Sometimes You Need a Little Trauma–Versary to Remind You That You Really Are O.K.

I want to go ahead and wrap up my posts about my little trauma–versary .

Part I  Part II

I can be walking down the street all grown up with a family of my own and I can make a conscious connection that reminds me of a fun filled family vacation and another near death, sibling experience. I can smile, laugh, shake my head and say to myself, “good times.” Little did I know that behind my conscious memory of our family trip to Oklahoma, was a deeper painful semi-conscious remembrance that through the connection of the present day fireworks to my trip to Oklahoma was only pulled forward enough from the back of my mind, that just the emotions and the feelings of fear and loss were accessible. Yet, the memory of the cause of fear, pain and loss remained tucked away and elusive.

let me just to be clear leaving my sister in Oklahoma was not the most traumatic, or even the biggest loss I had / or have experienced…not even close. That was more or less one more loss/trauma in a sea of loss and trauma. It was yet one more occasion where I thought things were going to get back on track and that everything was going to start to get better only to be rudely reminded that crazy was still shoveling the coal, and that this train was plowing way off the tracks full speed ahead.

Had I had a similar situation happen when I was still a child or a tween, where something had triggered an emotional/ adrenal response – I would have had no idea at all that something was amiss. I would have completely and thoroughly bought into my emotional response, accepted it at face value and would have been off and running with it, argumentative, oppositional and reactionary. I would have been less than “fun to be around” for days if not weeks, once I started digging holes. As an older teen or young adult I might have gotten self-destructive. I could have gotten very depressed for a very long time or the minute that trigger touched off that fight/ flight reaction (like when I had a strong urge to GET AWAY), I may have grabbed a couple of things and hit the road…in a FLASH, with nary a thought about it. And I wouldn’t have returned until the adrenalin wore off or something triggered me to flee again.

I am much older now. My brain (developmentally speaking) has matured. I have developed ways over time to manage my triggers and my reactions. I have figured out that when my emotional reaction do not match my actual circumstances I need to check in with myself and try to make a deeper connections. And yet sometimes I still struggle for a little while from time to time. But I have learned to keep working at it, and trying new things, to ask for help and I get un-stuck.

The moment I realized: We left my sister in Oklahoma.

I was FINE.

It was as if a wave of calm came over me. I am O.K. today. It is hot, my sink isn’t draining BUT I am fine. We are fine. When I was a kid I left my sister in Oklahoma and it broke my heart, and we are fine today.

I woke up the next day. I called my sister. I cried. She cried a bit, she works very hard at not remembering. She assured me she IS fine. And we moved on, consciously aware of what we’ve lost, and that we are BOTH O.K. today.

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Socks For Smiles

About Socks for Smiles

I am eleven-years-old and have a goal to collect colorful socks and other personal items, such as underwear, for foster kids. I was in foster care for five years. I was mostly given plain white socks to wear. I hated those socks! The other kids had colorful socks with fun designs and cartoon characters. It was another way I felt different. I haven't worn white socks at all since I was adopted in 2010! Now I want to help other kids feel special too. Socks may seem like a small thing, but it's sometimes the little things that mean a lot to a kid

Please Help!

Go check out my young fellow Foster Care Alumni, How cool is this!?

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The Anatomy Of A Trauma-Versary Part II

PART I

I love my mother-in-law.

“I have left Jimmy in more places, more times than I can count or remember.

…But I always went back for him.” She shrugs and laughs.

And she always did. Family lore has Mr. Sunday being left behind at home, at church, in stores, in the Upper Peninsula, in Wisconsin and so on. Being the youngest of seven kids, quiet and always having his nose in a book, somebody seemed to think somebody else had gotten him, they would eventually figure out nobody did and return to find him usually in some corner reading a book before he even discovered he had been lost. He seems no worse for wear.

My sister is 5 ½ years older than I am. She has always relished her role as a mother to me and our brother. When she was in Jr. High she made he and I matching outfits for her schools talent show. (I may have mentioned that before, but that is just not the kind of thing normal 13 year-olds do…stuff for other people, I mean.) Going into her 9th grade year, with the nod and support of my grandparents who were always very adamant that with my mother gone, it was not my sister’s job to raise us for our parents, the decision was made to send my sister to a prestigious boarding school in northern Michigan. (Interlochen Arts Academy)

She returned that summer having failed Algebra and boy was my dad PISSED! The decision was made that she would not be returning to boarding school for 10th grade and my parents began their epic, now classic game of I-don’t- want-her-you-can-have-her that lasted for the rest of our childhoods. Somewhere during that winter, my sister had had enough. She went out, flagged an 18 wheeler down and hitch-hiked her 15 year old self to California, where she stayed.

