These are my suggestions for talking to children about abuse, based on my personal experiences….

• Don’t ask once and then drop it. This is a very common mistake, particularly if a child says they have never been abused. Why? Well, a “no” answer (or just no answer) can be a great relief even to an adult who has lots of reasons to suspect abuse. And a “no” answer can be inaccurate, especially when coming from a child, because they might not understand the question, especially at a young age; might have repressed the experience; might not feel safe talking about it to anyone, especially if they have been threatened or told no one will believe them; might not know how to talk about what happened; might want to tell but not be ready to deal with those feelings or what they imagine would happen next; might not feel safe talking about it in this particular place or with this particular person…. It often takes time for children to process what has happened, to consider how to talk to you about it, and to decide that it is safe. You can support them in that process by letting them know the conversation is still open.
• Do remember that it is okay to keep asking, or to keep talking about abuse in general. It’s easy to tell ourselves that it is harassment, or that we will end up wrongly “convincing” them that they were abused. We already know, from decades of research, that it’s impossible to convince someone they were abused if they weren’t. We just have to respect their boundaries while still letting them know the conversation isn’t over.
• Do talk to them about abuse in general, about what it includes, why it happens, and what effects it has. Always in an age-appropriate way. You can talk about it meaning something that something does that is Not Okay, and help them brainstorm about what that might be. Abuse isn’t always a huge grotesque, life-changing event; there are many everyday forms. You can talk about bullying as a form of abuse, or things you see on TV, or talk about your or their experiences. Abusive behavior doesn’t make someone An Abuser, and being an abuser doesn’t mean that someone is intentionally cruel or unloving; you can help them grow up to be able to call a spade a spade without collapsing under the fear of what others will think of the term. You can find a lot of information about that stuff on this site, and more is always coming. You can also send in questions about anything you’d like related to abuse, addiction, and/or recovery.
• Don’t threaten or pressure the child to talk about it. No “you need to tell me,” no well-meaning “you have to talk to someone about it,” no “we’ll sit here until you are willing to talk”…. The fact is, they don’t have to talk about it. Many children never do. Some adults never do. You can let them know that you are ready to listen whenever they want to talk, or that you can help them find someone they can trust to talk to. You can let them know that talking about this stuff helps people feel better, and that the more you (or whoever they want to talk to) knows about it, the better you (or whoever) will be able to help.
• Do pay attention to and respect the child’s reactions. Treat them with the respect you would an adult having a sensitive conversation. An adult doesn’t have to tell you what happened to them, or how they feel about it; well, neither does a child. At the same time, if the child seems hesitant but is still showing up for the conversation – as opposed to doing whatever it takes to change the subject or play with something far away from you – you can continue to approach with the same cautious respect that you would show an adult. Pretend you’re asking a work friend about a miscarriage, or a parent about their time at war.
• Don’t recoil from their experiences. Sometimes, it can be terrifying or “gross” to hear about what has happened to abuse survivors. People can find themselves enraged, or incredibly nervous and unwilling to go any further. Or simply unsure of how to go any further with the conversation. It’s okay to sit with the silence. Listen to your heart or your gut for the next right move. You can always be honest and tell them that that sounds terrible, or that you aren’t sure what to say.
• Do share your own experiences in an appropriate way. Or experiences you have heard from others. You don’t have to have felt or experienced the same exact thing; it’s enough just to be able to share whatever situation comes up for you, to let them know that they are not alone and that what they are feeling is totally reasonable and understandable. And that there is life beyond it. Even if the abuse is ongoing, there will be an end to it and there are others who know what they are going through. Plus, sharing your own stories shifts the focus of the conversation off of the child for a while. It gives them space to just listen, and hopefully a cathartic space where they can see their own feelings echoed outside of them.
• Don’t share intimate details of sexual abuse, of course, but it is fine to share the fears that came up for you, what helped you (at the time, or in adulthood), and whether or not you could talk to anyone about it and what that felt like. You can talk about your experiences, or those of people you know, in a child-appropriate way: for example, “You know, my father used to hit me sometimes too,” or “I know this is hard to talk about, because the same thing happened to me when I was a kid – except for me, it was with my grandmother.”
• Do let them know that whatever you suspect is happening to them happens to a lot of kids, and that you know it can be very confusing and scary – that even trying to talk about it can be confusing and scary. You can read or give them books about it; some children will find this validating, others will hate it, and a lot of the time it depends on the book. You can check out books about how to talk to children about abuse, too.
• Don’t buy into their fear or denial. It’s common for children (and adults; anyone really) to freak out and want to take it all back after telling someone about their abuse. Many of us have to battle an intense backlash of fear, shame, and self doubt when we first confront our abuse. We think that we should not have told, that it was not that bad, that our abusers will be sad, that they really didn’t mean to hurt us, that we are going to be in trouble, that we are horrible people who are just blowing things all out of proportion, how could we have said that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, on some level, we want to control the abuse, to make it all disappear from history by denying it ever happened after all. Then we won’t have to deal with these emotions and memories anymore, right? (No, they’ll devour us from within instead. Much better!) Don’t make it worse by buying into their fear and letting them pretend they can erase it.

