Weiser, Lisa (1/12) The unspeakable affect of shame: its traumatic origins and imprint on object worlds (Philip Wong, Ph.D.;Nicholas Papouchis, Ph.D.; Kevin Meehan, Ph.D.)
Within a sample of 199 ethnically diverse college students, this study explored how diverse manifestations of interpersonal childhood trauma relate to developmentally-informed measures of object representations, shame-proneness and self-discrepancy in adulthood. The notion of trauma was explored from various angles, in an effort to highlight the destructive role of cumulative emotional trauma and subjective perceptions of parental maltreatment, in addition to investigating more conventional and objectively-measurable notions of childhood trauma (physical and sexual abuse). Moreover, in line with the shame-based focus on the self, the project explored how trauma-related shame affects the ability to conceptualize the self and significant others. The constructs of shame-proneness and childhood trauma were assessed with two measures respectively. Shame was assessed using the Test of Self Conscious Affect (TOSCA-3; Tangney et al., 2000), and the Internalized Shame Scale (ISS; Cook, 1987). Trauma was measured with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ; Bernstein, D.P., 1994), and the Parental Acceptance Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ; Rohner, 1990). Self-discrepancies, both the ideal and the ought-discrepancy, were measured using the Integrated Self Discrepancy Index (ISDI; Hardin & Lakin, 2009). Finally, levels of object representations were measured with the Object Relations Inventory (ORI; Blatt, Stayner, Auerbach & Behrends, 1996) which was coded on the Differentiation-Relatedness scale (DR) and the Conceptual Level scale (CL), in addition to the content scale for Malevolence-Benevolence by two independent and reliable raters (ICC = .78). Findings elucidate nuances of the relationship between early trauma and adult shame-proneness, with reports of emotional abuse/neglect and perceived parental maltreatment correlating with shame-proneness to the same extent as do the more popularized notions of trauma, namely sexual and physical abuse. Furthermore, the curvilinear relationship between ORI scores and shame corresponds with theoretical notions about the developmental pathway of shame, with its peaking precisely when the capacity to perceive the self objectively emerges (Einstein & Lanning, 1998). There are rich psychoanalytic implications for the finding that greater discrepancies between higher reports of trauma and lower reports of shame on the TOSCA coincide with less developed object representations. These results suggest that a powerfully denied sense of shame in the face of trauma, impressively affects the internal psyches of its victims. Finally, the ought-discrepancy demonstrated a mediating effect on the relationship between trauma and shame-proneness, revealing the process by which perceptions of harsh and severe early caretaking translate into feelings of inadequacy, self-condemnation and perceptions of malevolence in adulthood.
