u/expolife

Does anyone else (DAE) recognize how messed up yet natural it has felt to consider other people’s perspectives and perceptions before our own? I wasn’t aware for a long time that I even did this. I thought I was just looking for guidance and mentoring and I believed that I would always ultimately make my own choice. It wasn’t until some major relational failures within my adoptive family, navigating search and reunion with bios, and gaining more adoptee consciousness that I realized just how codependent I was with adoption and religious influences. I had some sense of self, but it developed inside somewhat dysfunctional versions of adoption and religious cultures (dysfunctional beyond the norms of adoption and religion as general institutions).

Now, after a lot of deconstruction and ongoing reconstruction of my identities, I am feeling sick and tired of this impulse I have to consider how other people see things whether an interaction or expectation or job opportunity or whatever. I used to experience this unconsciously or as a kind of obligation I’d just call good manners or social savvy if it were conscious at all.

I have a theory that awareness and frustration about this impulse to circumvent my own thoughts and feelings through my imaginary lens of empathizing with other people’s perspectives may mean I’m moving out of a healing era into new identity infrastructure. One can hope.

I’m still grieving the ways my adoptive parents and family’s behavior has sucked for me. In a lot of ways, I’ve reached the conclusion that they probably should never have been parents to anyone, adopted or biological. But when I spend any time thinking, feeling or talking about them, I start feeling annoyed and frustrated that the idea of them is still taking up space, time and energy in my life. It’s like my system is recognizing they’re* kind of an energetic black hole. Now that I’ve mostly purged any sense of obligation or guilt about maintaining much contact or relationship with them. As much as I wish things were different. Part of me feels impatient about accepting them and things as they are and moving on to healthier connections.

I don’t know how much of this is relatable or makes sense. I’m interested in hearing from anyone who can relate.

I heard someone say that they expected life to be challenging and difficult at times but that they didn’t expect those challenges or disasters to come from inside the house within their partnership or family. I can relate to that. I really didn’t know my adoptive family sucked most of my life. I was so adaptable and resourceful and attributed and projected a lot of my favorite traits and capabilities onto them and performed my role of good adopted child in a way that set them up to seem amazing and functional through my early adulthood. When I couldn’t maintain that effort and genuinely needed a family support system to be there for me, they turned out to be deeply ignorant, neglectful and emotionally immature people. I was parentified and parenting my adoptive family elders the entire time, filtering myself to maintain the belief system that I had it good so I could achieve and eventually enable a full-scale escape I didn’t even realize I was architecting.

I’m not sure how much it still stings to say this versus how much it stings* that I’m still spending time and energy to say this. It’s true. It’s mine. It’s real. It sucks. It matters. I hate it. I wish it were different. I wish I didn’t have to reparent myself because of the appalling adoptive parenting I received on top of the disgusting practice of infant relinquishment and adoption in general.

In IFS, there this saying that the adult Self is never disgusted. So I’m not sure what part of me is disgusted, but I have a lot of disgust for the behavior I’ve witnessed and experienced from those people who still expect my gratitude and performance. Families really can be cults with shared delusions. But the spell is broken.

DAE have experience reconstructing personal identity after ruptures in adoptive family or other relationships or identities (i.e. religious identity, professional identity)?

It has taken years for me to recognize emotional betrayal, abandonment, and neglect in my adoptive family system. “Emotionally neglectful families require self-neglect in order to survive. That’s how it works.” (K. Wolfenstein) I’m still wrapping my mind around this.

I’ve deconstructed adoptive and biological identities, religious identity and professional identity across different timelines that have also overlapped. I experienced a PTSD-inducing event as an adult that revealed adoptive family dysfunction for what it was and is. In retrospect, that incident what it revealed about my support system probably reduced the risk of search and reunion with biological family after decades of closed adoption since infancy.

Despite a lot of change and creativity, endurance and enjoyment, I’m still in a kind of liminal space between what I deconstructed and reconstructing what I need and want my identity and life to be.

I’m starting to realize that identity is a kind of architecture and infrastructure through which life force, energy, connection, and other resources flow. While it’s somewhat invisible labor to rebuild after deconstruction, it’s crucial psychological structure. And most people can take this structure for granted to a much greater degree.

Direct experience and action through tolerable steps are the only way I know for reconstructing. And I’ve had to expand my definition of action and activity to include more internal effort than productivity culture dictates.

Learning about memory reconsolidation and unlearning emotional learnings through disconfirming experiences including perceiving memories in new ways has helped demystify all the change.

Learning that rest, digest, create and change are the regulated expressions of our nervous systems when we don’t need to engage in hypervigilance or stress responses like fawn, freeze, flight and fight has also helped.

So much of the labor seems to be orienting and reorienting within myself internally and externally. Changing my relationships with myself, with time and presence, with reality, and with fantasy/illusion/vision.

It’s almost like going back to my childhood and giving myself the developmental support I needed but didn’t get from ages 0-7+.

I still feel frustrated that my past activation strategies don’t work. I used to fuel my achievement with negative self-talk, fear, obligation, guilt, and shame alongside curiosity, ambition and competence. In some ways it’s like the deconstruction was a kind of shipwreck with q lot of valuable cargo intact, and this season is about free-diving, scuba diving, or using robotic submersible to retrieve all that value from the now defunct vessel that carried the flow of my past pre-reunion, pre-PTSD (previously CPTSD-only) personality, activity, status and way of being.

I’m still sorting out how to express this. But I’m interested if anyone else can relate. My adoptive family and biological family relationships still matter to me, but they are not and will not be organizing dynamics in my future (which is sad, liberating and necessary). Therapy is a part of all this, but hasn’t been the most influential source of help for me.

How have you navigated becoming who you are with the identity, skills and emotional infrastructure you need on the other side of adoptee consciousness raising, coming out of the FOG, redefining family relationships on all sides, etc?

DAE relate to this process having impacts on your religious or professional identities? The intersections of adoptive, religious and professional identities changing separately and together have magnified the load and labor of their transformation for me. Interested if anyone else has experience navigating and finding help and resources for this.

