Attachment Disorder and the Adoptive Family

byBrenda McCreight, Ph.D.

How the child interprets his world

Attachment disorder is considered a disorder because it is a psychiatric condition that has the potential to negatively impact the child’s life forever. However, if you look at it from the child’s point of view, failing to attach to a parent figure is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if there has never before been a parent figure willing to attach to the child. This is entirely new territory for the child. He does not understand what is expected of him, and he becomes overwhelmed by the constant demands to be different than he is.

The parents are often going through the same kind of feelings as the child. The negative behaviours that are part of attachment problems are very wearing for an adoptive parent. It can seem like there is never a moment when the parent can sit back and relax. Instead, there is always another unpleasant surprise coming at them from the child. Yet, as odd as it may seem, this is also how it is for the child. The child may view the parent’s attempt to provide love and affection as frightening because it is so unfamiliar; and, the child may become exhausted from never having a moment to relax without the adoptive parents coming at them with another expectation and another rule. It is a risk for a young child to let his guard down and begin to trust when his entire life history (as short as it is) has been based on adults letting him down or leaving him. In fact, the more the child’s starts to feel like trusting the parents the more dangerous the situation becomes because this is when the child begins to consciously tread into the terror of all the previous abandonment. For the child, it is like creeping toward the blackest abyss of all. His basic coping mechanism, the thing that has kept him alive and sane through the darkest of experiences and the deepest of fears, has been to keep people at a safe distance. And suddenly he’s handed over to an adoptive parent who wants to have a level of emotional closeness that the child did not even know existed. It is like throwing a life jacket to a fish. The fish knows he doesn’t need it, knows it doesn’t fit, and sees no reason to do anything with it. It’s just one more object in the emotional ocean that the fish has to swim around.

The child’s experience has taught him several lessons that he believes are necessary to his survival. These are:

• 1. nothing lasts
• 2. everyone leaves
• 3. adults lie to children
• 4. adults hurt children
• 5. he can never let down his emotional guard

These hard learned lessons become part of his internal, unconscious, rule book for survival. While other babies were learning how to trust their parents, he was learning how to withdraw emotionally from parenting figures. While other children were learning how to behave from their parents, he was learning how to protect himself from his parents.

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