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Behind the Curtain: Honest Conversations about Foster Care and Adoption
Each episode will feature a conversation between host Rebecca Harvin and foster/adoptive caregivers or members of the community who support foster care and adoption.
Behind the Curtain: Honest Conversations about Foster Care and Adoption
Nurturing Connections: Trust-Based Relational Intervention in Adoption and Foster Care with Jennifer Lake
This episode highlights the transformative impact of Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) on families navigating foster care and adoption. By understanding emotional needs behind behaviors, caregivers can build stronger connections and foster healing, while also addressing their own emotional challenges in the process.
• Introduction to TBRI and its importance in parenting
• Definition and core principles of TBRI
• The role of the infant attachment cycle in development
• Understanding unmet needs behind child behavior
• Differentiating emotional age from chronological age
• Emphasizing connection over correction in parenting
• Recognizing the emotional toll on caregivers
• Real-life applications of TBRI strategies
• The significance of allowing grief in parenting journeys
• Insights on fostering healthy family dynamics through TBRI
Hi guys, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I'm your host, rebecca Harvin, and today the guest on the show is my friend, jen. Jen and I met through an organization called Christian Alliance for Orphans and, in the year that we've known each other, have become fast friends in this world of supporting foster and adoptive families. Jen is the founder of Dwell up in Pennsylvania. She is a certified TBRI practitioner and she is on the show today to talk to us about how TBRI works and how families can benefit from the use of it, and so, without further ado, I hope that you enjoy this conversation as much as we enjoyed making it. Hi, hey, thank you so much for being on Behind the Curtain and for sharing your wisdom.
Speaker 1:I'm really actually very excited about this because we have not had like a specific topic from the start. That I've ever done with a guest before. I've always kind of just said like, hey, what's your foster journey or adoptive journey, and gone from there. But today I'm going to ask a different question and it is well. First of all, I guess let's say like you're Jen, and you and I became friends through our mutual friend, michael Mitchell. He was like hey, you guys should meet. Yes, we said okay, we'll test out these waters and then, and then we were like, oh, he's not wrong.
Speaker 1:We, we actually are very compatible friends and in the same line of work and doing all of the things in, and it's been so lovely getting to know you and just watching our two nonprofits like being able to have somebody to talk to about business and life has been such a blessing in my world. But you do something at dwell that we do not focus on at Haven and that is that you guys focus on TBRI, yes, so can you first of all define what TBRI is and then share just a little bit about it for our audience?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. Um. Before I do that, just uh, I'll just say ditto same here. I have loved um, getting to know you better and um, you are sort of one of those friends. That's like how have we only been friends for this short amount of time? It feels like we've known each other for so much longer. That's how.
Speaker 3:I feel too Great. It's been just such a blessing this year. Yeah, so TBRI stands for Trust Based Relational Intervention. If our listeners don't know what TBRI is and it actually comes out of TCU so lots of acronyms which is the Texas Christian University in Texas and the Karen Purvis Institute for Child Development. I became a TBRI practitioner in 2019, just read from their, you know from their website. But basically, trust-based relational intervention is a therapeutic model that gives caregivers support and treats children who are at risk and have experienced trauma. So it's a therapeutic response and a therapeutic way of helping children who are coming from adversity and trauma, helping those children heal. And it really has everything to do with changing our approach as caregivers.
