Birth Parent and Adoptive Parent Trauma
In adoption there is trauma for all involved. Everyone has different levels of trauma and deals with it in various ways. When we talk about trauma, we are not saying you are a bad person, that you’ve ruined your child’s life or your own life. The definition of trauma is “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.”
As an adoptive parent I must take responsibility that my choice to adopt a child will cause a child trauma, myself trauma and birth parents (even extended family) trauma. Again, there are different levels of trauma for each person.
Let’s start with how adoptions trauma can affect adoptive parents. Some adoptive parents develop Post Adoption Depression Syndrome or PADS. First, it is important to know the signs of PADS and acknowledge them if you are having them. Signs of depression can include a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. It can affect how you think, feel and behave and can lead to a variety of physical or emotional problems. Doing normal day-to-day activities can become hard and sometimes suicidal thoughts can be present. Some people are more irritable, have angry outbursts, even over trivial things. It can disrupt your sleep and change your eating habits (reduced appetite or increased cravings for food). Depression and anxiety usually go together which means more agitation and restlessness. Your thought processes may suffer with trouble thinking, concentrating, remembering things or making decisions. You might be having feelings of self-blame, worthlessness or guilt or fixating on past failures. Physically you can have more headaches, back pain or stomach issues. These things occur most of the day and nearly every day. If you have these symptoms, please reach out to your medical provider and get help. There are many options and finding the right one for you is important.
Here are some perspectives from adoptive parents who have had PADS.
What did it look and/or feel like?
“The weight of the guilt and grief after placement I was not prepared for. Taking a baby home that I did not birth was a VERY unnatural feeling. Medication and therapy helped – as did knowing I wasn’t alone in feeling the way I did.”
“After having two biological children I was shocked to have PADS after we adopted our child at birth. It was weird feeling and no one understood and it made me feel so guilty.”
“I struggled with this deeply for two years after my second child was born. Challenges with birth family members not respecting boundaries (most did and we have a great relationship with) as well as my child being a high needs baby and not able to soothe or comfort contributed to me feeling disconnected and as if I were her babysitter, not their mom. Counseling, antidepressants, plus an adoption support group were all very important. Now that we have a diagnosis of autism 6 years later, it makes more sense.”
“It hit me like a ton of bricks. Any time the baby was sleeping, I was crying. I felt like a kidnapper. I didn’t know what it was. I met a birth mom online and she saved me. Some element of it was present for 3 years. I cried for his birth family every night before his birthday. The night before his 3rd or 4th birthday, I called his birth mom and we had a very healing conversation.”
“We adopted five of our children through foster adoption and from three different families of origin in two years. I had a hard time second guessing my choices and feeling very guilty and unworthy as well. Each situation was vastly different, of course. I had frustration at the biological parents who allowed four of my five children to come to me with PTSD. We have been in therapy with our children weekly all these years. Our youngest is in an outpatient program targeted at children at risk of out of home placement. Even today, it feels like I’m not adequate for to support my three with complex PTSD. I always feel like I am failing my biological children by not being able to give them anything close to enough time, energy and love. I take Prozac twice a day the last two years which allows me to feel like everything is ok when I know it’s not ok.”
“I went naively into adoption with the expectation that of course we would have an amazing, really open relationship with our child’s birth family. It has been extremely traumatic for me to instead watch from the outside and afar as our daughter’s birth family, while they made our family whole, their family has literally disintegrated. Abuse, homelessness, incarceration, foster care battles…and I feel like it’s my fault…that the placement of our daughter was the catalyst. I have never felt so helpless and broken because I have tried so hard to help, but I haven’t been able to save these people I love so much from all of these painful things. I think PPD and PTSD have been very real companions and I worry incessantly that my daughter will be traumatized as well if she can’t ever know her birth family. I have tried so hard to preserve as much of her story as I can…but I always worry if it will be enough? Since I haven’t been able to save her birth family from pain and suffering…will I be able to save our daughter from it? It’s been hard for me to share that I’m still really struggling with everything almost 3 years later. I feel like my heart will always have this gaping hole in it. I’m so grateful for a place where I can share all the hard feels safely…I don’t feel like many people outside of adoption understand at all, it’s been so isolating.”
