My husband and I are the parents of two children born in China. Our oldest daughter "Mandy" is now 7 years old. We adopted her in China when she was 12 months and one week old. Our younger daughter "Lilly" is now 5 years old and she came home from China when she was almost 14 months old. Both of our girls are from the same province, but their personalities and life experiences prior to coming to us are like night and day.
Mandy lived in very poor rural orphanage for her first year of life. We don’t know what her life was like, but from photos, things looked very stark and she came to us with the back of her head asymmetrically flattened. We assume she spent a lot of her time doing not very much in her crib, flat on her back. She was tiny and slightly developmentally delayed in her fine and gross motor skills. She was my first child and I didn’t realize she was delayed until much later. She was also serious, very verbal and cuddly. I was in love with her from the moment I held her in my arms.
Lilly was from a much larger orphanage where most of the children live with foster families. She lived with the same foster family for 13 months before coming to us. She was plump and healthy and advanced in her developmental skills. She even knew how to work a remote control. She was joyful, loved to laugh and eat. She is the poster child for the happily-ever-after China adoption. She is a joy to parent, easy to love and fun to be around.
I first began to feel like something was different about Mandy when she was about two and a half years old. She never slept very well and getting her to go to sleep had become a huge battle every night. My husband and I couldn’t agree and how to get her to sleep and where she should sleep. Getting her buckled into her car seat was a huge, physical battle every day. She needed to control everything she did and everything I did. My husband was working in a different town and gone 2-3 nights per week and didn’t see the difficulty that I was experiencing with Mandy. He didn’t see the morning that I missed an important meeting at work because I couldn’t get her buckled in her car seat for an hour because she physically fought me so strongly. He called it normal "terrible twos," but somehow I just knew that it was more. Only now I thought that something out of the normal was going on. No one else believed me. I began to doubt myself and my own judgment.
Soon we would be adding our second child from China to this crazy mix and I was worried and scared. I became depressed, but again, I didn’t realize that until much later.
Lilly came home when Mandy was 3 years old and things really began to get difficult then. Mandy hated her new sister and would hit her all the time. No amount of redirection and correction from me stopped this. She simply would not share me with Lilly and it was extremely stressful to me. Finally one morning I broke down and cried at breakfast and told my husband that I felt like I was parenting a vampire all alone and she was sucking the life out of me.
That began our journey to seek help for Mandy and our family. The first counselor we saw did not understand or believe that Mandy might have issues stemming from her early life. But she did understand that Mandy’s behavior was putting severe stress on our marriage. She helped us to get on the same page with our parenting choices and strategies. She also helped me to get on anti-depressants. I was no longer feeling that I was alone having the life sucked out of me. This was a critical step for our family – getting my husband and I working as a team again.
But Mandy’s behavior was escalating. By four years of age or so, she would hit her sister and attack me and my husband if she didn’t get her way about the simplest things. She would hit, kick and spit at us. She began to destroy things when she was angry at us. One day when I was taking a short break in my room and she wanted to be in there with me, she got a knife from the kitchen so she could cut her way through the bedroom door. She still needed to control everything and she was mean and rude to us. Everything things was a battle, getting dressed, taking baths, going to bed, eating, playing. She was a darling at daycare and at the grandparents’ house and they all thought she was the most charming, smart little girl on the planet. She would cry and tell us that she wanted to be with her mother in China and then rage and tell me that she hated me. Our relationship was very strained. I felt I had nothing left to give to this child.
We saw a child psychologist from our local FTC group who felt that Mandy had sensory integration issues. So we worked with an occupational therapist for 3 months. Many things got easier, but the rages and control issues continued to escalate.
We began to search for a therapist who had worked with adopted kids and finally found someone to work with. We saw him for about six months and his evaluation of our daughter was that she had anxiety and adoption issues, but not RAD. He did talk therapy with us and with her. We didn’t see much improvement and after six months, because of changes in his practice, he could no longer see us. He promised to help us transition to a new therapist. He sent us to a counselor was experienced with teens with oppositional behaviors, but not adopted children. She was totally charmed by Mandy and felt that the issues were mine. After a few sessions with her we stopped our treatment with her.
We could not find any other good therapists to work with in our town. Our daughter was now raging and talking about wanting to die and hating us and wanting to hurt us. I feared for our safety and the safety of our Lilly. I couldn’t imagine how she could be healthy growing up in such a terrible situation.
When I first began to realize that our daughter has some “issues”, but no one else believed me, I had read about a therapist who worked almost exclusively with children adopted from China with RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder). For a long time, I suspected this is what was really going on with Mandy, but no one seemed to agree with me. Our next step was to call this therapist who lived in a different state. He talked on the phone to us for an hour that day and for the first time, we felt we were talking to someone who understood what we were dealing with in our home. We decided to bring him to our home for an intensive weekend of therapy and parenting coaching. He worked with both of us and our 3 and 5 year old daughters. We learned that our daughter indeed has RAD and we learned out to parent her therapeutically. We began to see positive changes almost immediately.
For us, this type of parenting was not intuitive, we really had to work at it and we had to learn how to physically hold her to keep her and us safe during her rages. After parenting her this way for almost a year, we finally felt that we had made real progress with her. We had more good days than bad; she no longer had to attempt to control everything; I no longer felt scared of her and unable to handle her behavior; she acted lovingly towards us and would cuddle with us.
It is now 2 ½ years since we began therapeutic parenting for our RAD girl. Our children are 5 and 7 years old. Mandy is not completely healed, but she is making great progress and we have a happy family life. She is able to function normally and happily in our home. She and I have a good relationship at last. Just a few weeks ago, we went to Disneyland as a family and had a great time with no rages, not tantrums and no meltdowns. It felt magical.
I had read about RAD before we adopted for the first time, but I thought that it was uncommon in Chinese adoptees and if our child has issues, I felt that we were smart, capable parents and could love our way through it. I know now that love is not enough to heal these children and that not all adoptions are easy and blissful. I’m so glad that we finally found the help we needed to help our daughter heal. Very few people saw or understood what we went through to get to the point where we are today. How can we help future adoptive parents prepare to parent a RAD child when the existence of RAD in our children is rarely addressed honestly and openly in the adoptive community or by agencies? How to we get past blaming the adoptive parent? How can we help some families to know that they aren’t cut out for therapeutic parenting and perhaps shouldn’t even become parents by adoption because of that? These are questions I think about a great deal.
Showing posts with label Attachment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Attachment. Show all posts
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Notes for Those that Struggle
My name is Anne and my husband, son and I adopted Rose from a Chinese Social Welfare Institute in September 2007.
Rose was found the day she was born, no contact with family. She had an infection, was taken into hospital and then to the Institute.
From what I can gather, she had adequate care but nevertheless institutionalized and therefore multi-cared for.
My understanding of attachment was nil, not because people hadn’t tried to warn me, but because I simply didn’t have a clue about what anyone was talking about.
Rose was only 10 months old when she came home. Many adopters would believe that this is too young to develop attachment issues, but my belief is that increased cortisol levels in the brain can begin to overload almost immediately, so I suspect that she must have begun to shut down within weeks of being in the institute.
She was extremely docile, smiled at anyone and would be held by anyone except our male guide. She was serene, calm and ‘perfect’ in every way. I adored her, much more than I had adored my first birth child at that age. She was everything I had hoped for and more. She was beautiful. She was perfect.
Three weeks after our return to the UK, I was feeding her in my arms. She smiled, reached out her arm and pulled my nose as hard as was humanly possible for such a little thing. She really hurt me, it made me cry. She looked cruel and cold. That was the bit that hurt the most. She also began to bite me, to scratch and to arch her back when she was carried.
I felt devastated. Literally, my world and my beautiful relationship fell apart. I went numb and for a few days, lost the will to love her. I just cared for her in a cursory way and got on with it while I tried to process this information.
Having lost my mother 10 years ago, I was acquainted with grief, and I recognised that I needed to go through a grieving phase that she was not perfect and that she was not what I thought she was. I cried for a few days, wiped my eyes as it were and began to try to find out what was going on.
The first thing I did was to find out from fellow adopters where to go for help and that is where I found attach-china. I also found 4everfamilies and scoured both their sites to try and grasp what was happening to me.
