Witnessing Parental Violence as a Traumatic Experience Shaping the Abusive Personality

Abstract

Summary Previous work by Dutton and his colleagues has established a clinical profile on intimately abusive adult men that is quite similar to profiles of trauma victims in many essential clinical respects. Dutton (in press) showed that arousal modulation problems, affective monitoring, cognitive problem solving deficits, externalizing attributional styles, aggression and dissociative states are common to both groups. Furthermore, intimately abusive men demonstrate similar profiles as men diagnosed independently with PTSD on the MCMI-II. Dutton (1995a, 1995b) attributed the trauma to early assaults on the self through parental shaming, accompanied by insecure attachment and physical abuse victimization. Bowlby (1973) considered insecure attachment itself both a source and consequence of trauma. Since the infant turns to the attachment-object during periods of distress seeking soothing, a failure to obtain soothing maintains high arousal and endocrine secretion. Van der Kolk (1987) considered child abuse as an “overwhelming life experience” and reviewed the defenses that children use to deal with parental abuse: hypervigilance, projection, splitting, and denial. Terr (1979) also described driven, compulsive repetitions, and reenactments that permeate dreams, play, fantasies and object relations of traumatized children. Shaming, conceptualized as verbal or behavioral attacks on the global self, has been found to generate life-long shame-proneness or defenses involving rage. A combination of all three early experiences is traumatizing (Dutton, 1995a, 1995b; Dutton, in press). However, some evidence exists that suggests observation of interparental attacks can be substituted for physical abuse victimization as the third prong in this triad of traumatogenic experiences.