Category Archives: attachment challenged

The Journey

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Wisdom For Adoptive Parents
Dear Parent,
Just because the rock says JOY doesn’t mean you can always find it.
Adopting wounded children is like a spiritual journey to Mecca, the Mountaintop, the Wall.  Kicking and screaming, you will have to surrender your pre-conceived notions of who you are, what you want, and how you live. You will fight for things you never knew you needed and against things you never thought existed.  This journey will sweat you, bleed you, tear your heart out.  It will require courage of warriors and strength of angels.  You will find yourself flat on the floor, prostate and desperate.  And ultimately you will rise up from the ashes like a brilliant phoenix never before witnessed by mere mortals. Out of nowhere you will fall on the sword to save a child’s soul, so lost and contorted there is no other way to get around the past transgressions held deep within.
ReJOYce in your persistence, your resilience, your tenacity to live each day as if it were the first one; the first day you set eyes–eyes of hope, of inspiration, of love–upon your precious child.
Love matters,
Ce
The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for February 20th and 27th from 12noon to 4pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.com and she will register you.
 
Monthly Adoptive Parent Support Group is every second Wednesday of the month from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.  Group and Childcare are Free.
Look for Ce Eshelman’s Upcoming Book
 
Drowning With My Hair On Fire
Insanity Relief For Adoptive Parents
 
Expected Publication Date: February 15, 2016
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 big love. 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 Mother
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.

Keep Calm And Carry On Therapeutic Parenting

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Wisdom For Adoptive Parents
Dear Parent,
Humans express fear in many ways.  Parents often misread the behavior of their children as defiant, rude, oppositional, stubborn, willful, rejecting, negative, unmotivated, selfish, greedy, heartless or fake. When you see those behaviors in children from difficult beginnings, you can bet money on fear being the culprit deep within.  Trauma from abuse and attachment separation is frozen in the psyche of our children.
To change these undesirable behaviors, parents must keep calm and carry on with the healing power of corrective parenting–empathy, structure, nurture, training, and repetition.  It takes years to transform felt fear into felt safety.  That is your number one job as a therapeutic parent–slowing bringing your child out of the dark basement of fear into the light of a new loving family life.
Faint of heart, need not apply.  It takes nerves of steel to keep your wits about you, so be sure you get respite.  Without respite, you will find yourself expressing fear in your parenting.
Love matters,
Ce
The Attach Place Center
The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for February 20th and 27th from 12noon to 4pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.comand she will register you.
 
Monthly Adoptive Parent Support Group is every second Wednesday of the month from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.  Group and Childcare are Free.
Look for Ce Eshelman’s Upcoming Book
 
Drowning With My Hair On Fire
Insanity Relief For Adoptive Parents
 
Expected Publication Date: February 15, 2016
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 big love. 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 Mother
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.

Meet Your Child

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Wisdom For Adoptive Parents
Dear Parent,
It is so tempting to think our children with wounded hearts are doing what they do on purpose.  Somehow if it were on purpose, then it follows we would have hope that it could change by will power, incentive, desire or fear.
Unfortunately, hope springs more from seeing with clear eyes the child who stands before us imperfect in need of acceptance, than in the angry presumption that it is stubbornness, opposition, and hatefulness in need of punishment.
Providing safety, training, understanding, empathy, gentle correction and repetition beyond belief slowly allows the development of the part of the brain where the “brakes” live undeveloped.  Imagine being a train without brakes; a car stuck on go, or a bike speeding downhill without a chain.  Our children are like that, just itching to grow up into a stable brain.
Parents, take the high road every chance you get.  From that elevated place, the perspective is deep and wide.  From the low road, there are only embankments, ditches, hairpin turns and sinkholes ahead. It is a choice we all struggle to make.
Love matters,
Ce
The Attach Place Center
The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for February 20th and 27th from 12 noon to 4 pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.comand she will register you.
Monthly Adoptive Parent Support Group is open to all every second Wednesday of the month from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm.  Group and childcare are FREE.
Look for Ce Eshelman’s Upcoming Book
 
Drowning With My Hair On Fire
Insanity Relief For Adoptive Parents
 
Expected Publication Date: February 15, 2016
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 big love. 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 Mother
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.

