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Severance Magazine
Tag:

psychology

    ArticlesNPEs

    Object Relations and Atonement of the Father

    by bkjax February 11, 2022

    By Jennifer Carraher

    I am the daughter of an adoptee. My mother, adopted from an orphanage when she was nine months old, was raised by parents who were loving, protective, and kind people. They raised my mother, a second adopted son, and their third and only biological child in a pastoral, rural setting where the kids rode horses to their one-room schoolhouse, kicked around in the surrounding woods and pasture, and lived a pretty idyllic existence. When my mother was 18 years old, she became pregnant with me. In a whirlwind of impulsive action, she married my birth certificate father, moved 2,000 miles away from home, and six months later gave birth to me. By the end of the year, she had packed me up, returned to her parents, and essentially disappeared the man I believed to be my father. Within the next twelve months, she remarried, gained two more young children, and, four years later, she and my stepfather had a daughter of their own. Amidst this chaos, I immediately began to identify myself as an outsider in the family: a sensitive and insecure child, an interloper among the three children of a man with whom I lived but hardly knew. In just a few years, I was both born of and made into a fatherless child.

    The psychological construct known as object relations theory has shown us the cruciality of early childhood relationships to identity formation; that is, the origins of the self emerge from exchanges between the infant and others. Originally theorized by Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the essential idea is that the infant’s bond to the parents shapes future relationships. What this means is that the mother as a physical object is invested with emotional energy from the child, and the psycho-emotional impression of the mother—the internal object—comes to represent what the infant holds in her absence. If the object formation is disrupted early in life—as, I would argue, it is with virtually all adoptees and MPEs/ NPEs*—the failure to form these early relationships leads to problems later in the child’s life. Object relations theory also points out that situations in adult life are shaped by and mirror familial experiences during infancy.

    My mother’s own adoption unquestionably caused for her a failure of identity formation leading to problems in later relationships. No doubt and with good reason, the sense of attachment and security that adoptees can, and likely do, feel carries over into adult relationships in all kinds of ways. The question is how this manifests itself. Adoption is not, by any means, the only way that this attachment disruption occurs. In fact, biological children may suffer the same disruption for a variety of reasons. The lack of attachment demonstrated by my mother in her adult relationships is not necessarily a reflection of her relationship with her adoptive parents, and not all adoptees develop in this same way. In our case, whatever the disruption my mother experienced as a child, whether the result of her late-infant adoption or some other barrier to her attachment, it severely affected her identity formation. This affected identity formation is where the intergenerational disruption of object formation can be seen most clearly.

    I found out about my NPE status one year ago today. While reeling from the news for many months, I had not a single thought about my mother as a child—let alone as a daughter. I was too busy contemplating the questions, “Who is my father? Where has he been? Where can he be?” Over time, I began to ask myself questions about my mother’s own history, her fractured parental bonding as an adoptee, and how this object formation may have influenced her as a new mother in the NPE scenario. How does the attachment become so fragmented that the next generation could be subjected to suffering in this way?

    The foundation of the relational object is one in which, as the infant grows, she naturally wants to consolidate the work of managing her most basic needs, which are described by Klein as drives; she does this by forming an attachment to an adequate caregiver who can contain these drives. For example, how the caregiver responds to the baby’s need to eat, comforts her if she cries, and meets her most fundamental needs. If these drives are met, then a good object relationship is developed. The caregiver, usually the parent, is the “good object.” To soothe herself, the infant eventually must be able to internalize that good object.

    Conversely, if the caregiver cannot accommodate the infant’s drives, then the infant will experience the drives as being out of control and instead of developing a positive attachment to the mother or caregiver, the infant may develop a negative attachment. If the caregiver herself has inadequate object relations, if her drives have not been met and she is identified with a bad object (her absent parent), then it’s possible that in order to cope, the mother will project that identification onto the baby. This defense mechanism arises so that the mother may defend herself against unbearable feelings; it also works to defend the internal object against rage, which can destroy the internal object. The mother copes with the unbearable feelings and rage by externalizing those feelings. This is called projective identification. Because of this projection, the mother may begin to see the baby’s experience as the embodiment of her own bad object and perceived reality. For example, a mother may witness the baby crying uncontrollably and in that crying she will see the manifestation of the experience from which she has tried to distance herself. Because of this, her identification with a bad object is affirmed through her projection onto that child’s crying, and the child is left carrying that projected reality.

    But how does this play out in the NPE experience? In my case, the object formation disruption seems to be about the attachment with the father. If the NPE’s mother is enacting her own loss of the father object by projecting it onto the baby, the NPE child may grow to identify herself with this negative experience. This means that the child suffers the mother’s perceived losses (fatherlessness in this case) because the mother’s own drives are disorganized. Instead of nurturing and helping the child to consolidate her needs, the mother continually and repeatedly projects chaos onto the child.

