the parents find remains of the night roaming and begin the day with an elevated stress level. The child, sensing Mom’s stress and “knowing” from early on how best to survive with a stressed caregiver, becomes oppositional to Mom’s directives; he may even become aggressive toward her and battle for control. The child goes to school and describes Mom’s “mean and controlling” attitude. Now “triangulation” between adults begins when caregivers outside the home intervene on the child’s behalf. The child may lie about not having breakfast or not being provided a lunch. Feeling sorry for the child, school staff may offer the child a snack, school supplies or a hot lunch. They may even notify Child Protective Services if fearful the child’s needs are not being met. If this spiral continues downward, the child may be removed from the home and placed with another family!
Imagine the impact on the mother. She anticipated the adoption of a child who would respond reciprocally to her love, not react to her in fear and anger. She feels the pain of the child’s past but has no usable tools to help the child to heal. Her absolute best efforts at “normal parenting” are failing. She may lie about her child’s academic and sports successes to fit in with “normal” families. One by one, everyone begins to view her as the problem. If she would only be more loving, be more kind, be more firm, say “yes” more often, say “no” more often or just relax. This mother may lose her sense of self, as she does not have time for activities she once enjoyed. Her ability to relax diminishes. To relieve her distress, her partner may offer to take the child to the park or out to eat. Since the child is happy to go to the park with Dad, it looks and feels to Mom like he’s rewarding the child for misbehavior. Misinterpreting Dad’s motives, she may feel that her partner has become aligned with the child against her. Losing her partner may be the end of the family.
Imagine the impact on this family if mental health services begin and the therapist lacks training in early trauma, child development and attachment. Interventions may be purely behavioral, based on rewards and consequences. The therapist is confident in a behavioral approach. Everyone knows that you want to reward positive behaviors and “consequence” (punish) negative behaviors. The child is given a chart for the parents to monitor. “Catch your child being good and reward with a great amount of praise” is the directive. During the next therapy session, the child blames Mom for the lack of praise. He proclaims, “She did not notice all the good things I did this week!” Mom is admonished to be more observant next time. Mom feels that something is wrong but cannot identify the problem. She knows she does not feel good about the session. Throughout the treatment process the child vacillates between compliance to the therapist and refusal to comply with parental directives. The therapist is further convinced the parents are inadequate, overly critical and unloving. After all, what’s so difficult about following the therapist’s skillfully crafted behavior modification chart?
Over time, if the therapist remains involved, some children will become less amenable to the rewards. The therapist may give up or the parents may become angry about being blamed. Treatment is discontinued. Each will blame the other for the failure. This process is the migration of the child’s belief system (“I am bad”) into the treatment. Some refer to this process technically as “the parallel process” or “isomorphism” with the child’s original family. As the child’s belief system of “I am bad” transfers to others, the therapist views the parents as “bad” and may also feel personally inadequate to correct the family’s problems. Parents and therapists encounter failure.
Under these circumstances, the child will not heal and the family could be destroyed. Families on the Downward Spiral (see figure 1) may have the child removed from the home. Some children are moved to another foster or adoptive home. Others are housed in shelters, children’s homes, residential treatment facilities or juvenile detention centers. The process is emotionally and financially costly to the child, family and society.
Figure 1: A spiral that results from families reacting to a child’s behavior.
The Trauma Lens Paradigm Shift The Trauma Lens Paradigm Shift
I tried to keep Allan close by so that I could keep him safe. But he would slip away. One day he came into the house after playing outside. My sister and I were visiting together in the living room. Allan could not stand still while talking to us. He kept shaking his leg. My sister, a nurse, was always concerned about Allan’s health. As she investigated his ailment, a live bird fell out of his pants. He gathered up the bird and freed it outside. His grandfather witnessed a similar incident wherein Allan hid baby rabbits he’d captured in the field.
My quest for answers continued. I searched through training documents given to us when applying for the foster care license. With six hours of training, they should have covered noncompliant behaviors. I found nothing. I searched through stacks of files the agencies provided about Allan’s early years: court documents, foster care placement reports, psychological evaluations and school reports. Hours of reading provided detailed information about Allan’s abuse, neglect, abandonment and his multiple diagnoses. A new world emerged for me with unfamiliar mental health terms and diagnoses.
As I read more, Allan’s behaviors started making sense. His trapping skills were learned from a dad who earned extra money from trapping alligators to sell and trade. He learned to hide from the police when the authorities were attempting to arrest his father for his drug use and dealing. His chaotic lifestyle did not lend itself to good hygiene or healthy meals. He learned to scavenge through the neighborhood for food. He did not live with his mother, making “mom” experiences unfamiliar.
I could now make more sense of Allan’s strange behavior—why he was responding to me so differently from my biological children. But my search for new parenting skills was futile. The problem was that this was 1994 and no resources existed. I was determined nevertheless to find answers on how to parent this child.
The following year, while searching through the vast number of books at the largest library in the area, I found a new book, The Discipline Book, by William Sears, MD, and Martha Sears, RN. It differentiated the “connected” from the “unconnected” child. Their description of the unconnected child sounded like Allan. I then called the director of the volunteer agency and asked whether they were teaching new parents to attach to their infants. How would you teach a parent to attach to a nine-year-old child? The director had no answers. Some may think that the answer is obvious—it should be just like the myriad of ways you attach to your birth children.
But my experience was different. The things I could do for my birth children seemed to make Allan’s behavior worse. Days flowed into weeks, weeks into months and nothing improved. The Downward Spiral continued. Allan began to sneak out of his bedroom at night and raid the kitchen for the foods he was allowed in limited quantity during the day. He would eat ice cream straight from the carton. I began to lose sleep, worried about his safety overnight. When we installed a motion detector at his bedroom door, he began to entertain himself by setting it off “by accident.”
Finally, while Christmas shopping in December of 1996, I found the greatest present I could have received. On a rack of sale books outside a store I found a book entitled Adopting the Hurt Child by Gregory Keck and Regina Kupecky. The authors