Speaker 1:Which you do very well Like that's one of the things that I've noticed when you and I are talking and I'm talking about something that one of my kids just did you are constantly looking at it from one a fresh opinion, because you don't live inside of my house, but also from a very, like, compassionate caregiver from all of, from all sides, from like, hey, what is this? I know that one of the lions in TBRI and it might've changed over the years is like what does this baby need? Like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And so that comes from the teachings of the infant attachment cycle. So when we're thinking about, the infant attachment cycle says you know when, when a baby has a need, the only way they know to express that need is to cry, for the most part, Right. So baby has a need, Baby cries, Caregiver comes, the need is met. A need, baby cries, caregiver comes, the need is met, all is well. Until three seconds later baby has a need, baby cries, caregiver comes, the need is met, all is well. And so there's it's cyclical, and that happens hundreds of times a day. And when we say, you know, when we say like that caregiver comes, we're saying yes, yes, I will feed you, yes, I will keep you warm, yes, I will clothe you. Yes, I will, you know, pay attention to you. Yes, I will feed you again. Yes, I will change you again. Yes, I will play with you. Yes, I will stimulate your mind, yes, I will Like. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 3:Hundreds of times a day we call that the giving of yeses. And so when, when the child now, or youth or teenager is acting in a way that we just don't understand, just does not like, it probably pushes all of our buttons and we just don't quite understand. You know, you often think why is this child not acting their age? Well, you know, if we can think all the way back to when we were cradling or cuddling a baby and looking in that infant's eyes and think what does this baby need? And looking in that infant's eyes and think what does this baby need? And so even in the child, in the youth, in the teenager, what does that inner baby in them need? It can change our perspective and how we approach.
Speaker 1:The behavior I just said that to my kid yesterday, to one of my kids yesterday is you are such and such years old. How, how is this something that we're still doing? And what I love about TBRI is that it kind of has an answer for that, like like just what you were saying, like there's, there's a reason behind what's happening.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in TBRI we definitely take the approach and see all things through the lens of there's always a need behind the behavior, right? So behavior is a communication of an unmet need and if we can figure out the need then we can meet the need. And if we can figure out the need then we can meet the need. So one of the things we say is chase the need, not necessarily the behavior, because you just run yourself ragged. And really we know that children who have experienced significant trauma or adversity, their developmental age is about half their chronological age, roughly, roughly.
Speaker 3:So you know your 12 year old maybe having a tantrum that you would expect from your kindergartner, right? Your six year old or your preschooler. Or sometimes it's physical things like still wetting the bed or, um, you know, just doing just, I don't know a certain behavior sometimes where you just like look at that child and you're like, huh, what the heck is that all about? Um, but if that child, you know, if you think okay, if that child were, know, if you think okay, if that child were actually half their age, would that behavior make more sense?
Speaker 1:to me it might yeah, we have a therapist here in um in jacksonville that talks about this a lot and she says, to judge it based off of um how long you can leave the child in the room unattended. Like, um, you would not leave a baby in a room unattended, um, which I think the first time she said it, I think I said something snarky um in response which was like actually, you can for a little bit, because they're not moving like Like this, like development up a little bit too sassy for my own good sometimes, but um, her point being like you would never leave um a 12 month old in a room by themselves for an extended period of time. You are eyes on a one-year-old all of the time. You are eyes on a two-year-old, especially a two-year-old, all of the time. In fact, it's like the very nature of something being quiet and not having eyes on a two-year-old that sparks terror in mothers worldwide.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, what have they just gotten into? Trauma history or not? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like just just in motherhood and it, and I think she's like when she's talking about that, she's talking about it from like a a way to judge it outside of trauma. Like what do you do with a neurotypical like? When Zoe, my oldest, was two, what would I have done with her? Certainly she's not like making her own dinner at two Like certainly she's not.
Speaker 1:um, I'm not handing her a pair of scissors and being like just go ahead and make your own craft, you need no supervision.
Speaker 3:She doesn't get to use the toaster by herself to make herself toast and jam.
Speaker 1:Right. And so I'm like, okay, I can understand this, but, like you know, a five-year-old, you can be like, oh, they're playing quietly in the other room and you have a different metric system of what you can leave them to unattended. Still, they're not going completely unattended. And so this therapist moves that up for us and talks it out when she's teaching. And so I'm always like, okay, yes, and what does that look like? If you have, let's say, a seven-year-old who you're, you cannot leave in a room for one minute unattended. And so you move their developmental age to okay, I'm dealing with a toddler, I've got a one-year-old, two-year-old, mentally, developmentally, inside of her. What is that? What does that look like?
Speaker 1:Parenting with TBRI? Because certainly you want no, I'm using this, let's say, as a hypothetical situation Um, we're also. I just yesterday was like I said something that if I were to follow it out would would create shame in my kids, like in my kids' lives, which I was going to bed, and I was like, hey, you are going to need to like back away from, um, from what you said here, right, uh, because I don't want to be a cause of shame for my kids and also, we really are in this, I I really cannot leave you alone for one minute. And so, hypothetically speaking, of course, always, always hypothetical for that other parent that is struggling how do you parent a seven or eight or nine-year-old at their developmental level, acknowledging that their needs are younger than their age?