DAE have experiences of adoptive family having major mismatches in taste and style (i.e. food, clothing, activities, values) that led to teasing and withdrawal of care?

This is one of those stories that I’m not sure how to place, so genuine reactions are welcome. I know it represents a kind of material privilege and a type of devoted attention not everyone gets as a kid or adoptee, AND something else feels off and representative of the mismatch and lack of attunement in my adoption.

My adoptive family included extended family that gathered often celebrating holidays and birthdays even across long distances. The women in the family were very into houses, decorating, redecorating, clothes, food, entertaining, church social life, school reunions, Christmas cards, etc. very Ladies’ Home Journal middle/upper-middle class values. Worshiped the Kennedys and read presidential biographies. White people. Etc.

I was very open and spongelike about their tastes and preference but also developed my own tastes and knew I wasn’t innately into what they were into. Turns out I take after my bio family to a great degree. It was more than just generational differences.

The story.

For years, at least one relative would buy me a particular article of clothing for Christmas. I was polite and knew my manners. I performed the expected gratitude and donated the clothing or regifted it. When I left home for college, I asked my adoptive mom if she would circulate that I didn’t want any more of that type of clothing. I asked her if she thought that was an okay thing to express because I didn’t want the cycle of waste especially when I didn’t have a lot of storage space. (The core issue was that I was not known or understood by these people who made no effort to know or understand me or my sense of style or personal expression, and having to perform obligatory gratitude for that for years was painful and annoying, but I couldn’t consciously identity that. This was a small foray into trying to be authentic about this.) My adoptive mom is not the most socially insightful person, she said she thought it was okay and that she would pass on the message. The following holiday, I was pulled aside and led into a large room with all the women in the family already gathered and some of the men in the fringes. I was seated near the center in a chair prepared for me and a pile of holiday packages to one side. We have a surprise for you, they said. I played along confused, hopeful, unsettled. None of this was normal. One after another I opened each package to find another article of clothing (the type of had asked my adoptive mother to ask the family to stop gifting me). They smiled and laughed and told me how they heard I didn’t want their gifts so they came up with this prank to get as many different types of this clothing article from thrift stores so there would be a variety for them to wrap for me to open. Part of me got the joke and wanted to be cool with being a little roasted. But mostly I felt sick. No one ever asked me what I liked or wanted. No one noticed what I liked or chose for myself. It felt like it was all about them and how they felt about giving me gifts and how they thought I was supposed to feel and perform gratitude regardless of how I actually felt and how close I believed we were (close enough to be able to be more honest about personal taste).

One of the thrift store articles in this semi-humiliating spectacle was one I actually liked. And it felt weird that they had no idea which one it was and weren’t curious about it. I said I actually liked the one I liked wanting to claim some sense of self in the middle of the spectacle. I don’t remember them saying anything. One of the had a blank look on her face. Another one looked disgusted by my preference, or was she upset that I wasn’t playing along as expected? I’ll never know.

It felt like a punishment or humiliation ritual. I was definitely accused of being “too sensitive” and “overthinking” in my adoptive family. Looking back on it, I can’t imagine behaving the way they did and ever believing it was caring or loving. I can sense the humor and entertainment but I would never put someone in that position if they didn’t clearly align with that brand of humor. I don’t know how much my adoptive mom was in on it, but I doubt she was the ringleader. What I do remember is that she didn’t anticipate me being hurt or bothered by this. She seemed to think that the fact they paid this much attention to me was a sign that they cared about me.

Do your best or your worst. AITA? Sigh. What does it mean that I feel pressured to even ask that? I don’t actually believe I need to apologize for my experience anymore. But I was definitely conditioned to which is actual point of all this.

Did you experience mismatches like this? Subtle, insidious ones? Not just overtly neglectful or abusive ones (which are hugely painful on a major scale)?

I originally posted about this on r/adopted and heard from an adoptive parent wanting to know more, so I’m reposting here for members of the entire adoption constellation to discuss the topic of emotional neglect of adoptee loss and grief as a common feature in adoption dynamics. That way it can potentially benefit any other readers and lurkers here. ❤️‍🩹

I am an adult adoptee, former prospective adoptive parent, infant adoptee raised in a closed adoption, reunited with bio family years as an adult. Most of this post will be written from my perspective as an adoptee and my observations of both from my particular adoption experience and from witnessing many others socially and through study. It isn’t up to any adoptee to educate nonadoptees about adoption even though it’s very much needed. We don’t need another obligation when we’re the most affected and in many ways neglected within the context and structure of adoption. That said, we do what we can for the sake of other adoptees when we can.

Things that are completely inappropriate responses to adoptee experiences: “you just had a bad experience” or “I’m sorry you had a bad experience (but so-so or I had a good experience so yours isn’t as relevant as you seem to think)” or “all families have challenges/struggles/problems (so you shouldn’t attribute your issues to adoption” or “biological families have issues, too”…because all of these boil down to bypassing and disrespecting the adoptee’s right to be the authority of their experience of adoption and if their experience in general. These can be microaggressions or forms of DARVO and invalidation of the adoptee’s humanity which unfortunately isolates us further in our grief, loss and what’s truly unique about having to develop as human being while knowing family can end at any time because our first ones did often before we had a chance to anything other than exist. So please try not to speak to adoptees that way here or in irl. When you try to change how we feel, you never really do, you just force us to feel even more alone with the truth of who we are and what we have to carry alone. So shame on you for shaming us and please do better.

From the original post:

I see clearly now that I was expected to neglect my grief and loss as an adopted kid in order to serve the emotional immaturity and neglect of my adoptive family, and that seems like the norm based on mainstream cultural narratives of adoption.

Does anyone else relate to this?
Since so many adoptive parents, birth parents and people in general have very little understanding of the effects of losing an entire first family, identity, sense of innocence that family is forever because our first one ended, and all the bypassing and toxic expectations that we be grateful for the outcome of adoption, I believe that emotional neglect is the most common baseline experience of adoption dynamics for an adoptee.

