When the Person You Trusted Caused the Harm: Betrayal Trauma in Spiritual Abuse and Sexual Exploitation
Understanding Betrayal Trauma and Spiritual Abuse
Betrayal trauma is the particular kind of harm that occurs when the person or institution causing that harm is also someone you trusted, depended on, or loved.
Note: Please be aware that this article contains discussion of sexual grooming, spiritual abuse, and their psychological effects. Readers who have experienced grooming or abuse in religious settings may find some content activating. If you are currently working with a therapist or psychologist, you may find it helpful to read this alongside that support. If you are not, and you find the content distressing, please consider reaching out to a mental health professional. Support is available through: Lifeline: 13 11 14 (24 hours) Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 (24 hours) 1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732 (national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service, 24 hours). Full Stop Australia: 1800 385 578 (24 hours, formerly CASA). Beyond Blue online chat: beyondblue.org.au 1800RESPECT online chat: 1800respect.org.au
Betrayal Trauma (Freyd, 1994) is a particular kind of injury that happens when the person who hurt you is also the person you trusted, depended on, or looked to for spiritual guidance. It is not just frightening. It is morally and relationally disorienting. It can reorganise your sense of yourself, your faith, your memory, and your understanding of how the world works.
In clinical language, this is called betrayal trauma. And while it can occur in any relationship of trust — a parent, a partner, a doctor, an employer — it shows up with particular intensity in spiritual contexts: in churches, missions, ministries, religious communities, and wellness movements with charismatic teachers. When sexual exploitation or grooming is part of what occurred, the betrayal becomes layered in ways that are only now being properly named.
This article is written for victim-survivors who are trying to make sense of their own experience, and for the people who care about them.
Please read first. This article describes a general psychological concept and the patterns people commonly experience when harm has been caused by someone they trusted or depended on. It is not intended to characterise, diagnose, or make any claim about a particular person's or institution's behaviour, motivations, or intent. The dynamics described here can arise in many different kinds of relationships and institutions, and for many different reasons. How any of this fits, or doesn't fit, your own situation is something best made sense of in supported conversation, ideally with a therapist who understands these dynamics.
What is betrayal trauma?
Betrayal trauma is the particular kind of harm that occurs when the person or institution causing that harm is also someone you trusted, depended on, or loved. It is not only a frightening experience; it is a relationally and morally disorienting one. Understanding betrayal trauma can help make sense of responses that may look strange or self-defeating in hindsight — the long delay before naming what happened, the periods of not-quite-knowing, the lingering loyalty, the difficulty trusting your own perceptions — and recognise these as protective adaptations rather than personal failings.
Where the term comes from
The concept was developed by Dr Jennifer Freyd, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, in a series of papers and a book published between 1994 and 1996. Her central insight was that not all trauma is the same.
The traditional understanding of trauma is focused on fear and life threat, when someone experiences overwhelming danger of the kind that produces classic post-traumatic responses like hypervigilance and flashbacks. Freyd proposed that there is a second dimension worth considering: betrayal. When the person causing the harm is also someone you rely on for safety, care, or belonging, the trauma is processed differently. It is not only frightening; it is socially and relationally disorienting in a way that produces a distinct set of psychological consequences.
Trauma that is high in betrayal — abuse by a parent, intimate partner, trusted clergy, or institution — tends to produce particular adaptations: memory disturbances, dissociation, and what Freyd termed "betrayal blindness."
Why "not knowing" can be a form of survival - Betrayal Blindness
One of Freyd's most important contributions was the recognition that, when the person causing harm is also someone you depend on, fully naming the abuse can feel so threatening, that it is often denied by the victim.
Consider a child whose caregiver is also harming them. Fully recognising the harm would put the child in an unbearable position: they cannot leave, and they cannot survive without the caregiver. Therefore reconciling that the person they depend on is also abusive can be challenging. Something has to give. Often, what gives is conscious awareness of the abuse. The mind adapts by minimising, denying, forgetting, rationalising, or dissociating. This is because not-knowing allows the necessary attachment to the caregiver to remain functional. This is sometimes referred to as betrayal blindness.
This same pattern can operate in adulthood. A partner may not register infidelity that is obvious to others. A member of a religious community may dismiss warning signs about a leader they depend on for meaning and belonging. An employee may rationalise treatment they would name as abusive in someone else's workplace. Similar strategies of minimising, denial, or dissociation are used to protect the attachment or system the person needs at the time.
Betrayal blindness can also affect memory. High-betrayal trauma is associated with higher rates of dissociation, fragmented or absent memories, and delayed recall.
Institutional betrayal
In 2014, Freyd and her colleague Carly Smith extended this framework to institutions. Institutional betrayal occurs when an organisation you trust and depend on — a church, school, workplace, hospital, government agency, or family system, fails to prevent harm done by one of its members, fails to respond appropriately when harm is reported, or actively protects the person responsible at the survivor's expense.
This second injury can be as damaging as the original harm, and sometimes more so. Survivors of institutional betrayal often describe experiences like:
Being told to forgive, or to keep things "within the family", or “within the leadership team”.
Being asked what they had done to cause the harm.
Been asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect the institution.
Being moved or excluded within the community.
Watching the institution support and protect the person who caused harm
Inadequate or inappropriate response to abuse.
Being treated as the problem or scapegoat for naming what happened
Spiritual and religious contexts are particularly vulnerable to institutional betrayal, because community, relationships, identity, and meaning are tightly intertwined with the institution. By naming harm, a person can risk losing not only support but one's spiritual home.
