One of my pet peeves is when people assume that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental illness. It is not. To assume that a foster or adopted child who has been traumatized is also mentally ill is to add insult to injury. Of course, someone with PTSD could also suffer from a mental illness, but PTSD itself is not a mental illness.

A mental illness is a biological issue with the brain, which is why bipolar disease and schizophrenia are hereditary. PTSD is not. It is not possible for someone with PTSD to pass along the disorder to a biological child unless the parent traumatizes the child. PTSD is a disorder caused by environmental factors, not biological ones. See Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Nobody is born into the world experiencing flashbacks due to a physiological problem with the brain.

One issue that might surprise you as a parent of an abused adopted child is that recovered memories (or flashbacks) come with very raw pain. People often assume that, even though the memory has been “hidden” from the child, the emotions should not still be there, too. That assumption could not be more wrong.

When an abused child recovers a memory/has a flashback, the emotions associated with the event return as well. The full punch of the emotions might lag behind by a day or two, but they will definitely come. When the child feels those emotions, they are as raw is if the traumatizing event has just happened.

Whenever your adopted child has a flashback, prepare yourself for dealing with very raw emotions within the next couple of days. Your child needs you to reasssure him that what he is feeling is normal. Experiencing very deep and raw emotions years after the event took place can make the child feel “crazy.” It is very important that you reassure the child that feeling these emotions is a normal part of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

If you are parenting a traumatized adopted child who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), you might wonder what a flashback feels like. Before I had one, I had a very different idea about what a flashback was. I heard about veterans seeing the movie Saving Private Ryan and finding themselves “reliving” their trauma through flashbacks. I envisioned people who felt as if they had time traveled back to their past and lost touch with the reality of the present. This was very different from my experience with flashbacks.

Flashbacks generally come in one of two ways. One way is like what happened to those veterans: Something “triggers” the flashback because the sight, sound, smell, etc. reminds the person of the trauma. However, flashbacks do not necessarily need a trigger to come. Flashbacks also happen when the traumatized adopted child feels safe enough to begin healing from the trauma.

On my blog entry, Other Types Of Eating Disorders And The Adopted Child, Scrapsbynobody posted a very insightful comment. I have condensed it for brevity, but be sure to read the whole thing because she shows a lot of insight into the mind of the traumatized child:

[Our children] are very unaware of their own bodies. They talk too loud, crash into things, seem unaware of how to choose clothing for the temperature outdoors. They don't know when they are tired, they fret over minor injuries, but can't distinguish real ones … Our children don't over eat because of fear and trauma, at least directly, but because they have "shut down", or maybe never "turned on". – Scrapsbynobody

"Shut down" or "never turned on" is a good way to describe a traumatized child.

When I first started recovering memories of my abuse through flashbacks, I questioned their veracity because so many were from the perspective of the ceiling.