Category Archives: Attachment Hope

Sporadic Outbursts

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Sporadic outbursting is not a sign that your regulation challenged child is a brat.  Your child’s brain is developmentally unable to manage high emotion–sometimes.  Period.
 
Outbursting needs healing, not punishment.  
 
Do your best to intervene within the first two minutes of a meltdown because you have a slight chance of turning the tables if you do.  If you wait until the tornado gets on the move, you have missed your cortisol/adrenalin window to bring the sun back.
 
Intervening looks a lot of different ways.  Here are a few:
  • Oh, did I say something that upset you Sweetheart?
  • I know you really wanted to do that longer.  How much more time do you think you need?  Let’s negotiate that to 5 more minutes.
  • You can finish that game before you take your bath in 5 minutes. Would you like to do that?
  • Which would you like to do first, clean up your room or take your bath?
  • I can see you are very upset.  I am not trying to make you mad. Tell me what you need right now Honey? I love you.
  • Oh my, Mommy said that kind of loud, huh?  I am sorry.  I must have scared you.
  • (Touch a hand, arm, back gently.) You are safe Sweetie.  
  • There is plenty of food.  Would you like another snack? 
  • I can see why you are getting upset.  Let’s figure this out together.
  • I’m sorry.
  • I didn’t mean to upset you Babe. We just don’t sing during dinner.  
  • I love you and I want you to feel safe.
  • It’s okay to be angry.  Tell me what you are angry about.
  • Uh oh, tickle time.
  • Uh oh, wild hugging time.
  • Uh oh, stomping our feet time.
  • Hey Sweetheart, look at my eyes.  Can you see the love in my eyes.  I am not mad at you.
  • It’s okay to make mistakes. That’s how we learn. I make them all the time.
  • I know you feel bad.  You are not bad.
 
The Attach Place Logo Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

YOU are a precious child in my eyes.  Make sure your eyes are saying that.

NOTE: If you are planning to sign up, please go ahead and do it because I think the space will end up being limited this time around. The next REVISED Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.  If you have been through this course in the past, you will be getting significantly more hands on experience than ever before.
 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

The Art of Repetition

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You might have noticed that I say the same things to YOU, over and over and over in a bunch of different ways.  I do this because it it is difficult for parents to develop new mental models for therapeutic parenting, because you have to bust through the old template of how YOU were parented.
 
Our kids are the same, because their brains and our brains are similar. Depending on your early childhood and trauma experiences, YOU may actually have a VERY similar brain, as your child.
 
I say all of that in order to say this:  Therapeutic parenting requires a tremendous amount of repetition to create new neuro-pathways to replace the negative templates in a traumatized child’s brain. NAGGING is not the repetition I keep recommending you use over and over and over.  NAGGING is not the repetition I keep recommending you use over and over and over. NAGGING is not the repetition I keep recommending you use over and over and over. NAGGING is not the repetition I keep recommending you use over and over and over.  See what I mean?
 
Your child does not need exasperated, humiliating, eye-rolling, hard repetition of a command.  That is nagging with negative attitude. That tells your child, “I am sick and tired of you and you are too stupid to live, YOU annoying, worthless brat!” Yes, that is how your child hears it, even if you think they know you don’t mean it.
 
Your child needs soft eyed, patient, empathic, brain-building, neocortex developing, repetitive interaction about how, why, and when something either needs to happen or something did happen. Build the prefrontal cortex, executive function of your child if you want them to make better choices.  It’s not what you tell them. It’s how you engage them that develops the part of the brain that will allow you to be less repetitive over time.  Your child has to be helped by YOU to use that part of the brain in order to grow it.  
 
Nagging keeps your child and YOU stuck in a negative feedback loop.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships


Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Engagement is like water to a garden in Spring.

The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.

 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

Let’s Get Real

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Over the course of raising children there are some contributions we make, right? All parents make them, attachment challenged or not.

