Impact of Traumatic Childhood Memories on Personality Development

Background

Task:

It is important to note that the memories play an important role in shaping the personality of the individual and it is indeed a huge driving factor or a barrier in the development of one’s other experiences of life. Childhood trauma plays part in improving and shaping of individual’s personality (Cook, 2018). Thus, new issues are raised when one tries to understand the influencing human experiences in the development of the person and the personality shaping and the memory formation and as he or she, as a child and then an adult pass through the stages of the psychosocial development (Anand et al., 2014). Eric Erikson’s theory says the memories that are acquired over a period of time in the form of an autobiographical or an semantic memory takes desired or positive form thus helping the development of the personality of the human in the positive way and adding of the positive attributes. Adversely, this can cause also be leading to personality disorders and the complications in many different ways (Knight, 2017).

Another very important and extremely cardinal factor is the phenomenon of the mental defenses to the processes of memory consolidation or forgetting or transfer of the traumatic memory from the conscious to the unconscious followed by the surfacing of the traumatic memory from the unconscious to the conscious after many years resulting in personality disorders such as dependent, attachment and borderline personality disorders in addition to the various complications related to the psychosocial behaviors of the individuals leading to the negative coping with smoking, alcohol and other drugs intake which is personally, socially, biologically and psychologically very disruptive (Walter & Bates, 2012). There are many instances when the traumatic memories have been partially deactivated or it is completely active throughout one’s developmental years (Charak et al., 2019). As this is a very poorly researched area, the topic of the research is chosen to be ‘Impact of traumatic childhood memories on the development of personality of the individual’.

The search terms that will be used to perform the literature review and to find the gaps in the existing scientific literature done within the similar areas of interest will be ‘impact’ ‘influence of’ ‘false memories’ ‘traumatic memories of childhood’ ‘on the personality’ ‘personality’ ‘of adult’ ‘personality disorders’ ‘trauma’, ‘childhood trauma’.

The research questions that concerns the area and subject of this chosen research are as follows

1.What is the impact of experience on the memory of an individual?  
2.What is the impact of the memory on the behavioral and personality development of individual?
3.What is the impact of the traumatic childhood memories on shaping of personality traits of the individual?
Milestone 2 - Research Question, Hypothesis, and Annotated Bibliography

The research questions as a matter of fact focuses to understand three critical aspects of how memory, experience and the personality of an individual is attached and also very interlinked with each other. This play an important role in the development of all the individuals. The research questions focus to understand the impact of the experiences on the memory of the individual and how the memories that are formed as a result of experience impact cognitive and the social development, thus leading to the changes in aspects and the traits of the personality. The research question focusses to understand the development of the personality from early, middle and the later childhood to adulthood. The specific traumatic memories in personality development are studied. These are the memories related to the traumatic experience of physical, sexual or various types of deep emotional experiences due to loss, detachment from parent or loved one and also due to various types of social issues of stigmatization and bullying in schools that are most powerful stimulators in the chaperoning of the personality types and the behaviors so as a result of defense mechanism or due to the overcoming of the negative childhood experiences, leading to more strengthening of one’s self development against it, in a positive way. On the other hand, the research question also takes into consideration the fact that maladaptive behaviors in the adulthood is chiefly due to the non -overcoming of the various types of the traumatic memories, thus resulting in attachment and dependent personality as well in borderline and bipolar personality conditions.

The research hypotheses are as follows -

H1 There is a positive impact of the traumatic childhood memories on the development of negative personality traits of the individual
H0 There is no relation between traumatic memories and development of negative personality traits and personality disorders