INSIDE THE BRANCH DAVIDIAN compound in Waco, Texas, children lived in a world of fear. Even babies weren’t immune: cult leader David Koresh believed that the wills of infants—some just eight months old—needed to be broken with strict physical discipline if they were to stay “in the light.” Koresh was mercurial: one moment kind, attentive, and nurturing, and the next, a prophet of rage. His wrath was inescapable and unpredictable. The Davidians, as the members of the Mount Carmel religious community were called, became exquisitely sensitive to his moods as they attempted to curry his favor and tried, often in vain, to stave off his vengeance.
With his volatile temper and fearsome anger, Koresh excelled at using irregular doses of extreme threat—alternating with kind, focused attention—to keep his followers off balance. He maintained an iron grip, controlling every aspect of life in the compound. He separated husband from wife, child from parent, friend from friend, undermining any relationship that could challenge his position as the most dominant, powerful force in each person’s life. Everyone’s love converged upon him, like spokes connecting to the hub of a wheel. Koresh was the source of all insight, wisdom, love, and power; he was the conduit to God, if not God himself on earth.
And he was a god who ruled by fear. Children (and sometimes even adults) were in constant fear of the physical attacks and public humiliation that could result from the tiniest error, like spilling milk. Punishment often involved being beaten bloody with a wooden paddle called “the helper.” Davidian children also feared hunger: those who “misbehaved” could be deprived of food for days or put on a bland diet of only potatoes or bread. Sometimes, they would be isolated overnight. And, for the girls, there was knowledge that they would ultimately become a “Bride of David.” In a unique form of sanctioned sexual abuse girls as young as ten were groomed to become Koresh’s sexual partners. A former member said Koresh once excitedly compared the heartbeats of the prepubescent girls he violated to those of hunted animals.
But perhaps the most pervasive fear that Koresh instilled was the fear of the “Babylonians”: outsiders, government agents, nonbelievers. Koresh preached about and constantly prepared his community for the “final battle.” The Branch Davidians, including children, were being readied for the imminent end of the world (hence Koresh’s nickname for the compound, Ranch Apocalypse).
This preparation involved military drills, interrupted sleep, and one- on-one fighting. If the children didn’t want to participate or weren’t vicious enough in battle training, they were humiliated and sometimes beaten. Even the youngest members were taught how to handle guns. They were instructed in the most lethal suicide techniques with firearms, being told to aim for the “soft spot” in the back of the mouth if they faced capture by the “Babylonians.” The rationale was that “unbelievers” would ultimately come to kill everyone. After this apocalyptic battle, however, members were promised that they would be reunited with their families in heaven and Koresh—God—would return to earth to smite his enemies.
I CAME TO TEXAS IN 1992 TO become the vice chairman for research in the department of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston. I also served as chief of psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) and director of the Trauma Recovery Program at the Houston Veterans Administration Medical Center (VAMC). My experiences with Tina, Sandy, the boys at the residential center, and others like them had convinced me that we didn’t know enough about trauma and its effects on children’s mental health. We didn’t know how trauma during development produced particular problems in particular children. No one could say why some came away from trauma seemingly unscathed while others developed serious mental illnesses and behavioral problems. No one knew where the devastating symptoms of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder came from, and why some children would develop, say, primarily dissociative symptoms, while others would mainly be hypervigilant. The only way to figure this out, it seemed, was to closely study groups of children immediately after a traumatic event. Unfortunately, children were usually brought to us for help only years after they’d suffered trauma, not right away.
It was to attempt to solve this problem that I, in coordination with BCM, TCH, and VAMC, put together a “rapid response” Trauma Assessment Team. It was our hope that while helping children cope with acute traumas like shootings, car accidents, natural disasters, and other life threatening situations, we could learn what to expect from children in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic experience and how this related to any symptoms they might ultimately suffer. The children of Waco would provide one unfortunately apt sample to study.
