By Lauren Williams
I was adopted as a baby, and for most of my life, although I knew I was adopted, I didn’t really understand how being adopted had impacted me. I adored my mother, yet I never felt fully attached to her. My father, on the other hand, was abusive and I never attached to him at all. As an only child, I framed my failure to attach to my parents as an only child thing—I hated being an only child. I felt lonely, as if my life was missing something. It was only when I found my birth family and learned the story of my origins that I realized the narrative of my life had been a fiction all along.
In coming to know my birth family, I discovered my birth had profound consequences on two families’ lives. My biological father had been married, and when my biological mother became pregnant with me, his own family was shattered. My birth mother hadn’t wanted to give me up, but as a single mother in the south in the 1960’s, she felt giving me up was her only option. Society demanded she live with the shame and impoverishment of being an unwed mother or live with the guilt and regret of another family raising me as their own.
As for the man who raised me, my adopted father, he was antisemitic man, and I learned that my biological father was Jewish. That revelation was both humorously ironic, and disturbing—as if my father was repelled by my ancestral origins.
But in discovering my ancestral origins, I’ve found blessings, and burdens. The blessings are in finding my four brothers and sisters and my cousins. The burden has been not discovering my birth parents before they passed away, and in realizing my very existence brought such pain. There has also come a certain state of trauma with that discovery, one which has led me to study how adoption impacts people throughout their lives, and rethink the concept of the Primal Wound and what that means for the many different adoption stories and experiences of the adoptee and his or her families.
When we think about adoption, it’s typically stories like mine—an unwed mother feels she’s unprepared to raise a child, so she gives her child up for adoption to some lucky couple who will raise that child with love and care. But the reality of adoption is that it comes in all shapes and sizes, and there are distinctions and commonalities in each of these types of adoption.
There is adoption at birth, like mine, but there is also adoption at later ages, which can have an even greater traumatic impact on the child. A parent may have tried to parent their child and realized they just could not do it—maybe they were immature, impoverished, struggled with addiction, had several other children and were overwhelmed, or maybe they were abusive and had their child taken away. In some cases, the parents have died or been imprisoned. These children tend to suffer from severe attachment disorders that manifest in a range of maladaptive behaviors in adulthood.
There are children who are adopted by a stepparent, often after one parent has had their parental rights terminated, or voluntarily relinquished their parental rights.
And there are multigenerational adoptions, where a child is adopted by grandparents, older siblings, or aunts and uncles, and they usually grow up knowing their family member who they might call their brother or sister or cousin, is actually their biological parent. In some cases, they don’t learn the truth until they are teenagers or adults—Ted Bundy grew up thinking his biological mother was his sister, and the truth shocked him when he learned that his parents were actually his grandparents. Fortunately, most adoptees don’t grow up to be serial killers, but for anyone who learns they were adopted later in life, whether within the family or not, the discovery is a traumatic one and leaves them with a deep sense of betrayal by those they loved.
There are open adoptions and closed adoptions, international adoptions, cross-racial adoptions, adoptions by same-sex couples, and two types we don’t typically think of as adoption, are surrogacy and artificial insemination. In surrogacy, a woman has carried a child in her womb who may or may not be her biological child, and throughout her pregnancy she’s done so with the intent to relinquish her child, often for money. With artificial insemination, men have donated or sold their sperm to inseminate women they usually don’t even know. Like surrogates, these biological fathers have no interest in the child they create.
What all these forms of adoption have in common is the child voluntarily or involuntarily relinquished by the biological parent grows up knowing they were unwanted or a major problem for by one or more parent. We are told often we were “chosen” and that we are therefore “special,” but we also know these are words to comfort the reality that we were in the way.
We also grow up knowing we are “different.” We don’t look like anyone in our family, unless we were adopted within the family. We don’t know our medical history, while others in the family do know theirs. And in international adoptions or adoptions of children from a different race or cultural background, such children are often raised not knowing their cultural origins and ancestral traditions. This sense of difference inscribes itself on the psychology of a child and by the time they become adults, many have already developed a deeply-ingrained sense of self as less-than. It’s no wonder, then, that adoptees tend to have higher rates of substance abuse, alcoholism, eating disorders, and difficulty sustaining relationships.
These maladaptive patterns can be even more challenging to treat because contrary to the myth that being adopted means you’ve been raised in a better environment than if you’d remained with your birth parents, the truth is, adoptees are more likely to be abused. I’m not suggesting that all adoptions are a bad idea—many adoptive families are indeed more nurturing, loving and secure than some birth families—but lacking that biological connection, adoptees become more vulnerable to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. We often see such abuse by stepparents, even if they’ve legally adopted a child.
Adoptees can also be more vulnerable to abuse by their siblings, who in many cases view them as not “real” brothers or sisters and may resent them for competing for their parents’ love and affection, as well as competing for financial benefits.
These experiences can retraumatize the adoptee and re-open the Primal Wound. The concept of the Primal Wound was introduced by Nancy Verrier in her book, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Verrier suggested that the connection between birth mother is primal—it’s experienced psychologically and physiologically. When it’s severed, such as through adoption or the dissolution of parental rights, the child experiences unconscious and lasting impacts.
Verrier’s work is considered controversial because she suggests that the adoptee, even if separated from its mother at birth, retains memories of that connection. This argument is problematic, however, because the brain’s capacity to form memories requires maturation—the development of motor neurons and synapses necessary to store information, as well as other parts of the brain such as the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. Yet that does not mean that we ought to reject the notion of a primal wound altogether. Whether the child retains a conscious memory of its biological mother or not, growing up with the awareness of loss, and the constancy of knowing one is different from their adopted family, wounds, and often shatters the sense of self. And their sense of difference isn’t just something that they internalize—it’s something that society perceives, as well, with higher rates of bullying and abuse among adopted children, particularly by stepparents, siblings, and extended family members.
Even when a child grows up not knowing they were adopted, the higher incidence of abuse, neglect, and unfavorable treatment compared to biological children, heightens the sense of being unloved, unwanted, and rejected. Should that child later discover they were adopted, which is increasingly common with ancestry sites that enable users to post their DNA, the sense of betrayal can open a Primal Wound causing profound emotional and cognitive repercussions.
Thus, as therapists, we would be well served to consider the merits of the Primal Wound theory, even if the concept of primal memory proves unfounded. For adoptees, as well, the concept has great utility for understanding the complexities of adoption and being relinquished (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) by the birth mother. In my own quest to know my birth history, I found the concept of the Primal Wound to be both a comforting and discomforting explanatory model for unresolved emotions around my adopted and biological families. For my clients, I find it even more powerful, because far too often our histories of adoption have been suppressed through decades of being told our adoption makes no difference. Adoption does make a difference, and whether for the best, or far from the best, exploring that difference and how it shapes our lives, will carry us far along our healing journeys.