Childhood Sexual, Emotional, and Physical Abuse as Predictors of Dissociation in Adulthood

This Australian study explores a person's self-reported exposure to childhood abuse to identify the characteristics that are predictive of clinical levels of dissociation in adulthood. The final sample comprised 303 participants, including 26 inpatients and outpatients (24 females and two males) receiving treatment for a dissociative disorder (DD), and 277 university participants, including 220 controls (186 females, 34 males), 31 with elevated levels of dissociation consistent with a DD or posttraumatic stress disorder (27 females and four males), and 26 with clinical levels of dissociation (20 females and six males). The findings demonstrate clinical levels of dissociation and DDs occur in individuals reporting a history of childhood abuse, particularly sexual abuse and experiences that are potentially life-threatening to a child, such as choking, smothering, and physical injury that breaks bones or teeth, or that compromise the child's survival needs, including threats of abandonment and deprivation of basic needs. Females who disclosed being sexual abused in addition to being choked or smothered had a 106-fold risk of clinical levels of dissociation. As expected, self-reported amnesia was prevalent in the dissociative groups. Yet, even in the control group, one-third of those disclosing sexual abuse reported an unclear memory of it. Strong similarities in abuse experiences were found between the clinical sample and those in the university sample with clinical levels of dissociation (which is unlikely to have previously been diagnosed). The dissociative groups reported higher rates of corroboration of their abusive experiences. The findings support the traumatic etiology of dissociation.