What Are the Long-Term Effects of Child Abuse?

Child abuse is a traumatic experience no child should have to go through. Some people are not as equipped naturally or instinctually to care for a child. There are some that come into parenthood with malicious intent to begin with. None the less, a child has no way of controlling the abuse they are experiencing until they reach an age where they can protect themselves. While the longer the abuse continues the more damaging effects it can have, all trauma has negative effects both physically, mentally, and emotionally. We are going to the analyze what the long-term effects of child abuse are and how therapy can help.

Physical Consequences

These consequences will always vary depending on the abuse the child endured, but any type of trauma will have effects on the brain. When a child is abused or mistreated it can affect the neurological processes of the brain. The child can have a hard time regulating their emotions because they have had to experience dramatic mood swings from their abusers that they do not learn to regulate themselves.

They will have problems learning due to their inability to process new information. They learn to cope with their abuse by building certain processes within their brains to make sense of it. These processes keep new information from entering the brain. This inability can also affect their memory. A defense mechanism of a child who suffers from long-term abuse is to shut down their ability to retain their abuse to memory, but this can also make any addition to memory difficult. There are not only physical consequences but also behavioral and generational consequences as well.

Behavioral Consequences

Children who suffered long-term child abuse tend to act out and are prone to substance abuse. The tendency to act out is due to the effects the abuse caused to their brain and their inability to properly process information. This can lead them to irrational reactions and nontraditional solutions to problems. Traumatic experiences imbed themselves into your body and brain with triggers that when touched can cause the child to emit a reaction to one they felt at the time of the trauma. This can cause them to finally act against the person that touched a trigger of their abuse. While this allows them to feel in control, they can get themselves into more serious trouble by redirecting their abuse onto others.

Generational Abuse

Here is where we discuss the parents’ intent raising a child. A child who lived through the long term effects of child abuse can have a hard time not passing on the same behavior as what they endured. This is usually nothing premeditated as they enter parenthood but much out of habit. Just like you often parent the way you were raised, a parent who suffered childhood trauma will fall into the same path. The longer the abused is passed down the line put those children at greater risk for certain cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and mental health problems.

What A Therapist Can Do

If you or someone you know has suffered from long-term child abuse, there is hope when you get help. Therapy allows us to help identify the consequences you may already be suffering. Once we have analyzed the consequences, we can see what kind of triggers have developed to protect yourself from feeling the pain of that same abuse again. These triggers can be dangerous to others if triggered. We work to help the child understand how these triggers have developed and work through what they have experienced. This can be a hard experience as we ask them to relive their trauma, but this is to process the experience more successfully in a way that can bring about more positivity and purpose into their life.