The relationship between emotional abuse and the experience

Mitchell, S. M. (2000). The relationship between emotional abuse and the experience of emptiness.(Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2000). UMI no. 9987403

This theoretical study explores the complex relationship between emotional abuse and the experience of emptiness. Emotional abuse is just beginning to be understood as a real and formative type of maltreatment that leaves its recipients with an aftermath of inner destruction and a robbing of the soul. This paper explores the idea that emptiness and emotional abuse in our culture are pervasive. Growing numbers of adults having experienced emotional abuse in childhood are apt to act out this early trauma in the world. Their desire or need to consume and fill up the empty void can be witnessed daily, as emptiness seems to permeate our present culture, in which consumerism is the ideal and quantity is better than quality. A hermeneutic method was employed to explore the intricacies of emotional abuse and how such trauma of the soul leads to an inner landscape of emptiness. The literature engaged and examined in this study provided an abundance of evidence that supports the hypothesis that emotional abuse significantly affects and even creates the experience of emptiness in the abused individual. The story of Menelaus and Proteus in The Odyssey was seen as analogous to the struggles of the emotionally abused and empty individual. Menelaus had to struggle to catch hold of the shape shifting Proteus in order to find his way home- back to the true self. His efforts are akin to those of the empty individual who struggles to get in touch with his or her true self in order to heal from emotional abuse. Emotional abuse and emptiness in our modern culture were examined. We are a society addicted to change, constantly finding the need to reinvent ourselves, but not reaching the true self connection. People, in general, remain dissatisfied and compulsively attempt to fill the emptiness with consumer goods, self-help books, and addictive substances. As emptiness gets filled with meaningless objects, creativity is nullified and we become a "false-self" nation. The empty traumatized patient comes to psychotherapy with limited self capacities and in search of a selfobject. Ideally through the analytic process, transformation occurs where emptiness is gradually felt and not escaped from.