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They Will Not Just Grow Out of It
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Category Archives: Parenting Adopted Children
The Art of Repetition
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
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Everything Is A Seed
Everything you do or say to your child is a seed. Beware of what you sow, because you are planting the internal garden of a future adult. What kind of person do you want your child to become?
I am so disappointed in you and your behavior.
I hate you sometimes.
I don’t like you.
You are nothing but trouble.
You make me sick.
You are annoying.
I cannot stand being around you.
You are selfish.
You are ugly.
I think you are ridiculous.
What a worthless piece of crap you are becoming.
Get away from me.
You stink.
No one will ever love you if you don’t change.
You can’t be trusted.
You are hopeless.
No wonder your parents gave you up.
You are thoughtless.
You are stupid.
You are frightening to me.
Our lives are ruined because of you.
You are lucky I don’t drop you on the side of the road.
You don’t deserve a nice home and loving parents.
That’s it. I am done with you.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Delicious Reports
I have the deep privilege of getting to know many families who are loving through the light and the dark days of raising traumatized children. The most delightful part for me is getting updates out of the blue about the happenings in your lives long after I have stopped being intimately involved in your family shenanigans.
This Thanksgiving I got an inbox full. What I can easily pull together is a common theme. Blood, sweat, and tears eventually fall away to delightful times of joy and love.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Keep the faith.
Love matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Take care of yourself while keeping the faith.
Let’s Get Real
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
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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Parent the Brain of Your Child Before the Mind
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
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.
The Condom Talk
I have to admit that teen girls scare me. My son is cute, personable, and seriously gullible. Girls have been trying to hold his hand, kiss him, and date him for years. I have always been grateful that he wasn’t really ready for any of it.
I saw a post yesterday on Facebook that he is in love. Oh my. I knew he started liking a girl at school and that they were planning a Starbucks date. Within two weeks, they are “in love.” Time for the condom talk.
Oh sure, I have had it before many times with him, but he wasn’t interested. This time the kid was bright red and nearly crawling under the chair. That told me volumes. Definitely time for the talk. When I told him I was going to show him how to put one on, he screamed No! and crossed his genitals with both hands. He’s a bit literal, and I am not. Causes some momentary cortisol spikes.
I’m telling you this because it is good to continually prepare our kids for what they may not really, actually understand despite all the talks and all the emphatic, “I know, Mom”.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Candyland Nightmare
Oh my goodness, woke up from a weird dream, nightmare maybe. I was sleeping in the dream and awoke under candy wrappers stacked to the ceiling. There was sticky stuff, like melted ice cream, dripping down my neck.
It was flashback dreaming. Back to the time when hoarding candy, amongst plenty of other stuff, was a major force in my house. Where does all the candy come from? I watched so closely, and yet candy wrappers magically appeared by the dozens, stuffed in every nook, drawer, vent, pillowcase, and behind every bed, dresser, and door. Amazing really.
Sweets, like alcohol, jingle the reward system in children (and adults for that matter). Dopamine is the reward system’s candyman. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that makes all of us humans feel GOOOOOOOD. Soothed. Happy. Too much dopamine, however, can lead to psychotic behavior.
YOU can see why our attachment challenged children, who often have deficits in the happy neurotransmitters, would be seeking something sweet, eventually maybe sweet and alcoholic, to make all the pain in their hearts go away. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work long-term and their urgency amps up. My traumatized children are sweet-seeking missiles, even today.
Part of dealing with this is managing diet, providing sweet natural alternatives, sensitizing your children to loving touch, and letting go. YOU cannot control behavior, so you have to let go of trying so fiercely that it interferes with your relationship with your child.
You can give soothing whenever you can. Hold your babies (even if they are 18) when they ache. If they cannot tolerate touch because of complex trauma, sit close, use soft eyes, and talk sweetly. The positive neurochemical cascade can be ignited those ways, too.
Isn’t that term funny? Talk “sweetly.” Ha.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Sweet talk is a love language.
Broken-hearts need a lot of sweetness to heal.
Fear Is Not Required
One of my children was potty trained and talking at 1.5 yrs. The other was 4 yrs. before either of those things happened. I was frightened by both.
One of my children was astute and controlling everything and anything in her worldview. The other was forever a baby, needing help with simple tasks through the teen years. I was frightened by both.
One of my children was cunning and shrewd. The other was gullible and passively uncooperative. I was frightened by both.
One of my children used a 10″ butcher knife to threaten her adult step-brother and carve a line in the wall about waist high in every room in our house. The other foreshadowed this years earlier by meandering toward me with a similar blade, which seemed longer than the arm that was wielding it. I was frightened by both.
My fear made me distant. My children needed me closer.
Go closer.
Get some skin in the game.
Fear less. Engage more.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Wisdom For Adoptive Parents 