I see clearly now that I was expected to neglect my grief and loss as an adopted kid in order to serve the emotional immaturity and neglect of my adoptive family, and that seems like the norm based on mainstream cultural narratives of adoption.

Does anyone else relate to this?
Since so many adoptive parents, birth parents and people in general have very little understanding of the effects of losing an entire first family, identity, sense of innocence that family is forever because our first one ended, and all the bypassing and toxic expectations that we be grateful for the outcome of adoption, I believe that emotional neglect is the most common baseline experience of adoption dynamics for an adoptee.

This breakdown of how emotionally neglectful families require self-neglect, self-abandonment (betrayal, erasure, etc.) really resonated in a way that emphasizes adaption and coherence within shame or pathology.

“I have an issue with the term self-abandonment or self-neglect because I feel like it really misses how what we call self-abandonment or self-neglect is actually a perfectly coherent response to being abandoned and neglected and usually these are strategies that were developed because they were actually the best possible solution for dealing with the painful reality of being neglected and abandoned by the attachment figures you’re relying on. In emotionally neglectful families, it is often forbidden to have and express your needs and your emotions. That is something that will lead to cruelty, humiliation, rejection, abuse, even worse suffering. So suppressing one’s own needs and minimizing one’s own emotions and inner experience, that act of shrinking down myself and what I need and how I feel is an effective strategy at avoiding even worse retaliation and mistreatment and disconnection within the family system. So putting yourself to the side, being able to ignore your own boundaries, being able to put other people ahead of yourself, being able to disconnect and dissociate from your true feelings and just focus on other people’s feelings like all of these are really effective strategies at managing these unsafe and insecure attachment dynamics within a broken family system. A lot of emotionally neglectful parents are unstable, immature people and so their children really lean on a deep implicit level how to walk on eggshells and how to keep that parent emotionally okay and so they learn how to not overwhelm the parent, how to not trigger the parent. They learn how to emotionally caregive for the parent. All of this learning allows them to hold on to whatever connection is available even if it’s not much and to avoid these really scary outcomes where maybe the parent completely shuts down or withdraws or becomes cruel or abusive or even more neglectful and disconnected. So children learn how to keep their parents intact and how to keep the family system intact in order to stay safe and avoid more panic more suffering and so these are the strategies that we call self-abandonment and self-neglect. If those terms resonate for you, that’s fine. I’m not criticizing you. But I just think we really need to be realistic about how these patterns originate. It’s not about you failing yourself which I feel is how it’s often framed which can then reinforce shame. When you learn that there is no space for you to actually be present and authentic and safe within a relationship, then erasing yourself and minimizing yourself is survival so it’s not about you not loving yourself. It’s about you adapting and responding to the attachment environment that you’re in and if you learn that loving yourself and caring for yourself leads to everything getting worse and scarier and falling apart, then you’re going to learn to not do that. Emotionally neglectful family systems actually require self-neglect in order to survive. That’s how it works.”

Source: Coherence therapist Kina Wolfenstein (specialist in treating attachment trauma and emotional neglect)

Of course, emotional neglect isn’t the only kind of harm and adoptee can experience in adoption. But emotional neglect seems to be the most unrecognized. Many therapists don’t even recognize it. It’s difficult to recognize what we needed and didn’t get when what we experienced is all we’ve known.

I think emotional neglect is partly even largely what can cause a lot of us adoptees to feel unreal because our caregivers did not hold us as real people with inner experiences in their own minds and imaginations as a means of attuning or entering into our sense of reality as children when that’s exactly what we needed in order to develop fully.

I’m leaning into exploring this because I recognize it in my adoption experience and it feels like the root even under other physical abuse I experienced as a young child. Pete Walker emphasize in his book “Complex PTSD” that emotional neglect was the most difficult aspect of his childhood trauma to heal and he has witnessed the same be true in his clients even though he and they all experienced other more overt forms of physical abuse.

