Dear Parents,

The first year of a baby’s life is completely focused on establishing a secure attachment between the baby and primary caregiver.  This is usually referred to as a secure base.  With a well developed secure base, children literally have a brain blueprint for loving, reciprocal relationships for the rest of their lives.  They are more likely then to be resilient when life’s difficulties arise.  Securely attached children are better able to actualize their full mental capacity, moral development, cognitive functions of organization and positive decision making, and empathy for others at home and in the world.  As you can see, secure attachment is the greatest gift a parent offers a child; that beautiful, miraculous gift of love lasts throughout that child’s lifetime.  A child’s life is truly the legacy of every parent.

Adopting a child of any age means committing, as a parent, to the noble, sometimes gut wrenching task of systematically developing secure attachment; and, further, repairing the wounds in that child from the attachment breach, abandonment, and possible abuse in utero and beyond by the biological parent.

When your adopted children behave erratically out of an insecure base; when their world view’s are poorly developed for reciprocal relationships and self-regulation, your primary parenting imperative is to be the secure base your children did not get in the first year. Even if you adopted your child right from the hospital, your child’s secure base was disrupted by not going home to the arms, smell, heartbeat, and voice of the biological mother who the child knew intimately from the inside out.

Dear parents, meet your children with the eyes of empathy, compassion, and safety. When they are acting out their attachment wounds, creating chaos in your world, meet them with tender voice, soft eyes, understanding, and love; if you do, you will become the miracle of a secure base they missed out on in the early years.  What a gift you are to your child, your legacy.

The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love matters,

Ce

The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for April 23rd and 30th from 12noon to 4pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day, second child $10 additional. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.com and she will register you.

Look for Ce’s Upcoming Book

 

Drowning with My Hair On Fire is a compilation of over 175 daily support letters to parents of adoptive children and other children from difficult beginnings.  With a forward by Dave Ziegler, Ph.D. and a brief personal memoir, this publication is a response to blog-reader requests for a book of letters that can be easily returned to day after day, when inspiration is hard to find.

Praise for Drowning with My Hair On Fire…

This woman saved our family. This book will save your sanity! After years (and many therapists) of getting it wrong, Ce Eshelman got our traumatized family on the right path to attachment, sanity, and big biglove. Ce’s unique therapy is grounded in the latest brain research, her own struggles raising traumatized children, and work with hundreds of families like ours. Her stories, contained in this book, are our stories: full of pain, confusion, hope, faith, love and practical magic that really works.

Elaine Smith, Adoptive MotherDrowning with My Hair on Fire Book Cover

Ce’s daily blog has been a lifesaver, particularly when days are most dreary and hopeless.  Not only have her words of empathy proven to be priceless to our family, but I have often forwarded them on to others.  Such a comfort to feel understood, with no judgment.

Patty O’Hair, Adoptive Mother

In a real sense “Drowning with My Hair on Fire: Insanity Relief for Adoptive Parents” is a daily mediation of struggle, success, failure and getting up and trying again.  If that sounds like too much to subject yourself to then don’t adopt a challenging child.  And one more thing, shouldn’t we require prospective adoptive parents to read “Drowning with My Hair on Fire: Insanity Relief for Adoptive Parents” rather than another ‘All they need is love’ manual?

Dave Ziegler, Ph.D., founder of Jasper Mountain Center and author of many books on raising children from difficult beginnings.