Melissa Corkum and Lisa Qualls are the power duo behind The Adoption Connection. They offer support to adoptive families, including a faith-based community Reclaim Compassion. Melissa is both an adoptive mom and an adopted person. Lisa is an adoptive mom, former foster youth, and has lost children to adoption. They are both trained in TBRI and Melissa is a Safe and Sound Protocol provider- she was on the podcast back when I did a series on strengthening the foundation of the brain. Melissa and Lisa have just published an important book together all about helping adoptive parents who are experiencing blocked care. This is their first book together, though Lisa previously published The Connected Parent with Dr. Karyn Purvis. Clearly, these two women are powerhouses in helping parents of kids with vulnerable nervous systems and I’m so thrilled to bring you this conversation about blocked care- what it is, what causes it, and how families can begin to recover.
Keep Reading or Listen on the Podcast
What is Blocked Care
Blocked Care is language identified by Jon Baylin & Dan Hughes which describes the experience whereby:
Overwhelming stress in a parent’s nervous system can create this subconscious, not on purpose, self-protective mechanism that makes it so that some of the parts of our brain and nervous system that bring us the joy and the compassion into parenting shut down.
This can look like parents who are doing a lot of the actions of parenting (i.e., making therapy appointments, packing lunches, driving kids, etc.), but all the reward of parenting– that reciprocal relationship, the enjoyment, the satisfaction– has left, and it leaves parents feeling a sense of apathy towards parenting, which then cycles into guilt and shame.
The stress in a parent’s nervous system that causes blocked care is not always, but can often be related to big, baffling behaviors.
Especially for Melissa and Lisa’s audience, adoptive and foster families, this can begin with early adverse experiences that a lot of our kids come to us with that are really hard on the nervous system. What’s interesting about blocked care is the parallel experience in the parents. When we’re overwhelmed, or we’ve had adverse experiences, whether in our own lives personally or having to do with relationships with our kids, our nervous system starts to become defensive and protective, which leads to the shutdown of joy, compassion, and reciprocal relationships.
What are the Symptoms
Melissa and Lisa identify 10 signs of blocked care in their book. In our conversation they discussed two signs:
- Feeling too caught up in coping with your child’s behavior to be curious about the meaning behind it.
- Resentment toward one or more of your children or situation as a whole. You may even regret adopting or fostering.
And there’s no judgment here. This is about your brain and your nervous system trying to protect itself from something that feels very, very confusing.
An example of this is when adoptive or foster parents make bids for attachment with a child, and it is not received. The parent can become defensive and stop wanting to try to establish those overtures for attachment and connection, because it feels dangerous. So the receiving of it feels dangerous to the child, and eventually, the parent begins to feel the same.
Overcoming Blocked Care
Melissa and Lisa help parents begin healing their nervous systems by looking at three different aspects of their lives:
- We look at their internal world. So what’s happening in their nervous system, what’s happening in their mindset;
- We look at what’s happening in their external world, their sensory environments;
- We look at their relational world to safe people, spiritual relationships, etc.
“So we really try to look at the whole person, and help parents take a journey through a pathway of healing.”
In their book, each chapter offers simple daily practices that aren’t overwhelming for parents to begin healing their nervous systems. They also encourage parents to prioritize things like sleep and nutrition.
To hear more about blocked care and how to overcome it, head over to listen to the entire conversation on the podcast or read the transcript.
Listen on the Podcast
This blog is a short summary of a longer episode on the Parenting after Trauma podcast.
Find the Parenting after Trauma podcast on Apple Podcast, Google, Spotify, or in your favorite podcast app.
Or, you can read the entire transcript of the episode by scrolling down and clicking ‘transcript.’