July 24, 2025 • 32 mins
Dr. Jennifer Freyd, the leading expert in betrayal trauma, breaks down what separates betrayal from other traumatic experiences. For more on betrayal blindness, read Blind to Betrayal by Dr. Jennifer Freyd and Dr. Pamela Birrell.
For more on institutional betrayal and institutional courage, check out the Center for Institutional Courage.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everyone. We wanted to let you know that this
is our final episode of season four and Caroline Borega's story,
But don't worry, there's a lot more Betrayal coming your way.
We will be returning on Thursday, August seventh with a
brand new season of Betrayal Weekly. Be sure to subscribe
to make sure you never miss an episode, and there's
more Betrayal news. If Betrayal is your must listen, you
(00:24):
should subscribe to Beyond Betrayal, our new substack community. It's
free to join impact with the extras we can't squeeze
into the show. Our team shares behind the scenes conversations,
never before seen videos, and personal essays from the survivors
you've met on the series, including Caroline, Stacey, Ashley, and Me.
(00:44):
Upgraded members can even jump into live chats with us.
Ready to dig deeper, click the link in the show
notes or visit Betrayal dot substack dot com, hit subscribe
and join for free today. Okay, now onto the show.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
There was a woman whose husband was eventually arrested for
sexually abusing children in a school, and the police found
all these stacks of child pornography sitting around his living
room in plain sight, and they interviewed his wife and
she said she did not see them. She could have
(01:24):
her eyes on them and not see them.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I'm Andre Gunning and this is Betrayal, Season four, Episode
ten Courage. In our last episode, we closed the book
on Caroline's story, but before we end our season, we
wanted to dive deeper in to one aspect of Caroline's
(02:02):
healing journey.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Within a day of Joel's disclosure, I was seeking therapeutic
intervention for myself and my kids, and I am grateful
for that therapist. She definitely was there for crisis intervention.
That being said, though there was never this term betrayal trauma,
I never heard the term and our duration of therapy.
(02:28):
I'm not faulting her, but I hadn't had anyone actually
walk me through the emotions and that how I was
feeling was actually a normal part of being betrayed. The
reason why I wrote to the podcast was because listening
(02:50):
to season one driving with my daughter was life changing.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Caroline was on a road trip with Nicole when they
came across our first season of Betrayal. This was the
first time either of them heard a professional speaking about betrayal. Trauma,
and I.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Must have played that episode a dozen times. It was
just a description that was so empowering and so relatable,
and I just wanted to continue to have that connection,
even if it was through a podcast.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
The shame, the guilt. Caroline thought she was alone in
these feelings. She had no idea that there were others
out there suffering from the same form of trauma. The
people who've shared their stories in prior seasons and on
the Betrayal Weekly podcast felt the same way.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
The person I had loved and been in a relationship
with disappeared, and with him went three years of my
life into a black hole.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I was like, what's wrong with me?
Speaker 3 (03:53):
I was just heartsick, gut sick, heartsick.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
My whole body responded in All I could think of
was who are you?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
How could you do this?
Speaker 1 (04:04):
All these people experience betrayal trauma. It's the thread that
binds all the stories we tell. And we got the
opportunity to speak to the person who coined the term
betrayal trauma in the first place. She is a retired
research psychologist who pioneered the field of betrayal trauma. So
to close out our season, we wanted to share parts
(04:27):
of our conversation with you.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
My name is Jennifer Fried. I was a university professor
at the University of Oregon most of my career, where
I taught psychology and did a lot of research, specifically
developing betrayal trauma theory, the concept of betrayal blindness all
the way through to institutional courage.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
After going to graduate school for cognitive psychology, doctor Fried
made her way to the University of Oregon.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Some years into my time at the University of Oregon,
I really changed pivoted the kind of research I was
doing to the psychology of trauma.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Doctor Fried started compiling research on a specific form of trauma,
the kind you experience when someone close to you breaks
your trust.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
At the time, in the early nineteen nineties, there was
still within academic psychology a disbelief in the prevalence of trauma,
particularly interpersonal, particularly sexual trauma, as well as its significance
or importance. And I remember very well in around oh
(05:41):
maybe nineteen ninety one, ish I gave a talk in
my own department about my new research and ideas, and
people were just like looking at me like I had
gotten nuts.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Still, she kept going. She knew there was something here.
Eventually this pattern developed into a theory, a theory of
betrayal trauma.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
A betrayal trauma is when somebody that you depend on
and trust does something that harms you. It's that combination
of harm with the nature of the relationship you have
with the person the victim perpetrator relationships.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Betrayal trauma theory accounts for how we process traumas differently
when they're perpetrated by someone close to us. And there
was always one aspect of processing betrayal at Intrigue, doctor Fried,
how people can block out experiences like childhood abuse or
sexual assault, or how they can forget moments when they
(06:45):
caught a partner and a lie.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Betrayal trauma theory was always about understanding how and why
people could forget seemingly extremely important experiences and events in
their life, very important traumas.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
This is something we've seen over and over again on
our show. We've received emails from people of all ages, professions,
and backgrounds who say they didn't see what was right
in front of them. Here's the thing, not seeing when
someone close to you is betraying you. It isn't just denial,
it's a very real psychological experience, one that doctor Fried
(07:27):
has spent her career researching. She gave us an example
she uses in one of her books.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
There was a woman whose husband was eventually arrested for
sexually abusing children in a school. And the police raided
his house and found all these stacks of child pornography
sitting around his living room in plain sight. And they
interviewed his wife, and she said she did not see them.
