Tag Archives: Adoptive Parents

Stuck In Numb

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One form of protection the human organism has built-in to protect from the overwhelming emotions of trauma, abandonment and maltreatment is dissociation.  Dissociation can be viewed on a continuum from numbing to splitting off parts into personality fragments.  These are heady concepts that need real study to fully understand, though YOU may be experiencing it every day in your child(ren) without really knowing what it is.

If your child seems to have few highs and few lows and has the appearance often of sleepwalking, you are likely living with a child who is “stuck in numb,” in a dimmer switch state or breaker switch state.  Dimmer switch state is like being wrapped head-to-toe in foam where all feelings are dulled and muted.  Breaker switch state is like being “shocked” into feeling nothing at all.  Questions like “What do you feel?” are met with confusion or persistent responses of “I don’t know.”

Treatment is necessary for dissociated children.  Without it, your child will likely grow somatic or psychological conditions that plague for a lifetime

Love Matters,
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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.
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I recommend YOU Read This If YOU Haven’t

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I recommend YOU read this if YOU haven’t. 
 
adoptingatraumatizedchildcover
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
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.
Feel free to invite your friends and family to receive Daily YOU Time emails, too. Click here to sign them up.  All you need is an email address and first name.

The Freedom to Not Know

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YOU are a fabulous human.  How do I know?  I know because YOU are raising a child/children from difficult beginnings and spending every ounce of your life-force doing it.  By definition, YOU are fabulous.  Bask in it.  YOU deserve the pat on the back, the adoration, the gold star, the love, and the gentleness of self-love.
 
I was probably 35-years-old before I had an epiphany that it was okay to say these three words: “I don’t know.” Thank goodness I found that humility in my 30s, because I adopted attachment challenged children in my 40s and I didn’t have a clue what to do. My previous well-constructed life was suddenly turned upside down and I was stunned to find out just how much I didn’t know.
 
If you follow my email blog YOU know I am prone to hyperbole (kind of to entertain YOU and kind of to entertain myself), but in this case I am not exaggerating.  My children came home to me at 2 and 3-years-old and within six-months they were swinging from the proverbial chandeliers and I had no idea what to do. 
 
There was no shame in my not knowing, just as there is no shame in YOU not knowing. It is an imperative that YOU get support from people who “get YOU.”  Other adoptive parents will.  Find a therapist with whom YOU can be real–“I feel like strangling him.” That is a feeling, NOT child abuse.  Actually strangling her IS child abuse.  Wanting to strangle him is reality. Admit it, and it will set YOU free. Find someone to talk to who gets it.  YOU need that to find your way to the other side–determination to be a safe, predictable, loving, and tenacious therapeutic parent.
 
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
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.
Feel free to invite your friends and family to receive Daily YOU Time emails, too. Click here to sign them up.  All you need is an email address and first name.

Muffin Bed

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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,
The Attach Place Logo
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.

Complex Trauma

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What the heck is Complex Trauma anyway, sometimes referred to as Complex Developmental Trauma?  That is what most of our kids are experiencing and that you are trying to parent–attachment trauma and maltreatment trauma that interrupts human development and hardwires survival styles.  The styles are varied and overlapping, but fall into a number of ways of dealing with the stressors of life.
 
Unfortunately, one of the ways our kids learn to cope is by cutting off their righteously angry powerless emotions they felt as a child and internalizing them against themselves (“all bad”) or against YOU (“all bad.”)  These split off parts are destructive to the fabric of their identity and can cause a trajectory change for the worse.  YOU may have noticed a flipping back and forth between the all bad self and the all bad other.  That is what I am talking about.  
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 
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.

Your Child Is Not Really Angry With YOU!

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Calling all parents of angry attachment challenged teens: Hang-in, hang-on, don’t give up. They really aren’t angry at YOU.  They are, however, very wounded and have erroneously claimed their victimhood.  This error can wreak havoc without concentrated efforts to get to work on the inside.  YOU may need help from a therapist to do this. Find one that understands the underbelly of abandoned children who can move beyond the surface anger at YOU into the subterranean pain at the root.
 
Under that anger is a hardwired attachment wound that cannot repair or be healed without digging-in, excavating, feeling the pain, soothing the core, understanding the cause, changing the internal whispering demon dialogue, learning to care about the past/present/future, taking responsibility for hurtful behavior, making new choices, staking a claim, grieving the losses, letting go, forgiving, and accepting the challenge to live a different life with love and support from an attached family.
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 
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.

Our Children Need Their Story

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A coherent narrative–pre-birth to the present–is necessary for people to have stable mental health. Attachment therapists, like me, are emphatic about this.  Our attachment challenged children need their stories.  They don’t need it forced down their throats, but they do need it carefully unfolded over time in order to make sense of themselves.
Let me give you a belabored and extreme example:
Child B is adopted though never told much about the details. Child B feels different to the core, loveable, ashamed, angry, distant, and ultimately disconnected from her adoptive parents.  She is reactive, rejecting, and ungrateful.  Her adoptive parents are reactive and angry because they do not understand and they cannot find help who understands.  Child B eventually becomes a young angry teen and runs away. She ends up on the streets having sex with men for money to survive.  Eventually, Child B gets pregnant and CPS takes the baby (Child C) when born in the emergency room and a report is made about her apparent lack of reality.  The baby (Child C) gets put into short term emergency foster care for a few days, then placed in a foster family. And, so it goes.
Here is the back story.  Turns out that Child B described above had a birth mother, Child A, who was raped by her stepfather when she was 14-years-old.  Child A gave birth to Child B while living in an abandoned house where a lot of runaways stayed.  Child B was taken by CPS while still in the hospital because the “birth mother (Child A) was not capable of caring for a newborn (Child B).”  The baby (Child B) was put in short term emergency foster care for a few days, then placed in a foster family for 6 months, then transitioned to a foster family for another year, only to be given 7-day notice at 1.5 years of age to another fost-adopt family who really want to start a family.  The fost-adopt family tries desperately to parent Child B, but they cannot seem to feel attached.
Eventually, Child B gives birth to Child C. And, so it goes.
When children do not know their own story, like political history, they are bound to repeat it, search for it, long for it, re-create it, and have absolutely no idea how that happened.
Your child may be like Child A, Child B, Child C or a completely different version all together.  No matter really.  The narrative is the key to changing the trajectory.  Without the narrative, there is an unconscious bio-neuro-psycho-social “spin cycle” at work that is practically super-natural.  Actually, it is just natural.  Biological processes are like this.
A coherent narrative gives us all a chance to understand ourselves in light of our history, our parents’ history, our multigenerational trajectory.  When we understand, we can choose to stay the same or choose to change.  When we are blindfolded, ignorant, or mis-informed, we are driven unconsciously to repeat the stories of those who came before us–very little choice in the matter.
A coherent narrative leads to mental health and the choice for a life worth crowing about.
Love Matters,
The Attach Place Logo
Ce Eshelman, LMFT 
UPCOMING EVENTS:

  • This upcoming weekend we are holding our Trust-based Parent Training.  There are two spaces still open for July 19th and 26th.  Sign up here.

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,
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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