away, you know, flight, fight, etc. You touch a hot plate, you withdraw your hand, withdraw avoidance. The flight response is fundamental.

Second most fundamental is the fight response. Then there is the freeze response. And finally, the phone response.

But in abuse and trauma, initially in healthy situations, it’s flight.

But what do you do if escape is not a viable option? If your cheater detecting mechanism leads you to want to avoid and want to escape and want to flee from a person upon whom your survival depends, you can’t go away, you will die.

So what you do you suppress your cheater detecting mechanism for the higher goal of survival. It’s psychogenic amnesia. It’s designed to perpetuate attachment by blocking painful experiences.

And we have this in in romantic betrayal. Early literature freed, you know, everyone was talking about betrayal of an unspoken agreement like betrayal of trust, there was an unspoken agreement and it was breached.

And this is the source of the pain.

But betrayal trauma theory suggests that all these manifest all these behaviors like domestic violence, cheating and so on, they involve a betrayal of trust.

But when the victim has no viable exit strategy option, when the victim remains or returns to the abuser does not report the abuse, reports the severity of the abuse experiences shame and anxiety, which are also mechanisms mental mechanisms intended to downplay what’s happening or to repress to deny what’s happening.

All these are attachment injury. And it’s a component that is critical in betrayal trauma theory. It’s not only in a betrayal of trust, like in the classic literature, it’s a betrayal of trust in a time of need and dependence.

This combination is what is what destroys, erodes and corrodes the victim that the victim had been betrayed at its most vulnerable moment at her most vulnerable moment.

She depended. She depended on her abuser. She believed her abuser. She relegated functions to her abuser, sometimes ego functions, internal functions.

And then the betrayal. Betrayal alone is bad. But betrayal with trust, betrayal with need, betrayal with survival, betrayal. That’s horrible.

And in the context of intimate partner violence, vulnerability, fear relationship, relationship expectations, shame, low self esteem, communication issues. These are all outcomes of the exposure to betrayal trauma.

And there are barriers not only to escape, but also barriers to forming new relationships.

You see, ironically, if you cheat, if you cheat on an abusive partner, it’s a sign of health. It’s a sign of partial health. Let’s be precise, because at least you are taking care of yourself. At least you’re trying to solve your wounds. You’re trying to self administer some medication. It’s a dysfunctional solution. There are much better solutions. No contact is the best solution.

Gray rock, second best solution. But cheating is a solution that indicates partial health.