Trauma and its contribution to
violent behaviourDaniel J Neller and John Matthew Fabian review research-based
theories into how traumatic experience is linked to violence.
www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/sites/crimeandjustice.org.uk/files/09627250608553387.pdfThe Link Between Childhood Trauma and Later Violent OffendingPaul Renn
By Paul Renn
Published on 7th May, 2010
www.counselling-directory.org.uk/memberarticles/the-link-between-childhood-trauma-and-later-violent-offendingINTRODUCTION
Research findings relating to young offenders show a history of maltreatment and loss in up to 90% of the sample population (Boswell, 1996; Fonagy, Target, Steele et al., 1997). These findings accorded with my clinical experience when I worked as a probation officer with adult offenders in the community. In particular, I found that those who had committed violent offences had themselves been victims of childhood abuse and/or suffered neglect or loss experienced as catastrophic. Indeed, the acting out of unresolved childhood trauma in a criminal way was a consistent feature in the behaviour of those with whom I worked and, moreover, was strongly associated with substance misuse.
The study that follows illustrates the clinical application of attachment theory in a probation setting. It is presented as an example of the work I undertook with violent offenders and with the intention of emphasising the connection between childhood trauma and subsequent violent offending. It elucidates the way in which attachment theory may be used to explicate offending behaviour and to assess risk in a forensic setting. In line with Boswell’s (1998) advocacy of research-minded practice, the study seeks to demonstrate the importance of asking offenders about their traumatic backgrounds at the point of assessment. The therapeutic model shows that the application of attachment theory in brief, time-limited work may enhance the offender’s capacity for narrative intelligibility, leading to an integration of dissociated thoughts and emotional affect and to a concomitant cessation of violent behaviour.
THEORETICAL PARADIGM
Attachment theory played a central part in my assessment of the offender and I anticipated that this approach would underpin my intervention with him. As indicated above, I found attachment theory a powerful tool in explicating offending behaviour and assessing risk and, furthermore, eminently adaptable to working effectively with offenders in a probation setting. From this developmental perspective the person’s inner world of subjective experience is structured, shaped and organized by patterns of attachment and interpersonal interactions into representational models (Bowlby, 1969, 1980).
With regard to traumatic childhood experiences involving separation and loss, Bowlby (1969) found that when a young child is unwillingly separated from the attachment figure, he or she shows distress. In the event of the separation being prolonged, necessitating the child being placed in unfamiliar surroundings, such distress is likely to become intense. Typically, the child’s distress follows a sequence of protest, despair and emotional detachment. Bowlby (1969) suggests that these phases may be linked to three types of responses, viz., separation anxiety, grief and mourning, and defence. Further, he argues that these responses are phases of a single process - that of mourning separation and loss. The traumatic quality of the child’s grief reaction is encapsulated in Bowlby’s poignant observation that “Loss of a loved person is one of the most intensely painful experiences any human being can suffer” (Bowlby, 1980, p. 7).
Bowlby (1979, 1980) emphasises that the crucial process of mourning generally takes place in the context of the family’s characteristic attachment behaviour towards the child. He contends that the family may either facilitate the expression of grief by responding sympathetically to the child’s distress or adopt an inhibiting attitude that causes the child to suppress or avoid typical feelings of fear of abandonment, yearning and anger. Bowlby (1979, 1980) stresses that a supportive and sympathetic attitude within the family may lead to a process of healthy mourning in children as young as two years. The process consists of normal behavioural responses of anxiety and protest, despair and disorganization and detachment and reorganization. By means of this process, the loss is gradually accepted by the child whose capacity to form new attachment bonds is restored following a period of disorganization.
By contrast, in pathological mourning the child’s unexpressed ambivalent feelings of yearning for and anger with the attachment figure are split off into segregated or dissociated systems of the personality, and the loss may be disavowed. As a consequence, and in the absence of a trusted substitute attachment figure, the child has little alternative but to move precipitously to a defensive condition of emotional detachment, thereby internalizing a mental model of attachment that is dismissing or avoidant of affective states associated with separation and loss. In such instances, the child’s attachment behavioural system remains deactivated because attachment-related information is being defensively and selectively excluded from consciousness (Bowlby, 1980, 1988).
