On Trauma Tuesday, I talked about a difficult topic: Trauma Tuesday: Orgasms during Rape and Sexual Abuse. See that blog entry for an explanation of how experiencing orgasms during rape and sexual abuse messes with a child’s head. In this blog entry, I am going to focus on how you, as the foster or adoptive parent, can help your abused adopted child heal the wounds that resulted from experiencing orgasms during sexual abuse.

1. Explain that having orgasms during rape or sexual abuse is normal.

Most adult survivors of sexual abuse are not aware that experiencing orgasms during sexual abuse is normal, so most abused children are not going to know this, either. Reassure your abused child that his body reacted just like anyone else’s body would have responded to sexual stimulation. He bears no shame in having experienced an orgasm while being sexually abused.

2. Tell your abused child that the sexual abuse was not her fault.

Even if the child experienced an orgasm with every single rape, the child was still not responsible for being raped.

I am a big fan of the television show Samantha Who?, which stars Christina Applegate as a “bad girl” who got hit by a car, lost her memory, and is now a “good girl” trying to figure out who she is. In each episode, the amnesiac Samantha experiences a flashback in which she remembers being an incredibly self-centered and mean person. The Samantha today is starry-eyed and sweet. Trying to merge together who Samantha was with who Samantha is today is at the core of the show.

What does this have to do with adoption? If you are parenting an abused child, it has everything to do with it. While Samantha Who? is a comedy and not looking to “go deep,” it provides a wonderful representation of what it is like to deal with flashbacks.

On Trauma Tuesday, I talked about the sense of loss that all abused children experience, whether they are ultimately adopted or not, in my blog entry entitled Trauma Tuesday: Abused Child’s Sense of Loss for What Should Have Been. In this blog entry, I am going to explain some of the lost stages of development that contribute to an abused child’s sense of loss.

The best resource I have found that identifies these lost stages is the book Beyond Integration by Doris Bryant and Judy Kessler. The book is about a woman’s experiences with healing after integrating from dissociative identity disorder (DID). This book is a great resource for anyone parenting an adopted child who experienced severe abuse, whether or not the child has DID.

If you are parenting an abused child, you might learn a lot about your child by the costume that he or she chooses to wear for Halloween. Oftentimes, the subconscious can drive the decision-making process. You might be certain that your little boy will choose a Pokemon character because he is so into Pokemon, but he instead chooses to dress up like the bad guy from the movie, Scream.

From my teen years forward, I mostly did not dress up for Halloween. If I did, I would only choose one of two costumes: a little girl or a slut. If I dressed as a little girl, I would put my hair in pigtails. It really did make me look very young. The slut costume pretty much speaks for itself. I dress conservatively, so jaws would drop when I showed up to Halloween parties as a slut.

Last year was the first Halloween in which I dressed up as something other than one of those two choices.

Julia wrote a power blog entry asked What Is a Successful Adoption of an Older Child?. Linny posted some comments about her own experiences. I have known Linny for several years and was along for the ride for some of her issues, so I understand where her comments are coming from.

As an adult who was once a traumatized child, I would like to share my own view on this topic. I truly believe that there are no lost causes. I do not believe that there is any one form of abuse that is the nail in the coffin on a child’s ability to grow into a functional adult.

I believe this because, if there were a profile that was beyond healing, that would have been mine.

I am an active volunteer in my son’s school. One of my favorite ways to volunteer is to be a reading tutor with the kindergarten students. I love to watch the children’s joy as the world of reading opens before their eyes. I also love to nurture the little ones.

This is my fourth year as a reading tutor. The children just love me. I tutor at a Montessori school that has pre-K and Kindergarten children together in one class. I only read with the kindergarteners unless a pre-K student is reading on a Kindergarten level. The pre-K students spend all year getting excited about being a “big kid” and getting to read with me the following year.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I got a very different reaction from a new Kindergarten student.

If you are parenting an adopted child who was sexually abused, you need to know that she is vulnerable to becoming a victim of date rape. In fact, adolescents with a history of sexual abuse are five times more likely to fall victim to date rape than adolescents with no history of sexual abuse. (See Date Rape Among Adolescents and Young Adults.) Those are staggering statistics that foster and adoptive parents need to be aware of.

It is not a coincidence that young women who have a history of sexual abuse are more likely to fall victim to date rape.

As I shared on Trauma Tuesday in my post Relationship Between Anger and Anxiety & Depression, traumatized adopted children who repress their anger often struggle with anxiety, depression, or both. While some anxiety and depression can have a biological cause, adopted children who suffered from trauma, such as abuse or neglect, are very likely to be repressing their anger, which can cause or exacerbate issues with anxiety or depression.

If you are parenting a traumatized adopted child who rarely or never expresses anger, then your child needs you to teach him or her how to do it. Children who grow up in unsafe homes do not learn how to express their anger safely, so they need you to provide them with the tools for doing this.

A guest blogger name Dee Thompson wrote a great blog about the Importance of Therapy for Older Adopted Children. The focus of her blog was on the difficult adjustment that her daughter, Alesia, experienced in moving from a neglectful home in Russia, to an orphanage, and then to her safe forever home. Like many other adoptive parents, Dee believed that Alesia would be fine after moving into her safe home, but that is not how things unfolded.

What struck me was how similar Alesia’s reaction to her trauma is to the reaction of survivors of child abuse. The cause of her trauma was different from the cause of many other trauma survivors’ issues, but the reaction is the same. So, if you are parenting a traumatized adopted child, you can learn a lot from her blog, even though you did not adopt your child from another country.

If you are parenting a traumatized adopted child, you need to have your child in therapy. Period.

A reader contacted me with questions about female perpetrators of child sexual abuse. Considering that 12% of sexual assaults on children under age six are committed by women, those of you who are parenting traumatized children need to know the facts about female perpetrators of child sexual abuse.

The first obvious question is how a woman can sexually abuse a child, particularly a male child. Because a woman does not come equipped with male genitalia, many people assume that a woman cannot rape a child. That is an incorrect assumption.