Take Heart

Reclaim Compassion: An Interview with Lisa Qualls

• Amy J Brown, Carrie Holt and Sara Clime • Season 3 • Episode 134

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On this episode, Amy speaks with author, Lisa Qualls, who is an adoptive mom and shares her experience parenting children with trauma and the resulting blocked care. She talks about the challenges they faced and how their family has changed because of their children's needs. Lisa also discusses her book, The Connected Parent, which provides practical and honest tools for parenting children with trauma, and emphasizes the importance of seeking support from trauma-informed counselors. Lisa believes we can reclaim compassion by releasing the idea that we can completely heal our children. Join us for an insightful and eye-opening conversation. 

Ep.134; June 27, 2023

Key Moments:
[07:07] Admitting you need help with traumatized kids 
[11:45] Grieving old family dynamics 
[15:30] Blocked care: stress-induced defense mechanism in parenting 
[19:44] Compassion for self and child's trauma. 
[27:24] Reclaim Compassion: regulate your nervous system, not gritting your teeth 

Resources:
The Connected Child
The Connected Parent
The Whole Brain Child
Reclaim Compassion
The Adoption Connection
IG@lisacqualls 

If you enjoyed the show:

This is Amy Brown, and this week on the podcast, we have Lisa Qualls. Lisa Qualls is the co-author of the Connected Parent, which she wrote with Dr. Karen Purvis and Reclaim Compassion. She's a post-adoptive support specialist, a TBRI practitioner, a spiritual director, and co-founder of the Adoption Connection. Lisa offers adoptive parents hope and practical support in this complex parenting journey. Lisa is a birth mom, a former foster youth, a foster mom, and an adoptive mom. God has woven the thread of fostering and adoption through her life-giving her unique insight and compassion. She and her husband, Ross, have 12 children by birth and adoption and two precious granddaughters. Listen in to my conversation with Lisa. Thank you, Lisa, for being here.

Lisa Qualls: Well, thank you, Amy, for having me. This is really delightful. 

Amy: I would love for our listeners who don't know for you to give us a little background about your family. You have lots of children and lots of mothering experience. Could you share a little bit about your story?

Lisa: Yes. Adoption has been woven through my life. I'm an adoptive mom, I'm also a first or birth mom, and I'm a former foster youth. This has been woven through my life for a long, long time. For today's purposes, what I really want to share about is my experience of becoming an adoptive mom because, at the time that we were introduced to the whole idea of actually adopting internationally. We'd heard about adoption, and I had no idea how it actually happened. Then some friends of ours called to tell us that they were adopting two little boys from Ethiopia. That really opened up this whole possibility in our hearts. We felt like our hearts opened up to this, and God set a new path before us. We did not know it was coming. We began the process of preparing to adopt two little boys younger than our youngest daughter. In the process of all of that, we ended up deciding to adopt another little girl. She had some special medical needs. She was living in an orphanage for children with HIV. At that time, I mean, this was 2006, we really did not know much at all about HIV and AIDS and parenting a child. Was it even a safe thing to do? 
Could we provide for her medically? There was a steep learning curve there. We went to Ethiopia in February/March of 2007, and we met our three children. We didn't know it, but at the same time, we met another little girl. We would return a year later to adopt her and bring her home when we met our first three children. Our daughter was five and a half, our son was almost two, and then our other son was about five months, just a baby. We knew very early on that our daughter was going to be really difficult to parent. From the very beginning in Ethiopia, her behaviors were really difficult to manage. She had a huge amount of energy. We did not recognize it at that time, but it was really fueled by fear and keeping herself safe. The way to stay safe was to have everybody's attention, to be sort of the star of the show. I remember somebody who visited her before we got to meet her. We knew some other people who had gone to the orphanage, and they said, "She jumps the highest, sings the loudest, runs the fastest." That all sounds so amazing. But actually, it's extremely intense to parent a child like that. We brought them home. We brought our two little boys home first because at that time, the US government would not allow a person with HIV to enter the country unless you had filled out all these waivers and provided them with extra documentation to allow them to have a visa. We brought our little boys home, and when we were there, we submitted all of the waiver materials for our daughter. We went home and waited because we had no idea. There was no way to know if they were going to let us know in two weeks or two months or how long it would be before we brought her home. I will be really honest and say we got home, and we were a little scared. We had been parents for 20 years. Our two little boys were doing really well. Of course, they had a lot of needs. The older of the two had a lot of medical stuff going on. We knew life was going to be a lot harder after our daughter joined our family, and that definitely proved to be true. My husband traveled back a couple of months later and brought her home. Honestly, from the day she walked into our house, everything changed. Parenting her was just incredibly difficult from the very beginning.

