As someone who was abused as a child, one of the most difficult pills to swallow has been accepting that some things are never going to change. When I entered into therapy, I wanted the therapist to “make me normal,” which I defined as removing all post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. My therapist told me that this was an unrealistic goal, which was something that I did not want to hear. I would imagine that anyone parenting an abused child does not want to hear this, either.

My therapist went on to say that, while my PTSD would never be “over,” it would get easier as I learned how to manage it. Instead of being triggered for weeks, I would learn how to pull myself out after only hours or days. He has been right about this. The worst triggering I have had in a while only lasted for four days. While I felt every minute of those four days (and they felt like an eternity), I was better within days (although I did wind up catching a cold on heels of my triggering). A few years ago, I would have given anything to pull out of a nosedive within four days.

Another honest, real life, older child adoption guest blog from John. He is a retired commercial airline pilot who has adopted five boys, over three decades, from domestic foster care as a single parent. John and his family live in southern California.

Continued from Part 1. Every night he had to fill out a self report on his day. What did he do well, what went badly? What was most frustrating, etc. I was given a copy of them each week. Life was unfair; he was being blamed for things that weren’t his fault. The school sucked. The kids were damaged, and he wasn’t, and the staff was mean. There was another boy there that he truly disliked. Many nights his answer to “What did you do today that you were really proud of?” was, ‘I didn’t annihilate Kyle Goodman’. Kyle was two years older, and somewhat more beefy than Tyler, Kyle would not have been annihilated.

With each week there was progress. He was doing less and less deflecting responsibility, and more searching for answers. It was slow but steady. Nice even happened sometimes. We spent Thanksgiving and his birthday apart. We were going to spend Christmas night together, due to the schedule for the procedure that I needed to do with him.

Christmas night, I picked him up at 9PM, and we drove to the motel. On the way, he told me about something that really upset him.

A reader wants to know how to prepare for adopting a child with a mental illness. I decided to post this as a Trauma Thursday topic and broaden it to adopting a child with a mental illness (such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia) or an emotional disorder (such as post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD). While there is a difference between a biologically-based mental illness and an environmentally-based emotional disorder, both require similar preparation.

First, you need to educate yourself on the specific mental illness or emotional disorder. What symptoms can you expect? What is the best case and worst case scenario you are looking at?

Second, determine what resources are available in your community to help you meet the adopted child’s needs. Find out who is the best child psychiatrist or psychologist in town and if you will be able to get your adopted child signed on as a patient. Determine what kind of health insurance coverage you have and whether you can afford to pay for any medications the adopted child might need.

Third, make an honest assessment about whether you think you have what it takes to live with an adopted child with a mental illness or emotional disorder. Do not think that you can just “love” the adopted child’s issues away. A mental illness is a permanent, biologically-based condition that won’t go away no matter how much you love the child. An emotional disorder can heal over time but only if the child chooses to heal, and your child might not make this choice. Do you believe you have the stamina to endure living with a child with this condition if it does not improve?

I recently read a book that involved a young child enduring trauma. The adult characters in the book encouraged the child to “forget” what happened and move on with her life. She never talked about the trauma, and she lived her life plagued by nightmares that she could not understand. Although she had consciously “forgotten” the trauma, the trauma was ever-present in her dreams.

This is an accurate representation of what happens when we encourage survivors of trauma (abuse, neglect, etc.) to “forget” about what happened and not talk about. Even though the abused foster or adopted child might have no day-to-day recollection of the trauma, the child’s truths will scream out in his dreams. You cannot bury the truth of trauma. It stays ever-present in a child’s subconscious mind, wreaking havoc until the child processes the pain.

This is why therapy is so important for any foster or adopted child who has been abused. The trauma will not just “go away” by not talking about it and pretending like it never happened. While this strategy might seem easier for the adults responsible for the child, it is never the best strategy for the child.