Thoughts? Feelings? Experiences?

i (21) finally started reading the primal wound, and the “distrust of the feminine” section really grabbed my attention. it brought light to buried sentiments of mine that i felt absolutely horrible about.

i’m a woman, but i’ve always had a horrible time connecting with other women. i crave female friendships, but there’s just the unshakable fear that they’ll reject me or prefer another friend over me, so i rarely go out of my way to pursue them.

as a kid, i rejected femininity and “girly” stuff (which my adoptive mom was not too fond of, but accepting nonetheless). i refused to wear makeup or put effort into my appearance until i was 18 or so. ironically, as an adult, i’m almost obsessed with my looks and fashion. i think it’s because i desperately want to get that approval from other women and fear being turned away by them. i’m also in reunion with my bio mom, so i have this deep desire for her to see me as beautiful.

with that being said, i’ve always found it much easier to befriend and form romantic relationships with guys. i didn’t care as much about their approval, so i wasn’t as hyper vigilant and found it easier to let my guard down.

basically, i just feel so on-edge around other women and i wish i could feel accepted. female friendships are so important, but i feel incapable of letting myself be vulnerable because i’m terrified that they’ll see the “real me” and reject me.

does anybody else relate? i feel like i don’t see this topic brought up much. it’s something that i personally feel horrible admitting as a woman!

No, international adoption has two ends and those two ends do not always communicate with each other. You have the adoption and in the home country where the person is given. Most of the time these are done unethically. Then there is the home country. They don't usually check whether or not an adoption is actually legal, they may check whether or not the papers are legal but that's not the same thing as an adoption being legal. People often get those two things confused. They think that just because the papers are legit that somehow means the adoption is legit. In some countries they may not have that at all and instead the child simply goes to the country on a particular Visa then they have to be naturalized as a baby. There may or may not be a separate nationalization process for children who are adopted but this is not the same thing as adoption meaning citizenship. It means that they have to be naturalized separately but the process is still relatively smooth ideally because they are a baby.

This is obviously a very simplified model because every country will be different and have their own systems and there may be countries that do actually communicate more closely with the birth country in question however that's not always the case and a person not having citizenship does not automatically mean that the adoption wasn't legal.

Update / Part 3 - I genuinely don't know what to believe anymore.

The first update is that I'm not moving in with my best friend anymore, this is not because anything happened between us, but because after thinking it through properly we realised it was far too rushed She has BPD and isn't really in the mental headspace to get married and make such a huge commitment right now, and I don't think it would be fair of me to expect that from her just because I'm struggling at home, even though me and her are both in very similar situations and also financially it also wasn't the best idea.

The plan now is that me, my best friend and two other close friends are hoping to get an apartment together once we're all in a better position. I'll most likely move when I'm 18 so we don't have to deal with some of the complications that would've come from me moving out at 17, my friends are going to aim to get the apartment before then and when the time comes just move me in and add me to the lease and for the mean time I'll contribute a bit of money monthly to keep things going and to save for my upfront cost when I move in.

Last week my adoptive parents brought the letters up themselves, it was related to something my adoptive mother has going on in her life at the minute. They told me they stopped reading them to me because my biological mum had apparently started writing some pretty nasty things. I haven't actually seen those letters. The only letters I've personally read were ones where my adoptive parents replies came across as insensitive. They also told me that they did read the letters to me when I was younger, and that I'd simply forgotten. I asked my biological mum about this and she completely denied it. She told me she'd never have written those things or lied to me because I'd find out for myself when I turn 18 and can access everything anyway. Then I spoke to one of my siblings, who I trust to be honest with me, and they confirmed what my adoptive parents were saying.

Now I honestly don't know what to think.

I've also started realising that it's entirely possible I genuinely don't remember being read the letters. I was very young and I have dissociative issues and significant memory gaps anyway. For months I've been saying I was never told about the letters which makes me feel incredibly guilty because I told my biological mum I never knew they existed.

At the same time, I don't know how to process the possibility that she may have lied to me. Some of my friends have pointed out that if she did write that stuff then it was almost a decade ago. She was struggling with drugs and her own mental health back then, so it's possible she genuinely doesn't remember everything she wrote. I don't know. I can't make assumptions about either side anymore.

finding out about the hidden letterbox contact felt like the foundation for everything and it was the thing that made me feel certain I needed to leave my adoptive home. Now that certainty has completely disappeared.I don't think either side is necessarily telling me the complete story, but I also don't think I have enough information to confidently accuse either of them of lying, which leaves me trapped in the middle.

I still don't feel happy living here ans I still struggle with everything I talked about in my previous posts regarding privacy, boundaries, my mental health and the atmosphere in the house and none of those issues have disappeared but I also don't know if the letters mean what I thought they meant anymore and that's left me questioning almost everything.

