How Childhood Trauma Becomes Part of Who We Are as Adults

The process of "Identification with the Aggressor," introduced by psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi (1949) and described in Part 1 of this series, is a way to understand the impact of childhood relational trauma, whether marked by abuse or neglect. The child molds their sense of self to the needs of the adult as a way to seek emotional and psychological safety. In adult relationships, this accommodation might be transformed into what is popularly called “people pleasing,” an attempt to seek psychological or emotional safety by prioritizing other people’s needs. However, the ramifications of this process are broader.

In order to stay safe by becoming who others need them to be, the child must develop an acute sensitivity to the other person’s needs, wishes, moods, and feelings. What might look like maturity, empathy, or 'wisdom' might be an expression of how the child needed to change to ensure their emotional, psychological, and physical survival. When relational trauma is not defined by abuse but by neglect, rejection, or emotional unavailability, the impact can be similar. For example, in order to protect themselves from feeling abandoned or unloved, children of depressed parents can assume caretaking qualities or shape their personality hoping to "enliven" their emotionally unavailable caregiver.

Becoming empathic or nurturing, or identifying with aspects of our parents and their wishes for us, can, under normal circumstances, augment our sense of self and identity. However, they can be expressions of traumatic experiences when they involve taking parentified roles in order to preserve a sense of safety, while losing ourselves in the process. As Frankel (2004) notes, “As these capacities [empathy, attunement, etc.] are gained, the victim’s contact with his own emotional life is lost” (p.79). During adulthood, this might be experienced as having a limited relationship with our inner life, feeling disconnected or unsure about our own needs and wants, or engaging in masochistic relationships.

At the center of the process of Identification with the Aggressor lies the urgent task of meeting the adult’s narcissistic needs. Narcissistic needs might include feeling powerful, needed, useful, alive, desirable, or loved. Children become extensions of their parents’ needs, and experience themselves not as individuals but “as an object of use for the caretaker, rather than a person of intrinsic value” (Howell, 2014, p.52). This results in a diminished sense of agency, identity, and self-cohesion, which is often carried into adulthood and experienced as helplessness, depression, doubt about our selfhood, or as anxiety, fear, or instability as we depend on others to feel grounded and cohesive.

These are ways in which trauma, through the process of Identification with the Aggressor, might lead to more than just people pleasing. For example, a former patient of mine undermined her own sense of agency and decision-making because she learned during childhood that she needed to remain dependent on a parent who reacted ragefully at her early attempts to become her own person. Another patient, whose parents could not tolerate his dependence and avoided facing their own fears and longings, became the detached and self-sufficient person his parents needed him to be.

Internalized Aggression and Shame

As a result of childhood trauma, we unconsciously internalize our aggressors in an attempt to seek safety and self-regulate. By turning the aggressor into an unconscious mental representation, we make them “disappear” from external reality so that we can manage our overwhelming fear and helplessness. We pay a price for this, as the internalized aggressor will punish, threaten, or abuse us from within so that we can continue to experience the external adult/aggressor as loving and safe.

In this way, internalizing the aggressor also allows the child to preserve attachment with the adult, something they must do, as their existence depends on it. This effort requires the child to split the “good” and “bad” parts of the internalized aggressor, allowing the child’s longing for love to be fulfilled, even if only in fantasy, by an adult who can become loved, loving, or idealized.

Through the unconscious splitting of the adult, the child will develop an unconscious relationship with a loving and idealized “other” who exists, in the child’s mind, in relation to a “self” that takes on the “badness” of the aggressor. As Ferenczi (1949) put it, “The most important change, produced in the mind of the child by the anxiety-fear-ridden identification with the adult partner, is the introjection [internalization] of the guilt feelings of the adult” (p. 228, italics in the original).

Whether the adult aggressor actually experiences guilt is questionable. However, the point is that through the process of Identification with the Aggressor, the child is left feeling responsible for any hurtful, disappointing, or traumatic experiences. The child takes on the “badness” of the adult, filling the child with a deep sense of shame, guilt, and worthlessness, which often persists through adulthood. Acknowledging the failures of the adults we depend on would put our own existence at unbearable risk, so our minds will opt for making ourselves responsible and "bad."

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As a result, our feelings of hurt, fear, sadness, and disappointment with our caretakers remain dissociated, disconnected from our experience and our awareness. The process of Identification with the Aggressor requires the child to dissociate their own experience, evacuating their own sense of self, needs, wishes, and feelings, in order to become who the aggressor needs them to be.

Feelings of shame, longing, terror, and rage had to remain hidden in the realm of the unthinkable, separate from consciousness and leading to strong defenses to keep a sense of safety and some semblance of cohesiveness. Harsh, punitive self-critics, our own internalized aggressors, are the remnants of what we had to do to stay alive and manage the painful reality of fearing those we loved and needing those who were not there for us.

In the next part of this series, I will discuss how psychotherapy can help recognize, process, and heal the deep wounds caused by the aftermath of childhood trauma, seen through the lens of Identification with the Aggressor.