The next thing I did was to order some books on the subject. I still have some reading to do but I started with the following:
1 Nancy Thomas – Taming The Tiger While It’s a Kitten – This is programme for young children to help with attachment.
2 Nancy Thomas – When Love is Not Enough – A great insight into dealing with older children, which actually helped me to see where I might end up and therefore flagged up problems for the future, which I could work on now.
3 Martha Welch – Holding Time – A guide to holding your child to enable attachment and well being in the child
4 Dan Hughes – Building the Bonds of Attachment – a very inspiring case study of an abused child, which again, gave me insight into the future and how I could avoid letting Rose get to that stage.
5 The Connected Child – As someone on Attach-China described, a bible, a day-to-day book, full of useful tips that can be read and re-read over again. Not crisis management like Nancy Thomas.
My diagnosis of Rose is that she wasn’t held enough, she wasn’t looked at enough and she wasn’t talked to enough. I felt I had to tackle all these issues in order to get through to her. Now I realized that all was not well, it became glaringly obvious that she didn’t look at us, she held us at arms length and her speech was underdeveloped. Of course, she came from China, so one would not expect speech, but she would not mimic us, but rather try and lead all the time. Her concentration was appalling. She would brush through a roomful of toys in a minute and then look at us as if to say, ‘what’s next’. I found myself organizing outings every day just to keep her occupied. She began to look at us coldly more and more, hurt me as much as she could, resisted cuddles. The other thing to mention is that I actually became frightened of her. She scared me. She was cold. She didn’t seem to care about us. I knew these were early days but nevertheless I was frightened. By now I had read enough to know that these behaviours might continue for years and I wasn’t looking forward to it.
My reading was beginning to help a little. I understand that in order for a little person to survive, several things happen to their brain. First, and most obvious, they need to take control. It is said that if they are not in control, they literally believe that they may die. So control becomes a matter of life and death. Second, I learned that they become addicted to the adrenalin that has washed over their brain in order to survive, so creating chaos is a ‘good’ state for them to be in for them. It actually makes them feel more comfortable. I also learned the natural levels of cortisol, the stress hormone in the body is increased enormously which has a very damaging effect upon linking up the electric circuits, leading to neurological damage and eventually to an autistic kind of state. I wonder how much of this I have to deal with in the future.
So I faced up to it, I had the facts, but how to deal with it.
The all-encompassing word for the method of dealing with children with attachment issues is called ‘therapeutic parenting’. It obviously has many sides to it but the basic premise is that we communicate to our child, ‘you are too sick/ill to take control of your life at the moment. I am going to take control for you until you are well, and then you can have the control back.’
So how does this manifest itself on a daily basis? Well, because Rose was so young, I chose to go on a programme put together by Nancy Thomas called ‘Taming the Tiger While it’s a Kitten’. Nancy sends you CDs to listen to, very welcome and a booklet and she has a yahoo group too which is helpful. The idea was that we would carry Rose for twelve weeks in a sling for six hours a day, beginning to drop it at the end down to less and less. I won’t lie to you. This is a huge commitment. Hubby took extra time off work and we worked at this day and night, we slept with her, we bathed with her, we stroked, touched, kissed, bottle fed and played until we dropped! And the truth is that we really didn’t know if it did the trick or not. We did it because we felt if we didn’t, we may turn round in two years time and say, ‘oh, if only we had done it when she was so small.’ We took all her toys away and sung to her, danced with her and talked to her the whole time. We canceled all but gentle outings with friends, stayed at home and got through it. No one else held her, family got disdainful and made us feel dreadful!
After a couple of weeks on this programme, something happened, I actually cannot describe what it was and nothing happened for the rest of the programme. She became more compliant. She stopped whining all the time and began to rest her head on our chests. Hoorah! Nothing much else really. Nothing dramatic, nothing else happened for the whole process. She just learned to lean on us a bit and that was it. She also became more wary of strangers and clung to me when newcomers came to the house. Good news for unattachers.
When we began to get Rose down from the sling, I felt that it would be unfair to do the suggested method that she stay close to me all the time since crawling and walking became her main occupation and I gather, develops the brain, linking up the damaged electric circuits. That was enough to persuade me not to do that. Instead, I followed the advice of a member of attach china, and I gated off a substantial part of the house. Hence Rose is able to ‘potter about’. I have removed anything that she is not allowed to touch, hence reducing the word ‘no’ to a minimum and only in crisis. We have spent the last two or three months like this as she has learned to crawl and now walk.
My day consists of being a stay at home mum; I will not be leaving her for a few years yet. I am in the process of interviewing a mandarin nanny who will come in for four hours a week but I will be at home too until I am entirely happy that she is OK. On a therapeutic note, I keep my voice very even towards her, not too many highs and lows; I sing every song that comes into my head. I think music has been a connection between us. I affirm a lot of her learning and exploratory actions to build up the ‘good girl’ bit of her rather than the ‘bad girl’. I intend to start on a behaviour ladder (on the files section) before too long. I think this is a wonderful tool. I walk with her in the buggy for one – two hours each day. I just go to the shops or out to a nice park. We look at ducks. Normal parenting stuff really. But it is very routine. I use key words to warn her of what will happen next. Bottle, nappy, night night etc. Actually I re-read this stuff and it’s just mostly normal parenting.
Our day now goes in cycles. She really only moves into chaos and aggression now when she is tired. I try to keep up regular naps, regular food and bottles fed wrapped up in her "blankie". We hold her to sleep for every nap and at bedtime, which means if she is chaotic, she can have a good scream and get it out of her system before sleep. I have kept her bottle teats slow flow so that she has had to use a lot of sucking to get her milk. I felt this could get out her frustration. I will be putting some more holes in her bottle as I feel she can take it.
Six months on, I feel that we are seeing a change. I am guessing that it will be a year before we are a team. I am guessing that issues will rise and fall in her life and I don’t know what techniques I will use in the future.
I am humbly aware that I have not gone through nearly as much as some people on attach china who struggle minute by minute with their children. However, this is my story and I think it might be more helpful to those of you with young babies and children. The great thing about everything I have learned is that if things begin to go wrong again, I will simply re-adjust my behaviour to take back control.
Rose was found the day she was born, no contact with family. She had an infection, was taken into hospital and then to the Institute.
From what I can gather, she had adequate care but nevertheless institutionalized and therefore multi-cared for.
My understanding of attachment was nil, not because people hadn’t tried to warn me, but because I simply didn’t have a clue about what anyone was talking about.
Rose was only 10 months old when she came home. Many adopters would believe that this is too young to develop attachment issues, but my belief is that increased cortisol levels in the brain can begin to overload almost immediately, so I suspect that she must have begun to shut down within weeks of being in the institute.
She was extremely docile, smiled at anyone and would be held by anyone except our male guide. She was serene, calm and ‘perfect’ in every way. I adored her, much more than I had adored my first birth child at that age. She was everything I had hoped for and more. She was beautiful. She was perfect.
Three weeks after our return to the UK, I was feeding her in my arms. She smiled, reached out her arm and pulled my nose as hard as was humanly possible for such a little thing. She really hurt me, it made me cry. She looked cruel and cold. That was the bit that hurt the most. She also began to bite me, to scratch and to arch her back when she was carried.
I felt devastated. Literally, my world and my beautiful relationship fell apart. I went numb and for a few days, lost the will to love her. I just cared for her in a cursory way and got on with it while I tried to process this information.
Having lost my mother 10 years ago, I was acquainted with grief, and I recognised that I needed to go through a grieving phase that she was not perfect and that she was not what I thought she was. I cried for a few days, wiped my eyes as it were and began to try to find out what was going on.
The first thing I did was to find out from fellow adopters where to go for help and that is where I found attach-china. I also found 4everfamilies and scoured both their sites to try and grasp what was happening to me.
The next thing I did was to order some books on the subject. I still have some reading to do but I started with the following:
1 Nancy Thomas – Taming The Tiger While It’s a Kitten – This is programme for young children to help with attachment.
2 Nancy Thomas – When Love is Not Enough – A great insight into dealing with older children, which actually helped me to see where I might end up and therefore flagged up problems for the future, which I could work on now.
3 Martha Welch – Holding Time – A guide to holding your child to enable attachment and well being in the child
4 Dan Hughes – Building the Bonds of Attachment – a very inspiring case study of an abused child, which again, gave me insight into the future and how I could avoid letting Rose get to that stage.
