Love Never Quits – RAD in Foster Care with Gina Heumann

Transcript

foster care nation listen up we have some exciting news to share we’re going to offer up our first ever webinar if you’ve ever been curious about what it takes to be a foster parent and help kids in hard places join us on february 18th at 5 pm central for our free no obligation webinar we’re going to share our hard-earned knowledge and experience with anyone who has ever wondered about helping kids from hard places if you’re interested go to fostercarenation.com and sign up for our newsletter this is where you can get the details and the links to join us so that you’ll be able to ask any questions you have in the question and answer section now i know what you’re thinking webinar free no obligation webinar it sounds like there’s a sales pitch at the end i’ve listened to a lot of webinars guys i know what you’re thinking i don’t have anything to sell you i don’t have anything to sell you i promise i don’t have anything to sell you today but what we are going to do is try and support you and help you join us in our mission to help kids and if that’s what you’re interested in come see us i promise you we’re not selling anything today we’re just going to offer up our experience our knowledge and trying to help some people who are interested in helping kids as you can tell in the background i have some kids they’re here they’re noisy and i’m not even going to try and quiet them down at this time because i’m not going to get that done they’re wound up out there but you know what they’re happy and that’s what we’re looking for we’re just trying to provide a safe place for kids trying to help them through some of their traumas some of their things and make this world a better place and if you want to join us on that mission we welcome you to show up february 18th at 5 pm central like i said fostercarenation.com sign up for the newsletter and that’s where you’ll have all the information come out thank you so much

foster care nation

courage for the fearful hope and healing for wounded hearts

today’s guest is jeanne heumann author of the book love never quits surviving and thriving after infertility adoption and reactive attachment disorder if you’re a foster parent or an adopted parent or have ever thought about becoming one this is a topic you need to hear about we recently interviewed cheryl rujo who told their story of dealing with reactive attachment disorder and a child who did not get the help they needed at the time they needed it and was misdiagnosed for a very long time gina’s story however has hope so sit back put your phone in your pocket and listen to the knowledge that she has to drop

