Adoption

A common mistake adoptive parents make when hearing adult adoptees speak about adoption trauma is discounting their experiences because “times have changed” or their adoptee hasn’t voiced similar feelings. Some parents will straight-up ask their adopted children if they feel the same way and then rest easy when their children deny having similar feelings. Differing details of adoption stories can be used as evidence of irrelevance. Adoptee voices that land as “angry” are often quickly written off as “examples of a bad adoption.”

“Not my adoptee,” is a knee-jerk, defensive response that blinds parents to adoption-related dynamics that may be uncomfortable or painful to consider—especially when everything seems to be going swimmingly in early childhood. This posture, though, discounts the real and proven trauma inherent in adoption, missing an opportunity to fully support adopted children and ultimately benefit from closer, more authentic relationships.

That trauma looks good on you.

One reason it’s so easy to miss signs of adoption trauma is because it can present so well.

Adoptees are unintentionally groomed to be people-pleasers. Once we’ve lost our first mothers to adoption, we can work incredibly hard to win the love of our next mothers. We strive to measure up—doing and saying whatever is needed to keep our adoptive mothers close. This is all unconscious and certainly not meant to be fraudulent. To our brains, running the show, it’s simply a matter of survival. Children need parents, after all, and attachment is our greatest human need, taking priority even over such basics as shelter and food, as explained by child developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld.

Don’ t miss the latest in a series of webinars from Right to Know (RTK), a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of MPEs (misattributed parentage experiences), including NPEs (not parent expected).

On Sunday, October 18, from 4pm-5:30 EST, the webinar will address mental health issues experienced by MPEs. Moderated by DrPh candidate Sebastiana Gianci, the panel will include Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFT, therapist, cohost of the podcast Sex, Lies & The Truth, and creator of the innovative training program Parental Identity Discovery; Cotey Bowman, LPC Associate, creator of the NPE Counseling Collective, and Lynne Weiner Spencer, RN, MA,LP, a therapist specializing in donor conception, adoption, and the experiences of NPEs and MPEs.

Among the topics to be explored are trauma, identity, grief, ambiguous loss, anxiety, and rejection.

In November, the series’ presenter will be Libby Copeland, award-winning author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are. (Look for our Q & A with the author here.)

And in December, RTK’s webinar features the DNA Geek Leah Larkin, an adoptee and genetic genealogist. If you’d like to attend the upcoming webinar, request the Zoom link at RSVP2RightToKnow.us, and check out RTK’s event page to stay in the loop about upcoming presentations.

If you missed the last webinar, “Understanding the Medical Ramifications in Your DNA Test,” you can watch the recording.

Right to Know, created by Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, Gregory Loy, and Alesia Cohen Weiss, aims to educate the public and professionals about “the complex intersection of genetic information, identity, and family dynamics.” It works, as well, to change laws with respect to related issues, including fertility fraud. Find it on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram @righttoknowus.

In only a year, Blake Gibbins’ YouTube channel “Not Your Orphan” has garnered an enthusiast base of subscribers who tune in for the host’s thoughtful, engaging, and provocative videos about a range of adoption issues from adoptee infantilization to genetic sexual attraction. Gibbins, a queer domestic adoptee and adoptee rights advocate, lives in Colorado and is deep into a self-designed graduate program in child welfare history and contemporary adoptee rights from Vermont’s Goddard College.

“Not Your Orphan,” Gibbins explains, is for “adoptees and allies and all who wish to understand.” And unlike so many conversations about adoption in which adoptee voices are nowhere to be found, “Not Your Orphan” is a place, they say, “where we talk everything adoption from the perspective of those who actually live it.”

Whether focused on how to be a better ally, cognitive dissonance and its place in the discourse on adoption, the gross inequities in the adoption system, or the trauma of family separation, the videos are informative, illuminating, and even—despite the seriousness of the subject matter—amusing. With an easy conversational style and a guileless gaze that connects with the viewer, Gibbins add a surprising intimacy and even the illusion of interactivity to these videos. This disarming presence, combined with deft editing and creative effects, glides viewers through what Gibbins acknowledges are sometimes uncomfortable conversations.