Amy: We have two adopted kids, I mean, three. Two are domestic, and one was adopted at age 10 from an orphanage in Bulgaria. It was a similar situation where he's so friendly, and he likes everybody. I thought, well, that's good, not understanding the effect of trauma. It makes sense to me, of course, they don't have parents for 10 years, and they've been in an orphanage, and they've had fear. I guess I thought they would act out. When we saw him it, no, he was (I call it a cocktail party personality) really friendly. Then our daughters, we've had them since birth, but they still had attachment trauma. It's interesting. You see behaviors that in our world world seem positive. Then you realize, oh, there's so much underneath that. You brought these children home, and you had kids at home. When you said you had been a parent for a long time, that was one of the reasons I thought we have a lot of parenting experience. We can do this, not understanding the trauma. I'm gonna say you wrote the book, The Connected Parent, which is so helpful and practical, and honest. I have a very heavily underlined copy that I've had for a while. I was looking at it again before in preparation for this talk. I was just thinking, it's really practical, and it's really honest. There's a lot of conversation when I talk to moms. What can they control? What is trauma? I think that's the wrong question. I think what we need to know is some of the things in the book: the scripts (I'll let you explain that) and then some tools. That's not the right question. I want to go back to those first few days because I've had a lot of moms say to me, "I was not prepared. When you go back to those first few days, the first couple of years, when everything was going on. It's overwhelming and isolating, and nobody understands it. Can you take us back there a little bit and maybe some of the lessons or something you would say to a new mom? Here you are in this spot. Let me tell you some things I learned the hard way.

Lisa: Yes, I definitely can. Well, that first year, before we went back and brought our next daughter home, that first year, I feel like our world revolved around our daughter and her needs. For a very, very long time, I kept telling myself, I know how to do this. I've been a mom for so long. I should be able to - a lot of shoulds. I should be able to do this. I should be able to make her behave differently. I shouldn't feel the way I feel. I think I didn't want to admit that I was in way over my head and I needed help. I was trying to maintain this image that I had it together, but in our house, it was out of control. I cried a lot. I mean, I would just go to bed and think I don't think I can make it through another day. My other children were just so devastated. They all coped with it differently. I think I may talk about that in the book. I'm not sure. Some of them were old enough; they were in college, and they kind of disappeared. We had been this close-knit family. I'd homeschooled my kids, and we had this way of being that was so interrupted. We couldn't continue living the way that we had been. Everything was different. We ended up putting some of our kids in school. We ended up needing to change churches because we could not fit in a church where the children were expected to behave in a certain way because my children did not behave the way they were supposed. Going to church was so hard because I couldn't pretend very well. I really, really tried to pretend that we were okay, but we were not okay at all. I would say to a mom who might be feeling that way that it's better to reach out for help sooner than later. Don't keep waiting, thinking, oh, it's gonna get better, it's gonna get better. It might, but what I think so many of us find is that it doesn't get better. Time does not necessarily make everything better. Look for help sooner rather than later. I think that's really important. Be sure that if you're looking for professionals, you have to have therapists and people who are trauma-informed to understand because typical parenting tools will not work for our children whose brains had been so affected by trauma, abuse, and neglect. Their brains are wired differently. Behavior modification, things like that. I was talking with a mom just this morning about a ticket system. These do not work for children. Their needs are very, very different. We have to focus not so much on the behavior but what is underneath that behavior. What is that behavior actually expressing? What is the need?

Amy: Right. Fear doesn't always look like what you think fear would look like. I would add to your thoughts. We need help. Also, we need to be honest, even with our therapist and doctors, because I had a lot of shame going in. I assumed they were all going to judge me. Sometimes kids, and (I'm gonna say this to the moms out there) they kind of know how to work the system in that setting. You can sometimes be blindsided by an accusation from a child. That's not necessarily true. But then you think, okay, they're gonna think I'm a bad mom. Getting that help is so important, but it's not easy finding the right people.

