BlueKnot Foundation Coping Strategies

BlueKnot Foundation: Childhood Responses to Threat/Coping Strategies

When humans are young, their world often revolves around their parents or caregivers. They are the source of safety and security, of love and understanding, of nurturance and support. A child experiencing trauma or abuse develops strategies that become coping mechanisms to enable day-to-day functioning. They help the child detach from the emotional and physical pain of events, especially it continues over a long period of time (Henderson, 2006).
Researchers have observed the ways people respond to dangerous or abusive environments. These neurophysiological physical and mental responses to threat are of two main types:

In the face of persisting threat, a child will either move along the hyper-arousal continuum (the child's version of “fight or flight”) or into the dissociative continuum (Perry et al., 1995). The individual response will depend upon the age of the child and the nature of the threat. The younger the individual, the more likely he/she is to use dissociative adaptations rather than hyper-arousal responses (Perry et al., 1995).

Hyper-arousal continuum

1. 'Fight or flight'

The most familiar set of responses to threat are 'fight or flight' reactions, i.e. an instinctive response to try to overcome the danger (fight) or run away from it (flight). Infants and children, however are rarely capable of being able to either fight or flee.
“Fight or flight” are not the only response-sets to threat. In the initial stages of distress, a young child will use vocalization, i.e. crying, to alert a caretaker that he/she is under threat. This is a successful adaptive response if the caretaker takes appropriate action and fights for, or flees with, the child. If a child’s cries for help are ignored and no help arrives, or if the trauma is being inflicted by the caregiver, the child may shift from hyper-arousal to dissociation (Perry et al., 1995).

2. Freeze

Protracted threat may cause a child to “freeze.” The adaptive advantage of this response is clear: being still or quiet means one is less likely to be seen or heard and gives one time to prepare to respond to a potential threat (Cozolino, 2008). Internally, the freeze response increases anxiety and decreases cognitive processes, so it allows one to “figure out” how to respond (Perry et al., 1995). Being motionless is an effective form of camouflage that reduces the likelihood of attracting a predator.

Children who have been traumatized will often use this freezing mechanism when they feel anxious (Perry et al., 1995). In situations where the child feels anxious or out of control (e.g. a family visit), the traumatized-child may cognitively (and often physically) freeze. In such cases, the child may act as if he/she hasn’t heard or “refuses” to follow an adult’s instructions. Such non-compliance forces the adult to increase the “threat” by ramping up the instructions. This increased “threat” makes the child feel even more anxious and out of control. The more anxious the child feels, the more readily the child will move from anxious to threatened, and then from threatened to terrorized. If the child is sufficiently terrorized, “freezing” may escalate into dissociation (Perry et al., 1995).

2. CHILDHOOD COPING STRATEGIES

Avoidant Coping Strategies

1. Dissociation

A child who experiences extreme trauma or abuse has few coping mechanisms at his/her disposal. Understanding and integrating the experience may overwhelm the child’s coping mechanisms. In the absence of effective coping skills, the child's best option for psychologically surviving is to dissociate or shut off the experience from his/her consciousness (Henderson, 2006; Perry et al., 1995).
Dissociation refers to the mental processes that create a lack of connection in the person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of self (Amir & Lev-Wiesel, 2007; Reber & Reber, 2001).
Traumatized children use a variety of dissociative techniques. In dissociating, the child (or adult survivor) alters the normal links between thoughts, feelings, and memories (Briere, 1992) and so decreases awareness of, or numbs the pain of, distressing events (Putnam, 1985). Dissociation is commonly referred to as being “spaced out,” “blocking things out,” and “being out of touch with one's emotions.” Infants and young children commonly employ a variety of dissociative responses, such as numbing, avoidance, and restricted affect. Children report going to a “different place,” “assuming the persona of heroes or animals,” a sense of “watching a movie that I was in,” or “just floating.” Observers will report these children as numb, robotic, non-reactive, “day dreaming,” “acting like he was not there,” or “staring off into space with a glazed look” (Perry et al., 1995).

