The Legacy of Childhood Trauma

Camila Batmanghelidjh, Director of Kids Company, highlights the long-term effects of abuse and neglect.

Adult survivors of childhood abuse and neglect are often told not to live in the past, to get over it. It’s easier said than done because the past is intrinsically living in them, it’s inescapable and it colours much of their perceptions. It is this legacy which demands our urgent action to stop child abuse.

In brief I want to explain its inescapability. Human beings have complimentary capacities for calming and arousal, the ability to self soothe is acquired because of the loving care a child is exposed to initially as an infant and then through key developmental years. At first the baby is completely reliant on the caregiver to meet their needs, and calm them down. If the carer is mindful and sensitive an attunment develops, and after a while the memory of having been loved is tenderly internalised into a capacity to self regulate, manage personal needs, and generally be able to look after oneself. Children who have been appropriately loved and cared for become competent at self – management.

Normal arousal and energy makes life exciting, but for the abused child emotional arousal is confused with terror, severe hunger and insecurity. The reason for such intense interpretation of excitement is because abused children memorise both emotionally and physically the terror they are exposed to. Inappropriate sexual contact, beatings, humiliation, crazed behaviours are frozen in unprocessed memories deep inside the brain. These memories are not modified by time, they are as if “then” is “now”.

Additionally, these children are disadvantaged because they have not been loved so they have impoverished self-soothing capacities. The children describe being in a constant state of chemical urgency; they are hyper-vigilant, find it very difficult to calm down and are often driven to substance misuse in order to acquire some control over their own physiology.

It is as if they are like a glass too full, the slightest pressure is likely to spill them over. The emotional overflow is often explosive; these young people cannot tolerate anything which has a similar essence in its characteristics of the abuse they were exposed to. They hate eye contact because “looking” to them is a prerequisite for attack or an observation of their humiliated state; they hate instructions because anyone with greater power is potentially perceived as an abuser. They hate waiting because death feels round the corner so all needs must be satisfied immediately. Above all they are constantly ashamed and prepared to take unacceptable levels of risk because they don’t seek to self-preserve. Human life is interpreted as meaningless because that is what they feel about their own existence.

Potentially 150,000 adults a year carry this bleak past every minute of today, they are not social failures, in fact their having visited the darkest spaces of humanity gives them a sense of poetic insight.
They are able to speak truths many of us would find difficult to contemplate, they recognise that love is the most important ingredient of humanity and they endeavour to cut through our fake strategies to avoid it.

From the experiences of these special individuals science is now acquiring its greatest findings, the scanning machines are able to capture the subtle nuances of brain development.
The message is simple relationship sculpts the human brain and its capacities. What you put in is what you have reflected back.

The findings provide us with hope about reparation. Loving care and kindness can help repair the legacy of abuse, it cannot eradicate it but the repertoire to manage it can be gifted to an individual through the compassion and consistent care of another who takes responsibility for re-parenting. The cries of damaged children within adults cannot be controlled through retribution or enforced silence, so there is no point in telling people who have been abused not to live in the past because the past will always live in them.