Martha Jesty

A sense of loss expressed by most adoptees often seems manifest in sadness and depression. This might be interpreted as an unconscious yearning for the lost mother or in a feeling of incompleteness. The result appears to be a loss of a sense of goodness of self and mistrust of the permanency of future relationships with significant others. The stages of grief in a child include rage and protestation, a sense of hopelessness and despair, detachment, and finally a kind of resignation and the beginning of attachment to the substitute mother.

The unconscious fear of further losses, which threatens annihilation, causes anxiety in the adoptee. This anxiety may manifest in behaviour designed to make the parents understand the chaos the child is feeling inside like acting out or in withdrawal. Both responses are protecting the child from a more severe state of psychological deterioration. In children suicidal thoughts get acted out in risky behaviour (such as engaging in dangerous activities, driving recklessly, taking drugs, etc) whereas most adults are more overt in attempting to end their despair. Many adoptees say that they tolerate death better than they tolerate separations. Trying to avoid loss causes many adoptees to avoid intimate relationships (1).

The first trauma

Bonding occurs between a mother and her child before, during, and immediately after birth. A deep, primal wound is inflicted on the infant when this bond is abruptly and prematurely severed. Newborns do not make the transition from birthmother to adoptive mother easily and naturally. On the contrary, adopted newborns know that something is wrong, that someone is missing, and respond with sorrow and rage.

Recognition of the primal wound requires acknowledgement that a tremendous injury has been inflicted on the adoptee. Because of the painful feelings this evokes in everyone concerned, most people involved resist acknowledging this damage. The foetus has memorized her mother[s heartbeat and respiration, both sounds and rhythm and immediately after birth, her smell. If she is taken from her birthmother, she experiences the separation as painful and anger provoking. The birthmother-child relationship is irreplaceable. The separation is an irresolvable loss for both, a loss that should be avoided if at all possible. Skin to skin contact along with the familiar smell, voice and eyes activates the baby’s nerve endings and shuts off the stress hormones that were activated at birth. Without this skin to skin contact, the baby’s adrenaline keeps flowing and you have a hyper baby. When there is a premature separation, the infant experiences being taken from everything safe ain the world to a place of strangers where nothing feels safe, nothing feels right, sounds right or looks right.

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