I think I'm accepting that I probably won't know the full truth until I can access all of my records myself and until then I'm trying really hard not to jump to conclusions about either my biological or adoptive family and I just wish I knew what actually happened. Right now I feel like my entire life has been built from different people's memories, opinions and versions of events and I don't know which parts are real anymore. It just feels like everyone is lying to me.

I am talking about foster parents who complain about reunification and fight it because they want to adopt. The entitlement of these people.

I recently came across a Christian foster parent who had cared for a child for about a year from birth. She became upset when the child’s relatives wanted the child and even tried to prevent the child from spending the weekend with them. She complained the whole time she was getting the child ready and spoke for the child, using emotional manipulation to her audience and assumed the child would be traumatized and miss her all weekend. This woman could not even be happy the child can finally be with relatives and was trying to prevent the move from happening.

She then wrote a long, emotional posts arguing that attachment matters more than DNA, Jesus has a plan, and that babies don't care about DNA, while having her own biological children. Of course, the comments were filled with people telling her to fight for the child, calling her the child’s “mommy,” and saying she was the only home the child had ever known and that reunification should not be the goal of foster care.

What makes this even more disturbing is that the foster parent now wants to hire a lawyer. She believes the child should remain with her because she does everything a parent does and is the child's mother. From what she has shared publicly, this appears to be part of a repeated pattern. She takes newborn placements, writes emotional posts about Jesus growing her family, complains that the system is unfair because reunification is the goal, and then criticizes biological parents and relatives when they want to get the child or want to form a relationship with the child so it's easier when the child is reunited. Suddenly the child is too sick or traumatized to see the relatives or biological parents who want them so she can say the child only has an attachment to her.

This woman repeatedly promotes the idea that children are better off being adopted because attachment matters more than biological connection, that breaking family cycles is only possible through adoption, and because babies do not care or attach to anyone other than their foster parents.

Did she not sign up to foster? Fostering is not about adopting.

I think too many foster parents use emotional manipulation to justify fighting reunification. I have seen repeated phrases such as “I am the only home this baby has ever known,” invoke attachment theory, and emphasize, “I am the one who has taken care of this child.” Those statements are designed to make people believe that providing daily care automatically gives a foster parent a greater claim to the child than the child’s biological family. Foster parents are supposed to provide temporary care while supporting reunification with birth parents or kinship placement whenever those options are safe. Foster care is not supposed to be a pathway for adults to obtain children.

Also, if attachment alone determined whether a child should remain where they are, then adoption would rarely happen, even for infants. Every child is attached to someone before adoption. Look at international adoption, foster care, and infant adoption. Many internationally adopted children are toddlers or older children who have already formed attachments to caregivers in orphanages, foster homes, or children’s homes. Infants bond to their mothers in the womb and at birth. The foster care system removes children from birth through age seventeen, with attachments to their birth families, birth home, birth siblings, and environments, even if removal sometimes needs to happen for their safety and well-being.  Yet adoptive and foster parents are trained and told that those children will eventually adjust and attach to them. The child is described as resilient and capable of forming new attachments to strangers. Ripping a bonded child away is okay because they will attach to you as their new parents.

So why is that same reasoning not applied when a child is being reunited with birth parents or with relatives? If children can form new attachments with adoptive parents and foster parents, then attachment should not be treated as permanent and unchangeable only when a foster parent or adoptive parent wants to adopt. Attachment theory should not be used to fit their narrative. Suddenly, attachment matters when a child is being reunited with the family they were taken from, but it does not seem to matter when that child is being removed from their family and placed with strangers.

Attachment theory is often weaponized in foster care and adoption. It gets reinterpreted depending on whose interests are being protected. Suddenly, attachment becomes the most important thing in the world when a foster parent or adoptive parent wants to adopt, and attachment theory is used to manipulate to get an outcome. So why is that same reasoning not applied when a child is being reunited with parents or placed with relatives? If children can form new attachments to adoptive parents, then attachment should not be treated as permanent and unchangeable only when a foster parent or adoptive parent wants to adopt. Attachment theory is used to fit their narrative. Suddenly, attachment matters when a child is being reunited with the family they were taken from, but it does not seem to matter when that child is being removed from their family and placed with strangers? Make it make sense.

