Iraqi Mothers-- Reflections on attachment and war

I can't sleep.

My heart is heavy with images and news from Iraq. Right now, as I type these words 40,000 Yazidi, Muslim, and Christian Iraqis are stranded on a mountainside in Sinjar, northern Iraq. Hungry, thirsty, running for their very lives, fear pours like sweat down the faces of the besieged. Stories of decapitated children -- their small, severed heads mounted on poles -- circulate wildly. Told that those seeking refuge are "devil-worshippers," ISIS militants intent on "purifying" the land surround the base of the mountain. Their black flags flutter. Their weapons wait. The intensifying stress running rampant forever alters the physiology of all involved. 

I imagine a new mother, like myself, holding her toddler close. She is wondering if they will make it. Will she be able to continue to produce breast milk as stress, fatigue, and thirst take their exacting toll? Her milk provides a singular comfort to her son whose increasingly parched mouth brings mind-numbing terror to her consciousness. Her son seeks to find familiar solace while nestling into the softness of his mother's body. Yet, his mother is tense with worry and the sounds around him are full of fear. Forty children already have died from hunger and thirst amongst those marooned on the mountainside. In neighboring communities, tens of thousands of Iraq's religious and ethnic minorities flee from the expanding territorial grip of ISIS’s brutal regime. If a family is lucky to pass through the ISIS checkpoints intact, without daughters or wives being "married" off to militants, they will have to begin from scratch. Jewelry is taken off of their fingers and their very IDs are stolen away. If this mother and son survive their traumatic mountain exile, they will be forced to begin anew with nothing but their bond of attachment to guide them.

I imagine another mother. Her son was six when the US invaded Iraq. The sounds of bombs, the impact of suicidal zealots taking out cafes full of neighbors, and the stories of his father's cruel interrogation and imprisonment, forever altered his development. The young boy's brain lost its ability to settle into a natural limbic resonance of connecting to others through empathy and understanding. Forever on high alert, his emerging cognitive function also was terribly stunted. I imagine this mother watching her son grow up in war. Studies clearly show that even the presence of "mild" violence in the home -- for example, the use of spanking as a form of corporal punishment -- negatively alters a child's developing brain. Can I imagine fully what war does to children? Now he is a twenty-year-old young man captivated by the allure of a rigid, self-righteous, and brutal movement called ISIS. He experiences the intoxicating power of inflicting relentless violence against a scapegoated “other” believed to be responsible for all of the chaos characterizing his lot. I imagine this mother watching her son turn into a killer -- a killer that chases other mothers and their young sons into the mountains. She weeps. 

The limbic brains of both mothers, the physiological base for human attachment, are activated. Deep sadness moves these women to tears. If we are sensitive to their plight, we may notice tears come to our own eyes. Their tears and stories are what moved me out of slumber. These mothers feel. Even if what they feel is profound and devastating loss, they are some of the lucky ones. They still can feel. They still care. To experience empathy and remain open to both joy and profound sadness is better than an alternative, conscience-blinding numbness. For it is in the destruction of our ability to care -- a capacity rooted in our limbic brain’s attunement to resonate with another -- that we find the root of human violence currently tearing apart Iraq. 

What does limbic resonance have to do with the emergence of ISIS, or of any other the brutal militia? The stories of these mothers and this very question keep me up tonight. 

Consider the wonders of our triune human brain. At the base is the reptilian brain moving us to sex, aggression, and defense. We fight, flee, or freeze as all animals do when faced with threat. The primary functions of physical existence are woven into these primal energies of human life. Now, consider the wonders of deciphering symbols into sounds that conjure meaning. Through the power of cognition, I can reflect upon the primal energies that motivate my being. I can write about them and, if I am lucky enough to live with a brain that has been nurtured to develop normally, I can choose to direct their course with wisdom and compassion. 

These higher-level functions of cognition are rooted in our elaborately evolved neocortex, setting us apart from all other creatures. We create language, systems, social structures, and history due to the neocortex. Evolution’s most recent addition to our tripartite brain enables us to build bridges, write symphonies, and concoct science fiction. Through the use of our neocortex, the very face of the earth is marked with our presence-- for good and ill. That's the key. The neo-cortex and the reptilian brain can function together bypassing the limbic brain that links the two and when they do, the results lead to desperate families fleeing up rocky mountainsides for their very lives. 

The word “limbic” comes from the Latin limbus meaning “edge” or “border.” Unique amongst mammals, the limbic brain is the seat of our ability to feel empathy and nurture complex and compassionate attachments to one another. Originating in the resonance of mother-child attachment -- specifically linked to the mammalian practice of breastfeeding -- the emerging health of a child’s limbic brain determines her or his relational template impacting all future interactions. Do we trust others? Do we care for others? Do we feel a connection to strangers who suffer? Do we respond with sensitivity to another's pain? 

According to doctors Thomas Lewis, Fari Amani and Richard Lannon -- professors of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco-- without a healthy limbic brain, we are reduced to the functioning of intelligent reptiles. “…A limbically damaged human is deadly,” they write in A General Theory of Love. “If the neglect is sufficiently profound, the result is a functionally reptilian organism armed with the cunning of the neocortical brain.” In other words, we are reduced to functioning like those who stand at checkpoints and stare into the eyes of frightened children and feel only the rush of power’s impunity. There is no empathy. Limbically damaged people are physiologically incapable of feeling the normal pull of human attachment beckoning us to protect innocent life. Rooted in early trauma and resulting from the absence of the secure attachments formed in infancy and childhood, life without limbic resonance is war. 

Young men from besieged communities, in all cultures and all times, have found extremist and militant movements to be an alluring panacea to their profound experience of disenfranchisement and loss. Their limbically damaged brains make them impressionable and vulnerable targets for those peddling the opiate of self-righteous war. Those engaged in spreading the brutal violence of ISIS were children when the Iraqi war began. They were raised in homes full of intense stress, loss, and fear. There is “no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists outside the limbic domain,” write Lewis, Amini, and Lannon. “Monkeys deprived of early limbic regulation have lost both neural organization and the capacity for modulated aggression. They are erratically, unpredictably, chaotically vicious.” Tragically, so too are we.

Tonight I can’t sleep. Like the breastfeeding mother on the mountain and the grieving mother who has lost her son to the black masks and sharp swords of ISIS, my heart is heavy with pain. I vow not to dull this ache. May it inspire thoughtful and wise action leading to the protection of the most basic attachments upon which our human fate depends. I stand with Lewis, Amani, and Lannon in affirming the truth that the future of humanity depends on love, “the tether binding our whirling lives.” Without this anchor, “all of us are flung outward, singly, into the encroaching darkness.”