Humans need relationships and connections to survive and thrive. After all, we are social creatures. When one human victimizes another, that betrayal can leave survivors feeling alienated—disconnected and unmoored from themselves and other people. In turn, alienation has been linked to more psychological distress, including depression and posttraumatic symptom severity, for example.
What’s been striking to me as a researcher and clinical psychologist is how consistent this alienation-distress pattern has been across different studies and samples, from adolescents to adults. And these alienation-distress links cannot be explained away as a lack of social support.
Yet we still don’t know much about post-traumatic alienation among older adults. Of course, there’s a lot we don’t know about traumatic stress in older adults, as there has been relatively less research in this developmental period than others. But older adulthood is already a time when social networks and relationships are changing, making it especially important to understand whether alienation is linked with distress—and whether that can be better explained by a lack of social support.
My colleagues and I set out to address these issues in a study published recently in the Journal of Traumatic Stress.
Alienation-Symptom Links in a Sample of Older Adults
We examined alienation and posttraumatic stress symptom severity in a larger study of trauma in older adults. Thanks to a community-university collaboration, we recruited a convenience sample of 99 older adults (aged 60+) through social service and community agencies for the Study of Older Adult Resources and Stress (SOARS).
When we interviewed older adults, we asked them about interpersonal traumas before age 60 (such as child abuse, sexual assault, and domestic violence) as well as maltreatment and exploitation since age 60. We also asked them about posttraumatic appraisals, such as fear and alienation, as well as posttraumatic stress symptoms and social support.
Not surprisingly, interpersonal trauma was common in the lives of the older adults we interviewed. About 70 percent of those interviewed reported one or more interpersonal traumas before the age of 60. A majority of participants reported being maltreated since age 60, with emotional abuse being the most common form of maltreatment. Another 40 percent of those interviewed disclosed financial exploitation since age 60.
Turning to links between alienation and mental health, we found that greater posttraumatic alienation was linked with greater posttraumatic stress symptom severity, even when controlling for trauma histories, fear, and social support. Greater fear and less support were also linked with symptom severity, consistent with other findings in the traumatic stress literature.
Take-Aways: What This Tells Us About Trauma in Older Adults
Maltreatment and financial exploitation are terribly common among older adults in the U.S.—a reality that was revealed in this community sample. Whether earlier in life or since age 60, a majority of the people we recruited from the community for a study on stress reported trauma histories.
In the wake of lifetime and more recent maltreatment, feelings of alienation are linked to greater posttraumatic stress symptom severity. That pattern is in line with studies in other developmental periods, emphasizing the importance of recognizing alienation as part of the harm of interpersonal trauma. Indeed, these findings point to the relational consequences of trauma among older adults—and the importance of connection to healing.
