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THE PRIMAL WOUND:
LEGACY OF THE ADOPTED CHILD
The Effects of Separation from the Birthmother on Adopted Children
Originally presented at the
American Adoption Congress International Convention
April 11-14, 1991
Garden Grove, California
Nancy Verrier, M.A.
919 Village Center
Lafayette, CA 94549
(510) 284-5813
&There is no such thing as a baby....& When Donald Winnicott
said those words, what he meant was that there is instead --where knowing
comes from intuition and where energy is exchanged. The baby and the mother,
although separated physiologically, are still psychologically one. Needless
to say, for the child separated from his mother at birth or soon after,
such an idea has tremendous importance. But has anyone been paying attention
If anyone had told me, when we brought home our three-day-old daughter
on Christmas Eve, 1969, that rearing an adopted child would be different
from rearing one's biological child, I, like many new and enthusiastic
adoptive parents, would have laughed at them and said, &Of course
it won't be different! What can a tiny baby know? We will love her and
give her a wonderful home.& My belief was that love would conquer
all. What I was not prepared for was that it was easier for us to give
her love than it was for her to accept it.
For love to be freely accepted there must be trust, and despite the
love and security our daughter has been given, she has suffered the anxiety
of wondering if she would again be rejected. For her this anxiety manifested
itself in typical testing-out behavior. At the same time that she tried
to provoke the very rejection that she feared, there was a reaction on
her part to reject before she was rejected. It seemed that allowing herself
to love and be lov she couldn't trust that she would
not again be abandoned.
I was to discover during the ten years of my research that hers was
one of two diametrically opposed responses to h the
other being a tendency toward acquiescence, compliance and withdrawal.
Although living with a testing-out child may be more difficult than living
with a compliant child, I am thankful that she acted in such a way so as
to bring her pain to our attention. We were able, after years of trying
to deal with it ourselves, to get help for her. This was the beginning
of a journey which was to change all our lives.
I had no idea at the outset of her therapy that adoption had anything
to do with what was going on with my daughter. Despite the fact that I
had been considered a highly successful teacher with a deep, caring and
intuitive understanding of my students (as well as the biological parent
of a younger daughter who was not having these difficulties), I believed
that I must somehow be at fault. What was I doing wrong? Why was my daugher
acting so hostile and angry toward me at home, yet close and loving when
in public? Why was she so strong-willed and dramatic? Why did she feel
the desperate need to be in complete control of every situation? Why could
she not accept the love I had and wanted to give her? For most of the acting
out was directed at me, her mother. James Mehlfeld, a Bay Area therapist,
put it this way, &All the hoopla is the child trying to connect with
the mother.& At the same time, this attempt at bonding was sabotaged
by outrageous, destructive behavior on her part as she tested and retested
our love and commitment.
As I sought answers to what was going on in the psyche of my own daughter,
my interest began to expand to other children and their adoptive parents,
many of whom seemed alienated from one another. Subsequent conversations
with my daughter's therapist, Dr. Loren Pedersen, led to my research on
The ideas which will be presented here first came as an intuitive understanding
about what was going on for my daughter. For someone who was adopted almost
at birth, who was never in foster care and who was truly wanted and loved
by us, she seemed to be in a great deal of pain. In order to seek the source
of that pain I turned to the literature, but found something lacking in
all the theories I encountered. The explanations seemed too simplistic
and external. Too much was being ignored, perhaps because there were no
real solutions, no absolutes or perhaps because it wasn't easy to prove
or even support with scientific data what was really going on.
In any case, even though many of the ideas had validity, they didn't
completely fit what I was intuiting and observing in my daughter. Was she
an exception? I didn't think so. There was a kind of universality or primal
quality to her pain, which didn't lend itself to simple, readily obtainable
or easily acceptable explanations. There was an &intangible something&
which was missing in the adoption literature except by implication. No
one was spelling it out. In my quest of that &intangible something&
I had to go beyond adoption itself into the realms of pre and perinatal
psychology--the nature of attachment and bonding and the trauma of separation,
abandonment and loss.
