Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. We're the Nelsons. I'm Shaun.
And I'm Lanette. And we are excited to be back with more episodes for our celebration of National Adoption Month.
Yeah, we hope that the things that we share this month, typically about three episodes a week,
will help you in your observation of and recognition of National Adoption Month.
Yeah, we're really grateful for the opportunity to be sharing different perspectives and opinions
and always looking for that chance to learn. It's really one of our big themes here to listen and learn,
especially listen and learn from adoptees, but also from birth parents.
There's always something new that we can learn to help us do better going forward.
Yeah, so this month we're putting out several episodes a week.
You'll hear episodes conducted by us or by Alicia Gallacher, who's our Director of Communications.
And again, we just hope to kind of flood the podcast sphere with adoption content for this month.
Also, we're getting really close to 100 episodes, which is super exciting.
So this is helping with that too. Little side perk.
Perfect.
So we hope you enjoy this episode. And at the end, we'll chat just a little bit about our newsletter.
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Hey there. So today we are really excited to hear a little bit more from an adoptee, Sarah Odacio.
She shared with us on our Instagram last week during our adoptee takeover.
And she talked about adoption and ruptured attachments.
And we had a lot of questions and thoughts as she talked.
And it was really impactful for us.
And so we did some research afterward and thought we'd do an episode where we talk about attachment and adoption.
So we're going to hear from Sarah and we're going to talk a little bit more about it.
I want to share a perspective that I've had as I've thought and pondered the different ways that I had sabotaging behavior towards my mom as a kid and into my teen years.
I definitely had sabotaging behaviors and not accepting her care and attention and love to me.
And I do believe those were feelings of grief and anger that I had towards the ruptured attachment of my first mom.
Those feelings were being transferred onto my mom who was in that caregiving, nurturing role.
And I think that's probably not the only my part.
And my case probably isn't the only case of a similar situation where the people that are caring for us now get the result of our broken trust from people that we don't even have contact with now.
At least for my situation, I don't have contact with birth mom.
But my mom and my family and my close relationships get the result of the struggles that I have of having that broken trust from my first family.
I always love talking to Sarah. She's really fun to talk to and she works with people as a counselor.
She helps adoptees especially to work through different traumas and grief.
And she's just so wise. So I loved hearing her talk about how ruptured attachment impacted her relationship, especially with her adopted mother and the challenges that that presented in her life.
And it really got me thinking about how my own relationships might look, what my own attachment style might be and how I can help those in my life with their attachments as well.
And so I started doing some research and reading on this and found some work by Dr. Bruce D. Perry.
Now we talked about one of his books really recently. He and Oprah wrote the book What Happened to You Together and it's an excellent book.
So definitely recommend that book. But before that book even came out, he did lots of research looking at children and their attachment experiences.
And so he has an article. It's called Maltreated Children Experience Brain Development and the Next Generation.
And he really dove into this subject there. First of all, when we're talking about bonding with children and bonding with anyone really the word bonded.
It's like insinuating of what he says is emotional glue. It's the idea or the concept that we are bonded by love.
So each individual's ability to form and maintain relationships using this kind of emotional glue is going to be different.
Some people are going to be able to more naturally form attachments and express love while for others it might be more challenging.
It might look different. And so there's a capacity and a desire to form these emotional relationships.
But what that looks like and the ability to do that, it's related to the organization and the functioning of different parts of the human brain.
So Dr. Perry talks about how attachment in early childhood is basically this special bond with a primary caregiver and an infant.
And how this attachment bond has a few key elements. So he talks about three. One is that the attachment bond is an enduring emotional relationship with a specific person.
Second, the relationship brings comfort. It brings safety. Third, loss or threat of loss of that person evokes intense distress.
So basically this relationship is like a close bond. It's like maternal child relationships is really the typical relationship you'd see that fits this definition.
And so Dr. Perry talks about how there's a solid and healthy attachment with a primary caregiver.
And when you have that quality relationship, there's a high probability that that child is going to grow up and be able to have healthy relationships with other people.