We, my brother and i had landed, with our nannie (at first) back with our mother. By the time that summer rolled around, our nannie was headed back home to go back to school and my mom was making plans to hook up with some guy she met during his family vacation in Miami, Oklahoma that is. When my sister called from California my mom let her know where we’d be and invited her to join us, if she could find her way. Obviously, if a 15 year old can find her way from Michigan to California on her own that same 16 year old could find their way from California to Oklahoma.

I remember my mom getting a call and leaving us while she drove off t to pick up my sister from the local truck stop. The trucker bought them both dinner and listened to their story trying to make sense of it somehow. I remember my mother returning to the home of the family we were staying with my sister Amy. I remember my mother being incensed as she recounted their dinner with t said trucker and how that Trucker who had picked up her child on the side of the road and brought her on the last leg of her trip from California to Oklahoma to meet her family from Michigan for a family vacation had the audacity to question my Mother’s (of all people’s) parenting skills! The nerve of Him, really!

The guy my mom went to see had a daughter named Shelly (Delozier or Deloiser) who was my or my brother’s age. (I wonder what she’s doing now.) We went to the lake. We went to the Quapaw Indian powwow. We swung into the river while the brothers of my mom’s beau looked out for water moccasins (or that was what they tell the northerners to scare them), we parked along a dirt road hoping to see the “spooklights.” Someone feed me a raw potato and I puked my guts out. I got horribly sunburned; Oklahoma is not the best place for redheads.

We kids were left alone in a tent at a campground over night to fend for ourselves while fierce storms passed over, flooding the valley we were in and 5 separate tornados touched down around us. Per usually my mother was furious when she showed up the next day to find us upset, how could on earth could we hold her responsible for the weather?

And so went our family vacation/ my mother’s week long date, one big happy family…right up to the point that my mother drove my 16 year old sister back to the truck stop, so she could hitchhike herself back into the sunset and out of our lives.

and for the first time that trip, I realized that we hadn’t gone to Oklahoma to pick Amy up and bring her home-- that bringing her home was never part off the plan. She had been invited to baby-sit, she accepted to see her little brother and sister.

But she was not welcome

Nor did she have the desire to be-

Pulled apart.

Used.

At home.

We had left my sister in Oklahoma.

Oh. My. God.

We had left MY 16 year old sister alone in Oklahoma.

On purpose!

And somehow, in that moment, I knew I would be next…

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The Anatomy Of A Trauma-Versary (Or My New Life As a Circus Mom)

PART II

The governor of the great state of Michigan legalized fireworks this year. Yippee! Somewhere around the first thanks to a friend’s FaceBook post I had realized, knowing the family directly across from me the way I do, that I had BETTER start watering my “hay” as my kids had taken to calling my front lawn while they pretended to feed their toy horses.

On Wednesday The Fourth we had walked down the block, around the corner to watch another neighbor’s well organized well planned fireworks display, which CoCo, my sensory kid HATED and Mad my anxious kid toughed out. Since I was in the house with CoCo I wouldn’t know, but I am pretty sure the middle kid was wishing she could be the one lighting them off…they all came here with their own personalities.

As we made our way back home, rounded the corner and saw fireworks being launched over our still brown grass and another neighbors roof I made a remark about having not seen such an irresponsible use of fireworks since the 4^th of July we spent in Miami Oklahoma as kids. (My brother who was around 11 at the time (under supposed adult supervision) decided to put a whole gross of bottle-rockets in a coffee can and light them all at once. They started going off, the can tipped sending bottle rockets flying just above ground level towards all of us and into the open trunk of the car where the rest of the HUNDREDS of fun-time explosives were being stored. It was just like a scene from some war movie as we were all running around screaming looking for cover (there was none we were in a rock quarry) and the brother of the guy my mom was there to see (who looked amazingly like Jesus) climbed into the trunk and managed to dig out the light bottle-rockets before the whole car exploded. Good times!)