hello welcome back to foster care and i’m parallel journey with jason and amanda and with gina how are you doing today gina i’m great how are you guys we’re doing well doing well we wanted to talk to you because we’ve had plenty of stories about different experiences i’ve never heard anybody having an experience with rad that turned out particularly well and when i saw your ted talk i just knew that we had to talk to you because you have a story that has some hope in it yeah and that hope is is always kind of juxta positioned against the hopelessness that i’m certain you probably felt at first so what can you tell us about how this all started it started the minute we adopted him to be honest we just didn’t know what to look for at the time um there were signs that he was neglected like for example when we went down to guatemala to pick him up he was sitting on my lap in the restaurant at the hotel and he was diving across the table he was six months old diving across the table for food and we thought you know he has a good appetite we didn’t know that that was a sign that he probably wasn’t fed with his foster mom uh we got a bad vibe about her uh when we first got him it was like the planets had to align to get him to sleep it was it was very challenging he he would throw these you know tantrums for sometimes up to four hours at a time when he was a toddler um we could not figure out what was wrong with him we um you know went through so many diagnoses we started with you know obviously obviously it’s a dd after three minutes of looking at him and over the years it became well maybe he’s bipolar and they just kept throwing more meds at us and really it took so long to get to the rad diagnosis it was probably a decade before we actually got to that diagnosis and once we did that made so much sense to me we thought back we’re like oh yeah i think he was neglected um we know he was malnourished in the womb so there was he just had everything against him before we picked him up and um you know as adoptive parents you just think oh we can just love him and discipline him and he’ll be fine and you don’t realize that sometimes love isn’t enough you need to get some outside help and we had been doing that for years just you know i was open to trying everything so we tried you know uh alternative techniques we tried regular therapy we tried medications we tried uh well what did they call it friendship groups that was like a group therapy for kids in elementary school where they um learned anger um they learned how to manage their anger and they learned how to socialize with other kids my kid was the the leader of that group he was so good at it he knew everything from all this therapy he had been in but in the moment he couldn’t access it and um that was the real difference is that his brain would just go from like 0 to 60 anger at the smallest things we were constantly walking on eggshells and then as puberty hit things just started spinning out of control that’s when he got to the point where he was trying to hurt us um he had pulled out a butcher knife at one point and threw it at his brother and at that point we had to start locking up all the sharp objects around the house he was not wanting to go to school no matter how hard we tried so we would call the school resource officer and he had no problem showing up to school in a squad car but um it was still a challenge he just didn’t didn’t want to go he had so much anxiety um it he was just one challenge after another and it seems like as soon as we got one thing figured out like something else would happen and we just i i spent so many days crying on the floor of the closet wishing that someone would give me an answer so wow 10 years that’s a really long time it’s very long and i was actually starting to count down the days till he was 18. i’m like how much longer do we have to do this and um and then we eventually found an amazing combination of solutions so um for us the the catalyst was having him go to the juvenile assessment center um he had assaulted a teacher at school and they took him in a squad car he was they wouldn’t let me pick him up till about 5 p.m so the whole day i was worried you know what is what with my kids saying and i i was convinced he was gonna say you know we were beating him and we were gonna lose both of our children and i mean everything you can possibly every scenario you can possibly imagine that’s bad was going through my head we finally got there um to pick him up and he the the lady at the place said you know we’ve been talking to him for about six hours now and we suspect he has reactive attachment disorder and at that point we had already had our diagnosis and i said yeah no kidding what can we do about it and you know they gave us the usual here’s a list of therapists i’m like do you know how many therapists i’ve seen i started getting really angry at them and um an intern poked her head around the corner and she said hey i have an idea and i said sure what’s your idea she said well my uh friend is doing an internship at this place up in evergreen that specializes in um reactive attachment disorder would you like to would you like his number and i said yes so i called this guy immediately on my way home i think the next morning he called me we talked for about an hour and a half and i just knew he was our savior he knew exactly what was going on in our house and um he had a really good track record of how to fix it he’s actually a world-renowned specialist that goes all over the world to train other countries on how to deal with rad so i felt really good about him my my kid just loved him we did family therapy for two weeks and um at the same time we had found a different school for him that was a therapeutic school that had you know yoga and meditation and they were much more focused on kids that were outside the box and so that helped a lot too so i think the combination of school and this family therapy um after that it was about a year i didn’t notice a big difference because he was still flipping out at random times but what we didn’t notice because we live with them every day is that they were starting to come fewer and further between and we had our family therapy in may went home for christmas and my whole family was like wow he’s so different he’s so calm now and we’re like he is because he’s still kind of flipping out but then we realized another six months went by and then my husband said when was the last time he broke something on purpose and i was like i don’t know but shh don’t jinx it don’t jinx it so it ended up that was like it like now he’s he’s very mellow um he still has some rad symptoms i mean we’re still working on the food issue because he was neglected and didn’t get fed properly when he was a baby that’s uh still in his head like as soon as a hunger pain hits he thinks he’s gonna die so um you know we’re we’re still getting some therapy for the food issue but other than that i mean he’s he’s not flipping out he’s not throwing things at us anymore it’s um it’s pretty amazing and he wants to be a psychologist and help other kids with rad someday so i’m hoping that’s where he’s gonna go that’s really awesome yeah yeah especially because it shows a heart for helping people coming out of out of a really hard place yeah and you know he’s kind of always had the empathy piece and i know that’s not always common with kids with rad but when he was little he would every time we saw a homeless guy on the corner he was like well don’t we have some food we can give him and you know when we went to our synagogue for religious school um he would always pack something for the homeless people that we would pass on the way to the to the synagogue because there was always one guy on a specific corner so he was like we have to pack stuff for the guy and maybe some of his friends so he um he really does love helping people yeah that’s interesting that the empathy piece was such a big part of his life and i mean where do you think he got that from is that something that that you guys emphasized with him when he was young you know i think so we’re very empathetic people as well but i mean i’m not i’m not that good at feeling homeless like he is but um but we are empathetic people and i know that we read stories to him about you know helping others and things like that but i he’s just it’s been an innate thing with him is that it’s he’s pretty empathetic and he wants to help everyone else because i think it gives him control and he feels like he can’t help himself but he can help other people wow well it sounds as you were talking about you know going through the harder moments it sounds like you had a lot of frustration and hopelessness in your in your life there that you were trying to figure out how to deal with what was that like for you as a mom oh my god it was so hard i i always tell people if he would have been my first kid we only would have had one because i thought i was a terrible mother i couldn’t figure out you know you talk to your friends and they’re like oh well we do this one two three technique or we do this love and logic or we do this or we do that and they you know people would actually give me books because they were like well obviously she doesn’t know what she’s doing here’s a book you can maybe get some help and it was so frustrating because i kept thinking well look at my other kid he’s so good like doesn’t that mean i’m doing something right but um but it was hard i mean even family you know we would go over there and they’re like you know you need to start giving him spankings or you need to give him timeouts and and you know the therapists were telling us different things and you know we were just we felt so lost for so many years and just never knew what the solution was and i i know my older kid at some point was like why do we keep throwing money at all these therapists and things when nothing’s ever going to help him and i just kept saying well something’s got to help something’s got we can’t stop trying he’s our he’s our family member and that’s what we do we try to help each other out where did you find support um that was really hard because there wasn’t a lot of support for many years i do have a few friends that have been with me since the very beginning um i have a friend down the street it was her house that he would run away to when he was like six or seven years old and he would run away from home he would always end up at their house and her husband would always call me and say we have a small human here do you want to pick him up and um they would let him you know hang out at their house and sophie calm down because that was the thing with his reactions they were so intense that if you brought him home early it was just going to extend it you know so if he could just calm down in a safe place and then we could bring him home it was much better than if we tried to like force him or carry him home when he’s in that mood so

you know you mentioned something earlier and it’s something that when we talk with cheryl rujo in her story about having a daughter who suffered from a really difficult rad case i mean hers was incredibly severe and towards the end of the story she mentioned something very similar and that was that she realized eventually that it wasn’t a matter of her wanting to become this person you know it was a matter of what would happen to her daughter as opposed to what her daughter was choosing and you mentioned you know that but he did so well in some of those elementary school groups but that where he had the skills he could not access them when did you realize that it wasn’t a matter of didn’t want to or chose not to but it was a matter of could not

you know that’s the part that took me the longest um and i think that’s the part that helped the most too was when i realized that he wasn’t doing this on purpose and i changed my mindset that he is broken and he needs help and you know um one of the one of the protocols they follow at school i can’t remember who the therapist is but it’s um kids do well if they can and if they can’t then something is getting in the way and that helped me a lot that was after we had moved to the the new middle school and they had a class for us parents on the same disciplinary tactic they use at the school so that we would all be on the same page and that was all about you know finding out what skills he was missing and then helping him develop those skills and not just punishing him for not doing something that he couldn’t do um i read somewhere like you know everybody’s smart but you can’t ask a fish to climb a tree you know so so you can’t ask somebody to do something they don’t have the skills to do so that’s when i started to realize that you know it took a whole different kind of parenting and i had to be a lot more positive and i had to stop thinking that he’s doing this to me or that he just hates me or he’s just not a good kid i had to go back and think about the neglect and the trauma that he suffered and really get to a different place and that probably took me almost 10 years it was once i discovered the rad diagnosis and started doing research that that’s kind of we all had to get to a different mindset

