Journey Of The Adopted Self
This book, written by Betty Jean Lifton in 1994, focuses on three stages of the journey that adopted people take in “a quest for wholeness” – the subtitle of the book. It’s an unapologetically American study of the author’s own experience of being adopted, along with a large amount of research. Despite its age and non-UK feel I would say it is well worth a read, mostly because what Lifton describes really resonated personally with my own journey, and I hope will do the same for you.
The three sections that make up the content of the book, and the journey of the self, are:
The Self in Crisis
The Self in Search
The Self in Transformation
The first two sections take up just over 100 pages each, while the last was condensed to a practical 20 pages. I found I got progressively less interested as I went on. I was identifying the self in crisis in myself pretty much throughout the nine chapters that make it up, and that is where most of the value was for me. In fact I would go as far as to say that the first 125 pages was an affirmation that, as an adopted person, it is completely ok to be who you are, and there are reasons why you are who you are and why you may have struggled with fitting in or whatever.
Filton uses the idea that an adopted person becomes two ‘selves’ as a result of cumulative adoption trauma starting in the womb, encompassing abandonment and then hiding and a conspiracy of silence. There is the artificial self and the forbidden self. The artificial self is what we show the world in order to feel safe; the forbidden self is our ‘true nature’ that is unknown to us and anyone else following a rupture at birth from our birth mothers.
I found lots in the first section to resonate with, particularly the stuff on visual hunger and fear of intimacy. And one particular piece on the abandonment complex that I thought was worth sharing here.
“Inside every adoptee is an abandoned baby. It lies coiled in the core of the adopted self like a deep sorrow that can find no comfort. ‘The condition of abandonment is not unique,’ the Jungian Analyst Nathan Schwarz-Salant tells me. ‘But the extremity of abandonment in the adoptee is unique.’”
The book features accounts of some of the author’s research participants to bring colour to the points being made, which makes it a pretty accessible book to read. This is particularly so in the second section, which I found less helpful personally but nonetheless could appreciate the usefulness of for people still more actively engaged in their search for themselves and their birth family.
The final short section on transformation was basically a list of way an adopted person can become whole, for example through art or by becoming a therapist. What it did include though (on page 259 of my version) was a ‘recipe for becoming whole’, which was basically a list of six ingredients that I have replicated below in shortened form:
Weave a new self-narrative out of what was, what might have been and what is
Make the artificial self real and bring the forbidden self out of hiding
Integrate the fantasy and actual birth mother into one real person
Integrate the fantasy and actual adoptive mother into one real person
Integrate the fathers in the same way
Become their own child, not the birth mother’s or the adoptive mother’s
This is an incredibly well researched and referenced book. I really like the way at the end there are so many signposts, in the form of other books, magazines, organisations for the intrepid, adoptee explorer to use.
Betty Jean Lifton was a research, writer and counsellor who devoted much of her life to the advocacy of a more adoption system in the USA. She wrote a number of books, most of which were either explicitly or implicitly about adoption. Lost and Found is one I plan to look at next.