Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma as a Function of Dissociative Attachment Patterns

Dissociation is a relational process that keeps traumatic experience unformulated and thus experience is not fully integrated into consciousness and into a sense of self. Dissociation is a defense [defense here is used colloquially as it is not so much conflictual as it is the brain's response to traumatic experience -- a response which hyperactivates the brain’s limbic system (particularly, the right amydala) to encode experience emotionally, perceptually and procedurally while at the same time impairing the left hippocampus’ ability to symbolize and contextualize the experience. This change is brain functioning is mediated through hormones, the HPA axis, and neurochemicals and change in blood flow to brain centers.] Dissociated self states inaccessible to consciousness, and therefore to self reflection, keep self states from being in dialogue with one another.

Unresolved, dissociated trauma in the caregiver impairs her/his capacity to regulate affects in the child. Overwhelming affects can remain unintegrated into the child’s sense of self (they become the Brombergian Not-Me). Chronic misattunement from the caregiver is traumatic for the infant, setting the child’s psyche up for dissociative processes. While Bradfield states that it is not only painful affect that is dissociated but also the child’s need for relationship with the caregiver, I prefer to think in terms of attachment patterns (for example, avoidant attachment when an infant has learned that the caregiver is predictably unavailable to regulate distress). Later, such a child may continue to experience feeling “abandoned, abused, isolated, and fearful of others” with a self that is disconnected with parts of the self “sealed off.”  

Intergenerational transmission of trauma is “a function of patterns of attachment relationship.” Consciousness and unconsciousness are co-created reciprocally, if asymmetrically, and a caregiver with unresolved trauma can not respond to the infant’s distress. Instead s/he may be frightened or frightening to the infant and “may demonstrate incoherence, inconsistency, disintegration and fragmented expression of intense and contradictory affects.” Consequently, the infant develops specific strategies to manage its own distress, usually, with a dissociated parent, a disorganized attachment which predicts future dissociation in the child. Recall that dissociation is the hallmark of trauma. ‘Voila! intergenerational transmission of trauma!’

Traumatic experience, dissociated because it has not found a relational home [what Kohut called self-selfobject experience; Mitchell, the relational matrix; and Stolorow, the intersubjective context], is communicated to the therapist through relational patterns in behavior and in the body. It also enters the therapeutic relationship through enactments. 

Bradfield, B. (2011). The Dissociation of Lived Experience: A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma. Int. J. Psychoanal. Self Psychol., 6(4):531-550