Attachment Challenged Kids: Beyond Consequences, Logic and Control

Posted on: Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Comments: 0

This week, we are talking about Attachment and Adoption. Many of you really have enjoyed the show we did last year on Attachment Parenting: “Attachment 101: Bonding With Your Baby”. We know that you had a great response to that show. We are bringing you more on attachment but talking more about behavioral issues and attachment and in particular adoption. If you have an adopted child or are considering adopting a child, you definitely want to tune in. If you just want to know about attachment, you don’t want to miss what Heather Forbes, from Orlando, Florida has to say.

 

Heather is a licensed clinical social worker specializing in the area of Attachment Disorders and Adoption.

 

RM: Hi Heather. Welcome.

 

HF: Hi Kemi, it’s nice to be here. Thanks for having me on today.

 

RM: Your book, “Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control” comes highly-recommended by Sir Richard Bolwby, one of the most well-regarded attachment experts. That’s pretty high praise. Heather, what led you to write the book and why is the information in it so important?

 

HF: Wow. That’s a great question! What led me to write the book, Kemi, was not so much on a professional standpoint but more of a personal standpoint. I am an adoptive mother of two children who were adopted from Russia and my husband and I experienced a lot of behavioral issues. It was quite a journey going through all of the resources that were out there.

 

What we were finding was that a lot of the resources on attachment were actually what I would consider more fear-based. It actually created more chaos in our home at times. I started doing a lot of training and looking around and I worked with Bryan Post, who is also my co-author. When we started working with his model, it really was the thing that totally switched our house around.

 

His model, which he started developing and I have been training under and working under and which the book is about, is a much more love-based approach to working with children who have trauma histories versus children who may have mental health diagnoses—children who have trauma histories, children who have been in orphanages, who have gone through the foster care system—and what happens when you bring them into your home.

 

This model was the one that I really had a passion to getting out to families to say, “You know what? There are a lot of approaches out there, but this one works. This one not only works but it will create a lot of healing, and it will create a lot of strong relationships in your home.”

 

RM: Your mothering experience, what impact does the model have with your relationship you have with your children?

 

HF: The model requires you, as a parent, to first look at your own self. What we typically do is look at our children and say, they’re misbehaving, they’re not listening, they’re on the computer too long, they’re not talking, they’re talking back.

 

But this model says, “Wait a minute. Let’s look at the dynamic of a relationship. Let’s look at what happens when two people in that relationship.” The first responsibility comes with the parent. What that did for me, which was very difficult—difficult at first because it requires a lot of self-awareness and self-understanding to ask yourself what you are bringing to that relationship. What it did for me was to help me understand what I was bringing in. What my dynamic, my history, was bringing into relationship with my children. As I was able to work with myself and connect at a more understanding emotional level with myself, then I was able to get myself into a much calmer state and not, then, have to react to my children. That was what the piece that started turning in our family was really when I was able to start taking responsibility, when I was able to see that what I added into the situation would either create more chaos or could actually create more regulation or calming effect, then that was when I was able to make the shift and become much more of a loving parent as well.

 

RM: As you probably know, we did a show last season on Attachment Parenting and the importance of bonding with your baby. In that episode, Lisa Parker touched briefly upon some of the behavioral issues associated with insecure attachments. Now you specialize in helping families work through severe behavioral issues. Can you tell us a little more about the broad category “Reactive Attachment Disorder” and maybe some of the behaviors you might find in that category?

 

HF: Sure. Because we work with a lot more post-adoption children who have been through traumatic experiences, this is all back-end type parenting that you will find that a lot of children have a diagnosis called Reactive Attachment Disorder. Along with that comes a lot of other mental health disorders like Convicts Disorder or Opposition Defiance Disorder, ADHD, and you can put the whole slew of what I kind of call “Alphabet Soup” together.

