Overcoming Adversity and Building Resiliency: Supporting Mothers

To effectively intervene and treat adult survivors of child abuse, professionals must be aware of the long-term symptoms in child abuse survivors that may affect parenting abilities. To ensure treatment interventions are successful and to alleviate the long-term consequences for this vulnerable group, it is critical to understand the continued effects of childhood trauma on the next generation and to promote resilient capacities among mothers abused as children.

Supportive Hands

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Interventions designed to accommodate the psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual development of this group of mothers can decrease the risks associated with intergenerational abuse. Integrative and comprehensive services can seek to ameliorate the effects of abuse that interfere with parenting capabilities. Professionals can promote protective factors and increase resiliency by enhancing the supports they offer mothers, including enhancing significant relationships.

Supportive and affirming relationships are powerful protective factors that help to ameliorate the risk factors that confront mothers, who have histories of child abuse, and their children. Mothers who have experienced child abuse are more resilient and are better able to maintain psychosocial competence if they have stable and secure attachments with other adults. Significant social supports are critical resources and serve a protective function, and they help to ameliorate the adversities and struggles faced by mothers and their children. The women I have interviewed stated that their relationships with a caring mother, father, grandmother, husband or life partner, and or friends were essential in overcoming the effects of the abuse and alleviating the stressors associated with parenting.

Caring and attentive people, who are accessible, act as strong protective factors that decrease the adverse long-term effects linked to child abuse. Supportive spouses and life partners, extended family members, and friends who are loving, kind, and competent can be critical influences and valuable resources for successful parenting. Integrating natural support systems into their lives helps mothers build resiliency. Learning to create natural support systems and sustain healthy relationships can also enable mothers to wean themselves from reliance on the therapeutic relationship.

Specifically, mothers have stated that their husbands or life partners offered them relief from the demands of mothering and provided emotional support and a sense of security. They acted as confidants, shared in the stressors associated with raising children, helped with household chores, were caring and reliable, and shared in the essential daily responsibilities of parenting.

For many mothers with histories of child abuse, building connections and developing close relationships do not conjure up experiences of safety and comfort. Instead, close relationships are associated with apprehension, fear, terror, and mistrust. When a child experiences interpersonal violence, there is a disconnection, a violation of humanity. Reestablishing a caring connection is essential. A necessary aspect of creating and sustaining warm and positive connections is allowing oneself to be vulnerable, open, and engage in reciprocal relationships. Many of the mothers I have seen in my practice equated vulnerability with being unprotected and exploited. In the safety of therapy, mothers learned to feel comfortable sharing difficult feelings and experiences, which made it possible to reexamine and reframe what it means to be vulnerable and have close and caring connections.

Individual and group therapy can help mothers develop the skills to be competent and successful in relationship building. However, many mothers, because of the violations they experienced as children, do not always have the skills to discern who they should allow or not allow into their lives and the lives of their children. Mothers may need support and guidance in creating and sustaining meaningful and affirming connections with others. Effective communication skills, managing stress, de-escalating conflict, problem-solving, and regulating emotions are essential competencies that can be modeled.