Adopted

When people are not done with their own ego development, they cannot love their child fully. If they do not know what they are lacking in their ego development, they will not be able to understand and support their child in that stage. For example, if a person did not get the chance to explore as a child, and be innocent and curious as children need, and he is unaware of this need of his, he will suppress it in his child. People do onto others what they do onto themselves, and the only way one can love others is if he loves himself. John Bradshaw says in Healing the Shame that Binds You , toxic shame is where a person has grandiosity, and cannot see himself as human. It  is either being either good or bad; “appear as narcissistic self-enlargement or wormlike helplessness.” It results from the “human will being disabled.” This happens through “the shaming of the emotions.” Emotions are meant to be discharged after an event triggers them, and then the intellect can make sense of it...

There is nothing without love. Life starts within the mother’s womb, where she and her child are one. She is all he knows, and he needs her to develop his emotional brain, until he can become an autonomous self. Therefore, why are the role of women so inferior in society? They basically make up a human’s development of skills, true self-worth (that they are loved by another person), and growth potential.  Nancy Verrier says in Coming Home to Self that the experiences we have during the first three years of life “play a big part in our overall attitudes and beliefs” (Page 382). Personally I felt beaten down a lot, in my emotional body and ability to use my strengths of giving love. I feel like a shadow of a person, in this world, my skills and worth invisible to myself and to everyone else. This has to do with my suffering from the primal wound of being relinquished from my biological mother, and then adopted when I was a few months old. Verrier states, “Severing of the bond wit...

My daughter was trying to get my attention. She was under the covers playing hiding with me, wanting to be close. I pretended to make my hand come in- I guess I was enacting what I felt was going on- that I wasn’t listening to her enough and she was hurt by me, so she was scared of the hand. She was yelping that it’s a monster trying to get her. She laughed so much, with all her pent up stress. It was fun for me too. Soon the hand switched to being her friend, and she pretended to invite it in to her under-the-blanket house, with my “knocking.” She then wanted me to ask her what she did, like a song we sing about the family fingers... and then I played back and asked her if I can go to sleep because I was tired. She said yes, and I rested my hand on her, wherever she felt comfortable. If she didn’t want me to touch her, I lay my hand down on my body. It went on for a while, until I started watching my thoughts as I realized I was in pain and stressed. I felt angry at myself. I recogniz...

“Be grateful for being adopted- you got a chance to live!” It’s not true living when you are not connected to the one who gave you life. You live constantly in a state of confusion and feelings of having been abandoned- as if you’re not worthy of life. That’s not life. True life is being emotionally connected and loved for who you are. Adoptees get neither. Their adoptive mothers are not connected to them, as they do not acknowledge their pain. They are not loved for who they are, because their traits are not mirrored back to them and so they have to fake being something else to be accepted. Nancy Verrier says in Coming Home to Self , “The lack of genetic markers is difficult for adoptive mothers as well as for the adoptee. Both are trying to figure out how to be together. The mother.... keeps trying to figure it out. She cannot mirror the child the way his or her biological mother could have done. The child does not feel reflected, and is constantly hypervigilant, trying to understand...

I get scared a lot that I project my emotions on my daughter, and to what extent is she feeling loved? I often get stressed out about everything in life, but I repress myself to meet her needs. It’s an instinct I have that I was raised with, hyper vigilance as a baby to meet my adoptive parent’s needs of me, so that I disowned my true self. Nancy Verrier in Coming Home To Self states, “hyper vigilance and hyperarousal are manifestations of separation trauma (Page 9). “A human baby is no more primed to be separated from his mother than any other mammal. ... it feels wrong... to both the baby and mother. Neither completely recovers from this abomination of nature” (Page 347). I constantly worry that my kid feels unloved. I have to remind myself that she is not adopted, and is genetically mine. It’s weird how all my life nobody accepted my reality of not having my biological parents in life, and acted like my adoptive parents was all I had and I was made to feel normal. It messes with ...

She wouldn’t look me in the eye. I felt insecure. I guess if I don’t have a handle over my own emotional regulation.... It’s just so crazy- all day she was distracted. And I thought I was loving, but I guess I am more distracted most of the time too. I told her, Mommy is sad. She said she is sad too. I felt soo bad but I can’t help feeling sad and helpless. I prayed but not very fervently, and I realized if I want help I have to truly believe there’s no other help but G-d. Sometimes I rely on food for comfort- but it’s a substitute for intimate relationship, and that never helps things. It’s not real. In Scattered by Gabor Mate, he says that ADD is, “...a lack of inhibition, a chronic under activity of the prefrontal cortex. The cerebral cortex in the frontal lobe is not able to do its job of prioritizing, selection and inhibition.” Therefore the brain cannot focus, too flooded with information (Page 41). This is exactly what I see in my daughter and I. Try as I might, I cannot foc...

When Rabbis say that ego is bad, and having too much is a sin, they are not accounting how the ego can get shamed in childhood and a person has to develop defense mechanisms to protect it. These defenses cause them to not be able to see their ego needs, and have them met. It is frustrating because people are constantly shamed and it’s like being hurt all the time, and not understanding why. They do not know how to protect themselves because their parents were shame-based, and so they lost their true self in childhood. If the relationship with the parents is how the child will relate to G-d, this is very scary. The true self is denied, and the person with a shame-base does not trust themselves. As John Bradshaw says in Healing The Shame That Binds You, having toxic shame is spiritual bankruptcy. Children need healthy boundaries to develop healthily, and toxic shame damages boundaries (Page 104). The child sees their parents as omnipotent, because they see the world through them, so th...

It’s scary how I use reactive formation to get my child to be happy- I pretend to be happy to cover up my feelings that are “not allowed” from my childhood, like anger and sadness. I was fantasy bonded with my adoptive parents, learning to shut down my true self in order to make them happy, and pretend to myself that they loved me. John Bradshaw writes in Healing the Shame That Binds You: “Each child needs to develop boundaries and ego strengths. Children need their ego defenses more than adults. They need them until they can develop good boundaries. To develop strong ego boundaries, children need parents with strong boundaries. No shame-based parent has these. Toxic shame greatly damages our boundaries... a child cannot thrive. Having damaged boundaries is like living in a house without locks on the door. “Along with their egocentricism, nature provides children with primary ego defenses to take the place of boundaries. Each ego defense allows the child to survive situations that ar...

I think my daughter needing me so much has taught me that true feelings will always come through. There is no point in pretending they are not there, trying to excuse them away and ignore them. She goes to my ex for three and a half days, for Passover, and comes back totally different. Her attitude to me shifts, she is uninterested and angry when he tries to leave her with me. She screams and shrieks when I pick her up, wanting to cry her feelings out. I watch and listen, knowing her pain. It is priceless, to be able to listen. I know I love her and she loves me, and that’s all that matters, and like clockwork she calms down and is the happiest she’s been before. Knowing I understand and still love her. Life is a breeze when I can be honest about how I am feelings and in line with it. I was struggling so hard over the last three days to validate my pain. All kinds of feelings came up, most of them unworthiness and abandonment and pain from society. Not being understood. It’s the grea...

I always knew it. The inner child is the most important to heal. To know that you are worthy of love and affection, is the only way to connect to G-d. Not the way I was taught connecting to G-d was- through suffering and killing your ego. That was before I even knew I was worthy of love, and already my self-esteem was so damaged. They didn’t see or care, they acted like I was special and good that way. Being broken was seen as holy. It is not. Holiness has to come with choice. Otherwise it is just forced upon the person and is not genuinely felt. The person becomes robotic and not human, doing everything out of compulsion and not connected to their heart (Healing The Shame That Binds You, Page 95). This comes from unhealthy shame in childhood. John Bradshaw says, toxic shame is dehumanizing, being either inhuman or above-human (Ibid, Page 26). There is no room for the true self. It happens when a child is not allowed to develop into their full self, and is stunted in their ego needs....

I have to write this for my sanity. Get it off my chest because I cannot work out exactly where in my life I went wrong, and have such a hard time being happy. I want to be happy, and relaxed and present. I want to value myself and know that when I tell my daughter I love her, I mean it all the time. I don’t want to be dependent on her to love me, and not know with confidence that she does. I want my life back. Toxic shame causes us to be more or less than human, to disown our true self. Our self becomes shameful, we feel like a mistake. Instead of having healthy shame, which knows that our actions are the mistake. Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw writes that In a shame based person, the true self feels completely lost, because it became internalized (Page 114). It worries me when I see my daughter offering me “treats,” for her own attention.. I know it’s because she doesn’t feel heard enough so she is trying to buy affection. As Gabor Mate says, children live in an ...

