By Catherine Cox
“Mummy, my life is in your hands!” the young son of one of my colleagues in Ukraine frantically yelled at his mother.
The air raid sirens were wailing and his mother was not, in his view, being quick enough in rushing for the bomb shelter. If it is a cruise missile attack, you have 3 to 5 minutes to seek what cover you can. It’s no time at all.
For this reason many families sleep in air raid shelters, in their cars in underground carparks, on the floor in metro stations, often leaving their bedding and other necessities there for the next night.
His mother told me this story about her son as we were preparing to meet with a group of students. One student told me how she had stood with the husband of her closest friend and watched as the dead bodies of her friend and their three children were carried from the rubble after an attack. Everyone knows at least someone who has been killed in the war.
Every day, children in Ukraine face the possibility of their own death or the death of a parent, which amounts to almost the same thing in the mind of a child. Most bombing happens at night. No one knows who will be alive in the morning. They do not say, “Good night, sleep well, see you in the morning.” As dark comes, the terrors of the night are real terrors and sometimes these go on for hours.
When I visited Ukraine earlier this year, I did not see children playing on the street. What parent would let their child out of their sight when a drone or missile attack could happen at any time? One of my colleagues told me she was on the phone to a friend when they both heard a loud explosion. In that explosion her friend’s husband was killed, by metal shards dropped from a drone.
“What must it be like for these children? They were told they must leave their home, school, friends, father, grandparents and country – in order to stay alive.”
The first time I travelled to Ukraine, last summer, I travelled by train from Budapest to Kyiv. There are, of course, no flights. Ukraine is a big country and the journey took 21 hours. The train was packed full of refugees – mainly women with children, and also a few single women. They were all travelling home to see family. Some were taking the children to see their fathers and wanted to see their husbands, who are only allowed to leave Ukraine twice a year if they are lucky. Most also wanted to see elderly parents who had been left behind.
There was no restaurant car on the train. The mothers did their best to feed, entertain and care for their children for this long journey. But the children were not like children as we know them. How I wished they would just be naughty and boisterous and drive us all mad. But no, they were subdued; their eyes were dull, they did not trouble their stressed mothers, but were withdrawn in a world of their own.
When we crossed the border from Hungary into Ukraine, we all knew that we might be attacked, killed or injured at any moment. There was nothing we could do.
What must it be like for these children? They were told they must leave their home, school, friends, father, grandparents and country in order to stay alive, and now they were travelling back into it for two weeks. What awaited them? Later, on the return journey out, I cannot have been the only person to wonder which of these children would ever see their fathers or grandparents again.
My colleagues working in Ukraine tell me that the children with parents at the front can’t integrate with other children and special provision has to be made for them. Children’s brains are not like ours. Processing, in particular, comes later in development. They do not have the same means as adults to cope with trauma, grief and terror – which, even as adults, we often struggle to cope with. Their suffering may manifest in different ways – from shutting down, to aggression, acute anxiety, dissociation, bed-wetting, refusal to leave home and go to school, depression, inability to sleep, nightmares, self-harming and so on.
“Children’s brains are not like ours. They do not have the same means as adults to cope with trauma, grief and terror.”
To make matters worse, their parent or caregiver will most likely themselves be suffering from trauma; they may be grief-stricken, terrified at what might happen to their children or to a partner at the front; they will certainly be exhausted. All of which means that their emotional availability for the child will most likely be severely compromised, leaving the child emotionally isolated in their distress.
Young boys quickly realise that their future will not be to be an astronaut, or policeman or electrician. For now their fate is to be sent to war – where they may be killed, lose limbs, certainly suffer PTSD; they may be captured and tortured by the Russians. This is what they have to look forward to.
My mother is from Austria, near Linz, the city Hitler wanted to make the capital of the Third Reich. It is now 80 years since the Second World War war ended, and still the trauma of that war is being suffered by the descendants of those who are no longer alive. Psychologists sometimes describe this as intergenerational trauma or trans-generational trauma. The trauma of the first person traumatises the second, which in turn traumatises the next generation, without there really being a narrative that can be processed. A parent was emotionally unavailable, perhaps an alcoholic, couldn’t form good relationships, or was aggressive, or suffered from anxiety, or was over-protective or depressed – the list goes on.
This passes down the generations until a generation is far enough removed from the original trauma to be able to process their experience – often in therapy – and so not inflict it on their own children. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to support children who are caught up in one way or another with a war.
Sooner or later the war in Ukraine will end – but it won’t end for Ukraine’s children. That is not how trauma works. Trauma is an internal living state, where the psyche and body are stuck because they have been overwhelmed and cannot deal with what was experienced.
That is why the work of charities such as Children and War is so important. It is vital that someone is there alongside children caught up in war, helping them in some way to process.
If you make a donation that will help just one child, that child’s life will be changed for ever. The whole trajectory of their life will be different. They will have a greater chance of happiness and of fulfilling their potential in education and then in the workplace, of forming good relationships, of having better physical health, of contributing to society.
The problems facing us in the world sometimes feel so overwhelming that it is easy to feel defeated, but the reality is that we just need, each of us, to do our bit – and our single bit will make a huge difference to someone.
So I invite you today to make a difference. Children need adults to help. Their lives are in our hands.
Catherine Cox is a Jungian Psychoanalyst and Analytical Psychologist. She can be contacted at ccox@citypsychotherapy.org.
