We visited Husband's parents and siblings yesterday... The kids swam all day, jumped on trampolines, ate ice cream cake, and just had a great time.
So, of course... Today is a big ol' pile of suck.
Oldest took in a TON of water yesterday when she jumped in the deep end for the very first time (go Oldest!)... She couldn't breathe when she came up and ended up vomiting (Soooo awesome, right? Not in the pool, thankfully!). She told me she felt funny on the drive home, and then after she went to bed, she started having some very deep coughs. I didn''t think anything of it until RIGHT before I went to bed... Suddenly, all those articles I read about secondary drowning came rushing into my brain and I decided "better safe than sorry!" and took her to the hospital.
She was totally fine, but we didn't get home until 4 a.m.!
Then, both Middle and Little woke up around 6 a.m. Middle had a huge breakdown this morning and Little is in the midst of a three-hour meltdown... With no signs of letting up! Husband and I are taking shifts with him in his room, with varying degrees of success at therapeutic parenting.
I'm so glad today is Sunday... Today, I'm sharing some silliness with you that my mother-in-law shared with us yesterday. Ladies and gentlemen... May I present to you... "Guy on a Buffalo" by Possum Posse, an epic tale of love, loss, betrayal and... Revenge!
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.
**************************************** If you've read my previous posts, you know that Middle and Little experienced chronic early-childhood trauma before they came to live with us. When the judge presiding over Husband's custody hearing awarded him full/sole custody, we expected them to engage in some problematic behavior when they moved in... "But it will get better once they've been here a while," Husband and I said, "All it's going to take is consistency, patience and love."
I can't even begin to tell you how wrong we were.
Husband and I found ourselves totally unprepared to deal with the needs of my step-children... No one warned us that sustained early-childhood trauma can negatively impact the brain's development. We'd never even heard of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), and therefore we were completely baffled when they reacted so negatively to our safe and secure environment. And we certainly didn't know about thetherapeutic parenting style we would adopt when they resisted our traditional parenting methods (often with screaming and yelling and kicking and spitting...).
I tried my best not to put too much stock into the RAD diagnosis, but eventually, subconsciously, I started automatically attributing any negative or odd behavior to their attachment issues. I lived in near-constant worry that that our love wouldn't be enough, that they wouldn't get better, that all of our valiant efforts would fail miserably... And if I lost my temper and slid back into traditional parenting methods, I would dwell on the most negative thought of all... Maybe their behavior would get worse.
So you can imagine my reaction to Middle when she told me about "The Good and Bad Maps" in her brain that make her "do good/bad things."
I emailed her mental health counselor immediately... "Is this a sign she is having delusions? Middle's family tree has some mental illness in its branches... Should we look into other diagnoses for her?"
The therapist asked me to make a note when she brought up "The Maps," but said she wasn't too worried about it... Middle is very artistic, and her therapist thought she was just using visuals to explain how her mind works.
Middle brought up "The Maps" a handful of times that month, but nothing major. Satisfied that she wasn't experiencing dissociation or mental hallucinations, we let the subject drop, butin April she started going into great detail about people in her brain that made her do bad things. She vividly described their appearance to me and even imitated their voices for me! I sent another alarmed email, but was again advised again to make a note when Middle mentioned the "people in her brain." I complied and tried to play it cool, but I was getting more and more concerned convinced that we were seeing the development of an additional mental health problem.
She kept talking about multi-colored people that lived in her brain and how they were in control of her thoughts and actions. I grew more and more worried as this discussion continued on and off for a month or so, until one day I heard her squeal, "MOM!!! COME QUICK!!! IT'S THEM!!" I raced into the living room to find her excitedly pointing at the television, jumping up and down. "THERE THEY ARE! THE PEOPLE IN MY HEAD!"
I could only reply with an embarrassed, "Oh... Okay, I get it."
It was a commercial for Inside Out.
Mystery solved.
But wait... What about those maps she kept talking about in March?
Turns out, her kindergarten classroom had a giant poster about choosing the right path... The poster included drawings of paths to success and paths to trouble... Paths that Middle called "The Maps" in class.
Poor Middle... She was using her imagination so wonderfully, and there I was, a mother with no higher-level psychology education, trying to shuffle her into another serious diagnosis.
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This story's end may be amusing, but I hope it serves as a word of caution against relying too heavily on a diagnosis to understand someone (or even understand yourself).
The power of the RAD diagnosis was so strong that I guess I completely forgot that all young kids say things that sound weird to adults and engage in behavior that we don't understand from our vantage point. I'm glad I had this realization when I did because I didn't even realize I was seeing her diagnosis instead of her.
Now that I have recognized my faulty thinking, I do my best to avoid falling into that pattern of thinking again, and I'm much happier interacting with my kids diagnosed with RAD.
After all, it's so much easier to laugh at the absurdity of childhood experimentation and logic when I'm not constantly asking myself, "What does this mean?!"
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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The other day Little and Oldest were playing a "game" together. The game consisted of running as fast as they could into the wall.
That was it.
