Adoption is not one circumstance but many—every configuration of family, every age of placement, every distance of culture and kin, and behind each adoptee a biological mother, and the generations of family that have led up to the moment she is in labor and ready to push. Each of these circumstances deserves its own attention. Here, I would like to focus on a very specific one: the adult man who was adopted at birth.

I’ll offer some cumulative observations from my practice.

We don’t have narrative memory available at our birth, and in the first few years of life, our whole feeling of what it is like to be in the world, and in relationships, is wired up. It would seem impossible, therefore, to address (as an adult, in talk therapy) anything that occurred during that time period. Oddly, it is actually directly available if we can reflect on what our current relationships and sense of being in the world feel like.

So often we act this out unaware that we are running what amounts to no less than a program. This early wiring up leaves us with a blueprint that colors the feeling of our most intimate connections. So I become quite curious when someone comes into my office frustrated that the same things keep happening in their relationships, especially when they can’t seem to find any logical explanation for what is going on. It really feels like it is the other person, they report, and the same pattern has happened repeatedly, to the degree that the person feels cursed, and that life is uniquely against them.

It is also often the case that therapy has been tried, and his adoption confessed, and there were no issues to deal with there, and he doesn’t want to waste another analysis focusing on that. It is made quite clear that we won’t be talking about such things, and that his relationship with his adoptive family and parents has left him wanting for nothing. In fact, there are even fewer problems there than he sees in his friends’ family relationships—and they aren’t even adopted, he will quip. He’ll say things like: I was adopted as a baby so I never even had to feel bad about leaving my birth family, I always knew I was adopted, I always felt loved and taken care of, no abuse whatsoever. It’s never been an issue, he will tell me.

It’s at about this point that I am very interested in hearing exactly what it is that keeps reoccurring in his relationships. What is the nature of this curse he is under?

Well, he will say:

My relationships always start quite intensely, the feeling of them that is. There is an almost overwhelming sense of wanting to merge with her, an intense feeling that I have found “the one,” the missing piece, the one I have always been looking for. It is a very strong feeling and it completely overwhelms me. The trouble starts when there is the slightest sign of distance from her. Even if I know it is all quite normal, something in my body can’t stop my anxiety from taking over. I really can’t stop myself from going into a complete panic. I become needy for reassurance, which becomes insatiable, regardless of what she says or does. I feel that it will be impossible to ever keep her, or trust that she won’t disappear.

And that’s the gist of it, every time. It’s not a transcript from an actual patient, but it might as well be. The language is that succinct, and there are a few key words that tip off insight into the pattern, and allow us to line up an intervention that will get past his rigid defenses that convince us this has nothing to do with his adoption. It’s in the panic, driven by the intense feeling that there is nothing he will ever be able to do to keep her, and in the way his mind, and his whole nervous system, is predicting what it knows—because it has learned it through a real experience.

And what does his nervous system know? What did his infant psyche learn?

Nothing else in a human life replicates the way life begins: made inside a person’s body, surrounded by her, knowing the world first as her. This is not a ranking of relationships—the bonds we build later can be more matured, more earned, with more real, developed, conscious intimacy. It is a fact about beginnings. Each of us is gestated in exactly one body. And when a baby comes out of that body, and then that body disappears—that feels like something, and that infant body, and that infant psyche, learns something real.

He has fallen in love with her so many times. He has seen her in every woman that he has longed for. In the intensity of his yearnings is the yearning for a feeling his body remembers but his memory cannot narrate. And he thinks it is about all these women—he doesn’t know his psyche is trying to match a lost sensation with the closest thing that could resemble it. He dreams about her without knowing it is her he is dreaming about. How could he stop dreaming about someone who was that foundational to his existence, whose body he was made in, yet whom he has no memory of ever seeing? This man’s body learned, before memory, one lesson: that the wanting of the primary other and her disappearance were a single event. Hello and goodbye as one experience.

Infant adoption involves a real loss. The loss of the person in whose body life began. And in even the healthiest adoptions, the ones where everyone loves each other and everything is provided for, and especially in the ones where everything goes so well that there is never a question of needing to know the biological parent—that loss is almost never treated as a loss. It is un-grieved because it was never known as grievable.

The mind may not yet be developed enough to experience the separation as abandonment—but the organism notices that the body from whence it came has disappeared.

Author and adoption therapist Nancy Verrier made a keen observation: for the person adopted at infancy, there is no “pre-trauma self.” When trauma strikes a formed person, there is a before—a reference point, a self to get back to. The infant separated from his birthmother has no before in that relationship. The coping is what his sense of self builds around, like a pearl around a grain of sand.

This is why the loss hides so well in the consulting room: it doesn’t present as a memory, a symptom, or a story. It is just who he is.

In many adoptive families there is openness, honesty, and genuine love around the fact of the adoption—yet more often than not, there is no invitation to grieve. Not out of cruelty or malice or neglect. Sometimes it is out of the well-intentioned protection from the reality of loss: the belief that love, if it is full enough, closes the past behind the child. The belief that this closure would be better for him. Yet he lives with it. It is a learned truth, known so deeply that it lives through him as soon as he finds a woman to attach to. Then it all re-constellates and is felt right there with her, yet he is bewildered because the dots are so far away, and so un-remembered, that they cannot connect. So he is cursed.

Author Betty Jean Lifton noted that a child can feel real love and gratitude toward his adoptive parents and still carry an inner struggle about his origins. The family’s very happiness is what often makes it unspeakable. The better the adoption went, the less permission the loss has to exist.

