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It Gets In
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Tag Archives: parenting children with special needs
Things Get Broken
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Certainty
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Grateful For A New Day
What is that quote from Einstein? “You cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that caused the problem in the first place.” Actually, I am not sure that that is the exact quote, nor that it was said by Einstein, but I am going with it because it serves my purpose. If he didn’t say it, I am sure he would have agreed with whomever did say it, right?
I am so grateful for a new day, a new chance to see through a different viewfinder. Yesterday, I was all sour and sad and pathetic. And I sure needed a good cry and a couple shoulders to hold me while I did it. Time to pick myself up, dust off my soiled clothes and dirty hands, and think circles instead of boxes, inside or outside of them, as it were.
Focusing on my son’s lying problem is causing more lying. I know that. I can see it every day. So, true to form, I keep focusing on the lying every day. That is the same old thinking and it is getting me more of the same old problem.
There is a super sure-fire cure for lying. Up your empathy, expect the obvious (lying), and accept re-viewing, re-phrasing, re-doing, re-remembering, re-evaluating, re-inventing, re-seeing, re-explaining, re-visiting, and re-telling until your child settles on what is the last re-vision. Then re-joice because, little by little, your child is re-wiring for the truth.
This method happens to take the patience of a cat observing a mouse for the kill. My personal opinion: The answers to the great conundrums of the Universe are usually found in the ways of dogs and cats. Wag on, my friends, wag on and purr a lot.
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.
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.
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.
Hope Is Wind
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,
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.
Cell Deep
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,
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!
Over-Processing
I know it is hard to believe that I have been anything better than a horrible parent, given some of the things I have shared with YOU. I have my scorched earth moments and I have my strengths, too. One surprising strength of mine is not needing to process everything to death.
I think attuned heart-to-hearts are precious. When my husband and I have “the talk,” it is slow, purposeful, and over fairly quickly. We stop, sit down, look into each others’ eyes, say how we feel, what we need, what we don’t need, make a repair if necessary, and get done. These happen once in awhile. Our love, attachment and relationship are strong.
Over-processing leads partners and children to hate “the talk.” Make your talks emotionally yummy, satisfying, touching, and over quickly. Choose your topics wisely. Be selective about what requires “the talk.” If you are able to do that, you will probably get at least one of your child’s ears in the discussion. One is way better than none.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
UPCOMING EVENTS:
- Next Trust-based Parenting Course is scheduled for July 19th and 26th. Sign up here.
- Next Hold Me Tight Couples Weekend Workshop for Therapists and Their Partners presented by Jennifer Olden, LMFT and Ce Eshelman, LMFT is scheduled for June 20, 21, 22, 2014. If you are a therapist and interested in attending, 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!
Wisdom For Adoptive Parents 