A for Adoption

An Exploration of the Adoption Experience for Families and Professionals

Alison Roy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000042115
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

The experience of adoption—both adopting and being adopted—can stir up deep emotional pain, often related to loss and early trauma. A for Adoption provides insight and support to those families and individuals facing these complex processes and challenges.

Drawing on both a psychoanalytic, theoretical framework and first-hand accounts of adopters, adoptees, and professionals within the adoption process, Alison Roy responds to the need for further and consistent support for adoptive parents and children, to help inform and understand the reality of their everyday lives. This book explores both the current and historical context of adoption, as well as its depiction within literature, before addressing issues such as conflict in relationships, the impact of significant trauma and loss, attachment and the importance of early relationships, and contact with birth families.

Uniquely, this book addresses the experiences of, and provides support for, both adoptive professionals and families. It focuses on understanding rather than apportioning blame, and responds to a plea from a parent who requested "a book to help me understand my child better".

CHAPTER ONE


Adoption stories: beginning at the beginning

Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.

Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Stories about adoption are embedded in our social psyche and folklore and remind us that the adoption experience is, and has always been, familiar and central to the making of families. Perhaps, too, there is something in all of us that relates to the experience of feeling lonely and “different”, searching for a place where we can find a home and escape from the cruelty and harshness of life by being welcomed and accepted into the bosom of the family or community.

In this chapter, I explore how stories can help all of us understand adoption, while encouraging us to think about what shapes our ­identity—from our very first moments of life within the womb, through to adulthood. For whatever we believe about the point at which a human life begins, it is becoming increasingly clear, through numerous research studies looking at genetic influences, that our parents’ histories, and those of their parents, and so on, have already played a big part in forming who we are (Douet, Chang, Cloak, & Ernst, 2013). It is not possible to be clear about how much a child’s identity and quality of attachments is influenced by environment and how much is down to genetics, but there is a growing body of work that points to the probability that it is both. Graham Music’s book Nurturing Natures (2017) covers this subject extensively, as does Allan Schore’s work on the interactions between genetic influences and environmental risk factors (2000, 2012).

Because there is so much about the beginnings of a human life and the development of the brain that remains a mystery, I have selected stories that will, I hope, be helpful in enhancing our understanding about birth, parenthood, and adoption. Stories are central to the process of learning about what it means to be human, regardless of age, gender, birth place, or race. They can also illuminate some of the more inaccessible themes that crop up within the adoption experience, such as being severed from birth parents, a predicament that has been central to the plot of countless novels, fairy tales, and films.

The task of finding one’s true identity without the parents who conceived us is fraught with difficulty, and even some of the fictional portrayals of such a loss can be upsetting. I remember as a child watching Walt Disney’s early animation film Dumbo with my family, and how we had to hastily exit the cinema because my youngest sister became inconsolable at the point where the baby elephant suddenly became separated from his loving and protective mother. These heart-wrenching themes that feature in Dumbo, and in other Disney or similar children’s films, are central to traditional fairy tales on which many of the films are based. These tales, or stories, have been passed down through generations, like those rewritten by the brothers Grimm—Jacob [1785–1863] and Wilhelm [1786–1859] and by Hans Christian Andersen [1805–1875], but still hold meaning and relevance for families today.

How to survive the death or loss of a parent/parents is another related theme explored in innumerable novels and key texts, such as Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book; J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Great Expectations; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and The Little Princess; Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; and many more, including stories by writers like Roald Dahl, who himself suffered a number of catastrophic losses as a child.

Finding a story that helps to describe and make sense of a hard-to-digest experience can be tremendously important, not only for an adopted child or young person, but for all children and their parents. The most positive and resilient adoptive families that I have encountered are ones where there has been a concerted effort to weave a common thread between their two story lines, creating a living tapestry that records the lives of both the adoptive and the birth families.

