I wish that I could say, “Here’s what all adoptive parents of severely disturbed older children should do.” But it would only look like this:

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There is no handbook, no guide that’s guaranteed, only descriptive narratives detailing how others have struggled along, to which I am adding my own experiences.

When one lives with a severely disturbed child, one needs to take steps to protect the other children. What I’m learning now after many years, as I look back, is that I was often the target. There were threats, noises, intimidation attempts, and volatile situations that required my immediate attention, often also the deputies, but I’ve not actually been attacked outright.

I have one son, now in an outdoor therapeutic program, who’d threaten me, or push me, or act menacingly enough to provoke the older boys in my home to gang up on him in order to protect me. His level of anger was, and is, quite dangerous, and he needs to be where he is now. One night it took my very muscular 20 year old son, a NAVY veteran son and the bipolar son to subdue the 15 year old son when he’d violently slung me into the door. Yet this 15 year old is very emotionally attached to us. He’d never go into his anger mode until he’d looked around to ascertain there were enough older sons to stop him, to give him the fight that he subconsciously desired in the first place.

I represent everything to my children. I’m the maternal figure that all children want, yet when they get here and hear my promises, they spend years trying to make me regret my parenting attempts. I’m their biggest desire and their biggest fear and they don’t want to give me the power to hurt them as their own birth mother once did.

It has taken me years to understand that it takes them years to get it. Talk about a stalemate.

I have another son, now almost 19, who in his own words wanted to “raise Hell,” constantly and let me tell you, he was great at it. He did this in jail also, earning extra time for bad behavior. Sometimes as I look back I have no idea how I have survived under this intense level of stress and tension.

For those parents who now have children in RTCs or any other therapeutic setting, I would highly advise you to take a strong proactive stance. I’ve gone so far, when seeing a dangerous child could be released into our family once again, as to request that the releasing facility state in writing that they can guarantee our family’s safety regarding the kid.

I have way more to say about this in upcoming posts.