The Family Role You Still Perform: Hero, Caretaker, Scapegoat, Lost Child, or Mediator

Narcissistic Abuse • May 04, 2026

The hum of midnight traffic outside her apartment window was a distant murmur, but inside, Sloane’s chest tightened as she sat alone in the dim glow of her laptop screen.

The day’s meetings, negotiations, and presentations had left her drained, yet a persistent voice in her mind whispered that she still hadn’t done enough—not professionally, not emotionally, not as a mother.

She caught herself scrolling through old family photos on her phone, the faces smiling back at her from years ago, before she became the senior engineer, the mother, the woman who “fixed things.” There, in the quiet, the familiar ache of trying to hold everything together stirred again.

She was still performing the family role she had outgrown long ago, but one that never truly left her.

Understanding Family Roles in Adulthood: A Clinical Definition

Family roles are patterns of behavior and identity that we adopt within our family system, often unconsciously, to maintain relational balance or protect ourselves and others. These roles—commonly identified as the Hero, Caretaker, Scapegoat, Lost Child, or Mediator—serve as emotional survival strategies that children develop in response to family dynamics. In adulthood, these roles can persist, shaping how we see ourselves, relate to others, and navigate stress or conflict.

Clinically, these roles reflect complex interactions between attachment needs, nervous system regulation, and relational survival. They are not merely personality traits but embodied patterns deeply rooted in early relational experiences and procedural memory—the body’s implicit knowledge of how to act to maintain safety within the family system.

The Nervous System and Family Roles: Attachment and Survival Strategies

Our nervous system is wired to detect threat and maintain safety. In families marked by emotional neglect, inconsistency, or trauma, children often adapt by activating survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These responses are not just momentary reactions but become patterned ways of being that organize identity and relational expectations over time.

Attachment theory, pioneered by John Bowlby, MD, and expanded by Mary Ainsworth, PhD, reveals how early interactions with caregivers shape our internal working models of safety and connection. When relational safety is compromised, children may unconsciously adopt roles that soothe the autonomic arousal triggered by threat.

For example, the Hero role often emerges from a need to restore order and gain approval, calming the family’s distress by excelling and achieving. The Caretaker fawns to manage conflict and care for others at the expense of their own needs. The Scapegoat fights or rebels, drawing attention away from deeper wounds.

The Lost Child freezes or withdraws, minimizing presence to avoid conflict. The Mediator acts to balance opposing forces, striving for harmony.

These roles become somatic memories—held in posture, breath, and muscle tension—and procedural memories, guiding behavior without conscious awareness. The ongoing activation of these roles in adulthood can trigger shame, grief, and identity confusion, especially when the original family system no longer exists or has changed.

Composite Client Vignette: Sloane, Senior Engineer and Caretaker

Sloane is a senior engineer and mother of two, married to a supportive partner. Yet, despite professional success, she finds herself exhausted by the unrelenting need to “fix” things at work and home. She often feels invisible in her marriage, overburdened by her mother’s health issues, and haunted by a relentless inner critic that echoes her childhood role as the family Caretaker.

In therapy, Sloane identifies the ways she learned early to manage her family’s emotional crises, always stepping in to soothe and hold others together. Her nervous system, shaped by chronic autonomic arousal in response to parental conflict and neglect, still shifts into hypervigilance and fawning behaviors. She struggles to set boundaries, fearing abandonment or chaos if she stops performing her role.

Her story echoes clinical research on parentification, the process by which children take on adult responsibilities prematurely, often leading to complex trauma symptoms in adulthood [Hendricks et al., 2021][1]. Sloane’s Caretaker role is both a survival skill and a source of exhaustion and disconnection from her own needs.

Composite Client Vignette: Juliette, Attorney and Scapegoat

Juliette is an equity partner at a law firm, known for her fiery courtroom presence and unyielding drive. Beneath her formidable exterior lies a deep-seated pain rooted in her role as the family Scapegoat. As a child, she absorbed blame for family dysfunction, scapegoated to divert attention from parental failures and sibling conflicts.

Her nervous system’s fight response was honed early, fueling her assertiveness and perfectionism but also leaving her vulnerable to shame and relational isolation. Juliette’s internal world is marked by a persistent narrative of unworthiness and fear of rejection, common among adults who carry the emotional legacy of scapegoating [Felitti et al., 1998][2].

