Childhood Abuse and Neglect

A child enters the world vulnerable and with basic needs for safety, security and nurturing physical touch. It is necessary for these needs to be met in order to be able to develop a sense of 'rightness' about oneself in the world. When these needs are not met, a child will develop a basic sense of self-in-the-world as not safe or not belonging. The child will internalise a sense of 'wrongness' about itself that will then be carried as part of a core identity.

Abuse is usually thought of as physical or sexual acts against the person - assaultive boundary violations of the personhood. Abuse may also take more subtle forms. Parents who remain unawares of the damage from their own childhood are likely to repeat forms of parenting learned from their own role models. This may include shaming the child as a teaching tool, physical punishment "for the child's own good", a confusion of love, affection, sexuality and power, and the need to stifle the child's emerging spirit as "willful children are a problem". Anyone raised in such a way that their own spirit was censured as a child will find the emerging spontaneity in their own child intolerable - it will call to them as a reminder of their own lost part of self and such a realisation, for many, is intolerable. Similarly, the child's open need for love, affection and physical nurturing may evoke feelings of discomfort in the adult, so gratification of these needs may be minimal at best.

A child will then develop a sense of wrongness about their needs, learn that it is not safe to express them, and that they will not be met. Adults who are intolerant of their own 'neediness' have learned somewhere that to be needy is not acceptable. Looking to adults as the 'Gods and Goddesses' of our childhood lives, we trust them as we make sense of the world. Verbal messages like "If you do that I won't love you", "I wish I had never had children", "Why do you have to be so naughty" reinforce non-verbal behaviours (being physically punished, sexualised, pushed away, ignored) that carry the message of "not ok". We know as adults that it is not reasonable to expect parents to be perfect: a child simply assumes they are.

Adaptive creatures that we are, in the face of the dissonance between desire the inability to get the desire met, a child will develop strategies that minimise the unbearable tension of unmet desires. These may include (but are not limited to) deciding that "I don't need anyone"; shutting down the 'receptors' (psychic and physical) which are open to receiving love; believing "I am not worthy of getting my needs met" and that lack of attention/affection is "my fault". A child may then spend much of its energy seeking to prove his/her worthiness. Unexamined, there is nothing to stop this psychic mechanism continuing into adulthood. Ironically, having decided "I am unworthy" and being unavailable for receiving love, attention and affection, the quest for validation from others is one doomed to failure: even when presented with a genuinely loving response, there is no capacity for taking it in.

Adults who experienced abuse/neglect as children, and had no one with whom to share their misery, will carry a legacy that may include chronic low self-esteem, difficulties respecting boundaries (both their own and other peoples), fear of abandonment and living with high levels of anxiety and/or depression. Primary relationships in adulthood will trigger the emotional reality of childhood as the intimacy of the dynamic with the loved one evokes the early intimacies of the parent-child relationship. Often played out unawares within a partnership, dynamics that emerge which create difficulties are a call to healing of early wounds.

Therapy provides the opportunity to explore and heal early childhood experiences that then no longer need to be re-enacted within the current love relationship.