Trauma at Home: How Betrayal Trauma and Attachment Theories Understand the Human Response to Abuse by an Attachment Figure

At its foundation, attachment theory (AT) (Bowlby, 1969) is a theory of developmental psychology that uses evolutionary and ethological frameworks to describe how the caregiver*–child relationship emerges and how it influences subsequent social, emotional, and cognitive development. And while AT emerged out of observations of child–caregiver dynamics, it was quickly and readily generalised to address similar psychosocial phenomena within adult romantic relationships (e.g., Hazan & Shaver, 1987, 1994). Betrayal trauma theory (BTT) (Freyd, 1994, 1996), building on the most central concepts of AT, has focused very specifically on understanding psychological responses to trauma. Like AT, BTT proposes that trauma occurring within the context of an attachment relationship is qualitatively different than trauma that takes place outside of one. Also as with AT, BTT was first developed with the child–caregiver relationship in mind but has since been applied to other adult relationships, including not only romantic relationships but hierarchical relationships (such as that between an employer and an employee, or an institution and its member) as well (e.g., Freyd, 1996; Smith & Freyd, 2013). Regarding the specific circumstance of maltreatment or traumatisation by an attachment figure, both AT and BTT make specific predictions about how humans adaptively respond. The following paper aims to describe where and how these predictions overlap, and where they differ. More specifically, we will argue that the significant theoretical concordances include: