Understanding Early Trauma's Impact on the Growing Brain

Building Your Support Team Before Placement R

0:02 The single most protective thing you can do before a placement is build a realistic picture of what the first year actually looks like. The loss your child carries into a loving home. Imagine that a child comes to you through loss. They don't come to you through birth, through blood, through trauma, albeit whether that's a C -section that you had or a natural childbirth. that's traumatic and There's some loss in that but it's mostly for the parent because the parent on the outside is losing that growing growing of that child nine months the child also loses the loss of safety inside the womb and If there was safety and that's where I talk about in neutral trauma because there's a lot of adoptive families that will say I don't know why they're acting like this.

0:59 We give them everything they have everything they need they have Nothing to want for we've taken care of them We give them family structure we give them everything they need I don't know why they're acting like this the behaviors and just they see deterioration for years and years and years and then Sometimes, never even realised it wasn't about that. It was before they came to you. Before they came to you, the in -utro trauma, what did they go through then? What experiences did they carry in their subconscious that's in their DNA that shape their brain, that causes triggers, that affects their daily functioning, 10 to 12 years down the road?

1:44 Every child who joins a family through adoption or foster care at any age has experienced at least one significant loss. A birth parent, a foster family, a sibling, a culture, a language, a routine, a sense of safety. Love does not erase that loss. Love is enough, but you need more. It gives a child a safe place to eventually process it, but the loss travels with the child into your home, however good that home is. So if you can just separate yourself out. Even if you had that child from birth, even if you took it home from the hospital, it's the in utero, it's the past life, it's the generational cycles of trauma that have come from that family tree that you have got into your family tree and that implant implantation, transportation, however that family family were connected or disconnected grief and loss everything has to be addressed otherwise it will come out somewhere along the line.

2:47 Holding both of these truths at once that this placement is generally good for your child and that your child is also grieving something real. It's one of the harder emotional tasks of an adoptive and foster parent. Expect grief to show up sideways in irritability, in silliness, in a sudden refusal to talk about the past, in asking the same question about a birth parent over and over. That is what grief looks like in a child who does not yet have the words for it.