The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog Page 8

  It was only dumb luck that kept the Davidian children together after the first raid. Originally, Texas CPS had planned to place them in individual foster homes, but they couldn’t find enough homes fast enough to take all of them. Keeping them together turned out to be one of the most therapeutic decisions made in their case: these children would need each other. After what they had just experienced, ripping them from their peers and/or siblings would only have increased their distress.

  Instead of foster homes the children were brought to a pleasant, campus-like setting, the Methodist Children’s Home in Waco. There, they lived in a large cottage, initially guarded by two armed Texas Rangers. They were cared for by two rotating live-in couples, the “house mothers” and “house fathers.” While the state’s efforts to provide mental health care were well intentioned, unfortunately, they were not especially effective. Texas had pulled in professionals from its busy public systems, basically utilizing anyone who could spare an hour. As a result, the timing and consistency of these mental health visits was random, and the children were further confused by meeting with yet more strangers.

  In those early days the atmosphere of the cottage was also chaotic. Officers from various law enforcement agencies would show up at any time, day or night, and pull aside particular girls or boys for interviews. There was no schedule to their daily life and no regularity to the people that they would see. One of the few things I knew for sure by then about traumatized children was that they need predictability, routine, a sense of control and stable relationships with supportive people. This was even more important than usual for the Davidian children: they were coming from a place where they had for years been kept in a state of alarm, led to expect catastrophe at any minute.

  During my initial afternoon meeting with the key agencies involved, my advice boiled down to this: create consistency, routine, and familiarity. That meant establishing order, setting up clear boundaries, improving cross-organizational communication and limiting the mental health staff to those who could regularly be there for the children. I also suggested that only those who had training in interviewing children be allowed to conduct the forensic interviews for the Rangers and the FBI. At the end of the meeting CPS asked me if I would be willing to lead in the coordination of these efforts. Later that day, after meeting with FBI agents, I was also asked to do the forensic interviews myself. At that point we still thought that the crisis would be over in days, so I agreed. I figured it would be an interesting opportunity to learn while simultaneously helping these children. I drove to the cottage to meet a remarkable group of young people.

  WHEN I ARRIVED one of the Rangers stopped me at the door. He was tall, imposing in his hat, the archetype of Texas law enforcement. He was not impressed by this long-haired man in jeans claiming to be a psychiatrist who had come to help the children. Even after I’d established that I was indeed Dr. Perry, he told me that I didn’t look like a doctor, and further, “Those kids don’t need a shrink. All they need is a little love and to get as far away from here as possible.”

  Ultimately, this Ranger would turn out to be one of the most positive and healing figures in the children’s lives for the weeks they stayed at the cottage. He was calm, good with children, and intuitively seemed to know how to provide a supportive but not intrusive presence. But right then, he was in my way. I said to him, “OK, I’ll tell you what. Do you know how to take a pulse?” I directed his attention to a young girl who was fast asleep on a nearby couch. I told him that if her pulse was less than 100, I would turn around and go home. The normal heart rate range for a child her age at rest is 70-90 beats per minute (bpm).

  He bent down gently to pick up the girl’s wrist, and within moments his face filled with anxiety. “Get a doctor,” he said. “I am a doctor,” I replied. “No, a real doctor,” he said, “This child’s pulse is 160.”

  After reassuring him that psychiatrists are physicians with standard medical training, I began to describe the physiological effects of trauma on children. In this case an elevated heart rate was likely a reflection of the girl’s persistently activated stress-response system. The ranger understood the basics of the fight or flight response; almost all law enforcement officers have some direct experience with this. I noted that the same hormones and neurotransmitters that flood the brain during a stressful event—adrenaline and noradrenaline—are also involved in regulating heart rate, which makes sense since changes in heart rate are needed to react to stress. From my work with other traumatized children, I knew that even months and years after trauma many would still exhibit an overactive stress response. It was a safe bet then that being so close to an overwhelming experience, this little girl’s heart would still be racing.

  The Ranger let me in.

  THE DAVIDIAN CHILDREN had been released in small groups—two to four at a time—in the first three days following the February raid. They ranged in age from five months to twelve years old. Most were between four and eleven. They came from ten different families and seventeen of the twenty-one were released with at least one sibling. Although some former members have disputed accounts of child abuse among the Davidians (and although I was misquoted in the press to suggest that I didn’t believe that the children were living in an abusive situation), there was never any doubt that the children had been traumatized, certainly by the raid on the compound, but also by their life beforehand.