Lisa: I think not only do we find ourselves thinking, if I seek help, or they're gonna think I'm a bad mom. I think a lot of us begin to wonder, am I even a good mom anymore? Who am I? I think so often, we get in so deep, and it's so hard that we hardly recognize ourselves, and that was really scary for me.

Amy: Yeah, me, too. I had feelings and thoughts I never had before.

Lisa: Absolutely. Me, too. Me too. I did not like the person I was becoming. I was honestly doing my best, but it was not the mom I wanted to be. I had to get a lot of help to find my way, not back to where I had been before, but to find my way into a new way, being a mom. For a while, I hung on to this idea. We're going to find our way back. That will not happen. The family we were before adding four children to our family was gone, and I had to grieve that loss. That family was gone, and we had to become an entirely new family. I'm sure that a lot of moms listening to this for whatever reason, whatever they're experiencing as a mom, that one of the hardest things is being able to say, who we were before, we're not going to be there anymore. We are becoming something new and someone new. I think there's a lot of grief work that has to be done.

Amy: I'm so glad you pointed that out because I think there's grief around the dream of what we thought adoption would be. There's grief around the struggles our children have, but I don't think we always name our own grief because we keep going to help our kid. We just keep showing up to help our kids and we neglect grieving those kinds of things.

Lisa: I think we may think it ourselves, but also, sometimes, people will say it to us. "Well, you chose this." Now having a child who's medically fragile, that happens. We don't choose that, but adopting, fostering, we choose it. I don't think any of us know what it's really going to be like until we're living it, and some kids adapt and attach without huge struggles. There are a lot of us whose kids have really really struggled with attachment challenges, and that is unbelievably hard.

Amy: Well, that leads me to your new book. I'm excited to talk about this. Your book is about block care, and I'm gonna be honest, I was like, okay, do I know what blocked care is. Then I read the little snippet on it. I totally know what it is. I may not be able to give you a definition, so I'm gonna let you do that.

Lisa: Let me tell you how I first learned about it because I think that that helps a lot. Way back in 2006, I started blogging, and I wrote for years and years on a blog called One Thankful Mom. It's not there anymore. I'm reworking a lot of it. I used to do these Tuesday topics, and people would send in their questions. This mom sent in a question and she said, "What do I do if I don't like my child?" I remember reading it and resonating with it. At the same time, thinking there's no way I'm putting that on my blog because I don't want the criticism. The more I thought about it, I thought, you know what, this is very real, and maybe it's time to get really real. I posted her question, and I'm not kidding you, the flood of comments. This was probably more than 10 years ago, and it is still one of my most popular blog posts. people are still googling things. 

Amy: I think I've read it, actually. I probably googled it late in the night.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. What I started to see was all of these parents who were experiencing this, who were having such a hard time connecting, wanting to connect, wondering who they were, if they could go on. They felt a lot of despair. They felt very isolated, all of these things. I started teaching about it. I had no idea until more recently that it actually had a name. Daniel Hughes and Jonathan Baylin, in brain-based parenting, talked about something called blocked care. My partner at the Adoption Connection, Melissa, called me one day. She said, "Lisa, you've got to hear this." She read their definition of blocked care to me, and I was like, oh, my goodness, it has a name, and I started to cry because I didn't know that so many people were experiencing it. Anyhow, this blocked care, we really dove in, and we started studying it, Melissa and me. We realized that so many parents are struggling, and what's happening is many of us were experiencing shame, and shame leads us to isolation because we don't want anybody to know. That isolation goes nowhere well. We need each other. We need honest spaces where we can talk. What nobody had done yet, is really created a path out a path of healing, a path of recovering from blocked care and finding our way back to a healthier way of being and parenting. That's how I started with it from a blog post. I'd love to know who that person was now, all these years later, because whoever it was kind of changed my life. I'll tell you how we define blocked care. It's a self-protective mechanism in the nervous system, and it's activated by excessive stress. This stress then suppresses our higher brain functioning, our prefrontal cortex that we need for caregiving. It causes our nervous systems to develop a defensive stance toward our child. 

