If you are parenting a foster or adopted child with a history of trauma, your child might keep his or her bedroom “gross” for lack of a better term. My sister was this way. She would have her mattress on the floor, dirty clothing strewn everywhere, and cat urine, poop, and vomit covering the dirty clothes and carpet. I would watch sitcoms showing a dirty room, and the room on TV would be cleaner than my sister’s room. My sister was not a gross-looking person when you saw her out and about, but the smell of her bedroom could knock you over. (When we moved out of one house, we had to replace the carpet and repaint the walls to get rid of the smell.)

I couldn’t figure out why my sister was this gross because she wasn’t this way all over the house. I would have thought that she would want her bedroom to be the cleanest room since she had to sleep in it, but it was always the grossest even into early adulthood. It wasn’t until I started healing from the child abuse myself that I figured out why she did this. (I don’t even think she could have told you why she kept her room this way. She just acted like it was normal for her to live in a disgusting room like that.)

If you are parenting a foster or adopted child who was abused by his birth family, you might wonder how much value, if any, there is in the child maintaining some sort of ties with the abusive birth family. Twenty years ago, I seriously doubt that many people struggled with this issue. It seemed pretty obvious that children don’t reap a lot of benefit from visiting people who beat them, rape them, or lock them in closets for hours. However, thanks to the adoption propaganda purporting the need of all adoptees to maintain contact with all birth family, I fear that common sense has gone out the window.

I was an abused child, but I was not fortunate enough to be removed from my abusers. I had to make that choice myself as an adult without any support or help from loving foster or adoptive parents. Let me assure you that I reap no benefit whatsoever out of having any contact with any of my abusers, including my own mother. I know hundreds of adult survivors of child abuse who would back me up on this.

I recently read a magazine article highlighting the issues with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers. The article talked about the soldiers’ reluctance to admit that they were struggling with PTSD or talk about their experiences. Also recently, a woman shared with me that her father, who fought in World War II, told her about a battlefield experience that he had never told anyone before.

I always find it interesting to hear the speculations of people without PTSD about why those of us with PTSD do not share our stories because, in most cases, the speculations are way off base. I can tell you why – We don’t want to burden you. When you have endured something as horrifying as being locked in a box for hours covered in blood or feces, or storming a beach through the body parts of your fallen comrades, you don’t know how much the other person can handle hearing. We don’t talk about it because we don’t want to burden you with the horrors that haunt our nightmares.

It is common for traumatized foster and adopted children to struggle with suicidal urges from time to time. During puberty, these urges can become even stronger. While this can be quite disturbing to you as the foster or adoptive parent, rest assured that these feelings are normal and experienced by most survivors of child abuse.

When your foster or adopted child says that he wants to die, take him seriously because he very likely means it. However, what he is really trying to say is that he is in so much pain that he is willing to do anything, even die, to make the pain stop. This is very different than having a desire to die. Dying is merely a means to an end … the end of the pain.

Your traumatized foster or adopted child has experienced pain so deep that, unless you were traumatized yourself, you cannot possibly imagine the depths of the pain. Wanting to make the pain end is a rational reaction to such deep pain.