Displacement as Traumatic Event in Childhood
Typical for all trauma memories is that they are overgeneralized and not integrated into autobiographical memory on the same emotional level as other important events (Schdnfeld et al.
2007). Traumatic memories are often narratively fragmented and mix up temporal order (e.g., Bremner 2008; Dalgleish et al. 2008). The American psychiatrist Lenore Terr has studied the traumatic memories of children and young people and especially what happens to these memories in adulthood (e.g., Terr 1994; Terr et al. 1997). Her interest has been on the mechanisms that prevent people from recalling some difficult memories of their childhood. Terr argues that children often retrieve place and, for example, clothing from the traumatic event (Terr 1994/1997, p. 72). Places are not only remembered as descriptions of physical sites but as visualized and bodily experienced sensations. Depending on the type of childhood trauma, different characteristics appear (Terr 2003, pp. 327-331). The first type of childhood trauma means single-blow traumas, the second type refers to multiple or long-standing traumas, and the third type is a crossover between the first two. In the case of war children, the crossover type of trauma occurs. Typically, these crossover trauma children have lost something permanently: for example, their parent(s), home, or health. They experience a single-blow trauma, resulting in long-standing effects in their later life or even adulthood. The type three children are exposed to prolonged sadness and pain, from which they try to escape, for example, through numbing or significant character changes. Children suffering such a traumatic event can still have full, detailed and etched-in memories, but they may be partial and fragmented, and mistiming and misperceptions may also occur. Children try to work through the memories by searching for and giving explanations to why the event happened, how it could have been reverted, etc. (Terr 2003, pp. 331-332).It has been noted that refugee children, for instance, suffer from crossover trauma and have a high rate of depression in their adulthood (Terr 2003, p. 332, see also Yule 2002). Similarly, research on Finnish war children reports that some have high levels of depression over 60 years after World War II. Further, this traumatic experience in early childhood is associated with significant alterations in reproductive and marital traits among former war children (Pesonen et al. 2007, 2008). The research data on British war children’s psychosocial well-being is more ambivalent in this matter. Some studies show that child evacuees were more likely to have insecure attachment styles than the control group (Foster et al. 2003). On the other hand, Tennant et al. (1982), as well as Birtchnell and Kennard (1984), reported no differences in mental health or no raised levels of depression. These clinical studies, however, show that long-term social and mental risk factors of childhood displacement are possible. More importantly, it has been recently acknowledged that traumatic experiences of displacement continue to affect autobiographical memory and ways children and adults narrate their childhood experiences (Howe et al. 2004; Peltonen and Punamaki 2010, pp. 97-98).
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