Admitting Pain Is The Gateway to Spirituality

How come the people who won’t listen and want you to only be grateful for adoption get so angry and defensive when you say you were hurt by adoption? Is it possible for them to connect to G-d and feel whole, when they deny that a child’s pain is real? 

As for me, I feel like a child. I am untrusting, and feel like my life is unfair. That I was stolen from my biological parents and made to be happy about this all my life. It feels like people don’t care about me. These are my real feelings, I can’t be lying about them.

The only way to be spiritual, to reach that high point of being unattached to emotions and our physical needs, is to have had them met growing up. Erik Erikson’s Hierarchy of needs says Trust Versus Mistrust is the first stage of a baby’s development, and John Bradshaw says that if we are lacking in one side being fulfilled, we will not be able to be whole. We will have to polarize ourselves to only feel one side, like splitting. I had no sense of trust as a baby, when I lost my mother and my world fell apart. I was unsure who would take care of me. This would got deeper and deeper, as my later years of being ignored in my pain became my normal, and my true emotions got stuck. I was like a baby who could only tantrum, when my feelings were provoked. That’s what I still feel like, when I don’t feel good about myself. 

I learn to shut these feelings still, with everyone around me expecting me to be an adult. I have no right to be angry, needy and having a hard time functioning as someone my age. I have to be there for my kid. The anger is in me, though and I am writing it now so I can finally be myself.

My world feels like hell. Especially when the Rabbis is who teach “Torah,” and what is known to be “Truth,” tell me that babies’ feelings being heard are not that important to their development, and that my anger is because A- I am a sensitive person and most adoptees don’t feel trauma, and B- I am making up my feelings to make myself feel better. That one doesn’t even make sense, because if I didn’t have pain, what would I be having to feel better from? As for A, I am not over- sensitive, but the way babies feel do shape their outlook- Erik Erikson’s Hierarchy of needs says this. If their trust of a compassionate loving mother is not met, they will experience shock and their needs not being met. The problem is, a baby or child cannot recognize abuse, because they see it as what they are going through, so they cannot stand up for themselves (John Bradshaw). This is how abuse of their emotions are so justified, because parents are free to do as they want and control their children, who are vulnerable and dependent on them. The fact that society doesn’t credit this is outrageous, and allows emotional abuse to keep up. 

This is why adults are angry- because of the inner child who is wounded in them. All feelings are real, if we feel them. Ironically, being spiritual has to come from first being- as in, being allowed to exist. Toxic shame causes one to think they are unworthy of life if they are not doing great things, and it covers the authentic self with a false self (John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You). This causes spiritually to be out of reach, because it takes away the sense of awe and expansion that comes from being. I am sick of the Orthodox community saying emotions are wrong to have. And they repress emotions and pretend to be higher spiritually than those who are hurting and open, by doing actions of being religious, but not even feeling it. They repress and ignore their feelings and then it comes out in destructive ways- on their children, and on preventing them from connecting with their spouse, as it became their beliefs that they do not deserve love without doing things. Why? They are just shells of people who fake life and do not let their true feelings exist. Their childhood needs were never met, and they now guilt themselves for having them.