I first started working with Looked After Children nearly 20 years ago. At that point I was working with care leavers. We never discussed their trauma experiences. In fact, through the decade I spent supporting young people in various residential settings and the the very early days of my time as a foster parent, I never heard the word ‘trauma’ once. Or ‘attachment’, come to think about it.
That seems hard to believe now but, at that time, the prevailing view seemed to be about focusing on the here and now and preparing them for their independent lives in the future. Any mention of their past seemed to be about either patting ourselves on the back for rescuing them from it (cringe!) or being frustrated by having to deal with their poor behaviours as a result of it (double cringe!).
Thankfully these days ‘trauma’ is much more widely acknowledged, accepted, discussed and understood within fostering and adoption. It is no longer the taboo topic it once was. Or is it?
There is an area of trauma that I think still often remains unspoken, misunderstood, disregarded and unsupported. This is the traumas experienced by many foster and adoptive parents as a result of their parenting experiences.
At the start of this month I wrote this post explaining different types of trauma. It is no doubt easy to see how our children might have had trauma experiences. But what about us, their foster or adoptive parents?
I was going to write this post from the perspective of what I have seen when working alongside foster and adoptive parents in my professional role, but then I realised it may be more helpful to share my personal experience. I am passionate about creating safe spaces for parents to discuss how their role impacts them, so allow me to lead by example now!
I have experienced trauma as a result of fostering and then adopting my three children over the past 11 years. I want to start by saying that I love my boys very much and do not blame them for what I have experienced. Most of the time they were just doing what they had learned to do in order to survive a world that had not been kind to them. I do however feel that the fostering and adoption system, as well as other professional individuals and organisations could have been more supportive.
Here are the ways in which the different types of trauma have been present in my story.
Primary Trauma.
There’s a reason why we focus so much on behaviour in our children: it’s because it can be so hard to live alongside. As our children operate from their survival brain, it can often result in us parents experiencing situations that our brains and bodies interpret as a threat.
For many years I lived with behaviours in my home that caused me difficulties. These included continual theft, invasion of my personal space, false allegations against me, deceit, verbal attacks and physical violence. At times I felt overwhelmed by these experiences and there are three experiences of violence that could have resulted in my death. I write that not to scare people but because too often I have heard child-to-parent violence talked about in ways that do not recognise the level of risk sometimes involved. I will do a follow up post at some point to discuss this further.
On occasions, when managing these challenging situations I also felt under attack from professionals who were highly critical of my parenting, usually as a result of their lack of knowledge around trauma and attachment issues. I felt silenced by a fostering and adoption system that only seemed to acknowledge the needs of my child and i felt disregarded as the person who knew my children best but was ‘not a professional’ and therefore not always given a voice.
It was these experiences that prompted me to write my book ‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Shame – How to Feel Good Enough As A Foster or Adoptive Parent’.
Secondary Trauma
There have been many occasions in which I have had to support my children with their feelings resulting from their early life trauma. In particular, I found the early years of trauma rages really hard. It’s painful to watch a child you love experience so much pain themselves. I know that my own mental well-being was impacted at various stages. A question I often ask parents to consider is
It’s very easily to find that the tone of the house becomes defined by the trauma of the child. Trauma is powerful and as a parent you may find yourself experiencing trauma reactions to the experiences your child has had.
Vicarious Trauma.
I am prone to depression and therefore vicarious trauma is something I have to be very mindful of. This is something that I only really became aware of when I was years into my fostering experience. From the outside in, it may be easy for others to see the potential for traumatisation, but as a parent I often was so caught up in the work I was doing to notice. The trauma sort of sneaked up on me amongst the tasks of laundry, getting dinner on the table, telling them to ‘play nicely’ and wondering how long until bedtime!
In some ways our boys trauma became ‘everyday’. It just was what it was. I often forgot that what we were dealing with in our home was not the normal experiences of family life because it had become so normal for me. But the feelings associated with trauma were often one I experienced myself: hopelessness, despair, anxiety, shame, sadness and anger.
At some point their stories became woven with my story. I not only understood their trauma but I experienced it too. And I was continually exposed to it. If I wasn’t supporting them to work through it then I was managing the behaviour that resulted from it.
The system of fostering in particular has a lot to learn here. One of the greatest ways to increase a person’s trauma experience is to get them to continually retell their story (which is why I don’t do this with my therapy clients). As a foster parent I continually had to retell my story. Incidents would occur that I needed to report, then write down, then share with relevant professionals. I would then have supervision to discuss them and attend group support where they’d be shared again. I might have to attend risk management meetings and alter safe care plans as a result. The incidents would most likely be discussed again at LAC reviews and any planning meetings as well as on social worker visits and during my home review.
