What is Reactive Attachment Disorder - Part 1

Hey, welcome back, parents. All right, today I want to talk to you about reactive attachment disorder and how meeting a family back in 1993 really changed my career path from that special education track to learning about children's mental health and really being intrigued by the reactive attachment disorder diagnosis and wanting to help this population of kids. As I mentioned in episode two, I'd been working as a paraprofessional in our local school district while attending college. And then I also had a second job where I could work with kids with special needs after school in their home. And that's when my supervisor called me one day and she said, Jackie, we have a family that we'd really like you to work with. We feel like you could help them out. Their daughter's diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder and has some significant behavior issues. And we'd really like you to work with her. Well, I had no idea what reactive attachment disorder was. So I said, no, you know, I have enough hours and I'm doing good.

in. So I turned it down. After the fourth time, the supervisor called me. She said, Jackie, will you please just talk with the mom and then let us know what you think after that. So I did. I talked with this girl's stepmom and my heartstrings were tugged. I was like, oh my gosh, they are going through so much and they're very misunderstood. And I really felt like I could help this family.

So I arrived at their house. I walked onto the wooden porch. I knocked on the door and the stepmom opened the door and she said, here she is. Dad and I are going outside for a break. She's all yours. And I thought, whoa, wait a minute. Where's this wonderful mom I just talked to on the phone the night before? Like she seems super upset and strict and intense. Like what is going on? And here's this beautiful 10 year old girl, you know, with rosy red cheeks, like staring up at me with this very charming smile on her face. And I was like, what is going on here? So I played with the girl, kind of started to get to know her a little bit. And then about 30 minutes later, her parents came in, got her ready for bed. And then we sat down on the couch and had a conversation. I learned that the girl had been tantruming for two hours, the two hours before I got there. Like not just screaming, fighting, she was in a full rage. And when she heard my footsteps on the wooden porch, she turned it off just like that. She stopped screaming, pulled herself together made sense to me now why she had those rosy red cheeks. Well, her mom and dad were exhausted and drained from the tantrum, and they were just counting down the minutes until I arrived.

So they couldn't turn that intensity off in that split second like she could. They just were waiting for me for a much-needed break. You see, Elizabeth was a beautiful girl. Oh my gosh, you guys, so, so cute.

and her illness wasn't visible on the outside. Her teachers would describe her as somewhat quiet and very polite and she was a straight-A student. And her parents agreed she could be charming until she decided not to be. She could turn rage on and off just as fast as the light switch on your wall and she was very, very good at it.

So much so that most people didn't believe her parents when they said she could be dangerous. Now, the first few times I met with Elizabeth, even though I had heard from the mom and dad about their struggles with her behavior, honestly, I had difficulty believing it was true too. She was very polite. We had good, quiet conversations.

You know, I often caught myself wondering more about her parents' behavior than hers. And while I couldn't see what her parents saw, I did listen to every word they said. I was taking in the information. I was trying to imagine it. I listened to all the experiences that they shared and everything that they had tried to help their daughter. And then, after just two months' time, Elizabeth's true colors came through. I began to see what her parents had been experiencing for years. She was very troubled. She was angry, deceptive, And yes, she was dangerous.

Elizabeth trusted no one, including me. And it turns out she was suffering from Reactive Attachment Disorder, or RAD. And no one knew how to help her. Now, when I learned of that diagnosis, I read every book.

I listened to national experts. I even took college classes to better understand RAD. But nothing taught me more than my regular meetings with Elizabeth and her parents. Now, I worked with this family for well over a year, and eventually we were fortunate enough to raise enough money to get her the specific treatment and therapy that she and her family needed.

I learned something from this family that has become the foundation of my business. I will always believe in parents and support your parenting. My job is to listen to you and then to help you reach your child, to understand the root of the problem, and then support you. I can teach you how to adjust your skills in ways that make a big difference.

And while I thought my job was to help Elizabeth, I realized that my heart was in helping her parents. You see, Elizabeth's parents were hardworking. They were dedicated, smart, fun, generous, and very loving people. They were raising several children and had the typical ups and downs that all parents experience, and they were managing just fine with the other kiddos.

But Elizabeth's early life experiences with her birth mom caused her to reject her dad and stepmom's love and security. Elizabeth learned as an infant that adults weren't safe or predictable. So, as she grew, she challenged their direction. She pushed them away and defied their requests and their discipline and their love.