Speaker 3:Well, I think it's important to remember the whole child. So I think we tend to look at children and see, you know a seven-year-old and think they're seven all over, all parts of them are seven, but I don't. But that's not necessarily true, right, we have an emotional age. I'm also, I should say, a cultivating connection facilitator through Empowered to Connect, and it's heavily TBRIri, you know as well, and so, um, one of the things that we teach in cultivating connection is this idea of um sort of the developmental puzzle.
Speaker 3:So we have emotional age, physical age, school age, chronological age, social age, life experience age.
Speaker 3:So there's lots of parts to us and lots of parts to our children.
Speaker 3:And so, while you know they might be, you know physically they are, you know the average height of that child of that age, and maybe their gross motor skills are developed and they're you know all of that makes sense for that age, but their emotional age seems much, much younger, but maybe their life experience age is much older because they've experienced a lot more things than a typical seven-year-old would. So I think it's important to think about the whole child and not just what's presenting to you, to you through your eyes right, just just through what you see, because that's just the tip of the iceberg. You know, when you think about the iceberg analogy, there's so much more going on under the surface. So part of parenting through a tbri lens or a connected parent is really understanding that there's always more, or almost always more, going on than what you see. So, being a bit of a detective, remaining in a posture of curiosity, not taking things personally, that's so hard because things that our children do very much or could very much trigger our own, there it is Stuff. Yeah, and.
Speaker 3:I have to remind parents myself too. I mean, my children are older now, they're all adults, and so I'm not in the thick of it Like I was when they were younger. But I get to work with parents all the time that are in the thick of it, and I have to remind them that your children didn't create your buttons. They just found a way to push them. So buckle up, you're going to learn a lot about yourself.
Speaker 1:buckle up, you're gonna learn a lot about yourself turns out, turns out.
Speaker 3:This is not about what you think it's about yeah, man, that is.
Speaker 1:That was, side note, one of the most shocking things to me as we entered foster care and now in adoption that, um, my own system of being wasn't as well-maintained as I thought that it was if that makes any sense like that, that I just had really really strong coping skills in the avoidance of buttons. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I lived in a world where I could keep my buttons from being pushed a ton of times and I had kids that just kind of generally avoided my butt, like they just were like oh yeah, I don't think I need to go down this road. And then we go into foster care and then later adoption and it's like oh I, at the beginning it's not. It doesn't feel like this anymore, but at the beginning it was like I am walking through like, uh, like one of those like landmines um, what's there's like a word for it like I'm picturing princess diana walking through that, like do you know what I'm talking about? The picture of princess die, where she's walking through landmines but she's the first, like royal, to do it and she does it without any protection.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um it's like this very famous picture of her, and it's like, oh, that is exactly what I'm doing now. I am walking through this and my protective barriers are gone and it's inside my house and these kids, all of them, are masterful button pushers of buttons that, in your words, and what is true, they didn't create like well, yeah, they find a way to push them and they're not.
Speaker 3:I don't think that they're necessarily like no, they find a way to push them and they're not.
Speaker 1:I don't think that they're necessarily like I don't know. They're just trying to survive.
Speaker 3:Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:They're just trying to survive. It's not personal Right.
Speaker 3:The thing is, then they get the reaction. Yeah, it feels personal and it's like a dopamine hit and they're like Ooh, I got a reaction from that. Maybe if I do it again I'll get another reaction.
Speaker 1:Maybe if I do it again, I'll get another reaction, and then they do, and then it becomes fun.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, it's so annoying. Yeah, it's not. Yeah, it's, it's, it's exhausting, it can, can be exhausting.
Speaker 1:It's exhausting. It can be exhausting, yeah, it truly. And then what it does? What it did for me, is it flicked on some light switches, right, like that. There was some stuff hiding in the corners of who I am that I didn't even know was there. And so when the light came, like when the light switches went on, I had two choices to try to turn off, to try to like do whatever I could to keep it hiding in the corners, or to pursue healing.
