The Truth About Being Adopted
“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 how to be in this particular family” (Page 387).
The adoptee uses coping mechanisms to help him deal with having to call a woman his mother, when she is not his mother. Therefore his behavior is from the experience and not his true personality, but many adoptive parents fail to see this. He may either act defiantly to avoid connecting to the adoptive mother and the potential of another loss, or become compliant. However neither is the true self of the adoptee. “In order for parents to be helpful to their child, they must first discern what is the true personality of the child-what seems natural to him- and what is a behavioral method of communicating his pain.... they can use his behavior as a means to understanding more about his pain” (386).
Since this was never recognized in me, that my acting out and my passive behavior was in fact a result of my trauma, I was never understood or mirrored in who I was. It reinforced the fact that I felt “wrong” and “flawed” in my true personality. I took my own behavior as part of me, telling myself I was bad, or not worthy of being seen, as my adoptive parents did not object with it.
“When one’s first perception outside the womb is the disappearance of the mother, one’s perception is going to be very different from someone who remained with mother.”
“Implicit memory of having been separated from the birth mother may register as a form of abuse on the infant mind and may color the interpretation of future interactions with adoptive parents” (Page 32). The quality of a relationship to their parents are important in forming a child’s brain regulation. Children who are abused carry inordinate amount of the stress hormones cortisol and/or catecholamines in their system. They also have elevated amounts of adrenaline acting on their central nervous system and remain in constant state of alert to danger.” Siegel says, “excessive stress hormone release appears... to impair the hippocampal and amygdala contributions to memory processing. Under certain conditions, explicit memory may be blocked from encoding at the actual time of the experience. Trauma may be proposed to be such a situation... Unresolved traumatic experiences may involve an impairment of the cordial consolidation process, which leaves the memories of these events out of permanent memory’ (1999)” (Pages 32-33). Implicit memory imprint is more difficult to overcome, because unlike explicit memory, it never changes. Therefore “the earlier the trauma, the more damaging the affect on the brain” (Page 33).
“Trauma which accurs during the period of normal childhood amnesia, which includes immediate postnatal separation from mother, will be processed as implicit memory... the danger here is that, as Siegel says, ‘These implicit recollections are not usually subject to a process of self-reflection, as in ‘Why am I doing this or feeling this way,’ individuals may sense these experiences as just defining who they are” (Page 33).
Adoptees can relive their experiences of abandonment by responding to relationships as though everyone is going to leave them. “Knowing about implicit memory allows us the opportunity to free ourselves from the prison of the past” (Page 27).
Adoptees seem to have no sense of cause and affect in their lives, as “One can no longer trust the natural order because the event which normally follows birth is that the infant is locked into sublime symbiosis with the mother... the mothers disappearance is like falling through the universe.. floating through space with no grounding.... There is no reflection of self, no assurance that the infant is all right. Not only has the adoptee been betrayed by the mother, but also by G-d. There can be no more trust in the transcendent order of the divine. The adoptee may feel abandoned, disconnected, alone, and cast out of the human and divine systems. He feels counterfeit or false. Many adoptees feel as if they do not really exist, or, as the very least, as if they have no right to exist. For many the risk of connection is synonymous with the risk of annihilation” (Page 19).
The adoptee uses coping mechanisms to help him deal with having to call a woman his mother, when she is not his mother. Therefore his behavior is from the experience and not his true personality, but many adoptive parents fail to see this. He may either act defiantly to avoid connecting to the adoptive mother and the potential of another loss, or become compliant. However neither is the true self of the adoptee. “In order for parents to be helpful to their child, they must first discern what is the true personality of the child-what seems natural to him- and what is a behavioral method of communicating his pain.... they can use his behavior as a means to understanding more about his pain” (386).
Since this was never recognized in me, that my acting out and my passive behavior was in fact a result of my trauma, I was never understood or mirrored in who I was. It reinforced the fact that I felt “wrong” and “flawed” in my true personality. I took my own behavior as part of me, telling myself I was bad, or not worthy of being seen, as my adoptive parents did not object with it.
“When one’s first perception outside the womb is the disappearance of the mother, one’s perception is going to be very different from someone who remained with mother.”
“Implicit memory of having been separated from the birth mother may register as a form of abuse on the infant mind and may color the interpretation of future interactions with adoptive parents” (Page 32). The quality of a relationship to their parents are important in forming a child’s brain regulation. Children who are abused carry inordinate amount of the stress hormones cortisol and/or catecholamines in their system. They also have elevated amounts of adrenaline acting on their central nervous system and remain in constant state of alert to danger.” Siegel says, “excessive stress hormone release appears... to impair the hippocampal and amygdala contributions to memory processing. Under certain conditions, explicit memory may be blocked from encoding at the actual time of the experience. Trauma may be proposed to be such a situation... Unresolved traumatic experiences may involve an impairment of the cordial consolidation process, which leaves the memories of these events out of permanent memory’ (1999)” (Pages 32-33). Implicit memory imprint is more difficult to overcome, because unlike explicit memory, it never changes. Therefore “the earlier the trauma, the more damaging the affect on the brain” (Page 33).
“Trauma which accurs during the period of normal childhood amnesia, which includes immediate postnatal separation from mother, will be processed as implicit memory... the danger here is that, as Siegel says, ‘These implicit recollections are not usually subject to a process of self-reflection, as in ‘Why am I doing this or feeling this way,’ individuals may sense these experiences as just defining who they are” (Page 33).
Adoptees can relive their experiences of abandonment by responding to relationships as though everyone is going to leave them. “Knowing about implicit memory allows us the opportunity to free ourselves from the prison of the past” (Page 27).
Adoptees seem to have no sense of cause and affect in their lives, as “One can no longer trust the natural order because the event which normally follows birth is that the infant is locked into sublime symbiosis with the mother... the mothers disappearance is like falling through the universe.. floating through space with no grounding.... There is no reflection of self, no assurance that the infant is all right. Not only has the adoptee been betrayed by the mother, but also by G-d. There can be no more trust in the transcendent order of the divine. The adoptee may feel abandoned, disconnected, alone, and cast out of the human and divine systems. He feels counterfeit or false. Many adoptees feel as if they do not really exist, or, as the very least, as if they have no right to exist. For many the risk of connection is synonymous with the risk of annihilation” (Page 19).
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