It has long been known that institutions and temporary or multiple foster
care cannot adequately care for abandoned children. The lack of a permanent
caregiver deprives the child of some of the requisites for normal psychological
development--a continuity of relationship, emotional nurturing and stimulation.
As the number of caregivers increases, the ability to attach diminishes
and the numbing of affect becomes more and more evident. There is often
a failure to thrive and, in extreme cases, even death. What the child needs,
it seems, is a permanent caregiver and the sooner the better.
Adoption, then, has been seen as the best solution to three problems:
a biological mother who cannot, will not or is discouraged from taking
the child who
the infertile couple
who want a child. The fantasy has been that the joining together of the
latter two entities would produce a happy solution for everyone. The reality,
however, has often been less than ideal. Despite the continuity of relationship
which adoption provides, many adopted children experience themselves as
unwanted, are unable to trust the permanency of the adoptive relationship
and often demonstrate emotional disturbances and behavioral problems.
The statistics are staggering. Although adoptees make up only 2 to 3
percent of the population, statistics consistently indicate that 30 to
40 percent of those children found in special schools, juvenile hall and
residential treatment centers are adopted. Adopted children have a higher
incidence of juvenile delinquency, sexual promiscuity and running away
from home than their non-adopted peers. They also have more difficulty
in school, both academically and socially. What is it which places these
children at a higher psychological risk than the general population?
T. Berry Brazelton cautioned us not to ignore the amazing forty weeks
in the womb by treating the neonate as if he had &sprung full-blown
from the head of Zeus,& because by doing so we are ignoring some important
history, a history shared with his biological mother. Why is it that so
many adoptees are out there looking for these mothers, whom they do not
consciously remember? Is it just medical history or genetic curiosity,
and if so, why is it specifically the mother for whom they search? (For,
in my research it was most often the mother whom adoptees wanted to find.)
As one woman told me, &Oh, he (the father) was just someone who loved
her. She was the one I was connected to.&
I believe that this connection, established during the nine months in
utero, is a profound connection, and it is my hypothesis that the severing
of that connection between the child and biological mother causes a primal
or narcissistic wound which often manifests in a sense of loss (depression),
basic mistrust (anxiety), emotional and/or behavioral problems and difficulties
in relationships with significant others. I further believe that the awareness,
whether conscious or unconscious, that the original separation was the
result of relinquishment affects the adoptee's sense of Self, self-esteem
and self-worth.
In the literature on childhood development, there appears to be no distinction
made between a child who comes into a family by birth or one who has come
by adoption. Yet all adopted children begin their lives having already
felt the pain and, perhaps, terror of separation from the first mother.
They experience the environment as hostile and their bond to the mother
as transitory. They may also unconsciously experience themselves
as having been somehow lacking or unworthy of their birth parents' love
and protection.
While adoptive parents may refer to the child as &chosen&
and to themselves as the &real& parents, the child has had an
experience of another mother to whom he was once attached and from whom
he is now separated which he can never completely ignore. The words we
use to describe that separation or the cognitive reasons we give for it
make no difference to the feeling sense of the child. As one adoptee told
me, &Being wanted by my adoptive parents didn't compare to being
unwanted by my birth mother.& Whether we refer to this separation
as surrendering or relinquishment, the child experiences it as abandonment.
Some psychiatrists believe that the early age at which infants are placed
for adoption precludes any major trauma resulting from the separation from
the biological parents. Simon and Senturia have said, &The fantasy
or reunion with the biologic parents appears to be an effort to deal with
the depression that grows out of fantasies around abandonment.& It
should be noted that, although we may call the fear of being abandoned
by the adoptive parents a fantasy, there is precedent for that fear in
the original separation experience, which may be felt only unconsciously.
What the adoptee is fearing isn't a fantasy, it is a memory trace which
at any time can be repeated. Stone pointed out that the question, whether
spoken or unspoken, &Why did my own mother not keep me?&
is almost always followed by the unexpressed but equally anxious thought,
&If she could do that, what about you?& Is it
any wonder that adoptees go through life feeling as if at any time the
other shoe could drop? To what extent does this fear of abandonment
affect their development?