Speaker 1:And I think it's fair to say that I pursued healing. And I think it's also a little bit fair to say, like there's some things that I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like that can stay Not ready for that Great, Like you know, you pick and choose, but but the healing process for the adult in this situation, while all of this is happening in the home, can be so hard. Healing is exhausting and I think I want to mention this from the perspective of the kid as well, like the kids in your home, as their hearts are healing, as their brains are healing, as their bodies are healing. It's exhausting, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, yeah, I mean, think about it. Our bodies need rest to renew and kind of rejuvenate, right.
Speaker 3:So much of our rejuvenation of cells and all of that you know happens when we're sleeping, when we're resting and if we're not making intentional space for rest, I don't know how those systems could possibly catch up. We're just, we just keep going, keep stuffing, and sometimes, let's be honest, as a caregiver, as a parent, out of necessity, you know. So no judgment for that. I mean, I'm, yeah, I live there or have lived there also, and for me it really evoked anger in me and rage of myself in the mirror and was like whoa, that's what my children are seeing right now. I don't want that to be what they see.
Speaker 1:I don't think you're alone in that. I think that I mean I think that caregivers, moms in particular, who didn't know that they struggled with anger at all, come into this field and go. I am, I'm so angry all the time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't recognize myself. I don't know who this person is and therefore I don't know what to do with her or him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things when I tell people about, like how Haven started. It was I was becoming a mom. I didn't recognize.
Speaker 1:And I think that there's a couple of different ways that people come into foster care, come into adoption. And some parents come in from a place of never having parented before and so they don't have like a before and after, they just have who I was prior to kids and who I am after kids. But kids are either foster children or children that they've adopted, not as infants adoption, like I'm talking about older children there, right. And then there's another section of people that come in with years of parenting underneath their belt and they have an idea about who they are as a parent. And so, coming into foster care or adoption either way, about a year in you're like I'm. That person's gone, that person doesn't exist anymore. That parent that used to be so fun or so patient or so kind or have an endless supply of ideas to do or just whatever like or or. It was just super chill and like love could create a peaceful home. That was. That's never really truly been me.
Speaker 1:I thrive on a little bit of chaos but like certainly I was fun before foster care. I was right and and then it's like, oh, that I'm a person that I don't recognize anymore, and I think if parents are not careful, the blame goes to the kids.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's good. I mean, not many of us want to admit that it's our stuff, that that we need to hold a mirror up. You know, and take a look, it's hard. It is hard and you know, even when you're a parent of, you know pretty neurotypical biological children, you parent a certain way and then you think all children, this is how you parent, right, or this is how you show up, all children will respond to this the same way, because why wouldn't they? That's what you know, that's the evidence that you've had so far. Yeah, and then it doesn't work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so your job as a TBRI practitioner and at Dwell is to come in and say I have an idea, I have this theory of parenting that I think if you give it a try it might work. And also it will require you to change almost everything that you're doing as a parent.
Speaker 3:Yeah, at least change your mindset. Yeah, you're going about it. Yeah, yeah, how do you?
Speaker 1:cross that hurdle. How do you jump that?
Speaker 3:yeah, it's typically. Caregivers come to me when they are they're desperate for help. They're they're open to new, new ways of teaching. Essentially, at first, I think most caregivers just come wanting to know how to correct the behavior.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. Tell me how to make this stop.
Speaker 3:How to make this stop. And we say from upfront TBRI is there's kind of three parts there's the connecting principles, then the empowering principles and then the correcting principles. And we save correction for last, intentionally, which can frustrate some people, but we save it for last because we really believe that we kind of want to flip that on its head. We save it for last because we really believe that we kind of want to flip that on its head that the more connecting you can do with your child, the more connected they feel to you and to themselves, the less time you will actually have to spend on correcting. So TBRI really starts with kind of understanding the infant attachment cycle and attachment styles and how does that influence how it, how you're showing up as an adult, as a parent, and perhaps how they're showing up the child?
