TRANSCRIPT
I was recently having a conversation with a friend, talking about all different aspects of life. He said, “Do you think you would ever adopt a child?” I’ve been asked that a lot, thought about it a lot, and I’d like to share my answer and some thoughts around adoption. My answer was, “Well, would you like me to answer that practically or philosophically?” He was like, “Well, I guess both.” So I said, “Let me start with practically.” Practically, no, I don’t think I’m going to adopt children. I mean, you never know. It’s actually quite possible someday I could, but given the circumstances of my life now—age 52, single, not looking for a relationship, not in one, not having a real stable home of my own, living lots of different places, traveling a lot, out of the United States a lot, hitchhiking a lot—this is no life for a child.
And then there’s the philosophical side that, yes, I’ve actually spent my life adopting a child, certainly since I became an adult, and that child is me. The abandoned, rejected side of me, sides of me, whole parts of my life rejected from the beginning by my parents. My mother using drugs and having an affair from the time I was born, me not even knowing who my father was when she admitted to me that she did this, and having to find out, yeah, that the guy I thought was my dad was my dad. And my dad is a very, very lost, very, very immature guy who wasn’t loved as a child himself, who spent his life just looking for love, looking for attention from my mom, from me, from affairs with women that he later had. New wife now, my mom, new husband, split up, divorced, fighting, raging. It’s like my parents were threatened by me. They didn’t love me. They didn’t love each other. They didn’t love their own selves. They hadn’t adopted themselves. They hadn’t gone through the process of reclaiming their abandoned, rejected, neglected child from their own history—the child that raging, sad, neglected child that ruled their life through an adult pose.
That’s why my parents married. They were looking for each other to adopt them. My dad wanted my mom to adopt him and love him and be his parent, and my mom wanted that from my dad. They both chose impossible people who are actually very much like each other. And I think this is very common in the world. I think this is why a lot of people, most people, certainly many people, get into relationships. This, I think, for many people, is the definition of love for them—being in love, for sure. It’s like this magical fantasy that the other person will make up for all the things that my parents didn’t do for me when I was little. I’ve certainly learned this the hard way in my own life, having played out this fantasy, this dynamic many, many, many times—the parental rescue fantasy. In The Other Woman, she will love me, she will be my parent, and me eventually realizing more and more strongly that it’s my job to adopt myself, to take on this sacred role of nurturing this wounded, abandoned child who someone else failed terribly—someone else who created this child who couldn’t do the job or didn’t do the job or didn’t want to do the job.
So common in children. But then to get back to the practical, I think of all my years as a psychotherapist, working with many, many people who had been adopted along the way—some when they were babies, some when they were little kids, some when they were teenagers—and hearing again and again and again about stories of trauma before they were adopted. Stories of primal rejection, primal abandonment by their biological parents. Perhaps they didn’t even know who their biological father was. Perhaps their mother didn’t even know their biological mother, but being rejected—a terrible abandonment for a child. Perhaps a fundamental trauma, certainly as they got older, being rejected when they knew it, when they felt it all the way through their skin and bones—a terrible trauma. And then someone else took them in.
In my life, in my 52 years now, I have heard quite a number of stories—it’s going to say a lot, a lot. I don’t know if it’s a lot, but definitely quite a lot—from people who were adopted who said they had really wonderful experiences with adoptive parents. Most of these stories I’ve heard outside of the psychotherapy office, but people who were raised in loving families with parents who they really felt very blessed to meet, to connect with, to have take them into their lives. But then I’ve heard a lot on the other way—way more on the other end of the spectrum. I think of a book that I read a few years ago. I actually put a blurb on the back; it moved me that much. It’s called Something to Say by Leanne Summerfield, an artist who wrote about her story of being adopted by two well-off religious people and how sick these parents were to her and to her adoptive brother—like flat-out abusive to these little children.
And then you ask the question, why did these parents adopt children if it seemed like the main thing they got out of it was abusing them? But then actually the main thing also was they got to put on a show. “Look how wonderful we are for having adopted these two abandoned, neglected little children! Look what great moral, caring people we are!” And I’ve seen that a lot with parents who adopt children. They get, um, virtue points. They get to become very grandiose in society. “Look, I have adopted rejected, neglected children! See what a great human being I am!” And I’ve even heard some tell me directly, “Look, I’ve adopted this little minority child that nobody else wanted,” and really what they’re saying to me is, “Look what a great person I am.” And then I feel they’re kind of inducing in me something that, like, my job then is to love them. And it’s like they’re looking to me now to parent them in the way they were never parented because they have taken on the responsibility for nurturing this ultra-neglected, abandoned, traumatized child.
And I’ve even seen this with some psychotherapists who adopted children and adopted neglected, unwanted children from other countries, from far away, and took them in with this idea, “Yes, I know I’m adopting a traumatized child, but I’m such a healthy person and so mature in the world of psychology that my knowledge and my ability to listen and care will undo all their traumas.” And how wrong they are! They end up with children who have severe problems that are way beyond anything they can handle. I’ve even heard stories of these people giving the children back. “I can’t handle this child. This problem is beyond this. This is a neurological problem. This child is so impossible that nobody can handle them. This child needs to be institutionalized, needs to be on heavy medications for life, etc.” And it’s like, what kind of a parent are you? And if you really were anything resembling a good psychotherapist, you would have foreseen all this before you went out of your way to go to another country multiple times to adopt some rejected, traumatized, unwanted child of age 3, 4, 5, 6 out of an orphanage.
And also, if you went to all that effort to adopt a little blond-haired, blue-eyed baby from a faraway country, why didn’t you just adopt someone in your own city who lived a mile away from you? There’s so many people everywhere if you really want to adopt who are right near you. They might not be well, the right color, the right race, the right this, the right that. And that’s the other side—is yes, there are parents who want to adopt the minority children to get grandiosity and virtue points, but then there’s the ones who don’t want these children. And then that’s, to me, even weirder, ’cause if like you really love a child, it’s like you’re doing this to help a human being, and they’re right there. We live in a world of so many needy children. I mean, I’m in New York City right now. How many needy children are there? Nobody wants them. They’ve been forgotten and abandoned. Their parents may be dead, or sadly enough, their parents may not be dead—they just, their parents can’t take care of them, had them arbitrarily. And I don’t know.
But then there’s this other weird dynamic I’ve seen with adoption.
I thought of it until I heard the story many times, and then it suddenly formulated in my mind as, “ah, this is a common pattern that parents who adopt children not infrequently have.” An attitude they don’t even know it themselves, but it’s the attitude they have. I felt this with the parents in that book.
Something to say that because they have adopted a child who is so primally rejected, neglected, and unwanted by their biological parents, that they feel it gives them, the parents, the Liberty to abuse this child. It’s almost like they get a “get out of jail free card.” Well, I’ve already adopted someone else’s problem, so in a way, this gives me the right, because I am now their savior, to act out my own unresolved unconscious abuse on this child.
I think that’s very common. It’s common with parents in general that parents in general have children with the unconscious intention of acting out their abuse on them. That is, “I created you, that gives me the right to also harm you, to let out my rage on you, let out my hurt on you, let out my perversion on you.” But with a certain subset of adoptive parents, I think it’s even more heightened, because it’s not that I created you, therefore I can do this. It’s that I didn’t create you; it’s that I saved your life. Therefore, this gives me the right to harm you, and nobody can stop me, because no matter what, I have already helped you more than I can ever harm you. And it’s very disturbing, some of these unconscious dynamics of adoptive parents.
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