(07:55):
She would look at the coffee table and she would
not see them. She could have her eyes on them
and not see them.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
When I read doctor Fried's book Blind to Betrayal, I
was struck by another story, a story of a woman
who decided to visit her husband at his go to bar.
She was waiting there to surprise him, and when her
husband showed up, another woman approached him and kissed him.
He explained it away, and the wife forgot about the
kiss for years. At first, these two examples seem unbelievable.
(08:32):
How can people fail to see what's right in front
of them or forget experiences entirely?
Speaker 2 (08:40):
How does that happen? And why does that happen? And
the answer that I provided that I came to call
betrayal blindness was that it's a survival mechanism.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Doctor Fried explained that our brains block out information that
could threaten vital relationships.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
We are programmed to fall in love with people we
take care of, and people we take care of are
also programmed to fall in love with us. We have
a really strong attachment system, and it's a good it's
a beautiful thing. It makes life worth living. Is this
love that we feel? I mean, it keeps us alive.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Think of a child relying on a parent. The child
depends on that parent for love, food, and shelter, and
the child trusts the parent to continue to care for them.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
But here's the problem. What happens if you've got an
abusive parent? What happens if the parent is the betrayer.
If you withdraw or confront, you risk not getting your
survival needs met at all, or you may get more abuse.
(09:55):
It's not safe. The solution out of that is what
I came to call betrayal blindness. The attachment system matters more.
It's great to detect betrayal, but attachment matters more if
it's keeping you alive.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Our brains are constantly making choices about what information matters.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Most humans are amazing in how they filter information. We
do it all the time. We sort information out as
it's coming into the eyes and the ears and the nose.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
That filtering happens subconsciously. We don't notice it, but we've
all experienced it. Like when you're in a crowded room.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Even though there's twenty people talking at the same time,
you're not going to hear other parts of the conversation,
but suddenly your name pops out you or you know,
if there's a really juicy topic they're talking about, some
good gossip over in the corner, you might suddenly be
aware of that conversation. All that time, your brain has
been filtering out the information coming in and kind of
(11:02):
deciding which parts of it to be aware of. Because
we can't be aware of everything at once.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
It can be unsettling to think about, but our brains
are always selecting what we perceive and how we interpret
that information, and when terrible things happen, our brains work
to preserve important relationships. We can subconsciously delete information, or
sometimes even when we know the information, when we saw
(11:31):
and experienced something firsthand, our brain can create an entirely
new story It's.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Not just that we can block out information and not
see things right in front of us or not remember
things that happen. There are other ways we can twist reality.
So for some people, the way they engage in betrayal blindness,
they see the events happening, they remember it, but they
(11:57):
twist around who's response, so they blame themselves, not the
person who's harming them.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Like doctor Fried explained, this is a survival mechanism. That's
why she first conceptualized betrayal blindness using the parent child relationship,
because it's an essential relationship for that child survival. But
adults experience betrayal blindness too.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
For many people, their intimate marriage or partnership relationships have
these same dynamics, where one party feels very dependent on
the other. They may be financially dependent, they may be
emotionally dependent, they may have been betrayed themselves in childhood,
whatever it is. Adults can also have terrible betrayal blindness,
(12:49):
and sometimes that is also serving a major survival benefit.
If you are dependent on your partner and your partner's
betraying you and you confront her with draw, you risk
potentially losing access to resources you need. It's serving an
enormous survival benefit for many people in many situations, but
(13:14):
it does come at a cost. If you don't see it,
it's hard to stop it, it's hard to get help,
it's hard to get justice if you don't see it.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Doctor Jennifer Fried is the leading expert on betrayal trauma,
but she also has researched the psychology of people that
commit betrayals. She has identified common tactics that perpetrators use
to keep victims quiet. She calls this collection of tactics DARVO.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
DARVO is an acronym that stands for deny, attack, and
reverse victim and offender, and it's a tactic that perpetrators
can use when they're being held accountable for a misbehavior.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
We asked doctor Fried to break down the elements of DARVO.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
The denial typically is aggressive, a little over the top,
very angry denial. The attack is often an attack on credibility.
It often takes the form of saying you know you
are drunk, or you're mentally unhealthy, or they're sitting wrong
with your memory. And the RVO is the most insidious part.
(14:43):
This is reversing victim and offender, and this is when
the true victim gets put into the offender role by
daring to, you know, make this accusation.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Even just hearing this description, we thought of Caroline's story
like the time she heard about Joel having an affair
with their tenant. Joel denied the accusation, and he even
went with Caroline to confront her.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
This psychopath is got me on the road to the divorce.
My kids won't be out of the house.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Instead of taking accountability, he made himself the victim. Then
there was the moment Caroline confronted Joel about lying about
where he was in the middle of the night. He
said he was at an accident scene, but his location
on Life three sixty told a different story. Caroline described
Joel exhibiting the first element of darvo denial.
Speaker 4 (15:37):
Oh my god, that had to be a wrong cell
phone tower pinging and I was not even close to their.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Then the second element, Joel attacked her.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Why would you say that? Don't you think I want
to be home?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
And finally the third element, Joel reversed the victim and offender.