Whereas if you have a child who has a poor relationship or poor attachment to their primary caregiver, then there's an association with having emotional problems, behavioral problems later in life and having more trouble with attachment with others.
One thing that I read in his work that was really interesting to me, this surprised me honestly.
He said that there is a biological capacity to bond and form attachments. It is absolutely, he said.
I think he said most certainly this is genetically determined. So there's a genetic like predisposition right for potential bonding and attachment.
But there's like a but there too right. It's going to depend on nurture right. This is a little evocative to me of the nature versus nurture discussion.
So there's genetic potential for bonding and attachment, but it really comes down to the quantity of bonding and like time or the patterns of early life experiences that show what that potential becomes over time in a person.
So what a child needs is predictable, responsive and nurturing caregiving.
And so with that, an infant is going to be able to have normal bonding and attachment and without it that might not be realized for that person as they grow up, especially.
So a few specific explanations of what we're really talking about here. Dr. Perry says that this is really like being responsive if the baby's crying, nurturing and rocking, holding the baby, singing to them, feeding them, locking eyes, having eye contact.
Those are really the nurturing behaviors that he's talking about. And so he says quantity really does matter. In fact, it's crucial to bonding in childhood.
So spending lots of time together is so important in developing these secure attachments.
He also says that face to face interactions, eye contact, physical proximity, touch and other primary sensory experiences are so key and relevant in determining a secure bond.
So all of this to say scientists believe that the most important factor in creating attachment is having positive physical contact like hugging, holding, rocking the baby.
So the most important relationship in a child's life is the attachment to his or her primary caregiver.
And generally, traditionally, that's usually the mother. So healthy attachments to this primary caregiver are built by repetitive bonding experiences during infancy.
And this provides a solid foundation for future healthy relationships.
So that's a lot, right? That's a lot of information. But in adoption, we don't always have time with the children who become ours in their infancy.
We don't always have control over what bonding looked like before they came to our home. And so it's, I think, really important to understand all of that groundwork.
And in contrast, if we're having trouble bonding and attaching, it can lead to a more fragile biological and emotional foundation for that child in their future relationships.
And so doing our best to help heal any ruptures or any struggles in attachment is really so key, so vital.
So one question that seems to be commonly asked is whether attachment problems are always from abuse.
And Dr. Perry says no. He says that actually the majority of attachment problems are actually due to parents not even knowing or understanding what is developmentally needed for a child.
He says that many parents have not been educated about how important these experiences are, especially in the first three years of life for a child.
And so without that knowledge, knowledge is power, right? You can't be doing these things if it's not intentional or it's going to be harder to do things if it's not intentional.
And so his directive for us is to have public education and policy support in these areas so that we can improve.
And what I thought of when I heard that was that this should really be part of adoption curriculum for adoptive parents to really understand better on a deeper level.
I don't feel like it's something that Shaun and I really understood on a deep level when we were adopting.
I think it would be really helpful information to have, especially knowing that there are genetic differences and predispositions to ease of bonding.
I think that's so key and bonding is naturally going to be more challenging in some of these different adoption situations.
And so I think that's a really great initiative for us to take on to try to really help inform others about the importance of secure attachment and understanding it before we go into an adoption situation.
All right. And so currently it's estimated that one in three people has some kind of attachment disorder, right?
One in three people. Isn't that crazy? That's a ton of people.
And so like thirty three point three three three percent of the population is estimated to have either avoidant, ambivalent or resistant attachments with their primary caregiver.
And so just a really quick kind of overlook at what these different attachment classifications are.
So you could have secure attachment, right?
If a child is securely attached, they're going to be upset when their primary caregiver leaves the room.
They're going to warmly like welcome them back when they come back to the room.
They seek their comfort, but they're also willing to explore while their caregivers in the room.
They're not just like attached at the hip like they feel comfortable and confident exploring.
So that's what a secure attachment looks like.
And one year old children generally from studies, it looks like about 60 to 70 percent of one year olds have this secure attachment to their primary caregiver.
So insecure avoidant attachment is when the child will ignore their caregiver when they're present.
