Interpersonal Betrayal as Disempowerment

Jennifer J. Freyd (1996) proposed the concept of betrayal trauma (BT) as a paradigm for understanding both the phenomenon of delayed recall of childhood abuse and for conceptualizing such experiences as traumatic since they are rarely life-threatening. Interpersonal betrayal functions as another sort of common experience of disempowerment occurring in patriarchal systems in which social hierarchies are a norm and in which members of those hierarchies are assigned responsibility for the care and welfare of less powerful others. While Freyd’s model emerged from a study of the phenomenon of the abuse of children by their caregivers, it can exemplify the power of betrayal in many relationships to create distress where there is an acute imbalance of power between the parties involved. Because children in U.S. mainstream culture are frequently assumed to have characteristics that later in life will be gendered as female, gender and misogyny are implicit components of this betrayal of power-unequal relationships, even if both parties are of the same sex or male.

BT theory provides a cognitive science model of how interpersonal and psychosocial dynamics can make an experience of betrayal by someone on whom an individual depends disempowering and thus potentially traumatic and distressing. Freyd argues that humans, like other highly social primates, are acutely attuned to the possibility of interpersonal betrayal so as to know how to choose with whom to closely associate. Children, however, have no choice in the matter of their close associates; because human children are highly dependent on their adult caregivers for safety and nurturance and because those adults control children’s lives, children who are being abused in their family are placed in the intolerable position of having to manage betrayal, which generates the urge to detach and flee, with the need for dependency, which generates attachment and closeness.

Freyd has argued that this intolerable situation leads abused children to store their knowledge of the abuse in separate neural networks that are unavailable cognitively until such time as the child is either no longer dependent on the abusive adult, or cues in the interpersonal or physical environment retrieve the information and bring it to consciousness (e.g., an abused child, now an adult, has a child who reaches the age at which the parent’s own abuse experiences began to occur). Research by Freyd and colleagues (Freyd, DePrince, & Zurbriggen, 2001) has found that individuals with the “symptom” of delayed, intrusive recall of childhood trauma are significantly more likely to have been traumatized by close family members than individuals who never forget the abuse experiences.

The BT model posits that betrayal traumas are traumatic emotionally for humans only at that point when the extent of the betrayal becomes knowable and comprehensible. The BT model helps to explain why experiences that are confusing and unpleasant, but not an immediate cause of terror, can become sources of distress that are felt as life-threatening. The betrayals of trust that occur in contexts where people can reasonably assume that a powerful other is looking out for their interests and welfare shatter the assumptions embedded in gendered rules of behavior—for example, that being a conventionally masculine male is a protection against being sexually assaulted, a crime that implies the femaleness of its victims. A betrayal trauma does not require a family relationship of caregiving in order to occur, but can happen whenever power is abused in a context that patriarchy has coded as safe, so long as the rules of gender and other cultural norms are being observed by the less powerful. This etiology of distress seems particularly valuable to feminist practice given that gender is enacted so strongly in many interpersonal relationships and is especially powerfully evoked in relationships of care and emotional closeness, those settings in which betrayal has a greater likelihood of occurring.

There is a good reason that so many feminist models for the etiology of distress invoke the language of trauma. At its core, patriarchy is traumagenic; by devaluing some lives, it renders those lives more at risk. While feminist therapists are aware that BT and insidious trauma are different in many ways from the trauma of rape, combat, or torture, feminist therapy places those overt traumata of human design into the context of the larger cultural framework that creates them. Oppression can be traumatic, even when not of the Criterion A variety; by so naming it, feminist therapy emphasizes the powerful role that oppressive cultures and norms play in the trajectory toward distress and dysfunction for many people. Brown & Freyd (2008) have proposed that the awareness that one has been betrayed or oppressed can function as the “Criterion A” of these forms of trauma.