He made her feel as though she had done something wrong.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
I start feeling guilty for asking him something that I
factually see and then I start doubting myself and almost
believing could a self on.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Tower being wrong on life three sixty?
Speaker 5 (16:10):
Is that?
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Is that even possible? We found that one of the
consequences of being darvoed when somebody does that to you
is blaming yourself. When people blame themselves, they're much more
likely to go silent, and so if the perpetrator's goal
is to get the victim to be silent, darvo has
(16:31):
that effect too.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
This strategy worked on Caroline. It kept her doubting herself
instead of doubting Joel and darvo is not just a
tactic used interpersonally. It's commonly used in trials.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
It's often a technique used by defense attorneys in say
a sexual abuse case, where the defense attorney will very
consciously deny on behalf of their client the event happened
and attacked the credibility of the victim, and then reverse
victim and offender by painting the true victim as the
(17:09):
offender in the situation.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
This also made us think of Joel and how he
shifted the blame onte his home life during his internal
Affairs interviews. We played Doctor Fried this tape from when
he was investigated for sexually harassing reporters.
Speaker 5 (17:25):
I'm sorry, right, things were good at home, and I
think I fell into the trap of, you know, being
excited about the attention.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
What he does in the clip is really puts himself
into the victim role, you know, that crying and the
way he's painting himself. You know, he's a person who
we might want to feel sorry for. He sort of
put himself in the position of the one being wronged.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
In this next clip, Joel goes even farther. When internal
affairs demanded accountability for having sex in his police car,
he put the responsibility of his rehabilitation on the police department.
In his interview as part of the IA investigation, he
said the following, we pay a lot of.
Speaker 6 (18:23):
Loop service about our employees as our family and all that.
But I like to maybe somehow believe in that and
recognize that I've had issues, and I've had issues for
a long long time, and every day is a struggle
and I want help.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
There may be a truth to all that, in the
sense that he has issues and it's been a traumatic job,
but it's a way to deflect responsibility regarding his own
behavior in a police car with this woman.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Fried can't speak to Joel's specific psychological profile, but she
says in her research she's learned a lot about the
kinds of people who use DARVO.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
People that use darvo are quite a bit more likely
to also engage in sexually harassing behaviors.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Once again, Joel appeared to align with the profile Doctor
Fried developed. You may recall from an earlier episode, his
behavior had grown so disruptive that he was eventually banned
from the family doctor's office. Caroline learned the truth when
she went to get tested for STDs.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
And so she does a full exam and she leaves
the room, and when she came back in, she just
had this horrible kind of fearful look on her face.
And I just was sobbing, and I said, you can
tell I have something, can't You can already tell I
have something? And she shook her head and she said no,
(19:59):
And she said she was debating on telling me that
Joel had essentially been blacklisted from seeing her because he
had come in four different appointments before and had been
and appropriate with his commentary. I'm very sexualized with his
commentary toward her, and I was mortified.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Doctor Fried offered more details about people who use darvo.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
They are more likely to hold beliefs that blame women
for being victims, and they are more likely to have
certain personality characteristics three in particular that are often called
the Dark triad narcissism, machia, alianism, and psychopathy.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
People with Dark triad characteristics can be cunning, self interested,
and manipulative. They often lack empathy and are willing to
exploit others to achieve their goals.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
It doesn't mean if somebody uses darvau they are for
sure any of those things, just it's just much more likely.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Doctor Fried's research does offer one encouraging insight.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
We find if we educate people about darva, it reduces
the power of darvaux. If people know that this is
a pattern, they're not as swayed by it.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
We've been talking to betrayal trauma researcher doctor Jennifer Fried.
Her groundbreaking work has transformed how we understand and support
victims of betrayal. One reason we wanted to speak with
her for this season is her focus on a concept
she's termed institutional betrayal.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Institutional betrayal in its broadest sense, is when the perpetrator
of a betrayal is just something larger than one person.
So families are little tiny institutions. It can be a family,
it can be you know, the workplace. It can be
the church, or the school, or the government. It's the
larger entity that is betraying somebody who is dependent on
(22:20):
that institution, cares for it, very often loves the institution.
So the dynamics of betrayal trauma all apply to institution betrayal.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
After Joel was exposed, no one in the department came
to Caroline's aid. She felt shut out and alone. Doctor
Fred's research confirms this added layer of betrayal can be devastating.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
People are very vulnerable to being hurt by institutions they
trust it and depend on fail to protect them, fail
to respond well. When they've been harmed in that institution,
it's a whole new level of harm. I sometimes think
about like the second concussion, where you know it's bad
to be hitting the head once, but then you go
(23:08):
and you hit the head again. That's, you know, way worse.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Doctor Fred explains the way we depend on institutions is
a lot like the way we depend on people in
our lives.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Almost everyone has some institution they love. Most people love
their family, most people love their church if they have one,
or their school. They have emotional attachments, and the institutions
can't actually love you back. But it doesn't stop people
from loving the institutions. And that's not a bad thing
that we love institutions, just a very human thing, but
(23:44):
it does make us vulnerable to the harm of betrayal.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Doctor Fried found this idea of institutional betrayal deeply troubling,
but it also felt like an exciting issue to tackle
when doctor Fried and her students could have a real
impact on.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
It's actually easier to think about fixing an institution than
fixing all the interpersonal violence in the United States, and
we developed steps one can take to make institutions less betraying.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
These steps and the idea that institutions can prevent further
betrayal big up doctor Fried's theory of institutional courage. One
of the main steps is transparency.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Betrayal really loves secrecy and really doesn't survive transparency very
well at all. In families where you've got institutional betrayal occurring,
there's almost always secrets. They're things that aren't known, can't
be talked about and most therapists of healthy family systems
(24:49):
will tell you that secrets are bad for families, and
the more that can be shared openly and transparently the better.
