Children of Trauma: Rediscovering Your Discarded Self - Softcover

Standing still in the same spot for the past five minutes, the little girl remained perfectly erect. Her small-boned hands were clutched behind her. Her tiny leotard covered legs were crossed at the ankles and held tightly together. The pressed white pinafore was without a wrinkle.

She spoke a little louder, "Mommy please, I need to go to the bathroom." Four, perhaps five years old, the little girl appeared much older. As she stood near her engrossed parents in Chicago's O'Hare airport, Sandy was too patient, too sedate for a normal child of her age.

Fighting in strained intense tones, her parents seemed oblivious to the child's persistent yet patient requests. Another few minutes passed. Slowly she reached up and touched her mother's arm. "Mommy, please!" The mother grabbed the little girl by her shoulders, "Well go then. Sandy, will you grow up? Can't you see I'm busy talking to your father? Go!"

While her parents resumed muffled retaliations above the noise of the airport hubbub, Sandy backed away. Pulling herself even more erect, she started walking hesitantly down the crowded hall. A curious marionette in a well-starched pinafore, Sandy paused now and again. Trying her best to look grown up, she mostly appeared frightened, confused, alone.

Months and miles away, another child was playing quietly under the chairs of his mother's table in an airport cafeteria. Jimmy appeared to be about four. His very young mother painted and repainted her face, sipping cocktails with abrupt anxious movements. Every few minutes she would jump up and run to the door, nervously checking for the arrival of the plane for which she was so impatiently waiting.

Jimmy darted after her, "Wait, Mommy, wait!" She would turn, put one hand on her hip and point a threatening finger in his direction.

"Get back there! Do you want to ruin this relationship, too? Damn it, Jimmy, leave me alone!" Glaring at his mother, he retreated to the table and began taking sugar packets out of a bowl and tossing them one by one on the floor. For this behavior, Jimmy would get soundly shaken, slapped on the backside and banished to his stainless steel shelter. "Get back under there, you brat. You're just like your drunken old man! Stay out of the way!"

During one such interaction, the mother pushed her drink at him, trying to be careful that no one witnessed the offering. He drank some and made a face. She force fed him some more, "Look at you, you like it, don't you? You're going to be a drunk just like that no good dad of yours!"

Dragging him out from under the table, his mom combed his hair with abrupt rough motions. Finished with his grooming, she stared at Jimmy with blank harshness and shoved him back under the table prison. He gazed up at his mom while she retouched her lipstick one more time.

In another place and time four-year-old Danny stood, eyes opened wide, marvelled by the abundance of a department store toy section. The Yupik Eskimo child was running his hand gently across the face of a blond, white-skinned doll. His parents stood close by, silent, stoic, glancing at him frequently, nervously. Their eyes seemed to suggest, perhaps urge Danny to remember that gentle touches were enough.

Across the aisle from Danny, a little white boy sat cross-legged on the floor. Zooming a truck in circles around himself, the boy filled the air with imitations of diesel engines and airhorns.

After a time, the little boy's father, obviously frustrated from looking for his child, appeared at the end of the aisle, "Damn it, son!" he yelled, "Get up off that floor; you look like a drunk, squattin' Indian!"

Danny's parents looked away immediately. Their eyes fell to the floor as they moved slowly toward their boy. There was a sense of urgency in still downcast glances. With hushed briskness, Danny's parents whisked him out of the store. Not a word was spoken.

Sandy, Jimmy and Danny are children of trauma. Throughout their developmental years they faced "cumulative traumas" such as those described above. (Kahn, 1963). They might never remember what really happened, yet the buried feelings and emotional reactions to these experiences may direct the course of their lives. As adults these individuals may suffer from panic attacks, bulimia, chronic depression, antisocial behavior, compulsive behavioral problems and addictions. The therapeutic map and other necessary support required to work through, resolve and master the traumas may never be offered. They might not regain the discarded self that was lost in a childhood over which they had no control.

Adult children of trauma often become locked in unhealthy and addictive relationships. These patterns reflect repeated survival attempts to master old pain. They may choose not to have children, fearing they would be unhealthy parents. If they do have offspring, these parents may not bond to their children or may become overenmeshed, overprotective or permissive. They may attempt to reparent themselves (through their children) in order to heal their own wounds.

Some children of trauma may eventually become leaders of corporations, doctors, psychologists, artists or poets. The pain and sensitivity of past experiences may help them create gifts to the world, yet many will treat themselves with disdain and neglect through workaholism, extreme perfectionism or chronic illness.

Better choices are possible. As adults these children can learn that they are survivors of trauma and look at themselves with feelings of respect for that survival. They can learn to believe in themselves enough to risk a long journey back through the pain. This process will allow them to reclaim their discarded self and free them to live, bond and break the generational cycle of pain. Sandy, Jimmy and Danny may risk allowing themselves to feel the initial pain of being welcomed to the planet earth, a welcoming that children of trauma may ever have experienced.

Sandy, before the age of five, is already learning that it is not all right to have needs and feelings. She is an "unwelcomed visitor" who must take care of herself, control her needs and stay out of the way. In order to be accepted (allowed to stay), she must prematurely function like an adult. She is learning to focus on the needs of those around her and obliterate her most important developmental task: identity formation.

At the airport she was eventually taken to the bathroom by a well-meaning adult who was afraid for her safety. Sandy may have learned through this experience that strangers are more trustworthy than those responsible for her care. This lesson could have frightening implications for her if she continues to suffer the neglect experienced on this particular day.

