We are now watching this information about a whole society filled with Wounded Children (the name we use here in this blog to name adults carrying around their own, repressed ACEs) doing the best they can to survive the wounds of their childhood, that are produced in and by people in their most significant relationships.

The same place where our birth places us is the home that will give us any one of the adverse experiences listed below,  and in this way will put limits to our future possibility for happiness…

It is highly possible that our parents, by allowing any ACE to happen, are only reproducing the painful conditions of their own childhood; but the reality of us transmitting such pain to the new generations is very difficult to accept.

The ACE Study is an ongoing collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente. It is perhaps  the largest scientific research study of its kind, showing a direct, causal relationship between nine categories of adverse childhood experience:

• physical abuse;
• emotional abuse;
• sexual abuse;
• an alcohol and/or drug abuser in the household;
• an incarcerated household member;
• living with someone who is chronically depressed, mentally ill, institutionalized, or suicidal;
• witnessing domestic violence against the mother;
• parental discord indicated by divorce, separation, abandonment;
• emotional or physical neglect

The presence of each one of the Adverse Childhood Experiences determines at least 18 physical, mental and behavioral health outcomes. If you are brave enough, can you identify how many of those experiences were there, in your home when you were growing up?

The more ACEs people have had in their formative years, the higher the rate of mental, physical, behavioral disease and disability in the population, including higher rates of chronic disease, low educational achievement and increased violence.

In the words of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study authors:

“The ACE Study reveals a powerful relationship between our emotional experiences as children and our physical and mental health as adults, as well as the major causes of adult mortality in the United States.

It documents the conversion of traumatic emotional experiences in childhood into organic disease later in life. How does this happen, this reverse alchemy, turning the gold of a newborn infant into the lead of a depressed, diseased adult?

The Study makes it clear that time does not heal some of the adverse experiences we found so common in the childhoods of a large population of middle-aged, middle class Americans. One does not ‘just get over’ some things, not even fifty years later.”

Whatever we can plan or imagine that would improve relationships in the home, is adding to the possibility that any newborn could have the whole deck of healthy possibilities allowed for his/her future.

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20110514/OPINION03/705149995

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.We can begin by you having a complimentary consultation (by clicking here), with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

Technorati Tags: aggression, anger, conflict, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, frustration, healthy relationships, humiliation, isolation, loneliness, love, negative emotions, Relationships, respect, Self-Esteem

Want to know what John Shore has to teach you? Just click here now, and you will know

Once you are left without valid reasons to stay in a sad, empty and lonely relationship, you need to know how you can heal from the hurt!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

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Technorati Tags: abuse, anger, appreciation, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, emotions, frustration, humiliation, loneliness, Self-Esteem

Given the terrible fact that people can’t give beyond of what they themselves experienced, the odds of any baby receiving consistent good care delivered with love and respect are few. We all have been raised by parents who could not express love, or did not how, or were abused children themselves. Some of them, for reasons still not clear enough, even became abuser parents themselves.

In all the conversations about how to deal with the trauma of abuse, persisting after we grow up in hidden and obvious forms, the issue is how to heal and repair the damage. We all tended to assume that we could repair the damage through a mix of care, support and time.

Is that true? are emotional abuse wounds able to heal after some time? Are the scars left by factors like negligence, pressure by parents and peers, sexual abuse, aggressive environment at home with screams and scolding, physical beatings or public humiliations by parents or siblings able to heal and disappear?

What we know now is that childhood stress due to emotional negligence or abuse, especially when combined with genetic factors can result in structural changes in the brain and may make people more vulnerable to get depression afterwards.

The child receives, through early abuse, an indelible imprint of himself, of his parents’ image of himself, and of human relationships in general which will follow him the rest of his life and make the development of trust almost impossible.

Scientific research done on 24 severely depressed people from 18-65 years showed that abuse had caused some structural alterations of the brain, associated with a higher vulnerability to depression. They were investigated with high-resolution structural MRI and childhood stress assessments, and compared with healthy people from the same age group.