The more transparency, the less likely these betraying things will occur.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
This made us think of Caroline too. She made the
choice to be very transparent with her children about what
Joel had done. We asked doctor Fried for her opinion
on this.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It's interesting because if you were talking about eight to
nine year olds, this would be a tougher issue. With children,
you know, you have to be sensitive to their developmental
stage and not overwhelm them with information they may not
really have a way to understand. By the time you're sixteen,
that's no longer really an issue. Sixteen, seventeen, and certainly
(25:36):
nineteen twenty year olds are fully capable of understanding these
sources of issues and are only going to benefit from
honesty and only going to suffer from secrets.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
She also brought up that this isn't just a question
of knowing or not knowing. Transparency in this case is
key to ensuring the cycle of trail ends with Joel.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Secrecy is corrosive. Secrecy allows dysfunctional harmful patterns to repeat
over and over again. One way to think about this
is in terms of what's the probability that our teenager
who grows up in a family like this goes on
(26:23):
to repeat this dynamic as an adult, versus the probability
they go on to have a healthy relationship when they
develop their own family. The more things are hidden, unspoken secret,
the more likely they are to just repeat it. One
of the best ways to kind of innoculate people from
(26:45):
repeating dysfunctional family dynamics is to really shine a light
on them and be fully honest about what was messed up,
giving people that conscious awareness so they can choose not
to repeat that.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
We played Doctor Fried a clip of Caroline Son speaking
about this issue.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
I wanted to know everything. The truth hurt, but it
was powerful and it was needed. That was the only
way to move forward. One of the things that struck
me in that clip was how much courage this young
man has as well. It's not like he wants to
learn that his father's done harmful things. It takes courage
(27:29):
to learn that, but it does make it possible for
him to support the other family members in a really
meaningful way, and for him to go and develop his
own life without repeating this harmful pattern.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
The need for transparency also applies to larger institutions. Doctor
Fried pointed to the issue of sexual assault in the military.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
What people who've experienced that very often say is that
when they went to the authorities in the military to
report what had happened, what happened after that from the
authorities of the military was even worse than the sexual
assault in the first place.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
When victims aren't taken seriously or investigations are dropped or
covered up, it adds to the pain.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
We've compared groups of military sexual trauma survivors who went
on to have an institutional betrayal experience versus ones who didn't.
Everybody you know had bad effects from the sexual trauma,
but the ones who went on to have institutional betrayal
on top of that, we're doing much worse. In fact,
we're even more likely to attempt suicide. That's how bad
(28:46):
it is. So we know from now dozens of studies
that institutional betrayal harms people over and above the interpersonal
betrayals they've experienced.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
The institution can counteract this by taking accountability for the
wrongs for being complicit or even directly eating in betrayal.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
If they have the courage to really look at what's happened,
then they can move forward in a healthier way.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
This examination is especially needed when the perpetrator walks away.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
One of the things that can really help healing is
having a community that validates the reality. Even if the
betrayer never fully discloses or fully takes account a community
around them.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Ken Caroline may never get that validation from the CSPD,
but doctor Fried says Caroline is doing what she can
to take healing into her own hands.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
There's a wonderful quote that I won't get exactly right
from trauma therist Judith Hermann. The antidote to despair is activism,
and activism can take many pass It sounds like in
Caroline's case, her telling her story is activism because she's
(30:08):
being courageous. She's sharing her vulnerability, her personal pain, all
with the hope that it will help other people.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Thank you to doctor Jennifer Fried. If you want to
learn more about betrayal trauma, we highly recommend her book
Blind to Betrayal. You can also check out the Center
for Institutional Courage, a nonprofit founded by doctor Fried. It's
dedicated to understanding institutional betrayal and the steps needed to
prevent and counteract it through institutional courage. We've linked the
(30:51):
book and the nonprofit in the show notes. This is
the final episode of season four, Caroline Story. If this
story resonated with you, or if you have a betrayal
experience of your own to share, you can write to
us at Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. We'll be
back with new weekly stories starting August seventh. Thank you
(31:12):
for listening to Betrayal season four. If you would like
to reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at
Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at
gmail dot com. Also, please be sure to follow us
at Glass Podcasts on Instagram for all Betrayal content, news
and updates. One way to support the series is by
subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. Please rate and
(31:33):
review Betrayal. Five star reviews help us know you appreciate
what we do. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts,
a division of Glass Entertainment Group and partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason.
Betrayal is hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written
and produced by Kerry Hartman and Caitlin Golden, story editing
(31:55):
and producing by Monique Labourd, also produced by Ben Fetterman.
Our associate producer is Kristin Melcury. Our iHeart team is
Ali Perry and Jessica Crincheck. Audio editing and mixing by
Matt Ovechio, editing by Tanner Robbins, and special thanks to
Caroline and her family. Betrayal's theme is composed by Oliver Baines.
