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When I was fourteen, my mom called me outside on a lovely spring afternoon. She walked me over to the fence. "Can you explain this, please?" she asked, gesturing at the extinguished cigarette butts that covered the grass underneath my bedroom window.
OH NO! Thinkthinkthinkthinkthink... "I don't know... Weird."
My mom looked at me, steady. "Pick them up."
While I cleaned up the mess I'd so obviously created, my mind clamored for an explanation that would take the blame off me. And then I remembered something.
I finished my task and went inside to find my mom sitting in the kitchen. "Hey, remember how we've seen Jordan and his friends walk through here sometimes? I'll bet they are the ones who made that mess."
My mom laughed. "I think it was you. You've been smoking outside your window!"
"No! No, I don't do that!" I tried to muster up all the indignation I could find within myself. "It was those boys!"
Now. I'm 100% certain my mom knew I was lying. Of course she did... How could she not?! But this lie was just plausible enough to introduce reasonable doubt. Those boys had walked that way while they smoked their cigarettes. Maybe they did smoke dozens of cigarettes and throw them out under my window... I mean, that was certainly possible, right?!
So there we were. I'd been confronted with the stinky mountain of evidence I'd flicked out my window, but I would not admit my wrongdoing. Instead of coming clean and accepting the consequences of my silly teenage actions, I deflected the blame onto others, and I stuck to that lie for years. I've even lied about this incident as an adult! In fact, I've never come clean to my mom about this (and I'm 31 years old!). If she is reading this blog, this will be the first time she's ever heard the truth from me: I did that. I smoked outside of my window for months and made a huge messy pile of nastiness in our yard, and then I lied about it. I shouldn't have lied to you, and I'm not sure why I thought you would buy my ridiculous explanation.
"Crazy lying" or "lying about the obvious" is one of the top behaviors associated with RAD and trauma-related disorders. It seems so hard to understand, but it's not. I mean, haven't you ever been so afraid of what would happen if a parent or loved one discovered something wrong you had done?
I don't know why I felt the need to lie to my mom like that... She is wonderful, was never abusive, and never over-the-top in her punishments. Perhaps I was afraid she would go through my room (plausible), or take my privacy away (less plausible). I likely feared I would disappoint her (I had a healthy relationship with her and felt awful if I let her down) or make her angry. But, I did.
Same with kids diagnosed with RAD, or kids who have been through developmental trauma, or kids in general. Kids, and adults, lie to protect themselves... To keep something they want or need, to avoid punishment, to make someone happy, to avoid breaks in attached relationships.
Crazy lying, or normal childhood behavior?! You decide!
Here's the difference: if I hadn't pulled that far-fetched, but possible, excuse out of my you-know-where... If my mom had had irrefutable evidence that I'd been smoking, I'm fairly certain I would have come clean (maybe not! Who knows!). Kids with trauma who engage in "crazy lying" will lie for absolutely no reason. In fact, they may come up with a lie, seek you out, and start a conversation with a lie!
And when caught up in their lie, kids with traumatic pasts have even less motivation to tell the truth, because their life experiences have taught them they could be severely punished for wrongdoings and they might fear their current parents will completely derail when lied to.
Another difference between "normal childhood lying" and "crazy lying"? My lying was a fairly isolated incident that occurred out of "necessity" when my mom confronted me... I needed to lie to her so I could continue on in my stupid teenage mistakes (most of which weren't life-altering, but smoking was definitely something I should have listened to my mother about because I still suck down cancer sticks like they're full of oxygen instead of, you know, cancer). I did not initiate the conflict over the pile of discarded cigarette ends... I never would have walked up to her and casually mentioned, "Hey, there are a ton of cigarette butts outside our window and I have no idea how they got there." A child with trauma issues may do just that, perhaps to intentionally disrupt harmony so that they are in control of when their parent confronts them on something they've done. To kids with trauma issues, instigating a conflict (even an unnecessary conflict) beats responding to a conflict that someone thrust upon them unexpectedly.
I've mentioned that I noticed something was slightly askew with Middle almost as soon as I met her, but Husband didn't really catch on to her disordered mental organization until the first time she turned her tendency to "lie about the obvious" on with him (I'd been experiencing it from day one, but it took about a month for her to start in on her dad... and I didn't mention it because I felt like I was the crazy one and reading too much into the behavior of a precocious little girl who had experienced more trauma in her four years than I had experienced in my entire life).
I was cleaning the room Middle shared with Little when I noticed she had written some letters on the wall. Little hadn't learned to write yet, and I recognized Oldest's and Middle's handwriting, so I knew who had written the letters without a doubt. No big deal, I thought. I'll just have her clean the wall and we'll be done with it. I called her in. "Middle, what happened here?"
She started smiling. "I don't know!" she shouted.
"I think you do. Want to tell me about it?"
