when illusion spin her net

Nancy Thomas is an expert in Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) and her book When Love Isn’t Enough is assumed to be the go-to book for those of us trying to sail the seas of attachment issues with our children. At the very least, it’s the go-to phrase we latch on to when we’re faced with interventions more professional than parental love. When I write my book, it could be called When Love, Therapeutic Parenting, Therapy, Interventions, Medications, Residential Placements, and Other Safety Nets Aren’t Nearly Enough … or something more catchy like, FML: A RAD Mom’s Tragicomedy.

Like the good German Montanans we are, our family weathered our most recent crisis with quiet determination bordering on a homesteader’s preservation.  This silence is ingrained by both our locational and hereditary demographics, as well as by the nature of our particular beast: Mental illness.

Let me say it clearly: Our family lives with severe, life-threatening mental illness.

There will be no happy photos of our family of five’s first summer in Montana because one of our children cannot live safely in our home. They have PTSD and RAD and are triggered by the mere presence of those who love them and want to be in a relationship with them. It is a sick and beastly combination, this child’s particular diagnoses mix. It has robbed them of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It tells them they are not safe and never will be. It tells them they aren’t worth having what they so desperately want. It’s totally and completely abhorrent. It drives our family.

Fact is, all three of our children live with the same diagnoses combo. Two of them have, thanks to years of help both professional and parental, turned whatever corner they needed to turn in order to feel happy enough to live with us. One day each of them was angry, reluctant, violent, and abrasive (to put it mildly). Then, each on their own timeline, they felt the safety and love we have always provided and have managed to move on.  This doesn’t mean that they have left their psychological demons behind them. It means that they are able to own these demons — to live with them and talk with them and put them in their place. Every day we ask our children to talk about their feelings and fears, their hopes and paranoias, at a depth that most 30-somethings are incapable of reaching. If we don’t, if we slide every red flag under the rug, the beast begins its charge back. 

The nature of RAD and PTSD is to turn truth into diabolical fantasy, to twist everything you’ve ever felt was solid into a crumbling mass. Delusion and paranoia are the frenemies we placate, the unwanted guests in a home prepared to have them to dinner, to school, on every vacation. I cannot afford to feel negatively about them, that’s what gives them power. Heightened emotions fuel their fire, as does silence. This means we never, not one day, have the luxury of assuming that our kids are just taking some “me time” that the sudden silence is “nothing” that a chore not done was “forgotten.” We check in. We ask. We listen … carefully. With two of our children, we can attune and talk them through. With the third, we step so carefully that every word is weighed and every instinctive action is subdued. And, still, I cannot let the anger that builds in me come to the fore, or the sadness. 

When child three is out of the house, it’s as if a weight has been lifted off all of our shoulders and the sun has come out from behind a menacing cloud. It feels good to have them gone. And, so, with sadness and anger comes shame. Not a day has gone by in the past decade that I haven’t felt some level of shame for my inability to heal my own children, for the role I play in their emotional upheaval. (Let’s be honest, a house full of PTSD/RAD kids is no picnic, not for us and not for them. Talk about triggers!) Shame and its ally second-guessing have been my closest partners since we sent our first child to residential treatment. Even knowing that we’ve had a 66% success rate with residential doesn’t help. How can it? My child is not at home. My child!

Children come into our lives in so very many ways, and leave them in equal measure. There is a grief with each goodbye. Long ago I gave up weighting these truths and treat every relationship I encounter as beautifully sacred. 

And I hope you can do the same for my family’s complex entanglement, our organized crisis. We are not broken, we are whole in our own way. I write this to remember and I send it to the world as testament to both our strength 

... and our fragility.