You Can't Love It Out of Them: Trauma Therapist Ashlie West's Honest Account of Foster Care and Adoption

Ashlie spent years as a trauma therapist before she became a foster parent — and she will tell you clearly that knowing the clinical language for something is not the same as living inside it. This conversation covers a lot of ground: the sibling group she and her husband took in days after being licensed, the daughter whose reactive attachment disorder meant cycling between calling Ashlie mommy and treating her like an enemy, and the two years of physical injury and emotional confusion before Ashlie finally stopped believing she could love the trauma out of her. It also covers what she figured out along the way. She talks about why she put her kids in outside therapy immediately — because being trauma-informed at home is not the same as being your child's therapist. She describes the bedtime ritual that started as therapy homework and became a non-negotiable her teenagers still do, guests included. She reflects on the legal complexity that kept her older daughters in limbo for years, and the biological father of her youngest who showed up to court sober, swore himself in, and asked the judge to let Ashlie and her husband adopt his daughter because he knew he never would. And she talks about Daniel — her son, her thirteenth placement, who she met as a client and eventually told: I am a great therapist but a pretty mediocre mom. He chose her anyway. Ashlie does not have a redemption arc where the hard parts get smoothed over. What she has is a family she built, the willingness to adapt when the textbook failed her, and a clear-eyed view of what it actually takes to parent a child whose earliest experiences taught them that the people who were supposed to love them were the ones they couldn't trust. This is one of the most honest conversations we've had about what foster care and adoption look like from the inside.