Adoption Trauma

I’m feeling a bit stronger, so I’m reposting this.  A big thank you to my best friend and the adoptee community for their open ears and eyes and open hearts, and for making me feel less alone.

There’s something I want to address on here, prompted by a set of tags I saw the other week regarding separation, adoption, and infant trauma.  The tags reflected a view that isn’t restricted to just the one person who wrote them; rather, I’d say it’s a fairly common assumption.

The assumption goes like this: Infants separated at or near birth can’t be traumatized because they’re too small to remember their mother and/or the separation.

I’ve been thinking about this opinion a lot.  For years; as I’ve been confronting, sorting through and processing my own layers of trauma.  Before I go on, I also want to mention that the opinion that infants can’t remember being separated from their mothers probably helps contribute to the belief that infant adoption is “easier” (the desire to adopt infants): We’re “fresh”/blank slates, it happens before we can be traumatized, we can’t tell the difference / will adjust to a different mother without trouble, when we’re babies it’s easier to pretend that we “belong to” the adoptive parents, etc.

It’s hard, but I’m going to write about my own experience with trauma.  Though, listening to the podcast Adoptees On and reading many books and blog posts written by other adoptees [resources] have helped me realize that I’m not alone.

I was brought to an orphanage in Seoul, Korea, one day after I was born.  After that, I was fostered for four and a half months in Korea before being adopted to the U.S.  I’ve had issues with anxiety for as long as I can remember, this vague but present feeling of off-ness.  My childhood was fairly unremarkable in some ways; things seemed “fine.”

When I was a teenager, about 15-16, my parents announced that they were getting a divorce.  The divorce itself wasn’t a surprise, to be honest (don’t get me wrong, divorce still sucks).  They were unhappy and unhealthy together, never close, and for their sake, I was relieved.  But, for me, their divorce opened up this chasm that had been building since I was 12 or so.  My body was reacting even though my brain wasn’t consciously aware of why.  This is happening again.  Abandonment.  Losing a[nother] family.  The words do and don’t capture the feeling.  It’s like they’re too sophisticated, too word-y, too verbal, for the deep fear and loss that I felt.  I was set spiraling, falling without a net or anyone to catch me, my body dispersing to the winds.  Trying not to be abandoned again.  It’s probably this vulnerability, this need for safety, which my father exploited, doing what he did to me.  It was at this time that I started calling myself unreal, half-alive.  It was at this time that I started feeling like (or becoming aware of the feeling that) there was a hole inside every nucleus of every cell in my body.  What my mom’s pulling away from our family beginning when I was 12 or 13 and what her and my father’s divorce triggered was that initial loss, the loss of my first mother, an event which happened when I was just a day old.

The original animated Dumbo movie struck me deep when I watched it for the first time as a child (don’t remember how old I was; definitely lower primary school age).  Same with that scene where Widow Tweed lets Tod go in The Fox and the Hound.  Even when I watched The Children of Men at the age of 21 or so, I cried during the scene where Kee gets pulled away from Miriam.  It made me want to put my hands over my ears, curl into a ball.  I do not like separation scenes in movies or probably any media, especially when they’re violent or forced or sprung upon one or both parties.*  Because I can feel them.  Back then I don’t think I would have been able to tell you why; probably a combination of my body protecting me and perhaps society’s not addressing the trauma of adoption (no one ever asked).  However, I can now.  And when my mom died a little over three years ago, I was 28.  Her death triggered once again that first loss, and I grieved both her and my first mother, whom I hadn’t been able to grieve.  You see, subsequent losses only pile on top of that first critical one, hearkening back to it.  That first loss has been written into my cells, and it’s preverbal; my body remembers it, even if I can’t or couldn’t always articulate the conscious details of the trauma.  My reaction is not always as dramatic as with my parents’ divorce, but even something like a breakup has caused me to panic; therapy and time have given me the tools to calm myself.  And it doesn’t just crop up when loss occurs; the pain in my heart is now literal, constant, and deep, like a low-grade fever with some flare-ups.

I’m not writing this to gain sympathy, or to be gratuitous.  I’m writing in hopes that this sharing of one experience will be helpful to others.  Adoptees all cope with separation and adoption differently, this is true.  But if you all keep thinking that small infants aren’t or can’t be affected at all by these things, if you only affirm the stories you want to hear (the “good adoption” stories); if that’s your attitude, then it won’t help anyone.  You will keep doing harm.  And I can’t stand by that.

Objectively, how can separation not be traumatic, even for — especially for — small infants?  It’s another thing I think about a lot.  Maybe this warrants a different post, but I mean, kittens and puppies aren’t supposed to be separated from their mothers before they reach a certain age.  Doing so before that time can affect their ability to thrive, to handle stress.  Quite simply, they need their mothers.  That seems pretty basic, right?  And yet people seem to turn their blinders on when it comes to humans.  And I just… wonder why that is (not wonder-wonder; I can easily guess why).  Why can’t mainstream society afford this understanding and compassion, to make room for the harsh, far more complicated stuff in the human adoption experience?

I don’t know.  I’ve been thinking about all this a lot.  And even though I’m afraid to post this and of the response (“You just had a bad experience,” “My neighbor’s uncle-in-law adopted a kid and they’re fine!”), I have hope that what I’ve written above will help: help people learn, help people who have experienced trauma.

*The complement to these examples/the trauma of separation is that I’ve always been searching for my birthmother (for reunion) even on a subconscious level.  This is another thing I know I’m not alone on.

Last edited: 8/16/19.  I added a link to the tags I saw and shifted some of the language in this post because I’m tired of mitigating.