In therapy, Juliette is learning to recognize the adaptive purpose of her role while gently challenging the internalized beliefs that keep her trapped in cycles of conflict and self-criticism.

The Systemic Lens: Understanding Family Roles Within the Family System

Salvador Minuchin, MD, a pioneer of structural family therapy, emphasized that family roles cannot be understood in isolation from the family system. Roles serve to maintain homeostasis—keeping the family “functional” even if that function involves dysfunction.

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, MD, introduced contextual family therapy, highlighting the importance of relational ethics and balancing fairness and loyalty across generations. Family roles often involve implicit contracts and unspoken expectations that bind members in complex relational patterns.

For example, the Mediator role exists to reduce family tension, but this often comes at the cost of internalizing others’ distress and silencing one’s own voice. The Lost Child’s withdrawal maintains stability by minimizing conflict, but also risks invisibility and loneliness.

Recognizing these roles in adulthood invites a systemic lens: How do these patterns serve the family system? How do they limit individual growth? And how can we reimagine relationships to allow authentic expression beyond these roles?

Both/And: Embracing the Complexity of Family Roles

Family roles are neither inherently good nor bad. They are both protective and limiting, adaptive and constraining. Healing involves holding the “both/and” truth: honoring the survival strategies that once kept us safe while acknowledging the cost to our authentic selves.

For example, Sloane’s Caretaker role has been a source of strength and resilience, but it also obscures her own needs and boundaries. Juliette’s Scapegoat role propelled her professional success but at the cost of chronic shame and relational rupture.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, in The Body Keeps the Score, reminds us that trauma recovery is about reclaiming agency over these implicit roles, integrating body and mind, and creating new relational patterns that foster safety and authenticity.

Practical Healing and Recovery Map: Fixing the Foundations

Healing from entrenched family roles requires a phased, trauma-informed approach. The Fixing the Foundations program offers a clinically grounded pathway, informed by attachment theory, neurobiology, and relational psychology.

1. Safety and Stabilization: Develop somatic awareness and nervous system regulation to reduce autonomic arousal and create a felt sense of safety. Practices may include mindfulness, grounding exercises, and therapeutic support to interrupt automatic role enactments.
2. Your Relational Blueprint: Identify and map your family roles and attachment patterns. Recognize how these roles shaped your identity and relational expectations.
3. Attachment and the Nervous System: Work with the body’s implicit memories and nervous system responses. Therapies such as Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Ogden & Fisher) can support re-regulation and integration.
4. Grief and Mourning: Acknowledge the loss of the family system as it was, and mourn unmet needs and ruptured attachments.
5. Cognitive and Emotional Restructuring: Challenge internalized beliefs tied to family roles, such as “I must always fix,” “I am to blame,” or “I must disappear to be safe.”
6. Relational Skill-Building: Practice new communication and boundary-setting skills, build relational safety with trusted others, and explore authentic self-expression.
7. Integration and Forward: Create a coherent self-narrative that encompasses both past survival and present growth, allowing for more flexible identity and relational patterns.

This map is not linear; it invites compassionate pacing and iterative healing. Professional support is essential, especially when trauma or complex attachment wounds are involved.

The Nervous System’s Lingering Echo: Why Family Roles Feel So Ingrained

For ambitious, driven women like Sloane, Juliette, Anika, and Farah, the persistence of childhood family roles is not merely a matter of psychological habit—it is a lived, somatic reality encoded deep within the nervous system. These roles are embodied survival strategies, shaped by early relational environments that wired their autonomic nervous systems (ANS) to respond to ongoing stress or threat.

The autonomic nervous system, composed of the sympathetic (“fight or flight”) and parasympathetic (“rest and digest”) branches, orchestrates our physiological responses to perceived safety or danger.

When a child grows up in a family where emotional needs were unpredictable, inconsistent, or overshadowed by conflict, their nervous system becomes finely attuned to cues that signal threat or abandonment.

This attunement is not just cognitive but visceral: muscle tension, breath patterns, heart rate variability, and even hormonal cascades respond automatically to family dynamics.

For instance, the Hero role often arises from a nervous system that craves safety through control and excellence. Sloane’s body learned early that being competent and responsible quelled parental anxiety and reduced unpredictable chaos. Each achievement quieted the internal alarm system, providing a fleeting sense of safety. Yet this reliance on control can become a chronic state of hyperarousal or sympathetic dominance, exhausting the body and mind.

