'Primal Wound'--Why is the concept so upsetting to some?

Lorraine

Every expert who studies adoption acknowledges that children are best raised by their natural mothers, unless undue circumstances intervene. Being wrenched from the mother that nurtured you in the womb, whose smells and voice are familiar in an organic, original sense, and given off to new people--strangers--is a wrenching experience with a deep and lasting psychological impact.

Some call it a "primal wound," a phrase made popular by psychologist Nancy Verrier with the publication of her 1993 book The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child.

Attachment disorder in adoption--and parents who don't recognize it

Jane

John Brooks has a message for those who have adopted or are thinking of adopting an older child or a child from another country. It is NOT like adopting a pet. A child--any child--but especially those who have been traumatized need love and acceptance, not harshness and punishment.

The Girl Behind the Door is John Brooks's memoir about the 18 month old girl he and his wife, Erika, adopted from a Polish orphanage in 1991, and who killed herself at age 17. Like many couples whose fertility treatments fail, the Brookses turned to adoption. They rejected domestic adoption because of the risk that the mother-to-be would change their mind. The foreign adoption scene looked bleak, long waits, countries closing their doors. Then they learned that a few children were available in Polish orphanages. Since Erika's parents had immigrated from Poland and she spoke Polish, it seemed a perfect fit.

Part 4: Explaining reality to my granddaughter.

Lorraine

Continuing the story of a break in my relationship with my daughter, reason unknown, from a chapter of my memoir-in-progress, Hole in My Heart. For nearly two decades we had a relationship with various breaks, but now, settled into a happy marriage, we had been getting along swimmingly for a couple of years. Then suddenly, she broke off contact without a word. I was in the dark. Previous sections of this are on the blog, starting on August 6.

(Copyright Lorraine Dusky, 2013. May not be republished in any form.)

Fall 2003. Carol Schaefer, author of The Other Mother, is leading a group of us in a healing session at a retreat of Concerned United Birthparents, held that year in Williamsburg, Virginia. I’ve been on a panel, I’ve spoken of taking responsibility for our actions, no matter what. Now as I listen to Carol’s soothing voice, guiding our visualization, I see Jane coming towards me, walking over a bridge, carrying a

When all else fails, call us 'bitter and angry' first mothers

Jane

First Mother Forum has been getting flack from adoptive mothers and first mothers over what they claim to be our position on adoption and our characterizations of them. We're flattered we've caught their attention. Attacks are the harbinger of change.

We're also distressed because what our critics write is simply not true. We haven't denigrated all adoptive mothers or called them names as they accuse us of doing. Contrary to what they write, we are not against all adoption; in truth we have praised adoption as a loving act for a child who needs a family. (See What We Think About Adoption, link below)

An adoptive mother speaks: Why adoptive parents resist reunions

Jane

"Raising an adopted child is not like raising a biological child" adoptive mother "Gale"  wrote to First Mother Forum. After years of infertility, Gale and her husband adopted domestically a girl, now 19, and a boy, now 17, as infants. Gale, a nurse and writer who lives in Atlanta, asked us at FMF for advice about her son who wanted to meet his birth mother. We suggested working with a counselor to contact the birth mother and, if she was agreeable to meeting the boy, to encourage the birth mother to put aside any issues she may have and work together as a team for the boy's benefit.

She thanked us and went on to write: "Also, since I know you and [fellow blogger]Lorraine are devoted to helping adoptees and birth mothers, I’d like to offer an adoptive parent perspective ... that may help you understand when adoptive parents are resistant [to reunions]." We eagerly accepted her offer and post her email here.

Jennifer Lauck's "Found" reveals the painful truth of adoption

Jane

“This is your mother,’ my mother’s voice is weak and broken, a frail warbling. ‘I want you to know not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about you.’” Thus begins 44-year-old Jennifer Caste Lauck’s reunion with her mother Catherine as recounted in her new memoir, Found.


As she hears Catherine’s voice, Lauck feels "a rise of love so pure and utterly familiar. It is the same feeling I have for my children, which began sprouting the moment I knew I was pregnant with them.…I know I have been waiting--for my true mother, for Catherine—in order to finally release this universal love in the other direction. Love has always been in my heart waiting for the right person to trip the code.”

The Trauma of Being Adopted

Lorraine

While adoptive parents like Scott Simon present the happy-dappy point of view about adoption and the effects it is not likely to have on his children, there are experts who disagree quite radically. And as a first/birth mother I have been reading, thinking and writing about the myriad issues my daughter, relinquished in 1966, faced, and the host of problems stemming from them.

