Category Archives: Parenting Attachment Challenged Children

I Wish

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There is a part of me that wishes I didn’t have so darned much to offer in this daily email.  I wish my life were smooth as silk and I woke up each morning digging through the reference books for something salient to say that would help you, rather than simply tuning into my own life and drawing from here.  I know this way is more helpful to YOU.  I know it is and that, of course, is why I write it.  I want desperately for my attachment challenged life to have meaning beyond itself…that is the “why” I write this for me.

So many times I have listened to parents lamenting the relentless disappointment that comes with the two step forward, one (or three) step back way our children have of learning. It is so bewildering and yet so much “how it is.”

This week I had such a wonderful all-nighter talk-a-thon with my 17-year-old son that I felt my heart fill with renewed energy and soar.  I know many of your hearts soared with me.   And, I am pleased by that.

Yesterday, “three steps back” arrived in the form of my T-Mobile phone bill.  I discovered $80.00 in gaming money surreptitiously charged to my phone.  Sure wasn’t me.  To his credit, my son did not lie or deny.  He said he felt ashamed and retreated under his bed covers.  Unfortunately, his dysregulation was great, so he skipped his chores, failed to keep a promise, and broke a house rule that day.  When I got home from work last night, he was still under the covers.

An hour later he appeared in my doorway whispering, “I’m sorry.”

Wait for it…

Emotionlessly, “Saying I am sorry won’t fix all of this this time.”

Back under the covers for another day, no doubt.  What in the world would prevent me from saying, “Thank you for the apology honey; let’s talk about it”?   Answer: painful disappointment.

Life is so delicious.  The highs and the lows make it worth living though.  I am still learning to be loving in the face of my own dysregulating emotions.  Upside: I didn’t yell or scold or punish.  I did, in the end, reject him, which shamed and caused his internalized self-hatred to spike through the roof.

Did I really need to do that to him?  Didn’t he punish himself enough already? Wasn’t my own disappointment enough?  Did I really need to rub it in, push away, incur abandonment panic in both directions?

I hope there is something in this tale for YOU.  There is nothing wrong with being accepting when your child has disappointed YOU.  It is okay; it is beautiful; it is forgiving; it is big-hearted; it is the definition love.  And love matters.

Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Earthy Crunchy Granola Mamma

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I feel so Earthy Crunchy Granola Mamma this morning.  I just whipped up a dozen Organic Paleo Vegan Carrot Ginger Muffins for breakfast. They are baking, as I write.  Probably will burn them because I am multi-tasking.  This is a far cry from Donna Reed–now you know how old I am because half of you just said, “Who?”
 
I try really hard not to be a food Nazi, guilting and shaming YOU to death about what you feed your children.  Still, it is worth a shout-out once in a while.  Kids can be picky eaters to start with, so having attachment power struggles over food is one of those “duh” realities. If you clean-up your child’s palate, s/he will be better able to accept and enjoy fresh, healthy, whole foods that will help the nervous system to relax, repair and regulate life better.  
 
Food is a very important regulator of emotion.  Think about a time when you skipped a meal and found yourself anxious, foggy, short-tempered, irritable, touchy, angry, and even hysterical.  The reason for this is simple.  Without your full awareness, hunger sent your mind/body partnership into a cascade of neurochemicals that triggered fight, flight or freeze survival behaviors.
Think of a time when you allowed stress or bus-y-ness to interfere with healthy food choices, so you ate fast food for a few days in a row.  How did you feel?  Some of us are so busy so much that this fast food way of eating is normal, so we may not even notice that we don’t feel very well and it is because of what we are eating, rather than because of “crazy kids, crazy job, crazy partner, etc.”
To top it all off, if you are eating a lot of quick, processed foods at home or out, your taste buds and your child’s taste buds have become habituated to crave high levels of salt and sugar, making the natural sweetness of fruit and the savory flavor of fresh vegetables, grains and proteins, dull and tasteless. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth about fresh food.  Fresh foods are delicious, but not to a sugar/salt saturated palate.
I know life can seem impossible.  Just surviving the hustle bustle of each day is a miracle of faith and sheer will for many of YOU.  So, take this with a tiny, ironic grain of salt. Slowing down is one of the main ways to make parenting an attachment challenged child doable. Cooking whole fresh foods is a slow process.  It can be part of changing your whole way of engaging life and your children. Invite them into a new world of conscious engagement with food, healthy family life, and delight at the simple things–the jammy sweetness of a fresh summer blackberry, the laughter around a family card game, the joy in racing to the park.  Simple is better in the end.
Mmmmm, those muffins in the oven are starting to smell delicious and done. Nom. Nom.
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

