Thirteen ways to help children who are being abused Explore any and all abuse you have experienced, how it has affected you, and how to deal with it, so that you can share what has… Thursday Thirteen: 13 ways to help children who are being abused
This is a little gem I remember from my childhood of watching Sesame Street: All this time I thought the goat was saying “Everybody get maa-a-a-a-ad!” but it turns out it’s “It ain’t bad to… Abuse really gets my goat!
(I wrote this for a Psych 101 class I took while working at Mills College in 2005. The point of the assignment was to see if we could cite our sources correctly; I used it to explore my own questions about research on recovered/repressed memories, and to respond to the offensive inaccuracies in the textbook and the professor’s refusal to discuss them for more than a minute in class. Imagine how pissed off I was when all he did was check the form of the ending citations and return it! I’ve bolded stuff here that wasn’t emphasized in the original to make it easier on the eyes.)
Over the past two decades, no psychological issue has been embroiled in such controversy, nor so often misunderstood, as that of recovered memories. The definition is constantly shifting; the requirements for validation differ from study to study; and the research is often limited by what could almost be called a lack of imagination.
One barrier to effective research has been the divorcing of sexual abuse from all other forms of what researcher Nanette Auerhahn calls ‘massive psychic trauma.’ (Auerhahn & Laub, 1998) Most information about repressed memory, both in the clinical field and in lay writing, treats it specifically as a possible rare effect of extreme childhood sexual abuse. As a result, it has been tainted with the high-profile controversy around sexual abuse cases, and needlessly politicized. Yet in the areas of war psychology, of Holocaust survivors, and related areas, repressed memories are treated as a common effect of trauma. Even in papers not directly addressing the issue, one frequently finds mention of them, as in this study of the children of Holocaust survivors: ‘In our work collecting oral histories of Holocaust survivors at Yale University, we have heard of other children whose very existence had been ‘forgotten’ by their survivor parents. One Auschwitz survivor recalled being asked by a fellow inmate, upon arrival at a new camp, how her daughter was, to which she responded, ‘What daughter?’ She had forgotten the baby she had given birth to and managed to hide in a bag until an SS officer heard the baby cry and demanded that she hand the bag over to him.’ (Auerhahn & Laub, 1998) Recovered Memory Research