Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled (12 page)

“I think actually that was part of the reason I was in the marriage for so long. . . . I tried to keep up this masquerade that we were in a decent marriage, and that made it all the more difficult for them to understand why when I said I wanted to leave. They just thought he was this great guy. . . . What was your question?”

We repeated our question to Sam: “We had asked whether you had reported the hitting.”

“Oh, so I didn't even tell anybody, but now it seems a lot of my friends in Columbus know. . . . I really don't like people who act as victims. Like people who are victims of incest, and that becomes what defines their lives. I really don't want to be defined as a person who was abused because, first of all, I don't want pity, and second of all, in the past I certainly didn't want my friends thinking I was crazy and stupid. Actually, I feel bad because my closest friend back there used to talk about . . . I'd say he'd done this or that, and I even told her his dad used to beat his mom, and I'd say, ‘But he doesn't hit me'—I'd actually tell her that. And she'd say, “Well, that's amazing,” and I kept up this charade that he didn't hit me, and now I feel incredibly guilty because if she were to find out, she'd feel betrayed that I misrepresented him and our relationship. I worry a bit about that.”

“What about when you were going through the divorce? Did you tell your lawyer?”

“No.”

Sam didn't even tell her divorce lawyer! We were glad to hear that Sam had told some of her current friends about the abuse and that she even experienced this as liberating, although clearly she still struggled with identifying with the experience. We respected her desire not to be defined by something horrible imposed on her by Mark. We also shared Sam's dislike of spending time with people who are overly invested in the victim role. Yet there is a middle ground: one can acknowledge being victimized without being indefinitely consumed by the victim role. One can acknowledge being a victim and be available to others, too. Acknowledging being victimized need not be an obstacle to being a satisfied, even joyful, person.

We worried that Sam was still avoiding the full truth of her experience. As is detailed in the final chapters of this book, social sharing and disclosure are fundamentally part of breaking free of betrayal blindness. Sam seemed on her way to this liberation but still had some distance to travel. For instance, as she was talking to us, we began to suspect that Sam still didn't
really
think of Mark's physical attacks as a crime, as indicated by her reluctance to see Mark as being like the batterers on
Oprah
. Mark had unquestionably committed many criminal acts in his assaults on Sam. If she could label these actions crimes, this would be a good sign. So we asked her, “Do you think about the fact that it was a crime?”

“I don't really. . . . He was a victim, too. He was a victim of parents who had this behavior, so even if his behavior toward me was reprehensible, I don't really feel like I could pile that on him, too, that here now everyone is going to know what he did, too. . . . There were a few times I threatened, when he'd be hitting me, and I'd grab the phone and pretend that I was going to call . . . which I'd never do because the notion of the police showing up at my house . . . I don't think I had the courage for that. Also, I think I had enough knowledge to know that I would be so horribly embarrassed the next day trying to deal with it, people would know, he'd be in jail. . . . I don't think I ever really did think of it as a crime. I don't know that even now I think of it as a crime, which is funny because obviously it is . . . and when I hear of other women, I'm very sympathetic. I think I feel enough sympathy for him. . . . I'm protective of him. . . . So, yeah, it's hard to think of it as a criminal thing . . . because it seems there are degrees of it, too, and it's not necessarily even an absolute thing . . . there is a lot of gray area there. But yeah, it is a crime, I can't even imagine ever having reported it.”

As Sam acknowledged her difficulty thinking of Mark's treatment as a crime, distinct from her ability to see other women as victims of a crime, we reflected on the many versions of this double standard. We suspected that this dissociation between the meaning of personal experiences and the meaning of other people's experiences is an important part of betrayal blindness. Mark imposed double standards on Sam (he could go to bars; she couldn't even go to the movies); Sam imposed double standards on herself.

Double Standards and Other Mental Gymnastics That Support Betrayal Blindness

When complete forgetting is not possible, the mind resorts to other measures. Sometimes it transforms personal experiences into something different from the identical experiences of other people. Sam's story reminds us of a research study in which children who were emotionally abused were questioned about their experiences, and so were their siblings. Here is the interesting finding: the children were more likely to label their siblings as abused than themselves, even when they had had a very similar experience.
^1.

Thinking of this study, we mentioned to Sam that people are often resistant to taking on the victim label, not wanting to see themselves that way. We explained, “We hear what you are saying about matters of degree, but in this case it definitely seems he was engaged in criminal activity as defined by the law. It's interesting that when you were talking, you weren't seeing it as a crime . . . maybe more like the drinking . . . a behavior he doesn't have control over. A lot of people who witnessed domestic violence as children don't go on to abuse others . . . so it is related, but not everybody goes on to do that; some people go on to find a way past the abuse.
^2.
We think about what you have accomplished. Some people in your situation might have become abusive to their kids or something, but you haven't; you have done this whole other thing with your life.”

Sam didn't tell anyone, but we were still trying to understand: Did she
tell herself
? She still didn't think of Mark's abuse as a crime, so she could not tell herself, not really, that she was a crime victim. How far did her own unawareness extend? We knew she transformed the meaning and significance of the events from cruel crimes to something forgivable, but did she ever forget the abusive events themselves? This might be hard to find out, because if she did forget any of the events, would she remember them now? And if she forgot for a while and remembered now, would she remember forgetting? This is the sort of challenge that researchers focusing on memory and trauma inevitably face. First, we want to determine what is remembered, but in order to do that, we need to know what really happened. For intimate traumas such as battering, we almost always must rely on the victim's memory, because there are seldom other witnesses, and the abusers rarely will admit to the abuse. Despite these challenges, victims sometimes have good access to their memory for events, and occasionally they can even give detailed descriptions of the way their memories have become more or less accessible over time. Perhaps that would be the case with Sam.