ON FEBRUARY 28, 1993, THE “Babylonians” in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) came to the Branch Davidian compound to arrest David Koresh for firearms violations. He would not allow himself to be taken alive. Four BATF agents and at least six Branch Davidians were killed in the ensuing raid. The FBI and its hostage negotiation team managed to secure the release of twenty-one children over the following three days. It was at this point that my team was brought in to help with what we thought would be the first wave of children from the compound.
What none of us knew at the time was that we would never meet more Davidian children. The siege would end with a second and far more catastrophic raid on April 19, which left eighty members (including twenty-three children) dead in a horrific conflagration.
I heard about the first raid on the Branch Davidian compound like most people did: from the news on television. Almost immediately, reporters began calling to ask me how the raid might affect the children. When I was questioned about what was being done to help those who’d been removed from the compound, I replied almost off-handedly that I was sure the state was making sure they were properly cared for.
But just as soon as the words left my mouth, I realized that this was probably not true. Government agencies—especially the chronically underfunded and overburdened Child Protective Service (CPS) systems—rarely have concrete plans to deal with sudden influxes of large groups of children. Furthermore, chains of command between the federal, state and local agencies involved in law enforcement and CPS are often unclear in unusual, fast- moving crises like the Waco standoff.
As I thought more about this I felt pulled to see whether the expertise on childhood trauma that our Trauma Assessment Team had been developing could be helpful. I figured we could provide the people working with these children some basic information, consult by phone to help them solve particular problems, and play a supportive role in helping them better understand the situation. I contacted several agencies but no one could tell me who was “in charge.” Finally I reached the governor’s office. Within a few hours I was called by the state office of CPS and was asked to come to Waco for what I thought would be a one-time consultation. That afternoon meeting turned into six weeks of one of the most difficult cases I have ever had.
WHEN I ARRIVED IN WACO I FOUND disarray, both in the official agencies responding to the crisis and in the care of the children.
During the first few days, when the children were released, they were driven away from the compound in large tank-like vehicles.
No matter what time of day or night it was when they came out, they were immediately interrogated by the FBI and the Texas Rangers, often for hours. The FBI had the best intentions; they wanted information quickly so that they could help defuse the situation at the Ranch and get more people out safely. Witnesses’ statements were needed, and the Texas Rangers were charged with gathering evidence for future criminal trials in order to prosecute those involved in the shooting deaths of the BATF agents. But neither group had thought through how overwhelming it would be for a child to be taken from his parents, put in a tank after witnessing a deadly raid on his home, driven to an armory, and questioned at length by numerous armed, strange men.
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 sequentially—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 is 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 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 athreat. 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, acastle 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.
As I got to know the Davidian children, I saw similar contrasts again and again: islands of talent, knowledge, and connection surrounded by vast empty spaces of neglect. For example, they could read well for their ages, as they had to study the Bible regularly. But they knew virtually no math. The talents were linked to brain regions that had been exercised and behaviors that had been rewarded. The lacunae resulted from lack of opportunities for development, in Michael’s case, lack of opportunities to make choices for himself, lack of exposure to the basic choices that most children get to make as they begin to discover what they like and who they are.
Inside the compound almost every decision—from what to eat and wear to how to think and pray—had been made for them. And, just like every other area in the brain, the regions involved in developing a sense of self grow or stagnate depending upon how often they are exercised. To develop a self, one must exercise choice and learn from the consequences of those choices; if the only thing you are taught is to comply, you have little way of knowing what you like and want.
One of my next interviews was with a little girl, almost six years old. I asked her to draw a picture of her home. She drew a picture of the compound. Then I asked her what she thought was going to happen at home. She redrew the same compound building with flames everywhere. Atop it was a stairway to heaven. I knew then —just days after the first raid—that the siege was headed for a potentially cataclysmic conclusion. During that time other children drew pictures of fires and explosions as well; some even said things like “We’re going to blow you all up,” and “Everyone is going to die.” I knew that this was important information to convey to the FBI’s hostage negotiation team and to the FBI’s leadership team.
Earlier, we had created a group to facilitate communication between the various law enforcement agencies and our team.
