I am sure that most of you would be aware that an adopted person feels a baffling sense of loss and incompleteness. I am a teenager, battling the 'identity-formation' years! People (want to) believe that this is just a 'phase' which one outgrows on reaching adulthood. But the reality is that being adopted means being completely cut off completely from half of oneself. We basically do not know the parts of our personalities which is a product of genetics, and that is a very huge loss. With all due respect to adoptive parents, no amount of love can truly heal that loss. That loss has to be worked through by oneself, as I am learning already in my first session with my therapist. It feels like having a leg amputated (with respect to people who have really got their leg amputated), in the sense, you know that that part of you does exist but you just don't have it in front of you. All the same, you can't simply wish it away, you have to accept that it was there, it did exist, but it doesn't anymore. Sometimes you feel a ghost pain in that phantom limb, it is pretty much the same in adoption. In adoption ofcourse, that birth family very much exists, but to us it almost doesn't due to lack of records and general attitude of people. And, those feelings of hurt and loss feel like the phantom pain of an amputee, because we are deeply missing someone and longing for someone whom we have no conscious memory of. Damn right, it can be frustrating.
Thursday 22 December 2011
The hollowing emptiness
I am sure that most of you would be aware that an adopted person feels a baffling sense of loss and incompleteness. I am a teenager, battling the 'identity-formation' years! People (want to) believe that this is just a 'phase' which one outgrows on reaching adulthood. But the reality is that being adopted means being completely cut off completely from half of oneself. We basically do not know the parts of our personalities which is a product of genetics, and that is a very huge loss. With all due respect to adoptive parents, no amount of love can truly heal that loss. That loss has to be worked through by oneself, as I am learning already in my first session with my therapist. It feels like having a leg amputated (with respect to people who have really got their leg amputated), in the sense, you know that that part of you does exist but you just don't have it in front of you. All the same, you can't simply wish it away, you have to accept that it was there, it did exist, but it doesn't anymore. Sometimes you feel a ghost pain in that phantom limb, it is pretty much the same in adoption. In adoption ofcourse, that birth family very much exists, but to us it almost doesn't due to lack of records and general attitude of people. And, those feelings of hurt and loss feel like the phantom pain of an amputee, because we are deeply missing someone and longing for someone whom we have no conscious memory of. Damn right, it can be frustrating.
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this is deep stuff, well writen. gud job.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I know that many, if not most, adoptees feel this sense of incompleteness throughout their lives. People often want to come up with easy answers to complicated questions, so they ask, "Don't your adopted parents love you?" as though the answer "yes" is supposed to take away all the emotional emptiness. You are struggling with this in your teenage years...I remember how difficult that was. I am still struggling with this in my late 40s and often wonder if I will ever feel a sense of completeness.
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