We were perplexed by what the professionals at the international adoption clinic had to say. But I had found another source of information that was giving me a different perspective. An adoptive mom who was studying to become a therapist was organizing a list serve now known as Attach-China. What she and others were reporting there sounded so much like my daughter’s issues. I was happy to find someone who was seeing similar issues with sleep, language, rages and odd behaviors.

It’s hard to remember the exact steps I took next. But the more I delved into attachment and sensory issues, the more these things made sense to us. LuLu continued to get speech therapy several times a week, and the speech therapist was a perplexed as I was. It was obvious that LuLu had a certain amount of receptive speech, which she demonstrated more readily for the speech therapist than for me. The therapist taught her to sign, and they communicated well that way. But she acted as if she didn’t know what I was doing when I signed to her, although she responded well to Kay’s signing attempts.

I was reading everything I could get my hands on…Daniel Hughes’ Building the Bonds of Attachment was my first read (and is still one of my favorites). I picked up Love is Not Enough by Nancy Thomas, and re-read the Toddler Adoption: A Weaver's Craft book that I had slammed shut pre-adoption.

And 18 months after arriving home with LuLu, we trekked half-way across our state to the only attachment therapists here. While, after a few sessions, we decided that their therapeutic approach wasn’t for us; and they decided that she was “more than RAD” although they didn’t necessarily articulate it that way, something very insightful happened – LuLu started talking.

In a session where the therapists were holding LuLu, calmly across their laps, they asked me to leave the room. I was apprehensive, but knew I could monitor what was happening via a camera/monitor they had set up. So Super Dad and I watched, as they required LuLu to say what she wanted before she was allowed to come find me. LuLu was agitated, but it didn’t take long before she got this very determined look on her face, and blurted out the entire sentence, “I want my Mommy NOW!” We were all stunned. She had never uttered two words together, let alone a whole sentence.

Since that time, I’ve learned much about trauma and probably would never have allowed someone to be that aggressive with my then four-year-old. But it was as if the dam broke, and from that point on she started talking. It was both as if we had “called her bluff” and as if she realized that she didn’t “die” just because she spoke. So, now she was talking, and her frustration level was going to come down, right?

Wrong…

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