John Bowlby ascribed the threat of abandonment as the greatest fear
a child can suffer, and stated that children who experience repeated separations
or threats of abandonment become angry and dysfunctional. Harriet Machtiger
noted that the fear of abandonment is one of the most common fears of childhood
and a dominant theme in child myths. Because of their experience with abandonment,
is it possible that this threat is one which hangs over the heads of all
adoptees like the sword of Damocles all their lives, but about which they
might not be consciously aware?
I believe that it is, and that it is this threat which causes the generalized
anxiety so often found in adoptees. Anxiety is different from fear. Goldstein
said that fear sharpens the senses and drives them into action, whereas
anxiety paralyzes the senses and renders them unusable. Anxiety's paralyzing
of the senses might be what many clinicians describe as &numbing&,
and what some adoptees experience as an inability to get on with their
lives. Children who have been abandoned have an early awareness that they
need to be cautious, alert and watchful--a response which is called hyper-vigilance.
This gives them the means by which to try to avoid another abandonment,
but it does little to foster the true Self of the individual. It instead
creates a false self, about which I will have more to say later.
There have been and still are myriad debates about when a child should
be told of his adoption. Should he be told as soon as he is able to understand
the word? Before? During latency or after? Will telling a child of his
adoptive status during the very early years prolong the resolution of issues
pertaining to those stages of development?
&Tell him as soon as possible so that he will not think that it
is a bad secret which has been kept from him but will see it as a positive
thing,& some experts recommend. &Adoption is a complicated concept
which the child is not going to understand, so it is better to wait until
he is able to comprehend what he is being told,& others argue. On
and on it goes!
The problem with all of this rhetoric is that everyone is forgetting
something: the adoptee was there. The child actually experienced being
left alone by the biological mother and being handed over to strangers.
That he may have been only a few days or a few minutes old makes no difference.
He had a 40-week experience with a person with whom he probably bonded
in utero, a person to whom he is biologically, genetically, historically
and perhaps even more importantly, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually
connected. And some people would like him to believe that it is the &telling&
of that experience of the severing of that bond that makes him feel so
Adoption for these children isn't a concept to be learned, a theory
to be understood or an idea to be developed. It is a real experience about
which they have had and are having recurring and conflicting feelings,
all of which are legitimate. These feelings are their response to the most
devastating experience they are ever likely to have: the loss of their
mother. The fact that the experience was preverbal does not diminish the
impact, it only makes it more difficult to treat. It is almost impossible
to talk about, and for some even difficult to think about. Many do not
feel as if they were born, but as if they came from outer space or a file
drawer. To allow themselves to think about being born, even a feeling sense
of it, would mean also having to think about and feel what happened next,
and that they most certainly don't want to do.
Psychologists often talk about the first three years of life as being
very important in the emotional development of children. Our current understanding
of prenatal psychology has made many realize that the environment in utero
is an important part of a baby's well-being. Yet, when it comes to adoption,
there seems to be a black-out in awareness. There is a kind of denial that
at the moment of birth and the next few days, weeks or months in the life
of a child, when he is separated from his mother and handed over to strangers,
he could be profoundly affected by this experience. What does it mean that
we have for so long ignored this?
How many of us remember very much about the first three years of our
lives? Does our lack of memory mean that those three years had no impact
on us...our personalities, perceptions and attitudes? How many sexually
abused children remember those experiences? Are we to believe that if a
person can successfully keep those experiences from consciousness, they
will not affect his or her future relationships? In the case of abuse we
certainly recognize that there is, indeed, a profound lifelong effect on
the person, an effect which often requires years of therapy to overcome.
Yet what if the most abusive thing which can happen to a child is that
he is taken from his mother? I am suggesting that we have to understand
what it is we are doing when we take him away from her.
It is curious that in the literature there is no differentiation made
between the terms mother and primary caregiver. Often it is even pointed
out by the author that when using the term &mother& he is actually
referring to any mother-figure who acts as the primary caregiver. In other
words, it is implied that the mother could be replaced by another primary
caregiver with the child's being none the wiser. It is my thesis that this
is not true, and that the severing of the ties with the biological mother
and replacing her with another primary caregiver does not happen without
psychological consequences for both mother and child.