    Because I was born to my young mother, perhaps in the midst of this object disruption, no doubt in part due to her experience as an adoptee, she exercised her projective identification on me. This allowed for an erasure of my father, or the man I understood to be my father—the exact experience she imagined for herself. She did this not only by removing me from my birth certificate father almost immediately after my birth, but also as I grew and developed, I was told in both explicit and subconscious ways that my step-father/father figure, with whom I had lived since the age of three, could not belong to me either. When I learned in my adult life that my biological father was someone else entirely, the projection further solidified.

    It is not hard to envision that—because my mother was in an orphanage, was adopted, and expressed throughout her life massive levels of alienation—she continually saw herself as severed from her family, regardless of any external reality. Every detail of her experience as an adoptee could have triggered this alienation; for example, the birth of a biological son to her adoptive parents when she was 10 years old manifested as a catastrophic event for her. So many experiences of the adopted child can contribute to this perception of severance from the family.

    All of these experiences, in turn, influenced how she saw me as a child. My mother was experiencing the absent father. By enacting a dramatized reality, she was able to facilitate her projective identification as a fatherless child onto me. She played this out by running from her own (adoptive) father, disappearing my biological father, and sticking my paternity on a non-father/stranger she almost immediately abandoned. In both subtle and overt ways, I was continually reminded that my step-father was not a legitimate parent either; he could never belong to me because I didn’t “come from” him. Ultimately, though, it was all a futile effort because the enactment and projection did nothing to contain her own distress. As an example of how this played out, when I discovered my biological paternity and asked her who she thought was suffering most in this situation, she simply replied, “Your father.” Like many other NPE mothers, there’s no ability for her to imagine the suffering of the child because she is so resigned to her own suffering.

    Another developmental psychological theorist and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, theorized that the role of the father is to temper the ambivalence between the mother and the child. Ambivalence arises when the needs of the parent and the needs of the child are in conflict. Maternal ambivalence, specifically as theorized by Freud, is a universal maternal experience in which the feelings of love and hate for the child can exist side by side. When the father is absent, there is what Freud calls an ever-present “third” in the mother’s unconscious mind. For the NPE, the role of the father to modulate the mother-child relationship does not exist. This may be why so many of us have long-standing conflict with our mothers and spend years saying things like, of all of the children, I was always the outsider, or I never understood why I didn’t fit in, or asking why did she dislike me, what did I do wrong, and, eventually, why could I not have known my father? The answer to all of these questions lies quite simply in the projective identification of the mother onto her child: “If I can’t have a father, neither can you.”

    While my mother may have subconsciously or otherwise attempted to make me into a fatherless child, I do not see myself that way. In fact, I don’t actually believe that my mother perceives me as without a father. She sees it only in herself, and she projects her own suffering as an internalized, fatherless child onto me. I have come to understand over the protracted and immensely heavy year since my misattributed parent discovery, that even as NPEs, even through all of our intuitions and suspicions, detachments and alienations growing up, we do have fathers. We should never diminish the significance of this fact because if we continue the pattern of projection of the fatherless child in our own lives, the cycle can never be broken. The gift of the NPE discovery is the acknowledgement of what has been lost to us, the chance to discover ourselves anew in order to protect our own children by offering them our solid and unwavering belief in their fathers. The only way to do this, I am afraid, is to begin to forgive our mothers.

    *MPE/NPE: misattributed parentage experience/not parent expected or nonpaternity event

    Jennifer Carraher lives with her family in Sebastopol, California, where she’s an advanced practice public health nurse in the areas of women’s health and forensics. She’s also a medical sociologist who has worked extensively over the past 20 years in assisted reproductive technologies, kinship, and the social studies of science. Her current research is dedicated to promoting harm reduction as medical practice.   

    Since her misattributed parent discovery in December 2020, she has established The Mendel Project, which will provide DNA testing and genetic support at no cost to patients in the hospital setting. She also continues to collect narratives from other adoptees, NPEs, and those affected by genetic surprises for the podcast Unfinished Truths. Find her at themendelgeneticproject@gmail.com & unfinishedtruths@gmail.com.

    February 11, 2022 0 comments
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  • ArticlesDonor Conception

    The Emotional Life of Donor Conceived People

    by bkjax April 23, 2021
    April 23, 2021

    It’s not news to donor conceived individuals that they have feelings about the manner in which they were conceived—feelings that may never occur to, or be acknowledged by, others. According to a new study published in the Harvard Medical School Journal of Bioethics and discussed in a recent article in Psychology Today, not do individuals experience significant distress upon learning they were donor conceived, they think about the means of their conception often. The authors of the new study reviewed existing literature and recognized a dearth of research concerning how donor conceived people feel about learning of their status, about the ethics of assisted reproduction, how their sense of identity is affected, how they’ve coped, and more. Rennie Burke, Yvette Ollada Lavery, Gali Katznelson, Joshua North, and J. Wesley Boyd developed a survey with questions about these issues and Dani Shapiro, author of the Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love about her own discovery donor conception discovery, to help them recruit respondents. The response rate was 96.6, with 143 demographically diverse respondents, most from the United States, and the majority of whom were conceived through anonymous sperm donation. Among the findings: 86.5% believed they were entitled to non-identifying information about their donors 84.6 experienced a “shift in their ‘sense of self’” after learning they were donor conceived 48.5% sought psychological support 74.8% wished they knew more about their ethnicity 63.6% want to know more about their biological parent’s identity Highlights of the researchers conclusions are that increased attention to counseling is important, anonymous donation should be discouraged, and donor medical history should be provided to offspring, and the full potential implications of DNA testing should be considered before individuals proceed. J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD, took time to discuss the research.