“In retrospect, I think it was a combination of the week I spent surrounded by birth family (which I don’t regret at all, but it was intense) coupled with coming home and finding a goodbye letter from my daughter’s namesake, who died of cancer a few weeks later, on top of two other family deaths and the first anniversary of my mother’s death, all within a few weeks of each other.
I wish I had gotten help earlier. It took me 8 months, and I look back at pictures of that time and know that I felt nothing for that baby during that time. I still feel a little guilt from that, even though she’s almost 5 now and we are totally bonded.”
“I had post adoption depression really, really bad. While waiting for ICPC to clear after placement I had to stay at my mother-in-law’s home. Our agency had no clue how long I was going to be there. Between not knowing when we were going home, living with my mother-in-law, and all of the emotions and guilt with the adoption, I was a mess. I had depression and horrible insomnia. It really hindered my bonding with my child the whole 6 weeks we were there. I felt helpless. I had no control over anything. The only thing that helped was when we were told we could go back home. My depression and anxiety lingered until my child’s finalization almost a year later. Those first 9 months were the hardest ever.”
“I had it for close to 3 years after the adoption of our youngest. I think it’s still not gone (at 4 years), but I’m finally out of the fog enough to see how bad it was. I really have been in survival mode. Compounded with guilt and overwhelm from all the extras that come with adoption.”
“I had it more on our second adoption than our first. It feels like a deep hole of guilt and shame. With our second, I would just cry, all the time, but I still had to hold it together because I was supposed to be so happy. And I was. It’s so conflicting. It comes up for me every year around their birthdays.”
“For me what seemed to fuel things my PADS was my expectations vs reality. People saying how great a mom I was going to be and me feeling my shortcomings exponentially. The feelings I was letting everyone (my daughter, birth family, my family) down really weighed on me. I had this idea I needed to be perfect. I was really hard on myself.
What has helped?
“Acknowledging my trauma and that I chose this trauma (yes, even with infertility I chose to adopt-again not a bad thing-just reality) has helped me seek professional help for my trauma and really get through the haze I was in. It doesn’t make it hurt less-just makes me refocus.”
“For me I have been going to therapy and do neurotherapy to help with my added anxiety that adoption has brought on. After placement I knew I was different but looking back I realize I most likely had a form of PPD or PTSD from the trauma. I overcompensated (still do) and as a coping mechanism only allowed myself to focus on the positive things and hyper focused on helping/educating others (which I don’t believe was a bad thing-it was how I survived).”
“Along with therapy, I have used CBD oil. I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but thankfully it has been working for me.”
“I think I had a BIG leg up because my sister had got through infertility and then adopted 7+ years before me. I had seen her process and thought and talked a lot with her and my niece about it. I also already knew a birth mom, and had attended a great conference with all parts of the triad all about open adoption. Plus, my family is very supportive. All of that helped get me to a place where I could move on fairly easily from infertility to adoption. I also had to do some hard work. I was in an infertility support group for a while and then saw a therapist who had expertise in these areas for a few months. I used to think I didn’t have trauma, but as I think about this more, maybe it’s not that I didn’t have personal trauma, but I that had a lot of great support and education that helped me heal from the trauma. It is not an easy or short process.”
“CBD did not work for me, but Wellbutrin thankfully did, along with hormonal therapy. Getting the right medication and dosage may take time, but it was amazing when we found the right one!”
“I had major issues with this after both placements. The first time, I had no name for it. The second time, I knew what I was dealing with and still struggled. I got help from an adoption therapist to help me wrap my head around the humongous feelings I was having. Both times, mine began almost immediately after placement and I remember shaking the majority of the haze after their 3rd birthdays.”
“I was already on depression meds, so I went to see my doctor and increased them. I also went to a therapist, which was really helpful. Just know that you aren’t alone and it’s ok to struggle. I got so down on myself because everyone expected me to just be happy and everyone treated me like some kind of hero when all I wanted was to be a good mom. It felt like I had so much pressure on me to not make any mistakes. I also took a parenting course, which helped a lot because I went from single woman to Mom of a 9-year-old in the matter of a month.”
“I’ve done therapy and antidepressants. For me, therapy and exercise have been most effective, and learning to be so gentle with myself. I don’t know how long this journey will be, but I’m learning to feel all the feelings.”
