New words, same stuff?

I received some new adoption information the other day. We have been struggling with adoption issues this month and this information is a new way to look at the struggle.

We have been working with terminology based on the concept of Reactive Attachment Disorder. When a child does not attach to a caregiver it affects the child's ability to attach to others in the future. If that initial attachment is undermined or eliminated by neglect and abuse the child learns that adults do not protect, can not be trusted, and are painful to live with. Then when a loving adult tries to build a relationship with the child the child sabotages it. The closer an adult becomes, the more of a threat they are to a child who is unable to attach. When a child with attachment disorder is adopted, that child fights possibility of attachment to the adoptive parent. The closer the parent tries to become, the more the child pushes them away. Behaviors become extreme and sometimes violent. We have experienced this.

So this is the new look to the same stuff.

At even the preverbal stage, children somehow have some concept that their lives are in the hands of their parents. If things go wrong it is their parent's fault. They don't have the rationality to understand that there are things that their parents can't control. They just believe that their parents have the job of protecting and caring for them and if that doesn't happen, they hold their parents responsible.

So a child is abandoned, or maybe neglected or abused. Then the child is adopted by another family. After the adoption is final the child becomes angry and begins acting out at more and more extreme levels. This is good. Yup. This is good. It means that they have accepted the adoptive parents as parents and now they are angry at them for not protecting them from all the things that happened before. The anger is an indicator of acceptance of the adoptive relationship.

Inducement is another word that plays a part here. Inducement can be described with this scenario. One member of a family comes home at the end of a day that has gone badly. She is in a foul mood from the many things that went wrong. As she enters the house, even if she says nothing, the things she does soon have everyone in the house feeling the same intensity of negative emotions.

With adoption the emotions can be indescribably strong, emotions of abandonment, lack of trust, rejection, etc. Inducement is what happens to the rest of the family around such strong feelings. Somehow the child produces those same emotions in the parents, and sometimes the other siblings. It isn't an intentional thing, but there it is. It happens.

Unfortunately I have no suggestions about how to deal with all of this info. The article ended with the hope that life would be easier somehow just because we all know that the pain we are in right now is mostly because our child accepts us.

The ideas are OK. I can see the rationale. But either way the living it out is much the same. Whether I am being pushed away because attachment is so threatening or being hated because I wasn't there to protect my child from the bad things that happened to him, I'm still faced with the same every day life.

I guess the differences rest with the children. If the different language allows them to make more rational decisions then I'm all for the different language.