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I woke up this morning in a strange state that must have related to the time that surrounded my birth. As a newborn and this morning I was filled with an irrational rage and an uncontrollable terror intermingled with helplessness. That combination of emotions has frozen inside me and it is how I deal with my entire life. It’s a terrible way to deal, I know. I’ve been seeing a CBT therapist on sliding scale, but she’s just not getting down into that really dark discomfort. I think hypnotherapy is next, but right now I don’t have a job and I can’t afford it.

The thing about being adopted is about intrusion, the traumatic memory of that first abandonment, and constriction. a shutting down or surrendering to the situation at hand, being in the “wrong” family. Intrusion makes you hyper-alert to a possible repetition of the past trauma or the feeling that one needs to make trauma happen. The threat of annihilation or the urge to make concrete is an experience I might have had, but can’t remember–dying. Even if the present environment is safe, it doesn’t feel that way. In the case of constriction or numbing, the adoptee is in another state of consciousness, where she can’t be hurt by painful memories. This state is characterized by emotional detachment, indifference, complacency, and passivity. This is the state adoptees are in when everyone thinks she is daydreaming. It is almost as if she is in trance. She is feeling paralyzed, unable to integrate the trauma and get on with life. Mothers are not supposed to leave their babies. The adoptee is unable to make sense of either natural or divine order.

Unresolved grief over some long-forgotten or repressed loss may be the root of much of that which is considered clinical depression in our society. Those who experience loss need permission to feel their loss and the time and means to process it. They are suffering as a result of society’s ignorance, and its use of denial as a major defense against pain and paradox. Although blaming the victim is often a phenomenon of trauma, (rape victims and battered women), being separated from their biological mothers and handed over to strangers in the adoption process is the only trauma where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful. They are not grateful; they are grieving, and the original abandonment and loss are the sources of many other issues for the adoptee.

One of these issues for me is chronic writer’s block. Related to my writer’s block s my avowal that I’m unemployable. This society would see my statement as denial of my own laziness. I’ve always said no one will hire me, I won’t get the job. When an interviewer or employer rejected me sometime in the past, I now feel paralyzed by that initial rejection. I see it as a rejection of my person. That I am a failure. This fear of rejection is accompanied by a fear of success, my inability to believe I’m competent, a self rejection of my talents and capabilities which sabotages my success. I need to get one more advanced degree to prove that I have a right to exist. Workshops that pulverize your manuscript aren’t just about the manuscript. For me they have pulverized me as a person; they are forms of complete rejection. I am traumatized again, this time from the workshop experience, and writing has become a dreadful, fearful, malicious thing that threatens to rise up from the page and strip me of any feelings of worth. And because numbness and emotional detachment are my coping strategies I find it nearly impossible to access those parts of me that matter most to a fiction writer: my emotions. So I write from the neck up. It’s safer that way, like wearing water wings when all you’ve ever wanted to do, as a poet, an artist, a fiction writer, is to dive deep into the water. Writing about ideas has always been safer for me than writing about feelings.

The search for Self has always been my mission both as a person and as a writer. That’s because that that Self (which was inseparable from my biological for nine months) was annihilated upon the separation from her. I’ve always felt as if “I” was something that got lost between the hospital and the strangers who adopted me. So, my search for Self is intimately connected to the search for my biological mother. I did search for her and my search ended in learning that she had died many years earlier. Literally, my search for Self was a Dead End.

I looked up the term “disassociative identity disorder” and learned that those who have this are alert and aware of the difference between reality and non-reality, but everything around them feels like the rehearsal for a dream. If a writer has difficulty knowing who she is, that is, has a fluid, chameleon-like identity that she put on like a coat to fit in to a strange family, how can she find her way into herself through writing, when that self was never really there to begin with?

I end this post with an open-ended question, which is how my life began.

In a nutshell, my repressed mental monsters that began after my roots and identity were destroyed, and that eternal emptiness which began three days after my mother said good-bye to me forever that day I’d been in the world for three days, have begun to ask their due. They have been time bombs waiting to go off. Yet maybe this is the best thing that has ever happened to me, this realization that, like every living thing, I really am dying.