You can let them know why you believe them, what events or effects you have witnessed, or simply that you believe them. Or that this reaction is totally natural. Another good response is to respond as if they were demanding the impossible, as indeed they are: to simply agree that you wish it hadn’t happened too, and that you are sorry it is so scary but that it will get better with time.

This is a very useful response with little kids in general – the “that would be nice” reply, where we validate their fantasies instead of reacting as though they are impossibly demanding. Often, when kids whine about how they wish school would never start, or insist with seemingly insane stubbornness that we are wrong and it never starts up again and they’re not going, or ask for wild things like horses and castles and candy for breakfast, parents react with anger. Anger because they feel bad that they can’t provide that stuff for their child, or because they are projecting onto the kid that their child is going to “act up” and whine and resist them and frustrate them, or because they aren’t sure how to set a boundary in this situation and feel afraid that the kid will be totally out of control.

The easiest fix I have found is to move with what the child is saying instead of fighting against it. I know that school will start, they will go, and a horse is too expensive or candy too unhealthy right now. And really, I know that they know that (assuming that I’ve actually explained why what they want can’t happen). So there’s no need for me to get upset: I can just move on to acknowledging how nice it would be (if only from their perspective) if they didn’t have to go to school, or could have a stack of cookies for breakfast. We can even go into a long exploration together of what that would be like – so what would have been a struggle turns into quality time. And then they feel heard, and they move on to do whatever it is they wanted less or didn’t want at all.

This query showed up in my search statistics and I think it’s a great question. I’m surprised I never thought of it before, actually. After all, borderline personality disorder (BPD) often seems like pathological codependency – like codependence taken to its most life-damaging level. And, then, I really think that in many ways, codependence is Stockholm Syndrome.

I mean, think about it. Therapist Pete Walker describes codependency (yeah, I use codependence and codependency interchangeably… and I don’t know why!) as an extension of “fight or flight.” Fight or flight reaction is when we find ourselves in crisis (or imagined crisis) and seize up in a panic trying to decide whether to, well, fight or flee. Some people have extended this to “fight, flight, or freeze” – we can run away physically (fleeing) or run away mentally (freezing up, checking out, dissociating). Walker added a fourth F, making it “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.”

He’s using “fawn” as a verb here – “to fawn over someone.” Walker suggests that if we can’t fight our attackers, flee from them, or dissociate enough to feel like we are escaping the abuse, we frantically start trying to guess what it is they want, to find something, anything we can say or do that will keep them happy with us. Our focus in life shifts from our own needs and feelings to others’ needs and feelings. And not just our abusers, but everyone, because we no longer feel like we can trust that people will not randomly turn on us.

This is how abuse creates codependence – particularly intrafamilial abuse, where we are living in the pressure cooker of the abusive family system during good times and bad. I’d modify this theory a little; I think that codependence includes dissociation, that it includes every way that we try to control the uncontrollable experience of abuse. Focusing on what we think other people are going to do and think and feel about us is codependent and a way of dissociating from what we are doing and thinking and feeling about ourselves.

