Separated to Survive — (Blog Post 1)
As I read the article by Lyons-Ruth et al. (2017), it is difficult for me to fathom the sheer depth and breadth of the severe impacts of war, political violence, environmental destruction (and so on), on child development on a global scale. As a self-proclaimed attachment theory “nerd” and Play and Drama Therapist with children, my interest and focus usually centers on the implications of attachment relationships for individuals, couples, and family systems. Even then it can feel hard to conceptualize the full and complex effects of attachment trauma on a single person throughout their lifetime. It is for this reason that I chose to take Global and Child Adolescent Mental Health this semester. Though cultural contexts and child-rearing practices differ everywhere you go, I wholeheartedly believe that the fundamental instinct to survive (and conversely to care for) through connection and relationship is a universal truth. In recognition of this, especially during this era of unprecedented global political unrest, and in support of my growth as an attachment-informed clinician and an intended social justice activist, it seems important I learn how to simultaneously broaden and specify my scope of understanding of these matters. We are learning in this GC&AMH course, as was highlighted so eloquently in Dr. Steele’s most recent lecture on 9/21, that we must hold and honor a multiplicity of truths at once- truths of the individual child, their immediate and extended family, their community, their culture, the political context, and so on.
Still, reading about figures such as “…some 2.2 million children around the world live in institutional settings…” in Lyons-Ruth et al. (2017, p. 699), boggles the mind. That “…among the 643,386,753 children internationally between 0 to 4 years old, at least 102,941,880 young children would be diagnosed with a mental or emotional disorder…” (p. 700), and that “…1 billion children worldwide have experienced violence in the past year…” (p. 699), is staggering and almost beyond comprehension.
Perhaps selfishly, what helps me to contextualize this information — particularly information pertaining to socio-political circumstances quite different than my own (especially regarding the impacts of war and political violence) — is to imagine my own family’s historical narrative as I consider the legacy of political trauma on attachment and health. As you may have surmised from the photo at the top of this blog entry, my father and grandmother were Jews living in Budapest at the time of the Holocaust. The story is harrowing and incredible all at once. Without detailing all of the remarkable (and horrific) events that marked my dad’s first year of life, I will share in brief that in order to guarantee his survival, my grandmother begged a stranger on the street, a non-Jewish woman, to take the baby and deliver him to relatives outside of the Jewish Ghetto (outside of the Glass Factory/makeshift safe house where they were staying); because my dad was malnourished and apparently crying all the time. “All of the Jewish babies are crying,” a doctor told my grandmother. What would babies know of the atrocities being committed throughout Europe? It was hunger, I’m sure, as well as stress, fear, and existential panic permeating the attachment field which caused the Jewish babies to cry. Despite suffering the tremendous loss of my great grandparents who perished in Auschwitz, luckily my grandmother was reunited with my dad some six or so weeks later, and they and my grandfather survived. The family later fled in 1956, escaping Hungary as refugees and arriving in Canada, almost by chance, where they landed and built a new life. I sometimes wonder about the impact of this attachment separation on my father’s development as a person, and how it might have influenced him as a parent to me and my siblings. I wonder about not if, but how such attachment trauma is passed down intergenerationally, and how much Holocaust trauma lives within my nervous system, and what of that I could possibly risk passing down to my (hypothetical) children someday. All the while, I am grateful to my grandmother for her tremendous courage in navigating the most primal and seemingly paradoxical of instincts: to separate from her infant in order to keep him alive.
As I read through the astronomical data in the Lyons-Ruth et al. (2017) article, reflecting on my family legacy in this way gives me increased empathy and grounded associations for considering the many possible and varying attachment narratives of children in the present-day who are actively surviving end-of-the-world scenarios so very different than my white-privileged existence; especially those stories involving attachment separations. Perhaps I’ll keep my family history in my mind’s eye as an anchor, an example I can relate to (and to which I am related) as I continue to learn about the mental health of children and the intergenerational implications and benefits of promoting health and justice on the global scale.
References:
Lyons-Ruth, K., et al. (2017). The worldwide burden of infant mental and emotional disorder: Report of the task force of the world association for infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 8(6), 695–705.https://doi.org/10.1002/imhj.21674.
