According to the theory of Donald Winnicott, our apprehension of life, our motivations, our actions are the consequence of our intra-family relationship. The relationship with the parents, the relationship with the mother and the father are the breeding ground for our ability to adapt, to create, to transform aggressiveness into a positive force.
The benevolence of the family structure and the social interactions are therefore important factors of the child.
Holding is also important but the mother must not substitute her own desire for that of her child.
It’s a physical and psychological protection against threats. A fusion mother, ambivalent, who conveys her fears, makes her baby feel her own shortcomings. Her baby will develop his mindset consequently. Parents have to be reliable and predictables to generate a positive experience which doesn’t distort reality.
Douglas, Ressler and Burgess have interviewed a population of murderers. According to them, the social links has failed or has been selective. Parents have ignored, relativized or normalized certain behaviors. So, they enhanced these cognitive and emotional distortions of the child.
Child distress due to physical and/or psychological trauma was neglected. Nor was he accompanied or protected. As a result of the abusive events, the child may experience a high level of emotional arousal and when this sustained level interacts with obsessive thoughts, the child’s perceptions and therefore behaviors with others may be altered and inappropriate.
When the child has been neglected and/or psychologically/physically abused, when the parental bond and response is failing, the child may not have an adequate emotional response. Memories of frightening and traumatic experiences shape thought patterns and behavioral responses.
Faced with the parent’s inability to become role models, the child finds himself incapable of projecting and identifying himself. This incapacity of the parents comes from an absent father or an addict to alcohol and/or drugs, it is due to behavior that is itself abusive, it is due to intra-family violence which the child witnesses, it is due to a home that is not secure for the child.
For these reasons, the child does not develop any affective bond with his/her parents - “caretakers” - who will themselves have no influence on the child or the adolescent.
Acting out stimulates and reinforces the cognitive and emotional patterns of the child, but it also helps to reduce internal tensions and this is true for all acting outs. The red line will always exist for these children, but the only thing that allows them not to cross this limit is the capacity for resilience. This is strongly correlated with the creation of attainable, rewarding goals, generating responsibilities. If so, the child will be a stick of dynamite just waiting for a trigger to explode.