Today let’s talk about predation and prey. When we’ve been previously victimized, we’re unfortunately likely to experience it again. For what reasons?
In this episode, we summarize a paper:
Childhood maltreatment and adulthood victimization: An evidence-based model
Fatemeh Fereidooni et al
Journal of Psychiatric Research
2023
On the psychological reasons why revictimization tends to occur.
For the full details and study excerpts, jump into the long-form followup episode. You’ll find it, just check that patreon.
Now here’s what we can say from the research work.
Childhood maltreatment is shockingly common – with rates estimated between 6 and 75% depending on region and gender. CM is correlated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, impulsivity, suicidality, and cardiovascular disease.
It also correlates with interpersonal victimization in adulthood. CSA is linked with adult sexual victimization with an increased 2-3 fold risk compared to children without sexual abuse. This danger extends beyond sexual abuse, though; CM elevates the risk of physical and emotional abuse in adults, as well.
So why is that?
One theory is that adults unconsciously repeat past traumatic events to “redo” them. The mind wants a chance to try again, with a heightened degree of control and empowerment, to rewrite history.
Common psychological theories also suggest that there’s a certain familiarity, predictability, and comfort to replaying traumatic events. We’ve lived through them before and the mind is, in a way, validated by living through them again. Limiting self-beliefs, negative world views, and low self-worth, for instance, appear to be confirmed by recurrences of abuse.
Another potential explanation is the maltreated child learns to disassociate from the abuse to survive. Upon later instances of abuse, the adult instinctively disassociates again. This protective mechanism causes the individual to miss important informational and bodily cues, so that they don’t recognize the abuse is taking place. The person “exits the building” of their own meat jacket, and in doing so, doesn’t experience what they’re experiencing, or therefore learn the lesson of these repetitive abuse experiences to move away from the danger.
This has the added benefit of protecting the abuser.
Starting in childhood, we often need to see the other person as “good” because they are our lifeline. As an adult, we might continue to unconsciously protect the people around us when we feel we depend on them in some way. By disassociating during abuse, they retain their “good” image, and the maltreated individual may have no idea why they (and their life) feel so “bad.”
Annnnd let’s not overlook the PTSD that could result from CM.
Post traumatic stress symptoms themselves might confuse the situation. Being under constant stress as a baseline condition means you don’t know when you’re stressed out by another person’s behaviors. And the added stresses and symptoms might make a person more likely to stay in a bad relationship due to overwhelm; when you just need things to be calm, and sometimes another person helps to foster relaxation, you could be willing to overlook all the things they do that foster chaos and pain.
Plus…. Those PTSD symptoms? Might encourage a person to engage in escapist behaviors that put them in risky situations. Such as drinking, drugging, or risky sexual behaviors to numb the pain or to feel at all. In this way, delivering them TO dangerous circumstances and humans, in their attempts to cope with the prior dangerous circumstances and humans who left a lasting mark on their brains and bodies.
All this being said… there’s a need to study the layering, complex and nuanced, psychological factors that results from childhood maltreatment which, together, might increase the likelihood of encountering or permitting adult maltreatment.
Methods
And so, these authors sampled first-year female psychology students over 16 years of age from the Netherlands and New Zealand; interviewing and questionnaire-ing them four times within an academic year from 2017 to 2021. The intent? To gather information on their childhood maltreatment and later adult victimization of the emotional, physical, and sexual types, with the purpose of understanding mediating factors linking one to the other.
They specifically looked at mediators of PTSD symptoms such as disassociation, substance use, sexual risk-taking, sexual motives and assertiveness, coping, emotional dysregulation, early maladaptive schemas (AKA fucked up core beliefs and representations of the world), attachment styles, self-blame, risk detection capabilities, post trauma growth, resilience, distress tolerance, emotional reactivity, meaning in life, sexual sensation seeking, impulsivity, emotion recognition, and loneliness.
And began to develop a model, explaining how these factors amplify each other and correlate with adult victimization.
Findings include the verification that CM severity is directly related to victimization in adulthood. The most highly implicated factors were peritraumatic disassociation, PTSD symptoms, trauma load, loneliness, and drug use. Secondary mediators (factors that build on each other to result in adult victimization) include attachment styles, early maladaptive schema, and meaning in life. And some networking factors were also determined: these included first and second order mediators. Anxious attachment, PTSD symptoms, and loneliness).
But. Interestingly. What I just told you isn’t accurate.
Because peritraumatic disassociation was found to be a first, second, and networking mediator of adult victimization. It is a direct and indirect cause of later abuse, and also networks with the other previously mentioned factors to increase chances of adult victimization experiences. That seemed easier to discuss now, rather than to list peritraumatic disassociation under every category.
