e-mail
Monday night I went to a free support group meeting for foster, adoptive, and kinship families. I confess, I haven’t attended one in years, but I have been feeling a little desperate and depressed. The biweekly support group is led by a social worker with at least 30 years of experience in special needs foster care adoption, a MSW, and years of private therapy experience with internationally adopted traumatized children. The topic for the week was lying and stealing. She gave us a challenge and I am sharing it with you. Try Dr. B. Bryan Post, PhD, LCSW techniques for two weeks. He guarantees that if you follow his methods you will reduce your child’s lying by at least 50 percent in two weeks.
He has a completely different philosophy on why traumatized children lie and steal. Our trainer wholeheartedly believes in his techniques and the reasoning behind them. Traumatized children do NOT lie and steal for control or manipulation.
The children’s responses and actions are based completely on stress response, nothing else. Significant childhood trauma has caused the children to see confrontations with adults as life threatening, as ridiculous as that may seem to us, their parents. They can’t identify their emotions and can’t regulate them, so when you challenge them you perpetuate the behavior.
What do you do then when you catch your child in a lie or stealing? According to Dr. Post, you hug your child; assure the child of your love and of your unconditional commitment and you walk away. You do not give any consequences for the behavior. If you must address the behavior, give your child a couple of hours to calm down. Then quietly let your child know how the lying or stealing made you feel and drop it.
It is a two-week challenge for all of us. If we don’t see improvement then we can move on, but if you have been feeling frustrated and nothing else has worked, why not try it. I am going to give it a whorl.
AdoptionWeek e-Magazine To subscribe visit AdoptionWeek.com
For information/instructions on how to subscribe FREE to your favorite AdoptionBlogs, please visit this link. your favorite AdoptionBlogs
My FAS Child Can’t Stop Stealing
My Child Doesn’t Know She is Full
Did You Ever Think, “My Child’s Special Needs Are Too Much to Handle?”
I Forgot – Living with FAS/FAE
probably going to get kicked off for this
in 2003 his program was recommend for me to treat my son, I bought it lock stock and barrel, went to 3 “event”
I found out he employees Douglas Gosney, the man who ran and hid in Mexico while others were on trial for the death of a child in 2000…
Bryan Post’s degree comes from an on line fake school (he was reprimanded for it this year in Oklahoma)
the summer of 2004 several of the people following his program disrupted any way
you can read more about some of the issues people have with his program on childrenintherapy.org
what he has done and state that he is an expert, he is a gifted speaker, and he is selling his self published products around the country… he also runs a realestate on line thing… he is asking for donations for his new group home in virginia… that he is running off someone elses license…etc…etc…
my daughters has nightmares from his treatment program for years… it certainly did not help my son
life is consequences….
he also used to run a web site telling SWs how to get rich quick by self publishing and claiming to be an expert and evidentual people will think you are…
if his program works so well, why does he need a group home???? he says anyone who follows his program will succeed… I find it amazing how he thinks he can cure brain damaged children… cure true mental illness all drug free
IMO he is one of those people out their taking great advantage of very desperate adoptive parents (you know the ones mentioned in that report last year done by Child Maltreatment on RAD therapy)
I could go on
there are some message boards about the guy at forums.adoption.com where other people have major concerns as well
IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, IT IS
“Significant childhood trauma has caused the children to see confrontations with adults as life threatening, as ridiculous as that may seem to us, their parents.”
I do believe this to be true, based on my own experience with childhood abuse. Abuse survivors tend to go one of two directions — either they lie compulsively or they compulsively tell the truth. Both responses are driven by fear. I would not necessarily say that I felt a confrontation was life-threatening, but confrontations used to cause me EXTREME anxiety. I compulsively told the truth to any authority figure for many years.
As for how to parent lying — that is hard for me to say. My sister was a compulsive liar as a child and does not tolerate ANY lying from her own kids. She was often being manipulative and not fearful of consequences. It was more of an “up yours — you can’t control me” kind of thing. So, I don’t think the hug method would have worked with her. Her compulsive lying was a cry for help.
- Faith
I hope you have success with this Julia. I think I am so skeptical about all of these “easy” fixes that I need to SEE it work to believe it. It is so easy for people to tell you what will work without ever knowing or meeting your kids that it becomes a bit annoying to me after awhile. I was always willing to try ANYTHING to heal my kids. Now, years later, credit cards maxed out and alot of disappointing outcomes – I’m so much more cautious. This really couldn’t hurt, could it? I mean, with all of the lying and stealing they’re doing anyway, will two weeks of no consequences make things any worse. Best case scenario, it could make them feel closer to you, like you’re on their side and then maybe they won’t want to lie or steal. Good Luck!!
no, what usually happens is all progress you have made is lost… the RAD kid thinks they have pulled one over on you, they lie much more… steal much more etc…. start stealing more in stores and at school, etc… they think you are one more adult who they can’t trust.. and you get worse behavior…
I agree with you on that, just was hoping “something” could work – I’m afraid to say I’m an eternal optimist turned bitter skeptic.
I think it’s possible that different kids lie with different motivations. With one of our children, lying is just a reflexive response to anxiety. Lie to avoid confrontation. With another (RAD) it is totally an attempt to control and manipulate. This child will lie about ridiculous things, just to laugh up their sleeve at fooling you. Because every time they fool you they maintain a level of control. So with the one child, I can see some validity to the thought process…though I’m not sure about the method. With the other, I think it would just be asking for big trouble.
For lies I ofter just say… that sure is a nice story… not the false allegation of abuse lies… the ones about “I walked to the moon yesterday….etc…”
stealing… now that is another pain in the butt all together..
Thanks Getting Old, It is great to have someone so well versed in this technique to answer questions.