Betrayal Trauma

Betrayal trauma is a trauma perpetrated by a person or institution on whom the victim must depend. It involves the violation of the trust within caregiving relationships. Examples include child abuse perpetrated by relatives, teachers, or religious leaders; intimate partner violence; abusive treatment in employment settings; and political oppression. Betrayal trauma has specific psychological and cognitive consequences. A common response is dissociation, a mental process in which individuals separate themselves from conscious awareness of their present situations. Dissociation is linked to memory impairment for trauma. Betrayal trauma theory accounts for the deficits in awareness and memory for mistreatment that psychologists have observed in victims of interpersonal trauma. The terms betrayal trauma and betrayal trauma theory were first introduced by psychologist Jennifer Freyd in 1991. Since that time, at least seven research studies have demonstrated that individuals who experience betrayal trauma are more likely to report a period of amnesia for their trauma, as compared to individuals who experienced other forms of trauma such as accidents. Other investigations have demonstrated variations in experiences of betrayal trauma according to gender and age, and the impact of betrayal trauma on various aspects of physical and mental health.

Betrayal trauma theory addresses how individuals may separate instances of violation from their memory and conscious awareness in order to preserve a necessary relationship. Individuals do not need to recognize their treatment as a betrayal to experience betrayal trauma. Betrayal blindness is the term used to describe the deficits in awareness or memory observed in survivors of betrayal. A large body of research demonstrates that some individuals who experience memory impairment for trauma experiences later recall the trauma they endured, and there does not appear to be a link between memory accuracy and memory persistence. Although initially adaptive, dissociation and memory impairment can lead to individuals' being re victimized or becoming perpetrators themselves.

Research examining memory persistence for abuse demonstrates greater levels of memory impairment for trauma perpetrated by caregivers than for trauma perpetrated by other individuals or for noninterper-sonal trauma. In addition, laboratory experiments show that individuals with higher levels of dissociation exhibit deficits in selective attention tasks, but show increased skills on divided attention tasks, as compared with people with low levels of dissociation. In particular, individuals with high levels of dissociation are less likely to remember trauma-related words, which suggests that they may be particularly adept at disregarding threatening information. Individuals with high levels of dissociation are significantly more likely to report trauma experiences in general, and betrayal trauma instances in particular, than are people with low levels of dissociation.