Forget the faking

I got to visit this afternoon with a good friend whom I haven't seen in person since four years ago. It was great to catch-up and share our reading lists since they tend to be very similar. We also talk about adoption and trauma and parenting and homeschooling. We have a lot in common. During the course of our conversation, we managed to veer into talking about topic and coming up with a rather different take on it. We were both rather taken with our new ideas, so I thought I would share them here. 

If you are in the foster/adoption world you probably have heard the phrase, "Fake it 'till you make it," referring to the process of attaching to your new child. I might have even used that phrase here on the blog. 

[Sorry, I need to pause for an aside. Since I'm about to really critique the phrase, I thought I should do a quick check to see if I had used it. Evidently, my ambivalence for the phrase is long standing. I have put the phrase in two posts, but only to refer to something people say, not to suggest it. If you're curious, it appears in O Be Careful Little Brain What You Think and I'm Sure I'm not the Only One.]

What got us started on this train of thought was me sharing a bit about what Equine Facilitated Learning (EFL) was and how I saw it as helping parents who were parenting children with a trauma past. As we share this experience, we have long discussed how helping our children involved sorting ourselves out first. I was talking about how it took me a long time to be able to really work well with Java because if she picks up on someone's fear, it immediately sends her over the edge. (Not dissimilar to some of my children.) How I couldn't fake it with Java. For her to allow me to be in presence and work with her... grooming, saddling, etc., I had to work very hard at keeping myself calm. I couldn't be all roiled up on the inside and trying to be calm on the outside. Horses dislike incongruence [feeling one way inside, but acting in an opposite manner] in people, and Java really doesn't like it. 

From there we went on to talk about how people don't really enjoy incongruence in others, but we either don't understand the feelings that we are experiencing or we have learned to ignore them. We decided that children do not have the ability to ignore it and very much affected by the incongruence in the adults around them. If you have parented for any length of time, you know extremely well that a parent's mood can totally affect the moods of your children, even if you are trying to put on a happy face. There was only a short jump from this to thinking about the often repeated adoption advice of "fake it 'till you make it". It also made me understand why it has always made me a little uncomfortable.

It all has to do with the word 'fake'. I have never quite been able to erase the association of lying that I have with the term, and I am very uncomfortable with the idea of lying to children, especially particularly vulnerable ones who do not have a long history with a parent. So that, combined with the idea that we are able to emotionally intuit when another person's feelings do not match their outward persona all combined together as an "Aha!" moment for both of us as to why we have never loved the phrase.

I understand the purpose behind it; that we don't always fall head over heels in love with a child we have just met. Actually, I'm pretty sure that it is very rare to fall head over heels in love with a child you have just met. I know it happens, I just wouldn't count on it. It takes time to develop a relationship, and it is only from that relationship that love can grow. The aphorism is trying to say it takes time, that it is a process. But it goes wrong in suggesting that all you have to do is fake it and suddenly one day you'll wake up and be able to cross 'attach to child' off your to-do list. 

The reality is that attaching to your child, to really learn to love them, is actually a lot of active work that has more to do with acknowledging your honest emotions and feelings and then doing something to change them. It is not something that is going to happen passively. But there is that gap between the now and the not yet of attachment. What do you do then? Well, I think the best way to go about it is to be kind. This requires no acting or faking on the part of the parent; you do not have to be head over heels in love with someone to be kind to them. I would even venture to say, having been down this road more than a couple of times myself, that making your goal kindness instead of mushy emotional love is actually going to further your attachment more quickly. You won't be setting your child emotionally off with your incongruence and you won't have given yourself a goal that in those first months and years of your relationship you cannot actually meet. The whole sense of shame is thus avoided because you haven't failed. You lose the 'shoulds' and are dealing with what is. This is much healthier for everyone involved. A much better aphorism in my book would be, "Be kind to your child until you fall in love with them... and then keep being kind." 

I don't want to leave you with the impression that any of this is easy, but at least in my suggested approach it is at least honest. Attaching is hard work for everyone involved. If you would like more details as to how to go about the process, Adoption 101: Attachment, will help.