In most trauma scales, divorce is considered to be the second most traumatic life event, second only to the death of a child.
And yet, we pretend as if divorce is just run-of-the-mill, pedestrian occurrence, an impediment for sure, a bump in the road, but nothing much more than that.
We ignore the potential mental health effects on everyone involved, the adults as well as the children.
Some of these effects involve betrayal trauma, dissociation, somatization and much more besides.
A few weeks ago, in a presentation in Toronto University, Goldberg and Associates have referred to my work on the topic and analyzed it in depth and at length.
And today I would like to add to it.
But first let me introduce Goldberg and Associates.
Joe Goldberg with Goldberg and Associates has been in touch with me. And it is a legal consulting firm that provides mental health consulting and litigation support services to clients engaged in high conflict separations and divorce. They have several websites and you can find the links in the description.
As to who I am, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse. I'm also a professor of psychology in several universities, in several countries.
Before we start, I would like to refer you to three playlists on my YouTube channel. Altogether, they contain more than 300 videos. One playlist is titled Trauma and Dissociation, the other one is From Child to Narcissist, and finally the IPAM Personality Theory, the Intracek Activation Model, Personality Theory.
One video that I would like to single out and recommend to watch in conjunction with this video is a video titled Betrayal Trauma Dissociation Roots of Cluster B, Personality Disorders.
So these two videos go together, the current video that you're watching and the video that I've just mentioned.
I'm not going to repeat myself in this video, and so I'm not going to deal in depth with betrayal, trauma, and dissociation. This is what the first video is for.
Today I'm going to add additional dimensions to this perception or to this phenomenon.
I'm going to discuss ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, and I'm going to discuss object relations, object relations theories. Theories that were very dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, especially later in the United Kingdom, and that are experiencing a renaissance, a revival, a rebirth nowadays.
Okay. First of all, the pretension that divorce is out of the blue, a thunder strike which has not been expected, is sudden and abrupt. This is all untrue, it's fallacious.
Divorce is an adverse childhood experience and it always, always, no exception, co-occurs and is the culmination of other adverse childhood experiences.
Divorce goes hand in hand sometimes with domestic violence. Divorce sometimes is the outcome of abuse and mistreatment which is not necessarily physical. Divorce is the reification and the epitome and the culmination of a relationship between the parents that is fast deteriorating.
Divorce, therefore, is a devolution, not an evolution. Divorce is one of a cluster of adverse childhood experiences that children in the family experience.
High conflict divorce especially is traumatic because it generates cognitive dissonance that cannot be resolved except via infantile and dissociative defenses which are detrimental to long-term development.
Let me unpack this paragraph.
High conflict divorce is a divorce where there is acrimony, where there is overt, aggressive, often disagreement, there's externalized aggression.
And it is particularly traumatic because it generates in the child cognitive dissonance.
The child loves the parents, the child hates the divorce.
So this cognitive dissonance cannot be resolved because the child is attached to the parents, loves them, is bonded with them, and above all is dependent on them for its survival and existence.
So there's no way to resolve the cognitive dissonance, for example, by discarding the parents or by devaluing the parents.
The only way to somehow manage in this toxic environment is to regress to infancy and to resort to what we call infantile psychological defense mechanisms, among which is dissociation, dissociative defenses.
In less fancy language, the child simply dissociates the situation, forgets about it, develops amnesia, or depersonalization, or derealization. The child pretends the whole situation is not real. Depersonalization, the child says it's real but I'm not there, it has no effect on me. And amnesia is simply the repression or bearing of memories which are unacceptable, unpalatable, challenging and painful.
All these defenses are detrimental to long-term development of the personality, individuation and then maturation into adulthood. We'll come to it a bit later.
As I said, I would like to bring two additional perspectives to this debate or this conversation.
One is borrowed from object relations theories and one is borrowed from the framework of adverse childhood experiences, which is the largest study ever conducted on situations or circumstances in childhood which are conducive to trauma among other reactions.
I would like to remind everyone that there are two periods of separation individuation in human life.
The first one is between the ages of 18 and 36 months.
But the second one is in adolescence.
Separation simply means the ability to let go of the parental figure as a protective shield, as a secure base, and then grandiosely explore the world.
This is separation.
Individuation, owing to the friction with reality, to the exposure to peers, to information, to stimuli, this interaction with the world out there leads to individuation, the emergence of an individual, divided from the parental figures, personality.
So adolescence is a period of separation individuation, but whereas classic separation individualization, healthy separation individuation is self-initiated, divorce imposes separation on the child.
Let me explain.
The child separates from the parental figure, from the mother between the ages of 18 to 36 months, and from both parents in adolescence.
But the separation is initiated by the child.
It is perceived as autonomous, as agentic, as a whole mark of independence, as a positive experience. It's rarely egodystonic, it's often egosyntonic.