In A Minute

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For years, I put my children to bed with a tiny inside joke, “Get to sleep now because we have to get up in a minute.”  When they became old enough to understand the true meaning of the word play, we had brief smiles between us at bedtime.  When bedtime was not going so well, I would wait for a small window to make my inside joke and often it would turn the tide on a hellish evening.  Those were hundreds of moments of intimate connection in a life scattered with big disconnects.
 
Last night, I stayed up all night talking WITH my son.  It was delicious and I have waited 16 years for it–that is not hyperbole.  Around 5am, I found my window, “Get to sleep now, we have to get up in a minute.” He laughed hard, genuinely knowing the multiple layers of what that meant–we share history, we are family, we are glued together by love, and, literally, we had to get up in a minute.
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 

The Attach Place

Center for Strengthening Relationships

http://www.attachplace.com

Hope Is Wind

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Those hot dry summer days when there isn’t a bit of relief, the air is still, oven-like, suffocating our lifeforce, hardly filling our lungs to capacity; those days are like dying only we are still alive–barely. Those days we wait impatiently for a breeze, prayerfully for a high wind, or ragefully for a little wisp of any kind to buoy us up and save us from the hot dry dog days ahead.
 
Hope is wind.  It blows in unexpectedly and disappears without footprints in the middle of the night.  
 
YOU can have faith.  It always comes again.  Until then, let your breath be your wind.
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 
UPCOMING EVENTS:

  • Next Trust-based Parenting Course is scheduled for July 19th and 26th.  Sign up here.
You can sign up for this daily email distribution at http://www.attachplace.com–Daily YOU Time.

Conscious Parenting

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Respect is a two way street that starts and ends with YOU.  I think that may be some kind of mixed cul-de-sac metaphor, but I think YOU get what I mean. Parenting is a perennial exercise in self-discipline and our lapses in verbal self-control can be relationally incendiary. Kids are designed biologically to monkey see, monkey do. Wow, I am pulling out all the cliches this morning. Forgive me. Cliches are cliches for a reason, I guess.
 
Anyway, if you consciously give your respectful attention, care, and attuned listening, you are way more likely to get some of that back.  If you believe the thinking of a 14 or 15 or 16 year-old is “ridiculous,” that same child will think your 30 or 40 or 50+ year-old thinking is “ridiculous,” too.
 
Relationship is the key to winning the hearts and minds of attachment challenged children. Dismissive parenting will chill the heart right out of your child.
 
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Parenting takes a lot of work, whether you are engaged or disengaged, respectful or not. Conscious parenting will get you more of what you want than unconscious, but you cannot wait until you get it to give it.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

$1 July 4th Weighted Blanket Sale

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Today Only!  July 4th $1 Weighted Blanket Sale. 

Get one of these for your child.  Works to soothe, calm, slow down, regulate and focus kids with sensory issues, which are mostly all children from difficult beginnings.
Weighted Blankets

Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 
UPCOMING EVENTS:

  • Next Trust-based Parenting Course is scheduled for July 19th and 26th.  Sign up here.
  • The Attach Place is embarking on our second round of scholarships for families with adopted children who need services but have no funding to get them. We used up the last of our scholarship money last summer and are ready to start fundraising again. This time we have a pie-in-the-sky, big, hairy, audacious goal of $25,000. If you have a dollar you can afford to contribute, that is how we will pave the way–one dollar at a time. Go to: Love Matters Scholarship Fund. We are working on non-profit status, so these donations can be tax deductible.  Yay!

