u/No_Tone_5733

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a YouTube channel where survivors can share their stories, and I'd like to interview anyone who is willing to talk about their experience with attachment therapy. The goal is to help the public better understand attachment therapy and the harm it causes. I am also a survivor of attachment therapy.

Before recording, we'll go over the questions together and agree on what you're comfortable sharing. I'll only ask what you give permission for. You're welcome to add your own questions, and you can skip anything you don't want to answer.

You can drop out at any point, for any reason, and you don't need to explain. If you drop out after recording, your footage will be deleted and not used or stored.

You can stay anonymous. You choose whether to show your face, or use your real name or a different one.

Interviews:
Before anything is published, you'll get a private link to review your part. You can drop out at this time if you wish. There is no obligation at any time.

I look forward to speaking with each of you!

The therapists who diagnose children and teens with conditions, who then place these individuals in respite care, psychiatric hospitals, residential treatment facilities, and other types of treatment programs also need to be held accountable. These therapists are the clinical voice. The “legitimate” authority that stamps the seal of approval on all the bad stuff that happens to the child. The therapist also does a lot of damage during sessions.

Once a child is given the RAD label, everything they do is filtered through it. The therapist becomes the interpreter of the child’s behavior—and under the attachment-therapy framework, that interpretation is rigged from the start. A child who withdraws is “avoidant” and “controlling.” A child who acts out is “manipulative.” A child who is affectionate is “superficially charming” and “triangulating.” A child who resists the therapy itself is proving how deep their pathology runs. There is no behavior the child can offer that disconfirms the diagnosis—every response, including distress at being treated this way, is folded back in as further evidence of RAD. The therapist develops the treatment plan. The treatment plan can include strong sitting, manual labor, not being allowed to use the bathroom, excessive exercise, and being fed with a bottle and pacifier.

This is the engine of the abuse. The therapist’s reading of the child carries enormous weight—with the parents, with the school, with the courts, with every institution downstream. When the therapist tells a parent that their child’s tears are manipulation, that their fear is defiance, that their need for comfort is a control tactic, the parent is taught to distrust the child’s most basic human signals. Warmth gets withheld on clinical advice. Punishment gets reframed as treatment. The child’s genuine attempts to connect are recast as symptoms to be broken. And because it all comes from a licensed professional interpreting behavior in clinical language, it looks like care.

The child, meanwhile, is trapped inside someone else’s interpretation of them. They cannot behave their way out of it. Compliance and resistance are read as the same thing. The very authority who is supposed to help them has built a framework in which the child’s suffering only confirms the label—and justifies escalating “treatment” up to and including removal from the home.

That is what makes the therapist’s role so central, and so dangerous. The diagnosis opens the door, but it’s the ongoing clinical interpretation of the child’s every action that turns a label into years of abuse. And because this work is wrapped in licenses, degrees, and clinical vocabulary, it reads as objective. The unlicensed practitioner is easy to point to. The clinician who authored the entire framework of how the child is seen—and gave that framework the weight of professional authority—is harder to see, and even harder to hold accountable.

Nancy Thomas may have popularized Attachment Therapy and treatment for RAD, but before Nancy Thomas there was Dr. Cline, Forrest Lien, Connie Hornyak, Arthur Becker-Weidman, and the many “registered attachment therapists” who provide the clinical VOICE and legitimized the ideology behind RAD and the terrible myths that would damage children forever.

RAD is overdiagnosed in adopted kids — and there’s an industry built on it

On a recent episode of the Lila Rose podcast (ep. 322, guest Kelli Ingram), RAD came up — the guest shared that she learned about reactive attachment disorder, and the words “Reactive Attachment Disorder” were shown one at a time in big text on screen, over a caption about love being what helps a child develop.

This isn’t about that show or that guest: but seeing RAD put in front of a big audience with no context is what got me thinking about the machinery a RAD label feeds, and why a mention without caution matters.

It’s wildly overdiagnosed in adopted and foster kids. Real RAD is rare and has strict DSM-5 criteria. But in practice the label gets slapped on adopted kids who are grieving, adjusting, traumatized, or just acting out. Studies have found that a large share of adopted and foster children referred to specialty clinics arrive already carrying a RAD or attachment-disorder diagnosis that doesn’t hold up once they’re properly assessed. Clinicians reach for the scariest label in the book and the child gets marked by it.

Bad actors weaponize the label. The framing pushed in attachment-therapy circles is that these kids are manipulative, can’t love, can’t attach, are dangerous — that “love isn’t enough” and normal parenting and talk/play therapy won’t work. That reframe does something specific: it relocates the problem into the child and away from the neglect, the placements, the losses, and the adoption itself. Once a kid is labeled, extreme “treatment” starts to sound justified.

