ATTACHMENT DISORDER:  THE CHILD’s INTERNAL EXPERIENCE

Ongoing abuse, neglect, institutionalization, cause compound or complex trauma.  A cascade of internal experiences and symptoms results including:

· Mistrust of Parents and Authority, Resulting in Extreme Need to Control Situations and People.  The child has experienced that early caregivers were not reliable, and may have been actively hurtful.  The child’s survival instinct will not allow himself or herself to be in a position of risk again, and unconsciously resists any receptiveness to parenting.  The child feels a need to be in control.

· Hypervigilance – the child is “on guard” constantly monitoring the environment, waiting for signs and signals that the next episode of abuse or neglect is near.  Hypervigilance is a form of anxiety.  This hypervigilance can be so strong as to prevent learning,

· Dysregulation or tantruming is a sign in the child that it has encountered an emotional field that is overwhelming to it.  The emotions are too big to digest, and the child has melt down.

· Experiences any limit setting, consequences or parental disapproval not as teaching tools to improve behavior, but as deprivation.   This deep sense of  deprivation results in tantruming.  The child needs to control all situations to feel safe.  Typical parenting approaches like setting limits trigger the child into the experience that the adoptive parent is as depriving as the abusing, neglectful or abandoning early caregiver.

· Emotional Numbing & Emotional Cutoff – children of complex trauma become flooded by powerful emotions of fear, desperation, hopelessness and helplessness.  Facing these emotions repeatedly became intolerable so the child shut down to their emotional experience.  Feelings take shape in the body in the form of bodily sensations.  The child learns, as a coping mechanism, to shut off signals from the body.  Trauma has caused a defense mechanism of emotional numbing.  The child may be unable to report on feelings he or she is having, and may make up nonsensical answers to querries about internal feelings.

· Deep-Seated Shame and a conviction that “I am bad.”  From repeated experiences of abuse or neglect or parental absence, the child develops an unconscious belief system.  Common beliefs include that the child must be “bad, unworthy, and unlovable” and must have done something to deserve the abandonment.

· Oppositional defiant behavior, distancing behaviors, constant negotiation to get what is desired, regressed behavior, feigned lack of understanding, ignoring, avoidance, resisting physical contact, nuisance chatting, are all mechanisms of control employed by the child.  These should be understood as reactions out of fear and survival instinct, and an attempt to communicate the core feelings of anger experienced during trauma, rather than as a direct manipulation of the parent.

· Heightened Anxiety as a response to free time or an unstructured day.

· Reliance on primitive defense mechanisms including:
o        Splitting
o        Projective Identification
o        Dissociation / Disconnection
o        Projection of old mother onto new mother

· Can try to control adults by threatening tantrums to get what the child feels is essential supplies to avoid

· Can be superficially charming to non-caregivers.

· Highly sensitive to perceived loss of connection with parent, experience of lack of contact, experience of disapproval or parent’s actions perceived as deprivation.