(32:17):
Music library provided by my Music and For more podcasts
from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts,
Hi, everyone. We wanted to let you know that this
is our final episode of season four and Caroline Borega's story,
But don't worry, there's a lot more Betrayal coming your way.
We will be returning on Thursday, August seventh with a
brand new season of Betrayal Weekly. Be sure to subscribe
to make sure you never miss an episode, and there's
more Betrayal news. If Betrayal is your must listen, you
(00:24):
should subscribe to Beyond Betrayal, our new substack community. It's
free to join impact with the extras we can't squeeze
into the show. Our team shares behind the scenes conversations,
never before seen videos, and personal essays from the survivors
you've met on the series, including Caroline, Stacey, Ashley, and Me.
(00:44):
Upgraded members can even jump into live chats with us.
Ready to dig deeper, click the link in the show
notes or visit Betrayal dot substack dot com, hit subscribe
and join for free today. Okay, now onto the show.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
There was a woman whose husband was eventually arrested for
sexually abusing children in a school, and the police found
all these stacks of child pornography sitting around his living
room in plain sight, and they interviewed his wife and
she said she did not see them. She could have
(01:24):
her eyes on them and not see them.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I'm Andre Gunning and this is Betrayal, Season four, Episode
ten Courage. In our last episode, we closed the book
on Caroline's story, but before we end our season, we
wanted to dive deeper in to one aspect of Caroline's
(02:02):
healing journey.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Within a day of Joel's disclosure, I was seeking therapeutic
intervention for myself and my kids, and I am grateful
for that therapist. She definitely was there for crisis intervention.
That being said, though there was never this term betrayal trauma,
I never heard the term and our duration of therapy.
(02:28):
I'm not faulting her, but I hadn't had anyone actually
walk me through the emotions and that how I was
feeling was actually a normal part of being betrayed. The
reason why I wrote to the podcast was because listening
(02:50):
to season one driving with my daughter was life changing.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Caroline was on a road trip with Nicole when they
came across our first season of Betrayal. This was the
first time either of them heard a professional speaking about betrayal. Trauma,
and I.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Must have played that episode a dozen times. It was
just a description that was so empowering and so relatable,
and I just wanted to continue to have that connection,
even if it was through a podcast.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
The shame, the guilt. Caroline thought she was alone in
these feelings. She had no idea that there were others
out there suffering from the same form of trauma. The
people who've shared their stories in prior seasons and on
the Betrayal Weekly podcast felt the same way.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
The person I had loved and been in a relationship
with disappeared, and with him went three years of my
life into a black hole.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I was like, what's wrong with me?
Speaker 3 (03:53):
I was just heartsick, gut sick, heartsick.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
My whole body responded in All I could think of
was who are you?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
How could you do this?
Speaker 1 (04:04):
All these people experience betrayal trauma. It's the thread that
binds all the stories we tell. And we got the
opportunity to speak to the person who coined the term
betrayal trauma in the first place. She is a retired
research psychologist who pioneered the field of betrayal trauma. So
to close out our season, we wanted to share parts
(04:27):
of our conversation with you.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
My name is Jennifer Fried. I was a university professor
at the University of Oregon most of my career, where
I taught psychology and did a lot of research, specifically
developing betrayal trauma theory, the concept of betrayal blindness all
the way through to institutional courage.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
After going to graduate school for cognitive psychology, doctor Fried
made her way to the University of Oregon.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Some years into my time at the University of Oregon,
I really changed pivoted the kind of research I was
doing to the psychology of trauma.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Doctor Fried started compiling research on a specific form of trauma,
the kind you experience when someone close to you breaks
your trust.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
At the time, in the early nineteen nineties, there was
still within academic psychology a disbelief in the prevalence of trauma,
particularly interpersonal, particularly sexual trauma, as well as its significance
or importance. And I remember very well in around oh
(05:41):
maybe nineteen ninety one, ish I gave a talk in
my own department about my new research and ideas, and
people were just like looking at me like I had
gotten nuts.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Still, she kept going. She knew there was something here.
Eventually this pattern developed into a theory, a theory of
betrayal trauma.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
A betrayal trauma is when somebody that you depend on
and trust does something that harms you. It's that combination
of harm with the nature of the relationship you have
with the person the victim perpetrator relationships.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Betrayal trauma theory accounts for how we process traumas differently
when they're perpetrated by someone close to us. And there
was always one aspect of processing betrayal at Intrigue, doctor Fried,
how people can block out experiences like childhood abuse or
sexual assault, or how they can forget moments when they
(06:45):
caught a partner and a lie.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Betrayal trauma theory was always about understanding how and why
people could forget seemingly extremely important experiences and events in
their life, very important traumas.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
This is something we've seen over and over again on
our show. We've received emails from people of all ages, professions,
and backgrounds who say they didn't see what was right
in front of them. Here's the thing, not seeing when
someone close to you is betraying you. It isn't just denial,
it's a very real psychological experience, one that doctor Fried
(07:27):
has spent her career researching. She gave us an example
she uses in one of her books.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
There was a woman whose husband was eventually arrested for
sexually abusing children in a school. And the police raided
his house and found all these stacks of child pornography
sitting around his living room in plain sight. And they
interviewed his wife, and she said she did not see them.
