Reddit reviews The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook -- What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing
We found 12 Reddit comments about The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook -- What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Basic Books AZ
More of the 1st Year
I think I made the 1st year sound all doom and gloom. It definitely wasn't. The overarching highlight was getting to know these feisty boys of mine. My wife and I would alternate putting them to bed at night, and it turned into quite the ritual. Each night I had with the boys, we would read, play games, tell each other stories about our lives. It was a really, really unique experience. They had so much to share about their pasts and so much they wanted to know about mine. We also go to do a lot of firsts. They had their first time on an airplane, first time to the beach, first time outside of the continental USA, first time taking swim lessons, first time to professional sporting events, first time snowboarding. In so many ways, everything was awesome.
But my wife was not fairing as well with the boys. She preferred structure and routine over relationship. I don't know why she was inclined that way, that's just how it was. And unfortunately for my boys, they really wanted and needed a mom who would love them and take their shit, more than anything else. Except when they did act out, she would take it personally. She could never really understand that their actions, behaviors, choices had very little to do with us as people, especially during the first year. It was just the trauma talking.
The Now
For the moment, I am going to skip over April 2012 - December 2013. The Now starts after that. That's when I filed for divorce and became a single dad to these boys. Some amazing things have happened.
Certainly, being a single dad is a lot of work. The first few months I had to take over a lot of things I never handled before, like laundry, eye doctor appointments, dentist and ortho appointments, etc. Here we are 10 months later and I'm just more or less really starting to get into a rhythm with all the scheduling.
What I Left Out
Between April 2012 and December 2013, a lot of terrible things happened:
I don't really have time time or energy to go into that part of the story.
Some Resources
If you are currently or considering fostering / foster-adopt, I'm going to suggest some books and web sites that really helped me out. There is a decided lack of information about the true impact on chronic, development trauma that kiddos who end up in the foster care system endure. The trauma they experience literally rewires their brain. There's no quick fixes or magic bullets, but with love, kindness and a huge amount of emotional regulation the damage can be repaired.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-Raised-Psychiatrists-Notebook-What/dp/0465056539
http://childtrauma.org/cta-library/interventions/
There are a few titles I really love. I hope you like a few things on the list, if you have any questions let me know.
This idea
> I have always been told that I cannot recover from PTSD unless I go back to the same sorts of people and places who gave it to me in the first place, and this terrifies me.
is outdated, and not supported by any clinical evidence that I'm aware of. I don't blame you for begin terrified. I suffer from complex PTSD as a result of ongoing childhood trauma myself, although my experiences sound less horrific than yours. I also work on a crisis hotline so I deal with a lot of trauma survivors.
I am so sorry that you have had such repeated bad experiences. Your experience of having an involuntary hold put on you when you stated that you were not at immediate risk flies in the face of all current guidelines, which make a clear distinction between suicidal ideation (thoughts) and suicidal intent. Sadly, there are a lot of people out there hanging on to the outdated (and dangerous) idea that anyone with suicidal thoughts or evidence of trauma needs to be locked up immediately, and it sounds like that evaluator was one of them. Either that or she was just plain crazy herself!
As for getting help, you certainly deserve to find some real help. Our friend at metanoia.org (author of our "read this first" link), has put together an awesome guide on how to tell good therapists from bad ones, including bad ones with good intentions. You might find it helpful.
http://metanoia.org/choose/
SwirlingShadows suggestion to educate yourself is also a good one. Some books that I have found helpful are:
Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine
Invisible Heroes by Belleruth Naparstek
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz
Hugs to you.
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. A great mix of case studies and research.
That's because I wanted your attention, sweet thang. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. It's about trauma, as told from a child psychiatrist's perspective
It really has more to do with upbringing.
Here's some recommended reading.
This is more about how the science behind developmental trauma:
This is more examples of kids that have been abused and how they turned out. Some monsters, others got help in time and got better. I'm basically Ted from chapter 8 of this book, except that he got help as a teen and I'm twice his age with no support. 😞
The Importance of Being Little and The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog.
Well I can tell you about a book that changed my whole philosophy on parenting, although it's more of a "How-not-to-do-it" book:
http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Raised-Psychiatrists-Notebook--What/dp/0465056539/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313596665&sr=1-1
It is unbelievably tragic, and will make you wretch when you read it. But you will see how truly important love, compassion and empathy are to human development.
Like I said, I became a completely different person after reading it.
I'm 30 years old, and I went through similar things. I was also "strong" afterwards, while dying inside. I moved out at 15 and chose not to get mental help, figuring I was fine.
Recently I read a book called "The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog". It was written by a man who worked with abused/traumatized children and did the first serious research in to how children reacted later in life. Many of the traits he described I was able to recognize in myself. Knowing that those things were caused by the abuse, allowed me to focus and work on them.
If you want that book, I'll get it for you. For anonymity you could make an amazon wishlist with the shipping address hidden.
If this topic is of interest to you, this is a fascinating book.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-Raised-Psychiatrists-Notebook-What/dp/0465056539
TL;DR: You'd better hope you were raised by reasonable parents, developmental fuck-ups are very hard to fix.
The best online resource I can think of for brain function and organization is http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/
For each subject you can adjust the how complex the explaination is from beginner to advanced and the level of organization from molecular up to social.
Some good non-fiction books if you're interested in learning: The Brain That Changes Itself (neuroplasticity), The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog (brain development and how its changed by early experience), Phantoms in the Brain (brain function and expression; theres also a BBC doc on youtube)
This seems to have accessible stuff on neural pruning in learning and development: http://www.brainbasics.org/home/neural-pruning
This Wikipedia page Biological Basis of Personality and Googling 'neural substrates personality' gives a lot of information as well, though its a mixed bag of whether its relevent or accessible.
> Anyone saying shit like this is really hard to talk to because they believe too much in their ability to judge complicated situations and what the best outcomes are.
Not always, I'll read your links. You're probably right.
Check this out while you're at it: https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Raised-Psychiatrists-Notebook-What/dp/0465056539
You fuck up a kid, they are fucked for life and the possibility of improving their life outcomes (and the outcomes for people around them) is very limited. Fucking up a kid places a huge burden on society and is awful for the kid as well.
A child born with FAS is going to cost the taxpayers millions of dollars over their lifetime. We take away people's right to drive for repeated speeding, single instances of drink driving, even when they have caused no harm to others (I'm not advocating either). Why do we allow people to fuck up kids? They never recover.