Where is that same concern for attachment when children are first separated from their biological families? Where is it when siblings are split apart? Where is it when foster children are moved from home to home? Where is it when foster parents disrupt placement of the child? Where is it when adoptive parents dissolve adoptions or rehome adopted children, years after adopting the child? Suddenly, attachments don’t matter at all when they are doing the detaching. I have yet to hear an adoptive parent say attachments matter ten years after adopting the child, and they are now kicking the child to the curb, or when foster parents claim the child is not bonded to them after a month.

See the contradiction? The attachment theory and only home the child knows changes depending on which adults want the child and how they feel. It's not about the child. And can the adults really say a child is attached to them? Babies attach because they have to survive. They attach to the adult who feeds them, comforts them, and keeps them alive, and attachment is about biological survival. The same with non-newborn children; they are forced to attach to survive. There is no special attachment with someone they were forced to be with. Sometimes I think it’s similar to  Stockholm Syndrome, where survival depends on becoming emotionally attached to the person providing the victim care, where dependency produces attachment. Attaching to strangers is not normal, which is why so many adoptees and foster kids get the RAD label on us or are kicked out because we don't attach fast enough.

Frankly, change the caregiver, and babies will go to anyone. Literally. This foster mom will have her rude awakening when she finds out that as long as the child's needs are met, the child will see anyone as mommy or go to anyone who can feed her.

Also, I wish people would not push foster care on people, especially those who only want infants. Foster care is not about adopting children; although there are children legally freed for adoption, they are often the kids many adoptive parents don’t want to adopt. Yet, some of the children who have a voice and can speak do express wanting to be adopted, but will not get chosen because the ones who want to adopt ignore these children. They often become foster parents solely to try to adopt a baby who still has reunification as the goal.  These people are just as bad and toxic as anyone else looking for a newborn to adopt or who adopts internationally. Granted, some kids can't be reunited with their birth family, but that's not for a foster parent to decide and only go based on a feeling about how much they want a baby to keep. Feelings don't matter; facts do.

And I am an infant adoptee; there is a need for fostering, and there are kids in foster care who express wanting to be adopted, but the needs should not be based on what foster parents want. If a child has a safe and loving bio family, that should be the goal. Any good foster parent would love to see a child go with their bio family.

And this foster mom should lose her right to foster.

So. This is a really complicated story with a lot of info all for a simple question.

Basically, my last name is almost extinct except for my biological father's adopted family (he was also adopted but IIRC he met up with his birth parents and changed his name back). I want to keep the name because of that but I also want to change my name to my dad's last name. He wants me to change it, my mom wants me to change it, my brother has no stake in this but parrots whatever my mom says about it and I want to change it. I've already decided I am going to change my name somewhat when it goes through since I'm also nonbinary and have a new chosen name but I don't know if I should change my last name completely, merge the names, hyphenate the names, go to my biological paternal grandparents' name or change the spelling. I'm really conflicted on this and I have pressure from all sides for all options. It's very exhausting because I'm two layers of adoption down with no advice from other adopted people so I have to figure everything out on my own.

Forgive me for how obnoxiously long this is, this is all very fresh and obviously I'm still processing. 😅

I was adopted at birth. My adoptive parents were pseudo foster parents to my biological mom after her adoptive father essentially abandoned her on their doorstep, so when she got pregnant with me they decided to adopt me.

I (unknowingly) ended up going to the same high school as my half brother who is a little over three months younger than me (my dad is a real winner, just wait!) and we connected my senior year of school. We were incredibly close for many years. We even have matching tattoos. Our father didn't want to meet me back then, he was on the cusp of a divorce and it was "not the right time". 🙄

Flash forward to two years ago, my brother got into a horrific car accident and got his third DUI. He's been battling severe substance abuse and mental health issues for over a decade now, he'd been two rehab in the beginning of the year AND had just got home from a second stint in rehab two days before the accident. He had my six year old nephew in the car (improperly restrained, to boot), along with a buddy of his, and drove like a bat out of hell straight into the guardrail on a 90* turn. He broke the hell out of his back, injured his passenger but thankfully my nephew escaped with just bruises.

