The low pathology cluster one may call resilient in the domain of mental health outcomes. It appears that when trauma and personality interact,they produce differences in behavioral and affective outcomes in trauma survivors. Also, generic diagnostic labels like PTSD may prove to be inadequate to assess for the presence of trauma because reactions to trauma are in line with personality styles and therefore differ fundamentally across individuals. Resilience is impacted by external factors such as family and peer relationships. In terms of family attributes, research suggests that the quality of attachment and the type of parental monitoring predict adaptation . Literature on emotion regulation shows how important parenting is for the development of adequate emotion expression that controls behavioral outcomes of internal states . Trauma. A critical variable when studying youths who commit delinquent acts is trauma. While trauma is classified as an external factor since it is done to the child by someone else, it has long-lasting if not permanent internal effects. Trauma is defined as the intrapsychic outcome of the meaning of a stressful event that directly impact one’s sense of self. The American Psychiatric Association defines a traumatic event as one in which “the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the integrity of self or others” . It stresses that the reaction of the affected individual is critical whereby a traumatized person shows “intense fear, helplessness, or horror” . Victimization and abuse have a gross impact on the child’s psychological and social functioning. Children who were victimized through neglect, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse are likely to experience difficulty with regulating their own emotions, pots for cannabis plants and are thus vulnerable to develop negative behaviors and mental disorders. A classic study by Stouthammer-Loeber, Loeber, Homish, and Wei found that victims of abuse were more likely to engage in overt problem behavior such as minor aggression and physical fighting.
Additionally maltreated children were four times more likely to display high-risk authority avoidance behaviors like truancy, running away, and status offenses . They also found that maltreated boys follow certain pathways to antisocial behavior, which the authors called the authority conflict, the overt and the covert pathways. Maltreated boys were more likely to progress along the overt pathway, which entails varying degrees of deviance such as bullying, fighting, and rape . Also, maltreated children were more likely than the control group to reach the most severe level of the authority conflict pathway, i.e., truancy. However, maltreated children did not differ from the control group on the covert pathway that is associated with vandalism and theft. There is a solid research basis for the link between delinquency and trauma. Harmony, cohesiveness, and strong emotional bonds between family members have been found to relate to less delinquency . Children, whose parents are warm, responsive, and accepting, are more likely to regulate their emotions , which points to the critical role of parenting for fostering resilience. The ability to regulate emotions is a protective factor because it enables the individual to pursue goals in a persistent manner . Parental arguing, financial stress, and abuse are risk factors for committing crimes . The high prevalence rate of trauma among the population of youths with a criminal history is alarming. As the U.S. Department of Justice reported 93% of detained youths had experienced at least one traumatic experience and 84% had experienced more than one trauma. Those trauma rates dramatically surpass those of adolescents from the general population. Traumatic experiences pose a significant risk factor for the development of psychiatric disorders such as depression, substance use, or conduct disorder, which places youths on probation into a high vulnerability group . Trauma negatively impacts the psychic organization of an individual and causes emotional dysfunction that affects intrapsychic and extrapsychic domains like self-esteem and social support . Martens stresses that trauma increases the victim’s suspiciousness of the outside world because the victim’s trust was violated evoking a strong sense of vulnerability. It can therefore trigger schizoid states and feelings of hostility and separateness from the outside world. A study by Widom, Marmorstein, and White found that victims of childhood abuse and neglect reported using a significantly higher number of different drugs than their matched controls. This trend continued across life phases whereby abused and neglected children reported more illicit drug use in middle adulthood than their nonabused counterparts .
The authors concluded that while drug use and drug experimentation is normative in adolescence and emerging adulthood, victimized children were more likely to continue using drugs beyond those developmental phases . Rosenberg et al.’s study on 350 incarcerated youths found that at least 94% reported at least one traumatic experience and that trauma exposure was significantly correlated with PTSD, depression, and substance abuse. Another study employing the typologies of internalizing versus externalizing personalities examined 568 Spanish participants addicted to drugs and found that, those who clustered in the more severe group, i.e., lower socioeconomic status and less education and income, displayed schizoid traits and were addicted to heroin and multiple drugs . Clearly, there is empirical evidence and theory about the pathways of trauma and personality types, and the risks for substance problems associated with internalizing tendencies of withdrawal, suspiciousness, and emotional detachment. A study conducted by Bernstein et al. looked at inner-city substance dependent veterans to find out whether the types of trauma they experienced in childhood could predict different personality clusters. They found that when using restrictive cut-off scores physical abuse was reported by the majority , followed by sexual abuse , and emotional abuse . Moreover, emotional abuse predicted borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, paranoid, and dependent personality disorders.In sum, emotional abuse predisposed the individual to anxiety-prone, mistrusting character traits, and impulsive personality types, i.e., borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic. Importantly, emotional neglect was related to schizoid personality traits confirming the conceptual link between emotional neglect and schizoid personality . Similarly, a study investigating the link between childhood trauma and personality disorders among an outpatient sample confirmed previously reported findings on the effect of emotional neglect on cluster A personality types, i.e., paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal . The impact of emotional neglect may play a far greater role in the development of serious personality disturbances than previously thought. Support for the trauma-personality pathway came from research conducted by Daud et al. . They compared traumatized Swedish children to a control group on a number of intrapsychic and extrapsychic domains. They found that the traumatized group showed significantly higher levels of internalizing symptoms , higher externalizing symptoms , and more detachment than the nonmaltreated group . Daud et al. argued that early maltreatment leads to impaired personality traits. Related research found that emotional abuse was correlated with dissociative symptoms . Dissociative symptoms have been studied frequently in individuals who suffer from borderline personality disorder, but they are present in schizophrenia and depersonalization disorders as well .