They Have Their Own Trajectories

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Wisdom For Adoptive Parents
Dear Parents,
I received a cryptic email last week by accident, as it was not meant for me.  It was, however, a sentence sent to someone else about the email I sent to you about children from difficult beginnings and what “healing” involves. The upshot, if I interpreted it correctly, was something like, What happened to my child then, because s/he doesn’t fit with the tenets of this email?
This is what I know. You can do everything under the sun to the best of your ability:  Theraplay, coherent narrative work, playful engagement, withhold punishment to foster felt safety, and your child may still have a life trajectory that is not what you had hoped.  Further, some trajectories are ultimately tragic.
Things that happen in utero, at birth, and within the early years set a life course for each of us.  Then add to the equation genetic make-up, epigenetics, parenting and attachment styles, and you get quite a complex situation that no fixed set of interventions can overturn. I feel grateful when children grow, learn and become as much of who they are as they can, while parents accept, love deeply, and let go of unrealistic expectations.  That, to me, is the definition of healing.  Things like college, career, relationships, children, and other satisfactions of life are part of the big picture no one has complete control over. Sometimes the ugly side of life takes over and carries your child in directions you can hardly stomach.
Personally, my children are incredible human beings.  They have survived dreadful early circumstances and both have quite a genetic load of mental health issues.   Growing up, each had to deal with my attachment challenge entwined with their attachment and trauma challenges to find a way to grow, mature, and develop identities that allow them to keep going every day. The fact that we all survived and love one another is quite a feat.
Do I wish I had been able to whip up a miracle that would have launched them off to college, or on to a trade or talent?  Do I wish I hadABRACADABRA’d a strong enough relationship to shape their idea of the perfect life partner? Do I wish their mental health were more stable and their dysregulation less? Do I wish they could have experienced being students in regular high schools, the freedom to drive a car, the thrill of trying out foranything and getting picked?  Do I wish more for my children?
Yes. Yes, I do.  I feel sad when my children struggle; when they cannot explore the world or hold down a job or avoid homelessness.  I am heartbroken when I imagine that a relationship with a lifelong partner will likely be ephemeral at best.  Just yesterday my daughter came by urgent to shop in my kitchen for food because she hadn’t eaten in 5 days.
But here is the rub: I also rejoice when my children laugh at a joke, have friendships, connect with me over a bowl of ramen, and find small, satisfying things that give their lives meaning.  Isn’t that another definition of success? Both of my children are relatively happy despite their often precarious circumstances.  Is that good enough?  For me, it has to be.  What I hope and what they each have are like pages from several different books.  They don’t go together, so why try so hard to put them into the story I want to read?  We will all be disappointed by that futile effort.
How I manage my own grief is to emotionally release my children from living the life I want for them.  I accept them as they are, not as I want them to be. I love them unconditionally.  What they do with their lives is up to them. It is their trajectory.  Not a particularly novel idea, but it still seems new sometimes.
If you are a therapeutic parent who has dealt with your own attachment issues and trauma; if you have sought Theraplay and a zillion other therapies; if you have given yourself the gift of rest and friendship to nurture yourself along the way; if you use regulation skills and taught them to your children; if you did your best to heal your child’s wounded heart and intervened to support mental health; if you did all that, maybe success is in the definition. Perhaps healing is, too.  Acceptance of what is is the only thing that works in the end.
Love Matter,
Ce
The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for February 20th and 27th from 12noon to 4pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.com and she will register you.
Monthly Adoptive Parent Support Group is every second Wednesday of the month from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.  Group and Childcare are Free.
Look for Ce Eshelman’s Upcoming Book
Drowning With My Hair On Fire
Insanity Relief For Adoptive Parents
Expected Release Date: February 15, 2016
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 big love. 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 Mother
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.
Follow:
3406 American River Drive, Suite D
Sacramento CA 95864
USA

Groundhog Day

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Wisdom For Adoptive Parents
Dear Parent,
I wish that movie with Bill Murray called Groundhog Day were not so old, because every day I am living in a version of that movie and I know you are, too. The reference, unfortunately, is becoming a lost one. If you haven’t seen it, do.  If you have, you know what I mean.
Repetition, repetition, repetition creates new neuropathways in your child (and in you.)  If you want your child to change, be patient, be Bill Murray, learn to love Groundhog Day.
Happy Groundhog Day to you and yours,
Love Matters,
Ce
The Attach Place Center
The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for February 20th and 27th from 12noon to 4pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.comand she will register you.
 
