I wrote a blog not too long ago about ways adopters can "help" their adoptees cope with being adopted. Let's face it, it was a list of a couple of do's, and mostly don'ts. Problem. I've since come to a realization, with the help of adopter apologist Nancy Verrier, Adoptive Families Magazine, Adoptions with Love, Brave love, and Gladney adoptions (not to mention multiple mixed groups of adopters and adoptees on Facebook)...
There's nothing you can do to make it better. If you're the kind of person who thinks it's ok to adopt, you're NOT the kind of person who can help an adoptee cope with abandonment and relinquishment.
Even Nancy Verrier, author of the primal wound and supposed "adoptee advocate", was not the kind of woman who could do any good for an adoptee. Yes, her points about developmental trauma and the severing of the maternal/infant bond are spot on. But not even she can own her adopter shit. For instance: "...although she saw her relationship with her adoptive mother as a negative, until doing [regression therapy] she never considered the part she may have played in making the relationship difficult. ... It had never occurred to Janice that her adoptive mother needed to feel accepted by her and she may have instead felt rejected; ... It is interesting to consider, though, that adoptees may not realize the impact they had on their adoptive parents at the beginning of their lives." Or, on a random turn to a random page, I find: "Sometimes helping their child heal his wounds becomes difficult for the adoptive parents, because in the process of communicating his pain (by acting out the chaos and anger he feels inside), the parents become wounded." Or "There are ways in which an adult adoptee can help heal the wounds of his or her parents as well as those of the siblings." As if the onus for their damage, feelings, and healing are somehow OUR responsibility, after they helped inflict the trauma that "damaged them". This is what I mean. This woman is a so-called "adoptee advocate", but she absolutely refuses to own that adopters are not ideal, or even proper, parents, and that adoptees have no choice or responsibility for what was inflicted on us.
That's right, adopters, I said inflicted. And no, I didn't mean anything else. Don't you think you're innocent little lambs, because you're NOT.
Adopters, by and large, are fragile and selfish. The desperate desire to parent and inability to do so for whatever reason causes a kind of psychosis (for lack of a better term at this point) in their little one-track adopter brains. It makes taking someone else's child, changing its identity, altering its legal documents, severing its familial connections, and pretending it's theirs seem like a GOOD idea. It apparently makes them feel like some kind of superior entity that can be exchanged for the child's actual mother with no repercussions. "I can be family with a complete stranger in infant form! I can be your mom! I promise to love you! Wait... why doesn't this infant stop crying? What's wrong with it? I feel rejected! I'm going to punish you for rejecting me for the rest of your life! How DARE you want your real mother? I'M your mother now, godDAMNit!" (As long as you're good, loyal, faithful, normal, well-adjusted, happy, grateful, and you don't want contact with your actual family, that is... all of these are dealbreakers, and will get you "rehomed" or shoved in some juvenile lockup somewhere. Adopters and Nancy call it "acting out" and it wounds them to witness our pain. So they shove us off to the side somewhere or get rid of us altogether. Problem solved.) "But as long as you're all those things, and you don't damage ME, I'll be your mom! I'll love you, albeit conditionally."
That's the short short version. It takes years to get to the godDAMNit. Nevertheless, I KNOW I'm not the only adoptee who knows or is "related to" this adopter. Nancy Verrier's daughter is "related to" this adopter too.
Funny thing... the only thing that makes a child related to an adoptive parent is a court order.
They HATE it when you point that out.
In short, you cannot force a child to attach to you out of its will to survive, and have that attachment transcend its need of you.
That's the problem. Someone who's desperate to adopt, someone who goes through the adoption process while remaining willingly blind to what they are doing while they're doing it, is NOT fit to be a parent. Much less are they fit to handle a child suffering under the deepest trauma of all: the preverbal loss of an entire family and life all at once. It seems it would take a very special person to handle this kind of trauma appropriately. And it seems I haven't come across an adopter yet who fits that bill.
