Do Memories of Abuse Hurt More Than Actual Abuse?
What causes the adverse effects of child maltreatment?
Posted Jul 27, 2020
When it comes to the integrity of our physical body, objective facts tend to matter more than subjective memories. If your finger got amputated in a bad accident when you were a child, you’d grow up without a finger, regardless of whether (and how) you remember the event. But what about our psychological integrity? Do facts matter more than stories with regard to our internal architecture as well? Does what actually happened matter more than what we remember happening?
In the absence of evidence, we may entertain several contradictory yet equally feasible hypotheses with regard to this question. One may suggest that facts will carry the day regardless of subjective experience. If you were in fact abused as a child, then you will experience negative psychological and behavioral effects regardless of whether or not you can actually remember the abuse. If the integrity of the psychological system is hurt in real time, future consequences will ensue, regardless of whatever subjective meanings are assigned to the event.

An alternative hypothesis may just as well posit that in the absence of memory, psychological events don’t really exist. This approach may advance the notion that the internal architecture is different than the physiological one in that the subject and the subjective are its "matter." Psychological outcomes have psychological roots. Whether or not you actually have been abused matters less than whether you have a memory, a subjective experience of abuse.
A third hypothesis may argue that a combination of early objective events and subsequent subjective memories will affect future outcomes the most. In such a view, objective events leave a mark whether they are remembered or not, yet that mark may be augmented or attenuated by how it plays in memory. If something bad was done to you, and you remember that something bad was done to you, then you will suffer more adverse consequences than if something happened that isn’t remembered or something is remembered that hasn’t happened.
Now, for the purpose of this discussion, let’s set aside the moral aspect of child abuse—the patently obvious acknowledgment that mistreating a child is an immoral act regardless of whether it is remembered or leaves a mark down the road. Let’s also leave out the clear understanding that if memories of abuse end up being detrimental to mental health, these are much more likely to occur in people who have actually been abused, which would be another argument, for those who need it, as to why children should not be abused in the first place.
Having set these considerations aside for now, we may return to the original question: When it comes to the adverse effects of child abuse and maltreatment, what matters more, the objective events, the subjective memories, or the synergy of both? Who’s to say? Well, this is why we have science, our go-to method of refereeing between competing claims based on empirical evidence.
A new study by psychologists Andrea Danese of King’s College London and Cathy Spatz Widom of City University of New York attempted to answer this question. Examining official records from juvenile and adult criminal courts, the researchers identified a group of participants (n= 908) who were maltreated in childhood between 1967 and 1971, and then matched them on the basis of age, sex, race/ethnicity, and social class with a comparison group of like participants without official records of maltreatment (n= 667).
The researchers then traced, located, and interviewed members of both the maltreated and comparison groups twenty-some years later. The 2-hour in-person interviews included assessment of retrospective reports of childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect, as well as assessment of current and lifetime psychopathology. Overall, 1,196 members (76 percent) of the original sample were interviewed. Approximately half were female (48.7 percent) and about two-thirds were white (62.9 percent). The mean age of the sample at the time of the follow-up interview was 28.7 years. There were no significant gender, ethnicity, or age differences between the abuse-verified and comparison groups.
The researchers then compared four sub-groups within this sample: those who had an objective record of abuse but no memory of it; those who didn’t have a record but reported memories of abuse; those who had both a record and a memory; and those who had neither. Comparisons focused on how these groups fared in terms of their mental health outcomes, particularly internalizing (e.g., depression, dysthymia, generalized anxiety, or PTSD) and externalizing disorders (e.g., , alcohol or drug abuse, and/or dependence).
The analysis yielded a clear pattern: subjective memory, rather than objective fact, carried the day. In other words, the data appear to suggest that whether you have been abused is less important to your future adjustment than whether you have subjective memories of abuse.
