Hoover

Child Abuse and Mental Health: Toward an Understanding of the Moderating Effects of Religious and Spiritual Coping

Stanley C. Hoover

Abstract

Research on the ability of religious coping to moderate the development of posttraumatic symptoms following childhood abuse have yielded inconsistent findings and been limited to adult retrospective analyses. This theoretical study reviews literature related to the impact of childhood abuse on faith and the moderating effects of religious coping following experiences of childhood abuse. It then considers religious coping from the perspective of attachment theory and emphasizes the importance of secure attachment relationships as an integral part of effective religious coping. Compensation and correspondence hypotheses offer rationale for this emphasis. Finally, an empirical study is proposed to examine the interaction between religious coping and posttraumatic symptoms in children and adolescents who have suffered abuse. It is expected that positive religious coping will associate with fewer posttraumatic symptoms.

Keywords: religious coping, spirituality, childhood abuse, trauma, attachment theory