Reuniting with Birth Family

Reuniting is a tough topic. I want to start the discussion but not push it in any direction. Sharing personal experiences would be valuable here for other participants.

Self

In her book, Primal Wound, Nancy Verrier makes the eye-opening observation about babies like you and me who are taken from their mothers at birth. We need our natural mothers (i.e. birth mothers) in the first months of our lives to evolve, and we can't even conceive of ourselves as a separate entity apart from our natural mothers for up to nine months. Absent that relationship, everything falls apart. Think of every negative emotion you can name (fear, anger, sadness...) and we felt it as intensely as humanly possible when taken from our natural mothers. We remember those emotions - we'd love to forget but they're stamped into our very tissues - despite not having concrete tangible memories of the event because our hippocampuses weren't developed. Where does this leave us?

It leaves us broken. In his book, Adoption Healing, Joe Soll notes that we struggle to figure out who we are and often have to fake personalities to survive. He's right. We never formed a sense of self because we were little tempests of emotion too angry, bitter, sad, or whatever to become a human identity.

Many people struggle to establish an identity or sense of self. It's just ten times worse for us. However, it can be done. It just takes ten times the work. Post your thoughts and see if you can work through it and inspire fellow adoptees while you're at it.