“SYMPTOM” AS RESISTANCE

Specific symptoms of distress and dysfunction are defined in feminist therapy as evidence of resistance to experiences of oppression and of attempts to solve the problem of powerlessness via whatever means are available biologically, developmentally, intrapsychically, contextually, culturally, and/or spiritually (Brown, 1994). Feminist therapy posits that all persons make attempts to solve the problems of their existence, but that not all strategies work as well as others and that some strategies require access to resources that are dependent on privilege. Effectiveness of a strategy will reflect such variables as the ages and developmental stages at which it was invented by the person, with those strategies from younger ages usually leading to more problematic outcomes; whether the individual was required to invent the strategy alone or had assistance and/or modeling, with individual efforts frequently leading to more difficulties for the person; whether the strategy is one common to or dystonic with the culture and context in which the person lives, with culturally acceptable strategies usually giving better short-term outcomes; and how much social privilege is available to a person to assist in the implementation of the strategy or protect from its problematic outcomes (Brown, 1994). A person’s resistance strategies may be culturally coded as socially desirable and not immediately lead to distress or be seen as dysfunctional.

For example, the child sexually abused by her stepfather for 4 years beginning at age 5 may use overwork as a dissociative coping strategy to deflect awareness from the events happening at the hands of her perpetrator, with whom she must live and maintain a relationship. Working hard at school and becoming involved in extracurricular activities, which transforms into workaholism in adult life, are developmentally available strategies for coping. These strategies also place her out of reach of her stepfather for many hours of the day, and in the presence of more benign adults. If the child is in a situation of educational privilege where academic achievement is well nurtured and rewarded, privilege may cement the use of this form of dissociation even further. The overwork maybe construed by others as evidence of organization, dedication, or hard work, likely to yield rewards while in school and in the workplace.

However, overwork interferes with intimate relationships. For the child, this was functional; staying away from family and home offered safety until the stepfather left the family. This same child, grown into a young adult, may approach therapy in distress because a partner is unhappy with a now-chronic inability to take time for intimacy. At this point the resistance strategy has become a problematic “symptom.” Calling it a symptom by no means implies that it was a defective resistance strategy, however, since emotional and sexual intimacy are also likely to cue recollections of the childhood abuse. A resistance strategy that interfered with intimacy and sexuality and achieved kudos in the safer components of life was thus doubly protective and a highly effective form of resistance.

Feminist therapy acknowledges that some experiences of distress have strong biological components and origins. However, it argues that how that distress is culturally received and coded, and the metadistress that a person and her or his social context has about the symptom, has as much, if not more, impact on the lived experience of distress and any dysfunction arising from it as the biological phenomenon. Various forms of psychosis are, for example, thought today to be most likely due in large part to as yet unidentified biological variables. However, feminist commentators have noted that the reception given today to a woman who reports speaking with the Archangel Michael and being told to leave home and speak directly to the head of state (she is likely to be hospitalized and placed on an antipsychotic medication, which may cause her to gain weight, develop type 2 diabetes, and will at best dull her thinking and make her sleepy) is very different than that given to one particular young woman named Jeanne who reported, and acted upon, this communication in northern France in the 1300s. We know that second woman as St. Joan of Arc. A close reading of the lives of many saints and biblical prophets suggests that all or most experienced what would today be called some form of psychosis or delusional thinking. In their cultures and their times they were valued as women and men of vision and holiness, not diagnosed psychotic, locked away, or medicated.

Similarly, different cultural systems of understanding distress will construct the various ways in which people tell us about their distress. Feminist therapy argues, consequently, that even those sources of distress that are primarily biological are still given social/contextual meaning, which in turn informs the metadistress (how upset vs. how happy are you that you are hearing the angel or Blessed Mother or HaShem speaking to you) experienced by the individual, as well as the ways in which the culture around that person responds both to her or his experience and metadistress. The metadistress may be where the resistance can be identified and will reflect the client’s experiences of oppression and powerlessness, as well as resilience and personal power. The response of the cultural context will also inform the meaning that an individual makes of her or his experience, which in turn colors the metadistress.

