Pulling Children Out of Their Mothers' Arms

I was four years old shopping with my mother in Hudson's Department Store in downtown Detroit. At that age my eyes tended to swivel and dart as I tried to absorb the visual tumult of glass exhibit cases, ceiling lights as big as dirigibles, the meandering aisles streaming with strange ungainly people —a cacophonous optical dazzle. I somehow wandered into that heaving mass. Suddenly I was alone, all alone. Then I panicked. Separation anxiety grabbed me by my throat, my chest, my heart. Terror charged in.Moments later my mother grabbed me, took my hand and off we went.But I never forgot that instant of terror.Fear inscription is a universal childhood lesson. Our human brains are wired to register, respond to, remember, and be motivated to avoid fear. Anxiety is a direct correlate: it is fear without a direct inciting object. Anxiety allows us to go on watch when conditions seem potentially dangerous. Anxiety guides us. But potential danger can be triggered by associations linked back to causes of fear. Anxiety can run loose when it is cerebrally overlearned. Children discover this quickly and the memories (complex and multiply determined) stay fixed and fast.That is why parents, guardians, babysitters, teachers, siblings, and grandparents stand guard around their small charges. Yes, charges. Because those are the people who are naturally charged with protecting children from major fears, from trauma..

"The result is that early trauma expands its effect on future life by entwining itself among the processes that shape cognitive functions, emotional reactivty, mood stability, fear and anxiety processing, and the many folds of memory."

.Children are born incompletely formed. It takes two years for their innate speech capacity to be fully activated. They do not walk until they are twelve to fifteen months old. Their mental abilities take years to reach full function. They typically cannot learn to read until they are six or seven years old. Abstract philosophical concepts take even more years to be fully understood and appreciated.Fear is the fundamentally safe-guarding reactive mechanism that signals protectors to intervene, to save and safeguard children.Early trauma not only has lasting psychological, emotional effects—these inform the developing brain. But that brain continues to evolve, ever-restructuring itself through life. The result is that early trauma expands its effect on future life by entwining itself among the processes that shape cognitive functions, emotional reactiivty, mood stability, fear and anxiety processing, and the many folds of memory.There are many cultures, have been many throughout human history, that design traumas to prepare youths for the kind of socialized life that allows the community to survive and persist. Some of these traumas are conceived as rites of passage. Submission to such rites promotes social acceptance, forces bonds on the commitment to further the practice with future children. The ancient Greeks, even the extraordinary Athenians of the 4th century BC, trained their youths to endure the pain of physical assault in order to face death heroically. War memorials, the vivid sculptures of ages past, honor not just the fallen heroes, they glorify killing. Passing through the terror of rites of passage alters the personalities of children, hardens their experience of fear, deadens the response to terror.Empathy is washed in blood. Add xenophobic hatred into the mix and a warrior is formed. Our poor soldiers, rushed through a tough basic training, lacked sufficient early terrorizing to make killing and the horror of war endurable. They were boys brought up in a society that prided itself in protecting its children. We Americans have always wanted to be done with wars.So how do we find ourselves creating the framework that between 1942 and 1945 arrested thousands of people deemed unfit to live amongst its citizens and put them into concentration camps? We are re-traumatizing the immigrant families fleeing here for some form of refuge. America had always been the world's asylum. Although we, too, have erased our genocidal history regarding native Americans. And we succeeded in abolishing black slavery.What we are doing to those thousands of immigrant children is to create a deeply internalized trauma from which many may never truly recover. And we are continuing to do the same with imprisoning immigrants with no access to judicial process, to foreseeable paths to freedom, to balm, to heal the trauma of dislocation and incarceration.There are children in those families. Children are vulnerable. Their trauma will wreak damages which will haunt us.It already does.Is anyone not having night terrors?