DARVO: a common response pattern
Freyd (1997) also named a particular response pattern that people who have caused harm, and sometimes the institutions that protect them, use when confronted: DARVO, which stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.
The pattern typically unfolds in three steps:
Deny — flat refusal that the harm occurred, or significant minimisation of it.
Attack — turning on the person reporting the harm: questioning their character, motives, mental health, or memory.
Reverse Victim and Offender — repositioning themselves as the wronged party ("you are destroying my reputation," "you are hurting the community," "I am the one suffering here").
Survivors who encounter DARVO frequently describe feeling crazy, guilty, and ashamed, sometimes more so than they did about the original harm (Harsey et al., 2017). DARVO is psychologically destabilising by design, and recent research suggests that exposure to it can shift how observers view both the survivor and the person who caused harm.
Spiritual abuse, sexual exploitation, and grooming in spiritual contexts
Betrayal trauma can occur in any relationship of trust, but it takes a particular shape in spiritual contexts. A spiritual leader is often positioned as a representative of God, an interpreter of meaning, an authority on salvation, a guide to who you are at the deepest level. When that person causes harm, whether through emotional or spiritual control, grooming, or sexual exploitation, the sense of betrayal is profound.
Betrayal blindness (Freyd, 1996) is reinforced from multiple directions at once in cases of spiritual abuse, which is compounded by the way people in religious community respond. The community has reason for you not to know. The framework you live inside actively interprets reality in ways that protect the leader. Doubts can be reframed as spiritual immaturity, evidence of personal sin, or attacks on God's work. This means betrayal blindness is sustained not only by your own attachment system, but by the people around you and by the theology you have absorbed. It is rarely one person's denial. It is a whole environment that helps you not-see.
The harm of grooming, including adult clergy sexual abuse in spiritual contexts, can also contribute to betrayal blindness. Time alone, frequent contact, personal disclosures, expressions of being "called" or "led" to invest particularly in this person, mentorship language, prayer together, are not behaviours that look like or feel like harm in the moment. They often look like, and feel like spiritual care. This is part of why recognition so often happens late, and in fragments, after a very harmful dynamic has formed and harm has been done (Chaves & Garland, 2009; Garland & Argueta, 2010).
The injury layers in ways that are often invisible from the outside. Sexual exploitation or spiritual abuse by a trusted leader can simultaneously injure:
The mind, strongly impacting on the mental health of survivors.
The body, through physical violation or boundary-crossing
A person’s self-concept, through betrayal of trust, identity, and self-perception
The spiritual life, through the sacred becoming entwined with what was harmful
The community, through the rupturing or loss of belonging
The family, through fracture, judgement, or loss of standing
The framework of meaning, through the unravelling of how the world was understood to work
People around the survivor often do not understand the complexity of all of these layers.
What this might mean for you
If you are recognising your own experience in this material, some things worth holding in mind:
The "not knowing," or knowing only in part, that may have characterised certain periods of your experience can be confusing, but it is common.
Memory gaps, fragmented recall, periods of dissociation, or delayed recognition of harm are common features of betrayal trauma. They do not invalidate your experience — they are a part of your experience.
If your early experiences with the leader felt genuinely good, moments of being seen, mentored, cared for, spiritually nourished, those memories are not evidence against abuse. They are part of how the harm became possible, and it is normal to grieve them alongside what came later.
The institutional response to your disclosure, including minimisation, deflection, requests for forgiveness, or active protection of the person who caused harm, can be its own injury, and is increasingly recognised as such.
If you encountered something like a Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender (DARVO) pattern when you tried to name what happened, the confusion, guilt, and self-doubt you felt afterwards make sense.
Recovery from this kind of harm often involves grieving not only what happened but also the secondary losses that come with betrayal trauma. It takes time to grieve that the version of reality, relationship, community, and spiritual life you thought you had has been lost.
A note on getting support
Recovery from betrayal trauma — especially in the context of spiritual abuse and sexual exploitation — is rarely something people do alone, and it is rarely something that resolves on a tidy timeline. What helps most is being able to think through your experience with someone who understands these specific dynamics: how power, vulnerability, sacredness, and harm can become entwined, and how the nervous system holds the imprint long after the relationship or community has ended.
If any of this resonates and you would like to talk to someone about your own experience, you are welcome to get in touch.
At Refuge Psychology, I offer evidence-based counselling and support for those recovering from religious trauma and spiritual abuse. My approach is collaborative and faith-sensitive. To learn more or to book an appointment, click here:
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Key references
Chaves, M., & Garland, D. (2009). The prevalence of clergy sexual advances toward adults in their congregations. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 48(4), 817–824.
Freyd, J. J. (1994). Betrayal trauma: Traumatic amnesia as an adaptive response to childhood abuse. Ethics & Behavior, 4(4), 307–329.
Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Harvard University Press.
Freyd, J. J. (1997). Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism & Psychology, 7(1), 22–32.
Garland, D. R., & Argueta, C. (2010). How clergy sexual misconduct happens: A qualitative study of first-hand accounts. Social Work & Christianity, 37(1), 1–27.
Harsey, S. J., Zurbriggen, E. L., & Freyd, J. J. (2017). Perpetrator responses to victim confrontation: DARVO and victim self-blame. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26(6), 644–663.
Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587.
