Our Survivor

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!