We are still providing care; we're taking care of their needs, but our hearts have sort of left the relationship because our hearts are protecting us. It's super important for us to remember that it is not intentional on our part. This is not something we choose. This is happening in our nervous system. It's a subconscious, protective thing that's happening. For many of us who are parenting children who have come to us with lots of early adversity, it's not their fault, either, because what's happening in their nervous system is they're in a state of blocked trust, where they do not deep within themselves feel safe. They are protecting themselves from intimacy, from relationships from receiving care. They're blocked trust then leads to our blocked care, and it's sort of this cyclical thing that happens. It's not something that any of us are doing intentionally. But if you're a parent listening, and you find yourself thinking, you hear your child waking up in the morning, and immediately, your whole body feels like no, no, no, no, no. I want them to sleep a little longer. I don't think I can do it or whatever it is. If you're even in that point, like, yeah, whatever, some of us will go to a dismissive space to protect ourselves. If you feel like that, and you think I'll feed this kid, but I'm only surviving till she turns 18, that is a sign of blocked care. What we've done in our book, the book's title is Reclaim Compassion, and it's about reclaiming compassion for yourself and reclaiming compassion for your child.

Amy: First of all, the idea of reclaiming compassion for yourself because I've been there. I Have heard a child's voice, and my body recoiled, not even intentionally, and then had so much guilt and shame around that. I remember one time talking to a trauma-informed therapist, and I said, "I need to overcome it and help more," and she says, "You need to acknowledge that there's a voice that lives in your home that makes your body recoil." I think there's a lot of shame and blame we put on ourselves. Especially because if you already had children, I would say all the time, "It's not this way with the other kids," totally dismissing the fact that the other kids didn't have that trauma. I love that idea of, first of all, compassion for yourself, then also, obviously, compassion for our child. If you're a mom that's in that spot and also with attachment disorder, you are rejected a lot by your child all the time. I have a story that my child would reject, reject, reject, and then in front of somebody. One time I drove her to school, and the whole way to school, it was just awful. She's screaming about how much she hates me. She won't stay in her car seat. The minute she gets to the school, she turns around and says, "Mommy!" That made me mad. Wait a minute. I know that's part of the attachment. I remember thinking about that mile drive to school. I dreaded every second of it. I couldn't wait for her to get out of the car, and then I feel guilty all day. For a mom who's in that space I just can't do it, or I'm done. First of all, it's helpful to think you can get past that, like, this is not how it has to be. Where would you start with a mom, that's there. I know; there's probably more than one step. Where do you start?

Lisa: Yeah, Well, there are multiple steps. Actually, in the book, we take people through a pathway toward transformation and healing. But the one thing that we all need. It's so interesting. In order to overcome black care, we need the same thing that our kids need. We need someone to express compassion and empathy for us and care for us, which is really hard to find when you're the one who's the caregiver. It could be if you have a spouse who's parenting with you, they may be just as wrecked as you are. You may have each other, but both of you are in this. Your nervous systems are activated by everything that's going on in your home and in your family. You really need someone to provide compassionate care for you. We always tell people we do strongly encourage parents to have a therapist. If you're a person of faith, we think spiritual directors are fantastic. The third thing you need is you need community. You need other parents who understand what you are going through. I see you. I get it. I have felt that way. I think one of the things that Melissa and I bring to the work of overcoming block care is that we have come through to the other side. We lived through it. There are a lot of steps involved. We talk a lot about caring for your exterior world, your body, your mind, and your relationships. We take you through all of it. But we do not work on reclaiming compassion for your child until you have gone through this whole process. That's the last step because you need to do the work of healing your own nervous system and finding the care and support you need before you ever are going to really have the capacity to begin rebuilding compassionate attachment with your child. 

Amy: One thing I thought of when you were saying that is we have to get past the shame because you said you need to reach out. We have to get over that hurdle first. We also have to get over the idea that we have to do everything for our kids and ignore ourselves. I find that very common in moms. They think I got to do it all for this kid. I love the fact that we focus on ourselves first. I also love that you've taken the language that this is not my fault. This is not a character flaw. I've lived in trauma. I think people who haven't had kids from hard places don't understand the unrelenting, whether it's violence or screaming or stealing or behavior. I think one of the hardest things about it is you never know when it's gonna hit. You're always on high alert.

