Category Archives: therapy

Learning How to See Family

How does your child see you?
How does your child see you?
When it comes to perspective, I am not sure there is a single perspective more powerful than how we ourselves. However if there is one, I bet it is how we think others see us. Do they see all of our failings or our strengths? Do they see us as worthy of love?

Over the weekend, J and I took a hit in the how we think we are viewed by our kids. Our son,O, ran away. It started off as his usual morning defiance, riling up his younger sister and refusing to do the normal morning routine. He thought we would chase him down and force him to do it. So when I told him I had our foster baby in my arms because I was feeding him and there would be consequences if I had to go get him, he said “Make me.” After another minute of him dancing around, I put down R, and I went to go get him. He was waiting by the door which he opened with a smile towards me when he knew I could see him. He ran out into a down poor of rain. I texted J, and we thought his attempt to get attention shouldn’t work. He would come right back. After all, he wasn’t even wearing shoes.

He did not come back. He ran and 20 minutes later while J was out looking for him, he got into a stranger’s car. He told them he did not want to come home because his mom “mistreats him.” He was so lucky, because the older couple took him to the police station. The woman fell carrying our shoeless son into the police station treating him like the brave abused boy he was portraying himself. The cops heard he was “mistreated at home” and there were two other girls and a foster baby in the home. The cops took him to the hospital for an exam and to take photo’s of the bruises on his body as evidence of his abuse.

Of course by this time, I have called the police department giving his name and description trying to get their help to find him. After we had heard nothing for another 30 minutes, I called them back. They said a car was in route to my house. Two cops came in and asked if they could search the house. I replied, “Sure, I have looked everywhere in case he snuck back in somehow, and we have had a neighbor who does searches for the police over to look already, but the more eyes the better.” At this point, we have most of our street looking for him with phone calls out to all of the friends we could think he might try to reach. When they called back in, they said another cop was on the way to our house, their commander. When he got there is when I got the phone call saying O was safe at the precinct, but he was on the way to the hospital for an exam. We were relieved, and J wanted to go be with him, but we were asked to stay at home for questioning.

They took pictures of his bruises, none of which were from us. Wrestling on a trampoline with a kid who outweighs you by 30% will do that as will falling from the lip of a bathtub he was dancing on for his sister’s giggles. As I spoke with the ER doctor, I felt his hostility towards me grow steadily less when I explained his diagnoses and medications. Even though the doctor and Child Protective Services agent believed me, we still had to wait for him to come home and find out if there will be an investigation effectively ending our ability to foster children.

Now O had no idea the ramifications of what he was doing. He started off afraid of being yelled at again for misbehaving. Then it was a fear of being yelled at for running outside, and when I didn’t chase him he worried more. Fear drove him to act and then exaggerate. When the cops said they were going to go get the other kids in his house, he was happy. It never occurred to him that did not mean they would be with him in a new home. He just did not want to be yelled at again. When we questioned him about the ordeal that night, we had to be extremely careful with the wording of questions, because he was searching to say only what he thought we wanted to hear. He was still scared to the point he would have agreed to leave our house because he felt scared there.

I know his very early childhood before us was hard, but will he always be this scared? Will he always act impulsively to better his immediate situation without understanding how others perceive his actions and the motivation for them?

If one reads the Atlantic this month, it would seem likely. The article, There’s No Such Thing as Free Will, argues our thought process is predetermined by chemicals in our brains and the neural paths signals can take. Science seems to be arguing the nature side of the nature vs. nurture is the better bet for predicting and explaining actions. I buy the science behind the article, but I think it is too static. Sure we can predict/explain a behavior or action by looking at the brains pathways, but over time are we explaining the actions or the predispositions to certain actions?

Atlantic, There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

Can we change the brain process over time? Is this self determinism or free will changing the determinism?

Having seen Ericksonian hypnotherapy work, I also question how fixed these predetermined thoughts, reactions and emotions are to given stimuli. Can we not change how our brains work? If we can decide to change these paths, then the predictive value of the determinist model would seem to fall apart. Granted, one may say the decision to change was predictable, but were the situations to allow us to do so also predictable?

Family, it does a soul good.  The next step is teaching our body to react to this truth.
Family, it does a soul good. The next step is teaching our body to react to this truth.

