A recent Google search for Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) located a 2002 article (and not much else) written by a psychologist who specializes in adoption psychology.  She was writing about a child who was adopted as a preschooler, and her solutions for that child's attachment issues.  

I was heartbroken to find the following dismal bit of "expert" advice:  It may take until the child has reached adulthood to experience attachment.  If waiting that long would be a problem, then it would be better to adopt a child with an extremely low risk profile who isn’t as likely to frustrate you.

WHAT!?!  Let’s say that I’m an adoptive parent who has survived weeks, months, and years of prolonged battles in which my child screams that I’m not the “real” mother, and I never will be.  And while that child is now (blessedly) sleeping, I turn to the internet for any glimmer of hope, only to find out that I should have avoided “frustration” by adopting a lower risk child.  Would this "expert" dare to say that I'm weak because I see the situation needs help?  

The cruelty and absurdity of this so-called expert advice is, frankly, horrifying to me as a trauma recovery professional.  Of course the adoptive parent finds the relationship “problematic.”  There's screaming instead of hugging.  There's rage instead of giggles.  Of course every mother, every parent, wants a close and loving bond with the child they are raising.  And, even more, every adoptive parent has the most noble of intentions to create a loving and supportive life for their adoptive child who was innocently lacking that.  

Adoptive parents must pass through a gauntlet for the privilege.

There may be accidental pregnancy, but there’s no accidental adoption!

The psychologist goes on to recommend a formal RAD evaluation, family foot massages, modifications to time out, and the use of reward systems.  She then suggests that it would be best -- of stealing, setting fires, killing pets, and hoarding food -- to pick the issue that poses a safety problem.  There’s no mention of cutting, suicide threats, bulimia, running away, substance abuses, pregnancy, crime, or truancy.  She advises homeschooling or the purchase of a wardrobe that reflects the latest trends for easier socialization.  

Family foot massages!?!  How does this effectively resolve the adoptive child’s internal meaning that they’re so worthless that their mother gave them away?  What level of anger and challenge continues to arise from that meaning?  

Parents tell me that in addition to everything that’s invested in adopting, they've also flown all over the country seeing one specialist after another.  They live in fear for their child and of their child.  The parents and siblings are themselves traumatized by the chaos that has unraveled their previously loving home.  Guilt is woven into wondering what life would have been like now had they never adopted.  Spousal alienation and legal complexities aren’t even the worst-case outcomes.

Trauma is resolvable.  Traumatic events do create a meaning, a state of hypervigilance.  Traumatic events have an ongoing effect until the trauma is understood in different terms – not just intellectually, but all the way through mind and body.  The threat must be shifted so that it's done.  It has to be all the way gone, even when the child is asleep.  

What I do as a trauma therapist causes meaning, and therefore ongoing experience, to shift so that the threat is over.  Even more importantly, what was a threat now becomes wisdom.  It has value.  We all understand the idea that the strongest steel goes through the hottest fire.  But that poses no comfort at all when a person is still standing in the fire and can never foresee a time when the fire will be out.  

When the threat is deeply experienced as completed, then reactivity immediately decreases.  The warning system shuts down.  Until that happens, the trauma will always be the governing protective principle.

In other words:  I'm not being born by accident to someone who failed to raise me.  It's over.  I survived it.  I don't have to fix that problem, it has been fixed. 

A threat that has been defeated does create strength and peace.  Look for a therapist trained in Rapid Resolution Therapy or other brain-based methods that allow long-standing neurological circuits.  Or work with me by Skype.  These methods cause the way brain has gone over and over the same old thought or experience – to literally release and rewire.  Brain changes.  This may be a new way of thinking about the problem, but science shows that it’s more effective than just trying to talk it out.  Brains are plastic, changeable, throughout a lifetime.  

It’s never too late, and no threat is too great to rewire.  And it's certainly never too soon!

Attachment disorder is a family problem.  It's viral.  Everyone in the house is touched by it.  Find a therapist who will  work with all immediate family members – an, on occasion, extended family members, to cause the entire system to rewire away from the ongoing experience of direct or vicarious threat.  Now it all calms down, and life can go forward based on something else – like other families.