 

The common behaviors you will see with that, especially with Reactive Attachment Disorder, are children who—and our book outlines this as well—do a lot of lying. When I say lying, most kids will do their own share of lying just as a part of their development, but this is incessant lying, continuous lying, all day long until the parent really begins to question their own reality. Children that will steal silly things like a calculator off of a teacher’s desk or their parents’ calculator or just silly stuff that they don’t even need, it’s really nonsense type stealing. You’ll have children that do a lot of hoarding and gorging types of behavior. Getting up in the middle of the night and just eating sugar—doing odd things like that.

 

There’s also defiant behavior, like “Let’s go, we need to go to the store, go get your shoes on, Johnny,” and Johnny says no. But the defiance lasts over three hours, he will not put his shoes on.

 

The difference is that a lot of the behaviors are your typical childhood behaviors, but some of them are not. The difference I want to stress here is that there are three criteria. That’s the intensity, the duration, and the frequency of those behaviors. When you get to that level, you’re really dealing with a child who has a lot of fear that has to be addressed because of his trauma.

 

RM: I would imagine that there is a mom out there listening to the show and thinking, “Hmm, is my child really exhibiting behaviors associated with insecure attachment? He doesn’t want to share his toys, and for some reason he likes to stockpile sugar cubes. Is this hording?” Can you just, again, stress the difference between common childhood behaviors and when it actually moves to becoming a problem?

 

HF: I think again, it is looking at the intensity of those behaviors. I want to say again, Kemi, that even though I am a mental health professional, I really work to get away from the diagnoses. I get away from working to say, “Oh, this behavior is so intense it fits this category.” I think that the danger in that is that when we start looking at children as diagnoses, we start limiting them.

 

 To answer your question, I skewed off on a tangent there, but to answer your question, no matter how intense the behavior is, and if there is a mom is listening out there who says, “Gosh, this is happening five or six times a day,” I don’t want them to panic. I don’t want them to rush out and get a diagnosis for the child, because that is not where the healing is going to happen.

 

What I think is that all of us, to some level, at some time, are going to be attachment-challenged. What I mean by that is that when we get totally stressed out, we don’t want to connect with people, we don’t want to behave. If we really look at ourselves as adults, there have been times that I have been quite nasty. If everyone listening to the show is honest with themselves, when they’re stressed out, they’re going to be defiant. They’re going to be acting out in ways they know aren’t right. The common denominator here is stress. A child who is stressed out and cannot handle regulating themselves back into a calm state is a simply child that we need to look at and a child who needs a lot more attention from more of a perspective of connection, a perspective of parenting out of relationship.

 

I guess I’m not really answering your question. I’m answering it in the sense that whatever the continuum of behaviors that that child is at one time a day or a hundred times a day, along the entire continuum if we just start looking at children as being dis-regulated, or stressed out and if we connect with them in relationship—not putting consequences on them, not giving them logic and rational reasoning but at that moment really connecting with them at an emotional level—we are going to start developing a relationship with that child that they can then use throughout their entire life to start becoming regulated and not having to worry in a fear-based way of switching their behavior but really truly, at an intrinsic level, learning how to regulate through relationship. Does that make sense?

 

RM: Absolutely. Can you say more about what a fear-based approach generally looks like?

 

HF: Most of the time, if you take any traditional parenting approach and you will probably find a fear-based approach in that. Let’s say your child is acting out in their little play group and they are not sharing their toys and they stomp over Johnny’s little kingdom that he built. Mom pulls the child out and tells him, “You’re not behaving; you need to go sit in time-out for four minutes.” I consider that fear-based because what that does is say, “You were angry, therefore you need to be removed because you had emotions that you couldn’t handle and you are going to be outside relationship from everybody else and you need to settle down by yourself and think about what you’ve done.”

 

Most of the time children don’t think about what they’ve done in that timeout. But what they are feeling in that timeout is that they are not included, they cannot have emotions because if they have emotions they get in trouble. What it’s not teaching them is how to then start learning to regulate their relationship. They’re isolated. That’s a very fearful place to be for anyone—isolation. If you think about it at a level of, say jails. If someone gets the worst punishment, what is that?

