HEADLINE on GOOGLE: ACT, also known as Advocates for Children in Therapy, a for-profit organization, has recently made a rather large public statement saying they can prove that Attachment Therapy, Holding Therapy and Therapeutic restraints always hurt kids and always are lethal. Nothing could be further from the truth! I disagree with this statement on many levels, and find it incredulous that ACT is willing to make this statement and yet gives NO acceptable alternatives for adoptive parents and adoptees that has the power to replace the aspect of touch therapies and properly applied attachment therapies for severely affected victims of childhood abuse and neglect. In addition, ACT has no creditials for making such an assertion and has made a smear campaign against professionals who are aiding adoptive families in working with their severly unattachment children on bonding issues that are life-threatening if left untreated. Whomever authorized such statements within the ACT community has not done their homework and must have a personal vendetta against an individual in the attachment community. But why put out such statements that may prevent many victimized children a chance at a cure? I believe more attention needs to be paid to the false blanket statements of such organizations as ACT that proclaim to be reaching for an audience of adoptive parents who have children with attachment disordered children.
For children with severe reactive attachment disorder due to post traumatic stress disorder, the power of touch is the only modality of therapy that can reach these children's psych where abuse and neglect is often stored in the preverbal mind, which is the deepest and hardest to reach place later on in life. Does ACT not know that Traditional talk-therapy does not begin to address in a 3-5 year old the level of hurt that the child has experienced? Does ACT propose that parents do nothing? or use therapies that are known NOT to be effective? ACT seems to be putting adoptive parents in a catch-22. And after reading the ACT website, I am serioulsy wondering if any of the author's have ever actually seen attachment therapy in action or if any authors have even stopped to consider their actions on the children that will be denied help or treatment due to their negative and unthinkable words of ignorance.
There are no words to heal this predicament called attachment disorder. Only touch. There were no words for the 3 month old in a Romainian orphanage of understaffed and untrained poverty-ridden staff when no one came when he cried in hunger or pain. There were no words for the 6 month old girl a a Russian babyhouse for orphans who itched from scabies so deep in her skin that only unconsciousness was relief and even though it went on for months. There were also no words for the infant who was left in a dark closet full of nibbling rats while the birth parents were passed out drunk in the backyard of their summer shack in Ethiopia. Words don't heal attachment disorders. The pain is stored deeply within the child's most primitive bodily memories-which are 100 % sensory, and 100% unreachable without touch. Memories of the smell in that dark rat infested closet or the freezing temperature the child experienced are all stored in a cluster along with the misery. Once one preverbal memory is activated it lets loose the whole chain reaction-even though this happened long before the adoption into a new family. Muliply these traumatic episodes over any period of time, and you have the basis for a few early traumatic memories. Muliply these instances over periods of years-and you have severe post traumatic stress disorder that effects the mind of a child and causes reactive attachment disorder in full swing. It is no wonder.
Attachment therapy requires getting inside the hard shell of these kids' outer attitudes and emotions, getting to a vulnerable space where new memories of safety and security can begin crowding out the old, traumatic ones. There is no complete cure, only increments of recovery and better quality of life. In most cases, families have seen at least five professionals to help their child with his/her strange behaviors and attachment problems before they find out about or stumble upon a reference for a psychologist, counselor or social worker who has any experience in working with adopted children exclusively or with any expertise. Through trial and error, and usually desperation, a family will be relieved to find out:
A: the right diagnosis
B: that they aren't the only ones with this situation
C: there is documented evidence that shows the number of recoveries from RAD and PTSD
D: that their child has hope of not ending up in prison, dead or on drugs
It's also worth noting that ACT does not exclusively state in their literature that RAD is a problem only for adopted children. Rather, it states no knowledge of the special needs of children that have lived in institutions and what the post orphanage behaviors have done to them. although they are the largest group of children with known attachment disorders. Therefore, by saying ACT advocates for children in therapy, they are actually doing the opposite. It condemns the very type of therapies that specifically has been known by adoptive parents and professional attachment therapists to do wonders in healing. It is as if ACT has picked a cause to advocate for just because deaths and sensationalism has occurred in the misuse of attachment therapies used by unqualified individuals. It is a case of "contempt prior to investigation."
In all fields of medicine there are truly horrible situations that arise from extreme use of any method-including medications, surgeries, psychological therapies and even using "NO therapies." By using the extreme negativism of a handful of fatal cases of so-called rebirthing therapies, ACT stands that ALL therapies that include attachment therapies and the professionals that work with them are bad. ACT is fine with NO therapies or therapies that don't work, such as traditional talk-therapy.