In describing childhood pathological mourning, Bowlby (1979) makes the important point that his hypothesis is not confined to the actual death of or separation from the attachment figure. Indeed, he stresses that the child may experience separation and loss in numerous, less overt ways, for example, in the form of threats of abandonment, parental rejection, depression, neglect and/or abuse, as well as loss of love (Bowlby, 1979, 1988). Bowlby (1979) emphasises that the common factor in these various situations is loss by the child of a parent figure to love and to attach to.
In developing Bowlby’s theoretical concepts, Main, Kaplan and Cassidy (1985) suggest that patterns of secure and insecure attachment organization, internalized in the form of working models, are representational of states of mind in relation to patterns of attachment. Further, Main et al.’s (1985) research indicates that, once established, patterns of attachment tend to persist over time and become actively self-perpetuating because information experienced as potentially disruptive is countered by perceptual and behavioural control mechanisms. Internal working models are, therefore, thought to mediate experience of actual relationships and events, and to guide and direct feelings, behaviour, attention, memory and cognition. The authors’ findings support Bowlby’s (1979) contention that mental models shaped by childhood experiences of pathological mourning may be activated under conditions of separation and loss in adulthood, together with the expression of dysfunctional anger, hatred and aggression.
In the course of their research, Main et al. (1985) employed the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan and Main, 1984) in order to classify parental states of mind with respect to attachment. Using this research tool and Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters and Wall’s (1978) Strange Situation procedure, which observes and classifies the attachment status of children, Main et al. (1985) established a link between four distinct discourse styles and four corresponding patterns of attachment behaviour. These findings were confirmed by Main in a follow up study in 1991, which, together, demonstrate that each discrete pattern of attachment organization has, as its precursor, a specific pattern of caregiver-infant interaction and its own behavioural sequelae. Again, this research suggests that malignant childhood events relevant to attachment, such as separation and loss, may cause difficulty in integrating and organizing information, and that such difficulty may play a determining role in the creation of security in adulthood. As noted above, Main et al. (1985) conclude that internal working models derived from insecure patterns of attachment organization are resistant to change because error-correcting information is being defensively and selectively excluded from consciousness, resulting in perceptual distortion of relationships and events. The authors’ findings of research undertaken in Baltimore have been replicated in studies carried out in Germany by Grossman and Grossman (1991).
Along similar lines, Peterfreund (1983) suggests that different internal working models are in operation during different activities and in different situations making predictive calculation and adaptive behaviour possible. In advocating a “heuristic”, as opposed to a “stereotypical”, approach to the process of psychoanalytic therapy, he, too, stresses the significance of information processing and error-correcting feedback in this process, arguing that these are the means by which perceptually distorted internal working models are modified, updated and fine-tuned. Peterfreund’s synthesizing approach reflects Bowlby’s emphasis both on empirical observation of human relationships and the fact that many of the concepts underpinning attachment theory are derived from cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. Attachment theory, therefore, may be seen as acting as a bridge between cognitive science and psychoanalysis (Holmes, 1993).
In line with this thinking, my work with offenders was informed by findings from developmental studies, adult attachment research, trauma research and neurobiology. In combination with interactional and developmental perspectives in psychoanalysis, such findings provide both a particular way of listening to the offender’s narrative and of understanding the clinical process (Slade, 1999). In accordance with this view, Stern (1998) argues that “search strategies” which explore the client’s past are an integral aspect of the therapeutic process, contending that “In good part, the treatment is the search” (p. 203). As with attachment theory, Stern’s (1985, 1998) perspective views psychopathology as arising out of an accumulation of maladaptive interactive patterns that result in character and personality types and disorders in adulthood.