As host, Gibbins is both entertainer and the best kind of teacher, sharing deep knowledge of the history, workings, and abuses of the foster and adoption industry along with welcome dashes of humor and irony and a heap of social justice perspective. These videos, however, are informed not only by historical perspective but, and equally important, also by his lived experience. They’re clear and direct, and variously raw, vulnerable, angry, whimsical, and passionate.

Facebook groups and virtual support groups can be lifesavers, but nothing beats face-to-face time with people who know how you feel and have been where you’ve been. That’s why Erin Cosentino and Cindy McQuay have begun organizing retreats for adoptees, late discovery adoptees, donor conceived people, and NPEs (not parent expected) at which participants can get to know each other and share their experiences in a relaxed setting while learning from experts about the issues that challenge them. It’s not therapy, but it may be equally healing, and undoubtedly more fun.

Since the day that Cosentino, 44, discovered at 42 that her father was not the man who raised her, her mantra has been “Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed.” McQuay, 56, has known her entire life she had been adopted. Both married with children and busy schedules, each devotes considerable time to advocating for people with concerns related to genetic identity and helping searchers look for biological family. And each runs a private Facebook group, Cosentino’s NPE Only: After the Discovery, and McQuay’s Adoptees Only: Found/Reunion The Next Chapter.

Among her advocacy efforts, McQuay, who describes herself as a jack of all trades, helps adoptees locate the forms necessary to obtain original birth certificates (OBCs). A strong voice for adoptee rights, she strives to enlighten non-adoptees about the often unrecognized harsh realities of adoption, helping them understand that “not all adoptions are rainbows and unicorns.” Countering the dominant narrative, she’s quick to point out that adoptees “were not chosen, we were just next in line.”

As the new network television season begins this week, adoptees, NPEs (not parent expected or non-parental events), and donor conceived individuals are among the casts of characters on primetime programs. But will the series’ writers and producers bring a level of reality and depth to the depictions or simply exploit their experiences for dramatic purposes without accuracy, nuance, and sensitivity?
On October 2, the first show with a high-concept premise about donor conception premieres on Fox. The plot of “Almost Family” unfolds as it becomes known that renowned fertility doctor Leon Bechley boosted his clinic’s success rate by using his own sperm to help clients conceive—a practice that led to the conception of dozens of children.

While it would appear to be a plot line ripped from recent headlines, the show is based on the Australian Network 10 series “Sisters,” which premiered in October 2017 and may have been inspired by an earlier headline concerning an Indiana fertility doctor who in 2016 was sued for using his own sperm more than 50 times to inseminate patients. The show began streaming as a Netflix Original Series in September 2018.
As in “Sisters,” “Almost Family” focuses on the effect this bombshell has on Bechley’s daughter, Julia, and two women who discover that they were conceived from his sperm. One, Edie Palmer, has been a longtime friend of Julia. The other is a former Olympic athlete, Roxy Doyle.

Both shows purport to be about the redefinition of family and the issues that surface as these sisters face the facts of their conception, navigate the challenges, and encounter an ever-increasing number of siblings.

“Sisters,” with 7 episodes, begins promisingly enough. Dialogue suggests that feelings, experiences, and concerns arising from the characters’ discovery that they not only were donor conceived but conceived with the sperm of a fertility doctor will be on point.

Infants and babies taken from their birthmothers tend to perceive that severance as a danger, a threat to their wellbeing. The physical sensations associated with being removed from their mothers and the consequent feelings of being unsafe are stored in the body and the mind as implicit memories — remnants of trauma that remain and can cause distress throughout life. But because individuals don’t understand these as memories — that is, as narratives they can express — they may not identify their experiences as traumatic or link their distress symptoms to these early preverbal experiences.