Monthly Adoptive Parent Support Group is every second Wednesdayof the month from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.  Group and Childcare are Free.
Look for Ce Eshelman’s Upcoming Book
 
Drowning With My Hair On Fire
Insanity Relief For Adoptive Parents
 
Expected Publication Date: February 15, 2016
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 big love. 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 Mother
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.
Follow: Follow Me On Facebook Follow Me On Twitter
3406 American River Drive, Suite D
Sacramento CA 95864
USA

High Road Parenting

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Wisdom For Adoptive Parents
Dear Parent,
It is so tempting to think our children with wounded hearts are doing what they do on purpose.  Somehow if it were on purpose, then it follows we would have hope that it could change by will power, incentive, desire or fear.
Unfortunately, hope springs more from seeing with clear eyes the child who stands before us imperfect in need of acceptance, than in the angry presumption that it is stubbornness, opposition, and hatefulness in need of punishment.
Providing safety, training, understanding, empathy, gentle correction and repetition beyond belief slowly allows the development of the part of the brain where the “brakes” live undeveloped.  Imagine being a train without brakes; a car stuck on go, or a bike speeding downhill without a chain.  Our children are like that, just itching to grow up into a stable brain.
Parents, take the high road every chance you get.  From that elevated place, the perspective is deep and wide.  From the low road, there are only embankments, ditches, hairpin turns and sinkholes ahead. It is a choice we all struggle to make.
Love matters,
Ce
The Attach Place Center

The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for February 20th and 27th

from 12 noon to 4 pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.comand she will register you.

Monthly Adoptive Parent Support Group is open to all every secondWednesday of the month from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm.  Group and childcare are FREE.
Look for Ce Eshelman’s Upcoming Book
 
Drowning With My Hair On Fire
Insanity Relief For Adoptive Parents
 
Expected Publication Date: February 15, 2016
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 big love. 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 Mother
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.
Follow: Follow Me On Facebook Follow Me On Twitter
3406 American River Drive, Suite D
Sacramento CA 95864
USA

Take the Parent Challenge

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Wisdom For Adoptive Parents
Dear Parents,
Parents need to be the change agents in their homes.  Most of us want our children to change, when in fact we must be the first to take the challenge.
Relationship over compliance is a good mantra.  When you feel like giving a punishment for bad behavior, stop yourself and ask: Will this punishment help my child manage poor executive function?  Okay, you probably won’t remember that sentence, but you get my drift, right?
Children from difficult beginnings have bad behavior due to delayed prefrontal cortical brain development due to fear neurochemicals in the early years.  A spanking will not make that part of the brain grow.   Safety, understanding, empathy, and repetition will.
If you want to change your child’s behavior, change yours first.  Stop punishing your child for having a traumatized brain.  Challenge on.
Love matters,
Ce
The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for February 20th and 27th from 12 noon to 4 pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.com and she will register you.
Monthly Adoptive Parent Support Group is every second Wednesday of the month from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.  Group and Childcare are Free.
Look for Ce Eshelman’s Upcoming Book
 
Drowning With My Hair On Fire
Insanity Relief For Adoptive Parents
 
Expected Publication Date: February 15, 2016
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 big love. 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 Mother
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.
3406 American River Drive, Suite D
Sacramento CA 95864
USA

Invest in Play Now or Pay in Time Later

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Wisdom For Adoptive Parents
Dear Parent,
When you are tired to the bone at the end of a long day, the best use of your time is engaged play with your attachment challenged child.  If you immediately invest 15 minutes of play, you can save yourself and hour of tantrum management later.  Not always, but often.
Kids need parents to slow down, play, be silly, and care more about them than the laundry, the dinner, and the bedtime routine.
Love matters,
Ce
The Attach Place Center
The next 8 hr. Trust Based Parent Training is scheduled for February 20th and 27th from 12noon to 4pm.  $200 per couple.  Childcare available for $30 each day. To sign up email Jen@attachplace.comand she will register you.
 
Monthly Adoptive Parent Support Group is every second Wednesdayof the month from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.  Group and Childcare are Free.
Look for Ce Eshelman’s Upcoming Book
Drowning With My Hair On Fire
Insanity Relief For Adoptive Parents
Expected Release Date: February 15, 2016
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 big love. 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 Mother
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.
Follow: Follow Me On Facebook Follow Me On Twitter
3406 American River Drive, Suite D
Sacramento CA 95864
USA

Parents Or Enemies

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Still trying to be empathic with my nearly 19-year-old son about his lack of willingness to shower, brush teeth, and irradicate his room-stink-oozing-out-into-the-hallway living condition.  In the pre-dawn hours even before the dogs are awake, he and I have a quiet heart-to-heart.