A shared and understood narrative is equally important for professionals. Social care colleagues who place children usually have detailed information about the process of adoption and the matching of children with families, which can be helpful to other professionals seeking to support the family. They also have chronologies and backgrounds leading up to being removed, which adoptive children and young people can ask to see. However, some of these chronologies and later-life stories are full of “holes”, and, despite considerable “digging”, little may be known about aspects of the early history. Making sense of this experience is nevertheless important, for not having a well-documented history is part of these individuals’ stories and does not exclude them from having a version of their experience that they can be comfortable with.

There will always be much that is not fully understood, for all of us, about our earliest experiences and what influences our life choices. We also need to take into account the fact that previously held views or definitions of families are changing, and that there are many different kinds or arrangements in place when it comes to parenting or raising a child. Today, the conventional and traditional concept of what makes a family has shifted, making way for a new kind of “normal”. This does not mean, however, that children are any less interested in knowing where they come from or who they are connected to. What is important is that children are not discouraged from asking difficult questions, and that they are positively encouraged to be curious about themselves and why they might feel different from others.

I have often wondered about how to helpfully combine information from an adoptive family’s history with the birth family’s history, to provide a child or young person with a more holistic version of his life story, such as where he came from and how he came to be adopted, but also what his potential influences and triggers might be. A young person once asked me whether she should draw her adoptive family tree or that of her birth family for a history assignment in school. I contemplated with her how she might go about including both.

As far as the adopted child or young person is concerned, the not-knowing can feel like a place of shadows and secrets, adding to the struggle of making sense of his identity, especially when he may already feel that he is very different from his non-adopted peers. Most will get to a point where they (and their parents) can no longer hide behind the bright hopefulness of the stereotypical adoption “fairy tale”, where a childless couple become parents and the “abandoned” child finds a loving home.

You don’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface to see how powerful themes of loss and sadness are going to be pretty central to individual and family stories, despite a “coming together” as a family unit, once the adoption order has been granted. Adoption may be a new beginning—or another beginning—but new beginnings do also tend to stir up feelings left over from previous beginnings and endings.

This perspective is not intended to be negative, but the stories I have chosen do help to uncover more of the painful (truthful) realities, including the “bits that often get left out” (in one adopter’s words), of the adoptive experience. These potentially more painful or “missing” bits of the experience are, however, made more bearable and hopeful for the reader (and probably also the writer) when they are contained within the creatively crafted framework of the narrated story.

Jeanette Winterson, an author who herself was adopted, writes in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011):

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of story . . . but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. [p. 5]

Children can usually find a way to tell us about their feelings and life experiences through play or make believe, or by the way they behave in some situations and with certain people. They will therefore have their own methods of storytelling, and some can be very accomplished storytellers. Through the medium of the story, children can access feelings and/or memories that may otherwise have been unavailable to them.

Every adoptive family member will have his or her own incomplete version of their family story—the why, when and how their family came to be together. They may not recall the same details of events as other family members, or they may hold information that others don’t possess, but they will still need their individual stories to be heard and validated: only then can there be a way of sharing the story more openly and having the experience of it being meaningful or coming to life, or, at the very least, being laid to rest—through its telling.

According to Daniel Siegel (1999), a clinical professor of psychiatry:

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. . . . [S]torytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. [p. 333]

There is evidently a wealth of material to be found on the subject of adoption within films, literature, plays, or musical theatre productions like Les Misérables and Annie, but there are also the visual representations of adoption provided through the medium of paint or other art forms.

In 2015/16, the Foundling Museum, London, put on an exhibition entitled, The Fallen Woman, featuring paintings and art instillations documenting the traumatic experiences faced by unmarried women in the nineteenth century. These women were ostracized for conceiving children out of wedlock and were all too often forcibly separated from their babies. Paintings such as The Lost Path (1863) by Frederick Walker, The Outcast (1851) by Richard Redgrave, and The Gate of Memory (1864) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti were all included in the exhibition, which provoked a flow of heart-felt responses from those who visited, particularly among women who had lost or given up their own children and those closely related to a family member who had experienced a “forced” separation. There was also a specially commissioned sound installation by musician and composer Steve Lewinson, who worked with actors to bring to life the voices of the women who gave up their babies to the Foundling Hospital. One of the organizers of the exhibition reflected on how the exhibition had affected people and what she saw as the “deep . . . trauma [which] still lies in many families”.