For these babies and their mothers, relinquishment and adoption are
not concepts, they are experiences from which neither fully recovers. A
child can certainly attach to another caregiver, but rather than a secure,
serene feeling of oneness, the attachment in the adoptive relationship
may be that which Bowlby referred to as anxious attachment. He noted that
&provided there is one particular mother-figure to whom he can relate
and who mothers him lovingly, he will in time take to her and treat her
almost as though she were his mother.& That &almost& is
the feeling expressed by some adoptive mothers who feel as if they had
accepted the infant as their child, but whose infant had not quite accepted
them as mother.
There is reason to believe that during gestation a mother becomes uniquely
sensitized to her baby. Donald Winnicott called this phenomenon &primary
maternal preoccupation.& He believed that toward the end of the pregnancy
&the mother gradually develops a state of heightened sensitivity which
provides a setting for the infant's constitution to begin to make itself
evident, for the developmental tendencies to start to unfold and for the
infant to experience spontaneous movement...& He stressed that the
mother alone knows what the baby could be feeling and what he needs, because
everyone else is outside this area of experience.
The mother's hormonal, physiological, constitutional and emotional preparation
provides the child with a security which no one else can. There is a natural
flow from the in-utero experience of the baby safely contained within the
womb to that of the baby secure within the mother's arms, to the wanderings
of the toddler who is then secure in his proximity to her. This security
provides the child with a sense of rightness and wholeness of self.
The initial post-natal bonding and imprinting experiences are part of
a continuum and according to Jean Liedloff, author of The Continuum
Concept, are hormonally triggered and must be responded to immediately.
If the imprinting is prevented from taking place, if the baby is taken
away when the mother is keyed to caress it, to bring it to her breast,
into her arms and into her heart....what happens? It appears that the stimulus
to imprint, if not responded to by the expected meeting with the baby,
gives way to a state of grief.
It appears that this state of grief is felt, not only by the mother,
but also by the baby. There is a natural rhythm and sequence to events
which when interrupted, as in the case of the relinquished child, leaves
him with a sense of something lost, something missed. The adoptive mother
might be at a disadvantage in coping with the affective behavior of the
child, for she doesn't understand the depth of his grief or the limitations
placed upon her as his mother. She has not been told that her baby has
suffered a trauma, a profound sense of loss, and is in some stage of the
grief cycle. His security has been challenged, his trust impaired and bonding
made more difficult or impossible.
Perhaps this would be a good place to stress the difference between
attachment and bonding as I see it, because these two terms are also often
used interchangeably in the literature. I believe that it would be safe
to say that most adopted children form attachments to their adoptive mothers.
Their survival depends upon this. Bonding, on the other hand, may not be
so easily achieved. It implies a profound connection which is experienced
at all levels of human awareness. In the earliest stages of an infant's
life this bond instills the child with a sense of well-being and wholeness
necessary to healthy development. The bonding with the biological mother,
which begins in utero, is part of a continuum which, if interrupted, has
a profound effect on the child. It seems that the loss experienced by the
infant is not only the loss of the mother, but a loss of part of the Self.
Early in the 1970's, Margaret Mahler in the United States and Erich
Neumann in Israel came up with remarkably similar theories concerning the
psychological development of human beings. In essence their ideas were
that physical and psychological birth do not happen simultaneously. Because
human beings are born prematurely in comparison to other mammals, for several
months after physical birth has taken place the infant remains psychologically
merged with the mother. Though the body of the child is already born, the
Self is not yet separate from that of the mother but is contained within
her psychologically. Mahler called this phase the symbiotic stage and believed
the baby's capacity to be in dual unity with the mother to be &the
primal soil from which all subsequent human relationships form.& Neumann
also talked about the dual union between the infant and mother as being
crucial in the forming of all subsequent relationships when he said, &The
mother, in the primal relationship, not only plays the role of the child's
Self, but actually is that Self....This primal relationship is the foundation
of all subsequent dependencies, relatedness and relationships.&
Florence Clothier postulated that in addition to the normal demands
made upon the ego, the adopted child has also to compensate for the wound
left by the loss of the biological mother. The primitive relationship with
the mother which occurs after physical separation and which protects and
nurtures him in the new and alien world outside the womb, is denied the
adopted child. In fact he has learned that the environment is hostile,
the mother may disappear and love can be withdrawn.