5 The Connected Child – As someone on Attach-China described, a bible, a day-to-day book, full of useful tips that can be read and re-read over again. Not crisis management like Nancy Thomas.
My diagnosis of Rose is that she wasn’t held enough, she wasn’t looked at enough and she wasn’t talked to enough. I felt I had to tackle all these issues in order to get through to her. Now I realized that all was not well, it became glaringly obvious that she didn’t look at us, she held us at arms length and her speech was underdeveloped. Of course, she came from China, so one would not expect speech, but she would not mimic us, but rather try and lead all the time. Her concentration was appalling. She would brush through a roomful of toys in a minute and then look at us as if to say, ‘what’s next’. I found myself organizing outings every day just to keep her occupied. She began to look at us coldly more and more, hurt me as much as she could, resisted cuddles. The other thing to mention is that I actually became frightened of her. She scared me. She was cold. She didn’t seem to care about us. I knew these were early days but nevertheless I was frightened. By now I had read enough to know that these behaviours might continue for years and I wasn’t looking forward to it.
My reading was beginning to help a little. I understand that in order for a little person to survive, several things happen to their brain. First, and most obvious, they need to take control. It is said that if they are not in control, they literally believe that they may die. So control becomes a matter of life and death. Second, I learned that they become addicted to the adrenalin that has washed over their brain in order to survive, so creating chaos is a ‘good’ state for them to be in for them. It actually makes them feel more comfortable. I also learned the natural levels of cortisol, the stress hormone in the body is increased enormously which has a very damaging effect upon linking up the electric circuits, leading to neurological damage and eventually to an autistic kind of state. I wonder how much of this I have to deal with in the future.
So I faced up to it, I had the facts, but how to deal with it.
The all-encompassing word for the method of dealing with children with attachment issues is called ‘therapeutic parenting’. It obviously has many sides to it but the basic premise is that we communicate to our child, ‘you are too sick/ill to take control of your life at the moment. I am going to take control for you until you are well, and then you can have the control back.’
So how does this manifest itself on a daily basis? Well, because Rose was so young, I chose to go on a programme put together by Nancy Thomas called ‘Taming the Tiger While it’s a Kitten’. Nancy sends you CDs to listen to, very welcome and a booklet and she has a yahoo group too which is helpful. The idea was that we would carry Rose for twelve weeks in a sling for six hours a day, beginning to drop it at the end down to less and less. I won’t lie to you. This is a huge commitment. Hubby took extra time off work and we worked at this day and night, we slept with her, we bathed with her, we stroked, touched, kissed, bottle fed and played until we dropped! And the truth is that we really didn’t know if it did the trick or not. We did it because we felt if we didn’t, we may turn round in two years time and say, ‘oh, if only we had done it when she was so small.’ We took all her toys away and sung to her, danced with her and talked to her the whole time. We canceled all but gentle outings with friends, stayed at home and got through it. No one else held her, family got disdainful and made us feel dreadful!
After a couple of weeks on this programme, something happened, I actually cannot describe what it was and nothing happened for the rest of the programme. She became more compliant. She stopped whining all the time and began to rest her head on our chests. Hoorah! Nothing much else really. Nothing dramatic, nothing else happened for the whole process. She just learned to lean on us a bit and that was it. She also became more wary of strangers and clung to me when newcomers came to the house. Good news for unattachers.
When we began to get Rose down from the sling, I felt that it would be unfair to do the suggested method that she stay close to me all the time since crawling and walking became her main occupation and I gather, develops the brain, linking up the damaged electric circuits. That was enough to persuade me not to do that. Instead, I followed the advice of a member of attach china, and I gated off a substantial part of the house. Hence Rose is able to ‘potter about’. I have removed anything that she is not allowed to touch, hence reducing the word ‘no’ to a minimum and only in crisis. We have spent the last two or three months like this as she has learned to crawl and now walk.
My day consists of being a stay at home mum; I will not be leaving her for a few years yet. I am in the process of interviewing a mandarin nanny who will come in for four hours a week but I will be at home too until I am entirely happy that she is OK. On a therapeutic note, I keep my voice very even towards her, not too many highs and lows; I sing every song that comes into my head. I think music has been a connection between us. I affirm a lot of her learning and exploratory actions to build up the ‘good girl’ bit of her rather than the ‘bad girl’. I intend to start on a behaviour ladder (on the files section) before too long. I think this is a wonderful tool. I walk with her in the buggy for one – two hours each day. I just go to the shops or out to a nice park. We look at ducks. Normal parenting stuff really. But it is very routine. I use key words to warn her of what will happen next. Bottle, nappy, night night etc. Actually I re-read this stuff and it’s just mostly normal parenting.
Our day now goes in cycles. She really only moves into chaos and aggression now when she is tired. I try to keep up regular naps, regular food and bottles fed wrapped up in her "blankie". We hold her to sleep for every nap and at bedtime, which means if she is chaotic, she can have a good scream and get it out of her system before sleep. I have kept her bottle teats slow flow so that she has had to use a lot of sucking to get her milk. I felt this could get out her frustration. I will be putting some more holes in her bottle as I feel she can take it.
Six months on, I feel that we are seeing a change. I am guessing that it will be a year before we are a team. I am guessing that issues will rise and fall in her life and I don’t know what techniques I will use in the future.
I am humbly aware that I have not gone through nearly as much as some people on attach china who struggle minute by minute with their children. However, this is my story and I think it might be more helpful to those of you with young babies and children. The great thing about everything I have learned is that if things begin to go wrong again, I will simply re-adjust my behaviour to take back control.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Bethany’s Hope: A Journey in Helping Our Daughter Heal and Find Love Again
This blog story is just a snippet of our time and journey of healing. We continue to peel back the layers of our daughter's wounds in order to facilitate healing, but we are sure much farther along than when we first realized what was going on. We aren’t naïve anymore in believing that a few short years will undo all the neglect, loss and possible abuse she endured, but we do have faith that God will complete a good work in her.
When we realized what was going on with our precious girl we had to re-learn how to parent a wounded child. Much of it was not only different it was foreign to us. Remember we had already parented a birth daughter for seven years. We weren’t “green” in the parenting department, but Bethany’s issues quickly showed us that all traditional parenting was an absolute failure in helping her. Some quick examples are that we immediately quit all time-outs and did time-ins. For months she was literally linked to me by a jump rope so as to always be connected to me. We did bottle time daily for well over a year. We played baby with her and re-parented her through many of the moments she missed when living in the orphanage.
We played a game where she would climb under one of my husband’s big shirts, his silk pajamas from China to be exact, and I would pretend I was pregnant with her. I would pat her head and sing songs to her, as I did to my birth daughter, and when she was ready out she would pop through the shirt, and we would move to the rocker where I would rock her, sing to her and bottle feed her t. I know it sounds weird and believe me there were times I would think how bizarre this whole thing was, but she absolutely loved it and needed it. It was one of the big things that ended her severe jealousy toward her sister being born to us, and her not being my birth child.
Thinking back, there is so much that we did to nourish her healthy attachment to us that goes against traditional American beliefs of teaching early independence. One day she fell down and hurt herself. We made a big deal of scooping her up and kissing her “owies.” She would never come to us for comfort so we always had to go to her, but when going to her she would scream, “Don’t touch me. I don’t want your help!” One day she screamed this at me and started running away from me. I calmly looked at her and said, “You must be remembering a time back in the orphanage where you felt that no one cared about you. You might have fallen down and no one came to comfort you. You might have been sick and no one came to hold you and care for you, but you don’t live in an orphanage now. You live in a family where people care for each other and love on each other when they are hurt or sick. So what are you going to do?” She stopped midway up the stairs, thought a few seconds, and turned around and ran into my open arms. That was the beginning of her truly allowing us to comfort her, and now she comes to us if she hurt or sick.
We used jelly beans, Skittles and Starbursts to reward her when she willingly came to us. We practiced spilling water on many occasions everywhere we went because one of her trauma triggers was spilling. I am still not sure what might have happened to her, but each time she would spill she would scream in sheer terror. So, in order for her to learn that spilling was normal, we all practiced spilling (we made it seem like a true accident). We did “baby bird feeding,” which is feeding candies or sugary treats ONLY if she is making good eye contact. We would call her to us, look in her beautiful eyes and say some loving remark, and quickly pop a candy in. We kissed each and every sweet and sugary treat to show that mommies love had filled it before we offered it to her. We did not allow her to self-feed candy or any other sugary treat. It all came from mom or dad to begin with.