In a nutshell, when we have to live with our abusers, day in and day out, we do whatever we can to escape our own experiences. We do whatever we can to protect ourselves. And, especially in childhood, all we can do is pretend our abusers are perfect, our families are perfect, nothing is wrong, and devote all our energies to trying to get the right kind of attention or protection or love from them.

Just like how, when people are penned up in terrifying hostage situations – and how is that not abuse? – they can try to survive by humanizing their abuser, rewriting their story about what is going on, telling themselves that the person holding them hostage is really great, putting all their energies into pleasing that person. Of course, letting go of the myths we tell ourselves about our abusers doesn’t magically free us from codependency; we still have to let go of the myths we tell ourselves about everyone else, including ourselves. But deep down, people-pleasing, codependency, and Stockholm Syndrome are all the same thing.

Borderline Personality Disorder, on the other hand, is more extreme than codependency. Or a more extreme form of it. Codependency involves low self-esteem and the attempt to find self-worth from outside sources (lovers, work, friends, et cetera); BPD has all that plus a kind of “antisocial” flair for using people. Codependents will (often, anyway) feel bad for getting even the most reasonable and willingly-given help from others; some borderlines do the same thing, but many go to the other extreme, acting with an incredible sense of entitlement, as if everyone exists only to serve them.

Dr. Christine Lawson wrote a book called Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship, in which she identifies four “types” of borderlines: the Waif, the Hermit, the Queen, and the Witch. People can be more than one of these, or have characteristics of several, or ping-pong between different types. (Markham’s Behavioral Health blog has a lot more information about this book, for those who want to learn more about BPD and about these categories.)

In brief:

• The Queen acts like super-entitled and possibly insane royalty, demanding and intimidating, refusing any kind of responsibility or consequences, alternately charming and vindictive – “It’s all about me!”
• The Witch can be equally intimidating, using rage and emotional or physical violence instead of charm, thinking that everyone is out to get them on one level or another, motivated by fear and suspicion and seeking out self-esteem and the illusion of power by harming others – “I’ll get you, my pretty!”
• The Hermit actively lives in fear, refusing any kind of help and refusing to acknowledge any mistakes, isolating themselves, relentlessly negative and obsessed with control – “Life sucks and then you die.”
• The Waif lives in intense emotional chaos, forming deeply enmeshed relationships with others who (they hope) can manage their emotions for them, turning to addictions to self-soothe, living in a permanent pattern of suicidal crashes and panic attacks as both an expression of their pain and a way to attract soothing attention – “Life is too hard.”

I’ve dated people who were (and still are) stuck in Waif mode, who would say things like, “I know you’re not going to come down for my birthday because you don’t love me anymore.” Mary Cantwell, in “Manhattan, When I Was Young,” has another good example of this that I’m having trouble finding to quote – essentially, she reflects on how her late father, a deeply critical parent, had been God to her, telling her what to do and how she should have been better in every situation, and how glad she was that her deeply critical husband was there to be God in his place. (It’s an incredibly disturbing, un-self-aware book, and I really want to review it soon!)

I’ve worked for people who invested deeply in Witch mode. The most memorable one was hyper-critical and detail-obsessed – even to the point of requiring on-site employees to take detailed notes of every conversation they had with each other or her and firing someone whose notes (really, whose perception of one conversation) disagreed with someone else’s. She threw in a lot of Waif work from time to time, trying to get her self-esteem from her sense of oppression, and then ricocheted over to Queen, trying to get her self-esteem from the Important Work she claimed to be doing in hoarding history of her movement.

I’ve co-parented with people who liked to season a deep commitment to Hermit mode with a generous dose of Waif and Witch. And, most vividly, with one who ping-ponged between Queen and Waif, who lived her life on the principle that the world owed her something and that she should be able to find people to fulfill all the needs her parents had never met for her, even if it meant sucking them dry one after another.