The most important thing you can do is set up your support system before you adopt. Find a great therapist, psychiatrist and support group. Having this already in place will help you if you find yourself feeling depressed after placement. Know that you are not alone and there is help out there for you. If you are ever having thoughts of suicide, please call 988 and get immediate help.
Birth Parent Trauma
While it is important to know about the trauma that occurs with adoptive parents, it is also important to know and recognize how it affects birth parents. By reading this insight, my hope is it will give you empathy when times are tough, because most likely, you will have some rough times ahead.
What did it look like/feel like for you?
Every person will react differently and it may take years or decades for them to fully understand and work through the trauma of placing their child for adoption. Some symptoms could include: intrusive thoughts (distressing dreams, memories, flashbacks), avoidance (of memories, feelings, people, places, objects, etc.), dissociative amnesia (inability to remember certain aspects of or around traumatic event), apathy, problems with concentration, hypervigilance, and dissociative symptoms like depersonalization and derealization. During testimony, Australian psychiatrist Rickarby stated to the Standing Committee that PTSD was “a central issue for mothers who have lost a child to adoption” He states that major depression, dissociative disorder and other forms of psychopathology as “almost universal” in his experience of working with mothers who had surrendered children to adoption (Social Issues Committee, 1998, 21). Bloch Jones (1993) recognizes common symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety, avoidance and phobias among the natural mothers with whom she had corresponded (272). Kelly (1999) states that findings from her survey of seventy-nine mothers, 99% indicated that relinquishing their child was “extremely, very or somewhat true.” Wells surveyed three hundred mothers who had surrendered babies to adoption and found that close to half of the mothers felt that the trauma of surrendering “affected their physical health and almost all of their mental health,” as well as their “interpersonal relationships with family, partners and their parenting of subsequent children.” She offers symptoms such as avoidance, psychogenic amnesia, psychic numbing, lack of positive image, recurrent dreams and nightmares, triggering from being exposed to similar situations, depression and anxiety.”
Here is what a few birth mothers said it was like for them:
“I’ve tried to type out an answer three times but it sucks too much and my brain can’t slow down to write out what I feel. So… that may be an indication of how it’s still going 14 years later. I think we all think we’re “ok…. getting by” and then when we truly sit in it and try to even think about where we are emotionally our entire emotional world implodes into tiny confetti and we’re grasping in the air to try and catch it. At least, that’s how my brain responded when I tried to write this out.”
“Every day is different immediately after and even 8 years later. The challenges, the triggers, the fallout. It’s all different. I think the biggest/hardest for me has been the infertility. My own body says “nope we’re not getting pregnant again.”
“I just can’t. I have tried to tell you how I feel, but it’s too much. 27 years later. It’s still too much.”
“I masked it with gratitude and pretended like everything was fine and then one random day it would hit me like an anchor on my chest. I would cry it out and pretend the next day that everything was fine. After going through a ton more trauma leading to our super open adoption to almost basically closed, I had a really hard time accepting it. Now I feel cast out, unwanted, unloved, and lied to. I still basically just push it down into my subconscious and try not to think about it. I still struggle with the question, “how many kids do you have?” I literally pretend I’m fine every day, but if I actually think about it, I’m a huge mess. When I had my son, I was so traumatized by the birth and placement of my daughter and placement that I was petrified. I took a birthing class thinking it would help but nothing helped. I sobbed the whole time I was in labor. I felt incompetent to be able to care for him. Like, I already gave one child away because I wasn’t good enough… How can I raise this one? Bottom line, I’m a mess.”
“I have really struggled with being a mom post placement and feeling like I have to prove that I am actually capable of being a mom. Avoidance, numbing and disconnect with personal relationships are all things I still really struggle with. For a long time, I tried to separate these emotions from my adoption, I didn’t want them to be connected because I was (and still am) so proud of the choice I made, but just over the last year I have really embraced that my adoption did create huge life altering wounds. It doesn’t mean my choice was wrong, or that I would have made a different one if I would have known, or that I’m not capable of healing them and living a full life, but that it needs to be recognized in order for anything to improve. I think these facts need to be recognized, birth mothers suffering from PTSD need to be listened to and treated. Even a birth mother with an open adoption can have huge emotional struggles that she may feel like she doesn’t have the “right” to feel because “she has it good”. Emotional trauma in any mother of loss needs to be recognized, respected, and handled appropriately. The facts are not always easy to hear, especially as a birth mother, but when we can all learn and validate this trauma, we can all BE better, DO better, and provide expectant moms and birth mothers with the support they need before they are 5, 10, 15 years out and facing a huge life crisis.”
