Personality and Conduct Disorders

We reached the end of the road with my seventeen-year-old son who will not do his school work. We've tried peanut butter sandwiches instead of yummy food until his work is turned in. We even tried charging him $50 per missing assignment out of his part-time job paycheck. He cried when he had to pay us $200 then turned around and paid us another $150 for three more missing assignments. So did he really care? I don't think so. The final strategy--and this sounds draconian, but we were trying to get his attention--was to drive him to a motel and tell him we were paying for a thirty-day stay, and when he was getting close to the end of the… [more]

Hopeless. That’s how it felt. Nothing we did made a big enough difference. My dream of becoming a mother was fading fast. We spent so many years preparing to be parents. Then it took two years to finalize our adoption. Our son was nearly 10 years old when we adopted him from Kazakhstan. The “honeymoon” didn’t last very long. The rages lasted for hours. The violence was unbelievable. I still have scares on my legs from when he would attack me like a wild animal. Ceiling fixtures torn out. Computer monitors thrown. Walls kicked in. Chairs smashed. The destruction was, well…expensive. He would torture our animals. Every little thing set him off. I would get spit on regularly. He would even urinate… [more]

I have received some excellent and thought-provoking comments about Dora’s brief stay in respite care while I had my surgery. I will answer the questions and respond to the comments in a post in the near future … but this morning I am compelled to address yet another school shooting tragedy. I was actually presenting a luncheon RAD workshop to over a hundred Rotary Club members at the very time the Virginia Tech shooting was occurring. Those folks returned to their jobs for the rest of the afternoon and sadly, everything I had just said was reinforced in the craziness of that campus shooting. Now here we go again. I heard one of many news commentators (or perhaps it was a call-in guest) wonder… [more]

I would guess that anyone reading this blog would know what the word orphan meant. Most of us would state it means a child without parents, although Answers.com clarifies it to mean a child whose parents are dead. Answers.com lists a second definition as a child who has been deprived of parental care and has not been adopted. Another definition is one that lacks support, supervision, or care. All of the above definitions are nouns. Answers.com offers this use of the word orphan as an adjective: Not developed or marketed, especially on account of being commercially unprofitable. Where is this plethora of definitions leading? Most of you reading this blog are dealing with orphans … orphans in the strictest sense of the word. Kids who lacked parents… [more]

I have received several phone calls or emails this past few days, from parents reading this blog, posting on ATN’s various listserves, or referred to me by individuals. The common theme in their questions for me centers on “Will he heal? Is there hope?” One dad said, “Life is no fun … all we do is exist. He eats, sleeps and poops—nothing else.” This dad continued his post by describing all the attempts he and his wife have made to engage his son in life. Music lessons, sports, peer-attended social outings, etc. His son is inappropriate, passive-aggressive, disinterested and self-defeating. I could have written that post a few years ago. We, too, tried music lessons, soccer, dance, horseback riding, church functions, medications, therapy—you name it, we tried… [more]

Tonight’s local news featured a more in depth story about the accused killer of Kelsey Smith, a beautiful 18 year old recent high school graduate who was abducted in daylight hours from Target and killed shortly thereafter. I blogged about it here. The accused killer is Edwin Hall, a young man in his mid-20s, and a product of the foster care system. Tonight’s news byte offered up some old information and some new information. We had already known that Hall was adopted at the age of seven by a family in Emporia, Kansas. I have never seen them interviewed on camera, although tonight’s video clip showed their home. They had been interviewed by a local reporter, and she said… [more]

In this post I was discussing Foster Cline’s views about the types of individuals who work with abused children. Foster divides therapists and social workers into four categories: Abusive individuals who appear abusive: This is the most easily identified of the four types of individuals. According to Foster, these folks are honest about their pathology. They look weird or act weird and people take notice. They get their kids removed from their custody (but of course, after they have abused them …) Foster says, “One does not have to be a clinical wizard to know these folks have problems. They are bad, everyone knows they are bad, and no one has much problem deciding how to handle them.” Abusive individuals as therapists: Foster… [more]

I skimmed the recent posts this morning from one of ATN’s listserves, and several interesting things caught my eye. The first was this comment from one of the moms: What a miserable situation to be in … that of an adoptive parent of a child with RAD and whatever else. Boy would I like to get off the wagon and start over. I just want to yell, "HELP" to someone and have all of our situations fixed. I want these kids "healed" so that they can lead normal lives. The second thing that jumped out at me was this article that another mom had posted: Adoptive parents of molested boys wants state to pay. This story impacts me on so many fronts. It is… [more]

I am sure I would be preaching to the choir if I happened to say I see attachment issues and attachment disorder nearly everywhere I am … and if I don’t see it, it finds me. My friends call me the “RAD Magnet.” Here are some examples: I have spent a good portion of this past week networking, making and re-establishing connections in preparation for ATN’s second national conference in Excelsior Springs, Missouri this August. One of those connections was to approach a local bookstore about stocking and staffing a book table at the conference. I was connected with this really neat lady, about my age. I told her about the conference and mentioned some of the books we might want available. She… [more]

I have been sick since returning from Colorado. I don’t do sick well … I have way too much to do. But I spent all day yesterday in bed reading a book that was recommended to me by a family I met at Memorial Day weekend Family camp. The book was a NY best seller titled The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Seems I’m reading lots about other peoples’ daughters these days, having just read The Mistress’s Daughter. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter was a novel that began in the early 60’s. A woman gave birth to twins, one boy and one girl. Her husband was a doctor. The twins came in the middle of a snowstorm and the doctor/dad… [more]