We’d made a deal with the FBI: if they’d respect the boundaries that we’d created to help these children heal, we’d share any information our work revealed that might help them negotiate an end to the standoff. After I saw these drawings and heard these remarks I immediately communicated my concerns that any further attack on the compound had the potential to precipitate some kind of apocalypse. I didn’t know the exact form it would take, but it seemed it would be an explosive, fiery end. The words, the drawings, and the behaviors of the children all pointed to a shared belief that the siege would end in death. What they were describing was essentially a group-precipitated suicide. I was afraid they wanted to provoke the FBI to start this final battle. I met repeatedly with my FBI liaison and members of the behavioral science team, who, I later learned, agreed with me that further escalation by law enforcement would more likely provoke disaster, not surrender. But they were not in charge. The tactical team was, and they would listen but not hear. They believed that they were dealing with a fraud and a criminal. They didn’t understand that Koresh’s followers truly believed that their leader was a messenger of God, possibly even Christ returned, with the self-sacrificing devotion and commitment such a belief implies. This clash of group worldviews shaped the escalating actions that contributed to the final catastrophe.
AFTER I’D COMPLETED MY INITIAL interviews more than a dozen people from my home institutions in Houston joined me in Waco to form the core of our clinical team. Along with the guards, CPS workers, and Methodist Home staff, we worked to end the unstructured chaos in the cottage. We scheduled a regular bedtime and regular meal times, created time for school, for free play, and for the children to be given information about what was happening at the Ranch. Since the outcome of the siege was unpredictable, we did not allow them to watch TV or expose them to any other media coverage.
In the beginning there was a push by some in our group to start “therapy” with the children. I felt it was more important at this time to restore order and be available to support, interact with, nurture, respect, listen to, play with, and generally “be present.” The children’s experience was so recent and so raw, it seemed to me that a conventional therapeutic session with a stranger, particularly a “Babylonian,” would potentially be distressing. Incidentally, since Waco, research has demonstrated that rushing to “debrief” people with a new therapist or counselor after a traumatic event is often intrusive, unwanted, and may actually be counterproductive. Some studies, in fact, find a doubling of the odds of post-traumatic stress disorder following such “treatment.”
In some of our own work we’ve also found that the most effective interventions involve educating and supporting the existing social support network, particularly the family, about the known and predictable effects of acute trauma and offering access to more therapeutic support if—and only if—the family sees extreme or prolonged post-traumatic symptoms.
I thought these children needed the opportunity to process what had happened at their own pace and in their own ways. If they wanted to talk, they could come to a staff member that they felt comfortable with; if not, they could play safely and develop new childhood memories and experiences to begin offsetting their earlier, fearful ones. We wanted to offer structure, but not rigidity; nurturance, but not forced affection.
Each night after the children went to bed our team would meet to review the day and discuss each child. This “staffing” process began to reveal patterns that suggested therapeutic experiences were taking place in short, minutes-long interactions. As we charted these contacts we found that, despite having no formal “therapy” sessions, each child was actually getting hours of intimate, nurturing, therapeutic connections each day. The child controlled when, with whom, and how she interacted with the child- sensitive adults around her. Because our staff had a variety of strengths—some were very touchy-feely and nurturing, others were humorous, still others good listeners or sources of information—the children could seek out what they needed, when they needed it. This created a powerful therapeutic web.
And so children would gravitate toward particular staffers who matched their specific personality, stage of development, or mood.
Because I like to joke around and roughhouse, when children wanted that kind of play, they would seek me out. With some, I would color or play a game and answer questions or respond to fears. With others, I played a different role. There was one boy, for example, who liked to sneak up on me. I played along, sometimes acting startled, sometimes letting him know I saw him coming, other times genuinely surprised. This form of peek-a-boo—hide- and-seek—was engaging and playful. These short interactions helped create a sense of connection for him and, I believe, safety.