Now let’s run through the factors.
Factors affecting revictimization
Peritraumatic dissociation doesn’t allow an individual to learn from previous traumatic (abuse) events, because it interferes with information acknowledgement, processing, and integration. If you “leave the house” (being your body and broader psychological schema) every time abuse is taking place, you don’t notice or respond appropriately to the abuse. And because disassociation becomes a widely applied coping skill not only for trauma, but also for the unpleasant outcomes of trauma, it is implicated more heavily than any other factor in repeat adult victimization experiences. We have to be present to care for ourselves. Disassociation makes this impossible.
PTSD symptoms such as hyperarousal might make it difficult to notice real threats. Operating at a stress level 10/10 means you don’t notice when a predator is bumping up the measure to 12/10; you’re already maxed out and also likely to consider this sensation “the feeling of being alive,” so a person doesn’t even notice the abuse or their own discomfort. Another possible explanation is that negative emotions and physiological reactions are so high at a baseline level or under abuse duress that an individual becomes stagnated, frozen, or unresponsive and cannot move away from the threat. And lastly, PTSD symptoms might cause verbal and non-verbal cues that signal vulnerability to predators – signalling viability as a target.
Similarly, trauma load or ongoing psychological distress can affect mental health cyclically and place an individual in harm’s way in a recurrent manner. When they get low, chance of revictimization gets high, due to coping behaviors and unconscious cues of disempowered status sent to others.
Loneliness might make individuals less selective in who they spend time or partner with. It also might increase tolerance of abusive behaviors. When the alternative option is being alone and suffering, a human mind is surprisingly willing to accept negative treatment instead. Especially in the context of high PTSD symptoms and/or trauma load.
Substance use is a method of coping with trauma and the negative emotions it spurs. Unfortunately, placing traumatized people in dangerous situations with potentially dangerous (generally also traumatized) persons, during which they won’t be as mentally sharp as is required to detect or navigate the situation safely. And of course, substance dependency makes an individual more likely to accept maltreatment to secure their drug of choice.
Maladaptive schemas such as impaired beliefs about autonomy affect the individual’s thoughts and therefore ability to dream of alternative options or plan to secure them. If you don’t believe you’re allowed to function independently or that the world is a pervasively dangerous place to be alone, then a person is more likely to get “stuck” in an abusive set of circumstances, assuming they’re trapped and helpless. Or, even feeling “safer” through the very act of being partnered.
Anxious attachment is implicated as a secondary mediating factor for adult revictimization because it contributes via routes of loneliness, risky sexual behaviors, peritraumatic disassociation, maladaptive beliefs about rejection, emotional dysregulation, and PTSD symptoms. Anxious attachment might encourage tolerating abusive relationships due to fear of rejection. i.e. it’s better to be abused than to feel unloved or unlovable. And, at the same time, predatory men might prefer anxious attachment styles, due both to the positive and stabilizing effect it has on their (the man’s) ego and the increased acceptance of poor treatment that it fosters in the other person. In this way they can feel good about themselves while putting in very little effort or using their partner as a punching bag. Lastly, under the spell of anxious attachment, the desire to be “chosen” in order to cope with loneliness and negative self-regard is so strong that risky sexual behavior and peritraumatic disassociation are likely, and are likely to lead to acceptance of abusive relationships.
Early maladaptive schemas (we can call them fucked up core beliefs or low estimations of self-empowerment) foster insecure attachment and destructive cognitive and emotional patterns. People (mis)interpret and underestimate their self-worth versus others' behaviors, permitting negative treatment because “they deserve it” or “aren’t good enough to receive better.” This, again, can boost anxious attachment or promote the prioritization of others’ thoughts, feelings, and needs in order to receive approval or any semblance of nurturance. Core beliefs about rejectability, specifically, correlate with themes of unreliable support and connection, mistrust, low self-worth, impaired autonomy, dependence and enmeshment with others. All of this promotes insecure attachment and inability to self-regulate negative emotions, both of which increase risk of victimization. Moral of the story being, if we don’t believe we’re worthy or capable – if we believe someone else is necessary to make us valid - everything spirals from there.
In examining Meaning in life our researchers found that CM decreases perception of it existing. Coherence of life experiences, setting of goals, and considering one’s life important are decreased following CM, and this limits the capacity for negative emotional regulation. This increases PTSD symptoms, which increases chances of adult revictimization. Believing you are an unwanted accident or life is purposeless doesn’t instill the self-esteem or self-comforting skills required to leave dangerous situations. Rather, they are accepted as “part of life.”
Now let’s talk about a few unexpected research findings.
