New ideas on childhood trauma cause uproar

[CaptainChewbacca]

Link to book review

For a graduate research project at Harvard in the mid-1990s, the psychologist Susan A. Clancy arranged to interview adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, expecting to confirm the conventional wisdom that the more traumatic the abuse had been, the more troubled an adult the child had become.

Dr. Clancy figured she knew what she would find: “Everything I knew dictated that the abuse should be a horrible experience, that the child should be traumatized at the time it was happening — overwhelmed with fear, shock, horror.”

But many carefully documented interviews revealed nothing of the sort. Commonly, the abuse had been confusing for the child but not traumatic in the usual sense of the word. Only when the child grew old enough to understand exactly what had happened — sometimes many years later — did the fear, shock and horror begin. And only at that point did the experience become traumatic and begin its well-known destructive process.

Dr. Clancy questioned her findings, reconfirmed them and was convinced. Her audience, when she made the data public, was outraged.

First, her data flew in the face of several decades of politically correct trauma theory, feminist theory and sexual politics.

Second, Dr. Clancy found that the world had little appetite for scientific subtlety: “Unfortunately, when people heard ‘not traumatic when it happens,’ they translated my words to mean, ‘It doesn’t harm victims later on.’ Even worse, some assumed I was blaming victims for their abuse.”

Dr. Clancy reports that she became a pariah in lay and academic circles. She was “crucified” in the press as a “friend of pedophiles,” colleagues boycotted her talks, advisers suggested that continuing on her trajectory would rule out an academic career.

Having never suffered childhood trauma, I can't really comment on this, but if its REMOTELY true you'd think psychiatrists would be less outraged.

[Formless]

So... the conventional wisdom lacks nuance, but the end effect is the same. I don't think this invalidates the idea of childhood trauma, it just clarifies on how it screws up people's lives.

[Darth Wong]

It doesn't surprise me that psychiatrists would react in such a fashion. Psychology and psychiatry have always been politically charged. We're talking about a discipline which:

A) Has a history of very dodgy behaviour, thus lowering their credibility.
B) Often touches on issues involving sexuality, gender, family, and race.

Seriously, with a bad history and a tendency to get involved in all of peoples' hot-button issues, is it any wonder that the reaction is so politicized?

[adam_grif]

Seriously, with a bad history and a tendency to get involved in all of peoples' hot-button issues, is it any wonder that the reaction is so politicized?

Not really, but they're supposed to be "better than that". Our lecturers spent half a lecture last year talking about how Psychology is as much a science as anything else, and has to be empirical, free of cultural bias and so on. When things like this happen, it does not instill confidence in the discipline's ability to remain rational and detached.

[Formless]

Seriously, with a bad history and a tendency to get involved in all of peoples' hot-button issues, is it any wonder that the reaction is so politicized?

Not really, but they're supposed to be "better than that". Our lecturers spent half a lecture last year talking about how Psychology is as much a science as anything else, and has to be empirical, free of cultural bias and so on. When things like this happen, it does not instill confidence in the discipline's ability to remain rational and detached.

Well, yeah, of all the sciences other than biology, psychology is the only one that makes direct observations about the human condition and nature of our behavior. To say that its personal is an understatement.

Of course, setting aside the reactions of the psychiatric community (whose jobs, remember, are more often therapy than research), its findings like this that makes me more confident about psychology's status as an actual science. The theory was incomplete; observation improved it, but didn't falsify it. That's good. It means we are on the right track.

Oh, and Wong, I think there is one other point you can add to that list-- that psychology all too often bordered [edit] hell, still often borders [/edit] on philosophy for most of history, and that can make psychologists and psychiatrists quite a bit more attached to their pet theories than other sciences would deem reasonable.

[Count Chocula]

ITT we discover that children have incomplete conceptions of right and wrong, morality and immorality, and that heinous acts perpetrated against children may actually be something they can recover from due to their intellectual plasticity. Outrage, justified, towering outrage, may come later, but at the time it happens children may not recognize the violation for what it is, especially if the perpetrator is a family member or trusted adult. Really, this isn't hard to understand; for this, Ms. Clancy is a pariah in her field? That says more, and more negative, things about her peers than about her.

EDIT: Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides is fiction? I'm just shocked, shocked I say!

[Alyrium Denryle]

Seriously, with a bad history and a tendency to get involved in all of peoples' hot-button issues, is it any wonder that the reaction is so politicized?

Not really, but they're supposed to be "better than that". Our lecturers spent half a lecture last year talking about how Psychology is as much a science as anything else, and has to be empirical, free of cultural bias and so on. When things like this happen, it does not instill confidence in the discipline's ability to remain rational and detached.

Well you have to consider what branch you are talking about. Social, cognitive psych and neuroscience are pretty damn hard sciences. The closer you get to another person being in emotional pain though, no one can keep their objectivity unless they are basically biochemists who look at a double blind set of chemical assays in the brain and determine the level of glutamate floating around in the head of someone with PTSD...

