First, the family would be charged a large fine for having one extra child. Second, if the first child has a serious disease or disability then the family could apply for permission to have a second child (Johnson, 2016, P4-14). In some regions, people whose first child was a girl would secretly send the girl away, or never report her birth to the Residence Verification Department. Consequently, girls could not stay with their parents nor receive a proper education—for they didn’t have a legal registered identification. Extreme cases were found in Shanxi Provence where girls were reported as mentally disabled so that the family could have a second child.
Fear is deeply rooted in every girl’s heart in China. Fear surrounded Chinese females of being sent away, abandoned, neglected, and not loved. A patient once told me “I shall behave better, grow up faster, take care of others and never ask for my own, all because I am a girl in China.” Inevitably, the girls who were sent to relatives or other families developed attachment trauma due to the escalating birth plan. Without identity, rights or acceptance, those girls had been erased from the moment they were born.
Van der Kolk (2014) suggested that trauma could be triggered which leads the individual to one of three moods: Fight, Flight and Shutting Down. In my clinical experiences, I witnessed many women hiding their strength in relationships. The greatest fear is that of breaking a relationship. The most frequent sentence is: “I am worried what others might think of me.” As a main emotion, fear is considered the most efficient tool to control a social system.
Fear and Relationships
With great fear plugging an individual’s mind, one turns to one of the three models in their relationship. First, a woman may contain anger towards another gender as she grows up. The unfairness she felt inside became the original aggression towards her partner and children. I would relate this with the Fight model—the individual criticizing, attacking, belittling people close to her. Secondly, and more commonly, an individual goes into the Escape/Flight model.
For instance, you may see a woman choosing to ignore the signals of her husband’s cheating or focusing on housework rather than providing any space for emotions (the main focus having turned to other things such as children, work, online-shopping, etc.). The women would rather remain silent and escape into TV shows or fantasies rather than make a change. In addition, they often feel they can‘t afford to lose a relationship.
Thirdly, the individual reports feeling nothing. They are shutting down their sensation of negative emotions and as a result their perception system shuts down completely. The woman may say she feels fine, but she is actually dying inside. Statistics show that depression and anxiety are positively correlated with emotional isolation. Numbing oneself can also lead to the damage of the immune system. Li (2013) had used CECS (Cotould Emotional Control Scale) to test 1000 Chinese women. The result showed that repression of emotion can predict the status of female breast cancer. Anger is the main repressed emotion.
