Understanding How Your Adopted Child Thinks

Where does our kids' anger come from? What do we need to understand about them in order to respond with love and understanding? In this episode, I'll attempt to answer those questions and share some significant moments in our family's life - moments that gave me an opportunity to better understand how my children think.  I hope our story inspires, educates, and reassures you that you are not alone in this journey.

What is Living With Joy Renewed with Jeanette Nafziger?

Welcome friend! This is the Living With Joy Renewed podcast, where adoptive families find healing for the present and hope for the future.

I'm Jeanette Nafziger, and I'm here to come alongside you on your parenting journey each week with tips, real-life stories, and encouragement to help your family find renewed joy at home.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the living with joy renewed podcast, where adoptive families find healing for the present, and hope for the future. Joy renewed is here to support you on your parenting journey each week with tips real life stories and encouragement to help your family find renewed joy at home. Here's this week's episode.

Today, I want to share a little glimpse into how our adopted children think, and why they may think that way. Again, I am sharing from our own experiences and some of the revelations that we received on our journey. The way our children react to things may not match what you are experiencing with your adopted children. But my hope is that my stories can help you take ownership of your stories in a way that empowers you to take what you learn from your children and use that to parent them in a way that helps them continue on in their healing journey.

Today's episode actually has three different stories. But if you listen closely, you'll hear the same theme coming out and each of them. In the episode entitled Why it's okay to be a non-traditional parent. I talked about our move to a different state. We lived in that different state for almost eight years, I believe. And then we moved back again. I mentioned the upheaval and chaos that surrounds a big move like that for a family. And today's first story talks about that a little more. It was actually easy for us to make the decision to move. We love adventure and new things. Okay, well, maybe I love new things a little more than my husband, but he was completely on board. The one who wasn't on board was our oldest daughter.

She was eight years old at the time and the thought of leaving her room, her house her swing set was all very upsetting to her. On the day that she realized that she would also be leaving her grandma and her aunts and her cousins. Well, let me tell you that reaction is a story for trauma 101 Right there. So while we knew it was normal for her to be upset about a move, we never correlated up heaving her from her normal surroundings, with a fear of instability that being adopted could bring the movers rough. Her reactions were rough, the other children struggled too, but not quite at her level since she was the one really old enough to understand what moving meant. But we just made her go with the flow. Because sometimes life is rough. Sometimes it's tough, right? You know, she didn't really kick and scream and refuse to leave. She just cried a lot. Her defiance was more pronounced through many other different behaviors. But once we got there and we settled in, she seemed better. She made friends with the neighbors. And she really did settle in and seem to enjoy our new life. Then eight years later, when we decided it was time to move back home. That's when we faced the monster of a 16 year old kicking and screaming see to us we were going back home to her.

This experience had been the bulk of her childhood and she was home. It had been a rough eight years for her and for us since we had moved especially as she transitioned into that adolescent age. She felt attached to her home there and to her friends there and to her life there. However, we packed up and we moved again. After we moved back to our home state. That's when things got really hard. It was a rough four years after that, for her and for us. But before elaborating on that, let me go to the next story. This one involves our youngest daughter. While we were living away from our families, our children would often come back to our home state to stay with their grandparents and aunts for a month or so during the summer. Our youngest was finally old enough to do this one year. And so we drove her up and dropped her off with the rest of them. As soon as I was home, I started getting calls that she was homesick. And I couldn't easily turn around and pick her up. So we all figured we would give it a little more time for her to settle in and start having some fun. Plus, my husband and I at the time were owners and managers of a couple of small cafes, and we had catering scheduled. We had other business obligations that kept us from being able to drive all the way back to her within the next couple of weeks. Well, the situation only got worse. My family would shuffle her around from house to house to figure out where she was the happiest. And I'm using that term relatively because really nothing was making this little girl happy. She just wanted us she was crying every night, throwing up, not having fun at all. We would talk to her on the phone. Tell her we loved her. We tried to help her gain that resilience. She needed to tough it out. We told her we'd be there as soon as we could. But we were honest with her that it wasn't going to be right away. And we did finally get to her, but it was weeks later.

