The Betrayal Bond, Part I
I got this book from the library as sort of a follow up to my reading last year about professional exploitation; I had been told that this book is in use among some clergy abuse/exploitation survivors (and it seems to come up on reading lists at survivor web sites).
The book: The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships, by Patrick Carnes. I had Googled Patrick Carnes beforehand, and what I found left me ambivalent as to what to expect; his web site material tries to market him by appealing to the sorts of themes I respond to (supported by research!) and also by using the sorts of themes I respond to less well (words that probably appeal to other people, but which hit me as New Agey buzzwords). He’s a therapist specializing in issues of sexual addiction and sexual anorexia (his words, and another thing that had me wondering – how far are addiction and anorexia really useful metaphors for sexual problems?), with a residential therapeutic center.
The book is self help and aimed at a non-professional audience. It’s assumed that you’ll be reading it because you’ve been in an abusive or exploitive relationship, and are now trying to break free (either from the relationship or from the emotional aftermath of leaving it). The chapters come with exercises, in which you answer questions about your own life – you’re supposed to be keeping a journal – and develop a recovery plan.
The first thing I noticed, that I liked: though the book is definitely pop psychology (and a quick read, other than the time it would take to do the exercises), it’s a pop psychology/non-professional audience book that comes with references and footnotes. Not so many footnotes that you’d be overwhelmed by them, but just enough that you do have the pointers if you want to look and see whether the research really does support what Carnes is saying. I’ve seen other self-help books that don’t provide much background at all to let anyone evaluate the claims.
In this case, the claimed support for the model is that Carnes is synthesizing insights of professionals in the trauma field, the addiction field, and the marriage and family relations field, and that he himself has conducted a large study of recovering sex addicts (the results of which were published in another book). The bibliography is varied, from academic articles to popular books by people like John Bradshaw and Scott Peck.
The claims made by the book: First, there’s a discussion of what trauma does to people. Some of this is standard stuff that you might get at a lecture on PTSD, and some of it involves various forms of compulsive behavior. Then, Carnes moves to describing what he calls a “trauma bond,” which is sort of like Stockholm syndrome, in that it applies to people strongly bonded to people who are doing them harm (abused children, battered spouses, people exploited in sexual relationships with professionals, etc.). Then he proceeds to discussing recovery.
At this point I’m running out of time, so I’ll continue tomorrow.
August 7th, 2006 at 8:08 am
Sexual anorexia? Didn’t anorexia started primarily because of Victorian girls who didn’t want to enter puberty, and be presented to society in the rapid, out-of-thier-control husband matching that represented adult life. And isn’t is still about control, about using the destruction of the body as affirmation? Sexual anorexia seems to simply be trying to link to the popular concept of anorexia as a pop use phrase. There are body phobias that cover most of what this person labels as Sexual anorexia. The other difference is that if a person doesn’t have sex, they tend not to end up bruising when they sit down, bleeding internally, having thier hair fall out and dying because they remain too afriad to give up what control they have. Why doesn’t he throw in some of the real anorexia stuff, like when you lose control and binge/then purge – I guess that would be periods of nymphomania followed by…..??? douching?
I wait to hear the rest of the review but I am already a bit irked at appropriation of a condition that is already misunderstood and mistreated in order to give validation to a new “condition”
August 8th, 2006 at 9:07 am
“Didn’t anorexia started primarily because of Victorian girls who didn’t want to enter puberty, and be presented to society in the rapid, out-of-thier-control husband matching that represented adult life.”
Actually, anorexia goes further back than that.
There is evidence that female medievel saints used anorexia as a way to rid themselves of any feminine features so that they could be more Christ-like. At the time, and still somewhat today, to be Christ-like was literally thought to mean that one had to at least be male.
August 9th, 2006 at 6:31 am
There seems to be a lot of recent research indicating that there is a large genetic component to anorexia. What a society makes of it is a different story.