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.

Relinquishment Trauma

The adoption reunion experience can often be best understood when the impact of relinquishment trauma is acknowledged. It is common for birth/first parents to have relinquishment trauma due to the trauma of not parenting their child and how they were treated at the time of the crisis pregnancy/birth. Many first mothers have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder because of their trauma experience. Some adoptees have been traumatized by multiple caretakers as infants and/or the sudden breaking of the bond with their first mother resulting in relinquishment trauma (a developmental trauma). Other adoptees report relinquishment trauma due to never feeling like they fit in with their adoptive family. Additionally, birth parents and adoptees often feel trauma when their families act “as if” the relinquishment did not happen, or the adoption was only positive.

Adoption professionals, birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents can learn from the field of trauma which acknowledges that the brain and body change from trauma. The research on trauma tells us that new situations are viewed through the lens of the traumatic event. Thus, birth parents can work very hard to keep their secret of their relinquished child in the present because of the shame that was placed upon them at the time of relinquishment. Additionally, implicit memories created by relinquishment trauma are frequently triggered by contact between birth relatives and adoptees.

Trauma research also shares the more intense the visceral sensory input to the emotional brain (thalamus, amygdala, hippocampus), the less capacity the rational brain (prefrontal cortex) has to put a damper on the emotional brain’s reaction. This helps to explain the impulsive behaviors and the genetic sexual attraction (aka GSA adoption reunion) some adoptees and birth parents have. Adoption reunion relationships are often filled with a fight, flight, or freeze response which are common for individuals who have experienced trauma. The amygdala will release cortisol and adrenaline when it senses danger which can lead to birth parents and adoptees misreading interpersonal relationships because their brain is on overload. Birth parents and adoptees often pull back from stressful reunions without explanation due to their flight response. The freeze response may be why some individuals do not pull away from genetic sexual attraction experiences because their brain is in trauma mode.

Trauma changes the way an individual’s brain functions so adoptees and birth parents should not expect their relative to heal their trauma. Reunions often provide answers, opportunities for relationships, fill the void, and provide a sense of belonging, but will not erase all the trauma symptoms they have experienced for years, possibly decades. Rather individuals with relinquishment trauma should look to trauma therapies for help with their trauma.

Trauma Research

Unfortunately, there is minimal research on healing from traumas for birth/first parents or adoptees. The majority of what has been written is first-hand accounts of relinquishment trauma. Most of the adoption research is outcome studies focused on the life struggles of birth/first parents and adoptees without the framework of trauma. Origins Canada (2010) Adoption Trauma: the Damage to Relinquishing Mothers and Susan Well’s post traumatic stress disorder birth mothers (1993) are very informative in summarizing birth mothers’ trauma. Paul Sunderland’s lecture Adoption and Addiction: Remembered Not Recalled on YouTube is a very helpful description of the research on why some adopted individuals have relinquishment trauma.

Research by Regina Hiraoka, et al. (2015) found fewer post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in combat veterans that practiced self-compassion than veterans with have higher shame and self-judgment. I believe this trauma research can be extrapolated to birth parents and adoptees in that the shame placed on birth parents and adoptees (society, others, and themselves) can potentially increase the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Here is the research article: Hiraoka, R., Meyer, E. C., Kimbrel, N. A., DeBeer, B. A., Gulliver, S. B., Morissette, S. B., (2015). Self-Compassion as a Prospective Predictor of PTSD Symptom Among Trauma-Exposed U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans, 28(2), 127-133.