On December 14, 2012, a distraught young patient named Abigail arrived at my office in tears. Abigail's large eyes were red-rimmed and her hands were shaking. I had never seen her like this before. Tears pooled in her eyes and her fingers swiped awkwardly at the wetness on her cheeks, as she told me, “When I stepped out of the metro, I checked my phone, and this newsfeed popped up. All those children, I can't think about all those children!” She closed her eyes and folded her hands as if in prayer.
Busy seeing patients all day and with no access to the Internet, I had no idea what she was talking about. Before Abigail arrived, I had nothing on my mind but the flow of each session making up my day. It was from Abigail that I first learned the tragic news: Twenty children had been shot at close range at their school, along with six of their teachers. She said, “How could this happen? How could it be true? I don't know. I just can't think about it.” I heard and felt her anguish in each word.
Abigail had come to see me after an early-release day at her high school. When she got off the train, she checked her phone to see if her boyfriend had texted her. She had not been looking for the news. As she told me about Newtown, she sobbed and sobbed.
These events occurred roughly three months into my work with Abigail. She was an exceptionally bright and articulate girl, extremely hardworking and also hard on herself. Her list of accomplishments and activities was significant. Her gaze was direct and friendly, but I could sense the ways in which she held herself back. I wondered whether she would begin to trust me enough to open up and let me get to know her.
Now, here we were together in the midst of a remarkable moment. As Abigail described to me what she had read on the newsfeed, I was aware of my thoughts scattering in wildly different directions. I felt the stirrings of an old familiar feeling. I suddenly had a vivid memory of the morning of 9/11. Standing in line at my neighborhood grocery store, I overheard a woman say in an oddly animated way, “Did you hear what just happened? A plane just flew into the World Trade Towers!” I looked at her, a young mother dressed in skinny jeans and flats, blow-dried and moisturized, and thought firmly, “You can't possibly know what you're talking about. I'm from New York. That could never happen.” For a split second, my mind succeeded in pushing away the information, although it was already seeping into another part of my mind, where I knew it must be true. Even as I denied the possibility of such a thing, I was already tuning in to the news and calling family members who lived in New York. Of course, like others, I couldn't get through.
How, then, do children make sense of the trauma they are exposed to?
Sitting with Abigail after the Newtown shooting, trying to process the information I had just received, I was also acutely aware of my patient's distress unfolding in front of me. The on-the-spot reporting of the events that had reached her through a live news-feed and the odd compression of time that accompanied it had clearly denied her the ability to take in the news and process it. Her mind was reeling, unable to make sense of the images she had seen.
For those of us who treat teens, it seems that we are witnessing a new kind of global trauma. Today's adolescents are growing up in a world where information is delivered rapid-fire. The last decade has brought a plethora of new social media and technology that assures news is delivered fast, unfiltered, and ubiquitously. Such simultaneous, and often repetitious, newsfeeds deny the opportunity to adequately process and digest the information. How, then, do children make sense of the trauma they are exposed to? What sorts of defenses do they need to protect themselves from the steady onslaught of frightening, disturbing, and explicitly detailed news events?
Following the Boston Marathon bombings, the news announcers reassured the public that there was a “five-second delay” so anything “potentially disturbing” would not be aired. Five seconds? Potentially disturbing? How is it that the moment-to-moment police operations attempting to safely capture a dangerous and probably deeply disturbed terrorist could unfold in the middle of our living rooms while we were eating dinner or gathering as a family?
One consequence of instant feed media is that, when a devastating event takes place, we often have very little opportunity to talk to our children in the ways we might if we
Anne Adelman, Ph.D., in private practice in Chevy Chase, works with children, adults and couples; is co-author of Wearing My Tutu to Analysis: Learning Psychodynamic Concepts from Life; and co-editor of The Therapist in Mourning: From the Far Away Nearby.
had more time for reflection. Text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—the immediate delivery of unprocessed and raw, often violent and disturbing events reaches our children's ears and eyes before we can mediate and help them to process the information. It may be only after they have already heard the news that we are able to explain, try to answer their questions, offer reassurances. We may find ourselves pushed aside in our role as parents, comforting our children and soothing their fears long after the impact has occurred.
So, too, in our consulting rooms, we may at times feel isolated. Like with Abigail, people may arrive for their therapy sessions already distraught about news that the therapist may not have heard yet. Then, caught unawares, we must process our own alarm and fear alongside of our patients, simultaneously coping with their reactions and their grief. Our experience in some ways parallels that of our patients. We do our best to slow it down, to metabolize our shock and horror in the face of events that leave us feeling helpless and confused.
Sitting in my office with Abigail, I recognized that my own agitation mirrored her experience of being rocked by the unexpected news she had heard. I gathered my thoughts and asked if she could put her own thoughts and feelings into words. What came next was poignant. Abigail began by talking about her horror at how alone and frightened the children must have felt, the horror at not seeing their parents or being able to be comforted by them. As she spoke, her thoughts, like mine, turned to her own memories of 9/11. While she was only five years old at the time, she remembered the feeling of confusion and aloneness. The feeling of safety and security she had was disrupted, her usual sense of order and routine shattered. Children were gathered up, brought to friends' houses, kept indoors. She remembered her mother crying, her father talking on the phone, coming home from work early, hushed conversations in worried tones. She later came to make sense of these impressions, but on this day, with the news of the shooting, what came to her were these earlier, tightly tangled knots of fear, unrest, and unsafety.
It was striking that Abigail's thoughts had taken her to the exact place that mine had taken me, bringing home the power of the collective trauma we had all experienced more than a decade ago. The shattering events of 9/11, which also corresponded with rapid advances in technology that completely altered how news is delivered, changed the world for all of us, especially today's youth. It marked the beginning of a new era of terrorism in America. The unthinkable happened and caught us with our guard down, unready and profoundly vulnerable, making the threats that face our nation explicitly dire and direct.
In the last decade, terrorism has become a significant factor in our shared global awareness and vocabulary and has created a massive shift in our sense of ourselves as a nation. No longer can we assume to be invulnerable, protected, or mighty. For those growing up in the shadows of 9/11, safety as a nation, the threat of war, confusion about the use of force and even deeper confusion about our principles as a nation have become rampant. The teens we see in our consulting rooms have memories of that September morning that are often stark in their simplicity. Awareness of parental distress, confusion about what had happened, and a sense of deep unrest are pervasive for many teens.
After the Newtown shootings, I noticed a dramatic shift in my sessions with Abigail. She talked to me now in a direct, deep, and meaningful way. It was as if we had gone through something together, something that united us and brought with it a deepened level of trust, born out of shared experience. It was not unlike the feeling of unity shared by many Americans in the aftermath of global catastrophes. I learned from her about the subtle pressures of her family life, about her feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem, and about an undercurrent of anxiety that rarely left her and often focused around her future. Was there hope for her, she wondered? How would she ever become independent in the face of her powerful wish for her parents' approval and protection and begin to feel secure in the world? Was there somewhere an island of safety to retreat to when she felt overwhelmed?
I wondered how these anxieties were honed and amplified by her experience, shared by so many adolescents, of growing up in a world where the layers of protection were thinner and more frayed than before—where the knowledge of real-world dangers continually assault her in an unfiltered way and commingle with an array of internal fears and threats. We may not yet know how such knowledge will seep into the internal landscapes of today's children and adolescents, but these are essential developmental issues that urgently need careful attention and reflection.
Editor's Note:
The author disguised the clinical material to protect patient confidentiality.