Blog

Attacks On The Body

This information is about self harm which many domestic violence survivors use as a survival methods from the abuse they received in childhood and as a adult. This information is not well known and many people think that it is done as a way to get  sympathy or attention. This is completely wrong all survivors i have personally known and spoken to in groups i have been in including myself are so ashamed and hide that they do this action. It is actually done as a way of reliving massive stress and trauma that is held in the body so they actually survive another day. This report is from a Dr who wrote a book about trauma and how to recover from this to educate about this for survivors.

 

Attacks On The Body from Trauma and Recovery book Judith Herman.

These deformations in consciousness, individuation, and identity serve the purpose of preserving home and relationship, but they leave other major adaptive tasks unsolved or even compound the difficulty of these tasks. Though the child has rationalised the abuse or banished it from her mind, she continues to register its effects in her body.

The normal regulation of bodily states is disrupted by chronic hyper arousal. Bodily self- regulation is further complicated in the abusive environment because the child’s body is at the disposal of the abuser. Normal biological cycles of sleep and wakefulness, feeding, and elimination may be chaotically disrupted or minutely over-controlled. Bedtime may be a time of heightened terror rather that a time of comfort and affection, and the rituals of bedtime may be distorted in the service of sexually arousing the adult rather than in times of comfort and pleasure. The mealtime memories of survivors are filled with accounts of terrified silences, forced feeding, followed by vomiting, or violent tantrums and throwing of food. Unable to regulate basic biological functions in a safe, consistent, and comforting manner, many survivors develop chronic sleep disturbances, eating disorders, gastrointestinal complaints and numerous other bodily distress symptoms.

The normal regulation of emotional states is similarly disrupted by traumatic experiences that repeatedly evoke terror, rage and grief. These emotions ultimately coalesce in a dreadful feeling that psychiatrists call ‘dysphoria’ and patients find almost impossible to describe. It is a state of confusion, agitation, emptiness and utter aloneness. In the words of one survivor,“Sometimes I feel like a dark bundle of confusion. But that’s a step forward. At times I don’t even know that much. The emotional state of the chronically abused child ranges from a baseline of unease, through intermediate states of anxiety and dysphoria, to extremes of panic, fury and despair. Not surprisingly, a great many survivors develop chronic anxiety and despair which persist into adult life. The extensive recourse to dissociative defences may end up aggravating the abused child’s dysphoric emotional state, for the dissociative process sometimes goes to far. Instead of producing a protective feeling of detachment, it may lead to a sense of complete disconnection from others and disintegration of the self. The psychoanalyst Gerald Alder names this intolerable feeling “annihilation panic.” Hill describes this state in these terms. “I am icy cold inside and my surfaces are without integument, as if I am flowing and spilling not held together any more. Fear grips me and I lose the sensation of being present for I am gone”.

This emotional state, usually evoked in response to perceived threats of abandonment, cannot be terminated by ordinary means of self soothing. Abused children discover at some point that the feeling can be most effectively terminated by a major jolt to the body. The most dramatic method of achieving this result is through the deliberate infliction of injury. The connection between childhood abuse and self-mutilating behaviour is by now well documented. Repetitive self- injury and other paroxysmal forms of attack on the body seem to develop most commonly in those victims whose abuse began early in childhood.

Survivors who self -mutilate consistently describe a profound dissociative state proceeding the act. Depersonalization, derealization, and anaesthesia are accompanied by a feeling of calm and relief, physical pain is much preferable to the emotional pain that it replaces. As one survivor explains “I do it to prove I exist.”

Contrary to common belief, victims of childhood abuse rarely resort to self injury to “manipulate” other people, or even to communicate distress. Many survivors report that they develop the compulsion to self- mutilate quite early, often before puberty, and practice it in secret for many years. They are frequently ashamed and disgusted by their behaviour and go to great lengths to hide it.

Self injury is also frequently mistaken for a suicidal gesture. Many survivors of childhood abuse do indeed attempt suicide. There is a clear distinction, however, between repetitive self injury and suicidal attempts. Self- injury is intended not to kill but rather to relieve unbearable emotional pain, and many survivors regard it, paradoxically, as a form of self- preservation .

Self -injury is perhaps the most spectacular of the pathological soothing mechanisms, but it is only one among many. Abused children generally discover at some point in their development that they can produce major, though temporary, alterations in their affective state by voluntarily inducing automatic crises or extreme autonomic arousal. Purging and vomiting, compulsive sexual behaviour, compulsive risk taking or exposure to danger, and the use of psychoactive drugs become the vehicles by which abused children attempt to regulate their internal emotional states. Through these devices, abused children attempt to obliterate their chronic dysphoria to simulate, however briefly, an internal state of well-being and comfort that cannot otherwise be achieved.

These self destructive symptoms are often well established in abused children even before adolescence, and they become much more prominent in the adolescent years.

These three major of adaption-the elaboration of dissociative defences, the development of a fragmented identity, and the pathological regulation of emotional states-permit the child to survive in an environment of chronic abuse. Further, they generally allow the child victim to preserve the appearance of normality which is of such importance to the abusive family. The child’s distress symptoms are generally well hidden. Altered states of consciousness, memory lapses, and other dissociative symptoms are not generally recognised. The formation of a malignant negative identity is generally disgusted by the socially conforming ‘fake self’. Psychosomatic symptoms are rarely traced to their source. And self- destructive behaviour carried out in secret generally goes unnoticed. Though some child or adolescent victims may call attention to themselves through aggressive or delinquent behaviour, most are able successfully to conceal the extent of their psychological difficulties. Most abused children reach adulthood with their secrets intact.