how has that affected your relationship with your other child you know my my other kid is wise beyond his years and he always has been even as a little kid he was really um like he would have conversations with you like he was a college student when he was just three or four years old so he was he was always very communicative um it was hard on him and looking back i wish i had gotten him more therapy to get through this because he always seemed like the easy one the resilient one and so um i know he struggled a little bit in like high school especially having a brother that’s flipping out all the time but he’s very lucky he has a very loyal group of friends that have been with him since he was little and they’ve all seen the rad incidents and they were all very supportive with him so he his friend group understood and um you know he’s he’s actually done pretty well you know i i mention all the time that i’m part of a dad’s group and i talk with a lot of other dads and the top a lot of the topics that we end up talking about tend to be things like figuring out how to control the things in your house and what we’ve gotten to the point where we mostly understand that we can’t always we can rarely control the things in our house right we can usually only influence what’s going on but when as a dad especially as a young dad you know i can only imagine that your husband was going through some of those same emotions and trying to figure out how to manage that you know these daily crises that occur all over the place how did that affect him and and your relationship with him and his ability to see himself as the leader of a house when you have a kid who’s not neurotypical and all these things that everybody else tells you to do don’t work yeah it was very hard on all of us um you know my husband and i have a really good relationship and we always have and thank god we never divided over this i know a lot of couples with rad kids you know the one of the parents will be like oh we should try this and the other parents like no we’re not doing that my husband was always open to new ideas so if i said you know let’s try this um he was willing to try it he also comes from a family where they are big believers in therapy and you know his younger brother studied psychology and sociology and has worked with troubled kids and so it’s it’s a very supportive family on that side and um so they they know the value of therapy so my husband was never um closed off to that idea that we needed to get therapy that’s really good because sometimes you know you get divided and you never get back on the same page especially if you’re home and you’re the caregiver usually typically you’re the one that’s i don’t know how to explain it but maybe you’re the one that’s attacked more and the other parent doesn’t see that and they come home and everything’s oh and then you’re like you would not believe the day i had and it was terrible and blah blah blah and you know so sometimes there’s a lot of divide and conquer there so it’s really hard sometimes to stay together as a couple it is but we had an agreement and i know this sounds funny but if we were actually serious about it we’re like okay

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whoever asks to leave the relationship has to take the rad kid with them if that doesn’t keep you together yeah that’s one way to think of it you know people think i’m saying that funny but i’m like okay but that was true like neither one of us knew we both knew we couldn’t do this alone we needed each other to to do this yeah that’s that’s a real truth bomb right there we need each other we can’t do this on our own you know and did you recognize that in the moment or how long did that take you guys to get to the point where that was part of your bond oh that was early i think it was just so challenging and we just kept saying nobody understands but us nobody’s in our house but us so we have to be together on this and so we always said it’s us against them or us against the world you know that’s one of the things that that we’ve heard about a lot of people talk with with who deal with rad is that it’s very much a just us against them sort of mentality because the world doesn’t see that did you have people in your friend group in your community who were really putting a lot of that judgment on you and and how did you handle it um i cried a lot i drank a lot of wine i i really struggled for a long time because even you know i’d go to the elementary school and i could i could see other moms whispering about me oh she’s the mom of the bad kid or whatever and it was really hard and one time i was at target my kid threw a huge meltdown tantrum i was trying to drag him out of the store um he was old enough that i couldn’t just pick him up and carry him anymore but he was throwing some a huge screaming tantrum that like they could hear from the parking lot so i’m pulling him out of the store just to get him away i abandoned a card i had spent an hour filling and as i you know was heading out the door a lady came shaking her finger at me and she said you should be ashamed of yourself um you’re failing as a mother i don’t remember exactly how she said it but she said i raised six children and none of them ever acted like this in public you should be embarrassed you’re you’re failing as a mother and i got in the car and i cried the entire way home i was like i don’t know what else to do i can’t fix this so it was it was hard we got so many judgments from everybody how did you handle it in the moment did you say anything back to her i i don’t even remember what i said i know i was so flabbergasted that i think i just i just glared at her and left but you know i came up with a lot of great comebacks when i got home but in the moment i just couldn’t come up with them oh i have lots of comebacks they’re just usually not appropriate yeah because we’ve seen some some things in in our experience that that may or may not be rad involved but a lot of the same things that that at least at a bare minimum are trauma based right and people don’t understand that you know people do not understand what trauma really means and and when they see it oftentimes they see you as a bad human a bad parent an uninvolved parent you know you’re a mom who doesn’t care about your kids you’re just giving them what they want yadda yadda and that’s a real struggle to get through that for for us sometimes and for all parents who deal with kids who have some sort of deep trauma um so when you’re going through that and people are giving you those pieces of judgment how did you how did you get through that and get to the other side where where you could you could understand that look i’m doing the best i can and i trying to help this kid and other people don’t understand it they might see it they don’t know the story so how how did you look at that and say that this is not this is not about me and my child’s behavior is not a definition of who i am well like i said that i took me about a decade once i got to what it was once i got the rad diagnosis i know a lot of people are like oh i don’t want that diagnosis i’m like i did because at least there was a reason like it wasn’t just you’re a bad parent it was this kid’s been through so much trauma and we need to heal that trauma um that’s when i started to to think i deserve better with you know the judgments and things like that and i i know one day i was i was crying on the floor of my closet and i said i said god please if you ever get us to the other side i promise i will do my best to help other families so that was the whole gist behind why i did my tedx i was like you know i probably wouldn’t have done this if we were still in the thick of it but since we were kind of coming to the other side i felt much better about sharing all of our experiences and what we’ve been through to help others see what trauma can do and i think we really need some different laws

