Many children with severe behaviors such as chronic lying, stealing, aggressiveness, defiance, setting fires, bed wetting, poor parental relationships, etc., are increasingly being diagnosed as having an attachment disorder. Though having a label may initially give parents some relief in being able to identify the condition their child is struggling with, typically, it only constructs a scenario for frustration, guilt, blame and resentment. Unfortunately, a diagnosis in the mental health profession is rarely a positive thing. No parent wants a child with a diagnosis considering it implies some inherent defect of the child.
To have your child labeled as having Reactive Attachment Disorder will typically not bring a parent any heightened sense of relief. We must start to understand the children demonstrating such serious behaviors as the ones listed, among many others, have all typically experienced some degree of trauma. Historically, our understanding of trauma has been limited to the horrible experiences depicted in the media; however, trauma occurs in many more situations that we are not even remotely aware of. particularly as it regards small children, trauma can occur through the adoption process, foster care, loss of a parent, frequent moves or caregivers, prolonged illness, divorce, parental depression, automobile accidents, and the list goes on and on.
We must understand that <b>trauma is any stressful event that is prolonged, overwhelming, or unpredictable</b>. When we have not had an opportunity to cry, talk, scream, grieve, and mourn a traumatic event, sometimes repetitively, that experience has the ability to impact us all through the rest of our lives. When a traumatic event has occurred early in a child’s life, it can have an impact on the system responsible for helping him to handle stress, reply appropriately to fear, and structure lasting attachments with others. that system is referred to as the regulatory system. When that system is impaired, it leaves the child stuck in a pervasive state of fear and easily overwhelmed by the seemingly mundane task of daily life. Rather than being disordered in attachment relationships, the child is extremely challenged in the presence of stress within any relationship.
<b>The Influence of Early Relationships</b>
Our earliest relationships create blueprints for all of our future relationships. These early experiences in relationships create the lens through which we view others. Every interaction that we have with another individual is influenced by our own personal past experiences. John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, espoused that the first three years of our lives set up the blueprints for all of our future relationships. Upon reflecting at the differences amidst my sister’s earliest relationship blueprints and my own, it is not difficult to determine that at even such an early age, she was already imprinted on a physiologic level to view human relationships as not safe. When we consider trauma in the lives of children it is critical to realize that the majority of traumatic experiences occurring in their lives typically involves some aspect of human relationship.
If a child has been abused, battered, or neglected by the individual that is supposed to love her most, thereupon what would prepare subsequent relationships seem any safer? From infancy to adulthood my sister and parents struggled to be attached. The legendary attachment pediatricians, Marshall Klaus and John Kennel, inform us that attachment is the behavior of the child to the parent, and bonding is the behavior of the parent to the child. In the mental health profession, we have fostered an imbalance of influence. A child cannot develop attachment with a parent struggling to bond. Thus, unwittingly, an nearly impossible task was set in motion within my sister and my parents. Regardless of the trauma issues that my sister carried into the family, my own parents equally brought their own. As you can imagine, the family experience, the experience I refer to as the
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