I don't know why some of these are sideways...they are not sideways until I upload them....
Monday, August 20, 2012
Neuro-Reorg And more
There was a time when we thought the best possible scenario would be that our children would be a "favorite" at the orphanage, and the nannies would love them and take them home and cuddle with them. That this would teach them bonding and attachment, and they would slide into our families with an understanding of what it means to be loved by someone. I never had the illusion that a child adopted from any orphanage would be like a child raised in a family from birth, but we did have this false illusion that as a favorite, they would learn valuable bonding and attachment skills before coming to us.
Of course we knew that in orphanages, there are many babies. There are many babies and there are few nannies and there are schedules to follow and diapers to change and bottles to make and wash. But how lucky for us! Violet was a “favorite” at her orphanage. Because she is from a wealthy province, there are many fewer infant abandonments in her province than in others, and those children that are found in orphanages are usually children with special needs. In the case of Violet’s orphanage, most of the children were much older and significantly mentally handicapped, although I know during her time there were a few cleft babies as well. When we were there, it was predominantly the older mentally handicapped children. So when they said, “she was basically the one healthy baby, and we all loved her, so we took her home with us on holidays”, we thought, how wonderful! She has known love!
But the converse of that is really quite ugly. The act of bringing her home with them on holidays was kind and loving, and done with only the best intentions, and we cannot fault the nannies, because in their eyes they were performing a loving task. But the larger picture is that she was continually brought to a loving home, where she was more than likely doted upon by multiple people and cuddled and hugged and given treats, then brought back to the same orphanage to receive the same level of “average” orphanage care time after time. It was not so much that she was given “special time”, but in the mind of a baby and a toddler, she was repeatedly “SENT BACK” again and again. It was proven time and again that she was not good enough to stay with the families who took her for several days and cuddled and coddled her, and she was sent back.
This we now realize, did more to hurt our poor sweet girl than to help her. In the adult view, the child is being given a “treat.” In the child’s eyes, she is being punished over and over again.
We continue to see two sides to our sweet girl. She is loving and sweet and has the best cuddles. One of my favorite times with her is when she just wakes up from sleep, and she just wants to sit and cuddle with us. Or when she shouts out “I uv oooo!” (I love you.) She has an amazing sense of humor and is VERY smart, and even though she is still not speaking a lot of English yet, her receptive language is very developed and she knows how to play a joke without using words. I am convinced she will be the class clown in school. The other side is difficult, and it’s what the world does not want to hear. So if you want the sweet happy adoption story, go find another blog. Because we have reality here. And sometimes reality is rough. It is exhausting, it is stressful, and it is wearing on you. We continue to go to OT for her Sensory Integration issues, and we see some benefit, but it is a small portion of everything. We are waiting for an appointment with an attachment therapist. She comes highly recommended by a few people, (including our Neuro-reorg therapist, more on that in a moment), so while it is challenging to get an appointment with her, we will wait. Hopefully we won’t need to wait too long. We are also starting a 2 year program this Sunday called Neuro-reorganization. I cannot effectively explain it, although I’ve seen some excellent descriptions of it. After an initial evaluation, we are given exercises to do which serve to mimic normal development in infants- it involves a lot of creeping, crawling, and vestibular and proprioceptive inputs. By taking the body through these sequences in the order in which they normally would go (when children are not confined to a crib for 20 hours a day for instance and are fed and changed when hungry and wet), then we can actually create new pathways in the brain which repair those previously formed during trauma. But this is not an easy route. As I said, this is a 2 year commitment- at some point we “graduate”- and the time you put in and the age of the child determines the exact length, 2-3 years is average, since Violet is so young it could be less than 2 years. The exercises, from what we understand, can take an hour to an hour and a half a day, or some days perhaps up to 3 hours. This is not an “easy fix”. But we firmly believe this will help our child. When she is angry, she throws whatever is closest- if nothing is close she will remove her shoe to throw it. She will grab her sister’s hair and pull it hard and not let go, then when we remove her hands, she laughs and comes to me for cuddles. She will run after a random child she has never seen before to hit them and then come smiling at me as if to say “look how great I did!” These are not things that kids do “because they are two”. We love our children, and we want to see the best for them. We want the sweet and happy Violet to win out over the hurt Violet.
Neuro-Reorg will be difficult. It will not be fun, but we cannot wait to start because we know we will see improvements. I am sure there will be days we hate it, and days we love it because we see improvements. We may need support and understanding. We do need understanding and empathy when our child screams and we seem to do nothing because we are so emotionally wiped out we have nothing left to give for that day. Last week my hands and wrists were sore for days because I had spent so much time restraining Violet from hurting her sister. This is where we are now. We have good days and bad days. We tell our children, “we love you ALL THE TIME,” and that is absolutely 100% the truth. Because in all this, we know that there is a hurt little girl inside, who is trying to figure out what is right and if we are really going to stick around or not. More often than not lately she has been a monkey around my neck- desperately holding on afraid that I will disappear in a heartbeat if she is not holding on for dear life. Our little girl, so afraid, so sad, and so unsure that we are permanent. And now we are moving, which will only serve to make her more unsure of permanence. We tell her “wherever our family is together, that is our home”, but I know it will set us back quite a bit more. Fortunately it coincides with the start of the Neuro-Reorg activities, so we have nowhere to go but up.
