ABSTRACT
Childhood abuse is trauma, the pure physical trauma of a life-threatening catastrophe or the emotional trauma of two conflicting feelings linked together in the same event—love and pain, love and violence, love and rage. One incident of physical or sexual violation constitutes abuse; emotional abuse is characterized by a consistent and repeated pattern of humiliation, sarcasm, ridicule, rejection, or threats. It is often impossible to neatly categorize the kind of abuse suffered because physical, emotional, and sexual abuse are often overlapping. Any kind of childhood abuse violates the child’s quest for safety, which is second only to food and shelter in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1970). The core of a child’s world—the home—is not safe when the very people put on this earth to protect the child at the worst abuse and at the least fail to defend him or her. Childhood abuse damages and alters a child’s perception of self, others, and the world. Those damaged and altered perceptions affect each subsequent developmental task.
