Betrayal Trauma and Attachment

Two of my friends have recently drawn my attention to issues of attachment and betrayal. One wrote in response to a self-betrayal graphic – The thought to comes to mind is that from a young age children are likely to experience examples of this when parents are perceived (rightly or wrongly) as not acting in their best interest. The possibility of this type of ‘betrayal’ is then opened in their minds and then acted out.

The other provided a LINK> to a Neurobiology of Attachment pdf and specifically pg 4 re:the infant’s brain. Families can recover from childhood emotional wounds when all members discuss openly the mental conditions of the parents as a regular family health routine… growth & compassion for all. We learned that ‘communication’ could actually happen through the placenta, in which the adrenaline and cortisol that’s coursing through the mom’s veins wind up crossing the placenta and affecting the development of the brain. “Our connections with other people are critical for being able to tolerate and regulate our own emotional responses.” “This sense of connection occurs through nonverbal communication.”

This caused me to reflect this morning on my two adoptee parents who were relinquished in infancy by their mothers into closed adoptions. They both died without knowing much of anything about their origins – which fortunately, I now know quite a lot about the people and circumstances, though clearly with the passage of time and the deaths of all 4 of my genetic grandparents, I can never fully know.

In trying to put myself into my parents hearts/minds and inner beliefs related to their adoptions, how could they not feel betrayed by their first/original parents ? They had no way of knowing their mother’s stories or challenges or reasons including being coerced (and yes, I will always believe that BOTH of my grandmothers were coerced in the 1930s into giving up their firstborn children) that resulted in my parents being adopted. I sincerely believe that no adoptive parent can truly undo this sense of betrayal by the parent in the child they conceived and birthed. In the case of my grandfathers, it is more complicated. Definitely, one never knew he fathered a son and it turns out he never had any other children (it was the same for my mom’s mother who never had any more children).

I’ll never be able to know exactly why my mom’s father abandoned her and her mother (when my grandmother was 4 mos pregnant, nor why he did not come back to rescue her, infant in tow and financially destitute). So, the line above about communication through the placenta could definitely been my maternal grandmother’s mental/emotional struggles without her husband (they were married, in the case of my dad’s parents, they were not – his father was a married man having an affair with a much younger woman).

No matter the reasons, being relinquished for adoption and never knowing why, is betrayal trauma for the adoptee. I do believe modern trends that keep birth parents in the loop or the effects of reunions instigated by adoptee searches are some mitigating factors to the sense of betrayal that, whether they acknowledge it precisely as that or not, exits within the adoptee.

Besides the pdf linked above, I found two articles via google search that may be useful to some of my readers. [1] LINK>The Effects of Attachment and Developmental Trauma and Ways to Heal the Adoptee from the Adoptions from the Heart’s WordPress blog. (Basically, they are an adoption agency). [2] LINK>From Abandonment & Betrayal to Acceptance & Forgiveness: The Gifts of Memoir by Julie Ryan McGue and Judith Ruskay Rabinor at Adoption & Beyond (a 501c3 non-profit child placement agency licensed in both Kansas and Missouri). The reader is welcomed to consider the source when reading either of these.

It’s NOT Better

We teach our children to keep themselves safe from strangers.

Why do we as a society think it’s better to give a child away to strangers than to offer emotional, financial, and logistical support to the child’s first families in order to allow them to parent? Why is it seen as a good thing to permanently separate a child from their first family (in the absence of abuse)? What’s with the racist, classist belief that adoptive parents are more likely to raise healthy happy children, when all statistical evidence from studies on abuse in adoptive homes contradicts it?

There is a reason adoptees represent a larger percentage of people needing mental health treatment or committing suicide. There is a higher incidence of cancer, gut, and other diseases caused by toxic levels of years of cortisol. Birth moms, due to separation from their babies, tend to die 20 years sooner than mothers who remain with their children.

Complex Traumatic Stress – an over activated fight flight body response.

That child taken from its mother will try to save that child but has no power to help that child. That child is born with a “mom-operating system”. This never shuts down (cue adoptee reunions, if you doubt this).

Allowing complete strangers to raise a child is dangerous to that child.

