Cumulative Trauma and Relational Competence

Abstract

What about the patients who grew up in good families, whose reliable reports are free of explicit abuse? And yet they have difficulty in negotiating the worlds of career, friendship, and intimacy. Cumulative trauma is a concept that describes a child's experience of chronic lack of attunement to her developmental needs. And the concept of deficits in relational competence is one way to understand the consequences of cumulative trauma.