PTSD and CAPD

Sometimes even I forget. I forget how much damage was done in those first 3 years of her life. I forget, and then I am brutally reminded. Today was the guardianship hearing. I am now her guardian. She has been quite dramatic in proclaiming her stress over it. I've been offering glib reassurances. We've explained what was going to happen a dozen or more times. Today, she told me she was scared. I finally asked what scared her. She said, "I'm afraid I'm going to lose you, too."

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Suddenly it clicked. She wasn't equating this to her adoption hearing, she was again going through the trauma of termination of parental rights. I'll give you the short version of the trauma. Birth Parent's Attorney saw it as a game. There were a variety of reasons for that, but for him, it was a game. So, as part of that game, he was delaying and drawing things out, and he would subpoena Daughter for every court date. He knew she had been too young and was not a competent witness. But County Attorney was majorly incompetent. I won't even get into how incompetent, but it was unreal. CA didn't realize that it was possible to ask the judge to say Daughter couldn't testify and stop the subpoenas. BPA never called Daughter as a witness, he just made me drag her to the court house every month or so for over a year. Each time I'd take her to court, she would see her abusers. Each time I took her to court, she was traumatized. She wouldn't sleep after those appearances. I was fighting for her every way I knew how, but I kept running into brick walls. After months of begging, the psychologist finally looked back over her notes and realized that every time Daughter saw Birth Father, she regressed. I'd been asking her to stop the visits, but she didn't see why it was necessary, until she finally looked back over her notes.

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Does Daughter remember those court visits? Does she remember the details? I don't know. What she does know on a gut level is that the court house is a place where bad things happen. The psychologist who did her evaluation for the guardianship was amazed by the impact it had on her. When we go back to renew the guardianship, she told me to ask that Daughter be excused from attending because it is too traumatic for her. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Sometimes I forget.

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Psychologist also gave me a copy of her report on Daughter. As I looked it over, what jumped out at me was her biggest deficit. Her receptive language skills are significantly under the 4 years of age mark. Significantly. I pointed at that score and said, "Central Auditory Processing Disorder." For all of you adoptive parents, have your children tested for this while they were young, especially if they have Reactive Attachment Disorder, as the two often go together. When Daughter was finally diagnosed, the window of opportunity to really retrain the brain was closed. I did some research and bought some software that addressed the problem, but it was too late to correct the fundamental issue.

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Here is my less than perfect understanding of it: Language processing is one of the things that is at the core of the brain. The language processing center grows and develops when the parents talk to the infant. That verbal stimulation causes the center to grow and develop. In infants who suffer severe neglect, it doesn't develop during that critical time, and language processing gets pushed further out into the brain, into areas that are not as efficient. It's like stroke patient struggling to learn how to talk again. In Daughter's case, at some point in those first three years she literally shut off her hearing to protect herself. It was a real loss, and she was given loaner hearing when she was 3. It was amazing to watch her discover sounds for the first time. She had a high pitched hearing loss, so she hadn't been able to hear ess sounds. Once she got the hearing aid, she began stretching out the ess in words. It was amazing to watch these discoveries. If she'd gotten intense therapy at that point, it might have been possible to improve things, but by the time she was diagnosed 10 or 11 years later, it was too late. I find myself wishing it had been diagnosed earlier. I'm frustrated with the school psychologist who dismissed her as a retard and refused to look further, despite my protests. Central Auditory Processing Disorder. Sometimes I forget.

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She has been with me for over 21 years. The damage done in those first 3 years remains. Love, structure and stability couldn't fix it all, no matter what they said in foster parent training.

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