She wasn't responding to traditional parenting like the other children. Her parents reached out to doctors, to therapists, to teachers, and experts in an effort to help their daughter. And in turn, when the suggestions and advice from the professionals wasn't working, the parents found themselves being judged by the professionals. And in fact, one therapist even accused them of singling their daughter out, being too hard on her and saying that they didn't think they knew how to parent a girl. They just could not believe that this little girl could be quote unquote that bad. Parenting a child that doesn't reciprocate your love and your affection and your attention is incredibly difficult. In the first step of my Becoming a No Problem Parent online on-demand course, I talk about our need to seek first to understand. We need to really be acknowledging why is our child behaving the way they are and why are we responding to them the way we are. And so in today's episode, what I'm going to be focusing on with reactive attachment disorder really starts with the first year of life bonding cycle. Children learn to regulate or control their behavior based on how their caregivers respond to them. So when a baby is consistently responded to with care and love, they internalize the caregivers as safe and good.

And they learn that adults are responsible for the good feeling that they're having. So they develop trust for the adults. But when the baby's needs are not consistently met, They perceive adults as hurtful and unsafe. They remain in a state of distress and are unable to develop that sense that mom and dad will provide them relief. And as a result, they experience excessive anxiety, anger, and often a longing to be taken care of. But they don't show you. They kind of reject you. A lot of times you'll hear people say, oh, my baby's just independent.

Well, when children are unable to grasp what's going on and they're unable to do anything about their situation to change it, they often go from being fearful to reacting with fight, flight, or freeze. So this could look like a baby who constantly arches their back when you're trying to hold them to feed them a bottle and they just, they're, they kind of start to cry and throw a fit and don't want anything to do with you.

or it could look like a baby who's just kind of flat affect. They don't smile back. They don't reciprocate, you know, talking to you or cooing at you. Or it could be a child that just constantly wants to get down and get away from you, you know, so that fight, flight, or freeze. Okay, so in that first year of life bonding cycle, I like to describe it. I learned this many years ago from some of the best. Babies have a need. And how do babies let us know they have a need? They cry, right? They can't talk. So they cry. And if we can't get to them right away, they cry harder.

And sometimes they cry so hard, it is like a little rage, like their fists are clenched, their face is turning beet red, they arch their back. Sometimes they have to catch their breath because they almost like stop breathing, they're crying so hard. Well, as soon as we can, we get to that baby and we pick them up and we rock them and we bounce them up and down. We give them touch, movement, eye contact. We smile at them and we say, shit's okay, it's okay. We change their diaper and we give them milk. We feed them, right? And in that milk, there's lactose, which is the sugar that makes their tummy feel full. We do all of those things and that's called gratification.

So baby has a need. They cry to let us know. We pick them up. We gratify them.

We take care of their need. And that's what builds and forms trust. All right? So that happens over and over and over again, thousands of times.

I don't think anybody's ever been able to count how many times that happens, right? Children are exposed to unmanageable stress if the caretaker doesn't come to gratify them or it doesn't come consistently to take care of their need, if the caretaker isn't responsible for helping them to feel better by giving them that food and touch and security and assurance, or if that caretaker doesn't reduce or eliminate the stress, the baby's going to be unable to trust that adults are safe and loving.

Now, since the baby or toddler cannot talk or communicate or remove themselves from the inattentive or unavailable adult, right, They learn to cope by either being overly compliant or overly defiant. Understanding this about your child is key, and it's the foundation from which all your parenting responses and interactions should come from. Now, maybe you are the birth parent, or maybe you're the step parent, or maybe the grandparent or the adoptive parent.

But let's take a look at how infants and toddlers respond when they've had inconsistent caretaking in their first couple of years. So whether that's because the baby suffered abuse and neglect and was placed in foster care and then later adopted, maybe that was because the baby was placed in an orphanage because their parent couldn't take care of them and really wanted them to have a better life with a family who could.

maybe that's because the baby was born early born premature and spent several months in the hospital until they were their skin was developed enough for the you know we can deliver babies at a pound but their skin isn't fully developed so we can't touch them and hold them in those first few months and um and so maybe it was because mom had postpartum depression and so she was going through all the basics getting the diaper changed and the baby fed but emotionally not available Again, when I say I support parents, I have supported parents through each of these scenarios.

Parents who have lost their children due to abuse and neglect. I've helped parents make that decision that they needed to give the baby up because they couldn't emotionally care for them. I've helped families who have adopted babies right at birth from the hospital and their child still has, you know, some issues in connecting and entrusting the adoptive parents. I've helped families whose children have been in orphanages for a number of years and, again, had all the basic needs met of being fed and changed and clothed, but just didn't have that primary caregiver to develop that connection with.

