Our Survivor

We just got back from a great visit with our amazing survivor. It was a warm, emotional reunion and she talked and talked and hugged us. Knowing how hard closeness has been for her in the past it was a good sign. We shared some snacks, played some UNO, she gave us a tour of the place, and we brought her some books she has been wanting. I know that she is still in the initial stages of healing, but we were so encouraged that meetings like this would even be possible.

Thank you to everyone who has partnered with us thus far and to those who are willing to join us now. You are making a difference in the life and hope of this prescious girl. 

Our girl has her lifetimes worth of healing to do in her brain, and seem like it is never going to happen. After years of trauma, violence, fear in the home we can get hopeless that there can be something, anything, good in all of this. And despite people who claim to know how to help, it is easy to live in despair as everything they try falls flat… But God!

Hope and Fear:

8 months ago when we sent our girl to a therapeutic school we had only a little bit of hope and a lot of fear. But we have seen evidence of change in our girl that is more real and hopeful that we have see in all the other work we have put into her healing in the past. When our Survivor first went to the therapeutic school in Jamaica they did an initial assessment of her including a detailed brain scan. That scan gave great clarity to what was going on in her brain: clear responses to trauma, high commitment of the brain to stay in fight/flight/freeze/faint, sleep related issues, depression, anxiety…. and the list goes on for quite a while. That may seem overwhelming, but for us it was confirming. As a parent you second guess everything and this move was not just anything, it was really big and expensive and life changing. To have a licensed therapist and technician give evidence in her brain of the crisis she was in, confirmed that we were at last on a good path. 

Hard Work:

Over these last 8 months our survivor has had the hard task of really working on her brain and healing. She has regular neurofeedback sessions that focus on specific things identified in her brain scan. She has a much more rigid schedule and rules to comply with and everything she does wrong or right is marked down and reviewed with her and with us monthly. She is on a very healthy diet with increased exercise as healing the mind is often linked with healing in the body. She is pushed to keep progressing well in school, and when she cannot control herself she has to stop and do specific exercises (probably the wrong word but it kind of fits) that help the brain to reset, get grounded and safe, and help her regain control of her mind and emotions. It is hard and she is honest about how hard it is and what she does not like about it. 

Evidence of Healing:

As hard as this time has been for her we see glimpses of happiness and hope in her that have not been there before! Certainly happiness is not the measure for improved mental health, and a child can feel happy for a lot of reasons that don’t connect with healing. But when we look at her attitude, especially at a time of year that is typically her most violent, and also look at what she is valuing and how she is responding on our calls as well as the feedback from the program’s director, the picture is the most positive it has been in years. A few weeks ago I received an updated brain scan for our girl… The areas that they worked most on showed a significant improvement that affected her with reduced anxiety and better ability to concentrate. As often is with our brain, we may work on one thing but the whole brain engages in some way and it has an effect. For our Survivor it is seen in a  significant decrease in her brain’s commitment to staying in fight/flight/freeze/faint. So the smile on her face is partly because she isn’t just trying to survive, but is learning to live and thrive.

I share this all because you have partnered in that healing with your prayers and financial gifts. We are so blessed and thankful for your partnership, help and love. May the Lord richly bless you all in this new year, guiding and directing your steps for His kingdom!

It has only been a few months and there is so much to be thankful for. Our girl is now at the residential treatment facility and is getting used to the changes. Though it is really hard for her, she is responding well to her therapist there. Our prayer is that interaction would lay a foundation for her to lean into the work she needs to do for healing.

Our family is also learning to heal, the trauma that this brought into the home has created sort of a PTSD to different degrees with many in the home. The stress has also resulted in some physical issues for some that are being worked on. We are thankful for the healing, for the support and the encouragement we have been receiving. I am reminded by the administrator at the residential facility that none of the healing for either our girl or the rest of the family will come quickly. It will be slow and in small bites, but we are moving that direction together.

Answering some frequent questions:

How often do you get to talk with your girl? At this point we are on a call with her every week. When she is in a place to accept the work that needs to be done to heal her brain, we will also have a joint therapy session with her monthly.

How long will she be there? The simple answer is 2-3 years, but that is only because she will age out and may be able to opt into a plus 1 year. The more detailed answer is that to do this well she will have to go through several stages and the 1^st one is the hardest because it is getting the child out of survival mode long enough to really work on the brain healing. That phase sounds simple but it is the hardest part and can take from 6 mo. – 2.5 yrs! The healing work can be about 1+ yrs., and then reconnecting them with the more healed mind back into the family will also take some time.

