“…In addition to this, maltreated children tend not to address the interpersonal issues in the narrative by digressing and focusing on irrelevant details and avoiding important story themes; they are often constricted in their storytelling, producing incoherent, contradictory, disorganised or chaotic stories (Shields, Ryan and Cicchetti, 2001). Hence, the study findings are in line with previous research and suggest the deleterious effects of maltreatment on young children’s attachment patterns (Chesmore, et al., 2017; Davis, et al., 2014; Toth and Manly, 2018). They confirm the relationship between early experience of relational trauma and lost and insecure attachments (Raby and Dozier, 2019; Stronach, et al., 2013), typically of the disorganised-disoriented type response (Barnett, Vondra and Schonk, 1996).…”