Repetition Compulsion

Dear Parent,

A coherent narrative--conception to the present--is necessary for people to have stable mental health.  Attachment therapists, like me, are emphatic about this.  Our attachment challenged children need their stories.  They don't need it forced down their throats, but they do need it carefully unfolded over time in order to make sense of it in their own minds.

Let me give you an extreme example: 

Child B is adopted though never told much about the details. Child B feels different to the core--unlovable, ashamed, angry, distant, and ultimately disconnected from her adoptive parents.  She is reactive, rejecting, and ungrateful.  Her adoptive parents are reactive and angry because they do not understand their child’s behavior and they cannot find informed help to figure it out. Nothing works to change the negative behaviors. Child B eventually becomes an angry teen and runs away. She ends up on the streets having sex for money to survive.  Eventually, Child B gets pregnant and CPS takes the baby (Child C) when born in the emergency room where it is documented that she appears unable to care for the baby. The baby (Child C) gets put into short term emergency foster care for a few days, then placed in a foster family, ultimately to be permanently adopted into a family.  And, so it goes.

Here is the back story:  It turns out that Child B described above had a birth mother, Child A, who was raped by her stepfather when she was fourteen-years-old.  Child A gave birth to Child B while living in an abandoned house where a lot of runaways stayed.  Child B was taken by CPS while still in the hospital because the birth mother (Child A) was not capable of caring for a newborn (Child B).  The newborn (Child B) was put in short term emergency foster care for a few days, transferred to a temporary foster family for six months, then transferred again to a foster family for a year before at eighteen-months of age finally getting transferred to a fost-adopt family who really wants to start a family. The fost-adopt family tries desperately to parent Child B, but they cannot seem to feel attached to this child with challenging behavior that they do not understand.

When children do not know their own story, like political history, they are bound to repeat it, search for it, long for it, re-create it, and have absolutely no idea why they do it.  

Your child may be like Child A, Child B, Child C or a completely different version altogether. The narrative is the key to changing the trajectory.  Without the narrative, there is an unconscious bio-neuro-psycho-social spin cycle at work that is practically super-natural.  Factually, brain-based biological processes are like this.

A coherent narrative gives us all a chance to understand ourselves in light of our history, our parents' history, and our multigenerational trajectory.  When we understand, we can choose to stay the same or change.  When we are blind, ignorant, or misinformed, we are unconsciously driven to repeat the stories of those who came before us with little choice in the matter.

A coherent narrative is essential for positive mental health.  Get one.

Love matters,

Ce

P.S. Please check out the Love Matters Parenting Society membership for more support!