Effects Of Betrayal Trauma

1504 Words4 Pages

A unique type of trauma occurs in these cases of interparental conflict and parental alienation, cases of maltreatment and abuse by a trusted caregiver (Kaehler et al., 2013). Betrayal trauma theory suggests that when a trauma occurs in a trusted attachment relationship, the effect differs from those traumas that occur without the context of a relationship (Bernstein & Freyd, 2014). Kaehler et al. (2013) stated that these traumas involve a child’s violation of trust by a previously protective caregiver. The expectation of protection has been altered to be violating rather than preserving a sense of safety. Betrayal of trust within a trusted relationship plays a significant part in defining the severity of symptoms of trauma experienced by children and adolescents. Noted effects of betrayal trauma include depression, disassociation, information processing …show more content…

When a child is under undue stress and crisis, memory systems, encoding of experiences and storage of memories are not the neural priority (Porges 2007). While implicit contextual, sensory and emotional information is available, neural networks do not offer priority to retrieval of the memory. Therefore, triggers to the event tend to be sensory or emotional and often difficult to understand. Neurobiologically, it appears that these memories are not stored by the hippocampus initially in short term memory, possibly due to the heightened state of arousal which affects memory storage ( Badenoch, 2015). While memory is often irretrievable during the trauma, the individual will often be able to recall events and acknowledge details once distanced from the traumatic relationship (Bernstein & Freyd, 2014). Bernstein and Freyd (2014) discussed that in betrayal trauma, information is often omitted, and incidents selectively processed to achieve the maintenance of the bond the maltreating

Open Document