Tag: Dissociation

Seeking To Do Better

An adoptee with a challenging start in life but having done a lot of work to heal herself writes today – My mother was adopted at birth, and raised by a mom with substance abuse and alcohol use disorder. She suffered the same, and then I was adopted at age 8 and grew up in poverty before adoption and my adoptive parents used to tell me I should not have kids. Then because of all that I struggled with substance abuse disorder alcohol use etc, and human trafficking.

Now, I have been drug-free since 2015 and alcohol-free since 2019, went to college and graduated in behavioral science. I am in a very stable environment, have done a lot of healing, and am about to get married. We are family planning responsibly. We are both employed, college educated, etc, basically, everything I didn’t have growing up…. but my marriage also propelled me into a financial class I did not grow up in. Money does not buy parenting skills.

I just started therapy as well to get ahead of the game, but I am worried I will be a bad parent because of how I grew up. All those parenting classes and nurse family programs I see are only for low-income families. I think there is an assumption in the “parenting class” industry that only low-income people need to learn about how to be good parents. She asks – Is there some type of support group for parents with familial trauma, or anything like that ? just to have people to check in with ?

One adoptee shared encouragement – I think the fact that you’re concerned you’ll be a bad parent and have identified reasons why puts you ahead of the game. Awareness is huge. I’m a parent. I was emotionally mistreated by my mom. A lot of my parenting ability comes from treating my child in a way that I needed to be treated at that age, while also recognizing that my child isn’t me. Understanding that behavior is a form of communication is important too. Kids don’t need much. They need love and support. They need to be heard without judgement. They need structure and boundaries and clear expectations. They’re humans in small bodies and can understand much more than most people give credit for. It’s the easiest/hardest job. You got this!

As a resource, one suggests this – look into the LINK>Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) – Parent Info Forum. Its a music protocol that helps with emotional regulation as well as CPTSD and Dissociation. Life changing for my parenting game and in general, I was adopted from foster care at 12 with a history of complex trauma. I have 5 kids now !

An adoptive parent notes – Advice columnist LINK>Carolyn Hax in the Washington Post often recommends parenting classes in her live chats, and her column is read by people at all income levels. There are definitely some very wealthy terrible parents out there. It sounds like you have worked really hard to get to a good place. That says a lot about you. If you want to have kids, then do the classes and workshops (some may be available online), read parenting books, maybe read about trauma (if you haven’t already). In fact, a lot of books about parenting children from tough places actually help the reader/parent too. If you decide at some point that you don’t want to be a parent, that is a perfectly valid decision. But you are doing the work to heal yourself and if you have kids, I’m sure you’ll be a great parent.

Here is a list of some of the books she has read that helped her as a parent and human being. [1] Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors-Robyn Gobbel, [2] What Happened to You-Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry, [3] The Connected Child – Karyn B. Purvis, David R Cross, [4] The Explosive Child – Dr. Ross W. Greene, [5] Help for Billy-Heather T. Forbes and [6] The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel A. van der Kolk (blogger’s note – in fact, he is featured in the most recent issue of Time Magazine – LINK>Why People Still Misunderstand Trauma.)

A kinship adoptive parent offered more encouragement – Bad parenting is not a class/wealth problem. Everything I’ve learned about discipline boils down to “do the opposite of what my parents did,” and lots of people looked to them for advice because everyone who didn’t live with them thought very highly of them. If you want to have kids, don’t limit yourself by your adoptive parents’ issues. You can get therapy, take parenting classes, etc. and be a super awesome parent.

Another noted – You are aware and will stop the generational trauma. You will do great.

An adoptee who became an adoptive parent writes – I did LINK>Circle of Security. It was great and it’s been very helpful to help me understand how my trauma (not from adoption) plays into and against my child’s.

