Wanting to Connect, Fearing Connection

There is a Chinese proverb that states that the beginning of wisdom is to call something by its proper name. The term ”adoption” does not do this but rather disguises a series of complex, developmental traumas that begin with relinquishment and continues on, sometimes through challenging episodes of care, to the adaptions necessary to attach to the adoptive family. The legacy of this trauma for the relinquished child is a conflict between wanting to connect and fearing connection. This is often experienced as a hyper vigilance that has an enormous impact on relationships and functioning which can disrupt the ability to be present, with feelings that one is both “too much” and “not enough”.

It is hard to imagine a more devastating wound than a child being separated from its mother at the beginning of life. Trauma is an event that overwhelms ordinary human responses to life and as early separation is a relational trauma it manifests later in life as problems in significant relationships and, more often than not, in attempts at self-regulation through chemical and process addictions.

The impact of trauma on functioning is both physical and psychological: heightened levels of cortisol and adrenaline raise anxiety levels leading to difficulties with concentration, while lower levels of serotonin lead to depression, making feelings of shame harder to manage. The trauma victim becomes reactive rather than reflective and experiences disabling feelings around issues of belonging and abandonment. A hunger for attachment means that the capacity for intimacy is compromised by intense and contradictory feelings of need and fear. In relationships there is a belief that they cannot be accepted for who they are and the sufferer is left literally in two minds; at best indecisive and at worst questioning their sanity.

Unlike the computer, the human brain starts working before building is finished. There are 100 billion neurons at birth waiting to make connections based on instructions from life experience. In the first years of life explicit memory systems have yet to be established and the adoption wound is stored, like other early attachment wounds, in implicit memory systems. The unconscious remembers the relinquishment as devastating and makes a mental note to avoid any similar experience at all costs. The conscious mind cannot recall the experience and so has no defense against the old lie that what cannot be recalled cannot have impact. Furthermore, because adoptees have no pre-trauma personality that they can refer to, they develop a false, core belief that their post-traumatic coping behavior, along with the associated shame and anxiety, is in fact their personality.

It is important to understand too that politics and the establishment play, and have played, an enormous part in the psychological wounds of relinquishment and adoption. Traditionally the world of adoption has referred to “the adoption triad” comprising the adopted child, the birth parents and the adoptive parents. However, this term is also misleading and disguises the fourth party in the adoption quartet: The establishment and the adoption business.

The establishment has legislated the assigning of a new identity and the erasing of the birth identity so that it is often not legally recognized. It is as if the adoptive family owns the adopted child. This is a particular issue for trans racial adoptees many of whom, as well as experiencing disconnect between racial self-identification and the racialization of the receiving country, would struggle to obtain a passport from their, or their birth parents, country of birth. Needless to say this has associations with the historic relationships between colonizer and the colonized.

The business of adoption and the industry that facilitates relinquishment and placement comprises state organizations and religious organizations as well as “kidnappers” and “baby finders”. The impact of some of these practices is being revealed.

It is clear that many adoptees have been struggling with a sophisticated, developmental trauma that has been hidden from them and those around them. In many cases it involves a series of traumatic experiences involving attachment changes that are experienced as life threatening. This trauma is hidden from consciousness both by the brain that remembers but cannot recall the events, but also by society that views adoptees as “chosen” and “fortunate”. If mental health is dependent on a commitment to reality, then it is vital that we call these traumas by their proper name. Furthermore, clinical experience shows us that change and recovery begin with acknowledgement and continue with the taking of personal responsibility for solutions. Victims don’t recover but those who dare to take uncomfortable, therapeutic actions certainly can.

Inspired by a blog written by Paul Sunderland titled “Relinquishment and Adoption: Understanding the Impact of an Early Psychological Wound”.

Think About The Mothers

The family I was born into is heavily affected by adoption. Until I learned about the truth related to my mom’s adoption, I never thought much about how the mothers who gave up a baby to adoption were affected by what happened. I never thought about how it might have affected both of my sisters who each gave up a baby to adoption.

My first exposure was reading Lorraine Dusky’s book A Hole in My Heart. We have since become friends on Facebook and I know a lot more about what happened to her than only what she wrote in that book. She has been an activist for opening the sealed records in the state of New York. The effort was recently successful. Almost half of these United States continue to obstruct adoptees from knowing the truth of their origins. Adoptees are treated like second-class citizens denied the basic human rights that most people unaffected by adoption never give a second thought.