The child feels good about separating from the parents. The child feels that it is now strong enough, resilient enough, mature enough, knowledgeable enough.
Most of these perceptions are of course fallacious and grandiose, but they are necessary in order to drive the individual forward into a full-fledged adult life.
So this is classic healthy separation.
What divorce does, it forces separation on the child, often long before the child is prepared for it.
This coercive or coerced separation hampers, obstructs the formation, constellation and integration of a fully functional self and individuation. It causes severe mental damage.
And there are various, several reasons for that.
Number one, the divorce is often perceived by the child as a form of rejection or betrayal or attachment injury.
Divorce is a betrayal of trust in time of need, vulnerability and dependency.
The child trusted the parents to serve as secure bases, as rocks, as shoulders to cry on, and as a permanent presence to refer to and resort to in times of need and emergency.
And now they're gone. Now they're gone as if the child has meant nothing to them or means nothing to them.
And it is a betrayal of trust.
What Bulman called the Assumptive world, collapses.
Bulman said that children develop the misconception, one could say, the naive and gullible misconception, that the world is benevolent, meaningful and worthwhile.
This belief allows them to venture forth, explore the world, interact with it, and emerge and become an individual with a personality.
A divorce shatters, ruins the assumptive world. The world no longer looks benevolent or meaningful or worthwhile.
Divorce also induces guilt, especially in young children.
Young children tend to have autoplastic defenses. In other words, young children attribute to themselves the power to cause changes in their environment and assume responsibility for such transformations. It's a form of magical thinking.
The child says, my parents are divorcing because of me. My existence or my actions are causing this rift between my parents. They are parting ways because they can no longer tolerate me.
And this is autoplastic defense coupled with magical thinking.
Of course, it's the child's way or disguised or camouflaged way of reasserting control over a situation that is fast spinning out of control.
The child reasserts control over the situation, even at the cost of egodystony, even at the cost of extreme guilt and discomfort and shame the child says everything that's happening this divorce is my fault I'm responsible for it I feel guilty I feel ashamed I feel bad about it I feel bad about it, I feel horrible about myself, but I am making it happen. It's all my doing. I am in control.
So the price for regaining an internal locus of control is extreme guilt and shame.
And this leads to betrayal trauma and betrayal blindness. I'll come to it in a minute.
Long before Freyd, who came up with the idea of betrayal, trauma, and blindness, long before that, Fairbairn, who was a major figure in the British School of Object Relations, Fairbairn suggested there is something called moral defense.
He said that the child assumes an internalized bad object. In other words, the child says everything bad that's happening like a divorce is my fault because I'm a bad unworthy object. I'm a bad unworthy person. It's all happening because of me. I have a corrupting, contaminating influence. Everything around me rots because I'm rotten.
This is a moral defense, internalization of a bad object.
Long before Fairburn, Strachey called it a primitive superego and Melanie Klein called it a bad object introjection.
Be that as it may, the child faced with a high conflict divorce is forced into the creation of a narrative. This narrative is a self-soothing narrative.
And in this narrative, the child assumes full control and responsibility of the high conflict divorce.
The child is unable to admit that his parents are traumatizing it because this would amount to extreme betrayal and would necessitate breaking up with the parents, which a child is incapable of doing.
Betrayal trauma theory is a conceptual model for explaining why some children are unable to access memories of prior abuse, sexual, physical or otherwise.
According to this theory, says the dictionary of the American Psychological Association, this sort of repression of memories, deliberate forgetting, occurs when the perpetrator of the abuse is an adult on whom the child is emotionally dependent, and it develops out of the child's need to preserve the attachment bond.
Hence, the child is unable to access the stored memories of the abuse, while the need for the attachment is still strong.
This was first proposed by Jennifer Freyd in 1991, and then she teamed up with Briere, and they came up with the concept of betrayal blindness.
It's a major factor in the reaction of the child to high-conflict divorce and what this reaction does to the psychological structures, constructs, and processes, psychodynamics within the child and I've dealt with all this in depth in the video in the first video that I'd mentioned the beginning of this video.
High conflict divorce therefore leads to infantile regression. The child baby-babies, becomes clinging and needy.
There's a codependency that emerges, a kind of symbiotic merger, fusion or enmeshment.
There is abandonment anxiety, clinically known as separation insecurity, where the child reacts with utter panic to the prospect of losing the parent or theparent's presence.
That's one solution.
Some children react exactly the opposite, they become defiant. There is dissociative avoidance.
These children tend to develop insecure attachment in the future as adults.
And both solutions, the clinging needy codependent solution versus the pseudo-psychopathic defiant dissociative stance, both of them hamper individuation and cause developmental delay.
This is what object relations has to say about high conflict divorce.
Now let's talk, let's discuss adverse childhood experiences.
