Torn
The Science and Soul of Attachment Trauma in the Shadow of ICE
A woman moans as a contraction seizes her in a labor and delivery unit in Arizona. The physical agony and inevitable progress of childbirth urge the conclusion forward yet everything in her wills her baby to stay, because she knows what awaits outside the delivery door. Where some birthing moms have family waiting and praying for a speedy delivery, Erika has ICE agents wishing she’d get the baby out already so they can make their arrest and move on with their day. The baby is born, the nurses take her, and the still-bleeding mother is shackled and ripped away for the “crime” of seeking asylum from violence. Baby Emily, American-born, cries inconsolably; attachment begins in utero and the voices she hears now are not her mother’s. Trauma begins at birth for too many American children.
As a trauma therapist, I often hear people try to comfort themselves with the false notion that what their children can’t remember won’t hurt them. In truth, pre-verbal wounds cause lasting trauma and are the hardest to heal. The experiences of an infant form neural super-highways, core and deeply entrenched in the structure of the brain. With no memory of how dysfunctional beliefs were formed, there is no cognitive thread to grasp to unravel them[i]. Attachment trauma forms the framework of the infant’s rapidly developing psyche, setting the child up for lifelong struggles with anxiety, panic attacks, and difficulty trusting in relationships for reasons she may never fully understand. Forced separation from the mother on whom the infant has depended for life itself sets the foundation for a lifelong pattern of anxious attachments, marked by constant fear of abandonment.
A child is born with only 25% of their neural connections. Within the first 3 years, nearly 75% of the brain’s neural structure will be formed. What happens in infancy and early childhood sets the foundation for who they will be, what neuroses they will wrestle with, what foundational beliefs about themselves, others, and relationships will guide their attachments and behaviors throughout life.
Today, American children are being ripped from their loving parents at an alarming rate, in an unquestionably cruel bid to make a statement that solves no problem but creates myriad new ones: economic, intrapersonal (psychological wounding), interpersonal, and community-wide. Here on the outskirts of Los Angeles, shock-waves reverberate out amongst us as fathers are snatched while working in the sun, mothers ripped from children in the school pick-up line or the courthouse steps, loving families separated. Deep, secure, healthy attachments devastated.
In my therapy practice, I feel helpless to heal the wounds as the assault continues. As a trauma specialist, I typically work with clients’ historical memories to help make meaning and put the past to rest. Now, I sit with children whose parents are in cells – parents who have never committed a crime[ii]. Parents who felt safe, loving, nurturing. Families just like my own.
I hold space with American-born citizens (more rooted in this country than my immigrant self) who look identical to those detained; they are withdrawn into their homes, afraid to go outside, to take the needed job, to attend the wedding, the graduation, the funeral. Justice isn’t served by releasing the unjustly detained after traumatic days of callously mistaken incarceration; justice is the liberty to participate in community in safety, confidence, and security.
Neighbors grow hungry, afraid to leave the house for food. Fear is everywhere, and it is not an irrationality that can be examined with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or a negative cognition that can be reprocessed through EMDR. It is a valid reaction to an obscene domestic reality, in which cruelty and dominance and threat are emboldened above civil rights.
Belonging falters. Whether citizen or not, millions receive the intended (though false) message: You are not welcome here. You do not belong.
Belonging is a core psychological need. Maslow labels it as a building block of psychological health just above physiological needs (the groceries Latinos are afraid to collect, or can no longer afford as they abandon jobs to avoid being snatched) and safety (freedom from unwarranted arrest). Before self-esteem and self-actualization can be broached, we need a sense of belonging. Because belonging is a survival imperative. We know, deep in our ancestral DNA, that alone we cannot survive in a wild and brutal world. And we carry this foundational truth throughout our lives: alone, we suffer. In community, we thrive.
But community is under assault.
And yet, community is not a function of government or authority. Community is us. Community is demonstrated and developed in showing up.
Community grows as we check in on our neighbors, as we let them know we are safe allies. Community grows in the delivery of groceries, in the offer to pick up the neighbor child from summer camp, or to watch the baby while they meet with their immigration attorney, or to deliver documents to the law office in support of the fight for their spouse’s release. Community is fostered when we advocate for policies at school board meetings that protect the confidentiality of immigration status and create trauma-informed policies for students whose families have been ripped apart. And community grows through simple conversations:
Do you feel safe?
What do you need?
How can I help? (And through imaginatively considering what you might need in their circumstance; needs they might be afraid to vocalize, like help with legal fees.)
Community is preserved when those further away sacrifice and support legal defense funds[iii][iv][v][vi] for those taken without due process. Community is protected when those of us with greater freedom and physical security stand up and protest until unjust detentions are reversed – as with the four-year-old American cancer patient who was deported with her family away from life-saving treatments, without which she was predicted to die within days, who was granted reprieve for one year after massive protest[vii]. And as with Erika, who in response to an uprising of outrage was released and restored to newborn Emily[viii]. Not without trauma to both. Probably not before milk dried up. But restored. When we resist with organized, collective action, we can make a difference.
They may ravish our physical communities, they may disappear our neighbors, but we will not let them steal the humanity that makes us community.
If you feel threatened or have been affected by arrest of a family member, what support needs do you have?
What creative ways have you found to support the vulnerable in your community?
Please see the footnotes for places to donate to support legal defense.
[i] There may be somatic (bodily) memories that can come into play for early childhood trauma therapy.
[ii] Crossing a border illegally is a misdemeanor; not a crime, and the statute of limitations on misdemeanor enforcement is long past for most
[iii] https://immigrantjustice.org/
[iv] https://www.nilc.org/
[v] https://donate.amnestyusa.org/page/92978/donate/1
[vi] https://www.chirla.org/
[vii] https://people.com/girl-4-medical-care-us-nearly-deported-allowed-to-stay-11756425
[viii] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucson-ice-hospital-pregnant-reunited-b2745137.html
It is. My heart has been so heavy lately.
@Dr Deborah Vinall - Thank you for this poignantly humane, gut-wrenching piece. You speak both as a clinician and as someone fiercely attuned to the moral and emotional fabric that binds us. You remind us that trauma isn’t just personal, it’s political, systemic and heartbreakingly ongoing. I’m especially moved by how you tie attachment theory to the soul-deep rupture of forced separations. When belonging is denied, something essential in our shared humanity begins to fray. And yet, your call to community rooted in care, action, and imagination is a balm and a battle cry. I thank you for holding space where others have been torn away.