This breakdown of how emotionally neglectful families require self-neglect, self-abandonment (betrayal, erasure, etc.) really resonated in a way that emphasizes adaption and coherence within shame or pathology.

“I have an issue with the term self-abandonment or self-neglect because I feel like it really misses how what we call self-abandonment or self-neglect is actually a perfectly coherent response to being abandoned and neglected and usually these are strategies that were developed because they were actually the best possible solution for dealing with the painful reality of being neglected and abandoned by the attachment figures you’re relying on. In emotionally neglectful families, it is often forbidden to have and express your needs and your emotions. That is something that will lead to cruelty, humiliation, rejection, abuse, even worse suffering. So suppressing one’s own needs and minimizing one’s own emotions and inner experience, that act of shrinking down myself and what I need and how I feel is an effective strategy at avoiding even worse retaliation and mistreatment and disconnection within the family system. So putting yourself to the side, being able to ignore your own boundaries, being able to put other people ahead of yourself, being able to disconnect and dissociate from your true feelings and just focus on other people’s feelings like all of these are really effective strategies at managing these unsafe and insecure attachment dynamics within a broken family system. A lot of emotionally neglectful parents are unstable, immature people and so their children really lean on a deep implicit level how to walk on eggshells and how to keep that parent emotionally okay and so they learn how to not overwhelm the parent, how to not trigger the parent. They learn how to emotionally caregive for the parent. All of this learning allows them to hold on to whatever connection is available even if it’s not much and to avoid these really scary outcomes where maybe the parent completely shuts down or withdraws or becomes cruel or abusive or even more neglectful and disconnected. So children learn how to keep their parents intact and how to keep the family system intact in order to stay safe and avoid more panic more suffering and so these are the strategies that we call self-abandonment and self-neglect. If those terms resonate for you, that’s fine. I’m not criticizing you. But I just think we really need to be realistic about how these patterns originate. It’s not about you failing yourself which I feel is how it’s often framed which can then reinforce shame. When you learn that there is no space for you to actually be present and authentic and safe within a relationship, then erasing yourself and minimizing yourself is survival so it’s not about you not loving yourself. It’s about you adapting and responding to the attachment environment that you’re in and if you learn that loving yourself and caring for yourself leads to everything getting worse and scarier and falling apart, then you’re going to learn to not do that. Emotionally neglectful family systems actually require self-neglect in order to survive. That’s how it works.”

Source: Coherence therapist Kina Wolfenstein (specialist in treating attachment trauma and emotional neglect)

Of course, emotional neglect isn’t the only kind of harm and adoptee can experience in adoption. But emotional neglect seems to be the most unrecognized. Many therapists don’t even recognize it. It’s difficult to recognize what we needed and didn’t get when what we experienced is all we’ve known.

I think emotional neglect is partly even largely what can cause a lot of us adoptees to feel unreal because our caregivers did not hold us as real people with inner experiences in their own minds and imaginations as a means of attuning or entering into our sense of reality as children when that’s exactly what we needed in order to develop fully.

I’m leaning into exploring this because I recognize it in my adoption experience and it feels like the root even under other physical abuse I experienced as a young child. Pete Walker emphasize in his book “Complex PTSD” that emotional neglect was the most difficult aspect of his childhood trauma to heal and he has witnessed the same be true in his clients even though he and they all experienced other more overt forms of physical abuse.

Thoughts? Feelings? Experiences? Particularly from adoptees.

Questions from other members of the constellation are welcome. I’m sure adoptees who are able will respond as we can.

I see clearly now that I was expected to neglect my grief and loss as an adopted kid in order to serve the emotional immaturity and neglect of my adoptive family, and that seems like the norm based on mainstream cultural narratives of adoption.

Does anyone else relate to this?
Since so many adoptive parents, birth parents and people in general have very little understanding of the effects of losing an entire first family, identity, sense of innocence that family is forever because our first one ended, and all the bypassing and toxic expectations that we be grateful for the outcome of adoption, I believe that emotional neglect is the most common baseline experience of adoption dynamics for an adoptee.

This breakdown of how emotionally neglectful families require self-neglect, self-abandonment (betrayal, erasure, etc.) really resonated in a way that emphasizes adaption and coherence within shame or pathology.

“I have an issue with the term self-abandonment or self-neglect because I feel like it really misses how what we call self-abandonment or self-neglect is actually a perfectly coherent response to being abandoned and neglected and usually these are strategies that were developed because they were actually the best possible solution for dealing with the painful reality of being neglected and abandoned by the attachment figures you’re relying on. In emotionally neglectful families, it is often forbidden to have and express your needs and your emotions. That is something that will lead to cruelty, humiliation, rejection, abuse, even worse suffering. So suppressing one’s own needs and minimizing one’s own emotions and inner experience, that act of shrinking down myself and what I need and how I feel is an effective strategy at avoiding even worse retaliation and mistreatment and disconnection within the family system. So putting yourself to the side, being able to ignore your own boundaries, being able to put other people ahead of yourself, being able to disconnect and dissociate from your true feelings and just focus on other people’s feelings like all of these are really effective strategies at managing these unsafe and insecure attachment dynamics within a broken family system. A lot of emotionally neglectful parents are unstable, immature people and so their children really lean on a deep implicit level how to walk on eggshells and how to keep that parent emotionally okay and so they learn how to not overwhelm the parent, how to not trigger the parent. They learn how to emotionally caregive for the parent. All of this learning allows them to hold on to whatever connection is available even if it’s not much and to avoid these really scary outcomes where maybe the parent completely shuts down or withdraws or becomes cruel or abusive or even more neglectful and disconnected. So children learn how to keep their parents intact and how to keep the family system intact in order to stay safe and avoid more panic more suffering and so these are the strategies that we call self-abandonment and self-neglect. If those terms resonate for you, that’s fine. I’m not criticizing you. But I just think we really need to be realistic about how these patterns originate. It’s not about you failing yourself which I feel is how it’s often framed which can then reinforce shame. When you learn that there is no space for you to actually be present and authentic and safe within a relationship, then erasing yourself and minimizing yourself is survival so it’s not about you not loving yourself. It’s about you adapting and responding to the attachment environment that you’re in and if you learn that loving yourself and caring for yourself leads to everything getting worse and scarier and falling apart, then you’re going to learn to not do that. Emotionally neglectful family systems actually require self-neglect in order to survive. That’s how it works.”

