Ep 65 - EMDR for adoption trauma
When I was a young GP, I remember seeing a little girl who was around 4 years old at the time - crazily, she would be in her 30 s now!
When I first met her, I said to her in my most friendly voice “hello, my name is Caroline, I’m a doctor” and she said to me quite gleefully ‘I’m adopted too!’ It was a really special moment, that connection, even though I felt like a bit of a fraud allowing her to believe I was adopted, because she was so delighted to find someone similar to her!
I remember thinking in that moment how smart and brave her parents were, growing her up with that everyday knowledge, because there are so many stories of the disclosure of that information that do not go well, that are unplanned or poorly executed, that that example was such a lovely and delightful one.
This is just one of the traumas that adoptees can face, within that most precious sanctuary, of the family.
Adoptees are susceptible to many traumas, - the initial abandonment loss of leaving the birth mother, maybe time in special care nurseries, or adoption agencies or orphanages, the daily micro traumas of difference from family members - maybe skin colour, or hair type, or body size or shape, all of those little things to tell them they perhaps don’t fit in, they are different, an outsider. Maybe they have siblings either also adopted with their own traumas, or birth siblings, with maybe a different attachment to the parents. These things are all traumas. Parents may have had a difficult journey up until the adoption - parents may be traumatised by IVF, pregnancy loss, infertility, inter country adoption practices, extended family expectations or discrimination or othering due to their infertility. Difference from extended family. Maybe even just the timing - adoption takes years, and sometimes, after the infertility journey, having that new arrival may take place in the parents late 40’s, which makes them different to their friends and siblings and maybe other parents at the child’s school, etc.
We may also put the shame of the conception in there - the adoptee may or may not know the story of their conception, and there is often a huge question mark next to those missing details.
The debt of gratitude is also a big one for adoptees - even while feeling so alone and rejected, adoptees are often repeatedly told to feel grateful for having a home and a family. This expected gratitude can be very, very hard to bear, day in, day out, and create a cognitive dissonance, feeling so sad and lonely, being told they ‘should ‘ feel happy and grateful.
If the child grows up with the knowledge of the adoption, of being relinquished, the big question will always lurk, of ‘why didn’t my mother want me’. and a conclusion that is sometimes drawn from that question may be ‘because I am bad/ugly/not good enough/shameful. And while we as adults, can dismantle that easily, for a child that can be so so painful, and those negative beliefs can be so protracted and sticky, that even for those adoptees that grow up in the most attuned and loving of families, those beliefs can be so hard to shift.
Now none of these things alone may be supremely traumatic, or they may be. But put them on top of the attachment loss from the first days of life, and it can amount to a severe traumatic psychological wound.
Now on top of this, we can load all the additional trauma that may happen in childhood - adoptees are more likely to be subjected to childhood sexual abuse. I am speculating that this may be as a result of having adopted siblings or just being vulnerable kids, but those statistics stand true.
So what does all this add up to?
Adoptees have a much higher likelihood of experiencing anxiety, depression, substance abuse, PTSD, CPTSD, disenfranchised grief, and are up to 4 times more likely to suicide. Adoption trauma is real, and is prevalent within the adopted population.
And is treatable!
Luckily, we have this thing called EMDR… now I’m only half joking here, I fully understand that other therapies can be really helpful - and it seems with adoptees, especially group therapy can be really helpful, maybe because it can serve to alleviate the isolation and otherness that adoptees experience. In a group of adoptees, there is one hugely binding common factor, of their experience of abandonment and otherness.
Now I just want to share this strange little story, but, weirdly, when I was in my early 20s, I was in a stage play, and at one rehearsal we were talking about family, it turned out that the director was adopted, then more and more of the cast shared that they were adopted - it turned out that he had chosen a cast that had more than half of the women in the group who were adopted. He hadn’t known, when he chose them to be part of this play, that they had a shared history. Was that a coincidence? Or did it represent some sort of subliminal recognition of commonality? It was pretty special I think for those cast members to share their stories and talk about their experiences. Kind of a spontaneous therapy group formation!
With EMDR therapy, we would reprocess memories that are remembered, and imagined. so the remembered memories may be those of the disclosure of being adopted, or moments of feeling or knowing they are different to the adoptive family, which may be quite an extensive memory network and may need a few sessions, and of course any big t trauma like childhood sexual abuse or family violence. We might process memories that may be ostensibly happy ones, like the arrival of another sibling. It may be important to process memories of meeting the birth mother, or of the failed attempts to connect with the birth mother, which may represent another huge loss. With the implicit memories or the preverbal trauma, we can work with the felt sense of the loss, or an imagined image of the moment of abandonment and in my experience, this has brought substantial relief to the adult adoptee.
Now I have spoken mainly about adoption trauma from the adoptee’s perspective - of course, there are two other important parties in the triad of adoption - the birth mother, and the adoptive parents. And all of the three parties have their own aspects of trauma, grief and loss. And all are relevant and deserving of help and resolution as each other. With adoption, there is not only one hurt or victimised party, all three of the triad can be deeply affected by adoption or relinquishment. I recently attended a stage production about forced relinquishment, which was much more common in Australia in the 60s and 70s, probably quite uncommon now, but the grief experienced by those birth mothers was enormous. and btw, complex grief responds very well to EMDR. I did an episode about grief some time ago, if you are interested in this please have a listen back to episode 13.
Now just in case you are not sick of the sound of my voice by now, I will let you know that in June I am going to be doing a bit of a webinar about Shame, so if you are a clinician and would like other about how to treat Shame in clinical practice, then soon on my website I will have a link to book in for the webinar. 4th June, 7 pm. Then later in July I will be speaking about Dissociation, and in August, I will be hosting a webinar with my friend Cate Bearsley-Smith all about DID , which is such a fascinating topic, I can’t wait to bring you that one too.
I hope this has been helpful to you, please feel free to reach out to me via my website emdrdoctor.com.au or my email address [email protected] and if you have enjoyed this podcast, please do like, review and subscribe, or leave a comment or a request for a podcast topic, I love to hear from you all, and I will talk to you again next week, in the meantime take good care, bye for now.