we really need some different laws in this country that are going to help um you know foster kids especially because they have a much higher incidence of childhood trauma and rad and they need therapy and it doesn’t seem like the foster system is really helping with the right kinds of therapies and the right kinds of treatments and that’s one of those things that really i think does does need addressing in the in the foster system we’ve had a couple kids who are diagnosed rad at a very young age and and our experience with them was really challenging to figure out how to handle that but there’s just was not much information out there i mean i mean my god we have google and youtube now right if i want to know how to do some underwater basket weaving i can go find a youtube video on it but how to handle rad is not nearly as prevalent out there in in the youtube world even even yet when i think partly it’s because it’s embarrassing it’s embarrassing to admit that you do not know how to parent your child um you know we all want regular normal kids where we can put up a sticker chart but some of us didn’t get that so

yeah sticker charts work great for some kids not mine exactly exactly and most people don’t understand it but when you go to the far end of the spectrum on rad especially when you get way out there some of the diagnoses that i’ve seen done kind of postmortem have names like like hitler adolf hitler you know psychologists have gone back and looked at him and diagnosed that as having been obviously a very extreme rad case but that’s where a lot of the issues started for him well you know my ted talk i talk about um the oklahoma city bomber he was um supposedly a rad kid he had trauma um who else did i talk about oh nicholas cruz the parkland shooter he was he had so much trauma as a kid and you know if we could have just gotten these people therapy when they were still young enough i think it would have made the difference so as you’re talking to a parent out there who’s going you know i’ve had struggles with my kid you know what are some of the things that that you would say to look at and think this might be something to look for and a direction for them to head um i well i have these friends that started a non-profit called the rad advocates they are awesome people to start with because they can talk through the rad diagnosis with someone and they can recommend different therapies and treatments and things like that i’m also working on a an online class right now that i’m going to sell hopefully in a bundle um but right now i have three of the courses done basically like if you got a fresh rad diagnosis it would tell you what is rad what you can expect um how you can change your mindset right away um because like i said that one took me a long time i’d love to shorten the curve for some people

hey there foster care nation if you’d like to find yourself in a group with like-minded people head over to facebook and you can find us at facebook.com groups slash foster care uj we’ve got a group over there where we talk about foster care we talk about adoption and we talk about all the things related if your podcast player allows it you can also reach down and hit that subscribe button so you get notified every week when we put up uploads every tuesday a new episode comes out we’d love to see you next week now back to the show um but the rad advocates they also have you know resources about residential treatment centers we didn’t actually do that for our child um but it was on the list if we had needed it um yeah there’s there are some red experts out there um but i think we need more we need a lot more oh yeah yeah actually um cheryl russo when she told her story it’s close to the end is when she finally found red advocates and that they were a great help for her and so i’m familiar with that at least i assume when you get the online class done that’ll be on your website somewhere yeah and actually i have i have three done so i’m trying to decide if i should just release those three and then work on the rest of them i got a full-time job during covid so it kind of made my uh put that on the back burner a little bit so did you have a full-time job whenever you were going through the thick of it with your son um i i didn’t and i lost a lot of jobs um especially in that like right one puberty hit that’s when i decided it would be time to go back to work because he was just a little bit older and we found a nanny and oh my god i tried working a full-time job and i got calls from the school every single day and he went through a phase where his anxiety was so bad he would make himself throw up if there was a test if any kids were picking on him if he if he didn’t answer the question right in class he would lock himself in the bathroom that kid was in the nurse’s office every single day of fifth grade i think and i had to pick him up almost every other day so wow jobs don’t like that yeah i know that feeling my job gets a little frustrated i think sometimes when i have to take off for a sick kid i can’t imagine that often of a of an incident not causing some real work problems right and i haven’t i had the kind of job where i could take my computer home and do it i was developing online classes for a company and um you know my boss was great but after she left she went to another company in another state and uh the people that i had over me after that were not as understanding they were like no you need to be here like really i’m still getting my work done yeah so actually like 14 years ago i started teaching um community college just one or two classes at a time um it was three miles from home it was three miles from school it was three miles from the other school so i was right in between all my kids and um and my boss would give me like a two hour shift in the middle of the school day and then if the school did call i could say i’m almost done i’ll be there in you know half an hour or whatever so that worked well but i didn’t make a lot of money so so now i have a full-time professor position and actually have a real salary and i can hopefully get out of debt someday from all the therapy we’ve had to pay for yeah um and if anybody’s looking for those classes to pop up your website is loveneverquitsbook.com right yes that’s correct good deal i want to make sure people can find it and anything we talk about in here i’m i’ll be certain and put it in the show notes so you guys can listen and can find it and every now and then some of the different podcast platforms the stuff goes a little bit wonky and the links don’t work if you have any issues with the links just go to fostercarenation.com and you’ll find it you’ll be able to click on the podcast notes tab there and just scroll down to you’ll find gina’s episode click on it and inside there will be all the links so i’ll make sure they work there um so you’re you’re a college professor yes i teach interior design interior with red unless maybe you have a rad kid who’s torn the house up a time or two and you get a lot of practice redesign oh yeah well we didn’t have the money to do that but we’re doing it now i actually have contractors in the house trying to fix some holes in the walls well if you want to have them come to my house i have a couple holes i need to kill this one yeah yeah i think we all do over time eventually somebody somebody does that for us um so as you walk this journey and become a professional in the world and you see you see your son’s life changing you know what does that what does that do for you as you look back across where you came from and the trauma and the pain that you’ve experienced and seeing him become a successful human i cannot tell you how proud i am of this kid i mean he’s the one that put in the work he’s the one that you know dedicated his life to trying to get better and i i just i’m so proud of where he is right now he’s um he’s you know in the band at school and he’s hoping to either go to culinary school or um actually he wants to do both he wants to go to culinary school and become a psychologist so he said one of them’s going to be his major and the other is going to be his minor but um we we had his um we had his hands red which is really an interesting experience um the lady who doesn’t know she’s not a palm reader she’s a scientific hand analyst and she had done my um hands and told me i had to write a book and become a speaker so she was she could pick out your gifts and talents and she told him he has a real gift for helping people so he’s um it’s kind of cool i’m trying to do whatever i can right now to help him build his self-esteem because when you’ve spent you know 15 years being the bad kid it’s it’s really hard to come back from that so we’re we’re working a lot on trying to you know point out all his good traits and you know showing him where he came from you know he’s like i don’t want people to know that i was the bad kid and i’m like you know what it doesn’t matter i said you’re not that anymore i said you know the rolling stones trashed hotel rooms you know you trashed our house a few times you’re over it you’re better now i said be proud of where you’re at and how much you’ve much growth you’ve had and don’t worry about what you used to be yeah because that oftentimes can become people’s superpower is being able to tell people the real story of where you came from and how you got to where you’re at