(07:55):
She would look at the coffee table and she would
not see them. She could have her eyes on them
and not see them.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
When I read doctor Fried's book Blind to Betrayal, I
was struck by another story, a story of a woman
who decided to visit her husband at his go to bar.
She was waiting there to surprise him, and when her
husband showed up, another woman approached him and kissed him.
He explained it away, and the wife forgot about the
kiss for years. At first, these two examples seem unbelievable.
(08:32):
How can people fail to see what's right in front
of them or forget experiences entirely?
Speaker 2 (08:40):
How does that happen? And why does that happen? And
the answer that I provided that I came to call
betrayal blindness was that it's a survival mechanism.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Doctor Fried explained that our brains block out information that
could threaten vital relationships.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
We are programmed to fall in love with people we
take care of, and people we take care of are
also programmed to fall in love with us. We have
a really strong attachment system, and it's a good it's
a beautiful thing. It makes life worth living. Is this
love that we feel? I mean, it keeps us alive.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Think of a child relying on a parent. The child
depends on that parent for love, food, and shelter, and
the child trusts the parent to continue to care for them.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
But here's the problem. What happens if you've got an
abusive parent? What happens if the parent is the betrayer.
If you withdraw or confront, you risk not getting your
survival needs met at all, or you may get more abuse.
(09:55):
It's not safe. The solution out of that is what
I came to call betrayal blindness. The attachment system matters more.
It's great to detect betrayal, but attachment matters more if
it's keeping you alive.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Our brains are constantly making choices about what information matters.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Most humans are amazing in how they filter information. We
do it all the time. We sort information out as
it's coming into the eyes and the ears and the nose.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
That filtering happens subconsciously. We don't notice it, but we've
all experienced it. Like when you're in a crowded room.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Even though there's twenty people talking at the same time,
you're not going to hear other parts of the conversation,
but suddenly your name pops out you or you know,
if there's a really juicy topic they're talking about, some
good gossip over in the corner, you might suddenly be
aware of that conversation. All that time, your brain has
been filtering out the information coming in and kind of
(11:02):
deciding which parts of it to be aware of. Because
we can't be aware of everything at once.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
It can be unsettling to think about, but our brains
are always selecting what we perceive and how we interpret
that information, and when terrible things happen, our brains work
to preserve important relationships. We can subconsciously delete information, or
sometimes even when we know the information, when we saw
(11:31):
and experienced something firsthand, our brain can create an entirely
new story It's.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Not just that we can block out information and not
see things right in front of us or not remember
things that happen. There are other ways we can twist reality.
So for some people, the way they engage in betrayal blindness,
they see the events happening, they remember it, but they
(11:57):
twist around who's response, so they blame themselves, not the
person who's harming them.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Like doctor Fried explained, this is a survival mechanism. That's
why she first conceptualized betrayal blindness using the parent child relationship,
because it's an essential relationship for that child survival. But
adults experience betrayal blindness too.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
For many people, their intimate marriage or partnership relationships have
these same dynamics, where one party feels very dependent on
the other. They may be financially dependent, they may be
emotionally dependent, they may have been betrayed themselves in childhood,
whatever it is. Adults can also have terrible betrayal blindness,
(12:49):
and sometimes that is also serving a major survival benefit.
If you are dependent on your partner and your partner's
betraying you and you confront her with draw, you risk
potentially losing access to resources you need. It's serving an
enormous survival benefit for many people in many situations, but
(13:14):
it does come at a cost. If you don't see it,
it's hard to stop it, it's hard to get help,
it's hard to get justice if you don't see it.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Doctor Jennifer Fried is the leading expert on betrayal trauma,
but she also has researched the psychology of people that
commit betrayals. She has identified common tactics that perpetrators use
to keep victims quiet. She calls this collection of tactics DARVO.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
DARVO is an acronym that stands for deny, attack, and
reverse victim and offender, and it's a tactic that perpetrators
can use when they're being held accountable for a misbehavior.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
We asked doctor Fried to break down the elements of DARVO.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
The denial typically is aggressive, a little over the top,
very angry denial. The attack is often an attack on credibility.
It often takes the form of saying you know you
are drunk, or you're mentally unhealthy, or they're sitting wrong
with your memory. And the RVO is the most insidious part.
(14:43):
This is reversing victim and offender, and this is when
the true victim gets put into the offender role by
daring to, you know, make this accusation.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Even just hearing this description, we thought of Caroline's story
like the time she heard about Joel having an affair
with their tenant. Joel denied the accusation, and he even
went with Caroline to confront her.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
This psychopath is got me on the road to the divorce.
My kids won't be out of the house.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Instead of taking accountability, he made himself the victim. Then
there was the moment Caroline confronted Joel about lying about
where he was in the middle of the night. He
said he was at an accident scene, but his location
on Life three sixty told a different story. Caroline described
Joel exhibiting the first element of darvo denial.
Speaker 4 (15:37):
Oh my god, that had to be a wrong cell
phone tower pinging and I was not even close to their.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Then the second element, Joel attacked her.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Why would you say that? Don't you think I want
to be home?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
And finally the third element, Joel reversed the victim and offender.
He made her feel as though she had done something wrong.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
I start feeling guilty for asking him something that I
factually see and then I start doubting myself and almost
believing could a self on.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Tower being wrong on life three sixty?