Lisa: Yes, and if you have other children, you're trying to protect them from all of this as well. That is really, really hard. I remember one of my older daughters saying the hardest thing for her about adopting and what our family has gone through is she said something about how hard it is to love someone who's hurting the other people you love. She wants to and does love her siblings, but it was really hard when her other siblings were being harmed because we had some young children too. We had our younger daughter was sort of literally sandwiched between our two older adopted daughters and our two younger adopted sons. 
That's a really, really hard thing. There has been a lot of fallout for our kids. That's been heartbreaking. We are far enough through it now to also be able to say, "Wow, God has used this really difficult thing to change us, to make us more like him, to live lives with our hearts and our eyes wide open to the needs around us. My kids now, they see someone behaving in an out-of-control way. They don't think what a rotten person, or they don't judge other parents. They're like, Oh, yeah, that kid is so dysregulated; that's rough. They're compassionate people because of what we've lived through.

Amy: My kids are too. I will say that they've all been to therapy. There are different levels of how healed they are. I think I think I had a lot of guilt about that, too. It is what it is. The thing I like about what you're saying about your book is I think some of us stay in the camp and that it's never going to get better. It's just how it is I'm going to endure it. Then we have this other camp of its kind of rosy. I'm just gonna love a lot, l and it's gonna happen. This was a realistic path for us. it's naming what is there. I think it's so important to name this is what I'm feeling. I don't think we do that enough because we're ashamed of it. This is what I'm feeling. This is why I'm feeling it, and here's the path and not just pulling myself up my bootstraps and try to be kind. Here's an actual path that involves our bodies. We're embodied, people. Christ took on flesh. I think a lot of times we divorce our heart and mind from that embodiment. I've learned a lot about somatic therapy as I'm working with somatic coaching. I've learned a lot about regulating my nervous system. Actually, in the book, Connected Parent, (just yesterday, I was running around like crazy, and I was a little bit stressed), you said in the book you should rock your child. I thought, you know what, I'm rocking myself right now.

Lisa: Yes, we do talk about that in Reclaim Compassion. We talk about all those things about how to regulate your nervous system. Because the other thing I think parents do sometimes is they're gritting their teeth. I am going to pretend (I mean, they don't say pretend in their head), but I am going to maintain this facade. But the truth is nervous systems are very sensitive to each other. Even if we put a smile on our face, internally, in our nervous system, we are about to blow our top. Our kids' nervous systems know that. They sense it. It's a very sensitive thing. It's not just fake it till you make it. I mean, there are some aspects of that that can be useful, but that will not help you overcome blocked care. The other thing is the parents who really want to give up. I think sometimes it's so painful. It's just so painful that they develop a dismissive stance. It's like calling your child or radish, which a child with reactive attachment disorder and distancing themselves emotionally. I understand how we get there. I think there's something better. I think for those of us who really are following God to the best of our ability. He wants something so much better for us. There is more joy to be found. One of the things we take people through is really radical acceptance. What was your expectation? What is your reality? 
How are you going to process that gap?  Because there is a gap. We have to come to a point where we can accept maybe some of the choices I made, I made, having no understanding of where I was actually going to end up. Those decisions were made. I'm going to radically accept that I have a child who, because of their own wounding, will never have secure attachment with me. I'm going to learn how to love them within the capacity of what they do have. I'm going to love them to the best of my ability. I'm going to be at peace with that. I think for me because I had this idea, I will love and feel about these children exactly the way that I love and feel about my other children. I'm going to fight for it. I had to release some of that and say, "You know what, I love this child. But this child came to me when she was 10 years old, after being in an orphanage in Ethiopia. Her wounds are such that we're not going to have the secure attachment I dreamed of. What we do have will be Okay, and it can still be good, even if it's not all that I imagined.  I'm going to find peace and contentment and that and just love her to the best of my ability."

Amy: That's such a good word. That is going to encourage a lot of moms who are in that space if it doesn't look like I thought it would, which equals in their minds, failure, which it shouldn't, but recalibrating of your expectations.

