Effects of violence on intimate relationships

Effects of violence on intimate relationships

Jill Savege Scharff^*

Where does violence come from?

Violence is behavior designed to cause bodily harm or interfere with human freedom in various degrees along a continuum from the accepted to the intolerable.  Societies may sanction violence as a means of securing compliance, building character, and ensuring national security.  This is known as legitimate violence of moral purpose.  By creating a state of obedience to accepting further violent attack, and a willingness to accept orders to attack others, violence moves to the immoral: It leads to physical and sexual abuse, gang fights, rape, manslaughter, homicide, suicide, genocide, and war. Yet, we cannot see this as the result of innate species specific aggression and the expression of the death instinct. In our view violence results individually and nationally from trauma that is experienced when attachment fails, dependency cannot be trusted, and the only defense is narcissistic rage.

At the societal level

Western society accepts the value of legitimate violence — war, physical punishment to improve behavior, and sometimes capital punishment (Zulueta 1993).  These forms of violence, glamorized in film, television, and videogames, are woven into the fabric of the culture (Strauss 1991). The legacy of violence in our culture is buried in our psyches in the area of mind that Hopper (1996) calls the social unconscious, which has a profound ongoing effect on the development of individuals, couples, and families.   Responding to the shared social unconscious, nations develop identities and behave towards one another violently for the same reasons as individuals: Violence is a defensive attempt to maintain cohesion, identity, and self esteem.  For instance, Nazism, a highly narcissistic promotion of the perfect race from which all inferiors were to be eliminated, can be seen as a defense against the trauma of the humiliations of defeat following World War 1.  Trauma breeding trauma, this narcissistic reaction against defeat brought on the holocaust, defeat in World War 2, and further humiliation.

At the individual level

Violence stems from trauma. The process begins with the child’s introjection of intolerably bad internal objects that lie unmetabolized in the parent’s mind after trauma (J. Scharff and D. Scharff 1994, 2005).  The child takes these toxic objects inside the self to relieve the parent and protect the myth of the parent as good, but this goal is achieved at the expense of the self which now feels bad (Fairbairn 1952).  To protect the self from this bad feeling, the toxic objects have to be expelled  in random acts of violence against things or projected into persons and groups which are then viewed as bad, and therefore shunned or attacked (Aviram 2005).  At the personal level, this dynamic is lastingly destructive between partners in intimate relationship and in families.

 

How does violence interfere with development?

Normal development depends on a secure infant-parent relationship within which the parent attunes to the needs of the child, soothes distress, and encourages exploration (Winnicott 1960). Within this web of safety the infant goes on being and doing (Winnicott 1956). That calls for a healthy parent.  When the infant must attach to a parent who has been traumatized by violence in childhood, the infant develops an insecure attachment because that parent has not known, or cannot offer, security.  For the parent traumatized in the family of origin, previous experiences of security have been followed by violence so often that it appears as if security actually leads to violence, and should therefore be avoided. Trauma jolts the mind, which then defends itself unconsciously by dissociating from affectively charged traumatic material, sealing it in encapsulated nuclei, and leaving corresponding gaps in the psyche (Hopper 1991).  Where there should be fluid communication among parts of the parent’s mind –affect system, arousal system, memory banks, and executive function – there are instead knots and holes.  Where the mind of the parent cannot hold the mind of the child securely for growth from dependence to independence, the infant’s choices are to grab on to the knots or fall into holes.  Even when there is no repetition of actual trauma, the infant is likely to develop an attachment style of the fearful and disorganized variety (Fonagy 2001).

How does violence affect the couple?

This valuing of violence stems from the pioneer mentality when the strongest and most courageous laid claim to land, and from the hunting societies where the food base was mainly meat hunted by men. The men felt entitled to take whatever piece of territory they claimed, whichever animals they could shoot.  The sanctioning of violence privileges the male as the stronger gender and leaves the female at risk. Men are given permission to expect gratification of individual needs and to use their dominant status to seek such gratification (Kaplan 1988). Not surprisingly there is a demonstrable link between the incidence of legitimate violence and of rape (Baron, Strauss and Jaffee 1988).

