DOI: 10.6129/CJP.20170518
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2017, Vol.59, No.3, 145-161

Wounded in Temporality: An Existential-Phenomenological Analysis of the Lived Experience of Girls with Childhood Sexual Abuse and Broken Family Relationship
Wei-Lun Lee（Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, National Dong Hwa University）

Abstract

This study discloses existential temporality as the core to understand the lived experience of sexually abused girls with broken family relationship. Through a phenomenological analysis of 8 participants’ interview data, the result indicates that, for the girls who had been sexually abused, as their primary parent-child relationship were destroyed, they lost the connections with the adult world and fell out into the “wild world.” The “wild world,” in contrast with the “mainstream world” which is ruled by and composed of social orders, is full of spontaneous actions and events without plan and order. The modes of time lived are the keys to understand the differences between these two worlds. The time lived in the wild world can be called as flowing temporality, in which spontaneous actions are most obvious. While in the mainstream world, social orders and values are founded on the temporality of linear causality. To the girls lived in the wild world, all the desired goals in the mainstream world were set in accordance with the linear temporality and thus with no significance. Living in the wild world, peer relationships on the street appeared to be the pathway for the girls to earn their own linear-causal temporality, which would develop into a “new world” for the girls to live in. This study indicates the importance of peer relationships for the girls to rebuild the linear-causal temporality in their lives. The significance of existential temporality as a research framework to understand the experiences of girls with childhood sexual abuse is thus demonstrated.

Keywords: childhood sexual abuse, existential temporality, interpersonal reconstruction, phenomenological psychology