“When Love Is Not Enough,” Feature, 11/28
Clarifying My Attitude Toward Holding Therapy
I appreciate issues related to Reactive Attachment Disorder and its treatment receiving coverage in the media. Unfortunately, I was misrepresented and misquoted in the article, which stated that I used “holding therapy” and other controversial techniques in my practice. This is inaccurate and misrepresents my work. I do not believe that any type of coercive therapy is helpful in resolving the pain and losses the children I work with have experienced. I do, however, assist parents and their children in creating stronger attachments, resolving early traumas and healing from neglectful or abusive treatment, and accurate information about my practice can be obtained at www.attachmentadoption.net or by calling me directly at 510-339-9363.
Virginia Keeler-Wolf, Family Attachment and Adoption Center East Bay, Oakland
The Greatest Benefit
I am disappointed that my colleague, Virginia Keeler-Wolf, was misrepresented in this article. “Holding Therapy” is not done in her practice, nor anywhere in California that I am aware of. Additionally, I wanted to give credit to Virginia for what I believe is the greatest benefit we can offer these children and families, and that is our collaborative and multi-modal approach (taking into account the recent advances in neuroscience), and working in concert with the therapeutic parenting going on at home/school.
Lori DiRicco, Neurofeedback Provider, Family Attachment & Adoption Center East Bay, Oakland
Susan Kuchinskas Responds
The technique of keeping the child held securely in the arms in therapeutic sessions with Ms. Keeler-Wolf was described to me in detail and on tape by one of the mothers in my story. Maybe there is another more politically correct term for this practice. It should be noted that, while some rogue therapists have taken the technique to extremes, the “holding” is designed to recreate the experience of being safe in Mommy’s arms — not being held down. And, if I didn’t make it clear enough in the story, let me say explicitly that both mothers I interviewed had nothing but praise for Ms. Keeler-Wolf’s work, and both felt strongly that she had greatly helped their daughters.
What About the Joy?
As an adoptive parent, I have concerns about the “little monsters” label. The vast majority of adopted children are as delightful a blessing as any biological child could be, and maybe even more so because the parents have the joy of seeing a child go from a bad situation to a great one. Articles like this, while certainly helpful for some, also tend to make the majority of people who are not involved in the adoption community fearful of adoption, particularly when labels like the word “monster” are used to describe children.
The truth is that most adopted children, while suffering small developmental delays, are not “monsters,” do not have severe psychiatric disorders, and don’t exhaust their parents. In fact, not all parents choose to adopt because they cannot have biological children. I would love to see this publication write another article on the absolute joy of becoming an adoptive parent.
Kirby Jones, Folsom
Survival Skills
I disagree that attachment issues are not the norm. I don’t believe enough parents, whose children have mild attachment difficulties, know what they are looking at. Severe and moderate issues are easy to distinguish, but the more mild issues can be explained away or ignored, at least until those mild issues become more severe later on.
It is ludicrous to think that our much-loved and hoped-for children could go through what they have been through and think it won’t affect their ability to trust. It is also ridiculous to believe that these children’s worldviews won’t be altered from living in orphanages where their needs for more than just the basics aren’t being met simply because of the sheer numbers of children to caregivers. Parents need to put themselves in their children’s shoes and ask themselves how they would respond. These kids have perfectly normal responses for the abnormal situations that they live in. Attachment issues do not become apparent until they join their families, because before they enter into the family these behaviors are simply the skills they use to survive.
MeDenne Jones, Boise, Idaho
You Have Done These Children a Disservice
These therapies reported in your article are controversial, unproven, unscientific, and even dangerous. Some of these kids are fetal alcohol-exposed and that distinction is not being made here. Your article implies that all adopted children are seriously damaged. The statement below is very misleading if not totally wrong:
According to Families with Children from China, as many as 25,000 people are on the waiting list to take infants, toddlers, and children as old as ten from Chinese orphanages. In fact, foreign adoptions are cleaning out institutions in China, South Korea, and Eastern Europe; the number of waiting parents may exceed the number of available children.
There are over 700,000 children in Russian orphanages alone. If you are referring to people waiting for young infants with a specific set of criteria then you should make that distinction. It is a disservice to the millions of children without permanent families to print this slanted article.
Rebecca Schindeman, MLIS, MOM (five from ages five to twenty-five, two by adoption from Russian orphanages), Yardley, Pennsylvania
Responding As They Know How
I feel compelled to respond to this article on behalf of the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children (ATTACh), an international organization of clinicians, parents, and child welfare professionals. Some of the information contained in this article is considered counter-therapeutic, and certainly out of date, in the treatment of children with histories of attachment-related traumas. I would recommend interested readers to go to the ATTACh web site (Attach.org) and read the White Paper addressing issues in coercive interventions with children for more information.
The article by Susan Kuchinskas confuses many critically important issues. First and foremost is that in the article children with attachment difficulties are characterized as both “little monsters” and as children with PTSD. Children with unresolved traumas are reacting in predictable ways evidencing the ways their brains are literally being “hijacked” into survival modes of defensive and/or dissociative responses. They are not “choosing” to be controlling or manipulative — although their reactions often appear that way. They are responding in what are known as “conditioned emotional reactions” (previously termed “flashbacks”). Children who have experienced significant maltreatment in their early years at the hands of their caregivers have faced a particularly devastating form of “relational trauma.” This means that there is a combined effect of the hurt of the maltreatment itself (whether abuse, neglect, or both), the loss of a caregiver as a source of security and comfort, and the fact that the child is left alone to deal with the overwhelming distress that is engendered by the maltreatment. Some children literally die from this (as found by the pioneering work of Dr. Rene Spitz in the 1940s). Children who survive develop a survival response that Dr. John Bowlby called “compulsive self-reliance.” They did not choose this response — indeed life offered a profound lesson that it is them against the world.
If we do not understand this very fundamental, literally “hard-wired by experience” response, we can risk retraumatizing children by seeing their resistance as a conscious, chosen behavior. Doing so can fuel parents’ frustration and sense of rejection and can lead to escalating efforts to control these children to get them to comply with parental authority. These efforts too often tragically risk reinforcing the child’s distorted beliefs that adults are hurtful and coercive — beliefs that are the antithesis of seeing adults as a source of comfort and safety (the foundation of secure attachment).
Research from neuroscience, trauma, and child development have made compelling arguments that interventions need to begin with more sensitive and supportive approaches that help regulate the child’s fear reactions. As triggers are “tamed” in an environment that offers active supports and soothing from the caregiver, while simultaneously acknowledging and challenging the distorted negative perceptions and beliefs that derive from the earlier trauma, the child can begin to develop better regulation of emotions and behaviors along with more constructive perceptions and beliefs about self and others. As beliefs change, then the behaviors can change.
Yes, these children often have sustained real damage to their brains — but neuroscience provides compelling evidence of the brain’s capacity for growth and change. There has never been greater hope about the chance of resiliency for these affected children! Attachment therapy is following the many examples from medicine of developing techniques that are less invasive, yet ultimately more effective.
Vicky Kelly, President, ATTACh, Wilmington, Delaware
“You’re Getting Warmer,” Feature, 12/5
The Plot to Enslave and Destroy the White Race
Bill, You are a lying fraud. Over half of scientists DISAGREE with the anti-white man, anti-Western-civilization BIG FAT LIE of (white) manmade “global warming.” But many are afraid to speak up against you global warming dogmatists because they will lose their jobs and positions and they are often threatened with violence. You sons of bitches just want to shut down Western civilization and destroy the very survival of the white population that you hate so much. Thousands of climate scientists have signed the Heidelberg Accord denouncing the fraudulent dogma of “manmade” global warming. A major climate scientist in England who used to push Al Gore’s BIG FRAUDULENT LIE has now completely reversed himself. There are a multitude of technological and infrastructural energy solutions which you will ignore or refuse to allow because you tantrum-throwing, hatred-filled leftists simply want to shut down the white man’s civilization and to enslave and destroy the white race (except for your own selves) using gradualist government tyranny.
Steve Wenzel, Oakland
Smoke, But No Fire
I read the Bill McKibben article on global warming and have the following comments:
1. The cover shows smoke stacks when the issue is CO2 which is colorless and odorless. This seems designed to frighten the public.
2. The warmest years in recent times were in the 1930s, more so than the past ten years. 1934 was the warmest with 1931, 1938, and 1939 in the top ten. Ask your parents or grandparents.
3. Al Gore predicted a twenty-foot rise in sea level and NASA’s Hansen said thirty feet. Now the predictions are down to one foot. Why?