 

RM: Solitary confinement.

 

HF: Exactly. So what are we doing to a child when we are putting them in time out? I know that’s an extreme example, but for a child, pulling them out and ostracizing them is not a loving connection. If you look at a lot of traditional techniques of parenting, I really encourage parents to consider “time-ins.” This is just one example we demonstrate in our book.

 

Time-ins would mean, “Okay, Johnny, I see you’re having a hard time connecting and being polite.” That only tells him, it’s not blaming, “It’s only tells me as your mom that you’re really stressed out right now. I want you to come and sit with me for five minutes so we can get back together and you can calm down so you can go back and then I know you will be able to play just like you know how to play.”

 

It’s not that you’re rewarding the behavior—which is a fear that a lot of parents have—but it’s really that you’re addressing that child at a relationship level. You’re addressing that child at his ability or inability to regulate his behavior. It’s not about the behavior; it’s about communication about what’s going on deeper down inside that child.

 

RM: Well, in “Beyond Consequences, Logic and Control”, you propose a love-based approach. You just gave us an example, but tell us more about what a love-based approach looks like.

 

HF: I would say that the first thing, the first four chapters, the book talks what we call the stress model. This is why we called it a love-based approach. I will give you a short glimpse of what the stress model looks like. It is a simple model. It says the first thing you will see out of a child is behavior. If you go to the next level, though, that behavior is being driven out of an emotional state. That behavior is being driven either from a love-based place or a fear-based place.

 

An example: If I am feeling joyful, if I am feeling happy, then I am going to be able to say, [happily] “Hi Kemi, how are you doing today!?” If I come on the phone and I am not in that loving place, I am in a fearful place—and when I say fear, it’s not so much scared, it’s more of a deregulated place; maybe I’m angry, maybe I’m mad, maybe I’ve just had a disappointment today—I’m going to come on in just a deregulated place. So if we break down our emotions into two very simple places—either love or fear—we’re going to see then that our child is going to be acting out based on that emotional state. If they’re acting loving, then they’re in their emotionally-loving state. If they are misbehaving, they are in, what we call, a fearful emotional state.

 

By love-based parenting, what we are saying is that even if that child is acting out, if we create more fear in him that only means that we are adding more fear to their already emotionally-fearful state. So we have got to cover that child, wrap that child around with support, certainly with boundaries—we teach life lessons—but we have got to support that child in a loving state so that we are not adding more fear to that child. Does that make sense?

 

RM: It does. Now I happen to know quite a few parents who have considered or are currently considering adopting children. If there was one thing you could say to prospective adoptive parents regarding attachment, what would it be?

 

HF: I guess the best thing I would say is to start doing a lot of reading. Bowlby’s work is an amazing work at understanding what attachment is. Basically, attachment is simply about relationship. Relationship being reciprocal where one person in the relationship is being able to respond to the other person in that relationship so that if you put your arm around this child who comes into your house—typically when you put your arms around a child who’s been in the home since birth, you will be able to put your arm around that child and the child will hug you back and reciprocate in that relationship. That’s what a healthy attachment is.

 

What happens, then, to children that go through what we call trauma, any life experience, and this can even be birth children, it’s not just adoption. But certainly children who come into the home through adoption typically a child may be a little older in life—a toddler, a school-aged child, or a teenager even—they have been through so many life experiences that are not safe. Where relationships were exactly where you got hurt. Understanding attachments behavior is understanding that when you put your arm around that child when you expect that child to reciprocate and give back, that child may not be able because of his life experiences. The attachment is something that parent may need to do very slowly to create an environment where that child can slowly make that shift according to their own ability. It is not something that can happen overnight usually.

