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"This book is a 'must read'                   
for everyone touched
                             by adoption."


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"Joe Soll has probably worked with adoptees and first parents more than anyone else on the planet. His approach has always involved empathy, intuition and introspection, without which dialogue runs dry. Few know the depth of the adoptee and first parent experience as well as Joe Soll, especially the dark side, where loss and loneliness reside.

 

Combining his experience, or perhaps we should say wisdom, with current therapeutic approaches, Joe creates an environment where growth can occur. Read his work, try it out, see how it works for you." -

Robert Andersen, M.D., psychiatrist, author of Second Choice: Growing Up Adopted and  A Bridge Less Travelled: Twice Visited
Review by Jane Jeong Trenka, April 29, 2010
(Journal of Korean Adoption Studies)


Some books are so good that you can even forgive your friend for “borrowing” your copy and never giving it back. Adoption Healing … a path to recovery by Joe Soll is one such book.

Adoption Healing, a self-help book, has been passed around among the adult internationally adopted Koreans who have returned to South Korea, and who indeed rely on self-help while living in a country where gaining access to services in their own languages is difficult.

This book is the gift that “lifers”, Korean adoptees who have returned to Korea, give to one another after the initial fun of Seoul wears off and we are left with the hangover of too many late nights in Seoul’s student and foreigner districts, too many ruined intimate relationships or none at all, limited employment opportunities, and the mix of hope and despair that comes from living in a country where we are no longer recognizable to Koreans as Korean.

Our foreign mannerisms, shattered tongues, and imagined histories have been known to elicit pity and shame from South Koreans. How we are portrayed and perceived, and how we want to be portrayed and perceived, therefore, becomes a heated topic of conversation. How must we appear in order to get what we need — whether recognition from the South Korean government, acceptance in society, or more personally fulfilling reunions? Should we try to appear “successful” and “well-adjusted” or even “angry and ungrateful”?

These kinds of one-sided false selves have their roots in the adoptee’s understandable fear of abandonment, Soll tells us as he gently guides us into living more “authentic” lives. He explains that adoptees’ inner worlds are shaped by mixed messages that force them “to choose between the socially unacceptable reality they experience and a distorted, but socially sanctioned, interpretation of their reality as determined by others.” “This book,” he writes, “is about the realities of adoption and the realities of the inner world of the adopted person.”

Hope for Individual Change

Soll — a licensed social worker, psychotherapist, and American domestic adoptee — simply and concretely describes the adoptee’s inner world in 26 concise chapters. In each chapter, he gives examples of “Myths” and “Facts” about adoption, a summary of the information in the chapter, an exercise to write or do mentally, and a grounding “Experience of the Moment” designed to be read after the exercise. Always with the whole “triad” of adoptee, natural parents, and adoptive parents in mind, Soll ends the book with appendices that include lists of “What Adoptees Do Not Wish to Hear” and “What Natural Parents Do Not Wish to Hear,” and “What Adoptive Parents Do Not Wish to Hear.”

Readers of Nancy Newton Verrier’s The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child will be familiar with some of Soll’s fundamental beliefs about adoption, beginning with, “The mother-child relationship is sacred and the separation of the mother and child is a tragedy for both.” Soll considers thus “primal wound” to be the first trauma. He considers the second trauma to be the verbal acknowledgment to the adoptee that she is adopted. (It’s likely that many transracially and internationally placed adoptees, older adoptees, and children adopted into families where there were older siblings present, did not need to be told by their adoptive parents that they were adopted.) He considers “fracturing” to be the third trauma.

Fracturing is an acronym for the simultaneous feelings that the adopted child is surrounded by: Frustration, Rage, Anxiety, Confusion, Terror, Unrest, Regret, Inhuman, Neglected, Grief.

Fracturing occurs at the “age of cognition,” usually around six to eight years old. At that time, adoptees are able to start thinking about their own adoptions. They do so in the face of conflicting messages, for instance, “Happy birthday! / This is the day you were surrendered.” Faced with unresolvable messages that cannot be integrated into her reality, the adopted child will resort to her own logic about her abandonment. If not validated, the child represses horribly painful emotions, after which she is actually unaware of such emotions and suffers a “psychological death.”

“It is much healthier to deal with truth,” writes Soll, and indeed he puts every painful card out on the table: “It’s normal for adoptees to be in crisis during adolescence.” Adoptees, because of not knowing their origins, finds it difficult to imagine themselves getting older. They have more difficulty maintaining healthy intimate relationships. They have a harder time than non-adopted people finding careers that suit them. “Many people who appear happy are just (unconsciously) hiding pain.” He likens the material in his book to an emotional root canal – painful, but necessary.

“I am not happy about what I have written here, but it needed to be written” writes Soll, but, “it needs to be recognized as knowledge that can help heal those already hurt and help prevent some of the hurt for those who may become involved in or impacted by adoption.”

