Epiphanies

Today, at M’s first therapy session in 2 weeks, things went great. We LOVE, love, LOVE her therapist!!

We didn’t come by her the first try, but, rather the second and at a time when things were not going well. (The first therapist was good and knew her stuff, but wasn’t a good fit for our family.) We were eyeball deep with frustration, anger, resentment and lived day to day if not hour to hour dealing with M’s behaviors.

They. Were. Horrible.

However, they were typical RAD behaviors...She’d lock herself in the bathroom. Another time she hid at the bottom of her sleeping bag screaming and refused to come out. She would lie – often times about things that either could not be proved or not or things that were so wildly outrageous that it was almost comical. Once she told us it would take 5 hours to go across a nearby lake that one could cross in no time. Another time she REALLY wanted to wear a purple bra to school under her white t-shirt (I was beyond horrified).

M would yell at us, “You aren't the boss of me. My social worker is the boss of me. I don't have to do what you tell me, because my social worker is my boss....You aren't ready to be a mom...I don't have to do what you say…just wait and see what I do – you haven’t seen anything yet.” It was so draining and it went on like this for months! Everyday it was a battle to get her ready for school. Sometimes she refused to get out of the car - for long periods of time - once I got her to school.


It got to the point where I didn’t like coming home because I didn’t know what M might do or not do. And, people we knew either supported us or kept asking why are you adopting, when are you going to have your own child and we’d get the looks – you know from people wondering just what had happened to M to make her behave so inappropriately? Granted it was hard for some friends and family to relate just because although they sympathized, many of them had never had a RAD child.

However, there were SO many people giving us support through all of this. Adopting, we found out – fast!, is really alienating. We didn’t have a handful of friends with kids who had RAD. We did have some champions for us though who seriously kept us going - M’s therapist is one of those people. We discovered her in the midst of all this chaos and she has seriously moved mountains in our household and I’m not trying to say M is ‘all fixed’ or that we are the perfect family – because we’re not.

Things now are much better and my husband and I’ve worked hard to learn to not take M’s behaviors personally. This was SOOO hard for me! RAD consequences can be very counter intuitive and this took getting used to because (at least for me) I thought consequences needed to invoke an attitude of, ‘you did this so now I am going to do this (ha ha)’ element to them. Not so with the RAD child.

So as her therapist told us today that she thought that things were going so well in the regard that although M is still doing her goofy things off and on, the fact that we aren’t wrapped up in her drama though AND we’re holding her accountable for her behaviors is fabulous! Oh, and she also thinks we’re good to go for 3 weeks before we meet again! :) Woo-hoo! I NEVER would have guessed a year ago that we’d be where we are today. She even mentioned we were at the point in understanding RAD and how to help M, that we could train others – never, ever thought she’d say that!

As we drove home tonight I started making a mental list of what I’ve learned since we started the adoption process 2 ½ years ago.

Here are two of my bigger epiphanies from when M came home until now:

Control…M had very little control in her life situations before moving in with us. She needed to have that element there and for her it was her safety. It gave her an element of continuity that she didn’t have at other places she lived. Although it drove me WILD – it was to be expected and served its purpose for M. Overtime – she relinquished more control to us (she was MUCH harder on me than my husband) as we proved to her that we could handle her behaviors (we were keeping her!) despite the level of complexity and unanticipated timing of her behavior.

Consequences – don’t need to be hurtful – they need to promote brain growth and building new neural pathways in her brain. So, sometimes having her eat dessert for dinner after throwing a tantrum or taking her to a movie on an afternoon when she is grounded – although seemingly counter intuitive – they worked – kept her guessing and helped her brain re-route itself.

Understanding her desire/need/want for control when M came home and that consequences needn’t be mean, for me might seem obvious but living through it all – it was like trying to run through a mine field of chaos where we were constantly trying to uproot inappropriate behaviors and reseed appropriate behaviors - nonstop.