Maternal and Child Sexual Abuse History: An Intergenerational Exploration of Children’s Adjustment and Maternal Trauma-Reflective Functioning

Abstract

Objective: The aim of the current study was to investigate associations, unique and interactive, between mothers’ and children’s histories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and children’s psychiatric outcomes using an intergenerational perspective. Further, we were particularly interested in examining whether maternal reflective functioning about their own trauma (T-RF) was associated with a lower likelihood of children’s abuse exposure (among children of CSA-exposed mothers). Methods: One hundred and eleven children ( M age = 9.53 years; 43 sexual abuse victims) and their mothers ( M age = 37.99; 63 sexual abuse victims) participated in this study. Mothers completed the Parent Development Interview (PDI), which yielded assessments of RF regarding their own experiences of abuse, and also reported on their children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Results: Children of CSA-exposed mothers were more likely to have experienced CSA. A key result was that among CSA-exposed mothers, higher maternal T-RF regarding their own abuse was associated with lower likelihood of child CSA-exposure. Mothers’ and children’s CSA histories predicted children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms, such that CSA exposure for mother or child was associated with greater symptomatology in children. Conclusion: The findings show that the presence of either maternal or child CSA is associated with more child psychological difficulties. Importantly in terms of identifying potential protective factors, maternal T-RF is associated with lower likelihood of CSA exposure in children of CSA-exposed mothers. We discuss these findings in the context of the need for treatments focusing on increasing T-RF in mothers and children in the context of abuse to facilitate adaptation and reduce the intergenerational risk.

The Mentalizing Approach to Psychopathology: State of the Art and Future Directions

“…Studies on mentalizing and adversity have provided some of the strongest evidence for the potential role of caregivers' mentalizing capacities in child development. Early adversity and complex trauma (i.e., early negative life experiences involving neglect and/or abuse, typically within an attachment/caregiving context) in particular have been shown to have the potential to severely impair mentalizing, expressed in strongly biased mentalizing, hypersensitivity to the mental states of others, a defensive inhibition of mentalizing, or a combination of these features (for reviews, see Borelli et al 2019, Luyten & Fonagy 2019.…”

Conceptual Analysis: A Social Neuroscience Approach to Interpersonal Interaction in the Context of Disruption and Disorganization of Attachment (NAMDA)

“…2 An apparent exception to the elevated rates in clinical samples is adult depression, i.e., neither infant disorganization is elevated among depressed mothers nor these elevated rates of disorganization in samples exposed to adversity, the mapping of adversity with disorganization is far from perfect, suggesting that disorganization may account for meaningful variance over and above adversity. Thus, for example, in women with a history of childhood abuse, attachment disorganization gave rise to a 7½-fold increase in the odds of being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (48), stressing its putative role in the aftermath of adversity, where disorganization is thought to act akin to an intermediary factor, signaling how adaptively trauma has been processed (4,49,50).…”

Convergent Validity of Three Measures of Reflective Function: Parent Development Interview, Parental Reflective Function Questionnaire, and Reflective Function Questionnaire

“…Impairments in RF have been associated with poor mental health such as depression ( Lemma et al, 2011 ; Luyten et al, 2012a ; Ekeblad et al, 2016 ) and borderline personality disorder ( Fonagy and Bateman, 2007 , 2008 ; Fischer-Kern et al, 2015 ). Reduced parental RF has also been associated with poor child development ( Ensink et al, 2017 ; Borelli et al, 2019 ; Morosan et al, 2020 ).…”