Holding Space For Adoptee Voices During National Adoption Awareness Month
November is National Adoption Awareness Month. This observance, instituted under the Clinton administration in 1995, was expanded from Adoption Week which originated in 1976 by Mike Dukakis when he was Governor of Massachusetts. It was created, along with World Adoption Day, and National Adoption Day to raise awareness for the issue of finding permanent homes for children living in foster care. The occasion is often marked at courthouses across the country with ceremonial mass adoption finalizations. Many adoptees celebrate by posting selfies on social media with happy faces drawn on their palms. The focus is always on the positive aspects of adoption, and presents a uniformly idealized picture of the “happy every after” ending that adoption is supposed by many people to be.
Naturally, one hopes that placing children in loving adoptive families represents the beginning of a more stable life, the start of a healing journey for the relinquished child. However, that’s not the whole story, and it doesn’t represent the point of view of all the participants. The adoptees themselves, too young to have a choice or a voice, have historically been excluded from the public discourse. It’s important to remember that adoption is not a monolithic phenomenon. There are as many different adoption stories as there are people who were adopted, and the story is rarely as simple as the storybook ending the national observances would suggest. In reality adoption itself—in its neat legal and public relations packaging—obscures the complexity and intensity of the events that precede it. Namely, the tragic separation of the child from their first mother. More and more, the discourse on adoption is including the voices of adopted people themselves and the narrative is becoming less one-sided.
When we listen to adoptees, we begin to hear a much more nuanced version of the story. Scientific research in this area points to the traumatic impact of relinquishment on the adoptee. This has led many people in the adoption community to think more critically about celebrating National Adoption Awareness Month and the other days of observation. In response, another day of observation was introduced in 2020 by Adoptees Connect, Inc. founder Pamela A. Karanova. Today, October 30th, is Adoptee Remembrance Day. It’s a day to mourn the adopted people who have been tragically lost to murder at the hands of their adoptive parents, who died by suicide (adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide), or were lost to things like incarceration and substance use (adoptees are dramatically overrepresented in prisons and treatment centers.) This is a day to remember family members who were lost to adoption, unable to be found by their biological relatives. To raise awareness of the international adoptees who are living without citizenship or who were deported, lost between the cracks in the legal system. Finally, it’s a day to raise awareness of how much is lost for everyone in the adoption constellation.
British addictions psychotherapist Paul Sunderland states in his excellent lecture about adoptees and addiction, “There is no relinquishment without trauma.” Some people hear this and take exception to what they interpret as the notion that all adoptees suffer from the dire effects of trauma that he describes in his talk. To be clear, Sunderland is not saying that it’s impossible to be a healthy, functional adult adoptee. Fortunately, many people who were adopted have such bonds with their adoptive families as to form a secure base from which to cope with the normal struggles of life. Perhaps that’s why some adoptees don’t feel as if their relinquishment had any lasting negative consequences for them. To the contrary, the point Sunderland is making is simply an objective fact: at the root of every adoption is a catastrophic moment of loss for every member of the adoption triad. The birth mother must grieve the loss of her child—even if it was completely her choice, even if she knows in her bones that it was the best decision she could have made. The adoptive parents—no matter how loving toward their adopted child—must grieve the loss of the biological child they wanted but couldn’t have. The adoptee is faced with the devastating loss of their first mother. For a young child who is not yet psychologically equipped to grieve, they have no choice but to adapt using the limited resources they have at their disposal.
We know that even newborns are capable of perceiving the sudden absence of their biological mother, and that this absence is felt by the baby as a life-threatening emergency. This event has clinically significant impacts on the child’s development and brain chemistry. More often than not, this isn’t a singular event in the adoptees young life. For example, I myself was adopted at three weeks old. I’ve often wondered what took place during those three weeks. Where was I? Who took care of me? What kind of caregivers were they? How did I respond to them? Depending on where and when a child is born, they are typically moved from hospital nurseries to foster care placements, or orphanages during this phase. Their caregivers and settings—and all their attendant voices and smells—change at least once, but often more than once, before they child is finally placed with the adoptive family. From a child’s perspective, there is potentially a whole series of caregiver losses. They have no reason to trust that their adoptive parents won’t also leave them. This fear becomes intensely hard-wired into the developing brain and dictates how the adoptee will approach relationships going forward. The message that is encoded into their psyche is “I’m in danger here, it must be because I’m a bad person, I’m completely worthless, I need to hide my true self and do everything I can to stay connected with others in order to protect myself from further rejection and abandonment.”