Source: Coherence therapist Kina Wolfenstein (specialist in treating attachment trauma and emotional neglect)

Of course, emotional neglect isn’t the only kind of harm and adoptee can experience in adoption. But emotional neglect seems to be the most unrecognized. Many therapists don’t even recognize it. It’s difficult to recognize what we needed and didn’t get when what we experienced is all we’ve known.

I think emotional neglect is partly even largely what can cause a lot of us adoptees to feel unreal because our caregivers did not hold us as real people with inner experiences in their own minds and imaginations as a means of attuning or entering into our sense of reality as children when that’s exactly what we needed in order to develop fully.

I’m leaning into exploring this because I recognize it in my adoption experience and it feels like the root even under other physical abuse I experienced as a young child. Pete Walker emphasize in his book “Complex PTSD” that emotional neglect was the most difficult aspect of his childhood trauma to heal and he has witnessed the same be true in his clients even though he and they all experienced other more overt forms of physical abuse.

Thoughts? Feelings? Experiences?

I felt like I needed to be a good return on investment (ROI) for my adoptive parents and family. I felt I had to earn my right to have needs let alone have them fulfilled as a child and that has followed me and eventually burned me out as an adult before I finally faced the complexity of adoption and my adoptee experience.

Another way to put this was a that I felt indebted for existing and receiving care. I felt responsible for justifying my existence and obligated to provide certain “services and experiences” in return. I’m sure aspects of this are not unique to adoption, but I suspect they are amplified and organized in ways that are unique to adoption.

It hit me recently that I am developmentally accustomed to feeling indebted and obligated while also expecting a certain degree of “credit”, “endowment”, and provisional care in exchange. And I’m starting to ask myself how this carries over from my relationships with adoptive parents to not other dynamics including with myself, other relationships, my relationships with money, food, opportunities, etc

Our relationships with people, self, food, and money are interconnected with many parallel patterns because they’re all sources of energy, nurture, and nourishment either directly or indirectly. Add the concept and reality of FOG (fear, obligation, and guilt), emotional neglect or coercive control or even conditional care belonging as in many adoptee experiences of adoption, and it isn’t surprising to observe connections between attachment ruptures, neglect, underachieving, overachieving, disordered eating, codependency, etc.

Sarah Baldwin in her podcast “You Make Sense” says that our relationship with money mirrors and is influenced our attachments with caregivers. I think this manifests in many ways but the two I’ve observed most often follow the theme of overachieving/hyperindependence/anxious and underachieving/collapse/depressive. And I wonder if that depends on which adoptee behaviors were rewarded by adoptive parents and with what resources. Regardless a lot of dependency and enmeshment seem really common in both cases of overachieving and underachieving patterns.

All that said, I am asking myself: if feeling indebted and obligated is so familiar, and my nervous system thus mistakes that familiarity for “safety”, how am I orienting or repeating patterns of obligation and indebtedness in my life, relationships and finances?

AND, how does that benefit me in the past or present? (Which is a question I’ve learned from coherence therapy.)

I think the benefit of repeating a kind of relational indebtedness for me (and perhaps for other adoptees) is that it does forge a kind of attachment called the “endowment effect” where a person experiences more attachment to someone they give to than someone they receive from. For example, that’s why Benjamin Franklin would ask political or social rivals to lend him a book because even a simple gesture of giving and entrusting something to him would result in the rival viewing him more favorably.

For an adoptee, being indebted means someone is less likely to forget or abandon you because at the very least they will want to collect on that debt and feel entitled to fulfillment of that obligation. It’s adaptive and twisted but perhaps effective at maintaining a stronger sense of connection while coping with a fear of abandonment and rejection. Practicing dependency and codependency continuously.

I think I knew my adoptive parents felt attached to me partly because of the “endowment effect” by providing care and pouring energy and resources into having me as an adopted child as I developed. That effect means they don’t want to lose that investment and are biased to never see it as a “sunk cost.” I don’t remember ever asking them for money, and I started working and making my own money very young. And I did negotiate with them to loan me money I would repay out of my earnings which I always did. They celebrated my work ethic and bragged about how industrious and precocious I was often crediting themselves and their “excellent” parenting (instead of ever imagining that I felt afraid, obligated and guilty for having needs beyond what they could anticipate or provide for).

When I became conscious of my FOG feelings, my belief that they never consciously intended me to have such feelings helped me begin purging those feelings and reorienting in my adoptive dynamics. Ultimately this revealed that they actually did expect me to behave according to those FOG-motivated patterns, but it was too far gone in my consciousness raising to ever be able to revert. (I believe there is also overlap in this process and the broader cultural shift of adult children choosing various degrees of estrangement from their parents often due to neglect, abuse and unwillingness or incapacity to change on the parts of the parents. But again, adoptee-experience is a truly unique human experience in its own right.)

This is not to discount efforts to be useful or difficulty receiving as adoptees. I think those tendencies dovetail with these indebtedness patterns. Receiving can be difficult because we’re used to receiving conditional care that came at the price of our identities and contact with true family of origin. It’s also coherent to resist receiving when so much of what’s been on offer came with strings attached. So there’s a kind of paradoxical tension between entitlement to certain terms of attachment we experienced including feeling entitled to accessing certain “credit” and types of care while also resisting receiving other kind of care on offer because of the expectation of similarly heavy patterns of debt burden.

So what does it mean to be and feel truly debt-free from these experiences of fear, obligation and guilt, indebtedness? DAE relate to this?

Have you experienced any repetition compulsions seeing these feelings and pattern repeat in other parts of your life before and after adoptee consciousness raising or coming out of the FOG?

This is kind of a bizarre question.
But recently it bubbled up. It’s tricky because I know a lot of people experience emotional abuse and neglect that involves never hearing their parents say “I love you,” so hearing about that language becoming more insidious and manipulative may be triggering.