  One little girl had been released with a note pinned to her clothing that said her mother would be dead by the time the relatives to whom it was addressed got to read it. Another was given a kiss by her mother, handed to an FBI agent and told, “Here are the people who will kill us. I will see you in heaven.” Long before the compound burned, the Davidian children released to us acted as though their parents (at least one of whom they knew to be alive at the time they left) had already died. When I first met the children, in fact, they were sitting and eating lunch. As I walked into the room one of the younger children looked up and calmly asked, “Are you here to kill us?”

  These children did not feel as though they had just been liberated. Instead, because of what they’d been taught about outsiders and because of the violence they’d survived, they felt like hostages. They were more frightened of us now than they had been at home, not only because they were suddenly deprived of family and familiarity, but also because Koresh’s predictions about an attack had come true. If he was right that the “unbelievers” had come for them, they figured, his assertion that we intended to kill them and their families was probably correct as well.

  WE IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZED that we had a group of children that had essentially been marinated in fear. The only way we could get them the help they needed was to apply our understanding of how fear affects the brain and then consequently changes behavior.

  Fear is our most primal emotion, and with good evolutionary reason. Without it few of our ancestors would have survived. Fear literally arises from the core of the brain, affecting all brain areas and their functions in rapidly expanding waves of neurochemical activity. Some of the critical chemicals involved include those we’ve already discussed, such as adrenaline and noradrenaline, but also important is a stress hormone called cortisol. Two of the key brain regions involved with fear are the locus coeruleus, the origin of the majority of noradrenaline neurons in the brain, and an almond-shaped part of the limbic system called the amygdala.

  As noted earlier, the brain evolved from the inside out, and it develops in much the same order. The lowest, most primitive region—the brainstem—completes much of its development in utero and in early infancy. The midbrain and limbic systems develop next, elaborating themselves exuberantly over the first three years of life. Parents of teenagers won’t be surprised to learn that the frontal lobes of the cortex, which regulate planning, self-control and abstract thought, do not complete their development until late in adolescence, showing significant reorganization well into the early twenties.

  The fact that the brain develops sequ
entially—and also so rapidly in the first years of life—explains why extremely young children are at such great risk of suffering lasting effects of trauma: their brains are still developing. The same miraculous plasticity that allows young brains to quickly learn love and language, unfortunately, also makes them highly susceptible to negative experiences as well. Just as fetuses are especially vulnerable to particular toxins depending on the trimester of pregnancy in which they are exposed, so are children vulnerable to the lasting effects of trauma, depending on when it occurs. As a result different symptoms may result from trauma experienced at different times. For example, a toddler with no language to describe the painful and repetitive sexual abuse he experiences may develop a complete aversion to being touched, wide-ranging problems with intimacy and relationships and pervasive anxiety. But a ten-year-old who is subjected to virtually identical abuse is more likely to develop specific, event-related fears and to work deliberately to avoid particular cues associated with the place, person and manner of abuse. Her anxiety will wax and wane with exposure to reminders of the molestation. Further, an older child will probably have associated feelings of shame and guilt—complex emotions mediated by the cortex. That region is far less developed in a toddler, therefore related symptoms are less likely if abuse begins and ends earlier in life.

  At any age, however, when people are faced with a frightening situation their brains begin to shut down their highest cortical regions first. We lose the capacity to plan, or to feel hunger, because neither are of any use to our immediate survival. Often we lose the ability to “think” or even speak during an acute threat. We just react. And with prolonged fear there can be chronic or near-permanent changes in the brain. The brain alterations that result from lingering terror, especially early in life, may cause an enduring shift to a more impulsive, more aggressive, less thoughtful and less compassionate way of responding to the world.

  This is because systems in the brain change in a “use-dependent” way, as we noted earlier. Just like a muscle, the more a brain system like the stress response network gets “exercised,” the more it changes and the more risk there is of altered functioning. At the same time, the less the cortical regions, which usually control and modulate stress, are used, the smaller and weaker they get. Exposing a person to chronic fear and stress is like weakening the braking power of a car while adding a more powerful engine: you’re altering the safety mechanisms that keep the “machine” from going dangerously out of control. Such use-dependent changes in the relative power of different brain systems—just like the use-dependent templates one forms in one’s memory about what the world is like—are critical determinants of human behavior. Understanding the importance of use-dependent development was vital to our work in treating traumatized children like those we saw in the immediate aftermath of the first raid on Ranch Apocalypse.

  BY THIS POINT in my work, as odd as that may seem now, I’d only just begun to discover how important relationships are to the healing process. Our group and others had observed that the nature of a child’s relationships—both before and after trauma—seemed to play a critical role in shaping their response to it. If safe, familiar and capable caregivers were available to children, they tended to recover more easily, often showing no enduring negative effects of the traumatic event. We knew that the “trauma-buffering” effect of relationships had to be mediated, somehow, by the brain.

