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Journal Article

Citation

Dutton DG. Aggress. Violent Behav. 1999; 4(4): 431-447.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

I posit that a triad of childhood events found retrospectively in populations of batterers constitutes a powerful trauma source and that many aspects of the personality structure and function of intimately abusive men are best understood from a trauma- response framework. The trauma stressors include witnessing violence directed toward the self or the mother, shaming, and insecure attachment (cf. Dutton; Dutton; Dutton and Dutton). Bowlby (1973) considered insecure attachment itself both a source and consequence of trauma. Since the infant turns to the attachment-object during periods of distress seeking soothing, a failure to obtain soothing maintains high arousal and endocrine secretion. Van der Kolk (1987) considered child abuse an "overwhelming life experience" and reviewed the defenses that children use to deal with parental abuse: hypervigilance, projection, splitting, and denial. Terr (1979) also described driven, compulsive repetitions, and reenactments that permeate dreams, play, fantasies, and object relations of traumatized children. Shaming, conceptualized as verbal or behavioral attacks on the global self, has been found to generate life long shame-proneness or defenses involving rage. A combination of all three early experiences is traumatizing, and evidence exists in adult batterers both for the presence of trauma symptoms and the childhood experiences described above. Conceptualizing the affective, cognitive, and behavioral features of intimate abusiveness from a trauma perspective has many advantages over social learning models. A basis for the internally driven and cyclical aspect of the behavior becomes clearer as does the problems with modulation of arousal, anger, and the high levels of trauma symptoms found in populations of abuse perpetrators. The narrow social learning definition of aggression as a reaction to an appraisal of controllable threat is broadened to include reactions to trauma: uncontrollable-unbluntable-inescapable aversive stimuli.

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