Do you have doubts that the separation of families at the Mexican/US border is cruel and results in long-lasting harm to children and families? What’s the big deal? Kids will get over it. They are in foster care being housed and fed. They have supervision, play with other kids, sleep with pillows and blankets, maybe. (evidence of abuse is now coming to light.) All it will take is ultimate reunification. They will unite, hug, cry and then carry on with life, whatever place it shall be.
Then ponder this...A boy, about 6 years old, committed a kid-type offense that his father thought deserved a stern lesson, for lifetime correction....So, Dad sent him off to the police station with a note. The note enlisted the authorities in providing this lesson that would demonstrate what happens when you are ‘naughty’. The boy was put in a cell, and locked in with the clanging of iron doors. He was told “this is what happens to naughty boys!” It so happened whom ever was in charge decided a short time was sufficient. The boy learned fast having been left for only minutes, surely under one hour from start to finish. But what did he learn? And, what could the harm be to teach “a lesson” of such importance? Turns out it was a minutes long lesson that lasted a lifetime. The boy was Alfred Hitchcock,“Hitch” who the world knows as a man that told stores of fright and mystery, until his dying day. It is said that even his tombstone reads “...this is what happens to naughty boys.”
Emotional trauma can result in a lifetime of suffering. In clinical terms, it is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. What Hitchcock did, besides channeling his trauma through his phenomenal film making capacity, was post-traumatic behavioral reenactment. PTSD and traumatic play in children can, indeed, go on forever if untreated. It is similar to the off-loading of terror, as if Hitch needed to share his fear with his audience. With PTSD, the terror is relived, not resolved or put into perspective. It is key to bear in mind that circumstances do not need to materialize. Hitch was not going to be kept in jail or beaten but did he know that? We may even chuckle at Dad’s attempt to parent his miscreant young son. It was his childhood perception that entirely ignored time along with his inability to assess actual risk or reality. A similar key factor, if you study trauma through his films, is that what Hitch found most frightening was what was not known, what was not shown.
Adding the clinical analysis of Lenore Terr MD, the author of Too Scared to Cry, you learn that one can be traumatized not only by actual events but threats of events or action; the perception of such alone can be sufficient. One does not need to die in a near fatal accident to be traumatized by an incident. Or even have that accident at all. Imagine your emotion should you have a gun pointed at your head or a knife at your throat. People who recount torture have even claimed that the worst was when they were left to listen to the screams of those tortured nearby; not even their own abuse.
If this is not enough to give you pause, Terr goes into enlightening detail about two other traumatized children. Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe. It does not seem necessary to point out what these three creative people have in common. In King’s case, his trauma was witnessing the death of a young buddy who was killed by a speeding train. With Poe, as a 3-4 year old, he was nestled in the arms of his loving impoverished, abandoned mother for three days, clinging to her dead body.
What, America, are we doing to children and families who are fleeing death as they beg for mercy, if we even allow them to make a claim for asylum in accordance with international law? It is not really a mystery... but it should haunt us all.