Category Archives: Parenting Adopted Children

Tired To The Bone

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How familiar are YOU with these fun conversations?
 
Me: I was surprised to hear you went to the store Saturday and bought two swimsuits after we talked about your having two new swimsuits already.
 
Son’s Girlfriend:  It was Friday.
 
Me:  Okay, Friday, you bought two swimsuits after we talked about how you didn’t need new swimsuits.
 
Son’s Girlfriend: I only bought one.
 
Me: Yes, though you tried to get two and didn’t end up with enough money at the checkout, right?  That really isn’t my point though.
 
Son’s Girlfriend:  No eye contact and total silence.
 
When we returned home, I reminded my son to do his chores.
 
Son:  I know.
 
Me: Great, how about now?
 
Son:  I did one.
Me: Great, how about the rest?
Son: What are they?
 
Me: The same ones you have every day.
 
Son: I don’t have the same ones every day.
 
Me: Nearly every day then.
 
Son: No eye contact and total silence.
 
At that point I needed a little time out in my room to regulate.  Two adult RAD kids are enough to make my head spin, Exorcist style, over nearly nothing.  I must get a grip.  Do you know where I can buy one?
 
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is August 12th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course  every other month.  Our next course begins August 22nd and August 29th, 10am to 3pm each day.  Child care provided for an extra fee. 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.

Taking this stuff seriously will make your head explode.  

Split Off Parts

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When children have been abandoned, neglected, abused or maltreated in early childhood, their brains physiologically hard wire their regulatory systems into fairly fixed and heightened states of neurochemical arousal. Essentially, they are perpetually geared-up and on their marks for a fight, a sprint, or an immediate shutdown in the face of real or even imagined hints of danger.  Not their fault.
 
Along with this biological imperative to survive at all cost, the child’s psyche is susceptible to shutting off parts of awareness in order to compartmentalize disturbing material into manageable emotional bodies we clinicians often refer to as “parts.”  When I talk about splitting off parts, I am talking about these emotional bodies of experience and reaction that can be in or out of a person’s conscious experience. Children usually have no awareness of these parts.  That is why they often don’t remember when they have done something awful to YOU or their sibling or their teacher.  It was a part of them, they do not yet know about, jumping into action, then just as quickly receding back into the psyche’s island of bad boys and girls until the next time.
 
I am not talking about complete splits, as in what we colloquially call multiple personalities with names and separate histories, though that is the result of similar severe circumstances.  I am talking about triggered moments of irrational meanness, viscousness, violence and vile verbal assaults.  I am talking about triggered moments of instant regression into a screaming 2-year-old, only the child is far from that actual age. I am talking about triggered impulsive acts of diving into pornographic darkness, sexual enactments, senseless stealing, attempts to kill an animal, or extreme expression of gory, bloody flashbacks.
 
These moments can scare us parents into survival modes of our own.  We become frightened of our children.  We start thinking in terms of good and evil. We pull back and self-protect. We start imagining the worst case scenarios and outcomes for the future. We lock our bedroom doors. We begin serious consideration of sending them to treatment.  Those are all normal responses to abnormal circumstances. 
 
While residential treatment may be necessary, it is not required to deal with most child “parts.” Trauma treatment is, however, necessary to help the child acknowledge and increase tolerance for the experience and intense emotions each part is literally holding for the child.  
 
In everyday life, we can begin to understand our children and become a trauma-informed parent.  We can begin to be therapeutic and healing with our children by being curious about what they thought happened just before they, for example, bit you, what they felt when biting you, and how they experienced the event afterward.  Identify their feelings to them if they cannot.  Ask them to feel their body sensations, so they can identify moments when they may be emotionally dysregulated.  Teach them about their own body responses and their actions.  Give them skills for managing these intense experiences. Be soothing, loving, empathic and informed about what is really going on and how YOU can be part of the solution.  Healing is possible.

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is August 12th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course  every other month.  Our next course begins August 22nd and August 29th, 10am to 3pm each day.  Child care provided for an extra fee. 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.

Don’t let fear get in the way of being therapeutic.

