If you don't see shame in your traumatized child, please don't doubt that it's there. Now that mine can talk about it, I'm dealing with some serious guilt over how much she has felt so very deeply within her and how little I have honored that over the years.
I get it. I'm not Super Woman. I can't read minds. Even if I HAD been able to get an inkling of insight, I would have needed to shut down in those same moments just to keep on keeping on. Still, I'm her mother. When the healing DOES come, and the feelings CAN be genuinely expressed - splits. your. heart. wide. open.
It all comes down to one basic lie she has believed her entire life: "I am bad."
She has been strong enough lately to use words like "dirty" and "ashamed" and "bad" and "gross." Never before have these come out of her mouth, referring to herself. She has always been very passive in her phrasing - "I'm not good." Yet, they have always been there. She believes this about every single inch of her being.
Shame.
And at the same time, her behaviors soooooooo very piss me off. I hate them. I loathe them. I want to thump her on the forehead.
Today I want to swoop her up and hold and rock her in my arms, and sing softly while at the same time making her pay, and really giving it to her good so all of this will just stop!
It's a weird place to be. I've been here before. The parents' part of the journey is also confusing and complicated.
Listen to me: hearing her heart does not make it easier to deal with the behaviors.
The behaviors suck. I want to stop the behaviors. But I focus on the hurt and the truth which is underneath it all. Who she truly is. Who she was made to be.
19 comments:
I'm hearing you, girlfriend. I've started seeing the shame more and more with my kids as well. It bites, and it bites big time! It does rip the heart to shreds and puts all kinds of craziness into our already battered heads.
I hate PTSD! I hate RAD! I hate that other people's stupid choices did this to my kids (and my family.) I hate the insanity of the constant behavior issues. I hate it all and I want it to END...NOW! In fact, I've been posting about basically this same subject for the past two days.
It's all part of the grieving process we all have to go through, I guess. We have to grieve what was done to our kids and our families just as our kids do. Grief sucks! But, when those pangs of guilt come up, just remember "this isn't instinctive parenting." None of us came equipped to do this job. None of us do it perfectly. We all make mistakes along the way (and sometimes big ones like I've done lately.) But, YOU didn't do this to your daughter. You aren't the one who hurt her. You aren't the one who created the problems. YOU ARE the reason she HAS made such amazing progress, though!
(((Hugs!!))) I'm so very glad for our little village, too :-)
in that bottom photo, mar looks just like you. wow.
Hi! I started a new blog to document my weight loss journey. Since I want to be brutally honest, I've kept it anonymous - therefore can't invite my friends to read it. I'm looking for some followers so I have a little support in this. Check out my blog if you'd like! :)
It is soooo hard to hear this. When my daughter told me she was unloveable, I just wanted to reach in and rip that belief out. I know they can't just believe us when we say they are loveable, good, beautiful, smart, and capable, but oh I wish they could.
Mary in TX
Calvin believes to the core of his being that it is his fault that he was apprehended, so does his sister. There shame trigger is so huge that you practically have to walk the long way around to avoid it. He is slowly but surely being able to talk about it about sometimes it overwhelms me as well - I so hear you.
You don't have to be RAD to believe you are bad and have some of that shame. I don't believe my son is RAD, but he certainly has the part down where he thinks he is unworthy. Now I have to figure out how to get the teachers at school to NOT unknowingly feed into that shame by sending him to in-school-suspension lunch when he forgets to bring his book to class!
Natalie
adoptyaroslav.blogspot.com
I think knowing the feelings does help when dealing with behaviors, because at least for a split second compassion keeps the crazies from escaping.
Beautiful picture of the girls.
OH! Did I tell you the DVD series FINALLY came? :) Enjoying it thoroughly!
Blessings!
Hannah
I hear you. I will NEVER forget when my Russian daughter starting spilling it - letting us in. It was GUT WRENCHING and amazing all at once.
She still struggles with self esteem - but she has come so far.
The journey is so exhausting. Isn't it?
This is probably one of the most difficult posts I have ever read. Partly because I am always forgetting what my kids probably feel inside. Mostly because of the other stuff...MY guilt. I am the mother that some of your readers hate and are angry with...I am the one who hurt my kids...the reason for their behaviors. I spent years in abusive relationships, alcohol, drug addiction, homelessness...all of the stuff RAD and PTSD are made of. I still get upset over their behaviors...but I think that sometimes I let it be. I don't discipline as effectively as I could now because I don't even feel worthy enough to be their mom somedays. I know that people look at me and think about how it's not fair that I even have my kids, how I don't deserve them after what I put them through. It's amazing the type of judgement you face as "that" mother, despite the fact that we live a very different life now. I don't know the biological parents to any of the children any of you are raising, but I know what my children have been through. I know what I have been through. Unless their biological parents are just pure evil, I am sure that they feel serious remorse, guilt, and sorrow for the bad chioces that they made. As Diana said, none of us are perfect. It just so happens that some of our mistakes are a little bigger I guess. It doesn't excuse make the hurt that we caused right or ok. It does, however, give you a view into the fact that WE weren't equipped for the job either. No one was there to tell us that there was a better way, they were too busy judging. I do know that for those of you that have adopted children....the parents that hurt them did make one good choice, YOU have them now. And if they feel the way that I do, they would give their very lives to take that hurt away. It wasn't intentional....and we deal with that guilt everyday of our lives. Please pray for them, get to know them if you can, reach out to them if you have it in yourself. They are lost and hurting...at least I was...sorry for kind of rambling on forever, but this post really cut my heart in two..I pray that each of you find forgiveness for the "bad" parents. Blessings to you all.
