The impact of spirituality on the self-reported recovery of adults who experienced childhood trauma

Objective: To examine whether adults who had experienced childhood trauma, and who had a higher sense of personal meaning or spirituality, would have improved mental health and lower trauma symptoms such as depression, lower self-esteem, anxiety, dissociative disabilities, PTSD, and the like. Method: 115 participants were randomly selected from five mental health centers in the southeast of the State of Michigan of the United States. Each participant had an experience of one or multiple childhood abuses, namely: physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal/emotional abuse, child neglect or cumulative trauma. They had also been to treatment, and were between 18 and 60 years old. A demographic questionnaire, Personal Meaning Profile (PMP) and Trauma Symptom Checklist-40 (TSC-40) surveys were used as clinical measures. A multinomial logistic regression statistic was used for data analyses. Results: Each set of the hypotheses for PMP-and-Group and TSC-40-and-Group models were assessed for their overall significance using chi-square and goodness-of-fit tests, and both were statistically significant (p\u3c0.05) in both tests, respectively. Conclusion: The results suggest that adults who had experienced childhood trauma, and who had a higher sense of personal meaning or spirituality, would have better mental, physical and general health conditions, and lower trauma symptoms. Many research studies also indicate that this treatment option powerfully restores mental, physical and overall health conditions of the affected adults, and that the cost is usually inexpensive