 

It is all going to depend on the child’s experiences, their personal makeup, their genetics, everything about them. But to really understand that attachment is a place where a child really can reciprocate or cannot reciprocate, but the biggest thing is for the parents not to take it personally. I think that’s where a lot of parents have a very difficult time, they take it personally. They put their arms around the child and they pull back and resist. Our natural reaction is, “That person is rejecting me” but that is not what it is. It’s just simply that child has so many life experiences that they can’t allow themselves to be vulnerable anymore. Their experiences have told them that emotional connection—and any type of physical connection for a lot of kids—is vulnerability. They are going to pull back to create safety for them. The more the parent can really acknowledge that and see what the child is doing is not personal about the parent, is it simply about that child needing to create some emotional safety until they can deem the situation safe themselves.

 

RM: A lot of parents will often, or prospective adoptive parents, will look for younger babies simply because of the fear that maybe an older child would have been through more trauma. Would you say that a love-based approach to working with older children is one that should be implemented?

 

HF: Absolutely. It takes the parents really understanding where they are and what their limitations are. I think the only way, really, to bring a child in through adoption is through a love-based approach because they are probably working out of a foundation of fear. A love-based approach is really the only way they are going to effectively bring that child in without having a lot of turmoil into the home.

 

I have seen families that have even adopted one- or two-year-olds that have some trauma history. When I say trauma, I mean in-the-womb trauma. You don’t always know from conception to nine months what has happened. That is the other piece I wanted to touch upon.

 

People want to adopt an infant because they don’t want to deal with all the attachment issues. But there is a potential—it is not guaranteed—even for a child that is adopted at birth to deal with some struggles. That may show up even at one-, two-, or three-years-old. It’s because from 0 to nine months, you may have had a birth mother who didn’t want to be pregnant, who didn’t want that child. All that emotional stuff just gets transferred into that environment of the womb and that really creates neurological system and a whole psychological system that has felt that not being wanted in the world.

 

I have worked with a lot of families that adopted children as infants and by eight- or nine-years-old, they have this child that is off the scale with their behaviors and they do not understand. We do not always think that life starts at conception. But that’s a whole other show, I’m sure.

 

But for this, the understanding is, at four weeks old, infants have their auditory hearing. If that child in the womb is in a domestic situation where it is very violent and there is a lot of cussing and swearing going on, you can adopt this child and then at two-years-old when they start talking they are saying all these words that are inappropriate and you know they didn’t get that from Barney, so where are they getting it from? You really have to understand that.

 

I don’t mean to scare anyone, but I just wanted to tell everyone there is that potential. I believe that any child—either adopted or birth child—we should be raising in a love-based approach anyway. If we really kind of stand back in a philosophical standpoint and say, “Why do we need to have fear-based techniques anyway? Why can’t we just trust children would want to do well, that we really are designed to be in relationship with another?”

 

A lot of our work is based off of Bruce Lipton’s work, who is a cellular biologist. He looks at things from a cellular standpoint. Even cells in a Petri dish—you put five different cells all separated together, what happens? They all join together. That tells us that as human beings, we are designed to be in relationship. We are designed to be connected to one another. If we start trusting that, if we start trusting that we are supposed to be in connection and in a loving connection, certainly we should be parenting that way as well.

 

RM: Heather, how can moms out there get a hold of your work or connect with the resources you have available?

 

HF: We have a website and it is www.beyondconsequences.com. On that website are a lot of articles. There are some school resources. Our book is also available for purchase online there. Ww also have a lot of other supplemental materials to help parents. There are some audio CDs, we have a DVD. But I just want to stress that there is a lot of information. We put out a newsletter every other week that supports parents through a Q&A format. I just want to encourage your listeners to go to the website and check out all the resources we have there. I’m certain that if they don’t need it, they know someone else who does.

 

RM: Heather, thank you so much for joining me today on The Radio Mom Show today. We’ll have to have you back because you touched on some pretty important issues, and I’m pretty sure that some moms out there will have more questions.

 

HF: I am available. I would love to come back. Like I said, I just have a passion for helping families. There is no reason to suffer and struggle and there is no reason to not have a good strong relationship with any child.