“In regard to grief and PTSD related to placing, it’s real. Placing a child for adoption is the cruelest most unnatural thing I’ve ever experienced.
However, it has also been the source of the most tremendous growth, enlightenment, purpose and love in my life. It was the catalyst for more positive
transformation than anything else in my life. I wouldn’t give back one tear shed.”
“I was in it alone. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. In my mind I was just determined to remind myself I made the right choice and to stay positive. I suppressed a lot of emotions and feelings for good six years. That’s when I found that defining moment in my life where I knew that either I get help or end my life. I’m still here today because I ignored everyone’s opinion about mental health and got the help that I needed.”
“It ebs and flows but if you can recognize your triggers and acknowledge that they will come up at moments you don’t expect it gets easier to control the panic. That said, I still panic, have flashbacks, and dreams but therapy also helps make sense of it all. I work at the hospital that I gave birth and placed at. Over the years it’s gotten easier to be there without panicking. I haven’t been to the maternity ward though so that might be different.”
“Within the first few years, there was just immense grief.”
“I knew from the start that I would be causing myself trauma. I tried to prepare to get through it and be done with it. In the beginning I didn’t realize the lifelong consequences and where they would manifest. Where it manifests the worst is in my parenting of the children I had after placing. I’m ultra helicopter mom. I get super anxious about letting my children go anywhere alone or do anything alone. I’m always interfering anything that will cause them distress or pain. I spoil them so much, giving them anything they want because I couldn’t or still can’t do this for my 2 birth children. I’ve become aware of this a few years ago. I’ve been working hard at changing it. It’s been really hard. I still have a long way to go. As for the trauma I caused my birth children I have not even begun to forgive myself or others for it. I was told by the agency and by others who were trying to persuade me to place that my child would live this amazing life; that they would shout praises of me to the world for the choice I made for them. There was nothing about how there was a possibility of the adoptive family may not actually give them a better them the life I could give. No words about the trauma being an adoptee can bring. It was never mentioned that they would feel different and would want to hide the fact they are adopted or that they even hate me and want nothing to do with me. I bought into the fairy tale they told me. After diving deeper and deeper into the adoption world I learned that this was just something everyone said to get me to go through with placement. They themselves may even have believed it, but how could they know? They weren’t adopted. Most of the people who were counseling me were only aunts and uncles to adoptees at best or just no connection at all to it. How dare they say those things to me without even knowing. I’m mad at myself for thinking something like that could be true. Of course, there was a possibility of the adoptive family being not so good. They are human. I have been lucky though in that respect. I picked a good family. They have their faults and things I don’t agree with but it is not anything like the horror stories I have watched my friend’s go though. I’m currently dealing with adoptee trauma I believe. Things are not going well in my adoption story and I am being pushed further and further away. So as for that trauma I have accepted it, but I am not dealing with it in a healthy way at all. I also am dealing with fall out trauma to my children that I parent. Since we had an open adoption but it is now being taken away my kids suffer. They miss their brother and sister and ask about them and why we haven’t seen them.”
“I’ve realized some good things, such as: When I am interacting with and communicating often with my birth son and his adoptive parents, I experience less of the traumatic side effects of my choice to place him. In his early years when things were good with his parents, I felt proud and happy with my choice to place him and felt that things were right. 5 years into some terrible communication and I still feel that placing him was the right thing, but I definitely feel less like it was the right thing for me. I feel that I have probably ceased dealing with my trauma in a healthy way in the last 5 years and have not been owning that I made the decision to place and caused a good portion of my trauma. Something about my son’s birth dad dying last year has brought up more trauma, probably because of our rocky relationship and him blaming me for his feelings of unhappiness with placing our son. I carry guilt that he didn’t get his connection with our birth son in this life. As far as guilt for placing my son and the trauma that he might face, that hit me when he was around 1. I’ve hoped and prayed that he would be okay, but honestly, it’s one of the things his parents will never share with me even though I have asked if he has any things he is dealing with. Also, I deal with the trauma that placing my birth son for adoption and how it affects my parented children. I feel like I am in the thick of that right now and have been for a few years. My kids miss seeing him and ask to see him fairly often and express missing him. The helplessness of feeling like I can’t express that to my birth son or to his parents because they have asked me to stop is also traumatizing.”
