The mother child relationship as trauma, trigger and treatment. Working with intergenerational relational trauma, neglect and abuse: theory and ideas for practice
Treatment options are limited for families where the child 3 -12 years has severe and intractable disturbances of emotionand behavior, where there is suspected or confirmed maltreatment by the mother and where the mother has her own history of childhood neglect and abuse. This presentation proposes a model for understanding maltreatment in these mother-child dyads, drawing upon the developmental psychopathology, behavior and trauma literatures. At the core of this model is the hypothesis that a mother’s maltreating behavior arises from unconscious attempts to avoid the re-emergence of an attachment related dissociative part of the personality which contains the distress arising from her own early experiences of attachment relationships.
The dynamics of the parent child relationship (dominated by shifts in clinical presentation and relationship avoidance) are understood as having their origins in the activation of dissociative parts of the mother’s personality, in response to the ongoing affective demands of the parent child relationship. Implications of this model for therapy include the notion that successful treatment will depend on the therapist supporting the mother to elicit, understand, modify and integrate these dissociative parts of the personality, allowing maturation of the mother’s care giving motivational system and the development of more attuned and effective emotional communication between parent and child. This presentation, illustrated with clinical examples from a CAMHS clinic, will introduce this model of maternal maltreatment and an approach to intervention called Parallel Parent Child Narrative/Parent and Child Therapy (PPCN/PACT)