I send this information because I passionately believe in equipping adoptive parents, and supporting those who are struggling. During the last two years we have seen four disruptions of adopted children within the families we know. None of the disruptions are children adopted from China, but it breaks my heart just the same because when there is a disruption everyone loses. Honestly, I can’t judge or even criticize any of the families who chose to disrupt. It was a gut-wrenching and hideous decision to have to make and each family made it only after exhausting every avenue and every chance of helping their children heal. In the end, they simply had to re-home the child to give them all a chance to heal and progress. It has been so sad.
Anyway, I thank you for the blog and I hope many parents will find information, support and even a wake-up call if need be from the information found within. Thanks again!
Here is Neurogistics webpage: http://www.balanceyourchildsbrain.com/
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When our daughter was handed to us on October 15, 2002, she was very sick. Unlike all the other children who were awake and looking around, our daughter was out cold. She hung limply off her nanny's shoulder.
When she was handed to me I realized how hot she was and I knew we were in big trouble. I was not a first-time mom so I knew fevers weren't necessarily anything to worry about, but my little one was really burning up.
When we got back to our hotel room and I took her temperature I finally tossed the thermometer aside when it got to 105. We had taken many medications with us so we started her on Advil and Tylenol piggybacks. We also had to strip her, something I had not wanted to do immediately, and put her in a tepid bath.
While she was in the bath tub, she gave me a small smile -- a smile which would hold us through the next few days of our nightmare into the world of third-world medical care.
To fast forward, we spent two days going back and forth between the Nanning hospital for IV fluids, and fighting to get us out of Nanning and into Guangzhou, which had the western SOS medical clinic. We had taken our older daughter to China with us, and we were deeply worried about our new daughter being sick with Rotovirus.
The second day our daughter Bethany was with us she started vomiting every bottle we tried to feed her, as well as having severe diarrhea.
She was so dehydrated from the vomiting and diarrhea that we simply could not keep up with getting enough fluids into her. The three bottles of IV fluids given at the hospital, and lots of prayer saved her life.
Our agency did get us out of Nanning early, but not until after they recommended we reconsider adopting our daughter. We thought about that recommendation for a split second and then emphatically said no. She was our girl, sick or not, and we were bringing her home with us. We arrived in Guangzhou just days after meeting our daughter. We spent the duration of our trip hunkering down with a sick child at the White Swan, and checking in with the SOS clinic daily.
By this time, our girl's diarrhea had become bloody with severe intestinal cramping. She had the worst diaper rash I have ever witnessed, which neither of the two different creams we took with us would alleviate. Thankfully, the SOS clinic gave us something that worked. She also had a double ear infection, throat infection, and fever blisters all over her little mouth. She was one sick little girl.
Although the SOS clinic was far better than the hospital in Nanning, we didn't find out what was creating her illness until we reached home.
After reaching our home city, we immediately drove our older daughter home to her waiting grandmother, and headed to our local hospital for testing, again not something I would have chosen to do so soon.
Within a day it was discovered that Bethany had Shigella (which is like E Coli).
It wasn't just normal Shigella or the broad spectrum antibiotic we took would have killed it, but it was Super Shigella. The only antibiotic that it was susceptible to was Cipro, which was not being used with children. Of course we didn't have any choice but to use it, so we did. She was well within a week's time, and we settled in to become a family of four. But, it was not to be so easy.
What I now know is that our girl was displaying many early RAD signs. She was clingy (who can blame her after what she had been through), demanding (again good survival skills in an orphanage), and generally moody and melancholy. I didn't expect her to immediately be a happy smiley baby. I knew enough about post institutionalization to know it would take time for her to trust us, but I didn't know enough about early signs of attachment and trauma to see that her behaviors were indicating a real serious problem that hugs, kisses and reassurance would not heal.
I had already started attachment parenting. We started the family bed, which was a miserable failure due to her inability to sleep. I carried her virtually everywhere, which she insisted upon through screaming if I put her down at all. She did not go into any other childcare situation. I bottle fed her with eye contact. I rocked her nightly to the same lullaby music she still listens to at night. I bathed with her. I rubbed the same lotion on her that I wore. She was with me virtually 24/7, but it wasn't enough. Looking back now we needed the help of professional intervention, and I needed a whole lot more support to keep doing this work, even when I didn't see results.
Fast forward three years. Right before her fourth birthday, Bethany turned and looked at her big sister, Kendall, and said: "I hate myself." All the years of struggling with her very controlling and fake people-pleasing behaviors came to mind and I knew that our daughter was not securely attached. It was my greatest fear and yet it was what the Lord had called into my life. I would be lying though if I didn't admit that I was terrified.
I had read about the Romanian orphans. I had watched the "Dateline" specials. Heck, my brother worked as a social worker in a residential care facility that was filled with Russian adoptees who had RAD. I wasn't uneducated in this area. The problem was that the symptom lists I had learned about were for older kids. Our daughter was only three, and she didn't display those symptoms. Yet.
I called my husband and told him that we needed to find help for our daughter. He agreed and we made an appointment to see an attachment therapist who was local. We saw him for six months and realized that we were not getting anywhere, except that he was making her PTSD worse due to her incredible fear of men. On the homefront we
were busy learning all we could about post-institutional issues to help our daughter heal.
It was also during this time we started an adoption ministry at our church. It was focused more on the "We're home, now what?" premise. We wanted to explore adoption parenting from a Biblical perspective. We had been through too much confusion and faulty parenting advice to not follow God's calling in starting this ministry. We saw too many parents bring home struggling children and try to apply traditional parenting practices, which were failing everyone involved. We wanted to seek wisdom, apply what the Lord taught us and grow in the area of Biblically parenting the adopted child.
While researching RAD for another parent I came across the web page "Attach-China". I read the parent testimonies and every single question I had ever had about anything our daughter was struggling with was answered. Our daughter's inability to sleep through the night and her ever-present night terrors were all classic signs of the PTSD she suffered from. Her controlling behaviors such as hoarding food in her mouth, needing to be in charge all the time, and her extreme jealousy of any of my time being directed off her, were all symptoms of her insecure attachment. There were other red flags, but it would take a long time to list them all right now, but each
one of those symptoms was listed within "Attach-China"'s webpage. I cried as I read these testimonies because on one level I was scared for our family and our girl, but on another level I knew I wasn't crazy. We weren't alone! There were other families and other Chinese girls with these same issues.
I started pouring through information about attachment and PTSD. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I started calling every place I knew to get the help we needed. We paid special attention to adoptive families who had traveled this path ahead of us, and we learned from their victories and mistakes.
We realized that our daughter would need interventions that were not typical. From other adoptive families we learned of a neurodevelopment program in Oregon that was treating adopted children with RAD, as well as other conditions. We made an appointment to fly over and have her evaluated. Even though she had shown no major developmental delays maybe we had missed something. We also learned of a Christian attachment/trauma therapist who worked in Portland, Oregon. I looked at my husband and said, "I don't know what the checkbook says you make the decision." He replied, "You're going." We made an appointment to see the therapist, Dr. Kali Miller.
Our daughter was diagnosed with moderate anxious attachment (insecure) and severe Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). She also has some sensory processing issues, which showed at her neurodevelopment evaluation.
We came home from Dr. Miller's office and started bottle feeding her again during a daily snuggle time. Instead of milk we gave cooled hot chocolate. We also started co-sleeping with her again, which we had tried when we first came home. We pulled back into our family and really limited our outings and our visitors. She just couldn't handle any extra stress in her life, and we needed to learn out how to therapeutically parent her. When we re-introduced the bottle, with eye contact, she would take a few swallows and erupt in rage. She had made great eye contact when
we first came home, but I remembered that it was mostly on her terms. Now, I was asking her to make eye contact on my terms and she didn't want that. I had to hold her while she kicked, screamed, spit and fought through the rage that she was feeling. The first few times it was well over an hour before she stopped raging and started crying. It was exhausting work, but each time she would cry she would say to
me: "Mommy why did she leave me? Mommy I must have cried too much." So many times I cried right along with her as she entered into the pain within her heart. I didn't want to see my daughter hurt like she did, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. The only thing I could do was show her that this time she would not be alone. I
would walk this path with her no matter what.
