Progress

There's been a breakthrough on finding my biological parents.  I don't want to say anything more right now -- I'm almost afraid to breathe for fear it will all blow away -- but progress has been made.

Right now I've got a whirlwind of emotions swirling around inside me.  I'm trying to process them now so they don't get in the way later on.  Cry now, be calm later.

The Frankenfamily

I've been reading about other adoptees, trying to see how their childhood was like and not like my own.  In some ways mine was different, but there were all too many heartbreaking similarities.

Adoption Stereotype:  "One of these kids is not like the others." 

Many adoptees are brought into a family where everyone else is biologically related except them, so they stand out.  Not me. I didn't obviously stand out from my family because most of my family was adopted.  I, my sister, my father, and his sister were all adopted.  Adoptees made up 3/4s of my immediate family and 2/3s of the extended family I saw most often.  Aside from "white", there was no physical standard to adhere to or stand apart from.  Our ethnicities supposedly included English, French, Welsh, Irish, Scandinavian, and Native American.

Now you may think, "Great!  Adopted families have lots of love.  Your family must have had even more extra doses!"  Not exactly.  What we had were extra doses of dysfunction.  We were six random people with no ties at all between us other than living in close proximity.  My adoptive parents had married out of desperation, not love, so there wasn't even that to hold us together.

So it wasn't that I stood out from the norm, there was no norm, period.  Underneath my adoptive parents' overwhelming concern for social acceptance which led to both their marriage and our adoptions, anomie and disconnection were the norm.

I had no idea that families were even supposed to feel anything for each other, other than paying lip service to some idea of "love".  That revelation shocked me to the core when it came to me as an adult.

And there's the thought, "Well, at least you had other adoptees to talk to growing up."  Nope, not other than my sister.  My father and aunt were of a generation that did not talk about adoption AT ALL, denied knowing or wanting to know anything about their biological families, and discouraged us from bringing it up with them, each other, or anyone else.

In the privacy of my own skull I called us the Frankenfamily, a shambling monster created out of mutilated, unrelated bodies in a grotesque parody of normal life.

 I was reading about the Minnesota Twins Study when this passage really hit home:

MZT twins (identical twins reared together) have very similar—but not identical—personalities. People always assumed the similarities came from growing up in the same environment. But MZA (identical twins reared apart) twins also have very similar—but not identical—personalities, and there is no detectable difference in the degree of similarity between twins who grew up together and twins who grew up in different families—sometimes in different countries. The household, or the “shared environment,” has very little effect on personality, at least by the time people are adults.

Likewise, when biologically unrelated children are adopted and reared in the same home, they may resemble each other slightly when they are small, but as they grow up they become as different as complete strangers. It is well known that shared environment can have an early effect on IQ as well. “Virtual twins,” or unrelated children of the same age who grow up together, have a correlation of 0.3 for IQ at age five, which declines to 0.11 at age 11, and to essentially zero by adolescence.

This.  By the time we got to college my sister and I had nothing in common save for a shared unpleasant history.  We honestly had more in common with our room-mates, because at least we'd picked them out for ourselves.  Our whole family was just room-mates other people had picked at random for us.

There was an important way in which I stood out from the rest of the family, but it was subtle.  Most people didn't catch it at first, including me.  I'll talk about it later.

Part 2

Don't Stop Believing

Searching is hard on the nerves, and my nerves are not well suited for it in the first place.  Most people feel good as a result of doing good, setting up a nice positive feedback loop.  PTSD steals that from me.  I do good, I feel good, and PTSD opens the floodgates for yet another crashing wave of despair.

So, for me, doing good is a negative feedback loop on the emotional level.  The only benefits I get out of doing good are moral and intellectual.  That has to be enough, because there's nothing else.

People accuse me of overthinking.  Duh, I wonder why.

But searching brings up all sorts of feelings of doubt and self-worthlessness.  After all, it is an objective fact that I was abandoned.  However good the reasons might have been at the time, I am completely justified in feeling -- what do I feel exactly?

Abandoned.