Somewhat surprisingly, risky sexual behavior such as having sex with strangers, engaging with a large number of people, or being highly sexually assertive did not seem to increase the chance of adult revictimization. However, the authors note that this could be due to the relatively safe behaviors of study participants or the study’s focus on broad victimization experiences, rather than specifically on sexual victimization.
Also somewhat surprisingly, somatic disassociation (leaving the body) might be less dangerous than cognitive disassociation (losing oneself in time-space or disconnecting from one’s full autobiographical recall). The researchers note that bodily disassociation might place individuals in less risky situations than mental disassociation, explaining the discrepancy. We need to have our wits about us to make good decisions about where we go and who we engage with in order to avoid predators.
Also, coping strategies such as wishful thinking and self-blame were not implicated in revictimization, running counter to previous studies. The authors note that these could be less direct factors contributing to adult abuse, whereas coping strategies like using sex for emotional regulation might more strongly promote adult revictimization. I would note that wishful thinking and self-blame might be more potent factors for increasing the acceptance of abuse in an already established relationship, rather than putting one at risk for attracting or encountering predators. Wishing for the best and holding negative events against oneself don’t assist with making decisions to leave a victimizing situation, but they might not put one directly in harm’s way.
What can be determined from this research?
The relationship between CM and AR is not straightforward – a cocktail of factors with relatively small effects build on each other to increase the likelihood of revictimization. There is not one answer to the question “how does childhood abuse lead to adult abuse?” and there are many pathways this network of risk factors can take reach this end result. The combination could be different for each one of us.
However, the symptoms and psychological outcomes of childhood trauma and abuse are implicated as the materials that construct these pathways.
And lastly, negative views of self, emotional dysregulation and reactivity, and behavioral copings, together, seem to create the multi-nodal pathways from CM to AR. When we feel poorly about ourselves, we don’t know how to comfort ourselves, and therefore develop risky or maladaptive coping skills… and this brings us into the lairs of predators. People who, unfortunately, can pick up signals of the poor self-regard and previous abuse experience that underlies it all.
In conclusion, the authors state:
PTSD symptoms, loneliness, and drug use might be among the most significant risk factors for revictimization albeit they all showed small effects. In addition, peritraumatic dissociation emerged as a first and second-order mediator and it functioned as a network in the model, which highlights the importance of this factor in revictimization.
Childhood maltreatment severity is associated with anxious attachment style and early maladaptive schemas, general cognitive patterns used for processing information about the self and others. These cognitive patterns are in turn related to emotion dysregulation and emotional reactivity, factors that probably lead to intense negative emotions, while people with a history of childhood maltreatment have limited sources to regulate them adaptively. Therefore, CM-survivors may employ dysfunctional strategies such as drug use and risky sex behavior, increasing the risk of further victimization.
And, of course
It should be acknowledged that focusing on intrapersonal risk factors of revictimization does not imply that victims are responsible for the violence inflicted on them.
And although it is not your fault if you’re revictimized – childhood maltreatment and ongoing trauma have laid the groundwork via emotional deficits and self-damning belief systems - if you want to help yourself help yourself to avoid future revictimization…. you might focus on targeting:
Cognitive disassociation
Low self-regard and sense of meaning in life
Poor emotional regulation skills
Maladaptive coping techniques
Low social connection
As the factors to improve now, as empowered and autonomous adults who don’t depend on abusers to stay alive the way we did as children.
The most direct way? Working with a trauma trained therapist who can coach you through, yes, DBT and CBT. But also someone who understands the deep self-damaging beliefs (I’m worthless, the world is a terrifying and unfair place, there is no meaning in my life) created by childhood maltreatment, rather than focusing on individual ailments spawned by those maladaptive schemas, such as anxiety.
Get to the bottom of it – childhood maltreatment – not the myriad of complicating factors that emerge from it. With support, time, and corrective experiences, you’ll learn to think better of yourself, navigate difficult emotions, and engage in healthy coping skills. All of which dismantle the CM to AR model by keeping you out of the territories of predators, helping you to become aware of adult maltreatment through emotional recognition, and enabling you to put a new plan into practice via cognitive remembrance of where you’ve been so far, what you’ve already experienced, event processing and thought integration.
When you realize you’ve seen it enough before, you aren’t worthless or helpless, and your life DOES have meaning… the compounding factors that allow adult abuse will be neutralized. And your journey towards something better can begin or re-start with renewed power.
This episode has been based on the article
Childhood maltreatment and adulthood victimization: An evidence-based model
Fatemeh Fereidooni et al
Journal of Psychiatric Research
2023
Many thanks to the authors for their investigation and analysis.
Many thanks to you for being here, being motivated to have a better life, and being better than the people who came before you.
And I’ll talk to you soon.