Adoption Issues with your teen or adolescent?

Adoption issues have at their basis attachment issues, which in turn are grounded in a primal issue of not feeling safe. Adopted children live to often from this fear-based place even in the best of adopted, nurturing families.

At one time in my (Dr Y) group of boys at the therapeutic boarding school for which I was senior therapist, over half of my boys were from adopted families. When we looked at the school's population overall, it too consisted of about 50% adopted teens. Adoption issues were a major area we needed to specifically address. I soon started a special adopted group for the boys. We looked at such things as what they knew about their birth parents, if they wanted to know more about their birth parents, and other issues surrounding being adopted.

Now, as background to this story, this was in the days before we had introduced Equine Assisted Counseling to the school.

With their adopted parents' permissions, several of the boys went on the internet to see what they could find out about their birth parents. At the same time the parents were asked to provide information about what they knew about their sons' birth parents and conditions.

Several of my boys with the more severe adoption issues or problems had been adopted after being moved around from foster parent to foster parent, or had been adopted from orphanages from foreign countries.

One boy, adopted from Great Britain, was a twin. After spending about two years in an orphanage, he and his brother had been adopted around age two by a British couple. Their new adopted mother died a months later and the dad felt overwhelmed and that he could not raise them alone. The two boys were sent to a foster home. A year later they were adopted by an American couple. As they grew up, one twin was the "good twin", doing well in school, excelling in athletics, and active in community and extracurricular activities. The other brother became the "evil twin". Guess which one we had at the school. He had several adoption issues. See more on this topic below.

Below, I will present some of treatment strategies I used to help these boys. But first, let us talk about the first cause of their problems--their primal wounds...

The Primal Wound

In Nancy Verrier's The Primal Wound (link below), she emphasizes the primal wound to the adopted child is his/her loss of the mother. In the womb, the baby develops against the backdrop of her beating heart, her body, her emotions, etc.

Birth is a traumatic process by and in itself as the infant is torn from the safe environment s/he has known. Now in the external world outside his mother, as he suckles on her breast and is held by her, he is at least partially reunited with his internal womb-world through her voice, her smell, her heart beat. He is safe and with the familiar.

When that child is given up for adoption, he is not allowed this underlying support of the known birth mother. Even if taken immediately to his new mother, she is not the same. She is different and the world is not safe.

He has been rejected, abandoned by his birth mother. He forever carries this primal wound with him throughout his life. This lies at the basis of many adoption issues.

The evil twin

We see this phenomenon between siblings, not just twins. One son or daughter will be the "good" son/daughter, the other, the "bad" one. It has been especially noticed in twin adoptions, however. In the case of the birth son/daughter, the good one is often the oldest sibling with the middle or youngest child being the opposite. In adopted twins, it seems to be luck of the toss (as in heads or tails) which one plays what role.

The reality of the twins is that they both have the same adoption issues and abandonment, the primal wound, lies at the heart of it. Their "solutions" are different, however. The "good" twin is trying to be so good that this set of parents (his adopted) will not abandon him/her like his/her birth mother did. The bad twin has assumed that s/he will be abandoned and is going to prove it by being so bad that the adoption parents send him/her away. Their is also the underlying feeling of not being worthy or loved, which is part of the primal wound.

Attachment

The primal wound lays the foundation for attachment issues which are so often seen in adopted children. They have difficulties establishing and maintaining intimate, close relationships See Attachment issues for more on this.

Treatment

General

The resources below give a wide range of treatment suggestions. In my own treatment of adoption issues, including those discussed for attachment issues, I have found the four strategies below helpful:

• Open and honest sharing of feelings and concerns with adopted parents and child about the adoption and birth parents (if known) and with support groups. (On the web, do a search for "adoption support groups".)
• Helping the child to find out more about his birth parents, especially his mother. Again, a web search will bring up several organizations. Use the search term, "adoption birth parents", for example.
• Cognitive behavioral therapy addressing dysfunctional thinking and behaviors.
• Inner child therapy. We would like to say a few more words about this topic...

Inner Child Therapy

In indigenous medicine work, this might be called soul fragment retrieval. In modern terms it is referred to variously as Inner Child work and derives from Transactional Analysis. My approach combines hypnotherapy with Inner Child or soul fragment recovery.

What I (Dr Y) have found helpful for many of my adoptees is to help them "recover" that lost part of themselves that was lost during their adoption process. Then to becomes "friends" with that part and to mentor and nurture it.

When the adopted child is acting out in some form of negative behavior, it is really this scared Inner Child part that is creating the problem. If their older, wiser self now, can learn to recognize this and work with that child part, a lot of the behavioral problems are reduced.

Resources

Here are some books we can recommend for further reading:

The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child

Adoption Healing ...a path to recovery

The Secret Life of the Unborn Child: How You Can Prepare Your Baby for a Happy, Healthy Life

Facilitating Developmental Attachment: The Road to Emotional Recovery and Behavioral Change in Foster and Adopted Children

Index to Teen Problems and Issues: