TRAUMA IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

3 Reasons Why You Don’t Realise or Admit You Have Experienced Childhood Trauma

Are You Overlooking or Rationalizing Abuse?

1. Lack of Awareness

Due to the complex nature of abuse, most people don’t truly understand what it entails. Because abuse is generally perceived as physical and sexual or rejection and neglect, it is difficult for people to recognise certain dysfunctional parenting styles as abusive.

Less recognised forms of abuse can include parentification, smothering, forcing upon the child the parent’s own dreams, not recognising the child as a separate individual and not recognising the child’s boundaries, which all result in the objectification of the child.

For instance, being spoiled and having maternal overindulgence was linked to Narcissistic Personality Disorder in a study.¹ The results were interpreted as ‘lack of parental warmth did not predict narcissism over time’.

The problem is, the researchers considered parental overvaluation as an indicator of parental warmth. They failed to recognise it as a form of abuse consisting of behaviours such as overprotection, demanding obedience, exaggerated standards of achievement, intrusiveness and imposition of strict rules.

The participants were assessed using a questionnaire, which is another problem. Self-reports can be inaccurate as people may not recognise that their parents’ behaviour was abusive or downplay the effects of it unless they have gained insight through therapy.

2. Denial

Donald Dutton, who has conducted numerous studies on perpetrators of domestic abuse found that men sent to them by the courts for wife assault idealised their parents’ treatment of them.² It wasn’t until their reports were readjusted taking socially desirable responses into consideration that a closer approximation to the truth was found.

Socially desirable responses include enhancement (endorsement of positive self-description) and denial (rejection of negative self-description). For instance, Paul Mones discussed cases he had encountered that involved boys who killed their abusive fathers and he found that some didn’t want to talk about the abuse they had suffered and would even defend the parent.³ Another example of this may be someone describing their abusive parents as very strict or harsh, but claiming this made them a strong person.

In general, people who have experienced childhood trauma have a propensity to deny these experiences. In a lot of cases, it’s because this might simply not fit with their self-image — they might not want to think of themselves as a victim or as having been affected by abuse in any way.

3. Positive Impression Management

A lot of people who have experienced trauma struggle with perfectionistic tendencies. They are highly concerned with how they are seen and judged by other people. They might deny the abuse they suffered to others even if they acknowledge that it’s happened to themselves because they don’t want to be seen in a negative light.

There are psychometric tests such as MMPI with scales to detect when the test taker is attempting to present themselves in a favourable light. In MMPI, those who score high on L Scale, which detects a tendency to create a favourable impression, were shown to have the potential for problematic behaviour.⁴ This shows that an excessive need to make a positive impression is tied to behavioural problems, which result from trauma.

References:

[1]: Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Nelemans, S. A., Orobio de Castro, B., Overbeek, G., & Bushman, B. J. (2015). Origins of narcissism in children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(12), 3659–3662. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1420870112

[2]: Dutton, D. G., (2007). The Abusive Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships. The Guilford Press.

[3]: Mones, P. A. (1992). When a child kills: abused children who kill their parents. Pocket Books.

[4]: Weiss, P. A., Vivian, J. E., Weiss, W. U., Davis, R. D., & Rostow, C. D. (2013). The MMPI-2 L Scale, reports uncommon virtue, and predicting police performance. Psychological Services, 10(1), 123–130. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029062

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