Chapter 0

"Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful" - The Reverend Keith C. Griffith, MBE

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a serious mental condition. You can get PTSD after living through or seeing a traumatic event, such as war, a hurricane, rape, physical abuse or a bad accident. PTSD makes you feel extremely stressed and terrified after the danger is over. It affects your life and the people around you.

PTSD victims re-experience the event again and again in several ways. They may have frightening dreams and memories of the event, think they are going through the experience again (flashbacks that seem to be in the now), or become upset during anniversaries of the event.

Labeling PTSD victims as ill or diseased or crazy makes it harder to treat so, as I was taught in shrink school, I prefer no labeling but we must recognize that those separated by adoption do suffer a trauma and have PTSD unless they are given help. In my opinion therefore, victims of PTSD are not mentally ill, but rather have normal reactions to very abnormal situations that leave the victim unable to function in important areas of life. These difficulties in functioning are fixable.

Being lied to can also cause PTSD. Being told your parents died in a car-crash (as thousands of adoptees were told) can easily cause PTSD. Being told your baby died in childbirth (as thousands of moms were told) can easily cause PTSD as well.

Most important of all, the loss of a mother or baby to adoption is a trauma and unless treated causes PTSD. The symptoms may not be obvious but the trauma is there and needs to be addressed.

Here are some lies created by the unconscious mind that I’ve heard from moms and adoptees. Lies created to hide from pain...

All the above statements/questions serve to hide from one’s real feelings, feelings that are so painful they cannot be endured until one gets help.

Victims of sexual assault often claim responsibility for the assault because that is less painful than remembering the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness and in the case of incest, less painful than believing that someone who was supposed to love them could also assault them. It is not surprising that mothers of adoption loss often claim responsibility for their situation for the same reasons..

One of the things that I have seen over the years is the difference of response upon being contacted by one’s other to initiate a reunion. Mothers rarely say no, adoptees very often say no. I believe this is because our mothers remember, as painful as it is, what they survived. Adoptees have no conscious memory of what they survived so while being contacted can be terrifying, it is more terrifying for the adoptee as she has no idea what the pain looks like whereas moms do.

I am not comparing pain or one’s ability to endure pain or the amount of pain. There is no way to compare these things. I am talking about the fear of one’s pain and it is clear to me that in general, adoptees find it harder to do. This is why, in my opinion, adoptees can be more difficult to deal with in reunion than mothers of adoption loss, and why adoptees find it harder to do the healing work. We must recognize that all of the pain of our losses is very, very severe, and I am not comparing as, and I repeat, there is no way to do so... I am only looking at one’s ability to face it. To re-state it, mothers have a pre-traumatic self , a self that they can remember, a self that functioned in this world and the knowledge and memories of that self help her to face her pain. Adoptees do not have a pre-traumatic self and so facing her pain is harder for her. A mom can be reminded of that pre-traumatic self, that she knows what she survived, and sadly, an adoptee cannot be so reminded and this is why I spent six years, twice a week in therapy terrified to talk of adoption, even say the word for fear of instant annihilation. My fear, my terror of touching my trauma was typical of that of both moms and adoptees... the fear of instant annihilation. Yet, we can all break through bit by bit and heal.

Earlier I wrote about my experience after 9/11. I knew the trauma existed because I had dealt with my adoption trauma. It was easy for me to understand that I had experienced another trauma, was living in the aftermath of it, PTSD, and needed more help.

I had an earlier experience with trauma that I was unaware was a trauma until I began my adoption recovery work. Christmas of 1975, I was walking down 1^st avenue in Manhattan when suddenly I heard this almost inaudible weird sound: thwup, thwup, thwup. followed by a clunk on the top of my head. My first instinct was that someone had thrown an ice cube at me, I grabbed my head, felt the wet and looked at a hand smeared with blood. I hailed a cab and raced to a near by hospital ER.

By the time the physician came in and examined me, the bleeding had stopped and, he explained they wanted to be sure that there was no internal damage and ordered an x-ray. The results shocked me. The doctor told me that the x-ray showed a bullet lodged between my scalp and skull. Apparently the bullet entered about two inches above my right eye and traveled under the skin along the skull and settled approximately four inches above my ear. It was a miracle that the skull had not been penetrated. Ironically the bitter cold and wind that had me holding my head down, in essence was a life saver.

The police came to the ER as they are required to do for all gunshot wounds and after some further questioning and telling them of the location where I was injured, they revealed that a woman had been shot in the thigh by a roof top sniper on the same block earlier in the evening.

The physician did not believe I would need any further treatment, telling me that it was more dangerous to remove the bullet surgically than leaving it there to rest quietly... it would present no medical danger. (Strangely, I know two other male adoptees who were shot in the head by accident and survived.)

I had a very mild headache for a few days and occasionally when the a storm was coming, my scalp itched where the bullet was sitting. I gave it no further thought. However, a few weeks later I was walking down 5^th avenue and came to the large intersection at 57^th street and suddenly I was terrified. I was into a full blown panic attack. I realized that I was afraid of being shot again. I looked up at the open space and wondered if a sniper was lurking, ready to shoot me again. I had no idea I had suffered a trauma or that I had PTSD. A few minutes later, away from that intersection, I had no conscious memory of the terror I had just experienced. It was gone. Unknown to me, PTSD was at work.

