Fight, Flight, and Abuse

There were times when it just seemed hopeless, impossible to escape—the emotional abuse in my childhood home. My family will hate me for writing this. Mostly they would say, let go, it's in the past, and I agree, I've forgiven my father, I miss him and wish he were alive so I could stand up to it completely and thereby disable it, helping him to get free of his layers of barbed defenses. If only it would stay in the past. But not with this president. He has for the past month ordered those working the southern border to separate anyone entering from their children. Some 2,000 children have been taken and caged since that order began. Now he's saying this is the Democrats' fault for not giving him his wall. It makes me sick just to type this all out.

Today, ProPublica circulated audio from one child detention center where children were sobbing and screaming out for their parents, while a man working there joked about how they had quite an orchestra in there. I keep thinking of terrified, disconsolate kids. I keep thinking about the hopelessness of so many of the people who cross. They are seeking asylum, whether they declare it or not. They are fleeing one hell and entering another. But Trump and the people around him, many of them women, poison the air with lies and logical fallacies. They are aggressive about it, and it throws all reasonable people back a step or two. I for one feel backed up tonight. I feel it physically, in my gut. I had the feeling a lot in the months after the election, but it became less so over time; it's back.

What we are faced with is insanity capable of great distortion, complete falsehoods, and violence. Coming up against that, of course: fight or flight. In dealing with my father's unreasonableness as it welled up into abusiveness, I did both, but fought more than I flew. Until a point when I realized that these fights could not be won unless I matched his tactics, which I was not willing to do. Then I withdrew. When I was older and mostly out of adolescence, I had my own place to live and so my withdrawal could be both physical and emotional. But, once by myself, the absolute frustration was still there with me. Disinclined to renew and escalate the battle, even if there might be a catharsis that would change things in at least a small way between us, I often turned that feeling inward. I would smoke more. When I still drank, I would want to get drunk. When I was a very young girl watching it happen to my mother—the movement of words stated calmly to something like a hurricane of rage in mere minutes—I sometimes cried out and pleaded for it to stop. It seemed to me as if life, my life, had stopped and would not be permitted to start up again until the storm had passed. I muttered prayers out my bedroom window, just like I did tonight during yoga savasana, asking for the return of sense, the return of people being decent to one another, being just, compassionate, and not like predatory animals asserting dominance, the more lawlessly the more it is opposed. There were even a few times in my tween years when I did dramatic things like swallow a bunch of aspirin—not because I wanted to die but because I wanted to control the flow of events if I could, throw a strong current against his rapids. Make it stop.

Tonight The New York Times has published an editorial against this "zero tolerance policy" that has led to the incarceration of children away from their parents. Here's how it opens:  "Watching President Trump blame Democrats for his administration's inhumane practice of snatching immigrant children from their parents at the border evokes nothing so much as an abusive husband blaming his wife for the beatings he delivers: Why do you make me do this? I hate doing this! If you'd only be reasonable and listen to me, things wouldn't have to be this way."

I've got to say that, even though we were treated to that sort of reality bending in the course of the hellfire rages of my dad, my father was different from Trump and his administration: It might take a few hours or even overnight, but after an episode, he presented as remorseful and hoping it would never happen again. I don't remember being told, by the more rational, morning-after father, that I had something to do with what happened. The more I think about it, yes, there was some of that mixed in with the relative gentleness and rational-sounding speech tone and volume. Many people consider this conciliatory phase part and parcel of the abuse, but I don't see it that way. For one thing, I've heard tales of completely remorseless abusive parents and spouses. For another, I honestly think he wished that didn't happen, that deep down, he knew it was something in him and not us that caused him to become insanely furious and at times even physically violent. The older I got, the more I'd use those conciliatory moments to make it clear that I no longer believed I had caused the storm by, say, having a different political view during a dinner conversation or deciding I wanted to go away to college; I'd say to him, often with tears in my eyes, that he needed to get help.

My father loved me, and though I didn't always sense that from him because of the demons he struggled with, I knew that to be true, at least as an abstract principle.

This national abuse is much different. Though they are Americans like you and me, they do not seem to bear much love for those of us who have different views. In simple terms, they think it is okay to lock up brown children to enrich the contractors who run these concentration camps and show a few ignorant racists that they mean business about "illegals," and they hate us for thinking it's abhorrent and inhumane, for thinking—reasonably, I believe—that between the two terms of their either-it's-children-in cages-or-it's-open borders fallacy are an infinite number of solutions if there were two sides willing to work together to find it. To be unwilling to listen or hear the other side is a very thoroughgoing abusive disposition. And there is seemingly no escape from it. I feel impulses to violence when I feel helpless to reason with this governing group. Too often, because I don't want to act violently, I turn it inward. There, to keep from self-harm, I try to intercept it somehow. I write about it, as I'm doing now. I wish I could say that that is good in itself, but there are children and parents wondering whether they will ever see each other again sleeping on thin mats on concrete floors. There are people trying to rebuild their lives in Puerto Rico, after thousands of unnecessary post-Maria deaths. More must be done, and I should rest and be ready to help.