Parenting Children of Trauma: The Foster-Adoption Guide to Understanding Attachment Disorder

Do you ever feel confused about what went wrong in your foster or adoption story? Are you fearful about the future of your marriage and your children? Do you ever feel overwhelmed and desperate for help?

You are not alone.

Many foster and adoptive parents are trying to raise children with complex emotional trauma, desperate for answers to heal their families. Caught off guard, these families find themselves with shattered dreams, shattered homes, and shattered hearts, with nowhere to turn for answers. Extended family members, friends, and the greater community don't understand the challenges and sometimes add to the problems these families face, sometimes prolonging the healing process for all.

Attachment disorder is cruel.

This book is for the wonderful-hearted people who stepped into adoption with dreams of loving a child to wholeness, only to find that hurting kids sometimes hurt people. This book is for parents who feel overwhelmed, desperate, and depleted. Or for the friend or family member who has watched the the adoption story of their loved one unravel.

My family has lived our own version of hope and hell in learning what real love looks like for these children. It took our marriage to the brink, our own personal mental health to its limits, our family to some dark places--but we came out in a brighter place. We surfaced with the support of our community, our dedication to making it, and a whole lot of prayer. Before I was raising kiddos with attachment disorders, I was therapeutically supporting families who were. And now I want to offer this hope and help to you.

Parenting Children of Trauma brings you everything I've learned as mama, friend, and counselor, in a new and easy-to-understand way through:

• Demystifying attachment disorders and the impact of complex emotional trauma on our homes and society.

• Breaking down current treatment options for attachment disorders.

• Equipping you with information, strategies, and stories to know you are not alone or powerless in your own home.

• Resources to help the friend or family member who wants to support adoptive/foster families.

Walk with me through understanding trauma to alleviate fear and doubt about who you are, who they are, and what your future holds. Because parenting children of trauma will take you to the lowest parts of your existence, only to raise you back up again with a new resilience, a new freedom, a new compassion, and a whole new framework through which to see and love your child.

Whether you're already in this situation, thinking about stepping into it, or know someone who is in it, this book will help you set realistic expectations, redefine love, and walk away with actual tools to change the climate of your heart and your home.

What's stopping you from reclaiming your heart, your home, and your hope? If you're ready to live free of shame, full of hope, and safe in your own home, then this is your book.