#child-trauma

#child-trauma

I had just started teaching at a school in the Bekaa valley when war broke out in September 2024. Within days, an Israeli bomb tore through my family home. One minute we were eating lunch, the next the walls were collapsing around us and on to my car outside. I had spent three years saving for that Honda Civic, so when I saw it destroyed, I broke down in tears.

As a psychologist who lives just miles from the Annunciation Catholic School/Church in Minneapolis where a horrific shooting occurred this week, I offer this blog in support of parents everywhere. Our Minnesota summer began with the murders of former Minnesota House of Representative Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. And now, the first day back to school for these Annunciation School children begins with violence...an event having ripple effects across communities throughout the country.

You don't have to be Catholic to be horrified by bullets shattering stained-glass windows to kill Catholic school children, while they're at a "back to school" Mass, as we saw in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. But as a Catholic school kid who attended many of those Masses (plus many other holidays that required all-school Masses), I can see it. Too clearly.