I donated two leather couches, the walls (including quite a bit of drywall) in four different houses, window screens, window panes, window sills, bathroom mirrors, more carpet than I care to tell you about, too numerous to count glasses and plates, pans, cabinet hinges and doors, car seats, various bicycles, skateboards, dining room tables and chairs, mattresses, furniture of every kind really, musical instruments, computers, DSs, smartphones, iPods x6, video cameras, and a number of precious jewelry items that I loved with both sentimental and actual value.

That was stuff. It was my contribution. I let it go, after grieving for some of it. Now it doesn’t matter a bit. Time has erased the significance of the stuff and left me with a lesson learned.

The other night my husband broke several crystal glasses reaching for a water glass in the darkness of our kitchen. I am so grateful I know that stuff doesn’t matter more than love. When he came back to bed, I was only concerned that he escaped injury. There was a time I would have been upset about losing my stuff.

In ten years from now the stuff you get upset about losing to the rearing of your children will be meaningless. I am not saying that one should not value and be respectful of hard acquired comforts. I am saying that they are not as important as they seem, when put up against the value of saving the heart of a child.

The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Tend to the heart of the matter.

 

 

Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.

The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.

Please share freely. Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

 

Love and Other Stuff

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Why do heaters stop working the second the temperature outside drops below 50 degrees?  Don’t answer that.
 
I am thinking about love today. Despite all of my references to love, I am not a particularly touchy feely person.  I am more of a brutally honest, blunt pragmatist with a huge dose of life experience that led me down a twisty turny path to a few solid beliefs.  Here they are: 
 
  • Life is too long and too short to be “small-minded.”
  • Nothing but love really matters in the beginning, middle or end.
  • Love is an attitude of generous abundance and acceptance, not a feeling.
  • Giving away love doesn’t hurt one little bit or cost one little cent; it’s free and healing.
 
I discovered somewhere along the line that I can love anyone, even people I don’t particularly want to have a cappuccino with.  Love is an attitude with an open heart.  
 
How this relates to attachment challenged children is simple. If love is an attitude, with or without feeling, then it is possible to give generous abundance and acceptance in the face of our children’s biggest and most painful shenanigans.  
Love is about the lover, not about the perceived lovability or worthiness of the beloved. 
 
Just a little something to chew on.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Love begets love (eventually).
Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.
 
The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.
 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

 

Parent the Brain of Your Child Before the Mind

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When your complex traumatized child is what you interpret as “disrespectful” or “defiant,” take a breath to soothe yourself before you say another word.  What comes next depends on it.
 
Most of our children have an “implicit” memory of devastation hardwired into their brains from neglect, abuse, abandonment, and/or institutional living in the early years. They usually have no “explicit” memory of the events.
 
When I was 17, my mother was killed in a car accident.  At first I didn’t feel much but the chaos all around me.  Over time though, I started to feel a violent grief in the depths of my being that couldn’t be satisfied by anything except releasing a wolf-like howl for hours into the cold night of my empty room. I thought I would die of it.  
 
Because of this experience, I am keenly aware of attachment panic that feels like going crazy or like dying from despair. It was explicit to me. I knew the cause of the pain. Our children have this kind of violent despair implicitly.  They have no idea why they feel the way they do. 
 
Children from difficult beginnings are often triggered into that place when they feel the smallest slight, such as YOU saying “no,” them being pressured, or from fear of change, loss of control, or being thwarted in any small way.  To fend off the inevitable feeling of overwhelming despair, they fight, flee or freeze without awareness.  Our children are actually dissociated, operating on implicit memory, and from every cell in their being struggling desperately to survive.  If YOU happen to be the one triggering the event, YOU are in danger of being acted-out upon in very negative ways.
 
So, soothe yourself before your next sentence in the face of your child’s small misbehaviors, because a hint of rejection is all it takes to trigger the implicit memory of impending death that they happened to live through.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Be soothing to your child when YOU get disrespect or defiance.  Something deeper is afoot.
Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.
 