I’ve known for a while that my parents (adoptive) are emotionally immature and unavailable and unreliable. That took a long time to see clearly.

When I was in contact and negotiating more with them, I tried to get them to hear and see me and help me relationally. And I remember one of them saying “I love you,” and the subtext was essentially shut up, you’re so lucky, and what you’re saying is hurting my self-image as a good parent that I need to survive existing in this relationship. I can’t perfectly know what’s going on inside another person, but I know my own experience when I heard them say “I love you” was that it was effectively bypassing and deflecting what I was saying while enabling them to believe they were centering me when they were actually centering themselves in the conversation.

After a period of low contact, I experienced another form of this where it felt like them saying “I love you” was meant to call a debt due. Instead of expressing curiosity or asking for forgiveness for causing the distance to be needed, it felt like the “I love you” was meant to humble me instead of support or encourage or reconcile while maintaining their own sense of victimhood alongside this sense superiority as a loving parent.

A parent feeling the sentiment of love towards a child of any age doesn’t create a loving or safe relationship with that child. Because that’s possible when the child is being completely objectified. It was exists inside the parent and only becomes real to the child through the parent’s behavior.

I know my parents feel that kind of sentiment towards me along with many other sentiments they probably aren’t conscious of based on their behavior.

I’m continuing to view them as emotionally and relationally disabled.

It’s like they wave a flag that says “I love you” and believe they deserve for me to make them feel good for saying that regardless of my actual experience. Which means they want to be the children and want me to parent them.

I have the receipts on their failures as parents but I don’t really want to get into that in this post, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Does anyone else relate to this weird twisted use of “I love you”?

Can anyone else relate to any or all of this winding journey of adoptee consciousness raising and developing a sense of self beyond adoption roles and narratives?

For a while I was hyper fixated on the human rights violation arguments against plenary and closed adoption practices including renaming infants and severing access to original identity and heritage. The idea that adoptee rights are human rights felt very important.

Eventually, this fixation shifted into identifying developmental needs that corresponded to human rights.

It took a long time to realize I felt massive indebtedness to my adoptive parents and family for adopting and caring for me. That indebtedness overlapped with FOG feelings (fear, obligation and guilt.) For a long time, I could only imagine reuniting with biological parents in order to say “thank you for my life including the adoption.” Now, I look back on this and I know exactly how to express my rage at the injustice of a relinquished child adapting to abandonment and closed adoption to such a degree they believe it’s only natural and right to thank the original parents who abandoned them with no guarantee of future contact with them for abandoning them. Wow.

I’m noticing an important shift from claiming basic rights to my own experience and identity and humanity to acknowledging the reality of basic needs underneath the weight of right language.

For example, I have the right to be here and have a sense of self and a body and authority over my own experience and identity and knowledge of my heritage and true family of origin. That’s shifting to: I need to be here and have a sense of self…etc. Then that’s shifting into a sense of being: I am myself, I am here and I have a sense of self and a body and authority over my experience, etc.

It’s all boiling down so far to the growing belief that (as a baby especially), I deserved because I needed. A baby deserves care simply because he exists. A baby’s needs deserve to be met simply because they exist.

But that got messed up because all I had a chance to do was exist and have a body and be present in this world and instead of my needs being met by the community and the society through the natural parents who conceived and created me, the opposite happened and I lost everything that mattered via relinquishment (and the coercion that caused and facilitated it). (I’m not interested in hearing any opinions about how adoptive parents meet needs in this scenario because that combined with the relinquishment is a huge part of what creates these feelings of indebtedness in adoptees.)

I have difficulty asking for help and asking other people to help me meet my needs. I was rewarded and given attention for being easy and independent and not having needs as a child in my adoptive family. That isn’t unique to adoption, but it’s amplified by relinquishment and adoption.

I’m only recently realizing that this pattern has made me feel that I have to earn the right to have needs let alone have them actually be met or fulfilled. And that receiving care that does meet my needs can feel suspicious and dangerous because the care I received in my Christian adoptive family turned out to be so conditional (in a way I understand is common in adoption and often compounded by the soft form authoritarian Christian parenting à la James Dobson’s Focus on the Family).

So now the problem in providing myself with the various kinds of care I need as a person (materially and emotionally) is NOT a lack of awareness.

The problem is that receiving care itself (even from myself) has become associated with danger and indebtedness.

It’s almost like my system had to get by on so much toxic and conditional care to survive, that I have this block where I can’t absorb the nutrients of the care.

Now this doesn’t mean I don’t brush my teeth or pay my bills. Although it could manifest in neglecting those things I’m sure.

It’s like these wires have been crossed and they have to be unraveled and cleaned and woven together in a different way.

For example, I could brush my teeth because my inner critic who sounds like my adoptive mother rings on my head saying gently that this is just the right thing to do because this is what good kids do and then another part of me chimes in about how I should brush my teeth because I don’t want to be rejected by anyone for being gross or having a slightly more yellow smile or bad breath because I don’t want to be rejected and another part of me says I should brush my teeth so that I don’t get cavities so that I don’t have to deal with the dental bills. Notice all of this is shame-based and fear-based and even the internal voices are about external validation and effects instead of internal experiences like the joy of fresh clean teeth or preventing the experience of the pain of cavities or sensitive gums. The connection between doing something because the result feels good is absent and treated as incidental. Those are wild and insidious adaptations.

“I deserve because I need.”
That’s secure attachment. Particularly from the standpoint of a human baby needing to be fed, for example. (Not in terms of enabling an adult to extract something from someone else without their consent. Such as “I deserve to have someone else’s baby because I need to be a parent.”)

Then there’s the simplest path to care and action that gets disrupted.
I know this outcome feels good and is worth the action to make it happen. Maybe not addictively good, but habitually good.

All of this makes even relating to our own needs transactional and complicated.