So we returned to our earlier question: “Do you think there were times when you put out of your mind the fact that he hit you?”

“Now I'm really having a hard time remembering,” she said.  “Definitely in Alabama, there was a lot of abuse. But once we moved back to Ohio, it almost seems to me that there were years and years where I don't remember much happening, so I'm just thinking, ‘Did it not happen, or am I just sort of forgetting?' I mean, I don't think . . . I think it changed the way he abused me because he knew my family lived close by, and he liked my parents and my dad especially, so I think maybe that changed . . . but I don't know if I don't remember, or . . . because it seems to me there were years when he didn't . . . and people don't just change like that. . . . I'm thinking about Alabama. . . . I remember there were a number of times I was really bruised, so I couldn't even look in the mirror without remembering, so I know it was very fresh in my mind, but at the same time wanting to forget. Like: make this go away, I don't want people to see me, I don't want to believe this happened.”

Did Sam forget years of physical abuse between the early years of her marriage and the later years? She remembered it from the early years—there were the bruises. She remembered it from the last years—she was already preparing to leave. Were the middle years free of physical violence, or had Sam forgotten the violence? Sam did not know. Maybe someday she would ask Mark. At that point, we didn't know. Meta-memory, or having a memory for memory, is a tricky business. There is much about unawareness and forgetting that is hard to uncover and understand, in part because the very nature of betrayal blindness is a distortion of reality. We will struggle with this problem over and over. It's a challenge, but it's not an insurmountable challenge. What we did know in this particular case is that Sam doubted her memory and struggled with feeling that perhaps she had forgotten the abuse. We also knew that she remembered wanting to forget. Of course, we knew she found a way to rationalize Mark's violence and overlook his flagrant infidelity, too. Overall, Sam was a master at being blind to betrayal.

Dependence on the Perpetrator and the Need to Maintain the Relationship

Why would Sam not know something that was there for the knowing? This is the motivation question. As for her blindness to the infidelity, we believe the answer to the
why
question likely resided in Sam's need to survive. During the initial period of her marriage, Sam had a powerful—although barely conscious—motivation for remaining blind to her husband's betrayal: she felt utterly dependent on her husband. Knowing about the betrayal would have required some action, yet she could not afford to rock the boat. Better not to know. Sometimes ignorance
is
bliss. Ignorance can preserve the relative bliss of the status quo when knowledge would inevitably lead to chaos. Ignorance is bliss when it allows you to survive.

We asked Sam about her financial situation while she was still married, and how that affected her ability to leave Mark. Our theory of betrayal blindness leads us to predict that unawareness of mistreatment in marriage is most likely to occur in the context of financial dependence.
^3.
Sam explained that holding down a job while she was with Mark had been very difficult, that Mark expected to drive her home from work every day but would get very angry if she was late in coming out to the car. One job in particular required her to close the business each day. “It took a little while, and one time I came out and got in the car. He was angry and started hitting me, and one of the managers saw it, so then he told the head manager, who confronted me about it. And I was, I remember, mortified and angry with them for knowing about it or whatever, so shortly after that I quit.”

Sam was financially dependent on Mark; Mark made sure of that. Sam was isolated. Sam had never lived alone. These factors all made her feel dependent on Mark for her very survival. Eventually, Sam did get a part-time job she held onto, but by then she had Rosalie, and Sam didn't know how to live alone, never mind with a baby.

We wondered whether there was more to the story of why and how Sam overlooked Mark's betrayal than her adult situation alone. We suspected that aspects of Sam's childhood in some ways prepared her to respond to Mark and his mistreatment with denial and submissiveness, instead of with awareness and confrontation. It's hard to know whether this is a factor in Sam's case, but research studies indicate that childhood victimization is statistically related to adult victimization.
^4.
Abused women are more likely to have been abused as children than are nonabused women.
^5.
Such correlations refer to statistical probabilities, not deterministic patterns. Smoking may increase the risk of lung cancer, but not every smoker gets cancer, and not every lung cancer patient was a smoker. Furthermore, there isn't only one factor that predisposes someone to betrayal blindness. Many factors interact with one another in complicated ways, including genetic factors, childhood abuse, and gender socialization.
^6.

We did not feel comfortable asking Sam about childhood abuse just then. Asking about abuse can open up wounds, and if she wasn't ready to talk about it, and if we were not prepared to help her through the aftermath of opening up issues, then it was too big a risk to proceed that direction. Sam didn't raise the topic, and we didn't either. (Yet later we wondered: Was our own reluctance part of the dynamics of betrayal blindness, too? Hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil.) Instead, we asked about gender socialization: “Do you think your parents were pretty traditional in their gender beliefs? If you had been a boy, would it have been different?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “I look back, my brother was in Little League, and I wasn't. I used to like to watch baseball on TV. I was the one who actually liked to watch sports but was too timid to try them. My brother mowed the lawn, and I dusted and ironed. . . . I was so well educated in how to be a girl in our society. I have all the body image things, all the role-playing things. I really absorbed all of the things I was supposed to absorb, that it made it almost impossible to leave; it was a commitment for life, almost like ‘you made your bed.' I took that role very seriously. I made my bed. How can I make this work? I tried and tried and tried. It took me a long time to realize it really was not working, and that was really a hard pill to swallow: that I had failed in marriage. I felt ashamed that I was disappointing my parents, and it would go out through the family network, what people think of me, too. I think I just grew up trying so hard to be the good girl, the person I was supposed to be, trying not to displease my parents. . . . So I was trying to be the good wife. I tried for years. I was so delusional about how bad my marriage was.”