Reliving the Trauma…Over and Over and Over

Hey hey. After a couple months’ break I’m here posting again. Sometimes I wonder what’s the point of maintaining a blog about adoption, especially when I’ve seen so many other blogs of adoptees and first moms go dark or inactive.

To be honest, I get weary of getting out the pain and up on the screen, especially when the words go unread, or at least go unresponded to. Maybe it’s a kind of strange therapy, some kind of lurid exhibitionalism. But at least it’s free. Lord knows I don’t have health insurance and can’t afford to pay for it.

But Heatherrainbow has made me realize that maybe doing without “professional” therapy is a good thing. There are so many “professionals” out there who hang out a shingle and think they know how to help you, and wind up making things worse. That’s because there are still scant studies on the pathology of adoption. That and the fact that being an adoptee or a first mom is still seen as a crime just as racism is alive and well in this country. It’s just that the contentiousness that’s still very much alive has gone underground because it’s seen as impolite (or “not p.c.” as they say).

But just like health insurance lobbyists bring out the big guns whenever “single payer” or “universal” health insurance comes up in political debate and they are so powerful after stealing all of our money that they can squelch anything that smells like “socialized medicine” like a bug. Same with adoption, which is so damned lucrative for the adoption machine that its lobbyists will do anything to keep dissent and possibility of reform squelched.

As for me, I’ve always been alone, even in a crowded room. Not out of choice, but because I feel so absolutely alienated from contact with anyone, even those who say they love me–and I honestly believe that they do love me, only I just don’t know how to relax in that. I guess I’ve rejected everyone who’s ever tried to be close to me. Except for my beloved R who has helped me work through so much. But there’s still so much to work through that I doubt either of us will live long enough to complete the job. Even he can’t reach in there and pull out the lump of pain that burns continuously at the core of my being.

I’m so afraid of rejection that I go out of my way to avoid social contact. I guess you could call that “reliving the initial trauma.” But I can’t help myself. I still have to function somehow, knowing that nothing will ever take the pain away. So I act as if everything’s fine. I put on an act that looks like I know how to love people. Maybe my inability to bond is genetic rather than something caused by adoption. How can anything like this be proved?

Yes. Yes, I know. Sometimes nothing can be helped and a child must be adopted. But vanity adoptions that steal from young mothers who lack the economic means and the will to power against the machine, are criminal. And they reflect the rotten, stinking core of this “family values” society that is putrifying beneath a bunch of make-up and ribbons.