Charlie's story

My husband and I adopted our son ‘Charlie’ when he was 4 years old, along with his older and younger sister.

During our introductions and into the weeks ahead, he presented as a loving but very closed off little boy. In one aspect he was very easy to care for. He would never make a fuss, rarely cried or became angry, never asked for anything and did what he was asked to the first time.

Charlie has a personality that means people naturally warm to him very quickly but, part of this lies in his deep need to seek others’ approval. His cheeky and relaxed attitude made it hard for people to see past his smiling face to the trauma and insecure attachment that lay beneath.

He was very used to sitting on the sofa in front of the TV and sometimes we suspected he would have stayed in the same spot without asking for anything all day if we had left him to it.

However, underneath that was a very scared little boy that didn’t feel safe enough to share how he was feeling; who was too scared to ask us for anything because we might reject him; and ultimately felt that he was only loveable if he didn’t show his needs.

We distinctly remember a time where he took a nasty fall down a step and badly grazed both his hands and his knees. He fell with such a bump that we both expected a big scream but instead were met with “Mummy I loved that”. Everything inside us wanted to comfort his tears but he had such a hard time showing his true emotions, fearing he would face rejection, that his response was to try and please us by ignoring his own pain.

Fast forward a year and a half later, and our son is no longer the ‘easy child’ to care for. He feels things very deeply and strongly. When he is upset, he truly cries and when he’s angry the whole house knows about it!

But for us, this is a massive improvement. We raised concerns with our social worker that after just over a year of living with us and benefitting from therapeutic parenting, Charlie was not able to share his emotions or able to express his needs.

She then put in an application to the Adoption Support Fund and we were given some fantastic input from the ACE therapeutic team. Jacqui sat with us both and helped us to unpick just how Charlie might be feeling and why he was presenting in that way.

Through structured play sessions, we were given the skills to help him unpick his emotions and encourage him to stop and think about how things felt within his body.

Very quickly, we started to see a huge change in Charlie. Instead of hearing “I’m fine” or “it doesn’t matter”, he would become very sad or very angry. He would present with the same emotional regulation skills you’d expect of a two year old, with lots of screaming, arms and legs flailing and sobbing and, whilst these were immensely hard to watch, inwardly we celebrated the fact that our little boy finally felt safe enough to share how he was feeling.

Over the weeks of the sessions, this did improve and he was able to use some of the skills we practiced to help him co-regulate but he still feels things very deeply and his meltdowns can often be very intense. It can really challenging as parent to shoulder his big emotions and sit with him in sadness but we knew he needed to know he could trust us with his emotions and we would accept him for how he was feeling.

We are so proud of the progress he has made in learning to trust and open up. He is an incredible little boy and if you catch him when he’s regulated he can express his emotions in a very mature way. He openly expresses his wants and needs, not always in an appropriate way, but there is time to learn that. We will be forever grateful for the support we’ve had in helping him to feel safe enough to express his basic needs and to actively seek out love and support when he is hurting.

Would we say Charlie is easy to care for anymore? I guess, if by easy you mean he always does as he is asked the first time,  then no probably not. But we are incredibly grateful that he feels safe enough to say no, safe enough to share his anger and his pain, safe enough to just be him and have his own opinions without having to constantly try and please us. Easy might not be the word we would use but loving the whole him, not just the easy bits, is the most rewarding and humbling thing we have ever done.