Archive for December, 2010
As Within So Without
Thursday, December 30th, 2010All of us tend to recreate our outer environment according to the state of our inner world. There is a compulsion to repeat past traumatic patterns that seems irrational and destructive. Without help or insight, we tend to choose partners who resemble our parents and treat our children just the way […]
Impact of Abuse in the Psychological Dimension
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010The child of an abusive parent can reach another conclusion is that submission to abuse is the price one pays for love. Such a belief will distort the child’s personality formation. Children resort to such misunderstandings in a vain attempt to deny feeling helpless and to make sense of the pain […]
Impact of Abuse in the Psychological Dimension
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010Some abusive parents behave like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, abuser onemoment, comforter the next. But how can the child trust and receive comfortfrom the very person who inflicted the wound? Repeated experiencesof this kind only leave the child tense, confused, and mistrustful of all caretakers.In extreme cases, an […]
Impact of Abuse in the Psychological Dimension
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010One would think that physical or sexual abuse from an otherwise attentive and loving caretaker would be less traumatic for a child than from a stranger. Sometimes this is the case, but more often the confusion and emotional abandonment that happen when children are abused by a caretaker, especially a parent, […]
Impact of Abuse in the Psychological Dimension
Thursday, December 16th, 2010Verbal and emotional abuse of children can reach psychotic proportions, as when deranged abusers vilify children while they are abusing them, accusing their victims of being whores and demons. Already overwhelmed by the intense physical and emotional trauma of the abuse experience, children have no refuge from or defense against […]
Impact of Abuse in the Psychological Dimension
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010The consequences of breaks and tangles in the orange thread of emotional development and in the yellow thread of related cognitive dysfunction due to abuse can be even more damaging to the child’s future than accompanying physical injury. Abused children develop beliefs that cripple their capacity to grow emotionally and […]
Abuse and Mental Illness
Thursday, December 9th, 2010In the presence of pre-existing neuropsychiatric disorders, abuse experiences can have a devastating impact. With additional complications that diminish the child’s capacity to cope. A child with a genetic predisposition to Bipolar Disorder or Schizophrenia, for example, is already supersensitive to stress, especially in relationship to others, and therefore will […]
Overstimulation
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010The habitually abused child ultimately shuts down body awareness altogether.Thought and emotion are experienced without reference to body sensation, which has been cast into the shadows outside of the field of consciousnessto avoid pain. The full impact of the trauma is now carried in the form of constant body tension […]