A Preliminary Investigation of Childhood Maltreatment and Dissociative Psychopathology in Lebanon: Examining the Roles of Maltreatment-Related Betrayal, Anger, and Shame

Abstract

Dissociation is an evolutionarily adaptive response that aims to protect individuals from the emotionally damaging effects of extremely distressing and inescapable experiences, such as those of childhood maltreatment (Lanius et al., 2018; Levine et al., 2018). The past three decades have witnessed various efforts to delineate the impact of specific maltreatment-related characteristics associated with childhood maltreatment and identify the roles of several cognitive, emotional, behavioural, and relational processes in predicting dissociative symptoms. In line with this, Dorahy (2017) proposed that in response to the betrayal trauma of childhood maltreatment, individuals may suppress their anger at the perpetrator, redirecting it into anger at the self and shame, which ultimately results in the activation of dissociative processes to preserve needed albeit threatening relationships such as those with abusive caregivers. As such, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of five cognitive, emotional, and relational processes – namely, appraisals of betrayal, negative beliefs about anger, anger at the perpetrator, maltreatment-related shame, and anger at the self – over and above those of four maltreatment-related characteristics – namely, cumulative exposure to childhood maltreatment, age at onset of maltreatment, the total duration of maltreatment, and the severity of maltreatment – in the prediction of dissociative symptoms among a sample of adults who were maltreated in childhood and/or adolescence. In doing so, the present study seeks to validate Dorahy’s (2017) conceptual framework on the roles of various psychological processes in the prediction of dissociative psychopathology.