Stop Parent Child Separation Before It Goes Viral

The ripping apart of parents (mostly mothers) and children doesn’t just touch the fabric of our beings as human, it touches the very fibers.

I am a psychiatrist who specialized for many years in treating trauma and wrote, PTSD for Dummies, and have a passion for neuroscience.

When I say “fibers,” I mean the fibers that are at the center of our being alive and those fibers are the two strands of DNA literally at the core of our being.

When mothers and children are ripped apart by the current practices at the US-Mexico border, it is like the two strands of DNA being ripped apart.

One strand being the mother; the other strand being the child(s).

A mother literally doesn’t exist as a word without a child and a child literally doesn’t exist with a parent (and as I’ve mentioned, that seems to be more often a mother).

When a mother and a child are ripped apart it therefore literally tears into the core of that mother and that child, because without the other, neither a mother nor a child exist.

To exist as a mother, she must literally have a child (when a child dies, she turns into “was a mother”) and to exist as a child, he/she must literally have a parent. If that child’s parents die, then that child may become a child of the world, but then we refer to them as an orphan.

It is especially devastating to the child , which is why we hear their screams as if they are feral cats.

A mother also has identities as a wife or woman which can partially sure her up. On the other hand, a child without a parent only has the identity as a baby, toddler, boy or girl, or orphan — all of which are inherently dependent on someone else to exist.

If you think of the mother as one strand of DNA and the child as the other, when they are ripped apart, the mother strand — although tormented — can still survive whereas the child strand becomes truly desperate in its efforts to survive.

When that single child strand becomes desperate like that, it makes him or her vulnerable to becoming self-destructive toward himself or herself (through suicide) or violent towards others through joining gangs (or ISIS or cults), in an effort to kill off the terror and the vulnerability.

There is a place, however, where single stranded DNA does exist. And that is in viruses. At their core and central to how they function, viruses are literally a piece of DNA that infects hosts by invading the host’s DNA, which is why viruses are so difficult to kill off and why they are associated with cancer, because they can change a normal cell into a cancer cell.

That is why in the long term, children that are “spliced” away from their parents become a danger not just to themselves but to society and humanity.

When they grow up if they don’t destroy themselves through drugs like opiates, alcohol, etc. they will often turn that violent abandonment by the human race into a retaliatory rage and retributive justice.

Children — if they survive — that are cut off and thrown away, find a way to get back in and get even.