The Effects of Emotional Abuses on Children

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The aftereffects of emotional abuse and neglect on top of attachment challenge can be amazingly detrimental to our children.  The worst of which is not the behavior we see in the immediate years after our beautiful children come home to us, but rather what we see manifest years down the road when the development of our child’s self is so painfully distorted, disturbed and delayed.
Believe it or not, research shows that emotional abuse and emotional neglect are more harmful long term than sexual or physical abuse on children.  How in the world can that be? Well, it is much easier to pinpoint the cause of a child’s disturbance if we know what caused it (e.g. Your birth mom hit you…Your best friend’s father raped you…), so the treatment, while difficult, is specifically focused.
Emotional abuses of neglect, dark attunement, negativity, anger, rejection, control, absence, and hatefulness are like the water in the proverbial boiling pot that cooks the frog to death.  The frog just sees the water as pervasive in the same way we experience air; it is not experienced as a perpetrator of its demise, but rather the medium in which all life exists. Our children have the same vantage point.  Emotional abuse is the air in which they grow up.
Years down the road when our children begin to show up as significantly disturbed and relationally impaired, the environment of pervasive emotional abuse and neglect will be nearly impossible to pinpoint without guidance, and it must be identified and processed in order for your child to heal.
Yep, that’s it for today.  I am on vacation.  I have time to think.  It is a dangerously heady place for me to be.  YOU are on the receiving end of my pondering.  Apologies.
I am actually on my way to the beach.  Life is good.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is August 12th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
The Attach Place is offering a weekend workshop for couples on July 18th and 19th, 9am to 5pm each day, to help you create the loving relationship you want and deserve.   Jennifer Olden, MFT and Certified Emotionally Focused Therapy Supervisor, will conduct a two-day Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop.  For more information, call Jennifer at The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships 916-403-0588, Ext 3.
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course  every other month.  Our next course begins August 22nd and August 29th, 10am to 3pm each day.  Child care provided for an extra fee. 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.

Life’s a beach.  Today anyway.

Harassment For The Greater Good

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It has been a long time since I wagged my index finger in your face.  Today is the day.  Take time for yourself. Have YOU made every effort to find respite for yourself that includes an overnight?
To quote a famous tennis shoe, Just do it.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is August 12th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
The Attach Place is offering a weekend workshop for couples on July 18th and 19th, 9am to 5pm each day, to help you create the loving relationship you want and deserve.   Jennifer Olden, MFT and Certified Emotionally Focused Therapy Supervisor, will conduct a two-day Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop.  For more information, call Jennifer at The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships 916-403-0588, Ext 3.
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course  every other month.  Our next course begins August 22nd and August 29th, 10am to 3pm each day.  Child care provided for an extra fee. 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.

Respite is the key to long-term regulation.  Get some.

Grocery List

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I asked the kids, as I do each week, to leave me a list of food they want me to get.  Last week the list had only three things: peaches, plums, oranges.  All but the oranges rotted in the bowl. The oranges are still there. 
 
Today, I found this list on the counter when I came home from work:
 
Gater Raid – red, yellow, blue, purple
Waffles
French Toast Sticks
Mini Pancake Chocolate Chips 
peaches
plums
apples
pizza rolls
toaster struddles – strawberry
strawberries
grapes
pop tarts strawberry and cinamine
gonalla bars
bananass
cheese sticks
Top Ramon Noodle 12 pk chicken
yogurt
soy milk
 
Wow, they have got to be kidding.  This mad craving for sugar is amazing.  When our children are free to choose, they can make some profoundly poor health decisions.  Just as 2-year-olds do not get to choose their menu, neither should our kids because the taste buds in their brains are cross-wired.  
 
Oh, and no I will not be buying most of that list.  Maybe some bananass.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Hmmm, it has been a long time since I had a Pop Tart.
Maybe I am missing out on something… Naw.
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is August 12th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
 
The Attach Place is offering a weekend workshop for couples on July 18th and 19th, 9am to 5pm each day, to help you create the loving relationship you want and deserve.   Jennifer Olden, MFT and Certified Emotionally Focused Therapy Supervisor, will conduct a two-day Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop.  For more information, call Jennifer at The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships 916-403-0588, Ext 3.
 
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course every other month.  Our next course begins September 12th and 19th 2015 from 10am to 3pm each day.   Child care provided for an extra fee. 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.

Deja Vu All Over Again

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First day of summer school.  About 5 minutes before the ride to school shows, I knock for the third time on my son’s door, and finally open it a crack to see if it’s alive.  Sitting frozen in the middle of the disheveled bed is an equally disheveled man-boy in boxers and one sock.

You need to get going.  Uh, what are you doing?

“I’m looking for my pants.”