If the mother cannot be counted on to be the whole environment for the
child, what happens is that he begins to take over for her. This phenomenon
is often referred to as premature ego development. Rather than a gradual,
well-timed developmental process, the child is forced by this wrenching
experience of premature separation to be a separate being, to form a separate
ego before he should have had to do so. Even though this can have &survival
value& for infants in a world which, because of their abandonment,
is often found hostile, it is not appropriate at this stage of development
and is even considered pathological under age three months by some clinicians.
The compensating factor of survival value brings with it hypervigilance
and anxiety and takes away the serenity and safety of that primal mother/child
relationship. Although this survival value aspect of premature ego development
may no longer be necessary when the child is placed with the adoptive parents,
he does not perceive this. His experience is that the protector may at
any time disappear. The child becomes hypervigilant, which means that he
constantly tests the environment for clues to behavior which will keep
him from a further abandonment. One adoptee described this as &walking
a narrow ridge in the middle of the Grand Canyon.&
Rather than trusting the permanence of the caregiver, many adoptees
talk about always feeling as if they couldn't count on anyone and
having to be self-sufficient in life. Their feelings about this
go as far back as they can remember....and probably further. One adoptee,
in trying to put words to these feelings, said, &It was as if I figuratively
sat up in my crib and said to myself, 'I can't trust anyone. I will have
to take care of myself.'& She no longer had a sense of well-being
and security. She had lost something which could never be regained.
Another response to anxiety is one which, unsolicited by me in my original
research, nevertheless was mentioned by almost everyone whom I interviewed.
That was psychosomatic symptoms or chronic illness which began in childhood
and often persisted into adulthood. It seemed as if those children who
failed to act out their anxiety were the ones to most often display some
kind of psychosomatic illness. The chronic somatic disorders
reported to me were stomach aches, migraines or headaches, asthma
and allergies, stuttering or tics and skin disorders.
The most-reported chronic somatic disorder was stomach aches. This makes
sense when one realizes the close association between gastrointestinal
functioning and emotional states. These relationships have been noticed
throughout history and are reflected in the folk language by expressions
such as &not being able to stomach& something, noting that some
situations &make me sick,& or being &fed up& with a
situation. All of these responses may be seen as a result of anxiety, an
anxiety which for adoptees may be caused by the unconscious fear of another
abandonment and the deprivation of food or nurturing.
Rollo May called our attention to the &close association of gastrointestinal
functions with desires for care, support and a dependent form of love--all
of which are related genetically to being fed by one's mother.& He
believed that it is necessary that a distinction be made between anxiety
and fear when attempting to treat a psychosomatic disorder. He stressed
that &fear does not lead to illness if the organism can flee successfully.
&If on the other hand the individual is forced to remain in an unresolved
conflict situation, fear changes to anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms
often accompany this anxiety.
One can respond to danger by either fighting or fleeing. But if one,
like the adoptee, has no conscious memory of the source of the fear, he
may experience that fear as free-floating anxiety in which gastric activity
works overtime. The resulting pain or illness is different from hypochondria
in which the symptoms are imagined. These illnesses are real, but the cause
is emotional rather than organic.
Greenacre brought the discussion more immediately to the situation of
the adopted child by suggesting a predisposition to anxiety caused by immediate
postnatal trauma. She said that the experiences of the earliest days of
life &leave some individuals with unique somatic memory traces which
amalgamate with later experiences and may thereby increase later psychological
pressures.&
The experience of vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, insomnia and acute
depression following the rejection of a birth mother after a search may
qualify as a reawakening of those somatic and emotional memory traces and
a reenactment of the original organic response to abandonment. In a less
acute but perhaps more common example, one adoptee reported to me that
she has gotten &physically and mentally sick& at three-week separations
from her husband. She attributed this to missing her best friend to talk
with, but that severe a reaction would seem to go deeper than that. Other
adoptees have told me that they often felt sick when separated from their
mothers while at camp or visiting relatives. One man said that when he
went away to college he felt extremely anxious to the point of illness,
and a woman told me that while on her honeymoon she phoned her mother several
times but still felt sick. These examples illustrate that which might be
the reawakening of those memory traces to which Greenacre referred.