Violence in the previous generation affects the couple when their internal worlds collide.  When a couple falls in love their personalities mesh at conscious and unconscious levels.  It is the fit at the unconscious level that determines the long term quality of the marriage (Dicks 1967). The partners think that they choose each other on the basis of conscious features such as attraction, respect and shared life goals, but they are really drawn by the appeal of valencies for interaction between their mutually gratifying internal object relationships: The exciting object finds a rejecting object to fuel the feeling of unsatisfying longing; two rejecting objects keep all threat of intimacy at bay; two exciting objects partner to substitute longing and neediness for mature love.

Two young African-American partners, Latoya and Darrell, loved each other, shared values, and planned a life together.  They both had good jobs, worked hard, and enjoyed evenings together.  Latoya saw Darrell as a reliable, loving, respectful, self-directed person, totally unlike her physically abusive alcoholic father, mother, and younger brother.  On the contrary, Darrell was like her admirable older brother who was her guide and model.  Darrell appreciated Latoya because she was faithful, successful, dressed well, and took good care of herself and of him, unlike his drug-dependent mother and his abandoning father who drank and paid no child support.  Having been the breadwinner from an early age to provide for his mother and siblings, Darrell was glad to have a partner who could contribute to their shared income.  They had every chance of a more secure life than they had as children in the ghetto but they hit trouble when Darrell became controlling of Latoya’s spending excessively on clothes instead of food.  Latoya felt that Darrell was unreasonably stingy — for instance, denying her money for soda when she had not enough left for groceries after overspending on the perfect outfit.  He felt it was important to have limits and priorities to protect their financial stability.  Being denied a small request, she felt that he did not love her.  Then she lost interest in sex.  Being denied sex, he felt that she no longer loved him.

Latoya looked to Darrell as a secure attachment figure, much as she had looked to her older brother who always came through for her.  The more she needed Darrell, the less he became a sexual object of desire. She could not accept that Darrell was not as ideal as her brother, and he had sexual needs, which made her worry about being sexually exploited as she had been in previous relationships.  It took a while for her to reveal that this valued older brother who was never in trouble had been killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting.  She had been so traumatized by his death, and by her younger brother’s drugrelated death subsequent to losing the parental influence of his older brother, that she had not fully acknowledged her losses, and instead was reliving them in terms of feeling upset and abandoned when Darrell denied her treats, and losing faith in him being there for her.  She had lost her brothers, and she relived those losses by risking losing Darrell.  In premarital therapy, the couple traced their problem to their shared reaction to their separate histories of family violence, and to living in a culture of inner-city violence.  Grieving their losses and deprivations together they were able to find emotional intimacy and her sexual desire returned.

At the family level

Violence against a child creates a cascade of trauma.  Some children may identify with the aggressor and as adult become perpetrators so that trauma is now in their control; others become extremely protective to avoid doing harm to others.  Either way trauma exerts an influence on the dynamics of the couple and the family (Scharff and Scharff 1994).

Maria, a bright, artistic girl was her father’s favorite child, but her mother was jealous of the affection he showed to her.  Her mother favored their second daughter who was a practical child.  Maria felt that her mother did not like her, and indeed the mother frequently sent her off to stay at her parents’ house nearby.  Her mother’s father frequently entered the room where she slept, closed the door, and molested her, eventually including penetration.  She didn’t dare tell her mother in case she got in more trouble.  It wasn’t until her sister was abused and told their mother promptly, that her mother moved the family away from her parents, and the abuse stopped.  But the effects did not stop.

