The Impact of Growing Up in an Institution

Although the experience of growing up in an institution is individual, common themes can be identified within the impact on people’s lives. The effects of childhood institutional abuse are numerous and the impact on an individual’s life can be extensive and can carry across generations. These effects include:

• Low self esteem and self worth. Institutions rarely provided space, physical or emotional, to safely develop and trust a sense of self. Rather than receiving positive encouragement most children were taught that they were worthless and always to blame. This can lead to a tendency in adult life to blame oneself for negative outcomes and to place responsibility for one’s happiness on external factors.
• Self destructive thoughts. Low self esteem is usually associated with self defeating thought processes. Self destructive thoughts are commonly associated with anxiety and depression and negative coping strategies.
• Negative coping strategies. Many former residents developed strategies at an early age to cope with their negative and abusive environment. These provided a means of temporarily blocking out the emotional pain and provided a sense of control. These patterns of behaviour often continue into adult life yet are frequently expressed through activities such as alcoholism, gambling, self harming and eating disorders.
• Anger management issues. Having being raised in abusive childhood environments, former residents may react in two ways: some may continue with the role of passivity and withdrawal when confronted with a situation of anger or conflict; others will exhibit rage and anger in response with an understanding of the association between this behaviour and control and power.
• Anxiety disorders and depression. Typically associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder the effects of living in constant fear as a child carry into adult life. Anxiety disorders include general anxiety, agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorder and panic disorder – all of which are exacerbated by childhood flashbacks and frequently cause sleep disruption and hypervigilence.
• Nightmares and flashbacks. The experience of these often involves reliving the abuse and the trauma and the emotional and physical reactions. These can occur regularly and during daily activities such as responding to being in a queue at the local grocery store; reacting to someone not listening to you or ordering you around; being around someone else who is angry and abusive.
• Inability to trust others. Trusting people during a childhood in an institution frequently involved survival issues. Feelings around the abandonment by parental figures, being separated from siblings, and put in an environment which focused on individual survival, often taught children to trust no-one. Issues of trust were further confused when children were told to trust the same people who were abusing them physically, sexually and emotionally.
• Disrupted families. Siblings were often deliberately separated in institutions and contact with parents was restricted. As a consequence, adult relations with siblings and parents are often estranged.
• Attachment and boundary issues. Growing up in an environment of so many children often meant that physical boundaries were violated with perhaps the additional violation to boundaries caused by sexual abuse. The environment within homes and institutions, in which learning how to please was rewarded with abuse, meant that relationship and emotional boundaries were blurred.
• Dysfunctional relationships and intimacy difficulties. During childhood relationship role modelling was most likely based upon abusive behaviour and this produces patterns of behaviour during adult life. Many adults have internalised that the success of a relationship was dependent upon pleasing and gaining the approval of the other and that violence was a regrettable yet anticipated part of one’s relationship. For others it has meant focusing on other issues such as work or children as a means of avoiding or addressing intimacy difficulties.
• Parenting Difficulties. Not having been provided with any positive role models during their childhood, many former residents struggle with parenting issues. Some find it difficult to physically demonstrate their love through hugs; others worry about ‘passing on’ anxiety/depression and addiction problems; some find they are over protective and that they struggled during their child’s age which correlated with their own age during the time of abuse. Due to the inability to have functional relationships some parents have lost contact with children and accept this because of their own fragmented family background. Unfortunately, parenting difficulties become another issue which is often internalised as self failure.
• Lack of education, limited employment opportunities, poverty and housing problems. Lack of schooling (including basic literacy and numeracy) cause long term unemployment problems and self esteem issue. Direct consequences of this are struggling with poverty and accessing appropriate and affordable housing. For many it also means difficulties with helping their children with their homework.