What Causes The Trauma ?

A question was asked – what causes trauma in adoption ? I think it is valid to ask about that.

One adoptee responded – The separation in itself is traumatic. Example: I was separated from my birth mom right after I was born. She didn’t even get to see me. Now I know when babies are born it takes time til they understand they are a separate person. They still believe that they are A PART of their mother. It’s like someone cutting off a part of your body. And you have no recollection of who or why. Wouldn’t that be traumatising for you?

Another adoptee shared that the trauma came from not being able to understand why the original parents, or at least the mother, didn’t try harder. Often an adoptee interprets that to mean that somehow they were not good enough, not lovable, defective somehow. Children especially cannot appreciate the complicated situations many adults must navigate and how they arrive at difficult decisions that may even leave them with a lifetime of sorrow.

This frequently leaves the adoptee believing as they mature that no one could ever love them. They explain it this way – if the person who was naturally supposed to love them the most, as their own flesh and blood, couldn’t find it in themselves to love their own child, then why would anyone else be able to love them ? The concept of love is broken for many adoptees. For many, it is the ultimate betrayal and cannot be explained as anything less than a profound abandonment.

Many adoptees are given the standard narrative that their mother loved them so much and didn’t think she could really give the child the best life and so, she surrendered her child to someone else to raise, believing that would give her child the best possible outcome. And I think a lot of these mothers have become convinced one way or another that this is the truth of their situation. I try not to judge. But personally, I do find this sad. It arises from a self-deprecating and poor self-esteem that is preyed upon by agencies and lawyers who make money when they can get a child released from their original family to allow a more wealthy couple to technically “buy” that child. I realize that most adoptive parents do not see it as baby selling and buying.

There is trauma too in this narrative. This teaches an adoptee to equate love with abandonment and betrayal. The effects can diminish the opportunity to have strong, stable and healthy relationships later in life. Some will go through several failures (and one does not have to be adopted to have failed romantic relationships, some of it is learning what it is that one needs and what one can give to another person, including when and how to compromise) before they finally find a relationship that can help them heal from such misunderstandings. Some sadly never heal.

Abandonment

Is abandonment one of your core wounds? It is for most adoptees. This poem by Jeff Foster speaks volumes.

if abandonment is the core wound

the disconnection from mother

the loss of wholeness

then the most potent medicine

is this ancient commitment

to never abandon yourself

to discover wholeness in the whole-mess

to be a loving mother to your insides

to hold the broken bits

in open awareness

to illuminate the sore places

with the light

of love

When the damage has already been done there is really only one pathway forward – find the love for that self that you are. No one can change what has already happened but we can begin to refrain the experience to find something about it to be grateful for.

In learning about the wounds of adoption and separation in my own immediate family, I came to realize the miracle. When my mom conceived me out of wedlock, how is it with adoption so accepted in our family structure that my mom wasn’t sent off to give me up for adoption ?

I think I can credit my dad’s adoptive parents for preserving me in the family. Even if they had built their own family through adoption, I suspect they realized that keeping parents and their children together was the best possible outcome.

There Can Be No Denying

Becoming adopted will never be a natural circumstance. There is a loss of security and certainty in having been adopted that cannot be prevented. For whatever reason, an adoptee has been torn away from those who gave themselves to that life.

There cannot be other than a sense of abandonment and rejection. And not knowing the reasons and causes only makes it worse. That is why closed adoptions are not good and yet, there are fears attached to open adoptions as well. A fear of intrusion and difficult people making difficult demands and confusion as to who holds the authority over one’s life.

Life is a hard school. There’s no denying that. Adoptees have to contend with some harsh realities, no matter how much those people who do care about them try to minimize the effects.

Some will crumble under the reality and some will find within their own self a strength that requires no one else. Some will find the way to make the most of a bad situation and some will fight and struggle against what is all the days of their life.

While every person born faces challenges, those faced by adoptees are an added layer of complication that only they can meet and must meet in their own personal efforts to somehow rise above.

The Modern Foundling Wheel

Safe Haven Baby Box – Indiana

I first read about this concept in the book Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy while I lay in hospital having just delivered my oldest son. Mothers could abandon newborn babies anonymously in a safe place known as a Foundling Wheel. This kind of arrangement was common in the Middle Ages and in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A modern form, the baby hatch, began to be introduced again from 1952 and since 2000 has come into use in many countries, notably in Germany and Pakistan but exists in countries all over the world under various names.

Now in the United States, there is the Safe Haven Baby Box which is found in Indiana. Although every state in the US has a Safe Haven Law, anonymity is the benefit of the Baby Box. A Safe Haven Law requires the one relinquishing the baby to actually walk in to an authorized facility and physically hand the child off to a person. The one relinquishing is going to be asked some questions.

I am decidedly pro-Life because 9 months is a lot to ask of any woman who does not want to or cannot for whatever reason parent a child. However, if abortion is not accessible for whatever reason, an anonymous method of giving the child away safely is preferable to infanticide. And no, I do not think abortion is infanticide though there are plenty who would argue the point with me.

Although a baby left in a Baby Box is not going to know anything about their origins, inexpensive DNA tests and matching sites could still reveal some things about their origins in a future time once they reach adulthood. I know, it worked for me. No, I wasn’t relinquished but both of my parents were.

Abandoned Over A Pregnancy

This happened to my maternal grandmother. For whatever reason, she was abandoned by her lawful husband (my mom’s father) and she was abandoned by her own father.

