Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Childhood Trauma

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The various issues that an inharmonious identity can cause have their origins in the ways in which bonding can fail, with the result that the child, as it grows up, can find it difficult to create harmonious relationships with its peers and then later with other adults.

The characters of the parents are crucial for the child in its early years. Negative traits of character in the parents will hamper the ability of the child to bond with the parents. In particular, the child’s experiences of fear or of rejection prevent any bonds being formed with the parent, or are likely to weaken any existing bond. 

The worst situations for the child occur when it suffers abuse from the parents, or from other significant adults, or even from older siblings. Abuse can be intentional or non-intentional. The latter case arises when the parents or other people have the best of intentions for the child but lack the psychological and social skills needed to bring up the child competently in difficult times. 

Childhood abuse can take two forms: it can arise from invalidation or it can arise from inauthenticity [²]. Invalidation can generate emotions like self-pity, guilt and shame as the child begins to believe that it is to blame for its distress and difficulties. Whereas inauthenticity can generate emotions like fear, anger and resentment in the child as a response to the parents’ heavy punishment of it. A common means of invalidating and inauthenticating a child is the use of excessive and unnecessary criticism and fault-finding of the child by one or both of the parents. Whether criticism leads to invalidation or inauthenticity depends on which aspects of the child’s consciousness is being criticised.

As mentioned in Article 4 (The Family Setting), when the child feels trapped in a difficult relationship, he may passively accept it or actively try and surmount it. He may be swamped by despair and desolation, or he may become hostile to figures of authority and sexuality. Usually the child will swing between these extremes: sometimes he will have a period of passivity and despair, and then something will spark his anger and set off a period of activity and hostility, followed sooner or later by another period of passivity.

To start my analysis of childhood trauma I come back to my experience of catatonia in my mid-40s, which was an experience of extreme desolation.

Catatonia and its Effects

Catatonia indicates the collapse of the person’s will power, an effect caused by intense fear. The person experiences total desolation; in my case the desolation had an immediate effect of deepening the level of my psychological sensitivity. My sensitivity became deep enough to enable me to psycho-analyse my subconscious mind and to detect and identify the usual range of my emotions. Even today, I still retain a lot of this increased sensitivity.

The roots of catatonia lie in the occurrence of trauma in infancy. However, catatonia is not the original infancy trauma itself but a particular response to it. Infancy trauma is not confined to the children of a few bad parents; in my view it occurs to most of humanity in some degree and has shaped the course of human evolution (due to its long-term effects on sensitive and creative people). The most prevalent causes of trauma are due either to physical abuse or to the child’s interpretation of unpleasant emotional experience. It is physical and emotional abuse and emotional neglect that I primarily focus on in this chapter.

The original infancy trauma can generate infancy catatonia. I attribute this effect to the infant whilst recognising that its collapse of will is not obvious. The distressed infant hangs on to the mother’s will, and this manoeuvre gives it the appearance of near-normality. In other words, the infant is not in a position to become truly catatonic because of its identification, its bonding, with the mother. My mother often told me that she was baffled as to why I, as an infant, cried so much, much more than infants normally do. The family doctor told her that I would grow out of it (unfortunately, I never have grown out of that distress – the effects, though much less intense, remain with me even today). My constant crying indicated the destruction of my internal world. 

When, during my self-analysis, I abreacted the childhood states of infancy trauma I experienced devastating intensities of pain. This pain proved to me that time does not heal childhood wounds; the wounds are only banished to the subconscious mind, where they exert a permanent yet unrecognised influence on the ego. In my view, every sensitive and creative person experiences infancy trauma in some degree, ranging from mild to severe. Extreme trauma may create the roots for the later development of a psychosis. Apart from this possible severe reaction the trauma always generates a long-term response: it deepens the intensity of hatred within the child. Hate can be used in two ways: it can be directed at oneself or it can be directed at other people. These responses of hate lead to guilt and pride respectively.

The child desperately needs to withdraw from hate, especially the self-hate. So it flees into either identification with a parent or self-absorption into its own world of phantasy. In my case, as I eventually learned to understand it, my catatonia was caused by my father. So I fled into an excessive bonding with my mother, alternating that bonding with a deep absorption into daydreaming and my own world of phantasy.

What is the psychological meaning of catatonia?  It relates to the issue of power. By this I mean the power to create an harmonious ego and an harmonious sense of identity. Catatonia indicates the presence in the child’s subconscious mind of an intense belief that it has no psychological power. In my case, my father inhibited my ability to develop an harmonious sense of masculinity.

Trauma can occur intentionally by a parent, or unintentionally. The child has to interpret its situation. If its interpretation is correct, then trauma results from intentional abuse. If its interpretation is mistaken, then trauma results from unintentional causes. For example, if the mother is angry with the father, she may go and cuddle the child. The child feels the mother’s anger and mistakenly thinks that she is angry with it. Ideally a parent should not hug the child when that parent is in a negative mood.

Both the mother and the father can pass their subconscious stresses to the infant, as it introjects their emotions. This is especially so when the parent handles and cares for the infant. For example, the regular close-proximity of the mother and infant means that the infant is regularly within the mother’s aura: this situation allows the infant to introject the mother’s emotions easily.

Speed of Onset of Trauma

Either parent can be a source of trauma in the child and we can understand the situation better by suggesting that the onset of trauma is either rapid or slow. Slow-onset trauma means that the trauma happens over a period of time, by a process of cumulative addition of negative experiences that are regularly repeated until trauma finally occurs.

When the child’s distress is instantaneous and serious enough to create trauma, then I call it fast-onset trauma. This is always the result of an intense feeling of fear or self-pity erupting like a volcano in the child. Fast-onset trauma occurs when the person’s will (or will power) is broken. Whereas, slow-onset trauma occurs over a period of time, so the will is not always broken.

One cause of fast-onset trauma is the experience of overwhelming fear of a parent. The most likely cause is physical abuse. The abuse may happen because a parent is a bully, or over-reacts when punishing the child, but it can also happen if the parent is a strict disciplinarian.

The other cause of fast-onset trauma is an explosion of self-pity erupting into the person’s consciousness. The self-pity is a response to an overwhelming feeling of being rejected or being abandoned, so that there is nothing of any value left in the person’s life.

At lesser intensities, self-pity can cause slow-onset trauma, as the child feels the lack of sympathy and love from its parent. The slow attrition of the child’s good feelings about itself can result in the child excessively bonding to the abusive parent. The excessive bonding hides the child’s fears and depressions, though it does not usually show joy in its ties with the parent.

Another cause of slow-onset trauma is the regular occurrence of guilt-induction in the child by a parent. The guilt [³] is in the self-hate mode. This is emotional abuse. The child believes that it has been humiliated or denigrated by the parent. The child may be accurate in its belief that the parent has denigrated it, or it may be mistaken by interpreting a parent’s mood of hostility (from any number of causes) as being one of denigration towards it. Either way, if the child’s state of mind is at that moment receptive to negative suggestion, then trauma will be induced in it. Because the trauma has a slow-onset, the child gradually adapts to it and is never overwhelmed by it. At a subconscious level of mind, the child not only learns to hate himself, but he also learns to hate the parent.

Emotional abuse occurs, for example, if the parent regularly criticises and finds fault with the child. This is done in excessive and non-respectful ways. Especially bad is the induction in the child of the feeling that sex and sexuality are dirty and repulsive. What is at issue is the tone and intensity of the parent’s disapproval.

Long-term guilt and self-pity induced in the child prevent it from attaining a sense of validation.
Long-term fear of the parent prevents it from attaining a sense of authenticity.

In general, when a child experiences trauma due to fear, then this is likely to prevent bonding with that parent. Whereas, the regular reception of criticism from the parent will make the child hate the parent. However, since it also loves the parent, the child will develop an intense love-hate relationship to that parent.

The child may experience fast-onset trauma from one parent and slow-onset trauma from the other. A likely scenario is that a boy fears his father and has a love-hate relationship to his mother. If a child is brought up by an abusive single-parent, then this may maximise the conflicting stresses acting on that child.

Eventually the child becomes an adult. Its attitudes to its parents are now expressed in its relationships with other men and women. If he now marries, he may treat the wife in the same way as the father treated the mother (perhaps physical abuse), or he may treat his children in the same way as his father treated him. That is, he may do to others what was done to him. He may be idealistic enough to treat his wife and his children differently from the ways that he was treated as a child. Even so, if he becomes immersed in prolonged and severe stress then he may revert to the pattern of relationships he absorbed from his parents and so begin to ill-treat the wife or the children.

My Parents

I was born in November 1944, during World War II. My parents seemed to be just a normal couple. My father was a career NCO in the British army, who served in World War II as a company sergeant major. However, after the war he left the army for a short period and had a mental breakdown. At that time the breakdown would have been labelled battlefield shock or fatigue. Today this would be labelled as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. He was hospitalised for a short time. After his breakdown, father stabilised himself by re-enlisting in the army. With my father, fast-onset trauma occurred to me before any significant bonding. I was aware during my childhood that I did not have any deep positive feelings towards my father. I never felt any attachment to dad during the few periods of early childhood that I can remember and this puzzled me for most of my life, especially since I had no memories of him being abusive towards me. [My childhood memories only start to become plentiful from about age 9 onward]. The lasting effect is that I have always had a rebellious nature and cannot have a positive relationship to authoritarian men. I find it difficult to mask my negative attitudes to such men.

My mother was a high-spirited, fun-loving person but emotionally cold. Her speciality was fault-finding. From her I experienced slow-onset trauma. This happened after bonding had occurred. The lasting effect was to produce in me a love-hate relationship to mother. I can have a positive relationship to women so long as no negative factors emerge. I can mask fairly easily my negative attitudes to women. Nowadays I accept that the traumas I experienced in childhood were caused unintentionally; my parents stayed within the norms of the currently-acceptable ways to bring up children at that time. They simply had no idea how to handle a sensitive child.

