Hello,

I’m Bryan Post and if you would give me ten minutes of your very valuable time I might be able to offer you hope where you have not found any.

As a specialist in working with very difficult children I understand fully how much you love your child. Yet, I also understand that love may be hard to come by when you’ve spent years being hurt by your child’s behavior, unable to explain it, feeling helpless to know what to do, leaving you angry, hurt and resentful.

Though it is sadly much more common than you might imagine many parents are being abused by their children every day. Many children who have experienced trauma whether being adopted, foster children, or biological children have nearly impossible ability to trust adults, especially parents. Due to the stress and trauma they have experienced they often times lash out, hit, destroy property, emotionally abuse, and demean the very people trying to love and care for them. Expectedly, most parents end up lost and overwhelmed feeling as though they are held hostage in their very own home.

Everyday can be a struggle with a challenging child, in fact so can every night.

However, let me be the first to say, “Thank you for not giving up. You are doing a good job even though you may not realize it.” Parenting a challenging child is perhaps one of the least rewarding undertakings in the world. You don’t get paid, rarely are you told thanks, and most of the time seeing the results of your hard work, patience, dedication, and understanding can take years. Not to mention that during this time you are regularly disregarded, cussed out, spit on, emotionally and sometimes physically abused. In some instances your most cherished heirlooms are destroyed and in many instances beloved family pets can be harmed if not killed. All of this seemingly with the least regard from your child. Sad but you know this to be true if you are a parent of such a child. After fifteen years of working in this field, parenting, and raising children I know it to be true as well.

It is not your fault. In the greatest majority of cases that I have worked with over the years including the parenting of my own foster/adopt child, you are not to blame for your child’s behaviors. The field of neuroscience helps us to understand that the first years of our lives are some the most important ever. This also includes the prenatal period. Many adopted, foster, and biological children experience events and go through situations that set their brains up for difficulty in coping at the earliest of stages of life. These experiences follow them for long periods of time and sadly most traditional parenting methods and interventions do little to fix these issues.

It’s hard for parents to admit that they are abused by their own children, that they don’t feel competent any longer to care for their child, or they want to give up. It is extremely scary for a parent to even trust that it is okay to tell a therapist, counselor, teacher or friend what they go through with their child for fear that they will be reported to social services, judged, blamed for not caring for their other children enough and keeping them safe. Believe me, this is a terrible place to be in. After a period of time you can’t help but feel burned out. Not to mention if you have already been through years of counseling with little to no relief, left feeling blamed, in worse shape than when you came, misunderstood, etc. In fact, by the time most parents come to work with us at the POST Institute they have been through on average five to seven years of previous mental health counseling and their children are on an average of three to five psychotropic medications. Talk about scary, desperate and frustrated. How could you not be?

Listen to me. There is an answer.

There is hope. There is help.

I understand that you may be hurting as much as your child, perhaps more. Maybe the tension and stress with your child has done damage to your marriage. Perhaps your spouse is not on the same page as you for how to proceed, or maybe the very behaviors that your child acts out causes you to have to relive painful or traumatic experiences from your own past. Not to mention if you have other children in your home who you feel like don’t get enough of your time because your challenging child is always manipulating for attention, or your other children have to miss important engagements and appointments because your challenging child refuses to cooperate or go when asked. Besides parenting and working on healing your challenging child you also have to wash clothes (and often the carpets, walls, and furniture, not to mention sometimes the child), cook dinner, go to appointments, pay the bills, keep up the house, deal with doctors, social workers, and teachers. Not to mention you might also have a job, and if you can find the time you’d probably like to eat, sleep, and shower yourself!

When I was a child my adoptive parents really struggled with my sister and I. It wasn’t their fault that we had the issues that we did. They didn’t abandon us, reject us, expose my sister in utero to drugs and alcohol. They were simply two people looking to have children of their own to raise and nurture. Additionally, they couldn’t have had any idea what they were getting into when we both came to them as infants! Lying, stealing, defiance, aggression, sexually acting out, poor peer relationships, diminished social skills, on and on, how could they have possibly known? We were not easy children, in fact I would venture to say we were a couple of the most difficult in the whole town we lived in, yet my parents never gave up. I know for sure had residential treatment been an option during those days there is a great likelihood that my sister or I would have ended up there. Luckily for us it was not an option, but for many parents it is one of the few options available for ending the insanity in your home. This does not make you a bad parent. It doesn’t make you a parenting failure. It makes you human. You are simply not supposed to have all of the answers especially when the very society we live in advocates for parenting practices that are bound to make your efforts in parenting even more challenging. More about that later.