The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.
 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

Big Bad Scary World View

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Without a “felt sense” of safety, our children with complex developmental trauma (abandonment + abuse) default to a big, bad, scary world view. Translated, that means very high anxiety, through the roof cortisol spikes, and super huge walls of defensiveness. Frankly, they are often reactive, verbally and physically defensive, rejecting, fearful of change and new things, rigid, and controlling.
Fear is powerful poison in the well of a child’s psyche.  It changes children from roly-poly bundles of silly delight and giggles into hypervigilant, self-focused and sometimes maniacal survivalists.
Therapeutic parenting is all about creating a patient, playful environment where chronic poor choices are seen as mistakes to learn from, rather than calculated misdeeds that need to be punished. “Felt safety” cannot grow in an angry, punishing family.
 
Therapeutic parenting tip number 1,000852:  Start every day anew.  And to quote Taylor Swift, “Shake it off. Shake it off.”
 
Love Matters,

The Attach Place Logo 3

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.
 
The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.
 
Please share freely.  Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.

 Put on some music and dance around. Come on. Shake it off.

I Wish I Had An Attitude Adjustment Earlier

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I bought a panini maker.  Mmmmm, nothing like a cheesy/carbo-load to get the kid out of bed. What I discovered is how sweet my son is when he knows I made it for him, whether he has time to eat it or not. When he was younger, I would have pitched a fit if he lollygagged and didn’t eat it.  Then he would have pitched a fit back, maybe throwing the hot panini puck at my face. I would have insisted at higher and higher volumes that he NEEDED to eat breakfast, but why was I MAD when he didn’t. After awhile, I took everything personally.  It felt like these shenanigans were by way of gutting me with a fishing knife. I started to hate my life and my kids, too. This is the ugly truth.
If you are waiting for your children to have love in their eyes before YOU have love in yours, YOU will be waiting a very long time.  Oh, I know you used to have love in your eyes, but your child’s attachment challenged shenanigans drained you to flat, hopeless, and sometimes bitter despair. I’ve been there. I know. And, I don’t judge YOU. I get YOU. I am YOU. I am YOU years down the road.
When my kids were younger, I wish someone had bonked me on my head, like a V8 commercial, so I could have had an earlier attitude adjustment.
So, (if you need one) here is my attempt at a “bonk” on your pre-frontal cortex.  If you are a parent who adopted a child, YOU are their best hope of finding the buried treasure of love in that damaged heart (a.k.a. pre-frontal cortex.) Have I mentioned that pre-frontal cortex is my favorite set of words? Of course I have.
Here is the key:
YOU must make a DECISION every day to BE a loving person. Period.
No one loves the shenanigans of traumatized children–the mean, hateful, scary, snide, cunning, unrelenting, mind-boggling, mind-numbing, heart-stopping, shitty crap (clinical term) they dish up. No one is made for that, better suited for that, temperamentally predisposed for that.  So, YOU wishing you could give up, throw them back, leave them on a corner, put them back on a plane, or relinquish them is very human, understandable, and evidence of the magnitude of grief YOU feel to the bone.  I wish I could hug YOU.  I know you need it.
If you consider yourself capable of being a loving person, then be that in the face of adversity. Raising this kind of child is the definition of adversity. There is a payoff.  It is down the road. Essentially, your love is “paying it forward.”  It will come back to YOU.  Gandhi said it best,Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the love you want to see in your child.  It starts with YOU.
Shenanigans be damned, but not the heart-broken child or the heart-broken parent.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

 
Love in the face of adversity is the definition of love.

Bed Head Day 5

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I have had A DAY.  It is 9:04pm and I am just now finding a minute to send YOU a daily missive.  Where are my priorities?you might ask.
 
Uh, not sure.  I do care very much about YOU.  Still, I must admit to caring about my life a little bit more.
 
This is day five of my son’s bed head, and day three of school refusal.  
 
A text I read from his confiscated phone by him to some odd anime-named girl in Michigan read, “I hate my “f-ing” mother, so I am making her suffer by not going to school.”   Huh, who knew?
 
