They suffered every parent’s worst nightmare when a stranger
snatched their little girl. Then their most improbable dream came
true when Jaycee Lee Dugard was found alive after 18 years in
captivity.
By Courtney Perkes, McClatchy News Service
SANTA ANA
They suffered every parent’s worst nightmare when a stranger snatched their little girl. Then their most improbable dream came true when Jaycee Lee Dugard was found alive after 18 years in captivity.
As Terry and Carl Probyn rejoice, they must also grieve the childhood that was lost as they help their daughter move forward. While Dugard, 29, and her two daughters allegedly fathered by Phillip Garrido, will need extensive psychological treatment, mental health experts say the parents will have a crucial and challenging part in restoring them to family life and society.
“Our thoughts and prayers need to be for the grandparents here,” said Curtis Rouanzoin, a Placentia, Calif., psychologist who specializes in trauma cases. “They’re going to be an important part of the healing.”
The Probyns, who raised Dugard in Orange County before moving to South Lake Tahoe where the abduction occurred, will have to contend with their own pain.
“This couple tragically had their first set of expectations cut off when their daughter vanished,” said Laguna Hills, Calif., psychologist Sunny Steinmeyer. “Now they still have a daughter, but not the daughter they thought she would be. It must be worse than trying to get to know a stranger in some ways. They have to walk past their dreams and expectations and imaginings of what this girl would be like at 29 and have to readjust to who she really is.”
And who she is, psychologists say, is likely a woman deeply traumatized and potentially struggling with mixed feelings toward her kidnappers and her parents.
Dugard’s stepfather, Carl Probyn, said in an interview Friday that his estranged wife, who is in Northern California with Dugard, told him their daughter expressed guilt over bonding with Garrido.
“She might have aspects of the Stockholm syndrome,” said psychiatrist Jeff Sugar, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry crisis and emergency services at the University of Southern California. “She might be very confused about who and what this person is to her. She may have some attraction to him, even loving feelings for him. Often there’s a lot of shame associated with the trauma and feelings of guilt.”
Dugard also might have been told that her parents didn’t love her and didn’t want her anymore _ part of the manipulative emotional imprisonment created by an abductor.
“I think it’s a very difficult road back,” said Heather Huszti, a child psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. “In following some of these other cases where kids have been returned, sometimes those issues do come up of ‘You didn’t look for me. Why didn’t you come and get me?’ It wouldn’t be unusual to have some anger at some point.”
Rouanzoin, the Placentia psychologist, said the parents of Elizabeth Smart serve as examples of immersing their daughter in love after her return home nine months after her 2002 kidnapping.
In an interview with CNN, Elizabeth Smart, now 21, advised Dugard to “just relax and enjoy your family and spend some time reconnecting.”
Elizabeth’s father, Ed Smart, spoke of how the family helped her recover.
“A psychologist once said to me, ‘It’s really almost like being born again. You have to re-establish a bond with Elizabeth,'” Ed Smart said Friday in an interview with the Associated Press. “Finding those things she loves and enjoys helps her move forward – finding things that will become her passion and allow her to put the past behind her.”
But the Probyns also have the challenge of grandchildren they didn’t know about who are the product of violence against their daughter.
“The parents of this young mother can be very therapeutic if they can find it within their own hearts to love these kids and embrace their mother and show them what loving grandparents are about,” Rouanzoin said. “It will be tough.”
Yorba Linda, Calif., psychologist Lois Nightingale said Dugard and her children will need time to debrief and transition from the coping skills they developed to survive. The children, who are 11 and 15, could be delayed in social skills because of the deprivation and lack of stimulation they experienced.
Nightingale said she hopes the parents can help craft a family story to help them all move forward with resilience.
“Our emotions come from what we say about things,” Nightingale said. “If the family has a family story of: ‘We’re survivors. We are strong and we had a faith about this and we went through this for a reason,’ they will be able to use that to survive. If the media and their friends and teachers see them as victims and keep saying, ‘Poor, poor you,’ it will be harder for them. The more they can develop a story of power and gratitude, the better the children will do.”
