Marcia Angel
Adoption & Attachment Issues
Marcia Angel writes:
Adopted children can bring emotional baggage with them into their adopted family. Their behavior often reflects lost or missed developmental experiences. A child’s behaviors can get stuck at any age.
Revisiting earlier stages of development to repair missed steps is necessary to form a foundation for a healthy attachment. Understanding basic child development helps the parent to identify which behaviors correspond to which developmental stage.
Learning certain parenting techniques can help to address the needs of adopted children at the stage of development they are stuck in.
Highlighting behaviors that need special attention is done in the context of knowing what behaviors are healthy at specific developmental stages. This empowers the parent to provide what is needed at the developmental stage the behavior is illustrating and by doing so, the parent can promote a healthy attachment.
Identifying problems is the first step in finding solutions. Learning how to best respond to specific problematic behaviors that an adopted child exhibits involves knowing what developmental step has been missed which leads to identifying the child’s unmet need.
The adoptive parent can learn to make a helpful response and intervention. Adopted parents find it helpful to realize their first response to these challenging behaviors is typical and not unusual.
They learn to find a new and better response based on understanding the child’s developmental delay and emotional need. I offer training sessions for caregivers in the area of attachment issues and trauma associated with adoption.
Sensory Processing
Marcia Angel writes:
Sensory Processing [also known as Sensory Integration] can be described as the way the nervous system receives sensory messages and turns them into responses.
Sensations become electrical impulses and enter the brain from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin, as well as from one’s body position in space, one’s relationship to gravity, a sense of balance, movement and rhythm.
Our brains use the electrical input to make order of the flood of incoming information. The brain sifts through this information and organizes it for use to direct one’s body and mind.
A Sensory Processing Disorder [SPD] can result in slow learning and poor behavior. Developmental, emotional and educational concerns can arise due to inadequate sensory processing.
Some sensory pathways that are built into the brain may not be properly formed and as a result information is lost, exaggerated, mis-directed, held up, twisted, over-dramatized, confused, arrives at the wrong destination and can be too intense or not intense enough.
My work in this area, with people of all ages, from infants to adults, is to ‘make sense’ of one’s world, for those who cannot fully rely on their senses working together to supply information needed for use in the activities of daily living.
The brain must select, enhance, inhibit, compare and associate sensory information in flexible, constantly changing patterns. Deficits in interpreting sensory information from the body and the environment effect academic learning, conceptual thinking, behavior and movement of the body.
The work may involve learning to reduce too much sensory input in one instance and increasing not enough input in another instance.
Equally important to the work is finding the appropriate action response to sensory input.
Crucial to the process is understanding how sensory processing works [the sensory paradigm] to enable the person with sensory deficits and distortions to learn how to develop successful organization of sensory and motor processes.
Marcia Angel Podcasts Series:
Snails & Dinosaurs
Marcia Angel, in conversation with her husband Billy, talks about sensory & attachment issues in the context of developmental delay.
This regards children and teens and how their parents (and carers) navigate the long journey to maturity.
In the Moment
Marcia Angel teaches on how to build a relationship with your child as a first step toward learning new skills & confidence.
For Marcia's Playfull Series (2017) click here.
Introductions to:
1. Listening Therapy
2. Sensory Integration
3. Adoption Issues
4. Inner Healing
Summertime '22
Marcia speaks about her life and career as a therapist/ healer.
Marcia's Sensational Love series, recorded in Florida in 2010.
The Sensational Love teaching series is an opportunity for adults to receive further understanding of how to better engage with children at home, school, church and in the community.
Marcia Angel addresses issues in relation to child development, sensory processing, the language of emotions, effective learning & communication, and behavioral strategies, pertaining to children at all levels of functioning.
Sensational Love is a teaching series of 7 sessions designed to:
- Highlight the key stages of a child’s development: body, soul and spirit
- Uncover the internal processes that form the foundation of our perception of self,
other and our world.
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Enhance understanding of a child’s sense of movement, sound, light, touch, aroma,
color, space, time, vibration, gravity and more...
- Tap into sensory strategies for accelerating learning and altering behavior
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Ignite the power of imagination, spontaneity and creativity
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Offer tools for validating a child’s feelings while disciplining his behavior
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Awaken the power of descriptive praise
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Catch glimpses of potential promises: See the child God created in His Image
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Promote spiritual exercise: Faith is a muscle!
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Learn to always hold the doors of your heart open for Joy
Working with young people, as a parent or a worker, requires being prepared for a complicated task, being ready to set the tone of the interaction, providing the right framework regarding expectations & boundaries and having a strategy for success.
The Sensational Love teaching series will enable all participants to move closer to the goal of seeing children ‘blossom’ and helping young people find the right path in life.