CHILDHOOD DAMAGES: The Ripple Effect

More than two hours screentime a day could damage children’s brain development

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However, we must be careful not to remain fixated upon the problems PTSD creates and simply attempt to medicate the symptoms, as we are currently doing with millions of children diagnosed with ADD and ADHD. It is imperative that we remain clearly focused on the risk factors that lead to the development of PTSD, and then do something to heal the cause rather than simply treating the effect. It is interesting to note here that according to the National Center for PTSD in the United States, the risk factors for developing PTSD for women are rape, sexual molestation, physical attack, being threatened with a weapon and childhood physical abuse.

For men the risk factors are rape, combat exposure, childhood neglect and childhood physical abuse.

All these risk factors require our urgent attention. The development of PTSD, depression and the host of mental disorders currently identified and labelled, represent the ringing of alarms we have been ignoring too long in favour of the easier solution of developing drugs to sedate the effect , rather than making the difficult and urgent changes to the way our societies parent and treat children.

According to WWO, depression amongst year-old men and women is now the second biggest contributor to the global burden of disease.

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However it may well be that undiagnosed anxiety disorders are an even bigger global burden. Once this happens, depression invariably sets in, making it comorbid with the PTSD. A further complication is that there is some overlapping of the symptoms of depression and PTSD, making the PTSD difficult to detect by those doctors lacking the training to recognise its symptoms.

The reason why nothing changes is that too many of us have either repressed, or are hiding dark secrets of abuse that are much too painful and shame-producing to confront. I continue to discover that most people do not want to confront the pain of their past and would prefer to sedate the effect in any way they can—often with food, drugs, alcohol, and even sex.

CHILDHOOD DAMAGES The Ripple Effect

As a counsellor, and while doing the research to write a book on child abuse, I have seen adults abused as children repeatedly fail to thrive on every level—including the inability to create financial security and happy and harmonious relationships. Many live in poverty on every level. Virginia Woolf, who was diagnosed with manic depression bipolar disorder , suffered years of anguish and turmoil as a result of sibling sexual abuse.

The way in which the men received her revelation of what a half-brother did to her when she read out her autobiographical essay, 22 Hyde Park Gate, to the Bloomsbury Group still, unfortunately, applies today. From what Virginia Woolf wrote about the incident in her diary, it clearly demonstrates why many women never speak out about such abuse.

What possessed me to lay bare my soul! Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level… Like traumatized people we have been cut off from the knowledge of our past. Like traumatized people, we need to understand the past in order to reclaim the present and the future. Therefore, an understanding of psychological trauma begins with rediscovering history.

While arrests are now being made in Texas over the rape of the year-old girl, the community is being torn apart. It is very unlikely that she will ever find happiness in her life without a long, uphill battle to learn to replace the shame and self-loathing resulting from such heinous acts, with self-love and self-respect.

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And if people are wondering how these young men could have acted in such a demeaning way, John Bradshaw wrote in Homecoming: We drank and whored to prove our manhood. There is, however, a more potent way of reclaiming lost power. And that requires journeying into childhood pain to remember what caused it and connect with the feelings of anger repressed for years. Harnessed in a creative way, this anger is a powerful force which imbues us with the energy to live life.

It can become a driving force to help us achieve goals that grace our lives with purpose and meaning. And for those who can develop the capacity to forgive, they will also discover the joy of peace in their hearts.

Adverse experiences include emotional abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse, having a caregiver who has a drinking problem, takes drugs, is depressed, or has a mental illness. Loose Morals or Searching for Love? March 12, October 21, Bonnay anxiety disorder , child sexual abuse , dehumanises , depression , integrity , life-long scars , PTSD , ripple effect , secrets , shame , soul murder.

It can lead to a long, dark night of the soul, where life holds no joy. Kaiser remembers clearly the bedroom where it all started; at the top of the four-storey house she shared with her mother and five siblings her father died when she was a toddler. After an older sister ran away from home, the room was left empty — and supposedly out of bounds — but she would sneak up. One on the train robbery, and a book about Tutankhamun. Over the next six years, she told the Truth Project, she was assaulted by three other men, both in Britain and when visiting Pakistan.

She always felt that to tell would put her mother in danger. Those lines were not blurred at any time. That was a no-go area. It was as if there was a place for men, and those men have their reasons.

As she got older, she drew on her experience as a British Asian straddling two cultures to separate herself from what was happening. The girl at home enduring unspeakable things — withdrawn and always frowning — became separate from the popular, more assertive girl at school. It was a school sex education lesson at 13 that finally provided words for what was happening. She walked out in the middle of it, and not long afterwards summoned the courage to tell her mother. I sat down on this little cushion by the gas fire and started to tell her.

The words I used were: So she started fighting at school, skipping lessons, waiting for someone to notice. Someone did, but she says the teacher appointed to counsel her then abused her all over again; she was eventually taken into care aged 15, after months of shuttling between foster families and home. If new acquaintances asked about her parents, she would say she was an orphan. At 19, Kaiser found herself pregnant by an older boyfriend who had no idea of her history. She struggles to forgive the social worker who, on learning of her pregnancy, told her to get counselling or she might abuse her own child.

Perpetrators are disproportionately likely to have been abused as children, but the idea of the cycle repeating itself is a sensitive one, says Farrant: With that warning ringing in her ears, Kaiser suffered postnatal depression after her son was born. I loved him so much, there was this fear that I was going to hurt him because there was something wrong with me. But she went on to have a second son, and this time it was easier, because she had learned that there were places not to go in her head.

We become damaged goods, broken beyond repair. And yet she did not break. However, she has had another relationship that she describes as highly abusive, but realised during counselling that she was unconsciously mirroring her childhood experience. Adult survivors are, she says, vulnerable to predators because of their desperation to be loved: Just the impact is different. What saved her, Kaiser thinks, was being reconciled with her mother in her late 30s.

Two years after she got back in touch, her mother died, and when Kaiser subsequently saw adverts for the Truth Project, she felt ready to talk. They are asked beforehand about objects that might trigger disturbing memories, and staff adapt accordingly; if an abuser carried rosary beads, nobody in the room can wear beaded jewellery.

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