Despite the joy that usually accompanies a pregnancy, it is one of the most stressful life events. If a pregnancy is unexpected or unwanted, the stress compounds.

When the person coming to grips with this surprising change is then abandoned by her support system (parents, a lover, a spouse), it’s devastating. Though either parent could be shunned, the mother typically bears the brunt of the rejection.

The expectant mother may believe some false concepts about herself – what they say about me is true, the baby is the cause of all my trouble, love is temporary and people always leave when times get tough. Beyond false beliefs are the fears – of being abandoned again, of the judgement of other people, being spiritually condemned or being unable to care for herself and her baby

These mothers may go into denial, acting as though they aren’t pregnant. Some may attempt to hide the pregnancy. In modern times, there is a stigma if the woman chooses a legal abortion. The woman may become emotionally unavailable or wallow in self-pity or blame. There is the worry about her ability to cope all alone and doubt about her ability to be a mother.

If the mother-to-be has decided not to keep her baby (or after she has relinquished her child), seeing happy couples caring for their baby together will be especially painful.

If this mother is unable to find support, she will realize that she can’t depend on others to help her. If it is a difficult pregnancy, it will compound the challenges.

Death Is Even Harder

Facing the death of loved ones is difficult for many people. I remember the first dead bodies that I saw as a public schoolchild. Two friends died while yet school age and my uncle died when I was a senior in high school. My young sons saw dead bodies at a very young age as their paternal grandparents died at home. We have also taken them to local visitations. It is good to view death as a natural part of life.

For the adoptee, especially while yet a child, death can trigger pre-verbal memories of abandonment. There was a first mother who gave you away to an adoption agency and then went away. The adoptive parents came and got you. Death can really drive home to an adopted child that their first mother has gone away and never came back.

Coming face to face with death can also create fears related to the adoptive parents – will they go away and never come back? There are other kinds of death – What happens then, if one of the adoptive parents does leave because they have filed for divorce ?

Under such circumstances, many families break apart and become dysfunctional. An adoptee may take this kind of loss harder than a non-adoptee would. If the result of the divorce is leaving and selling the place that was always home, this can also be harder for an adoptee – “I always thought I’d have some place I could call home and now I don’t.”

Loss is often a lifelong difficult place for an adoptee.

Impact Of Adoption On Health

Every adoption is unique and every situation is different. There have been well studied impacts on mental and emotional health for an adoptee that other people in the general population are less affected by. Most have to do with a sense of abandonment or rejection. No matter how much the adoptive parents try to convince their adopted child that they are “special” because they were “chosen”, nothing seems to shake that initial feeling of having been unwanted or not wanted enough for the original parents to work things out. This is mostly a child’s perspective because they lack the mature experiences of life that most adults acquire.

My dad (both of my parents were adoptees) often accused my mom of being a hypochondriac because of her constant and evolving health problems over the long decades of their marriage. They were married over 60 years at the time of my mom’s death. I never judged her that way. She did have a LOT of health problems from her heart to her kidneys to her pancreas and beyond. She had a intervention scheduled for a blockage in her esophagus pending when she died just a few days before.

I am a believer in mind/body health implications. I do believe my mom suffered from low self-esteem. There is no way to know for certain whether her adoption had an impact but given her belief that she was stolen from her parents and then denied her adoption file and told at that same time that her mother had already died, denying her once again the reunion she desperately desired, there is a good chance that her mental/emotional state of being played a role.

Statistics tells us that 80% of visits to primary care doctors are the result of emotional distress. Stress kills. My mom had several interventions for her health beginning younger than I am now. First a bypass and then angioplasties and stents. My mom died of a massive heart attack that no one could have saved her from quickly enough. The coroner said it was instantaneous and thankfully that she didn’t suffer.

Sadly there is a lack of financial incentive for doctors to prescribe stress reduction instead of surgery, drugs or other expensive medical procedures. I continue to do battle on that front with my own doctors for my own best health as I age.

Abandoned Babies

Gary Gatwick

Today, I read the story about the baby that was abandoned in 1986 at the Gatwick Airport. He was later adopted, had a decent childhood and attempted to locate his birth family after having a child himself. He has been successful but much like my own mother, discovered that the woman who gave birth to him has died and thus, he’ll never get the answer to the question closest to his heart of “why?”.

Not that long ago, I also read a story titled The Foundling: The True Story of a Kidnapping, a Family Secret, and My Search for the Real Me by Paul Joseph Fronczak. His was also the story of a search for his authentic roots.

People who are not adopted or abandoned often do not understand why knowing one’s true identity is so important to some of us. A writer friend of mine once asked – “If the adoptive family was good, why does it matter?” As I talked to her about it, she came to understand how most people actually take such a deep knowing for granted. Indeed, many don’t really care about it at all until they are much older, if they ever do.

A piece in the Huffington Post some years ago realized that “this was a shared narrative with no fixed racial or cultural background: my own search for identity, though anchored in part by my own experiences, is part of something larger. It is a collective and contemporary identity crisis.”

Maybe this explains the popularity of DNA testing and the matching sites of Ancestry or 23 and Me. I also wonder, given the pushback on women’s rights taking place at the moment, if beyond threatening women’s health and autonomy, an unintended consequence could become more abandoned babies . . . and depending on where and when, may result in death.