Marija Cicek
University Hospital Rebro
Croatia

Traumatised fathers and adolescents

Padres y adolescentes traumatizados

War veterans, suffering from PTSP, do not fit into the roles of caring, lovable, long expected fathers and husbands. Their return from the frontline back to family life demands many adaptation abilities from all family members, in order to reconstruct family homeostasis.

Engaged with their own anxiety and disappointment, wives and mothers mostly do not have capacities to deal with new negative emotional experiences caused by their husbands' either "distant" or "aggressive" behavior. They do not have capacities for the needs of their adolescent children either.

Exposed to intensive "family anxiety" and powerless parents, adolescents often have problems in reaccepting their fathers. Since the main task of the adolescence period is successful termination of individuation and separation, the process of identity development is seriously endangered. Some basic positive, supportive and stimulative parental messages are missing in order to encourage adolescents' emotional autonomy. Fathers and their adolescents do not recognise positive aspects of their personalities, but mutual guilt, which could escalate to unbearable dimensions and could lead to suicide. The centrality of the father figure and constant need for the idealized father is evident even if the father is not necessarily positive.

A father is an integral part of an adolescent's inner picture of the family, even if he has suicidal tendencies and is suffering from PTSD. This is why adolescents from these families are exposed to extreme risk factors, especially during the self-crises period of the late adolescence. In the paper authors will discuss problems of vulnerability of adolescents whose fathers suffer from PTSP, based upon case studies, analyses of clinical practice, and results of some empirical research.