Raising kids who have gone through trauma but still have highly malleable brains, I have to hope the nurture model can help. Maybe I am but a part of the masses needing to be gullible, but I tend to think the brain was wired to make this choice and do this action is believable only in a specific static scenario. My brain, as it is right now, will always decide A if given a choice between A and B. However, I might train to look at both choices and sometimes choose B based on a different decision model. My thought processes are not carved in stone, and I hope my neuro paths are not either…though a bit more resistance to cuts of those paths would be nice (Sorry, bad MS joke since Multple sclerosis, which I have, means many cuts).

Could we not plausibly argue the brain paths simply predispose us to a course of action or thought at a given time under given circumstances? Can we then work to narrow the range of circumstances prompting the bad reactions and broaden the number of paths to the preferred outcome? If not, then why bother with parenting?

Side note: The highlight of my week came when I heard O tried to calm a girl in his class using what I had taught him. I have been working with him to be the candle giving a soft glow rather than an inferno burning everything to ash. It was all based on a nintendo Wii game where you have to sit perfectly still. We started saying to each other, “Be the candle, not an inferno.” Of course for me, the candle is my grandfather’s torch of my dreams.

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"Lifeisnowhere."

“Lifeisnowhere.”
What do you see when you read the title?  I have written this down on sheets of paper and asked people to read it.  It’s interesting because it’s a pretty evenly split response between
1. Life is nowhere.
And
2. Life is now here.
As I look at my family’s life this week, I think a convincing case can be made for either.  Therefore, I will start with evidence for the first option, the “nowhere” option.  My kids and wife are losing their best friends in 2 weeks as they move to Africa for two years.  At the same time, they are losing their home visiting therapists whom they have worked with for the past 2 years.  If that is not enough, they may also lose their other therapists as well as they are promoted/reassigned.  It all makes a tough way to start a new school year.  
I tried speaking with the director of the at home services about the timing of the change.  When told they had needed to change/end this service for months, all I could ask is why they waited until now to tell us?  Had we known, we would have ended the service at the beginning of the summer when they still had their friends for months.  As I said this, he told me we must teach our kids people will come in and out of their life.  Learning to deal with this is a skill they need.  
Do they need to learn everyone will leave them save J and me?  At the same moment?  This does not feel like a healthy concurrence of events for children who already have attachment issues.  That these issues are common for foster children in no way makes them less difficult with which to live.  I do not understand how a director of a project whose mission is to provide mental health services would so casually dismiss the strain the timing of their withdrawal is causing.  
As their bodies start showing some of the signs of strain of stress and lack of sleep, their behavior becomes fit to make a parents hair curl every afternoon.  At this point other parents avoid even customary greetings too my son after school because they know they could expect nothing more than sour grumbles in reply.   As my head hurts more and more often towards the end of my infusion cycle, I feel less able to string ideas together, which can make programing at work take longer.  I am having a harder time dealing with multiple situations at once, so with our kids at home I take longer and longer to get things done, whether it is getting them bathed or cleaning the dishes. Yes, times like this feel like life leads nowhere.
In times like these, I am thankful for Dire Strait Why Worry lyrics, “There should be laughter after pain.  These things have always been the same.  So why worry now?”
K pianno
(For a more positive side, continue on to the next page)

2. Life is now here:
O cake
Both kids had double birthdays of fun celebrated first with Grandma and Grandpa and then with our friends down the street.   We have had lots of cake.  Grandma made some awesome cakes designed to invoke memories and smiles from some of their favorite moments of the last year that they both enjoyed last weekend.  Then during the week, we had a cookie cake (for A) followed a few days later with a tie-die colored cake covered with purple icing in honor of the Ravens (for O).  Sharing them with their friends made for a fun filled school night.
Then over the weekend, we all took part in my mom’s wedding.  While they did not sleep well the night before, they did have fun running the dog around the house until its tongue looked permanent hanging out the side of its mouth.  People commented on how calm Rodger (the dog) was, and we chuckled because even a young labradoodle is no match in energy to the waves of energy our kids brought to the game of chase.    In fairness, it was three on one.  K also had a great time picking up the beet played by the piano player and joining (uninvited at first).  It turns out she has a gift for music.  In our next house, we will have to make room for a piano.
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As for which reading is correct of the original “lifeisnowhere,” I think I will stick with my original reading.  When I first read it, I said, “Life is here now or life is nowhere.”  We have only now to pull what joy we may.  Sometimes, that means making the best of difficult times.   I think we continue to do so, making the best memories possible from stress-filled days.
This blog will soon be moving in full from www.thelifewelllived.blogspot.com  to this site.  For now, I continue to work on setting up the widgets and add-ons. 

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