A therapist specializing in treating complex attachment trauma said these patterns can be difficult to perceive or be conscious of because in order to see them we have to open our attachment system and begin to feel the grief of so many unmet needs. That it was adaptive to believe we didn’t have needs if our caregivers couldn’t meet them because then we could believe our caregivers were better than they were. And that’s less scary than acknowledging we have to rely on inadequate or scary people in order to survive.

I could say so much more about all of this, but I’m sure that’s more than enough for now.

Thanks for the riding the ramble. Please share your stories and anything related.

DAE hate how adoptee and adoptive parent dynamics are depicted in stories and media?

I watched the latest Superman film. SPOILERS ahead.

And the ending where Clark Kent as Superman is a grown man hanging out in the Fortress of Solitude replacing his birth parents video message montage with a custom video montage of his adoptive parents…felt UTTERLY ridiculous and infantilizing to the point of sickening me as an adult adoptee.

Story Background

Early in the film, Superman visits the Fortress of Solitude to recover from a battle and his robotic assistant play excerpts of a video message of his biological parents saying that it comfort him.

This is familiar to adoptee experience. I had photographs of my biological parents that I carried with me all the time like religious icons. It was so significant to have anything of them and knowing what they looked like and how much we resembled each other was deeply precious and orienting to me. This is not uncommon for adoptees, although many adoptees don’t have such items for reference and those of us who do keep them to ourselves and rarely talk about their deep significance to anyone.

Fast forward in the film and the remainder of the message from Superman’s original parents is restored and reveals that they advised him to colonize and dominate planet Earth and all its people with his powerful gifts and superhero status. He never knew this about them and developed in Mr. and Mrs. Kent’s care without that message.

That raises other topics I wont get into here.

The bizarre twist at the end of the film is that instead of just retiring the images of his biological parents or continuing to watch the portions he resonates with which would honestly be much more believable, Superman replaces his ritual of rewatching the bio parent message with a home video montage of growing up in Kansas with his adoptive parents. As a grown superhero man in his late twenties or early thirties who left Kansas and moved to Metropolis the first chance he got, what soothes Superman the most is watching home videos of his upbringing with the Kents as an only child??? Bullsh*t.

It’s an adoptive parent replacement fantasy. And a trope that infantilizes adult adoptees. Also perhaps a social fantasy that however adoptees might feel about biological parents could be fully transferred to adoptive parent figures.

Images of my adoptive parents could never serve the same nor even a similar psychological function as images of my biological family. Not because they aren’t significant figures or relationships but because they’re completely different people in completely different roles in my experience and in relation to me.

I don’t feel particularly special about looking at a photo of my adoptive parents. Maybe that will change when they die. I don’t need images of them when I have tons of memories of them that come to mind any time. There’s no reason to engage with external images or photographs of them at all. Nothing beyond the occasional holiday or family vacation photo album. No impulse to look at those except once in a blue moon. I can’t imagine that’s much different for kept people raised in biological families.

I’m sharing personal perspective from my lived experiences. I’ve heard similar from other adopteees. And in sure there’s naturally variation in how all of us feel and cope with our various family members and their images both available or inaccessible.

What do you think? What are your experiences?

I’ve seen and heard more about the Nothing Place recently—the original developmental wound and place survivors of mother-infant separation experience as adoptees. It’s a kind of ground zero possibly caused by a baby being separated from the original irreplaceable mother during the first six months after birth before the baby develops a clear sense of self and other. So losing the original mother during that time probably is devastating and disorienting. And the Nothing Place is this place we can get triggered back to where we feel a sense of freefall, floating in empty space alone and helpless, like babies with no fight or flight response. Just frozen there. Maybe even with a sense of doom or near-death risk. Maybe infant relinquishment is a kind of near-death experience for an infant especially during that first six-month period of life.

I didn’t have any sense of this until I started search and reunion and had deeper relationships as an adult. Conflict would sometimes trigger a conscious experience of the Nothing Place. Feeling unseen, misunderstood, abandoned, rejected, betrayed or in some small sense feeling not treated as fully human would be gateways back to the Nothing Place. Like I said, it can be related to feelings of death, too.

I’ve developed enough awareness of this place to consciously accompany and comfort myself when I feel myself there again. I’m learning to accept how awful that can feel and that it seems to help for me to not judge it but just acknowledge how I feel about it reminding myself that this place is mine, too, it’s a place I can survive and inhabit and own with comfort and care I can provide now. It’s not easy. But I feel like it’s happening. And the more I grow in relationship with myself as the witness of my thoughts, feelings and emotions with curiosity and presence instead of judgment, the more hope I feel that there’s more life and vitality on the other side of the grieving and FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) of adoption and its origins.

IFS parts work has helped with conceptualizing these ideas in ways that help me navigate the actual experiences.

I’ve had to start considering my bonds with my adopters as trauma bonds and the care I received as their adopted child as inherently conditional because it was structured in a way that required relinquishment (which was coerced in my case), zero access to original identity or kin, renaming/rebranding, and mandatory performance of “emotions” like gratitude which I can now identify as a form of emotional abuse. It makes sense for adoptive parents to be grateful for the opportunity to become parents through adoption. It’s sick to expect a vulnerable child to be grateful for their basic human needs to be met by anyone, biological or adoptive relatives.

More and more, I think the idea of parental responsibilities should be centered alongside the most rights and developmental needs of children instead of any mention of parental rights. Parents have responsibilities. Talking about parental rights instead of responsibilities betrays the idea that parents “own” their children like property. Parental rights are a veiled form of property rights under capitalist patriarchy. And adoption is an institution founded on sexism and childism (discrimination against the basic human rights of children).

I understand culture is powerful and changes over time in various ways. I get the complexities f social institutions and the limitations of law and how it relates to history and culture. At best, adoption is harm reduction. And some children do need external care. But that doesn’t negate any adoptee’s need to understand what has happened in their particular history socially, politically, legally and illegally, physically, emotionally and relationally as the ultimate authority on their own lived experience and from a unique positioned to judge adoption in both personal and systemic ways.