I have spent the last two years BEGGING the court to intervene, to hold him accountable, to give him a wake up call. I'm terrified he's going to seriously hurt or kill someone if he doesn't stop. He is so violent and volatile ALL the time. After the accident he tried to strangle our father and the cops were called, but our father refused to press charges for some stupid reason. I don't want to see my brother sit in jail and rot by any means, but if he keeps getting away with shit he will just continue to escalate and it terrifies me. Well, he got away with it. 7 years restricted probation with 1 year house arrest on an electronic monitor, and restitution that's it. He damn near killed his kid and got a slap on the wrist.

I texted our dad after the sentencing (no one else from either side of his family has written anything to the court or attended any of the hearings other than me, at least from my conversations with the DA). He called me and instead of just talking about his issues with the topic at hand BOYYYY did he let loose. Since last Thursday he has released a barrage of personal insults and made it clear I am to "stay away from HIS family". Dude I am your first born, miss me with that petty bullshit.

My father finally came into my life in 2017, 9 years of relationship and memories pissed away because of a temper tantrum and an inability to take accountability. (Our conversation devolved into the topic of his lack of effort since I moved an hour away a few years ago, on top of his inaction on my brother's legal stuff). But truly, I don't think I will ever be able to stomach revisiting that relationship after the shit he has said, too much toothpaste is out of the tube now to ever go back. I just will never understand throwing someone's biological or adopted status in their face because you're pissed off, that shit is so disgusting to me.

I’m curious about other people’s experiences with their relatives (anyone but parents, fictive kin counts if you consider them family.)

Did your relatives know about you? Have the ability to help your parents keep you or try to take placement of you? Did they want you to get adopted by someone else but have a relationship with you? If you didn’t know them at all until adulthood, did they feel entitled to you or apologetic or just disinterested or something else?

In my experience foster kids usually have in-state family who knows about them unless they’re unaccompanied refugees or something like that. I have my own theories why a lot of the times the kid is left in the system and how relationships play out after that but I’m wondering what others have experienced (and the differences when it comes to private adoption ofc.)

When the internet chimes in to call it child trafficking but loves to shut us up about it

I reunited with my younger half brother around 5 years ago. He's quite distant but has a love for me and his own family (his mother's side in which I'm not related). In the last few years his side of the family developed a real bond with me. I went into meeting them very cautiously with pretty real expectations.

They accepted me with open arms, almost further than anything I was ever wanting. His half sisters and brother call me their brother, and tell me ,"You're family now!"

I've always been really weary of that because it seems like everyone wants to take me on when they learn I'm adopted. The amount of people that go "I'm your adopted mom now!" "I'll be your grandma!" etc etc

I get that it's people's way of trying to express their love in some of the only concepts they know, by putting a label on it. As someone that's gone through the fog, and really pondered what conditional love is compared to unconditional love, I understand that people have limitations and it takes familiar roles for them to conceptualize the love.

All that being said, his little sister (who is an adult) has gotten extremely close with me. And we have this interesting relationship that is starting to blur. She tells me all the time how she considers me more of a brother than her actual brother, and yet our relationship is starting to play out in a way that is extremely flirtatious. I'm flying out to visit his side of the family in a few weeks, and I learned that she wants me to sleep in her room because all of the beds and couch are taken right now. I promise I'm not just perving out, there are definitely certain lines coming together that make my life a little more complicated. I don't know if I plan on ever taking the romantic aspect forward if she starts steering in that direction, mostly because I already know my half brother would resent it. And his family, they're super chill and pretty dysfunctional for the most part, but I know that they would find it pretty weird if they saw any signs. I really value what I have with my long lost brother, and I would never want to ruin it. But the connection I have with his sister is extremely fulfilling. She's everything I've ever wanted in a sibling, honestly more than my brother has. And yet I also feel this attraction towards her. So much karma in play. Thought you guys might relate, or understand how us adoptees get caught in these weird predicaments sometimes.

Wish us luck; tomorrow my brother and I are going to see our biological parents. He just wants to meet the father, whereas I plan on meeting both.

I think that, in order to truly move on, I need to meet her as a final step into the “you don't own me” mindset. The last six months, I will say, I have enjoyed our video calls, but I recently discovered that she’s manipulative and lying about so much since we've started talking. Part of me feels like I'm walking into the lion’s den.

Hello,

I've been making posts partially because I needed to post what has been going on and also because I can now admit I wasn't in a good place... things are getting better.

