Reactions Are Always Negative

There is a moment that almost every caregiver of a traumatized child describes, usually in their second or third session of therapy, when the careful professional vocabulary finally cracks and the real sentence comes out. The sentence is some version of this: I don't understand what is happening, and I am terrified that I never will.
This book exists to answer that sentence.
The central argument of everything that follows is simple to state and radical in its implications: the reactive, oppositional, defiant, destructive behavior that characterizes children with complex attachment trauma is not pathology to be extinguished. It is not manipulation to be outmaneuvered. It is not willfulness to be broken. It is a brilliantly adaptive neurological strategy - one that was, at the time of its formation, genuinely lifesaving - and it has simply outlived the danger that created it. The child is no longer in the burning building. But the brain does not know that yet. The brain is still running fire drills, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in a house that has not been on fire for years.