They weren't crashing into each other. They weren't fighting. Middle wasn't in the room so I didn't have to worry about my step-kids triggering each other. The floor was clean and free of obstruction. They were being safe... well, as safe as kids can be when they are slamming themselves into the walls. They were having a great time, and walls can be fixed if damaged, and running into the wall isn't too likely to result in major injury... If we owned our own free-standing home, I like to think I'd have allowed them to continue this game because this... interesting game is just "Big Body Play," and I know that is important.
Unfortunately, we live in an apartment with adjoining neighbors and we try to be courteous, so I had to ask them to stop and tell them that slamming into the walls is against the rules. I left the room and they stopped... But after a few minutes, loud, dull THUDS began reverberating through the walls again.
I asked Husband to go in. I figured he would separate them, but he did something totally unexpected and pretty brilliant.
He stood in the doorway and waited for them to notice him. When they saw him standing there, they of course stopped their game. "What are you doing?" he asked.
"SORRY, MY FAULT!" Oldest said.
"I didn't ask you to apologize, I asked what you were doing."
"Breaking the rules," Little said, nonchalantly.
"Okay... But what were you doing?"
The kids fell silent. So Husband asked them again until Little said, "We were running into the wall."
"Oh, yeah? Do it again. I heard you guys laughing, so it must be fun." At this point, Oldest started crying, Little started smiling. "Why are you crying?" Husband asked Oldest. "I just want to see what you are doing in here."
Little smiled and laughed while Oldest wailed. "Go on," Husband said to Little. "Show me."
Little charged the wall and bounced off it, giggling.
"Your turn, Oldest," Husband said. But Oldest refused to move.
"Why won't you do it?" Little asked Oldest. But Oldest wouldn't answer.
"It's because she feels guilty for breaking the rules," Husband explained.
"Huh?" Little asked. "Guilty? What guilty means?"
"She knows running into the wall is against the rules. She knows that I feel upset when she breaks the rules. She doesn't want to upset me."
Oldest nodded.
End scene.
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So. How does the above example illustrate the differences in healthy and unhealthy attachment? How can I say that when there is an age difference of four years between Little and Oldest? Am I reading too much into this?
Well... No. I do realize that this is not a perfect example to show the differences between secure and insecure/disorganized attachment because of the age difference... The development of empathy (the ability to consider how one's actions effect the well-being of others) and morality (the ability to choose the "right" thing even if it contradicts your own personal desires) is a long process that doesn't fully develop until the "tween" years. The Evergreen Psychotherapy Center in Colorado describes the typical process like this:
Primary Process Thinking (ages 12-27 months)
"I want it, so I'll take it!"
Primitive Causative Thinking (ages 2-3 years)
"I want it but my parents will be upset with me... So I'll take it when they aren't looking!"
Causative Thinking (ages 3-5 years)
"I want it but my parents will find out... Is it worth the risk?"
Emerging Internal Control (6-7 years)
"I want it, but I won't take it because I don't want to upset my parents and then I'll feel bad."
Internal Control (8-11 years)
"I want it, but I would feel bad if I took it."
So, even if they were on track with their development of empathy and morality, my daughter would far more often choose the right thing to do for the right reasons. At five and six years old, respectively, Little and Middle should be considering the fact that we might find out about wrongdoings before they take action.
Unfortunately, they're not. Instead, they seem to vacillate between "primary process thinking" and "primitive causative thinking." I have been contacted by teachers more than a few times about Middle and Little trying to get away with something "wrong" even when they know it is wrong (primary process thinking). I warn the teachers that even if they say they are sorry, they are likely to just continue that behavior whenever their back is turned... And then I get another email in which the teacher expresses shock that the behavior is continuing on the sly.
Of course they're shocked... Most kids their age learn not to do "bad" things after getting caught and receiving consequences a few times, but since my kids are several years behind in this area they just don't have the cognitive skills to consider much outside of their own personal interests.
And they don't have these skills because such skills are dependent upon a strong, natural desire to please their parent-figure, which emerges as a natural and pleasant consequence when a secure attachment bond develops between parent and child.
Middle and Little don't have the type of desire to please we expect from young children because they did not develop a secure, healthy bond with Husband (army deployments disrupted their attachment process) or their biological mother (who, for whatever reason, wasn't able to provide them a safe environment while Husband was away).
And that is why parenting children who experienced early-childhood trauma can be so damn challenging... We see kids who are physically 5, 6, 10, whatever, but their development of empathy and morality is just not on target. And it's incredibly hard to get them on target, because the early foundation was never put down.
But we keep trying to get them there. And we will keep trying. Until we get there.
Trying this out... Raising kids is hard, raising kids with special needs is super hard, and raising kids with attachment/trauma issues seems damn near impossible sometimes.
We all need to laugh.
So, every Sunday, I'm going to get silly around here and post things that make me laugh.
I hope they make you laugh, too.
Today, I am featuring Fowl Language Comics. The artist and author, Brian Gordon, was kind enough to give me permission to use comics from his site for my first "Silly Sunday."
Things have been utterly atrocious at my house since mid-June.
I am presently on my "family" vacation with only a small fraction of my family. Little and Middle are home with Husband, Oldest and I are road-tripping it to my mom's house.