Conversely, the Lost Child’s nervous system might default to parasympathetic shutdown or freeze responses, as seen with Anika, a marketing executive who learned to become invisible to avoid familial conflict.

Her breath slows, her posture shrinks, and her voice softens—not out of shyness alone, but as an autonomic strategy to avoid triggering conflict or neglect. Over time, this freeze response can calcify into emotional numbness or dissociation, making authentic connection in adulthood feel risky or unreachable.

The Scapegoat’s nervous system is often primed for fight, as with Juliette’s fiery courtroom presence. Her early experiences taught her that challenging others was the way to assert presence and protect herself from internalized blame. This fight response, while adaptive then, can now fuel chronic adrenaline surges, leading to burnout, strained relationships, and shame cycles.

Farah, who takes on the Mediator role in her family, has a nervous system that toggles rapidly between sympathetic activation and parasympathetic withdrawal. Her body is constantly scanning for relational ruptures to repair, which can feel like walking a tightrope between overwhelm and withdrawal.

The emotional labor of balancing opposing family members leaves her body in a chronic state of allostatic load—a wear and tear from persistent stress that can manifest as fatigue, anxiety, or somatic symptoms.

Understanding these autonomic underpinnings is vital. When we recognize family roles as nervous system strategies rather than immutable character flaws, we open the door to compassionate self-awareness and targeted healing interventions. This perspective invites women to listen deeply to their bodies, learning to identify when role-driven responses arise—not as failures but as echoes of early survival.

The Cultural and Systemic Context: When Roles Are Reinforced or Complicated by Society

The persistence of family roles into adulthood does not happen in a vacuum. Cultural expectations, societal norms, and systemic inequities often reinforce or complicate these roles, particularly for women navigating professional, relational, and caregiving domains.

For example, the Caretaker role aligns with culturally sanctioned narratives about women as natural nurturers and emotional laborers. Sloane’s experience of feeling responsible for “fixing” others’ problems is amplified by workplace dynamics that reward competence while undervaluing vulnerability or boundary-setting. The invisible labor of emotional caretaking—at home and at work—often goes unrecognized and unrewarded, layering exhaustion with invisibility.

Similarly, the Hero role can be intensified by cultural pressures toward perfectionism, achievement, and self-sacrifice. Juliette’s relentless drive in the legal field is both a response to her Scapegoat past and a navigation of a professional culture that demands toughness and competitive edge. Yet this can exacerbate internal conflict, as the external role clashes with internal feelings of unworthiness and isolation.

The Lost Child’s withdrawal is often misunderstood in cultural contexts that valorize extroversion, assertiveness, and visibility. Anika’s quiet presence may be mistaken for disengagement or lack of ambition, rather than a nervous system’s protective strategy. This can lead to misunderstandings, underestimation, and further internalized shame.

Mediators like Farah often shoulder the burden of emotional diplomacy in families and workplaces, a role culturally linked to women’s expected relational labor. This can create patterns of over-functioning and self-neglect, particularly when systemic inequalities limit access to support or respite.

Recognizing these cultural layers is crucial. Healing family roles involves not only personal insight but also navigating and challenging broader social narratives that shape identity and relational expectations. For ambitious women, this means learning to differentiate between authentic self-expression and roles imposed or reinforced by societal conditioning.

Practices for Repair: Rewiring the Nervous System and Reclaiming Authenticity

Healing from entrenched family roles requires a multi-dimensional approach that honors the body’s wisdom, the mind’s narratives, and the relational context. Here are clinically informed practices that can support this work:

Cultivating Somatic Awareness and Regulation

A foundational step is learning to recognize when the nervous system is activating an old family role. This begins with body-based mindfulness—attuning to bodily sensations, breath patterns, posture, and muscle tension that signal role enactment.

For example, Sloane might notice the tightening in her chest and shoulders as an early sign of slipping into the Caretaker role. With gentle curiosity, she can invite her breath to deepen, soften her muscles, and create space to choose a different response.

Tools such as paced breathing, grounding exercises (feeling the feet on the floor, noticing textures around you), and movement (stretching, yoga, or walking) help downregulate the sympathetic nervous system and shift toward parasympathetic activation.

