Adopters are taking increasingly traumatised children into their families. These children bring with them disorganised attachment patterns that helped them survive early familial maltreatment. Since they were highly adaptive in their formative family environment, children cling to these relational patterns ‘as if their lives depended on it’. As part of the Family Futures therapeutic team, Caroline Archer and Christine Gordon have established effective frameworks for collaborative working, based on trauma and developmental-attachment theories, and have developed the practitioner role of parent mentor. Taking behaviour as the child's ‘first language’, mentors help adopters to understand and translate youngsters' behavioural and thinking patterns in terms of their traumatic histories. Parents are then encouraged to increase their children's physical, psychological and social sensitivity by using developmentally appropriate re-parenting strategies, acknowledging the psychosocial ‘gaps’ in children's attachment histories that inhibit healthy neuro-developmental organisation. Gradually the neurobiology and ‘language of trauma’ can be over-written by the neurobiology and ‘language of love’.
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