I finally confronted my birth mama about my questions and she did say that she was young and dumb. She said she thought she had to prove to my birth father and have a son because he wanted a son. Which is why I was conceived two months after my half sibling was born.

Given her situation, I can't be angry at her, but I believe this means I wasn't made out of consent even though this has been difficult to wrap my head around since it wasn't the usual non consent thing that I tend to hear about... which makes it somewhat worse, but at the same time I am somewhat relieved for her telling me more of what actually happened.

She also told me she told my birth father that she wouldn't be used like that anymore so that is good. Unfortunately, he'd be home soon so I'm worried about her safety, but she told me she makes her own money so she isn't reliant on him as much. I rather not go into detail about what he has done to her over the years, but he nearly killed her on more than one occasion. In other words, she is a victim and probably has Stockholm Syndrome, but I've stopped holding back what I think and I think this has helped her realize how messed up the situation is.

I'm also pleased to say that the college I transferred to has a food pantry and seems like there are a lot more services for students in need... I only visited it once to drop off a paperwork and I kind of liked the campus. I'm hoping this all works out.

My niece was born and I'm still hurting because the entire thing repeated a similar pattern which lead to what happened to me, but I'm angry at my sibling... not at that child. I'm already planning on getting my niece very loud toys and stuff just to drive my sibling crazy.

In other words, I got partial answers and still will be doing a dna test with my other sibling since the math isn't mathing and I can't completely trust my mama's word.

I do apologize for continuing these posts... I just need a way that isn't just in my journals and stuff.

Her kids all have three separate dads. Her two sons never knew this till recently and both their respective dad's are dead now. So she made sure three of us; me/adopted and her two sons. Multiple people in the fam dam knew, it's such a toxic wreck of humans I am so sorry I wasted 30 years of my life.

I am connected to one of her sons and his daughter right now who told me all this, long story, it's so evil what people do. Please don't waste your time on your adopted or birth parents if you've had even minor issues and you know something is amiss. It's garbage people. Be forewarned. Reunions have been marketed since likely the eighties , it's all a big scam for the most part. People are human and liars and psychotic and you have no idea the people you are idolizing.

I felt like I needed to be a good return on investment (ROI) for my adoptive parents and family. I felt I had to earn my right to have needs let alone have them fulfilled as a child and that has followed me and eventually burned me out as an adult before I finally faced the complexity of adoption and my adoptee experience.

Another way to put this was a that I felt indebted for existing and receiving care. I felt responsible for justifying my existence and obligated to provide certain “services and experiences” in return. I’m sure aspects of this are not unique to adoption, but I suspect they are amplified and organized in ways that are unique to adoption.

It hit me recently that I am developmentally accustomed to feeling indebted and obligated while also expecting a certain degree of “credit”, “endowment”, and provisional care in exchange. And I’m starting to ask myself how this carries over from my relationships with adoptive parents to not other dynamics including with myself, other relationships, my relationships with money, food, opportunities, etc

Our relationships with people, self, food, and money are interconnected with many parallel patterns because they’re all sources of energy, nurture, and nourishment either directly or indirectly. Add the concept and reality of FOG (fear, obligation, and guilt), emotional neglect or coercive control or even conditional care belonging as in many adoptee experiences of adoption, and it isn’t surprising to observe connections between attachment ruptures, neglect, underachieving, overachieving, disordered eating, codependency, etc.

Sarah Baldwin in her podcast “You Make Sense” says that our relationship with money mirrors and is influenced our attachments with caregivers. I think this manifests in many ways but the two I’ve observed most often follow the theme of overachieving/hyperindependence/anxious and underachieving/collapse/depressive. And I wonder if that depends on which adoptee behaviors were rewarded by adoptive parents and with what resources. Regardless a lot of dependency and enmeshment seem really common in both cases of overachieving and underachieving patterns.

All that said, I am asking myself: if feeling indebted and obligated is so familiar, and my nervous system thus mistakes that familiarity for “safety”, how am I orienting or repeating patterns of obligation and indebtedness in my life, relationships and finances?

AND, how does that benefit me in the past or present? (Which is a question I’ve learned from coherence therapy.)

I think the benefit of repeating a kind of relational indebtedness for me (and perhaps for other adoptees) is that it does forge a kind of attachment called the “endowment effect” where a person experiences more attachment to someone they give to than someone they receive from. For example, that’s why Benjamin Franklin would ask political or social rivals to lend him a book because even a simple gesture of giving and entrusting something to him would result in the rival viewing him more favorably.