so i guess i i do want to ask another question because this is one of the things that i have a hard time always wrapping my mind around how people get to that place you adopted kid from was it was it guatemala both of them or just one okay so you adopted two kids from guatemala and i i know a lot of people who who will come up with the you know there’s so many kids in america who need help we need to help kids here yeah yeah i can tell by your face alone that you’ve heard that more times you had and personally i believe you you know we all have a calling we have a thing that sets our soul on fire and and our job is to figure out what that what that thing is and then go light that fire and so what was it about international adoption that really set your soul on fire and made you go all the way across the world to get two kids um you know at the time we had gone through years of infertility and you know some of the adoptions in the us are a little bit less um certain you know you’re on a list for whoever knows how long until you get chosen by a birth mother and um and honestly we were afraid of foster care because we thought we might get a kid with rads not even knowing at the time what it was we were like there’s those kids have trauma and you know so we thought getting a newborn from guatemala would be a you know easier solution um also i was president of spanish club in high school and i just always loved the culture and i thought if we’re gonna adopt from another country we need to adopt the whole culture you know like we need to have tapestries from guatemala in our house and we need to have latin american foods and things like that so you know i was really excited about adding a whole new dimension to our lives and it’s that part’s been pretty great um we actually go to a camp every year it’s called latin american heritage camp and it’s for kids who were adopted from latin america but there’s actually 11 camps through this heritage camps for adoptive families and it’s to teach kids about their birth culture but there’s also so much more to it that talks about adoption issues and discrimination and racism and things like that so we’ve had this whole community for gosh probably 12 we’ve gone for 12 years in a row now and you know we have other adopted kids that look like them that we’re friends with and their parents look like us and it’s it’s just pretty cool and then i’ve had all these great role models who’ve had kids older than mine and can tell me what it’s like to parent a kid going through puberty or you know what kind of adoption issues come up during um the college years where we’re discovering that’s coming up again so um the art that camp has been really helpful for us well it sounds like you guys have done a great job with being certain to include some culture some history and not you know just kind of whitewashing over the entire backstory which is something i find really important in a lot of groups that i’m that i look at where people talk about adopting trauma oftentimes that’s a part of it is that they’ve had their their whole history erased for them and was that something that you you started from the beginning just because you you found that that would you thought it would be helpful or did you find that along the way we actually found it along the way um we we had just moved to colorado we were out hiking on mother’s day and we came across another family that had a child that was internationally adopted i don’t remember from where but we started talking and they said you know um oh you just moved here do you know about heritage camps and i said i said no i don’t and they said oh well it’s too late to sign up for this year but next year you need to go and so i wrote it down and um that same year was uh landry was in kindergarten he’s my older one and he was doing a project one day this kid loved school and one day they were doing a uh what do you call it self portrait and he said most of the kids in his class use the peach marker because they’re all peach but he has to use the brown marker and it’s too dark and you can’t see his eyes or his mouth so he was totally stressing about going to school because he didn’t have the right marker and i told his teacher she postponed the project she bought multicultural markers she helped him match his skin color those were things i didn’t even know existed like i didn’t know to look for that so once we got to so after that incident i was like what was that camp those people told us about we need to find out what else is going to come up that we don’t know about so we immediately signed up for camp and then the next year i became a director and i’ve just been really involved in the camp ever since so that’s been really helpful for us and that’s where we found our most supportive group is that you know there’s a lot of kids with issues at camp so if a kid’s flipping out we all understand and we’ve all been there so it’s it’s a really helpful group of people yeah finding a group of people who understand trauma on any level is incredibly helpful and valuable in your situation i know you said you guys were kind of afraid of foster care because of the trauma and you know you ended up in that same place which just proves my point that i think god has a ridiculous sense of humor