2. Splitting

Splitting is often related to early abuse and appears to be a mechanism by which people can preserve some semblance of happiness in the face of very negative experiences. Splitting refers to the failure to integrate the positive and negative qualities of self or others into cohesive images (Mounier & Andujo, 2003). People with split representations struggle with highly polarized “black or white, but not gray” views of others and self; people are viewed as either entirely good or bad (Dombeck, 2008; Reber & Reber, 2001). Originally, this idea was used to describe how a child deals with the presence of both good and bad in an abusive parent by creating distinct categories in their mind between good mother/ father or bad mother/father (Mollon, 2002).

3. Fragmentation of personality

When childhood trauma or abuse is chronic, the personality becomes organized around the central principles of fragmentation because fragmentation serves to keep the trauma out of conscious awareness (Herman, 1992).

4. Denial

Childhood trauma and abuse often violates the trust that forms the core of the child’s relationship with the world. The child’s attempts to reorganize his/her understanding of his/her world often exceed his/her cognitive-affective abilities. Rather than experience the complete cognitive paralysis or disintegration that can occur from such a severe disruption to the child’s world, the child uses denial, a defense
mechanism that simply denies thoughts, feelings, wishes, or needs that cause anxiety. Denial seems to be the mind’s way of staving off complete dysfunction precipitated by overwhelming trauma (Walker, 1994). Denial may enable an individual to survive and function until a time at which he/she is able to come to terms with the event. In this context the term “denial” describes unconscious operations that “deny” that which cannot be dealt with consciously (Reber & Reber, 2001, p. 187).

5. Forgetting: Recovered memories and traumatic amnesia

Adults who recall traumatic events from their childhood that they were previously unavailable to recall are said to have “recovered” or “repressed” memories. This is also called “traumatic amnesia.” Thomson (1995) explains repressed memory as “an unconscious mechanism that protects the ‘self’ from being overwhelmed by the memories of the traumas by quarantining those experiences from consciousness” (p. 97, as cited in Henderson, 2006). Traumatic amnesia may last for hours, weeks, or years, and recall can be triggered by sensory or affective stimuli reminiscent of the original event.

Traumatic amnesia and delayed memory retrieval of traumatic events has been widely documented for almost 100 years and was scientifically accepted in the context of war, accident, or disasters (van der Kolk & Fisher, 1995, as cited in Henderson). The concept only became controversial when it referred to child sexual abuse (Henderson, 2006).

By the mid-1980s, a significant body of research had built up indicating that many adult survivors of childhood abuse also suffer from traumatic amnesia. Many people abused in childhood do not remember anything about their experiences for many years, while others recall some but not all of the details of their abuse (Dallam, 2001). Extensive research on traumatic amnesia points to the significance of the victim's age at the time of the abuse as well as the duration of the abuse. More recent evidence suggests that amnesia is more likely to occur when the child is dependent on the abuser for survival (Henderson, 2006).

One of the most definitive studies on delayed recall was a non-clinical sample of adult survivors whose sexual histories had been documented at the time of the abuse (William, 1994). Between 1973 and 1975, 206 girls aged ten months to twelve years had been examined after a report of sexual abuse. Seventeen years later, 38%, or 129 of the 206 subjects (i.e. those that could be located) had not recalled the abuse when interviewed.

Reframing Strategies

1. Rationalizing

When avoiding reality becomes impossible, children may construct a rationale to justify their abuse. One common reaction is that children believe they are bad and deserve to be punished, i.e. if “she is bad and can become good,” then there is some meaning and hope for the future (Herman, 2001, as cited in Henderson, 2006). To maintain hope and meaning, a child will often preserve faith in her/his parents or caregivers, constructing explanations that absolve them from blame and responsibility, and so accommodate primary attachment to her/his parents (Henderson, 2006).

2. Minimization

Minimization is the reduction of an experience to the smallest possible effect (Ostler, 1969). It is often used as a coping strategy for children surviving abuse when denial fails (Henning, Jones, & Holdford, 2005). For example, “My uncle does hit me occasionally, but I’ve been through far worse.”

3. Please or Appease Strategies

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