Because I’d interviewed all of the children and because they could see that the other staff deferred to me, they knew that I was somehow “in charge.” Because of how they’d been raised, they were acutely sensitive to signs of dominance and cues related to who currently had the most power. These cues were, due to the patriarchal system Koresh had imposed, explicitly gendered.
For this boy, then, the idea that “the dominant male in the group is being playful with me” conveyed a real sense of security.
Knowing that he could interact and predictably get this dominant male to be friendly gave him a sense of control—a stark contrast to the powerlessness and fear he’d previously lived with. Similarly, a little girl who was worried about her mother might go to a female staffer to talk about it. But when the conversation got too intense, too intimate, too threatening, she could walk away and do something else or simply stay alongside the woman and play with her toys. In staff meetings we would chart each child’s daily contacts so that everyone would know the full story of what was going on with each child and be able to guide their next engagement with him or her appropriately.
But these children needed more than just the ability to choose whom to talk to and what to discuss. They also needed the stability that comes from routine. In the first days following the assault with no external organization imposed upon them, they immediately replicated the authoritarian, sexually segregated culture of the Davidian compound, where men and boys over twelve were segregated from women and girls, and where David Koresh and his representatives ruled with absolute power.
Two of the oldest children, siblings, a boy and a girl, declared themselves “scribes.” The female scribe dominated and made decisions for the girls, and the boy led the boys and also held sway over the female scribe, with the other children falling into line and complying without complaint. The girls and boys sat at separate tables for meals; they played separately and deliberately avoided interaction if at all possible. The oldest girls, who had been in the process of preparing to be David’s “Brides,” would draw stars of David on yellow Post-it notes or write “David is God” on them and put them up around the cottage.
But none of the children knew what to do when faced with the simplest of choices: when offered a plain peanut butter sandwich as opposed to one with jelly, they became confused, even angry.
Inside the compound almost every decision had been made for them. Having never been allowed the basic choices that most children get to make as they begin to discover what they like and who they are, they had no sense of self. The idea of self- determination was, like all new things for them, unfamiliar and, therefore, anxiety provoking. So the children turned to the scribes for guidance and let them make these decisions.
We weren’t sure how to deal with this issue. We wanted them to have a sense of the familiar and to feel “at home,” and we thought that allowing them these rituals might help them feel safe. On the other hand we knew that they would need to learn what would soon be expected of them in the outside world.
We had only trial and error to guide us. My first attempt to break the segregation between the boys and the girls was a disaster.
One day I sat down at the girls’ table for lunch. Immediately, all of the children seemed to tense up. A three- or four-year-old girl challenged me, saying, “You can’t sit here.” I asked why. She said,
“Because you’re a boy.”
“How do you know?” I asked, trying to use humor to defuse the situation, but she stuck with her challenge and looked to the female scribe, who confirmed to her that I was male. When I continued to sit there almost all of the children became angry and the air became so charged and hostile that I was afraid they would riot. Some of them stood up, taking an aggressive stance. I backed off. After that, we allowed them to maintain their separate tables and the bizarre dietary restrictions that Koresh had imposed, such as not eating fruit and vegetables at the same meal.
We decided that all we could do was to allow them to see how we adults lived and interacted with each other, and hope that over time they would see that there would not be negative consequences if they chose to live as we did.
Discipline was an especially charged issue, of course. We intentionally avoided imposing rigid restrictions, corporal punishment, isolation, or physical restraint—any of the disciplinary techniques that had been used at the compound. On the rare occasions when children did become physically aggressive or said something hurtful, we gently redirected their behavior until they calmed down and had them apologize if necessary. Because the post-traumatic response can keep a child in a persistently aroused, fearful state, we knew that fear might prompt them to act impulsively or aggressively and that they might not immediately be able to control these reactions. We didn’t want to punish them for these natural responses.
And we began to see that as children cope with the aftermath of terrifying experiences like the first raid on Ranch Apocalypse, they respond to reminders of what happened similarly to the way they responded at the time. So, for example, if they were able to flee, they may respond with avoidance; if they fought back, they might respond aggressively; if they dissociated—that phenomenon in which a person’s mind and body feel disconnected from the reality of the event—they do that again. When the Davidian children were upset, or when they had to confront things they were not yet ready to think about—for example, in interviews with law enforcement— we would see these reactions.
During an interview with one of the girls, Susie, a six-year-old, I saw one of the most extreme dissociative responses I’d ever witnessed. I had asked Susie where she thought her mother was.
She responded as though she had not heard the question. She crawled under a table, tucked herself into a fetal position, and did not move or talk. Even when I tried to touch her to comfort her, she was so nonresponsive that she didn’t notice when I walked out of the room six minutes later. I watched her through a two-way mirror from another room for another three minutes before she slowly began to move and become aware of outside stimuli again. The children, usually boys but sometimes girls as well, would sometimes behave aggressively, throwing things when asked a question that made them recall what had happened, or responding verbally with anger. Some would break crayons or get up and walk away.
Our questions, of course, were not the only reminders of what they’d witnessed. One day a press helicopter flew over the cottage when the children were playing outside. They had been told by Koresh that the FBI would fly over them with helicopters, douse them with gasoline, and light them on fire. Within seconds, the children had disappeared and taken cover, like a platoon in a combat movie. When the helicopter had passed, they formed two single file lines, one of boys, one of girls, and marched into the building chanting a song about being soldiers of God. It was one of the eeriest things I have ever seen.
Similarly, upon seeing a white delivery van that looked like one of the ATF vehicles they’d seen near the compound before the raid, the children once again fled and hid. As we had hypothesized and other researchers have also confirmed since, post-traumatic stress disorder is not signaled by a constellation of new symptoms that develop long after a stressful event but is, in many regards, the maladaptive persistence of the once adaptive responses that began as coping mechanisms in response to the event itself.
DURING THE STANDOFF AT WACO our team literally lived with the Branch Davidian children. I would make the hours-long drive to Houston now and then to take care of the bare minimum of my administrative duties and family responsibilities. I spent hours in meetings with partner organizations dealing with the crisis, trying to ensure that when they left us, these children would go to safe, healthy families, and also trying to see to it that those who needed it received continuing mental health care. I also spent many frustrating hours trying to get the information we’d learned about the high probability of a mass suicide or suicidal terror attack on the officers surrounding the compound to someone who would listen and who could change the tactics being used. I told the FBI about the fiery drawings and the threats the children had repeated;
I described how, when they came into the interview room, which was filled with toys, every boy and girl immediately gravitated to a very realistic-looking toy rifle and looked down the barrel to see if it was loaded. One four-year-old girl picked it up, pulled the toy bolt action mechanism, then said with disgust, “This isn’t real.”
Unfortunately, however, the tactical team in charge of operations continued to see Koresh as a con man, not a religious leader. Just as the group dynamics within the cult pushed them toward their horrific conclusion, so too did the group dynamics within law enforcement. Both groups tragically disregarded input that did not fit their world view, their templates. The law enforcement echo chamber magnified rumors about Koresh beyond belief; at one point, there was actually concern that he’d developed a nuclear weapon and was planning to deploy it at the compound. Both groups listened primarily to people who simply confirmed what they already believed.
Working with the Davidian children—and seeing the unfolding crisis in Waco from the inside—repeatedly reiterated to me how powerful group influences are in human life and how the human brain cannot really be understood outside of its context as the brain of a member of a highly social species.
EARLY IN THE MORNING OF APRIL 19, while in Houston, I received a call from an FBI agent I didn’t know. He said that I needed to come to Waco immediately: the government had begun a raid on the compound intended to end the siege and free the young people who remained inside. As I drove I listened to the radio.
When I crested the hill at the boundary of the city, I saw a massive pillar of thick gray smoke and orange fire. I continued immediately to the Methodist Children’s Home. The adults looked stricken, but they had managed so far to avoid betraying their distress to the children. They’d been preparing to care for the twenty-three children still inside the compound, getting to know them through their siblings and through videotapes made of the children inside the compound by Koresh and released to the FBI. Now they felt their loss, and were all too aware of how their deaths would affect the children they were already treating.
Adding to our pain was the fact that we knew that much of the trust we’d developed with these children would probably now evaporate. We’d told them that we were not their enemies and that their parents, siblings, and friends would not be killed. But events would now further confirm the accuracy of Koresh’s prophecies: just as he’d told them that the “bad guys” would attack the compound, he’d also accurately foreseen the fiery end of the group. That would add to their ongoing trauma. And, of course, the next part of the prophecy was that Koresh would return to earth to slay all the “unbelievers,” a group that the children who had been moving away from his teachings would now quite logically fear included them.We had to carefully decide the best way to break the news. Due to the unfolding of events, we waited until the next day because we didn’t have information about survivors until then.
We set up a meeting in the living room of the cottage. Each child there had developed a close relationship with at least one or more of the staff in our team. Our plan was that I would tell the group what happened in as factual and clear a manner as possible. We would ask them if they had any questions. After that, each child or sibling group would spend time with the two or three staff members they were close to.
It was one of the most difficult moments of my clinical life. How do you tell a dozen children that their fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and friends are dead? And yes, they died just as Koresh foretold. And yes, we assured you that this wouldn’t happen. At first, some simply refused to believe me. “It’s not true,” they said over and over, as many people do when faced with the death of loved ones, “It can’t be.” Others said, “I knew this would happen,” or, “I told you so.”
The worst part of all was knowing that things didn’t have to end this way. The response of the Davidians to the final assault was predictable, and the loss of life could have certainly been mitigated if not entirely prevented. Nonetheless, the federal government had taken the action most likely to result in a disaster, and eighty people, virtually everyone these children knew, had died.
BY THE TIME OF THE FIRE MANY of the children had already gone to live with relatives outside the group; only about eleven girls and boys remained at the cottage. The raid was, unsurprisingly, a setback for most of them. Their traumatic symptoms returned, as did their observance of Koresh’s dietary rules and sexual segregation.
By this time we’d learned how careful we had to be. There was a big debate, for example, as to what to do about the fact that the girls and boys still took their meals at two separate tables. I finally suggested that we remove one of the tables and see what happened. When one of the girls asked why we were taking it away, I told her that we didn’t need it any more. She accepted my reply without further inquiry; it was clear that there were far fewer children living at the cottage by then. At first the girls sat at one end and the boys at the other. Then slowly and naturally, they began to interact and mix. Over time their traumatic symptoms and their observance of Koresh’s rules began to recede again.
NOW, TWENTY-FOUR YEARS LATER, WE have had various opportunities to follow the Davidian children—all informal. We know that all of them have been permanently and profoundly affected by what occurred. About half left to live with relatives who still believed in Koresh’s message, and some still follow the religion in which they were raised. Some have gone on to college and careers, and have had their own families; others have led troubled and chaotic lives.
There were inquiries, Congressional hearings, books, exposés and documentaries. However, despite all this attention, it was still only a few short months before interest in these children dropped away. There were criminal trials, civil trials, lots of sound and fury.
All of the systems—CPS, the FBI, the Rangers, our group in Houston—returned, in most ways, to our old models and our ways of doing things. But while little changed in our practice, a lot had changed in our thinking.
We learned that some of the most therapeutic experiences do not take place in “therapy,” but in naturally occurring healthy relationships, whether between a professional like myself and a child, between an aunt and a scared little girl, or between a calm Texas Ranger and an excitable boy. The children who did best after the Davidian apocalypse were not those who experienced the least stress or those who participated most enthusiastically in talking with us at the cottage. They were the ones who were released afterwards into the healthiest and most loving worlds, whether it was with family who still believed in the Davidian ways or with loved ones who rejected Koresh entirely. In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life.
I also saw how bringing disparate groups together—even those with conflicting missions—could often be effective. Dozens of state, federal, and local agencies had worked together to care for these children. The power of proximity—spending time side-by-side— had pulled us all to compromise in our efforts to help these children. Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people. The cooperation, respect and collaboration we experienced gave us hope that we could make a difference, even though the raids themselves had ended in such catastrophe. The seeds of a new way of working with traumatized children were sown in the ashes of Waco.
