Chapter 3

It is very common for adoptees and mothers of adoption loss to have difficulty dealing with their anger. If one has not had help with anger it can seem nuclear and be terrifying to express.

Street lamp reaction: The slightest incident, remark, event or even a smudge on the side of a street lamp can be perceived by an adoptee or mother as a “rejection” or “abandonment” and can create simultaneous feelings of rage, terror, hatred, pain and sadness that to the sufferer has no cause. Our plunges instantly and into the depths of hell and is ready to explode, unaware of what is truly happening.

Having no choice about losing a child to adoption or losing a mother to adoption is an angrifying event.

Anger is a cumulative emotion. Let’s imagine that anger is represented by dominos. Each event that causes anger stacks up a bunch of dominos vertically. Perhaps our adoption loss puts twenty dominos on the stack. Other things in life cause anger but since many of us are not “trained” in healthy ways of dealing with it more dominos go on the stack. The stack gets higher and more unstable. Someone looks at us cockeyed or we “think” they do. We get street lamped. One more domino goes on the stack and KaBoom! The stack of dominos (Our anger) is unstable and we explode. If we don’t Discharge our anger the D goes in front and makes it Dangerous.

I believe that only hearts free of rage can see objectively. I say this because I meet many adoptees who cannot get rid of the rage at their mothers for not keeping them. Their reunions are often tumultuous and the adoptees blame the moms for their difficulties. However, it is my belief that in any relationship, adoption related or not, if I have deep anger or rage at my “other”, I will always be looking at them through “anger colored glasses” and therefore not be able to be objective about our relationship. I will not be able to see them clearly and may sabotage the relationship unwittingly. Our inner children will be in charge of our decisions about our relationship.. We need to learn how to remove our core anger at our mothers to be able to have a chance at a good relationship. We need to help our IC lower the stack of dominos.

We need to learn how to express our anger in healthy ways. We need to know it’s ok to say we are angry when things anger us. Emotions are never wrong. Even if caused by illogical thinking, if we feel it, it is valid. We need to express it in a polite way or the domino stack will grow.

Aside from expressing it vebally, we need to journal it, channel it and list it to get it out of our system. The more we express it, the more diminished it will become. We need to express it until we do not need to any more. As we express it, the dominos will be taken off the stack, most will disappear... some will remain but will be lying alongside each other, flat on the ground, there but not in any way harmful, simply inactive or tamed, but usable for channeling into physical activity.

Journaling is done by writing your thoughts and feelings about the incidents that anger you. The more you write, the more your anger will be released in a very healthy, non-destructive way.

Channeling anger is like having a bilge pump in a boat. If the pump is off, the boat will sink as water seeps in and accumulates. One can lessen or release anger by channeling it. To channel it, you need only say a few quick words out loud in your head. You do not have to feel it, or even know why it is there. You just need to know the anger exists. You need to say out loud in your head, for example, “I’m going to take my anger and use it to exercise” or “I’m going to take my anger and use it to paint”, etc. Common activities that lend themselves to channeling are: doing your daily work, cleaning, doing the dishes, exercising, mowing the lawn, jogging, painting, playing music, walking, writing poetry, prose or music. Any physical activity will be useful to channel your anger. Although it may be tempting, you cannot channel your anger into reading a book, watching TV or listening to music. Sedentary activities just won’t cut it. You may need to say (again, all of this is out loud in your head) I’m going to take my anger and use it to get up out of this chair (a jump start) and clean the house.

The more you channel, the better you will feel, the less anger will be a problem and the more energy you will have to live your life. When you are channeling your anger, you are really talking to your unconscious mind and asking it to do this chore for you and it will obey. You literally free up the energy that you were using to keep the anger under control and you also save the good energy that you would have used to do the chore otherwise. When you channel your anger on a regular basis which is many times a day, you will eventually not even have to say the words out loud in your head anymore. You will start to channel as a way of life, automatically and you will feel so much better.

Another way of dissipating anger is to make anger lists. Get a note book and write down every single thing you are angry about, no matter how picayune. Put a number from 1 to 10 by each item in the list to indicate how angry you are about that particular item. This will help validate your feelings. The more you list, the less dominos will remain on the stack, the less anger will be within you.

One of the things we need to do as adoptees is get in touch with our IC’s anger at not being kept. Children cannot see the world in gray, only black and white so this may be difficult. What often happens is the adoptee says to me, “My IC is not angry” and changes the subject.

The only way to know what our inner children think or feel is to ask them and have them tell us directly. If we try to guess or presume, we will short-circuit our work. We adoptees need to talk to our ics and get them to express the Primal Wound anger that I believe must be present in their minds. If they don’t express it, it will not go away and can easily sabotage our relationships, especially with our mothers at reunion. Sometimes the adoptee is terrified, without being aware of it, of this primal anger so this work may take a while and a lot of patience but it must be done. Once our IC acknowledges the anger, we can explain that our mothers had no choice, that it was not about us, and that it’s ok to have anger but to move the anger to the fact that it happened (which is very difficult for a child to do) or to the circumstances that prevented our moms from keeping us, which is also difficult for a child to do. To repeat, this takes time and patience to accomplish. Our ICs can be very stubborn about this.

For a mom, the biggest sticking point I see is getting past anger at her child for being distant or non-communicative. Since, sadly, most adoptees do not prepare before they search, reunion usually (unconsciously) brings up all the emotions from the past, the rage anger and sadness of losing mommy and the adoptee, who can be very open at the beginning of reunion, can suddenly put on the brakes without being aware of what is truly going on inside her. To mom it’s being, “rejected” but to the adoptee it’s just being safe. Ironically, the more open a mom is at reunion, the more likely it is for the adoptee to run. The chapters on “Fear of Mommy Love” and “Conflict of Two Moms” will, hopefully, help to explain these reactions of adoptees, painful and anger provoking as they are to the mom.

One of the things we all must do is to read as much as possible about the psychology of our “other” and stop deciding we know what is going on inside them. We are only learning ourselves about what makes us tick and if our “other” is not doing any self-work, we need to have a lot of patience. If we can remember that what we think creates what we feel and can see that the actions of our “other” is not about us but about their own wounds, fears, pains, then our own feelings of pain, anger and sadness will lessen a great deal.

What we need to do is stop taking things personally, give our “other” lots of space and do our own work. The more we work on our own healing, the better able we will be to communicate to others in ways that may work.

∙ We need to find healthy ways to express our anger and tame it so that it is not a destructive force in our lives

∙ Close your eyes and try to imagine saying out loud in your head, to someone important in your life, “I am angry because you do not understand me.” and imagine that person saying, “I’m glad you told me you are angry. I will try to understand!”

∙ Can you journal how you feel after you tried expressing your anger out loud in your head? Be as explicit as you can be.