Conflicts of adoption

The Conflicts of Adoption
Article one on Adoption by Dr. Art Martin

I have had many parents discuss their feelings of not being able to have children with me. They want to have a family, but they have been informed by a doctor there are infertility problems which will not allow pregnancy to take place. Quite often they feel there is something wrong with them which pushes them into desperation. Sometimes they will take almost any child just to have children so they can have a family. Adoption agencies very seldom will reveal the background of the child. Unless it is a private adoption where the prospective parents meet the birth mother you may not know the difficulty you may be entering into. There are very few adoptions available for children in the US, so parents resort to adoption from other countries.
Adoption agencies need to provide the truth with background on the origin of the children. It is very important if the child is being adopted from Eastern Europe, Asia or a third world country. The parents are so desperate to adopt a child they don't ask questions about backgrounds or about how damaged the child might be from trauma of being bounced around without proper care. Adoption agencies avoid these discussions for fear of losing the parent if they back out. It is almost as if they treat you as if they are selling you a product. This may seem as a gross way of describing the way they are promoting their programs. It seems to me they are not providing proper guidance in a very important delicate situation. Pre adoptive training should stress the difficulties and problems adoptive parents will face in relationships with children who have been traumatized. Most of time it is watered down only stressing the good deeds the parents are doing by adopting a child. Most of the time the questions such as "if your child will not follow your directions what would you do. They never discuss the negative side such as if your child does not get along with you and becomes belligerent what would you do.? If the child has been in your family for an extended period of time and they physically attack you what would you do.? They never discuss the main conflict of adopted children, that of RAD or Radical Associative Disorder. I would rather replace associative with attitude because this is really what acting is. It is on a belief of not being given attention and recognition. (more on this later in this article).
With children which are adopted shortly after birth there are less problems and conflicts than if they have been in an orphanage or a foster home. The older they are the more programming will be picked up by the child which makes it more difficult for them to adjust to a new family. You can not just drop a child into new surroundings and expect them to adjust and work with everything so it will be just perfect because the parents want a new child. It does not make any difference how much compassion, attention and affection you give the child because the child is not sure that they will get rejected again so they will not trust the adopted parents and keep their distance pushing them away. This happens in 85% of the cases.
Most of the adoptive parents I have discussed these conflicts with are not aware why their child is pushing them away and acting out. Most parents try very hard to give their child attention, support and affection but find themselves being pushed away. Post adoption services are almost impossible to find in most communities. So parents struggle along trying to understand why their child will not warm up to them. Some children bcome belligerent trouble makers just to get attention. They are described asa RAD children (Radical Associative Disorder)
There is very little support parents can fall back on. Professional help is not much support either as they blame the parents for their children's behavior problems. Most therapists are not qualified to provide proper guidance and they give inaccurate diagnosis so this exasperates the conflicts. Schools are not equipped to handle the conflicts either as there are no trained therapists who understand the conflicts. So they resort to drugs to in a sense "dumb them down" so their behavior is not a disturbing their school class. I have had a mother tell me the school was going to suspend her child if she did not consent to give him Ritalin. The base cause was he was not getting attention at home so he acted out. This was not an adopted child. This child was born in this family.

What is the solution and how do we go about helping these children and their parents? Change will not take place unless we come to new understanding of what the conflicts are caused by so we can work on the base cause and core issues. We have to understand the childhood trauma. Parenting traumatized children is a challenge. With proper understanding and therapy you can go from trauma and hopelessness to peace, happiness, harmony and joy. I have seen it happen in a few hours. You have to come face to face with conflicts of fear, anger, resentment and the trauma that created it.
The challenge is that almost all therapists and practitioners are not properly trained. Colleges and universities have been teaching the same worn out methods which do not work for 75 plus years plus. Parents have been handing down dysfunctional parenting programs for who knows how many years. How can you parent if you have never been trained? We function from example. Our parents handed us a program by example and we continued to use the same dysfunctional authority, control, manipulation, forced compliance and discipline program to this day. Children do not respond well to "do what I say or you get into trouble." They react to authority and control. I hear parents tell me "how do you control your children then." It is very simple. Children respond to unconditional love, unconditional attention, recognition, validation, approval, acknowledgment, compassion and forgiveness which builds respect and trust. Less than 25% of the parents today have those qualities in their core mind programming. Children can see through us. They are very intuitive. We can't hide anything from them. How can we give them the above qualities if we do not have them? Quite simply we can't and they know it and can see through us. This is the key to all of it. We must be authentic and walk our talk. How do we do this if we do not have the required qualities? We must ReParent Ourselves so we can recover the basic Qualities of Unconditional Love. When we do this our children will respond with trust and respect for us. Children were born preloaded with the eight qualities of Unconditional Love along with self esteem, self worth, and self confidence. They were preloaded just like a computer we buy with windows preloaded in it. What do parents do to children? They proceed to take all these qualities from their children as they grow up. By the time they are five years old we have succeeded in destroying all these good qualities. Many people will disagree with my contention on this, yet it has proved out to be true in all the cases I have worked with.
The story is different if the child is brought up in functional family. Less than 10% are brought up in functional families. The test on this is; children get sick to get attention. Children from functional families do not get sick. It almost like their mind sets up immunity to illness because they can be exposed illness and disease and never contract it. My own children never wer sick.
The second key is you have to understand a child may not interpret how you are treating them is acceptable to them. It is not what you do, it is how they perceive or interpret what your intentions are. If you do not have the nine qualities of unconditional love in your core being they will recognize this and push you away or they play the game with you and let you give them attention and affection, yet they do not believe your actions. I have had many children confide in me about their true feeling about their parents which is very different from the parents story. We can turn this around in one session. We must work with mother first to restore unconditional love which was lost in childhood.

Dr. Art Martin has worked with many children and parents to help them understand the behavior of their children. In his therapy process he can get to the base causes and core issues very quickly by working with the programming in the Subconscious Mind. He prefers to work with the parents first so the children will be able to build trust and respect in their parents. He has seen miracles happen with children when the mother and the child have worked with him.
This is the first article in a series on Adoptive parenting. Go too www.reparentingyourself.com for info