Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Effects of Childhood Trauma

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

Trauma due to physical abuse is perhaps not the most common kind. I consider that trauma due to unpleasant emotional experience is the most prevalent kind, and it is this kind that I focus on in my writings. This kind is one of the sources of the intellectual and artistic ideas that have been important to mankind.
To help the person who desires to understand himself or herself, I list several major effects of infancy trauma.

a). The Two Identities
Infancy trauma creates the two identities, those of social identity and individual identity.[²]. Having two separate identities generates confusion; usually the person will prefer one to the other. But once confusion is removed then he or she finds that they can be either an individual or socially-centred as the needs of the moment dictate. Infancy trauma is assimilated when the person has learned to balance the two identities.

b). Depth to Consciousness
Infancy trauma also bestows depth and intensity to consciousness. This effect is in proportion to its severity. This is the effect that enhances the production of intellectual and artistic ideas. The more intense the trauma was, the more intense the person’s creativity can be. A person who experienced little or no infancy trauma is likely to be an emotionally-balanced adult, but with little intensity to their character; they will have little creative ability and little ability to understand the needs of other people. In general, it is only extreme sorrow, whatever its cause, that deepens consciousness. And there are few sorrows more extreme than infancy trauma.

c). Severity of Abreaction
The degree of severity of trauma in the infant can affect the degree of severity of abreaction in the adult. Trauma gives intensity to the process of abreaction, so that the adult feels guilt, resentment and bitterness much more deeply than the average person. A traditional effect of such intense emotion in a sensitive person is that the person gravitates to solitude and the monastic life.

d). Influences of the Mind
Trauma always makes the person much more sensitive to the influences of the mind. The person can turn this effect into an ability. He can use his increased sensitivity to probe very deeply into the workings of the subconscious mind. The more mental pain that a person has experienced in life, so the more deeply he or she can penetrate into the subconscious and unconscious minds. Extreme distress can bring extreme awareness. However, he or she also needs strong will power, an ethical idealism and a dominant sense of survival in order to surmount the darkness he will encounter. Hence a deep psycho-analytic exploration is not for everyone. Most people are content to probe only a little into their mind.

e). The Oedipus Complex
Another effect is the construction of the Oedipus complex [³]. This begins from sexual imprinting [4]. Then the identification bond masks the infancy trauma. The underlying influence of trauma gives intensity to the child’s sexual identity. Once the child is an adult, if he desires intense sexual relationships then he will pick a female partner who has similar characteristics to his mother. However, he may pick a partner who is different from his mother, but in this situation his sexual relationship will lack intense passion.

There is a variation to this effect. The child, once he has become an adult, may search for a beneficent mother figure, an ideal mother figure. He creates an idealised image of womanhood, an idealised image of female sexuality, which is really the kind of woman he would have liked to have had as a mother. This variation is familiar from the themes of chivalric literature.

f ). Attitude to Male Authority
There is also a variation to the boy’s attitude to male authority, which is represented by the father. Trauma from the father may cause the boy to question authority figures, but alternatively, the boy, once he has become an adult, may search for a beneficent father figure. He may find faith in a religious figure or a political leader. The figure or leader symbolises the ideal father that the child did not have.

Hence trauma can lead eventually to the adult attaining a religious identity that helps to mask the influences of trauma. This kind of identity is of the right-wing fundamentalist, born-again kind. Religion has to be “pure” and “uncorrupted”, not liberal and considerate. I consider that this form of faith is an immature one, since the adult usually develops hatred towards those sectors of society that are not controlled by religion.

Not everyone who goes to church has suffered childhood trauma. In many cultures, going to church is an aspect of social conformity, little different from the necessity of the orthodox male adult to wear a tie. But where the adult shows intense emotional attachment to his religion, then this intensity derives from the intensity of trauma.

I believe in God but not in religion. A religious person can be spiritual too, but a spiritual person does not have to be religious. What is the difference? A religion is a belief with boundaries (another name for this belief is an ideology); anything outside of those boundaries will be despised. Whereas being spiritual has no boundaries, so everything can be accepted, no matter how faulty it appears to be. In my view, a religious identity is only a stepping stone to a mature spiritual identity, one based on tolerance and acceptance.

g). What is Universal?
Many people wonder what is common or universal to all humanity, despite the obvious differences between cultures and between various periods of history. Some think that humans have a common essence. We could delve into metaphysics and say that each human has a spark of divinity within him or her. However, from a psychological perspective, the only things that are universal are childhood and violence.

Violence is independent of cultural and historical differences between societies – such differences only change the forms that violence takes. So where does the universality of violence come from?  The universality of violence must come from something that is also universal. The only other universal thing about humanity is childhood, particularly the trauma that each child may experience. Hence the universality of violence comes from the universality of trauma that the young child faces. The sad fact of infancy trauma creates the potential for each child to become violent, because of the stimulation of hatred within the young child. If the stimulation of hatred is severe, then the child will veer to becoming right-wing in politics and will admire the strong, authoritarian leader.

I consider this view in more detail. If trauma is severe, it produces high levels of stress in the subconscious mind of the child. Call this kind of stress the child’s internal stress. These stresses remain and do not fade away with time. The child may be able to contain them in some ways by developing various coping mechanisms, such as identification and self-absorption. If, during its adult years, the person finds that his usual situations and/or relationships change drastically so that the external stresses acting on him increase markedly, then he may find that he can no longer manage his internal stresses any more. Then two common effects are to either engage in some kind of violent anti-social behaviour or else to experience some form of madness. These will usually manifest during episodes of abreaction, during the resentment and bitterness stages. Overall, many forms of madness have their roots in the child’s traumatic interpretations of experience.

The only way to neutralise violence and anti-social behaviour is to change the conditions of childhood, so that infancy trauma becomes a rarity in the drama of a human life. The way to do this is to teach psychology on an equal footing with science in schools, so the child grows into an adult who can handle effectively all the kinds of relationships that make up society. This also means that the competitiveness of capitalism as a political/economic system needs to give way to a society that believes in cooperation equally as well as competition.

[¹]. My ideas on emotions are on the Home page, in the articles on Emotion. [1]

[²]. For a description of the two identities, see previous article Personal Identity. [2]

[³]. The Oedipus complex is explained in the previous article, Personal Identity. [3]

[4]. I have two articles on imprinting, beginning with Overview of Bonding. [4]

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