The Cycle of Vicarious Trauma and Relational Patterns

A girl who grows up witnessing this will tend to form relationships with lower levels of stress than what she witnessed growing up. For example, her father used to kick her mother. As an adult, she may find herself in relationships where she is slapped or dragged by the hair, but not kicked. Being kicked becomes the line she will no longer tolerate being crossed. Everything else feels like it is not that bad, something she can handle.

The feelings a child experiences when witnessing trauma do not necessarily belong to the child. The guilt a child feels often actually belongs to one of the parents.

If the parents were violent, fighting, and causing such a disturbance that neighbors would rush over and people would whisper about them around the neighborhood, the child would feel intense shame. But that shame belongs to the parents. The child's own emotions would be more about fear, horror, and self-compassion.

The same patterns will continue to play out as the girl tries to reclaim her dignity, her right to be an equal partner, and her right to have a voice and make her own choices in a relationship with a man. But, in reality, she is trying to reclaim these things for her mother. And that is impossible.

Vicarious trauma creates a powerful entanglement between the mother's life and the daughter's life. There is no inner sense that “I have a different story, a different mind, a different life.” Instead, there is a feeling that she must either repeat the same pattern or run away from it as if she were on fire. And the harder she tries to run away from it, the more likely she is to find herself caught up in it.

Trauma instills in the child an intense fear and horror of repeating the same experience: “This will never happen to me.”

To prove that no one can treat me that way, I will keep finding myself in the same situation over and over again.

And that is the vicious cycle.