My eyelids close in slow motion and I vividly detect a sandy burn around the inside landscape of my eyes before saying,  That is an interesting vantage point for your search, son.

The usual stunning silence.

Slowly pulling the door closed, I perk up saying, Okay, good talk.

School is on and I am in deja vu purgatory.  How about YOU?

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

     Inquiring minds want to know: yes, he found pants and caught his ride on time.

          Why do I so fret his timelines?

The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is August 12th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
 
The Attach Place is offering a weekend workshop for couples on July 18th and 19th, 9am to 5pm each day, to help you create the loving relationship you want and deserve.   Jennifer Olden, MFT and Certified Emotionally Focused Therapy Supervisor, will conduct a two-day Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop.  For more information, call Jennifer at The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships 916-403-0588, Ext 3.
 
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course every other month.  Our next course begins September 12th and 19th 2015 from 10am to 3pm each day.   Child care provided for an extra fee. 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.

Hope, Expectation, and Disappointment

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When parents have children, from day one there are implicit or maybe even explicit hopes for them.  Parents say, We want our child to grow up and be happy, and in our minds we often have a template, a blueprint for what “happy” means.  It is different for each parent, but the hopes generally exist.  Here are a few unconscious or conscious expectations:

  • Do well in school (Get As and Bs preferably, but Ds are failing)
  • Be a good person (Character, faith, conscience, family centric, stand up straight and puts a napkin across the lap)
  • Go to college (Because that is how one becomes successful)
  • Get a good job (White collar job preferably because, YOU know)
  • Find someone to love (Normal, educated, employed, responsible, possibly specific gender, possibly specific race, possibly specific class, possibly specific religion)
  • Be loved by someone (Normal, educated, employed, responsible, possibly specific gender, possibly specific race, possibly specific class, possibly specific religion)
  • Create a family (2.5 children with mortgaged white picket fence–home attached)
  • Be healthy (Have nothing go wrong with body or mind)
  • Be happy (Look and sound happy because all the points above were achieved)

Children put a kink in those expectations and from the beginning parents start to fear, fear for their own hopes for their children. Here is a word to the wise: support the child you see in front of you, rather than the one you have in your mind.  Attachment challenged or not, children have their own trajectories for their lives, which may be significantly different from the one you hold in your mind.

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is July 8th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
The Attach Place is offering a weekend workshop for couples on July 18th and 19th, 9am to 5pm each day, to help you create the loving relationship you want and deserve.   Jennifer Olden, MFT and Certified Emotionally Focused Therapy Supervisor, will conduct a two-day Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop.  For more information, call Jennifer at The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships 916-403-0588, Ext 3.
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course  every other month.  Our next course begins July 25th and August 1st, 10am to 3pm each day.  Child care provided for an extra fee. 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.

Intimate, loving attachment 
is about understanding and accepting your child as s/he is.

Be The Leader Not The Director

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I have a sweet friend, Grish, who raised a great son who also happens to have Autism.  He is graduating from UC Davis on Saturday.  Isn’t that cool?

Okay, I am mentioning this because I am proud of him and of her forever loving support of him.  I also want to share something she taught me about how she handled his incessant, self-focused talking. She taught him she could hear about four sentences on a topic before she stopped being able to hear at all.

Lightbulb!  I had never thought of that before that day.  I could just teach my children to stop after four sentences.  That turned out significantly harder than it sounds, of course. Isn’t everything?

My kids both get it now though.  They talk enough to share and not too much to make me start to pull my hair out.  It took about a year to drive it home, but it was worth it.  

I love it that my kids both still want to talk to me, share with me, get my ideas on things, etc.  I also really love that I can stop them now after a few minutes without hurting their feelings.   As a matter of fact, when their eyes glaze over when I am talking to them we can joke about my having over-reached my four sentences.

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is July 8th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
The Attach Place is offering a weekend workshop for couples on July 18th and 19th, 9am to 5pm each day, to help you create the loving relationship you want and deserve.   Jennifer Olden, MFT and Certified Emotionally Focused Therapy Supervisor, will conduct a two-day Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop.  For more information, call Jennifer at The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships 916-403-0588, Ext 3.
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course  every other month.  Our next course begins July 25th and August 1st, 10am to 3pm each day.  Child care provided for an extra fee. 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.

When they talk, listen.  Just be sure to take care of yourself by limiting the amount of talk your ears can tolerate.

