How we connect with others is key to our mental health. Depending on our past experience, we will have a specific type of attachment style. What’s key for adopted children is that they were all separated from their original biological parent/s. This significant bond WAS disrupted. No matter how wonderful you are as an adoptive parent, this turmoil always impacts your children’s everyday lives, behaviors, sense of self, ability to manage hard things, to name a few. As parents of adopted children, we must understand the interaction of early attachment to present day to become the best parents we can possibly be.
Put Yourself in Their Shoes
Imagine if you will, being a baby and crying as you are hungry, or perhaps you have a wet diaper, or just that you are afraid. Then sit with what it must feel like to have no one come to meet the needs underneath your tears. Imagine what must happen to your body and your brain and your ability to trust. I hear you saying well, my child wasn’t in that situation, or they were only with their neglectful biological parent for 3 months, or I know I can heal whatever trauma they went through. These are all common reactions to coping with just how damaging a disrupted attachment was for your child. But try hard to really imagine just how tough this must have been. And trust me that research studies prove that your child’s brain was changed from this. They had to learn ways to get their needs met somehow. They learned how to survive.
Survival Tactics
Your child had to learn how to cope with being ignored, being hungry, and not feeling safe. Their body and brain cooperated as we are a species hard wired to survive. Depending on their age, personality, and several other factors, these survival strategies all are unique. What they do have in common is that this is how they needed to “make it” in their home. These ways of behaving were adaptive in that situation. Problem is you adopted them and surrounded them with food, love, and safety. But their brains and bodies already had distinct patterns of survival. These patterns literally saved their lives but they are no longer needed, useful, and actually make things worse. Your child still uses these behaviors as this is what worked before you came along. Now that they are safe, their old survival tactics have become obsolete or maladaptive.
Maladaptive Behaviors
So how can you tell if your child has these so called maladaptive behaviors? First, you have to get rid of all your preconceived notions of your child. If you see your child as attention seeking, manipulative, clingy, controlling, lying, prickly; try to wipe those words from your mind. Most likely if I described your child with the above adjectives, these are those maladaptive behaviors left over from their early childhood and infancy. It all makes sense if you truly can put yourself in their shoes. You must be controlling if you spent time early on afraid of your caregivers. You needed to always be on alert for the next loud fight between those big people. You had to be extra vigilant if you only got food intermittently. Always looking around for any hint of sustenance and safety is a hard pattern to change. If you child follows you everywhere you go, even to the bathroom, you can be sure they do not trust you will actually stay in their life. If you find your child hard to love, they recoil from physical hugs, and seem to hate you, chances are you are dealing with maladaptive behavior that kept them alive before you adopted them. Imagine being the toddler who cannot trust that their caregiver will feed them and keep them safe. You learn never to trust the big people. Your tough exterior, your anxiety, your defensiveness; these are all ways you learned to cope. They just are not necessary anymore. Seeing your child’s behaviors through the lens of their early childhood might just give you the shift you need to make to better parent these kids who survived! Sometimes compassion is all we need to make a change.
3 Types of Attachment Styles
- Insecure-ambivalent: Infants that stay close to their mothers, there is limited exploration, and they become very distressed upon separation and ambivalent toward their mother upon reunion but remain near her. Mothers of anxious babies were observed to be “more mean-spirited to merely cool, from chaotic to pleasantly incompetent. Though well meaning, these mothers have difficulty responding to their babies “in a loving, attuned, consistent way.” Often seen in clingy behaviors or given aseparation anxiety diagnosis.
- Insecure-avoidant: Infants that show little distress when separated, ignore their mother’s attempts to interact, and are often sociable with strangers or may ignore them as they ignore their mother. These mothers often have an aversion to physical contact themselves and speak sarcastically to their babies. This is the child who quickly connects to strangers, as if any adult will do since none of them reduce their anxiety properly.
- Insecure-disorganized: Infants that are the most distressed upon separation and are considered the most insecure. They seem confused upon reunion and exhibit behaviors that appear to be a combination of resistant and avoidant. Children who sometimes seem clingy then when they get to emotionally close, push away, and make the parent feel crazy.
Remember regardless of your child’s attachment style, healing can only happen in relationship with an emotionally available and stable adult.
Don’t Take It Personally
Easier said than done, I know. However if you really let yourself understand and feel how grueling and scary it must have been for your child way back when, then maybe this can help you to distance yourself from your child’s troubles. It’s not your fault. You are not a bad parent. Your child doesn’t hate you. Your own baggage needs to be left at the door. You didn’t fail as an adoptive parent. Your child needs you, even though it doesn’t look like it. They desperately want to succeed in pushing you away to resolve their old attachment issues; to prove they were right to recreate this original broken bond. None of this is what they need however. It is your job to stick by them, to understand what is underneath their behaviors, and to get them the help they may need. The key to parenting kids with attachment issues, and trust me all adopted kids have some, is to not take it personally.
Moving Forward
If any of this resonated with you, here are tangible and positive steps that may help. The first step is to figure out your role in the attachment dance. Sometimes our children provoke our own trauma and attachment issues that get in the way of parenting. If you think this may be you, please reach out to a mental health therapist to work on your own baggage. If your child is struggling with attachment issues that seem to be interfering with their daily lives, it is time to find them a mental health counselor. In an ideal world you would find an attachment and adoption informed therapist. But as we know in this Covid reality, it’s not that simple. So make sure you “teach” the therapist what you know about how your child’s attachment issues are impacting their current problems. And no matter how your child reacts, make sure you let them know you are by their side to stay. Tell them everyday that you love them. Tell them one wonderful thing about themselves daily.