Commentary
Almost twenty-five years have passed since the disastrous raid on David Koresh’s Ranch Apocalypse in Waco, Texas, and in that time, our understanding of how threat and fear affect both groups and individuals has evolved.
Specifically, we have learned much more about the importance of relationships within a group to create opportunities for development and healing—or to do the opposite. Increasingly, we’re realizing that the health of the group can have a large effect on the health of an individual.
As we’ve seen, perceived threat and fear will change the way the brain works in any given situation. In general, when people feel threatened, key networks in the cortex will shut down: specifically, the regions involved in reasoning, planning, and other complex thinking. This allows rapid action in emergencies, but is obviously not the state of mind you want to have when you are in class or studying for a test (see Appendix, Figure 3).
In fact, all of the functions of the brain—learning, thinking, feeling, moving, regulating hormones and other chemicals—are “state-dependent.” This means they will change with our physical, and importantly here, emotional states and experiences.
The consequences are profound: a child in a state of fear will have a difficult time learning anything, even physical activities, like sports. And children’s behaviors will reflect their emotional state: during fear, they are primed to fight, freeze, or flee, as we haveseen.
But as we discuss in much greater depth in our second book,
Born for Love, groups also respond to situations in a state- dependent manner (see Appendix, Figure 5). Human beings are social creatures, and our individual neurobiology and body physiology are influenced by those around us. The moods and actions of those around us are contagious—especially those of the perceived “leader” of the group. This has countless implications: the most relevant of these for working with traumatized, maltreated, and fearful children is that the “helping” adults cannot teach children to regulate their emotions and behaviors unless they themselves are in an emotionally calm and reasonably well- regulated state.
Just like dogs, all humans, especially traumatized children, can sense fear and anxiety—so self-care for those who work with maltreated children is essential for effective therapy. Front line workers—or parents, teachers, or caregivers—who are themselves being poorly treated by supervisors or others in power can inadvertently pass their distress down to these vulnerable children.
This means that a demoralized, disrespected, and overworked clinician will have a hard time being effective. An underpaid, micro- managed teacher will be less likely to inspire learning, and an overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted foster carer will be less capable of being present, nurturing, and regulating. (Sandra Bloom’s Sanctuary Model, which helps organizations prioritize this insight, is among the best I’ve seen. For those who would like to help leadership implement relevant changes, see Sanctuaryweb.com for more information.)Another major change in the field in the past decade is the increased awareness of the “Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)” epidemiological studies. As we mention throughout the book, developmental adversity impacts the entire body—not just the brain. The first ACE study, which looked at the current health of 17,000 adults, was led by Robert Anda of the Centers for Disease Control and Vince Felitti of Kaiser Permanente in California. They began publishing results in 1998. The basic findings were stunning: as the number of ACEs increased, so did the risk for everything from heart disease, stroke, and obesity to addictions and depression in adult life. (We discuss this work throughout the book; for more on the specifics of this research, see Chapter Seven in Born for Love). Despite the importance and power of these findings, a twenty-year “innovation gap” followed. Only within the past five years have these important studies begun to have widespread impact on practice and policy.
These and similar findings have led to an explosion of “trauma- informed” practices in education, juvenile justice, mental health, child protection, and even in neighborhoods. This has been heartening and there are many programs that have truly made a difference in children’s lives.
At the same time, unfortunately, as with all large-scale shifts of focus in society, especially when people recognize that there is money to be made, there is a lot of chaff with the wheat. Self- declared experts arise with packages of programs allowing systems to “check the box” about being “trauma-informed.” Over time, this will settle out, and we remain hopeful that the ultimate result will be positive.
In the meantime, appreciating how state-dependence plays out in organizations can be useful in understanding some of the challenges we face when attempting to make positive changes in practice, programs, and policy in any organization or system (see Appendix, Figure 5).
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