The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently completed a study led by Robert Hahn on traumatized child therapy. Someone apparently noticed the wide variety of therapies used to treat children who have suffered trauma through either abuse or exposure to violence. Therapies used to treat these children include drugs, art, play therapy, talk therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy to name a few of the more common ones. The CDC claims that while more than 75 percent of health professionals use alternative therapies to treat children with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder there is no evidence supporting their effectiveness.

The CDC report indicates that old-fashioned talk therapy works and is the tried and true method. Robert Hahn stated that substantial research supports children, including teens suffering from PTSD, benefit from individual and group cognitive behavioral therapy. In cognitive therapy, a trained counselor uses techniques to change a person’s thoughts and beliefs.

Hello everyone, I am glad to be here writing with my old friends. Some of you may remember me from the previous adoption website where we all wrote about adoption, foster care, and special needs together for well over a year. Some of you may not, so allow me to introduce myself. My husband of 17 years and I have been licensed foster parents for 14 years. We have adopted six children through foster care. We also adopted a toddler at birth, from private domestic adoption when I was 43. I have three birth sons, two of whom are adults. Two of our adopted children are also adults, gainfully employed. The oldest has blessed us with two beautiful granddaughters whom we babysit for frequently. 

I blogged a lot about special needs previously because several of my children have special needs. Included in our children’s special needs are Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, ADD, ADHD, Aspergers syndrome, PTSD, Dyslexia, Bi-polar disorder, Pituitary Dwarfism, learning disabled, anxiety disorder, hypo-thyroid and well, you get the picture.

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.

If you are parenting a traumatized adopted child, you might notice that he becomes agitated if he returns to the city in which he suffered trauma. This happens to me every time I return to my hometown. For about a week before the trip, I struggle with insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, and irritability. To put it more colloquially, I start “wigging out.”

The only reason I put myself through this is that my grandmother, who lives in my hometown, is very old and unlikely to be around much longer. Once she passes away, I doubt that I will ever return to that city. It is just too hard for me, even after years of healing from the child abuse.

Ideally, a traumatized child should be adopted into a home that is far away from where the trauma occurred. Moving to another state is ideal. When I cross the state line to return home from a visit, I can feel my body release over a week’s worth of tension. Seeing that state line makes me feel safe.

The location that triggers a traumatized adopted child does not have to be a specific place

Most people are familiar with visual flashbacks being a part of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I have also written about emotional flashbacks. Another variety of flashbacks that is less well-known is called a body memory.

A body memory is a flashback that a traumatized adopted child feels in his body. A body memory can result from any form of trauma to the body. A good example is the amputee who continues to “feel” his amputated limb. Some people believe that even the cells of the body experience trauma and that body memories are the body’s way of releasing the energy associated with the trauma, just as a flashback is the release of the emotional memory.

If the traumatized adopted child does not know what is happening, experiencing a body memory can be scary.

I adopted my darling Natasha from Ukraine when she was 3.5 years of age. And at the time I knew she had special needs. Her eyes were crossed and she had developmental delays in every area; physical and mental. As an added bonus, she came home from the orphanage with PTSD. Bucket loads of different therapies and surgery to fix her crossed eyes greatly helped my darling.

But it wasn't until she started school that I really understood just how special she was... She was diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia, and working memory defect. By this time her PTSD had given way to Generalized Anxiety Disorder. She was very concrete minded and struggled making friends.  And she loved learning. She appreciated the clear rules at school.

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.

Over on her blog, Julie gave some good advice about Keeping A Behavior Log if you are parenting a traumatized adopted child. She wisely pointed out that the traumatized child often does not even know why he is acting the way he does when he is triggered. Because I have spent most of my life experiencing triggers without knowing the cause, I thought I would write about this phenomenon from the traumatized child's perspective.

A trigger is anything that elicits an emotional reaction from the traumatized child. While it appears that the child is overreacting to a stimulus, he really isn't. Instead, he is reacting appropriately to something traumatic that he experienced but has not yet dealt with. Because you, as the adoptive parent, do not know what that trigger or experience is, it appears that your child is overreacting and just being difficult.

For example, I absolutely cannot stand to get dirt in my fingernails.

Many adopted children who have been traumatized, whether through abuse, neglect, or other form of trauma, are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When a person has PTSD, he is vulnerable to triggers in his life that cause him to remember a prior trauma. This is true even after doing lots of healing work.

I just went through this yesterday, when I saw that my husband had taken our seven-year-old child out onto the roof to help him paint a window. I don’t think I am going out on a limb to assume that the vast majority of adoptive parents would agree that taking a seven-year-old boy with impulse control issues out onto a slanted roof is a bad call. However, most adoptive parents probably would not have reacted quite as strongly as I did.

I was diagnosed with PTSD several years ago. I have worked very hard to heal from the PTSD, but I am still vulnerable to triggers. Seeing my precious child up on a roof was a huge trigger for me.

When I was around six or seven, my then-four-year-old sister and I witnessed a young child fall from a deer stand.

Why is it that two children can experience similar trauma but have different reactions to that trauma? Why can one child walk away from severe abuse with minor road bumps while another child's life is devastated? Many adoptive parents have asked these questions, particularly those who are parenting abused adopted children with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). The medical community is growing closer to providing us with an answer.

A new research study has identified a gene that seems to play a role in determining which children develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).