Although policy and culture has changed since the nineteenth century, taking a child or children from one family and placing them with another is unlikely to be a straightforwardly “happy” experience, especially if the baby or child has not been relinquished willingly. There will inevitably be painful and fraught times where the loss of one family and the arrival into another is likely to be disorientating and traumatic—indeed, some children never really recover from this.

Adoption histories may include the factual details of early separations, but the intense emotional distress these cause can never be fully appreciated by professionals placing a child or by their new adoptive parents. Perhaps this is where stories can paint a more accurate and universal picture of the adoption, from the rich and varied pallet of emotional experience: a picture that can be viewed from a number of perspectives.

In my work with adoptive families and with organizations working with them, I have found that some of the most painful and traumatic stories or disclosures can be hard to take in at a first sitting. There can be an initial understanding, but the fuller picture can only take shape through the process of sharing ideas and formulating a plan together, acknowledging the need for a supportive environment in which it can be possible to hear the distress and pay attention to our own responses to what we are hearing. Unlike a painting, hearing real stories about real children may also require specific action to be taken in order to protect a child from harm. This means that thinking and reflecting serves to inform our decisions but does not prevent us from having a clear plan of action. In my experience, when there are stories that cannot be discussed or heard, the risk increases, and I have witnessed how some families with painful (his)stories are “bounced around” the system. As one social worker explained, “these families are passed from pillar to post . . . it’s like everyone thinks that someone else should deal with the high level of distress and concern”.

In some high-profile cases, risks and documented concerns appeared to have been ignored or glossed over, as with Victoria Climbié [2 November 1991 to 25 February 2000], who was tortured and murdered by her guardians. Her death led to a public inquiry, which resulted in changes to child protection policies and procedures in the UK. Right up to her death, she had been in contact with universal children’s services and her local church. In a public inquiry, headed by Lord Laming, it was noted that professionals failed to act, despite being in position to do so, and that if someone had taken action and engaged with her story about the abuse she was suffering, her death would have been prevented. This is an extreme example of how distress and trauma can become apparently “invisible” when a particular story is too painful to process. Having an awareness of why this can happen, and therefore creating the space to reflect on the full story and what needs to be shared, is important, then, in order to learn from such tragedies.

In reality, it is difficult to know exactly what has occurred in the first hours, weeks, months, years of a child’s life, but as he or she grows up, more of the information that has been hidden or “stored” away can begin to surface.

“Even though I now know what happened—it doesn’t feel like it was me there—it’s like it wasn’t real. But the anger—the anger is real!”

(Young person—talking about abuse he suffered from his stepfather)

These fragments of thoughts or early memories may gradually show themselves over a long period of time, but they can also take the form of extreme physical responses to certain situations or people. Some parents have described to me how events from their child’s past can suddenly surface and seem to come “crashing into our family life, like lightning”. They feel that they are in the midst of an intense emotional storm, which understandably leaves them reeling. These strong reactions are meaningful, despite being disturbing, for they can provide clues about past experiences. However, parents and professionals on the receiving end of these reactions will require good supervision in order to be able to hear, bear, and piece together the story and, in doing so, begin to integrate disconnected or “lost” parts of the self.

Robert Louis Stevenson, in Treasure Island (1883), describes the powerful influences of the past on the present landscape:

This Grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought: and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still. [p. 234]

Another young person, who was able to recall much of her childhood, explained how she had developed “a secret self” in order to distance herself from her distressing h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the author and contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Adoption stories: beginning at the beginning
• 2. Creating a family life from a family life that has been broken
• 3. The force of the blow: clinical perspectives
• 4. What’s love got to do with it? Parents in pain
• 5. A different kind of normal: the voices of young people
• 6. The professional couple, the consultant, and the outside world
• 7. Establishing a psychoanalytically informed adoption service: the AdCAMHS model
• 8. Baby number 9: let’s talk about the birth parents
• 9. Side by side: the importance of continuity of care
• Conclusions: “It’s been emotional”
• References
• Index