As a self-help book, Soll’s description of adoptees’ inner worlds, while not exactly feel-good material, gives adoptees and the people who care about them a lot to consider and reflect upon. I was personally surprised by the power of Soll’s simple affirmations and visualization exercises. Like another reader, I found them to be a little weird at first, but I soon realized that they are very worthwhile. One exercise I particularly liked is this:

    Light a candle and then let the flame represent the burning desire to have something that doesn’t exist anymore, like wanting to go back and this time be raised by your natural mother. When you are ready to stop wanting something that is impossible to happen, blow out the flame that holds you back from living your life, that burns you with a desire for the impossible.

Hope for Systemic Change

The book offers help like this on an individual level, and also suggests systemic changes in the practice of adoption. To start with, all members of the “triad” suffer huge losses — whether infertility, the loss of a child, or the loss of the mother — and these losses should be truthfully addressed instead of whitewashed with either platitudes (“You were chosen.”) or completely denied (“Get over it.”). As far as specific recommendations on policy, Soll includes the following:

1. Every effort should be made to keep children with their birth families, followed by the extended family.
2. All adoptions should be “open,” meaning regular visits should be held with the natural mother throughout childhood and adolescence, even if the visits have to be supervised.
3. Children should keep their names and heritage.
4. Adoptees should have periodic psychological development “checkups.”

In short, Soll is a big fan of speaking the truth and dealing with reality. He is completely in the camp of open records. “A reunion should preferably take place before puberty,” writes Soll, saying that a reunion between the ages of six and eight can help prevent the “fracture” and even bring adopted children closer to their adoptive parents. He sees closed records as a symptom of the lack of respect for adoptees, natural parents, and adoptive parents.

Implications for International Adoption

Soll’s work seems to be mainly addressed to American domestic adoptees, but it also has huge implications for the system of international adoption, considering that many adoptive parents choose international adoption over domestic adoption for the very reason that they do not want to have contact with a natural mother. Natural mothers of international adoptees are at the time of this writing almost hopelessly separated from their children by geographic distance and hidden paperwork. If adoption agencies took Soll’s advice to heart — keeping adoption records open and reuniting adoptees with their natural mothers for regular visits in childhood, for the benefit of the child — would there be so many international adoptions?

What Soll proposes to be necessary for a healthy adoption culture would make international adoption even more dreadfully expensive and inconvenient for adoptive parents. If all members of the triad were guaranteed contact, agencies would be forced to give accurate social histories of children. Honesty would be enforced. Perpetrators would be caught. Governments would have to freely give out visas to non-white people, often impoverished, from non-Western countries or countries of  the global south. People would have to see natural mothers as real people — not whores or saintly human gift-givers. Natural parents might get to speak, and the literature on international adoption would have to include their voices. Adoption agencies would have to find a way to help bridge differences of language and culture in ways that are personally meaningful, instead of encouraging adoptees to relate to their cultures of origin as tourists and consumers.

The financial cost for international adoption agencies to heed Soll’s advice is incredibly high and may even be destructive to the system of mass international adoption itself. But the human cost of not heeding his advice is even higher. It is simply the reality of today, reflected in the high rates of suicide, incarceration, and mental illness amongst adoptees, as well as “disrupted” adoptions.

Additional Challenges for International and Transracial Adoptees

Soll, however, does not specifically address the additional challenges that internationally and transracially adopted people face, including racialized violence in their adoptive countries and the language barrier if they are reunited. Many internationally adopted people, who as of now have little hope of reunion with their natural families, may be reunited instead with their original countries and culture. (The “mother country” is routinely proffered to adopted Koreans as a substitute for the actual mother.)

Yet we also need a way to cope with feelings of abandonment by entire countries, governments, and cultures. Extending Soll’s ideas about individual reunions between mother and child to social groups, it’s possible to guess that what is behind the drive by some adoptee groups to represent themselves as purely “Successful!” to the Korean public is actually the fear of a second abandonment — not by a mother — but a country. If they could see who we really are, in all our complexity, would they still love us?

In the midst of so many internationally and transracially adopted people of color checking the “white” box on U.S. demographic forms — lying to themselves and creating a false self for the world to see — adoption agencies should seriously consider whether they are helping adoptees lead “authentic lives.” When the adoptee is denied the opportunity to lead an authentic life because of enforced secrecy and lies, it impoverishes not only the adoptee, but also the natural mother and the adoptive parents.


Reality and Recovery


In The Will to Change, bell hooks summed up why people impacted by adoption need to heed Joe Soll’s advice —  no matter how uncomfortable, inconvenient, or expensive: “Anyone who has a false self must be dishonest. People who learn to lie to themselves and others cannot love because they are crippled in their capacity to tell the truth and therefore unable to trust.”


