Adoption, Trauma and Attachment Disorder in Teens
Adoption is a beautiful and redemptive event, but it’s one that does involve loss. For the child, the loss is not remembered but it’s also not forgotten; it can operate as an invisible force and, therefore, has to be brought to consciousness so that it can be dealt with. Often there is loss on both sides—the parents inability to have children and the child’s loss of her biological family. For the teen, we work to help her realize that she is continuing to behave as if she is going to be abandoned at any moment. We try to help her understand the very real (but until then mysterious) source of her fears, and then to distinguish between real and imagined threats of abandonment.