Our youngest daughter has severe PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and RAD (reactive attachment disorder). The first time that we met with her new psychiatrist about a month ago, he talked about thinking of RAD as being like an arranged marriage in the sense that neither you nor the child chose this circumstance and now you need to learn to love each other.
At first, the words landed, but didn’t quite hit home for me. I understood that obviously my daughter had not asked to be orphaned or to then be adopted, but I had signed up to adopt and had then later even signed papers indicating that I would adopt HER.
I specifically agreed to adopt her after the referral for she and her brother had come to us. I agreed to adopt them. I had seen their pictures. I knew their information (though almost none of what we read, including their ages was accurate) and I agreed to this adoption. Therefore, I did not initially see how this was an arranged marriage on my end.
I also felt a bit defensive at his implication that I would need to learn to love her because of course I already love her. I have to. She is my daughter.
For days after the appointment, his words circulated in my head as I tried to decide how I felt about them and what they meant for me. There was some truth there. I love my daughter and feel bonded to her, but due to the attachment difficulties on her end and what that has looked like in terms of her reaction to that, I have struggled in my attachment to her as well.
Initially, I attached to her easily. When her RAD behaviours came to the forefront and she began actively pushing me away, over time, I did begin to find myself feeling less attached to her.
Although I of course still love her, that love has been tested and is not easy. At times, it has been stretched so thin that I could barely hold onto the thread of it.
That is hard to say. It’s hard to admit and even harder to know that it is the truth.
In regards to the psychiatrist’s statement about RAD being like an arranged marriage, I have come to some conclusions about how that applies to me personally. When I signed up to adopt this child, my daughter, I did not know her history.
I did not know of her trauma and the impact that it had had on her developing brain. I did not know how my own limits and sanity and patience and marriage and beliefs and parenting would be challenged and rocked to the core because of that. I did not know what lay beneath the surface.
In terms of an arranged marriage, it was as if someone had shown me a picture of a very nice looking young man from a neighbouring village and I had agreed to marry him and then on the day of my wedding, I arrived and was presented with the same man but with his face grotesquely disfigured from an accident.
The accident was obviously not his fault and somewhere beneath the scarring, he was still the same man, but it would take time and a lot of work to discover that. That is what living with RAD is like.
The daughter I thought I would have exists underneath another one, one who has been grotesquely disfigured and scarred by trauma and I have to learn to love her and hope that someday I am able to see the girl she really was meant to be.
It will be a long process, a hard process. It will be made harder by the fact that this is like an arranged marriage for her too. She never asked for another mama. She didn’t want to be taken from her culture and everything she knew and brought to this new country, this new family. She has a lot of adjusting to do too. She is scared to trust again, to get hurt again.
It will take time. It will take work. But hopefully in the end, this will be a “marriage” that will grow rich and deep and be filled with a love that is based on each of us choosing the other. She will need to decide to choose to love me and I will need to learn to love her all over again…this time through her scars.
Update: I wrote this years ago when things were still quite raw. We were in the muck of daily behaviours due to RAD and it was hard at that time to see the light. It was interesting today to read back through this. I could recognize the despair I felt at the time, but at the same time, I can see so much hope interspersed between the words I shared. A lot has changed since then. To read an update on how our RAD journey with our daughter is progressing, read this.
If you’re looking for information about Reactive Attachment Disorder:
What I Wish You Knew About Parenting a Child with RAD Recognizing the Signs of Reactive Attachment Disorder