5 Facts About The Behavior Of Mothers Who Survived A Stressful Event

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The problem of PTSD, particularly in mother-daughter relationships, is fairly new. When we talk about this problem in the context of medicine and clinical psychology, we primarily focus not on post-traumatic stress, but on post-traumatic stress disorder. But, as you know, psychologists do not have the authority, firstly, to establish a diagnosis, and secondly, to carry out any kind of treatment that concerns disorders.

What does psychology do? From the point of view of Nadezhda Vladimirovna Tarabrina, who in Russian psychology is the founder of the research area of the psychology of post-traumatic stress, psychologists should study the psychological picture of post-traumatic stress. This is a complex of features, signs that arise in a person under the influence of high-intensity stressors: natural, biogenic, man-made disasters, various accidents, as well as under the influence of stressors related to family relationships, primarily threats to life, physical and sexual violence in the family.

1. Features of post-traumatic stres

What are the characteristics of PTSD? First of all, a person must have a history of a specific stressor that influenced his condition. The intensity of this stressor is such that it caused a person's reactions of horror, fear, helplessness and is associated with the experiences of life and death. The peculiarity of post-traumatic stress is that it has delayed-onset symptoms. A person can acutely experience a certain event, and after some time, three to six months or more after overcoming the acute state, the influence of this stressor can resume in the form of intrusive pictures of this event. Physiological arousal may also increase, social activity may decrease, sleep problems may arise, a person may try to avoid situations that remind him of this stressor.

2. The specifics of the behavior of mothers who have experienced traumatic stress

If we turn to the problem of “mother-daughter”, it turns out that post-traumatic stress can affect not only a person who directly experienced some adverse event or was its indirect victim (transmission of information through television, radio, newspapers can affect person as if he became a real eyewitness to these events), but also to his close and distant environment. Even if there are no warm and trusting ties between mother and daughter, this couple is still two very close people who remain inseparable until some point in their lives.

Research has shown that mothers who have a history of a stressor or a group of stressors that lead to PTSD symptoms have specific behaviors that affect their daughters. I would focus on two features that we identified in daughters in comparison with other couples, that is, mother and daughter, where we did not find signs of post-traumatic stress in the mother: personality traits of the daughter and mother and their social roles (feminine, maternal role and sensation yourself as a person).

3. Personality traits and confusion of social role

It turned out that daughters whose mothers experienced a stressful event copy their mothers in personality traits. That is, if you build personal profiles, then they practically overlap. The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung said that in the case when we observe the coincidence of answers to a particular test, sometimes the illusion may arise that this is a favorable picture, which indicates that people are close. But in fact, this is a deep problem, because they are different personalities, and although they may be similar in some way, they should not be symbiotic. In the same case, it turns out that the daughter is living the life of the mother.

The second phenomenon we discovered is the confusion of social roles. The daughter takes on the role of the mother, while the mother, on the contrary, takes on the role of the daughter. At the same time, the daughter may experience great difficulties in fulfilling the mother's role, since she is not yet ready to take on such responsibility. The mother, despite this, can remain dependent on her daughter, since she needs social support and does not have the resources to cope with life's difficulties.

4. The complex of abandonment

Also, according to a number of our diagnostic methods, my daughter has a complex of abandonment. This means that the mother, who may have had an early traumatic experience, became depressed as a result of these symptoms and was unable to respond to her daughter's needs, thereby becoming a negative conduit for her to the world around her. She broadcast to her daughter that the world is depressing, threatening and traumatic. And, most likely, in such emotional isolation, she did not give her daughter adequate support in difficult situations, which the daughter experienced as abandonment.

In this sense, the identification of the daughter with the mother becomes very clear. The daughter may have an abandonment complex due to emotional emptiness. In addition, the mother-daughter relationship can affect the daughter's relationship with men. She can take on a masculine role due to the fact that her experience with her mother made her an early adult.

5. Research prospects

One of the obvious questions in this area: at what point in her life did the mother experience the influence of the stressor and at what moment did the signs of post-traumatic stress appear: before the birth of her daughter, immediately in the first year of her life, or at the moment when these events occur in the life of an adult mother, already having an adult daughter? This line of research is very promising. It will make it possible to contribute to the very problem of post-traumatic stress and to understand what additional factors influence the appearance of post-traumatic symptoms.

I would also very much like to understand what practical effect this problem has, that is, how we, as practical psychologists, can help mother and daughter in this difficult situation. The fact is that a daughter, who may not have had the influence of high-intensity stressors in her experience, nevertheless has difficulties associated with the influence of the mother, and can transmit these difficulties to future generations. This problem is associated with transgenerational relationships: a once unlived traumatic event is transmitted not only to children, but also to grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on.

Natalia Kharlamenkova

Doctor of Psychology, Head of the Laboratory of Psychology of Post-Traumatic Stress at the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Department of Personality Psychology at GAUGN