Emily Simmons days before leaving Russia for her new home in the U.S.

Several of my children live in Reactive Attachment Disorder World. We’re trying to teach them how to live in their new world, but I’m afraid they find it boring.

Children who live in Reactive Attachment Disorder World belong to a place so colorful and full of possibilities that people like you and I can hardly comprehend it. Because of their history of inconsistent reactions to any given event, for RAD sufferers, outcomes are always a surprise. Violence is as likely as compassion. Anger strikes whether or not it is merited. A knife under the pillow? Hey, it’s just good practice. You never know… Anything could happen. Anything.

Did you ever watch horror movies? Why? Did it have anything to do with the rush you experienced when you were surprised? What if you could feel like that your entire life? I know, you say you wouldn’t like it. But what if you became addicted to that rush; that sensation?

Then you enter a new family and they tell you can come out of Reactive Attachment Disorder World and read a nice book. How calming… Don’t you love that sensation? Wouldn’t you like to feel like this all the time? Here’s the beauty; once you read the book the first time, you always know how it is going to end. You can read it a million times if you want to. Don’t you love that? No surprises. Life can be like that too! You don’t need to live in Reactive Attachment Disorder World.

Emily was fifteen when she joined our family and began trying to make Reactive Attachment Disorder World mesh with her new one.

In your new world, good begets good, almost all of the time. When you have bad behaviors, in all likelihood, bad outcomes will be the result. Isn’t that calming to know you have so much control? You can feel this mellow almost always! Go ahead… read the book again!

My daughter is twenty-three now. Emily was fifteen when she joined our family and began trying to make Reactive Attachment Disorder World mesh with her new one. Before she joined us, the result of every event in her life was a draw from a deck of cards. Maybe she would be punished. Perhaps she would be abused (oh how often that happened and how devastatingly severe it was). Many times there was no reaction at all. She was ignored. No big deal. She’d do something to cause another random reaction. In Reactive Attachment Disorder World the surprise of that outcome was reason enough to light the fuse. And if the fuse fizzled out just before the explosion, all the better! Nothing is a bigger rush than re-lighting a short fuse! The acquired need for that surprise—that excitement—didn’t end just because we thought my daughter would be happier in an environment that was less stressed—less RAD.

In Reactive Attachment Disorder World controlling outcomes means everything.

Sometimes, when her life was the calmest, my daughter was most agitated. Nothing was happening! Something would happen, though… something always happens! What if something happened when she wasn’t expecting it to? What if she wasn’t ready? How can you be prepared to react to a situation if you have no idea when it will happen? How much better it would be to create and event and immediately react to the response! In Reactive Attachment Disorder World controlling outcomes means everything.

Would you create an event like that without a plan as to how you would respond as the reaction escalated? Of course you would have a plan for several reactions in quick succession. How far would you need to prepare your responses? How far had events in your life taken you before? What if someone was so angry with what you did that your life was in danger? It wouldn’t be the first time! With a history that causes Reactive Attachment Disorder, anything can happen. Anything!

Exhilaration is life in Reactive Attachment Disorder World.

What excitement! What possibilities! How exhilarating to know that not only anything is possible, but that random and varied results to the very same action are the only consistency. Exhilaration is life in Reactive Attachment Disorder World. For an analytical engineering-type brain like mine, comfort comes from knowing that I can very closely predict outcome. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” and I might add: every-single-time. So why am I right? Why is Emily wrong? Am I right? Why is my world better than Reactive Attachment Disorder World?

I’m hard pressed to believe that life would not be more exciting, more enjoyable and far more fulfilling if I could watch almost four hours of Gone With the Wind with a very distinct possibility of finding at the end, that this time, Rhett Butler really does give a damn!

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