Comparing Is Mental Kickball

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Last week I was getting all emotionally preeny about my life being kinda normal. Yep, I was comparing my homelife to the fantasy “Normal Family” that has lived in my head for circa 55 years now.  First of all, on the face of it, that is hysterical.  If anyone saw inside my family life last week there is no way, no how, they walk away thinking “Hey, Normal Family.” 
 
So, there you have it–my dirty little secret.  Despite my zany life mission to live “outside of the box,” I secretly wanted a little box all my own.  I thought mine might have a fabulous neon orange door, but still I was hoping for normal inside.
 
My 17.5-year-old son’s stimulant meds got held up at the doc for 8 days.  Yep, count em–8!  He is scary off meds. Darts into the street like a two-year-old.  Leaves the front door wide open while chasing a stray dog for two hours. Gets lost going to a friend’s house on Light Rail and nearly perishes walking miles in the noon heat–he had a cell phone and could have called me, but didn’t think of that. Falls asleep on a pinhead or stays awake all night every night–no rhyme nor reason to his patterns. Talks at me like I am actually standing in Alaska. Only sees one tile of kitchen counter that needs to be Ketchup free. Spends lunch money on, uh, no idea.  Thinks showering takes too long. Lives in questionable jammie-bottoms. Interrupts all conversations with nonsensical stories about cartoons and video game monsters or dreams he cannot actually remember at all. He cannot find his head anywhere, though he forgot he was looking for it.
 
Oh, there, I just heard a collective sigh.  You just now feel normal, don’t YOU.  Your life sounds like mine, sorta, right?
 
Well, that is because I am telling you about the inside of my normal life.  When you compare your “inside family life” with the “outside of someone else’s family life,” you are playing mental kickball–and YOU are the ball.
 
Let me say that again:  Comparing inside normals to outside normals is mental kickball, and YOU are the ball. 
 
Embrace your “normal life.”  You will feel so much better about it once you do.  
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 
UPCOMING EVENTS:

  • Next Trust-based Parenting Course is scheduled for July 19th and 26th.  Sign up here.
  • The Attach Place is embarking on our second round of scholarships for families with adopted children who need services but have no funding to get them. We used up the last of our scholarship money last summer and are ready to start fundraising again. This time we have a pie-in-the-sky, big, hairy, audacious goal of $25,000. If you have a dollar you can afford to contribute, that is how we will pave the way–one dollar at a time. Go to: Love Matters Scholarship Fund. We are working on non-profit status, so these donations can be tax deductible.  Yay!

Cell Deep

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I was fumbling for words the other day to explain to a parent why a child who is adopted right at birth can still have attachment challenges.  The words “cell deep” kept coming into my explanation.  Memory is cell deep.  Birth children whose mothers had extreme ambivalence during pregnancy or some other condition that caused them to be emotionally unavailable for some of the nine months can end up with attachment challenges later in life.  This is because, even in utero, there is cell deep memory.
Okay, there are two types of memory:  explicit and implicit.
Explicit memory is what we are usually thinking of when we think of memory.  I remember my trip to Brazil.That is in my conscious memory. (Lying, I have never been to Brazil, but…YOU know…I am entertaining YOU.)
Implicit memory is stored outside our conscious awareness.  While it constantly influences our daily function, we do not recognize it as a memory. I experience this kind of memory more like “who I am.” Implicit memory holds things like recognition of shapes and forms; bodily memory of movement, habits, routines; emotional and relational connections.
Attachment challenges are rooted in the failure of the original infant/caregiver attachment attunement experience which gets stored in implicit memory, outside awareness, but profoundly influencing daily life. Our kids are driven by various ghosts of a mis-attuned, maltreating, abusing, or absent original parent or multiple care-givers.
One of the fundamental reasons “talk therapies” are not helpful for healing attachment trauma is the simple fact that implicit memory is unconscious and nonverbal.  Therapies that help a child/adult find their “felt sense” of fear and safety are more helpful in bringing the unconscious material into the present so it can be understood, soothed, and integrated.
Alrighty then, I’m headed back to my Brazilian vacation memory–completely made up, but richly embedded in my imagination.
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 
UPCOMING EVENTS:

  • Next Trust-based Parenting Course is scheduled for July 19th and 26th.  Sign up here.
  • The Attach Place is embarking on our second round of scholarships for families with adopted children who need services but have no funding to get them. We used up the last of our scholarship money last summer and are ready to start fundraising again. This time we have a pie-in-the-sky, big, hairy, audacious goal of $25,000. If you have a dollar you can afford to contribute, that is how we will pave the way–one dollar at a time. Go to: Love Matters Scholarship Fund. We are working on non-profit status, so these donations can be tax deductible.  Yay!
 

