It Is Hard To Do

From an adoptee – Coming out of the fog is hard. It’s a bit like jumping out of a building but instead of dying before you can even hit the ground, you hit it, hard, and break every bone in your body.

This is to say that coming out of the fog (losing the cognitive dissonance you’ve been living with your entire life) is first of all very painful and second of all takes a long time to heal. Then, even when it heals, it never feels quite right again.

This is only the effect of coming out of the fog and not a lifetime of adoption trauma.

Anger is part of the grieving process. We talk about grief in adoption in a relatable way: We grieve the loss of our first parents. That’s true, but it’s also true that as we come out of the fog, we begin to grieve the things we believed to be true.

Loving adoption, supporting it, and verbally confirming the societal bias that adoption is a loving way to support children who can’t live with their families for some reason, and then leaving that behind when the fog lifts is a huge change, and when huge changes occur in our lives, we do often grieve.

We grieve the person we are leaving behind, the assumptions that we once carried, and the comfort of the lies we told ourselves. (Blogger’s note – while not an adoptee myself, I’ve been greatly impacted by adoption – both of my parents were 1930s era adoptees. Learning who my original grandparents were, who who all deceased by then, had an unexpected but profound effect on me. I would assume I am still processing my feelings 6 years later.)

Anger is part of that grieving process, and each grieving process is different. Some people will always be angry. Some will spend their lives in denial (the fog).

If we are angry, there are a number of reasons but grief is an important part of it.

We are not (always) mad at you, as a person. We may be angry with adoptive parents, but more often than not this is not personal and not personally directed at you. When it is personal, it’s because you have triggered one of our privileged voices, often by gaslighting, demonstrating fragile behavior (cognitive dissonance), or you have challenged someone by calling their lived experience their opinion and justified your behavior by saying you’re allowed to have your opinion [on their experience].

Some people are angry with adoptive parents in general. You might not understand it, but there are points that I could make which would indicate this anger is justifiable. Most of us are angry with the adoption industry and an extension of that anger is that we are angry with the people who feed the demand that drives this industry. Without demand, there is no industry (and we already know there aren’t hundreds of babies waiting in an orphanage to be adopted).

Anger with people who participated in the system of oppression is natural. I’m not a professional therapist, just a life coach. Whether or not this anger is healthy or if it is merely a coping tool for trauma that masks other big emotions, I can’t say. Either way, anger is part of processing what has happened to us that we had no control over. When you see our anger, it is because we are hurt and we are healing.

Adoption is a multi-billion dollar per year industry in which people (infants, children) are exchanged for as much as $60k each. It’s really easy to overlook facts that don’t agree with your personal cognitive bias, especially when you benefited from this industry. If you paid an adoption fee, regardless of who received that fee or what they did with it, you exchanged money for another human being.

It might be hard to see yourself as having participated in human trafficking but you did. Even if money were not involved, we are still talking about the redistribution of human children.

You can see, no doubt, that the objects of that trafficking (adoptees) would be angry to have been trafficked. Or, if you cannot cognitively comprehend the word “trafficking” in this situation, you can understand that adopted people are goods that were exchanged from one bearer to another.

Being adopted is a lifetime of ongoing trauma and chronic stress. It doesn’t go away when we turn 18. It doesn’t stop when we meet our biological families. It doesn’t end because we are in therapy.

When you accuse adopted people of inappropriate anger, you are contributing to the ongoing chronic stress and trauma we experience as adoptees because you are asking us to perform for you. In order to feel “safe”, many adoptees will, and, this is SUPER important, so please listen! You’ll never know they’re performing for you, you’ll just think they’re better people for not “attacking” you. You should know, then, that we are, at all times, under a high-pressure situation. You might step on a landmine without knowing you were stepping on a landmine but it’s a landmine nonetheless.