The early years often appear seamless—Brodzinsky and colleagues observed that adopted and non-adopted infants interact with their parents in much the same way, which lulls everyone into believing adoption will make no difference. And in almost every clinical and developmental marker, including the capacity to build secure attachments with the adoptive parents, that is true. It makes its difference later: at adolescence, when identity work begins, and again in adult intimacy—the first relationships with a woman since the birthmother that constellate that magnitude of closeness and physical intimacy. Here his sexuality can become extraordinarily impassioned, yet the relationship extraordinarily cursed with dread. Bowlby’s sequence of protest, despair, and detachment, laid down at a separation he doesn’t remember, reappears in the adult at every threatened separation from a partner. The partner is being asked, without anyone’s knowledge—least of all his—to carry the reactions to a loss she did not cause and cannot repair.

If this man walked into your office, how would you know he is suffering from any of this? He will tell you his family was wonderful. Yes, he was adopted, but there isn’t any problem there. That’s the tell—not the adoption, but the speed at which he glosses it over. His defenses are built to recruit your agreement, and everything he says is true: he was loved, there was no abuse. I have believed him many times. So often individual therapy colludes with the defense. His reasons are offered so reasonably that agreeing feels like respect. And to be clear, the therapy that follows is real treatment, and needed. The anxiety is real, the panic is real, the drinking or whatever vice he has found to hold what his imagination won’t let in is real, and all of it deserves the caring attention of a devoted clinician. But it can also go on for years without ever reaching the ground floor: the self-similar pattern repeating through his relationships, the loss that was never known as grievable. If someone has come to mind while you’ve been reading, let that curiosity grow, and bring it to the next appointment. It doesn’t mean the treatment has failed or should end. In fact, your consistent presence over time, witnessing these realities in him, can start to wake him up to the pattern.

So, what to do?

It all follows from what is outlined here. He needs to know, and he needs to connect those distant dots. His ego needs to tolerate letting in the reality that he has defended against his whole life. There is no way around the breakdown, because to touch into it will bring to consciousness a grief his body has known all along but not consciously felt. And not only will he have to grieve the loss of his biological mother, but also every failed relationship, every painful goodbye, every self-destructive thing he has done in the meantime. And that is when the healing begins. If the loss is acknowledged and grieved as a loss, the unconscious expectations placed on his relationships are relieved. The partner is no longer responsible for replacing what was lost before memory began.

It doesn’t make it all go away. He cannot undo his past. And these habits are built into his body, so they don’t necessarily stop. He is still triggered, still anxious. His past will never not be real—that body that he came from disappeared, and if something that foundational can happen, if the person who had a biological imperative to keep him alive can just disappear, why would his body ever believe anyone else would remain?

You can’t and shouldn’t tell him otherwise, because this is all true and real. Yet, with the awareness brought forward in this analysis, and with his ego growing the capacity to grieve, the best he can do is know what is happening when it gets triggered, and what it is really about, then go off and grieve. Or better yet, one day, he might meet someone who has the capacity to love him, and he will have developed the ability to articulate his deep self with a narrative he never had—and then a real relationship can form. A real relationship with that infant who lost the body he came from, and a real relationship with a new body who will never be her, yet can know him just as deeply.

Brandon Worden is a marriage and family therapist in Berkeley, California, working with families, couples, and adoptees. This kind of process often sits alongside an ongoing individual therapy rather than replacing it. Colleagues weighing a particular case are welcome to reach out—I’m glad to think it through with you. Find me at brandondworden.com

Sources

Bowlby, John. Attachment. 2nd ed. Basic Books, 1982.

Brodzinsky, David M., Marshall D. Schechter, and Robin Marantz Henig. Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self. Anchor Books, 1992.

Lifton, Betty Jean. Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness. Basic Books, 1994.

Verrier, Nancy Newton. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Gateway, 1993.

Verrier, Nancy Newton. Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up. Gateway, 2003.

Because it is a practice. So often people come into my office, and the least helpful thing I can do is put them in a box and, right off the bat, set up the expectation of change. Your change is not in my control, and sometimes it might feel that it isn’t even in yours. How many of us have struggled with something, maybe even for a lifetime, aware we would like to change it but unable to make change stick? This section is for those who have become aware that something needs to change. It is for those who carry shame about how much they have been banging their head against the wall.

Practice requires patience. Practice requires self-discipline. It is a practice to be a family. It is a practice to be in a relationship. It is a practice to be a parent. Being human with intentional practice is what makes being human meaningful.

Our minds have a capacity that, as far as we know, no other creature shares: Our awareness can turn back on itself. We can notice what we are doing and feeling while it is happening. That self-reflective capacity is what makes practice possible at all. It is also a responsibility, and a great gift. I had a teacher who used to say: Used well, our mind can be our greatest gift; used poorly, our greatest nightmare. This is just as true of our relationships.

The good news is that the mind is a trainable phenomenon. Our perceptions are malleable. And because our relationships depend on our minds, the mind is the first stop if we want to keep our relationships meaningful and healthy. And—this takes practice. The practice of what, exactly? That is what the writing in this section of Meristem, titled On Practice, will explore.

The framework is one of understanding. Coming into a more conscious understanding of oneself, and consequently deepening one’s understanding of everything beyond oneself. It is through understanding that we gain the opportunity for something new to unfold—the possibility of agency over things that once felt out of our control. And once we are there, we practice what we’ve found.