All my life I’ve lived to conform and get along to avoid rejection, mostly sacrificing my own feelings and needs to the desperate need to belong. All these years I’ve denied my grief and inner loneliness and pain. This in a world filled with bottomless grief and loneliness and pain.

For the first time in my adult life I’m able to get medical help because of (temporary) student insurance. I went to a medical provider and she gave me drugs for anxiety/depression and insomnia. I couldn’t even take them a month. They were shredding me, making things worse. This reaction is to be expected from these drugs–things must get worse before they get better. But the idea of introducing a chemical maelstrom into my body only added to my anxiety. I told her I wanted off all drugs three weeks later. She told me to taper off and look into acupuncture. So far I haven’t begun that, but apparently it can help. I’m too afraid to get the panel of tests she wants me to have: mammogram, pap smear, blood tests. So I’ve stopped going to see her.

I did find a therapist who was herself adopted. I’ve only seen her twice, but she’s the only therapist I’ve approached who truly understands that emptiness. The first time was a general mutual introduction. The second visit brought up issues for me and I cried because I felt she was dominating me and I couldn’t relax. She was kind and listened to me.

She recommended that I get a copy of The Girls Who Went Away and gain a new understanding of what mothers like mine had to go through when they gave up their babies to strangers. I followed her advice and cried uncontrollably as I read the first chapter in the words of a girl who had to give up her baby.

Another major stress factor for me has been that the Pacific Northwest, where I live, received a cloud of radiation fallout from Fukushima back in March, and so our rainfall, our bodies, our food all contain death particles. Children are particularly vulnerable. We only learned this through leaks this month–the media has been criminally silent on this issue.

As anxiety dominates everything in my life, I found an online support forum for people with anxiety. Unfortunately, every time I posted a question, the moderators deleted it. I have no idea why. What I wrote was neither unfriendly nor aggressive. The old rejection thing kicked in after that, so I had to drop one of the supports in my life.

However, I’ve also begun to explore Mindfulness Meditation. It has a Buddhist approach, but it may be practiced without any spiritual tradition whatsoever. In my situation, in the deplorable state of things in this world, and now that an ophthalmologist discovered I have cataracts in both eyes, the type of cataracts that are aggressive and quickly cause blindness, I seek refuge in a larger truth, in recognizing that I am not my pain, my grief, my cataracts, my adoptive emptiness, the state of the world, or anything outside my true state of mindful awareness.

Time to get off line and do some sitting practice. Thank you for visiting and reading. I wish you peace.

Stephen’s six articulate and intelligent essays may be found here.

But someone who commented on that post asked if I ever get panic attacks, and I replied that I do, in fact. That the first panic attacks I had I thought I was going to die. And while it’s true, anyone can get panic attacks adopted or not. I wonder if they are more prevalent in the (female) adoptee population, especially in compliant adoptees such as myself, where I was terrified of rocking the boat or I might be abandoned again, so I’ve forever gotten along to get along. I’m terrified of all conflict and I avoid it with the flight half of the fight or flight reaction. This makes for a spineless and un-assertive human being, since I’ve never dared stick up for myself. Maybe that’s just me rather than me being an adoptee, but I can’t prove it either way. All I know is I’m terrified of abandonment and rejection.

Every time a loved one is late coming home, when they said they’d be home or when they should reasonably be home, I always expect the worst. Every siren has to be for them in some horrible accident. I can’t cope with it. I panic. I don’t know where to put my anxiety and it eats me alive. This is wholly irrational. And I can write that right now, but when I’m in the situation, I can’t even think about rational.

If you or anyone you know is an adoptee and experiences any of these symptoms, please leave a comment. Thank you.

But lately I see I have some really deep issues to face–some of them difficult on a personal level. I don’t know if they began with my separation at birth from my natural mother or if they’re just an inherent part of my personality or if they were caused by environmental factors. Who knows? Where they came from isn’t important.