As always, thank you for your heart Christine.
Thank you, my dear, dear friend. I love you so very much. You are living, breathing proof that miracles can emerge from chaos, and true and lasting change can occur in a heart ... in parents ... in an entire family. You are literally walking into healing WITH your children.
I marvel at you every single day.
And I need to return your call because I'm so stinkin' excited that we're going to get to see you all!!!!
Love the picture of the three of them!
We are at that stage of teeter-tottering between vestiges of craziness (milder versions, but it can still be across the board, and it still makes me think I'm losing my mind) and increased attachment, openness and appropriate expression of the big/hard feelings. In many ways I have found this phase difficult. The earlier phase of just trying to get P to attach and dealing with all the nutso stuff: I could sort of go on autopilot once I learned. This feelings phase: keeps hurting my heart. I can't imagine what it's like for P. It's got to be 100 times worse. I'm sure it was, in many ways, easier for him to just act RAD and not let himself really feel all the stuff. Now he's letting himself feel more things more accurately, and there is a ton of shame and hurt and fear. I just keep thinking that I can never lose sight of the frightened and ashamed little guy inside my 10-year old's body.
Givens Family - I just reread what I wrote after I read your comment. Oh, goodness! I certainly didn't mean to offend and ask your forgiveness if I did.
Yes, sometimes I do get very frustrated with those who hurt my kids and left such a whopping mess for us to clean up. Yes, it was their stupid choices that no matter what was behind them were still stupid choices that made my kids they way they are. That's not a judgement call. It just is what it is and sometimes the reality of it really sucks, as I'm sure you are very well aware.
But, the miracle it is that I still have my kids has not escaped me. I am still very grateful for the right choice their birth mother made to give them life. Even though I may have sounded angry at her, I'm not. I have great compassion and pity for her. In fact, my heart breaks for her. I can't imagine having a life so broken and so empty and most likely so full of her own hurt that she lost literally everything she ever had, including her two beautiful boys.
I'm also a big fan of repentance. People can and do change, and what a blessed, beautiful miracle it is. In the big, eternal scheme of things, it really doesn't matter where you've been. It matters where you're going and what you do with what's in front of you.
The cool thing about your story IS that you still have your kids! You get a chance for a do-over and to turn the tides of the past. You have the opportunity to change and repair your relationship with your kids without them having to go through the added intense grief and loss of losing you and being adopted by another family. Also, because you know exactly what your kids have been through, you can also better guess, and thus easier address at what's really driving the insanity of their behavior.
That's something that most of us and none of our adopted kids have. I know that for myself, personally, I've never experienced anything close to what my kids have and sometimes its very hard to wrap my brain around. And, like so many adopted kids, my boys have no contact with their birth families. My older son remembers only snapshots of his birth mother and my younger son didn't even know he ever had a mother. The boys were removed from their birth home by authorities and put in an institution when he was still a baby. I know precious little about my boys' birth mother myself - and what I was told was all rather heart breaking and negative in tone. It's very sad for me and for them. I know she wasn't all bad or all evil. But my children will never have the opportunity to see her grief or her guilt or her course corrections. In fact, there's about a 99% probability that they will never see her again...or ever even be able to find her even if they wanted to.
My comments to Christine were strictly to lose the guilt over not being a better mom to them and for not seeing the shame earlier. She didn't cause the problems, but she's doing a fantastic job in fixing them. And without her, her kids wouldn't be who they are today.
But, I also say to you to lose the guilt. You may not have been equipped at the time your kids were tiny, and you may indeed have made some whopper mistakes. But those times are in the past. Yah, there might be a few of those mistakes you still pay for for awhile, but that's life. It is what it is. It's also part of the healing and repentance process.
The thing I hope you can and do focus on, though, is that somewhere along the way, someone saw in you the great potential you have and they granted you a do-over opportunity...an opportunity that most parents who make foolish choices and the children those choices so profoundly effect never get. Cherish it, embrace it, who freaking cares what society thinks...they don't get it anyway, and hold your head up high as you move forward with the life you now have.
I so struggle with this. Princess hasn't verbalized anything about her history or her feelings since she was three. She says she won't, because if she does it might happen again. I can only guess, and I'm very sure my guesses only scrape her reality. Until this post, I've been longing for her to verbalize it. Now I'm not sure I could handle it. I'm sure my heart would crack wide open.
wait im lost... what happened?
I love this picture.
hey where are you and your rv park in Texas, we are in Texas alot in the summer and would LOVE to come visit! Oh but we don't have an rv, lol!
Thank you so much Diana for your encouraging and kind words. I have no doubt that you meant anything directly. The whole blog and comment and emotion thing just really got the best of me I think. I really do struggle with the guilt a lot. Mostly I think because that a lot of my kiddos' behavior isn't just a result of trauma, but of unforgiveness. Everyday, it's like I have to ask for a little more forgiveness from them. That is what breaks my heart so. Even though we are making progress, I don't know if they will ever truly forgive me. I do commend you for what you moms do. I know that it can't be easy cleaning up someone else's mess so to speak. You moms just have some really big hearts, I don't think I could do it. I love following RAD blogs and trying to seek after the heart that you moms have. I am still learning how to really be a MOM. Everyday, I have to ask for another measure of grace. Blessings to all of you RADical moms out there!
Thank you for your honesty. I struggle sometimes with the whole "seperating the child from the behaviours" thing. Even though the more I learn about what my kids have gone through, the more understanding I have, it doesn't always make the day-to-day struggles easier. Thanks for making me feel a little more normal, a bit less guilty.
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