There is much I agree with in Dr. Perry’s book, The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog. But in the chapter I was reading today, he lands squarely on the evils of attachment therapy…and in specific…on holding. I bristled when I read this, because I think attachment therapists get a repeated bad rap. So many of them recognize the trauma our children have endured and realize the critical importance of attachment. So many of them are nothing short of brilliant when it comes reaching unreachable kids.

To Dr. Perry’s credit, if you read exactly what he’s written (the entire book, from the beginning) you will learn that he does, in fact, agree with much of the nurturing holding concepts that most attachment therapists are now using. He speaks of a particular foster mom whose intervention consisted of holding her “babies” and treating them like the developmental age they were stuck in. He even sent other parents to her to learn from her ways.

Yet in another chapter he details holding and supposed attachment therapy gone mad (and resulting in severe injuries to a child). In this particular case, the “therapeutic” foster parents were parenting children they believed to be victims of ritualistic abuse. There was also a religious element of needing to exorcise the demons.

I deeply appreciate what Dr. Perry has to say about what is dangerous about the zealous “witch hunt” that occurred in Gilmer, Texas and was described in this chapter. I also appreciate the dangers he points about coercive holding and re-traumatizing traumatized children. But I still think it gives attachment therapy a black eye. And that if we continue to label holding therapy as being the coercive rage reduction (provocative) methods used by the early developers, we are “throwing out the baby with the bath water.”

I know countless families who have had successes with holding and other modalities of attachment therapy. I also know families whose children have benefited greatly from a neurosequential (neurodevelopmental) approach. (This is what Dr. Perry advocates.) And I know several who have had remarkable success with various components of biomedical interventions. So much so, that I want none of these interventions to be “off limits” to families in crisis.

It apparently is human nature to want to categorize things as black or white; right or wrong. We humans tend to go to extremes in all things. And what often happens is that the true answers to life come in the ability to balance. This is what I think about attachment therapy. I believe that those practicing attachment therapy (and attachment parenting) correctly do it by carefully balancing nurture and structure tailored for each child’s level of emotional development. I realize that Zaslow and those early pioneers of attachment therapy were coercive by today’s standards. They also didn’t have the benefit of knowing what we now know, thanks to Dr. Perry and others, about trauma’s effect on developing brains. But they did know they were in a “fight for a life”…the life of a child who would end up socially detached or as a sociopath.

And here we are, more than 20 years later, with society still not believing that infants can be profoundly affected by early experiences. “They’re resilient”…remember? And the general public correlates the words “attachment therapy” with the ritualistic abuse debacle of Gilmer, Texas or the rebirthing tragedy that occurred in Colorado. So the public can lump all of us together and say “see, we told you those people who thought we needed to give high nurture and intense intervention to traumatized children were just a bunch of wacko therapists and stressed-out religious zealot adoptive parents.” Meanwhile, traumatized children are the losers.

When are we (and I’m talking the adoption community here) going to recognize the truth about traumatized children and insist that our children get the interventions they need?

Man, am I on a tear or what????

Holding

Holding Time

More on Holding Time

Still More on Holding Time