My Adoption Trauma Isn't About You (but you might not be helping either)

 When I was writing this post in my head at 3am, it was perfectly ordered and the prose was persuasive and beautiful and I knew just what to say. Now, I'm not sure where to start, but here we go anyway.

There's been a lot going on this week that's pretty overwhelming, so instead of thinking about ALL OF THAT as my therapist would, I'm sure, prefer I do, I'm thinking about adoption, yet again, as always, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. 

However, three specific things have been swirling in my head for a while: 

1. My adoption trauma isn't really about anyone but me. It's not about my birth family or my adoptive family or even random people who are connected to adoption. It's about me. I'll explain more on this in a bit.

2. Making my adoption trauma about you takes the focus away from what I need and might be pushing me away. 

3. There are issues inherent to adoption and ignoring those issues compounds the problem instead of making it magically disappear. 

What I mean by the first point isn't that people other than me (whoever they were) didn't compound or even cause my trauma; no, I mean that it belongs to me and nobody else. Adoptive families (and others) who make their adoptees' trauma about themselves and get hurt and defensive are centering themselves in a narrative that isn't theirs. 

I see a lot of defensiveness and insecurity from adoptive families, especially adoptive parents, and it does so much harm to both their adoptees and to themselves! 

I'm going to pick on one of my cousins for a little bit, because I love her self awareness and ability to learn and grow. She once told me that, until I started sharing my adoption trauma, that she would get defensive of adoption itself when she'd hear someone speak negatively about it, because it threatened the idea of us as family. She loved me. She's happy I'm her cousin. I wouldn't be her cousin without adoption, therefore adoption can't be bad and, if it's bad, that might mean we wouldn't get to be cousins. And I get it! It's out of love! But it was missing the bigger picture, which is that two conflicting things can be true at the same time:

1. Adoption harmed me deeply.

2. But I can still love my adoptive family and they can love me.

And, to this cousin's great credit, she totally gets that now and supports my truth and, I dare say, that has brought us closer together, because I can trust her with my pain. She can hold space for all of me without it being about her and that bonds us in trust. 

So back to the insecure adoptive families. Because the paradigm of adoption rests precariously on these ideas of fate and make believe, many families center themselves over adoptees' needs and get defensive (just as my cousin used to) when we get brave enough to speak up about our pain. But, again, not only does that center the wrong people, it will end up pushing adoptees away from their families. And then I hear families complain about their ungrateful adoptees, when it's the families who are the ones who cause these rifts. If they'd support their adoptees, hold their pain with them, show them love no matter what (and no matter what we say about adoption), their relationships could be so strong! 

But they just have to pretend there aren't issues. They have to pretend adoption is beautiful, otherwise what have they been doing? 

I find this idea similar to other impossible hypotheticals, like, If your parents hadn't ever met, you wouldn't have been born. And? So? If that had happened, I wouldn't know it, because I wouldn't exist! It's silly to play those what ifs because they are impossible to do anything about. We're not jumping timelines here; we live in reality.

I'm going to tell these people a secret: We can't change the past, so it's no use feeling insecure about it now. We're here. Let's face reality head on and with compassion. 

If they can't accept that there are inherent issues with adoption itself and that they need to stop centering themselves in their adoptee's trauma, they will continue to hurt their own feelings and drive us away. But, if they set their insecurity aside and choose to listen and support, they can create deeper relationships with us.

And, honestly, there isn't enough time to talk about all the inherent issues with adoption, so I won't try, but I want to stress that pretending those issues don't exist will make the problem worse and the only way to support and love adoptees fully is by accepting these issues are inherent to adoption and giving us space and support to speak our truths (sorry for the trite phrase but it's the most apt) and truly listen to us. 

So much of what's wrong with adoption are in the lies and secrecy, but most of those are systemic. They change our birth certificates to make it look like our adoptive parents birthed us. They hide our records and our parents and our names from us and make us jump through (often impossible) hoops to access them. They keep our new names and locations and info secret from our first families. It's designed to lie. It's designed to be secretive and shameful. This is mostly due to Georgia Tann btw (google her if you want to know more, but not before bed, trust me) and it's, I think, to cover up the shame of infertility and so we must falsify adoptees' origins and play pretend in this big American farce of familial perfection. 

But I never understood it. Why the farce? If adoption is SO beautiful, like the propaganda says, why not just be honest about it? 

I don't often say great things about my adoptive mom, but I'll give her this: she did always tell me the truth as she knew it about my origins and adoption. Many adoptive parents lie to their adoptees, but mine never did. Now, they didn't know much and what they did know was due to a cool social worker who broke some rules and the little they learned of my birth father when he interviewed them, but they never kept any of that from me. And she fought for a more open adoption, asked for photos, a letter, medical history, anything! But was told no, no, no, hell no. The state of California sealed my records, said I could open them at 18 (which wasn't entirely true), and said good luck and don't call us! After that, there was no more info for either side, no communication, no access, just secrecy designed by the state. 

But while my family never lied to me nor did they make me feel ashamed to be adopted necessarily, I still felt forced onto a lifelong role of playing pretend in their family play. I was still different from them and I felt like someone was trying to gaslight me every time someone said I looked like my dad or when I acted like someone in my adoptive family, someone would say, "It's a sign she was always meant to be yours," or even, "That's totally your child!" It's so bizarre to always feel different but then to be constantly told I wasn't. 

I want to make it clear at this point that the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) of same-race adoptees are not the same as those for transracial adoptees (TRA) and, from listening to many TRAs, it sounds to me like adoption ACEs exponentially compound for them with an added dosage of colonialism/white saviorism and racism. But, same race adoption isn't the perfect solution many think it is either. We still lack genetic mirroring. Many of us report feelings of being alien or not real. We still feel different every single day of our lives. We're still forced to pretend to belong and work our asses off to belong, while never really totally belonging.

So why the make believe? Why the pretend? My family all knew I was adopted, so why try so hard to pretend I wasn't? 

And I'll tell you something else: the family members who just let it be a fact, but not a source of insecurity nor a massive beautiful blessing, are the ones I felt most seen and loved by, and still do! The ones who saw it as one simple facet of who I am and loved me and treated me just the same and supported my unique needs? That's who I have the deepest bonds with. 

The ones who didn't make me work to fit in with them are the ones who I most felt accepted by and, thus, fit in most with. Isn't that interesting? 

I'll leave you with this: lies compound trauma. Secrecy creates shame. Shame festers in the dark. 

If you have an adoptee in your life, the choice is yours whether you want to live in truth and have a relationship with them or live in lies and shame and push them away. 

We were so different, but we support each other
by loving those differences