“I knew it would cause some trauma, I mean of course it would, you’re going against nature to give your child a life that you couldn’t give them. I just didn’t realize how bad it would be for me personally. And of course, no one tells you how bad it will be. How do you prepare for something like that? Then there’s the unexpected triggers or questions from people that you have no control over. Or a 2-year-old nephew who doesn’t know better asking where your baby is, just days after you get home from the hospital. Then the unexpected “hiccups” along the way. There’s no way to prepare for all of that. If I had known, then I wouldn’t have done it.”
“I honestly feel a bit different about trauma within my adoptions. I was raped by a close friend a month shy of my 18th birthday, and I didn’t tell anyone for 3 years. That trauma is, I feel, what the catalyst was for me to even begin down the path that led me to placing twice within those 3 years of silence. Had I spoken up about that trauma sooner, I might have been able to release myself from the guilt I felt in believing the rape was my fault and avoid going down the path of getting pregnant at all. But instead, that trauma catapulted me into two pregnancies with my family having no idea why it had all happened or why I had changed into this different person. During my second pregnancy, I got into a huge fight with my mom and shouted at her, ‘Well, maybe if I hadn’t been raped, none of this would have happened!’ And the lightbulb went on for all of us…being raped and staying silent was what thrust me into the lifestyle that led to having to make the two choices I did. In all truth, adoption, my children I placed and their parents were the least trauma, and even more so the salve that led me to eventually getting help because I wanted to be better for them as well as for myself. Becoming a birth mom, in a lot of ways, helped guide me back towards the amazing path I am on today: it led me to some amazing friends in the adoption community I never would have had in my life, to sharing my story with and helping others, to the man that is now my husband, to a degree that I can used to help others, and to helping write a curriculum specifically for birth mothers to help them through their emotions. While there is trauma in the loss of being able to be their mom, the joy and healing has come from seeing how much they have thrived with the couple who were always meant to be parents, their parents, and having them become a part of my family and watching my whole family embrace each other and them and grow exponentially through these many years. If I had spoken up about the initial trauma of being raped, I wouldn’t know the joy that has come with being their birth mom and having them in my life. In some super, strange, weird way, I’m thankful for that trauma because it led me to their parents and to all of these incredible things that have fallen into place from choosing adoption for them. More of the ‘trauma’ I’ve had from adoption has come from a bit of guilt that my adoption was successful and has become such an amazing part of my life and story, especially when I hear the horror stories of what others have had to go through in their adoptions. In many ways, becoming a birth mom saved my life and I couldn’t be more grateful for it.”
“I take responsibility for my trauma. In fact, I blame myself a lot for not knowing more and for not seeing the warning signs with the APs. But I also blame them for a lot of my trauma as well. If I could I might put it all on them but I can’t. I chose this. I was the one who couldn’t do it. I chose them.”
“I have trauma around placement. I have trauma around not being good enough for him. About not being able to raise him myself. I have trauma and guilt around adoptee trauma and knowing that I caused that. I have trauma around not knowing him and feeling helpless and unable to be there for him when he does struggle. I fear that my trauma and anxiety will make it impossible to have other kids. And I fear that I will struggle for the rest of my life to find someone to be in a happy healthy relationship with. I have betrayal trauma and struggle to trust others and myself.”
“When I was pregnant after placing my first child 10 years earlier, I was struggling with some PTSD issues. I have been going to counseling, which I think was helpful, but I was still struggling with being absolutely terrified of the birthing process. I struggled to get in a mindset to be able to think about, plan for, and focus on the birth that was going to happen whether I chose to accept it in my head or not. I panicked when I started to think about labor, see a TV show or movie depicting labor, or hear about labor in conversation. It is literally unbearable to think about. I’m had an insane disconnect and could not wrap my mind around the fact that I’ll actually bring this child home and be his full-time mom. It made it really hard to even have any excitement about my pregnancy/baby, which made it hard to want to get the nursery ready, etc. I felt like I was walking around with the mentality that this wasn’t really happening… even though it was very much happening. Plus, I felt like it SHOULDN’T be happening or that it was a mistake to get pregnant in the first place. All those feelings slammed down on top of the feelings of pure joy and excitement to be a mom, which is something I’ve always wanted and yearned for. I felt like this had to be more related to PTSD than just general anxiety that comes with normal pregnancy and birth.”
