PART 1 – Introduction
It has taken a long tortuous path for the therapeutic community to recognize the true impact of psychological trauma on mental health. For centuries, psychological trauma has received some attention but that attention has always been capricious rather than sustained. Despite its documented history – extensively in wartime – it was not until 1980 that the American Psychological Association included PTSD in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd Edition (DSM-III) for mental health practitioners
A naturally resilient child who is loved and supported by at least one primary caregiver, can often recover from an individual traumatic experience. Permanent damage is the likely result of ongoing domestic violence, corporal punishment, sibling tormentors, teasing, humiliation, and physical threats. While emotional deprivation and humiliation are frequently ignored as issues, but these may constitute serious trauma.
Sexual violation can be perpetuated by immediate as well as extended family members like uncles and grandparents. People close to the family or child, such as so-called friends, ministers, teachers and others may be abusers. We cannot afford to be so naive as to overlook such possibilities.
But given the depth of its impact, why is trauma so often overlooked?
Simply speaking, we often close our eyes to ugly facts of life. We keep them closed until we are absolutely unable to do so anymore. Whether the result of natural occurrences or from human evil acts, trauma inflicted on children is a topic most people wish to ignore, forget, or deny that it ever happens – certain that it would never happen in their family or community.
There remains the tendency to ignore, leave out of our consciousness or deny even sweeping acts of atrocity such as the Holocaust, the Nanjing massacres, or the Pol Pot’s Cambodian massacre. While we sometimes can include our shock at the torturing of children or at domestic violence, the practice of genital mutilation in certain culture and incest, this is usually limited to the generalities of the topic rather than the horror of individual cases. This enables us to insulate ourselves from the reflected pain of such an experience, to limit our empathy to the conceptual rather than experiential.
When such topics are avoided or minimized individually as well as by society, they are more easily excluded from our index of suspicion in clinical diagnostic settings.
