28/09/2023
For adoptees, our lives don’t begin at placement- our lives begin in utero/at birth. However too often I work with adoptees who were raised in spaces that only fully honor the parts that include adoptive family, seemingly forgetting whole chapters that influenced & impacted our worldviews and challenged our senses of safety.
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“She never had a family until us.”
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“He couldn’t miss birth family, he’s never met them.”
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“You’re being too sensitive, not everything is about adoption.”
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These are examples of phrases- that I have repeatedly heard over the years, that are forgetting the chapters before adoption. These are the phrases that ignore implicit memory, that are rigid rather than curious. These are the phrases that forget we must be looking at adopted children and their experiences through the lens of grief & loss.
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How might our perspective shift about big, challenging behavior , big complicated feelings, struggling to find identity,
High risk behaviors, search & reunion, and other big topics if we were to slow things down and get curious about grief and how it bubbles under the surface - a key factor in all of these.
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For many adoptees, this grief is some of the biggest to hit the system. Often occurring in the most vulnerable developmental stages, which also means it’s occurring in preverbal, pre- explicit memory making phases. How (understandably so) disorienting. We cannot underestimate the impact this has.
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Of course things feel hard when you have lost so much. Of course things feel isolating when there are no solid answers. Of course things feel disorienting when loved ones raise you and will not acknowledge what came before as if it’s a secret, or something to be ashamed about.
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When children are adopted the wholeness of them is adopted, the wholeness of them deserves love & the wholeness of them needs attunement.
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