Thriving despite it all
When he was 6 years old, Rasheen Coleman’s drug-addicted mother chased him around a room wielding a knife and threatening to cut off his fingers. For years, his mother regularly berated Rasheen and beat him with anything that was at hand: her purse, a broomstick, her fists. The little boy was regularly in charge of two young half-siblings, preparing their meals and supervising their play. Any lapse -- a middling report card or a brother’s naughty behavior -- would bring a storm of his mother’s verbal and physical wrath upon Rasheen.
And then, when Rasheen was 12, his ordeal was over. His mother died of AIDS.
By reliable estimates, more than half of kids like Rasheen would enter adulthood with festering psychological wounds of one sort or another. A victim of such severe abuse is more likely than the broader population to have fallen prey to mental illness or addiction, to have dropped out of school, relied on public aid or run afoul of the law. He or she would be far more likely to have had a string of failed relationships or jobs. Almost half, according to one study, would go on to abuse or neglect their own children.
But somewhere at the core of Rasheen Coleman, there is a certain steel. And perhaps too, at the core of kids like him lies a more subtle alchemy: the secret to mending, and maybe even preventing, the emotional wreckage that child abuse and neglect can leave in its wake. It is a prospect that mental-health professionals increasingly hope to mine.
Now a 25-year-old graduate student at Texas A&M;, Coleman proclaims “an abundance of hope.” He lives a life surrounded by friends, directed by ambitions and disciplined by the experience of having faced crushing adversity and beaten the odds, all at a tender age.
Coleman struggles -- mightily and daily. But most days, optimism and discipline just seem to trump the fear, anger and self-doubt of his childhood. He is shy, but pushes himself toward a career in politics. He likes to party and have fun, but won’t allow himself so much as a cigar for fear of addiction. He wants to forgive the woman who turned his childhood into a nightmare, but also wants to forget her and move on.
“I’m more than a conqueror,” says Coleman in a voice that conveys more conviction than boast. “Whatever I face, I know I’ll be able to overcome it. I don’t let things get me down.”
For those who study the long-term effects of child abuse and neglect, survivors like Coleman are models of resilience, and, increasingly, objects of intense scrutiny. Early in his adulthood, Coleman appears to have escaped the most typical effects of a childhood marked by severe abuse, including depression, criminality, academic failure and substance abuse.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 984,000 children were victims of maltreatment in 1998, the latest year for which figures were available. More than half suffered neglect, while almost 1 in 4 were physically abused. Nearly 12% were sexually abused.
The mistreatment of children is as old as parenthood itself, and the study of child abuse and neglect is a venerable academic field. But a recent event -- the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- has brought new focus and research funds to the community. After thousands of children were exposed directly to the horror of those attacks -- and millions more through public media -- government officials scrambled for insights into the causes, effects and treatment of childhood trauma. Those who study and treat victims of child abuse were among the first to step forward with treatment programs and ideas for further study.
It was not their first foray into subjects making news. During the 1980s and ‘90s, many in the child-abuse field turned to the study of children traumatized by gang- and drug-related violence in their communities. Studying ever-broader populations of children, says Joy Osofsky, a leading thinker in the field, has helped the field mature quickly. And the new focus on “protective factors” -- or resilience -- is a result of that, she adds.
“With more understanding about how trauma impacts children, we’ve learned more about children who experience trauma differently,” says Osofsky, vice president of the organization Zero to Three, and a psychologist at Louisiana State University. “And we’ve seen that somehow, with various resources and circumstances, some children are able to weather it and move on.” While the research lags behind that observation, the intriguing treatment implications of “protective factors” are sparking more interest than ever, she adds.
Throughout the mental-health profession, the new emphasis on resilience serves two purposes. First, it is a hopeful reminder from social scientists that the abused child does not always face an immutable sentence of doom: They are asserting that factors such as child abuse -- or low birth weight or a family history of mental illness -- stack the probabilistic deck against a kid. While they may warn of “increased risk,” they are not predicting his guaranteed failure. Some kids, they acknowledge, emerge perfectly fine.
