Bait and switch

I'll tell you up front that I am doing a bait and switch with this blog post. First I'll share a picture of Vienna.

I'll even tell you that Vienna is doing extremely well. She even was a little spicy for the farrier yesterday. It shows how much back to normal Vienna is these days. The farrier was so happy that she wanted to cheer for the spicy pony who was giving her a bit of a hard time. I'm so happy to have my little brace pony back to herself. It's been a long 5+ months. 

But that's not really what this post is about. I needed to open with a pony picture because I didn't want this to show up in the thumbnail and have someone assume my support of it as a result.

I'll say it right out loud. This is wrong. This is child blaming writ large. A more accurate version would say, "Parenting a child with past trauma is constantly filling your child's cup with love, only to watch it bleed out of them and have them say, 'I don't feel loved.'" The picture would be a child bleeding out that love from thousands of different cuts on his body. 

I cannot even begin to tell you how angry this image makes me. The trouble (well, one of them) with this image is the tacit implication that the child is rejecting the parent's overtures of love on purpose. It implies that the child has control over what they do and how they react. It confirms for hurting parents that the child is making their life miserable on purpose. It gives the parent a pass for truly doing the hard work of bending and connecting because the child is broken and unfixable. 

Regular readers are probably tired of hearing me say this, but I don't think it can be said enough. RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder) is a real diagnosis, but it is very extreme and it is very rare. What most children are dealing with is developmental trauma. While trauma is a beast and does not play nicely with growing brains, it is also something that can be healed given time, connection, and felt safety. Behaviors can get better as the reasons behind the behaviors are addressed. 

What broke my heart even more when I saw this picture today were the comments about how accurate the photo is. You just can't give these children enough. Now I know first hand exactly how challenging parenting a child with developmental trauma is. It is not a walk in the park. Some days one of the bravest thing I did was to get out of bed and face another day of very hard parenting. There is little we haven't seen over the years.

But I also know that not all forms of parenting are going to help a child heal. There are definitely some types that just add more trauma and fear onto a child already laden with those things. I've done that, too. I know exactly how difficult it is to switch. I also know exactly how important it is to do so. 

But here's another thing about RAD parents. (Their term, not mine.) They don't like to have their reason for resentment taken away. They don't want to hear there is another way. They have become so frozen in their own pain and fear and anger that changing feels impossible because it feels like giving in. I am not popular with this crowd. I will never be asked to speak at their retreats. I (and other voices saying similar things) cause too much cognitive dissonance to be comfortable. 

I also want to be clear. It may sound as though I'm parent blaming. I'm not. Parents do the best they can with what they have just as children do. It is the refusal to try something different even if it is uncomfortable along with the expectation that the child is the one who needs to bend first that I have difficulty with. But if any one of them were to reach out to me, you can bet your bottom dollar that empathy would ooze out of me because it is a hard road to walk and an even harder road to change. It's a very fine line for someone who wants to be supportive to walk. 

The organization that created that picture? Not so much empathy. If you hold yourself up as a place of help for hurting parents, you have no right to throw the hurt child under the bus as you do so.