[Knife]

ITT we discover that children have incomplete conceptions of right and wrong, morality and immorality, and that heinous acts perpetrated against children may actually be something they can recover from due to their intellectual plasticity. Outrage, justified, towering outrage, may come later, but at the time it happens children may not recognize the violation for what it is, especially if the perpetrator is a family member or trusted adult. Really, this isn't hard to understand; for this, Ms. Clancy is a pariah in her field? That says more, and more negative, things about her peers than about her.

EDIT: Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides is fiction? I'm just shocked, shocked I say!

An added factor could be that they haven't learned the shame from cultural or religious teachings yet that contribute to the trauma when those mechanisms are in place.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Given the sham of statistics that psychology doles out, I am not the slightest surprised. Anyone who claims linear correlation with r^2 = 0.5 is an idiot.

[Simon_Jester]

Well you have to consider what branch you are talking about. Social, cognitive psych and neuroscience are pretty damn hard sciences. The closer you get to another person being in emotional pain though, no one can keep their objectivity unless they are basically biochemists who look at a double blind set of chemical assays in the brain and determine the level of glutamate floating around in the head of someone with PTSD...

Which example does the best job I've ever seen of explaining why double blind studies need to be DOUBLE.

Thank you.

[Samurai Rafiki]

ITT we discover that children have incomplete conceptions of right and wrong, morality and immorality, and that heinous acts perpetrated against children may actually be something they can recover from due to their intellectual plasticity. Outrage, justified, towering outrage, may come later, but at the time it happens children may not recognize the violation for what it is, especially if the perpetrator is a family member or trusted adult. Really, this isn't hard to understand; for this, Ms. Clancy is a pariah in her field? That says more, and more negative, things about her peers than about her.

EDIT: Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides is fiction? I'm just shocked, shocked I say!

An added factor could be that they haven't learned the shame from cultural or religious teachings yet that contribute to the trauma when those mechanisms are in place.

Richard Dawkins had a story about this in his book. He talked to a woman who had been sexually molested as a child by her priest. The woman said that the molestation was just a bit icky, but what actually traumatized her in her childhood was being told that her protestant friends would go to hell, and the according descriptions of hell she was given.

[Flagg]

I'm not going to get into any details here, but as someone who suffered sexual abuse as a 4 year old I can attest to the facts raised in the study. I clearly remembered the entire events without putting together the fact that they had in fact been sexual abuse until I was 13 when it hit me like a brick and at that point the trauma began.

[Oskuro]

Uh, I'm no expert but, isn't the fact that children cannot fully understand and recognize abuse one of the main reasons they are so susceptible to it?

Although, even if the reaction is retarded, I can see where they are coming from: I'd bet abusers would readily quote Dr.Clancy to claim they are not really hurting their victims, and there'd be idiots out there that would even agree.
Then again, the reaction is overblown and stupid, and betrays an unwillingness to actually understand the whole concept instead of fixating on problematic nitpicks.

[cosmicalstorm]

It strikes me that a lot of people just say "sexual abuse" and then assume that all forms of sexual abuse must be completely equal.

Surely there must be many different degrees of sexual abuse, I'm pretty sure that a child who is raped by her or his father on a bi-weekly basis for many years will come off much worse than a child who is groped by a stranger in the park on one single occasion.

[Xon]

That sexual abuse trauma may function similar to post-traumatic stress syndrome isn't really much of a suprise to be honest.

[Akkleptos]

Splendid! The idea had been around for quite some time now, around specialised circles and people interested in the topic. I myself always subscribed to the notion that it's the realisation of having been "abused", with all that entails culturally speaking is what gets an individual "traumatised" in the first place. Before that, for the victim, it's just something that happened, maybe bad or painful, but it doesn't carry such a negative load to it as it does eventually later on in life, after being told how terrible he/she must feel, etc.

Again, as pointed out by Lord Oskuro, this by no means implies that any kind of children abuse is right. It's still criminal. The distinction is that a great deal of the damage comes later on with the realisation of the implications, and neither the abuse itself nor the later insight on it are things anyone should have to go through.

It's very unfortunate that her published work had such a terrible reaction. I guess it speaks volumes of the Zeitgeist in the US' psychology and psychiatry-related professional community.



And speaking of new ideas, there are also these interesting findings by the Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute:

Neuroscientists explore erasing bad memories

[Liberty]

So - what exactly are the practical implications of this? I mean, how could we lessen the harm to abused individuals - by changing how they realized what happened? Or coming up with a better process for that? Or is it bigger than that?

[Flagg]

So - what exactly are the practical implications of this? I mean, how could we lessen the harm to abused individuals - by changing how they realized what happened? Or coming up with a better process for that? Or is it bigger than that?

There is no way to do so short of decriminalizing sexual abuse of children and culturally changing the rightful perception that it's morally abhorrent. The fact is that once the abuse takes place, barring repressed memories, the damage is done. At some point the person will realize what happened was abuse.

