Mental health articles

Recollections of the abuse and neglect
In parents abused as children the capacity to reflect on and think about the
experiences of childhood seems also to have an effect on the risk of repetition of
abuse. Parents who are able to recall their childhood experiences and the
associated emotions are less likely to repeat the abuse than those who have no
recall or recall without emotions.
Fraiberg, Adelson and Shapiro, in their seminal paper ‘Ghosts in the Nursery’
(1975), say this about parents who are likely to repeat their own abuse:
these are the parents who, earlier, in the extremity of childhood terror, formed a
pathological identification with the dangerous and assaultative enemies of the
ego…identification with the aggressor (p. 419).
What was not remembered was the associated affective experience…The original
affects had undergone repression (p. 419).
Our hypothesis is that access to childhood pain becomes a powerful deterrent against
repetition in parenting (p. 420).
Herzog, Gara and Rosenberg (1992) also suggest that those abused parents
in the most psychological pain are those likely to provide the best care for their
children. Easily written, but not so easily lived! The extent to which adults
abused as children use dissociation, splitting and projective identification has a
huge effect on the capacity to balance the difficult memories and feelings
associated with their own childhood experiences, and the needs of their infants
and children for care in the here and now.
John Briere (1989) talks about this as the extent to which the capacities of the
self are overwhelmed by recollection of the trauma, just as the effect of the
trauma itself is linked to the extent that the child’s emerging sense of self was
overwhelmed or disrupted.
Empathy (for the child now and in the past) is proposed as a resource that the
parent can draw on to counter abusive impulses.

Tags: abuse