A year later I began my therapy, the twice-a-week, no-adoption-talk therapy, that lasted for six years. I never told my therapist about the shooting. Only after digging into my adoption trauma did it occur to me to talk about being shot and then the impact of this trauma become apparent. I had for years afterwards avoided open spaces, always walking close to buildings, hurrying across intersections, unconscious of the trauma that controlled how I behaved on the street. Discussing this trauma brought up the other near death incidents, incidents where an inch or a few seconds meant the difference between life and death. I began to realize how the trauma of losing my mother at birth was compounded by a half-dozen newer traumas. I began, with the help of my shrink, to understand what I had truly survived. I began to be proud of my scars, they were proof of what I had survived and only by being aware of our trauma(s) can we heal. I stopped being afraid of open spaces, I stopped being afraid to fly, I stopped being afraid to live.

We may fight acknowledging the existence of our PTSD because of our fear. Once we acknowledge it, then, bit by bit we can try to talk about it in safe places with knowledgeable people. As we learn to talk about it, as painful and scary as it is, we come to understand that these feelings will not cause us to perish. We get comforted with validation, with words, perhaps hugs from those we want to hug us. The more we talk about it, the more we become desensitized to the thoughts of our trauma. The more we cry, the less we will need to cry; the more we talk about our anger, the less we will need to talk about our anger. The best therapists are those who have experienced the same type of trauma and worked it through in their own therapy. If they have not worked it through, they are unlikely to be able to help us. A mom should not need a mom therapist, nor should an adoptee need an adoptee for a therapist. A therapist who is a mom or an adoptee and who has done her work on her own trauma should be able to help any other adoptee or mom since I believe that we adoptees and moms share so much of our trauma on a cellular level.

Before we leave this chapter, it should be noted that traumatic events have a cumulative effect. The more traumas we experience that go untreated, the more severe our PTSD will be. Many of us do not recognize how many traumas we have experiences.

Moms have not only the trauma of the loss of their babies but may have the trauma of maternity home abuses, trauma of involuntary sterilization, sexual abuse and trauma of many unrecognized earlier and subsequent events.

Adoptees have the trauma of loss of their mothers, the trauma of “discovery” of adoptive status and the trauma of age of understanding. Add to that the all too common emotional and physical abuse and possible sexual abuse and there could be many layers of trauma that need to be addressed.

One abuse that is all too common is sexual abuse. The percentage of moms and adoptees (both male and female) who are sexually abused is staggering. Sexual abuse is often so well hidden that it never shows up but can affect the abusee in a myriad of ways. If you suspect you have been sexually abused, I suggest you read, “The Courage to Heal” by Bass. It may help you figure it out. As a victim of sexual abuse, this book helped me greatly and it led me to a secondary specialization of helping those who have been sexually abused. Working on sexual abuse issues can be just as terrifying as working on our adoption issues but it is vital that it be addressed.

Trauma victims often claim responsibility for the abuse. Moms will say they freely made a decision to not keep their child when, in fact, they did not have a choice. Victims of sexual abuse will commonly say they encouraged it or were to blame in some way, when by definition, victims of sexual abuse had no choice. Why take the blame? Why would someone insist it was her my fault? One common reason is because it’s less painful then remembering the hopelessness and helplessness of the trauma. Adoptees will often (illogically and vehemently) take responsibility for their mother’s pregnancy or for not being kept. Remember that children always blame themselves for what happens to them and once those thoughts occur to a seven or eight year old, they are fixed in cement until and if and when the adult does her healing work.

Clearly for moms and adoptees the accumulation of their traumas can be very hard to deal with... hard but very, very, do-able. One needs to make the commitment to do the work and follow through.

Channeling anger involves saying out loud in your head, “I am going to take my anger and use it to exercise, mow the lawn, etc.”
Saying this out loud in your head tells your unconscious mind to take untamed anger and use it to do the specified physical activity.
One cannot channel sadness or pain, etc. Only anger.

Just as a good tennis player needs to practice every day and an alcoholic may need to go to a 12-step meeting every day, we adoptees and moms need to do daily work to heal. Going to a support group once a month is not likely to be enough. Inner child work must be done daily. There are people I know who travel great distances to get to support group meetings. One mom and one adoptee I know came separately to my meetings, driving more than three hours each way. Before I started Adoption Healing, I once took a plane from Dallas to NY, so I would not miss my monthly afternoon meeting at the local support group, and flew back to Dallas that same evening... I knew I needed it. So please don’t sabotage your work by not doing it regularly. No matter what, find a way. Read, chat, go to meetings, journal, channel, and take care of your IC.

Healing involves a lot of time and patience. I look at it as climbing a mountain of recovery. Each person’s path up the mountain is different, the climb steep, but climbable, no matter what. There are many crevices and gullies on the way up, perhaps some abysses too, but each crevice, gully or abyss is still part of your path up the mountain and going down into it and up the other side is part of your path to freedom. Freedom from constant fear, pain, sadness and anger. When one stops being afraid of her emotions, one is truly free. Peace and contentment and happiness are the reward.

∙ You might be experiencing some tightness in your chest or some anxiety or pain. You might be feeling something undefinable. Can you write about it?