The anxiety produced by the uncertainty of the permanence of the mother-figure
often manifests in two diametric behavior patterns: provocative, aggressive
or withdrawn, compliant and acquiescent. When
there are two children in a family they almost always assume a polarity
in their overt behavioral patterns no matter what their personality, sex
or birth order. The child who acts out is displaying counterphobic rejecting
behavior which not only tells the parents and makes them feel that which
he feels inside, but repeatedly tests their commitment to him. This is
the child most often found in treatment.
But what about the quiet ones, the ones who
cause no trouble? When one has experienced the wrenching and premature
separation from the mother, one fears the loss of one's own center. This
losing of one's center of Self often results in the creation of the , an exaggerated persona, which the child believes will protect
him from further rejection and abandonment. The damage this does to the
child's sense of Self is often overlooked because of the apparent adjustment
most children make to the new environment. In addressing this, Harriet
Machtiger said, &Though the psychological effects of childhood trauma
may only become apparent in later years, the actual damage to the personality
has been there since childhood, even though it may be masked by a superficial
adjustment.
This superficial adjustment disallows a true mourning of the original
loss which, as Machtiger said, &coincides with the development
of a false self or a persona wherein feelings are bottled up.&
This tendency toward a false self is important to recognize as a defensive
coping mechanism for adoptees and deserves further investigation because
it is often seen as &good adjustment.& We must not be lulled
into believing that this child suffers no pain. Adjustment often means
shutting down.
Adult adoptees whom I have seen in treatment, most of whom did not
act out in childhood, speak of having a sense that the baby they were &died,&
and that the one that they became was going to have to be different, to
be better, so that he would not be abandoned again. Many became &people
pleasers,& constantly seeking approval. As children they were very
polite, cooperative, charming and generally &good.& But locked
inside them was pain and the fear that the unacceptable baby who died would
come back to life if they were not vigilant. They could never truly bond
with anyone because they were not being themselves. They related an inability
to show how they felt about things, especially negative feelings.
The acquiescent, compliant child is very deceptive. Because he doesn't
cause much trouble, he therefore seems untroubled. Although he often seems
affectionate, it might be important to notice how willing he is to express
other feelings such as anger, sadness, hostility and disappointment, to
ascertain how real the feelings of affection actually are. Are they truly
expressions of a deep secure love or are they an anxious response to the
fear of a further abandonment? Parents often mistake clinginess for affection.
Children who feel secure in their parents' love can more easily risk expressing
negative feelings as well. A well-adjusted child or adult can allow himself
to experience a whole range of feelings. Rather than telling a child that
he shouldn't feel a certain way, it is a parent's or therapist's responsibility
to teach him acceptable ways in which to express those feelings.
It is important to understand that the feelings are legitimate and appropriate.
Although knowing the reasons for the birthmother relinquishing her child
may aid an adoptee's intellectual understanding, it does not cancel out
nor mitigate his feelings. As my daughter said when she finally allowed
herself to feel the loss of her birthmother, &I can understand that
she had to give me up, Mom, but why doesn't that make me feel any better?&
I told her that it was the 14-year-old girl who understood the reasons
for her relinquishment, but the feelings were those of the newborn baby,
who just felt the loss of a mother who never came back. The baby
doesn't care why she did it, the baby just feels abandoned, and that abandoned
baby lives inside each and every adoptee all his or her life.
The anxiety caused by the distrust of the permanency of the adoptive
relationship manifests in other ways which need to be understood in order
to correctly diagnose and treat adoptees. Because of their tendency to
split and their fear of connecting, which is often misinterpreted as a
fear of engulfment, adoptees are sometimes labeled as borderline personalities.
This is unfortunate because treatment should be radically different than
that for the true borderline. Abandonment is not an intrapsychic concept
for the adoptee, it is an experience, and working through his issues
of abandonment, loss, trust, splitting, etc., must be done in a manner
appropriate to this experience.
