Managing the Holiday Grief

The holidays began their descent upon us in late summer/early fall when department stores began advertising for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I noticed Christmas trees in the big box stores as early as Halloween! But, as with any big celebration or transition, anxieties about how to manage children with complicated trauma and grief issues also arrive earlier than the calendar dictates.

Kids with Developmental Trauma have a lot of feelings and grief attached to nodal events. Nodal events are the anniversary dates of anything of importance. For example, birthdays, adoption day, adoption month, the month your child entered into foster care, dates of the moves within the foster care system, mother's and father's day, their birthday, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. Attached to these nodal events are complicated feelings of anger, sadness, and the grief of "what could have been if such and such didn't happen."

From my most recent post, I had explained Developmental Trauma as trauma occurring before the development of language. Kids with Developmental Trauma do not have a verbal language for explaining how they feel; they just know they feel pretty bad inside and cannot find the words to tell you. No matter how many times we give the permission, "Use your words," kids with Developmental Trauma struggle to make the statements they want to say. Instead, they use what comes easiest: regression into old behaviors, destruction of property, shutting down, and, sometimes, physical aggression. If they cannot talk it out, then they will act it out.

Coordinating family and holidays are stressful on their own. How do we coordinate with ghosts from the past or echoes of trauma and still celebrate being a family? I have found preemptive compassion to be very helpful with kids who have doubts about celebrating their new family when they are worried and/or angry about their birth family. The question kids ask the most is if their birth mother is getting enough to eat or has enough money during the holiday season. Acknowledging that this is a big worry and has 'all the sad feels' attached to it is important for your kid to hear. They need the validation that this feeling is normal to have about a birth parent to whom is attached very complicated feelings. And, because they have very few words to describe all the complicated thoughts and feelings they hold inside their little bodies, you have done the work for them. They can avoid a little of the shame and loyalty issues if you take the lead and say it first. Then the thoughts and feelings become not so secretive and taboo.

When the compassion does not help you or your child and there needs to be a consequence, be mindful and try to use a natural and logical consequence. If your child breaks his toys in a fit of rage, then compassion that he has no toys to show his cousins is most appropriate, for example. It is important for your child to see that their anger cannot hijack your brain into acting out their complicated grief issues. Sometimes kids feel that the way to 'win' is to project their anger and negative self worth onto others. I believe they feel less lonely in their grief but we know it just makes them feel worse about themselves.

It is also important to process your own complicated feelings about your child's behavior about their birth parent issues with your partner or close friend or family member. Your child is not the only one who is stressed during the holiday season. You may need someone to distract your child or take them out of the house for a few hours so you can take a break. If you have no one to lean upon, then try to find an adoptive mother's group on FB to find compassion from other parents dealing with the same issues. There are also local grassroots support groups, like the Coalition of Adoptive Families, here in central Ohio, which provides support and education to adoptive families. You can find them on FB. If you need more help than this blog can give, then contact me and we can talk about therapy.