One adoptee explains their reasoning regarding choosing not to become a parent – Many reasons, of course, but a big one was my lack of family support that others could count on. I was adopted shortly after birth but my adoptive family was garbage and my adoptive parents were both dead by the time I was 30, after which the extended family ghosted me. I would have had no trusted people to help me care for my child. So I definitely get it. I hope you’re able to find the kind of help you’re seeking and, yeah, parenting classes focusing on family trauma/loss would benefit a whole lot of of people.

An adoptive parent added a couple of additional resources…LINK>The Connected Parent by Karyn Purvis and Lisa Qualls. And on Instagram, Gottman institute has links to resources/classes they offer. And also on Instagram, Raising Yourself. (blogger’s note – I don’t “do” Instagram, so you are on your own there.)

One person added – I would strongly consider LINK>Mommy and Me or other similar parenting support groups. Classes are great and all, but you can learn a lot from being with other parents. When watching others, you can generally get a feeling for what’s right and what’s not (making excuses for your child when they hit someone is not ok, and neither is hitting the child) and what is better (listening to the child’s feelings and validating how big it is even if you don’t necessarily give in is pro parenting). Watching others can tell you a lot about what to do and a lot about what not to do, plus you’ll get other adult/parent interaction out of the deal…which is kind of hard to get as a new parent.

One person sums up “the ultimate goal” is to remember to be a basically genuine presence with your child (that exact person), switching to their perspective when necessary, and to have love, respect and protection always at the forefront, no matter what parenting style you choose or the specific parent/child relationship you have.

Bribing DNA Test Sites ?

I do have my doubts about the bribing but it is a real concern for the adoptee in today’s story.

I have semi-recently remembered that I am adopted, something that my parents hid from me and still do not admit. So are my siblings, but all of us are not related to our parents and each other. Certainly, not as closely as immediate family. We started to guess that we were adopted when we were children. Our allergies were very different. And for me again in 7th grade, when we did a genetics unit. My siblings and I don’t talk about it now as adults. When I was in college, I hired a private investigator and he unearthed so much that everyone was lying about, including this. I’m really wanting to do so again, but can’t afford it. A DNA test isn’t a given, because my parents have money (I don’t) and they can bribe the testing site to give fake results, it’s happened before. I did get real results when I was an adolescent, but I can’t remember what they were except for a few parts. I don’t know what happened to the test result papers. I had wanted to keep them forever.

One suggestion – Once you do an Ancestry or 23 and Me test, I suggest joining DNA Detectives and ask for a search angel. Search angels are volunteers who help you find your biological family for free, if you are interested in that.

Someone else pointed out – Ancestry, 23andMe etc have very strict rules and I very much doubt that they could be bribed to give you false results. You wouldn’t even have to get your parents to test. With a bit of detective work and some close enough matches, you can prove if you are related to your parents or not. 

Yet another person notes – you’d probably be disturbed to learn the extents small local places are willing to go to protect recipient parents. I wouldn’t be surprised if a local facility was supportive and even somehow involved with misinforming the adoptee. Something can be illegal, yet people/businesses can still (and often do) break the law. “Illegal” doesn’t mean “impossible” or even “unlikely”.

More than one expressed this thought – now is NOT the time to tell original poster to seek mental health help. Dissociation is a trip. It’s not surprising someone would suppress or dissociate away from the information that they’re adopted. Imagine finding something like that out after being lied to. People are going to process something like that at their own speed and seek help when they feel ready.

One adoptee added – don’t we all need some professional mental healthcare for our adoptions and lifetimes of traumas!? The lucky few have access to those resources.

And something like this DOES happen and so someone shares this story about a person that didn’t find out he was adopted until he was 40. His sister said that they tried to tell him when he was 6 years old and he got really upset – so they decided to just not bring it up again. He was very different looking to his parents. He finally got tested. It took him a bit to be ok with it all but now he is.