”When I started to tell people I was pregnant with my son after placement, it felt shameful to me. Like it was a mistake…which I then felt guilty about! I didn’t even tell most my family I was pregnant until I was already four months along. I definitely felt like it wasn’t real, and I felt a huge disconnect throughout my entire pregnancy, all the way into delivery. Having everyone be happy for the pregnancy was a struggle for me, which was weird. I didn’t even really buy anything for him until a couple weeks before he was born. My husband ended up doing about 90% of the shopping for him. I was terrified I wouldn’t bond with my son once he was born. For the first while after we brought him home, I did not feel qualified to be his mom. I don’t know if this all was because I have placed or I was just scared to be a mom! But there was a lot of complicated feelings for sure. As far as the birth, well certain hospital smells brought me back to when I was in the hospital with my birth daughter. But bringing him home was a whole new world.”
“I had a completely closed adoption with my baby taken out of the room just seconds after I gave birth. I never got to see her, hold her or even know she was a girl. For years I suppressed my feelings and emotions. Looking back on the infancy of my other two, I was very possessive. I was not willing to be anything but a stay-at-home mom. Since I have met my daughter, my emotions have been crazy. I find that I suffer from everything from attachment disorder (afraid that I am not good enough to be her mom) to depression to anxiety to jealousy. It’s crazy the roller coaster I have been through (just 19 years later).”
What has helped?
“If I could give any advice, it is to find other women who’ve experienced what you’ve experienced. Embrace your birth mom community. More than anything, understand your boundaries. If it’s too much for you or not helping you in a positive way, it’s okay to say no. Never think you’re not good enough! You have worth! Take the time to find the right people to support you in a positive way. Find your support however that may be to you. NEVER think you’re not worth it because you are.”
“I take responsibility for my trauma. For years I blamed others, until I realized that I chose to stay in my situation. We chose adoption for her and our other children, but we also chose for us. For years, I sat in the trauma and I became a victim. I finally realized that my trauma wasn’t what I needed to focus on. Listening to adult adoptees wrecked me. It was a truth I wasn’t willing to hear. Over the past two years I’ve focused on learning how to cope with the trauma I inflicted on my birth children. A trauma they did not ask for. I need to find the way to help them however I can to alleviate some of that trauma when and if the time comes. I was the victim until I took ownership of the choices made to bring myself to adoption.”
“I am a birth mother, placed two decades ago (partially open). There are two parts to coping with this for me: healing the huge shame involved and forgiving myself and those who chose to hide me away; coming to peace with and taking accountability for my part in this sacred contract to place my son.”
“I still work through shame often and it also has a lot to do with my weight now that I carry around my belly. It became my protection so that no one would view me sexually and manipulate me and I would never experience these huge consequences again. All of that sounds childlike and awful, but sadly it is a message I gave myself then and am still working to pull out of my unconscious thoughts and work.”
“I have attended retreats for birth mothers and counseling for about 6 years now. They have helped immensely and completely changed my life.”
“I’ve learned that not all of my trauma stems from my adoption experience but it has made it worse. I cope by trying to remember to breathe and trying to accept that I have no control over how things turned out. I don’t always cope well. I stuff or I make stupid decisions, but I try to work through it as best as I can. Luckily, I have an awesome therapist who has been there through my whole experience, otherwise I would be completely broken, more so than I am now.”
“I have felt VERY alone, because all the women/friends I know that are pregnant right now just don’t seem to be on the same page as me. Everyone is always so excited and happy about all of it, and I can barely wrap my mind around it. And even when I do wrap my mind around it, it doesn’t seem right. Like, I’m not meant to be a mother or be the person that’s taking care of this child. It’s such a struggle. I didn’t feel ready at all. If you can afford a doula, I would definitely recommend getting one. Doulas are an amazing support system with or without PTSD. I felt like having one there will definitely help you maintain control of the birthing experience.”
