Please download the Advocates for Children of Trauma brochure here.
Dear Friends,
I am the mother of an adopted child with numerous mental health issues. He has a history of severe abuse/neglect/ trauma. We adopted our son from Bulgaria at age 7 1/2 in Feb. 2000.
Our son has severe attachment disorder. At age 12 he severely beat me breaking my nose, knocking out 2 teeth and attempting to stab me repeatedly with a butcher knife. I had defensive knife wounds on my hands and contusions over my entire body. I had to flee to a neighbor's house in a foot of snow in my bare feet to escape. My son was arrested at gunpoint by 5 of our local police officers.
Our son has been in a Residential Treatment Center (RTC) and now a group home since the brutal attack in Jan. of 2005. We continue to be very involved in all aspects of his care and treatment. We have regular short home visits. Unfortunately to date he has not been able to be reached or helped to any great extent. His trauma was just too horrific. In addition, he was exposed to alcohol inutero and thus has fetal alcohol effect (FAE). There is no treatment for FAE; the damage is done before the child is even born and it cannot be repaired. These children often "act out" and have little impulse control, putting all those in close proximity in danger.
My story is only one of thousands of families out there under similar and even worse circumstances. The members of our group generally are adoptive parents, foster parents, or adoptive parents or guardians of children of relatives who were removed from their birth parents home because of severe abuse and neglect.
Often the therapies that have been most successful with our children are not covered by insurance and are very expensive and not within reach of some families’ financial situations. Parents have gone into deep debt or bankrupt trying to help their children heal. Medications often do not work on our children, or unusually high doses have to be prescribed with little benefit. This is the untold story that thousands of us are living this nightmare everyday and with few resources.
Our struggles and pleas for help fall on deaf ears. Social services often will not get involved unless our child is in the juvenile justice system and unfortunately a number of our children are. The police seldom want to get involved and don't know what to do with these kids either. Psychiatric hospitals will generally do a maximum of a 3 day hold where occasionally med changes are made, but mostly observation is the only intervention. The child is then returned to the family with the same issues and often with the same dangerous and out-of-control behavior as when they were admitted. Many of us have been told not to "come back" because there is nothing more that they can do. This leaves thousands of parents with children in crisis and their entire families in imminent danger with no recourse.
My husband David and I have been relentless in our attempts to help our son. We have worked with 2 excellent attachment therapists, 4 psychiatrists, a number of psychologists and have traveled from WI to Alexandria Virginia too see world renown neuro-psychiatrist Dr. Federici who specializes in attachment disorder. He has been a guest on numerous national TV programs.
What the general public does not understand is that these traumatized children don't know how to love and reject love at all costs. They instead become enraged and violent. Many parents (especially mothers are most often the target) are attacked, maimed, poisoned and even in rare instances killed. Siblings have also been attacked. Some are sexually assaulted by these traumatized children, often acting out what was done to them. Pets don't escape their wrath either. Family pets have been abused, maimed and killed at the hands of our children. Our lives are in constant chaos and damage control. Our other children get emotionally neglected because so much time and energy is spent on the disturbed child.
Lisa Eberhardt
Oak Creek WI.
dave_eberhardt@ execpc.com