I’ve had RAD my whole life
Hi Ken, my name is (omitted). I wrote to you a long time ago about your website and it took you a while to get back to me. I just want to say now that anything I write you can post, if you want. Please don’t post my name. I can be known as “pal” if you have to put a name or email. Beyond that, it’s all okay.
I’ve had RAD my whole life. A few of my closer friends have asked what it’s like not being attached. I ask them what its like to BE attached. I can’t imagine any other existence, it’s like talking to a blind man about colors.
I was very severely abused as a child: sexually, physically and emotionally, until I left home as a teenager. To this day I don’t bond normally. I don’t feel much when people die, and I love gore and violence. The one unique thing about me is that I also love animals and would rather be hurt myself than see animals hurt. I am a vegetarian and rescue abandoned animals. A few therapists have noted that that I may have bonded to animals instead of people, but even so, it would’ve been pretty shaky bonding, as no one in my family had any consistant pets.
I did have the fire bug as a kid, and to this day, my mid twenties… I restrain myself. I love fire.
I guess I am writing to say that kids with RAD an grow up cold and detached… but not stupid. And if you are bright, you can learn, and you can grow. You might never be normal, but you can adapt.
My tips for parents or those with RAD kids is this – don’t take away everything they love, even if it is gory or whatever. They will get it somewhere else and just learn to lie to you better.
Most horror movies are pretty stupid if you look at them. Sometimes sharing a kid’s interest can bring people together. Instead of banning things outright, set set periods of time for them and make them positive – like a Freddy Krueger weekend with pop and popcorn. If you ban everything, they’ll just learn how to lie better and they’ll feel angrier towards you. Trust me on that.
It’s very hard to get older kids (10 and over I guess) to bond. It’s primarily an infant thing. If you can get them to respect you intellectually, that’s a huge accomplishment. Don’t worry so much about the emotions. Lots of RAD kids and grownups don’t know what we feel like half the time. But intellectually I identify with Hannibal Lecter. I like how he is polite, refined and erudite.
RAD sucks, I guess. I know I won’t ever feel “bonded” like lots of people, and I am curious about that, and yearn for it in my own way.
But people with RAD have also contributed to society. Some make excellent surgeons because they can detach themselves. Some make awesome bomb squad staff.
Intellectual respect is often the most you’ll ever get out of someone with rad, but we give this out rarely! I think RAD isn’t a disorder so much as a natural process that takes place when an infant doesnt bond.
I love animals. I may be unique in that. I don’t love people but I love animals. I also find myself able to get into the mind and gore of violent people and am thinking of pursuing a career as a homicide detective.
These are my main pointers for parents/guardians of RAD kids:
- Don’t ban everything. They’ll get it elsewhere and learn to lie better.
- Set aside a special time for horror movies or lazer tag. Have fun.
- If your kid is into fire, teach them about pyrotechnics and responsible use and the movie industry. Almost any “hobby” can be made positive.
- If going with pets, start out with ant farms or fish… or plants. Unless your kid obviously loves animals, be careful! I have RAD and am very respectful of animals, more so than most people without RAD! I love animals WAY more than people! So remember, there are always exceptions.
- Teach your kids about history – not just the bad guys, but the ones that are strong like Viktor Frankl. Teach them about philosophy and new ways of thinking.
- Remember that a lot of behavior is normal, and just being a kid. People do grow up.
- RAD kids have a deep sense of loss that they don’t know how to fill. It can haunt them their whole lives. You HAVE to take more direction in some areas and prove that you can handle them falling apart without abandoning them.
- Don’t humiliate or physically punish or you’re asking for trouble. RAD kids feel older than they are. You don’t want to shame or humiliate them but make them responsible for their actions.
- Try to imagine what their world is like. It will be hard. But if you feel lonely and alone and haunted, you have a taste.
- There is hope for everyone, even those that are violent! I have RAD and never got help as a kid – never started counseling till my early 20s. I am slowly learning social skills and to love. It can happen. I feel like Data on Star Trek, emotionless most of the time, but I think there is hope for me.
I really love the movie “Hannibal rising” because it’s about what makes Lecter a monster and some of it resonates with my own childhood.
I was thinking it would be good to pair adults with RAD up with younger kids. Like a big brothers/big sisters thing. I am not that great in the real world. I am on disability for complex post traumatic stress disorder, but I still have more experience living with this than a kid; and I have a soft spot in me for kids going through the same thing. They act tough, and you want to hug them, but you can’t. I know it.
Good luck. Feel free to write anytime.