Does surrender (for the birth/first mother) and adoption (for the child) lead to PTSD?

One adoptee Facebook friend, Robert Wilson Harrington McCullough, wrote a note a couple of weeks ago that I want to share with readers all--natural moms, nurturing moms (to use his phraseology), and adoptees because he discusses the brain wiring that makes some of us so sensitive to all matters adoption.

For instance, the other day, my neighbor and friend, Yvonne, whom I've written about before, and who has never heard of an adoption that wasn't peachy-keen and the adoptee just happy as a pig in a sty to be raised in a family not their own and original, told me that she heard that another neighbor, a young man whom we both like tremendously, and the girl friend who moved in with him a couple of months ago are now looking into adoption. I say young, because I'm in my sixties; he's probably either late thirties, most likely forties, and the age of his girl friend is probably the same. In other words, they are  like a lot of young people today...waiting and waiting and waiting to settle down with a partner until the time when conception comes easy is long over. I suppose we do have The Pill thank for this...the 50th anniversary of The Pill, incidently was...Mother's Day.* But I digress.

Their answer to the age old dilemma of fecundity decreasing with the onset of the forties and perhaps, peri-menopause? Adoption. If Sandra Bullock, Angelina, Madonna, Meg Ryan, Sharon Stone, Katherine Heigl, Michelle Pheiffer, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Hugh Jackman, Senator (TX, R) Kay Bailey Hutchinson,** and the lady down the block all have adopted children, why can't we?

Yvonne then held up two fingers entwined, opened her eyes widely, and nodded her head in approval and hope. Not exactly the f!@#ing reaction I was having. I said a few things nearly incoherent words about stealing babies in China and India to feed the market here, that adoption screws up people way more than she's ever acknowledged, that why didn't they support the poor woman who couldn't keep her child, and that she had no idea what she was talking about before I left. Grrr...that was part of my buildup to Mother's Day.*

You wonder why this birth/first/natural mother went into a funk in the middle of the week? That did not help. I am not really sure what I am going to do about our "friendship." Our lives have been somewhat entwined for several years, and Yvonne is 80 and needs some assistance from a neighbor; there is much else about her that is worthy. She has called me "her youngest sister." It was only about a year ago I realized how truly far apart we are about the realities of adoption, and how much that would lead to such a split in our relationship. I asked her to read my memoir, Birthmark, and she did, and she was moved, she said...but that did not change her thinking. One of her oldest friends is an adoptive grandmother to a child or two from Siberia, and that woman's husband has called me: our greatest nightmare. Cool. They are my greatest nightmare.

Now I am not sure I even want to be around Yvonne. I spoke to my old-pal-in-arms Florence Fisher yesterday, and her advice is to simply stay away. I know that for the immediate future, I sure as hell need to do that. She may be one of those toxic people in my life that therapists talk about today.  But it's not going to be easy, she lives too close; we've been too close. She's like family, only she's not. Family.

But my reaction to Yvonne, while I do not think it was an over-reaction, led me back to the essay that Wilson Harrington McCullough wrote. We have written about the after effects of surrendering a child to adoption before: Does giving up a child for adoption make you sick? I maintain the effects of the trauma of relinquishing a child are real and lasting and can not help but be detrimental to one's health. A primal wound, in other words. And I doubt many women can somehow bury thoughts of the baby who is lost once they sign the surrender papers and move on without examining what has happened to them, and the child.There must be a group of them, and many of them are the women who reject a reunion with their surrendered "birth" children.

Anyway, all  of this is by way of a buildup to Robert Wilson Harrington McCullough's piece, which I found enlightening. Some of you on Facebook may have read it already, but I wanted to share it here:

An article in this month's Scientific American triggered some musings in my cabeza. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits The premise is that neuroscience is now using imaging to map what actually occurs in the brain in realtime for patients suffering depression, OCD, ADHD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental health disorders.

The human brain is a complex mechanism which is constantly evolving, building new pathways along prewired inherited structures. I was particularly interested in their findings on PTSD, because many of the effects common to adoptees are similar to PTSD.

I believe Nancy Verrier's assesment of the Primal Wound as a trauma is essentially correct. The separation of an infant from the only environment he has known since quickening in his mother's womb has deep emotional effects at the beginning of life. Surrender of a child is likewise a trauma; though relinquishment usually occurs at a later age than adoption, a huge loss like this is no less a severe interruption of a person's personality than "battle fatigue".

