Do abused become abusers?

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Question:

Dear Doctors, i will really like to have an explanation for something that i try to understand since a long time. I have been abused (sexually and emotionally), by my father and my family from youth to adolescence. I told my doctor and my mother, but nobody did anything.

I will skip the details to do not make this question become too long.

I got married, I lost three children because of anatomical malfunctions of the womb.

Now i have a 5 years old kid, Francesco.

I have been the eye-witness during a trial against a pedophile. I went to college and study psychology to try to understand, and to try to cure myself from the multiple behavioral weirdness that characterize me. I am about to finish college and i bless the day that I decided to apply.

My curiosity is this: how is it possible to develop a sensibility and a behavior exactly opposite to the one that was suffered? Basically, why am i so different from my family?

I am doing a psychotherapy since 2 years, and i succeeded in becoming a bit more detached and selfish...but it is still too little to make the idiots that surround me respect me (read: my family).

Studying development psychology, i read that only 15% of the abused subjects does not take the same deviated career, but for the rest there is no hope.

The first time they told me this info, I was 22 years old and I got so scared of being a pedophile, that I was not able to take a bath for my kid.

Thanks to the psychotherapy, now things are better, way better. But i would like to understand why that 15% is sane regardless of the past, the context, and the negative and destructive surrounding emotions.

Thank you.

Answer:

Dear Cynthia, i hope that your doubt, that seems to be a little bit obsessive, will dissolve in time also thanks to the help of psychotherapy. That is the best place to communicate your thoughts, your fantasies, and your doubts.

What I can tell you is that you seem to be a person that succeeded and is succeeding, regardless of the hard experience of the past, in finding your personal path made of victories, bravery, and confidence.

Probably you are naturally equipped with a personality that contributed to make your resolute temperament, and that the abusive experience did not break.

You chose to be a good and responsible person, and you want to give what you did not receive in your life: love, respect, trust. In your life you saw evil, but you chose goodness.

I believe that you should let go of your doubt, and believe that you are the good person that you seem to be.

Best wishes

Answer:

Maddalena Bazzoli, Psychotherapist

Question:

Cynthia, 32 years old

Publication Date: 01/24/2008

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder & Hypnosis

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Question:

Hello, i have a simple and straightforward question: is it possible, through hypnosis, to delete completely and permanently part of one's past from memory?

Thank you for your answer.

Answer:

Dear Jane, i could straightforwardly answer you no. But that would not be the truth, because the truth is way more complicated than that.

I will explain better: when we -as human beings- have to face very stressful situations, our nervous system fixes these times in our memory, and they often become knots of anxiety and distress.

This means that, in some unfortunate cases, we are forced to live always focusing on these chunks of memory; this causes us to suffer, and gives us the feeling that time never passed, and that our future will not exist. Always remember that this experience is only determined by the way our minds work, and it is not reality.

What i just described you is what who suffers from a condition called “Post-traumatic stress disorder” experiences usually. As you can imagine, this kind of disorder is particularly constraining, because the subject perceives time as in a story that never ends and always comes back to the starting point.

What can be done? The answer is clear: it is not possible to delete memories, but it is possible to reallocate those memories within a story that is able to create an evolutionary patch in the subject's experience.

In order to achieve this, hypnosis is a valuable tool, because through the alteration of the state of consciousness of the subject, it is possible to modify the emotional answer to certain memories, so to give back to the subject a feeling of control over his reality.

Dear Jane, I do not know what happened to you, but what i can tell you as a psychotherapist is that what you are living right now is only part of a narrative structure that caged you in a game without end, a tale that loops taking away your ability to make projects for the future.

I will conclude quoting an ancient Greek philosopher, Epictetus, in the hope that will bring you some hope: “Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men.”

Good luck.