Pal
Pal, thanks a lot for writing me again. I remember your earlier letter well. Just as you may be curious, or even fascinated by things that you have never experienced, so it is with me. While my nephew was with me, I tried very hard to view things from his perspective. However, that was difficult if not impossible to do because I wasn’t at his vantage point, and it wasn’t like he was going to explain it to me, although I think that there were times when he tried. I did manage to get past the habit of viewing things as normal or not normal, recognizing that normal people are perhaps the most boring people in the world, that is if such a condition is even compatible with life.
R.D. Laing had this to say of normalcy: “Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” — R. D. Laing, British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, ch. 1 (1967). In the same book, although he was speaking of schizophrenia, perhaps it might apply to reactive attachment disorder as well, he said: “The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.”
Rather than striving for normalcy, perhaps we should seek happiness, however we may define that, so long as our happiness does not necessitate the opposite emotion in someone else. At that, we must recognize that none of us is truly happy, if we define it as satisfied. Perhaps we should try not to be miserable.
There is a spectrum of attachment, and at some point in this spectrum we draw an arbitrary line and term anyone on the other side of it disordered. That point, I think, is based on the amount of detachment necessary to prevent a person from living a productive and reasonably satisfying life, which should include healthy relationships with others. It’s all in how you define the terms, and I think there’s some room there for individuality.
You acknowledge that you are yearning to know what it is like to feel bonded to another person. I yearn for enough money to be able to buy a house on an island. Although I can live a reasonably satisfying life without ever achieving my objective, still I hope to be able to one day, this despite the fact that I’m not actively working toward that goal. Will your life be worthwhile to you even if you are never able to bond to another person in a way that you might consider normal? Whatever your answer, you are at least actively working toward your goal so yes, there is hope for you.
Those on my side of the attachment spectrum are not equally bonded, by any means. There are those even in my family who have never moved far away from home because they can’t bear to be away from family members and others to whom they feel bonded, yet I have only been home to visit a few times since I left my father’s house at the age of seventeen, otherwise living thousands of miles away. Few of the friends that I have made in my life have long survived a move to another location. Typically after one or the other of us moves, there are a few telephone calls or emails in the first months following a move, and then nothing. I have only one friend from high school whom I am still in touch with and even then, no more than every few years when one or the other of us happens to be thinking of the past. I have four brothers whom I love very much, yet we speak only about once a year, and sometimes not that frequently.
You mentioned surgeons. I was a paramedic for more than twenty years, a period of time in which I was a participant to a lot of tragedy and death, yet for the most part I didn’t bring that stuff home with me. I considered major motor vehicle accidents, stabbings, and gunshot wounds to be fun, although I would define it more as an excitement than a pleasure. Once, I didn’t even recognize that my patient, who had died en route to the hospital, was someone I knew fairly well, until her son met us at the hospital. In the ambulance, she was my patient rather than a human being whose house I had been to several times. I don’t know if I was detached or simply too busy trying to keep her alive to make the connection.
It was impossible to predict which patients would hit home with me. One who did was a seven year-old boy from Mexico who was shot in the chest by a cousin while visiting relatives in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where I was living at the time. His vital signs were fine, and he was conscious and alert the entire trip to the hospital. Everything went well from my perspective, in that we did everything that we were expected to do, and I was able to start a couple of IVs without too much difficulty. As it turned out, although the bullet had passed very close to the heart, lungs, and aorta, it had missed the vital organs, but struck his spinal cord. He was expected to be paralyzed from the waist down, for the rest of his life. Worse, as a Mexican citizen whose parents had no money, he was unable to avail himself of the benefits that might have been available on this side of the border, but was transferred to a Mexican hospital. That kid is still in my head twenty years later.
Why did I take him into my head? I don’t know really. It’s not just that he was a kid because he was far from the only pediatric patient I have ever had, which include some who didn’t even survive the trip to the hospital. Yet I didn’t take the others home with me in my head.
Am I disordered? Perhaps, if someone were to draw the line in another place.
Unfortunately, those who are drawing the lines and passing out the labels are doing so on the basis of what they can see looking in, when the truly important thing is how you feel about yourself. Certainly, there is hope for you, so long as you don’t redraw the line in order to keep it out of your reach, or allow others to persuade you that happiness is being just like them. You say that you are learning social skills, and to love. Be happy with what you have and then strive for more, but don’t keep happiness outside of your reach.
Thanks for writing, and for the suggestions. Some I may have trouble with, but are nevertheless worthy of consideration, while others resonate with the tones of truth.
– ken