Naming and Mapping Roles

Explicitly identifying the family role(s) one performs creates psychological distance and choice. Journaling or therapy can help articulate how the role originated, how it shows up in adult relationships, and what internal beliefs it carries.

Juliette, for example, might write about the ways her Scapegoat role shaped her self-criticism and conflict patterns, beginning to challenge the belief that she is inherently “to blame.”

Boundary Setting and Relational Experimentation

Practicing new relational behaviors is essential for integration. This can involve setting small, manageable boundaries with family or colleagues, such as declining to mediate every dispute or asking for help with caregiving tasks.

Anika might experiment with voicing a need in her relationship, noticing both the discomfort and the relief it brings. Farah could delegate some emotional labor to siblings, observing how family dynamics shift.

Grieving and Releasing

Healing also requires mourning the loss of the old family system—even if it was dysfunctional, it was familiar and provided a sense of identity. This grief allows space for new ways of relating and being.

Therapeutic modalities that incorporate grief work, such as narrative therapy or expressive arts therapy, can facilitate this process.

Building New Relational Patterns

Finally, cultivating relationships that support authenticity and safety is transformative. Whether through friendships, romantic partnerships, or therapeutic alliances, new relational experiences can provide corrective emotional experiences that rewrite implicit internal models.

Sloane’s journey might include deepening connection with a partner who values her boundaries and needs. Juliette might cultivate friendships where vulnerability is met with acceptance, not judgment.

The Nervous System’s Lingering Echo: Why Family Roles Feel So Ingrained

For ambitious, driven women like Sloane, Juliette, Anika, and Farah, the persistence of childhood family roles is not merely a matter of psychological habit—it is a lived, somatic reality encoded deep within the nervous system. These roles are embodied survival strategies, shaped by early relational environments that wired their autonomic nervous systems (ANS) to respond to ongoing stress or threat.

The autonomic nervous system, composed of the sympathetic (“fight or flight”) and parasympathetic (“rest and digest”) branches, orchestrates our physiological responses to perceived safety or danger.

When a child grows up in a family where emotional needs were unpredictable, inconsistent, or overshadowed by conflict, their nervous system becomes finely attuned to cues that signal threat or abandonment.

This attunement is not just cognitive but visceral: muscle tension, breath patterns, heart rate variability, and even hormonal cascades respond automatically to family dynamics.

For instance, the Hero role often arises from a nervous system that craves safety through control and excellence. Sloane’s body learned early that being competent and responsible quelled parental anxiety and reduced unpredictable chaos. Each achievement quieted the internal alarm system, providing a fleeting sense of safety. Yet this reliance on control can become a chronic state of hyperarousal or sympathetic dominance, exhausting the body and mind.

Conversely, the Lost Child’s nervous system might default to parasympathetic shutdown or freeze responses, as seen with Anika, a marketing executive who learned to become invisible to avoid familial conflict.

Her breath slows, her posture shrinks, and her voice softens—not out of shyness alone, but as an autonomic strategy to avoid triggering conflict or neglect. Over time, this freeze response can calcify into emotional numbness or dissociation, making authentic connection in adulthood feel risky or unreachable.

The Scapegoat’s nervous system is often primed for fight, as with Juliette’s fiery courtroom presence. Her early experiences taught her that challenging others was the way to assert presence and protect herself from internalized blame. This fight response, while adaptive then, can now fuel chronic adrenaline surges, leading to burnout, strained relationships, and shame cycles.

Farah, who takes on the Mediator role in her family, has a nervous system that toggles rapidly between sympathetic activation and parasympathetic withdrawal. Her body is constantly scanning for relational ruptures to repair, which can feel like walking a tightrope between overwhelm and withdrawal.

The emotional labor of balancing opposing family members leaves her body in a chronic state of allostatic load—a wear and tear from persistent stress that can manifest as fatigue, anxiety, or somatic symptoms.

Understanding these autonomic underpinnings is vital. When we recognize family roles as nervous system strategies rather than immutable character flaws, we open the door to compassionate self-awareness and targeted healing interventions. This perspective invites women to listen deeply to their bodies, learning to identify when role-driven responses arise—not as failures but as echoes of early survival.

Composite Moments: Feeling the Role in the Body and Relationships

To illuminate how these family roles manifest in daily adult life, consider these richly textured vignettes drawn from composite clinical experiences.