and so has your do you have a faith component in your life i assume you do i believe you mentioned having gone to the synagogue so how’s your faith really really added to your experience yeah i think i think it’s helped a lot um our our synagogue has been very supportive my kids went to religious school and you know we informed them all about his issues and they were really understanding in fact when maddox ended up at the juvenile assessment center we had to go to court and he was on probation for a year and he had to do community service and i was like well what can i do with a 12 year old community service wise and they suggested if you have a church maybe see if they can do something so i call her our rabbi and they were so supportive and they were like okay well just bring him here for let’s let’s say six hours once a week and um we’ll put him to work and it was over the summer so he stuffed envelopes and put stamps on things and put books back on the shelf in the library and i know they were doing construction so he opened a bunch of boxes and he helped them put ikea things together and so that was his community service but they were so supportive and helpful and they didn’t make him feel bad about it they just you know um they were just really great i think a lot of people you know a lot of people have problems with idea the idea of religion you know that question of why would why would a good god allow this to happen always comes up and how did you how did you deal with with that those thoughts of understanding what you were going through and and how your faith could could help you as a mother and as a woman you know i spent for you for years i thought i was being punished for something i did and then i finally got to a point where i was like you know what we were meant to be his parents because we never gave up i said and i’m i research all the time i mean i have two degrees so or two master’s degrees i love school i love studying things so i just did a ton of research on my own and you know i know a lot of other parents may not have done that so i’m like i think he ended up in the right place because we were gonna help him no matter what yeah so now i think and and i also feel like i learned a lot about myself in the process that you know i did become a better mother i did become more empathetic i used to be a little judgy of other parents and how i’m like what can i do to help you because i know that this doesn’t always go the way it’s supposed to yeah i i know the what you’re saying exactly right there i have some pretty stark memories of when our older kids who were you know biological kids were very young and being in the store and seeing a mom with a kid who’s throwing a fit on the floor having a meltdown and looking at my kids and and making those judgmental comments you know what would happen if you tried that you know right and i and i wasn’t even cautious about whether or not they heard me it was that judgment that look at what i’m doing i’m doing this right i’m doing this good my kid doesn’t act that way right and so now when i see it now when i see it i try to always well first off i have kids with trauma now so i have to pay attention to that going on and whether or not that’s going to be a trauma trigger with our own kids but i also you know can walk by at least offer a smile or ask if the if i can help do anything you know do you need a hand with anything you know i heard one woman who suggested just standing by and she was an older lady and she said now i just she said i had one lady who who was having a hard time with the kid who was just having a meltdown and i said can i help you with anything and she was completely just exasperated situation which she goes no i’m fine and um and she said okay well i’m just going to stand here while you deal with your child in case you need any help and that piece of kindness really struck me because kindness wasn’t a thing i was feeling in those moments when i was younger and now that i understand it i look at it and understand that i have that power we have that power as to how we respond to people and whether or not we’re judgmental or we’re kind right yeah and i’ve started carrying five dollar gift cards for starbucks um i haven’t done this so much since covid because i’m hardly ever out anymore but but i used to carry a couple extra starbucks gift cards in my purse and if i saw a mom having a really bad day with a kid then i’d be like look i understand here have his coffee on me um and they’re usually like so thankful that somebody gets it yeah and and you’re out there spreading that that knowledge of your own experience and that kind of goes back to what i mentioned earlier understanding that that your what felt like failures is is your superpower now and you can change the world using that you know what was attorney what was the turning point for that for you that that made you realize that that’s what you could do with this with this bucket of trauma well i think um part of it was we were we were already past the worst of it things were getting better at home and we were actually starting to feel joy in our house you know like playing games with the kids on the weekends without big fights happening and going out to dinner and nobody would throw a fit and things like that so it was just i started feeling better and then like i said i had this hand analysis done and she said you should be writing and speaking and i said you know in the back of my head i’ve always thought about writing our story into a book and i said but i’m not a writer and she said oh yes you are and i said no i wasn’t an english major or anything and she said it doesn’t matter you can tell your story and she said editors will help it sound good but yeah yeah that’s that’s powerful well now that well i guess well i want to make sure i don’t forget to mention this you have actually written your book yes and that’s on the website we mentioned earlier and the love never quits book.com because the book is named love never quits by gina human and you’re going to misspell human if you go google search the book it’s uh it’s human spelled funny it’s h-u-e-m-a-n-n h-e-u oh man i was so close

