Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled (14 page)

Kathy Becker-Blease and Jennifer Freyd found a similar interaction with preschool children, using pictures instead of words.
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In this study, children were asked to look at pictures that were either neutral or charged. After they looked at the pictures, their memory was tested by showing the children a new set of pictures that included some they had already seen and some they had not. The children were told to tell the research assistant in each case if they had seen the picture before. All of the pictures came from story books for children, but some were of mundane scenes, such as a picnic, while others were more threatening, such as a father lurking in a doorway next to a sleeping child.

A divided-attention context was created by telling the children to look at the pictures while also listening to animal names being played in the background. Every time they heard the word
sheep
, they were supposed to squeeze a sheep toy that made a “baaa” sound. In selective-attention conditions, children simply looked at the pictures without hearing animal names. The results with children were similar to those with adults. Under divided-attention conditions, children who had trauma histories and who were highly dissociative remembered fewer emotionally charged pictures and more neutral pictures when compared to nontraumatized children. However, there were no differences between children's memory under selective-attention conditions. As with traumatized adults, the traumatized children seemed able to divide their attention in ways that let them
not
remember information that might cause them to be aware of betrayal.

In summary, these studies suggest that keeping information about betrayal traumas out of awareness and memory may lead to high levels of dissociation. Related to this, people who are high dissociators (and therefore may have experienced abuse and had practice in “not knowing”) are more likely to keep emotional information out of their awareness and memory. This dissociation seems to require dividing one's attention. A very interesting possibility is that dissociative individuals may even seek or create environments that require divided attention, such as a hectic workplace. Children who are dissociative may seem to create chaos around them, not because they are disorganized but because they cannot let themselves know. Both children and adults who have been exposed to betrayal trauma may find it easier to manage in environments with a lot of distraction. To low dissociators, this might look like a preference for chaos. It might even appear as if high dissociators are trying to create chaos. Yet in fact they may do this simply because it helps them keep out of their awareness any betrayal information that is too dangerous to know.

Dissociation

As we have discussed, we can know and not know at the same time. This ability to know and not know may depend on the compartmentalization of knowledge that is possible due to the design of the human brain. Consider the case of “Marnie,” a thirty-three-year-old woman who has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (previously called “multiple personality disorder”). Marnie is most often depressed. She has been treated in the mental health system for many years. Marnie has participated in research involving brain imaging—scientists have watched Marnie's brain in action using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). One of Marnie's alter personalities is “Mimi”—a bright and energetic woman, quite unlike the usually sullen Marnie. Mimi tells about Marnie's past, when she experienced beatings and sexual and psychological torment at the hands of her alcoholic and criminally violent mother.

Marnie, Mimi, and several other personalities agreed to team up with their psychiatrist, Don Condie, and neurobiologist Gouchual Tsai.
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Using fMRI, Tsai and Condi were able to peer into Marnie's brain as she was switching from different personality states. They found out that a crucially important part of Marnie's brain, the hippocampus, was dramatically smaller than would be expected for her brain size. Shrunken hippocampi have been found in other trauma survivors as well, and we know that the hippocampus plays an essential role in forming memories. When Marnie was switching between different personalities, a child personality named “Guardian” took over, and activity throughout the hippocampus and the surrounding (temporal) cortex ebbed. When Marnie later reemerged, the right side of the hippocampus lit up with renewed activity. The researchers compared all of this to a task in which Marnie was just pretending to switch personalities; in this instance, the brain activity was very different. These sorts of results are preliminary—but very suggestive—of the underlying brain activity involved in the most extreme cases of betrayal blindness. We explore more about dissociative identity disorder in chapter 9, when Cathy has a chance to tell her story.

Knowing and Not Knowing about Feelings

Researchers in personality and clinical psychology have investigated the ways that individuals differ in terms of their disconnection from themselves and others. For instance, some people show high levels of alexithymia.
Alexithymia
refers to the inability to know or state one's own emotional feelings and experiences—probably a very useful condition for maintaining betrayal blindness. You may notice that alexithymia and dissociation are related ideas. Dissociation is the more cognitive disconnection that can occur between one's perceptions, memories, and awareness. People who have a lot of dissociative experiences are considered to be high in dissociative tendencies. Exposure to betrayal trauma is associated with having higher dissociative tendencies.
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We also know from research, including research conducted in our laboratory with Rachel Goldsmith, that the amount of alexithymia is related to the person's exposure to childhood abuse.
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It appears as if both the dissociation of perceptions and memories and the dissociation of feelings are ways to remain blind to betrayal.

Perpetrator Grooming and Demands for Silence

In addition to internal processes involved in not knowing about betrayal, the victim may experience social pressures not to know and to be silent. For example, the perpetrator and others (such as family and church) may demand silence. Demands for silence may lead to a complete failure to even discuss an experience. Social pressure interacts with psychological mechanisms so that experiences that have never been shared with anyone else may have a different structure in the mind than shared experiences do. We talk more about this in a later chapter.