All of these modes, characteristics, behaviors, whatever we want to call them, are just responses to abuse. In his blog, David Markham points out that a borderline parent “may create new borderlines in their children by terrorizing them with rejection and abandonment to punish them for not following her will.” (Don’t be fooled by the discussion of “the borderline mother” and its associated “Queens” and “hers”; men can be, and often are, borderline as well.) Borderline personality disorder is a reaction to intense emotional abuse. It happens when someone’s psychological development is so interrupted by abuse that they become consumed with trying to get their needs met; when the emotions left over from their childhoods are so intense, and their skills for dealing with those emotions are so absent, that they end up re-perpetrating their own emotional abuse over and over on others while pulling them in to try to fill the painful chasm inside them. It’s like a black hole, where the various borderline behaviors, from charm to violence, are the intense gravitational forces whipping around to pull people in.

It’s very difficult for borderlines to heal. Not only do they have to heal from the abuse they experienced, including the intense fear and shame around feeling their emotions in the first place, but they also have to overcome the intense fear and shame they inflict upon themselves for doing anything wrong. Often, it’s the Waifs who take on the task of healing, because at first they give themselves some validation for the diagnosis, romanticizing their mental illness. This is not necessarily bad; there is a silver lining in anything that leads people to heal. The crucial parts of healing from BPD are facing the history of abuse; becoming willing to feel even the seemingly terrifying feelings; and developing an ability to accept reality, whatever it may bring. Really, those skills are crucial to everyone, but without them there is no healing from BPD.

Codependency is only one piece of BPD. I suppose the deepest difference is that the person who, for example, is in love with their kidnapper has Stockholm Syndrome, is codependent; the person who then goes out and kidnaps others, literally or metaphorically, has borderline personality disorder. Codependency plus the schism with reality that allows them to become perpetrators.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, they often say that alcoholism is not the problem, it is just a symptom. Many people, especially in early recovery, enthusiastically cast aside drinking for another addictive behavior, and just about everyone in every twelve-step program discovers myriad other self-destructive behaviors they’re engaging in as they take inventory of their lives. These behaviors echo past trauma and abuse. The true problem is that these traumas have taught us that we deserve pain and chaos. We have learned to seek out and recreate our unresolved traumatic experiences even after the original harmful situations have passed. It is immaterial whether we perpetuate it by starving ourselves, berating ourselves, short-circuiting our bodies with harmful substances, underearning, choosing and staying with abusive people, cutting our bodies, or something else entirely.

So what’s the solution?

Well, don’t worry, we have our top psychologists, scientists, and therapists working on that around the clock… oh. We don’t?

Well. Here are a few pieces that might fit.

Every twelve-step program uses the same twelve steps, regardless of the behavior being addressed. And, I believe, part of the reason that this is done and that it works for all our addictive “symptoms” must be that it addresses this core problem. Let’s see what the steps ask us to do that might be vital to recovery from trauma and abuse.

The first step, of course, is to admit that we have a problem. It is a very profound step: it helps us begin to see what we are doing that is harming us. It shows us what is not working, what we want to change. It helps us begin to be honest with ourselves and others, instead of harming ourselves with denial and fear.

Step two gives us the opportunity to explore what we believe about the universe, and what parts of that have and haven’t worked for us. We get to see what has worked for others, too, and see that other people have found relief from these painful problems. In step two, we begin to experience hope that things can be different, which I think is crucial to any kind of recovery.

In step three, we learn to ask for help. We seek a willingness to seek out healing from outside, trustworthy sources – to stop trying to do it all ourselves – to realize that our methods have not been working for us. This is mindblowing for many people, especially for those of us who have learned not to ask for help because we are just a burden. Beginning to understand that that is not actually true, and to see ourselves as worthwhile human beings who deserve support and who deserve to get our needs met, is nothing short of a miracle.

The fourth step brings us back to that honesty. We take a long, hard look at our lives, being as honest as we can about our resentments, fears, and relationships in general. This has tremendous implications: it can lead to much deeper clarity about what things have been like and what is harming us; it can bring us back to the emotions that we’ve numbed for so long; it can teach us where our boundaries really are and what we need to do to take responsibility for them. It is an incredible and far-reaching exercise.

