No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.–Victor Hugo
As an adopted child, I had a recurring dream about the emptiness inside me, always symbolized by a black, empty room that had no foundation, no floor…nothing to stand on. If I dare took a step across this floor, I knew I’d fall forever.
I suffer from the universal hallmarks of being an adoptee: disconnectedness, free-floating anxiety, and an endless search to belong but never belonging. I’ve lived every day of my life with this loss and unresolved grief.
With the loss and grief associated with divorce and death, the larger society has resources to offer people comfort, support and recognition for their grief through accepted universally known rituals.
A common experience for adoptees is the grief from the loss of an unknown person without understanding why, but there’s no social context in which this loss is recognized. There’s no real adoption language or rituals to help adoptees cope and grieve, unless you can afford health insurance for expensive, private, long-term therapy.
This lack of support excludes adoptees from that larger society and infuses them with an existential emptiness that can result in various behaviors like difficulty with intimacy in relationships, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, thoughts of suicide, suicide, homicide, and so forth. Like living in an invisible, socially accepted, psychological concentration camp. At the very least, those who were adopted unnecessarily (see my post on vanity adoptions) are second-class citizens.
Which is more harmful in the long run, physical or psychological trauma? I’ll leave that for you to answer.
Unnecessary adoptions are saturated with secrecy. Secrecy, by its nature, hides something that protects its keeper(s), which in the case of unnecessary adoption, is a sociological conspiracy.
Here are just a few of countless reports by and about adoptees who bear the scar of pathological secrecy–
From tribe.net
“i am not able to master anything i try in life, always giving up, feeling like i will never be good enough. but i am more determined than ever to find and clear the issues that stand in my way. it is weird, i feel also like i have a hard time forming relationships, and keeping them….”
“My adoptive parents told me at a very young age (when I was young enough to understand) that I was adopted. I have always felt fortunate to be raised by my adoptive parents. They made me feel like I was special to have been adopted and treated me as they did their own biological children. I grew up in a pretty functional nuclear family and am grateful to have received the love I did from my parents, siblings, and extended family. However, no amount of love has replaced the emptiness that I feel as an adoptee…”
From Pushpa’s Blog
One of the biggest voids is understanding of the adoptee and their suffering that occurs without a foundation of familial background. We all need to know our ancestry and our families regardless of the situations we came from, it is only natural for humans to have this desire. Another problem are the legalities, who is really watching over these adoptions to make sure that they are done properly?
All of us affected by adoption are being called forth to help in our own little ways to make a change. There is no change with ignorance and complacency nor without acceptance.
From Stolen Nation
Many native adoptees suffered from not only geographical displacement and cultural confusion but also emotional emptiness, violence, physical and sexual abuse, and drug or alcohol abuse.
“My brother was adopted at four years old,” recalls one of the birth relatives of native adoptees interviewed for Our Way Home. “His adoptive parents divorced when he was 12 and they gave him back to the agency like returning merchandise. His life after that was a living hell of abuse, violence and alcoholism. My brother hanged himself at 20 years old.”
Unnecessary adoption requires a conspiracy of secrets
Q. Every day we read/hear about and see racism, sexism, and homophobia. Where is the same broad publicity and discussion on unnecessary adoption, the deceptions that surround the institution of felony kidnapping?
A.It’s as invisible as the ongoing grief carried around inside adoptees because aggressive colonizers have always secretively, systematically, and deceptively coerced and manipulated the voiceless members of society (in this case, vulnerable natural mothers and their children) and their environment with the express purpose of extracting profit.
One thing is clear to me. Society would no longer tolerate unnecessary adoption if the secrecy behind it was exposed to the light of day,
