June 26th marked 25 years since the “handover” of Hong Kong back to its motherland, China. What an odd term, “handover”, as if what is home to millions is but a puck or a ball in some larger-than-life sporting game. I am largely ignorant about the history of China, my knowledge being limited to the bleak stories our dad told us throughout childhood about his seven years in the Shanghai ghetto, part of his multidirectional flight from Hitler Germany.
I remember the frightening descriptions of opium dens and the tragedy of his mother’s death there when he was 12 when Jews were not admitted to the hospitals. My college roommate was a vociferous Maoist, and a larger-than-life poster (not Warhol!) of the Chairman filled most of a wall of our dorm room making him almost a third roomy. That was most of my familiarity with that massive country and its equally massive history.
As part of the observance of this anniversary, BBC played an interview with a woman born in Hong Kong when it was still a British colony in the late 1950s and early 60s. Besides its own bulging population, the territory was flooded with refugees from the mainland in flight from a historically horrific famine. The population became so dense, and the people so poor, that there was a catastrophic scarcity of food and space, with three million people squashed together and occupying 62 square miles (160.579 square km). As many as 3,500 people occupied some single blocks, and families were hard-pressed to keep their children.
As a result, countless babies were being “disposed of” in various ways. Newborns were routinely dumped in garbage bins, graveyards, in the gutter, on doorsteps – anywhere they might be stumbled over by a magnanimous passerby. The interviewee was one of them, abandoned at 14 days old on the staircase of a public square. Although there was a record of the specific location and address, even the date she was found, her birthdate was unknown, and she had no name.
Police retrieved her and delivered her to an English-run orphanage, where she spent her first couple of years (there, the ratio of abandoned girls to boys was 76:6). The girl foundlings were all given the same name, Tsin: the name of a Chinese region.
When this Tsin was almost 2, a British couple came to the orphanage looking to adopt. They were a mixed couple which in Britain was largely unacceptable in those days, the husband being of Chinese descent, which complicated adoption in the racist UK. They figured in Hong Kong, they would have more luck. After touring several orphanages they selected our Tsin rather randomly. “My father tickled me, and I laughed, so I was the one.”
In her adoptive country, Tsin felt like the alien that she, in fact, was. She was somehow expected to emerge from the cocoon a fully English child. She didn’t know a word of English, and no effort was ever made to introduce her or support her around her cultural identity. Her parents gave her the domestically pronounceable name of “Debbie”, but that hardly helped her to fit in, let alone be accepted by the other children. She was teased and mocked with racist “jokes” and faces. Sadly and silently, she longed to wake up in the morning with white skin and round eyes. Her well-meaning parents exercised “benign (or simply clueless?) neglect,” leaving her to flounder in a lonely existence of feeling invisible, lost, and not understood.
It was many years later when the internet had shrunken and connected the world, that Debbie discovered others like herself; in fact, she found a group of women all lost and found on the streets of Hong Kong, with their own iterations of her story. She was dazzled and awed by the new experience of feeling kindred and feeling seen, and she felt in a way she never had. She had hardly known how numb, bereft, and lifeless she had been until then. Finding these women was truly a kind of birth for Debbie. When the little international group finally decided to meet in person, it was indescribable for her and all of them and a testament to the well-known healing impact of relationships and groups.
Perhaps the most poignant point in Debbie’s story was when she and a few other women visited the Hong Kong public square where she had first been disposed of as an infant. She sat on the cold stone of the steps, feeling a swirl of nameless emotions and emptiness. Being with the other women helped to ground her as she looked around at passersby, wondering, like the lost baby bird in the old children’s book, “Are you my mother, my aunt, my cousin, my near or distant relative?”
The quest and hunger for affiliation and attachment are as boundless and timeless as are their healing properties.
Interestingly in London, there is a “Foundling Museum.” Who knew?
Apparently, we have a fascination with mother-lessness (or parent-lessness, to be more correct) and an understanding largely outside of awareness of the primariness and immense power of that first and most essential attachment. On some level, we must know that attachment trauma, with or without bodily scars, constitutes the deepest and most stubborn of the injuries we endure. Although research is slowly bearing this out, developmental trauma and, most specifically, neglect, are slow to garner attention, let alone research, treatment, and education dollars to mediate and eradicate it. Absurd! What is neglect, but obliviousness to the centrality and salience of this bond, or lack thereof? On some level, we know.