Speaker 3:Um, we talk about early risk factors because it's not just children who have, because it's not just children who have experienced foster care, abuse, neglect, adoption, that have experienced trauma.
Speaker 3:There's in utero trauma and so you know you might be a caregiver that adopted or brought your child home from the hospital, even if it's through foster care or through infant domestic adoption, but you're seeing things later on or early on, that just really make you scratch your head and you don't think of it as adversity. But when we kind of unpack all of that in the early risk factors and we start to talk about we kind of unpack all of that in the early risk factors and we start to talk about you know what happens neurologically, it starts to make sense. And we have found that once parents understand, or caregivers understand, what's happening inside their child's brain as much as they can and that it's not personal, right, we say, like it's not you against them, it's not against your child, it's you and your child against their past. That you're a team and that you want you know, we want to help this, this child, heal. It's also not going to happen overnight and we really are a society of quick fixes.
Speaker 3:I want the quick fix. I am not a patient person. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, Like people are coming and they want a tourniquet for the bleeding to stop and you're like I can maybe patch the wound a little bit, but it's still going to bleed. It's still going to bleed.
Speaker 3:And think about an actual wound. It's like I recently had surgery. I had wounds that needed to heal and I had to go back to my doctor for checkups and repeats and you know, to make sure everything was healing properly and like it. It took a good year for me to heal and and I was very focused on it I wasn't so distracted by everything else because the pain and the discomfort kept me focused on that healing.
Speaker 1:So you're saying that pain and discomfort served a purpose?
Speaker 3:I just might be saying that Don't throw something at me, right? I really maybe it's good that we're doing this over Zoom. Oh man, yeah, I really, really, really do believe that our pain and our suffering are never meaningless. So I don't subscribe to the whole everything happens for a reason and that toxic positivity, because I think it can really be dismissive. But I do believe that it's that our suffering and our pain are never meaningless and and look, we may not I may not see or understand or really grasp the full meaning, this side of glory. But I might I might.
Speaker 1:I think one of the most like, profound talks that I ever sat under was this person talking about scars and that she had had, like she had had, thyroid surgery, and I'm going to skip ahead of so much of the like, really beautiful story that she told. But this person came up to her after she spoke and said we have the same scar and pulled down, like the, the collar of her shirt to show her her scar, the collar of her shirt to show her her scar, and they were able to have this conversation about what life and and um, what their lives had had been like. Right, and I keep I've thought about that so many times with some of the scars in my life, my own life, my own life, when I get to, when I get to access the scars from a place of healing, but when I see somebody with a wound, that's going to be the scar that I have, or you know what I mean. Do you know what I'm trying to say? Where I'm like hey, I have that scar. I, I can tell you that there's life on the other side of this. I think is one of the most beautiful things that we can do with, um, with pain, and I think I think I try to look at that with my kids too. Like my goal is not to keep them from never experiencing pain. In fact, the fact that we live inside this world, and specifically the world that that we have chosen to live inside of, it's not an option to avoid pain, but it's like what do you do with it? What do you? How do we hold pain?
Speaker 1:The conversations that I'm having with one of my kids right now is about really the concept of holding two things that are true at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's really hard. Yes, you do want to go live with, with your biological mom and dad, and also I am your mom and your dad is your dad, and you have two sets of us and you know, like those kinds of things where it's it's really hard, it's really complicated and there's a ton of behaviors surrounding this pain inside of them right now. There's a ton of behaviors surrounding the struggle with adoption, and it's interesting because I find that I can access compassion, because we can name what's happening with this kid, so I can access compassion, as opposed to another one of my kids who has a ton of behaviors right now surrounding God knows what and because the, because the God knows what isn't named. I am like, then get it together, like is it, and I just am going to. I guess I'm like putting myself on in the hot seat as, like a typical parent, probably, like I would imagine that a lot of your parents experience this.
