Oppositional Connection

My child is HAVING a hard time. 

versus

My child is GIVING me a hard time.

Oh, when he goes into his tirades, it is so hard not to take it personally!  My child is oppositional.  There are few things that we ask him or tell him that do not elicit opposition.  For me, it is exhausting.  For him, conflict is a way of bonding.  It is a way of controlling the people around him.  He has a negative, shameful idea of himself and he gets into a cycle of doing shameful things to reinforce that idea of himself.  He pushes everyone away to keep himself safe from being hurt again.  He does not anticipate that the people in his world are going to help or care about him - that is his script, his map. 

To help heal that broken script, my therapist suggests two strategies (from Colby Pearce, Repairing Attachments):

1)  Anticipate his needs before he has to ask for them.  Little acts can let him know he is being thought of, that he is being taken care of.  This goes a long way in repairing our relationship.  For me this looks like:

• giving him a cold drink when he gets into the car afterschool on hot days
• when I get a drink of water, offer to get him some as well
• give him a small snack and drink while he is doing his homework
• offer to cover him up when he goes to bed
• help him take off his shoes when he gets home from school
• put his towel in the bathroom and lay out his pj's when he takes a shower

2)  Speak his feelings out loud for him.  This sends him the message that you understand him, that you care enough to notice his moods.  He feels less isolated and like no one "gets me."  For me, this means saying things like:

• "I can see how that upset you." He often wants to talk about the tiniest scrapes and hurts he has accumulated over the day.  This can sometimes wear me out.   I can more genuinely show empathy for him being upset vs. saying I am sorry for his tiny scrape.  I can validate that he finds this experience upsetting.  I can also ask myself, "Why is he coming to me with this?"
• "You are upset because  you have such a hard time with this and your brother doesn't."
• "I can tell that you are tired."
• "I know you are ready to be done with school by now and that you'd rather stay home and play."
• "I know that you love daddy and me, but that you still think about your mama and dada back in ____________ and you wish you could be with them, too."

Slowly over time, these emphatic gestures are supposed to help my child lower his guard a bit.  Perhaps one day, his way of bonding will not be through opposition and conflict, but through a feedback loop of love and connection.

Healing My Own Trauma

Now that I knew I had suffered the effects of early trauma, there was hope.  I started seeing an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Therapist.  Here is a quick description of EMDR.* If you think it sounds hokey, join the club.  I thought this sounded crazy but I was desperate.  These sessions were a bit expensive, but I was desperate for healing.  My own therapist had done EMDR and had found it helpful.

EMDR changed me profoundly.  By spreading my traumatic memories around my brain and dislodging them from the state level, I became much more logical in my responses to stress.  I still get angry and frustrated, but I don't turn into monster mommy anymore.  The rages and lack of control of monster mommy have not shown their ugly heads since my EMDR therapies.  I can think more clearly and react more calmly under stress.  My family has noticed.  It is almost freaky at times.  I remember my husband coming home very late from a meeting once.  From previous experience, he expected to find me on the other side of our front door seething with anger that I had to keep the children past my mental "check-out time" when I usually handed the parenting duties off to him.  What he found was a peaceful me, a peaceful home and happy children.  The opposite had been the norm for so long when he came home late, that it took him aback.  It has happened again and again with this and other previous triggers of mine.  It is as though the fuse to my landmines refuse to light.  There is so much more peace in our family.  I can trust my own self more.

I will warn you, EMDR is tough.  I was depressed for days after many of the sessions and the thought of returning made me weep.  There is nothing feel-good about it.  I hated going because I knew I would leave feeling so down and worn out.  I hated paying money my family could barely afford to do this.  I am proud of myself for sticking with it.  I did it for me.  I did it for those I love.  What an investment it was.  It took me leaps and bounds into my path of healing.
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* (In my sessions, I did not follow the therapist's fingers as described in the link above, but chose to put on a headset that beeped alternatively in each ear while holding sensors that would vibrate alternatively in each hand.  I preferred this method so I could keep my eyes closed and relaxed.  The alternating vibrations were the only soothing parts of this therapy.)

My Own Trauma

Why was it that I felt my husband could so easily deal with my children when they were in trauma mode and I could not?  Why did I turn into a monster when my children needed me most?  I was physically unable to be of any help to my kids when they were having meltdowns.  In fact, I became abusive during some of those times.  Why?  Why did parenting seem so much more difficult for me than for the next person?