Therapy doesn’t always help. Sometimes it harms. We promote therapy as though it is the panacea for all trauma. And many people, when facing opposition to their cognitive dissonance use therapy as a way to gaslight and abuse. “You need therapy!” as a response to someone’s heartfelt outpouring of emotion is arguably always abusive. (This leaves aside that it is always dismissive and used as a way to silence the person expressing themselves due to the need to protect themselves from further trauma/abuse.)

Most adoptees who have seen therapists have, at some point, encountered a therapist who didn’t have good training in adoption trauma (even if they thought themselves to have been trained). These therapists often follow the larger social narrative of adoption as “rescue” and further silence us by correcting our emotions (due to their own natural defensiveness and cognitive distortions) or they avoid the subject altogether, leaving the adopted client confused and gaslit.

Adopted people aren’t to blame for our trauma — adoptive parents are. Some of you are already thinking “Trauma happened because of the birth parents and I had nothing to do with their decisions!” First of all, if you adopted an infant privately (not through foster care), you did have something to do with their decision, even if indirectly (through a lawyer or agency). This is a matter of fact, regardless of any coercion you participated in directly — but a lot of you — especially the ones accusing adopted people of being “hateful” did participate in coercion directly.

The trauma of adoption is not a single event but a series of events that are ongoing throughout our lives. Those events are often facilitated by, or at least not prevented by, the adoptive parents. You can never protect your child entirely, but you can learn to support them better by increasing your emotional awareness and maturity. When you accuse adopted people of being angry, hateful, or blaming adoptive parents for their problems, you are in fact deflecting your own culpability onto the object of a contract to which you are the subject and therefore the beneficiary.

To put it simply, you accuse us of shifting our own blame onto adoptive parents because something in you has been confronted and you may be experiencing some form of rejection sensitivity dysphoria. Shifting the blame you hold for participating in an oppressive system onto adoptees and expecting us to solve the problems created by our adoptions — on our own! — is not the way you want to present yourself to the world.

The Foster Care Problem

Today again, for the umpteenth time, I learned of 2 children being removed for neglect when that neglect was fixable! It’s criminal these kids are removed.

Being part of the Foster Care System in a non-kinship capacity makes you part of the problem:

If being a foster parent is such a good thing, if they are doing right by these kids, then why do we have these statistics?

Half of foster youth will never graduate high school

One in five will enter the homeless population

One in four will be involved with the criminal justice system

The False Belief: Neglected, abused children are pulled from their home and placed in welcoming environments that are stable and safe

The Reality: More than 1/3 of youth in foster care have documented abuse in foster homes. The act of removal adds additional layers of trauma

So you, who are wanting to become a foster parent, are thinking you are one of the good ones right ? You would not abuse a child – so fostering is the right thing to do because you’re a good guy.

Awesome, but to fight for these kids, you often have to really fight and you are at the mercy of the state. You really have no leverage. You are a glorified babysitter in many cases.

That means your fighting for these kids could be one mis-step away from crap with the caseworker that will cause you to lose that child to a home that WILL abuse them considering how high the likelihood of abuse in foster care is.

So before someone else says it – let’s talk about “what’s the alternative, just let children be abused by their parents ?”

The False Belief: Children removed from their homes are removed “for a good reason”; otherwise they would not be removed

The Reality: “Neglect” is cited in 76% of the cases but what is considered neglect runs the gamut: lack of proper supervision, food insecurity, housing/utility issues, medical challenges, safety issues, assumed neglect due to poverty level, assumed neglect due to the race of the family.

What would solve the “Neglect” issues cited above ? These are ALL solvable issues and addressing them would reduce the number of removals by 76% !!

Why do so many NOT see how the money, time and energy, that goes to Foster Parents and/or the Foster Care system, could be put to programs for family preservation. Doing so would vastly reduce the number of removals and keep children with their families.

What is it going to take for John Q Public to get this and advocate for change ? What is it going to take for foster caregivers to do better and put their time and efforts behind helping families keep their kids out of foster care.

Why Did You Adopt ?

My husband and I made a conscious decision not to adopt when we had been trying unsuccessfully to conceive. I believe our main concern was that uncertainty factor. We decided that we preferred to start “fresh” using an alternative form of medicine (obviously the main response to the question in the survey above).