More blogs soon to come... Probably several during my little "break"!
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).
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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In Part One of my blogs on this subject, I shared with you the heartbreaking day when Husband realized the "abnormality" of Middle's lying behavior and how we responded in one of the worst possible ways. Today, I'm going to tell you how to deal with it.
My favorite resource on how to deal with the lying comes from Christine Moers, of course!
I love how she emphasizes the fact that you shouldn't ask them whether or not they did something because it's pointless, and that getting them to admit their lie is usually pointless as well. Middle recently gouged markings on my desk and I knew she had done it. There was no question. Just like when she wrote on the wall, I had all the evidence I needed to accuse her of gouging the desk without worry that maybe it was another kiddo.
I felt like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty... "IT'S JUST! A! DESK!!!!"
But she would NOT admit it, no matter how many times we told her she wouldn't be in trouble, that we didn't care at all about the desk but only that she trust us enough to tell us what happened. It took her four hours to admit it under intense interrogation, and by that time we were so angry that she was already in trouble for lying to us and her admitting the truth didn't mitigate our anger or her consequences.
A few days after the desk gouging incident, Middle lied to me about a marker she'd hidden in her room (she is not allowed markers in her room because she marks up her walls, and we rent an apartment that for some stupid reason used matte-finish paint on the walls... so removing the marker results in the paint coming off which means we have to pay to repaint the room when we move!). I asked her where it was, she said she didn't know, so I said, "If I find it hidden in your room, I will know that you are lying about not hiding the marker. Are you sure you don't want to tell me? You won't get in trouble, but you will if you don't tell me the truth right now."
"I didn't hide it. It's just gone."
Of course I found the marker, hidden carefully and strategically underneath her clothes. I didn't move the marker, and went back to her to ask, "Are you sure you didn't hide it?"
"I didn't do it!" she yelled, and started crying.
"Middle, I already found it and know you hid it. Won't you tell me the truth, please?"
"Aaaaaaaaahhhh-ahhhh-ahhhhhhhhh!" she wailed. "You don't believe me!"
"I want you to find the marker and then we will talk," I said. I was starting to doubt that she'd hidden it. Middle is very convincing.
But when she came in, she went right to the clothes and pulled it out. And I saw RED. I wanted to punish her and I started yelling at her. "WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST TELL ME WHEN I ASKED YOU!? NOW YOU ARE IN TROUBLE!"
I went out and bought ice cream sandwiches and gave them to Little and Oldest, and then asked her again if she'd hidden the marker. "No," she said.
So I put her ice cream sandwich back in the freezer. "You can have THIS when you decide to tell me the truth!"
The next night after dinner, I doled out ice cream sandwiches again but withheld Middle's. "Are you ready to talk about the marker?"
::silence::
"Okay, no ice cream sandwich for you."
After that night, I started feeling guilty. I was definitely not following the SPACE model for therapeutic parenting by trying to force her to explain herself. I thought really hard about why she was lying, and past incidents in which she felt she had to lie, and realized that she absolutely did not believe us that she would avoid punishment if she'd just tell us the truth. I realized that in her past, she probably faced severe consequences when she finally owned up to a lie, consequences that were the exact same had she kept on with the lie. She was afraid to tell me the truth... And when I asked her what she thought I'd do if she admitted to hiding the marker, she said, "I don't know... Swat me or something."
I decided that since I already knew the truth about the marker that it didn't really matter... what mattered was that she trust me enough to admit a wrongdoing. So we practiced. I made her feel as safe as possible, and asked her to say, "I hid the marker because I wanted to keep it in my room." And when she did, I responded by giving her half an ice cream sandwich, with the promise of a whole one after dinner.
That hasn't stopped the lying. Oh, no. Not by a long shot. But instead of responding with anger and punishment, I've started having her practice telling us the truth. The last lie was over our shower nozzle which she accidentally broke (or on purpose, but that doesn't really matter, does it?). She freaked out when I asked her about it and started lying and crying, but I reassured her and told her it was safe to tell me the truth. I asked her again what she thought would happen if she admitted to breaking it, and she said, "Never let me take a shower again." And we practiced her telling me, "I accidentally broke the shower nozzle." And I said, "That's okay! And, since you told me what happened, I know how to fix it! Thank you for being so brave!"
I'm not sure how this will work out in the end, of course, but I'm feeling pretty good about this method I'm trying out. I certainly enjoy working with her like this instead of punishing her or getting so angry... because when I get angry it just scares her more and makes her clamp onto that lie for dear life. It breaks our bonds and depletes her trust in me, and how can I expect her to tell me the truth if she doesn't trust me?
Bottom line: "Crazy lying" originates from the fear she grew up with before I even met her. When I punished her for lying, I only reinforced the paradigms of her trauma (I can't trust anyone, I must protect myself, and my parents will hate me, maybe hit me, if they find out I did something wrong). While addressing a lie is important because of the control issues our kids with traumatic pasts tend to have, it's important to address it in a way that makes them feel safe and reinforces the bonds of attachment you have with them, however tenuous those bonds may be.