[Formless]

Not just sexual abuse either-- regular physical abuse too. You can't assault an adult and seriously expect him to consider that okay, so you can't seriously expect adults who were beaten as kids to consider their childhood experience to be okay either. That would be delusional.

[Akkleptos]

So - what exactly are the practical implications of this? I mean, how could we lessen the harm to abused individuals - by changing how they realized what happened? Or coming up with a better process for that? Or is it bigger than that?

The solution is apparently quite easy on principle, yet incredibly difficult to implement. In my opinion, without having specialised on the handling of psychological trauma and PTSD, it would involve a society-wide change when it comes to perceptions (when it is about sex). Not an easy task, by any means. Physical abuse, on the other hand, is a tad trickier.

When an abuse victim finds -frequently at an age at which he/she is still quite malleable, still developing, still forming his/her idea about the world- that he/she has in fact being abused, taken advantage of, that's bad enough in its own right. But upon learning or even just suspecting that there was something sinful, dirty, intrinsically bad to it; that it's maybe something that makes him/her a bad person, that maybe he/she provoked it; etc, that's when it starts to become what we call a "trauma", when the very idea of it (or its implications) begin to be too much to handle.

[Formless]

Just how much does feelings of guilt and self blame factor into trauma? I imagine that if you removed those from the equation (especially in the case of sexual abuse/assault) you would go quite some distance to making the victim feel better, but I doubt thats the only aspect of it that needs attending to.

[Darth Wong]

I suspect that people tend to think of this as if it works on a higher conscious level than it really does. People aren't the thinkers they believe themselves to be. A person who's been abused doesn't necessarily experience conscious thought syndromes relating to it which can be analyzed, broken down, and repaired somehow. Instead, the problem is that their brain has become accustomed to certain patterns, due to repetition and early imprinting. The trauma occurs when they realize how much these patterns differ from normal. There is no easy fix, because the patterns are deeply ingrained and cannot be erased or made to match normal patterns, nor can you take away the realization that the person is far from the norm.

It would be very disturbing to know that you accepted something for years which most people would consider horrifying. And yet, there is no easy cure. You can't change the fact that you accepted it for years. You can't change the fact that it seemed normal to you through all that time. You can't change the fact that most people would consider it horrifying. The root causes can't be fixed.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I suspect that people tend to think of this as if it works on a higher conscious level than it really does. People aren't the thinkers they believe themselves to be. A person who's been abused doesn't necessarily experience conscious thought syndromes relating to it which can be analyzed, broken down, and repaired somehow. Instead, the problem is that their brain has become accustomed to certain patterns, due to repetition and early imprinting. The trauma occurs when they realize how much these patterns differ from normal. There is no easy fix, because the patterns are deeply ingrained and cannot be erased or made to match normal patterns, nor can you take away the realization that the person is far from the norm.

It would be very disturbing to know that you accepted something for years which most people would consider horrifying. And yet, there is no easy cure. You can't change the fact that you accepted it for years. You can't change the fact that it seemed normal to you through all that time. You can't change the fact that most people would consider it horrifying. The root causes can't be fixed.

Exactly.

A little kid does not have any other frame of reference for how things are supposed to be. In this case being abused is all they know. It is later that they realize just how fucked up things were for them, and that they are in fact clinically depressed, or that the nightmares they have every night are symptoms of PTSD.

[Akkleptos]

Just how much does feelings of guilt and self blame factor into trauma? I imagine that if you removed those from the equation (especially in the case of sexual abuse/assault) you would go quite some distance to making the victim feel better

Of course. The thing is that there should be no abuse, period. But until such a thing is possible (if ever), dealing with the negative views and introspects regarding several aspects around abuse (perticularly the sexual kind) is essential.

but I doubt thats the only aspect of it that needs attending to.

Certainly not. There's a process of acceptance to go through, as abuse is something bad that happens to us, upon which we have no control, like many other tragedies, and it is necessary to learn how to deal with it, assimilate it, and move on. It's a long, tourtuous journey, but as DW said, there's no easy cure. Or no cure at all. Just learning to accept, put it where it belongs, and live with it.

[Liberty]

It would be very disturbing to know that you accepted something for years which most people would consider horrifying. And yet, there is no easy cure. You can't change the fact that you accepted it for years. You can't change the fact that it seemed normal to you through all that time. You can't change the fact that most people would consider it horrifying. The root causes can't be fixed.

Huh. I came here right after briefly discussing harmful fundamentalist thought patterns ingrained in me by my parents on a thread in the Girl Talk forum, and mentioning that I feel like I have to actively reprogram my brain to get rid of these patterns and that this makes me mad at my parents. Then I read this post here. And I have to say, I know you were referring to physical or sexual abuse, but when I read it I read it as if it was being raised fundamentalist that you were referring to. Because it fits.

I should point out that I am in no ways saying that being raised fundamentalist is analogous to being sexually abused as a child.