The focus of these blog posts should be more in the how-to realm, I tend to write about parenting my traumatized children as that is my aim in life. I’m now debating internally if I should continue here or work harder on my other blog/book.

On my personal blog I’d recently had a young lady contact me, the victim of emotional abuse all her life, now very educated and wondering what steps she should take in her consideration of the adoption of older children from foster care.

My first thought was that she go through therapy in order to understand that she was mistreated due to someone else’s deficiencies, through no fault of her own.

I know from experience that traumatized children attempt to recreate the lives of chaos that they’ve known and been familiar with, and if she’s left untreated, these same children and she could potentially have a dangerous situation.

I’d advise all adoptive parents to become as emotionally strong, solid and stable as is possible. These darling children will rock your world. Cute as buttons in adoption photo listings, internally boiling with a steaming, smelly cauldron of negative emotions, one hardly has any clue as to the level of explosions that are bound to follow a placement.

I might once have bristled with offense at the thought of being advised to participate in therapy yet I’ve learned from my children that up is not up nor is down necessarily below when one’s emotions have been battered beyond recognition.

We have almost always needed a third party, a neutral professional individual to help us sort through such damage. Emotionally wounded children lash out, they create smokescreens that aren’t even the issue, they are master manipulators and we naïve, befuddled parents are slammed hard.

We are not properly trained to deal with the depths of despair from which our children have sprung. Often we can see their physical scars, but the inner wounds are hidden deep and must be worked through in order for our children to go on to have successful lives, careers and marriages.

Therapy is a must have, thankfully Medicaid pays for it and even if that were not so, I’d work an outside job just to pay for this singularly necessary component.


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