Orphans who are adopted that were exposed to alcohol and/or drugs or other lethal toxins during pregnancy are more prone to be severely traumatized by orphanage living due to their lack of appropriate or available coping mechanisms. These children can develop a hard, aggressive stance toward anyone who might hurt them---even if that means love and protect them. The severe form of personality disorder that develop out of this state is called borderline or antisocial personality disorder. Once into later teens and adulthood, the prognosis for adoptees with this label, personality disorder, is practically bleak. Prisons and insane asylums are full of personality disordered adults. These people often lead extremely lonely and isolated existences (and even committ suicide) because of a lack of early intervention strong enough to change the course of the reactive attachment disorder. Yet some type of attachment therapy gives an extremely good prognosis when intervention happens early in life.
Do parents want to do nothing as ACT suggests? Or are they willing to try what has worked for many other RAD and PTSD adpted children? In our case, we opted for hope. My wife and I became attachment therapy adocates ourselves as we watched and learned while our children grew beyond their pasts. Not only did I, personally, sit in on every single session with the attachmenent therapist, I was always asked to hold my child in a loving, gentle and safe way at all times even when I was being punched in the face repeatedly by my 5 year old son. Did I have to be strong enough to watch my child struggle when his comfort level was getting busted? Of course. Was it easy to see my son cry out in rage that he hated me for no reason? Yes. Did I look him in the eye and tell him over and over that I loved him and needed to keep him safe no matter what? I had to. When my son spit in my face and told me he wanted to go back to Russia (even though they'd abused him) because I was worse, did it shock me? No. He would say anything to keep intimacy out of his heart and mind. Truly, it is fear that held my son captive, not the work of attachment therapy. Intense feelings of fear of loving, being loved, trusting, caring, and needing another human being were paramount and highly subconscious in my son. Once those feelings were activated by any number of triggers known and unknown he would run or fight even if it meant self-sabotaging himself over and over. It was a no-win situation that held him prisoner and us, as parents, the wardens. Neither my son nor I could have told you any of this before we went through a year of attachment therapy with a qualified attachment therapist. Fast forward seven years ahead and you will see a boy who DOES NOT have these issues! He is still overly sensitive and sometimes jealous if he thinks we love the cat more than him, but there is no overt symptoms of a child who we were once told had brain damage, RAD, PTSD, Conduct Disorder, ADHD, Pervasive Developmental Delay and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The attachment factor is key!
The good news I want adoptive parents and adoptees to know is this. Once the attachment issue was resolved, everything else got better. That's the testimony of a parent who's been in the trenches, but this was an area I knew nothing about when we adopted our son. What would we have done without a qualified attachment therapist, like Dr. Ronald Federici, to take our case? Who would we have turned to if it weren't for the work of Dr. Bryan Post and the Post Institute, or Heather Forbes? What if Bowlby had never written about the controversial attachment theory due to fear of whether groups like ACT would end his career by ruining his reputation? Where would we be now? Would our son be in a group home or juivenile delinquint facility? Yes, left to his own devices, we believe he would have had to be locked up and supervised carefully around the clock to keep from hurting himself or others when he was "activated" with PTSD triggers, which was constant and growing when we started attachment therapy with him.
Without being taught and actively working with our son by using behavioral and attachment therapy and therapeutic restraints that were age appropriate to limit his aggression, would we have eventually just let him run away or beat us up? He was trying his utmost at the time to get away and torment us. Should we have just let nature take it's course? Hell no! My son was worth saving, and so is every other kid out there who suffers. We must do whatever it takes, while thoroughly doing our homework, to make sure we are using the utmost safety and latest standards of proven therapy modalities and qualified experts to give our children what they never had-ADVOCACY. I would advocate to the very end for my children and so would Dr. Federici, Bowlby, Forbes and Post! I pray these professionals don't take an ounce of flack from organizations that promote NOT curing our kids. I pray adoptive parents will not delay early intervention using attachament therapy by a qualified attachment or behavioral specialist to get into the solution NOW before it's too late. As for ACT, I wish they could have walked a mile in our shoes for just one day before they made such liable comments about attachment and holding therapy and the pros who helped us. Its a personal insult.
So why any organization or group would advocate against the work of a type of therapy that changes so many lives for the better, that enables so many severely disturbed children to recover over time, or that lends itself to the quality of persons teaching and delivering the therapy, I don't understand. Why throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak? Show me some other equally effective treatment for RAD and PTSD in adopted children that works and I will certainly eat my words. Until then I pray ACT will rethink their wrongful propositions about what kids need in attachment therapy---especially if you haven't had a child with RAD, aka. the raddishes.
Jon Goodman, Adoptive Dad
