I am often fascinated by what things stick or don’t stick in my memory from the near and distant past. I’m not even talking about traumatic memory, although that definitely fascinates me, but rather simple “declarative”, ordinary narrative memory. My husband can tell you all the restaurants we have been to and even what I ate and how I liked it. I may not even recall having been there. Fortunately, he is gracious about my “disability”, and does not take advantage… Similarly, of the probably thousands of books I have read in the last 50 years, I am curious about which ones I remember in detail, including what may have struck me about them at the time- and how they might be similar or different in their impact now.
A particular book that I read in 1980 when it first came out (long before many of my readers were born!) was Assassination on Embassy Row(Patheon,1980)by John Dinges and Saul Landau. The book chronicled the cold-blooded 1976 car bombing murder of Orlando Letelier, and his assistant, Ronni Moffit, in broad daylight, in shadow of the US national capital in Washington DC. What jogged the memory, by the way, was not all the recent uproar the past week or two, about “assassination” in the US, but rather the imaginary conversation that Salman Rushdie has with his ersatz assassin, in his recent memoir. Rushdie made the point that his almost killer was an alienated, disenfranchised, disconnected lost soul who found his spiritual leadership and affiliation on YouTube, and began his zealotry there. He was in effect a sitting duck for a charismatic opportunist.
Letelier was the Chilean ambassador to the US appointed by the socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende and was successful in advancing both US-Chile diplomatic relations and international banking. When Allende’s government was violently overthrown and displaced by the Pinochet’s fiercely authoritarian military regime, Letelier was one of the first members of the Allende administration to be seized and arrested by Pinochet’s notoriously brutal D.I.N.A., the newly empowered military police, and served 12 months as a political prisoner in a similarly brutal prison camp. But I know you don’t come to me for Latin American political history.
The car bomber was a man named Michael Townley. (Even that stuck in my head…) Townley was, much like Rushdie’s imagined almost killer, a lost soul: disenfranchised, disconnected, untethered, unaffiliated, and relationship-barren young man starving to belong. He was an ideal recruit for the D.I.N.A. In Jodi Picoult’s novel, 19 Minutes, (2007, Atria) the story of a high school mass murder, committed by a high school student, like Rushdie’s attacker, same profile. It seems in too many of the numerous mass shootings we have seen in the US, the “shocked” parents had no idea what their kid was up to, or that they had problems, mental health concerns, or weapons; and most certainly needed. I even recall after one of the mass shootings in the past few years, I can’t remember which one, reading that the mother of the shooter had been convicted of leaving him alone in a locked car when he was two.
How many of these wildly dysregulated perpetrators of violence and havoc, large and small, grew up in a desert of “nothing?” Storyless, they seem to think. It is chilling to me, but shockingly real, how the failure of attachment, the experience of floating untethered in dark and empty space, can give rise to the kind of desperation to belong, ennui or rage, that can make a poor soul ready prey, a waiting recruit to be lured or drawn in by all manner of gurus, autocrats looking for “hitmen,” or belief systems. Why not?
“Transition Sites”
I consider myself a double heiress, well maybe triple. Both of my parents were grievously traumatized and tragically neglected, but my father additionally actively passed on some aspects of his own traumatic past. I hate the word “perpetrator,” but that would be a shorthand. Intergenerational transmission is the devastating sequel to an original blast of trauma that remains unprocessed. It can be bequeathed in all kinds of untoward ways. One of my clients came in the other day and told me he and his son had taken a big load to the “transition site.” He laughingly told me that “transition site” is the new moniker for garbage dump! I affectionately figured it must be the City of Berkeley, famous for coming up with the most creative politically correct new, and euphemistic words and names for things. But no, it was another less renowned Bay Area suburb. We imagined, something akin to pumpkins turning into elegant coaches, old family trash items tossed into this transition site, crossing over into some magical, mystical angelic, perhaps eternal form. We had a good laugh together, all too rare in psychotherapy, at least with me, I’m afraid.
Returning to the serious, in effect we become the sorry, unwitting, certainly unintentional “transition site” for the unrepaired, rusted, or mildewed old junk of our forbears, the “sins of the father…” That is why I am so impassioned about every level of trauma processing and healing so we don’t keep generating and regenerating more, like waves on a pond when a stone falls in, rippling endlessly in concentric circles of agitation. I guess we have the option to transition to something new and different if we are lucky.
Seeds
My friend in Hawaii is a tomato whisperer. Her yard is a veritable jungle, an Eden of every imaginable and unimaginable tomato plant, in hanging pots, climbing wildly up trellises, and in several crowded greenhouses, which I would call mansions, (not to be confused with the famous movie…) built by her husband. Her husband describes her rapture when the seed catalogs come. Already amazed that she starts her massive plantation from seeds, he describes the scene of the tiny woman, hidden under the sea of heavy volumes. When I was little, living in New York City, the phone books, (yes some of us are old enough to remember those!) were so fat, my mother would use them to build a makeshift high chair, or at least booster seat. I imagined only the tip of my friend’s head, and some of her long black hair flying out, from under the stack. She lovingly starts this lush and delicious paradise, from seeds. Not unlike raising a little creature, a child I imagine. She like, myself, is not a mother of children. But indeed, has many offspring, all colors, shapes, and sizes. And they all begin from these minuscule, these tiny packets of living energy.
Parents of human children often come to me after my talks, alarmed about their own children, and what harm they may have passed down by not getting to their trauma/neglect therapy in time. The fact that they are concerned and thinking about it, that they care, is already an important sign, even a start. I always tell people and don’t mind repeating myself about this, that the attachment researchers tell us the gold standard, the best of the best accurately attuned parents, are getting it right 30% of the time. That’s right, 30%. The rest is a ceaseless dance of rupture and repair. Those are the best of caregivers.
One of the most sorely absent developmental experiences, certainly in the case of trauma and neglect, is repair. I have so many clients who may be of advanced ages and have never known the wonder, the miracle, the joy of relationship repair. They have never received a truly healing apology, and have no idea how to make one. And the answer to hurt is generally to withdraw or cut and run. Learning repair is so valuable that I am often almost grateful (well not quite, or maybe not until they are far in the rearview,) for my mistakes. So, it is not too late to learn repair skills and practice them. To heal with perhaps hurt children, and offer. (Of course, I can’t resist making a pitch for this year’s Oxford Trauma Conference which will be all about this. Please see more information here.
The takeaway today is not new. Nothing is not nothing. And tragically as this exploding world keeps reminding us, sometimes, nothing is lethal.
But let’s end on a positive note:
Today’s Song:
