A traumatized family

Toward the middle of this summer I was just feeling...abused. It was the only word I could come up with. I felt like an idiot for even thinking it.

Abused? By a child? Really? What kind of parent could be abused by a child?

I started, the way I often start new feelings or thoughts, by wandering the web. I just typed in my feelings, watched what came up and chose something that sounded about right. You know how it goes, right? Clicking through page after page of stuff, hitting on something that was spot on, consuming that site and moving on to something that's linked there. Suddenly my life was becoming more clear. There are parents out there who are being abused by their children.

And that's how I started figuring out what was happening in my house.

I know RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder) because my daughter has it. I live with it every day. But I'm still learning about the toll it takes on the family. The severe triangulation and what that really means. The abuse certain members (mom, siblings, pets) of the family suffer, the confusion of the father (because of the triangulation, Dad rarely sees the abuse). None of it is Loreli's fault, it's not like she can help being this way...it's what trauma does to her brain.

Here's what I learned this summer:

RAD is a mental illness. I never thought of it that way. I knew it was a “disorder” and I knew that trauma caused it, why, and what the symptoms were--I just thought it was something we could eventually work through. I looked up RAD and DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.) The description had me wondering what was the difference between "disorder" and "mental illness" and I found there really wasn't one. I asked a psychologist friend of mine and she concurred. 

Finding that RAD was a mental illness helped me so much. It's not that my daughter was a horrible person or that she has this weird “disorder” that for some reason we weren't able to help her with yet, she's mentally ill. Her brain isn't working right because of the trauma she suffered.

That led me to looking at mental illness. Lots of sites for that but I came across one called Out of the Fog for families with loved ones with mental illness. A huge amount of pertinent information. Explanations of various types of mental illnesses, forums, types of treatments. Nothing about RAD unfortunately and when I posted on one of the forums I found great people, but the moderator nicely said that it was a forum for families with children that have a diagnosed mental illness.

Sigh. I have a child with a diagnosed mental illness. And this is a huge trigger for me: Because it's a child, because so few have ever heard of it, because it's aimed at the adoptive mom, siblings, pets and so rarely the father--therefore it must be rare or possibly untrue. A figment of imagination of an adoptive mom who isn't able to parent, because something is wrong with her. I've seen the confused looks when I try to explain Loreli's behaviors. Her behaviors sound normal to other parents, "Oh Jamie did just that the other day." Believe me fellow Mommy, he really...Did. Not.

Does your previously happy dog suddenly start running, skittering across the wood floor, peeing, fleeing, and hiding when he sees your child?

No? Good. I'm happy for you.

Is your younger son afraid to go to sleep because his sister's room is across the hall?

No? Yay. I'm happy for you.

When you connect with your daughter and have a great time together (even something as simple as reaching out to hold her hand or having a close conversation)--within 24 hours does she turn around and start verbally and psychologically abusing you? Or, worse yet, verbally, psychologically, and physically abusing your youngest child and your pets?

No? Seriously. I'm happy for you. I wish I could say the same.

Do you have to keep your daughter in line-of-sight at all times to make sure your other children are safe? Has your daughter ever pushed your son down the stairs and when questioned, look you dead in the eyes, with an expressionless face and deny that it even happened?

This kind of stuff seems crazy and unbeliLorelible, even to me, and it’s happening in my home. After 6 years of this the mom of a RAD child starts doubting her own sanity. Standing at the top of the stairs, looking down into the faces of my children: Loreli two steps down, looking at me with zero emotion and Daniel huddled on the middle landing (thank God our stairs are split in half) crying and looking up at me with his big brown eyes, hurt (and not just physically) and confused why his sister (who he obviously loves) would want to hurt him. Looking into Loreli’s eyes (the only time she locks eye contact like that is when she is lying) and have her say in a flat, dead, monotone, “I don’t know. I didn’t do it.” As that mom, I know what I feel: hurt, confused, angry, betrayed. The center of my chest literally aches…all the time now. I hear her words, I see her looking at me, I know she’s lying. But the liar and the lie is so strong, so in-your-face, so resolute, so certain, so angry that she might not be believed that a part of me questions what I just witnessed first hand.

Warring inside my heart every moment of every day is what I know to be true and a child who will do anything to survive what she perceives as ongoing trauma.

I wondered if there was a term for the way I was feeling about Loreli's behaviors. Confused, hurt, feeling like I am crazy, feeling like I'm going to die, wondering why certain things looked so innocuous but felt horrible or looked horrible, felt horrible, but I was being told that what I was seeing wasn’t true...I started typing in those phrases and came up with an uncanny description of what was happening. It's called "gaslighting." It wasn't in the context of RAD but in adult relationships. It was under narcissistic personality disorder. As she gets older and smarter, her behaviors become more and more covert. She's a bright and clever girl. 

"Another common tactic of emotional abuse employed by individuals with narcissistic issues is “gaslighting.” This term was coined after a movie titled Gaslight (1944) in which a form of psychological abuse resulting in cognitive dissonance occurred for the main character, played by Ingrid Bergman. The result of gaslighting is that the target of abuse doubts his or her own reality of the situation because the abuser is trying to confuse and disorient the target in order to maintain power and control, all at the cost of the emotional well-being of the target."

In order to keep my son, dogs, and myself safe, I put Loreli in 9-5 daycare for the remainder of the summer. It looked so odd to others. I didn't care. As the full realization began to hit me, safety was my number one goal.

I remember thinking, "I can't deal with her abuse anymore. No...I won't deal with her abuse anymore and now that I know for sure what’s going on, I won’t let her hurt anyone else in the family either."

Kids with RAD fight against connection. I've talked about this before. Their trauma was so severe that they can't trust anyone anymore. This plays out on the adoptive mom, often siblings and pets, but not dad. The experts guess it's because of the bond we have with our mom. Losing bio mom, or being damaged by bio mom, or being abandoned by bio mom traumatizes the child to the extreme. They felt like they would die when it happened and eventually it becomes clear to them: love, bonding, connection, attention from mom, is certain death. How would you act if you thought that a relationship would kill you?