When Love Hurts: Living with RAD

I want to continue telling our story but I need to back up and clarify that Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) happens in biological, adoptive, foster and step families and is not something that is exclusive to special needs kids who are adopted when they are older, it can happen whenever there is childhood abuse and neglect. Children develop coping mechanisms or survival mechanisms, that help them get by when they are serially abused or neglected and those survival mechanisms become literally hard wired into their brain. Neurological pathways are created that will impact and define them FOREVER. There is no cure or proven effective therapy for Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).

Reactive Attachment Disorder happens when a child does not properly bond with a caregiver during the first four years of life. (The core of who a person is and will be is determined by the time they are four years old, so what happens in those formative years is crucial!) When a child cries and is not comforted or is hurt by those who care for him, it causes permanent damage; the child becomes unable to bond with other people and will sabotage relationships with the people who are closest to them, functioning best with people who do not know them well. They typically blow out of close relationships because they are simply incapable of maintaining them.

Children and adults with RAD are typically very charming, they know how to project the illusion of connectedness, love, and compassion and go to great lengths to portray that image to people who are peripheral in their lives. It is the people who are closest to them who suffer; others will never know the reality of living with a reactive attachment disordered child or adult, because they wear different faces for the different people in their lives. This disparity in behavior can leave the person who is seeing the worst behavior feeling like they're quite literally insane, because nobody else sees what they're seeing!

I think it helps to KNOW that. I spent so many years thinking there was something wrong with me because I could not fix my relationship with our adopted daughter, Bethany. Others only saw the vaguest glimmers of what I saw: the push and pull, the lying, the manipulation, anger, and rejection; mostly they saw a child who appeared to be trying to please.

There were times when Bethany would appear to soften a bit towards me in our private relationship and I would think I was getting through to her only to run up against the wall of her anger and rejection. There were times when she would cling to me, touching my face, telling me she loved me, and I would reach for her only to be pushed away; she would call me names, kick and bite at me, and tell me that she hated me. And the lying... She lied about anything and everything; it was truly crazy making.

I kept telling myself that a small child could not possibly be acting as horribly as what I was experiencing and that feeling was hugely compounded by the fact that there was nobody else in my life who had witnessed it to the degree that I had. My husband definitely saw glimmers of it but it is hard to believe that a CHILD is capable of the kind of behavior that RAD children exhibit towards those they are closest to; again, the same is true of RAD adults.

I tried to distance myself from Bethany but it felt like neglect. We had adopted her, hoping to give her a better life, wanting to rescue her from the history of neglect and abuse that she had already suffered at the hands of her biological mother who was a drug addict, alcoholic, and prostitute.

The harm that Bethany’s birth mom inflicted on her by alternately lavishing love on her and then abusing and neglecting her is incalculable; Bethany learned the art of "push/pull" from her birth mother; she was not trying to be horrible to me, she was simply trying to survive in the only way she knew how.

Those years with Bethany were some of the darkest of my life. I became a person I did not recognize. When all attempts to love her to wholeness failed, I turned to harsh "discipline” and spanked and shouted to a degree that shames me.

If I'd only known not to take it personally, that emotional distance was the RIGHT RESPONSE and not neglectful, maybe then I might not have come undone, and I did come undone when I finally began to let go of her six years after she came to us. I cannot even type that without crying. It has been years and it hurts as if it was today. I had to let go of Bethany. There was no other way.

You see, Bethany cannot tolerate love. She wants it more than anything but is scared to death of it, so she nurses her anger and that makes her feel safe. She creates close relationships and then blows out of them HARD, leaving emotional massacre behind her. It is a horrible thing to be caught in the wake of someone with RAD; loving and living with Bethany was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but letting go of her was hardest of all.

I have jumped way ahead of myself here, but I felt a need to make it clear that this story does not have a hearts and flowers ending, it is a story of pain and hardship and growth. The good news is that it is not over; Bethany's story is not finished yet.

Once again, I want to clarify that I am neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist and I cannot offer clinical help, I am simply telling our story in the hope that it may help someone else; if you're struggling with a RAD child or adult, please know you are not crazy and you are not alone. Most important of all, it is not your fault; do not be afraid to talk about it or ask for help.

©Just Kate, 2009