Maria’s abuse occurred in from 6 to 8 years of age, when she should have been learning to read.  Her cognitive skills were impaired by all she suppressed, and she remained functionally illiterate.  Her affect regulation was also compromised, leaving her prone to crying spells and feelings of lack of worth.  As an adult, her self esteem was so poor that she could not sell her art work.  She found Manuel, a man she could depend on, who to her surprise and relief wanted to marry her despite her shame about who she was and what had happened.  For his own reasons he was glad to support her and protect her from the demands of the world — in return for which she took care of his dependent needs so that he could continue to appear self sufficient and earn her admiration and gratitude.

Maria was able to be sexual with Manuel, provided the door was not closed as it had been by her grandfather.  When the children arrived, they had sex less often because Maria wanted the door kept open so that she could listen for her girls to be sure they were not being abused. Consciously Maria did not suspect her husband as an abuser but unconsciously she was driven to forbid him to bathe or undress the girls.  She did suspect other fathers, and so she did not allow the girls to have play dates outside the family.  Both parents worried about their girls’ safety in the outside world, and so evoked a fear of social life and sexual knowledge in them.

The marriage worked well until Manuel upon whom Maria relied so heavily became chronically ill, perhaps because of the self-imposed strain of guarding his wife and children. Maria became depressed and one of their teenaged daughters became school phobic. The emotional upset caused by this shift in the balance of power drove the family into therapy.  Family therapy gave Manuel a new perspective on his over functioning and enabled him to find other defenses; it provided Maria a chance to reveal her history, review its impact on her husband and her girls, and liberate the girls to become more confident women.

 

How is violence transmitted from one generation to another?

A concluding brief example will serve as illustration and summary of the ideas in this paper. Herman, a bright teenaged boy with excellent grades suddenly showed poor school performance due to drug abuse and inhibited learning.  Previously a source of pride, he suddenly became an object of worry to his parents whose self esteem as parents floundered in his wake. His parents were a European immigrant couple intent on the American dream, and their ambitious, gratifying child, Herman fitted right into it. What happened?  Why had Herman suddenly lost his footing and become so self-destructive?

It was a mystery until his mother and father revealed their family histories.  Herman’s father’s emigration had been a flight from a violent revolution that had damaged his family and friends in his country of origin, which left him with a disturbing image of trauma and survivor guilt for escaping.  Herman’s mother then revealed that she did not know for sure who her father was, but that an uncle who gave money to her mother was probably actually her father who was hiding the fact that he was the brother of a Nazi who had been executed because he had been commandant of a concentration camp, a subject never discussed in her family. She was ashamed to think that it was likely that the money he gave her mother was perhaps laundered Nazi money. Herman’s parents had been drawn together not only by their conscious appreciation of their shared history as emigrants and their aims of settling in the land of opportunity, but also by their unconscious resonance with the shame and guilt of violence. As a latency age boy, Herman identified with their conscious aims: as an adolescent he identified with what they suppressed, with the need to blot out memory and knowledge.  In a combination of couple therapy, individual therapy for Herman, and family therapy, the couple and their child learned that these traumatic origins were pooled in the tensions of the marriage and then in their son’s symptoms, continuing the effects of the internalization of violence in the current generation.

Conclusion

Physical abuse, sexual abuse, war trauma, and cultures of violence interfere with establishing enduring intimacy, healthy sexual relationships in couples, parenting, and family life. Early violence and resulting trauma profoundly affect development at every level, from the maturation and differentiation of the brain to the establishment of affect regulation, acquisition of cognitive skills, ability to form intimate connections and sexual relationships, and capacity for effective parenting.  Parents who have experienced trauma and vow not to repeat it nevertheless tend to create an unconscious psychic culture of trauma despite their best efforts.  The vignettes illustrate the point that the experience either of receiving direct, actual violence or of living in a family or social culture of unconscious violence tend to be carried in psychically unsymbolized ways that limit full emotional development and result in many areas of symptomatology. Psychoanalytic couple or family therapy reveals these histories in shared narrative form and provides a path to healing and halting transmission of their impact to the next generation.

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^* MD, Codirector, International Psychotherapy Institute, Chevy Chase, MD, USA.