Jimmy, on the other hand, is learning that he is more powerful than life. This lesson creates a tremendous lack of security and a need to act out more, seeking the outside controls which make him feel safe. He is learning that he can externalize his mother's anxiety and depression. Jimmy is also learning the blueprint for his life. He is bad, causes nothing but trouble and is destined to become an alcoholic. He has already tasted the liquid which may later sedate inner feelings of terror, pain and loneliness.

Danny's lessons may lead to the internalization of cultural self-hate. He is hearing that there is something wrong with him because of the color of his skin and the ways of his culture. The dolls he loves are not like him in color or features. Powerful figures on the family television set or officials in the school system are also different from him. He is already hearing a statistic which he may come to believe, that Indians are alcoholics (and doomed to die at earlier ages).

If his parents remain speechless about their own past pain and internalized shame, Danny will learn to hide his feelings to protect them from further distress. Ethnically or racially different childen are subject to a sense of shame that can turn into self-hate and intense isolation. If the parents have adapted to their own shame through learned helplessness, the child's world becomes divided. Ensuing conflicts in loyalties create an outside and inside reality that deeply injures a sense of self.

When we look at Sandy and Jimmy, we do not see behavior typical of happy-go-lucky, four-year-old children who have in only two years' time become comfortable with learning the "I." Nor do they within that knowledge begin really exploring their new world of self, asking hundreds of curious questions, showing expansiveness, energy and experimenting with language, cause and effect, imagination and tall tales.

Normal four-year-olds are busy learning to sort out the real from make-believe, questioning for the first time, "Where did I come from?" and "What happens when I die?" We see the curious child between four and five involving a parent for the first time in serious discussions of life. In both Sandy and Jimmy, however, we see children focused on parental behavior rather than their own developing language and curiosity. We do not see the shocked response of a traumatized child: frenzied, frozen, panicked and regressed. Instead, Sandy and Jimmy exhibit behaviors which indicate experience with trauma. They already show signs of massive defenses established through repeated traumas which make them less sensitive to emotional neglect and abuse. This can be likened to behavior adopted by soldiers experiencing war.

"Soldiers can be hardened in training by the battle of experience; while certain physiological expressions of anxiety were considered normal in what was once called a soldier's baptism by fire, the seasoned soldier may take similar situations in stride."

Waelder, 1967

The energy a child expends to protect the self from frequent trauma, however, is energy that cannot be expended in normal child development. Basic trust in the security and continuity of the emotional and physical world are key to the development of a sense of positive identity and self-esteem.

Masterson (1985) talks about several elements that are present in a healthy real self. Among them are, "The ability to experience emotions deeply with liveliness, joy, vigor, excitement and spontaneity. . . the capacity to identify one's unique wishes and to use autonomous initiative and assertion to express them in reality . . . the capacity to limit, minimize and soothe painful emotions . . . the capacity to express the self fully in close relationships with minimal anxiety about abandonment or engulfment."

These capacities are sorely missing in adults who experienced regular unresolved traumas in their families. Or because of their parents' own traumatic childhoods, these children were not helped to resolve the traumas present in losses or in their ventures out into the world of school and community.

A child learns the trust and security of the world (through the unconditional love and nurturing of parents) in the initial weeks and months of life. This love extends beyond being fed and clothed. It is the warmth of the mother's body when being fed, the loving remarks and smiles of the parent when diapers are changed. Also involved is the early protective shield of the parents' holding the child. A sense of security develops also in the knowledge gained through repetition that although the parents may not always be right there every minute, they will return. In later months and years, while the child is building a sense of self, the parent's acknowledgment, praise, confidence, support, encouragement and comforting will be internalized by the child. This helps the child develop her or his own ability to express confidence in self, to self-praise for accomplishments, to self-encourage when confused and to self-soothe when disappointed. The parent's consistency and limits will be internalized as the child's self-discipline and self-control. The parent's positive attention to, and encouragement for the unique person the child is becoming, is positively internalized in the creation of the child's own sense of self and heightened self-esteem.

Children of trauma are most frequently parented by individuals who experienced trauma that was never resolved. A child's first steps, when met with encouragement, cause the child to make greater steps forward. Children who experience disdain and judgment will be critical of themselves. If the parent shows anxiety and fear, the child will be unsure and tenuous or will take inordinate risks as a defense against fear. If the child's needs are rejected (as in the case of Sandy), the child will learn to show disdain for her own needs. This child leaps into expected responsibility of the pseudo-adult world with little or no foundation in reality. Typecast into a role and unable to live outside the world of the theater this child excels at memorizing lines and remains dependent on the cues of various "directors."

Some children, like Jimmy, learn that normal childlike existence is a threat to the security of others. They learn that normal emotions are like weapons that can actually endanger the foundations of their parents' lives. With this internalized sense of self, they are equipped only to live out their identities as "bad apples," to become the alcoholic or"slut" their mother sees in them, abuse themselves for the contempt the parent shows or to turn the parent's anger on themselves, being afraid that to express it would create danger to others and to their sense of security. They may keep testing their environment to finally secure punishment for overpowering "crimes," committed before the age of five.

Children live out what they see reflected in their parents' eyes or in the eyes of others in their community. If what is reflected is the disdain and unacceptability of their developing self, that self will be discarded in order to meet the image in the reflective mirror of their world. The wall of internal defenses keeps their true self in check, a wall created by stimuli too great for an unprepared ego to endure. Children of trauma live in environments that stimulate emotions and simultaneously block their release. When the defensive wall is relaxed, as is the case of a soldier with no more wars, a workaholic without a job or a caretaker without someone to care for, what is seen is the original panic of the frightened child.

In her book, The Ego and the Mechanism of Defense: Vol. II, (1966), Anna Freud writes:

"That the ego's defensive system acts as a protection against traumatization becomes evident whenever an individual is prevented from using a habitual defense in a situation that represent...