Splitting was first introduced into the literature by Freud in his &family
romance& theory. When a child becomes aware of rejection by a parent,
he has a tendency to imagine that he is not really the child of this parent
but of another who is all-loving and all-permissive. This fantasy takes
on more reality for children who actually do have two sets of parents.
Instead of seeing both aspects of good and bad in one set of parents, adoptees
often assign one attribute to the adoptive parents and the other to the
biological parents, especially the mother. Sometimes the good image is
given to the adoptive mother and the negative aspect is for the biological
mother who gave them away.
Frequently, however, using the mechanisms of reversal and displacement
(in which feelings one has for one person are projected onto another more
convenient person--like yelling at one's wife when one is really mad at
one's boss) the adoptee projects the negative image onto the adoptive mother
in an effort to work out feelings of hostility, anger and rejection as
a result of having been relinquished. She is, after all, available while
the birthmother is not.
Sometimes the child's perception of the adoptive mother vacillates between
her being seen as the rescuing mother and as the abandoning mother, with
the child's demonstrating ambivalent feelings of compliance and hostility
in his attitude towards her. These feelings, which are defending the child
against vulnerability and possible annihilation, are confusing to both
mother and child and inhibit his working out his feelings of love and hate,
both toward his parents and towards himself.
If the adoptive mother is insecure about her own sense of being the
child's mother (and I believe that in a certain sense there is good reason
for this feeling of insecurity), a child can exert a great deal of power
over her by using this split to his advantage. The &mean& adoptive
mother is not after all the &real& mother and the child doesn't
have to pay attention to her. The adoptive mother may give in and allow
the child to misbehave in order to regain his love. Or, feeling rejected
herself, she may act in an angry, rejecting manner towards him, thus setting
up a vicious cycle of rejection, anger, anxi resulting
in a confusion of inconsistency and acting out.
This scenario is sometimes played out in reverse where the child, having
been told that he is &special,& feels that he has to be
perfect in order to retain the love and acceptance of his parents.
This need to be special can put a great deal of pressure on the child to
live up to some perceived expectations which are frequently unattainable.
This often leaves the child feeling inadequate and worthless, a reinforcement
of his feelings of having failed his first mother. The need to be perfect
for the &rescuing& parents makes the child suppress his own true
self in order to submit to the wishes of his parents. This seems imperative
to his survival: &You have to be good or you're gotten rid of.&
The insecurity of his being good enough to keep can be made even more
acute if he is also insecure about the meaning of love. Many children are
told that the reason that their birthmothers gave them up was because she
loved them and wanted to do the right thing. This sets up a cognitive context
for a prevailing feeling: that if one is loved, one is abandoned. This
is a dilemma for the adoptive parents who want the child to see his birthmother
in a good light, but at the same time don't know how to convey this without
unwittingly setting up the equation of love equals abandonment. The phrase,
&your mother loved you so she gave you away,& is a non sequitur
so far as the child is concerned. Mothers who love their babies do not
give them away. Birthmothers grapple with this feeling too. An inordinate
number of these fertile women never conceive again.
The dilemma for the child is acute because he desperately needs love
and affection, yet this seems dangerous to him. His need to defend against
further devastation causes him to initiate a distancing response to bonding.
Even when describing the relationship with the mother as positive,
there is often a qualification that, in truth, the relationship was shallow
emotionally. A typical response to the question of intimacy with
the mother came from a woman who felt quite connected to her mother and
modeled herself after her, but said, &I cannot discuss intimate feelings
with her.& She described herself as &numbing out& her own
feelings and aligning herself with her mother, becoming what her mother
wanted &a la Alice Miller.&
I had not been told when I adopted my first daughter that she had suffered
a trauma which would impact every aspect of my relationship with her. And
had I been told, as I said earlier, I probably would not have believed
it. Prospective adoptive parents who consult with me certainly don't want
to believe it. It is difficult to accept something which we can't basically
change. And we can't eliminate the trauma and pain of separation from the
first mother. We can help though by understanding their suffering, acknowledging
feelings and providing ways in which to work through that pain.