Second, social scientists hope that if they can distill the qualities of resilience in some children, they can use these lessons in the treatment of all abused or neglected children.
But if the idea is simple, it is a vastly more complex challenge to tease out and treat the effects of violence and indifference on a child. The virulence and duration of a child’s exposure to abuse matter -- and vary widely from one case to another. And so, apparently, does the nature of the mistreatment. Neglect, while frequently lumped with abuse, may leave fewer physical scars but deeper psychological hurt than some hitting. It was long believed that a youngster would not be harmed by witnessing the abuse of another in his home. Now, researchers suspect that the resulting fear is psychologically as corrosive as direct abuse of the child. And while sexual abuse may still be the most shocking form of mistreatment, many clinicians are beginning to believe that emotional abuse -- constant criticism and berating -- wreaks the greatest damage in the long term.
Beyond that, the temperament a child starts life with matters greatly -- whether she is irritable or easygoing will affect not only how well she copes with adversity, but how a parent will respond to her and whether the two will form an early bond. And along the path of her childhood, the serendipitous appearance of an adult “buffer” -- a stepparent, teacher or coach -- can spell a world of difference in the life of an abused or neglected child.
“There is no magic pill,” says L. Alan Sroufe, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. Resilience, Sroufe notes, “is not just something you have or don’t have; it’s a developmental construction.”
In other words, resilience does not simply happen to some kids and not to others. It evolves in some kids, given the right circumstances, and it can atrophy in those who get no emotional support from inside or outside their family, says Sroufe. “There are no good seeds or bad seeds. There’s virtually no child who, with enough help, doesn’t do OK, and no child who, if enough is going against them, doesn’t struggle.”
Steven Wolin, a Washington D.C., psychiatrist, calls resilience a potential which is present in every child. “It’s like having biceps -- muscles with potential. How they develop depends on how much and how you use them.”
Removed from home
Although his youth was punctuated by terrible pain and loss, some circumstances did smile on Rasheen Coleman, and the little boy’s sweet nature seemed to help draw sympathetic adults to him.
When he was 10, the state of Texas removed Coleman and his half-siblings from his mother’s home and, after bouncing briefly from orphanage to foster family, they landed in Omaha, Neb., with his aunt, a hard-working mother of three. There, he became involved in the South Omaha Boys Club (now the Boys & Girls Club), and met a series of staff counselors whose attention, he says, made him feel special and built his self-confidence. If he did not show up at the club when he was expected, a counselor named Ruth Hamlin would venture into the public housing complex he lived in with his aunt and collect him -- a gesture of commitment to him at which Coleman still marvels more than a decade later.
Although he was not athletic (“I realized later that fast-moving things around me made me feel nervous,” he recounts now), counselors drew him into community service projects, which had a profound effect on him. “I felt like, ‘I can do this,’ ” says Coleman. “This shy, withdrawn person who really didn’t feel like I wanted to live: I had this sense of usefulness, a sense of worth, a sense that I belonged.”
He attended Creighton Preparatory High School, a Catholic school where, he remembers, a teacher named Tom Hoover once told him, “Rasheen, you’re a leader -- a quiet leader, but sometimes, that’s just what’s needed.”
Coleman went on to be named the Boys & Girls Club of America’s Youth of the Year in 1997 -- an honor that involved speaking often and publicly about his painful past. The recognition also landed him in the Oval Office for a brief chat with President Bill Clinton. In 2001, Coleman graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the nation’s leading traditionally black colleges.
But lucky breaks late in adolescence clearly are not enough. If there is one point on which most researchers agree, it is that the cornerstone of a child’s resilience is his first loving bond to an adult.
“The best resilience predictor for a child is a caring relationship with one adult, hopefully a parent,” says Patricia Van Horn of UC San Francisco’s Child Trauma Research Project. “The more relations like that, the better. But children who have at least one do better than those who don’t.”
