Memory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Intimate Partner Violence

In continuing our commentary on Intimate Partner Violence, we should motivate your interest and concern as much as possible by highlighting some evidence as to why this form of violence really is a key social problem that hurts everyone. Now, if you dug into the research literature, everybody, you might well find some studies indicating that both women and men are capable of violent assault. Of course, that’s true. However, if you only looked at the overall incidents of domestic violence that occurs out there, then you might walk away with the conclusion that tendencies to be physically abusive are not too different for male and female intimate partners. If you decided to think that way, you wouldn’t be thinking about things hard enough (this is a common problem). A more thorough review of the research would clearly reveal that the scope and severity of physical assaults within intimate relationships is MUCH greater when considering incidents of male assaults on their female partners than the reverse. That’s true in terms of the likelihood that a victim of IPV will be significantly or permanently injured and the probability that an incident of IPV will result in death. Having made that very important qualifying point, physical assault is still wrong, damaging, and costly for Canada and every other country in the world, and it is something that some PEOPLE do, even though the results tend to be worse when males do it.

Here’s some local statistics for you:

1. Manitoba and Saskatchewan claim the highest rates of IPV incidents in Canada.

2. Violence amongst family members represents 25% of all violent crimes reported in Canada and about half of those crimes are instances of IPV (in this case, spousal assault). In the other half of these cases, the victims are other family members, such as violence against children by parents, between siblings, and parents by their children.

3. Women are 2X as likely to become a victim of police-reported family violence.

4. 52% of spousal abuse victims report their children as having witnessed them being assaulted by their partner, which is an important component of that “cycle of violence” we’ve made reference to before.

5. Girls are more frequently victims of violence committed by partners and family members than are boys, with the difference increasing as they age, mainly as a result of a much higher risk of experiencing sexual assault.

6. In Winnipeg, 40% of reports made to police in 2010 (around 17,000 incidents) were cases of domestic disturbance, most typically involving some form of conflict between intimate partners. These incidents resulted in more than 2,000 charges in which 80% of those charged were men over 18.

7. Year by year, about 20% of the murders in this city, the city with the highest per capita murder rate in Canada, involves the death of a woman killed by her intimate partner.

(Turner, 2012)

Hey, students of PSYC 1200, you should know that we separate our course based on traditional boundaries within psychology. So, we talk about psychology disorders separate from memory and emotion and we talk about social psychology separate from neurological issues and principles of learning. You must understand and constantly remind yourself that these boundaries are artificial. In a real person, does it make sense to separate what they remember about their life and their learning experiences from their having or not having a mental disorder? Does it make sense to think about human cognition – i.e., the way a person thinks, forms judgments, and makes decisions – separate from their culture or from their social status or from their learning history. Obviously not, and that is super obvious whenever you direct your mind toward understanding something as complicated as IPV.

At this point in the course, the relevant topics that you will want to understand in preparation for the next exam are Memory, Cognitive Processes, Intelligence, and Emotion. A person could quite easily teach an entire course just on one of those topics, and both Dr. Leboe-McGowans actually have done that in the case of Memory and Cognitive Processes. We want to use this opportunity to describe how IPV might relate to these four topics, but let’s not fall into the trap of thinking about these four topics as though they can actually be separated from one another and other aspects of psychology. To keep things brief, here we will discuss a link between Memory and IPV. Maybe that will stimulate your cognitive processes to think of other ways in which IPV might relate to these topics.

Memory

Memory preserves the experiences we have. All of that learning that fascinated the behaviourists needs a place and that place is our brain connections. Memory boils down to the brain connections that get created when we have experiences in our life. Every exciting, scary, tragic, boring, nonsensical, inspiring, or surprising thing that happens to us changes our brain and contributes to the contents of our memory. To a psychologist like me, the contents of memory (or the ever-changing structure of our brains, if you prefer) define who we are at any moment and, in collaboration with what’s going on around us, those contents determine what we do and the ideas we come up with and our attitudes and feelings about everything.