Some Thoughts On Trauma

I came across a discussion about trauma yesterday. About a year ago, I had a 6 yr old molar tooth pulled. The dentist even gave me 6 mos to get used to the idea. 6 mos after that yanking out of my tooth, in a follow-up with my dentist, I admitted that it traumatized me. I quickly added that I knew he was a sensitive and caring person and that there was nothing he could have done to prevent my feeling traumatized. I said, since I have been learning about adoption related trauma as I have learned more about both of my parents as adoptees, I think I was just more aware of it.

I knew nothing about Doris Brothers at the time nor did I know about ACE scores. What I learned about her is that Doris Brothers urges a return to a trauma-centered psychoanalysis. Making use of relational systems theory, she shows that experiences of uncertainty are continually transformed by the regulatory processes of everyday life such as feeling, knowing, forming categories, making decisions, using language, creating narratives, sensing time, remembering, forgetting, and fantasizing. Insofar as trauma destroys the certainties that organize psychological life, it plunges our relational systems into chaos and sets the stage for the emergence of rigid, life-constricting relational patterns. These trauma-generated patterns, which often involve denial of sameness and difference, the creation of complexity-reducing dualities, and the transformation of certainty into certitude, figure prominently in virtually all of the complaints for which patients seek analytic treatment.

Below this is what I read yesterday, that struck me as relevant, though the discussion was not about adoption.

“Yesterday I read an interesting article by Doris Brothers about traumatic attachment, dissociation, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Part of what she conveyed was the idea that in a traumatized system dissociation operates to reduce complexity, which serves a salutary function insofar as it functions to eliminate from consciousness that which interferes with the reestablishment of order and predictability in needed relationships.”

“Dissociation may be understood, in part, as a means of simplifying experience through a radical reduction of experiential complexity. . . . To experience such complexity might well heighten what is already a level of uncertainty about psychological survival that is close to unbearable. As complexity is dissociatively reduced, a traumatized person’s relational world comes to be ruled by simple, rigid SECs [systemically emergent certainties] [a concept similar to organizing principles] that are clung to with desperate ferocity.”

“In the absence of trauma, SECs are subject to change according to the shifting needs of the constituents of the systems in which they arise; they are, in other words, context sensitive. Trauma-generated SECs are strikingly different. Emerging within systems dominated by the desperate need to halt the spread of chaos and tormenting uncertainty, they tend to be impervious to the changing environment.”

Moreover, Brothers observes that “traumatic attachments tend to be rigid, constricted and highly resistant to change,” and that “the more trauma, the more risk of inflexibility.”

Brothers also observes that “attachment patterns that form in the context of unbearable experiences of existential uncertainty in one generation may influence the attachment patterns that emerge in the next,” and that “dualities and dichotomies” often characterize traumatized systems.

~ Doris Brothers Ph.D. (2014) Traumatic Attachments: Intergenerational Trauma, Dissociation, and the Analytic Relationship, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 9:1, 3-15.

From the person raising the discussion – “All of which got me to thinking about those who promote dichotomous ideologies and Manichean worldviews. Ordinarily, I pull no punches when thinking or talking about these people (especially when they are jockeying for political positions that could affect my life and the lives of people I care about). But if I withdraw for a moment from the impulse to ridicule, I reflect that these may be people whose lives, whose organizing principles, are the product of trauma, maybe even trauma that didn’t happen to them directly, but to their parents. Seen in this light, the impoverished either/or thinking, the insufferably reductive and punitive moralities take on a different hue, that of involuntary affliction, sequelae of a prior generation’s trauma, and those saddled with such worldviews suddenly appear more understandable and less blameworthy.”

Manichaeism was a major religion founded in the 3rd century AD by the Parthian prophet Mani, in the Sasanian Empire. Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Clearly, humanity has not progressed very much in reality.

Many adoptees tell stories of a variety of degrees of abuse. An ACE score is a tally of different types of abuse, neglect, and other hallmarks of a rough childhood. According to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, the rougher your childhood, the higher your score is likely to be and the higher your risk for later health problems.