He tells me he has always thought of his bio parents and me as the enemy.  He tells me he only trusts his sister, my older daughter (who happened to be mean to him, frightened him, threatened him most of his first ten years.)

In the moment of his honest expression, I am deeply saddened and stymied as to how to help him make the leap from trauma reactive child to responsible-for-his-own-life adult. I suggest it is truly coming the time he lives somewhere without a mother figure.  He says he doesn’t want to leave me.  He says he does see the problem, though: “I am always badgering you to get your attention and I never do what you want me to do for myself.”

These talks are painful.  I love him, and he sees me as the enemy. Me.  He thinks the person who loves, listens, works, shops, cooks, cleans, gives, transports, finances, and considers him every day of his life is his enemy.

Outside, his ride to school honks. We hug good-bye.  He says, “I love you, Mom,” as he rushes toward the front door.

I call after him, I love you, too. honey.  Have a good day.  We exchange this sentiment today as every day.  We will do it again tomorrow.  Life goes on.  I will look for the next phase of his transition into adulthood outside our home. That is hard for me.  He is my baby. He is not ready to leave home, and he will never be ready.  I must push him out of the nest. How do bird mothers do it? With all of my heart, I believe his transition into adulthood depends on it. I hope I have the heart.

I was finally able to do it for my attachment challenged daughter, his sister, and she is standing on her own, caring for her daughter, and creating a home right next door to her biological father.  There is something right about this outcome.

Faith is my Tonto.  I watched black and white reruns because I am not quite that old.  For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, this sentence is for you:  Faith is my sidekick.

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

The Attach Place provides a monthly, no fee Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is December 9th at a NEW time–5:30 pm. Join us.  Child care provided.

The Attach Place offers an 8-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course every other month.  Our next course dates are December 5th and 12th, 2015. Sign-up online at www.attachplace.com. 

The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans.  Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment and 20 session course of treatment.

Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to receive Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.

The truth about our children’s experience has to be safely held by parents.  There will be no healing without this.

Fear, Fear And More Fear

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Whoow, back from Thangsgiving.  That was a nice long break, except for the fact that my heat has been off since Wednesday and it has been sub 55 degrees in my house for 5 days.   Burrrrr.  Chihuahuas are very shaky in a house with no heat.

Hope you had a lovely few days together.  I know holidays are not always jolly with healing children, so I am hoping that the calm of back to school routine has set in already.

I was talking with my son yesterday about why a classmate of his who also happens to come from difficult beginnings is suddenly spending a lot of time at our house.

Her mom is in cancer treatment, so we are helping out. But your friend doesn’t know, so you can’t tell her. 

“Oh,” he says, “I can see why she hasn’t been told.  Her mom probably doesn’t want her to feel the way I did when you had cancer.”

Suddenly feeling like I didn’t protect him enough five years ago, I fumble for words, Uh, yes, because she is different than you and not prepared to experience the fear.

“The terror, Mom. I was terrified the whole time,”  he emphasizes with air exclamation points.

I am sorry you were terrified for so long.  You were very brave.  You went to school every day, were beyond sweet to me, and held it all together until I got well.

“Yeah, then I had to go back to residential because I lost it when you got better,” he tells me as if I don’t know that is why he “lost it.”  

I don’t remember very much about that year, just that you were amazing.

“Me either,” he says. “Just the terror and the good times.  We had some good times that year, too. I remember those.”

Would you have wanted me to try and keep it from you so you wouldn’t have been so scared?

“That bald head probably would have given it away, Mom,” he says without humor. When I laugh, he sees the funny part and laughs, too.

“Let’s not do that again, okay?” he asks in a statement.

Okay deal, I promise, like that is possible, all the while hoping against all odds I am not lying right now.

Life is full of scary twists and turns.  Even after bringing them home from their difficult beginnings, we cannot always protect them from the parts of life that hurt.

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

The Attach Place provides a monthly, no feeAdoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2ndWednesday of each month.  Next group is December 9th at a NEW time–5:30 pm. Join us.  Child care provided.

The Attach Place offers an 8-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course every other month.  Our next course dates areDecember 5th and 12th, 2015. Sign-up online atwww.attachplace.com. 

The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans.  Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment and 20 session course of treatment.

Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to receive Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.

Fear strikes at the core of children who were scared to

death from the beginning.