Alone.

Isolated.

Helpless.

Betrayed.

Cheated.

Terrified.

Alone.

Hopeless.

Anonymous.

Bereft.

Grief-stricken.

Alone.

Those are my feelings.  I will claim them and own them and not deny them or try to "get over them" or "walk away from them".

But those are the feelings of my younger self.  The person I am today is not alone, not isolated, not helpless.  I have to keep reminding myself of those facts.  The positive emotions they generate are obliterated by the tidal wave of negative emotions from the past, nonetheless, none the less, they are facts.

I have to hold on to those facts.

PTSD is endemic among adoptees.  That means this struggle must be common among adult adoptees.  Another "benefit" of the "win-win" of adoption.

Mardi Gras 2014

I got word that my DNA sample reached the lab today.  Yippee!  I'm so excited!

You can expect to receive your results in the next 6-8 weeks

Oh.

And that's what I'll be doing for Lent sorted out.

A Light

I tried meditating again the other night.  For a few moments, instead of the usual pain, numbness, sadness, and/or despair; I felt calm.  It didn't last, but it was there for a short while.  That hasn't happened in a long time.

Babies and Bridal Bouquets: The Issue of Trust in Closed Adoptions

 One of the things I can't wrap my mind around about closed adoptions such as my own is how could you just throw a baby out to a random couple that you never get to meet and have any trust, any expectation at all, that the baby would be treated well?

How could you be that trusting?

What evidence did you have to support such a trust?

Yeah, there was a "home study" but that was a joke. My parents paid the study team to say good things about them, and they got their money's worth. The actual evidence in the house at that time (and there was actual evidence that could have been used against them) was discounted and the money was pocketed.

Granted, because I'm an adoptee I have severe trust issues but -- I don't get it.  I know girls were encouraged to be much more trusting in the 1950s - 1960s but really, there's less consideration shown towards who would end up with their baby than would be shown by someone purchasing a car.

Good grief, newborn babies aren't bridal bouquets. They're a lot more fragile and a lot more important -- in theory.  You can't just toss a baby backwards over your head and trust that one of a giggling horde of girls is going to catch it and take good care of it.  At least you shouldn't.

When I asked this question online, the answer I got back was that these young mothers were isolated from their communities into "maternity homes", stripped of their names and identities, and intimidated daily until they signed the papers.

There's a term for that process.  It's called "brainwashing".  Certainly the stories told by former maternity home inmates in The Girls Who Went Away and The Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative matches Singer's description of the sort of brainwashing from Cults in Our Midst:

• Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how attempts to psychologically condition him or her are directed in a step-by-step manner.
  • Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group. The goal may be to make them deployable agents for the leadership, to get them to buy more courses, or get them to make a deeper commitment, depending on the leader's aim and desires.
• Control the person's social and/or physical environment; especially control the person's time.
  • Through various methods, newer members are kept busy and led to think about the group and its content during as much of their waking time as possible.
• Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.
  • This is accomplished by getting members away from their normal social support group for a period of time and into an environment where the majority of people are already group members.
  • The members serve as models of the attitudes and behaviors of the group and speak an in-group language.
  • Strip members of their main occupation (quit jobs, drop out of school) or source of income or have them turn over their income (or the majority of) to the group.
  • Once the target is stripped of their usual support network, their confidence in their own perception erodes.
  • As the target's sense of powerlessness increases, their good judgment and understanding of the world are diminished. (ordinary view of reality is destabilized)
  • As the group attacks the target's previous worldview, it causes the target distress and inner confusion; yet they are not allowed to speak about this confusion or object to it - leadership suppresses questions and counters resistance.
  • This process is sped up if the targeted individual or individuals are kept tired - the cult will take deliberate actions to keep the target constantly busy.
• Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person's former social identity.
  