I was homeschooling my oldest daughter, Kendall, at the time, and one day I had a homeschool mom's Bible study meeting. Our discussion was about grace that night, and the leader asked if anyone had shown their child grace recently. I raised my hand to speak and calmly told my story. That same day during our daily snuggle/bottle time, while I had been telling my daughter how much I loved her, she had matter-of-factly looked up at me and said, "I don't love you. I hate you!" Her hatred was very real and very true, and it was expressed during a time of intimacy. Although I was taken aback I felt the Lord tell me, "It's okay, I've got her," and only through His strength I was able to look her in the eyes and say, with love and acceptance in my eyes, "That's okay sweetie, I have enough love for both of us." After I sent her out of my room I went into my closet and sobbed. It was the moment when the magnitude of what we were dealing with first hit me, and I felt my heart rip into pieces.
To facilitate bonding our daughter was kept very close to me. She slept with us on my side of the bed. For the first six weeks she fought to get away from me in her sleep. It was so strange to have a sleeping child kick and moan in her sleep, while trying to scoot as far away as she could get from me. I didn't get much sleep during those first six weeks, but after the initial difficulties she learned to snuggle in to me. In fact, she would sleep with one leg over me at all times, as if she was afraid I would get away otherwise. She slept like that for over a year. It was only this Christmas that we moved her to a mattress beside our bed, which is where she still sleeps today.
For approximately six months I heard my daughter scream over and over again that she hated me, and each time her outbursts ended with me holding her while she raged. Each episode ended with more of her pain coming to the surface. She cried, "I hate my birthmother, she hurt me and when I hurt I want to hurt other people." My heart ached for her, but each time my only job was to stay with her and allow the Lord's love to flow through me to her. It was hard work, and even though I knew I was never alone myself I felt so isolated and scared.
After about six months, instead of screaming she hated me she began screaming, "I don't want you to love me; love hurts." Again, these snuggle times ended in more rages and more holdings where the pain she was holding onto came flooding out. The holdings no longer lasted over an hour. They lasted around 30-40 minutes.
Outside of snuggle time she was starting to have some really good days. They weren't the good days of old where you never knew if she was being real or not, but these were genuine. We started to see real smiles and hear real laughter from her. They didn't come often, but they were wonderful to see just the same, and we cherished every one of them.
The whole time my daughter and I had been flying back and forth, every two weeks, between Idaho and Oregon to see our daughter’s attachment therapist. A year into this, Bethany started coming into snuggle time saying, "I want mommy's love." She was also making great eye contact, and she was draining her hot chocolate bottle. In fact, there were many times when I would look into her eyes and see the baby that I knew wanted nothing more than to be loved. Her eyes were soft and trusting like a small baby’s would be in a mother's arms. It was very different from the dark rage filled eyes I had seen looking up at me six months ago.
The journey through attachment has been long and hard. We have learned so much about how neglect affects children. Without having a sensory rich and nurturing environment while living at Pingnan, our daughter’s ability to process sensory stimuli has been compromised. Without had any one caregiver to bond with she has learned not to trust those around her, and with the introduction of the severe neglect she suffered her brain development has suffered. She reads everything as a potential threat and reacts accordingly.
These behaviors are not just a choice for her, and they aren’t just emotions she is feeling. They are hardwired into her brain and cells through pre-verbal cellular memories and neurological impairments stemming from the neglect so prevalent in so many orphanages worldwide.
Because of all the challenges she faces we intervened in ways which are not typical. She started a neurodevelopmental program two years ago. At her evaluation we discovered anomalies in her tummy crawling, her hands and knees creeping, and so many other developmental areas that we were never informed about. To this day she has creeped and crawled over 120 miles, and through what appears to be silly interventions of fetal patterns and other infant patterns, we have seen wonderful improvements. She no longer rejects the love I pour into her, but runs to me for comfort and hugs.
We also had her neurotransmitters tested last year via a urine test, and that her brain chemistry was way off. It was described to me that her brain chemistry showed as if she had consumed 40 cups of coffee with nothing to eat. In fact, the practitioner we work with said Bethany’s brain was never chemically ready to attach. It is no wonder she had explosions. We started her on targeted amino acid therapy and we saw immediate improvements.
The biggest area we saw her improve was in the area of sleep. She was so hypervigilant that she had not been able to sleep well since she had come home from China, which was over four and half years ago. During her third year she had so many night terrors I could count the number of times she didn’t wake screaming on one hand. Sadly, nobody knew how to help us because nobody knew what was going on. Once we started her on the supplements for the amino acid therapy she started going to sleep in five minutes, but what was even more encouraging was that she stayed asleep through the whole night.
We continue to peel back the layers of her wounds from her early beginnings. We continue to fly back and forth between Idaho and Oregon for bi-weekly therapy. We hope one day soon to be able to drop down to once a month. Bethany is almost finished with her neurodevelopment program, and she will be beginning neurofeedback to target the anxiety she still struggles with. We do therapeutic parenting in our home, and we try to educate as many people as will listen that parenting adopted children is very different than parenting birth children, whose beginnings don’t include trauma. We know because we have done both in parenting our girls. Bethany’s struggles stem from living in inadequate orphanage conditions, and those challenges take an entirely different approach.
Our daughter has made tremendous strides in healing. She no longer tells me she hates me. She will say, “I can’t push mommies love away,.” During nightly prayers she thanks God for sending her a mommy who will always love her. She is beginning to make connections with others in our family. She is not fully healed, but I have faith that He who began a good work in her will not finish it until it is completed. I am sure she will always have trauma as a part of her history and she will always have rejection and loss to work through. But, I see how far God has brought her through the interventions and the help of the powerful team of professionals He put together. I know He has a plan for her just as He had a plan for Helen Keller.
She was recently the “Star of the Week” in her kindergarten class, and for the question what do you want to be when you grow up, she put “I want to be a Dr. Kali and help children who hurt.” I couldn’t ask for anything more.
MeDenne Jones
For more information about attachment disorders or Post Trauma disorders in Chinese
children see attach-china or a4everfamily.org.
When we realized what was going on with our precious girl we had to re-learn how to parent a wounded child. Much of it was not only different it was foreign to us. Remember we had already parented a birth daughter for seven years. We weren’t “green” in the parenting department, but Bethany’s issues quickly showed us that all traditional parenting was an absolute failure in helping her. Some quick examples are that we immediately quit all time-outs and did time-ins. For months she was literally linked to me by a jump rope so as to always be connected to me. We did bottle time daily for well over a year. We played baby with her and re-parented her through many of the moments she missed when living in the orphanage.
We played a game where she would climb under one of my husband’s big shirts, his silk pajamas from China to be exact, and I would pretend I was pregnant with her. I would pat her head and sing songs to her, as I did to my birth daughter, and when she was ready out she would pop through the shirt, and we would move to the rocker where I would rock her, sing to her and bottle feed her t. I know it sounds weird and believe me there were times I would think how bizarre this whole thing was, but she absolutely loved it and needed it. It was one of the big things that ended her severe jealousy toward her sister being born to us, and her not being my birth child.
Thinking back, there is so much that we did to nourish her healthy attachment to us that goes against traditional American beliefs of teaching early independence. One day she fell down and hurt herself. We made a big deal of scooping her up and kissing her “owies.” She would never come to us for comfort so we always had to go to her, but when going to her she would scream, “Don’t touch me. I don’t want your help!” One day she screamed this at me and started running away from me. I calmly looked at her and said, “You must be remembering a time back in the orphanage where you felt that no one cared about you. You might have fallen down and no one came to comfort you. You might have been sick and no one came to hold you and care for you, but you don’t live in an orphanage now. You live in a family where people care for each other and love on each other when they are hurt or sick. So what are you going to do?” She stopped midway up the stairs, thought a few seconds, and turned around and ran into my open arms. That was the beginning of her truly allowing us to comfort her, and now she comes to us if she hurt or sick.
We used jelly beans, Skittles and Starbursts to reward her when she willingly came to us. We practiced spilling water on many occasions everywhere we went because one of her trauma triggers was spilling. I am still not sure what might have happened to her, but each time she would spill she would scream in sheer terror. So, in order for her to learn that spilling was normal, we all practiced spilling (we made it seem like a true accident). We did “baby bird feeding,” which is feeding candies or sugary treats ONLY if she is making good eye contact. We would call her to us, look in her beautiful eyes and say some loving remark, and quickly pop a candy in. We kissed each and every sweet and sugary treat to show that mommies love had filled it before we offered it to her. We did not allow her to self-feed candy or any other sugary treat. It all came from mom or dad to begin with.