The fifth step is even more terrifying for many people than the fourth. It asks us to share everything we learned in the fourth step with another human being and with a higher power of our own understanding. But when we share this with someone who is trustworthy, we learn amazing things. We learn that we are not alone. We learn that our feelings and actions and experiences are not so horrifying that people will run from us if they find out the truth about them. We even learn that those feelings, actions, and experiences are not who we are. And with all of this this comes a greater ability to trust, and a step toward self-acceptance.

Step six builds on that fourth step work too. We get to look at all of the behaviors that are harming us and start thinking about the possibility of maybe someday not doing them anymore. We get to just be willing for things to change, and to know that for the moment, that is enough.

So with the first six steps, what do people get that helps them recover? The beginnings of honesty; hope; help; reality; feelings; boundaries; trust; the possibility of change; and a door opens toward self-acceptance and compassion. That compassion is not located in any specific step, but undergirds the whole process. It’s the motor that powers all our healing.

What on earth could be left for the last six to provide? Read the rest of this entry »

Emotional Freedom Technique combines acupressure with emotional exploration. The theory behind it, at its most basic, is that by tapping on specific acupressure points around the body we can clear energy blocks in the form of negative beliefs and painful experiences. The beauty of it is that there is no need to understand anything about the meridian system that the points are a part of, or energy work, or traditional Chinese medicine, or somatic psychology, in order for it to work. Nor do we need to trust another person enough to let them touch our bodies or discuss deep emotional traumas with us. We can simply tap lightly on several different points on our own bodies and see how it works.

The basic recipe of EFT is as follows:

The “monkey spot” is located on the ribs a few inches down from the armpit, around where a bra strap would hit. It is so named because you can fling your arm over your head while you tap it and make monkey noises. The “karate chop spot” is on the center of the outside edge of your hand. The collarbone spot is actually about an inch below the collarbone and to the side of the sternum.

Any of these points can be tapped on either the left or the right side of the body, with either the left or the right hand; it doesn’t matter if you switch halfway through because your arm gets tired, or if you pick a different side the second time around.

The first step, before the basic recipe, is to gauge the intensity of the problem. Whether you were using EFT to relieve the pain from a stubbed toe or the intense belief that you did not deserve a good job, you would rate the intensity of your feelings on a scale from zero to ten, where zero meant that it did not bother you at all and ten was as painful as it could get. Then there is the setup: you rub the side of your hand while saying a setup phrase three times, along the lines of “Even though I have this problem, I love and accept myself completely as I am.” For example, “Even though my toe really really hurts and I feel stupid for not looking where I was going and slamming it into the door, I love and accept myself completely as I am.” You don’t have to believe it at all, but practitioners have found that saying it beforehand helps prevent us from subconsciously sabotaging ourselves.

The basic recipe comes next. It’s very simple: it just consists of tapping lightly five to seven times on each of those points with the tips of the index and middle fingers of one hand. It isn’t any more effective to tap harder or longer, and you don’t get extra points for bruising yourself! If you are concerned about doing this in a public place, you can also try the “tap and breathe” technique. This consists of lightly holding your two fingertips on each point for the time it takes to breathe in and out once. Many people actually find this even more effective than tapping, although it takes longer. After completing a round or two of tapping, stop, take a deep breath, and then reassess the intensity on the same 0-10 scale.

The key to EFT is not to stop too soon. Many of us are used to accepting less than we deserve, and may stop after the pain descends from a 7 to a 4 and then decide that it is not such an effective tool after all. Or we may give up after one round if the pain does not immediately shift; or have success with it at first and then “forget” we have this tool in our arsenal and never use it again. Insist on complete freedom for yourself. Try it on everything, and keep doing EFT until you have reached a 1 or a zero. If after two or three tries you find that nothing has shifted, look for different aspects of the situation: it may be that your anger at your boss has not shifted because the real problem is that you are enraged at yourself for repeatedly getting into abusive situations at work. And if you find that the intensity goes up at first, don’t worry. This often happens when we are somehow numbing ourselves to our true feelings. EFT can help us see how bad things really feel on the way to relieving that pain.

There are many variations on these basic rules. The website for the World Center for EFT, emofree.com, has much more information about how people have used these techniques and developed their own variations. Experiment to find out what works best for you.