Lisa; Another thing we talk a lot about is how we define success as parents. Success means my child is going to love me, and my child is going to go to college, and she's going to come home every Christmas. That's what success is going to look like. We cannot actually define success by our children's actions. We can only define success on our own. Can I maintain common regulations around my daughter? That's success. Can I love her and care for her in whatever capacity, depending on her age and stuff? That's success. We can only define success based on ourselves, not upon our children.

Amy: That's another hard lesson because I think in our culture, we have this idea of what it should look like. I think the churc, (we've talked about this before on the podcast); the church is saying, let's adopt, but then they're not really there. They don't have a full understanding of trauma, which none of us did. I had no idea. Then it makes it hard even at church. As you said, they have so many moms telling me we can't go to church anymore. Because, well, they're having three meals a day and a bed, they should be fine now.

Lisa: Why do you see your kid doesn't feel safe? They're perfectly safe. The thing about felt safety is it's deep in the nervous system. It's not about the things we can see. Felt safety is so much deeper than that. Everything I wrote about in the Connected Parent, those are great tools, and they can take us a long way. I'm so thankful for everything I know about connected parenting and trust-based relational intervention, all of that. 
I'm so so thankful. I use it every single day, even with teenagers, I use everything I learned. I have had to realize that I am not the healer. God chose me, and he chose these children for me. I am an instrument of healing. I have all the skills that I have and a desire to be loving, and a desire to be a great mom. But he is the healer, and I'm not. We have to release that. We have to release the idea that we can heal our kids because we absolutely cannot. We are not the healers. We are instruments of healing.

Amy: That takes such a weight off when you can finally say, "I'll be faithful. I'll be a faithful presence, but I am not the end all and be all, and the one has to fix everything." That is such a good encouragement. I love everything you've had to say today. It's so encouraging. I told you this privately before, but I'll tell you publicly that you've been an encouragement to me for many years. I've read your work and your writing. Tell me where our listeners can find you. The Adoption Connection I know you have. Could you tell us a little bit about where they can find you and the names of your books again? We'll have all that in the show notes, but I want to make sure that they know where to find you.

Lisa: Yes, so my first book was The Connected Parent, which I co-wrote with the late, Dr. Karen Purvis, and she is a hero in my world and so many other adoptive and foster parents. Her first book was The Connected Child, and what we did with the connected parent was we co-wrote it with her as the developmental psychologist and me as a real mom. We took theory and practice, professional and parent, and we wove it together into one book. I think it's an even better starting place for learning about connected parenting than the connected child because it is so real. It's very practical. That was my first book. My new book, which I co-wrote with Melissa Corkum, who's my co-founder of the Adoption Connection, is called Reclaim Compassion: The Adoptive Parents Guide to Overcoming Blocked Care with Neuroscience and Faith. You can find the book everywhere, on Amazon, but you can also find more information by going to www.reclaimcompassion.com. We also have a free assessment just for your audience. For any of you listening, if you want to learn more about blocked care and you want to read our signs of blocked care and see where you are in this, go to the www.adoptionconnection.com/takeheart, and you'll come to a free assessment where you can learn more about blocked care. Then we have all kinds of resources for you there. 

Amy: You do. You have great resources. Before we go, I want to say this quickly. Not all of our listeners or adoptive moms. I think you alluded earlier to me, when we were talking before. There are other areas where we have blocked care when we have trauma. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I want moms, not just adoptive moms, I want moms that have kids with special needs to know how this would fit for them.

Lisa: Yes, so blocked care is definitely not specific to adoption and foster care. This book is written more for our audience, but it's actually useful for any parent because the pathway to healing is the same. Whether you adopted your kids, whether you have a child who's neurodivergent, or has medical needs that have just worn you so thin, you may be experiencing blocked care. Blocked care can also happen because of trauma and crises in your own life. It can happen when a parent is going through a difficult divorce, or if there's an illness, severe illness for a parent, all kinds of different things can get us to this place of blocked care where our nervous system is just protecting us. This book is useful for everyone. I do have another book that will be coming. It takes forever to publish a book, as you know, Amy. That book will be broader in nature. But truly, this book will help anybody who's experiencing blocked care. 

Amy: Good. Well, thank you so much for being with us today.

Lisa: Thank you for having me. I'm so thankful you invited me.