Stress Responses

Some adoptive parents mistake their adopted child’s compliance with the situation as a good outcome adjustment. What I have learned from adoptees that there is an even more intense reaction that is called fawning. Think of the kidnap victim that eventually identifies with their captors – like Patty Hearst did.

Every adoptee is an individual and each responds differently to the circumstances of their relinquishment and their placement in a new home.

Fawning is best understood as “people-pleasing.” Both of my parents were adoptees and I saw this kind of behavior in my mom and learned it from her. This kind of behavior can endear one to other people but it is not always healthy to be this way.

People with the fawn response are so accommodating of other people’s needs that they often find themselves in codependent relationships. Fortunately, when that has happened to me, I’ve found a way out – even if it took some time to get there.

Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others. They act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences and boundaries. It takes some maturity to take one’s power back.

Sadly, fawn types are more vulnerable to emotional abuse and exploitation. Abusers may suppress a survivor’s fight or flight responses by threatening punishment. The appease response, also known as ‘please’ or ‘fawn’, is a survival response which occurs [when] survivors read danger signals and aim to comply and minimize the confrontation in an attempt to protect themselves. I’ve been there, done that and I’ve seen my mom do likewise.

If you are an adoption survivor (adoption is definitely a form of trauma to a child), you are not alone in using this for safety. There is no shame in struggling with fawning. Fawning, like the other stress responses, is a self-protective armor. It has helped many adoption survivors live through being placed in a family that does not fit their nature naturally.

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.

The Life Cycle Of An Adoptee

What is it like to live as an adoptee ?

A tiny baby who didn’t consciously know what was happening to it.
The child who loved their adoptive parents.
The unsealed records finally arriving but causing an emotional wound.
The adult still trying to figure out what it all means.

My mom was a people pleaser. It could have been driven by a fear of being given back or given away – again. This is simply a logical extension of what the child may have been told – “Your birth mother loved you enough to give you up, and now we love you.” Seems simple and appropriate on the surface.

But what is an adoptee supposed to think ? It would not be surprising if their silent response was – “So you could give me up too ?”

My mom may have been aware that she was the fulfillment of her adoptive mother’s dream of becoming a mother. I have my grandmother’s letters to the adoption agency in the file I received. She was over the moon happy and thought my mom the most brilliant child. So, my mom may have wanted to do a good job of being the fulfillment of that dream. In her teens, she didn’t feel she measured up to my grandmother’s expectations.

My mom never got that reunion with her original mother that she yearned for. I have gotten “some” of that reunion joy as I have met cousins and an aunt on each side of my parental adoption equation. And honestly, it has filled in a gap that I couldn’t even know as clearly as I do now that I am whole.

I literally had to wait many decades to reconnect with my original family.