Apparently, that comment I made about him showing me apps on the new phone I told him not to download apps on, put him over the edge. He decided in his head that I was mad. He decided in his head that he was grounded. He decided in his head that he would make me suffer by not going to school and staying in bed for 5 days straight.
Truth be told, it was like a 5-day vacation for me.  No inane conversations about Minecraft.  No stalking for attention. No requests to drive him anywhere. No requests for dinner. No smelly body in the living room. No nothing.  It was all kind of peaceful around here. I was basking in this suffering.
Still, he did need to go to school, plus he had an IEP he was supposed to attend this afternoon, so I just did the obvious:You can have your phone back if you get up and go to the IEP with me.
 
Boom.  Five minutes later he was in the car (very stinky, not having showered in 5 days) and ready for me to drive him to the IEP.  
 
We talked later about how he was the one suffering, not me. He was calm and accepted the reality of the situation.  I could have offered the phone sooner, or tried to be more soothing sooner, or offered some other reward for getting it together sooner.  That probably would have decreased the 5 day “sleep in” protest, but he is about to be 18 and I had a sense there was a better lesson to be taught by waiting it out.
 
Tonight we had the talk.  He listened and shared and learned by the lack of emotional upheaval.  That is all I can ask.
 
I’ll let you know how it goes.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Love Matters Scholarship Fun can use your contributions.  Click here for more information.

I love my son.  It is time he really gets what it takes to be a family kid beyond 18 years old. This is my process.

Winged Love Whisperers

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Today, I woke up feeling a well of gratitude for mothers and fathers everywhere who are raising challenged and challenging children.  Woohoo! YOU rock. YOU are awesome. YOU are probably tired.  
 
When I adopted kids, I did it for myself and my own desire to have children I couldn’t conceive otherwise.  I am not particularly a selfish person, but I had purely selfish motives in this case.  I was not thinking about the kids at the time.  I assumed they would be “happy” to have a loving home with loving parents.  I was truly ignorant to the realities of adoption and had no idea of the pain in the hearts of the children, nor the mountains ahead that would need hooks and chisels and ropes and pulleys to scale. Some of the chasms required wings.
 
My eyes were opened pretty darned fast, as I am sure happened in many of your homes, too.  Then what?  For me, and likely for YOU, an incredibly fierce journey of healing hearts without losing my sanity ensued.  I joke around the office that I am earning wings. For some reason that helps me keep my patience, hold on to love, and take the higher road, when everything else is going to hell in a handbasket (whatever that is.)
 
Take your inspiration from anywhere you can.  YOU have my gratitude, love, and appreciation for all that you do, Winged Love Whisperer.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Winged Love Whisperer has a nice ring to it, yes?

The Quirks of Human Brains

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The whole Ebola situation in the U.S. tells a cautionary tale, but maybe not the one you are thinking. If you connect with the greater world via TV, Internet, newspapers, and magazines, you may have found yourself feeling a little worried about when Ebola is going to break out in your town.  Of course, it could happen (and did for those in Texas), but you are far more likely to get into a deadly car accident today, than you are to catching Ebola–and that isn’t very likely either. Just to be on the safe side, go knock on some wood (if you can find something still made out of wood.)
 
The human brain is quirky.  Much of how we think is based on pre-historic conditioning.  Yep, our brains still function as though something big and scary (maybe even hairy) is plotting to eat us at any moment. So, hearing something repeated over and over–Ebola, Ebola, Ebola, Ebola, Ebola–our brains start being hyper-alert and a bit fearful to the point where someone coughing in public sends us running for our pocket-sized hazmat suits.
 
Don’t get me wrong. I am not making fun of Ebola.  It is a terrible, deadly virus. When unchecked, like in West Africa, it is one of the worst public health crises since the Bubonic Plague.  I am, however, making a point about our human brains.
 
If YOU are telling yourself over and over again that your attachment challenged child is going to grow up to be a criminal (because your child’s brain is pre-historically conditioned so s/he lies, steals and breaks rules), then YOU are scaring your own pre-historic brain to death, causing yourself hypervigilance and over-the-top parenting, and making the situation worse.
 
Pre-historic fear or love?  
 
Fear or love?
 
Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

 
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need.
And nerves of steel.