(That by the way was more or less just another funny family story. Since I had spent most of my childhood watching my brother gas things, set shit on fire, damn near killing me and being pretty sure that one day he would, that was more or less just another day in the life, as a opposed to a traumatic experience. Thank goodness with the adult brain comes some impulse control. Some of my scariest/funniest childhood memories begin with the phrase, “I wonder what would happen if I …”)

Anyhow…we came home, put the kids to bed and during the middle of the night a storm rolls through and knocks out our power in the middle of a heat wave. UGH! I woke up hot, frustrated and irritated Thursday, on the verge of tears Friday, depressed and relieved that I had to work in the air-conditioning Saturday, Sunday RAW, the power came back on but the kitchen sink was backed up and flooding the basement, Monday with my skin crawling, having bouts of uncontrollable sobbing and the overwhelming urge to get in my car and drive until I ran out of gas, money or hit an ocean.

Anyone who knows me in real life knows, crying just isn’t my thing. I am way more likely to shed a tear for someone else than I am for me. We foster kids have the uncanny ability to let life’s physical / environmental discomforts roll like water off a ducks back. So it was clear to me that what I was feeling was in all honesty disproportionate to what was actually going on around me…even though it truly did suck. There had to be something else…

As I lay in bed Monday, trying to figure out how one runs off to join the circus with three kids in tow, I realize that this was crazy…I mean crazy…as in bat-shit crazy and I had better figure out what the heck this was about because, with her gimpy leg and lack of coordination CoCo is absolutely not cut out for the circus. This has to be connected to something else this MUST be some kind of trauma-versary, it is the only thing that could make sense. What the heck happened in my past around the fourth of July that could possibly have me so rattled? I started going through the list.

· My mom left? – No

· Patti, my nannie left? -No

· My mom took us back? – Na, right time of year, but it doesn’t feel right

· I went into placement? -No

What the heck?

And then it hit me

Hard…

OKLAHOMA!

Not the stupid fireworks thing. Not that at all!

It was my sister!

Oh. My God!

We left my sister in Oklahoma!

To be continued…

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Since When Is Your Anger MY Symptom?

She’s making me angry!

He’s pissing me of!

They are making me feel bad!

Nope! Not allowed! Rephrase that please. Nobody can MAKE you feel ANYTHING, we are each responsible for our own emotions. - Therapy, Group-home, and Residential Treatment Center 101.

That we are each responsible for not only our own actions, but our emotions as well is a concept that had been drilled into my head for YEARS, in some of the very same settings that parents of traumatized (RAD) children turn to (supposedly) get their children the help they need.

Now, I feel angry when… because for g-d’s sake it is mine to own, you can’t say I never learned anything in exile.

So, when HE makes me angry, I know it is not HIM, it is ME choosing to feel anger about the situation…HE is not MAKING me feel ANYTHING, no other person has that kind of power over my emotional state. That is something that I, (with MUCH brainwashing by the therapeutic community) have come to accept as a fundamental truth.

I feel angry…

I feel scared…

I feel overwhelmed.

I feel depressed.

And if I don’t like it, I am the only person responsible for changing it.

(And sometimes I CHOSE to feel angry, scared, depressed, and pissed off. Sometimes I CHOSE to stew in it…FOR DAYS…WEEKS…YEARS)

But NOBODY has the POWER to MAKE ME FEEL ANYTHING.

Point taken…I got it.

So imagine my surprise and disbelief when I noticed this little gem in the list of signs and symptoms that YOUR CHILD may have RAD:

· “Parents appear hostile and angry.”

Whoa, whoa, Back. The. Fnck. Up!

Either I have been lied to by the very same professional / expert types who use these lists or something is amiss.

Maybe I misunderstood- maybe it is only traumatized children (or those diagnosed with RAD) who are responsible for their own emotions and actions?

Maybe “Parents appear hostile and angry,” should be added to the symptoms of ADHD, because there times when I have been really pissed off by my child’s behavior, and I am sure that I have “appeared angry and hostile” and silly me. I thought that meant I needed to work on MY coping skills. I can’t imagine how much better I would have felt if I had just realized, that it was about her, and my feelings were a symptom of HER diagnosis…not anything to do with me or MY parenting.

How about adding “Parents appear hostile and angry” to the list of symptoms of cerebral palsy (CP) /brain injury? During the two years I lugged my baby around to specialist after specialist only to be told that, I just did not have enough experience with “normal children” to know whether or not some something was just not “right” with my child. And while I spent hours and hours on the phone and writing letters fighting with the insurance company fighting to get therapy for a child that was going to just miraculously “catch up” I am positive I “appeared angry and hostile.” Clearly it was the CP, not me.

Or Autism, giftedness…

And here is where I call, Bull Shit.