What matters right this moment is that I’m airing my laundry for anyone to read. It’s painful, but here it is.  My social phobia goes way back. And it’s part of a cluster of other things that include clinical depression and panic attacks. It’s a darkness I can’t begin to express. If you have any of these things, you probably understand. If you don’t, well, you are lucky indeed.

So, I confess: I’ve lost my function in the real world. I’m unemployable. Yes, I need help. But I can’t afford health care. I ‘ve seen (sliding-scale) counselors throughout my life, but all that happened was that I shelled out a lot of money and gave up. No growth or transformation (taking pharmaceuticals isn’t an attractive option for me). Once a kind woman posted to this blog offering to help, but I didn’t follow up because my guilt stopped me from being a “taker.” I knew I couldn’t reciprocate her kindness.

I’ve thought about suicide at different times in my life. I’ve called a suicide hotline. Somehow I worked through these episodes. I have no idea what leads me to them. See this, but this, and this seem to indicate that the verdict to link an increased risk of suicide among the adoptee population is still out. Studies are still inconclusive.

I once knew a girl in her early twenties who was adopted and all she could do was hide inside her apartment all day, lying on the sofa eating and watching television. Her apartment smelled. Wrappers, spoiled and spilled food, piles of dirty clothes. It looked like a dumpster. She gained a lot of weight. She wallowed in her pain, her grief, her fears. She was socially paralyzed. Everyone gave her a hard time. They called her a spineless slob, they avoided her. But I understood her inability to gather the courage to act, to do something with her life. I’m not that bad. Yet. And yes, like me she needed to get help.

And last I heard she did get help. After her boyfriend left her. She couldn’t hide behind him any more. She lost the only crutch she had. She enlisted in the military. I guess you could say she “grew a  spine.” I don’t know if she went on medication or where her life took her from there. I don’t know if she’s better off now or if she’s dead.

I don’t have the option to join the military, and wouldn’t if I did, since it’s against my principles. My only recourse now is to find a way to get out and volunteer my time, to begin to help others and/or the planet. Forget my own pain and misery, for short periods of time at least.  I’m not sure how that will play on my social phobia; not sure if I can handle the potential panic attacks. Right now I feel broken, crippled, saturated with the world’s pain, and hurting mentally, physically, and spiritually. But I don’t see that I have any other choice.

Adoption is one of those subjects that everyone thinks they know something about – and has an opinion on. Unfortunately, many of these opinions are wrong, since most people are not adopted, and have no first-hand experience of the adoption process or the effects it has on the families involved in adoption. There are many fallacies concerning adoption – some of them may surprise you!

Read The Eight Great Fallacies About Adoption, an essay by Anne Slagle

As the days and weeks progressed I was conscious of sinking further and further into my own shell rather than participating in the discussions. Although there were only 11 people in the workshop, I felt a growing sense of discomfort. Not because of anything they or the instructor did or said to me, but because of my awareness that they were (except for another woman and myself) so at ease within themselves, gliding between the moments, grounded and self-contained, so sure of who they were, laughing and bantering as close-knit groups tend to do. There was a general sense of camaraderie.

But I was not a part of that camaraderie. I sat away from the desks because I couldn’t relate to their light-hearted assurance and ease. I couldn’t relate to their grounded and balanced knowing without having to think about where they came from and where they belonged in the world from birth, regardless of their family conditions.

I mentioned there was one other woman in the group like me. She was also adopted. I knew this because we’d taken a workshop together before and when she read one of my stories, she recognized the description I wrote about feeling disconnected. We talked awhile and we both learned we were adopted at birth. She never said much at all in either of the workshops. She kept to herself at all times, just like I did.

At the end of this last workshop, she was the first one out the door. Everyone else held back for old times sake to say farewell and ask questions and schmooze. All except for me. I was right behind the other adoptee. She was 100 paces ahead of me down the hall. I watched her back recede as I ran down the stairs to outside wishing I could peel off my skin and become invisible.

Read the rest here.

But one thing has remained from the earliest days of my life, and that’s a sense of inferiority. I always feel like less than everyone else. I always feel like I’m taking up space that might better be used for something else. What I do, think, and say don’t seem very important, and certainly have little effect on anything. It’s as if I’m falling, falling, falling forever into nothing.

