Adopted children who have been traumatized frequently experience both nightmares and night terrors. I have always suffered from nightmares. I pretty much expected to have one every night throughout my life. It was only after healing that I starting having dreams that were not nightmares on a regular basis.

A friend of mine (who was also abused as a child) and I took a quiz about nightmares and were shocked to learn that the average person only has one nightmare a month. I did not know that my experience was abnormal until reading that.

The nightmare that a traumatized child experiences is very different from a run-of-the-mill nightmare. In many cases, the nightmare is a flashback. The information in the nightmare might not be accurate, but the feelings behind them are emotional flashbacks from trauma.

For example, I used to have a recurring nightmare of being led by a person I trusted into a small room with two doors. I would follow the person into the room through one door, and then the person would quickly go out the other door and leave me behind. I would try to open the door, but it was locked. Then, I would go back to the first door, and it was locked, too. I would completely panic and then wake up in a cold sweat with my heart racing. The dream played out in a variety of ways, but the details of being locked in the small room were always the same.

This scenario really happened, and I was playing it out in my dreams. A babysitter who I trusted told me to go from the hall into her bedroom through the walk-in closet to get a doll that I wanted. She locked me in the closet in the way it played out in the dream. She sexually abused me in the closet, and I was so taken aback because I did not see it coming. I had been abused many times by then, but I thought this woman was safe, and she was not. The dream was not focusing on the abuse itself but on the breaching of the little trust I had.

Telling a child who has this type of dream that it was "just a dream" is not helpful because it was not "just a dream." It was a flashback. I did not stop having this recurring dream until I worked through the trauma of that experience.

If your adopted child struggles with recurring nightmares, then talk with your child about the details of the dream. Write those details down. Any details that continue to play out in a predictable pattern are likely your child's way of trying to work through unresolved trauma. Talk with your child's therapist about the dreams so the therapist can explore the cause with your child.

In the meantime, comfort your child. Flashback nightmares are terrifying, even to me as an adult. Give your child lots of hugs.

Related Topics:

• Aftereffects of Child Abuse: Dreams of Abuse
• Abusive Dreams After Child Abuse
• Tracking Child Abuse Healing Progress through Dreams

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt