“Ghosts from the nursery” is an alteration of a phrase coined by psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg: “ghosts in the nursery.” Fraiberg used this phrase to refer to the tendency of parents to bring to the rearing of their children the unresolved issues of their own childhoods. “Ghosts from the nursery” is used to express the idea that murderers and other violent criminals, who were once infants in our communities, are always accompanied by the spirits of the babies they once were together with the forces that killed their promise. The metaphor has connected for thousands of readers since Ghosts from the Nursery was first published in 1997, as Americans searched among relatively superficial explanations of the roots of violence in our nation and across the world.
When Ghosts from the Nursery was first made available to the public, the spate of school shootings across the United States had barely begun. At the time we thought that the first of these—the killing of two students and one teacher by a fourteen-year-old in Moses Lake, Washington—had been an anomaly. The second school shooting did not occur until almost a year later, in February 1997, when a sixteen-year-old shot his principal and one student at his school in Bethel, Alaska. But just as the manuscript for Ghosts was going to press in 1997 we began to see evidence of a frightening trend: In October, two students were killed and seven were wounded by sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham in Pearl, Mississippi, and in December, three students were killed and five wounded by a fourteen-year-old in Paducah, Kentucky. As the year ended, another shooting took place in Stamps, Arkansas, when a fourteen-year-old hid in the woods to ambush two students in the school parking lot.
In 1998, the pattern escalated again. In March of that year, one teacher and four students were killed and ten others wounded outside their middle school as a thirteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old student shot their classmates while they stood outside their school in response to a false fire alarm. A second middle school shooting took place the following month in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, when a fourteen-year-old shot a teacher and two students at a school dance. Three additional high school shootings followed that spring in Fayetteville, Tennessee; Richmond, Virginia; and Springfield, Oregon. This latter event had a huge impact on those living in Oregon. The fifteen-year-old shooter, Kip Kinkel, was the son of two respected teachers. On the previous day in May, Kip had been suspended and sent home for bringing a gun to school. Kip rose the next morning and shot each of his parents, then went to Thurston High School where he opened fire on his schoolmates in the cafeteria, killing two students and wounding twenty-two others.
In 1999, one middle school shooting occurred in Deming, New Mexico, and three high school shootings occurred in Georgia, Oklahoma, and, the deadliest thus far, Littleton, Colorado. At Columbine High School, one teacher and fourteen students were killed and twenty-three students were wounded in a well-planned and meticulously rehearsed massacre by two adolescent boys who, like Kip Kinkel, were from middle-class families. Videos documented that the boys had spent hours in the woods near their homes staging the massacre over the course of several months.
Following Columbine, as the new millennium unfolded, Americans have lived through more than thirty school shootings. Few of these have received extensive coverage in the media. But 2012 culminated in a new level of horror. The pre-Christmas massacre of twenty six- and seven-year-olds and six staff in their grade school classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, stirred us from a decade of ennui regarding violence among our children.
Until Newtown, this millennium’s discussion of violence in America was focused on concerns outside our country—war in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the slaughter of young children on our own turf generated an unprecedented level of anxiety. If we can’t protect our children—the most vulnerable among us—who are we?
We have known for a long time that the confluence of madmen and guns is disastrous. Following each of the major school shootings across the nation, the conversation about firearms and mental instability has filled the media to the point that strangers passing in a grocery store exchange informal remarks on gun control as if they had all just exited a lecture on the topic. Harder to talk about is the madmen side of the equation. But this is where the real conversation needs to take place.
Gun control is a critical issue, and we need to do all we can to employ adequate background checks in order to keep firearms out of the hands of children and emotionally unstable adults. But the common denominator we continue to overlook in these events is the pervasive question of “why” and the central role of the human brain in the equation. How and why can a baby develop into a vicious killer? And what can we do about it?
The person who answers this most succinctly is Dr. Bruce Perry, director of the ChildTrauma Academy in Houston, who is frequently cited in the ensuing chapters. Perry claims, “It’s not the finger that pulls the trigger, it’s the brain. It’s not the penis that rapes, it’s the brain.” Violence begins in the brain, and the brain begins in the womb.
Ghosts from the Nursery explains how all behavior, prosocial or antisocial, is controlled by a physical organ: the brain. And we will elucidate how the brain is fundamentally built inside of relationships—beginning with the mother during gestation. If the caregiving relationship is inadequate or traumatic, especially in the first thousand days of life when the brain is chemically and structurally forming, the part of the brain that allows the baby to feel connected with another person can be lost or greatly impaired. A child may mature lacking the ability to attach or to relate in any profound way to others, rendering the child emotionally damaged. Absent adequate nurturing by an emotionally competent caregiver, the baby faces an unpredictable tide of unregulated emotions.
To enable a baby to build this critical part of human function requires time and a quality of care that we continue to overlook in our discussions of “why.” We have yet to recognize that if a baby’s experiences are pathological and are steeped in chronic fear, the very capacities that mitigate against violent behavior—including empathy and the capacity for self-regulation of strong emotions—can be lost. As these children grow into adolescence and adulthood, impulsive and aggressive behaviors are common outcomes across class and ethnic lines. Fundamentally, Ghosts from the Nursery argues that children who are attached and empathic with other people, who have learned from their caregivers how to modulate strong negative emotions and are primed to focus on complex problem solving, are not attracted to aggression and violence or to using guns to hurt other people. It’s time to make the connection.