Speaker 5 (16:10):
Is that?
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Is that even possible? We found that one of the
consequences of being darvoed when somebody does that to you
is blaming yourself. When people blame themselves, they're much more
likely to go silent, and so if the perpetrator's goal
is to get the victim to be silent, darvo has
(16:31):
that effect too.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
This strategy worked on Caroline. It kept her doubting herself
instead of doubting Joel and darvo is not just a
tactic used interpersonally. It's commonly used in trials.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
It's often a technique used by defense attorneys in say
a sexual abuse case, where the defense attorney will very
consciously deny on behalf of their client the event happened
and attacked the credibility of the victim, and then reverse
victim and offender by painting the true victim as the
(17:09):
offender in the situation.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
This also made us think of Joel and how he
shifted the blame onte his home life during his internal
Affairs interviews. We played Doctor Fried this tape from when
he was investigated for sexually harassing reporters.
Speaker 5 (17:25):
I'm sorry, right, things were good at home, and I
think I fell into the trap of, you know, being
excited about the attention.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
What he does in the clip is really puts himself
into the victim role, you know, that crying and the
way he's painting himself. You know, he's a person who
we might want to feel sorry for. He sort of
put himself in the position of the one being wronged.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
In this next clip, Joel goes even farther. When internal
affairs demanded accountability for having sex in his police car,
he put the responsibility of his rehabilitation on the police department.
In his interview as part of the IA investigation, he
said the following, we pay a lot of.
Speaker 6 (18:23):
Loop service about our employees as our family and all that.
But I like to maybe somehow believe in that and
recognize that I've had issues, and I've had issues for
a long long time, and every day is a struggle
and I want help.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
There may be a truth to all that, in the
sense that he has issues and it's been a traumatic job,
but it's a way to deflect responsibility regarding his own
behavior in a police car with this woman.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Fried can't speak to Joel's specific psychological profile, but she
says in her research she's learned a lot about the
kinds of people who use DARVO.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
People that use darvo are quite a bit more likely
to also engage in sexually harassing behaviors.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Once again, Joel appeared to align with the profile Doctor
Fried developed. You may recall from an earlier episode, his
behavior had grown so disruptive that he was eventually banned
from the family doctor's office. Caroline learned the truth when
she went to get tested for STDs.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
And so she does a full exam and she leaves
the room, and when she came back in, she just
had this horrible kind of fearful look on her face.
And I just was sobbing, and I said, you can
tell I have something, can't You can already tell I
have something? And she shook her head and she said no,
(19:59):
And she said she was debating on telling me that
Joel had essentially been blacklisted from seeing her because he
had come in four different appointments before and had been
and appropriate with his commentary. I'm very sexualized with his
commentary toward her, and I was mortified.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Doctor Fried offered more details about people who use darvo.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
They are more likely to hold beliefs that blame women
for being victims, and they are more likely to have
certain personality characteristics three in particular that are often called
the Dark triad narcissism, machia, alianism, and psychopathy.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
People with Dark triad characteristics can be cunning, self interested,
and manipulative. They often lack empathy and are willing to
exploit others to achieve their goals.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
It doesn't mean if somebody uses darvau they are for
sure any of those things, just it's just much more likely.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Doctor Fried's research does offer one encouraging insight.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
We find if we educate people about darva, it reduces
the power of darvaux. If people know that this is
a pattern, they're not as swayed by it.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
We've been talking to betrayal trauma researcher doctor Jennifer Fried.
Her groundbreaking work has transformed how we understand and support
victims of betrayal. One reason we wanted to speak with
her for this season is her focus on a concept
she's termed institutional betrayal.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Institutional betrayal in its broadest sense, is when the perpetrator
of a betrayal is just something larger than one person.
So families are little tiny institutions. It can be a family,
it can be you know, the workplace. It can be
the church, or the school, or the government. It's the
larger entity that is betraying somebody who is dependent on
(22:20):
that institution, cares for it, very often loves the institution.
So the dynamics of betrayal trauma all apply to institution betrayal.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
After Joel was exposed, no one in the department came
to Caroline's aid. She felt shut out and alone. Doctor
Fred's research confirms this added layer of betrayal can be devastating.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
People are very vulnerable to being hurt by institutions they
trust it and depend on fail to protect them, fail
to respond well. When they've been harmed in that institution,
it's a whole new level of harm. I sometimes think
about like the second concussion, where you know it's bad
to be hitting the head once, but then you go
(23:08):
and you hit the head again. That's, you know, way worse.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Doctor Fred explains the way we depend on institutions is
a lot like the way we depend on people in
our lives.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Almost everyone has some institution they love. Most people love
their family, most people love their church if they have one,
or their school. They have emotional attachments, and the institutions
can't actually love you back. But it doesn't stop people
from loving the institutions. And that's not a bad thing
that we love institutions, just a very human thing, but
(23:44):
it does make us vulnerable to the harm of betrayal.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Doctor Fried found this idea of institutional betrayal deeply troubling,
but it also felt like an exciting issue to tackle
when doctor Fried and her students could have a real
impact on.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
It's actually easier to think about fixing an institution than
fixing all the interpersonal violence in the United States, and
we developed steps one can take to make institutions less betraying.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
These steps and the idea that institutions can prevent further
betrayal big up doctor Fried's theory of institutional courage. One
of the main steps is transparency.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Betrayal really loves secrecy and really doesn't survive transparency very
well at all. In families where you've got institutional betrayal occurring,
there's almost always secrets. They're things that aren't known, can't
be talked about and most therapists of healthy family systems
(24:49):
will tell you that secrets are bad for families, and
the more that can be shared openly and transparently the better.