  • the target's old beliefs and patterns of behavior are defined as irrelevant or evil. Leadership wants these old patterns eliminated, so the member must suppress them.
  • Members get positive feedback for conforming to the group's beliefs and behaviors and negative feedback for old beliefs and behavior.
• The group manipulates a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group's ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors.
  • Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group's beliefs, and compliance are rewarded while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. Anyone who asks a question is made to feel there is something inherently disordered about them to be questioning.
  • The only feedback members get is from the group; they become totally dependent upon the rewards given by those who control the environment.
  • Members must learn varying amounts of new information about the beliefs of the group and the behaviors expected by the group.
  • The more complicated and filled with contradictions the new system is and the more difficult it is to learn, the more effective the conversion process will be.
  • Esteem and affection from peers is very important to new recruits. Approval comes from having the new member's behaviors and thought patterns conform to the models (members). Members' relationship with peers is threatened whenever they fail to learn or display new behaviors. Over time, the easy solution to the insecurity generated by the difficulties of learning the new system is to inhibit any display of doubts—new recruits simply acquiesce, affirm and act as if they do understand and accept the new ideology.
• Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order.
  • The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing.
  • Members are not allowed to question, criticize or complain. If they do, the leaders allege the member is defective, not the organization or the beliefs.
  • The targeted individual is treated as always intellectually incorrect or unjust, while conversely the system, its leaders and its beliefs are always automatically, and by default, considered as absolutely just.
  • Conversion or remolding of the individual member happens in a closed system. As members learn to modify their behavior in order to be accepted in this closed system, they change—begin to speak the language—which serves to further isolate them from their prior beliefs and behaviors.

It is deeply ironic that a population which was watching The Manchurian Candidate and arguing over whether such things could really by done  to "our boys" in foreign countries were perfectly willing -- even grateful -- to have them done to "our girls" at home.

The main criticism of "brainwashing" is that the effects are short-term; however in this case it only had to last until the woman signed the relinquishment papers.

Then again, I suppose if the young women hadn't been kept ignorant and trained to be overly trusting they would have insisted on birth control.  I can only conclude that for all the overt fuss made over them white Boomer girls were raised like mushrooms -- kept in the dark and fed on garbage.

The Geography of Pain

Different aspects of my life reverberate in different parts of my body.  Pain in my shoulders and upper arm muscles emanates from my now-deceased abusive adoptive mother, which still act up whenever I think about my childhood.  My arms are twinging -- Hi Mom!

But when I think about my adoption, the place I feel it is at the front and base of my neck, right on the windpipe.  It's as if someone is choking me, or trying to keep me from speaking.  I'm feeling a lot of that lately.

Traipsing Through Tar Pits

Been quiet lately.  Not that I haven't had things to say, there's an impressive stack of half-written posts in my "Drafts" folder about various things.  But I ran out of steam and into despair.  Stopped being agitated and started being overwhelmed.  Then just stopped.

My adoption paperwork has always knocked the wind out of my sails.  Just having a piece in front of me is enough to fold me up like a puppet whose strings have been cut.  All desire, energy, curiosity, anger, passion is gone, leaving behind a lethargic numbness.  Behind that numbness lies more pain than I can bear at this point.  Moving is like walking through tar, like I've been walking through tar for uncountable years and lack the strength to move another step.

With everything else stalled I tried reaching out to that pain the other day.  I know I've got to feel it in order to get through it.  I've got to let the beast clawing up my insides have it's say, but it isn't talking it's screaming.

It seemed to me that I was sitting Shiva, but I couldn't say for whom or what.

It wasn't long before I flinched.  Kinda like standing in front of a blast furnace door with no protective gear on.  That's a good way to get burned, and I did.

Didn't want to deal with anything after that for a while.  Eventually tried reaching out to it again just to see if it would be that bad a second time, but the "blast shields " were locked down so tight I couldn't even find the door.

Still, I got another form filled out.

Hope it gets easier with practice.

Ulterior Motive

In order to understand my biological mother better I just got in a copy of The Girls Who Went Away:  The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children For Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v.Wade.  My 14yo daughter immediately asked to read it.

I can't imagine a better prophylactic.

Comfort Food

On a related note, coping with adoption trauma has expanded the range of dishes I cook.  I talk about that over here.