that would be an easy one to misspell all the time um so as you went through this experience right like this this causes trauma in your own life for you and your husband to deal with how did you deal with your own trauma while you’re trying to figure out how to deal with your child’s trauma well honestly i ignored my own trauma for the whole time we were going through our stuff with um him it wasn’t until after the fact he was getting better and i my anxiety was getting worse because i just kept waiting for the other shoe to drop you know like oh something’s going to go wrong so i’m going i was so anxious and um i finally saw a therapist and was diagnosed with ptsd myself and uh she helped me get through that with a whole bunch of really cool techniques and so my ptsd is is better now so that’s helped a lot too but yeah i think i mean parents need right now we’re so lucky that the internet exists because they’re like you know i’m in like five different support groups for parents of kids with rad and that wasn’t a thing when i was going through my stuff and i was like i would have done anything just to have somebody to talk to and i remember i met a mom at therapy whose kid was having issues too and we’re still friends to this day because her kid’s not perfect my kids are not perfect and we understood that we were like okay we can go out and our kids can not be perfect together in the park and nobody will care at least none of the important people care right that that’s amazing that you you learned that you need that support group around you and i think so many of us are challenged by that because we’re afraid people will judge us that we don’t tend to build those supports and when you start to talk with other people and you find out that oh yeah by the way i’m not the only person right you know maybe your child doesn’t isn’t dealing with rad but maybe they’re dealing with a diagnosis that that puts you in the same struggle and you’re going through your own moment where ptsd is occurring in your life right and i agree that therapy is such an important option you know my wife and i we have a guy we see on a regular basis and i credit dr tom with a whole lot of our successes because he’s been able to talk us through a lot of things and help us do a lot of things that we didn’t even realize we needed to work through so what would you say to the to the parents you know to the the other moms out there or god help us the dads who think we don’t need help we got this we’re just gonna white knuckle bear down and we can make it through because we’re big and strong and and we we kind of halfway actually believe that a little bit and we push against the idea of therapy because that’s just woo-woo stuff and and we don’t need that you know what do you say to the people who believe that well you know i used to believe that myself too and i think it it really takes finding the right therapist for you um because there are you know there we went through a lot of therapists that weren’t a good fit for for medics and we went through a lot of therapists that weren’t i went through a lot of therapists that weren’t a really good fit for me and i just thought i’m not a therapy person but then when i found the right person when i found michelle she was you know she understood what i was going through and she sort of spoke my language a little better so i think you know if you if you do try therapy don’t just put all your eggs in one basket if it doesn’t work try something else and there’s different types of therapy too there’s there’s talk therapy and then there’s um uh what is that thing called neurofeedback or right yeah neurofeedback where it can actually change your brain waves um that’s been very helpful for people with ptsd um my therapist does tapping which is very um very good for me so the emdr yeah well i did emdr but this is called eft tapping okay so it basically is a way that you you basically do a series of taps on your body while you’re talking about the troubling issues and it actually helps rewire the brain because you’re tapping on the opposite side of the body so it’s helping rewire things i guess i don’t know it really helped me with in just a few sessions overcome my ptsd that’s amazing it sounds like it’s like it works similarly to emdr although that’s eye movement so yeah that that’s incredible did your husband go with you to those therapy appointments we did the rad family therapy so that was two solid weeks it was four hours a day five days a week um four therapists and all four of us and we were you know we tried so many different techniques over the two weeks like a lot of it was aaron and i in a special room um talking to you know two therapists while the kids were doing like art therapy and you know play therapy and things like that but we had to go hash through our childhoods to figure out what triggers us and i realized i had i had a little bit of a challenging upbringing with my dad and like that affected me so much that um i didn’t realize so i had to i had to heal from all of that before i could really help my son um and my husband he grew up with the cleavers you know like um on leave it to beaver like mom and the perfect dad so he didn’t have as much trauma to overcome but it really did also help him see where we are now and you know that that we’re doing the best we can and it sounds like maybe it helped him understand where you were coming from as well yeah it really did and then the coolest part though i have to tell you this part of the story we had my son um on our laps and he’s a 12 year old and he’s not small but we’re holding him like a baby and then the therapist had this flip chart and it had like on the first page he said let’s just talk about how babies bond with a caregiver and so we made like a list of uh or no i think he started with what do babies need and so we made a list of you know they need their diapers changed they need a place to sleep they need love they need this that and then he’d flip to the next page and he’d say well let’s talk about how babies bond with their caregivers so then we talked about eye contact and touch and using a special voice and you know things like that so he made that list and then he went back to um he said look maddox this is what happened you got the things you you got fed you got your diaper changed occasionally um he said basically your foster mom kept you alive she did some of the things on this first page but all the stuff on the second page she didn’t do and it wasn’t because you’re a bad kid it wasn’t because you were a bad baby it was because she was a terrible caregiver she was not capable of doing the things on this list that is not your fault has nothing to do with you not your fault it was done to you but it’s not your fault and so after all this therapy which was like an hour or something um the therapist said okay well we’re gonna leave the room and here’s what we want you to do we just want you to hold him and be there for him and when you guys are ready we’ll be in the hall and i’ve kind of looked at my husband and i was like well i don’t know what we’re supposed to do to get ready i’m ready we’ve been here an hour and as soon as that door closed my son cried like i’ve never seen him cry before for like 20 minutes straight cried and cried and cried and cried and then started reaching for us and started giving us eye contact and started hugging us and it was the coolest thing ever and i swear to god that was the catalyst of his change was just understanding that it wasn’t his fault it made a huge difference that’s probably something that we all need to to really understand you know my own wife went through her her struggle as a child as well and it’s taken a lot of years for her to understand that for her and and it sounds like his his trauma was significant and that that’s an amazing pivot point and yeah i don’t know if you ever would have found that if you hadn’t been open to new kinds of therapy no and that that was just i left there with like chills on my arm up my arms i was like that was the coolest thing i’ve ever seen and then the next day he had to pick a teddy bear off this giant wall of teddy bears and i knew exactly which one he would pick and he picked his teddy bear and his teddy bear became him as a baby and then with the therapists coaching him he had to tell his story to you know baby maddox and he had to give him hugs and cuddle with them when things got hard and that was kind of giving himself some of that stuff that he missed out on in his early childhood it was it was a very cool experience we had wow that’s interesting that you mentioned that we have a we have a one of our young sons who has um yeah it’s a little bit age inappropriate he’s a little older than what you would expect to see this but he carries you know a lot of kids carry around a blanket and all that but he has a blanket that he has named baby and he walks around and he kind of balls up the end a little bit and makes a head out of it and he talks to her and tells her to behave when she’s misbehaving he he feeds her sometimes you know he he does all of this and it sounds very much like that it’s one of the things that i’ve watched and just the other day amanda and i were in a room and we were something was going on and he sat there and he’s talking to this blanket and i looked at him like just be quiet i’m like just watching we were watching and it was almost like he was busy trying to give himself his own therapy session it was the most amazing thing to see come out of a five-year-old and i sat back wondering like what is the therapeutic value of this well you know i there’s something here i know there is i can see it happening but i don’t understand it and just to hear you say that gives me some hope that that what he’s dealing with because he’s dealing with his own level and types of trauma but it’s helpful for him and i see that on a regular basis you know there are times when he wants to go play and he will come in here i’ll be in here working doing something on the computer he’ll walk in and say daddy i need to go help turtle with something can you watch baby for me and he has this whole caregiver mentality that he’s building at a young age and hopefully that’ll knock down that 10-year frame time frame but you guys experienced but it’s so easy as a dad especially because you know going back to talking as a dad right kids the boys don’t play with dolls he’s turned a blanket into his own little little doll to carry around and you know thankfully i i’ve experienced enough that that i’ve just set back and watch and and i’m so hopeful from your story that that there’s there’s some real value in it for him you know um what was your moment of like where when you first saw an inkling of hope that you no longer were counting the days till they turned 18 so you know you could you know strap on the steel-toed boot and say all right we’re done because i mean if you have a teenager i’m just going to say we all get there i don’t care if you have a neurotypical teen or not you’re going to get there with a teenager that’s just part of experience like it’s well we were all that way as teens i know my parents want to throw me out at some point but what was that moment when you saw the first glimmer of hope um you know i i really think that therapy was like where i said i think this is really gonna help us and then you know then we like i said didn’t think it worked for a really long time until we went home for christmas and that’s when the family was like oh my god he’s so different he’s so calm now and that’s when i started thinking well maybe maybe he is getting better and then then at school um when he graduated from eighth grade he went to a very small school like i think his graduating class only had like 30 kids and so each of the teachers had a special relationship with a couple of kids and so they each gave a speech about their that kid and their growth since they’ve joined the school and and then he actually volunteered to give a speech at his school this was the therapeutic school and he told them about how anger he was when he got to school and how he couldn’t be where he is now and the kid’s a good speaker too so he um he gave this great speech that was very heartwarming and funny and you know made you cry a little he’s just he’s really good at that and that’s when i was like you know what this kid could change the world someday wow well coming from from a home where where mom is a tedx speaker i mean that he probably had some decent modeling there well and that’s that’s one of the issues i’m having now is because my husband and i were both straight a students and our kids are not and our kids struggle with school and it took me a long time to get to the point where i was like you know what we do not need to make them get all a’s it’s just not gonna happen let’s just help them do the best they can and you know not every kid has to go to college not every person needs a master’s degree you know my my other son is at um trade school for recording arts he’s a dj and he absolutely loves it so i’m like as long as they find something they love that’s all that matters to me amen amen because one of the one of the things we fall into oftentimes is having our kids future planned out for them and i have one son he is he’s 19 now this at 14 the boy could look me in the eye and i’m not a small guy today he’s about six foot four and 206 255 265 pounds depending on on the day and this kid never if you handed him a football he would drop it he’s like i don’t want that i mean i know the high school coaches were like drooling over this kid he was over six foot when he was 14. and he wanted nothing to do with sports and i made it a point not to push him into it because i knew it was a waste of time but now we have another young guy well i call him a young guy he’s 15 and as a freshman in high school he wants nothing more than to strap on pads which make the top of his helmet come up to the shoulders of most of the other kids and get out there and and just run into people and tear and and he’s talented and he loves it and he has skill and talent and drive and he wants to push towards that and so i’m like okay if i was going on what i thought did made the most sense the big kid would have been a sport kid this guy would have been doing something else but that’s not where they want to be and just to to be enough of a parent to sit back and learn what they’re they really want to do and then to support them in becoming that yeah yeah i’m a tall woman and people always ask me if i played basketball and i’m like no i have no talent with balls