So I don't want to scare anybody off by talking about this. I just want to say I am truly all in and supportive of you as the parent that's dealing with a child who is not reciprocating your love. And some of the ways that babies show us that they're not connecting, they're not reciprocating and feeling that trust for you, things like they aren't reaching for you when, you know, you're going to pick them up and you put your arms out and they don't lift their arms up to reach for you.

That's a sign. When they're overreactive when we touch them or they're overreactive to sounds or to light. maybe they're not settling in when their needs are met. So even after you've changed the diaper or you fed them, they're still fussing. Maybe they're just not really interacting with you and they're sort of lethargic. They're not smiling back when you smile at them. Maybe they're not giving you eye contact, especially when you're holding them to comfort them or holding them to feed them and they're not reciprocating that eye contact. Babies who are self-abusive, They're headbanging, they're biting, they're pulling their own hair, they resist cuddling, they're kind of stiff when you pick them up and they don't really kind of snuggle in or settle in.

These are all things that are just signs. Now, I don't want anybody to go diagnosing your own kid, but they're signs that something's not right and the baby can't talk to us. They can't verbalize. I mean, even up to three years old, sometimes they can kind of tell us what's going on or what's wrong, but if it's an emotional thing that they're not feeling comfortable about, they can't verbalize that with us. So it's up to us to help figure it out and to meet their need. As I'm sharing this with you all, I'm realizing it's getting kind of lengthy. So let me finish this up by telling you a story about a family that had called me to help work. They had adopted a couple of kiddos and they were having some problems with the toddler. And so they called me up and asked me if I'd come help out with this little guy. And I showed up at their house and both of the kiddos were taking a nap. You know, if you're a parent, you know, never wake a sleeping baby, right? Or a sleeping kiddo,

like let them nap. So it actually gave us a good hour for the mom and dad and I to just sit and chat. And I got to know them a little bit better and their story, their adoption story, and sort of a little bit more about where the kiddos came from and what they had experienced in their early life. And then their little nine-month-old woke up from his nap. And so, you know, mom went over and picked him up and dad went in to fix a bottle. And, you know, they're snuggling the kiddo and, you know, dad brings the bottle over to mom and she starts to feed him. And I noticed that the baby was facing sort of out, not snuggled in, looking at mom during the feeding, which could have been, you know, I mean, I was there and we're having a conversation, but, you know, knowing a little bit more about the baby's story and they just had him for maybe a few months. I just, I asked, I said, well, you know, while we're waiting for your toddler to wake up, would you mind if I tried something with you and the baby? And mom said, well, sure. And so I asked her, I said,

what if you turn the baby towards you a little bit more as you're cradling him in your arms and you hold the bottle? The baby had been holding the bottle by himself. And so I said, what if you turn the baby to you and you hold on to the bottle and look into his eyes and just kind of, you know, gaze at him while he's drinking from the bottle. And so the mom kind of looked at me like, okay, whatever. We don't have any issues with this baby. He's super content, rarely fusses, rarely cries, like he's just an easy baby. But she turned him towards her and held on to the bottle. And immediately the baby pulled the bottle out of his mouth, threw the bottle down, arched his back, shut his eyes real tight, and started to cry. And he cried really hard.

Now this mom and dad looked at me like I had just wrecked their baby. But I coached them on how to settle the baby back in, even having her put the baby down for a minute to let the baby calm because clearly this baby felt like if he didn't hold the bottle himself, something bad would happen. And because of my experience with other families, I knew that there were trust issues between this baby and this mom. Previously, when that baby looked at his birth mom's eyes, he was rejected.

And often she was overwhelmed and couldn't take the time to feed the baby herself. So the minute he was old enough to hold onto that bottle himself. He would suck that bottle down for dear life, not knowing when the next bottle was going to come. And so now, even though he's with this loving mom who has all the time in the world to care for him, he's associating this mom's eyes with his birth mom's eyes, which were distraught and stressed and overwhelmed. And so that fear of taking a bottle and even thinking about connecting and feeling settled in and soothed from this mom was so great that the baby just couldn't risk it. And so I taught the mom, and this took us a good, oh man, I think it was over an hour, hour and a half,

of helping that baby realize that this mom was safe and that he could allow her to hold the bottle and look into his eyes. But like I said, we had to take little breaks. We had to let the baby get down and sort of finish crying and then look up and want that bottle again and then pick the baby up and mom would feed the bottle again and he'd reject it. And then she'd let him drink a little with him holding the bottle by himself because we didn't want to traumatize this baby, right? But at the same time, we didn't want to ignore it. We needed to recorrect the thought that he was responsible for the good feeling he was having with that milk coming in.

