on trauma, overwhelm and severed emotional bonds

I think they need to experience what they can do now,

rather than what they cannot.

This struck me as a particularly interesting quote taken from the movie The Windemere Children based on a true story of a group of Jewish children taken in after being interred in concentration camps -some of them up to three different ones – by a group of English and German men in hopes of ‘rehabilitating them.’ I found just hearing those words painful, exactly how does one come back from such devastation, seeing those you loved gassed, experiencing beatings, shootings and near starvation on a daily basis?

They come to this refuge established for then naturally full of fear, as you can imagine, and some of the things they have to go through must have been so triggering, having to remove all of their clothes in order to undergo physical examinations, watching this pile of clothing burned to kill any signs of disease.

But that quote bought to my mind also how our own trauma often attracts us towards further self defeating situations, especially avoidant or anxious attachment trauma patterns..

I am trying to cope with my times of overwhelm, where I realise with a sense of great shame and shock how I have so often over extended myself and found it hard to admit to needing or even being able to ask for support due to my own trauma. How I then also seem to attract others in need. .. I see how terrified I have been for most of my life about being overpowered by people more able to express and self assert.. I woke from a deep sleep last night feeling there was a dark presence in my room that wanted to take me over or abuse me, when I woke it took considerably less time than in the past to recognize it was not true but surely this dream (which I have had from time to time in my life) means something very significant on a psychological level.

My heart goes out in this movie to what these young ones have lived through, and another quote from the movie directed to the therapist who is overseeing the project that at this time the children are less concerned with healing and more concerned about the news of their family they were separated from during the war echoed what the hospice chaplin Kerry Egan mentioned in her book on ministering to the dying. That in the end family relationships as well as the hidden nuances of what occurs in those earliest of attachment and bonding relationships will be the dominant influence overshadowing the psyches of those facing death. To experience such a violent severing of bonds is so painful and will leave lasting scars, so in this sense the ideal of ‘rehabilitation’ may not be one that is actually even humanly feasible in such a situation, although I am sure there is something to be said to a painful coming to terms which must surely occupy so much of the intense soul journey those who live through such violent traumas experience.