"I DON'T KNOWWWW!" she wailed, and started to cry (but the smile remained on her face... I would come to figure out that the smile she puts on while simultaneously sobbing indicates she is terrified, but at the time I mistook her smile for her thinking our discussion was funny).
Husband entered the room, concerned. "What?!" he asked.
"Someone wrote on the wall. It's not a big deal, it will easily wipe off! But I want Middle to talk to me about it."
Husband looked at the writing. "Middle, why did you write on the wall?"
"I didn't!" she cried.
"Middle. All that is going to happen is that you'll have to wipe it off." He got a towel. "Here. Why did you write on the wall?"
Middle threw down the towel and started wailing. Then, she stopped and suggested, "Maybe it was Little!"
Husband pulled Little in and asked him to write the letters that were up on the wall on a piece of paper. He could not do it (he was only three at the time). Husband looked at Middle pointedly. "Little did this?" he asked.
"YES!" Middle then said, "Hey, Little, like this... This is what you did!" and proceeded to write the letters out on the paper for him!!!
"You know, whoever did it will have a consequence. Are you okay with Little having to take the consequence?"
"YES!"
"Middle, Little did not write on the wall." Husband held the piece of paper up to the wall, comparing handwriting samples (CSI here we come!).
"THEN IT WAS OLDEST!" she screamed. Husband repeated the process.
Now, this was before we knew about therapeutic parenting. This was before we switched from the ways we'd been raised... Stern lecturing and exasperated yelling from me, isolation and corporal punishment from Husband (I am neither for nor against spanking... Husband sees no problem with it as he is a typical Southern guy (sorry for the stereotype!), who believes physical punishment worked well with him and his siblings and didn't see any problem with giving his kids a swat when they misbehaved. HOWEVER, we have both come to realize that physical punishment and yelling do not work with our kids... In fact, that usually just serves to make things worse. Therefore, we try not to utilize these "old school" methods and try to remain bastions of therapeutic parenting). This went on for HOURS and HOURS as we tried to get Middle to admit lying. By the end of the night, we were all exhausted and traumatized (and re-traumatized) by trying to get her to tell the truth using discipline methods that only forced her to cling to that lie even tighter. These discipline methods probably would have worked well with most kids (stay in your room until you are ready to talk, if you lie again I'm giving you a swat).
Let me tell you... We handled that lie poorly. As we have many, many other lies... She once sat at the kitchen table every day after school for most of the evening because she kept insisting she didn't know how to read the word "of." EVEN AFTER SHE'D JUST READ IT, EVEN AFTER WE'D JUST SOUNDED IT OUT TOGETHER, EVEN AFTER I FREAKING TOLD HER THE WORD.
And we handle the lying poorly because it shows us how different her brain works from our brains, from the brains of kids who didn't go through the trauma she did, and those differences can be incredibly scary. The prognosis for a child diagnosed with RAD is frightening, and sometimes we overreact to our own fear when our kids engage in troubling behavior (and, sometimes, unfortunately, when they engage in normal childhood behavior). We were--we are--terrified for Middle and Little in a way we are not for Oldest (I am certainly apprehensive for her as most parents are when they think of their kids' futures, and I'm probably more nervous for her future with her genetic disorder delaying her development, but I'm not worried about her empathy levels or her understanding of cause-and-effect like I am Middle and Little... But I digress).
We let our own fears overtake us when our traumatized kids confront us with a "crazy lie." And during the "writing on the wall" fiasco, Middle really punched Husband's fear for their mental health on the nose because, at one point, she shouted at him, "It's not a lie in my head!" That caused Husband to completely lose it because there is a history of mental illness in his family, and the kids' biological mother's history and family. Her claiming that her lie was actually true unsettled him to the point he began shaking, full of anxiety, wondering what, exactly, she meant by that. Would she be able to surpass her trauma and become a healthy adult? Or has she already started building an alternate reality that she will live in instead of "the real world," and run into all sorts of terrible problems that we can't solve for her?
Bottom line: When a traumatized child gets stuck in a lie and can't bring herself to tell the truth, even if we swear up and down that she won't get in trouble for the action we want her to discuss with us, NOTHING makes her tell the truth about what had happened until she feels like it. And the more we try to push them into opening up to us, especially if we employ punitive methods in an attempt to get the truth, the more they lock themselves up, and that is a dangerous road to travel down with any child, but it's especially dangerous for kids with traumatic histories. Traditional discipline strategies of punishment won't work, and ignoring the lie won't really work either, because we need the kids to open up to us, to give us a chance to prove we won't hurt them for something like writing on the wall or destroying the desk or ripping holes in clothing or hurting the cat or hiding the laptop or hoarding the Halloween candy or lying about their academic abilities (all things that have been lied about with gusto in my house).
So. What do we do?
I'll cover that in my next blog.
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