Adoptees’ lives, emotional health, and even our ability to love our parents are entangled with the very policies and conditions that created us. What have those conditions been? Overwhelmingly, those conditions have been filled with lies – our own lies, family lies, agency lies, government lies.


For those adoptees working to make positive changes in these very adoption policies that shaped our lives, it is essential to tell the truth, both personally and politically,  to ourselves and to our loved ones. For all adoptees, it is important to acknowledge our complex realities so we can live in a joyful way, so that we can make conscious decisions and, as Soll says, fully experience the world, not just exist in it. Joe Soll offers us paths that we may explore on our journey toward healing, health, recovery, and love.


This is an important book for adoptees, adoptees’ partners and close friends, natural parents, and adoptive parents. Soll’s straightforward approach and clear organization makes it possible to do the emotional work without being burdened by a text that is too long or laden with jargon. Parts not of interest can be easily skipped over and returned to later. An added bonus of this book is that the writing is simple enough to be understood by people whose speak English as a foreign language.


Although it has been nine years since it was first published, Adoption Healing deserves continued and widespread recognition. After all, as librarians say, “Every book is a new book until you have read it.” May you enjoy your copy, and pass it on.



 
"Adoption Healing" presents a clear, comprehensive, and theoretically consistent approach to address the issue of healing in adoption... this book should be required reading by anyone serious about attempting to resolve emotional conflicts in adoption.

- Robert Andersen, M.D. and Rhonda Tucker, authors of "The Bridge Less Traveled."



This comprehensive and thoughtful book, offers a positive approach to help members of the adoption triad heal lifelong wounds. It is a welcome addition to the growing library written by experienced individuals who occupy both personal and professional roles in this world.


- Annette Baran, LCSW, co-author of "The Adoption Triangle and Lethal Secrets."



As an author, teacher, and therapist, Joe Soll has brought the essence of adoption, its inherent pain to pen. His words offer counsel for the tragic separation that has occurred in the sacred union of mother and child.


- Jane Guttman, DC, author of "The Gift Wrapped in Sorrow."



In his gentle way, and with the expertise from years of leading support groups, Joe Soll teaches us how to face our deepest and most painful feelings - and survive... Joe's caring heart is with us every step of the way.


- Carol Schaefer, author of "The Other Mother."


"This is the best adoption book I have read in a long time, and I can recommend it wholeheartedly to all readers of this Journal. I can do this because the author himself ~ gives every hurting reader who might find it too much at any point, most caring and sensible advice as to how, when and whether to proceed with it. Yes, it is a book that confronts, but it also greatly encourages. It is a book about dark tunnels and demons that haunt, but it is also about coming out on the other side having faced the worst that fantasies and fears can do, and replacing them with realities.

              It is written by a social worker/therapist who was himself adopted, and he writes to all parts of the 'adoption triad' (particularly relinquishing birth mothers) as well as to the professionals. He has 'been there', both himself and in all he has heard over many years from his child and adult clients, and from the support groups and searching agencies he works with.

              His basic thesis is that losing your birth mother by being placed for adoption means pain, pain and more pain, not just for the child but for both their families too. There is then a corresponding need for validation, validation and more validation of this pain and its effects, by the adults to the child. Linked to both of those needs (and this is where the healing in the title comes in), is openness, honesty and reality, rather than any sort of continuing denial of feelings or facts around adoption. He also advocates as much real-life contact as possible between child and both his families throughout childhood, as in divorce situations.

              I found it refreshingly real to have it again affirmed that adoption of itself is not the solution to anyone's pain, least of all the child's, and is only potentially the beginning of the healing process. Nancy Verrier speaks loud and clear through much of what Joe Soll has to say, which to my mind further validates both books. I could imagine that for those who haven't yet braved "The Primal Wound” itself, this book might be a less harrowing and easier to assimilate introduction to the realities of loss and pain in adoption.

              Reunions, too, cause both pain and dynamic regression. "This is a good thing ", says Soll, "not a bad one. Reunion brings the adoptee back to the initial trauma, and revisiting the trauma is the only way to heal. " Soll strongly makes the point throughout, that however unpleasant or difficult reality turns out to be, it is enormously to be preferred than an aching void of unknowingness. It is, he claims, easier to live at peace with reality eventually, than with conflicting and confusing fantasies that only fragment and torment one in their grip. Yes, knowing two mothers can be confusing, "but not half as much as knowing one and fantasizing about the other ". Soll emphasizes that searching for birth parents is unlikely to be any reflection on what was offered by adopters, but a necessary part of the adoptee completing the whole and working towards the formation of the 'authentic self and identity.

