Adoption Therapy
I came across this book by chance and thought it was worth describing here. It is a collection of 16 essays written by clinical practitioners and their clients on the topic of processing and healing what they describe as ‘post adoption’ issues.
The book, published in 2014 was edited by Laura Dennis, herself an adoptee and adoption writer. Like much of the literature on adoption professional services, the research is almost totally of the American adoption experience, nonetheless there are some universal lessons to be learned.
It feels very much like a manual or handbook for either adoptees looking for therapeutic help or the professionals engaged in providing such help. You might call it ‘lessons from the couch’ (in face that’s far catchier than the sub-title Dennis chose. The book is made up of thirteen chapters, each containing a self-contained, titled essay with a short biography of its author.
Rather than trying an draw any general conclusions here which, given the diverse nature of the writing, would have to be so high level as to be banal, I thought it would be more helpful to list the essays below with a sentence on them. Probably the only general point I want to make first is that some of the essays talk about adoptees and fostered children interchangeably.
Chapter 1 - Untherapied Adoption Wounds
A powerful first person account of what happens when the wounds of adoption are not attended to.
Chapter 2 – Red Flags That a Therapist Could Do More Harm Than Good
A description of 12 red flags that happen all too easily when therapists attend to adoptees, followed by some signposts for professionals to follow to become better informed.
Chapter 3 – Approaches To Repairing The Wounds of Separation
A transcribed conversation between two adoptees – one a writer, one a therapist on the ways in which the trauma of separation can be attended to.
Chapter 4 – The Myth Of Reactive Attachment Disorder
A strong argument that the disorder often ascribed to ‘difficult’ adoptee children is a misleading and unhelpful screen that prevents the real issues being attended to.
Chapter 5 – Heeding The Body’s Messages: Body-MIND Implications of Pre-Natal Trauma
A revelatory idea to me, that trauma for an adoptee starts in the womb, is given a thorough exploration here, together with some discussion on the implications if this trauma being held unconsciously in the body. For me, a deeply resonating chapter.
Chapter 6 – Creating Closeness and Creating Distance: What Therapists Need To Know To Help Adoptees Increase Their Capacity For Emotional Connection
This is a very practical step-by-step guide to working therapeutically with an adopted person, using the hypothesis that adoption has a negative impact on a person’s capacity for closeness.
Chapter 7 – Perspective Of An Adoptee Conceived By Rape
A first-person account of an adoptee who discovered the circumstances of her conception from her adoptive mother as a relatively young adult.
Chapter 8 – The Transracial Adoptee And Body Dysmorphia
Another first person account – ‘being a transracial adoptee is a lifelong condition’ - of this particular context for adoption.
Chapter 9 – Late Discovery Adoptees: The Original victims Of Identity Theft
A further first-person account by an adoptee who, as a 19 year-old, was approached by her birth mother and told she was adopted. The author goes on to discuss the implications of this in more general terms.
Chapter 10 – Adoptees and Intimacy: Of Fear, Yearning, And Restoring The Capacity For Connection
A co-authored chapter covering a lot of the ground suggested in the title. Mixing their own stories with what they have learned professional, this is one of the more general essays in the series.
Chapter 11 – Beauty, Control And Adoption
An impactful, quirky, poetic first person account of an adoptee who’s trauma lead to, among other things, anorexia.
Chapter 12 – Co-Dependency in Adoptees
A conversation between an adoptee and a therapist/writer on the tendency of adoptees to over attach to others due to a lack of bonding with a birth mother.
Chapter 13 – (Afterword) Living With Or Without Therapy: Its Effect On The World
A post-script to the essays on the benefit of therapy for all involved in the adoption triad.
As you can see there’s a lot of ground covered in response to the editor’s question; what is the ‘something more’ that adoptees need over and above being ‘loved as if she were your own’, which is pretty much the guiding mantra for adoptive parents?
The essays are almost all written by adoptees who have become professional clinician – St Luke’s “Physician heal thyself” present throughout. And what is revealed is how little the ‘normal world’ knows or understands of the adoptee’s experience. So books like this definitely help, in a very tangible way.