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Love Matters Bootcamp Day 2–Owning Your Own Sh#*t
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Category Archives: Marriage and Attachment Challenged Children
Because YOU Matter
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Free Trust Based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento CA
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Eyeballs
When was the last time you said to your child, “Let me look at those beautiful eyeballs of yours”?
When you do playfully get them gazing back, YOU can respond with a sweet, loving, eyeball-to-eyeball smile of recognition–I claim YOU, sweet child; YOU are home in my heart.
Soft, eye contact is a pathway to the deep heart of your child’s brain. With every intimate look, you and your child get a jolt of oxytocin and dopamine–ahhhh, love juice.
Eyeball Challenge: Consciously double your soft, playful eye contact every day for a week and see what happens. I dare YOU.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
YOU must claim your child first
before expecting your child to claim YOU back.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th. Save the date.
Next Hold Me Tight Couples workshop by Robin Blair, LMFT at The Attach Place is planned for April 17th, 18th and 19th.
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.
Parent Healers
There is a place for therapy for attachment challenged children, but only after parents have regulated themselves, adjusted their parenting practices, and addressed their own childhood wounds. Without consistent emotional safety in the family home, traumatized children cannot do the work YOU might want them to do.
For example, chronic control, lying, defiance, manipulation, opposition, and badgering are not going to get better by sending the child to therapy. Those are all behaviors that spring out of insecure attachment, avoidant attachment, complex reactivity and poor parent/child relationships. Trauma is about the only thing that can be lessened one-on-one in therapy with an attachment challenged child, and even that is hit or miss.
Attachment challenged children can make great strides in Theraplay and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy with the parents.
There is no way around YOU being the best healer for your child. YOU have to learn the tools though.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
I always wished a therapist could help my children, but I was the only one who could find that tiny hidden doorway into their hearts.
Next Trust-based Parent Course is planned for March 28th and April 4th. Save the date.
Next Hold Me Tight Couples workshop by Robin Blair, LMFT at The Attach Place is planned for April 17th, 18th and 19th.
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.
When YOU Get Tired
When YOU get tired, take a Mommy or Daddy time out to refuel, readjust, reenergize, and reconnect with yourself. Without YOU, then what?
I know this can go against the grain of what having children is all about. Aren’t we supposed to put our children’s needs above our own? Yes, sure. And most of the time YOU do. But sacrifice to the point of martyrdom will not a healthy family make.
After you have taken a breather, put your head back on with a new set of lens for your eyes. The second best way to take care of yourself is to re-adjust your attitude about your traumatized children. Their pain, wounding, outbursts, hatefulness, rejection, meanness, and fear has nearly nothing to do with YOU, and nearly everything to do with how they experience themselves and others in a dangerous world. YOU scare them to the core.
If you were made of cardboard, YOU would still be the object of reactivity and likely be covered in spit and kick marks. So, refocus your thinking. Don’t over personalize your child’s reactivity toward YOU. It is not about YOU.
Here is a suggestion: Love from a higher place. Some of YOU have the love of God in your hearts. Others the love of passion. And still, there are folks who are rising to a call. Some are engaging the challenge. How ever you keep your heart alive and giving, do it. Do it every day like your life depends on it–because it does.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Love is not just a feeling. It is a commitment.
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.
Sporadic Outbursts
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.
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.
Love and Other Stuff
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Dear Desperate
Maybe I need to address this differently.
Dear Desperate,
I know that YOU are at your wits end. YOU have tried everything. Nothing, I mean, NOTHING works. Nothing! I know that sickening feeling in my bones–that exhausted, weary, battered feeling of despair and powerlessness that seeps into everything you say and do. It makes your work an escape, your marriage a war zone, your parenting a desperate nightmare you never wake up from.
This is the point where the rubber hits the road and you are challenged to stay in the game of life with your extremely emotionally disturbed and disturbing child. You have been hit, bit, spat upon, and that isn’t even the half of it. You have felt rage, the depth of which you never imagined. You have wanted to (or maybe you have) hit your precious child. You want to leave your marriage, kill yourself, run away forever, or you may even fantasize about taking the whole family over the side of the bridge together. You endlessly feel regret, focus on how it used to be, and wrestle with overwhelming tidal waves of guilt and shame, as you ruminate about life without your child.