Dissociative symptoms, such as splitting, are part of a defense mechanism that works to create an altered state of consciousness resulting in a loss of a coherent perception of the environment . Psychoanalytic theory understands dissociation as a defense mechanism against intolerable affective experiences that are part of traumatic events . Hence, traumatic experiences have deleterious consequences on the individual’s functioning by altering the way he relates to himself and the world. In other words,cannabis flood table trauma creates a personality pathway. Social support. Social support appears to be a palpable concept by which resources are provided by others; yet it is in fact multifaceted and complex . Ways of measuring social support range from assessing types, frequency, and kinds of support to asking participants whether they felt supported . This is also referred to as structural and functional measures, whereby the former addresses the size of the support network and the latter appraises perception and function of support received . In order to capture the concept of social support in its entirety, it is important to expand the types of social support provided to include a variety of sources. Peer relationships have been described as a protective factor, especially during the developmental period of adolescence where peer groups assume functions for identity development . Sports, friends, and creative outlets are important factors in the process of individuation in which adolescents seek more time spent with peers than parents. In other words, there is a developmental transition from a primary parental support system into a primary peer support system in adolescence . Group membership bestows a sense of belonging and control, which can help overcome feelings of marginalization or isolation. Peer groups provide emotional support, offer the opportunity to experiment with different roles, and to engage in self-disclosure. This is especially important for adolescents who are in the process of forming their identity and establishing their autonomy. Importantly, research shows that it is the satisfaction with social support that is associated with resilience and not the frequency or importance attributed to the support . Research has linked social support in adolescence to a range of outcomes. For example, adolescents with poor social skills showed higher internalizing problems, such as depression . Moreover, there is evidence for gender differences whereby a lack of friends was positively associated with depressive symptoms for girls but not for boys. DuBois et al. reported that social support predicted emotional and behavioral adjustment in adolescence by acting as a mediator. This implies that social support positively affects internal strengths, for example self-esteem, which in turn fosters well being and adjustment. Notably, social support can produce negative effects. For example, it appears that potentially negative effects are domain-specific whereby peer support has been linked to higher externalizing problems compared to adult support . Yet, in their study DuBois et al. found that adolescents preferred support from the peer domain, which may put them at risk for a negative trajectory. This leads to a discussion of the complexity of social support in the case of delinquent youths, in particular. Many youths who engage in illegal activities are affiliated with gangs. For many, their gang is a form of social support. Gang affiliation as a form of peer membership has been linked to alcohol and illicit drug abuse as well as criminal activities . Gangs may therefore be a double-edged sword in that they function as social support and simultaneously pose risk factors in other domains, i.e. substance abuse and criminal activity.
Mouttapa et al. argue that the process underlying the association of gang membership with drug abuse is through identification with gang member characteristics, such as aggressive behaviors and drug use. It is the identification with the negative characteristics that leads to negative outcomes in the context of gang affiliation. Moreover, Mouttapa et al. state that focusing on the identification process enables researchers to understand how even those youths who are not in a gang, but identify with it and its culture, are more likely to engage in negative behaviors . Sharkey, Shekhtmeyster, Chavez-Lopez, Norris, and Sass explored how basic needs of belonging and identity that cannot be found elsewhere are met by gangs. Indeed, gang members often come from low socioeconomic neighborhoods that offer few opportunities for prosocial activities and little hope for a better future. Moreover, families residing in such neighborhoods tend to suffer systemically from disrupted relationships, absent fathers, and domestic violence. Hence, youths from these environments are looking for an alternative to provide them with their needs for esteem, respect, and dignity . Studies distinguished resilient from nonresilient individuals based on their association with deviant versus nondeviant peers . Deviant peer behavior such as drug use and criminality puts individuals at higher risk for engaging in those acts themselves via modeling and social learning. Previous research has depicted gangs to be antisocial and predictive of substance use and criminal activity. The resilience research describes gang membership as a risk factor because of its association with alcohol use and crime in general . Yet, there is the potential that gangs are helpful in developing competencies based on self-esteem and self-respect. Some findings suggest a more nuanced role for gangs as they can provide sources of social support, acceptance, and socialization along group cultural norms for members. This study is less concerned with the source of social support than with its function as something positive in the youth’s life that is conducive to self-development.