So why is adoption promoted and not family preservation ? Because there is a ton of money to be made in selling children (which is what adoption actually is in most cases) but no money, only expense coming out of tax dollars, in keeping a family together.

Adoption is trauma. There’s no way around it. Even if you were to be the most incredible adoptive parent in the entire world, the trauma and hurt isn’t negated. Society needs to try to understand why the mom feels she can’t parent her child and give that mom the support she needs. You can love a child without taking them away from their parents.

This is true in infant adoptions, where altering birth certificates is standard procedure. The procedure may be different with a teen who has been in the foster care system for years and without being coerced, asks to be adopted. However, even then legal guardianship is still the best case procedure.

The truth about adoption trauma may be hard to accept because most people have been spoon fed what society wants us to believe about adoption. the difference between a viewpoint (for profit adoption narrative) and lived experiences (adoptees) can cause cognitive dissonance.

So to say, “…adopting a child can be a good option…” is actually an admission that adoption isn’t always good, and actually for anyone involved. Surprisingly, adoptive parents do not often have the happily ever after experience they bought into. So their “lived” experience as well because the traumatized child is more difficult to parent than a biological, genetic child – and most parents would admit that isn’t always easy either. Add in that layer of adoption and it is exponentially harder (check it out with some trauma informed therapist who works on adoption issues).

While it is true that some adoptees will tell you that they had good outcomes, I’ve read significantly more horror stories than happy outcomes… That is because I spend time in a space where it is safe for an adoptee to honestly express their own truth. Yes, there are cases where the biological family could have been as much (or even more) of a nightmare as an abusive adoptive family. The answer is to try and treat the issues in the biological, genetic family – addiction, poverty, poor parenting role models, etc.

And on the issue of mother/child separations – this story is indicative.

My grandmother started caring for me full time the day after I was born. I didn’t really spend time with my parents until I was 3-4 years old. I feel the trauma from that and its not even close to what someone who has been adopted must feel….I just remember feeling so strongly that all I wanted was to be with my mom when I was little. My grandmother is an amazing woman but its not the same. I still experience extreme anxiety and went through really bad PPD after I gave birth bceause I couldn’t understand why my mom couldn’t be there for me when I was that little. Anyway, my story isn’t really important I’m only trying to illustrate how deep the trauma goes when you’re separated as a child from your birth parents.

Just for good measure – what is the mainstream narrative ?

1) first is the idea that biological parents are incapable of parenting and don’t deserve to parent their own children, 2) that those saviors, the grace of willing adopters stepping forward, have prevented an abortion, or abuse, or neglect, or abandonment, and of course 3) that anyone who adopts will simply provide a “Better Life” and a “Forever Family” for these poor unwanted souls. These things are not the truth for the majority of people who end up adopted. These are the myths of the adoption industry.

Regardless of varying lived experiences – every single adoptee has experienced a traumatic loss: the separation from their mother.

And wrapping up – What is missing?

Better mental health services, care and protection for pregnant women, support for families and their communities could really improve many families’ situations. In many cases, it could do more that – actually enable them to parent adequately by most average standards.

No person should have their true identity and family erased for the rest of their life, simply in order to be cared for in a safe, loving, secure home during their childhood.

Adoption, at its core, is a legal construct that transfers ownership of a person. This is done by cancelling the adopted persons birth certificate and issuing a new one, falsely stating the adoptive parents (not actually related ie strangers) are the biological parents, and replacing the adoptee’s name and identity with a new false one.

If this sounds way to close to slavery, you are not mistaken.

The legal construct forces legal recognition and legitimacy of biological falsification for the adopted person’s lifetime, and that of all their descendants, and erases all legal ties and rights to their own family (parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins etc). All without the adopted person’s consent. Ask me, I know, I’m one of those descendants.

Moving a child to a “loving stable home” is not best if the adoptive parents seek to erase the birth parents 100% and “love the child AS IF it is their own.” (Say this sentence… “I’m going to love this a cat AS IF it is a dog.”) This will convey the idea.