I resent being raised by adoptive parents who can’t keep up with me about these things. I’m relieved I’ve been able to mostly stop compulsively feeling compassion for their limitations and stop trying negotiate with them. F*ck the FOG (fear, obligation and guilt). I get to be a whole person and belong to myself with my whole history without reference to anyone else’s preferences, insecurities or interests except as narrative details. Relationships have to have reasons to exist. Not all reasons are good enough for relationships to last. We’re meant for more than endurance. We’re meant to enjoy not just endure.

DAE relate? I appreciate hearing your stories and experiences.

This is both a personal and sociological post. My intention is to explore intersections between emotional neglect experiences and adoptee experiences. It’s a Venn diagram of sorts.

I recently joined the r/emotionalneglect sub after learning more about emotional neglect and realizing that not only did I experience this in my adoptive family but I believe it’s also baked into the structure of adoption as an experience and as an institution.

Somehow I wasn’t surprised to encounter the fantasy of being adopted among people who were neglected as kids in their biological families.

This is something I’ve sensed and encountered in mixed adoption spaces especially among adoptive parents who had horrible experiences as kids themselves in their biological families.

I don’t know what to ask or suggest exactly. I’m just recognizing this and sitting with how elements of these experiences are more common than I imagined while other elements divide us adoptees from other people with neglected and marginalized experiences. In some sense, we’re all trying to be fully human and fully ourselves individually and relationally. And until we can recover from the dependency issues created by these developmental conditions…sigh, I’m not sure where I was going with that, except that I see potential solidarity and communion with others who didn’t experience adoption as adoptees.

And the more clearly I see how many people use the pain of one marginalized group (kids abused or neglected by biologically intact families) to further harm another marginalized group like adoptees (often abused or neglected personally by adoptive families or systemically by adoption as an institution) by deflecting, shaming, or dismissing our pain…the more I wonder how and where does this cycle of shame and disconnection end?

This isn’t the trauma Olympics.
Relational healing isn’t a competition.
Integration and reality include all of us and all of our pain and all of our experiences. But “all pain matters” as a response to individual suffering is toxic and a form of willful blindness. Another form of bypassing, spiritual or otherwise.

I’ll be sitting with these themes for a while.
How we use fantasy to cope with realities beyond our control as children. How this can continue into adulthood and even our whole lives. How the FOG of adoption can be made of fantasy as well as fear, obligation and guilt.

If part of me feels erased by emotionally neglected kids fantasizing about being adopted as a form of rescue from suffering at the hands of their biological family, then does a part of kids neglected in biologically intact families feel erased by me as an adoptee fantasizing about reunion or an alternate timeline where I was raised by biological family? I think that’s an assumption some people make, and I think more than anything it’s a way for them to avoid both the suffering of others and perhaps also avoiding their own suffering.

One thing that seems universally true: when kids are hurt enough developmentally to have complex relational trauma (CPTSD), a feature of this is longing to be rescued. And that can persist into adulthood. I think that’s what the “I wish I had been adopted” fantasy is for kids in abusive biological families. Adoption as a rescue fantasy.

And a lot of adoptees know better. That adoption doesn’t guarantee a better life, just a different one. And the difference can and does often include abuse and neglect personally and structurally/systemically.

Thoughts? Feelings?

DAE relate to this?

Receiving care or recognition from others can feel like there are strings attached instead of something freely given and safe to receive.

For a lot of people:

Receiving just means support. It’s simple and clean. Especially as kids when receiving care is most of what they need and do.

For a lot of adoptees (maybe most if not all):

Receiving doesn’t just mean simple, clean support.

Receiving means obligation.
Obligation means a loss of autonomy (feeling in control and good about who and how we are).
And loss of autonomy means a kind of captivity.

When we experience and learn this emotionally, it can make us feel like being welcomed, helped, chosen, recognized, or supported is not a positive or simple thing.

Receiving that kind of care can feel like we have to anticipate the cost.

A relational cost. And deal with the expectation that eventually someone will come to collect.

That care isn’t a gift, it’s a contract. And often we can’t know or even ask what the terms and conditions are.

That belonging isn’t about who we are, it’s about how well we comply.

That care is actually leverage we’re indebted for.

I’ve written before about how long it took me to realize I felt like I had to be a good return on investment (ROI) for my adoptive family. That’s another way of saying I felt indebted to them because that’s what mandatory gratitude actually means.

I think this is why participating authentically in our own lives can feel dangerous sometimes. Because it isn’t just rejection we’re afraid of. We also have experienced reasons to fear being accepted because acceptance can contain hidden demands. Because we’re so used to receiving good treatment as conditional and even performative.

This may be especially challenging for adoptees who experienced adoptions where there was no physical neglect and where emotional neglect or abuse were more covert.

I’ve been thinking about being seen and recognized relationally since one of my recent posts on the difference between recognition and regulation. Because I can see that I crave being known, seen, recognized and understood, AND when it’s possible that can feel uncomfortable in another way. I don’t think it’s just because it’s unfamiliar in some ways. I think it’s for these other reasons as well.

I’m sure this overlaps with nonadoptees who have experienced emotional neglect and developmental abuse as well, but I think adoption can be structurally conditional, narcissistic and neglectful even when adoptive parents are really exceptionally good at individualizing care for adoptees.

Does this resonate?

“Self-trust is the ability to say, “whether or not you understood what I showed you. I know what it was.””

This is what I want for me and for all of us.

DAE relate this question? And how it becomes more conscious over time?

After years of deconstructing my beliefs about adoption, family, identity, reunion, and religion, I’m wondering about this question.

What is conditional about the care we receive via adoption? What does that do to us and how we provide care for ourselves or seek care in other relationships?

For myself, I can’t help see that adoption structure my adoptive family relationships and biological family relationships in a way that forced me to develop with a sense that all the care I received was conditional.

Some of the conditions that had to be met in order for me to receive the care I needed to survive and exist as a human baby and child:

I had to lose my original identity and birth name.
I had to be rebranded with a new adopted name and identity.
I had to lose contact and access to biological kin.
I had to be displaced from the geography of my heritage, kin and ancestors.
I had to conform and comply with the beliefs and religious indoctrination of my adoptive family.
To name a few…

I think the effects of this conditioning can include how we care for our own bodies, how we eat, clean, and relate to our own physical care, not just how we show up in relationship with others, but how we show up in relationship with ourselves and our bodies.

