And so little money! I continuously feel like I’m caught in a never-ending quagmire of which interventions to try first. I’m guessing I’m not alone in this dilemma. Any family raising a combo platter kid can get overwhelmed with the potential choices of interventions to help the child. The confusing thing for me has been that many of these interventions do bring about a positive impact. But not a single one has been THE magic bullet.

For the first five years or so (maybe longer) that LuLu was home, I was sure I was going to find THE answer to her problems. It was nearly impossible to determine what all her problems were, but I knew that somewhere there was THE answer. Here are the interventions that have produced part of THE answer, but none has been a miracle cure:

Attachment Therapy. I don’t know what I would have done without the guidance of some awesome attachment therapists and finding support through the Attachment & Trauma Network. While LuLu’s many other disorders (sensory, language processing and autism spectrum) impede her ability to heal through attachment therapy, it just made the most sense to me that we needed to address the attachment piece first. If she didn’t trust me, how could we get her cooperation on other therapies and how could the other healing occur? Out of all of LuLu’s disorders, her RAD is the most healed. Her doctors now consider her as having PTSD, but not attachment disorder. And even though she’s still working through trust issues, she is attached to me, and to us as a family. She no longer “mom shops” or rejects my hugs and signs of affection. And she shows genuine affection to us as well (albeit odd sometimes…which I’m told is attributable to the autism spectrum).

Neurofeedback. When LuLu was five we started neurofeedback and did it multiple times daily for over a year. We did over 400 sessions in less than 12 months. The initial results were awesome. Until neurofeedback (she’d been home 3 years) she had NEVER slept through the night, usually only about 2-hour stints. The whole family was severely sleep deprived. It was through a neurofeedback protocol that she began responding to our facial expressions and becoming more socially aware. It wasn’t until 1st grade that she was even able to name the other kids in her class…up until that point, she didn’t even know they were there. The one thing that neurofeedback did not do (that sent us on to the next intervention) was calm her incredible rages. The other incredibly affirming thing neurofeedback did for us was the QEEG. Through this brain map, doctors were able to confirm that our child was severely dysregulated in several areas of the brain. This helped to explain why even our best efforts at attachment parenting just were not working.

Medications. So I finally acquiesced and found a psychiatrist. I fought the idea of meds for a long time. But it was a good and necessary step. And it still is. The one thing to remember about medications, though, is that they stabilize a child, but don’t heal them. There are other interventions that can produce more of a healing change.

Biomedical Interventions. So, we limped along on a pretty stable medication regime until the summer of 2005, when a friend contacted me about the incredible improvements her daughter had made on biomedical interventions, specifically dietary changes and supplements. I was intrigued, but skeptical. I was starting to realize there was no magic cure for LuLu and starting to exhaust at searching for one. Yet she was convincing, so we decided The testing done for this intervention was validating as well. It showed that she had several biochemical abnormalities. Her biomed patterns are not typical autism patterns, but have similarities. More evidence that LuLu has a very unique combo platter.

HBOT. Last spring we dove into HBOT and next to neurofeedback we have to say it’s the intervention that has made the largest impact. It helped significantly with her noise sensitivities and language processing. We have no scientific measurement of this, because we opted not to pursue MRIs or other brain mapping at this juncture. But we did 40 dives and they helped. Her DAN! doctor believes (and we agree) that she would benefit from more.

Fast ForWord, Interactive Metronome, The Listening Program. Based on the neuropsychological evaluation and other evaluations we had conducted in conjunction with our due process complaint, we realized just how globally impaired LuLu’s processing (language, auditory and visual) was. At the advice of many therapists we began exploring these therapies. In 2006 we did all three of the above. Of these three, Fast ForWord had the greatest impact. It increased her reading fluency and gave her a boost of confidence in being able to use reading to learn material. She now reads silently (didn’t used to).

Still, there’s so much to do, so much that could be done. But where will we turn next?