A reader wants to know if she should be concerned about her adopted daughter’s self-destructive comments. The short answer is yes. If you are parenting a foster child or an adopted child who has been traumatized, always pay attention to self-destructive comments, such as, “I want to die,” or “I wish I was dead.”

It is common for children (and adults) who have been abused to struggle with suicidal urges and even to attempt suicide. The reason for this is the despair that the child experienced while the abuse was happening. The child had no power to make the abuse stop. As a result, the child felt very deep despair but was unable to express it at the time. Those feelings are still buried inside of the child. As the child heals (and/or when the child reaches puberty), those feelings of despair bubble up.

The problem is that a child does not have a lifetime of experiences against which to compare how he or she is currently feeling.

A reader asked me to talk about why her traumatized adopted child bangs her head on the wall. Head-banging is a form of self-injury (or self-harm) that children sometimes use as a coping mechanism. Even though it is disturbing to watch a child bang his head on the wall, the child is actually doing this as a way to ease his emotional pain. The emotional pain that he is feeling runs so much deeper than the physical pain experienced through head-banging.

In fact, while your child is banging her head, she is not feeling pain at all. Instead, she is feeling an enormous amount of relief. In the moment, the head-banging silences all of the pain and shame that have been overwhelming the child. The physical pain from the head-banging comes later, after the emotional turmoil is over.

As a parent, the worst thing you can do is try to force the traumatized child to stop banging his head. Imagine if you smoked cigarettes to manage your stress, and then somebody took away your cigarettes. How would you react? Your child will react in the same manner. Even though head-banging is, admittedly, not the safest or most constructive way to manage emotional pain, it is effective, which is why your child returns to this behavior.

Last week, FosterMommy wrote an interesting blog entitled Attending Support Group Combined With Training. In her blog, she covered an interesting topic – how traumatized children exhibit physical manifestations of their anxiety.

Here is an except from FosterMommy’s blog:

It is interesting the way anxiety manifests itself in children who have suffered trauma. Anxiety leads these children to develop odd self-soothing rituals … Masturbating, even in school, can be brought on by anxiety. Anxiety can cause picking the nose, ears, scalp, or any other orifice even to the point of bleeding and including self-mutilation. Poor school performance, especially on exams, running away, enuresis, encopresis, thumb-sucking, hording, eating, not eating, and vomiting are more examples.

FosterMommy is absolutely correct about this, and her list is far from exhaustive.

I have never seen any study or observation about the parallels of forms of self-injury and forms of eating disorders in people who have suffered from severe trauma, such as abuse. However, after reading hundreds, if not thousands, of stories from child abuse survivors, I have noticed a pattern. I want to share this pattern with you in case you are parenting an adopted child who suffered from trauma, such as abuse, before joining your home. I am hoping that my observations will help you to understand your adopted child a little better.

I have talked with numerous abuse survivors who have used both cutting and anorexia to manage their pain.