The current exhibit at this Foundling Museum is about Superheroes. Admittedly, I have never been well versed in comic book lore. Although our family lost everything in the Holocaust, Oma on my mother’s side continued to be proud and even somewhat “uppity” about her Oxford education, which they could not steal, and that attitude permeated our family. We were raised to be bookish and “scholarly.” So, the characters of comic books were absent from my childhood reading education.
I was curious to learn from the description of the museum exhibit that all the Superheroes are, in one way or another, orphans. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Black Panther… others of whom I have never even heard, in other languages and of other stripes. How very curious!
Say the exhibit designers: “Marvel’s X-Men experience both discrimination and social ostracisation… The superheroes’ early life experiences impact on their roles and the stance they take over good and evil in their comic lives.”
On some level, we must know that to endure the loss of the primal bond requires a strength that is superhuman. And the quest to connect to the world in some way, if not via an authentic self, and make that larger world safer for all, would be a super drive. That, in fact, does make sense. And looking at myself and countless children of neglect and disconnection that I know, it’s what drives many of us.
I have the good fortune to study with and be mentored by the greatest neurofeedback-of-trauma expert in the known world, Sebern Fisher. By some stroke of genius, I approached her and asked her to mentor me back in 2009 when I first trained in neurofeedback. Back then, there was a spot to be had on her weekly appointment calendar, which I have greedily clung to ever since. Two tenets that I learned from Sebern are trained indelibly into my brain. She has taught me immeasurably more, but I find these two little statements I repeat to myself and others more than any other:
This is why I prefer not to practice neurofeedback with other therapists’ psychotherapy clients and why I schedule sessions that are long enough to do both. The neurofeedback creates the regulation that often makes more and deeper material accessible and manageable for psychological processing, or so it appears.
On some level, we all know it, even if we are not awake to it. The litter of neglected attachment must be scooped up, transformed, healed, and prevented, even if one brain at a time.
Today’s Song: Talking Heads: People Like Us:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
Alarmed by the barrage of horrifying mass shootings in the US of late, we are all shaking our heads and wondering, “what is happening to us? What is going on here? What does this mean?” Researchers have been looking into what, to me, are “new” places in an effort to comprehend what appears to be a not only alarming but growing trend. The most recent run of rampages, apparently neither politically, racially, nor ideologically motivated, have sent some researchers to the internet to track shooters’ “online footprints” in search of warning clues or explanations.
In studying the most recent suspect in the “Highland Park” mass shooting, experts discovered a trail that I certainly had no awareness of. I, of course, am no paragon of savvy about what goes on in the online or social media worlds. Tracing the 21-year-old shooter’s recent activity, including his online activity, revealed a startling, dramatic, and relatively new cyber sub-world or underworld. Emerging in the last couple of years, it was certainly new to me.
This new genre of online communities consists of blood, gore, nihilism and the creation of fictional identities exhibiting and glorifying those traits. Particularly jarring, according to researchers, is the way they appear to blur reality and fantasy, creating a psychotic-like confusion of Self. An opportunity to “be” someone else, and then an obscuring of identification of who I am “really.” Designed to be immersive, “viral”, or result in prolonged and repetitive hours of “play,” apart from whatever the psychological impact of such horror might be, combines with the still not fully understood brain impact of protracted screen time, on especially developing brains. And these sites tend to be most frequented by young people between 13 and 21 years of age. We see, in effect, a scrambling of alarming content with a potential for brain damage, precisely in prime years of identity formation and brain development. Where I might be inclined to exclaim “oy vey!” that would seem trivializing here. Throw in the context of climate change, and any vision of the future may seem apocalyptically blighted.
Trauma simmers (and potentially ultimately boils) with confusion, conflict or simple lack of identity at the heart of neglect. So, a child of neglect might be particularly vulnerable and susceptible to the offer of an alternative and powerful identity and even a loose posse of similarly searching and lost souls like themselves, all lacking distinction, purpose, connection or even something to do.