You aren't equipped to handle what's happening with us and to us. You don't "deserve" to be a parent. And those adoptees? They "deserve" a parent who can offer them what you can't... actual permanence and connection.
There's nothing you can do to make it better. If you're the kind of person who thinks it's ok to adopt, you're NOT the kind of person who can help an adoptee cope with abandonment and relinquishment.
Even Nancy Verrier, author of the primal wound and supposed "adoptee advocate", was not the kind of woman who could do any good for an adoptee. Yes, her points about developmental trauma and the severing of the maternal/infant bond are spot on. But not even she can own her adopter shit. For instance: "...although she saw her relationship with her adoptive mother as a negative, until doing [regression therapy] she never considered the part she may have played in making the relationship difficult. ... It had never occurred to Janice that her adoptive mother needed to feel accepted by her and she may have instead felt rejected; ... It is interesting to consider, though, that adoptees may not realize the impact they had on their adoptive parents at the beginning of their lives." Or, on a random turn to a random page, I find: "Sometimes helping their child heal his wounds becomes difficult for the adoptive parents, because in the process of communicating his pain (by acting out the chaos and anger he feels inside), the parents become wounded." Or "There are ways in which an adult adoptee can help heal the wounds of his or her parents as well as those of the siblings." As if the onus for their damage, feelings, and healing are somehow OUR responsibility, after they helped inflict the trauma that "damaged them". This is what I mean. This woman is a so-called "adoptee advocate", but she absolutely refuses to own that adopters are not ideal, or even proper, parents, and that adoptees have no choice or responsibility for what was inflicted on us.
That's right, adopters, I said inflicted. And no, I didn't mean anything else. Don't you think you're innocent little lambs, because you're NOT.
Adopters, by and large, are fragile and selfish. The desperate desire to parent and inability to do so for whatever reason causes a kind of psychosis (for lack of a better term at this point) in their little one-track adopter brains. It makes taking someone else's child, changing its identity, altering its legal documents, severing its familial connections, and pretending it's theirs seem like a GOOD idea. It apparently makes them feel like some kind of superior entity that can be exchanged for the child's actual mother with no repercussions. "I can be family with a complete stranger in infant form! I can be your mom! I promise to love you! Wait... why doesn't this infant stop crying? What's wrong with it? I feel rejected! I'm going to punish you for rejecting me for the rest of your life! How DARE you want your real mother? I'M your mother now, godDAMNit!" (As long as you're good, loyal, faithful, normal, well-adjusted, happy, grateful, and you don't want contact with your actual family, that is... all of these are dealbreakers, and will get you "rehomed" or shoved in some juvenile lockup somewhere. Adopters and Nancy call it "acting out" and it wounds them to witness our pain. So they shove us off to the side somewhere or get rid of us altogether. Problem solved.) "But as long as you're all those things, and you don't damage ME, I'll be your mom! I'll love you, albeit conditionally."
That's the short short version. It takes years to get to the godDAMNit. Nevertheless, I KNOW I'm not the only adoptee who knows or is "related to" this adopter. Nancy Verrier's daughter is "related to" this adopter too.
Funny thing... the only thing that makes a child related to an adoptive parent is a court order.
They HATE it when you point that out.
In short, you cannot force a child to attach to you out of its will to survive, and have that attachment transcend its need of you.
That's the problem. Someone who's desperate to adopt, someone who goes through the adoption process while remaining willingly blind to what they are doing while they're doing it, is NOT fit to be a parent. Much less are they fit to handle a child suffering under the deepest trauma of all: the preverbal loss of an entire family and life all at once. It seems it would take a very special person to handle this kind of trauma appropriately. And it seems I haven't come across an adopter yet who fits that bill.
You aren't equipped to handle what's happening with us and to us. You don't "deserve" to be a parent. And those adoptees? They "deserve" a parent who can offer them what you can't... actual permanence and connection.
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