So now let's fast forward about eight years later to another story. Our children are much older at this time, and three of them are living out on their own, leaving our two youngest at home with us yet our son, who was still at home was 18. And our youngest daughter was 16. At this time, it's 2021, and the housing market was booming. So we decided we were going to put our house up on the market, we knew we didn't want to stay where we were, we had plans for our business that required a different type of property. And we figured if the time is right to sell, we should take advantage of it. So we put the house on the market where it sold quickly. The only problem was, we didn't have another place to move to. The downside of taking advantage of a seller's market is that you also need to be a buyer in the same market. So we figured what the heck, it's summer, we love camping, we can park our camper at a campground and see if we can wait out the market a little bit, maybe find our ideal property in a month or two. It sounded like a grand plan to my husband and I but I guess that was really the key. It was a grand plan to us. While we were finishing up the packing. And the cleaning of the house we had just sold my sister called me up to my daughter's room where she was there cleaning the floors. On the wall was a calendar still hanging, and my sister laughed and told me to take a look at the entry for the next day which was our actual moving day. My daughter had written homeless across the block. How cute. We laughed. We talked about how dramatic she can be sometimes. And the next day, we moved into our camper with two teenagers, two cats and three dogs. What an adventure this was going to be right.

We were there for six months before we finally moved into a rental home. While we were at the campground, our daughter decided she wanted to stay in a tent so that she had her own space. Our son had his own room in the camper, but she was kind of tucked up in a loft that was a little bit more exposed to everything else going on in the camper. And besides with four adult sized people, two cats, three dogs. She was really just looking for some quiet space outside of the chaos. So she and her daddy set up a platform of pallets. On top of the pallets, they erected the largest tent they could find. And she set it up with lights, fans, a bed, some dressers and even some accessories. She had some pictures hanging down on the quote walls of the tent. Everybody that saw it. They said it looked like a princess castle and they just remarked how cool it was. Her cousins told her she was so lucky. But if any of them had looked a little closer and been privy to some family interactions, they would have seen a different story. She was mad, she was sad. She was depressed. She couldn't seem to control her emotions. And she talked a lot about bad childhood memories that she had some that we weren't even aware of up to this point. It was really bringing out a lot of stuff in her.

At the same time our son was also struggling. Just a little background on him. He always struggled, our youngest son with controlling his anger. When he would get angry. Everyone knew it. We had to patch up a couple of walls before we moved out of the house because of fists that were going into them instead of the flesh of whomever he was angry with. He never got irrationally angry. Again, as I watched patterns, I noticed that he would get very angry at injustice. His reactions were irrational. But in his mind, and sometimes in mind, his anger was justified. For example, He was suspended from school for three days once for attacking a classmate at recess, he ran him down and he punched him. Of course, we were appalled. But I really wasn't actually surprised when the school principal called a little later to share that. Yes, while he was still suspended for his reactions. The principal did find out that the other child had been making fun of our son's best friend in front of him at recess for the past week. So our son admitted yes, he just couldn't take it anymore. He saw red and he pushed into the ground and he punched him. That was the real moment we realized we have got to help him understand himself a little better. He needed to understand that injustice is a big trigger for him. And then we needed to help him become equipped with better anger management skills. So among other things, we got him a punching bag and let him use that to get his anger out son. We taught him how to run off steam. But really helping him understand his triggers. And why they were triggers was a big part of his journey. So back to the campground. Like I said he'd been making great progress on his anger management skills. But when we moved in that camper, it seemed that all sense of control was out the door. He got so upset one night at something that happened at work that he threw his phone as hard as he could. It hit the corner of flat screen TV and it cracked it. Next thing I know he's punching the TV and completely destroying it. And then he picks it up. He takes it outside. He was throwing it around until it was crushed to smithereens. Remember, I told you I'm not just going to share the good stories. We're going to talk about some of the lowest points, and that was a low point. I was scared that night. I didn't know how to get him to calm down. I was scared for him. I couldn't figure out and when asked he couldn't either, why he lost complete control in a way more violently than he had ever experienced before.

So there's three stories, but all with the same theme. Did you catch it? We moved and then we moved back, we sent our children to stay with relatives 500 miles away, we sold our home and moved into a camper with no real idea of how temporary it was going to be. Displacement. That was the theme. I started this episode with the title, how to understand how your adopted child thinks.

Bottom line, it's not always the way we think. How could I not have understood what displacement could do in an adopted child who was still trying to process their adoption? My oldest daughter feared what moving away from those who loved her meant for her? Would she see them again? How often would they remember her? Would they still love her from so far away? Does this sound familiar? These are typical adoptee questions. When we moved back to our home state, we were controlling that aspect of her life. We were forcing her to leave where she felt finally like she was home. What we saw when we moved to this new state was a new beginning. But what she saw was an unwanted ending. And what we saw is returning home eight years later, she saw as manipulation and control that she had no say in and this really caused a rebellious spirit to swell up in her. Once we moved back. She struggled to finish school. She did do it. But she was drawn to a rough crowd of friends. She partied to drown out these emotions. Eventually, as young adults, she did move back to that state. Things really spiraled for her while she was there. She has since moved back to our home state again, and she is doing great.

