An adoptee’s view on the complexities of attachment and insightful guidance to best support those struggling with relational trauma.
Abandonment and attachment keep coming up everywhere I seem to look lately. And then my life smacked me upside the head with both recently as I reconnected with my former foster sister. Abandonment and attachment are both crucial aspects of my life as an adoptee. As my therapist so accurately explained to me, “Attachment is the wound of adoption.” Nail. Hit. On. The. Head.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll never stop saying it: Adoption is trauma.
Abandonment, no matter when it occurs, creates attachment issues, even as a baby!
Adoption is Trauma
It is crucial for an adoptee to experience healthy attachment in every way, especially healthy emotional attachment. This is necessary to try and heal that primal wound.
When I’m going through tough things, my response is to take flight, shut down, put up the walls, and try and fix my stress away. It is so hard for me to sit in the hard, allow myself to feel the hard, embrace the hard and all the waves of emotions that comes with it. It is even more challenging for me to let people in and sit in the trenches with me, comfort me, and tell me they aren’t going anywhere. I wonder if a lot of fellow adoptees and foster youth feel the same exact way.
In the hardest seasons of life, when stresses amplify or my support system shrinks back, I see this primal wound of attachment rear its ugly head. So, I try to fix the hard, and if I can’t fix it, I try to push off talking about it. Finally, I just shut down and say I don’t want to talk, because it’s feels safer.
My body so desperately holds onto the feelings of stress, abandonment and hurt. My nervous system is trying to protect me from struggling through them again. It is reminding me of how I didn’t see much emotion modeled growing up; how I never really had a place to let out the ugly; I never really felt I was heard. So it just got stuffed down. I have to do a better job of sitting in the hard letting myself deal with the emotions. I need to lean into my husband and support system, and allow myself to fully attach to them.
Being Hit in the Head with Attachment and Abandonment
Recently, after 10 years of separation, I reunited with a former foster sister. She spent years growing up with me and we formed a very tight bond. For reasons that aren’t mine to share, she was in and out of our home for a while. There was a few visits following her adoption by another family. However, the visits were so challenging, they had to eventually stop all together. Looking back, the visits and our connection with her should have continued! Hard doesn’t mean end it and give up. It means work through the hard, and find resources to help deal with it, not eliminate it!
The reconnection with her and then having to say goodbye again, brought to memory so much anger and fear that my younger-self faced. Anger that our deep connection was suddenly severed, and fear for what she might endure without me. My body in return felt EVERY SINGLE thing that my previous self felt. Feeling the familiar waves of abandonment, I realized my body had kept the score perfectly and it was holding on to the trauma. Even though my mind didn’t remember the details well, my body remembered EVERY SINGLE ONE and I was forced to feel them all over again.
Attachment Struggles after a Life of Transition
Adoptees go through attachment being formed with birth family and then ripped away. Most of us also struggle with attachment in the context of foster parents and siblings. In the worst of circumstances, some of us also struggle with it in the context of potential adoptive families. Attachment unfortunately is an ongoing issue for a lot of us. Having to attach to people we grow to love, and then being ripped away from them, over and over again.
As an adoptee, I don’t want to feel the hard; I try to run away or fix it. After my experience of reuniting with my foster sister, I finally understand why adoptive and foster (and maybe even bio parents) sever contact with a previous family. It is because it’s hard, and hard just feels impossible sometimes.
How to Love on a Foster Youth/Adoptee
With that being said, if you are an important adult in a foster or adoptive child’s life, please make every effort to not sever relationships with those we have formed bonds with. Please don’t give up on us; we so desperately need that connection. Yes, it will be hard and yes, we will show our emotions through tantrums and hard behaviors. Instead of giving up, provide us with resources, like therapy, to help with the hard.
And goodness! Please, please, please emotionally attach to us when we are going through the hard struggles of attachment.
- Be present with us. Look us in the eyes and tell us you will work with whomever to continue contact.
- Make sure we feel safe to show the hard behavior instead of having to stuff it down. We are often told we are acting like a victim and that you do not have time to deal with our hard stuff.
- Don’t give up on us. Emotionally shutting us down, not providing a safe place to show our hard behaviors, and not endlessly pursuing us intentionally, is giving up on us.
To all my Fellow Foster Youth/Adoptees
If you are a foster or adoptive child, keep fighting to attach. Don’t give up and put up the walls forever. You deserve to be loved, and you deserve to be cherished. The heartache will be worth it. Someday you will find that person or community who loves you unconditionally, letting you show your full ugly and love you regardless. You are enough. You are worthy. Don’t stop fighting to find someone who will tell you this, because these are the exact sentiments of your heavenly Father. He has put people on this earth who will strive to love you just like He does.
Letter from Inspiring Hope to you:
Dear April,
It sounds like you have done so much hard work in trying to understand yourself and others. I am sure that was really helpful after growing up and feeling the weight of abandonment and attachment struggles. Knowledge is power, and it can help take the shame out of how natural our bodies stress responses are! So we are left to deal with our challenges, and not the incorrect self diagnosed flaws in our identity. The score you mentioned that our bodies keep isn’t always fair. And it can feel like the balance never tips in our favor towards healing. But it does, and we do find healing in ways we would never expect. Even in the midst of really hard things like missing your sister.
Your story is very similar to many who have braved the complexities of foster care/adoption. Abandonment and attachment can be cruel thieves in our stories, but I so love following your life now on social media. It’s beautiful and yet so honest and real. Healing isn’t linear or always pretty, but as you said, SO worth it! You are amazing friend, thank you for sharing your truth with us!
Take Care,
Inspiring Hope Collective Team
If you would like to follow April too, you can find her on Instagram @mercy.and.healing