I’ve been told to cheer up and make the best of things. That it could be worse. I’ve also been told I fit the profile for depression. There are so many people in this world, and so many people are suffering while others are focused on their own lives and could care less about the suffering of others. And there are so many kinds of suffering. The suffering you can’t see is sometimes worse than the kind you can see. We all walk around suffering quietly in our own way and for our own reasons. It’s such a lonely reality we don’t share.

They say that depression runs in families. I have no idea if it ran in my blood family. All I have to go on is what’s inside me. Maybe I would have been depressed even if I weren’t adopted at birth. It’s all speculation. Sometimes dark thoughts take over and I can’t get out of the room. They effect everything I think, say, do. I’ve never been that outgoing, but now I’m pulling back even more. I wonder if other adoptees experience any of this and suspect it’s caused by not knowing who they are and walking around with an empty nothing in their center. This is, to my mind, the result of childhood trauma rooted in secrecy. And the result is damaged goods.You might not agree with Nancy Verrier, but for me, no one else has come as close to describing my experience as she has.  The following is a paper written by Ginni D. Snodgrass at George Fox University in 1998:

The secrecy in an adoptive family, and the denial that the adoptive family is different builds dysfunction into it. “… while social workers and insecure adoptive parents have structured a family relationship that is based on dishonesty, evasions and exploitation. To believe that good relationships will develop on such a foundation is psychologically unsound” (Lawrence). As John Bradshaw, the well-renowned therapist, says, “A family is only as sick as its secrets.”

Secrecy erects barriers to forming a healthy identity. Sealed records implicitly asks for an extreme form of denial. There is no school of psychotherapy which regards denial as a positive strategy in forming a sense of self and dealing with day-to-day realities. (Howard)Adoption is a psychological burden to the adoptee. The effect of this burden is known, but the origin is confused. Secrecy plays a part in it, but Nancy Newton Verrier, Ph.D., sources the difficulties to the separation of the newborn from the mother. The Primal Wound [1993] is the most recent and revealing work done on the effects of adoption on the adopted. In the author’s own words, “I believe that the connection established during the nine months in utero is a profound connection, and it is my hypothesis that the severing of that connection in the original separation of the adopted child from the birth mother causes a primal or narcissistic wound, which affects the adoptee’s sense of Self and often manifests in a sense of loss, basic mistrust, anxiety and depression, emotional and/or behavioral problems, and difficulties in relationships with significant others (21).” Verrier has been criticized for her work, but her response says it all, “The only people who can really judge this work, however, are those about whom it is written: the adoptees themselves. Only they, as they note their responses to what is written here, will really know in their deepest selves the validity of this work, the existence or nonexistence of the primal wound” (xvii).

Secrecy, denial, and the primal wound have all played a role in the effect adoption has on the adoptee, but there is still more. Having spent nearly eight years studying and working as a volunteer with over 1000 people affected by an adoption (nearly all adoptees and birthmothers); I have seen the effects of adoption.

Humans have a basic need to feel they are individually whole, yet part of a whole. For the adopted this can be difficult. Often adoptees feel they do not belong (Kirschner). It is very lonely and isolating to feel different from those you should feel the closest to, your family. Edin Lipinski, M.D., brings insight to these feelings:

In an existential sense, the past is as important to adopted people as their future. It is the present that is most troublesome. Not knowing where they fit into the spectrum of happenings is a great problem for them. – Statistics on the Effects of Adoption

Adoptees who go through their lives like I have will always be children looking for their parents…sometimes even after they find them, because really, the longer adoptees and their parents are separated, the longer the stretch of no history together. In my case, my mother died long before I got to begin my search (my adoptive mother was terrified of giving me any information) and no one in my mother’s family knew who my father was. My half-siblings have written me off (again, no history together–we’re strangers),  my aunt died four months after I found her… and my uncle’s political views are so virulently opposed to my own that he won’t connect with me. So…I’m as alone as if I’d never searched.

This is why I blog. But blogging is only words on a flat screen, and with the state of the world as it is, there aren’t any places to turn to any more.