"Crazy Lying": Enough to drive you crazy!

This post is also available at my new website Trauma Mama Drama.  If you enjoy reading my blog, remember to update your feeds, emails and bookmarks with the new link, because eventually I will only post updates on the new site's blog.

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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.

I Have to Bite My Tongue When Someone Says, "But ALL Kids Do That!"

This post is also available at my new website Trauma Mama Drama.  If you enjoy reading my blog, remember to update your feeds, emails and bookmarks with the new link, because eventually I will only post updates on the new site's blog.

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If you have a child with trauma issues, I'm sure your well-meaning friends and family members have asked you at least a million times: "What's the big deal?  All kids do that!"

And they're not wrong... All kids do lie, talk a lot, play too rough, fight with their siblings, talk back... Right? Right! All kids have illogical reasoning and get angry when their parents don't understand. Right Louis C.K?

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING VIDEO CONTAINS SOME EXTREMELY STRONG LANGUAGE.  It is absolutely hilarious, though, so please listen if you can handle coarse words and sarcastic ranting about the behavior of children, 

Louis C.K. manages therapeutic parenting with his daughter who clearly woke up on the wrong side of the bed!  Go, Louis!

So, yes, all kids do things that make us mad, that scare us, that irritate us. Some kids engage in these insanity-inducing behaviors daily just because they are kids, and some kids engage in these behaviors because they're ornery or just aren't thinking because their brains are still babies. But kids with trauma behaviors don't engage in "normal negative behavior" because their trauma responses take "normal negative behaviors" into scary movie territory.

Securely attached,  non-traumatized child responds to his mother when she catches him drawing on the wall. 

Child with attachment issues responds to his mother when she catches him drawing on the wall.**

In the first video of Heather Forbes's online parenting course, she says something that I want you to memorize, repeat and utilize when people give you that look... You know the look. The one that says, "You are a total loon and your kids are fine!" Oh, I hate that look.

Anyway, Heather Forbes says something along the lines of:  My child's behaviors are not the concern, but rather the intensity, the frequency, and the duration of the behaviors.

Spot on, Heather.  You rock!

I'll use Little's tantrums to illustrate what I'm talking about here.

All young kids have tantrums, according to one study published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Most preschoolers throw tantrums on occasion (about four times a week), and about 8.6% throw a tantrum daily. And most fits only last about five minutes, with longer meltdowns increasing with age tantrums of preschool-aged children usually last for about five minutes, and are shorter in duration in younger children, according to statistics on tantrums gathered by researchers Potegal and Davidson from the University of Wisconsin.

Now, I don't want to dismiss the feelings of parents whose children engage in "normal" fit-throwing behavior, because fits are annoying and exasperating. They test the limits of even the most saintly, with-it mother. I know that even "normal" tantrums can be absolutely horrible. But kids with traumatic pasts engage in completely different tantrum behavior. Unless they've healed through therapeutic interventions, traumatized children do not engage in "normal" fit-throwing behavior. Tantrums of traumatized children do not last for five minutes. They don't happen "a few times a week." They aren't merely expressions of frustration, anger, sadness, or exhaustion. They aren't very predictable and are not easy to avoid with small modifications in routine or expectations. They aren't easily managed by utilizing traditional techniques such as ignoring the behavior or putting the kids in time-out.

No. Trauma-tantrums are something else entirely. Little once had a meltdown that lasted for 5 days. I was about to take him to the hospital on the fifth day, but was advised to try a dose of Benadryl first which, thankfully, helped him snap out of it. That is, of course, and extreme example and thankfully has not happened since, but Little's meltdowns used to be constant and all-consuming. Before we started him at his behavioral therapy program, Little's meltdowns occurred daily and lasted for at least two hours, but more often lasted four hours. Every day.

And they were--and still are--violent. Husband and I have barricaded ourselves in the room with him, keeping him away from his sisters and the cat. He has gouged holes into the walls of his room by throwing things.  Countless toys have fallen victim to the wrath of Little, and I've been physically hurt by him on a small number of occasions.

The craziest thing about Little's fits, though, is that no matter what we do to avoid or calm his fits of absolutely terrifying anger and sadness and anxiety, nothing really works. Nothing. We've tried several methods of dealing with his meltdowns and have even gone so far as to commit the ultimate parenting faux pas and given him what we thought he wanted... But even acquiescing just intensified his rage!

If you are parenting a child with trauma-related behavior issues, you know the truth in what I'm about to say:

The behaviors that consume so much of our lives are NOT normal.

I want readers who support a friend or family member who parents a traumatized child to know that we trauma-mamas-and-papas understand that you have the best intentions in mind when you say things like, "Oh, that's normal," or, "Yeah, my kid does that, too!", or "When my kid does that, I do this and it works every time." However, those words, earnestly said in an attempt to assist a distressed loved one, are more likely to frustrate the very person you want to help.

That's not an attempt to discourage you from offering up tips to parents like me and Husband. Some traditional parenting advice does work well with our children and sometimes we are open to suggestions. However, if you have never raised a child with trauma issues and want to sympathize, empathize and advise a trauma parent, you must ask them the following question before you respond to them when they are distraught at the behaviors he or she sees in his or her children: "Do you want my advice, or do you just want me to listen?"

Because some days, when I call my mom or my friends ranting that Little threw a car seat at me while I was driving or that Middle manipulated a reward system I thought was working, I don't want advice, especially if I'm calling shortly after the upsetting event took place. I just want to talk about it, get it out, and hear, "Wow, that sucks!!!  What did you do?!"

Other days, usually after I've calmed down of course, I am completely open to the advice of others, because I know that my fellow parents know their stuff, whether or not they are raising neuro-typical children, physically disabled children, or children with mental issues.

So, bottom line: Kids with trauma issues may seem like perfectly normal kiddos with no issues. They may even be completely angelic in your presence if you don't interact with them frequently. You might question the sanity of parents who seem "hostile and/or angry" when they talk about or interact with their kids. However, please recognize the validity of their parents' concerns, because while the specific behavior may be "normal," the intensity, frequency, and duration of that behavior is not. Please keep this in mind if you want to help or advise a trauma parent.

**Note: this image is from We Need to Talk About Kevin.  I watched this movie long ago and read the book, enthralled with the story line.  It was probably the BEST "creepy kid" movie I've ever seen.  Middle and little aren't NEARLY as vicious as little Kevin there, but there are a few similarities.  I tell you this to warn you away from the film if you have a child diagnosed with an attachment disorder... because I know some of my fellow trauma parents have kids who DO engage in the behaviors the movie illustrates on screen, and also because it ends in the worst-case scenario for children with mental disorders/mental illness.  Husband wanted to watch it, I made him watch the trailer, and he noped out of that idea reeeeeealll quick.