Childhood trauma as factor of social ills and chronic diseases

[Mole]

I am just championing the choice we will always have as human beings to take control of our lives.

The problem is control. The adult abusers are in control and take control of the sexual-emotional life of a child. This does permanent psycho-sexual damage to the child.

It is of interest that controllers also seek to control women and it is this control of women that leads to domestic violence against women.

More morally advanced cultures, rather than seeking to control children seek to help their children achieve their life goals.

And rather than controlling women, more morally advanced cultures seek equal relations with women based on empathy and creativity.

 

[Blackout]

The problem is 'getting laid' will not allow us to access our psychological pain, will not allow us to analyse our psychological pain, will not enable us to evaluate our psychological pain, and will not enable us to integrate our psychological pain into our daily life.

Indeed the phrase 'getting laid' is pejorative and shows contempt for love making.

And this contempt is because 'getting laid' does not meet our deepest and most vulnerable needs. Indeed 'getting laid' denies our deepest needs. At the same time 'getting laid' is cool and enables us to present a false front to the world.

I was just saying I think we all just want love deep down.

 

[ChocolateMoose123]

We will have to agree to disagree on Mole.

I was not refuting the article in its approach or its veracity. I attempted to add to it with with-that-being-said-now-what motive. The truth is that there is never much resolution in life, but our future wellbeing and self-actualization need not be held hostage to it. No matter how much help these children get to deal with the childhood abuse, healing will always start from the point where the now adult makes the choice to take control, in the present, of their life and safeguard their future from being defined by what was not a choice. To this triumph of human spirit, I attest and pay obeisance, which is the most important moment of reckoning in our lives.

I did not give extreme examples to belittle anybody's suffering. As a rule, role models and exemplars like Elisabeth Fritzl or Jaycee Duggard are a cut above the rest. They are by no means average people and we should never compare the resiliency of the victims of abuse anyway. The point was to see them as inspiration for all of us who, not being dead, have to survive and move on. How well we do that depends a lot on the attitude of the person, the kind of therapy they receive and the message they get from the environment.

There is a certain popular trend to take the power away from the survivor in the name of validating their pain by overanalyzing and overfocusing on the past to the point where it becomes the causa causum of everything that happens afterwards. This may feel good in the short run, but never helps in my experience.
I don't agree with that approach. Maybe that is what is registering here as not being politically correct or supportive enough of the victims?
I have no idea, how else to put though.

I totally understand your point and consider it very valid, but what you describe is....healing. You are describing the end, the last leg of the journey, so to speak.

Making the decision to move on, realizing nothing can be undone and taking control...is being healed. It's acceptance, it is reconstitution of ACE's back into ones life so that they do not have power. The pain associated becomes manageable and the fear of the experience lessens.

Prior to help, these are not integrated or not done so properly.

Not many health professionals put emphasis on the empowerment aspect because it happens AFTER one seeks help. AFTER one goes through self pity, pain, sadness, guilt....AFTER they work through the ACE's.

Most people have to break down before they can rebuild stronger.

That being said, I love to see someone tell their stories and survive. Coming out the other side, wiser, and willing to help others that where in the same boat. This is motivation.

It's why I became a Guardian Ad Litem for abused, neglected children. I needed to be there because I had been. I would not be able to do that if I had not dealt with my past. It would mess my head up.

Being empowered is the end result and I like that you were here to remind everyone who reads the thread that it's not ALL pain, but you have to feel pain and get through it to feel peace.

 

[Siúil a Rúin]

The problem with childhood sexual abuse is that it interrupts the maturation process. This psycho-sexual process only operates through a particular window of time, usually round 12, 13, or 14. And once this window has passed there is no way of repeating it. So childhood sexual abuse does permanent psychological damage to the victim.

A lot of childhood trauma is permanent damage. Think of it like losing a limb. Resiliency is not recovering back to what you would have been without the damage. I suspect resiliency is the ability to adapt and work around the broken parts.

 

[ChocolateMoose123]

A lot of childhood trauma is permanent damage. Think of it like losing a limb. Resiliency is not recovering back to what you would have been without the damage. I suspect resiliency is the ability to adapt and work around the broken parts.

+ infiniti

 

[Poki]

Yes, moving on is the classic way of betraying children.

so is staying you know how many abusive people get stuck in abuse because they didnt move on when they should have.

 

[Lark]

The problem with looking back too much is that everyone had imperfect childhoods and it is not possible to have made it through this far unscathed. Such is life.
So it becomes a question of degrees of trauma...

I was thinking of Joesef Fritzl, the evil scum who kept his daughter imprisoned in the basement for over two decades and forced her to have over seven of children with no medical help or social interaction.

He blames his childhood for his problems and indeed, Stalin's dad used to beat him up so badly that he would have blood in his pee due to internal bleeding. But these people went on to make others suffer and I have really begun to question the "my-abusive-childhood-ruined-my-life" theory. Look at Fritzl's abused daughter who turned out to be an angelic mother and put an end to the abuse cycle. Who could have blamed her if she had been unable to care for her children due to her own pain?
As sad as all this is, we should focus, I think, on the ability of the human spirit to rise above these negative starts to life and not allow ourselves to be defined by what we couldn't control. A lot can be done NOW, in the present and all we have left is the future.


You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could've, would've happened... or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the fuck on.”
― Tupac Shakur

I think that trauma in childhood can result in impairment, although the sort of early life trauma which is the more significant and formative, to do with attachment style, and stems from maternal deprivation is often much more serious, for the individual, than the sorts of "later life" but still early years traumas like being physically beaten up by parents.

That kind of trauma and its legacy results in either impairment or improvement being passed on as an "inheritance" in families and some families become the source of trauma in communities, they are impaired and they cause impairment to those who associate with them. I think that's totally linked to social ills, definitely linked to micro cultural struggles over territory, drugs, deviance, all that sort of stuff.

That's a different question to politics and social character though, which I think effects everyone and is important in cases like Stalin etc. social character is a social product with political consequences and despite some societies or communities within societies moving more rapidly in the direction of things like marketing orientations I think the escape from freedom, escape from the emotional conflicts arising from individuation and the breaking of primary ties, which most people opt for remains authoritarianism in some degree.