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If Only You Were Different, I Would Love You
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Tag Archives: adoptive children
Shake It Off
Good Morning Fellow Parent,
![Shake It Off]( "Shake It Off")
Got up this morning to the usual: Teeth, Deodorant, Zipper? Close, but no trifecta.
Just have to Shake It Off with Audrey and Dad:
Honestly, it has been one of those kid weeks. It’s definitely my house, because the same things happen every day, every day, every day. Shaking it off is the only answer.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
When nothing else makes sense, DANCE.
It Gets In
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Things Get Broken
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Certainty
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Jinxed Myself
I am so often guilty of thinking “my children never learn.”
In the middle of the night (oh, around 1:30am) a couple days ago, while I was writing to YOU about how “mostly” my family is on the other side of insanity these days, I discovered my son in bed playing away on his computer. With very little fanfare or emotion I said, “You need to go to sleep now and you have lost your computer privilege… goodnight honey,” and I trotted off to bed like a little carefree pony.
When 6:30am rolled around and it was time to go to school, he refused to speak to me, take his meds, or get up at all–spent the whole day in bed and wouldn’t speak to me when I got home (though he did manage to do all his chores–win/lose sorta.) Here it is three days later and he still isn’t speaking or going to school. He doesn’t have a computer, so doesn’t have a life-force apparently.
My punishing him in the night the way I did, albeit calmly with an obvious natural consequence, sent him into a cortisol cascade impeding his prefrontal cortex and launching days of poor decision making. So, thinking “my children never learn” is hysterical. The truth is: I never learn.
I know some of YOU are thinking: Okay, but what did you really do wrong Ce? He knew he shouldn’t be doing that. He knew he would get into some kind of trouble. He was wrong. He was breaking the rule. He needed a consequence (punishment) to learn not to do it again. How else will he ever learn?
I truly wish I had a child with a brain that could manage that kind of thinking and that kind of parenting. I don’t. I have a child with extremely poor cause and effect thinking under pressure. Period. He does not learn from natural or logical consequences dropped on him even by a quiet and gentle little pony. He dysregulates, blows up or in, and makes one poor decision after another. He can’t learn under those circumstances. His brain is offline.
Frankly, I am the only one in this equation with the capacity to actually think during times of stress and yet I often don’t. Funny how I want him to do something that I can’t. Isn’t that the parent way? That was my parents’ way. How about YOU?
When will I learn to parent the brain of the child I actual live with instead of the one I wish I had? When will I ever learn?
By the way, this could have been handled the next day with a simple conversation. He likely would have consequenced himself without the drama, but I just couldn’t wait to parent power-bomb him. I think it is a little meanness in me. I really do. Oh, the shame of being naked in the mirror of my baser nature. If I look at it, I can set myself free. This is how I will one day learn.
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.
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.
Muffin Bed
Last week I was up early baking Paleo muffins. Yesterday, while looking for a lost remote, I found one of them under the bed covers of “YOU know who.” Hoarding has long been an urge for both of my children. It may be for your child, too.
Children from difficult beginnings hoard for a variety of reasons. Here are a few:
- They were not feed regularly enough as babies or young children and have starvation imprinted in their pre-verbal, felt memory–food insecurity.
- They lost the most important thing in the world to them when they were little, and they cannot stand letting go of anything (including an unwanted muffin).
- They feel deprived at the core and try to fill up the hole with food and other stuff.
- They rarely feel the satisfaction of “enough.”
- Stuff is comforting.
- Hoarding gives a big sense of control over powerlessness.
What is a parent to do?
- First, severe restriction is not the answer. That will make it worse. Try to relax your own fear.
- Allowing power and control over food intake and stuff will allow the obsessive hoarding to slowly dissipate over months and years.
- Offer food and snacks every two hours–high protein foods.
- Provide a snack drawer or bowl that is always full with nutrient rich foods.
- Stay away from cereal products, sugary foods, highly processed foods. Allow tasty, sweet treats once in a while though. Over-strict rules will increase hoarding.
- Encourage eating until full. Don’t worry about obesity. Our kids need YOU to cool your jets on this American obsession–weight control. Even if weight gain is at hand.
- Provide a hoarding bin for stuff.
- Create a weekly give away or throw away ritual.
- Help your child think through what needs to be discarded or given away each week. Resist making your child figure it out alone. They need your loving support to feel secure enough to let stuff (even empty smashed boxes and broken-up toys) go.
- Be gentle, accepting, understanding and non-shaming.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Huge shout out to those of YOU who have given so generously to our Love Matters Scholarship Fund. YOU know who YOU are: Mary, Patti, Sharon, Mike, Ann, Greg, Sarah, Tom.
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.
In A Minute
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,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Wisdom For Adoptive Parents 