Betrayers often help those they betray to remain unaware of the betrayal. For instance, rather than making explicit demands for silence, perpetrators often groom their victims for unawareness and denial. Some perpetrators may do this without even realizing it. Such perpetrators may even remain partly blind themselves, and this blindness may help account for the lack of awareness of others around them. Many betrayers seem to be engaging in a repetition of acts of betrayal that occurred to them. As one therapist who treats young sex offenders said to us, “They are so afraid of betrayal, they betray again.” A perpetrator who is himself blind may induce a kind of blindness in the victim and the bystanders.

Other child molesters seem to be more aware of betrayal blindness in their victims and to take advantage of it. It is as if they know how it works, and they then make it work to their advantage. Consider the case of Michael Mattingly. Mattingly was charged with sexually assaulting a nine-year-old boy.
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He told police that he had befriended the boy's mother years before the abuse began, in order to gain unrestricted access to her son. Mattingly also told police that in other cases, he gained the trust of his victims and their families by offering to baby-sit, take the children to movies, or have them stay at his home for sleepovers. By the time Mattingly actually abused the children, the families had come to depend on his friendship and help with child care. The trust and the dependence were there, making it easy for Mattingly to abuse the children, while he remained protected by the betrayal blindness he helped create.

Groupthink and Government Cover-Up

Betrayal blindness is also helped along by various group processes, including what has been called “groupthink.” There are many times when self-censorship can preserve the harmony of the group in the short run, although it may lead to disasters later on. Irving Janis offered the Bay of Pigs invasion as a classic example of groupthink.
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Although the invasion was planned during the Eisenhower presidency, it was the Kennedy administration that accepted and authorized the plan. Initially, some members of Kennedy's advising team raised important objections to the plan, but group pressure ultimately resulted in self-silencing. The advisers began to believe the impossible, and the result was a fiasco.

Governments can also effectively cover up betrayals. The cover-up of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 is an example of blindness to institutional betrayal, in which the government directly contributed to the forgetting. The Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in Beijing on June 4, 1989, when nonviolent protestors were killed by police forces. The protesters, mostly students and intellectuals, began congregating in April to mourn the death of an official who had supported political liberalization. Students at the mourning then demonstrated in support of continued economic reform and liberalization. By May, this was a powerful nonviolent movement in China. The government responded by declaring martial law. On June 4, the government moved into the streets and used gunfire to clear the area. Although it is not known exactly how many civilians died, most estimates are from hundreds to thousands. After the killing, the government arrested many surviving protestors and banned the press from covering the events.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) forbids discussion of the Tiananmen Square protests. Among the actions the CPC has taken to block or censor information are limiting media and Internet resources and requiring textbooks to omit the topic.
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One cannot even search for “4 June” on search engines such as Google within China without meeting a news blackout. Those who do dare to speak about Tiananmen Square have been arrested. As a consequence of all of this explicit censorship, public memory has been effectively blinded.

Need to Trust

Closely related to betrayal is the concept of trust. Remember that we cannot be betrayed by someone we do not trust.

The headline reads, “Trusted Doctor Found to Be Killer,” and below that, “Citizens feel betrayed to discover that the respected Dr. Harold Shipman had a dark side.”
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Shipman was a doctor in Hyde, England, a working-class mill town of thirty-five thousand, who was found guilty of killing fifteen female patients with injections of heroin. Like the notorious American physician Dr. Michael Swango, dubbed “Doctor Death,” who was charged with poisoning three of his own patients, Shipman is suspected of poisoning far more of his patients than can be proved in court.
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Both Shipman and Swango apparently got away with murder—over and over and over. In retrospect, former patients and coworkers point to overwhelming evidence in both cases that the string of patient deaths surrounding these doctors was completely outside of the normal range. How could this evidence have been ignored so consistently and for so long?

The concept of trust—and the need to trust—comes up again and again in both of these cases. Patients, the community, and coworkers all felt a powerful need to trust Drs. Shipman and Swango, and they repeatedly turned a blind eye to the evidence of unnatural deaths. We trust physicians with our lives. Without that trust, we would have a challenge accepting their care and advice. As we said earlier, this need to trust is a powerful blinding agent.

Whenever a person or a group is dependent on others who have more power, it may be advantageous to remain unaware of mistreatment from the power holder(s) to preserve the status quo. Knowing about mistreatment naturally leads to withdrawal or rebellion, which may alienate the more powerful person(s). Such betrayal blindness is almost always a survival strategy. As one mother said in response to her daughter's claim that she had been raped and impregnated by her mother's boyfriend, “I would have a hard time believing that somebody in my home, whom I loved and trusted, would hurt any of my children.” By refusing to believe her daughter, this mother was able to preserve her trust in, and thus her relationship with, her live-in boyfriend. People often have a powerful motivation to remain ignorant of mistreatment and betrayal.

Betrayal blindness at its inception is based on an extreme need to keep some aspect of a situation intact, whether maintaining a marriage, keeping a family together, or holding onto one's position in a community. If the marriage, the family, or the community appears necessary for survival, remaining blind to the betrayal is a survival strategy. As we have seen, both internal and social processes operate to keep us unaware. This unawareness is a survival strategy, but it can also prove toxic to the mind, the body, relationships, and society.