Thank goodness for my attachment therapist, who pointed out that she felt I had trauma in my early childhood.  I knew things were tough in my family when I was between the ages 0-4.  I did not know how bad things were.  I talked to my mother to find out more.  My mother got married to my father and moved to another country (his home) when she was 19.  She had me at 24.  My parents fought horribly.  My father yelled and lost his temper often.  He shook me when I was a colicky baby.  He was extremely jealous of my mom and had her followed because he was paranoid that she was having an affair.  He had a gun in the house and he threatened her with it.  He often told her that it was legal in his country for a man to kill his wife in matters of infidelity (this was true at the time).  In the heat of an argument, he put his hands around her neck and chocked her so badly she was afraid he might kill her.  She pretended to faint so he would stop.  He went out of town on business a lot.  He himself had many affairs.  My mom never reached out for help.  She did not tell her family (who lived in another country) or anyone about their problems.  She lived in constant fear.  She could not take me out of the country without his permission and he threatened to take me away from her if she ever left him.  This was the environment in which my brain began developing.  This trauma left me with scars.  I was completely unaware of this effect until I was pushed to my limits.

As a new mom of two, sleep deprived (I do not do well with little sleep) and challenged beyond anything I had ever experienced, I cracked.  By that I mean that my children screaming, tantruming and just being children pushed my own trauma buttons.  Fight/flight/freeze!  That is what their behavior elicited in me.  And I fought.  I fought them and mostly I fought myself.  When I pummeled my fist into the ground and broke my hand, I realized I needed help.  I got on antidepressants for the first time.  I started seeing a therapist.  Things got a lot better, but my own trauma background and its effect on me was not discovered yet.

It was not until 4 years into our life as a family that our attachment therapist named the fact that I also had a trauma brain. "You are right.  Your children's behavior does not have the same effect on your husband or on your friend because they do not have a trauma background."  Light bulbs went off in my head and a huge load of guilt and anger at myself rolled away.  I was not a horrible mother.  I was a wounded mother.  There was hope.  After years of thinking I was the worst possible mother for my oldest child, my therapist changed how I viewed myself when she said:  "No one will understand how hard it is for your son to calm himself down, to keep from losing his temper, to keep it together - no one will understand better than you because of your background."  These words opened the floodgates for me to finally give myself and him the empathy we both desperately needed.

Trauma Brain

Once it hit me square in the face that yes, my children suffered TRAUMA, I was able to learn a bit more about how it affects developing brains.  Sometimes, when I say to someone that my children have suffered trauma, they ask, "Oh, no, what happened to them?"  This might have been my thought before.  Now I want to scream at them (and at the past me) - they lost their primary care givers, their mama, their daddy, the people whom they most loved in the world without any ability to understand or control what was happening to them!  What else would need to happen for you to understand they had trauma?  My heart hurts just writing that.  What happened to them and countless other children was so traumatic for such vulnerable little brains trying to make sense of the world. What is a little brain to do when the floor drops from beneath their feet?  Rewire?  Halt?  Go backwards?  Disconnect?

Beyond Consequences, Logic and Control gave me the best understanding of the effect of trauma on a developing brain.  Here are some points that I want to remember from the book and from my attachment parenting therapist:

• traumatic memories get stored at the state level - part of the emotional, not the rational brain
• when triggered, children who have trauma backgrounds receive the information at the state level, which activates the "fight, flight or freeze" responses.  All negative behavior arises from an unconscious, fear-based state of stress (p.4).
• what may seem like a trivial thing to some, feels like life or death for those with a trauma brain and may induce reactions that are way over the top for the situation
• you learn self-soothing and how to emotionally regulate in the first couple of years of life

Trauma

Trauma.  I had associated that word with abuse and violence.  Rape.  Murder.  Physical abuse.  Years of neglect in an institution.  In my naivete, I assumed my adopted children did not have trauma.  They did not have any of these horrible things happen to them.   I knew that they had always been loved.  I knew my children had suffered deep losses, but I did not make the trauma connection.  I inadvertently overlooked the very deep and formative trauma that can happen to a developing young brain.   I don't blame myself.  There was a lot going on in my life before and after adopting two young siblings (8 mo/36 mo), one of whom is a special needs child.

Four years later, I am learning A LOT about trauma.  What I am learning is making a night/day difference in how I see my children, how I parent them and how I show them love.  This blog is an attempt to write what I am learning down so that I process it once again.  It is an attempt to share with anyone else out there who is realizing the effect of trauma on their children and can benefit from what I post.

I am a parent, learning as I go.  I am by no means an expert.  All I am doing here is passing on information - gathered from therapy sessions, books or articles, in hopes that the information will stick all the more in my mind and be of benefit to yours.