In this revised edition of Ghosts from the Nursery, we have updated all data, though we have not replaced most of the original research articles reported in the first edition unless newer research contradicts the original outcomes of studies. When we found a major relevant addition to the research, we added brief updates in a section we call “Postscript” at the end of the affected chapters. The acquisition of data on some issues (e.g., crime rate) is done by several agencies (e.g., the FBI, Bureau of Justice Statistics) and is sometimes inconsistent, so references are always noted.
Each chapter in this book is introduced with pieces of the story of “Jeffrey,” a young murderer. Told in his own words, his brother’s words, and excerpts from his child welfare case records, the story—in all important aspects—is true. Only names, places, and certain facts not central to the actual crime were altered to protect his identity.
At the time that Ghosts was originally published, Jeffrey sat on death row pending the outcome of his appeal. Now his sentence has been commuted to life without parole. Due to a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that makes it illegal for minors to receive the death penalty or life without parole, it may be possible for Jeffrey to eventually have his sentence further commuted to life with parole and to ultimately earn his freedom. But this possibility depends on how this new ruling will be interpreted state by state and case by case and is open to speculation. In appendix D, at the end of the book, we bring you up to date on Jeffrey’s life over the last fifteen years since we originally interviewed him. Our hope is that Jeffrey will ultimately earn his freedom and will continue to influence the decisions of other youths who are fortunate enough to benefit from Jeffrey’s story inside prison walls, a story he is increasingly determined to share with the world.
Jeffrey’s file was originally selected with the help of lawyers, police, and child welfare and mental health professionals because it typifies the profile of a violent, impulsive, but not premeditated or “cold-blooded” murderer. Psychiatric reports confirm that Jeffrey is not sociopathic. While there were three adolescents involved in the crime, Jeffrey’s story is the only one told because of limitations of time, space, and the complexity of conveying his detailed recollections pertinent to each chapter. The authors continue to thank all the professionals and the extended family of Jeffrey who contributed to this story, as well as “Jeffrey” himself. To a great extent, even though facts and individual circumstances in the lives of violent children vary greatly, Jeffrey’s story illustrates key factors in the stories of most children who kill. Mike Green, formerly the district attorney for Monroe County in Rochester, New York—and currently the executive director of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services—says that in all his years as district attorney he never prosecuted a capital case where the defendant didn’t have a serious history of child abuse.
A note of reassurance to parents: Having received feedback on this manuscript from many experienced parents, we find that it is a common response to feel anxious or guilty upon recognizing the potentially powerful impact on babies of treatment over which parents may have had little previous knowledge or control. For example, a mother may have consumed alcohol before she knew she was pregnant or may have suffered a period of postpartum depression.
But we may all be reassured that with the possible exception of certain rare head injuries, no one biological or social factor by itself predisposes a child to violent behavior. The research underscores that it is the interaction of multiple factors that may set the stage for the child’s later violent behavior; for example, fetal alcohol syndrome combined with early neglect due to the mother’s alcoholism combined with physical abuse of the child. No one negative experience predisposes children to violence. The multiple factors that, in interaction with one another, have been correlated with later violent behavior are presented in appendix A.
Everyone makes mistakes with babies. We all have done things as parents that we wish we hadn’t done. But the human lapses in essentially constructive interactions with babies due to ignorance or desperation are not the genesis of violence. If this were the case, all of us would be so disposed. The key to understanding the roots of violence is the number of factors at play in relationship to the number of protective factors available in the child’s environment.
SCARED SICK
For many years after Ghosts from the Nursery was published, a question that consistently surfaced from our audience was “How do you explain the majority of children who survive early abuse or neglect but never become violent? Do some of us emerge unscathed in spite of early trauma?” While we knew the answer to this question was clearly no, at that time we did not yet have the science to make the case. Now we do.
The first answer to this question regarding the majority of child trauma victims came to us in the form of the Adverse Childhood Experience Study, first published by Dr. Vincent Felitti and Dr. Robert Anda in 1999. Known as the ACE Study, the research reveals a clear correlation between the number of traumatic experiences in childhood and adult mental, physical, and behavioral health, including addiction (more about this in chapter 10). Essentially, the more emotionally traumatic experiences one has in childhood, the more profound the consequences to adult health. This study opened the door. The next steps were to understand the biology that explained the correlations and what we can do to prevent and to heal such consequences to our health, which is the topic of Scared Sick: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease (Basic Books, 2012).
As is true with aggressive and violent behavior, the consequences of early chronic emotional trauma may not be evident in mental, physical, or behavioral health until later in development. The specific path these outcomes take is influenced by many factors including genetics; timing; frequency; the kind of trauma experienced; the child’s previous experience, temperament, and intelligence; and, most important, who was there to protect and comfort and heal.
In the introduction to this revised volume of Ghosts from the Nursery, Dr. Felitti—an esteemed physician, researcher, author, and speaker—illuminates the potential for this understanding. Although it’s commonly believed that by the time we become adults we forget the trauma we experience as babies and toddlers, in fact the first thousand days of life may set the course of our health for the rest of our lives.
Chronic emotional trauma in childhood is the common denominator in both books. Many of us find our own stories, renewed hope, and healing in understanding the effects of this reality in so many lives.