 

Slow Down YOU Move Too Fast

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There is an old Simon and Garfunkel song from the 60’s:
 
skippingSlow Down 
YOU Move Too Fast
You’ve Got To Make The Morning Last
Just Skipping Down The Cobblestones
Looking For Fun and Feeling Groovy
 
If YOU know this song, I am sure I just clicked it on “repeat” in your head for the rest of the day.  
 
Now do it. 
 
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Developmental Trauma

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I want to straighten a little something out (from my point of view anyway.)  

trauma face

There has been an evolution for me over the last 10 years about what it is I am seeing in traumatized children and what usual diagnoses children from difficult beginnings are given by mental health professionals.
 
There are really only a few diagnoses that routinely get applied to our children: 
Reactive Attachment Disorder of Infancy and Early Childhood (RAD), 
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 
Bipolar Disorder 
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
 

Trauma Boy 2

The fact of the matter is that most of our children are traumatized by attachment breaks, toxins in utero, pervasive maltreatment, neglect, and other abuses in the first 10 years of life.  The abuse that takes place during the first 33 months of life, of course, globally rewires the child’s brain for high alert that becomes cellular and can last a lifetime.
 
I used to stomp my feet and insist that mental health practitioners stop misdiagnosing attachment trauma  as ADHD and PTSD because those labels were inadequate (and they still are.)  I encouraged instead using Reactive Attachment Disorder of Infancy and Early Childhood because it was the only diagnosis that pointed in the developmental direction and I thought early correct labeling would get better, more focused attachment treatment for our kids.  Well, I have moved on from that, too.  Calling all traumatized children RAD is not correct and again points to too narrow of a viewpoint on treatment. And, frankly, some mental health practitioners misinterpret the RAD diagnosis as a “hopeless,” untreatable condition.
 
There is a new diagnosis Developmental Trauma being bandied about, but it has not made it into the Big Book of mental health disorders, the DSM-V.  There was a whole political push for and against this diagnosis just prior to the publication of the latest DSM-V, so it was left out.  Boohoo.
 
Once again, I find myself on the side of advocating mental health labeling that is more effective for treatment.  Labels are intended to support correct treatment, nothing more. Developmental Trauma is usually what we are dealing with when we are parenting children from difficult beginnings.  If we called it by a more attuned name, perhaps we would be more attuned to the various ways their history has impacted their development.  We would also be less scared our children will grow up to be criminals, right? Developmental Trauma can be treated.
 

trauma boy

Developmental Trauma, in my opinion, is a huge public health issue across the world. I saw a statistic that nearly three million children in the U.S. alone are diagnosable with this every year.  EVERY YEAR! My heart aches about this.
 
Developmental Trauma is all about developmental deficits, relational misattunement, and chronic patterns of dysregulation that lead to life-long issues negatively impacting brain development, the nervous system, the endocrine system, and memory.  This is likely a better diagnosis for your child. RAD, PTSD, ADHD, Bipolar Disorder are all too narrow and miss the boat on effective treatment.
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 
UPCOMING EVENTS:

  • Next Trust-based Parenting Course is scheduled for July 19th and 26th.  Sign up here
  • The Attach Place is embarking on our second round of scholarships for families with adopted children who need services but have no funding to get them. We used up the last of our scholarship money last summer and are ready to start fundraising again. This time we have a pie-in-the-sky, big, hairy, audacious goal of $25,000. If you have a dollar you can afford to contribute, that is how we will pave the way–one dollar at a time. Go to: Love Matters Scholarship Fund. We are working on non-profit status, so these donations can be tax deductible.  Yay!
 
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