The lack of professionalism and expertise was stunning. I worried that we had been just given a sales pitch to get our child in the door, and in retrospect, that's clear that's all they could offer us. They showed no capacity to understand reactive attachment disorder and instead did the thing that we have seen all too often from inexperienced therapists: a lot of pussyfooting around and making endless excuses for the child's bad behaviors, while assuming the parents were really to blame and treating us as adversaries instead of partners. They refused to believe anything they didn't directly observe themselves even though the child was not at home, in a classroom, unsupervised, or asked much of anything, so of course they weren't going to see how he would show up in other contexts, but even when we shared evidence of a series of poor choices he made right under their noses, they still pretended as though it were nothing. They were entirely incapable of holding him accountable or providing proper supervision to keep him from feeding his technology addiction, and they minimized everything he did, from breaking their rules to harassing teenage girls. They showed their ignorance when they allowed their own hero complexes to get the better of them, genuinely believing that because he seemed charming and cooperative, it was because they were doing such a good job (or that he had no issues in the first place), when, in fact, that's a basic, textbook symptom of RAD -- and, incidentally, of sociopaths, who would take them right in and practice deceiving them as though they were the greenest therapists in suburbia. When they started actively interfering in family connectedness, we pushed back hard, and rightfully so: it's the worst thing to do to a child with RAD and is more likely to exacerbate the problem than anything else. They clearly had no real concern for him, despite their feigned care, since they took him off most of his meds, promising a new neuropsychology evaluation, but they couldn't be bothered to get that done even though he'd been there a month. They were disorganized from the start, and we had to keep pushing for them to even follow through on their most basic promises. When we came for a visit, they decided, just hours beforehand, to kick him out and send him home instead, a day before the scheduled neuropsych eval, probably because they didn't want to have to acknowledge his case as a total and utter failure on their parts. They provided no transition planning at all. They provided our kid nothing more than an expensive vacation. He learned nothing beneficial at all. Don't waste your effort or hope or your child's time at this place.
