Adoptee Struggles: Finding the Peace
7/24/2019
Look at her. She is teeny tiny and beautiful and soft. She coos and gazes at your eyes and will grab your finger when offered. She is a newborn; freshly brewed and served into this world on a perfect shiny platter. She is pure; free of malice, judgment or harm.
When I work with adopted clients, I often return to this image. Many adoptees feel tossed away or damaged and believe that they are being relinquished by their birth mother because they did wrong.
In a therapy session I encourage the adopted client to imagine herself as a baby and together we process the images of the sweet, innocent infant. I try to impress upon her that this baby has done nothing wrong; the baby is not at fault for anything.
The adults are making the decisions. The decisions are heavy, painful and complicated. They are decisions that have been made from nine months of thoughts, feelings and conversations having nothing to do with the worth of this beautiful baby. The baby was not bad and therefore given away.
The baby was perfect; all babies are perfect. The adult was conflicted, sad, scared, hurting; we don’t know for sure, but whatever it was, it had nothing to do with the beauty, the worth, the value of this baby.
This is a hard concept for many adopted kids and adults to embrace. The sense of abandonment that they often feel is so deep that they can not imagine any reason other than their ‘badness’ to have caused their relinquishment.
Often with love and support from their adoptive family and good therapy, they can rebuild their sense of worth and grow to believe in themselves. This is a difficult task as they have lived with this false belief for as long as they have lived. I do see joy and confidence become part of their being; it is a difficult path, but these clients can and do find their worth.