I am so angry at how my ex father in law and his son, my ex called me lazy for staying home and raising my daughter. When it is the most important part of her life to have her mother at her side, being emotions attuned to her. They call being connected to your child “lazy.” This shows how they view emotions and connection a child has to his parents- non existent, and a lie used to manipulate the child for the parents own sake. Gabor mate proves it in his book, Scattered. “The relationship with the parents is the earth, the rain, the sun and the shade in which the child’s mental development must blossom” (Page 146). If a mother is not present to be attuned to her child, he develops ADD and problems with learning and exploring the world. He remains need and stuck in the infant stage of needing love foremost. “If the child is to be freed to go through the necessary developmental stages, the attachment relationship with the parent has to be made paramount” (Page 147).  “When the child ...

I realized after reading that book Scattered  by Gabor Mate, where all my frustration comes from in being with my daughter. How I react when she needs attention and I am stressed about something, and it exacerbated the situation to make her even more needy. The reason why I have such low self-esteem, and believing in my ability to parent with empathy - because I never saw my skills as great, due to being ignored for who I was and learning that other’s needs where more important than me.  Page 140 writes, that a child who is forced to disregard his very self and innermost feelings, “assumes automatically that there is something shameful about them, and therefore about her very self.” Page 242 says that a person disvalues his truth and rather places value on what others think is best for him. He loses his own self esteem. On Page 243 it says that a woman who felt like living her life to please others was second nature to her, and interestingly, he explains, “it had neve...

Sometimes I read things and it makes me realize too much, and so I sink into depression and cannot function normally. Eventually it comes out, in my pain being ignored for so long. After I forced myself to pretend everything was fine for too long. I really wanted to write this, to process it. To make myself feel better for what I lacked as a child, and see pain in my own child for. Reading Scattered by Gabor Mate fueled all this realization at how much suffering I go through. He says that babies are wired to need attunement from their mother, and if she is stressed for some reason, they will feel something is wrong and then end up feelings of being alone and like no one can understand. We need this attunement so strongly, and will go all our lives trying to get it fulfilled in others such as a spouse or even our own children. It says that infants, as they grow up will attempt to satisfy the he lack of human contact by other means -addictions (Page 74). This makes me so hurt, becaus...

I am realizing more now that my daughter is affected by my withdrawing because I can’t focus and be present, and I am lacking seriously in love. It comes from the lack of love for my certain parts, thinking they are unlovable. It scares me when I see her talking on and on to me, trying to extract attention from me in neediness to be seen. It also worries me when I see her not feeling comfortable to eat, because I am not paying attention to her and making her feel comfortable. I worry that she hides her pain of not being loved because I am impatient and short with her at times, I guess because my own inner self was not loved enough at her age. She also tries to hand me back food, as if imitating me trying to please her. I also realized that my intake of not the healthiest foods, like corn cakes and cheese, teaches me to want them also, and then I give them to her those kids of food and keep salad and fruits for myself, while she just nimbles on them. This makes me realize that I am no...

Our self-concept in our past makes up our subconscious. If we do not go there, we will never know what is there. When I was 23, I decided to go to an adoption group meeting because I was in touch with my biological older sister, whom I contacted on Instagram when searching her name one day. It brought up my past pain about adoption, and I decided to explore it more. I was already a bit aware that adoption had a big impact on my life, from experiences I had as a teenager getting into painful relationships and needing an understanding of why I got so triggered. My mother was open to therapy for me, as long as it could “fix” my issues so they no longer had to burden her. She wanted me to be better so she didn’t have to deal with my complaints and abnormalities. I knew something was deeply wrong with me, as I had been struggling all my life with myself. My angry thoughts and pain at rejection that came out of nowhere. My mother suggested that I call Nancy Verrier, a famous adoption write...

The first stage of a person’s life, an infant, is when they are in need of love from their mother the most. Not getting it will make it hard to move up to any other stages in life, such as trusting themselves- Erik Erikson’s Autonomy Vs. Self Doubt stage of a toddler. (Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw). It’s unnatural for a mother to go against her instincts and ignore her baby’s cries, dismissing them as not mattering. Then, the baby feels something is wrong in the world, that he can’t trust people to answer him, and this goes about in the rest of his journey in life, because it was his foundation to life. It will seem that nothing is real, and he will not be able to shake the pain that something is missing. He gets addicted to materialism to distract him from the inner wound, and will rely on materialism more and more to feel “good.” Gabor Mate says in Scattered that the invisible atmosphere in a child’s environment most affects his personality “during the critica...