Our youngest daughter's story. Bottom line is she wasn't ready to be out on her own yet without us. This isn't out of the ordinary; it happens with kids. Sometimes they get homesick, they think they're ready for this. They're not. But with her she didn't have the resilience to cope, and to try to make the best of it. And this is because she was so scared. She felt abandoned. She had no idea when we were coming for her. And she wondered if we really would, is that rational? Yes, that's what my mind would say. But her mind was saying something different. This situation for her, it triggered a fear of leaving my husband and I for many years after this. She wouldn't go to sleepovers, even just down the street, she wouldn't go she hated when we would get babysitters and leave for an evening. And if I'm completely honest, she lost some of her amazing sense of humor and carefree personality. For a while after that. What we saw as a fun summer getaway for her, she came to see us abandonment and a sense of insecurity crept in that we never saw.

In my final story, what we saw was an epic summer of bonding and camping brought out feelings of instability, insecurity, a fear of the what if the unknown, our children were reacting because their brains were in chaos with these feelings that they couldn't control and they couldn't really understand. Now this did happen as older teenagers like I mentioned. So they did have a better way of putting words to these feelings. And they had been able to when they were younger, and they eventually were able to share these feelings with us. And all I could ask myself was how could we have missed that adoption, even when it occurs at a very early age as in the story of our children, it causes a level of trauma that we will talk about in some coming episodes. And this is really becoming more of a known fact now the trauma of adoption. But are we as parents really aware of how it may be playing out in the minds of our adopted kiddos in each situation? If I had understood then what I have more knowledge of now, I would have done things differently.

In all three of these stories, we would have still moved it was right for our family. But I would have understood the fears that a move like this might bring up in an eight year old adopted child a little better. She had thoughts during that time that we would never dream of, but I would have paid more attention to them. If I had been more aware I could have given more information to her about what the move would look like what these relationships were going to look like. And eight years later, we still would have moved back home. It was definitely time for many different reasons for us to move back. And that's probably a whole different podcast episode. But I would have been more prepared to watch for the unhealthy coping mechanisms that she used. And I maybe would have understood how an adoptees reaction might be different than that. I'd have another 16 year old who probably would still be upset at the routing. And that's just what kind of what I assumed it was, I didn't quite understand that there was a different level in her adopted brain. With my youngest daughter's story, this one's tough for me, because beyond a shadow of a doubt, if I had that summer to do all over again, when we sent her all the way up there with her siblings, and she wanted to come home, I would have went and picked her up. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is make sure your adopted child knows that you will never abandon them. And sometimes that means doing difficult things that may seem irrational to us, but just adds this sense of security in them that you are here, always for them.

As far as somewhere in that camper, I'm not sure what the best move would have been in that situation. Uh, maybe not moving into a nomadic lifestyle and instead renting a house right away. But with the kids being a little older at that time, I think as I look back, I know for sure, I should have taken that homeless word in the calendar entry a bit more seriously. And I should have sat them down before we ever did this, to ask them to share how they're feeling about this decision. That might have been enough to acknowledge that this is difficult for them instead of just completely missing it. But whatever I would have done differently in each of these situations, it's awareness or lack thereof. That is the key. I guess I just assumed that while these situations were sure to cause some level of upheaval in any family, we could rally through them.

My mistake was forgetting or in those younger years, not really having the right knowledge that my adopted kiddos brains process things a little differently, because of each of their unique stories. Sometimes in our desire to make our adopted children's childhood experience, and if we're honest, our own parenting experience, as normal as possible, we do a disservice to them in their stories. As humans, we all process everything that happens to us through a part of our brain that stores experiences. And my kids experiences include questions about why was I abandoned? And could it happen again? What did I do to make my birth parents not love me enough to keep me? And could I possibly unknowingly do it again, causing the same reaction? What if I hadn't been adopted and I had to live not knowing how secure my environment is, or in living arrangements that are unstable, and could life take away that security so I actually do end up experiencing all that. So they might not always have these words, but their brains are outputting these feelings. Our job as adoptive parents is to always be aware that something may trigger our children in a way we don't fully understand or comprehend. Because our brains don't harbor the same experiences or questions. As adoptive parents. We will never have all the knowledge but the cool thing about our kiddos is that if we pay attention they will teach us as long as we're aware that we need to be taught. Being there safe place isn't about knowing as much as it is about acknowledging that there is always more to know.

Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Living with joy renewed podcast. We hope that this episode resonated with you and provided some hope and inspiration for your own family's journey. If you'd like to join a virtual or in person life group with other adoptive families, visit us at www dot live with joy renewed.com. In the meantime, stay connected with us on Instagram at live with joy renewed. And remember to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss the next episode. As always, thanks for allowing us to be a part of your family's journey.