How are the Finances coming? We are rejoicing at having received gifts and pledges that cover 20 months!!!! That has been so amazing and it includes the cost of flights for the required visits, an estimated amount for medical, school costs, therapy, room and board… so much! That leaves either 4 (or 16 months) left to cover. I am adding the 4 month part to our goal until we know if they will allow the additional time.

How can we pray for you?

–         Pray that she will be able to get out of survival mode sooner and really start doing the healing work. The longer time she has to really work on healing the brain, the better her long-term prognosis is.

–        Pray for our family, we have lost so much and have so much healing to go through. As our kids get approach the ages where they are getting ready to move out and start their own lives we desire to help them heal enough so they can thrive.

–          Pray for her medicine. They are not able to get one of her medicines there so we need to find a way for her to meet with her med provider over telehealth and see if they will prescribe it for her and then have us get it delivered to the facility. There are a lot of logistics with this that must get figured out.

–          Pray also for what comes next. There is a lot of fear of her coming home because of the violence. It may be healthier to help her get set up on her own, but that will also be hard. We ask the Lord to guide all of our steps in this.

We are so thankfull for all the gifts and all the prayers we have recieved. Our girl has now been at the residential facility for 3 weeks as of tomorrow. This evening was the first time we have been able to get on a call with her. It was both good and hard. Good so see her and know she is healthy, hard to see her hurting as she wants to go come home so bad. 

The facility moved to a new location this last week, something that has been in the works for a very long time. Hurrican proof housing, beautiful grounds, about 200 goats for the kids to care for, new school areas, gardens, and areas for teaching working skills. The goats are her favorite and school her least favorite. 

Thank you all for your continued prayer and support – we certainly feel the covering of God in this!

What is RAD anyway

I am not a doctor or therapist, but for the sake of my daughter I have dug through different websites sites, read books and talked with therapists for years that have helped me understand symptoms, developmental causes, possibilities, and therapeutic options. I am going to take a stab at sharing a very basic understanding of RAD and the brain. I hope this over-simplified description helps you get a feel for what our girl is dealing with.

NATURAL RESPONSE:

A healthy brain processes information both automatically (our heart beats, we breath, we flinch when something pokes us) through the brain stem and cognitively though what I will refer to as the “thinking” brain. Our senses feed information to our brain that is filtered thought a switch called an amygdala that tells the brain if the information coming in is safe or unsafe which helps our brain know if the brain has time to think about its response or not.

CRISIS RESPONSE:

When this switch tells our brain that the information is not safe, the brain moves into a crisis mode that bypasses our thinking brain in favor or our reaction brain. Often, we hear this talked about as fight/flight/freeze/faint mode. In this mode a person reacts without thinking in hopes of making it into a safe place again.

UNHEALTHY RESPONSE:

When a mind goes through significant ongoing trauma without the ability for the brain to stop and process it, the part of the brain the regulates emotions and processes memory stops working as well. Combined with that, the safety switch becoming more of a hair trigger causing the mind to go into that crisis mode too quickly. You may hear this referred to as PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD is one of a group of trauma and stress disorders that can cause someone to treat a normal situation as a crisis and react without control or restraint potentially causing harm to themselves and/or others.

RAD BRAIN:

As tragic as all trauma and stress disorders are, when that trauma occurs while the brain is still developing in early childhood the safety switch never learns what safe is, the cognitive brain does not develop beyond childhood, AND the emotion/memory processing center of the brain not only shows little to no activity, in some cases it is absent all together. In a RAD child, EVERYTHING they do is in attempt to survive. This form of trauma and stress disorder is referred to as, Reactive Attachment Disorder. The person with RAD can therefore be a slave to almost constant unsafe reactions to the world around them putting themselves and others in danger without warning.

HOW?!?!?:

A good perspective here on how this kind of trauma forms in a child in an institutional orphanage, or in an abusive home would be something like this: when these kids were babies, they likely cried and cried and nobody came. Have you ever been hungry when you fell asleep? And when you woke up you felt less hungry? That’s what our kids did. Same with a wet diaper. Cried, nobody came. Fell asleep. Woke up, didn’t notice the diaper as much later. The things a loving parent does with a newborn without thinking; making faces, making noises, responding to cries, bouncing as we hold them, touching their hands and feet. These are God-designed for healthy brain development. The brain has a window of development that does not happen again in life so if these things don’t happen well the child bears the damage in their brain their whole life!