Listing a parent’s feelings and behavior as a feature of their child’s diagnosis, is not only unprofessional…it is unfair.

Those of us who have survived childhood trauma have enough to deal with without being held responsible for the emotional health and actions of the adults around us.

 

Thoughts? Do you think this would be so readily accepted with other child hood afflictions?

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You enjoyed the convenience of my solitude

excuse me if I seem a little rude
While I was missing my childhood,
My brother and my prime
You enjoyed the convenience of my solitude

I will NEVER thank you for my solitude!

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A new model of family… | The Adoption Counselor

 

Brenda McCreight

July 8, 2012

When is the adoption industry going to move beyond the notion that attachment is the key to everything? I mean really, the myth is perpetuated that once the child achieves the capacity to experience a reciprocal attachment relationship with the adoptive parents then there will be no further problems and the adoptive family will be no different than a genetic neurotypical family. Just look at the adoption conferences – the main topic is generally about attachment strategies. All the conferences and seminars I’m asked to speak at want something from me about how to facilitate and create attachment. How did we get to this place?

I mean really – yes, attachment is important because it means that parts of the child’s brain have developed physically to a point where relationships are possible. That’s good, even I can agree to that.  But —- the problem is that there’s a total denial about the incredible significance of factors that I think are vital.

A new model of family… | The Adoption Counselor

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I Feel, Therefore I Am.

I haven’t posted much lately, not because I don’t have a lot to say…that is for sure…I NEVER seem to run out of things to say.

Sometimes the past and present collide in ways that make it all hard to untangle and make any sense of…and I get stuck.

I took a real job last August which put me in the inner-city and put me (back) in touch with the heartache of poverty, lack of education and hopelessness that plagues a good section of our population…especially the children. It sucks. It is sad and depressing and because I spent a good deal of my childhood in foster care and a fair amount of my youth in the community we serve I can’t seem to build up the callousness and apathy that it requires to not let the whole mess depress the hell out of me.

I gotten so depressed, frustrated, overwhelmed and triggered that I resigned. I literally did not think I could walk through the doors to do one more shift, and I can’t thank Lisa enough for teaching me EFT and getting me through that. At least I am not having panic attacks every time I think about going to work.  So, here I am now working almost as many hours at a job I quit as I did before i resigned, still depressed, frustrated, overwhelmed but not nearly as triggered and it STILL sucks. And since I can’t seem to muster up the ability to shrug my shoulders and say, “it’s not my problem…” and I have kids at home I need to take care I guess this is just the way it is gonna be for me.

Sometimes I wish it were true what so many would like to believe: the myth tat those of us who survived “ACEs”, “children of trauma”, from “hard places”, “children of rage” grow up with an “inability to feel empathy” because that would make my life a hell of a lot easier. What I, lack is the ability to not see it my responsibility and the pressing urge to do something about it, which seems to come quite easily for those normal people who see the plight and pain of others as, “not my problem.”

I feel, therefore I am.

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Adoption PSA From Second City

Would I find this so humorous if it weren’t so true? Discuss.

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The Medication Generation: Teenagers and Antidepressants - WSJ.com

As a parent who has attempted to medicate a gifted child into conformity, to save her the inconvenience of being exceptional, this article defiantly struck a nerve with me...

Looking back, it seems remarkable that I had to work so hard to absorb an elementary lesson: Some things make me feel happy, other things make me feel sad. But for a long time antidepressants were giving me the opposite lesson. If I was suffering because of a glitch in my brain, it didn't make much difference what I did. For me, antidepressants had promoted a kind of emotional illiteracy. They had prevented me from noticing the reasons that I felt bad when I did and from appreciating the effects of my own choices.

As medications saturate our culture, we may be growing less able to connect our most basic feelings with the stressful factors in our lives. "There's been a kind of pathologization of life itself," said David Ramirez, a clinical psychologist and the head of counseling and psychological services at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. "Life is full of stress, and anxiety, and sadness—those are just base-line phenomena that have come to be considered illnesses that need to be treated. Young people aren't sure how to think about their distress."

The desire to protect kids and help them to succeed is hard to fault in itself. But pushed too far, it can lead to unnecessary prescriptions that cause pain or harm in their own right. Though psychiatric medications have become part of the fabric of modern childhood and adolescence, they are powerful drugs, and we owe it to the next generation to use them with caution.

The Medication Generation: Teenagers and Antidepressants - WSJ.com

Doesn’t is totally suck to realize that in an attempt to protect our children from short term discomfort, we are setting them up for long term failure?

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