What does it tells us? That this is the most tragic event in the life of a young person. Being abused in any way is a serious violation of personal boundaries that not only attacks a baby now, but determines the future of her relationship with others and the world in her future.

We are talking here about damaging the capacity to experience love and trust in a relationship with others unhindered by fear. It is what makes us humans, the capacity to trust others and be with them. How someone is willing to trust others if the brain configuration has been altered precisely in the aspect of connection with others who could again abuse?

If you recognize the scars of abuse in your perception of the world and of others around you, (mistrust, suspicion, fear) perhaps you can explore the possibility of looking for abuse in your childhood. Going ahead, we could talk about some process that, beyond repairing your self-image so you feel that you have the right to be loved and cherished in the right way, would allow you to cross the bridge of blame and guilt and forgive.

Why forgiveness? I can’t find any other resource who could help mend the damaged relationship between the parents or relatives who abused us and ourselves. There has to be a way to clean the past, bury the abusive child-raising practices, begin a new one relating to the children now in our lives showing love and respect.

Does forgiveness help reshape the brain? We don’t know yet. Probably not, but what it can do is to manage the abuse experience as one more of the memories of our childhood and archive it. We have learned through tears our lesson: there is no growth or balance or love in interpersonal violence and abuse. We have learned resilience.

What is, then, left? You tell me, what’s your experience? from this side, forgiveness is a process that takes time, and begins not with forgetting, but with remembering our emotional abuse with the question: what do I have to learn from this experience? and how do I move on afterwards?

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: abuse, aggression, appreciation, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, feelings, forgiveness, hidden anger, humiliation, resilience

A new study by Florida State University researchers has found that people who were verbally abused as children grow up to be self-critical adults prone to depression and anxiety. Of the whole sample population, an staggering 30% reported that they were often verbally abused by their parents. What kind of abuse? Insults, negative comments, swearing, and threats of physical abuse, all determining an unhealthy doses of self-criticism in the children.

What happened with the people who were abused as children? We know already that it has negative effects on the personality of grown up people. Professor Natalie Sachs-Ericsson, the study’s lead author, says that the results are on the area of depression and anxiety: “People who were verbally abused had 1.6 times as many symptoms of depression and anxiety as those who had not been verbally abused and were twice as likely to have suffered a mood or anxiety disorder over their lifetime.”

Now we know for sure: parental verbal abuse is toxic, and it not only affects the emotional stability of children, but follows them as a shadow in their adult years. We are forever paying the consequences of abusive parenting. Negative self-criticism generated by parents’ comments continues into adulthood and has been shown to make an individual more prone to depression and anxiety.

Why is this? Aren’t parents the ones supposed to take care, love and protect their children? We have been silent for a long time about noxious parenting happening almost in every household.

Either it is that parents have been themselves traumatized by abuse when children or that they got to believe that stern discipline and fault finding is the best way of raising their children, this has to stop. We need more public advocacy about negative parenting, more role models for positive, self-esteem building child-raising styles and in general a deep transformation in the way we treat children.

It’s no surprise now that adult children of abuse sometimes decide that they need to separate from their parents, when the parents continue the abusive and denigrating commenting about their adult children’s lives they did in the past.

We need more public comments on how abuse from the past re-appears in the present and keeps doing psychological damage. We need to say clearly that we are only going to interact with healthy people who would not use destructive comments to hurt other people’s self-esteem. Perhaps now we can go around even feeing appreciated and loved, for a change?

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: aggression, appreciation, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, feelings, humiliation, isolation, passive aggressive, reconciliation, resilience, verbal abuse

The male desperation to keep the female under control by either physical, sexual, economic and psychological ways shows up in so many ways. If we see a husband controlling whatever resources the wife can have, either the food money or her income or her time, we can assume there is a man insecure of his role as a man.

Is this surprising? of course not, there has been in process a transformation in gender roles, from authoritarian to egalitarian partnerships, still under way. This is also a personal transformation required from today’s husbands, if they want to be part of a relationship which makes both sides happy.