any sport that requires a ball i’m terrible i’m with you i’m with you totally but yeah so to be able to find something for your kids that allows you to to really support them in their in their movement forward is is always incredibly helpful to help them develop as a as a really good kid so what do you see for your for your future with your sons now that you’ve been through so much well i think it’s made us closer we’re we’re a very close family now and we have a lot of like heart-to-heart talks over dinner i try to do dinner at the table still my 19 year old is still at home because he’s um can’t afford to move out yet but one of these days he’ll be out i i know what you’re talking about i have one of those and he is also 19 so i know the feeling what do you see what do you see um um maddox is your son’s name right max is my younger one yeah okay so so what do you see his future looking like i i really see him changing the world somehow like i think he’s going to become a psychologist and really get into rad but you know right now he’s not great at school i think it’s going to be a little bit later in life um you know i i know you know not everybody knows what they want to do right away so um i think this is what he eventually wants to do but he’s just not in the place to study that hard yet but i think he will be i think i think it’s going to mean something to him when he gets a little bit older and i think for now he wants to go to culinary school and you know maybe he’ll make me dinner all the time that would be so wonderful i hate cooking dinner every night me too it’s like what do i feed all of you can we just do pizza 24 7. yup and teenage boys eat a lot oh yes ma’am they do i thought maybe that was just ours

so you and your husband at some point in the nearest future they end up being empty nesters do you have any plans to to do anything else with with kids in trouble places or you guys have other other uh other ideas for uh for your future um you know i don’t know right away because did you guys see the movie instant family yes oh my god it’s so good if you have adopted kids or foster kids it’s so good but when we watched that movie i was like we could go back and get some foster kids and my husband goes no we did our part we’re done so um we will continue to help somehow um you know i’m trying to get my classes written so that we can offer an online class um i’m i went and we had a law here in colorado to make it easier to get access to residential treatment facilities for kids with autism or rad or different traumas i went and testified in front of congress so that was really cool and i’ve already talked to a bunch of the state representatives and if they want to do more laws regarding foster kids and trauma i am here to help so i do hope to keep up the activism and help other families well that’s awesome that’s awesome did you have anything else that you wanted to make sure that we we got in here before we before we get done i don’t think so this was a great um chat yeah now the only thing that i could say is is please keep in touch with us and when you get the those courses and and all that going on please let us know i know parents are always looking for help and looking for resources great i will yeah i just sent them to my sister-in-law because my sister-in-law and brother-in-law are planning to take in foster kids and so i was like you need to watch my classes first so you know what to expect and so she she said they’re they’re good so i’m i’m excited so i need to get that word out to more foster communities and hopefully we can help more families yeah i’d love to take a look at it yeah i’ll send it to you guys that’d be great thank you so much yeah because you know there’s a lot of agencies out there in pretty much every county and every state that are always looking for for uh for resources like that to help parents because foster parent at you yeah foster parent attrition is a real thing most foster families leave the system pretty early because they don’t know the depth of what they’re getting into oftentimes and if we can help that we could change a lot yeah i think you’re right and i think we need to educate them ahead of time absolutely when when we started we had no idea what we were doing you know yeah we went to the classes off the groups too and trying to help the casas so they know what’s going on as well yeah i mean it was just you know we did the classes we thought oh yeah great we’re gung-ho we’re ready to do this and then we got there and we were like oh wow not certain what we’re doing here but we made it absolutely absolutely well thank you so much for coming on here and telling your story here gina thank you for having me i hope you have a wonderful day you too all right guys thanks for listening to gina’s story i hope you have gained some knowledge of wisdom that you can bring into your life and your families be sure you come back next week we put up new shows every tuesday if you’d like to share your story as a guest you can reach us at fostercareuj gmail.com you can connect with other like-minded people at facebook.com groups slash foster care uj as well don’t forget we have a patreon where you can help support our mission at patreon.com foster care nation and as always you’re so super awesome i thank you thank you for listening thanks

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