And there’s a whole industry waiting for those parents. Attachment therapy, holding therapy, “therapeutic parenting” programs, residential treatment, “attachment camps,” and even adoption dissolution services all market directly to desperate, misinformed adoptive parents. The through-line is deadly and current:

**•** Candace Newmaker died in a “rebirthing” attachment session in 2000.
**•** Four-year-old Skyler Wilson died in 2023 after his adoptive parents used restraint and “swaddling” techniques they said they learned from Nancy Thomas, a prominent “therapeutic parenting” figure who trained at the same Colorado practice tied to Newmaker’s death. His parents were sentenced for his murder in 2026.

This is a live, well-funded system, not history. An AP investigation this year went inside CALO (Change Academy at Lake of the Ozarks), a for-profit center that has charged up to $20,000 a month and markets itself specifically around “reactive attachment disorder” and “developmental trauma.” The AP found adoptees are as much as 10 times more likely to be institutionalized than the general population, that these centers are often taxpayer-funded yet barely overseen, and documented runaways, assaults, and more than a dozen lawsuits.

So when RAD gets mentioned to a big audience with no context, this is the ecosystem a curious parent walks into when they search “RAD parenting.” The clinical reality — that these kids overwhelmingly heal through stable, patient, responsive care — is the exact opposite of what the industry sells. Getting the information right is prevention.

Author’s Note: Sources will be added in the comments later.

TW: abuse, SA (only mentioned, not described).

Hi everyone - I wanted to make a post for attachment therapy survivors and discuss how life is for us today. Attachment therapy has caused severe harm in my life. It started when I was 6 years old. I remember my life changing completely. The home environment that was free, calm and loving suddenly became controlling, paranoid, and abusive. The adults around me exerted tremendous coercive and authoritative force over me. It was scary, confusing, torment of being tortured by therapist and caregivers who claimed/believed I had RAD. Then, after being SA’d I was kicked out of the house at 18. From 18-24, I was suddenly exposed to a world I had never been allowed to participate in, and that world was even more cruel and cold. While I attended school and worked, I also struggled with depression, panic attacks, and entered a cycle of homelessness that resulted from being harmed and having no family to support me during that. By 23, I had developed a genuine and severe mental health condition. I also contracted HIV. Everything had gone wrong with my life, and since I was living on the street and had no connections to society I was destined to die of AIDS.

I did think I was going to die. I believed I’d never be part of society or cared about by anyone ever again. It’s really traumatic to be raised by a family, go to school, go grocery shopping, graduate high school and learn to drive, talk to people at University and have emails with professors to then suddenly being absolutely meaningless to everyone. When you’re living on the street, people continue to walk by you as before but now you’re also targeted, considered a nuisance, and people mess with you. It’s shocking. From having a bed every night as a kid to sleeping on a damaged sofa chair, curling up cold and scared behind a dumpster and getting harassed.

I also started getting arrested a lot because I was sleeping where I wasn’t allowed to be. That was scary for me because the police/forced institutionalization was always threatened during attachment therapy. I had no reason to trust anyone. During attachment therapy, if I reacted to the mistreatment, the psychological abuse, any of it - they’d say “you’re becoming unsafe. If you’re out of control we’re calling the police on you for our safety”. None of this was true. It taught me I couldn’t be upset about anything and to always comply. I broke this curse much later in life but not after encountering the worst of humanity post-getting kicked out.

Through all of this I also believed I had RAD anyways, that’s the worst part. You start to process yourself and the world around you through this lense. This attachment therapy causes a self-harm. Because when you need safety, you think you’re being controlling, so you avoid seeking and taking the steps to get safe. Which meant I stayed in abusive situations and told myself I needed to be better, more likeable, more fun to be around. It’s a total abandonment of self for the desires of the other.

Fortunately there is a positive end to this story: it’s 2026 now. For the past 2 years I’ve been rescued by a loving family. I was lucky. Not everyone is lucky. This blessing is my motivation to get my degree and work on this broken system so people have safety nets when exiting abusive situations.

But something I’ve learned while with this family, is I’m very fearful. I get scared when people say my name because I expect that they’re going to have an issue with me and harm me. That was my life for a long time. My entire life was viewed through the lense of Nancy Thomas/Foster Cline. Evil people.

And that fear, being aware of it, in this really safe place, I’ve also become angry because I’ve learned recently that my life didn’t have to be this way. There is so much freedom, peace, and I get to just be. That’s what life is. It’s really… something.

Anyways how are all of you? What would you like to tell the world? For me I want to speak more about the therapist who harmed me. But I’m not there yet. It still feels dangerous to.

Wishing you all the best.