Reducing the Psychological Impact Felt Later in Life From Child Abuse
What happens in our childhood for most of us is largely forgotten by the time we reach early middle age. We forget either because we just do, or because we screen it out. Fortunately, we can be encouraged professionally to recall much of it comparatively easily, if we wish to.
It is now better understood how children learn to pattern themselves mentally and emotionally from an early age. The way individual children achieve this varies widely. Many of them form patterns of behaviour and set up emotional defences to enable them to cope with life in their family.
The stimuli for this harmful process can be parental behaviour which can seem innocuous to outsiders. More than that, the dysfunction can be unintentional in the parent and can result from patterns they themselves formed in their own childhood.
It can involve the ways the parents handle feelings of affection between them or the lack of it. It can stem from the resolution, or the lack of it, of disputes within the family. Attitudes within a family to certain behaviours of other people can play a part. It can even stem from how all the members interacted together socially as a family group.
These are just some of the ways children can feel bound under the psychological pressure on them to create their own patterning processes. Clearly cases of severe physical mental and emotional child abuse set up the reactions in the child which can initiate more rigid patterning and defence strategies.
Despite the threat having gone when they leave home, all too often the affected child continues most often to carry the patterns and defences forward into their adult life. There, far from them withering, the patterns can be re-enforced and perpetuated sub-consciously, impacting for good or ill on the adult’s sense of personal well-being and spirituality. Worse, the adopted strategies can have adverse influence on future relationships with partners, siblings, children and friends.
These patterns can also be applied naively to deal with new problems despite their unsuitability as adult response mechanisms to deal even with the issue that spawned them..
However there is a strange feature often found in such a process of adult recall and analysis of their childhood. It occurs among adults who as children were brought up in merely dysfunctional families, or where they were severely abused physically, mentally or emotionally. In all such cases, very often those adults who suffered, reveal an understandable and marked reluctance to review their childhood experiences.
What is perhaps more extraordinary is what can happen once those adults are equipped with a more detailed recall of their childhood. They can find that even to admit to themselves what happened seems deeply disloyal to the very parents who subjected them to the dysfunction or abuse! With that highlighted for them, only then do they begin to appreciate the extent of their denial.
One myth with far wider ramifications is being systematically dismembered by cognitive research. Hitherto, the unique behavioural patterns and defences of any individual have often been interpreted as the sum total of what that person is as a person. Yet, truth to tell, those behaviours were mere strategies adopted by that person as an immature, inexperienced child to protect him or herself from the worst effects of parental dysfunction or abuse. These can mask a very different person trapped behind them. So often there is someone, though they have been hiding, they are capable of being released psychologically and motivated to shed their shell like a crab and begin living to the full.
I wish you well if you decide to embark on it and feels sure you feel emancipated by the process.
Sir Gerry Neale has lectured and trained under-graduates and post graduates at the University of Westminster in cognitive thinking. He has mentored courses for corporate strategic planning and how to position the organisation and the individual’s thinking in relation to them. He has conducted counseling and life coaching programmes with individuals in person and on-line. He paints watercolours, writes lyrics to music and writes fiction as well as non-fiction.
He can be reached on http://psychologysimplified.blogspot.com/ and http://cognitivementors.blogspot.com.