“EMDR therapy was helpful to me for my PTSD. Not every therapist is certified in EMDR, so if you choose this route, do your research and make sure the therapist is certified in it AND has extensive (many years) of experience helping clients with their trauma.”
“PTSD is a physiological response to experiences we have had in our past. Our bodies respond to triggers in a way that our minds might know are irrational. It’s tough! I’ve struggled a lot with it! I’ve read a lot about it and tried many things to overcome it. My triggers were becoming a real hindrance in my life and relationships. One of the most interesting things I learned was that you can’t “talk therapy” your way out of it, but that you have to rewire your brain and body through breathing, yoga and meditation. Those things worked for me (and I continued to see my therapist). I would say learning and maintaining a good meditation schedule has helped me more than anything!”
“I have to take meds and went to therapy to figure out some good coping skills. I still get super angry sometimes and triggered but I’m better at calming down now.”
“Ketamine treatments have helped me.”
“EMDR therapy has helped a ton with the rage. I hyper focus on something. A lot of the time it is deep cleaning. Since being diagnosed with leukemia I haven’t had the energy to do pretty much anything so I have found comfort in meditation apps. I thought they were BS at first but when I can hyper focus on my breathing it actually helps.”
“I’ll watch something funny or run. I have many different reasons I have PTSD and have been to a lot of therapy. Those 2 things work well or doing some type of mindless arts and crafts.”
“I’ve been crafting more. It calms me and makes the creative part of my brain happy. But the best part is seeing something completed when I’m done.”
After reading about trauma in adoption you may be wondering if adoption is the right choice for you, and that is a valid question! Here is some advice from those who have gone through it if you are having those thoughts:
A birth mom said, “I think adoption at this time is a necessary evil, and I’d so much rather place with someone who is clearly compassionate and empathetic than someone who doesn’t care to educate themselves. We need more HAPS that ask these hard questions and prepare themselves for the hard parts.”
“It is good to see the difficulty in this now. Being blindsided by it after the fact is much worse. One thing that has gotten me through some of it is that our son’s birth mother would have placed anyway and I am glad that it was with us because we have and will keep our promises of open adoption.”
“I’ve been where you are-there is a lot of great things in adoption too-and advocating for change of the things that aren’t ethical or right will only make it better.”
“I felt like this a few years ago, partly because I was seeking education and my daughter was starting to struggle. I remember asking myself (after learning more about primal wound and adoptees, “How can I bring this much pain to someone else again?” I really felt for a while that we needed to stop our adoption process and I struggled. But things happened and I knew we were to move forward, whether it meant we were to adopt or just be connected with expectant parents along the way and help support them. We moved forward and I’m grateful. Our little one is a blessing in all our lives. I’m not expecting this journey to be any easier…harder actually, but I also
realized some things along the way. For me, it helps to know that my role is to support my children in their struggles. I can support them even if they hate adoption and wish I wasn’t their mom. I can tell them that’s okay because it was never their choice. It isn’t easy but I have learned a lot. You will know if it is right for your family.”
“I am a birthmother 23 years post placement. I wouldn’t say it gets easier. There are phases to grief. It changes. There are new losses to experience with every passing year. It never goes away! It just changes.”
“11.5 years post placement, my advice is a lot of the same already here. Allow yourself to move forward, and make a positive future for yourself. One your child would be proud of and want for you! Find support from others involved in adoption. I will always be grateful for my best birth mom friend. She gets it when no one else does and I have no one else to cry to. Allow yourself the sad moments. Grief is never ending and is constantly showing up in different forms and in different places, but in the same breath, move on to the next thing in life and don’t dwell in the grief. Forgive yourself and learn to love the you who loved your child enough to give your child a family to love and to be loved by.”
“My birth daughter is 20 now. My advice is its okay to hurt you don’t have to be tough and pretend you’re always doing good. It does get easier with time. Also, its okay to live your life and not feel guilty about doing it. It’s great to allow yourself to be happy again and create a life you want! Your child would love to know not only did you give them a better life but you allowed yourself a better life. A strong support system is a must. No one’s process will be the same no one’s story will be the same try to embrace the positives and not to dwell on the negatives. Remind yourself the reasons why you chose adoption, not everyone will agree with your choice but that’s okay…it’s your choice that you made out of complete unselfish love for your baby.”