One example I’ve heard from fellow adoptees who experienced some degree of emotional neglect is that they feel like they have earn the right to eat certain foods or earn a shower by performing in some way. Maybe they have to sweat by doing a good workout to feel they’ve earned the activation energy to shower. Because somehow the connection between the physical cue of wanting a shower and knowing it would feel good to be clean and cozy isn’t motivating enough. It’s like these motivation sequences got corrupted by so much requiring external validation or beliefs about what a disciplined person should do (which is inherently shame-based).

Paul Sunderland has noted in his YouTube presentations on adoption, addiction, and adoptees and healing that he has marveled at how high-functioning many adoptees present and how they can collapse in surprising ways and struggle with self-care. He attributes this to adoptees adapting to doing all forms of self-care that preserve connection and image in order to survive and avoid rejection, abandonment and withdrawal of care. He doesn’t pathologize this as much as acknowledge developmental harm to trust in self and others.

Gabor Mate says any child will always choose attachment over authenticity in relationship with caregivers because attachment is the means of survival. Which is another way of saying, we will default to performing a role instead of being ourselves if that’s what’s required to survive and earn the care we need to survive.

Another psychotherapist I can’t remember the name of says this another way, any child forced to choose between self and safety or between self and survival will choose safety or survival every time.

Some of this conditioning is deeper and more historic than just the adoption itself caused. My adoptive family had its own legacy and intergenerational trauma including the way their religion helped and harmed them, all of which I had to adapt to in order to earn and maintain their care.

Now, I know a lot of people including some adoptees have a tendency to “all lives matter” these adoptee-specific experiences. I’m still figuring out how to express and convey these ideas from my own experience. I don’t expect wholesale agreement, but more and more I do expect respect for me to have the authority to represent and interpret my own experience.

Does anyone else feel these things are connected?

DAE relate to this?

It hit me today that what I relationally crave and find nourishing is recognition. Not in the award-winning sense of the word. Recognition as sight and acknowledgment. Being seen. Being located in my experience. Being accurately witnessed. Being attuned to and accompanied.

So much healing content focuses on regulation and regulating your nervous system, but something about focusing on regulation never sat well with me. It felt like another thing to perform or comply with.

Paul Sunderland mentions in his YouTube presentation on adoptees and healing that you have to be seen in order to feel safe, you have to feel safe in order to feel soothed, and you have to feel soothed to feel secure. I think that’s an IFS framework.

It hit me today that being seen is recognition and being soothed is regulation. It’s a process, a ladder, a progression.

Recognition has to precede regulation. Recognition is the first step in regulation.
Recognition is what we need to give ourselves in order to regulate, and what we need in relationships in order to co-regulate.

And regulation isn’t the end goal. Connection is.

Recognition. Protection. Regulation. Trust. Connection.

Finding words for experiences and needs has helped me throughout this adoptee consciousness raising journey.

How does this hit for you?

DAE relate to this?

This very closely described the adoptive family I was raised in. And I’m convinced some degree of this experience is baked into adoption as an institution and experience especially the earlier it happens in the adoptee’s life and the more closed the adoption is. But biological family can also participate in this type of emotionally neglectful dynamic in an open adoption and reunion. Almost no one ever really imagined or shares in the adoptee’s emotional reality. No wonder it’s so hard to figure out what our own reality truly is (i.e. coming out of the FOG, adoptee consciousness raising).

“Family systems where the emotional neglect is very covert, very hidden because the family appears on the outside to be very functional, but actually the child is being starved of all of their developmental needs. So this is a situation where there is no physical neglect. The child has clothes, they have food, they have, they have a house. Usually they come from a middle class or financially secure family. And oftentimes there will be parents that are very image conscious. They’re very aware of presenting as a happy family, and that’s important to them. And so the child really learns the role that they are expected to play within their family to make their parents happy, to make their parents look good, to make their family look good. And in order to play that role, it requires this kind of dissociation and denial, like this performance of acting like things are okay and denying the truth of what’s happening in the family system, which is that the child, in many cases, feels that they’re more of a possession or an object than an actual human being that their parents love and have a relationship with. And it’s also not uncommon at all in these types of family systems for there to be covert abuse happening behind closed doors that everyone is in denial about and dissociates from and pretends is not happening. These children who grew up in these kinds of families are living in a reality where it’s actually not acceptable to acknowledge the truth, even to themselves. The truth cannot be known. They can’t even let themselves know the truth of how bad things are. There’s absolutely no one around them who will mirror that reality back to them, who will reflect the truth, that things are really bad. And so these children are persistently getting the message that everything is perfectly fine, and if you’re unhappy then there’s something very wrong with you. So a lot of time these kids end up being in the scapegoat roles because they go on to have emotional problems. They have substance abuse problems. They have eating disorders. They have all kinds of struggles with their mental health. And then they become the black sheep where it’s like, you are the problem in this family, and where do these issues even come from? Because look how great our family is. It’s certainly not us. It takes a lot of time when you come from that kind of trauma, to even say the truth to yourself, to let yourself know the truth of how devastating and traumatizing the impact of that emotional neglect has been. And that despite how that may look on the outside. Despite the way that the parents may be able to point to all of these ways in which their children’s material needs were met. The child has actually been completely starved of the things that they needs most. And not only that but has been forced to perform all these years as if they are having their needs met. So it takes time to thaw out of that frozen and collapsed and dissociative state and to come back into reality when reality has been so distorted and reality has actually been kind of forbidden within the family. No one is allowed to say how they actually feel.”

Someone shared this with me. I think it’s by a therapist specializing in treating CPTSD.

Emotional neglect seems to relate closely to Lindsay Gibson’s work on emotionally immature parents and people. It seems like emotionally immature people and parents are emotionally neglectful. It’s the naturally order of these two conditions creating and reinforcing each other.