Gemma Speck

This is just your brain trying to explore every possible solution.

I get this question sometimes.

Do manipulators know what they're doing?

And the answer is

Yes, they do.

And even when they don't think they are being intentional about what they are doing, they are willingly and actively pushing down feelings of discomfort and guilt that any normal person would be able to read, understand that they are hurting somebody.

And if they had a slice of empathy in them, turn away from, right?

Even that naivety, even that avoidance, even that ignorance that they may claim they have,

Like that is still a sign that they are a manipulative person and that they had intention.

Because at some point they ignored that feeling, the feeling that told them they were doing something wrong.

I think that is just such clear evidence that this is not, was not, cannot be your fault.

This is just sometimes how people operate.

They're just callous and they're cruel and there are people out there that are like that.

I want to talk about this other strange psychological phenomena that often happens after betrayal.

It's called betrayal blindness.

Jennifer Freyd, she's a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon.

And she's actually the founder and the CEO, president, I guess, of the Center of Institutional Courage, basically talking about betrayal trauma.

And she's done more extensive work on the impact of betrayal on the mind than probably any other human has, especially institutional betrayal, actually, and interpersonal betrayal.

And through her research, she found that sometimes our mind protects us from seeing or processing betrayal early on in a relationship or early on in our lives because

Because to do so would be so disruptive that our mind almost willingly ignores it for us, which is why we then get that sense of like, shouldn't I have known?