Adoption 101: Memory
Just when I think I have said all I have to say, I realize there is yet another angle to discuss. This time it is memory, or more specifically, the lack of memory.
I will admit that this is an aspect of parenting a child with a trauma background that completely caught me off guard, particularly with H. Now, even knowing that H. had some structural brain differences, her inability to form memories was concerning. It wasn't just more academic things such as vocabulary or numbers, it was every day life things, such as what we did the day before. I would ask her and she would have no idea. We spent a long time practicing to remember what happened the day before. It was a slow process, and being able to put those events in order was an even slower process. But I'm happy to say she got there.
Because I was newer to this particular aspect of adoption, there were some dots I didn't have the information to connect, which I can now. For instance, in one of our very early doctor's appointments when we still had a Mandarin interpreter joining us, H. was looking out of the window and staring up at the clouds. She turned to the interpreter and asked what those things were and what they were doing. He was so shocked at the question that he told me what she had asked before attempting to answer. I have to admit that I was shocked as well. (She was 9 at the time.) I was absolutely baffled that she did not have this basic piece of information. I knew she had been outside and seen clouds in China. For a while, I chalked it up to another piece of the profound neglect which she had experienced.
I am willing to say when I am wrong, and I am pretty sure I was wrong about this.
Recently, H. has been asking us a lot of questions about where food comes from. It's as though the idea that foods has origins outside of our refrigerator or grocery store is a very new idea for her. This despite the fact that we have had gardens for the entire time she's been home, and I have pictures of her helping in her foster home's gardens and eating the food out of them. This sudden awareness is not because of a previous lack of exposure.
So what's going on?
First, this phenomenon is not isolated with H. It is something that I hear about pretty routinely from parents with adopted children who have experienced trauma. It's a thing. It's also pretty baffling and surprising to come across it for the first time. We get so conditioned as to what we expect children to learn in early childhood that we just cannot fathom a child growing to an older age without having learned these things. The seem pretty basic to us.
And the child probably was exposed to these ideas and concepts and experiences, but if it was during a time of trauma, the probably did not form any memories of it. This is either because the stress of the trauma was stopping the brain from forming memories or because they were disassociated during the event or because they were so hypervigilent that they weren't actually paying attention to anything but staying safe.
It is just another example of how safety is required before learning can happen. In order to learn and make memories the brain has to be able to relax and pay attention to something other than survival. The child also needs to feel safe enough to stay present in the situation and not disassociate. Safety comes before learning. If a child was in a perpetually scary or chaotic situation, it is little wonder that what we consider the basics of learning were missed. What are clouds? Where do apples come from? Are ice and liquid water the same thing? Or, my favorite story of filling in H.'s gaps... that we live on a planet that orbits the sun.
If you are adopting an older child you cannot take anything for granted. There will be gaps, you just do not know what they are or how deep they go. Since being adopted and moving to a country with a different culture and language is also traumatizing, you can also be sure that experiences and facts that you thought were learned early on probably won't be retained. All of my children who were adopted, even the emotionally healthier ones, have some pretty big gaps in memory about those first months, even up to a year. The brain remembers what it thinks is important to keep itself safe, anything else is jettisoned as excess baggage which can't be carried in a scary world.
It can take a long time for felt safety and thus the ability to remember and learn to appear. It took H. four years before we saw real headway in this department. And even now, at nearly eight years home, there are still things rising to the surface that she had been exposed to that didn't stick.
I'll sound like a broken record here, but there is no time frame for 'catching up' and being done with the processing of moving from one life to another. There will never be a time, at least not for many years, when you say, "Okay, now we have everything covered. Time to move on." It is a back and forth, progress and regress, over and over and over process.
I will admit that this is an aspect of parenting a child with a trauma background that completely caught me off guard, particularly with H. Now, even knowing that H. had some structural brain differences, her inability to form memories was concerning. It wasn't just more academic things such as vocabulary or numbers, it was every day life things, such as what we did the day before. I would ask her and she would have no idea. We spent a long time practicing to remember what happened the day before. It was a slow process, and being able to put those events in order was an even slower process. But I'm happy to say she got there.
Because I was newer to this particular aspect of adoption, there were some dots I didn't have the information to connect, which I can now. For instance, in one of our very early doctor's appointments when we still had a Mandarin interpreter joining us, H. was looking out of the window and staring up at the clouds. She turned to the interpreter and asked what those things were and what they were doing. He was so shocked at the question that he told me what she had asked before attempting to answer. I have to admit that I was shocked as well. (She was 9 at the time.) I was absolutely baffled that she did not have this basic piece of information. I knew she had been outside and seen clouds in China. For a while, I chalked it up to another piece of the profound neglect which she had experienced.
I am willing to say when I am wrong, and I am pretty sure I was wrong about this.
Recently, H. has been asking us a lot of questions about where food comes from. It's as though the idea that foods has origins outside of our refrigerator or grocery store is a very new idea for her. This despite the fact that we have had gardens for the entire time she's been home, and I have pictures of her helping in her foster home's gardens and eating the food out of them. This sudden awareness is not because of a previous lack of exposure.
So what's going on?
First, this phenomenon is not isolated with H. It is something that I hear about pretty routinely from parents with adopted children who have experienced trauma. It's a thing. It's also pretty baffling and surprising to come across it for the first time. We get so conditioned as to what we expect children to learn in early childhood that we just cannot fathom a child growing to an older age without having learned these things. The seem pretty basic to us.
And the child probably was exposed to these ideas and concepts and experiences, but if it was during a time of trauma, the probably did not form any memories of it. This is either because the stress of the trauma was stopping the brain from forming memories or because they were disassociated during the event or because they were so hypervigilent that they weren't actually paying attention to anything but staying safe.
It is just another example of how safety is required before learning can happen. In order to learn and make memories the brain has to be able to relax and pay attention to something other than survival. The child also needs to feel safe enough to stay present in the situation and not disassociate. Safety comes before learning. If a child was in a perpetually scary or chaotic situation, it is little wonder that what we consider the basics of learning were missed. What are clouds? Where do apples come from? Are ice and liquid water the same thing? Or, my favorite story of filling in H.'s gaps... that we live on a planet that orbits the sun.
If you are adopting an older child you cannot take anything for granted. There will be gaps, you just do not know what they are or how deep they go. Since being adopted and moving to a country with a different culture and language is also traumatizing, you can also be sure that experiences and facts that you thought were learned early on probably won't be retained. All of my children who were adopted, even the emotionally healthier ones, have some pretty big gaps in memory about those first months, even up to a year. The brain remembers what it thinks is important to keep itself safe, anything else is jettisoned as excess baggage which can't be carried in a scary world.
It can take a long time for felt safety and thus the ability to remember and learn to appear. It took H. four years before we saw real headway in this department. And even now, at nearly eight years home, there are still things rising to the surface that she had been exposed to that didn't stick.
I'll sound like a broken record here, but there is no time frame for 'catching up' and being done with the processing of moving from one life to another. There will never be a time, at least not for many years, when you say, "Okay, now we have everything covered. Time to move on." It is a back and forth, progress and regress, over and over and over process.
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