Adoption, which has been heralded as the best social solution to the
problem of unwanted pregnancies, is not the panacea which we would like
it to be. The infant's connection to his or her biological mother seems
to be physiological, emotional, mystical, spiritual and everlasting. To
be separated from her causes lifelong issues of abandonment and loss, rejection,
trust, loyalty, shame and guilt, intimacy, identity and power or mastery
and control.
Some children respond to this early loss by acting out in aggressive,
provocative and impulsive ways, while others do so by withdrawing and acting
in a compliant, acquiescent manner. Both are wounded, but each is responding
to the pain and anxiety in a different way. Each has the same wish for
love and acceptance and each has the same fears of rejection and abandonment.
One pushes for the inevitable and the other guards against it. In neither
case is the child operating from his true Self, but from a false self,
which he (probably unconsciously) believes helps protect him from further
hurt, rejection and disappointment.
The manner in which we respond to these problems will have a great deal
to do with the developmental and emotional health of the adoptee. The adoptive
parents can and do make a tremendous difference in the lives of their children,
but their effectiveness and that of the clinicians who work with them would
be greatly enhanced by honesty, education, support and understanding.
For children who truly cannot be taken care of by their biological families,
adoption is still the best solution, but it is imperative that adoptive
parents, clinicians and society in general begin to acknowledge the complexity
of that solution. It is important to recognize that all adoptees by definition
have suffered a traumatic loss at the beginning of their lives and that
that experience has or will impact all their subsequent relationships.
The pain is great, but healing is possible. The road to healing is a
long road, and we must all travel that road together: birthmother, adoptee
and adoptive parents. We ca it is a part of our history
forever. To regret it is wasted energy, just as worrying about (rather
than planning for) the future is wasted energy. Both deplete the strength
we need to be in the here and now, to be truly present for one another...to
acknowledge, understand and empathize with one another's feelings. Let
us be present and let the healing begin.
REFERENCES
Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and Loss (Vol. II: Separation).
New York: Basic Books.
Brazelton, T. B. (1982). Pre-birth memories appear to have lasting effect.
Brain/Mind Bulletin, 7(5),2.
Brinich, P. (1980). Some potential effects of adoption on self and object
representations. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 35,
Clothier, F. (1943). The psychology of the adopted child. Mental
Hygiene, 27, 222-230.
Donovan, D., & McIntyre, D. (1990). Healing the Hurt Child.
New York: W.W. Norton.
Freud, S. (1990). Family Romances. Standard Edition, 9, 235-241.
Goldstein, J. (1939). In R. May, The Meaning of Anxiety. New
York: Ronald Press Co. (1950), p. 292.
Greenacre, P. (1953). Trauma, Growth and Personality. London:
Liedloff, J. (1975). The Continuum Concept. New York: Warner
Machtiger, H. (1985). Perilous beginnings: Loss, abandonment, and transformation.
Chiron, 101-129.
Mahler, M., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological
Birth of the Human Infant.
New York: Basic Books.
May, R. (1950). The Meaning of Anxiety. New York: Ronald Press,
Neumann, E. (1973). The Child. New York: G. P. Putnam.
Schechter, M., Carlson, P., Simmons, J., & Work, H. (1964). Emotional
problems in the adoptee.
Archives of General Psychiatry., 10, 109-118.
Simon, N., & Senturia, A. (1966). Adoption and psychiatric illness.
American Journal of Psychiatry,122, 858-868.
Small, J. (1987). Working with adoptive families. Public Welfare,
Sorosky, A., Baran, A., & Pannor, R. (1978). The Adoption Triangle.
New York: Anchor Press.
Stone, F. (1972). Adoption and identity. Child Psychiatry and Human
Development, 2 (3), 120-128.
Viorst, J. (1986). Necessary Losses. New York: Fawcett Gold Medal
Wickes, F. (1927). The Inner World of Childhood. New York: Spectrum
Winnicott, D. (1966). The Family and Individual Development.
New York: Basic Books.
*Nancy Newton Verrier has a fuller development of the theory of the
primal wound available in book form. To order her book The Primal Wound:
Understanding the Adopted Child, write Nancy Verrier, 919 Village Center,
Lafayette, CA 94549. The cost is $14.95 plus $2.50 mailing & handling.
(CA residence add 7.25% state tax)}