Sloane’s Evening Unraveling: The Caretaker’s Tether to Exhaustion

After a long day of strategic meetings and project deadlines, Sloane arrives home to find the household in mild disarray: her partner is on a late work call, her youngest child is fussing, and a text pings from her mother, who is struggling with a health scare. Her chest tightens, her shoulders rise, and the familiar inner voice chides, “You’re the one who has to keep everything together.”

She moves into caretaker mode—checking on her child, texting back her mother with reassurances, and mentally recalibrating the family calendar to accommodate unexpected doctor visits. Though she’s physically tired, her nervous system is on high alert, activating the sympathetic branch to mobilize energy. Her breath is shallow, and her heart pounds softly under her blouse.

Sloane’s identity and nervous system are intertwined with this role: to soothe others’ distress is to keep internal alarms at bay. Yet this repeated activation comes at a cost—her own needs go unmet, and the cycle perpetuates feelings of invisibility and depletion.

Juliette’s Internal Fire: The Scapegoat’s Fight and Its Costs

Juliette strides into her office, her heels clicking with purpose. In court, her voice is commanding, her arguments sharp—a reflection of a nervous system primed for fight and defense. Yet beneath this fierce exterior, a familiar tension coils in her jaw and neck, a physical signature of her lifelong role as the family Scapegoat.

When a colleague questions her approach, Juliette’s breath shortens, and a flush rises to her cheeks. Her mind races to justify her actions, to prove she’s not the “problem” her family once labeled her. This fight response that once served to deflect blame now fuels cycles of overwork, isolation, and chronic irritability.

In intimate relationships, Juliette sometimes finds herself withdrawing, afraid that vulnerability will reopen old wounds of rejection. Her nervous system’s fight mode becomes an armor she struggles to lower, even when craving connection.

Anika’s Quiet Disappearance: The Lost Child’s Sedative Freeze

Anika sits at her desk, the hum of the open-plan office fading as she retreats into a quiet inner world. Her voice is soft during meetings; she avoids eye contact, preferring to listen rather than lead. This pattern mirrors her childhood role as the Lost Child—silently observing family tension, shrinking to avoid drawing attention or conflict.

Her breath is slow and shallow, her posture slightly stooped as if trying to disappear. At home, she finds it difficult to ask for help, fearing she will burden others or provoke disappointment. Her parasympathetic freeze response, once a protective refuge, now contributes to feelings of loneliness and invisibility.

Anika’s challenge is learning to reconnect with her body’s aliveness and claim space without guilt—a process requiring gentle nervous system recalibration and therapeutic holding.

Farah’s Balancing Act: The Mediator’s Nervous System on Edge

Farah’s day unfolds as a series of negotiations—between team members at work, between her partner and teenager at home, and, most persistently, between her own needs and the emotional demands of her family. Her body is a barometer of stress: shoulders tense, jaw clenched, breath irregular.

As the family Mediator, Farah’s nervous system is in constant flux, toggling between activation to manage conflict and withdrawal to avoid overwhelm. She often feels as if she is walking a tightrope, balancing opposing forces that threaten to pull her apart.

This allostatic load—chronic physiological wear and tear—manifests in headaches, digestive issues, and sleep disturbances. Farah’s healing journey involves cultivating somatic awareness and boundaries, learning to tolerate discomfort without over-responsibility, and reclaiming joy in her authentic self.

The Cultural and Systemic Context of Family Roles

It is important to situate family roles within broader systemic and cultural frameworks. For many ambitious women, roles like Hero or Caretaker may be valorized in professional and social contexts, reinforcing patterns that originated in childhood. Societal narratives about women’s responsibility for emotional labor, caretaking, and maintaining harmony can deepen the entrenchment of these roles.

Moreover, intersectional factors—such as race, socioeconomic status, and cultural expectations—shape how family roles are assigned, performed, and perceived. For example, Farah’s experience as a first-generation immigrant negotiating family expectations alongside career ambitions adds layers of complexity to her Mediator role.

Understanding these systemic dimensions helps women contextualize their roles not as personal failings but as adaptive responses within cultural scripts and family systems. This awareness can foster self-compassion and empower choices that honor both individual needs and cultural identity.

Repair Practices: Rewiring Nervous System Patterns and Reclaiming Self

Healing from the grip of family roles is a somatic and relational endeavor. For driven women balancing careers, family, and self-care, practical repair practices can start with small, accessible steps that foster nervous system regulation and boundary-setting.