I send this information because I passionately believe in equipping adoptive parents, and supporting those who are struggling. During the last two years we have seen four disruptions of adopted children within the families we know. None of the disruptions are children adopted from China, but it breaks my heart just the same because when there is a disruption everyone loses. Honestly, I can’t judge or even criticize any of the families who chose to disrupt. It was a gut-wrenching and hideous decision to have to make and each family made it only after exhausting every avenue and every chance of helping their children heal. In the end, they simply had to re-home the child to give them all a chance to heal and progress. It has been so sad.
Anyway, I thank you for the blog and I hope many parents will find information, support and even a wake-up call if need be from the information found within. Thanks again!
Here is Neurogistics webpage: http://www.balanceyourchildsbrain.com/
__________________________
When our daughter was handed to us on October 15, 2002, she was very sick. Unlike all the other children who were awake and looking around, our daughter was out cold. She hung limply off her nanny's shoulder.
When she was handed to me I realized how hot she was and I knew we were in big trouble. I was not a first-time mom so I knew fevers weren't necessarily anything to worry about, but my little one was really burning up.
When we got back to our hotel room and I took her temperature I finally tossed the thermometer aside when it got to 105. We had taken many medications with us so we started her on Advil and Tylenol piggybacks. We also had to strip her, something I had not wanted to do immediately, and put her in a tepid bath.
While she was in the bath tub, she gave me a small smile -- a smile which would hold us through the next few days of our nightmare into the world of third-world medical care.
To fast forward, we spent two days going back and forth between the Nanning hospital for IV fluids, and fighting to get us out of Nanning and into Guangzhou, which had the western SOS medical clinic. We had taken our older daughter to China with us, and we were deeply worried about our new daughter being sick with Rotovirus.
The second day our daughter Bethany was with us she started vomiting every bottle we tried to feed her, as well as having severe diarrhea.
She was so dehydrated from the vomiting and diarrhea that we simply could not keep up with getting enough fluids into her. The three bottles of IV fluids given at the hospital, and lots of prayer saved her life.
Our agency did get us out of Nanning early, but not until after they recommended we reconsider adopting our daughter. We thought about that recommendation for a split second and then emphatically said no. She was our girl, sick or not, and we were bringing her home with us. We arrived in Guangzhou just days after meeting our daughter. We spent the duration of our trip hunkering down with a sick child at the White Swan, and checking in with the SOS clinic daily.
By this time, our girl's diarrhea had become bloody with severe intestinal cramping. She had the worst diaper rash I have ever witnessed, which neither of the two different creams we took with us would alleviate. Thankfully, the SOS clinic gave us something that worked. She also had a double ear infection, throat infection, and fever blisters all over her little mouth. She was one sick little girl.
Although the SOS clinic was far better than the hospital in Nanning, we didn't find out what was creating her illness until we reached home.
After reaching our home city, we immediately drove our older daughter home to her waiting grandmother, and headed to our local hospital for testing, again not something I would have chosen to do so soon.
Within a day it was discovered that Bethany had Shigella (which is like E Coli).
It wasn't just normal Shigella or the broad spectrum antibiotic we took would have killed it, but it was Super Shigella. The only antibiotic that it was susceptible to was Cipro, which was not being used with children. Of course we didn't have any choice but to use it, so we did. She was well within a week's time, and we settled in to become a family of four. But, it was not to be so easy.
What I now know is that our girl was displaying many early RAD signs. She was clingy (who can blame her after what she had been through), demanding (again good survival skills in an orphanage), and generally moody and melancholy. I didn't expect her to immediately be a happy smiley baby. I knew enough about post institutionalization to know it would take time for her to trust us, but I didn't know enough about early signs of attachment and trauma to see that her behaviors were indicating a real serious problem that hugs, kisses and reassurance would not heal.
I had already started attachment parenting. We started the family bed, which was a miserable failure due to her inability to sleep. I carried her virtually everywhere, which she insisted upon through screaming if I put her down at all. She did not go into any other childcare situation. I bottle fed her with eye contact. I rocked her nightly to the same lullaby music she still listens to at night. I bathed with her. I rubbed the same lotion on her that I wore. She was with me virtually 24/7, but it wasn't enough. Looking back now we needed the help of professional intervention, and I needed a whole lot more support to keep doing this work, even when I didn't see results.
Fast forward three years. Right before her fourth birthday, Bethany turned and looked at her big sister, Kendall, and said: "I hate myself." All the years of struggling with her very controlling and fake people-pleasing behaviors came to mind and I knew that our daughter was not securely attached. It was my greatest fear and yet it was what the Lord had called into my life. I would be lying though if I didn't admit that I was terrified.
I had read about the Romanian orphans. I had watched the "Dateline" specials. Heck, my brother worked as a social worker in a residential care facility that was filled with Russian adoptees who had RAD. I wasn't uneducated in this area. The problem was that the symptom lists I had learned about were for older kids. Our daughter was only three, and she didn't display those symptoms. Yet.
I called my husband and told him that we needed to find help for our daughter. He agreed and we made an appointment to see an attachment therapist who was local. We saw him for six months and realized that we were not getting anywhere, except that he was making her PTSD worse due to her incredible fear of men. On the homefront we
were busy learning all we could about post-institutional issues to help our daughter heal.
It was also during this time we started an adoption ministry at our church. It was focused more on the "We're home, now what?" premise. We wanted to explore adoption parenting from a Biblical perspective. We had been through too much confusion and faulty parenting advice to not follow God's calling in starting this ministry. We saw too many parents bring home struggling children and try to apply traditional parenting practices, which were failing everyone involved. We wanted to seek wisdom, apply what the Lord taught us and grow in the area of Biblically parenting the adopted child.
While researching RAD for another parent I came across the web page "Attach-China". I read the parent testimonies and every single question I had ever had about anything our daughter was struggling with was answered. Our daughter's inability to sleep through the night and her ever-present night terrors were all classic signs of the PTSD she suffered from. Her controlling behaviors such as hoarding food in her mouth, needing to be in charge all the time, and her extreme jealousy of any of my time being directed off her, were all symptoms of her insecure attachment. There were other red flags, but it would take a long time to list them all right now, but each
one of those symptoms was listed within "Attach-China"'s webpage. I cried as I read these testimonies because on one level I was scared for our family and our girl, but on another level I knew I wasn't crazy. We weren't alone! There were other families and other Chinese girls with these same issues.
I started pouring through information about attachment and PTSD. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I started calling every place I knew to get the help we needed. We paid special attention to adoptive families who had traveled this path ahead of us, and we learned from their victories and mistakes.
We realized that our daughter would need interventions that were not typical. From other adoptive families we learned of a neurodevelopment program in Oregon that was treating adopted children with RAD, as well as other conditions. We made an appointment to fly over and have her evaluated. Even though she had shown no major developmental delays maybe we had missed something. We also learned of a Christian attachment/trauma therapist who worked in Portland, Oregon. I looked at my husband and said, "I don't know what the checkbook says you make the decision." He replied, "You're going." We made an appointment to see the therapist, Dr. Kali Miller.
Our daughter was diagnosed with moderate anxious attachment (insecure) and severe Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). She also has some sensory processing issues, which showed at her neurodevelopment evaluation.
We came home from Dr. Miller's office and started bottle feeding her again during a daily snuggle time. Instead of milk we gave cooled hot chocolate. We also started co-sleeping with her again, which we had tried when we first came home. We pulled back into our family and really limited our outings and our visitors. She just couldn't handle any extra stress in her life, and we needed to learn out how to therapeutically parent her. When we re-introduced the bottle, with eye contact, she would take a few swallows and erupt in rage. She had made great eye contact when
we first came home, but I remembered that it was mostly on her terms. Now, I was asking her to make eye contact on my terms and she didn't want that. I had to hold her while she kicked, screamed, spit and fought through the rage that she was feeling. The first few times it was well over an hour before she stopped raging and started crying. It was exhausting work, but each time she would cry she would say to
me: "Mommy why did she leave me? Mommy I must have cried too much." So many times I cried right along with her as she entered into the pain within her heart. I didn't want to see my daughter hurt like she did, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. The only thing I could do was show her that this time she would not be alone. I
would walk this path with her no matter what.