The more transparency, the less likely these betraying things will occur.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
This made us think of Caroline too. She made the
choice to be very transparent with her children about what
Joel had done. We asked doctor Fried for her opinion
on this.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It's interesting because if you were talking about eight to
nine year olds, this would be a tougher issue. With children,
you know, you have to be sensitive to their developmental
stage and not overwhelm them with information they may not
really have a way to understand. By the time you're sixteen,
that's no longer really an issue. Sixteen, seventeen, and certainly
(25:36):
nineteen twenty year olds are fully capable of understanding these
sources of issues and are only going to benefit from
honesty and only going to suffer from secrets.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
She also brought up that this isn't just a question
of knowing or not knowing. Transparency in this case is
key to ensuring the cycle of trail ends with Joel.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Secrecy is corrosive. Secrecy allows dysfunctional harmful patterns to repeat
over and over again. One way to think about this
is in terms of what's the probability that our teenager
who grows up in a family like this goes on
(26:23):
to repeat this dynamic as an adult, versus the probability
they go on to have a healthy relationship when they
develop their own family. The more things are hidden, unspoken secret,
the more likely they are to just repeat it. One
of the best ways to kind of innoculate people from
(26:45):
repeating dysfunctional family dynamics is to really shine a light
on them and be fully honest about what was messed up,
giving people that conscious awareness so they can choose not
to repeat that.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
We played Doctor Fried a clip of Caroline Son speaking
about this issue.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
I wanted to know everything. The truth hurt, but it
was powerful and it was needed. That was the only
way to move forward. One of the things that struck
me in that clip was how much courage this young
man has as well. It's not like he wants to
learn that his father's done harmful things. It takes courage
(27:29):
to learn that, but it does make it possible for
him to support the other family members in a really
meaningful way, and for him to go and develop his
own life without repeating this harmful pattern.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
The need for transparency also applies to larger institutions. Doctor
Fried pointed to the issue of sexual assault in the military.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
What people who've experienced that very often say is that
when they went to the authorities in the military to
report what had happened, what happened after that from the
authorities of the military was even worse than the sexual
assault in the first place.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
When victims aren't taken seriously or investigations are dropped or
covered up, it adds to the pain.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
We've compared groups of military sexual trauma survivors who went
on to have an institutional betrayal experience versus ones who didn't.
Everybody you know had bad effects from the sexual trauma,
but the ones who went on to have institutional betrayal
on top of that, we're doing much worse. In fact,
we're even more likely to attempt suicide. That's how bad
(28:46):
it is. So we know from now dozens of studies
that institutional betrayal harms people over and above the interpersonal
betrayals they've experienced.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
The institution can counteract this by taking accountability for the
wrongs for being complicit or even directly eating in betrayal.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
If they have the courage to really look at what's happened,
then they can move forward in a healthier way.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
This examination is especially needed when the perpetrator walks away.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
One of the things that can really help healing is
having a community that validates the reality. Even if the
betrayer never fully discloses or fully takes account a community
around them.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Ken Caroline may never get that validation from the CSPD,
but doctor Fried says Caroline is doing what she can
to take healing into her own hands.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
There's a wonderful quote that I won't get exactly right
from trauma therist Judith Hermann. The antidote to despair is activism,
and activism can take many pass It sounds like in
Caroline's case, her telling her story is activism because she's
(30:08):
being courageous. She's sharing her vulnerability, her personal pain, all
with the hope that it will help other people.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Thank you to doctor Jennifer Fried. If you want to
learn more about betrayal trauma, we highly recommend her book
Blind to Betrayal. You can also check out the Center
for Institutional Courage, a nonprofit founded by doctor Fried. It's
dedicated to understanding institutional betrayal and the steps needed to
prevent and counteract it through institutional courage. We've linked the
(30:51):
book and the nonprofit in the show notes. This is
the final episode of season four, Caroline Story. If this
story resonated with you, or if you have a betrayal
experience of your own to share, you can write to
us at Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. We'll be
back with new weekly stories starting August seventh. Thank you
(31:12):
for listening to Betrayal season four. If you would like
to reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at
Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at
gmail dot com. Also, please be sure to follow us
at Glass Podcasts on Instagram for all Betrayal content, news
and updates. One way to support the series is by
subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. Please rate and
(31:33):
review Betrayal. Five star reviews help us know you appreciate
what we do. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts,
a division of Glass Entertainment Group and partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason.
Betrayal is hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written
and produced by Kerry Hartman and Caitlin Golden, story editing
(31:55):
and producing by Monique Labourd, also produced by Ben Fetterman.
Our associate producer is Kristin Melcury. Our iHeart team is
Ali Perry and Jessica Crincheck. Audio editing and mixing by
Matt Ovechio, editing by Tanner Robbins, and special thanks to
Caroline and her family. Betrayal's theme is composed by Oliver Baines.
(32:17):
Music library provided by my Music and For more podcasts
from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts,
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