What the article pointed out was that the brain has normal processes (called extinction) to gradually diminish the effects of trauma which under normal circumstances make the memory recede in significance. In PTSD, however, the person becomes stuck in a loop which bypasses the parts of the brain which normally reduce the pain; in fact, the brain rewires itself to the point where slight triggers can cause anxiety and stress equal or even more crippling than the original trauma.

The implications are that there are ways to rewire the pathways and learned responses to overcome this, by therapy and targeted medications. I agree with this; the way to overcome irrational fear is to expose oneself to the causes of fear in a controlled, nonthreatening environment, and gradually reinforce new responses instead of falling back into the old pattern of trigger/response.

While I was pondering that, I heard a segment on NPR dealing with foster children who age out of the system at 18. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125729965

What struck me from this was the similarity to adoptee experiences; the feeling of not fitting in, of high rates of involvement with criminal justice system, of becoming single parents at an early age, and of abandonment issues. The defining factor between success and failure seemed to often depend upon the parenting they received; most of them say had it not been for a good home placement, they would have had real problems like many of their peers.

This led me to recall an Ira Glass segment on This American Life I heard several years ago: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/360/Switched-At-Birth

It is about two girls in Wisconsin who were accidentally switched at birth, and the struggles they had fitting into their families; it's hard to grow up the only extrovert in an introverted family, and vice versa! This story pointed out that it is not adoption per se which causes the feelings of incomplete identity, but the transferrence from one's genetic family to a nonrelated family.

Mulling over all these topics led to this thought; Normal personal and social development involves building the mental pathways, control mechanisms and coping strategies necessary to become a functional, happy member of society. This development, training and education normally begins within a family setting. Much of this occurs through observing and interacting with family members - People who are genetically similar! It is no secret that physical traits (hair color, stature, features) are shared in families; I can attest in my own biological children and family that intellectual and emotional traits also run in families.

My insight is this; most people develop coping mechanisms to compensate for neurologically based behaviors whether they be good or bad. They pass physical traits as well as behaviors along to their children, through both nature and nurture. For example, a biochemical tendency toward depression because of an imbalance in serotonin reuptake, or to ADHD because of similar imbalances, can be inherited - but successful strategies the parent learned to compensate can also be taught, and indeed are observed from infancy by the child. That is the normal course of human development over most of our history. However, it works best when parents and children share DNA. (Of course, unsuccessful behavior can also be taught - not every family is functional. Some families keep the "fun" in "dysfunctional" from generation to generation!)

When a child is transferred to a different biological family, the strategies may be inappropriate. Indeed, they may even aggravate the problem, by using the wrong methods, or disciplining incorrectly. For example, a non-musical family cannot understand why their non-biological child is always whistling or singing or beating time with their hands; not understanding it themselves, they decide the child is inattentive or preoccupied so they may even punish them for behavior which would be encouraged and developed in the correct biological family! It's like trying to read a Russian novel without a Russian/English dictionary. My point is that half the resources available to the biological child are missing in nongenetic families.

I believe this is at the heart of why so many adopted children, foster children and even children of divorce sometimes have social adjustment problems; they lack the appropriate compensating mechanisms which children raised in their biological families gain by proximity to those who share their emotional and intellectual hardwiring!

Certainly there were behaviors of my daughter that she was "corrected" for. In some ways she did fit into her new family of genetic strangers; in so many other ways, she did not, and the more I learned about them, the more difficult it became for me to accept what her being adopted meant to her sad life.
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*For those who follow astrology even a bit, this year Mother's Day came during Mercury in retrograde when all kinds of communication and travel gets screwed up: Ergo the Greenland volcano erupting and disrupting traffic, the Times Square would-be bomber, the eruptions of anger that various comments have unleashed in the blogosphere, dishes sent from Michigan that were largely broken because the UPS guy did not mark them "Fragile"[a personal reference], flowers not delivered [ditto], flashes of anger when I spoke to my husband, and there's more. The good news is that Mercury goes out of retrograde on Tuesday (tomorrow), though it will take a while--a couple of weeks--for everything and everyone to calm down.

** If you know any more celebrity adoptions, please add them in comments. Thanks.  

Valentine's Day Message: I'm sorry without caveats

Hello...this is blogger Linda's cute house, decked out for Valentine's Day, Saturday.

While mostly we write about what is tearing our hearts out, I want to share today and through the weekend the wonderful heart-warming card that I received from my daughter Jane in 1984, when she was seventeen.

