Robert G. Lewis

Exploring and developing our promise of a permanent family for every child.

What Do You Think? ^©

March 2003

Volume 4, Issue # 5

Topic: No Youth is a Family-Connection Write-off

Ideas: There are no residual kids who have been so damaged that they cannot benefit from a healthy family’s claim. Of course emotional issues consume energy and attention that seem to leave little room for attachment. But our job is to choose life: connecting, relating, loving and even losing.

Discussion: We just do not know all the elements of human development and interaction. We can talk about how damaging repeated trauma can be. We know that the trauma makes hell of lives that are forced to relive it in post traumatic episodes and in desperate attempts to run from the repeated pain whether in substance abuse, self destruction or other ways. We know that early trauma can compromise the ability to relate so dramatically that the primitive emotions of fear and rage seem to be one’s only resources. But we also know that we don’t have all the answers for why and how raging, frightening teens can develop into self reflective, caring, responsible adults. Is there really any one of them who could not benefit from a healthy family’s claim? No one is a write-off for a life-long-relationship.

As the challenges of adolescent development grip a young person, they use enormous energy just keeping up. As they strike out in anger and confusion, they seem least available for connection. Certainly in them, the confusion and sometime pain of becoming personally responsible looks a lot like detachment. For the youth who have experienced unhealthy, early distressed attachment there’s little room for teenaged attachment. It is the time when adoptive families are most likely to suffer with a very disturbed young person to the point of doing “anything to get help and relief”. But common sense tells us it’s a time when they most desperately need healthy connections despite being unable to comprehend them.

Recently two stories of young men have come to me; both used the phrase “he was dead but is alive”. One was adopted as an early teen the other made his own family at 16. Both have come through rocky times into adulthood. One was actually condemned by psychiatrists and social workers as too unhealthy ever to live successfully outside an institution; with no possibility of ever relating to other humans compassionately. For both boys caring adults made the decision to buck convention and claim them, antisocial and self destructive behavior and all. For both, the spark of human connection was enough to give hope for a flame to come. Since we can’t build on weakness, we have to choose to work with even the most limited of strength. The hope of connecting, loving, and relating is where the building starts, in the adults. Since we don’t have all the answers, as hard as it may be hopeful for our most challenging youth, can we really choose any other course?

What Do You Think?