Listen, I know you’re not stupid. You have tried many, many things to help your child and family, and read more books than most professionals. If you are like many of the parents I know you have searched the internet endlessly looking for answers and a glimmer of hope. You’ve spent untold amounts of money, time and energy just trying to understand what makes your child tick and would likely pay a reasonable amount of money to have one peaceful day, see your child get through one school day without being sent to the office, or heck just a peaceful dinner.

Well for the past eight years, my highly trained team of professionals has been helping parents just like you have the breakthroughs they’ve been searching for in very short periods of time. Not years or even months, but quite literally in the span of a few days parents have been able to gain key insights, make emotional connections, and come to a deeper understanding of themselves and their child that has transformed the days and nights of hopelessness and frustration in to renewed hope and positive outlook for the future. And they’ve done this not by learning how to apply consequences more effectively, creating a new and snazzier behavior chart, or increasing medications, but rather through seeing and being awakened to a totally new and simple, not easy, way of parenting based in love rather than fear.

Healing trauma is not a quick fix, it is a process, a journey. But what I can offer you in only two days time is a breakthrough approach to parenting the most difficult children which you can learn to apply and utilize in a period of time so short you will be wanting to strangle me for not having introduced you to it sooner. You really can reduce many of your child’s previously untreatable, ever-increasing, bad behaviors rapidly, in hours and days rather than months and years. This love-based approach has been researched, time-tested, and empirically validated. It has been proven effective with the most challenging of children, children who have received diagnosis ranging from Reactive Attachment Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and Conduct Disorder to Depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Bi-polar. These children have been in the leading residential treatment centers in the country having received little more than an increase in medication for their parents hard-earned money. This approach has been proven effective by thousands of parents and professionals and was the basis for the national best-selling book, Beyond Logic, Consequences, and Control.

Following are the results from a study conducted to test the effectiveness of the model I’m talking to you about. As you can clearly see, when compared to a very common parenting model the results were actually dramatic, especially when considering that the other approach had been taught for four years previous compared to only six months using the POST Love-Based Model.

The 2 Day POST Attachment and Trauma Parenting Camp: For families who have tried everything else!

How many years have you already spent in therapy? How many books have you read? Seminars attended?

Surely you are tired of fighting with your child about going to another therapy session, hoping you are doing the right thing, driving across town, sitting for a couple of hours, only to return home and have another argument.

And the thought in your head,"I paid money for this!"

One of my favorite quotes, "If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always be where you’ve already been!" It’s time to do something different!

Over the course of Two Information Packed, Experiential days you will come together with parents and professionals from all over the country to learn what it means to apply the love-based model in your home and how to do it!

Here's just a few ways you will benefit by attending:

• Learn and experience an understanding that will jumpstart your families healing.
• Learn how you, NOT your therapist, can be the primary catalyst to change for your child.
• Return home to create a therapeutic environment that promotes daily healing for your child.
• Relate to your child at an emotional level never before experienced in your family.
• Develop deep supportive connections with your partner.
• Restore the spark in your marriage, even if it has been missing for years.
• Experience a loving connection between you and your attachment challenged child.
• End the feeling of threat experienced in your parent child relationship.
• Learn why even adoption at birth impacts a child’s emotional development.
• Learn why traditional parenting might be adding to your child’s stress, and what you can do differently.
• Gain specific understandings that will help you reduce and eliminate aggression.
• Gain specific strategies that will help you over come defiance and gain cooperation.
• Reduce and eliminate your fear and anxiety as you witness your child healing.
• Gain an understanding of sibling rivalry as it relates to the attachment challenged child and strategies to increase sibling harmony.
• Learn the understanding that can be applied to every challenging behavior your child presents.
• Restore the hope and love you felt when you first thought of having children.
• Learn exactly what your child needs when they are demonstrating challenging behaviors.
• Learn why traditional talk therapy will not meet your child’s needs.
• Learn why behavior modification, consequences, rewards, and logic will not create the desired behaviors you are seeking.
• Learn how to help your child’s teachers help your child be more successful in school.
• Learn what will support your child in being more peaceful and calm, and more capable of demonstrating acceptable behaviors.
• Receive more than 20 hours of intense and educational family-oriented, parent training.
• You will be able to experience the deepest sense of relief when you are finally able to move beyond Guilt!

