Living in the KiD-house can be understood as a time of reconsidering, a time of pause and yet of becoming. It comes along with agonizing memories of past events, with confronting and reviving painful emotions. But it is also a time of relief and empowerment that activates hidden powers and new possibilities in life.

Knowing the pattern of the crisis sharpens the view for this transition phase. Professionals, the family and the affected child look for strategies how to master not only the current crisis but also their future lives – and how to start healing.

Working with maltreated children

The syndrome of neglect and deprivation as well as psychological, physical and sexual abuse includes forms of violence which hurt the children’s souls and threaten their psychological and physical integrity.

The course of the children’s development is interrupted most dangerously when the experience of violence is continuous and becomes an integral element of daily life and growing up.

Threatened in their need for safety, control and development the children begin to focus their powers on surviving, by adapting, by trying to control their fears and by protecting themselves the best they can.

Adapting to threatening situations, to the violent personality and dysfunctional reactions of the (biological or social) parents the child develops defense mechanisms which provide short-term relief and a certain control. But in the long run these defenses often result in dysfunction and destructiveness toward oneself and others.

These defense strategies often include strange or worrying behaviors that must be understood as signals of distress to the outside world.

The children´s cognitive, emotional and behavioral distortions reflect their experiences of victimization and conflict as well as the best coping strategies that the children could find under difficult and changing outer and inner conditions.

Entering the world of traumatized children is necessary in order to initiate processes of healing. It is essential that these troubled children feel understood in their pain as well as in their ambivalence and attachment towards the perpetrators. To interrupt the fatal cycle of abuse and violence it is necessary to accompany and guide the children through their pain, confusion and helplessness, helping them to decode the meaning of their experiences. Otherwise they will make the violence that hurt them their own - and eventually hurt others.

Especially children who were exposed to massive sexualized violence at an early age, turn emotional states into their opposite: pain becomes pleasure or sexual arousal – often laying the basis for a sexual perversion.

In psychoanalysis this process is called reaction formation. The pain of victimization is denied and numbed but eventually a need to cause pain in others or to punish oneself may develop.
Clinical experience and scientific research show that prolonged suffering and victimization may develop into active destructiveness – into aggression against others as well as auto aggression.

The attempt of the child to avoid pain by denial and reaction formation may provide short term relief. But it puts the child at risk of developing chronic behavioral patterns of victimizing others. The cycle of abuse is complete. We need to interrupt the cycle with its fatal consequences for individuals and society at the earliest possible time.
KiD attempts to do this with adequate diagnostic attention and therapeutical treatment. Preventing victims to become abusers is prevention in its best sense.