As I said, divorce is an adverse childhood experience, high on the trauma scale.
But it always co-occurs and is the culmination of other adverse childhood experiences.
And so this causes two types of impact.
Developmental stress and traumatic stress.
The adverse childhood experiences scale is divided into categories.
And the third category involves what is called household dysfunction.
Household dysfunction in terms of adverse childhood experiences includes parental separation, divorce, and it creates a substantive impact on the well-being and functioning of members of the household.
So adverse childhood experiences are sources of both developmental stress and traumatic stress.
Developmental and traumatic stress increase vulnerability to emotional dysregulation and to impairments in cognitive functioning.
And when you put together the emotional dysregulation and the deterioration, the decline in cognitive functioning to the point of cognitive distortion, what you have is distress-related dissociation.
I'll explain in a minute why distress- related dissociation has to be distinguished from trauma- related symptomatology.
Let's discuss in a minute.
So let's first start with the question.
Why does developmental and traumatic stress induce dissociation or distress- related dissociation?
Well, take the two elements.
Emotional dysregulation.
The child confronted with high conflict divorce is subject to extreme stresses, which give rise to anxiety and to cognitive impairment.
There's also an impairment of reality testing. Ego functions, what Freud used to call ego functions.
But okay, we leave that aside.
So there is severe impairment in the ability to gauge reality appropriately, to process it, to cope with it, and to interact with it in ways which are self-efficacious.
At the same time, emotions become unbridled and overwhelming and out of control.
If you put the two together, the inability to engage in cognitive activity, which is relatively functional, and the inability to regulate emotions, emotions go hand in hand with memory.
Memory cannot be retrieved efficaciously when there is emotional disturbance.
When you try to recall something, when you try to remember something, you dredge it up from your long-term memory together with the emotions that are attached to the memory.
In the absence of such emotions, you would find it very difficult to have memory retrieval or recall.
Memories are crucial, emotions are crucial for memory management.
So when emotions are all dysregulated and disturbed and there is no ability to compensate for this with cognitions, because the cognition is impaired, the cognition is distorted.
What you end up having is an inability to form long-term memories, what is known as distress-related dissociation.
And distress-related dissociation or dissociative defenses have three manifestations.
One is the classic, well-known amnesia, forgetting the memories, burying them, repressing them.
Presumably they're there and subject to retrieval, for example, in hypnotherapy, but that is highly debatable. Highly debatable.
It's much more likely, in my opinion, that these memories, long-term memories, are not formed at all. There is some hippocampal dysfunction.
So this is amnesia.
Then you have depersonalization.
When the person registers the environment and reality, the high conflict divorce, for example, but absents itself from the scene, the person says this is happening, but this is not happening to me. I am not there. I'm gone. Maybe my body is there, but I am not there. I'm gone. Maybe my body is there, but I am not there.
So this is known as depersonalization. It happens a lot in highly traumatic experiences, which usually yield post-traumatic stress disorder.
And the final manifestation of distress- related dissociation is derealization. Derealization is the defense that causes one to perceive reality as unreal, as if it was some kind of movie.
The person who depersonalizes says, I'm here, but whatever is surrounding me, the environment, this high conflict divorce, whatever, the fights between my parents, the physical violence, verbal abuse, whatever, all this is not happening. It's unreal. It's a dream. It's a fantasy. The feeling is a dreamlike surrealistic experience.
We should distinguish stress-related dissociation from trauma-related symptomatology.
Trauma-related symptomatology is actually mostly bodily. The famous book, The Body Keeps the Score.
So hyperarousal, somatization, conversion symptoms, but also some behaviors, for example, avoidance behaviors, and also some cognitions, negative cognitions. All these are not part of the dissociation.
They are reactions to trauma. The trauma provokes these symptoms in the individual, but they don't necessarily go hand in hand with dissociation.
High conflict divorce would be so traumatic that it inevitably would yield both distress related dissociation and the symptomatology of trauma.
We should also distinguish peritraumatic dissociation, premorbid personality and premobidity with the actual traumatic dissociation.
So peritraumatic dissociation is the immediate emotional and physiological distress experienced during a traumatic event.
You're in a car accident, you're being raped, you're being assaulted, you've witnessed a plane crash or whatever, and your immediate reaction, both emotional and physiological, they go hand in hand, is that of extreme distress, helplessness, and a kind of morbidity, morbid mindset, darkness, a penumbral experience.
And this is known as peritraumatic. You would usually dissociate this experience. You would usually pretend it had never happened.
And I'm saying pretend because dissociation is actually voluntary in many cases. We used to believe that dissociation is totally automatic mechanism, that we have no control over it, that it is built in or baked in to the wetware or the mental construct.
But today we realize that there is some element or voluntary element. There is some decision-making process taking place.
