animal rape

Trauma Tuesday: How Honest is Too Honest?

Submitted by FaithA on Tue, 10/13/2009 - 07:42

Traumatized Adopted Child (c) Julie C

One of the challenges of parenting a traumatized child is figuring out the right balance of just how honest to be with the adopted child. On the one hand, you should never lie to your adopted child because, if you do, your child is never going to learn to trust you. Before your traumatized child, whose trust has been shattered, can even have the hope of learning to trust you, you must be trustworthy.

However, on the flip side of this is that you do not want to burden a child with any more information than he or she needs to know at a particular age and stage of development. In fact, it is possible to trigger flashbacks before a child is ready to deal with a particular trauma if you start talking about something that the child is not yet ready to face.

For example, a couple of years ago, my sister (who suffered most of the same abuses that I did) told me that she could handle anything as long as she did not suffer from animal rape. Her mention of this caused me to have a flashback right then and there, and I was not yet ready to deal with it. Because I was not yet ready to process this particular trauma, I experienced a very heavy nosedive, complete with self-injury and suicidal urges. You don’t want to do this to your adopted child.

Trauma Tuesday: Believing Your Traumatized Adopted Child

Submitted by FaithA on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 08:45

Traumatized child (c) JulieCIf 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.

Talking with Abused Adopted Child about Severe Abuse

Submitted by FaithA on Fri, 02/29/2008 - 20:07

Boy in Field (c) Lynda Bernhardt

I have a personal blog that I write to encourage adult survivors of child abuse along their healing journeys. I keep track of the topics that bring people over to that blog. I have been surprised that I get the most page views for topics on severe forms of child abuse, such as mother-daughter sexual abuse or animal rape. Those are tough topics that most people do not want to think about, much less talk about.

If you have adopted a child who has suffered from one of the more severe forms of child abuse, you might be at a loss about how to talk with your child about the abuse.