Betrayed Wives Being Diagnosed With Ptsd

[Friday]

The idea that combat doesn't deeply involve interpersonal relationships just makes me tilt my head. Much less that it's not trauma involving people.

 

[joeylittle]

Yeah, @Friday.

It's as simple (I think) as people on people trauma, more intense than natural disaster on person trauma. The PTSD sourcebook cites Schopenhauer as the source of the thinking...I'll look it up later.

 

[Anarchy]

@joeylittle wrote:

Betrayal does not result in death. There is no actual fear of death. There is enormous amounts of pain, and sometimes a desire to die - but that is not the same thing.

So, that's why it would take some major revising of the current diagnostic guidelines to accept marital betrayal as a criterion A trauma.

Betrayed Wives Being Diagnosed With Ptsd

thinking about this, I think that the guidelines wouldn't need very much tweaking at all.

even ignoring the emotions, Spousal abandonment is still major shit for the woman, in the western world. Go back more than about forty years, and it was really serious (and not helped at all by the culture, churches or legal system).

there have been exceptions to that, for example in medieval Ireland, where a woman retained full rights to her own property and person throughout marriage, and out of the other side of it. And had full rights to divorce a man and remain single or re marry. (Thanks, British imperialism for snuffing that, and the post 1916 indiginous patriarchs of all genders for keeping it snuffed out </bitter sarc>).

but outside of the last few decades here, and in exceptional (and non state) cultures like medieval Ireland's, getting betrayed and dumped, could and often did result in the deaths of any small children, and very possibly of the woman herself, and certainly her being ostracized by the community. Yes there were some exceptions, one of my great grandmothers drove her husband out in the early years of the twentieth century - she was incredibly tough, and a narc.

already we're close to a brush with death, within living memory and the experience of members here. we don't have to go to the brothers Grimm for the real dangers of evil stepmothers, evil stepfathers and evil step everything else, there's plenty first hand experience on the board here. some male mamals will kill the young of any other male that they encounter, as a matter of course (some cats, mice, pigs and rabbits are examples). humans don't routinely do it, but it's not exactly rare. unrelated to the board, a former classmate of mine lost a child, murdered by her new bf. FFS! if I wrote that class as a script for a soap opera, it would be rejected as too unbelievable, damn that was supposed to be a "nice" school.

go back a bit further and there's plenty of folklore of the abuse of unaccompanied women and children; the children rented out by the parish to chimney sweeps, the parish workhouse inmates (I used to have a next door neighbour who was born in the workhouse), Magdelain laundries, " finger of birth strangled babe, ditch delivered by a drab" and Doctor Hooke, the seventeenth century physicist, who fecked his own rejected neice, until she took her own life.

The human brain is much older than just recorded history. The Limbic brain, the part that deals with fear, is reptilian. It's not logical, it is definitely not verbal and it is incredibly fast at reacting.
The occasional times I've found a viper close to my feet, the hairs on the back of my neck have stood up before my conscious mind has registered that there's a snake there, big juicy tropical centipedes are even worse. in social settings, I'll start to blush even in situations that I know logically are harmless. my head also turns before I consciously realise that my amigdala had identified someone it regards as hot and wants a better look at (I don't think I've ever positively handled an accusation of perving).

Those are old unconscious phenomena, from brain structures that long predate humans.

If we look at the social relations of some of the other homenins

Orang utans are solitary, they spend most of their time up trees and don't have much to fear up there.

The others all live in social groups, and show very marked sexual dimorphism. Males are typically fifty or more percent heavier than the average for females, and are very heavily muscled, sometimes the males have big canine teeth too.

Fossils of early humans are ultra rare. many of those fossils bear the toothmarks of leopards. One of the favourite prey for present day leopards is baboon. In daylight on the ground or up a tree, a big male baboon is more than a match for a leopard. a female or her youngster isn't. If a leopard is confronted by a male baboon, it will back off, rather than risk getting killed.

The fossil evidence is that leopard liked to prey on early humans, in the same way as they do on baboons.
Don't assume that this necessarily makes baboon culture a patriarchy, it depends from troop to troop and species to species. IIRC, amongst the gelada baboons in the Ethiopian Highlands, males had better be well mannered or the females shun them.

I think there's also probably an evolutionary element to the wimin spoiling the dog... dogs and humans go back a long way together. I don't know which adopted the other first, and dogs it seems likely that dogs looked after women and children, from very early in human evolution. There's probably a good evolutionary reason why the lady wants custody of the dog.

is it any wonder that my ex was peed off when her jack Russell terrier returned home late one night, smelling of girlie human perfume?

If we take human development over a period of something like ten million years. For most of that, being betrayed by your mate, probably came at a very high price for you and probable death for any small children.

The instinctive parts of our brains were undergoing selection pressures all of that time. It seems that the women ( and mothers in law) who feared betrayal and abandonment and demanded exclusive committment from their males (but not necessarily from themselves) were the ones who became our ancestors.

I know that there's more to an evolutionary "battle of the sexes" than just that, and yes some people and some cultures (eg Inuit) are happily poly, as are our closest widely known homenin relatives, bonobos.

so if there is a n evolutionary element to the level of disress experienced by betrayed partners, there may be a diversity within that, Some people may perhaps be traumatised, and with good reason, others might just check whatever the evolutionary equivalent of a phone book is.

Conclusion
if an infant left alone to cry, dissociates so that it doesn't attract predators
is it surprising if a betrayed woman might experience news of her betrayal as something at the level of a threat to her life? and the lives of her children.

and that's without having to invoke pre existing traumas, and the compulsion to repeat traumas manifesting itself in choosing poor material for partners.

 

[joeylittle]

but outside of the last few decades here...getting betrayed and dumped, could and often did result in the deaths of any small children, and very possibly of the woman herself, and certainly her being ostracized by the community.

I think this might be the only small hole in your argument. It's been a number of decades since that dire of an outcome has been seen for the majority of women with children who are betrayed and then abandoned by their spouse. I think that there are places in second and third world countries where spousal abandonment is a real issue, and creates a dire threat to physical safety.

But I'm not sure the domino effect that you describe is enough of the current norm to really warrant that kind of PTSD reaction; even if our lizard-brains are still partly wired for it.

You're also talking about betrayed and abandoned, with children - which is an interesting (useful) distinction in this conversation. The wives in the situation brought up by the OP were, I think, still married to their spouses. Betrayal doesn't always result in a separation - so would one have to specify that, and also specify the presence of dependent children?

ETA: in many of the 'he cheated on me and I have PTSD' posts I've read here, the relationship is still active; the person who was cheated on just can't get past the reveal of the betrayal, in their mind, and are experiencing severe anxiety/depression/even some form of hyper-vigilance.

 

[J'qel]

It is true that the human mind is impacted by the impacts of our society and history. However, the statistics on human males versus females is more based upon breeding selection than anything. You'll find a wide disparity in body types throughout history and cultures. Women are typically made noncombatants not primarily because they were smaller (I know it wasn't said but I'm nipping it now), but because they carried children to term. You only needed one male for a group of women (though polygamous relationships have shown that fertility decreases as the male has a larger female pool) in order to perpetuate a family line. Think of it more as a hold over from our ancient and perhaps not-so-ancient traditions of breeding out the competition.

We're still very close to our primitive days if you consider the age of the planet we're on, even the species before us were millions of years older. We're in our infancy, so of course we still have some primal leftovers, as adaptable as we may be, we still need more time to shed our primal origins.