              The author writes simply but persuasively, in short sentences with frequent repeats of key points. Some key points and quotes are in display boxes, making it much easier to take in what each chapter is about. The book is broadly chronological, and each chapter lists the frequently found myths and then the realities commonly encountered at each life stage of the adopted person. The developmental tasks of @Y childhood are particularly well covered, with no room for doubt as to the massive additional work-load carried by the adopted child in relating, in both fantasy and reality, to two sets of parents. I was struck by the suggestion that 'ghost parents' can give rise, in an adopted child without the reality of birth parent contact, to the same sort of disabling 'phantom pain' experienced after amputation of a limb.

              This is a book brim-full of practical suggestions to the hurting person, child or adult, such as journal-keeping and pillow-punching, and dialoguing with one's 'inner child', if not with one's therapist or support group as well, while reading it and experiencing each new wave of emotion. He clearly regards both therapist and support group as essential outside supports, which may not initially strike all readers on this side of the Atlantic positively. And anyway, we might say, chance would be a fine thing over here. His answer would doubtless be earlier access to specialist professionals, long before adolescence might be seen as masking the real issues. And there are many helpful comments on why he feels that the ages of six to eight offer the best 'window of opportunity' for therapeutic intervention for adopted children. This is the 'age of cognition', after which there is (without help) greater risk of the ”fracture of the personality ...and descent into belief in one's unlovability", There are also many helpful comments about healing through anger management and channeling (recycling toxic waste), through finding the right vocabulary for pre-verbal experiences, and through grief and mourning. He also has helpful comments on panic attacks, the inner child and visualization techniques, affirmations and the giving of respect (by society and by one's self).

              This book is particularly good on the schooling, employment, and relationship difficulties adopted children and young people so often face. Until there has been some degree of healing, Soll maintains, none of these areas can go forward smoothly or positively, as so many of us know only too well. But the difference with this book, is the emphasis he then puts on to what can actually be done about it.

              I think that just about everyone with any interest in adoption could not fail to have their eyes wider opened by this book, apart from any who might still be determined to view adoption itself in a 'happy-ever-after' golden glow that wipes away any tears in an instant. I was struck by the value this book could have for several groups:-

              a) Some of our older and more articulate teenagers, already grappling with so many of the issues raised, and perhaps facing parenthood themselves.

              b) It could be a very helpful starting point for many trying to think through the pros and cons of searching and tracing their birth mother, and whether this is best done sooner rather than later, alone or with support, and with or without adoptive parents' knowledge (his preference would be for sooner, slowly and with support, and with adoptive parents).

              c) It could also be of great practical help to many professionals and therapists without much specific experience of adoption and pre-adoption issues, and who could therefore be mis-led by apparent denials of pain or difficulties.

              d) Teachers and learning support staff, who do not always appreciate the massive 'hidden agenda the adopted child has to work through before he is emotionally available to learn.

              e) Adoptive families going through challenging phases with children they feel do not accept their parenting.

              f) Health and Social Services managers and policy makers who hold the purse strings for post-adoption support and therapy.

              There is a particular issue around 'telling' a child he was adopted, that Joe Soll emphasises. He stresses that this should be in no way an isolated instance, something too terrible ever to mention again. He urges adoptive parents to create a climate of free speech, both verbal and non-verbal, that enables the child to keep raising issues and hurts and fears around his pre-adoption life and the people that were in it, throughout his childhood and on into adulthood. Ongoing talking about adoption and why it was ever necessary are, he maintains, enormously more important than the initial one-off disclosure, and is in itself a crucial part of the healing process. Old hat, you might think, but Soll makes the point that where for whatever reason there is not that open communication within the family, there is by definition the need for professional help from outside it

              There is a final comment I might make, about his references to adoptive parents. I do feel there are one or two rather sweeping statements in this book about us in general, that do not quite fit with the idea of equal partnership between all parties in adoption, and make one wonder what era he is talking about. For instance, there is quite a bit about our own assumed 'unresolved infertility issues' clouding our abilities to focus on our children' s needs. And, more worryingly, there is even the suggestion that adoptive parents have "no way ofknowing the inner pain their child i.'} suffering", and can neither see nor understand it, let alone help in the recovery process, which many ofus would take issue with. Nor does he specifically mention any other of the traumas that most of today's adopted children have experienced on top of that 'primal wound', but in talking of all adoptees as 'survivors' he is presumably applying the same principles to their healing and recovery from these other traumas too.

              But even after those niggles, this book leaves you in up-beat and prose\ytising mode. Having faced in these chapters the depths and disasters he describes, I am left with an urge to tell others of it and of the benefits it could have for so many of us and our children, and their' other mothers' .It is at the same time profoundly deep and real, and also reassuringly pragmatic and positive, bringing a wealth of healing possibilities into the range of all."


 -
Alison B,  Adoptive Mom in England

 










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