As a consequence of this paradigm for understanding distress, diagnostic thinking in feminist therapy does not focus on assigning a DSM diagnosis. In fact, in common with humanistic and narrative therapy models, feminist therapy eschews the use of the DSM except where necessary to obtain access to care for a client and then only in consultation with the client about the necessity for the use of the DSM label. As Brown (2000) noted, “Feminist psychology has a long and ambivalent relationship with the construction of psychological distress as disorder or pathology” (p. 287). This ambivalence is most commonly enacted at those junctures where the practicing feminist therapist must decide whether and how to use formal diagnostic labels; feminist therapists have discussed how to use formal diagnostic codes without unconsciously participating in the reification of distress as pathology inherent in the medical model (Ballou & Brown, 2002; Brown, 2000).

What a feminist therapist does practice is the assessment and “diagnosis,” as it were, of the client’s various resistance strategies. Inquiry, direct or subtle, is made by the therapist into how a person dealt with the vicissitudes as well as the triumphs of life, focusing attention on questions identified earlier as to variables informing resistance strategies. The contributions of culture to expressions of distress and dysfunction will be added into this exploratory mix, since patriarchal norms also create standards of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” emotional expression. In common with therapists informed by solution-focused models, feminist therapists will invite their clients to appraise their symptoms as problem solutions that may have outlived their usefulness or that have always suffered from insufficient information or resources during the development of the solutions. This discussion, in which the person in therapy is invited to perceive themselves as having been engaged in the struggle to be safe and well, becomes a component of an egalitarian and empowering relationship between therapist and client.

For example, a client may be struggling with intrusive images of creatures that no one else can see, or voices that tell her to hurt herself. The client expresses to her therapist a desire to be less frightened or controlled by those voices and images and also expresses a desire to not take medication as she has had alarming experiences with medication in the past. A feminist therapist might invite the client to have a more powerful relationship with this aspect of self and keep safe by offering instruction in mindfulness-based methods such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2003), which unlike antipsychotic medications, do not make voices go away but do change the individual’s relationship with such voices so that the individual has more choice and less fear in relationship to them. ACT involves a fair amount of direct instruction and activity by the therapist and may on the surface appear not to be egalitarian or empowering, as it is quite directive at times. But as Brown (2002) notes in a discussion of another fairly active technique, eye movement desensitization reprocessing (Shapiro, 2002), a therapy may be feminist as long as it meets the criteria of supporting feminist practice—the creation of feminist consciousness, the development of egalitarian relationship, and the empowerment of the client. Thus, ACT may be utilized as a feminist empowerment strategy if the client identifies feeling disempowered by the voices in her head, as it offers a powerful tool for increasing the client’s choices. The problem becomes, not the voices and visions, or even the client’s fear, but the metafear, learned from this culture, of having voices and visions and what this implies about being “crazy.” However, if the therapist were to impose the use of ACT to treat voices and visions when that was not the client’s agenda, then egalitarianism would have been violated and the practice would no longer be feminist.

Feminist therapists also pay attention to the larger social context as it influences the distress that a client brings into therapy, the ways in which they express that distress and the process of therapy itself. Feminist therapists invite clients to attend to ways in which the external environment has been a source of misinformation about themselves, their value, and their capacities. They ask themselves and their clients to examine how culture has taught them to encode their inner experiences into communications with the world. How have they learned to convey sadness, fear, and anger when all of those emotions, and more, are constrained in their expression by norms of gender and culture? They also invite clients and themselves to notice how changing external worlds affect internal and relational worlds, changing the salience of an experience to render it more meaningful in either joyful or painful ways.

MULTIPLE IDENTITIES AS NORMATIVE PARADIGM

A final key construct of feminist therapy is the model of multiple identities. Any feminist epistemology of identity will take two factors into account. The first is the presence of multiple social locations in the life of each person and the attendant combination of privilege and disempowerment stemming from each of these. The second is that these experiences will interact in a variety of manners and that there is not one, but a multiplicity, of trajectories of identity development that can lead to good function and/or distress and dysfunction. The models discussed here are illustrative of how feminist therapy approaches an understanding of people’s multiple identities.