1. Somatic Grounding and Body Awareness: Techniques such as mindful breathing, body scans, or gentle yoga invite the nervous system into a state of safety. Noticing where tension accumulates—whether in the shoulders for the Caretaker or the jaw for the Scapegoat—can become an entry point for releasing habitual contraction.

2. Naming and Witnessing Role Patterns: Journaling or therapeutic dialogue that identifies how and when old roles activate can increase conscious choice. For example, Anika might note how she physically withdraws during conflict, while Sloane tracks moments when she feels compelled to “fix” others.

3. Boundary Practice in Small Doses: Setting limits doesn’t require grand gestures. Saying “no” to an extra request at work, or pausing before responding to a family crisis, challenges automatic role enactments and builds new neural pathways.

4. Cultivating Relational Safety: Surrounding oneself with people who honor authentic expression—friends, partners, therapists—provides corrective relational experiences. Farah’s journey includes learning to share her needs without immediately stepping into mediator mode.

5. Rituals of Grief and Release: Mourning the loss of the “family role self” can be powerful. This might include writing unsent letters to family members or symbolic acts like burning role-related scripts to externalize and process grief.

6. Integration of New Narratives: Re-authoring one’s life story to include both survival and growth helps dissolve rigid identity constraints. Juliette, for instance, is learning to see her assertiveness as strength while welcoming vulnerability as a path to connection.

These repair practices align naturally with the Fixing the Foundations program’s phased approach, which supports nervous system regulation, relational attunement, and identity integration. For women like Sloane, Juliette, Anika, and Farah, this journey is deeply personal yet universal—a reclaiming of wholeness beyond the roles that once kept them safe but now limit their fullest expression.

Toward Fixing the Foundations: A Pathway Beyond Roles

Recognizing the enduring impact of family roles is the first critical step toward healing, but it is only the beginning. The Fixing the Foundations program offers a clinically rigorous, trauma-informed roadmap to move from survival to thriving. By addressing nervous system dysregulation, attachment wounds, and relational patterns, this approach empowers women to rewrite their internal scripts and create new ways of being that honor their authentic selves.

For driven women balancing multiple domains of life—work, marriage, parenting, finances—the work of fixing the foundations is both practical and profound. It asks: How can you cultivate an inner sense of safety that is not contingent on performing a role?

How can you engage with family and colleagues from a place of centered authenticity rather than automatic survival? How can you nurture your body’s wisdom to guide decisions that align with your values and well-being?

This work requires patience, compassion, and skilled support. Yet it also offers the promise of liberation: the freedom to step off the family role carousel and inhabit a life marked by choice, presence, and relational integrity. The journey from role to authentic self is not linear but is rich with discovery and healing—a deep repair of the foundations upon which lasting transformation is built.

[Continue to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)]

A Warm Communal Close

If you recognize yourself in one of these family roles, know that you are not alone. These roles were, and are, acts of love and survival—testaments to your resilience. Yet, they do not have to define the totality of who you are. Healing is a path of reclaiming your full self, with all its complexity and longing for connection.

In this journey, may you find gentle companions, safe spaces, and the courage to step beyond old patterns toward a life that feels truly yours. The work is tender and profound—worthy of your time, your heart, and your care.

If you feel called to explore this path more deeply, consider professional support, such as the Fixing the Foundations program, or reach out for therapy that honors your story and your nervous system’s wisdom. Together, we can reweave the threads of your relational blueprint toward freedom and belonging.

Related Reading and Research

• Hendricks BA, Vo JB, Dionne-Odom JN, Bakitas MA. Parentification Among Young Carers: A Concept Analysis. Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal. 2021. PMID: 38828384. DOI: 10.1007/s10591-010-9123-5.
• Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, Williamson DF, Spitz AM, Edwards V, et al. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 1998. PMID: 9635069. DOI: 10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8.
• Simon E, Raats M, Erens B. Neglecting the impact of childhood neglect: A scoping review of the relation between child neglect and emotion regulation in adulthood. Child Abuse & Neglect. 2024. PMID: 38733836. DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106802.
• Lahousen T, Unterrainer HF, Kapfhammer HP. Psychobiology of Attachment and Trauma—Some General Remarks From a Clinical Perspective. Frontiers in Psychiatry. 2019. PMID: 31849787. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00914.

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