On Being Adopted
The primal wound of millions
Two years ago I dated (I use that term loosely) a silver-eyed musician I’d met on Hinge. His eyes were so silvery they looked like iridescent scales, watery and piercing in contrast to his ink-black hair. He was achingly beautiful and seeking wholeness in a way I understood completely. We are both adopted, you see, and not much needed to be said between us to explain our constant search for something we can’t quite articulate is missing.
“Sometimes it feels like a lot just to exist in the world,” he said one night in the dim light of my sparsely furnished apartment. I don’t remember what I replied, probably an “mmm” or some other soft confirmation. But the words stuck with me; I’d never been able to say out loud that specific feeling, either because I didn’t know how to name it or because speaking it made it too real. I’ve borrowed the line since, when people ask what it’s like to be adopted. It feels like a lot just to exist.
Adoption trauma is the imprint of an attachment disruption on the brain’s neurobiology. Every adopted child experiences this massive assault on the unconscious mind, particularly in newborn and infant adoptees whose only desire is to bond with their birth mother. Physiologically wired, then, is an anchor-weight trauma in the earliest days of life that the body has to start surviving around. Then we carry it, forever.
In the luckiest of situations, an adoptee’s family provides an avalanche of love and support that adequately buries that first trauma, at least enough for the child to thrive and grow with the tools they need to combat the “hard to exist” feeling on the worst of days (Tier 1). There are many who grow up in families whose love and support wavers down the middle, and so, too, does the adoptee (Tier 2). And then, there are the really unfortunate cases where the adoptee keeps experiencing trauma at the hands of the family who adopted them (Tier 3). It is one thing to be offered a room in a home and food on a table, and another thing entirely to be given unconditional love. That can be said for any family, but it hits a little different if your first unconscious memory is of having been abandoned.
My personal story, if you’ve read my essay “The Writing Will Save You,” falls somewhere between Tier 2 and Tier 3 (to be clear, I’ve made these tiers up, but I think they are illustratively truthful). Most of the other adoptees I know have a story in Tier 2. My best friend hit the jackpot with a Tier 1 family, who I tried to acquire for myself by loudly exclaiming whenever I saw her father, “Hey, Dad!” He’d lovingly respond, “Hey, Daughter!” with a megawatt smile and I truly think if I’d really asked he would have adopted me, too.
Of course, it’s not so black and white as a series of tiers suggests. There are nuances to the adoptee experience that float like a haze in every situation, relationship, and goal. Studies suggest that this specific “primal wound” (a term coined by Nancy Verrier in 1993) can, and often does, manifest in depression, anxiety, lost sense of self, and difficulties in relationships with significant others. Pretty much every adopted person I know has felt in some form those repercussions either sporadically or consistently, consciously or unconsciously, as they’ve navigated adulthood.
I’m not here because I have the answers to any of it. I feel something that so clearly stems from that very first wound creep into all of my relationships, romantic or platonic. On my way to a doctorate in educational psychology, I can now recognize so many of my complicated feelings, but I can’t always convince myself to act differently despite knowing. It’s really hard work. When it comes down to the basest of desires, I just want to be chosen. Like, really chosen. Chosen as though I am the four-leaf clover you’ve spent your entire life trying to find in a field of three-leaves. Plucked and preserved in the pocket over your heart.
And if you, reading this, love an adopted person, keep doing that. Love them like hell. Love them all the way through.
