Adoption can be a wonderful event and should benefit all involved. Many times it does not and I want to briefly explore why this may happen. Developmental Trauma Disorder affects many children in the adoptive and foster care system.

As parents, therapists and caregivers, what we need to be concerned about, is that most trauma begins at home. It is reported that about 80 percent of people responsible for this abuse are the child’s parents. This is why you come into the picture as foster care and/or adoptive parents. Yet, even though you are providing a safe environment and a loving heart, this does little to remove the experience or neurological, physiological and emotional trauma.

How does one parent a child with complex trauma and begin to develop a healthy parent-child relationship that has the foundation of safety and trust in it? Understanding Developmental Trauma may help to provide a wider perspective and understanding of the pain your child lives with and operates from when dealing with the world and those in it.

Lets look at what is Developmental Trauma Disorder, which, I hope one-day will replace Reactive Attachment Disorder in the DSM-IVR. RAD describes how a child, within the first three to five years of his or her life, has experienced trauma that disrupts the bonding/attachment cycle in his or her development of a safe and healthy parent-child relationship. There is a “reaction” to the attachment (developmental) cycle. It is thought that that Developmental Trauma Disorder better explains this, because the trauma disrupts all developmental milestones. Keep in mind that this is referring to “complex” trauma and not a one-time event, although this does not mean that a one-time event cannot disrupt the developmental process of forming a healthy parent-child relationship.

It is thought that most of the pathways in the brain that give us the capacity to feel safe, trust and love begin in utero. Therefore, the first several years of a child’s life are critical, and what takes place in those early years will be the hard drive that the child will use to form the basis for future relationships. What happens to a child in these early years also has an adverse affect on his or her future physical and emotional health.

Developmental Trauma Disorder Developmental trauma disrupts the physical, emotional and social well-being of the child and it disrupts the ability to integrate and process sensory and emotional information. This sets the stage for the inability to regulate and integrate stress. The child looses the ability to develop cause and effect thinking. This is when we see a child vacillate between the flight and fight response or remain in a “freeze” response.

Children learn to regulate their emotions by anticipating their caregiver’s response to them.Most of your children have a negative internal working model and no matter what you say or do, they are still going to work off this negative model. How do you change this? It requires patience. Keep in mind that the human brain learns through experience on a social and physical level. This requires less talking and more participation for the information to have a longterm impact on forming a healthy relationship.

Traditional therapy does little to create change in children who have experienced complex trauma. The child has little insight capacity between what he or she does, what he or she feels and what has happened to him or her. These children have not developed the emotional and cognitive skills to articulate their past experiences in a way that would help them synthesize, process and experience healing.

Movement therapy is critical to help these children heal and develop healthy parent-child bonds. Many of the behaviors of a child with Complex trauma are a tendency to repeat the trauma. Until this is recognized anything novel, including protective boundaries we set for them, the child will simply experience as trauma or those in their lives as perpetrators.

Trauma disrupts the mastery of physical sensations and the ability to regulate one’s body and emotions to be able to relax and feel an internal sense of safety. Safety needs to be established before they will be able to form a healthy parent-child relationship. To be able to develop this sense of safety a child needs to know where he or she is in space and within him or herself before addressing and looking at the trauma without repeating it.

Movement therapy addresses the developmental patterns that infants go through when in a safe environment. The developmental patterns, such as tummy time, rolling over, reaching out to grasp things, pulling things toward them, sitting up and crawling give the child the physiological and neurological pathways to form a healthy sense of themselves. A child learns and masters from these experiences, to be in the present moment. In a healthy environment they will be ale to reflect on this with a positive internal working model.

Movement therapy focuses on establishing safety and competence through physical pleasure and mastery that is therapist directed. This insures a sense of internal safety that assimilates the healthy parent-child relationship. Remember children learn through physical experiences and mastery through calm, safe and repetitive activities. This assists the child in trusting his or her environment and nurturing parental relationships.

Repeating and learning these patterns through Movement Therapy leads the child away from Trauma and toward a healthy development of a parent — child relationship.

Tracey Turner-Keyser, MA, ADTR, LPC, has worked with children with mal-attachment, ADHD, PTSD, sexual reactivity, ODD and more for more than 20 years. She is licensed in North Carolina as a Licensed Professional Counselor. Turner-Keyser has a master’s degree in psychology/ dance movement therapy from Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, N.H.