Of course we knew that in orphanages, there are many babies. There are many babies and there are few nannies and there are schedules to follow and diapers to change and bottles to make and wash. But how lucky for us! Violet was a “favorite” at her orphanage. Because she is from a wealthy province, there are many fewer infant abandonments in her province than in others, and those children that are found in orphanages are usually children with special needs. In the case of Violet’s orphanage, most of the children were much older and significantly mentally handicapped, although I know during her time there were a few cleft babies as well. When we were there, it was predominantly the older mentally handicapped children. So when they said, “she was basically the one healthy baby, and we all loved her, so we took her home with us on holidays”, we thought, how wonderful! She has known love!
But the converse of that is really quite ugly. The act of bringing her home with them on holidays was kind and loving, and done with only the best intentions, and we cannot fault the nannies, because in their eyes they were performing a loving task. But the larger picture is that she was continually brought to a loving home, where she was more than likely doted upon by multiple people and cuddled and hugged and given treats, then brought back to the same orphanage to receive the same level of “average” orphanage care time after time. It was not so much that she was given “special time”, but in the mind of a baby and a toddler, she was repeatedly “SENT BACK” again and again. It was proven time and again that she was not good enough to stay with the families who took her for several days and cuddled and coddled her, and she was sent back.
This we now realize, did more to hurt our poor sweet girl than to help her. In the adult view, the child is being given a “treat.” In the child’s eyes, she is being punished over and over again.
We continue to see two sides to our sweet girl. She is loving and sweet and has the best cuddles. One of my favorite times with her is when she just wakes up from sleep, and she just wants to sit and cuddle with us. Or when she shouts out “I uv oooo!” (I love you.) She has an amazing sense of humor and is VERY smart, and even though she is still not speaking a lot of English yet, her receptive language is very developed and she knows how to play a joke without using words. I am convinced she will be the class clown in school. The other side is difficult, and it’s what the world does not want to hear. So if you want the sweet happy adoption story, go find another blog. Because we have reality here. And sometimes reality is rough. It is exhausting, it is stressful, and it is wearing on you. We continue to go to OT for her Sensory Integration issues, and we see some benefit, but it is a small portion of everything. We are waiting for an appointment with an attachment therapist. She comes highly recommended by a few people, (including our Neuro-reorg therapist, more on that in a moment), so while it is challenging to get an appointment with her, we will wait. Hopefully we won’t need to wait too long. We are also starting a 2 year program this Sunday called Neuro-reorganization. I cannot effectively explain it, although I’ve seen some excellent descriptions of it. After an initial evaluation, we are given exercises to do which serve to mimic normal development in infants- it involves a lot of creeping, crawling, and vestibular and proprioceptive inputs. By taking the body through these sequences in the order in which they normally would go (when children are not confined to a crib for 20 hours a day for instance and are fed and changed when hungry and wet), then we can actually create new pathways in the brain which repair those previously formed during trauma. But this is not an easy route. As I said, this is a 2 year commitment- at some point we “graduate”- and the time you put in and the age of the child determines the exact length, 2-3 years is average, since Violet is so young it could be less than 2 years. The exercises, from what we understand, can take an hour to an hour and a half a day, or some days perhaps up to 3 hours. This is not an “easy fix”. But we firmly believe this will help our child. When she is angry, she throws whatever is closest- if nothing is close she will remove her shoe to throw it. She will grab her sister’s hair and pull it hard and not let go, then when we remove her hands, she laughs and comes to me for cuddles. She will run after a random child she has never seen before to hit them and then come smiling at me as if to say “look how great I did!” These are not things that kids do “because they are two”. We love our children, and we want to see the best for them. We want the sweet and happy Violet to win out over the hurt Violet.
Neuro-Reorg will be difficult. It will not be fun, but we cannot wait to start because we know we will see improvements. I am sure there will be days we hate it, and days we love it because we see improvements. We may need support and understanding. We do need understanding and empathy when our child screams and we seem to do nothing because we are so emotionally wiped out we have nothing left to give for that day. Last week my hands and wrists were sore for days because I had spent so much time restraining Violet from hurting her sister. This is where we are now. We have good days and bad days. We tell our children, “we love you ALL THE TIME,” and that is absolutely 100% the truth. Because in all this, we know that there is a hurt little girl inside, who is trying to figure out what is right and if we are really going to stick around or not. More often than not lately she has been a monkey around my neck- desperately holding on afraid that I will disappear in a heartbeat if she is not holding on for dear life. Our little girl, so afraid, so sad, and so unsure that we are permanent. And now we are moving, which will only serve to make her more unsure of permanence. We tell her “wherever our family is together, that is our home”, but I know it will set us back quite a bit more. Fortunately it coincides with the start of the Neuro-Reorg activities, so we have nowhere to go but up.
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