Customer Reviews

Broken Spirits ~ Lost Souls: Loving Children with Attachment and Bonding Difficulties

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I've waited in anticipation for this book for quite a while! Very comprehensive! Very informative! Very necessary! Many parents of RAD children have spent countless dollars, years of energy, and sleepless nights trying to find support and understanding for these children and the plight of their families. And now our tears will be shared and understood. The actual sharing by parents will help to educate others about the enormous stress and heartbreak these children can introduce to families. And yet, Broken Spirits-Lost Souls provides access to strategies, therapies, and most of all, hope!

If I were dictator of the world, every foster parent and child and every adopted child and his/her parents, and every parent and child of troubled childred would be REQUIRED to read this book. It is more than an eye-opener. It gives hope and help to a group that is sadly all to common yet little is understood - those children with attachment-bonding issues.

My husband and I adopted 3 siblings and our oldest was 8 at the time of the adoption. He is a sweet, beautiful boy with the potential to be an amazing person, but he has been through a lot of trauma in his life and has developed behaviors most people would never guess an 8 year old would be capable of. It is a daily struggle to love him, feel for him, want to provide the nurturing and structure that we know every child needs, while also dealing with his rage and inappropriate behaviors. Finding a support group of parents in similar situations is almost impossible. Broken Spirits, Lost Souls became that support group for us. Our child has RAD, but not to the same degree some of the other children do, so we were able to also use the book to feel good about our situation and to really hope for our child's future. The stories are heart-wrenching and unbelievable, to see such unexpected behaviors and to know the impact of those behaviors on the extended family who just want to love and raise a child. There is very practical advice in the book about how to cope on a daily basis and the stories are poignant, and funny, and tragic, and true. While we read so many books about RAD, you don't know what it is until you experience it. Many of the other books on the subject are more clinical and dry in nature, and therefore not great as teaching tools for others who will come into our child's life. Broken Spirits, Lost Souls is written in a way that allows us to share our daily experiences with extended family. They don't need to read a 400-page clinical book -- we can point them to 3-4 family situations in this book and it gives them a wealth of information about why our child does what he does, how other families have handled it, and how it makes us feel.
The book falls short on stories about children with RAD who got the treatment they needed early in life and were primarily successful in their adolescent years. I know those stories are out there and it would be good to read about those successes as well, but the stories of the families and the sharing of their tears, hearts, joys, small victories, and tragedies is of value to anyone struggling with a child showing signs of RAD.

The author clearly is a proponent of a fringe practice called "Attachment Therapy" which has been condemned by the mental health professions as abusive (see the journal *Child Maltreatment* Feb 2006).

Such proponents do not use the official definition of Reactive Attachment Disorder in the DSM-IV, which is characterized by either being very withdrawn or overly friendly with unfamiliar people. There are no aggressive features (although a child may react against someone their age or smaller if food or a possession is taken from him).

Attachment Therapy proponents use a bogus, catch-all diagnosis called "Attachment Disorder," and they like to conflate it with RAD. It is disturbing to see how the AD diagnosis demonizes these vulnerable children.