Freud Is Not My Friend

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All weekend I cogitated, marinated, stewed on letting go of everything, only I did it Freudian style, unconsciously.  Without realizing it, I set about divorcing everything that I love.  Started with trying to pull the plug on my sweetheart of a husband, moved on to my children, cut off a colleague, Dear John lettered another, and finished with a vicious hostile divorce nightmare (during a precious, coveted nap, no less.)  

Then, I got confronted (thank you “thera-friendies” all around me) and realized this was all about grief.  I am scheduled to put my best doggie friend of 12 years down on Monday and the grief is unbearable.  Unconsciously, I started cutting my ties so I would never have to feel this horrible heartache again–EVER.  You know, getting all the grief of a lifetime over in one week.  That’s possible, right?

I think my unconscious self is about 6 years-old, full of magical thinking and a desperate desire for chocolate.  The crying around here has been akin to a marathon meltdown–this time it’s all me.

I’m telling you this because unrecognized, unidentified, denied, repressed or ignored grief about the reality of your life since bringing kids home may leak out in other ways.  Grieve what is right in front of you or you might do things you regret Freudian style.

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The loss of a dream is painful.  It’s okay to grieve, as it does not negate the decision you made to love your children.
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly no fee Trust-based Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month.  Next group is June 10th at 6pm. Come join us.  Online RSVP each month required.   Child care provided.
The Attach Place is offering a weekend workshop for couples on July 18th and 19th, 9am to 5pm each day, to help you create the loving relationship you want and deserve.   Jennifer Olden, MFT and Certified Emotionally Focused Therapy Supervisor, will conduct a two-day Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop.  For more information, call Jennifer at The Attach Place Center for Strengthening Relationships 916-403-0588, Ext 3.
The Attach Place offers a 10-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course  every other month.  Our next course begins July 25th and August 1st, 10am to 3pm each day.  Child care provided for an extra fee. 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 loss of a dream is painful.  It’s okay to grieve, as it does not negate the decision you made to love your children.

Pain In Adoption

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My daughter gets regular check-ins with CPS workers because her baby is so sick and, understandably, the hospital staff thought it was possibly due to neglect. Thankfully it wasn’t, but CPS stayed on.  
 
Eventually CPS actually took her baby, my grandbaby. My daughter was grief stricken and I was…mixed about it all.  
 
In the middle of last night (the only time she thinks she should talk to me) my daughter texted me that she was dreading going to court against CPS.  I responded that I remember that feeling very well.
 
“CPS was called on you, Mom.  YOU never did anything.”
 
I am forever amazed at how little either of my children remember about the vast shenanigans that occurred in our home throughout their childhood years.  
 
CPS opened cases on me three or four times–false abuse allegations, being on the run, living on the river, living with strangers, pregnant minor, etc. Every one of them scared me to death. I know this has happened to many of YOU.  And I know many of you live in fear of this.  Some of you have lost your homes, gone bankrupt defending yourself, lost family and friends, and had children taken away because of CPS allegations.  
 
Oh, the stress and grief of it all.
 
Now that I am on the other side of CPS’ grip the PTSD has mostly faded and I am thinking about what I could have done differently during the “crazy” years.
 
1.  I could have parented with more understanding and less control. This might have saved me from some threats at the point of a butcher knife. 
 
2.  I could have “seen” my children as individuals separate from me, and attended to their life experience more.  I never allowed wild, revealing clothes, colored hair, outrageous talk… But I wasn’t doing it either, so what was the big deal? 
 
3.  I could have found more ways to soothe my own pain and fear, so I wasn’t so reactive.
 
4.  I could have joined with others more for support–online or in local groups with others going through the same thing with their attachment challenged children.  I didn’t think I needed all that.  Who was I kidding?
 
5.  I could have insisted on respite for myself more (though I have to say I did a pretty good job of this.)
 
6.  I could have shared my fear with CPS workers more, instead of being fearfully defensive. Yelling, You don’t get it! in the face of a CPS worker was probably not that helpful.
 
Hindsight, I know.  Some folks often feel I am hard on myself when I talk about what I could have done differently. That is not my intention.  I am pretty forgiving of myself, as I truly know that I did the best I could at the time.  I am simply hopeful my musings on the past can help YOU in the present (especially, if you are in the midst of the crazy years.)  
 
I know this in my bones: Our kids get better if we hang in there and give ourselves the benefit of everything we can find to support our herculean efforts.