And in peritraumatic dissociation, this is very pronounced because you witness the event or the series of events in complex trauma, in CPTSD, and then you kind of decide to not pay attention to it.
There is a kind of attentional refocusing away from the traumatic experience or experiences, which makes it impossible for you to memorize them.
At the same time, the experience induces in the witness, the child, for example, the experience induces emotional dysregulation, which makes it even more difficult to remember the events in the long term.
End result, peritraumatic dissociation often leads to stress-related dissociation, which is long term. And it is related to the exposure to abuse or abusive adverse childhood experiences, but also to certain types of personality.
It is not true to say that all children, all adolescents, who are members of a family where a high conflict divorce is taking place, are likely to react identically.
It crucially depends on the psychological makeup of the individual, the child or the adolescent, and most importantly on the premorbidity of the personality.
Premorbid personality or general primobidity increases the risk of trauma-related disorders and co-occurring dissociative symptomatology.
I refer you to work by Marshall and Schell, 2002, Mechanic and others, 2017, and so on.
Studies support the idea that peritraumatic dissociation is a risk factor. And it's a risk factor lifelong.
An exposure to a single event, let alone multiple exposures to repeated events, as is the case in high conflict divorce, lead to either PTSD or C-PTSD.
Classic post-traumatic stress disorder or complex trauma, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, first described by Judith Herman.
And so it's a risk factor.
Once you have acquired the trauma, once you have reacted dissociatively to it, then it becomes a risk factor.
You're far more likely to develop a negative self-concept. Negative expectancies related to threat.
In other words, they're likely to become more hypervigilant and maybe even paranoid to some extent, paranoid ideation, and you're very likely to develop negative emotional states in the future and I refer you to work by McDonald and others 2013, Thompson and Hollands John and Sloan 2017, and Vasquez and others 2012.
What about chronic exposure to traumatic and overwhelming stressors during childhood? Such as the stressors involved in high conflict divorce?
Because high conflict divorce usually takes quite a while, it's not a single day event, it takes months or years, very often years, and then some of it become chronic.
High conflict divorce when one of the members of the dyad or the couple is narcissistic or psychopathic or obsessive-compulsive or paranoid, the high-conflict divorce could last forever, literally, unfolding in the courts and outside the court.
So there is a chronic exposure by the child and the adolescent to traumatic and overwhelming stressors.
And it's been proven that this kind of exposure creates a greater risk of developing severe forms of post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative disorders in adulthood.
I refer you to the work by Dysuf in 2005, Dye2018, Frewen and others, 2019, Kalmakis in 2020 and so.
And so there's still research going on about the association between increasing exposure to adverse childhood experiences and the occurrence of trauma-related disorders and dissociative symptomatology.
This is a field that is very much in the headlines in the psychological community and their scholars like Frewan and Zhu and Linus and so on so forth.
I refer it to an article jointly written by them in 2019 and they're deeply into this question the connectivity or the relationship between adverse childhood experiences dissociation and trauma is clear I don't think there's any debate about it the mechanisms however the translational mechanisms the conversion mechanisms are not completely clear.
And I would like to read to you a section from the book Dissociation and Dissociative Disorders: Past, Present, and Future published by Routledge in 2003. It's the second edition.
There are two important considerations for conceptualizing adverse childhood experiences and dissociative disorders, the pathway from exposure to ACEs and pathological forms of dissociation.
Number one, how traumatic and developmental stress from exposure to ACEs disrupt and impede developmental capacities that give rise to trauma-related and dissociative symptomology and disorders?
And the second consideration, what factors support a pathway between ACEs related distress, disruptions in beneficial development, and experiential disconnection from distress-related dissociation, as well as pathological forms of dissociation during development?
These three factors strongly associated with the negative impacts from adverse childhood experiences, attachment dynamics, experiences of threat and deprivation, performance and skills deficits.
Whereas, in my personal opinion, divorce is always preferable to a dysfunctional relationship between the parents, always preferable to domestic violence, always preferable to ongoing verbal and psychological and emotional abuse, always definitely preferable to coercive control.
Divorce is much preferable to a dysfunctional household, generally speaking.
Perhaps the only exception is high conflict divorce, which perpetuates all the adverse and negative dynamics of the relationship and carries it forward into the new territory of the divorce, victimizing the children or adolescents in the household, first and foremost, stunting their growth, retarding them or regressing them into infancy, and making it impossible for them to individuate and develop adulthood, adult skills, adult cognitions, the ability to regulate emotions, stabilize moods, and so on.
In other words, it would be safe to say that high conflict divorce induces in some children.
I would say the majority of children.
Dynamics which are indistinguishable clinically from a borderline personality organization and may lead to the emergence of dysfunctional pathological defenses both dissociative and narcissistic.
This is not an outcome any parent should wish for before you engage in a high-conflict divorce you may ask yourself who is going to pay the price and for how long.