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.