Speaker 3:Oh for sure, and I have experienced this, I'm not immune to this, you know this either, and I think that what you're describing, though, is fear-based, so like we don't understand it. So we're afraid of it and we're gonna put, we're gonna do what we need to do, put things in place wherever we need to put in place, so that I don't need to feel uncomfortable, because afraid is uncomfortable. It reminds me of a time and I share this occasionally, but I always have my son's permission to share it Our son came home to us. He was 29 days old when he came home to us, and I was seven months pregnant, and our daughter biological daughter was two at the time. So I was a little stressed, just a smidge, a little bit, but anyway, yeah, our son came home to us 29 days old, when he was about eight, nine, 10 years old, something like that. We were just, we were not a happy home. He was angry all the time, he was moody all the time, he would shut down for days, and he couldn't really articulate at that age what was going on or why he was, you know, acting or presenting the way that he was, and I didn't know anything about TBRI at the time. This was a good 10, 12 years ago, and so there was one particular night that like weeks and weeks of this kind of just unhappy home, like it was just heavy, heavy, um.
Speaker 3:And one particular night my husband had our other two kids out of the house and I said to our our son, um, go upstairs and get ready for bed, I'll come up and tuck you in. And, um, he still let us, you know, tuck him in at that age. And so, anyway, I was just grateful that he complied. And so he went upstairs and got ready for bed. And then, a little bit later, I followed him up and I went to his room and he was in bed with his back to me and I sat down on the bed and I just put my hand on his back in the quiet dark of the night in the room, and I just started rubbing his back and all of a sudden, you know, after maybe three minutes of doing that, he says to me mom, if I wanted to find phone numbers, how would I find them? And I thought, well, that's a really odd question, for, you know, eight, eight year old or nine year old, however old he was to ask. But I was like well, I think you, you know we could google it or look in the phone book. If there's still a phone book, like you know why, whose phone number do you need? And he's like no one's. And then he says to me mom, did my other parents have jobs? And I was like um, that's whose phone number you want.
Speaker 3:And I talked him through you know, yes, you know what, what I knew and the information that I had. And you know he's like didn't I have another brother too? And we talked about that. And did she want for him to be adopted? Why did she want for me to be adopted and not him? And it's like oh, my goodness, these are heavy questions, right? And then he asked me a few more questions and I answered them and he's always known his story. It's not like that was when he was hearing it.
Speaker 1:He wasn't surprised that he was adopted.
Speaker 3:Not at all. No, we, you know we have different skin colors. He's no, you know, right. So, um, and then all of a sudden, uh, he kind of paused for a while and I thought he'd fallen asleep, but he hadn't. And he took a deep breath and he kind of sighed out he's like Mama, do you think she thinks about me? And I, I just was stunned. I did not see that coming and you know, I thought I am so not prepared for this. Like I, there's no playbook, right. And you know, baby, I think she thinks about you all the time. And we talked about that a little bit more.
Speaker 3:And then he finally fell asleep and I left his room and I went down to my room and I sat in my closet and wept wept for his loss, for her loss, for the, the stress that I'd been holding on to in our family. And it sort of all made sense that, like, this is the, this is what's going on underneath that iceberg being the tip of the iceberg, being the presenting of defiance, major attitude, aggression, depression, depression. I'm seeing those things and I'm thinking he's just being a jerk. Why is he being such a jerk? And then that night happened and it really changed the trajectory and the course of my thinking. I didn't know anything about TBRIri then, but um it just, everything started to click, you know. It was like oh, that is heavy stuff our little kid would be holding on to yeah he had been home with us since he was 29 days old yeah and still he's questioning.
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, mama, do you think she thinks about me?
Speaker 1:Yeah, what? One of my kids just asked me that question, jen, um, between the time that you and I saw each other and now, like so within the last month and a half, one of my kids just asked me that question and I said, oh, um, it was beautiful and it was gut-wrenching, honestly, because it led to a lot more of their story than they'd heard previously, because they had this need to, that that particular child needed to know. Oh my God, hold on, in real time, I'm putting this together.
Speaker 1:That conversation is the impetus for the last, like four weeks of insanity that we have had in our house yeah if this were recorded so that the audience could watch it on youtube, you would see what jen sees right now, which is like my face, in absolute shock.
Speaker 3:I think I've had something that's going on like in your real world crisis right now.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, we had this conversation. We had this exact same. I mean different because it's different kids, right, but they asked a series of questions that but they asked a series of questions that pointed to deep fear over safety for their parents.
