Adoption Issues..


Article author:

Nessa Muller

Nessa Muller has a Master’s degree in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, a Higher Diploma in Counselling & Psychotherapy and a certificate year in Addiction Studies.She is a member of The Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland.

Adoption

Adoption is a legal process whereby a child becomes a permanent member of a new family. It means the child has the same family name and the same legal rights as if they had been born into the adoptive family. Hnece, all adoptees share the experience of being separated from their birth families of origin and placed in an adoptive family, usually very early in their lives. The impact of this experience is very personal and varies with each individual.

Nevertheless, as an adoptee you may find you have some feelings in common with others who were adopted. Below is a list of the kinds of feelings or experiences that you, as an adoptee, may have:

  • Adoptees may feel grief about the loss of their birth family; 
  • Adoptees may feel anger at their birth families, adoptive families, or the adoption system; 
  • Adoptee may have questions about identity and self (particularly at times of life transitions such as adolescence, marriage, or the birth of their own child(ren); 
  • Adoptees may have ongoing feelings of not belonging; 
  • Adoptees may feel shame about disclosing their needs or feelings about being adopted; 
  • Adoptees may have a need to know more about their origins, and to access their adoption records; 
  • Adoptees may want to search for and have contact with their birth family;  
  • Adoptees may feel guilt based on a belief that their need to search for birth family conflicts with their connection with their adoptive family.

 

Core issues of Adoption

 ‘Adoption is created through loss’ (Silverstein & Kaplan, 1982).

 Indeed without loss there is no adoption. Birthparents lose the child to whom they are genetically connected (possibly forever), adoptees experience their first loss when separated from their birth mother/birth family and with that they lose a significant part of their personal history which is crucial for a grounded identity. Adoptive parents lose the child that would have been born to them through infertility, failed pregnancy, stillbirth, or the death of a child and therefore have suffered great loss prior to adopting. 

Adoption is a fundamental life-altering event. Huge loss and heartache is experienced by all parties involved in adoption.  Unfortunately, society generally encourages birthparents, adoptees and adoptive parents to ignore their losses. Adoptive parents are expected to be happy to have a child, adoptees perhaps experience that they ought to be grateful that they were adopted as opposed to have grown up in state care or an orphanage in a different country ‘a third-world country’. Birthparents also are urged to forget their loss or made to feel that they do not deserve to feel their loss (Silverstein & Kaplan, 1982).

·        Ø  Loss

·        Ø  Rejection

·        Ø  Guilt and Shame

·        Ø  Isolation

·        Ø  Grief

·        Ø  Identity

·        Ø  Intimacy

·        Ø  Control

·        Ø  Tracing Birth Parents

·        Ø  Gaining access to information on birth parents

·        Ø  Conflicting feelings

·        Ø  Anger

·        Ø  Losses are painful but also can enrich our lives

 
Loss

 To be adopted is to live in a shadow world.  Your parents are yours, but they are not.  You have a history, but you do not, for it is unknown.  You had a birth, but you did not, because you do not know the woman who bore you.  You have a heritage, but you do not, because you do not know what it is.  You have a name, but you do not, because you had a different one at birth.  You have lost the whole template of your history.  You have been transplanted to fill in the gap on someone else’s template.  Your roots have been eliminated.  You have sprung like Aphrodite from the sea.  You are both divine and damned.

 Rejection

To be adopted is to be expected to live a lie.  The lie is that you were born of your adoptive parents and that your biological and genetic history does not matter.  The lie becomes a belief that you were never really born.  You believe that your adoptive parents chose you.  You are different, more special than others.  At the same time, you sense the real, dirty truth: that you were not really meant to be born.  That you were someone’s mistake.

Guilt and Shame

To be adopted is to feel guilt and love all mixed up for your adoptive parents.  You love them very much, because they are Mum & Dad, they are the ones who took care of you and fed you and taught you.  But you feel guilty because you are not the child to whom they would have given birth.  You are second best.  You can never quite be what they want and expect you to be.  And also, at the same time, there is a shadow mum and dad hovering.  The shadows haunt you.  You do not know their names, or even what they looked like; sometimes you picture them looking like you.  You do not know their story; you only know that you are the product of it.  You do not know what your other life would have been, the life you would have lived had they kept you.  You wonder sometimes if it could possibly have been as difficult as your life is now.

Intimacy

To be adopted is to live in a shadow world.  You want to love and trust other people, to live normally, as others do.  But you are bound by your fears.  How can you love and trust another if the very parents who gave you birth abandoned you to your fate?  If they could not love the innocent baby that you were who could love you now?  So you are afraid to love, to get too close.  Or you love so hard that you are unable to be yourself, to let go and be a person, to be on your own.  You are terrorised by the thought of being abandoned again.  You fight your demons on the battleground of relationship.  You frighten people away.  Or you cling like a child.  You cannot find the happy medium, the middle road.  You swing from being a totally independent, self-sufficient adult to a needy baby who craves satisfaction and is insatiable.

Identity / Isolation

To be adopted is to be not understood by the rest of the world.  Children who grew up with their biological parents simply know who they look like, who gave birth to them, and what their ethnic heritage is.  They don’t have to wonder.  They don’t have to guess.  The adopted child’s the great unknown.  You look at your parents, or your adopted brothers and sisters, and you do not look alike.  Temperaments may be very different.  There is no root from which the tree can grow.  It hangs suspended in mid-air, having begun from nothing that was grounded in the earth.  Those who are adopted do not feel grounded or rooted.  You love your families, but you feel unlike them.  You want to be part of your families, but you know that in significant ways, you do not quite fit.  You see your extended families, and the resemblances between generations, and your own face is not reflected anywhere.

Pain / Grief

To be adopted is to know pain every day of your life.  The pain of being abandoned.  The pain of being unwanted.  Every single time you feel abandoned again or unwanted again, even as an adult, it sends you back to the helplessness of that frightened infant, who searched incessantly for mother, only she never came.  She was gone forever.  Someone else may have come in her place.  But that hole where she was could never really be filled by another.

Tracing Birth Parents

If you as an adoptee are compelled to search out your birth parents, to solve the mystery of your origins, you learn all over that you are a second class citizen.  The law has sealed the records.  Everyone on earth is presumed to have the right to know from whence they come, to know their own mother’s name.  Everyone except for adoptees who were adopted during the sealed record era.  The name of the woman who gave you birth is not supposed to be given to you to know.  And you are looked down upon for wanting to know. 

 

Gaining access to information on birth parents

The day you learn your birth mother’s name your life changes forever. You are never again an unknown, you were born from woman. You may look for her and find her.  You may find your father too.  They may accept you and want a relationship with you.  They may be afraid of you or think that you will disrupt their lives.  Things can get complicated.  But it is better to know.  It is far better to know.  You answer so many questions.  “Why did they give me up?” is the first one most adoptees ask.  From there you find out your heritage, your ancestry, your medical history, your background.  The blank spaces start to fill in.  Your curly hair came from your father.  Your slenderness came from your mother.  Your hot temper came from your grandfather.  You have a place in someone’s family tree.  You were born!  But new feelings arise.  For to be adopted and know one’s birth family is to not be sure who you really are.  Are you still Kim?  Ore are you now also Lee, the name your birth mother gave you?  Are you still not the child of the parents who adopted you and cared for you all your life?  You still call them mum & dad.  But there is another mum and dad, real now, flesh, no longer shadows.  Still, the shadows of the other possible lives you might have lived hover more strongly.  What if you had grown up with just your mother, after your Dad had left?  What if they had gotten married and you had been born to them legitimately?  There are so many shadow lives now, possibilities that once had been real; possibilities that were stillborn when you were given away.

 

Conflicting feelings

To be adopted and to know who your birth parents are, after spending your life not knowing, is to feel

disloyal to the adoptive parents who raised you.   You want them to understand why you needed to know.  You realise you are not quite the child they expected.  You can’t seem to make them understand the pain of what you went through prior to the time they took you home, or that losing your birth mother was a real loss, even though you were only a baby.  They may not understand.  They may feel betrayed.

To be adopted and to know your birth parents’ identities can be to regress to childhood.  You might want them to love you and parent you, but you are an adult now and have to relate in adult ways.  You are no longer that baby they gave up so long ago.  Yet you want to explain to them that you still feel like that baby.  You never really grew up.  Adoptees don’t, in some ways they remain craving infants, because that early craving for mother did not get satisfied, and so remains, gnawing in the gut for eternity.  And finding your birth parents when you are an adult does not satisfy that infantile craving.

 To be adopted and to know your actual birth name is to wonder what your name really is.  Most people know their names.  They identify with their names.  If their names change, such as a woman changing her name with a marriage, it is because they take on a new identity which is important.  But when you are adopted, you had a secret name, one which you were not allowed to know.  If you learn what it was, you may have a desire to take it on, to take on that identity which you were never allowed to be, but which was your earliest self.  Yet you feel guilt, because that would be a betrayal of the name your adoptive parents gave you.  So who are you?  What is your real name?

To be adopted is to yearn for that world of substance, not shadows.  To want to walk in the sunlight of your full identity, not in the darkness of confusion.  That is difficult to do.  The shadows follow.

To be adopted is to be angry at the system which hurt you, your birth parents and your adoptive parents, who perpetuated the myth that adoptive families are the same as biological ones, perpetuated the lie and the pain of separation from your roots.  It is to be angry at the lost years when you could have known your beginnings and from there, grown into what you were meant to be by being able to see and know what had come before.

Losses are painful but also can enrich our lives

But to be adopted is also to be able to identify with others’ pain.  It is to develop compassion, because you know the pain of feeling alien, of not fitting in.  It is to have caring and tolerance for others, because you are a survivor.  It is to grow strong with your own new sense of self, forged not only from both of your families but from your own achievements and emotions, and pain and pride.  It is to work for a change, so that others do not have to know the trauma and pain of not knowing who they are, so that they can see where they are going and who they are to become.  It is to care enough to speak out and tell of your experience, even though that is painful, so that others may learn and begin to understand.

 

References

Melina, L (1990). The seven core issues of adoption. Journal of the Adoption Council of Ontario.

Bebavides, S.C (?). To be adopted. Clinical Psychology Union Institute Ohio.

Silverstein, D & Kaplan, S (1982). Lifelong issues in Adoption. American Adoption Congress, website       

http://www.americanadoptioncongress.org/grief_silverstein_article.php

This article was written by Nessa Muller, psychotherapist at Mind and Body Works. To read more about Nessa please click here

 

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