THE TRUTH ABOUT ADOPTION TRAUMA

Adoption trauma is complex and multilayered making it challenging and overwhelming to go on a search for the truth. As you begin, there are two basic layers that will help ground you as you get started. At this point, it is undeniable that there is an industry that has created a global child supply market for people looking to start or grow their families. Let’s break down this first layer of trauma that is generational and historical. As an industry, many of the laws and policies center on how to source children from their living parents and define those practices. According to Janine Vance, the author of Adoption What You Should Know, she provides historical evidence that the modern adoption industry originated from the illegal practices of human slavery and child labor over 400 years ago. The industry has continued to target, recruit, victimize, dehumanize, commodify, and exploit women for their eggs, wombs, and children. Women today are growing up in a globalized culture of coercion built from the messages that “adoption is in the best interest of the child” and “adoption gives them a better life.” Women around the world are coerced and deceived into giving up the child for adoption. Read The Illusion of Adoption is Over by Moses Farrow.

The second layer is marked by the neurological trauma that is experienced by both mother and child at the time of their pregnancy. Teenagers and adults alike face the same stigma, shaming, and pressure to “give up the child for adoption.” Systemic oppression cannot be ignored as the mother faces biases in their homes, churches, doctors offices, and reduction or removal of their reproductive rights. All of this stress is passed along through the biochemical link between mother and child. This process of victimization, dehumanization, and commodification is overshadowed by the more popularized narratives of relinquishment, abandonment, and loss at the time of adoption. The industry is no longer denying the mental health issues it has caused and instead built yet a new market of clients in need of adoption competent therapists. As the industry does not want more attention on the more illicit practices, it is directing people’s focus on attachment trauma, which is already well-defined and treatable. However, it’s necessary to fully acknowledge all layers of the traumas inflicted by the industry to know the truth of what has happened to you. The factsheets below are designed to help start these conversations with the people in your life.

WHAT MAKES ADOPTION UNIQUE?

Everyone who engages with the adoption industry joins an ongoing legacy that goes beyond mental health issues related to relinquishment and loss. When we take a sociocultural perspective, we open ourselves to the industry’s unique imprint on human history. It’s important that we know the truth about how adoption has shown up throughout the world. Adoption has been present in colonizing new territories, child migraine schemes, genocidal campaigns against indigenous populations, religious cleansing, war crimes, trafficking and slavery, in essence, crimes against humanity. As products of this industry, we are bound to its living legacy.

On an individual level, it's about realizing that we are taken from the lives we are born into and put in an alternate reality. It explains why we struggle to find a place we belong and yet never seem to fit in anywhere. As if we are caught between two worlds, two dimensions, two realities one of which shouldn't even exist. This explains the pain we're in, that's constant and lifelong. Being stuck in this alternate reality, it makes sense that all we want is for the pain to end, commonly pathologized as suicide. A constant state of yearning, hoping that any kind of connection to either world would satisfy this unexplainable void overshadowed by the loss(es) often brought up as causing adoption trauma. The turmoil the soul goes through as our attention is directed to make the best of this life, to seek wholeness in whatever way that leads to happiness, even in the smallest ways, to accept that there is no going back to the life we were taken from. All the while not acknowledging we live in some version of the twilight zone, never to get back that which was taken and never to be able to return to the life we were born into. This is one of the hardest truths about adoption trauma and one of the most profound I have come across in my pursuit of the truth.

Similarly this is true of victims of kidnapping and trafficking. As investigations of adoption programs continue to spread across Europe, Asia, and South America, more adoptees are beginning to re-label themselves as "taken", "stolen", "trafficked". With such labels comes deeper understanding and realization of the trauma and underlying truth of what really caused it.

*If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis, please call your local emergency services or contact one of these emergency resources.
*Take the PTSD Self-Screen and get help today.