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| Sunday, 10 August 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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The aftermath of abuse : Scars of emotional damage by Naeema Zain Jiffrey, CCHT, Clinical Hypnotherapist In recent years the world has seen a heightened awareness of childhood abuse, physical as well as emotional, which occurs inside and outside the home. Numerous children are emotionally abused leaving invisible scars; pain, fear, insecurity, inability to trust and to feel, depression, continuing cycles of relationship problems, eating disorders, and addictions. Any one who was sexually or physically abused must also live with the emotional damage caused by the experience.
They long for a break from their cycles of repetitive self-defeating patterns of behaviour, yet they cling to familiar habits not knowing the way out of it. Conflicts and struggles dominate their lives, as do persistent feelings of being victimized, exploited and betrayed by others. Often symptoms of emotional abuse are not obvious to others or to themselves, no broken bones, no damaged tissues, not a scratch on the skin. They continue to feel violated, anxious, depressed and lonely; trapped by their past, yet only vaguely aware that their present day difficulties are substantially related to their childhood history. Some cannot even recall those experiences because trauma can create a gap in memory. At some level they realise there has to be some thing more to life. Whether the abuse is sexual, physical, emotional, or childhood neglect the common trend is that of emotional abuse. Emotional abuse is an inherent part of any form of abuse, more emphatically so in childhood abuse because it is during childhood that we are particularly vulnerable to emotional and psychological scarring from trauma or maltreatment. However, emotional injury caused any time in life, regardless of age, will produce behavioral implications. Emotional damage is often the underlying problem in many cases that first appear as other forms of abuse or neglect. In cases of physical or sexual abuse and neglect, emotional injuries along with the physical ones must receive attention and treatment. Unless emotional injury and maltreatment is considered an essential piece of the puzzle, efforts to protect and nurture children and grooming them to grow up to be sound adults are incomplete and bound to fail. While injuries to the body heal relatively quickly, emotional injuries leave more permanent but less visible psychological scars. Scars of emotions are not dormant, they are functional, causing lifelong problems, behavioral issues and complications; and these complications get triggered and aggravated by traumas and crisis situations, unless they are healed. Healing the body alone is insufficient; for healing to be complete, it should be three dimensional, body, mind and spirit. Emotional abuse even in the absence of the element of physical/sexual abuse is damaging in its own right. A child may hurt even without a scratch. Words can hurt, words can hit harder than a fist. Emotional assault and psychological starvation are of equal, if not greater, importance as social problems as physical abuse and nutritional starvation. Rejection, fear, constant humiliation, and consistency being told 'not good enough' devastate a child emotionally and shatter him/her spiritually; and all of these are carried in to adulthood. Growing up one's spirit shattered, emotions disregarded and discounted, one lost something precious: one's natural state of innocence, one's real self buried behind the psychological barriers one built to cope with and to escape the abuse. Most abused children are susceptible to substance or process addictions and eating disorders. The core of the problem is low self esteem, inability to trust, feeling empty within, depression, childhood emotional abandonment due to consistent lack of nurturing, protection, and guidance, which were all too painful and frightening, and created constant feelings of internal deprivation, emptiness and isolation. To fill this emptiness it is likely that one tries to replace love, security and emotional comfort lacked with something outside of oneself such as alcohol, drugs, food, sex, relationships, gambling, etc. Someone that was physically abused as a child associates touch with pain. They learn to link feelings with hurt and to constantly be alert for an open hand or something that might hurt or harm them. The very people they turn to for love and protection may well become their tormentors. All because of the feeling of insecurity created, because, as a child they didn't feel safe with their parents or primary caretakers or due to some other experience of abuse. For some one sexually abused their body was treated like an object to be used. They could never feel safe being touched or caressed. Touching meant pain, sex without love, forced sex, rather than affection. They don't feel safe turning to some body for their simple needs of being held and cuddled because they were robbed of their innocence and of the right to discover sexuality gradually when they were psychologically and physiologically capable of assimilating sexual experience. This, in adult life, can bring about a series of failed relationships, relationship problems, and sexual dysfunction, in addition to other problems. Any time a parent or caretaker fails to provide a child with basic necessities such as food, water, shelter, medical care, attention to personal hygiene, or adequate supervision required for optimal growth and development, a child suffers physical neglect. The child develops feelings of deprivation, insecurity, loneliness, and vulnerability which can result in an array of behavioral problems. One may be wondering whether one was abused or not. If you're not sure you probably were. You may even down play the effects, 'if wasn't all that bad, a lot of people had it worse'. Whatever the case, without you being aware, the scars of your emotions - the emotional abandonment, deprivation, and the plunge in your self esteem are carried into your adult life, and manifest as behavioral and relationship issues, and passed on to the next generation since adults abused as children tend to abuse their own children. Acknowledging the fact of abuse leads to the road to recovery. |
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| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
Adults who have been abused when they were growing up may want to
down-play the issues or deny the effects, but the inescapable fact is that
the abuse suffered at childhood continues to substantially affect them.