Speaker 1:And I said, well, do you want to ask me any questions? And they were like, why would I ask you the question? I mean literally like well, I might know the answer. And they were like, how would you know? And I said, well, your belly mom and I talk. And then it comes up like well, do you, do you? They ask the question, do you think that they think of me? And I said, of course I, of course. Yeah, of course I think that she misses you.
Speaker 1:My kid looked at me with this like incredulous. Look like, why would you say that? Why do you think that she misses me? And I was like, well, you were, you grew in her belly. Like, of course she knows, of course she thinks about you every day. And they said, why does me growing in her, what does me growing in her belly have to do with anything?
Speaker 1:And from that we start into like the story and and a little bit of the birds and the bees, a little bit of like biology, a little bit of it was all kinds of things, but at the end, but at the end I was using my, I was like trying to visually portray connection with my hands and I interlocked my fingers to talk about their relationship with their biological mom and dad, like from birth and attachment.
Speaker 1:And this interlocking fingers, hands like gripped together, and that being in foster care and then later TPR like separates them and I was holding two hands side separate.
Speaker 1:I'm trying really hard to only talk about like my side of the story, to honor, to honor my kid here, and then I talk about how at that moment, brad and I were present and like made the kid, made one hand like into a fist to show the kid and covered that hand with my other hand, like Brad and I right, so, like rock, paper scissors, paper beats rock, right, like that's the, that's the, and I was like we're here and we're and we're, we've got you, like we're not leaving. But this doesn't feel like this. And I moved my hands back to interlocking and my kid was like it doesn't, it doesn't feel like that and I was like I, I know, I know that it doesn't and it was a very sweet, tender conversation and it was gut-wrenching because it was an acknowledgement of what was lost and what, what isn't right now, and that it's not just my kid who feels like that, and of course I did not say that in the conversation, but that Brad and I also like attachment is hard.
Speaker 3:You recognize it feels different also.
Speaker 1:And it feels different and it's like man and it has to be good enough, like right, like it's like. This is one of the things that I was saying was like this is what we have, like this is this is life and we get to choose what we do with it. We can keep separating and coming back together and separating and coming back together and okay, or we can stay. We can try to figure out some glue to hold this. And what I love about how you're describing TBRI and that connection piece is like building, like creating that glue that can hold families together that are coming together and falling apart and coming together, like where attachment is so tenuous and so fragile, and how you use TBRI as a tool to to just get some stick there. So, yeah, no scaffolding.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To give language to. When we have the language for things they don't feel as scary, we can name it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, that's what I'm saying Like where with my other kid, where it's like they could name what was happening, and so it was like oh, I've got compassion for days, but this, but this other one, which clearly they did name what was happening and I forgot that they named, they didn't tie those pieces together. Yeah, they didn't tie those pieces together. When behaviors are escalating and you're just in a storm of behaviors, if you can't access compassion in the middle of that storm, it is nuts yes, for sure of this.
Speaker 3:For caregivers is giving yourself permission to acknowledge that there is grief in this journey. To acknowledge and to grieve the family that you thought you would have to, the children that you thought you would have, yeah, to grieve the idea of what your family was supposed to look like. Not that it may never look that way, I don't know, it might but if that's what you're stuck on, that my family and my children are supposed to, this isn't how it was supposed to be, then you're you know you're always looking for things to confirm that that bias, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and nobody's immune from that.
Speaker 3:No, I mean, you know, this is not. That's not specific to to foster and adoptive parents, right? Because you have a biological child that has significant medical needs and you're that's not specific to to foster and adoptive parents, right? Because you have a logical child that has significant medical needs and you're completely caught off guard and this was not what I thought my family was going to look like and there's grief in that, but I'm not so sure that we've done a great job of making space and giving permission to be sad about that.
Speaker 1:I would concur we have not, and so it all just gets stuffed and it all comes.
Speaker 3:Because what kind of parent am I? What does it say about me if I think and say those things out loud? But the reality is we're all thinking those things out loud, but the reality is all thinking those things, same girl, same. Somebody just got to say it first.