They don't seem very distressed if there's separation and they don't really respond when the caregiver returns to the room.
In fact, they might even like avoid them, like turn away from them.
And so that's about 15 to 20 percent of one year olds display that whereas insecure resistant attachment.
It means that the child would have very little exploration while their caretakers in the room.
They just want to like stay close to them.
They're really distressed if caretaker leaves the room.
And then when they return, they're like upset and angry or ambivalent.
And so that's about 10 to 15 percent of one year old to have been studied.
And then the fourth type is insecure, disorganized or insecure, disoriented attachment.
And so in this attachment style, you'll see confusion about whether they should approach or avoid their caregiver.
They're going to be most distressed by separation.
And then upon return of a caretaker, they're confused, maybe dazed.
It's kind of like all over the place.
And so you'll see that in about five to 10 percent of one year olds.
So that's a little overlook of what these different attachments look like.
And so one in three people has one of those insecure attachments.
Which is a lot of people. Right.
I was so shocked by this.
I feel like this really is something that we need a lot more education and public policy regarding to help increase secure attachments.
So with all of this information, what do we do with this?
Right.
Something that I really appreciated from one of the resources that I found as I was reading about attachment.
We will include this in the show notes.
But there's a website called child trauma dot org.
And there were eight different tips of what we can do to help nurture these children after all of this information from Dr.
Perry.
So number one, we can try to understand the behavior before punishment or consequences.
So if you have a child who's behaving in a way that's frustrating and isn't really making sense, let's try to understand what this behavior means, where it's coming from, what's going on before we say, hey, time out, go to your room or, you know, have some kind of punishment bestowed.
That's not going to help if we have a knee jerk reaction of anger or sending them away. Instead, we want to try to understand what's really going on, get to the root of what's happened.
Number two, we want to help these children.
We want to parent these children based on their emotional age.
Number three, we need to be consistent and predictable and repetitive.
Consistent, predictable and repetitive.
I really like that.
That's a lot to wrap your head around, or at least it was for me.
But consistent parenting will help promote secure attachments and creating an environment where it's not this volatile, hostile environment is going to make it feel less secure to a child.
So if you want to help nurture your children and help them develop some more secure attachments, you want to be consistent.
All right.
Number four, we need to model and teach appropriate social behaviors.
So a lot of children who have insecure attachments, they might end up being very huggy or affectionate with all kinds of people and seem to have like no fear of other people.
And while it might look like that means they have secure attachment, it actually really doesn't.
It means it's an insecure attachment.
And so it's really important to model and teach children that it's really not OK to go hug the stranger at the grocery store or sit on a man's lap that you don't know.
These really aren't good behaviors, but you want to teach them and model that in a way that's not going to make them feel ashamed.
Like you want to do it in a natural way that helps them to learn, but gently so you can read more about this on child trauma.org.
But that's a really important one.
Number five, we need to listen to and talk with these children, which isn't a huge key, right?
We always want to be listening to children to help them.
Number six, we need to have realistic expectations.
Number seven, seven, be patient with children's progress and with yourself.
And number eight, take care of yourself, too.
I thought that was a great list of some takeaways for what we can do as we go about these potentially challenging.
Situations of helping children to work through ruptured attachments, helping children to hopefully develop more secure attachments and feel that safety with us.
So hopefully this is some helpful information.
And I really do encourage you to look up more from Dr. Perry.
He is so helpful.
I really loved his book.
What happened to you and highly recommend that to you and really appreciate you being here and learning with us.
About ruptured attachments and what different attachment styles look like.
So a big thanks to Sarah for helping us to think more about this subject.
It was so helpful to hear her personal experiences with it and for us to do a deep dive and to keep learning about it.
So big thank you to Sarah.
We encourage you to continue to keep learning, too.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
The Open Adoption Project.
Yeah, we're so grateful to be able to share a lot of content this month, November 2023 for National Adoption Month.
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Yeah, thank you so much for being here and learning with us as we just keep talking and learning about all of these different nuances of adoption.