A friend in my writer’s guild once asked me at a conference as we were discussing my manuscript project, what does it matter if someone was adopted if their adoptive parents were good people and their childhood fortunate ? As I explained it to her, she understood in her own way that her genetic origins were simply something she took for granted. Whether she cared to know anything at all about her heritage, it was accessible to her. Not so for the adoptee.

The more contact I have with women who have lost their children to adoption, the more I understand the lifelong regret, sorrow and pain this causes them. Adoption is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Too often people think the problem that is today will always stay a problem forever. Change is constant, so that perception is never the truth but it is easy to lose sight of that in extreme need.

Not only do many mothers never know what became of their child, many adoptees exist in a black hole. If they know they were adopted (which is generally the case in our modern times and even for both of my parents, adopted in the 1930s, they knew they had been adopted even though they never learned anything about their own origins), there is this strange kind of existence and knowing they are not related to the people who are “their family” and genetic heritage ? the heritage that is their adoptive family’s possession, it isn’t their heritage.

And sadly, when one finally does know the heritage, as I have been blessed to discover my own (know all 4 original grandparents and something about each of their stories) and have contact now with true genetic relations, I don’t feel fully as though I belong to these families. We have no shared history. It is as though I’ve been robbed twice. Though I am grateful to at least have the truth now and not a false identity.

Chosen Parents

There is a poem common among adoptive parents and often framed and hung on the wall. There is actually more than one version out there.

“You’re a chosen child
You’re ours, but not by birth
. . . Chosen above the rest.”

“I had to tell you, Dearest Heart,
that you are not my own.”

This concept of being “chosen” is often disturbing for an adoptee. This is not a supermarket where people go to buy commodities. Adoptees are human beings with feelings and so many of the messages they receive are contradictory statements and confusing.

When my sister learned she was pregnant, she also knew that without a willing father to help her raise her son, she needed to give him up for adoption. This being a “modern” version, her son wasn’t chosen so much as the parents to raise her son were chosen.

Couples submitted applications, glossy proposals of why they would be the best choice. I was with my sister as she tried to make a decision. She sent these packages to me for my opinion – though the ultimate decision was one she made for herself.

The messages adoptees receive are paradoxical – they were unwanted, abandoned, and yet chosen, special and lucky. They rarely feel the “yets” as much as the more obvious facts. Their original mothers are often marginalized as “incapable” but oh, they were heroic to give up that baby to a mother who could raise a child no other way.

Adoption is a legal contract to which the child never agreed. They are made to appear “as if born to” with their identity amended to hide their true origins. An adoptee is asked to live their life split off from their true identity. They become masters at people pleasing – sometimes compliant, other times defiant.

Gratitude

Sadly, there seems to be an unreasonable standard that expects an adoptee to be grateful to the people who adopted them for having saved them from a worse fate.

Generally speaking gratitude is an important spiritual practice in my own life but I get it.

In truth, while parents are mostly grateful to have received the children born to them and to have the complicated, difficult and ultimately satisfying job of mentoring the next generation into the ways of the world until they are able to navigate it on their own, that does not mean that their children are obligated to be grateful to their parents for having done what parents are supposed to do.

An adoptee has a complicated situation. They are expected to give up any attachment to the people who gave them birth, allowed to have the basic details of their identify changed and more accurately falsified and then expected to be forever grateful to the strangers who took them in and raised them.

This is not a realistic expectation. I understand so much, so much better now, that learning about my own parents’ adoptions has also encouraged me to learn more deeply about all aspects of this human practice.

Breaking The Cycle

Both of my parents were adoptees, so it is no wonder really that the pattern of giving up children to adoption continued in the lives of my sisters and I. Both sisters gave up children to adoption. While I did not and while one of my sisters experienced a horrific outcome through the courts that I will always believe was biased, two more children were not raised by us because of circumstances, including financial hardship, beyond our control. I even understand now that it was a minor miracle that I wasn’t given up for adoption when my teenage mother conceived me out of wedlock.

Happily, I have optimism that our children, who are raising their own children successfully, are breaking the cycle that has fragmented my childhood family both on the parental side and through our own children.

I believe that the general perspective is shifting now, though not yet entirely ending mothers losing their children to adoption, to encourage more mothers not to chose that deeply painful loss that too many mothers have suffered and too many children have been damaged by.

There will always be some need for surrogate parenting but it may be time to allow adoptees not to become a false identity but to be supported in order to grow up as whole and integrated selves with their original identities and family trees known and intact.