If someone is a victim of IPV, they have experienced a quite possibly terrifying and injurious physical assault by someone who they were probably hoping to be able to trust. In other words, being assaulted by an intimate partner qualifies as an extremely traumatic experience and such experiences are known to cause a psychological disorder that is aptly named, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD). As a person’s physical injuries heal from a physical assault, it is the psychological ones that remain in PTSD. The process arises from a fundamental human reaction to being threatened. People experience heightened arousal from identifying a threat and that will tend to be experienced as anxiety (or fear) when the person decides that the threat is a danger. This arousal is meant to prepare us to respond to a threatening situation. It’s meant to allow us to survive by fighting or fleeing. That system is pretty useful when someone encounters a bear or when you want to survive a nearby volcanic eruption. Unique problems arise when the source of the threat is something that is difficult to escape and fighting back is not something that a person is willing or strong enough to do. It is that situation that characterizes many people who experience an assault by their intimate partners. It is also the situation for other people who are frequently in life-threatening danger, but they can’t escape it or they won’t because the danger is all wrapped up in their career. Soldiers or police officers are an example of professions in which there is an elevated risk for experiencing an episode of PTSD.

A victim of IPV may well find it difficult to escape the source of their fear. They may be in love, which is an emotion that one person can have for another, as frustrating as it can be for outside observers, even when their partner abuses and assaults them. There are other reasons why a person might not be able to escape a dangerous relationship, such as financial concerns or a willingness to sacrifice safety and mental health to keep a family together. Whatever the reason is, maintaining oneself in a state of fear is psychologically damaging when the source of that fear is something that persists and is known to be a real threat, which is the case when a person finds themselves with an abusive intimate partner. This situation can lead to chronic hyper-vigilance and hypersensitivity to potential threats, in which a person’s body may react to even very slight threats with a panic response or a complete suppression of emotion and behaviour. In other words, chronic anxiety and/or bouts of severe depression are common psychological outcomes for victims of IPV, which emerge from our natural human stress response to perceiving danger.

Note: In the above paragraph, every area of psychology is at play. It all has to do with peoples’ brains, reactions to threat depend on our learning history and the way we form cognitive judgments about the information we have available to us, the learning history is preserved in memory, identifying a threat is an act of perception, hyper-vigilance is partly a cognitive process that relies on attention and draws power from the emotion of fear, these reactions emerge within the social context of an intimate relationship, how people behave in relationships has much to do with how their lifespan development has gone, and the psychological consequence for many victims of IPV is squarely within the domain of clinical/abnormal psychology.)

PTSD wouldn’t occur if people didn’t have anywhere to store their traumatic experiences. The disorder can arise in people who directly experience a violent assault or in someone who only witnesses one. The primary feature of the disorder is a persistent reliving of the traumatic event, which can include recurrent images, thoughts, nightmares, and flashbacks. Another symptom is dissociative reactions, in which the person becomes emotionally numb and unmotivated, as though they are detached from the world and/or the world has lost all of its colour and charm. That second symptom relates somewhat to symptoms of depression. Another symptom is that features associated with the trauma will be avoided. A victim of IPV may not be able to fully remove their abusive partner from their life, but they may physically avoid them as much as possible or they may psychologically avoid them by keeping themselves detached and unemotional in their interactions with their abuser. It is a common reaction of the individuals with PTSD to socially withdraw from other people and their surroundings. Symptoms must persist in a person for longer than four months to qualify as an instance of PTSD (Shekhar, 2012).

Even if they escape their abusive partner and seek to begin a new life, someone who has experienced IPV may well exhibit PTSD symptoms long after the threat from there former partner is gone. Thanks to how our memory functions, the most frightening and painful events in our life tend to affect us the most, so nightmares and waking flashbacks of abuse may continue for many years after someone ends their relationship with an abusive partner. Thanks to processes of learning and memory, people who experience violent trauma also tend to generalize beyond the specific source of their trauma. As a result, the same mechanism that would cause a person to avoid and withdraw from an abusive partner may present a challenge for them to put their trust in other potential mates. It is important to appreciate that, thanks to memory, one or a few incidents of violence can have multiple tragic long-term outcomes.

Reference: 

Shekhar, A. (2012). Psychological problems associated with family violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning (pp. 125-131).

Turner, J. (2012). Top crime happens at home. Winnipeg Sun, Wednesday, July 18, 2012.