The pattern of thoughts, feelings, and adaptations that adoptees frequently develop has led researchers to hypothesize a diagnosis of “Developmental Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”. The following patterns commonly seen in adopted children and adults consistently echo the signs and symptoms that are used to diagnose PTSD:
The relinquished infant’s perception that a life-threatening event is happening to them
Leading to intrusive feelings that this event is repeating over and over in real time
Avoidance of rejection and abandonment triggers
False beliefs about themselves being fundamentally flawed, or the world being a hostile place
Persistent shame, anxiety or depression
Behavior that is irritable, angry, impulsive, self-destructive, or overly acquiescent
Constantly looking out for threats related to loss, shame, rejection and abandonment
Difficulty concentrating or keeping track of time
To add to the complexity of these symptoms, when a trauma occurs at the very beginning of life—before the child has developed language, conscious memory, or even a separate sense of self—there is no pre-trauma personality. If you take for example a person who develops PTSD from military combat; that soldier will be able to recall the kind of person they were before the onset of their symptoms, before the triggers and the avoidance behaviors became woven into the very fabric of their life. In the case of the relinquished child, they cannot easily differentiate their personality from the patterns of trauma adaptations. These adaptations can be overt and disruptive, but often take the form of an extremely agreeable and acquiescent personality. In the latter case, it’s easy for the issues to go unnoticed well into adulthood. Often, it’s only through the process of healing in therapy that adoptees can begin to understand their true identity as separate from the behaviors, thoughts and emotions that they developed in order to protect themselves from the constant threat of abandonment, shame, anxiety and grief.
The adoption reform community strives to raise awareness of these and many other struggles adoptees go through. They seek legislation to correct the ways we are disenfranchised politically and legally. They seek justice for the aspects of adoption that are less than humanitarian, such as trafficking and corrupt adoption systems. They raise awareness for the fact that, tragically, some children fall victim to abusive adoptive parents who were not screened out during the adoption process.
As difficult as these issues are to think about, it’s understandable that they sometimes raise powerful internal conflicts for adopted adults. It’s not unusual for even the most loving adoptive parents to lack the skills and knowledge necessary to help the adoptee understand what they’re going through. With so much societal pressure to draw a happy face on their palm, to feel grateful to their adoptive parents, to accept only the message “you were chosen”, and ignore the painful fact of their relinquishment—it’s hard for adoptees to find space to hear to their own thoughts and feelings and to grieve. However, it is possible to hold space for two conflicting feelings at the same time. To be grateful for a loving adoptive family and acknowledge that one’s opportunities were likely improved by their adoption, while simultaneously recognizing that one suffers from the effects of trauma. As a community, we can make space alongside raising awareness of children in foster care, for a day of mourning to process all this loss.
Even in the best of circumstances, the system of adoption is not perfect. As the adoption narrative becomes more inclusive of adoptee voices, we can begin to normalize the impact of relinquishment trauma. Sometimes the lack of a genetic fit, which is beyond anyone’s control, is the very real reason an adopted person has a vague sense not belonging anywhere. It’s normal to feel as if something is missing if something actually is—namely the presence of the birth mother, in which your brain and body was primed to seek comfort after your birth. Having a deep-seated fear of losing the people close to you is only natural for someone whose earliest experiences of life were shattered by the loss of the one person they needed most. Considering the powerful disruptions in brain chemistry that this experience caused, it makes sense for an adoptee to struggle as an adult with anxiety or depression, or to have difficulty adjusting to life transitions.
If you or someone you know is struggling in these ways, you are far from alone! The world doesn’t always provide a platform for adoptee voices to be heard. Perhaps sometimes, it even gaslights us into thinking that we’re the cause of our own problems. That’s why it’s understandable that you might need a safe space to explore your true thoughts, feelings, and identity. A place to filter out the voices of others. Art therapy is a highly effective method of shedding light on the thoughts and feelings that your body remembers but which your mind cannot recall. It can help you understand the difference between who you are and what happened to you, so that you can begin to unpack the patterns of behavior that you probably grew up thinking were just your personality. By developing awareness of your true identity, you can begin to approach relationships, career, and everyday life challenges with more ease and confidence. You can develop coping strategies that are effective instead of relying on ones that are self-defeating. By training your brain to focus on more reality-based, compassionate messages, you can begin to love yourself more, and to find joy, clarity, and peace in your life.