RAD sex is something big enough that we can’t deal with it secretly, alone, at home. Sorry, I wish I could tell you otherwise.

I Know we Don’t Want to Talk About it. Maybe we Need to.

She was five. She had only been out of the orphanage for two days when she grabbed the bathroom door of our hotel and started using it like a pole in a strip club. I was shocked. My wife was horrified. But rather than freaking out or shaming her, Amy took her into the other room and started teaching her fun dances for children. That was our first experience in dealing with RAD sex but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

Part of this refusal is not feeling like they need to hide or be ashamed of things that were no fault of their own whether those things were RAD sex related, or not.

Please know that I have permission from everyone in our family to write about the things in my blogs that I share. Amy set the example by teaching us that we couldn’t help others in difficult situations without sharing some difficult things that are embarrassing to us. There are things we have agreed not to share, but please understand that this blog is not victimizing anyone in our family beyond what they have agreed to, in order to help others. Though abuse of various kinds was heaped on our children who suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder, they refuse to be victims anymore. Part of this refusal is not feeling like they need to hide or be ashamed of things that were no fault of their own whether those things were RAD sex related, or not.

RAD sex is confusing to kids. In so many cases, it has been an integral part of any part of their lives that they can remember.

Some of our children were sexualized from at least the time of their earliest memories. When we taught my young daughter that it wasn’t appropriate for adults to touch her in certain places, she was confused. Later, as she came to understand that her feelings of discomfort in those situations were justified, she asked why her first mother had allowed other adults to touch her like that. RAD sex is confusing to kids. In so many cases, it has been an integral part of any part of their lives that they can remember.

With that, all we could do was try to hang onto the reins of the runaway stage coach, attempting to keep RAD sex under control by trying to help her to understand appropriateness and boundaries.

I wondered how we could get my daughter back to acting like a five-year-old when it came to sex and I even talked to her therapist. Bad news. “Sex is like a one way switch,” he told me. “Once you turn it on, you can’t turn it back off.” With that, all we could do was try to hang onto the reins of the runaway stage coach, attempting to keep RAD sex under control by trying to help her to understand appropriateness and boundaries. We were honest in answering her questions and curiosities. We were clear in providing explanations and evidence for our reasoning when we talked to her about sex.

With all of the polarization that anything sex-related causes, RAD sex made an already difficult parenting subject a minefield.

We were frustrated. We were angry. I didn’t think it was fair that my sweet little princess had to grow up so fast in so many areas. But you can’t put the stink back into the pig. The hardest part was trying to help our daughter understand that she wasn’t bad; that we weren’t ashamed of her. My children who come from hard places already have enough difficulty with self-image. With all of the polarization that anything sex-related causes, RAD sex made an already difficult parenting subject a minefield. We always had to be cautious that our efforts to help our daughter to understand and to make wise decisions did not make her feel like she didn’t fit in with the family, or that she was bad or “dirty.”

Trying to run interference to keep RAD sex from running our home and every other part of our lives was exhausting.

It was hardest with the older ones, who joined our family at fifteen and fourteen, respectively. Sexual abuse had been a part of their home lives. Sex had been a part of their orphanage lives, and about any other part of their lives. Sex was as natural to those kids as it was to animals on the farm. And where they had never learned boundaries, they brought no boundaries with them. No one was safe from their sexual advances. That included family. There were no scruples and it was nothing for them to plop down between a married couple, to flirt with a husband who was ten, twenty or forty years older than them. Trying to run interference to keep RAD sex from running our home and every other part of our lives was exhausting.

RAD sex is something big enough that we can’t deal with it secretly, alone, at home. Sorry, I wish I could tell you otherwise.

We soon learned that we needed others to help us. That meant we couldn’t keep things hidden away under the rug. We made sure that our children addressed sex issues with their therapist(s). We talked to teachers at school and people at church. We told them that if they saw something unusual, that it probably was what it appeared to be, even as much as they wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. We shared counsel from our therapist on how to deal with these situations and asked those whose help we solicited to keep us informed so that we could address issues at home. RAD sex is something big enough that we can’t deal with it secretly, alone, at home. Sorry, I wish I could tell you otherwise.

I wish I could tell you that we always did everything right. I wish I could tell you that RAD sex never caused difficulty in our home and family. I wish I could tell you I have all of the answers. I don’t. (But The Child Welfare Information Gateway has made an excellent brochure available. Here’s the link: Parenting a Child Who Has Been Sexually Abused) What I do know is that we need to do everything we can to educate our kids from hard places about how to be safe in all areas of their life and that includes sex. As with so many other parenting subjects with our kids who come from hard places, how we handle this is not how we would do it in traditional parenting and families with no history of trauma. And as we teach we must be careful. Rules, values, lessons, and counsel are not more important than our children. Those things are there to help us to help our children, not to become something we love more than individuals.