We are all familiar with the thousand ways in which we can recognize coercion and power games from the husband to the wife, and sometimes the other way around…This exercise of the “male privilege” is a relic of the past, but much cherished when men don’t know how to be otherwise…most social models portray a man who knows best and has all the answers…

Adults know how much insecurity is hidden behind this charade, but anyhow some men tend to believe it’s their duty to prevail over their spouses. This is a good example of what we call “winning the battle but losing the war strategy.” It is not a surprise that it generates a lot of resentment and anger.

If we could educate young boys and men in the art of sharing decision-making with their female partners, we could eliminate one of the ugliest scars of relationships, the push to use control which becomes the path to interpersonal abuse and domestic violence.

Marriage is a game in which both sides agree to learn from each other to be able to develop into grown up people. It is impossible to do so if there is not an opening up to receive and to give.

Receiving, for the blockaded male soul, means being open and respectful of her ideas and influence.

How difficult is this for any man? A little bit of emotional intelligence can go a long way…perhaps the husband only needs to remember that his best role is to:

-listen to the other side;
-make joint decisions;
-accept that her side is important;
-value her perspectives;
-even when making the decision, integrate her views in it.

Just forgetting the need to win over the other side is a great step ahead. Another big step is to learn how to fight fair in your marriage.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: abuse, control, domestic violence, emotional intelligence, Healthy Marriage, marriage, power over, resentment

Even worst is the fact that few people have some or the right answers, so we are left with a sense of impotence in front of a grave injustice.

In a recent article, Phyllis A. DeMott has explained some common misconceptions about domestic abuse. Here we reproduce two of them:

“MYTH: Abuse happens when a person loses control or is angry.

FACT: Abuse is defined by control. Abusers manipulate their victims emotionally, financially and physically long before the first time they hit. Abusers make calculated choices about how to behave in a given situation to retain control over their victim. Abusers choose when and where to behave violently. An abusive partner may become angry in public or with someone other than his partner, and these situations do not lead to immediate violent outbursts. Instead, an abuser will wait until he is alone with his victim before using physical violence. This shows clear control over his decisions.”

“MYTH: Both the abuser and the victim are responsible for the abuse in the relationship.

FACT: Responsibility and accountability should always be on the abusive partner. We don’t blame a pedestrian for being hit by a drunk driver, nor do we blame the victims of identity theft. Battered women are victims of crimes perpetrated by their partners. Victims should never be blamed for the abuse they suffer.”

The main point of Phyllis’ contribution is simply to clarify two misconceptions that common people use: that domestic violence is a crime of passion, unleashed by a loving person out of his emotional self-control, making both victim and abuser responsible for his outburst. This way of reasoning will always help cover the real question:

“WHY does an abuser think violence is the right behavior?” Perhaps focusing the discussion in this way we could answer the unspeakable:

Some people still think of the heterosexual marriage as a relationship between people of different value, where one person is destined to command and control, and the other has to obey, for a thousand reasons based on culture, biology or ignorance. In this frame, violence is a useful tool to teach submission from the beginning.

BECAUSE it is the cheapest and fastest way to terrorize the victim into submission, violence is used.

Because control demands submission and submission is NOT voluntary, has to imposed by means of fear, hurt and the humiliation of being beaten by the same person freely chosen to be a peer, a companion and a lover.

Here is the emotional violence that the victim has to suffer: the unavoidable insight about the real nature of her relationship leaves her sad, scared and terribly alone….Now, she knows that she is not in a love relationship between equals, where she can trust the other person with her physical integrity.

She has now to deal with the realization that her relationship is similar to slavery, in which the control over her body, thoughts and feelings is in other person’s hands.

Healing from emotional abuse is a long process that the victim needs to complete to recover her self-esteem. And there is a lot of support coming her way if we all around see domestic violence as what it is: not a “wrong way to express intense love”, but the sad connection present in a toxic, controlling relationship where one partner believes he needs to be the master and the other is forced to be the slave.

Phyllis A. DeMott: “Domestic abuse is defined by control”
(http://www.pioneerlocal.com/niles/news/forum/1515708,ni-guestessay-040909-s1.article)

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: control, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, humiliation, impotence, Self-Esteem, unjust, violence, wife beating