“It’s good you’re evaluating all of this; it’ll give you some perspective. But honestly, as both an adoptee and birth mom myself, I’m actually really excited to adopt one day. Terrified too, but excited. I have such a positive view of adoption, for me I’ve found extraordinary and incomparable joy in open adoption both as an adoptee and a birth mom that is unique to adoption. It’s definitely not easy, but I feel like I’m equipped to do what I can for the biological family and the child. I think adoption education is the biggest solution to unethical adoption practices. I genuinely think and from my experience know that adoption has so much potential for beauty. But you have to be informed, you have to be prepared for what adoption means, and you have to all be prepared to be on the same team. It’s not some replacement for not being able to have kids of your own.”
“Adoption is traumatic. There is no way around it. It has gutted me at times. But as an adoptee (and AP and HAP) I see the other side of it too. The love that I have and the life I was given. It doesn’t make the trauma go away but… we don’t grow without going outside our comfort zone and I view each adoption as my opportunity to learn to be a better human. I’m not a savior and I am not even deserving of all the love and honor I’ve been given…. that makes me stop and think long and hard about how I treat others as I move forward. I also try to use my story as a way to share some of the positives that can come out of an ethical placement…. but it’s a hard pill to swallow. Having your dreams being the weight that drowns someone else is emotionally scarring at times.”
“We struggled with these feelings in the 3 year wait the first time we adopted. I struggled with it after as well, but found peace through conversation with our son’s birth mom and through other friends who have placed or who were adopted. Now we are waiting to adopt again and all of the hesitations are coming back in full force. We are making sure we stand by our ethics and not work with anyone who has questionable adoption practices. It takes a lot of research and may lengthen our wait, but we have to answer to our kids one day and we want to be able to tell them we did everything as ethically as possible.”
“You having these feelings of doubt is what will make you a great adoptive parent. After placement I was angry. I was hurt and I was a mess. The best thing that happened to me in my mess of a placement was my son’s parents loving me through it. It wasn’t their fault that I felt placement was my only choice. There were a number of things that lead me to placement, some of them my own doing. But they still loved me, supported me and became my family. It isn’t an easy road. I won’t pretend that I didn’t have real hurt or that the impact of it didn’t hurt me. With that said placement for me would have happened had it been them or had it been someone else. That was my road and my road isn’t their responsibility. Wanting to be a parent isn’t selfish. You didn’t create the situation; it is well outside your control. What you can control, your actions and your choice to love someone and the child that brought you together. You can control how you treat your future child and you can control how you treat their biological family.”
“Bravo to anyone that leans into the hard things that arise instead of brushing or glazing them over. We don’t know what we don’t know and that isn’t an excuse, but when we educate ourselves, we better equip ourselves and perspectives change. Yes, adoption is trauma. Yes, there are varying degrees of that trauma and it’s never a guarantee of a lesser vs greater, but the more we know the better we can be. You are wanting to know the hard truths, that is what more should be seeking after, the hard truths, because there are far more of those than there are soft truths and if we don’t embrace and learn to be fluid with processing through the hard, we can’t become better as people for it. More people need to question, and make the decision with all of the knowledge they can possibly find of what they could possibly be faced with. Keep questioning! Keep educating yourself! And if your heart still pulls you to it, then you are moving down the path you need to be. And from a birth mama perspective, absolutely work with an agency or law office that has consistent post placement support in place for the women who terminate their parental rights and that has an ethical responsibility to these women in the aftermath too.”
“As a HAP I can say we wrestled (and I mean WRESTLED) with this before proceeding…for almost a year. I told my therapist about some unethical things going on with an agency and I’m so glad we resolved this in our hearts before jumping in. Our values had to be clear going in. Keep walking in integrity no matter what you do. Expectant parents deserve it, any babies’ stories you might be involved with deserve it, you deserve it. Knowledge is power and responsibility. Keep learning about ethics in here, keep talking to birth mothers and also adoptees, in here and in real life. You’re on the right path no matter what you decide. And don’t be surprised when people outside the adoption community (or in it) don’t get this wrestling. It’s not you, it’s them.”