  But how? In order for an animal to be biologically successful, its brain must guide it to meet three prime directives: first, it must stay alive, second it must procreate, and third, if it bears dependent young as humans do, it must protect and nurture these offspring until they are able to fend for themselves. Even in humans, all of the thousands of complex capacities of the brain are connected, in one way or another, to systems originally evolved to drive these three functions.

  In a social species like ours, however, all three essential functions are deeply dependent upon the brain’s capacity to form and maintain relationships. Individual humans are slow, weak, and incapable of surviving for long in nature without the aid of others. In the world in which our ancestors evolved a lone human would soon be a dead one. Only through cooperation, sharing with members of our extended family, living in groups and hunting and gathering together could we survive. That’s why, as children, we come to associate the presence of people we know with safety and comfort; in safe and familiar settings our heart rates and blood pressure are lower, our stress response systems are quiet.

  But throughout history, while some humans have been our best friends and kept us safe, others have been our worst enemies. The major predators of human beings are other human beings. Our stress-response systems, therefore, are closely interconnected with the systems that read and respond to human social cues. As a result we are very sensitive to expressions, gestures and the moods of others. As we shall see, we interpret threat and learn to handle stress by watching how those around us. We even have special cells in our brains that fire, not when we move or express emotions, but when we see others do so. Human social life is built on this ability to “reflect” each other and respond to those reflections, with both positive and negative results. For example, if you are feeling great and go to work where your supervisor is in a vile mood, soon you will probably feel lousy, too. If a teacher becomes angry or frustrated, the children in her classroom may begin to misbehave, reflecting the powerful emotion being expressed by the teacher. To calm a frightened child, you must first calm yourself.

  Recognizing the power of relationships and relational cues is essential to effective therapeutic work and, indeed, to effective parenting, caregiving, teaching and just about any other human endeavor. This would turn out to be a major challenge as we started working with the Davidian children. Because, as I soon discovered, the CPS workers, law enforcement officers and mental health workers involved in trying to help the children were all overwhelmed, stressed out and in a state of alarm themselves.

  Furthermore, the more I learned about Koresh and the Davidians, the more I knew that we would have to approach the Davidian children as if they were from a completely alien culture; certainly their worldview was going to be very different from those shared by their new caretakers. Unfortunately, the very same capacity that allows us to bond with each other also allows us to collaborate to defeat a common enemy; what permits us to perform great acts of love also enables us to marginalize and dehumanize others who are not “like” us, not part of our “clan.” This tribalism can result in the most extreme forms of hatred and violence. Additionally, after their indoctrination from Koresh, I knew that these children viewed us as outsiders, nonbelievers—and as a threat. What I didn’t know was what to do about that.

  DURING MY FIRST two days in Waco I began the delicate task of individually interviewing each child to try to get useful information to help the FBI negotiators defuse the standoff. In any situation where child abuse is suspected, such interviews are difficult because children, quite reasonably, worry about getting their parents in trouble. In this case, it was further complicated by the fact that the Davidians had been brought up to believe that it was OK to deceive “Babylonians” because we were the enemies of God. I knew they might fear that being honest with us was not only a possible betrayal of their parents, but a grievous sin as well.

  To my horror, every child gave me the distinct sense that they had a big, terrible secret. When I asked what was going to happen at the Ranch, they’d say ominous things like, “You’ll see.” Every child, when asked explicitly where his or her parents were, replied, “They’re dead,” or, “They are all going to die.” They told me that they would not see their parents again until David came back to earth to kill the unbelievers. But they wouldn’t be more specific.

  It is not unusual for children to be deceptive or withholding or to purposefully lie in order to avoid things they don’t want to share, especially when they have been instructed to do so by their families. However, it is far more difficult for them
to hide their true thoughts and feelings in their artwork. And so, with each child old enough to color, I sat with him and colored as we talked. I asked one ten-year-old boy named Michael, who was one of the first children interviewed, to draw me a picture of whatever he wanted. He went to work quickly, producing a fine unicorn surrounded by a lush, earthly landscape of forested hills. In the sky were clouds, a castle and a rainbow. I praised his drawing skills and he told me that David loved it when he drew horses. He’d also received kudos from the group and its leader for his renditions of heavenly castles and the incorporation of the group’s symbol into his drawings: the star of David.

  Then I asked him to draw a self-portrait. What he drew was virtually a stick figure, something that a four-year-old could produce. Even more shockingly, when I asked him to draw his family, he paused and seemed confused. Finally, he created a page that was blank but for a tiny picture of himself, squeezed into the far right hand corner. His drawings reflected what he’d learned in the group: the elaboration of things that Koresh valued, the dominance of its supreme leader, a confused, impoverished sense of family and an immature, dependent picture of himself.