“All of us were imprinted one of two ways:

Either the world is dangerous with moments of safety, or the world is safe with moments of danger.” 

                 — Deepak Chopra

Adoptive parents are eager to welcome a child into their home and hearts.  Sometimes they need extra help with the special attachment challenges these children can present.  Typical symptoms of attachment problems are a child who distances emotionally from primary caregivers or misbehaves in extreme ways.  Often children with attachment difficulties have suffered trauma, abuse, neglect or frequent changes in caregiver early in life.

Early trauma causes impairments in two important developmental processes causing a double whammy of deficits in neurological and psychological/ emotional development.

Neurological Impact:

During the first three years of life, the brain’s neurological pathways are forming.  In an intact parent-child bond, constant parental attention, holding, need satisfaction and soothing support neural development and a growing child’s neurological maturation.  The brain builds a network of neural pathways which control strong emotion and regulate mood.  But frequent traumatic insults caused by episodes of abuse or neglect impair this regular neurological development, negatively impacting the child’s brain.

Psychological Impact:
Building trust in caregivers is the first stage of psychological development.   It is easy to understand how traumatized children struggle to build trust in adoptive parents when their first caregivers harmed them.  Traumatized children bring a template of negative experiences into all future relationships, even those where love is abundantly available.  This template includes core experiences and beliefs that caregivers cannot be trusted, and that the child is sure to be abandoned.  The child experiences himself or herself as unworthy and unlovable.

Attempts by caregivers to increase closeness can trigger in the child fear, distancing and acting out behaviors as the child attempts to protect themselves from the abandonment he or she fears.  These children exhibit a high need to control many situations in order to feel safe.  In Dyadic Developmental Attachment Therapy the therapist facilitates a restorative, corrective set of parent-child experiences which actively seek to repair the break in attachment and trust.   Attachment progress occurs when the child is increasingly able to trust, relinquish control, allow comforting by parents, have empathy for others, and take responsibility for actions.

Common Symptoms of Attachment Disorder:

• Emotional Distancing or Excessive Clingyness
• Frequent Uncontrollable Tantrums
• Oppositional Defiant Behavior
• Lack of Understanding of Consequences
• Lying, Stealing, Hoarding & Lack of Conscience Development