This website is for information only and is not intended as a self-diagnosis or self-therapy guide. It is designed to give personally affected individuals and their family members and loved ones a better understanding of the subject:

 

Based on real life events, it will highlight the relationship between cause and effect. The deductions made are from the perspective of a personally affected individual who makes no claims whatsoever to any medical or scientific training. This website takes a strong stand against the trivialisation of child abuse. It is also opposed to the stigmatisation of the psychiatric secondary illnesses associated with child abuse, for example depression.



Psychological abuse of minors by their parents and the far-reaching consequences



Psychological abuse can be described as repeated behavioural patterns by parents or a recurrence of extreme incidents that let children know in no uncertain terms that they are: worthless, full of flaws, unloved, unwanted, in extreme danger, or only worth the air they breathe if they can fulfil the needs of another human being. To name a few examples, this is exercised via:

rejection

instilling fear

terrorisation

ridicule

humiliation

intimidation

incarceration

Psychological abuse means that the healthy development of the victim’s personality is severely compromised. Aside from a very limiting quality of life – that can go well beyond childhood – other consequences that can manifest themselves are serious psychiatric illnesses often with chronic ramifications. The consequences of psychological child abuse can be as serious as child abuse involving substantial bodily harm or sexual child abuse. This does not mitigate the severity of the act by any means! Even though psychological child abuse is the most prevalent form of child abuse today, it is the one that remains relatively unrecognised.

It is difficult to fight violence that is neither tangible nor provable, but which causes injury nonetheless. Mental violence humiliates, takes away self-esteem and renders its subject helpless. Perpetrators use it to boost their egos and satisfy their cravings for recognition and admiration. (Source: Marie-France Hirigoyen)

Nothing can change the past. We can ease the intensity, have a psychology practise work through it with us, but what has happened can never be undone. The innocent psyche of the child remains violated. Every so often a wound will heal up but the scar remains. The first experience happens so early on in life and lasts to such an extent that it is impossible for us to achieve a reversal. The imprint is everlasting.

Not only did Konrad Lorenz – an Austrian-born Nobel laureate in physiology and professor of psychology – deduce from his research that this first imprint was irreversible later on, but he also established that by the same token there is no way of catching up on a first imprint once the sensitive period of childhood has elapsed.

With this basic knowledge every act of child abuse must be treated as a crime against the young individual. The earlier a child is subjected to it, the more long-term the damage and the more difficult, if not entirely impossible, for reconditioning to occur.

Exposure to abuse or violence whatever the nature in the formative years invariably spells out a particularly hard plight in life. Even though there is a widespread prevalence around the world of people burdened with such a plight, this does not ease its intensity – especially while it is not recognised for what it is. (Source: Anke Diehlmann – Doctor of Medicine)