I was homeschooling my oldest daughter, Kendall, at the time, and one day I had a homeschool mom's Bible study meeting. Our discussion was about grace that night, and the leader asked if anyone had shown their child grace recently. I raised my hand to speak and calmly told my story. That same day during our daily snuggle/bottle time, while I had been telling my daughter how much I loved her, she had matter-of-factly looked up at me and said, "I don't love you. I hate you!" Her hatred was very real and very true, and it was expressed during a time of intimacy. Although I was taken aback I felt the Lord tell me, "It's okay, I've got her," and only through His strength I was able to look her in the eyes and say, with love and acceptance in my eyes, "That's okay sweetie, I have enough love for both of us." After I sent her out of my room I went into my closet and sobbed. It was the moment when the magnitude of what we were dealing with first hit me, and I felt my heart rip into pieces.
To facilitate bonding our daughter was kept very close to me. She slept with us on my side of the bed. For the first six weeks she fought to get away from me in her sleep. It was so strange to have a sleeping child kick and moan in her sleep, while trying to scoot as far away as she could get from me. I didn't get much sleep during those first six weeks, but after the initial difficulties she learned to snuggle in to me. In fact, she would sleep with one leg over me at all times, as if she was afraid I would get away otherwise. She slept like that for over a year. It was only this Christmas that we moved her to a mattress beside our bed, which is where she still sleeps today.
For approximately six months I heard my daughter scream over and over again that she hated me, and each time her outbursts ended with me holding her while she raged. Each episode ended with more of her pain coming to the surface. She cried, "I hate my birthmother, she hurt me and when I hurt I want to hurt other people." My heart ached for her, but each time my only job was to stay with her and allow the Lord's love to flow through me to her. It was hard work, and even though I knew I was never alone myself I felt so isolated and scared.
After about six months, instead of screaming she hated me she began screaming, "I don't want you to love me; love hurts." Again, these snuggle times ended in more rages and more holdings where the pain she was holding onto came flooding out. The holdings no longer lasted over an hour. They lasted around 30-40 minutes.
Outside of snuggle time she was starting to have some really good days. They weren't the good days of old where you never knew if she was being real or not, but these were genuine. We started to see real smiles and hear real laughter from her. They didn't come often, but they were wonderful to see just the same, and we cherished every one of them.
The whole time my daughter and I had been flying back and forth, every two weeks, between Idaho and Oregon to see our daughter’s attachment therapist. A year into this, Bethany started coming into snuggle time saying, "I want mommy's love." She was also making great eye contact, and she was draining her hot chocolate bottle. In fact, there were many times when I would look into her eyes and see the baby that I knew wanted nothing more than to be loved. Her eyes were soft and trusting like a small baby’s would be in a mother's arms. It was very different from the dark rage filled eyes I had seen looking up at me six months ago.
The journey through attachment has been long and hard. We have learned so much about how neglect affects children. Without having a sensory rich and nurturing environment while living at Pingnan, our daughter’s ability to process sensory stimuli has been compromised. Without had any one caregiver to bond with she has learned not to trust those around her, and with the introduction of the severe neglect she suffered her brain development has suffered. She reads everything as a potential threat and reacts accordingly.
These behaviors are not just a choice for her, and they aren’t just emotions she is feeling. They are hardwired into her brain and cells through pre-verbal cellular memories and neurological impairments stemming from the neglect so prevalent in so many orphanages worldwide.
Because of all the challenges she faces we intervened in ways which are not typical. She started a neurodevelopmental program two years ago. At her evaluation we discovered anomalies in her tummy crawling, her hands and knees creeping, and so many other developmental areas that we were never informed about. To this day she has creeped and crawled over 120 miles, and through what appears to be silly interventions of fetal patterns and other infant patterns, we have seen wonderful improvements. She no longer rejects the love I pour into her, but runs to me for comfort and hugs.
We also had her neurotransmitters tested last year via a urine test, and that her brain chemistry was way off. It was described to me that her brain chemistry showed as if she had consumed 40 cups of coffee with nothing to eat. In fact, the practitioner we work with said Bethany’s brain was never chemically ready to attach. It is no wonder she had explosions. We started her on targeted amino acid therapy and we saw immediate improvements.
The biggest area we saw her improve was in the area of sleep. She was so hypervigilant that she had not been able to sleep well since she had come home from China, which was over four and half years ago. During her third year she had so many night terrors I could count the number of times she didn’t wake screaming on one hand. Sadly, nobody knew how to help us because nobody knew what was going on. Once we started her on the supplements for the amino acid therapy she started going to sleep in five minutes, but what was even more encouraging was that she stayed asleep through the whole night.
We continue to peel back the layers of her wounds from her early beginnings. We continue to fly back and forth between Idaho and Oregon for bi-weekly therapy. We hope one day soon to be able to drop down to once a month. Bethany is almost finished with her neurodevelopment program, and she will be beginning neurofeedback to target the anxiety she still struggles with. We do therapeutic parenting in our home, and we try to educate as many people as will listen that parenting adopted children is very different than parenting birth children, whose beginnings don’t include trauma. We know because we have done both in parenting our girls. Bethany’s struggles stem from living in inadequate orphanage conditions, and those challenges take an entirely different approach.
Our daughter has made tremendous strides in healing. She no longer tells me she hates me. She will say, “I can’t push mommies love away,.” During nightly prayers she thanks God for sending her a mommy who will always love her. She is beginning to make connections with others in our family. She is not fully healed, but I have faith that He who began a good work in her will not finish it until it is completed. I am sure she will always have trauma as a part of her history and she will always have rejection and loss to work through. But, I see how far God has brought her through the interventions and the help of the powerful team of professionals He put together. I know He has a plan for her just as He had a plan for Helen Keller.
She was recently the “Star of the Week” in her kindergarten class, and for the question what do you want to be when you grow up, she put “I want to be a Dr. Kali and help children who hurt.” I couldn’t ask for anything more.
MeDenne Jones
For more information about attachment disorders or Post Trauma disorders in Chinese
children see attach-china or a4everfamily.org.
Friday, March 14, 2008
The American Kidnapper
Wednesday, August 22, 2007.I looked up from my stir-fry, American style, hoping the view in front of me had changed.
No dice. It was the usual back of Mei Mei’s head as she surveyed the restaurant dining area while refusing to look at me. She was hoping to find her two orphanage sisters who had been adopted at the same time and if they couldn’t be found, well, the wall was preferable to her new parent.. To the left was a happy group of five couples with the adorable babies they had waited more than two years to claim; to the right, local Chinese families glancing my way, doubtlessly wondering what torture I had inflicted on a cute, 7-year-old girl to cause such alienation. MeiMei’s plate stayed almost untouched as I continued the charade of pretending to eat, unconcerned, and she continued her contempt and rejection.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. At the Civil Affairs Bureau ceremony the day before, every one of 12 families had seemed the happy family, the perfectly united adoptive family, except mine. Sobs started during the fingerprinting. Sobs continued during my oaths to take care of her. Tears flowed as the passport photos were completed, the eyes red-brimmed between the pigtails. In fact, MeiMei only stopped when the director of the orphanage appeared to soundly scold her: “you are the smiling girl—you are always so happy. You must not cry now and bring shame to us!” As a result, a girl who at least was prepared to show her true feelings to her new adoptive mom was transformed into a stoic semi-adult, refusing to speak to any and all.
Every night that week, my own self-talk would come back to haunt me as I would drift off to sleep. “She’s older: she’s seen so many get adopted; she’ll surely appreciate the fact that she was taken in before it was too late.” I had been naïve—worse than naïve—willfully ignorant. Of course she had attachments. Of course they mattered. And of course—no one had really thought to obtain her consent and understanding over the whole of idea of being adopted.
For the first time I saw adoption in a new light. For one person, it meant adding to a family to enrich it and hopefully give a child in need a better future. For the other person, evidently, it meant being kidnapped and taken away from all she had ever known—and worse, kidnapped with the consent of her “real family”—the orphanage director, the preschool teachers, the nannies she had known since one day of age. And the kidnappers were strangers, looked different from anyone she had every known, and spoke only the most primitive forms of Chinese. Why in the world would she have consented? This business of “America”—it can only be an abstraction when one is seven.
