The story By now you may have read the headlines such as “YouTuber Myka Stauffer Reveals Adoption Dissolution 2 Years After Welcoming Son Home from China.” You may have even viewed the original adoptive parents’ tearful YouTube video about the …
The Challenge Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo? It stands for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words per day for the month of November. At the end, you will have a text roughly equivalent to …
Winter break always gets me to thinking, and this time it has me pondering the implications of raising a child diagnosed with RAD. I don’t know if all the things I have done to help my child will bear long-term …
New Year, New Who? 5 Trauma-Informed Resolutions Read more »
Last week on the blog, I told you a little about what life was like with my son with complex early trauma. I talked about the lying, the stealing, the fear, the things we did to protect ourselves and him. …
I have moved into a new phase in life, especially my parenting life. My last child has moved out of the house. Another child visited for the summer, so we didn’t experience a true empty nest immediately. Yet it is …
As a trauma and emotion-centered psychotherapist, I am relieved that children are now being screened for toxic stress. Thinking about mental health as a byproduct of a child’s environment is an important addition to current thinking on how to improve …
ACEs and Toxic Stress: How We Can Heal Children’s Brains Read more »
[original version published on Parenting with ACEs on June 5, 2016] There are many adults with low ACE scores who parent children with high ACE scores. These parents are often feisty and fierce advocates who tirelessly seek out support, strategies and …
Trauma-Informed Parenting: What Adoptive & Foster Parents Can Teach About ACEs Read more »
1) There are (at least) 2 kinds of being brave. One is an illusion in which we tell ourselves a version of events that we would like to be true. The other is the real deal. It involves facing our …
What I Learned -or Remembered- when I Read Brave Read more »
–by Laura Dennis I don’t know about you, but parenting a child who has suffered trauma and been diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder can bring out a side of me no one should ever see. I’ve yelled far more than …
–by Julie Beem In early October I fell and broke my left knee cap (annihilated it into pieces is a more accurate description). The skillful surgeon put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but I was ordered to remain immobile for …