Many adoptive parents are driven by altruistic reasons – it is not because of infertility – but they truly would like to be there in a positive way for a child who they believe needs them. It is a form of rescuer or savior motivation.

DIA is not through an agency but is a disclosed identified party adoption aka an open adoption. The inconvenient truth is that regardless of the type of adoption – agencies are manipulative, hopeful adoptive parents are clueless and often blinded by their own wants, expectant mothers are coerced into giving up their babies because they are led to the false belief it will be better for their infant, and infants experience tremendous trauma when they are separated from their original mother. The whole system of adoption is sadly a mess.

Hopeful adoptive parents usually have good intentions, even if they are blinded to more selfish and personally oriented reasons for adopting. Wanting to be a parent and acting on that is a selfish decision via adoption, regardless of how you get there. These adoptive parents may have more than they need for just their own selves. They want to share from their abundance because for some people sharing feels good.

Many original mothers were forced. One example that I read about – she was told either she place her son for adoption or they were going to report her to Child Protective Services – she was in extreme poverty, she did not have a job, she was depressed, unmarried and her my son was originally conceived through a man no longer in the picture. She was told she wasn’t good enough to raise her own son and that he deserved better.

It is important to change the narrative about adoption – it is not a beautiful circumstance. It is damaging and painful and should only happen in the very rarest of circumstances, and then it should be within the family, if possible (and honestly, it usually is possible). I am pro-reunification. It is important that the pain of separation is not permanent if at all possible. My perspectives on adoption, I will admit, have gone 180 and mostly against. There are exceptions, of course, and good ones.

Finding Out One Was Adopted

Above is a segment of my Dad’s original adoption papers. He was actually adopted twice (his adoptive mother divorced the first husband and remarried, changing my Dad’s name when he was already 8 years old). Upon discovering one of my Hempstead relatives, the first thing she noticed had entirely been missed by my own self, the Salvation Army appeared to “own” him and his mother’s name was nowhere to be found on the document.

I don’t know how old either of my parents were when they learned they were adopted but I believe each was as old as they needed to be told. I think they always “knew” even before they consciously knew.

There are many ways an adoptee can learn they were adopted. They might accidentally overhear a conversation. They might develop a serious illness that requires accurate medical information. They may discover papers in their adoptive parents’ files after their death or a stranger may come into their life (thanks to DNA testing) and claim to be related.

Most human beings have a need for love and a sense of belonging, also for self-esteem and a recognition of their value. It seems the almost all emotional wounds need these and some also highlight safety and security and I believe that is true of adoptees as well.

There are so many sad, false beliefs that filter into the heart of an adoptee – something must be wrong with me because my “real” parents gave me away, I don’t belong anywhere, I probably never should have been born, I don’t know who I am and if my “real” parents could abandon me, anyone could.

An adoptee seeking reunion with their original family fears another rejection. If they were adopted into a family with children already, they may believe they are loved less and many fear they could be taken away from their adoptive family and even fear that it might be the original family recovering them.

Adoptees suffer many side effects of having been adopted. They may be subject to mood swings, they feel less equal within a family unit, they may be obsessed with the past, struggle with a sense of identity, see how they are different than the adoptive family they are living within, have a hard time saying good-bye, may be always trying to prove their worthiness, may expect to be deceived or engage in risky behavior and may exhibit behaviors indicating a subservience.

That is a lot but it actually is not the end of it – they may experience anxiety or situational depression, they may need to double-check facts for accuracy, they develop various insecurities, they may be cynical and reject the adoptive family. An adoptee may fantasize about a reunion with their “real” family and actually seek them out.

On the plus side, an adoptee respects honesty and openness. It may have been emphasized to them that they were chosen, even if they had a hard time accepting that as a positive aspect of having been adopted. They are adaptable, analytical, appreciative, centered, curious, diplomatic, easygoing, empathetic, happy, private, sentimental, supportive and wise.

They are as complex as any human being could be.

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.