Apart from this troubling digital footprint, what about the concrete and observable signals that something is terribly amiss? Who is even watching? The young Highland Park suspect was hardly subtle in scattering his clues: suicidality, homicidal threats to family members, violence-laden artwork, even a chilling mural-sized painting he left on an outside wall of his mother’s home of a sinister smiley-faced figure brandishing an assault rifle. Somehow, he remained stunningly invisible in the days, even years leading to the massacre. What was this young man’s story? Attempting to track his actual history did not turn up too much.
Living with his father and a paternal uncle, he was quiet and withdrawn, tending toward depression. The men thought he was a good kid, but to be honest, it appeared no one was really looking. When his father helped him obtain his weapons, he claimed the boy was going to use them for target practice, or so he “believed.” Some neighbors commented that his “parents worked long hours.” Perhaps he was left unsupervised too much? In 2002, his mother was convicted of leaving him alone in a hot car when he was two years old. These are the stray crumbs of childhood material I was able to find. His father matter-of-factly and non-defensively said, “I want a long sentence; that’s life. You know you have consequences for actions. He made a choice. He didn’t have to do that.”
To my lens and sad eyes, this adds up to another story of deadly neglect; in this case, deadly for so many more than the original “child” in question.
So often, I hear clients say – at least those new to me or my work – “—-But nothing happened to me!” If one isn’t using the familiar and perhaps “valid” triumvirate of sexual abuse, physical abuse and more vaguely defined “emotional abuse,” they come up empty. They may even come from significant privilege, pointing to paid-for fancy educations, plentiful food, money and creature comforts. Or, in the cases of less plenty, they may point to hard-working parents doing the best they could to provide, often with their own traumatic backgrounds. This may make for additional layers of shame and guilt for “complaining, suffering, or inexplicably feeling so bad.” Layer on top of that, the “protective lenses” of denial or even gaslighting that much of the larger world wears, and individuals feel that much more despicable and unworthy for feeling bad.
The field of psychological trauma has known for years about the pivotal and decisive impacts of early attachment relationships (the primate researchers have known even longer.) Trauma experts decades ago coined the term “developmental trauma” as catchment perhaps for all these uncategorized or unacknowledged micro or even macro-injuries. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the diagnostic “dictionary” relied upon by clinicians for insurance coverage) has yet to include them, despite well-documented field trials.
In 1995-97 the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study was admirably undertaken, turning up reams of hugely valuable data about the relationship between “small” and “large” childhood experiences, linking them to medical and mental health outcomes. Only in the last few years, a quarter of a century later, has this information penetrated the larger medical and mental health fields, let alone the field of education and the public at large. Neglect in its various iterations is, of course, included. Childhood neglect is not nothing! Perhaps everyone is tired of hearing this from me. And maybe my emerging from my own invisibility is to wave this flag.
Again, as the attachment researchers began to document and teach us long ago, mirroring or not has profound developmental impact. Many of us are very familiar with the famous ‘Still Face” research on this. It is impressive if you have not seen it and well worth the quick watch. Being seen, mirrored and understood are like food and shelter for the growing and developing organism. They are foundational building blocks to knowing who we are; to coherent identity formation.
The shootings leave a whole new population traumatized: families and loved ones of those murdered, witnesses to the atrocities, and the larger world. Meanwhile, how many young and old are still glued to their screens, or unaware, as I was, of an additional variety of internet infections and potentially magnetic or “bingeable” content. As essential as connection is, babies to caregivers, communities, nations, is the mandate to connect the dots. Twenty-five years later, families of the Columbine dead still grieve. They will never get over it, nor really will any sufferer of traumatic loss. It behoves us to connect the dots.
Increasingly I am compelled by the interconnection of social, social justice and individual psychological trauma. It can seem to be a Gordian knot of complexity to tackle it all. That is another reason why we need each other. You have skills and inclinations, creativities and ideas that I don’t have, and universally vice versa.
Let’s work together.
Today’s song (an all-time favorite of mine!):
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!