Helping Adopted Children Heal From Past Trauma and Loss

Did your child experience trauma or loss before they came to you? Do you want to help them heal? Join our conversation with Dr. Amanda Baden, a Professor and the Doctoral Program Director at Montclair State University in the graduate counseling program and a licensed psychologist in private practice in Manhattan. She is an adult adoptee from Hong Kong and an adoptive parent of a daughter from China.

In this episode, we cover:

• What is trauma?
• What types of events/things create trauma?
• Why are trauma, abuse, and neglect so harmful to children?
• Is neglect a form of trauma?
• How trauma impacts children, and what factors influence how much the trauma impacts the child later in life?
• How to tell the difference between typical developmental behavior and behavior that is the result of trauma or loss?
• What is triangulation?
• How to break the triangle?
• Helping our kids integrate their birth, adoptive or foster, and self-identities. Many children who do not live with their birth families struggle to incorporate parts of their birth families, foster or adoptive families, and who they innately are into a whole that is their identity. How can parents help their children form a healthy, complete identity?  
• Practical tips for helping children heal. Often, we do not know exactly what trauma our children have experienced. Either they don’t remember, or it happened before they were verbal, or they cannot or have not told us. How can we help them if we do not know what happened to them?

This podcast is produced  by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

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