Thursday, the day for visiting the orphanage arrived—one I had promised and now suddenly wanted to take away. We wrapped presents for her friends and I had MeiMei label them. One, two, three presents—all for her favorite nanny. Suddenly I had unreasoning jealousy. She must be some nanny, I thought. After a 2 ½ hour drive we found ourselves at a large, well maintained orphanage building. All the rooms were larger than those in my little condo at home and seemingly cleaner as well. A flock of children came running to greet MeiMei as a minor celebrity. She handed out my candy and my gifts, all the while ignoring me. I was clearly secondary to the entire event of the Returning Orphanage Star. I capitulated and fell into the role of paparazzo, camera at the ready, although the hardest photo of all to take was MeiMei and the nanny together—one dissolving into tears, the other trying not to. The watching children stared at me and my older daughter. Clearly I was persona non grata, there to remove their favorite friend. With effort I managed to smile and ask a few perfunctory questions. Then I hightailed it out of there, eager to start our new life away from all that was holding MeiMei back.
The days remaining in China passed quickly, and I was only too glad. We went home and I tried to ease the way. We would find Chinese speakers in stores and restaurants; I got their numbers and would call them when MeiMei seemed down. I enrolled her in a school with several Chinese-speaking children. I had MeiMei send letters in Chinese to friends back at the orphanage and she did so—but the letters were always about school, as though her new family simply existed as the school transport system and nothing more. For months my daughter and I found ourselves entertaining a house guest—one stubbornly refusing to speak English, eat what we ate, play as we liked to play, bathe when we liked to bathe, and recognize the possibilities of family.
It is hard to pinpoint where real change began. It may have been the major birthday party we threw her in November, complete with magician. It may have been the day, late that same month, when in a Helen Keller-like moment for me, she tried her first word—“juice” and I rewarded her. It may have been due to the undeniable physical delight of having her first ski lesson over Christmas, or being encouraged to call other kids from the orphanage to keep the ties going. It may have been my refusal to react when MeiMei was cold and rejecting. It could have been emerging patience that I wasn’t aware that I had. And finally, it may have been the Mandarin-speaking therapist who gently, carefully managed to explain, “when we love people we must tell them that we love them, or they will not know.” I only know that in early March, as I went to turn out the light, saying “Good night; I love you,” that I heard the same words spoken in return—freely and happily for the first time by the little girl in pigtails.
Today, as we approach April, there is still work to do. But MeiMei is the one who comes running into my arms every morning for her hug when I say, “I’m missing something.” She is the one who buries her head in my neck and kisses it at bedtime, insisting that I not leave. She is the one confidently trying English right and left, and the one who at last is not afraid to call me Mom. MeiMei is still learning who is the Big Boss and who has to take a second or third seat in the family. But at least she is finally in the game.
And as for those other American families we met in China who felt sorry for us—and as for the orphanage staff—they are not here to see our small miracle of change, but it no longer matters. Each child’s heart has its own timetable and its own path to follow—one to be watched, understood and respected. As former “kidnapper,” I am coming to terms with MeiMei’s ways of coping and steps towards acceptance. Both kidnapper and kidnapped are co-discovering and co-inventing family, and that’s what matters most now.
No dice. It was the usual back of Mei Mei’s head as she surveyed the restaurant dining area while refusing to look at me. She was hoping to find her two orphanage sisters who had been adopted at the same time and if they couldn’t be found, well, the wall was preferable to her new parent.. To the left was a happy group of five couples with the adorable babies they had waited more than two years to claim; to the right, local Chinese families glancing my way, doubtlessly wondering what torture I had inflicted on a cute, 7-year-old girl to cause such alienation. MeiMei’s plate stayed almost untouched as I continued the charade of pretending to eat, unconcerned, and she continued her contempt and rejection.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. At the Civil Affairs Bureau ceremony the day before, every one of 12 families had seemed the happy family, the perfectly united adoptive family, except mine. Sobs started during the fingerprinting. Sobs continued during my oaths to take care of her. Tears flowed as the passport photos were completed, the eyes red-brimmed between the pigtails. In fact, MeiMei only stopped when the director of the orphanage appeared to soundly scold her: “you are the smiling girl—you are always so happy. You must not cry now and bring shame to us!” As a result, a girl who at least was prepared to show her true feelings to her new adoptive mom was transformed into a stoic semi-adult, refusing to speak to any and all.
Every night that week, my own self-talk would come back to haunt me as I would drift off to sleep. “She’s older: she’s seen so many get adopted; she’ll surely appreciate the fact that she was taken in before it was too late.” I had been naïve—worse than naïve—willfully ignorant. Of course she had attachments. Of course they mattered. And of course—no one had really thought to obtain her consent and understanding over the whole of idea of being adopted.
For the first time I saw adoption in a new light. For one person, it meant adding to a family to enrich it and hopefully give a child in need a better future. For the other person, evidently, it meant being kidnapped and taken away from all she had ever known—and worse, kidnapped with the consent of her “real family”—the orphanage director, the preschool teachers, the nannies she had known since one day of age. And the kidnappers were strangers, looked different from anyone she had every known, and spoke only the most primitive forms of Chinese. Why in the world would she have consented? This business of “America”—it can only be an abstraction when one is seven.
Thursday, the day for visiting the orphanage arrived—one I had promised and now suddenly wanted to take away. We wrapped presents for her friends and I had MeiMei label them. One, two, three presents—all for her favorite nanny. Suddenly I had unreasoning jealousy. She must be some nanny, I thought. After a 2 ½ hour drive we found ourselves at a large, well maintained orphanage building. All the rooms were larger than those in my little condo at home and seemingly cleaner as well. A flock of children came running to greet MeiMei as a minor celebrity. She handed out my candy and my gifts, all the while ignoring me. I was clearly secondary to the entire event of the Returning Orphanage Star. I capitulated and fell into the role of paparazzo, camera at the ready, although the hardest photo of all to take was MeiMei and the nanny together—one dissolving into tears, the other trying not to. The watching children stared at me and my older daughter. Clearly I was persona non grata, there to remove their favorite friend. With effort I managed to smile and ask a few perfunctory questions. Then I hightailed it out of there, eager to start our new life away from all that was holding MeiMei back.
The days remaining in China passed quickly, and I was only too glad. We went home and I tried to ease the way. We would find Chinese speakers in stores and restaurants; I got their numbers and would call them when MeiMei seemed down. I enrolled her in a school with several Chinese-speaking children. I had MeiMei send letters in Chinese to friends back at the orphanage and she did so—but the letters were always about school, as though her new family simply existed as the school transport system and nothing more. For months my daughter and I found ourselves entertaining a house guest—one stubbornly refusing to speak English, eat what we ate, play as we liked to play, bathe when we liked to bathe, and recognize the possibilities of family.
It is hard to pinpoint where real change began. It may have been the major birthday party we threw her in November, complete with magician. It may have been the day, late that same month, when in a Helen Keller-like moment for me, she tried her first word—“juice” and I rewarded her. It may have been due to the undeniable physical delight of having her first ski lesson over Christmas, or being encouraged to call other kids from the orphanage to keep the ties going. It may have been my refusal to react when MeiMei was cold and rejecting. It could have been emerging patience that I wasn’t aware that I had. And finally, it may have been the Mandarin-speaking therapist who gently, carefully managed to explain, “when we love people we must tell them that we love them, or they will not know.” I only know that in early March, as I went to turn out the light, saying “Good night; I love you,” that I heard the same words spoken in return—freely and happily for the first time by the little girl in pigtails.
Today, as we approach April, there is still work to do. But MeiMei is the one who comes running into my arms every morning for her hug when I say, “I’m missing something.” She is the one who buries her head in my neck and kisses it at bedtime, insisting that I not leave. She is the one confidently trying English right and left, and the one who at last is not afraid to call me Mom. MeiMei is still learning who is the Big Boss and who has to take a second or third seat in the family. But at least she is finally in the game.
And as for those other American families we met in China who felt sorry for us—and as for the orphanage staff—they are not here to see our small miracle of change, but it no longer matters. Each child’s heart has its own timetable and its own path to follow—one to be watched, understood and respected. As former “kidnapper,” I am coming to terms with MeiMei’s ways of coping and steps towards acceptance. Both kidnapper and kidnapped are co-discovering and co-inventing family, and that’s what matters most now.
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