The UCSF project, housed at San Francisco General Hospital, traditionally has treated children who have watched as their primary caregiver, usually the mother, were abused by a partner. In many cases, the child herself also was abused or neglected, compounding the trauma. In an effort to fortify the traumatized child, Van Horn and her colleagues first must try to repair a relationship between that child and her mother (or whoever cares for her), which has been roiled by the domestic violence. The battered parent and child often see each other as reminders of the traumatic event, which disrupts communication, trust and affection. If the child is to lay down the first building blocks of healthy relationships later, the tears in the fabric of this first relationship must be mended.
In the literature of child development, the first attachment a baby makes -- most often, though not necessarily, with her mother -- forms the basis and shapes the terms of most all future relationships. If this first give-and-take is a good partnership, a child learns about how to get his needs fulfilled and how to control his impulses. He will build the capacity to see adults as reliable and trustworthy, and so, even if the first relationship disappears or disintegrates, he should be able to reach out positively for comfort and support if another adult steps forward.
The pivotal importance of that first bond is underscored by the work of Sroufe and his research partner Byron Egeland, both at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Development. Twenty-six years ago, the two started tracking 267 children, all from families with low income and education, at birth. From family members, teachers and the children, the research team took periodic psychological soundings, including a battery of visits and observations in the first three years.
Sroufe and Egeland concluded that 15% of their research subjects had been abused or neglected. Among those infants growing up with a “psychologically unavailable” caregiver (children who also were, in some cases, abused or neglected), not one was deemed to have developed a “secure attachment” to that caregiver at the ages of 12 months and 18 months. By the age of 17, only four of the mistreated kids Egeland and Sroufe were following were judged to be completely free of symptoms that amounted to mental illness. In all four cases, a firm bond with a parent had been recorded at an early age.
Egeland surmises that this early experience of trust probably makes a difference at a critical juncture: When a caring adult reaches out to support a mistreated child later in his school-age years, the child who had some early experience of an adult as reliable and trustworthy was able, socially and psychologically, to grab the lifeline. Children without that foundation may have rebuffed or failed to recognize such overtures, and never found what Coleman said he found in the staff of the Boys & Girls Club: “a second home and a second family.”
A respite with ‘Big Ma’
Indeed, in Coleman’s case, the early signs were promising, as well.
When Coleman was 6 months old, his drug-addicted mother willingly handed him over to the stern, God-fearing matriarch of her family, whom he came to know and love as “Big Ma.” For the next five years, Rasheen has happy memories of a childhood in Bertha Moore’s prodigious shadow. Growing up in Mobile, Ala., he remembers singing in the church choir, sitting with the adults right behind his great-grandmother. He remembers being the one to carry her cookies to all the church functions. She was strict, he says, but fair and loving. “The person I am today was because of her.”
When Rasheen was 6, he heard a banging at the door and a hollering he knew was his mother’s voice. She snatched the boy up from in front of his cartoon and drove with him and a half-sister and brother he had never met from Alabama to Dallas. A stepfather passed briefly through his life, bringing a measure of protection and companionship. But he abandoned Rasheen, under a rain of his mother’s blows as well.
This four-year ordeal of neglect, abuse and loss has not been without consequences for Coleman. He acknowledges that he is extremely reserved about his emotions and has found it hard to sustain a close romantic relationship with a woman -- problems that UCSF’s Van Horn says are a classic fallout from abuse involving a parent.
“Just relating to women, I find it very difficult. Not having that love and affection from my mom or my dad has been difficult,” says Coleman now, who says he draws his greatest strength from his Pentecostal Christian faith. “I just have to grow and mature. I won’t use it as an excuse.... I have to decide I want to be a great husband, a great father.”
Now finishing his master’s at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Coleman hopes to marry a woman who is his mother’s opposite -- and his own complement. Not explosive. But also not too shy, like he is himself.
And would he ever hit or berate the wife and two children (first a boy, then a girl) that are the family of his dreams?
Here, Coleman relies on the happy confluence of the many factors that have made his life so far a triumph against bad odds. He has faced the pain and loss, often and openly. And Coleman acquired a gift for empathy.
“I don’t think I would ever do to my kids, or to my wife, what my mother did to me,” says Coleman quietly. “I just know how it felt -- and I would never want anyone to feel like that, especially my kids.”