This is really huge card--by huge I mean it's 20 inches by 12.5 inches--and the picture on the front is of a little guy in red outfit, a "Ziggy" character who is surrounded by a sea of people, doctors, nurses, tennis players, firemen, ladies in hats, cops, students, a Frenchman in a beret, a guy with a cello, hippies, a witch, a woman with a briefcase, a hobo, a waiter, a maid, and so forth...and the message above Ziggy's head says:

JUST THINK, VALENTINE! ONCE WE WERE PERFECT STRANGERS, BUT THEN FATE STEPPED IN, AND THROUGH SOME MIRACLE, OUT OF ALL THE MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, OUR PATHS CROSSED!

Inside the card says: NOW WHAT?

Jane had written a note inside that said: I just wanted to say I love you (underlined several times) in a very special way, to a very special person, on a very special day. Love, Jane.

She added ♥ and a smiley face.

So now you understand that though we mostly write about the troubles of a relationship with our children, there were some very warm/loving/happy times...which I need to remind myself because I also remember this:

I hadn't seen her for a while and she was not speaking to me, when I was asked by her parents to come to Wisconsin to take care of our granddaughter while they were away. I jumped at the chance. Jane was married and living with her husband in a one-bedroom cabin in the woods, but granddaughter Kim, who had moved in with the grandparents when she was six, was still living with them. Jane was probably working full time at that point, and anyway, her ability to manage a job and Kim was questionable. I know it's confusing, but so was Jane's life. Her epilepsy made her life unstable.

The adoptive family returned, and we went to Mass Sunday, the day before I was to leave. I had not seen Jane the entire two weeks I was there. Jane and her husband were expected to be at Mass, as the Catholic church in their small town in Wisconsin has only one service on Sunday. I was standing at the end of a pew. Jane came in as the Mass was starting and said hello to what seemed like half the people in the church, continuing to nod to this one and that one even after she slipped in next to me. I felt like an absolute idiot, as half of the people she was saying hello to knew who I was (the dreaded birth mother!) because I had been there several times, knew the priest, et cetera. After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, Jane at last turned to me and said, Hello.

If there was ever an way to show me how angry she was with being adopted that was it. We--her adoptive parents, granddaughter, Jane and her husband--went out to brunch afterward, but again she barely acknowledged my existence. Her parents tried to normalize the situation without much success. After brunch, I did speak to Jane and her husband without anyone else around outside the restaurant. I do not remember what was said. The next day I flew back to New York. I still had absolutely no idea what I had done to cause her to reject me. We had not had an argument. She never gave a reason, she had just drifted away. I felt terrible, I cried a lot. Linda talked me through Jane's birthday one year.

In the middle of this separation and silence, I was on a panel at a CUB (Concerned United Birthparents) retreat. There I was talking about how to normalize our feelings and heartache, trying to help other mothers learn from my experience, when my own daughter wasn't speaking to me. At an imaging workshop given by Carol Schaefer, author of The Other Mother, I ended up in tears as I visualized Jane walking across a bridge with a present for me, a small package wrapped in rich pink tissue paper. Who knows what that was except my fondest hopes....
I heard Nancy Verrier, author of The Primal Wound, say that we mothers should once say to our surrendered daughters and sons: I'm sorry. I'm sorry you were adopted. That's it. No adding, It was the times, you don't know the pressure I was under, my parents made me do it--just a simple, I'm sorry I let it happen. I'm sorry.

I called Jane a few weeks later on a Saturday afternoon, and, with pounding heart and a flush of sweat (yes, I was anxious), did just that. Said I was sorry, plain and simple. She said she didn't know what to say, but we spoke for over an hour. It was a good conversation. She did not call back the following week or month. More time passed.

But one day, Jane called out of the blue, and we went on as if the disconnect had never occurred.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry you were adopted. If it's possible, every adoptee needs to hear those words once. Maybe the occasion of Valentine's Day--an ancient holiday with roots in the pagan culture--is the time to do it. Adoption leaves a lot of broken hearts in its wake. If it's possible to help a healing, and mend a sorry heart filled with hurt, maybe this is one way.--lorraine

PS:In the bizarre-news category: Kristen Chenowith, whom we previously blogged about as she said in her memoir that she was not interested in searching for her mother, says that she believes her natural mother may have congratulated her at a beauty pageant before disappearing in a crowd. Could be true, I suppose, as some of the stories in the National Enquirer are. And having heard a million strange stories about mother/child relationships, this just might be true.