The authors write: “We found that risk of psychopathology is concentrated among individuals with subjective rather than objective measures of childhood maltreatment… The risk of psychopathology linked to objective experiences of childhood maltreatment, even for severe cases of maltreatment identified through official court records, is minimal in the absence of a subjective appraisal. In contrast, the risk of psychopathology linked to subjective experiences of childhood maltreatment is high, whether or not subjective appraisal is consistent with objective measures. The findings were remarkably invariant across different types of maltreatment and psychopathology and across genders and races… These results suggest that psychopathology emerges as a function of subjective rather than objective experience of childhood maltreatment.”
To be sure, one study, however well designed, is insufficient to determine truth. In particular, a study like this one, which was neither longitudinal nor experimental, cannot establish causality. The fact that subjective memories of childhood maltreatment correlated with psychological problems does not mean that the memories caused the problems. Subjective memories of abuse may be the result, rather than the cause, of psychopathological processes. It is also possible that some extraneous unmeasured variable (such as, say, negative attentional focus or neuroticism) facilitates both subjective recollections and psychological problems. These findings also raise intriguing questions about what causes some abused children, but not others, to remember their abuse, and what may cause some adults to develop memories of abuse in the absence of actual such events.
At the same time, these findings do align well with old insights from the arts (as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”), from psychotherapy lore—which holds that our subjective thoughts and self-narratives shape our commerce with the world—and from cutting-edge cognitive science, such as the work of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who found that our moment-to-moment "experiencing self" differs from our retrospective "remembering self," and that our wellbeing is tied more to the latter than the former.
If this finding is replicated and holds, the potential implications are intriguing. For example, if all you need in order to suffer is a self-constructed, subjective story of abuse, then protecting children from actual abuse may not sufficiently protect them from future harm. At the same time, the findings invoke thorny moral questions. For example, if we know that objective harm was done to you as a child, and we also know that knowing about that harm will cause you further harm down the road, do we have a moral responsibility to shelter you from that knowledge? Is the objective truth a higher value than one’s subjective mental health?
Discuss.
re
great thoughts, imo yes they do, as well as the well-meaning treatment of people who had traumatic experiences - it can cause more harm than the actual trauma itself. it is applicable to the rehabilitation of former prisoners, too, where they fail not due to the fact that they were not rehabilitated, but because others won't allow them new identity.
for traumas in general important thing is to put them in place.
on a broader level, the bullying videos of school children or revenge porn or terrorists videos of killing journalists, or similar videos/images of torture/humiliation have another vile function apart from the obvious one, and that is to keep trauma perpetual.
Perpetual Trauma
Perpetual Trauma is EXACTLY the feeling to those of us who have suffered at the hands of others. NEVER have I found the right phrase. I pretty much just deal and do not talk to others or make it an issue for others- But the feeling I call the "OH NO!", has been a constant companion in my life. Letting go of the past, does not take away the chemical reaction with in the body when you sense a new threat.
Listen to your clients
They will tell you which one is important or matter to them.
In my case, I was brutally abused violently until age of legal. I was sexually abused violently at 4, at 8, at 10 by different people. I remember them not vividly all as I also had some dissociation with ptsd symptoms.. But
As an adult, I never had similar experience no abuse, highly functional, happily married... Because I never fought against my memory and I did not take too deeply its impact. I have good values respect self, respect body and respect others and nature. I may suffered avoidance, loneliness and inferiority despite, I got education, job, property, great love.
Now I went therapy and all break loose. So what I learned and heal me faster than average is I know what happened, despite I am happy but when I remember again I am depressed. So I dissociated from the depression and now I am in the process of accepting the depression just like I accepted the memory because I have a full adult life that contradicts everything I was thought by the abusers. The child life is not more important than adult life. Bit is a matter of perspective.
Memories
I was abused at a very young age, continuing through my teen years. I just remember scraps of memories from those early years and they are the ones that cause most of my problems. I dissociate, along with having anxiety and panic attacks.
I have had some excellent therapy with talking about the fragments of memory. I find in doing this, it takes the toxicity away from trying to suppress the memories. I don't need all of the memory to heal. It's a memory, it's not happening now. The problems arise with the avoidance by drug, alcohol abuse.
Complete memory loss of the abuse would be ideal, but most often that's not the case.