Speaker 1:I feel like my like law in life is to be the person that just says it first and hopes to God that somebody else in the room is like, oh my God, me too. I just like I will say these things. And I'm like, rebecca, why can't you keep your mouth shut for one second? When it comes to like sharing some hard, vulnerable thing, where I'm like I don't, I don't know, I didn't, I, I didn't get that skillset, I just but it's. I joke about that. But it really truly is that I have this deep belief. It's a gift, not a burden.
Speaker 1:It's a gift to me? It might be, but it's like this, um, it's this deep belief that that that if I have a question I've been like this all my life, not like not even just about like vulnerable things, but like in college I would just, I would raise my hand like the professor is talking, and I'd be like I got a question, and but I assumed that if I had a question, somebody else in the class also had the same question.
Speaker 3:I think it's beautiful, that's your default because I don't, I, I, I am not the same in that. I'll keep that question in my head because I'm afraid of embarrassing myself.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I have the same metric for embarrassing.
Speaker 1:I'm getting much better at it, um you know but Well, you have to because you're teaching other people how to um, how to access their vulnerable parts. And I think in teaching people how to do that, I mean now let's be real that my therapist and I had this mindfulness coach that I adored for a season of my life and she was like I don't think that you're ever actually vulnerable. Like vulnerability is different for me than it is for other people. It's not that like it's not in saying the hard thing that doesn't feel vulnerable to me, in saying the hard thing that doesn't feel vulnerable to me, asking somebody for a need that I have and them not doing it is like that's the most vulnerable that I could possibly be, to have to be like to be needy. But this is no therapy session, although sometimes podcasts do turn into that for me. But okay, at the end of every episode I ask a series of lightning round questions Are you ready? I'm ready. What is currently on your nightstand?
Speaker 3:Like as in a reading material.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Like is it messy, is it clean? Are you like a? Only two things go on my nightstand.
Speaker 3:And now I'm a seasonal girl so I it gets messy until I lose my mind and then clean it up. But reading material I don't know. I tend to read on my phone a lot, but as far as like an actual book it's. There's probably a book about perimenopause on my nightstand, right now Such a hot take.
Speaker 1:These days, people are talking about it all over the place now.
Speaker 3:I'm glad we are because it's a journey.
Speaker 1:It's a whole thing from what I've heard.
Speaker 3:It's a whole thing.
Speaker 1:Okay, what song do you want played at your funeral? Oh Goodness of God.
Speaker 3:Oh yes, goodness of God, yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, what podcasts and or books are you really liking right now?
Speaker 3:Um, I listen to the daily. It's just like a news update Every day. I'd say three to four days a week when I go for my walk but it publishes every day, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I've heard of this one before. Um, and then my last question and my favorite question what is bringing you joy right now?
Speaker 3:so right now, in this moment, my kids will all be home tomorrow. Uh, so I have bigs, um, our daughter's 22 and our two boys are both 21, lives at home Cause he goes to a local college right here in our town a few miles away. Uh, the other one lives three hours away, goes to Westchester university, and then our daughter is a nurse in Philly. So my Westchester and Philly kid will be home tomorrow. So that is bringing me so much joy. Everybody under one roof, all my chicks under one roof, yes, what does that feel like as a mom?
Speaker 1:Like dream, with me here for a second.
Speaker 3:No, I fully understand that, Like I'm speaking a bit of a foreign language. You know they're older and like they're big now and they're making their own decisions. And there comes a point in parenting where you're kind of no longer parenting, you're coaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, but to gather them back underneath yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh, I'm so excited I'm just here. Here's the measure of excitement for me. I hate to go to the grocery store. It's overstimulating, I just hate it. And I texted our family group chat earlier. It was like what do you guys want for food? So we have it, you know, at the house, and I'm actually excited to go to the grocery store tonight to get that they want Cause. I'm only going once. I'm only going one day.
Speaker 1:This better last year till after Christmas. Don't you dare eat all your goldfish early right exactly um. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and for being my friend, and um for saying yes to michael mitchell setting us up on our first zoom blind date oh, praise god for good friends, good people, good spiritual directors, good leadership.
Speaker 3:Yeah.