Childhood Nightmares

I have no memory of having been traumatised by my parents. So how do I know that trauma occurred?  My experience of catatonia during my 40s could not have happened unless there had been a previous occurrence of it during childhood. My catatonic experience was simply a replay of what happened to me when I was a child. A child cannot handle trauma in a realistic fashion; it is too immature to understand what has happened to it. Instead, it has to handle trauma in symbolic fashion: it has to project its fears onto symbols. I had two nightmare experiences during childhood. I call these the bear and the Little Red Monkey.

When I was around 4 or 5 years old, I was with some other children. We were looking across a field and I saw a figure walking across it. The idea of a bear came into my mind and I became terrified. I ran home as fast as I could in complete terror. Mother sat me on her lap as she tried to calm me. What did the bear symbolise?  It could only be my father. This incident shows that even at such a young age I had a great deal of subconscious fear of him.

When I was 8 years old, BBC television showed a murder mystery dramatised in six weekly episodes. It was called The Little Red Monkey, and it gave rise to a popular dance called “the monkey”. In the final episode, a man was seen getting ready to murder a woman. Since this was early 1953, violence on British television was only suggested, never portrayed. So all the audience saw was the man putting on a pair of gloves prior to the murder (or attempted murder, I forget which). Nevertheless, I experienced intense fear and shock; the programme created an instantaneous trauma in me. The programme had the effect of releasing all my pent-up subconscious distress, thus bringing the fear into normal consciousness. A new habit was born from it: I displaced this fear onto a more objective theme, fear of the dark. From now on I always kept looking over my shoulder when walking alone in the darkness of night. I was afraid that an orang-utan would swing down from the trees and attack me. (It was never monkeys, gorillas or chimpanzees that scared me, but only orang-utans). This habit eventually faded by my late-teens, though even up to my early 40s I occasionally had flashbacks when walking down dark alleys.

Trying to understand this nightmare was more complicated. Feminine feelings were beginning to influence me (by the time I was 10, one of my favourite pleasures was sewing, and when I was 14 years old I began cross-dressing secretly for a few weeks). So for a long time in my adult years I believed that the nightmare symbolised my fear and hatred of male sexuality (I had identified with the female victim), or more specifically, the hatred and rejection of my own sense of masculinity. However, this belief lacked conviction. So I returned to my analysis many times over the years, but could not improve on it. Then I changed my mind: the event seemed to indicate that I wanted to kill mother, because she regularly found fault with me. So I had actually identified with the male murderer. Eventually I considered the speed of the trauma. The trauma arose very fast and generated intense fear, and so it could only be the result of fast-onset trauma. So I have returned to my original interpretation, in that it shows my fear and hatred of my father, and of male masculinity in general.

Other children may symbolise their fears as demons or monsters, or whatever else scares them. Does this strategy serve any useful function?  Minor fears may indicate nothing of lasting importance, but trauma is different. A child translates trauma into symbolism. It displaces its negative emotional responses to a parent onto a more manageable object of phantasy that does not seem to refer to that parent. The fear of the symbolic object takes the centre of attention, rather than the fear of the parent. This response enables the child to adapt to a difficult situation, that of having to live with the parent it is scared of. So some degree of bonding with the parent may be maintained. A side effect is that the displacement also allows the child, once it has become an adult, to deny that trauma ever happened. It remembers only the symbolic drama and not the reason for it.

Even when the child has become an adult, symbolisation may still be used to represent childhood fears. One night in my 40s, as I lay in bed, I experienced the primal scream. In a dream I went back to my childhood relations with my parents. As I came out of the dream I suddenly realised that they were not happy relations but negative ones. Then quite spontaneously arose an involuntary welling up of a deep scream. It poured out of me. I could not stop it. I muted it so that it did not wake up mother in the next room, but I was still astonished at the phenomenon. The sensitive idealist or seeker usually goes through a period of soul-searching sometime in his adult years. This is his second time in the wilderness. Childhood is the first time in the wilderness!

The primal scream is a physical manifestation of the deep self-pity that underlies the child’s relationships with its parents or other significant adults. In my case the scream did not generate fear, and so it represents an expression of slow-onset trauma. So the scream indicated the effect on me of receiving regular criticisms from mother.

The young child who experiences trauma has to interpret it in order to make some sense of it. Usually he is too young to be able to use language to interpret it, so he uses symbolism. This is why psycho-therapy takes such a long time: in order to resolve a problem that originated in childhood, the person has to learn to unravel the symbolisms that he used to encase his negative experiences, and this can take years.

[¹]. See the article Creation of the Ego. [1]

[²]. See my two articles Validation and Authenticity. [2]

[³]. I have three articles on Emotions on the Home page. [3]

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