When you walk into your home after this experience you will never look at your child the same again, ever!

WARNING: This is Not a New Program.

We have been conducting these life changing seminars for years. Where have you been? Many of our earliest participants, their children are now adults or are graduating from high school. The impact of these camps works both short-term and long-term.

Put an end to worrying about your child’s future.

We are grateful for the opportunity to pen this open letter to you. We participated in the Parent Boot Camp in December 2004.

To truly convey the impact this therapeutic intensive had on our family, it would be best to first share with you what brought us to Florida for the Parent Boot Camp from our home in Northern California.

In a word, it was quite literally desperation. Our family is composed of two birth children ages 6 and 9 and two adopted children ages 10 and 12. Our adopted children are siblings and came to us at ages 5 and 6, although they came to us almost three years apart. Our son (now 12) came to us at age five with an abundance of documented abuse and neglect in his wake. He was born tox positive and had severe emotional issues that put the health and safety of other family members at risk. At age 10 he entered residential treatment for 18 months in a final, desperate attempt to get him (and us) help.

Diagnoses included: Reactive Attachment Disorder, Generalized Anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Mood Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, along with various forms of ADD. If we were to give a ballpark figure as to how much money went towards therapy, treatment, and related expenses it would be well over the $100,000 mark.

Therapeutic interventions included play therapy, narrative therapy, EMDR, attachment therapy, family therapy, psychotropic medications, SPECT brain scans and home schooling, along with the full implementation of “take back the control” attachment models that included 100% line-ofsight supervision, alarms on doors, etc. Everything we tried seemed like a failed experiment at best that left us no better off than when we began.

Ronda quit her job to take care of our emotionally draining children. Our general health suffered, along with loss of feelings of joy and well being. We had lost all hope that our situation could or would change. When we were faced with the choice of bringing our son home from residential treatment or finding permanent long term care for him, my husband found out about Dr. Post and the Post Institute.

We jumped in feet-first (so to speak) at the Parent Boot Camp. We learned (and experienced) for the first time that the true underpinnings of our children’s behavior (and our stress) were trauma and fear. These two paralyzing cocreators of mayhem had destroyed our children’s ability to relate to others, define their own needs, seek comfort, and move beyond their severe abuse and neglect. After SEVEN YEARS in our home, our son was still paralyzed by his fear and my daughter was literally fighting for her very survival. We can honestly say that the Parenting Boot Camp is the Adoption Orientation we wish we could have had before we ever brought children into our home.

Through the experiential workshop Bryan provided, we finally “got it”. Not only were we for the first time able to understand our children, but we were able to understand ourselves and one another on a whole new level. Parenting these children was traumatizing and magnified pre-existing stressors in our lives and relationships to new extremes. Also, being the non-adopted siblings of these children (and the children of stressed-out parents) had also further traumatized all of our kids. We needed a new understanding to change the way we engaged all our children and we needed healing to stamp out the fear that was so pervasivein our children and our relationships with them.

Since our return home, things are very good. We have to work at it every day, but no one in the family is on any psychotropic medication and our one-on-one interactions are regularly warm and positive. Our oldest son is now living at home permanently and after failing fifth grade, he graduated from sixth grade with honors. He spontaneously smiles and last week, was thankful for the Slurpee brought to him at his soccer game. Our oldest daughter attended sleep away camp and spent most of her candy money on a phone card just so she could call home…she actually missed us!…and the other kids feel calmer and safer in this new “gentler” atmosphere. The work that we did with Bryan and his team gave us as parents the ability to better understand all our children, to relate to their experiences, and connect with them like never before. We feel joy and hope for the first time in seven years, and a confidence that “we can do it!” What we learned from Bryan is understandable, makes sense, and it really works.

When seeking help for your family, don’t make this your last resort (like we did), make it your first. It will truly change your life, and the lives of your children …and God willing, future generations in your family. You can’t afford not to invest the time in this endeavor. Go For IT!! You truly do have everything to lose. Don’t let this opportunity slip by. You won’t regret it!

With deep gratitude and encouragement,
Bill & Ronda Evans Chico, California

(P.S. It has now been 5 years since our camp experience and our son, as well as our other children, continue to thrive academically, socially, and emotionally! Furthermore, you might find this hard to believe and even consider in your current state, but we have now adopted again, adding another child to our home. We feel so much more confident in raising this child with what we now know.)