Phoenix airport December 2025. It’s hectic with holiday travelers and security is crowded. I get through the scanner and a man is arguing with one of the TSA agents. Voices are raised and tones are sharp. The first thing I hear is the guy saying “she’s diabetic.” Apparently his wife did not comply with one of the security procedures. She is close by, not engaged in the conflict, just standing there looking at the ground. She was embarrassed and this happens all the time.
The agent’s tone escalates and you can feel the situation heating up. Other TSA agents are starting to gather. They have been trained for this. I step back so I’m clear in case shit goes down.
Their son, in his mid-20s, is pulling on his father’s arm, come on, let’s go, trying to diffuse the situation. This is the family pattern. Dad blows up, mom shuts down, son goes into damage control mode, trying to keep the peace. I feel for all three of them but mostly for the son, who is the collateral damage of his father’s unresolved issues.
Son is now using aggressive physical force to try to pull his father away; he grabs father’s face and tries to turn his head away from the TSA agent at whom his father is now shouting. Father resists. It is quite the altercation now, the father desperate to engage in conflict, the son desperate to diffuse the situation before it gets out of control, which is what usually happens next.
Now there is another TSA agent yelling in the guy’s face, sir you need to step away, you need to step away. This has the feel of the last warning. Through some combination of the son’s efforts and the escalating intensity of the cadre of TSA agents circling the man, he backs down while yelling, I want his name, what is his name, I demand to talk to a supervisor.
They get him over to the supervisor’s desk. Now he is trauma dumping on the supervisor about how they were treated by this agent. Of course he is blowing it out of proportion. Sure the agent was a little short but how could you never get short with anyone doing that job. The supervisor was not reacting, letting the man get it out. “So he was rude to you?” This happens all the time.
The whole thing was tragic. All that stress and hate and another episode of peacekeeping trauma for the son, so much sound and fury, sturm und drang that wouldn’t have happened if either of them had a little EQ training. This was a battle between two triggered amygdalas that were each fighting for survival. The details were incidental, this was kill or be killed. The man felt disrespected, disregarded, unheard, unseen which from a mile away shows that his parents were not there for him. This was an open wound from decades ago.
I am happy that therapy and trauma work is becoming normalized and that as a result episodes like this will happen less and less over the coming generations.
Polyphonic 