Okay, maybe YOU haven’t experienced all of that, but plenty of it, right? I could tell you to get help, but I know you already have. YOU are doing everything you can think of and nothing is working to make your child the one you thought you were adopting. I know you thought that therapy and love and a good family was going to change that little brain that was harmed before s/he ever came home to YOU. And now you think none of that works and none of it matters.
What can I say to YOU that will make it better? Maybe nothing, except, “Me, too.” YOU are not alone, but it sure feels like it. I know this is going to seem impossible, but there are a lot of things that you have to do for YEARS before change occurs and, even then, your child is still likely going to need more parenting than one or two people can provide.
1. Get regular respite. YOU cannot do this without space from your child for your own amygdala to get out of cascading neurochemical flooding. I am talking about weekly childcare so you can go out; hire a daily in-home child-care worker to help with daily routines; find weekend respite once a month, etc.
2. Enlist family and neighbors to learn about complex developmental trauma and emotional dysregulation in children from difficult beginnings. Family members can only be helpful if they are educated and informed. When someone asks if they can help, say yes and get them up to speed on what YOU really need.
3. Face it: YOU have to be a therapeutic parent. YOU don’t get to be just a mom or just a dad. You actually must practice trust-based parenting strategies and sensory engagement consistently–consistently. Use life scripts. Use routines. Use correction strategies. Do it over and over and over and over. It matters, but it takes years sometimes for the scripts to kick in and the strategies to make new neural pathways. That is what you are doing for your child–creating new neural pathways. That is hard work that requires playful engagement and repetition to the point of tears. Do it like a meditation.
4. Get help for your marriage, if you still have one. Our children split their parents and parents turn on each other. YOU cannot be in a relationship war and simultaneously stay out of parenting hell. You need more than a “pretend” united front. Get help to get more.
5. If you are feeling even half of what I wrote about above, then you are likely suffering from Post-Adoption Traumatic Stress. It is a REAL thing. You need help, or YOU might actually hurt someone. At the very least, your child will not get better without you healing your knee-jerk reactions. Those are trauma induced reactions. YOU need to help yourself–put the oxygen mask on yourself first. Consider: yoga, meditation, neurofeedback, medication, therapy, Brainspotting, EMDR.
6. If YOU really have done it all and you cannot find a way to live with the chaos, look for residential treatment. This can help when YOU cannot give another ounce. I know it feels like abandonment, but it isn’t. YOU are always going to be the parent. You will be engaged in treatment until your child comes back home to you. It is not a magic bullet. Trust me on this. But, it can help everyone’s trauma resolve and routines to be established. There will be plenty of work left when your child returns home. Did I mention trusting me on this? Been there, too.
7. Be gentle on yourself and on your child. Children are not like this to “mess” with YOU. They are like this when they have been harmed in the early years. You are not like this because you want to “mess” with your child. You are traumatized, too.
This is hard, unfair, unreasonable, scary, and life altering, but YOU can do it. I didn’t think I could, and I did. So can YOU.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
UPCOMING EVENTS:
- Save the Date: Next Hold Me Tight Couples Weekend is September 19, 20 and 21, 2014. Email for more information: jennifer@attachplace.com.
Your Child Is Not Really Angry With YOU!
Calling all parents of angry attachment challenged teens: Hang-in, hang-on, don’t give up. They really aren’t angry at YOU. They are, however, very wounded and have erroneously claimed their victimhood. This error can wreak havoc without concentrated efforts to get to work on the inside. YOU may need help from a therapist to do this. Find one that understands the underbelly of abandoned children who can move beyond the surface anger at YOU into the subterranean pain at the root.
Under that anger is a hardwired attachment wound that cannot repair or be healed without digging-in, excavating, feeling the pain, soothing the core, understanding the cause, changing the internal whispering demon dialogue, learning to care about the past/present/future, taking responsibility for hurtful behavior, making new choices, staking a claim, grieving the losses, letting go, forgiving, and accepting the challenge to live a different life with love and support from an attached family.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
UPCOMING EVENTS:
- This upcoming weekend we are holding our Trust-based Parent Training. Sign up here.
- Save the Date: Next Hold Me Tight Couples Weekend is September 19, 20 and 21, 2014. Email for more information: jennifer@attachplace.com.
- Save the Date: Next Trust-based Parent Training is September 27th and October 4th, 2014. Email for more information: ce@attachplace.com.
Wisdom For Adoptive Parents 