Exploring paranormal beliefs in subjects with a history of trauma, abuse, and/or neglect.

If you grew up like I did, moving from place to place, even country to country, you know what instability feels like. If you grew up ignored, abused, or traumatized by dysfunctional parents, you know what fear feels like: fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment, fear of disease, death, bullying, and a general sense that you are not safe. If you do not feel safe anywhere, and especially if this sense was accompanied by extraordinary experiences, this post is for you.

There are many respectable (read: university-research based) articles published on the relationship of “paranormal beliefs” and a childhood history of trauma. This is an enormously complex topic, one that requires multiple posts to simply introduce the concept. I have included the abstract of one such article at the end of this post, which claims that a belief in witchcraft is strongly correlated to a history of abuse. Their take on this correlation has to do with the need to control one’s environment, and the occult arts promise a level of mastery over one’s environment via spells, rituals, and occult practices.

Trauma in childhood manifests in various ways. I, for one, never found witchcraft to be appealing, in spite of a difficult upbringing where I was more often than not, left to my own devices. There are other theories: a belief in the paranormal comes from the ability to dissociate and disconnect from one’s violent or upsetting reality, creating the necessary conditions for an alteration of consciousness conducive to tuning into other worlds. Yet, dissociation is often treated like a symptom of mental illness rather than a tool to connect with other worlds. The default, academic assumption is that those alternate realities do not exist independently of our chaotic mental processes. Yes, some people dissociate due to mental illness; however, others discover that this power to leave the current reality leads to other realms of existence. We can argue about the objective reality of those experiences, or we can accept that some level of dissociation is necessary to enter these alternate realities.

Other academic approaches center on the idea of escape, of leaving one’s normal awareness behind to “run away” to other dimensions. I have never felt that I can “escape” to other worlds at will; maybe others can, but what is lacking in these articles are interviews with the experiencers themselves, to see how they understand their relationship to the paranormal. Without their words and input, the theories remain theories, based on surveys and not in-depth discussions. Materialism, clearly, continues to dominate our understanding of reality; there is (still) no room for any epistemology that allows for non-material experiences. The bias is to see experiencers of the paranormal as deluded, mentally ill, or psychologically unstable. I have yet to see research that takes their perceptions seriously.

I take most peoples’ experiences with the paranormal quite seriously, and the majority of us are not suffering from delusions or mental illness. I believe that a history of abuse, neglect, and traumatic experiences predisposes one to notice what others usually miss. When you learn how to “read the room” in any situation, you become acutely attuned to subtleties of gesture, expression, body language, tone, inflection, and energy. This intense attention to detail, to taking in the entirety of a situation, allows us to perceive the possibility of danger or distress far sooner than anyone else would. We grew up in worlds where negative emotions could and did explode into violence, where tense words could lead to abuse and manipulation, and where disagreement might lead to punishment.

When you develop the skill of reading others’ energy, you don’t shut off that skill when you are alone. Your antennae are always up and actively searching out signals. This is why, for example, I can walk into a house and know immediately that something terrible happened there, or know that a non-material person is standing near me, or pick up messages from the departed. If you become exquisitely sensitive to signals, to energy, to subtle vibrations in your environment, you learn that you are not limited to the material world. All the worlds become accessible.

I do not believe that I am deluded, nor mentally unstable, nor “predisposed” to fantasy or irrational desires for personal control. However, if your philosophy doesn’t allow for any reality that the one you can perceive with five senses, then the perception of alternate realities becomes a symptom of an ill mind. The paranormal will never find academic respect as long as we interpret its perception and experience as a result of psychological imbalance or a projection of unmet needs.

I long ago understood that there was little point in relating my paranormal experiences, as nothing would convince a skeptic or a committed materialist that my stories were objectively true. Extraordinary experiences become simple entertainment or fodder for arguments and fruitless debates on the nature of reality. One recent example of this was the nighttime torture of being kicked, pinched, awakened, and generally not allowed to sleep. My husband blamed me. However, I was awake when he bolted upright, insisting that I had pinched or kicked him. He heard three knocks at the bedroom door when I was upstairs. Something whispered in his ear when I was out of the house. However, to admit that something paranormal is happening to us is impossible if you refuse to take such experiences at face value: it had to have a “rational” explanation. These events must have had a logical, objective cause. Otherwise, we are in that fuzzy territory of the unexplained and the impossible.

The issue of the nighttime “attacks” was resolved by moving downstairs. We simply do not discuss it. This is the usual fate of paranormal experiences; they are either attributed to one’s fragile psychological state, or they are ignored as not worthy of serious study.

Is it true that many of us were raised in a state of fear and insecurity? Is it true that we lived through chaos and learned to pay close attention to details that most don’t perceive? Yes, it seems that we share certain characteristics. We often don’t feel safe and struggle with grief and tragedy. Instead of concluding from this that we are irrational and disconnected from reality, perhaps the truth is the opposite: we have seen the worst of human nature, and we are therefore highly sensitized to energetic frequencies and hidden worlds. We perceive more because there is more to perceive. We are more connected and more rational than those who see only a fraction of the multiple dimensions that form the matrix of our reality.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

Childhood physical abuse and differential development of paranormal belief systems

Stefanie L Perkins ¹, Rhiannon Allen

Affiliations Expand

• PMID: 16699384
• DOI: 10.1097/01.nmd.0000217832.85665.c5

This study compared paranormal belief systems in individuals with and without childhood physical abuse histories. The Revised Paranormal Belief Scale and the Assessing Environments III Questionnaire were completed by 107 University students. Psi, precognition, and spiritualism, which are thought to provide a sense of personal efficacy and control, were among the most strongly held beliefs in abused subjects, and were significantly higher in abused versus nonabused subjects. Superstition and extraordinary life forms, thought to have an inverse or no relation to felt control, were the least strongly held beliefs in abused subjects, and, along with religious beliefs, did not differ between the two abuse groups. Witchcraft was unexpectedly found to be the most strongly held belief among those with abuse histories. Results suggest that by providing a sense of control, certain paranormal beliefs may offer a powerful emotional refuge to individuals who endured the stress of physical abuse in childhood.