Answer:

Paolo Chellini, Psychotherapist

Question:

Jane, 25 years old

Publication Date: 03/19/2008

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Coping with sickness

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Question:

Dear Experts, i am a 31 years old woman, I am the mom of a 5 years old boy, and i had many projects. At least until 15 days ago...They diagnosed me, all of a sudden, a multiple sclerosis.

From that moment, my life stopped.

I cannot perceive myself as the same person, the same mother, the same wife. Even though i try as much as i can to don't leave myself the time to think about it, every night I am in tears. I keep my few smiles for my boy, i do not want him to perceive my pain.

Barely a semester is left before my master in psychology, but I am not sure anymore that i will have the mental strength to finish it. How can i find again the strength to keep going ?

Thank You in advance.

Answer:

Dear Erika, the discovery of such a complex sickness surely brought up very unpleasant emotions: stupor, frustration, fear, anxiety, anger, pain, and negative thoughts about your future. I understand you very well, because i already had been close to persons that have been diagnosed with severe illnesses: sclerosis, cancer, diabetes.

From my experience i had the chance to notice how the mix of medical and psychological cures can lead to the recovery some times, or to the stall (to a non dangerous step) of the sickness.

Your are not the sickness, you have the sickness. Plato used to say: "There is no point in trying to heal the body without healing the soul." In fact, i think that the real healing begin within your consciousness, and one of the easiest way to reach it is through emotions.

So I suggest you to:

1) take all the medical exams to evaluate the step and severity of the sickness;

2) Begin with the pharmacological therapies that the doctor will prescribe you;

3) Work on the emotional blocks related to this experience, in order to reach a full consciousness of yourself, and of the psychological mechanisms that are involved.

This will also help you after the graduations, to better decide which specialization to pursue. I am sure that you will do well, good luck!

Answer:

Ornella Furlani, psychotherapist

Question:

Erika, 31 years old

Publication Date: 05/24/2010

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What is Compulsive Hoarding?

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How many times before to throw away some old object you thought: “Should I keep it? Maybe it will be useful...?” It is never easy to let go of our stuff, but there are people for whom it is almost impossible. They cannot distinguish between what is important and what is not; they are affected by a pathology: Compulsive Hoarding.

What is Compulsive Hoarding? 

Let's see.

Compulsive Hoarding is often defined as “pathological collecting,” and its is the pathological tendency to keep massive amounts of useless objects to the point that parts of the house (if not the whole house) of the affected become uninhabitable. This usually creates many problems in the life of the subjects, one of them being that they are constantly forced to justify themselves in front of family and friends.

Why do compulsive hoarders keep so much “useless junk” around? Researchers have found that the hoarders are excessively involved towards their properties. Every old grocery receipt, or depleted pen is perceived as part of the subject's person and of his past; so these objects that most people would define “junk”, have a great emotional importance for the hoarder. 

Also, it exists a “functional” hoarding: some compulsive hoarder do not throw away the old hairdryer, or the old toaster, because they believe that they might be useful in the future.

The accumulation of stuff is directly related to complications in planning and organizing: those affected by pathological collecting have limited “mental categories”, and problems in cataloging objects.

Some researches in neuroscience show that the brains of the hoarders handles the problem “throw away or not?” in a very different way from “normal” brains. Specifically, the prefrontal cortex reacts very energically when the subjects are asked to throw away old things. This cerebral area is also stimulated when there is a need to take difficult decisions, or to evaluate feelings or rational thoughts. In fact, compulsive hoarders often lack of decision-making skills.

When a subject recognizes as exaggerate his tendency to keep his stuff , he should see a psychotherapist. Sadly though, compulsive hoarding is only discovered after the subject see a therapist, because it is almost never the original reason. This happens because many compulsive hoarders suffer from depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. One of those reasons is usually what make them set their first appointments.

An efficient therapy includes many exercises to learn how to organize one's mind and how to take decisions, so to lead the patients to reconsider their relations with old, broken, or worthless objects.

Source: http://www.crescita-personale.it/

Publication Date: 09/21/2012

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