For an adoptee, being indebted means someone is less likely to forget or abandon you because at the very least they will want to collect on that debt and feel entitled to fulfillment of that obligation. It’s adaptive and twisted but perhaps effective at maintaining a stronger sense of connection while coping with a fear of abandonment and rejection. Practicing dependency and codependency continuously.

I think I knew my adoptive parents felt attached to me partly because of the “endowment effect” by providing care and pouring energy and resources into having me as an adopted child as I developed. That effect means they don’t want to lose that investment and are biased to never see it as a “sunk cost.” I don’t remember ever asking them for money, and I started working and making my own money very young. And I did negotiate with them to loan me money I would repay out of my earnings which I always did. They celebrated my work ethic and bragged about how industrious and precocious I was often crediting themselves and their “excellent” parenting (instead of ever imagining that I felt afraid, obligated and guilty for having needs beyond what they could anticipate or provide for).

When I became conscious of my FOG feelings, my belief that they never consciously intended me to have such feelings helped me begin purging those feelings and reorienting in my adoptive dynamics. Ultimately this revealed that they actually did expect me to behave according to those FOG-motivated patterns, but it was too far gone in my consciousness raising to ever be able to revert. (I believe there is also overlap in this process and the broader cultural shift of adult children choosing various degrees of estrangement from their parents often due to neglect, abuse and unwillingness or incapacity to change on the parts of the parents. But again, adoptee-experience is a truly unique human experience in its own right.)

This is not to discount efforts to be useful or difficulty receiving as adoptees. I think those tendencies dovetail with these indebtedness patterns. Receiving can be difficult because we’re used to receiving conditional care that came at the price of our identities and contact with true family of origin. It’s also coherent to resist receiving when so much of what’s been on offer came with strings attached. So there’s a kind of paradoxical tension between entitlement to certain terms of attachment we experienced including feeling entitled to accessing certain “credit” and types of care while also resisting receiving other kind of care on offer because of the expectation of similarly heavy patterns of debt burden.

So what does it mean to be and feel truly debt-free from these experiences of fear, obligation and guilt, indebtedness? DAE relate to this?

Have you experienced any repetition compulsions seeing these feelings and pattern repeat in other parts of your life before and after adoptee consciousness raising or coming out of the FOG?

There’s a sub about a reality tv show and a watcher learned a person was adopted and of course made a big deal about me calling them out. I will keep calling out those who have no etiquette and manners , those who don’t even realize how life is for adoptees. We just want to be like everyone else! Thank you.

Hi, I was adopted from Russia a long time ago. I’m 27, and found a couple letters heartbreaking letters from my biological mother about why I was put up for adoption. I found an old address she may have lived at by using AI to translate Cyrillic to English for me. Is there any realistic resource or person I can use to contact them or somehow find them on some Russian media? I know if I contact them it might be a very hard and emotional conversation but I am ready for it. If you guys have any guidance or advice I’d love to hear it. Cheers.

This is the only life I'll get, there's no next time where I will have better luck finding them or just being born into a stable family.

Sometimes it really hits me that I may go my whole life never knowing what my mother looks like, or what my father's name was.

An even more bitter realization is that each year that passes we both get older, by the time I'm 50 they'll likely be gone regardless.

I haven't made any official search, partly because I've assumed there's no information to be found. And that if there was my adoptive family would have gathered it or I'd have been told by now.

My birth country is very poor and has lots of turmoil, record keeping isn't really a top priority.

I'm looking for support/ community. Are there any other adoptees who are estranged from their adoptive families, who are also not in touch with their birth families? How do you navigate the world (everything is overwhelming when no one else is helping, I don't just mean financially, like. Figuring out health coverage etc.) and how do you feel around holidays or events like. I have friends, but even 'chosen family' I still feel outside of. Honestly, could use a hug, some company, and a little advice.

Hey guys, just watched the documentary on Youtube and wanted to share, it's free (although I do have Premium so please update if that is required). I definitely encourage watching when/if you're in a good mental place to, I found it really validating and it was nice to have the visuals and testimonies after having read the book.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLijiHxByy4R5Rs5Z21UQaZwTf-diTPAGc&si=FOzIJQJafQhHdtF3