If you are parenting a foster or adopted child who has been traumatized, you might notice that the child frequently gets sick. Recurring illness is a common aftereffect of trauma that is frustrating for the child as well as for those in the child’s family. Ironically, while living in an abusive environment, the child likely rarely got sick. It is only when the child is removed from the trauma and placed into a safe environment that recurring illness becomes a problem.

Even after years of therapy and living in a safe environment for decades, recurring illness continues to plague me. My doctors all tell me that there is nothing physically wrong with me other than having a few allergies, which are treated. However, I continue to wrestle with one cold after another to the point that I just want to jump off a bridge, and hub is ready to jump after me.

Some people speculate that the problem is the high level of adrenaline that is ever-present in the body of a trauma survivor. This would not surprise me. I am constantly plagued by nightmares, even after years of therapy, and waking up in a cold sweat with my heart racing is the norm for me.

A reader found Adoption Under One Roof while seeking the answer to the following question:

Why does constantly talking about abuse feel like reliving it?

My answer is that I suspect this person still has many emotional wounds from the child abuse that still need healing. Until you heal your emotional wounds, then anything that makes you think about those wounds is going to hurt and make you feel like you are reliving the trauma.

When I first entered into therapy, I asked my therapist how long I was going to have to be in therapy. He said that I needed to talk about the child abuse until I no longer felt the need to talk about it anymore. He was right. I no longer feel the need to talk about what happened to me and share my story with others. This is because I have healed the pain.

That being said, I do talk about child abuse a lot, both here as well as on my personal blog. I don’t do it because I need to talk about it – I do it because others need me to talk about it.

A common form of sexual abuse is by siblings or cousins. If you are parenting a foster or adopted child who was sexually abused by an older child, particularly by a sibling or cousin, you will have added issues to deal with. The most difficult one is the adopted child feeling responsible for the abuse.

I see this issue frequently among adult survivors of sexual abuse. They believe that, because the abuser was also a child, they must have consented to the abuse or be partially responsible for it. You might hear this line of reasoning from older adopted children, particularly those in their teens. The problem is that, as abused children grow older, they judge themselves through their teen or adult eyes and lose sight of their vulnerability as a young child. They forget that a 12-year-old child is not a peer of an eight-year-old.

In most cases, the abusive sibling is older, often by three or more years. Think about an eight-year-old’s “power” over a five-year-old. They are hardly peers. The younger child views the older child as a “big kid” and typically views the older child as an authority figure of sorts. So, there not a mutual relationship between the siblings.

Unfortunately, child abuse survivors tend to discount the difference in age.

Anyone who has parented a traumatized foster or adopted child can tell you that parenting a traumatized child is not for the faint of heart. These kids can put you through the wringer. You can shower them with love and show them nothing but kindness, but they can still choose not to trust you and test every boundary you set (as well as many you never even thought of). At what point should you give up? When do you say, “Enough!”

I have two answers for this – one from the perspective of the parent and one from the perspective of the child. Let’s start with the child…

I do not believe that any child is a lost cause. As long as your traumatized foster or adopted child is still breathing, there is hope for that child. However, that hope lies in the hands of the child, and there is nothing that you can do to change this. You can shower that child with all of the love and support in the world, but you cannot reach that child unless and until that child chooses to receive that love. Every child has the capacity to make that choice. Unfortunately, for you as an adoptive parent, you have no control over whether your child will ever choose to let you in.

That brings me to the other perspective – the parent.