Cluster B = intent to cause long-term bad-memories
The honorable Dr Sir Shpancer the Brave, you are sooooooooooo close, just millimeters away from Nobel-level insight.
Toxic Abusers are Cluster-B people, their sickness doesn’t express its symptoms through them, the symptoms are suffered by those they attack. The moment-itself of the physical-delivery of the abuse is unimportant to them. Ariel Leve and countless others have carefully described this phenomenon, while other victims of non-dominating-physical-abuse (I know that’s rare but it exists, mostly in grown spanked-children of parents of the 1900’s) have been able to relatively easily move-on.
The Toxic Abusers’ goal is the long-term memories. Domination itself is enacted through the medium of these memories. Example - the famous movie-mogul-abuser’s victims will look at the movies they aren’t in (if they refused) or are in (if they were abused) and feel the twinge of abuse every time. Meanwhile he openly and loudly calls himself “The Sheriff of Hollywood.”
Bad Science
The question of what matters more when it comes to abuse is a bad question to ask because what purpose could you possibly have for that knowledge other than to invalidate abuse victims or create a contest between them? What good could possibly come of this? It's like trying to find out which race is the most intelligent. It's not exactly a noble goal.
On top of that, the study performed doesn't strike me as all it's cracked up to be, either. Of course someone who has bad memories of abuse is going to be more likely to have issues, duh. But don't you think the coping mechanism of denial plays into this at all? I think it is the process of realizing and admitting to oneself that they were abused that causes these diagnoses to surface; not only does the revelation itself make some people go a little mad, but the fact that your entire society can end up more or less gaslighting you or something similar (you should be grateful to your parents! You should forgive them and move on and see them again! They did the best they could! Theu love you! That wasn't really abuse! Etc) ... That can be at least as hard to cope with as the effects of the initial abuse itself. As for people who were abused but don't have diagnoses, that doesn't mean they're healthy. Abuse is omnipresent and socially acceptable, if not required: from honor killings to corporal punishment, people hurt each other with the justification of "because that's just the way it is". This does not mean there are not harmful effects to that abuse. Plenty of people were spanked and turned out "okay", or so they claim. But in a world where more people are physically punished than not, what does "okay" look like? We've probably never actually seen it. They didn't turn out healthy, they turned out normal and socially acceptable, and that's why they registered as "okay" in that survey: because the world of psychology is still plagued by the false notions that normal=healthy and abnormal=unhealthy. It's very telling that "abnormal psychology" is considered to be synonymous with "clinical psychology" and that harmless paraphilias and homosexuality were considered to be illnesses for so long. Also, the survey seems to have entirely excluded things like financial, medical, and psychological, mental and verbal abuse and almost certainly did not take into account all corporal punishment as counting as physical abu
Glitchy phone, comment posted early
As for the ethical questions... Is it okay to shield someone from the truth if knowing the truth would do more harm than good? Theoretically, yes, as in the case of scientists seeking answers questions no one is prepared to know the answers to, but that is nowhere near applicable here. If the subconscious is real, then even if a person has no memory of what they've endured, then it's entirely possible for people to be affected and their abuse and knowing about it will provide much-needed answers to "why am I such a dysfunctional person?" Even forgetting about the subconscious, it's an objective fact that people can't always explain their own actions. The way a person makes decisions is determined by their interactions with the caretakers in the formative years (ex they will learn whether or not they can trust people based on how trustworthy their parents are, they will learn whether other people touching them is okay or whether it will hurt, they will learn how to solve problems or not, and their core beliefs that they form at this time about how the world works may not go challenged and it will certainly be earth-shattering if they ever step outside that Platonian cave), but a person can't remember what actually happened to give them those beliefs unless they consciously think about it. A person is not going to remember whether their parents responded to them crying as a baby or whether they were neglected or abandoned (or punished). All they are going to have to show for it is behaviors like maybe a recurring pattern of not even bothering to ask for help because they didn't even think of it (which could have just as easily been caused by a later issue), or no problem asking for help (or are afraid to, if they were punished for crying).
