Before we adopted, I had heard one or two horror stories about (what I now know as) RAD and how it manifests in families. We chalked it up to families not doing enough. Not understanding trauma. Not learning a language (like I did). Not cocooning. Not advocating. You name it, I thought I was going to do it better. I even wrote a book about how to do it because I was determined that I was going to fix everything. That I was enough. That love was enough.
Until it wasn't.
This
is the ongoing story of one of our Salvo families.
This
is who we fight for.
After struggling with infertility for about 5 years, my husband and I felt God calling us to foster/adopt. After a lot of prayer and research, we felt he was really calling us to foster in a local county. Our second placement was a sassy, energetic almost 3 year old child who had witnessed and experienced every trauma you could think of. We were brand new foster parents and clueless as to what the future would hold. For the first few years, we kept saying "she has toddler behaviors, but they are a little extreme." Then we noticed the behaviors worsening as she started school and as she continued to get older. If she was told no or did not like what her situation was at home, she would hit, kick, spit, bite, scream and rage for upwards of an hour and forty-five minutes. We got her into therapy at the age of three and psychiatry at the age of 5. We also started our own research and enrolled her into equine therapy at the age of 4. We were told by the specialists that if we got her into attachment therapy at 3 years old, that she would be "fine." We participated in two and a half years of therapy, tried a number of modalities but behaviors worsened. She would hide under tables, run around the treatment room and hiss like an animal.
At school, she was reported throwing chairs, touching peers inappropriately, raging at teachers, hitting and spitting on teachers and much more.
In 2020, we finalized her adoption. All of the specialists said that this permanency would help her settle in and be part of the family. They couldn't have been more wrong.
At the age of 9, she told her therapist that she poisoned me (her adoptive mother) by keeping her evening pills and dropping them in my drink. A few months after this she threatened to kill me (her adoptive mother) and her younger sister. The next day in school she calmly sat and told the school her detailed plan to kill me which included knives that we have in our home. She said she wanted me to suffer. The school called stating they were concerned for our safety and said she needed to go to the ER immediately. Children's ER essentially mocked us, stating that she was "only 9 years old" and that a 9 year old really cannot hurt adults. She stayed there for 36 hours while we "secured our home with indoor security cameras, fingerprint and combination locks.
She is now 11, and has similar behaviors. Rages almost daily at home and has a number of issues at school. We not only feel like prisoners in our own home, but do not have felt safety in our own home either. This has been one of the most devastating and difficult journeys of our life.