It’s ridiculous isn’t it? “as if” is the Adoptive Parent theme song. Adoptive parents think they can buy an infant, and nurture it into becoming something it’s not— but this belief only causes more trauma to the child. The bottom line is this – it is ALWAYS unsafe for a child to be their authentic self in an adoptive home. The love received is conditional but the child must pretend to be something they are not in order to keep that love flowing.

I don’t really want to be redundant – there will be another blog tomorrow and the next day . . . in the meantime, my family history attracted to me this video (yep, adoption would appear to have been a “family tradition” in my own family of birth – but it also appears that our children may have broken the cycle with their own children – thankfully !!).

The Fog

In adoptee centric communities, one quickly learns about “the fog”. This is the feel good narrative that adoption agencies and adoptive parents “feed” their adopted child. Many adoptees never come out of the fog. Most do not come out until maturity, maybe when they give birth to a biological child genetically related to them and begin searching the adoption related literature, a prominent one is The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. This is the preverbal, subconscious trauma experienced by a baby when they are taken from the mother who gestated them and then gave birth. It matters not a lot whether this separation occurs immediately after birth or months later. My parents were 6 mos and 8 mos old at the time they were separated from their mothers – so preverbal. The trauma is real and has ongoing effects.

So, I was attracted to an article in The Guardian titled Brain fog: how trauma, uncertainty and isolation have affected our minds and memory in the Health & wellbeing section by Moya Sarner. A feeling of brain fog has become more common as a result of the collective trauma of the COVID pandemic. It is described as a feeling of being unable to concentrate. There’s this sense of debilitation or of losing ordinary facility with everyday life.

It could be helpful for an adoptee to understand that this feeling isn’t unusual or weird. There isn’t something wrong with you. It’s a completely normal reaction to a seriously traumatic experience. This can affect you ability to problem-solve, your capacity to be creative in the face of life’s challenges. There can be a lot of different factors that taken together and interacting with each other, can cause these impairments, attentional deficits and other processing difficulties. Humans have effectively evolved to stop paying attention when nothing changes, but to pay particular attention when things do change.

For an adoptee, it is life changes such has giving birth that can begin the process of waking up from the fog. The adoptive parents dying, so freeing the adopted child from a need to remain loyal to the people who cared and nurtured them growing up that may kindle a need for their own personal truth. Who were the people that gave them life ? Are they still living ? What is the background story ? Are there other genetic relations ? What can they learn about their familial medical history ? What is their cultural identity ? Waking up to the reality of who the adopted person actually is.

Brain fog is a common experience but it’s very complex. It is the cognitive equivalent of feeling emotionally distressed; it’s almost the way the brain expresses sadness, beyond the emotion. One needs to think about the mind, the brain, the immune and the hormonal systems to understand the various mental and physical processes that might underlie this consequence of stress.

When our mind appraises a situation as stressful, our brain immediately transmits the message to our immune and endocrine systems. These systems respond in exactly the same way they did in early humans – with what may feel like an irrational fear. The heart beats faster so we can run away, inflammation is initiated by the immune system and the hormone cortisol is released. A dose of cortisol will lower a person’s attention, concentration and memory for their immediate environment.

An experience of the fog is one of the most disturbing aspects of the unconscious. Recognizing the fog is our body and our brain telling us something, a signal – an alarm bell. We should stop and ask ourselves, why am I feeling this way ? What is the trigger ? What is the source ? The idea is that we have a force inside us that is propelling us towards life. What has been hidden from us is now pushing us into a discovery. To make connections with our familial tribe and seek to expand the meaning of our very own life with the truth.

The mental weight of our unknowns becomes harder to drag around. We have – at some moment in our lifetime – a will to know something about ourselves and our lives, even when that knowledge is profoundly painful. Paradoxically, there is also a powerful will not to know, a wish to defend against this awareness so that we can continue to live cosseted by lies. An adoptee might chose to live in the misty, murky fog rather than to face, to suffer, the painful truth and horror of their origin situation because the truth of the experience of how and why they were separated from their natural mother is too hard to bear.

We all experience grief, times in our lives where we feel like we can’t function at all. If you find yourself here, may it be mercifully temporary and may you recover from the shocks of reality and move forward, feeling a new wholeness in an expanded identity of yourself.