Considering Adoption ?

Too often adoption facilitators are more concerned with socioeconomic factors than psychological, emotional or intellectual considerations. There are better indicators for adopting a child than providing a nursery or having enough money in the bank for a college education.

What there is a need for is emotional stability, honesty, and the willingness to become truly informed about what this process means for the adopting parents and the child they adopt.

Prospective adoptive parents can help by making certain the child they are considering REALLY needs to be adopted.

~ The Primal Wound

When asking how to best raise an adopted child, the experts in the 1980s said there were no unique needs and that being adopted (though I should be told as soon as possible) would mean nothing to me.

There is no post-adoption support.

You will not know why I feel so drawn to the ocean if my original family is from Tennessee.

I will tell you that you are not my “real mom” a handful of times out of frustration and not feeling understood.

I will make you prove over and over again that you love me.

I will spend too much time with people who don’t care about me because I will not be able to stand rejecting anyone.

When I become a mother, the adoptee in me will awaken. You will be bewildered when I start talking about being adopted, missing my first mother and my interest in my roots.

When I embark on reunion, you will support me, but feel as though I am rejecting you. I will have to tell you over and over again that I am not leaving you, but regaining part of me that was left behind.

~ Letter to my Prospective Adoptive Parents in The Declassified Adoptee

Much that I have read resonates with what I have seen in my own family. Both my parents were adopted and each of my sisters gave up a child to adoption. Inform yourself. Don’t create a false identity for the child you adopt. Be prepared for perhaps the hardest choice to parent a child. Apply love liberally.

A Separate Reality

An adoptee may “know” they belong with their adoptive family but there is this “other element”, this feeling that they ALSO belong somewhere else. A need to know, to be complete inside. Otherwise, never whole. So the adopted person doesn’t actually feel like they belong with the natural parent(s) either – if they end up reunited.

Like one is a broken circle. Like they have this person somewhere inside of them that they have not been allowed to be. Like walking on a fence that one can fall off of at any moment.

Adoptive parents have a certain insecurity. They live in fear that someone is going to take their child away. That is their deepest darkest fear. At the same time, the adoptee always feels like they are going to be rejected.

It is entirely not a “normal” situation and there is no getting around that.

What Happens in the Womb . . .

Stays in the Child.

One of the most helpful of the books I’ve read in the last year was The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier. She is the mother of two daughters – one who was adopted and one who was not. Her clinical work has been with adoptees and other members of the adoption triad. With these experiences, she has come to believe that even newly born infants, when separated from their mothers, are deeply wounded and that their pre-verbal state of consciousness renders these wounds into a feeling state without the verbal context that memories require.

This has not been well understood until recently. But upon reflection, it makes a lot of sense. The gestating fetus grows inside the mother’s body. This is a very important time in both the mother’s and the infant’s lives because they are bonding and preparing for their lives together, once the child is delivered into independent life.

Any woman who has given birth, upon reflection, will realize that her infant knew her from the first moments of its life. Taking this child away from its mother causes deep anguish and sorrow. When placed in the adoptive family situation, the infant instinctively knows this stranger is not the child’s natural mother.

While in good circumstances, the child will learn to accept it’s placement into an adoptive home, deep inside there are fears of rejection and abandonment. Individual children will deal with these anxieties in one of two ways – either they will be compliant and do their best to live up to their adoptive parents’ expectations (while fearing all along that if they don’t they will be sent anyway, causing a lifelong insecurity in the person) – or they will act out. A defiant adoptee will often disrupt the family they have been placed within, causing biological or other adopted siblings to resent them and causing feelings of rejection in the adoptive parents – if, they don’t understand the source of the challenges they face in trying to parent this child.