4. Notwithstanding the hysteria of the past ten years, global warming has always been of positive benefit to humanity. Thirty-five-thousand years ago we made the transition from stone age to tribal society during a period of global warming. Ten thousand years ago the leap from tribal to agricultural society along the Mediterranean also took place during a period of global warming. On the other hand, I’m sure I needn’t remind the sophisticated readers of the East Bay of the disease and famine of the “Little Ice Age” period from 1300 to 1850. Al Gore’s own book uses examples of global cooling not global warming to prove his point.
5. Greenland was green back in 1200 when the Vikings colonized it, now it’s returning to that more habitable state, and that plus the opening of the northwest passage will be a boon to all humanity.
6. Antarctica is getting colder not warmer.
Check out if the entire story is being told and if the individual parts make sense. Look deeper and you may be surprised. For starters, PAST WORLDS — Atlas of Archaeology (Harper Collins) published that the conditions of the Sahara improved 9,000 years ago (with global warming), lakes appeared in many places, and human groups were able to move back (see page 94). This was published in 1992 before the current censorship of any contradiction to global warming dogma. If that were written today it would never get past the editors’ desk.
I admit I’m just an amateur here but the above contradictions indicate that the debate is far from over and, in fact, has just begun.
So people, turn on those hot showers without guilt and have a Merry Christmas.
Wayne Huber, Berkeley
“Abandoning the Mentally Ill,” Cityside, 11/28
Fodder for the Machine
I have seen Bonita House and the Russell Street House give a decent life with dignity to many of the disabled homeless I work with and advocate for in Berkeley. The changes made in these people have often brought me to tears. It’s amazing what a little care will do in someone’s life. Besides the state cuts, the city of Berkeley has cut funds to these programs in favor of funding Options Recovery. Options has found a way to make a good salary by charging for what is essentially an A.A. meeting. Now they are Mayor Tom Bates’ biggest supporters of the punitive measures of the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative. In return they have asked for and gotten the money cut from housing and meal programs and from the Russell Street House. Options is a strong believer in jailing the visible, and with these cuts more disabled people are in danger of homelessness and becoming fodder for the Options machine. It pains me to think what could be accomplished if we would only put funds toward a real recovery program in Berkeley.
Dan McMullan, Berkeley
“Books to the Rescue,” Holiday Guide, 11/21
Check Your Own Brains
What a singular disappointment in your review of Oliver Sacks’ most recent book, Musicophilia! You state that Sacks’ first book was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. TMWMHWFAH was his fourth book, not his first. It was preceded by Migraine, Awakenings (which cannot be too highly praised), and A Leg to Stand On. What is the world coming to? My wife thinks I should get off the computer on Thanksgiving Day.
John Culver, Berkeley
“Whose Side is ICE On?” Cityside, 11/21
Good Job
Woodfin has become a bad neighbor for using retaliatory immigration action against Woodfin workers protecting their right to a living wage. Congratulations to Allison Davenport at Centro Legal de la Raza, the community organizers at EBASE, and “Rosa Flores” and the other brave former employees of Woodfin for protecting the rights of the documented and undocumented working poor. Good job, Wendy Patterson, for carefully covering this important community issue.
Sara Matlin, Oakland
“Too Mainstream?” Water Cooler, 11/28
Free Speech For Stalinists
I’d bet anything that Peter Laufer wasn’t fired for cutting off callers, for that’s the management’s policy. Neither was he fired for being nasty, for Larry Bensky was as nasty with people who disagreed with him as Laufer.
When you call a show on KPFA, you have to give your name and town, that’s your ID; if you’re on KPFA’s politically incorrect caller list you’re either disconnected, bypassed, or told that your comment is not relevant to the subject at hand, or that there are too many callers in line; or you are asked in advance what you are going to say; if, somehow, by mistake or by trickery, you pass the screening, you’ll be cut on the air.
Screening callers is used at all programs on KPFA by Kris Welch, Phyllip Moldari, Waylon Southon, Larry Bensky, and including Dennis Bernstein; that’s why I say that Laufer was not fired for being nasty to the callers. But it’s possible that, because of his personality, he was also nasty with management. However, the triggering action might have been that in his last program he was very critical of Cuba’s dictator for life system and, Cuba being the last refuge for Stalinism and Stalinists, that was the last drop.
The “free speech radio” is for those who adapt to the program of Stalinism.
Leo T. West, San Leandro
Letters Policy
Please provide your full name, address, and daytime phone number, although we’ll only print your name, city, and affiliation. Send letters to [email protected]m or Letters, East Bay Express, 1335 Stanford Ave., Emeryville, CA 94608. Letters are edited for length and clarity.