Yes, it is true that it is only our minds that determine something as bad or good. But as much as armchair psychologists deride adversity survivors for a victim "mentality" for daring to feel bad about bad things that happen to themselves and others, people cannot simply choose to be okay wity their abusers getting away with everything because that would mean throwing away their morals. Compassion for the suffering and a need for justice doesn't exclude the self, and these forces are what make the world a better place, not the "might makes right and/or weakness is a disgusting moral failing", "happiness is a choice", "it can't be helped (when people hurt you but it can be helped when you feel pain, because that's your choice)" type mentalities that only let the evil get away with being evil, blame and guilt trip victims for being in the way, and are often flat out wrong. Being conditioned to accept the horrors of our current reality won't make it any more pleasant for those who fall through the cracks because society couldn't quite get the Stockholm syndrome to kick in, and I think those sick people are the victims, not the problem.
Not a psychologist.
I agree, the fact that a person will be faring worse after receving therapy for past abuse, reveals that the memory is to some degree present but not yet properly processed. It's more often the case that processing difficult memories is emotionally difficult at the moment and can make you feel worse but is beneficial in the long term. I'm not a psychologist nor someone that was abused though.
This is separating body from mind?
As far as several studies have linked abuse to several physiological problems later in life, and in many cases the abused didn't remember at first, neurological changes in the brain and the physiology of trauma are not in line with hypothesis, they are facts. The ACEs study the work of Kolk and others. I always had memory of my abuse but despite of the fact I did not know it was abuse due to denial and ignorance I had all the symptoms, and now some flashbacks. I feel this argument that if you do not remember it doesn't do anything is a very dangerous one.
ACE Test
Yes- it does seem contradictory, as the chemistry and brain changes of people who score high on these tests- explain why so many people abuse substances. Trying to medicate rather than work through and become empowered, by learning to move through.
I am sure there is more information from this doctor than is in this short page.
re
very true, agree with your conclusion, especially because it can be used by criminals.
Childhood Trauma
Due to coming from an abusive childhood- with memories of some of the happenings and not of others- I can affirm that the problems faced by these adults is hard to identify, unless you have experienced it. Younger people (under 30) may not yet have faced their demons. Even those of us who have- still have parts of our personality that we did NOT know were abnormal. For me personally- learning that my deficits had to do with chemical and brain changes that were most likely due to constant fear through childhood, WAS very therapeutic.
What are my deficits? Even though I appear highly functioning and am altruistic - I have lived my WHOLE life with what I call the "OH NO!" feeling. I experience that instant dread and panic at the thought of almost EVERY activity I do. At 58 years old- I have just learned to live with it and to carry on. But I often wonder if I would have had a higher education and professional career, if I could have handled more than wife/mom part time employee. I am just GRATEFUL that I have NEVER allowed these things to make me present as a victim.
Gratefully I KNEW to make my family priority one- not how I feel that moment or day/week.month....
Hi debra
Thank you for sharing. I have similar feelings of no...and similar that I am highly functional but I am moved by your words of what is my deficit.
If u am functional, no meds, fearful but always take my time to make decisions and yes missed opportunities but also still gained a lot in spite of that... What is my deficit. My deficit is I did not I dissociate often... Even though I over compensate so successfully to a point... It was getting harder. Now I can easily separate trauma parts and my parts since the veil of dissociation is gone. It is painful to know what could have been seeing how intelligent I am to survive blindly better than a lot non trauma people.. But then that is my grief.
Just saying what could have been... But then I think that goes for all humanity.
Thank you
Thank you for sharing your experiences. Pretty much, the human condition is so well documented- that we can see we are not alone in our hardships- if we just open up and talk to each other. Truthfully- I would not have known to fight victimhood- if I had not felt God guiding me out of the trauma.
You mention disassociation. YES. I am very familiar with that. But I think of it as "not thinking of myself more highly than I should." Which is from the bible and very good advice. To me, it means- not letting what has been or will be done to me- be more important than those who count on me. Not letting past trauma be more important than accepting healing.
Post Comment