If you are parenting a traumatized adopted child, he needs you to believe him when he tells you about his trauma history, even when this information might be difficult to believe. People who have never suffered from trauma often have a hard time wrapping their minds around the kinds of evils that can be inflicted upon an innocent child. As a result, the traumatized adopted child feels less comfortable in talking about the traumas that he suffered. If he suffered from a less well-known form of abuse, that memory might eat away at him because he fears that nobody will believe him.

For example, I wrote an article entitled Recovering from Childhood Animal Rape on my personal blog. This topic was part of a short series that I wrote on particularly degrading forms of child abuse. For those of you who have never heard of animal rape, it is when an abuser forces a child to have sexual contact with an animal, typically a dog. To date, that one article has had over 1,200 page views.

Despite the fact that a large number of people have found my personal blog by searching for terms such as “animal rape” or “raped by an animal,” I have received numerous emails from readers who believed that they were the only people to have ever suffered from that form of abuse. And, because they thought they were alone, they never told anyone about it and spent their lives feeling deep shame over the experience. Just learning that someone else suffered from that form of abuse and knowing that they would be believed did wonders to help them heal from a very painful experience.

I write about other “hard to believe” topics on my personal blog as well, such as mother-daughter sexual abuse and ritual abuse. I have received multiple emails from readers who feared they were the only people to have suffered from those forms of abuse as well. When you believe that you are the only person who has suffered from a particular form of abuse, then you fear that nobody will believe you. It is so important to be believed.

I know from personal experience as well as from reading hundreds of stories from other child abuse survivors that the depravity of child abusers knows no bounds. They bury children alive. They lock them in cages. They smear children with feces and vomit. I know this is disturbing to hear, but if you are parenting a traumatized adopted child, you need to know that this level of evil exists in the world. Your traumatized adopted child needs you to know that he is not making this stuff up.

No matter how warped, disturbing, and twisted your child’s story might sound, believe him. The more twisted the story is, the more likely it is to be true. After all, how could a child come up with such a sick story in the first place unless he really did experience the abuse? Many of the abuses I suffered were things that I had never read about from any other source. That is one reason I started my personal blog – so other child abuse survivors would know that they are not alone and that they can heal.

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Photo credit: JulieC