Adoption Reunion Complexities

Due to closed adoptions, adoptees and birth parents have spent years wondering about the other’s personalities, what the other person thinks of them, looks like, how the other’s life has been, and a hundred other things. All of these thoughts and expectations need to be reassessed and felt after receiving facts about their relative and having contact. One example is a birth parent or adoptee that had hoped for a connection with their relative and did not feel what they hoped. Betty Jean Lifton discusses this experience in her article “Ghosts in the Adoptive Family”. The adoption reunion experience becomes further emotional when seeing a relative that has similar looks, mannerisms, and interests resulting in an emotional genetic attraction like no other. This is especially true for adoptees who grew up without genetic mirroring of knowing a relative that looked like them and had a poor fit with their adoptive family.

An additional complication to the adoption search and reunion process is the adoption triad member conducting the adoption search has had more time to prepare for the adoption reunion than the person who is found. Adoptees need to be aware that many birth mothers have not told their family members of their child that was adopted. In a Pew Research Center article Mail-In DNA Test Results Bring Surprises About Family History for Family Users, 27% of individuals who reported using direct-to-consumer DNA testing shared they learned about close relatives they did not know about previously. 

The closeness and physical contact in adoption reunions can trigger implicit memories from the time of the relinquishment. For birth mothers with relinquishment trauma, hugging their child, and being physically close to them can often emotionally bring them back in time to the time of relinquishment. A birth mother may have an urge to parent their baby or feel the shame of their crisis pregnancy. Based on research, it is reasonable to believe that adoptees have implicit memories of their first mother’s voice. Some adoptees have reported surprising urges of wanting to “suckle on their mother’s breast” or other actions that are common in newborn-mother relationships.

Individuals in a reunion should proceed with caution in the early stages until they have an understanding of where their relative is with their relinquishment and adoption issues. Adoptees can overwhelm a birth mother with post-traumatic stress disorder by asking questions around the time of relinquishment, birth father, or sharing too many photos from their childhood. Similarly, not all adoptees are waiting for their birth relatives to contact them.  Depending on where adoptees are with being “out of the fog”, relationships with adoptive parents, or trauma history will impact their initial response to birth relatives will go. Additionally, there may be non-adoption-related emotionally draining issues (medical crisis, divorce, employment problems) going on with individuals that need to be considered. It is better to start slowly than to have to repair a relationship that started off on the wrong foot. At the end of this blog post is a list of keys to successful adoption reunion relationships.

Some adopted individuals and birth parents find their relationship to have an intensity that is unlike any other relationship. This is usually due to falling in love with a relative that is so similar to them, a strong need for attachment, and bonding over relinquishment trauma. The reunion intensity can be seen as a constant need for contact (phone calls, texts, emails, visits), ignoring existing family relationships, and idealizing the relative. The field of adoption refers to this as “genetic attraction” and when there is a sexual feeling “genetic sexual attraction”.

Adoption reunion issues around boundaries happen for many reasons. Some relatives need constant reassurance that their relative is not going anywhere, so they need frequent reassurance through constant phone calls, texts, or visits. The fear of hurting their relative’s feelings often gets in the way of an individual speaking up when boundaries are not respected. Sometimes when an adoptee or a birth relative wants more of a relationship than their relative, they keep contacting their relative even when their relatives want minimal contact because they have trouble letting go of the dream relationship.

An additional adoption reunion issue is integrating all the family members. It is quite common for adoptees to meet not just their birth mother but her extended family. Similarly, birth parents often meet the adoptee’s immediate and extended family. If an adoptee is also in an adoption reunion with their birth father this is another family to incorporate into the existing family relationships.

Often, part of a successful reunion is letting go of the fantasy of the dream relationship and focusing instead on building a relationship that is workable for everyone in the present. The stress management techniques for healing trauma blog post has exercises that could help with the stress of reunion and traumas.