Relationship between childhood trauma, parental bonding, and defensive styles and psychiatric symptoms in adult life

Abstract

Introduction A relationship between different types of childhood trauma, parental care, and defensive styles and development of psychiatric symptoms in adulthood is proposed in this study. Understanding the nature of this association is essential to assist psychotherapists who treat patients with a history of past trauma. This study aims to examine the associations between childhood trauma, parental bonding, and defensive styles and current symptoms in adult patients who sought care at an analytical psychotherapy clinic. Methods The sample comprised 197 patients from an analytically oriented psychotherapy clinic. Participants responded to four self-report instruments that assessed, respectively, presence and frequency of several types of early trauma, type of parental attachment, styles of defenses, and current symptoms encompassing a wide variety of psychopathological syndromes. Results Only 5% of patients reported not having experienced any traumatic experience in childhood. Several traumas such as emotional and physical abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect showed positive and significant associations with several dimensions of current symptoms, and also with parental bonding and defensive styles. When analyzed together with the other variables, defensive styles explained the level of psychological suffering caused by the symptoms. Conclusions This study offers additional support for understanding the associations between childhood trauma, parental bonding styles, and defense styles and the psychiatric symptoms of patients in analytically oriented psychotherapy.

Defense mechanisms mediate associations between exposure to adverse childhood experiences and anxiety and depression in Kenyan adolescents.

“…To the best of our knowledge, this is the It can be proposed that multiple direct exposure to ACEs in adolescents who predominantly use immature defense mechanisms might intensify their use of primitive defenses, such as projection and denial, to lessen distress and anxiety caused by a threatening environment and unreliable people to restore a sense of emotional control when they experience an overwhelming sense of helplessness and vulnerability (Vaillant, 2011). However, the prevalent use of immature defense mechanisms is ineffective in implicit emotion regulation processes (Rice & Hoffman, 2014), which aggravate both anxiety and depression symptoms severity (Waikamp et al, 2021). Furthermore, the association between direct exposure to ACEs with anxiety symptoms was fully mediated by immature defense mechanisms.…”

“…Although neurotic defense styles were not considered in our hypothesis, they were introduced in our analysis as well. This procedure was adopted because of some evidence of the relationship between neurotic defense mechanisms with anxiety and depression symptoms (Olson et al, 2009; Waikamp et al, 2021) and an absence of studies on the relationship between these variables in Kenyan adolescents. For this reason, although we did not expect neurotic defense mechanisms to be associated with psychological symptoms, the former was introduced into the model.…”

“…It was observed that immature defense styles were associated with anxiety, depression, and general psychological symptoms among people with a history of childhood trauma (Diehl et al, 2014;Nickel & Egle, 2006). In a study with young outpatient adults highly exposed to early traumatic events, Waikamp et al (2021) found that immature defense mechanisms were strongly positively associated with anxiety and depression symptoms, neurotic defense styles were weakly positively associated with depression and anxiety symptoms, and mature defense styles showed a strong negative association with depression symptoms.…”

“…Previous research has mainly focused on the psychological impact of specific forms of adversity but underestimating those children and adolescents often exposed to co-occurring traumatic events (Contractor et al, 2018). Notably, it is well established that children and adolescents present higher vulnerability of being exposed to multiple types of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs; Breslau et al, 2014; Dyregrov & Yule, 2006; Finkelhor et al, 2007; Waikamp et al, 2021). Moreover, previous findings indicate that children and adolescents exposed to one kind of traumatic are more likely to be exposed to other ACEs thereby increasing the risk of developing mental disorders (Contractor et al, 2018).…”

“…It seems that the immature defenses are adopted by individuals who experienced trauma to escape or avoid unwanted or unacceptable feelings associated with the traumatic experience (Fang et al, 2020). Otherwise, the use of mature defense mechanisms affords some protection against depression and anxiety symptoms using problem-solving actions (Grebot et al, 2006; Waikamp et al, 2021). The use of more functional defense mechanisms promotes higher ability to cope with stressful events successfully and consequently lower levels of psychological distress (Goulia et al, 2015).…”