The Primal Wound of Adoption
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Unfortunately, it isn't a priority for the adoption agencies to evaluate and truly look into the psycho-emotional adequacy of the adoptive parents to know what mental and emotional state they are in prior to adoption. And also the psycho-emotional evaluation of the child so the parents can be informed as to what service they would need to provide for the child once in their care and where to obtain those resources for themselves and the child.
Very rarely do adoptive parents seek counseling previous to adopting, perhaps thinking that having a baby obviates the need for such work. Yet there is certainly a lot more work to be done prior to adopting a child. Not only do prospective adoptive parenting need to examine the impact infertility has upon them, but they also need to work through their own issues of abandonment and loss in order to be able to adequately help their adopted child work through theirs.
Adoptive parents must take the time to acquire advanced emotional intelligence in order to be able to connect with this child with empathy and compassion and to respect the integrity of this child's identity. And above all, never forget that they had an existence before you entered their lives. You had to seek to listen to them and help them stabilize in their new life. With an understanding that while choosing to be an adoptive parent, you have now stepped into being the person that will help them through the process of rehabilitation from the trauma of adoption. Your absolute priority must be for the holistic well-being and rehabilitation of this child and not for the purpose of filling a certain void.
Because of this mentality, you already give a "duty" or a "role" or a "responsibility" or "expectation" to this child for them to fulfill in your life, to fill a void within you. I guarantee you that 100%, at any age of adoption, any child will feel this and have great negative and painful impacts on them. It's inevitable, if you don't pay attention to your own inner psychological and emotional conflicts you're going to add another trauma into their lives. This will be that he or she is there to come to service or help with your emotional and psychological needs and wants. This trauma also consists of putting you (the adoptive parent) first and meeting your needs, your mental and emotional health, and your well-being before their own well-being, they see their own struggles as not being important as you don't put them as a priority in your life then it must mean that it is not important. Because no one is helping them, so they forget themselves and prioritize the desires, cares and needs of their primary caregivers above their own even to the point of ignoring their own internal guiding system in order to fit-in, to feel accepted, loved and cared for. The child learns that help will never come, the pain they feel inside is normal and that they will just need to learn how to live with it. Sometimes adopted children are often reminded of how lucky they are and how grateful they should be to be adopted into this new family. Learning to be content with their current situation and that's exactly what they learn growing up. That love means fulfilling a void, a need, and a desire at the expense of your own.
This newly learned connection pattern is an innate instinctual method of survival because the child knows by instinct that he or she will not survive in this world alone. So they don't have a choice but to adapt that way.
Recognizing this as a parent will help you realize how much of an unjust responsibility and heavy load to put on the back of a child who has just had all his life shattered to a point that the only resource at their disposal at this point is their survival instincts.
until they receive the proper help their biological roots remain cut and separated which is crucial to finding and forming one's identity.
So as a parent. Please keep in mind that the child may at first appear physically well and healthy, but if you could see and feel his emotional, mental and energetic body. You will find that he or she is a child in need of immediate, urgent, unconditional attention. Just as if the injuries was physical and bleeding out. There is no difference, this child needs your help and support, empathy, compassion and the help of an expert in this field.
Please Consider that the child will need you to provide professional therapy and rehabilitation sessions every week and follow the expert's instructions from day one, it is your responsibility as an adoptive parent to take care of the holistic well-being of the child, being able to provide for its needs adequately.
Also consider that you, too, will need personal therapy to be able to support this child, you need to provide to your own needs adequately first prior to adoption. Because otherwise you risk continuing bad relational habits and creating more traumas for the child If you don't pay attention to your own internal relationship patterns. Otherwise, this development can create unhealthy and destructive bonds of co-dependency. Look first, what exactly is the emptiness that you feel inside of you? Do you have codependency habits in your home or with your partner? How is your relationship with your own parents? How is your sense of identity? Not being able to have a child naturally? How did that impact you? How did it impact your partner? Did you talk to anyone about it? How does your partner truly feel about adoption? do you have any unresolved issues you need to heal from in order to not pass down unprocessed generational trauma to your new adopted child?
A good place to start is to look for your inner child first.
Figure out how to provide for it, heal it and take care of him or her first and then you can fulfill your desire to adopt a child.
This is the mentality that our society should strive for. this is a goal that we all should all try to achieve for ourselves and for all children on this planet.
The adoption agency will not do this assessment and evaluation with you, unfortunately, because it is not their priority. It's a business, after all, let's not forget that. It's up to you to take responsibility for yourself. This new child depends on you now and he or she is a gift that will allow you to know yourself better and become a better person overall for you and the people around you.
in mainstream psychology, they recognize that some of the issues raised by psychologists regarding adoptive parents relate to sexual repression, feeling rejected by the adoptive child, unconscious aversion to parenthood, overprotectiveness and insecurity that the child is really theirs or the inability to come to terms with their infertility.
For a child, abandonment is a form of death, not just the death of the mother or father or the separation from the biological parents. But also the death of a part of himself. This primary being of oneself which makes one feel whole.
Adoptees need to understand that their experience is real.
Just because they do not consciously remember it does not make it any less devastating. The lack of resources for the psycho-emotional state of adopted children is greatly neglected in our society and they are hardly recognized. An adopted child comes into a new family with a broken heart and a great sense of grief that are unacknowledged or tended to. Therefore, these wounds have not healed. Adoptive parents welcomed the adoptee and expect the child to be grateful for this opportunity while the internal pain and suffering are overlooked.
Psychologists often talk about the first three years of life as being the most important years of emotional development. Our current understanding of prenatal psychology has made many people realize that the utero environment is an important part of a baby's well-being. Although when it comes to adoption, there seems to be a blackout in awareness.
Adoption is considered by many to be merely a concept when in fact adoption is a traumatic experience for the adoptee. It begins with the separation from their biological mother and ends with living with a stranger. For most of their life, they may have denied or repressed their feelings about this experience having had no sense that they would be acknowledged or validated. They may, instead, have been made to feel as if they should be grateful for this monumental manipulation of their destiny. Somewhere within them, however, they do have feelings about this traumatic experience, and Having these feelings does not mean that they are abnormal, sick, or crazy.
It means that they are wounded as a result of having suffered a devastating loss and that their feelings about this are legitimate and need to be acknowledged and validated, rather than ignored and challenged.
The severing of that connection between the adoptive child and their birthmother causes a Primal Wound, which affects the adoptee's sense of self. This often manifests in a sense of loss, basic mistrust, anxiety, depression, emotional or behavioral problems, and difficulties in creating healthy bonding patterns and attachments in romantic relations or any relationships in general. The awareness of that original separation, whether it is consciously or unconsciously recognized, was the result of a " choice" made by the mother. This decision affects the adoptee's self-esteem and self-worth and a deep and painful longing for a sense of belonging and being whole again.
Also, a greater choice was made by adopting agencies and adoptive parents to conform to their ideals of what purpose they were adopted for. The feeling of having the carpet swept from under you and having no control nor choice in the matter left some deep profound scars, emotional signatures, and negative emotional feedback loops followed by triggers. This is a form of PTSD that has been overlooked for way too long.
In this session, I aim to help you heal this Primal Wound for Adoptees as I was adopted back in 1994 at the age of 2 years old. I can speak from my own experience of the struggles and wounds this Primal Wound causes and how it can impact one's life.