We wanted him to be able to associate mom with a good feeling so that he could gain that trust and learn to trust. We repeated this, you know, several times. And then finally, oh, I could cry when I think about it. After several minutes, the baby allowed mom to hold that bottle.

And he looked up into her eyes. and he drank for a little while. And then, the most precious thing, he reached his hand up to stroke his mom's cheek, to grab kind of onto the mom's cheek. That's connection.

He was trusting her. He looked at her. He didn't turn his head away. He didn't arch his back.

He settled in and looked at her and allowed her to feed him. And then we did the same thing with Dad. It wasn't just mom that the baby was rejecting. The baby was rejecting dad too. And in fact, he fought even harder with dad. He arched his back and his screams were even louder.

And when I asked the dad what was going on as he was, what dad was feeling as he was going through this exercise, dad said, I feel like I'm hurting him. Oftentimes men will feel that way, right? Because they're strong. Not that women aren't strong. It's just that a man oftentimes feels like they're not as sensitive maybe, or they're not as nurturing. And so he didn't want to have to struggle to hold this baby in. And I didn't want him to have to struggle. This wasn't about winning a physical battle. This was about allowing that baby to learn to trust that dad wasn't going to overpower him, that dad wasn't going to hurt him, that dad was gentle, and he could sue them, and that this baby could trust him. And I'm not kidding you, you guys. Those kinds of experiences can be super hard, and too often, we don't, as adults, do those hard things because we feel so bad. We feel like we're overpowering our children, and it's not about overpowering them. It's about letting them know that we are strong enough, not power strong, emotionally strong, and capable of seeing them through their fears with comfort and consistency and without anger or frustration or further rejection. When I tell this story to parents of older children who experienced early life trauma or separation from their primary caregiver, they often say things like, oh my gosh, we wish we would have known that sooner. You know, now their child is 10 or 13 or 16,

and that's okay. You know, we can make new connections in our brain. There's still hope, So don't worry about that. I am doing this episode because I want you to know if you do have a little one and it seems like they're more independent than they should be and they're not receptive to your snuggling, your connecting, or your direction, then reach out to me and let's have a conversation.

As I mentioned earlier, oftentimes kids won't be diagnosed with a reactive attachment disorder until a little bit later in their life. And oftentimes therapists and other clinicians sort of try to prevent making the diagnosis. Because many times it's a misunderstood diagnosis and people are very fearful of it. And I'm here to tell you there's no need to be afraid of it.

once we seek first to understand what's going on with our children and why they're behaving the way we are with that kind of understanding, then we can parent confidently instead of emotionally, instead of parenting from a place of guilt or a place of, oh, I screwed up my kid or, you know, super sadness that our infant or our child went through, you know, some trauma in their early life. Parenting, of course, we're sad. Of course, we get frustrated with, you know, the behaviors and all that, but we don't have to parent from a frustrated or sad place. So reach out if you have any questions about your kiddo. Because of my experience with reactive attachment disorder, I can help you find the right therapeutic resources. Hello World is not a therapeutic resource. However, I can help you find the appropriate resources for your kiddo and your family. All right. So next episode, part two of this one, I'm going to get into some of the symptoms and behaviors in toddlers, children, and teens that have some attachment issues or have reactive attachment disorder. Okay. So stay tuned for that one for now. I know this is a little bit heavy for people who have never heard of reactive attachment disorder. For those of you who have heard of reactive attachment disorder. If nothing else, reach out to me. I'd like to thank you for hanging in there with your kiddo and see if there's a way that I can support you.

And before I let you go today, I'd like to let you know that just about 10 years ago and totally out of the blue, Elizabeth called me to talk. She's all grown up now and the mother of a beautiful child. And she told me she wished it had been different back then, yet she was grateful that her parents elicited the help they needed to put a stop to her downward spiral. She wanted to thank me for supporting her family, especially her parents, all those years ago. Well, I thanked her too for the fire she lit in me to make it my mission to help other struggling parents and their resistant children. All right, join me next time for part two of What is Reactive Attachment disorder. And for now, if you're enjoying the podcast, please like and subscribe to it.

This is the No Problem Parenting Podcast, a place for parents who care and are allowed to learn in real time. No fixing, no fluff, just steady leadership for real kids and real homes. We can help you become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. Thanks again for listening today.

See you next time.