Tag Archives: Adoptive Parents

Delicious Reports

Leave a reply
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

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

Leave a reply

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

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

Leave a reply
Why do heaters stop working the second the temperature outside drops below 50 degrees?  Don’t answer that.
 
I am thinking about love today. Despite all of my references to love, I am not a particularly touchy feely person.  I am more of a brutally honest, blunt pragmatist with a huge dose of life experience that led me down a twisty turny path to a few solid beliefs.  Here they are: 
 
  • Life is too long and too short to be “small-minded.”
  • Nothing but love really matters in the beginning, middle or end.
  • Love is an attitude of generous abundance and acceptance, not a feeling.
  • Giving away love doesn’t hurt one little bit or cost one little cent; it’s free and healing.
 
I discovered somewhere along the line that I can love anyone, even people I don’t particularly want to have a cappuccino with.  Love is an attitude with an open heart.  
 
How this relates to attachment challenged children is simple. If love is an attitude, with or without feeling, then it is possible to give generous abundance and acceptance in the face of our children’s biggest and most painful shenanigans.  
Love is about the lover, not about the perceived lovability or worthiness of the beloved. 
 
Just a little something to chew on.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Love begets love (eventually).
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.

 

Parent the Brain of Your Child Before the Mind

Leave a reply
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

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

Leave a reply
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

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

 

Candyland Nightmare

Leave a reply

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

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

Leave a reply
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

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

 

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

The Quiet Talks

Leave a reply
The quiet morning talks are always so enlightening around here.  Today’s topic:  Hatred.
 
“I do love you, but I also hate you.”  Never has a truer sentence been spoken.
 
My son tells me that he, “Can’t put two and two together when it comes to any sort of consequence.”  He says, “Consequences seem like they will last forever, even though I know nothing ever goes away for longer than a day or a day and a half.”  In that moment, “I hate you.”  
 
“The rest of the time there is this feeling inside me like defiance of rules…Whenever there is a rule, I feel hatred for it…Sometimes I just won’t ask you for something because I am afraid how I might react if you say no.”
 
How frightening it must be to react so emotionally violent to every day structure, rules, and expectations?  That is a thwarted, everything-is-against-me worldview many of our traumatized children experience.
 
My compassion for the collective struggle our children experience continually increases over time, and my ability to hold my son with soft eyes and empathy grows exponentially alongside it.  Better late than never, I tell myself, though my grief for how long it has taken me is right there, just under the surface.
 
                                                                 Love Matters,

The Attach Place Logo 3Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Big Bad Scary World View

Leave a reply
Without a “felt sense” of safety, our children with complex developmental trauma (abandonment + abuse) default to a big, bad, scary world view. Translated, that means very high anxiety, through the roof cortisol spikes, and super huge walls of defensiveness. Frankly, they are often reactive, verbally and physically defensive, rejecting, fearful of change and new things, rigid, and controlling.
Fear is powerful poison in the well of a child’s psyche.  It changes children from roly-poly bundles of silly delight and giggles into hypervigilant, self-focused and sometimes maniacal survivalists.
Therapeutic parenting is all about creating a patient, playful environment where chronic poor choices are seen as mistakes to learn from, rather than calculated misdeeds that need to be punished. “Felt safety” cannot grow in an angry, punishing family.
 
Therapeutic parenting tip number 1,000852:  Start every day anew.  And to quote Taylor Swift, “Shake it off. Shake it off.”
 
Love Matters,

The Attach Place Logo 3

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

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.

 Put on some music and dance around. Come on. Shake it off.

Be Gentle and Kind

Leave a reply
When we teach scripts to parents for correcting and redirecting attachment challenged children, the first one is usually Be Gentle and Kind.  At various places around the office that direction can be heard throughout the day, every day, every week, all year long, year after year. It takes thousands of repetitions to stick the landing of a new neuropathway.
 
It occurred to me this morning that my last three Daily YOU Time emails have really fallen under the heading of Re-parenting Parents With the Script Be Gentle and Kind. 
 
I wish I had been re-parented early on to Be Gentle and Kindwith my children. I just did what was imprinted by my parents–Be Powerful and In Control.  That was misguided and made a mess of things for quite a while.
 
So, forgive me for my repetitious re-parenting script to Be Gentle and Kind.  I am simply trying to make it stick for YOU and your attachment challenged child(ren).  It makes all the difference over time.
The Attach Place

The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships

Love Matters,

Ce Eshelman, LMFT

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.

 Be Gentle and Kind All the Time. Why not?