In cases where Reactive Attachment Disorder is involved, a situation change that involves authority always brings on RAD mini cycles.

I’ll Swap You a Thousand RAD Mini Cycles for One Broken Mini-Bike.

They’re behavior troubles, not the fun little wobbly bikes with lawn mower engines that you rode as a child in the sixties and seventies. RAD Mini Cycles… that’s what my wife calls them, anyway. We’re gearing up for a bunch of them as we speak… My oldest daughter left Russia to join our family and her three biological sisters when she was fifteen. She’ll turn twenty-five this spring. That daughter lives in a group home, now. Due to her low IQ and other factors, most of her financial support comes from Social Security and Medicare, though for the past year, she has been able to maintain a part-time lower-wage job in a fast-food restaurant. As much as she would disagree with me, I don’t foresee a day when she’ll be able to live completely on her own. I love the staff members who help to care for her and keep her balanced and (relatively) in control of her behaviors and emotions. Her staff is awesome. They have been successful where our family was not. And while my oldest daughter is still involved with our family, with weekly and holiday visits, as well as phone and online contact, her home is about an hour’s drive away from ours. It has been educational to be able to watch my daughter from a distance (on most days). “From the outside looking in” has given me the opportunity to evaluate RAD mini cycles without the stress of being closely engaged in each crisis, at every moment.

In cases where Reactive Attachment Disorder is involved, a situation change that involves authority always brings on RAD mini cycles.

Since the staff already let the cat out of the bag, I can talk about the situation that I see setting off the next round of RAD mini cycles with my daughter. The House Manager, who has been over that house for about four years (almost since my daughter moved to that group home), just received a promotion and will be moving up in the company. There will be a new house manager. It appears that the new House Manager is one of the girls who has been a staff member in the same home for quite some time, so that bit of consistency will be better than none at all. But in cases where Reactive Attachment Disorder is involved, a situation change that involves authority always brings on RAD mini cycles.

My daughter continued to cycle through these behaviors for weeks, trying to figure out which of the tools in her arsenal of RAD mini cycles worked on each particular person.

We first recognized these RAD mini cycles when my oldest daughter went to school, weeks after she arrived in the U.S. In each class, with each administrator, and with every adult working in the high school, my daughter tried everything. She tried being sweet and charming (tell me you haven’t seen that one…). Sometimes she threatened physical violence, including violence with weapons, whether it was a kitchen knife or broken glass. She practiced self-harm and there were often threats (and even a couple of attempts) at suicide. She bargained; she’d promise better behavior for a teacher if that teacher let her get away with a few small things. She threatened, she would notice an adult breaking a rule and hold it over their heads, telling them that they broke rules too, and if they told on her, she’d tell on them. Usually the adult infractions were slight and the threat didn’t work. It didn’t stop her from trying. In the beginning she made it clear (mostly without explicit verbal offers) that carnal favors were available. That never worked for her in the States, but as often and forcefully as she tried it, I can only imagine that it worked wonders in Russia. If only she could have held a threat of revealing sexual improprieties over an authority figure’s head, she knew she could do whatever she wanted. She tried to push the sex thing with me relentlessly. She tried it with my oldest sons. She tried it with her English tutor of the same gender. When one manipulative behavior did not work with any given authority figure, she tried another. My daughter continued to cycle through these behaviors for weeks, trying to figure out which of the tools in her arsenal of RAD mini cycles worked on each particular person. When she found the cracks in the proverbial dams, she exploited them relentlessly.

It was usually pretty easy for us to see when she had cracked someone’s dam. If it was bargaining for better behavior in trade for minor violations, that person would begin to tell others (including us parents) that we were just too rigid, that my daughter was easy to work with if people would just be reasonable. But my daughter’s demands to break rules would escalate with her victim, even threatening to sell them out for allowing her to break rules in the first place. Without exception, they gave in more and more, in the beginning. Once they realized that they would need to eventually draw the line, hopefully before needing to cut her back to six homicides per week, they dug in their heels. Then she’s send them down the river. Even therapists/psychologists who were not familiar with Reactive Attachment Disorder fell victim to my daughter’s RAD mini cycles.

So now my wife and I know from troubled experience, what lies in wait as there is a changing of the guard at the group home where our oldest daughter lives. We’ll ride the RAD mini cycles until they wear out. (Yippeeeee!!!) But the new House Manager already knows my daughter’s methods and history. This dam isn’t breaking! 🙂

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