Trauma Severity and Defensive Emotion-Regulation Reactions as Predictors of Forgetting Childhood Trauma

Abstract

Using a retrospective survey, we studied a sample of 1,679 college women to determine whether reports of prior forgetting of childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, and other traumas could be explained by trauma severity and individual differences in the use of defensive emotion-regulation reactions (i.e., repressive coping, dissociation, and fantasy proneness). Among victims of physical abuse (but not sexual abuse or other types of trauma), those who experienced severe abuse and used defensive reactions were sometimes more likely to report temporary forgetting of abuse but other times less likely to report forgetting. We also found unanticipated main effects of trauma severity on temporary forgetting. Our results provide an understanding of victims' experiences of forgetting by demonstrating the importance of considering unique effects of trauma type, different aspects of trauma severity, and victims' defensive reactions to trauma.

Keywords:

• childhood trauma
• childhood physical abuse
• childhood sexual abuse
• memory
• individual differences
• repressive coping
• dissociation
• fantasy proneness

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Larry Grimm and Rebecca Campbell for statistical advice; John Briere for comments on the survey instrument; Shari Diamond, Leonard Newman, and Sarah Ullman for helpful comments during various stages of the project; Beth Schwartz, Gail Goodman, Jodi Quas, Simona Ghetti, and Maureen Smith for help with participant recruitment; and Nadine Stevoff, Catherine Pelzman, Kara Doering, Elaine Shreder, Maria Vargas, Orlando Torres, Giselle Hernandez, Dalia Marmel, Anthony Marino, and Adell Crawford for valuable research assistance.

Notes

1. An anonymous reviewer wondered whether the dissociation and fantasy proneness interactions with fear of injury remained significant when entered simultaneously as predictors of temporary forgetting of physical abuse. An additional logistic regression analysis that included the main effects of dissociation, fantasy proneness, each of the six trauma severity indices, and all Dissociation × Trauma Severity and Fantasy Proneness × Trauma Severity interaction effects (i.e., that combined the variables shown in Tables 2 and 3 into one model) revealed that the Dissociation × Fear of Injury interaction remained significant (p = .008) but that the Fantasy Proneness × Fear of Injury interaction only trended toward significance (p = .16). This might have occurred because of reduced power but probably not because of multicollinearity, because another multiple regression analysis that predicted forgetting of physical abuse with dissociation, fantasy proneness, and the trauma severity indices showed that all variables had tolerance ≥ .57 and variance inflation factors ≤ 1.75.