With the success of the latest Yellowstone spinoff: Dutton Ranch, BHC thought it would be a great idea to look into one of the most interesting lead characters. Beth Dutton is one of the pillars of the franchise, a figure of empowerment that people love to hate. Her take no prisoners attitude, say it like it is mentality, and softness under the rough exterior make Beth a complex character to root for. Her business acumen helps the Duttons maintain control of the ranch and her dynamics with leads such as Rip Wheeler (her future husband), John Dutton (her father), Jaime Dutton (adoptive brother), and Kayce Dutton (younger brother) make her the glue for the cast. This blog post will be analyzing Beth during Yellowstone’s initial run and yes, there are spoilers ahead.
Beth first appears when she heads home from Utah. Her brother, Lee Dutton, has just died. We don’t get much more context to her until episode 3, where we get a flashback of her riding horses with her mother and brother, Kayce. Beth, scared of her horse, loses control and causes her mother’s horse to rear and partially crush her, mortally wounding her. Beth continues to carry that grief throughout the rest of the show and it is revisited several times. Later that same episode, John asks her to run for state assembly. Despite having no interest, she agrees, thus starting another pattern of behavior that will appear throughout the show. Her initial relationship with Rip is explored, where she is hot and cold with him and inconsistent with her intentions. She is constantly badmouthing Jaime to her father, stating that he can’t be trusted. She spends the rest of the season undermining a competitor, Dan Jenkins, and eventually getting him removed from the board of his company.
Season 2 features one of the most brutal scenes ever adapted to modern television. After angering some dangerous investors, they send hitmen after the Dutton family. Beth and her assistant are captured and tortured in her office. She is brutally beaten and forced to watch her assistant be killed in front of her. She is then nearly raped before Rip intervenes and kills them, though he is nearly killed in the process. Some of the fallout is explored, with Beth softening significantly toward Rip. Closer to the end of the season, that tenderness appears again when she saves her sister-in-law, Monica, from being harassed by a local shop owner and the police. While Beth remained strong during the initial assault, her heart opened just a little bit more toward the people she loves.
Around the middle of season 3, we get the context as to why Beth constantly undermines Jaime: he got her sterilized when she asked for his help to get an abortion. We discover this in a sad, tense flashback, and it is a pain that Beth has been living with for roughly two decades. It is implied that the child was Rips. Beth informs both Rip and John about these events, alienating Jaime from the family. She later asks Rip to marry her. Towards the end of the season, competitor Willa Hays buys the controlling stock of her company and has Beth fired. Beth vows to get revenge. In the season finale, her fate is left uncertain after a bomb goes off in her office.
Season 4 reveals that she survived the bombing and is shellshocked. She learns that her father has fallen into a coma and while at the hospital, befriends a young man named Carter. She takes him under her wing and offers him a place on the ranch. Despite some issues in a clothing store, Beth quickly makes her boundaries clear and Carter begins to respect them.
Later on, Beth finds her dad in bed with a new love interest (Summer) and is cold to her. She later utilizes Summer in a plot against Market Equities, having Summer lead a protest that ends in her getting arrested. This angers John, who threatens to kick Beth out of the house. They later reconcile. Market Equities finds out about Beth orchestrating various issues to slow them down and threatens to sue, firing her. Beth kidnaps a priest, thinking she is going to jail, and marries Rip on the ranch. Afterwards, she gets confirmation from a reliable source that Jaime’s father hired the hit on the Duttons and that Jaime found out later and did nothing. She decides to use this information to blackmail Jaime into killing his own father.
The final season features Beth helping her father run his campaign and pointing out various loopholes they can exploit to protect the ranch. After one particular victory, Beth and some others go out to celebrate. During the celebrations, a woman flirts with Rip. Beth proceeds to smash a bottle over the woman’s head and is taken to jail. Jaime bails Beth out and she learns that he has a secret child, bringing back the pain of her sterilization. John removes Beth from custodial supervision of the ranch. Beth and Summer later get into a fist fight that same day over continued disagreements. Jaime later calls for impeachment of John and finds out about the “train station”, a place the ranchers dump bodies so nobody will ever find them. Fearing the worst, Beth talks to John about possibly killing Jaime. Unbeknownst to her, Jaime decides to hire hitmen.
The second half of the season opens with John Dutton’s assassination, made to look like a suicide. Beth instantly suspects Jaime, though Kayce remains adamant that he didn’t do it. Chief Rainwater discusses the ranch with Beth, who gets the idea to give the land back so it can be kept whole and never developed on. In the series finale, John is laid to rest. Beth goes after Jaime and attacks him, but is nearly killed in the attempt. Only Rip’s intervention saves her, allowing her to finish Jaime for good. They manage to make the scene look like Jaime was the aggressor and get away with the murder. Beth purchases a small ranch elsewhere in Montana and starts a new life with Rip and Carter. The show ends with the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch sold, but a new life begins for most of the characters.
The diagnoses that Beth fits the criteria for are Borderline Personality Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Looking at the criteria, Beth struggles with an instability in interpersonal relationships. She struggles with feelings of abandonment (not wanting to disobey John), impulsivity with sex, substance use, and spending, instability in reactive mood, feelings of emptiness, intense anger, and paranoid ideation. The PTSD is a little more self explanatory, as she suffers from exposure to death, injury, and sexual violence. She directly experienced the traumatic events, prolonged psychological distress to cues about the incident, trying to avoid triggers, persistent negative emotions, verbal aggression, reckless behavior, sleep disturbance, and not attributable to substance use. It would probably also fall under delayed expression, as she doesn’t meet the full criteria for a diagnosis within 6 months.
Beth’s treatment plan would need to focus on the trauma surrounding her. Instances include her mom’s passing, her brother Lee’s passing, her forced sterilization, her severe beating, almost being raped, the bombing, her father’s coma, finding out about the train station, John’s death, and killing her brother Jaime. Any one of these would be severely crippling mentally for a person. All of them combined would be hard to overcome. Additionally, her problems with abandonment, reactivity to emotions, and unstable relationships would need to be addressed. Medication would be recommended for this case, as Beth’s emotions often shift drastically from one minute to the next.
Beth Dutton is a rather polarizing character, but for the people who love her, she is an iconic character. Her hardships help lend credence to why she behaves the way she does, even if we don’t agree with her actions. She has been through many difficult situations in her life, but her resilience keeps her going in the face of adversity.
At Behavioral Health Clinic, we have clinicians who specialize in trauma, PTSD, and personality disorders. Reach out at 855.607.8242 or email us at appointments@bhclinic.com.
