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25 January
NO 1256
Hurt children
The popular image that childhood is a period of happy, protected, carefree innocence may not be accurate for many of those who enter child welfare as a profession. If it does hold, it may be tarnished by memories of unhappy experiences or by the recollections recaptured in a personal analysis. But few clinicians we know have experienced their own childhood as an unending nightmare filled with violence and violation. In trying to understand a world in which unrelieved and fully justified fear reigns, in which the threat that your parent will kill you or violate you sexually is an everyday occurrence, clinicians are forced to confront processes related to their own psychological maturation and painful, suppressed recollections and feelings.
We fear pain, abandonment, and death and go to great lengths to avoid them. We try to construct a life in which we feel safe and loved, or at least not endangered or abandoned. As part of our psychological development, we develop ways to protect ourselves from the unbearable anxiety associated with external danger; for self-protection we suppress many unpleasant childhood experiences. In contrast, these mistreated children have lived with physical danger, beatings, maimings, role reversal, abandonment, sexual stimulation, and family disorganization. They develop a view of the world and of human relationships that challenges any optimistic, self-protective image.
Although many of us view life, particularly in the big city, as potentially dangerous, and take precautions to avoid harm, for these children the danger is at home, from parents, whom we usually think of as every child’s primary protectors. Having dangerous parents leaves these children without a secure base in the external world, so they cannot internalize a sense of security and carry it inside for the rest of their lives. To them, the world is neither in fact nor in potential a good place; their view is misanthropic from experience, and paranoid in defense. These children develop a picture of life as an unrelieved jungle, where every minor confrontation involves fighting, where being "lean, mean, and merciless" is the only way to survive.
In clinicians' efforts to remain in empathic
contact with the parent (as the state mandates) and empathy with the
adult world, they may have difficulty believing that what has been said
about the children's experiences could actually have happened. We would
like to believe that all parents really love children even if they don't
know how to show it, and that it is not right for children to hate
parents.
ALVIN ROSENFELD AND SAUL WASSERMAN
Rosenfeld, A. and Wasserman, S. (1990). Healing the Heart: A
Therapeutic Approach to Disturbed Children in Group Care.
Washington D.C. Child Welfare League of America. pp.4-5.