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  • ArticlesDNA SurprisesFamily SecretsNPEsPsychology & Therapy

    The Trauma of a DNA Surprise

    by bkjax March 10, 2020
    March 10, 2020

    DNA surprises often appear to cause a great deal of emotional upheaval. Would you describe it as traumatic? Any surprise can be traumatic, but a DNA surprise raises one of life’s most fundamental questions: Who am I? Your very identity is made up of your memories, your shared stories, and experiences with family and friends. When you find out that something is not true, or not exactly true, it is a major shock to your emotional system. Would it be accurate to say that people experiencing this kind of trauma don’t always recognize it as trauma? Perhaps they think they’re overreacting or are less capable than others of handling things? It is easy to tell yourself, “This is no big deal. I should be able to handle this.” But “handling something” is a process. And that process may involve feeling upset and expressing various emotions. Like any trauma, the emotional reactions can come in waves and when you least expect them. You and your family members both may minimize your experience by emphasizing you had good parents, you shouldn’t be upset, or even that you’re being selfish by looking for answers. I tell people that I don’t know what qualifies as an overreaction to news that changes your understanding of your world. Your reaction is not a sign of emotional weakness—it’s a sign that you are in touch with reality enough that you react when reality changes. I suggest you accept your reactions, your feelings, as being there. Accept that they are what you need to feel in the moment. There’s no need to try changing them—that doesn’t work anyway. You need to work through the process.

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  • Self-Care

    Rejection: A Q&A With Lisa Bahar

    by bkjax February 27, 2020
    February 27, 2020

    Joyful reunions have become a television staple. Less frequently told are the stories of the unsuccessful searches and unhappy reunions. Adoptees, donor-conceived people, and NPEs (not parent expected) risk being spurned when they reach out to biological family members, and rejection may cause significant distress. We asked Lisa Bahar, a licensed marriage and family therapist and licensed professional clinical counselor in Newport Beach, California, about how rejection may influence and interfere with interpersonal relationships, how individuals can help soothe themselves, and how therapy might help.

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  • AdoptionArticlesNPEsPsychology & Therapy

    Ambiguous Loss: When What You Don’t Know Hurts . . . Forever

    by bkjax June 19, 2019
    June 19, 2019
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  • AdoptionArticlesDonor ConceptionLate Discovery AdopteesNPEsPsychology & Therapy

    Implicit Memory: How the Imprint of Early Trauma Influences Well-Being

    by bkjax June 19, 2019
    June 19, 2019

    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.

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http://www.reckoningwiththeprimalwound.com

What’s New on Severance

  • There Was a Secret
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  • 20 Questions and a World of Stories
  • The Wizard and I
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  • We Three

After a DNA Surprise: 10 Things No One Wants to Hear

https://www.righttoknow.us

Call Right To Know’s resource hotline to talk with another MPE be paired with a mentor, get resources, or just talk.

Original Birth Certificates to California Born Adoptees

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erHylYLHqXg&t=4s

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Recommended Reading

The Lost Family: How DNA is Upending Who We Are, by Libby Copeland. Check our News & Reviews section for a review of this excellent book about the impact on the culture of direct-to-consumer DNA testing.

What Happens When Parents Wait to Tell a Child He’s Adopted

“A new study suggests that learning about one’s adoption after a certain age could lead to lower life satisfaction in the future.”

Janine Vance Searches for the Truth About Korean Adoptees

“Imagine for a minute that you don’t know who your mother is. Now imagine that you are that mother, and you don’t know what became of your daughter.”

Who’s Your Daddy? The Twisty History of Paternity Testing

“Salon talks to author Nara B. Milanich about why in the politics of paternity and science, context is everything.”

What Separation from Parents Does to Children: ‘The Effect is Catastrophic”

“This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.”

Truth: A Love Story

“A scientist discovers his own family’s secret.”

Dear Therapist: The Child My Daughter Put Up for Adoption is Now Rejecting Her

“She thought that her daughter would want to meet her one day. Twenty-five years later, that’s not true.”

I’m Adopted and Pro-Choice. Stop Using My Story for the Anti-Abortion Agenda. Stephanie Drenka’s essay for the Huffington Post looks at the way adoptees have made unwilling participants in conversations about abortion.

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@2019 - Severance Magazine

Severance Magazine
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Severance Magazine
  • About
    • About Severance
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    • Submission Guidelines: How to Contribute
    • Contact Us
  • Articles
    • abandonment
    • Adoption
    • Advocacy
    • DNA & Genetic Genealogy
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@2019 - Severance Magazine