That’s a lot of occasions to retell an event that is relevant to the child but impacts you too. The added pressure within fostering is doing this alongside the expectations that goes with a professional role. I was often expected to talk about these incidents in a factual and evaluative way that give no recognition of the emotions I experienced, and in spaces and relationships that didn’t always feel safe to me.
Compassion Fatigue
There’s a reason why I called my first parenting book ‘I Can’t Do this – When Fostering and Adoption Feels Too Hard‘. It’s because of the number of times that I said to myself or my wife “I don’t think I can keep doing this”! Fostering and adoption has been the best thing I’ve done with my life but it’s also been the hardest.
During the harder periods of false allegations, violence and placement breakdown I know I was at real risk of developing compassion fatigue (aka blocked care). At those times I found it hard to think about the trauma behind their behaviours because I was too focused on the impact those behaviours were having on me. In no other situation are people expected to love people who cause them hurt and criticised if they find this hard to do.
As an adopter I have been in the position of trying to access services during those difficult times. One of the issues with this is that it involves working with people you don’t have a relationship with at the same time as you are going through a lot personally. One social worker told me that the issues we were experiencing with our son were a result of me being a ‘cold and hostile mother’. That hurt. It could not have been further from the truth. I was not ‘cold and hostile’, I was traumatised. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was that I cared so deeply that I felt a lot of anger for the way that the system (and this social worker) had failed my son. Anger that I had to contain during that meeting and did so by switching off from it. Not a healthy response granted, but genuinely the best I could do given the circumstances.
Burnout
Foster and adoptive parents don’t get to go off work with stress. But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t if we could. This is why I get so cross when I hear people criticise us for taking respite. Yes of course we need to be mindful of the impact respite has upon our children, but they will be much more impacted if not having respite leads to placement breakdown because of burnout.
As many of you will be aware, my youngest son doesn’t live with me. When he was 15yrs old we reached a point where we had to make the heartbreaking decision that he could no longer live with us. Simply put, we could not keep him safe and living alongside him did not keep us and his brothers safe. In honesty though, I don’t know how much longer I could have gone on anyway. Both my wife and I were in the early stages of burnout and had very little left to offer him or his brothers. The support we were promised when we adopted did not materialise and what we did received was so lacking in therapeutic knowledge and awareness that it caused more harm than good.
Complex Trauma
There often isn’t a lot of space to breathe within fostering and adopting. As soon as one issue passes it seems that another rears its head. This is particularly true when parenting more than one child who’s had difficult life experiences. My wife and I used to joke about our boys having some kind of secret pact as to who got to act up. We laughed about them passing the poor behaviour baton to one another saying “I’ve had my go at throwing everything at them, now it’s your turn. Have fun!”.
For a long time it seemed that no matter what we did to create calmness in our home there was always at least one child struggling. They seemed to take it in turns and we had about 5 years in which we could count on one hand the number of days we experienced with all of them managing well.
The definition of complex trauma is to struggle with a number of difficult experiences. We can’t begin to heal from trauma when it is still present in our lives. Often I’ve found that I’ve had no time to heal from one issue before finding myself in a different, but equally difficult situation.
Triggered Trauma
I believe that fostering and adoption is all about relationship. In relationship everything I am meets everything the other person is. It’s easy to think that it is only the child who has ‘problems’ or that they are the cause of ours. But this is rarely the case.
I don’t know about you, but I have been through some difficult stuff in my own life. Things that have no relation to my children. Things that I thought I had ‘dealt with’ prior to becoming a parent. But it turned out that that was not the case.
Some of the feelings I initially attributed to my experience of fostering and adoption were actually feelings from experiences in my past that I had not resolved. Sometimes it’s been hard to unpick situations and see whether the trauma origins belonged to me or to them. In a lot of cases it’s been a mixture of both.
If we can accept that the children’s trauma history can impact us without the child being aware, then we need also to be willing to examine how our trauma history might in turn impact our children. Sometimes it is my behaviour that has been the issue and my needs have had to be met. And in those times I have had to learn to offer myself the same kind of loving, therapeutic parenting I try to consistently offer to my children.
The aim of this post was to raise awareness about the many ways in which foster and adoptive parents could be impacted by living alongside their children. I hope that I have also shown the depth to which this impact can be felt. Because it is my belief that
If you are struggling with your experiences of fostering or adopting I do currently have some spaces available to offer counselling so please do get in touch if appropriate. I would also recommend these titles:
If you would like to express your thoughts about what I have written please do so in the comments below. Equally, if anyone is willing to share their experiences that would be fantastic. I believe that being vulnerable with our story raises awareness and aids the healing process. It’s time for foster and adoptive parents to have their experiences recognised alongside their child(ren).
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