What is The Adoption Trauma Spectrum?
If you’re an adopted person, you may find yourself wrestling with feelings that are hard to name—issues around attachment, grief, loss, or identity. A framework for understanding the impact of adoption across the lifespan and informing adoption-informed care, the Adoption Trauma Spectrum (ATS) is a helpful way to make sense of these experiences and guide you toward increased understanding and healing.
Separation at Birth
When an infant is separated from their birth mother and placed with adoptive parents - who, despite all good intentions, have unfamiliar scents and sounds - the infant’s brain releases high levels of stress hormones like cortisol. This early separation can result in what is often referred to as the primal wound.
Awareness of Being an Adopted Person
Closed adoptions in the U.S. began in 1917 as a way to protect adopted children from feeling their otherness, but the outcome has led to generations of people who feel lost in their own worlds, unsure of who they are or how to identify ethnically, culturally, and racially. This can impact self-esteem and attachment.
Adolescence
An already intense time of change, many adopted people report the absence of a firm identity foundation which provides historical, racial, cultural, and ethnic context for a person’s identity, causing many to report feeling lost at sea. Research suggests these complex issues contribute to higher incidences of depression, anxiety, substance use, and risk of self harm among adopted people, adolescents in particular. Now that we know better we can do better. Open communication and learning about your history can be powerful tools to help you build a stronger sense of self.
Becoming a Parent: Revisiting Your Own Story
Becoming a parent is a time when most people reflect upon beginnings. Holding your child may bring up unexpected feelings related to your birth parents. Some experience a new sense of empathy, viewing birth parents through the peer lens, while others understand for the first time just how vulnerable both the birth mother and infant are in those early moments.
Searching and Reunion: The Complex Path to Connection
Seeking is healthy; secrets are not. Regardless of what leads to reunion, there is pain for practically everyone involved. The excitement of reunion may overshadow the reality of that pain, minimizing the paradigm shift for adopted people who have cobbled together an idea of who they are, where they belong, or their place in the family. When emotions catch up with reality, it can be overwhelming, leading to adjustment issues, increased anxiety, and a real sense of vulnerability. In short, it’s a total mind twist.
When Reunion Doesn’t Go as Planned
Reunion implies a mutual desire to connect, but that’s not always the case. It is not uncommon for birth mothers to keep secret the child put up for adoption, by choice or by force. Reunion, especially in the age of at-home DNA testing, can lead to the violation of privacy, unwanted contact, and unearthed trauma. When reunion leads to people who don’t want to be found, when closed boxes are opened without permission, it puts people at risk of second rejection.
Facing Loss: The Final Chapter
Facing the loss of a birth or adoptive parent when questions remain unanswered and ruptures remain unhealed, people are at greater risk of experiencing complicated grief.
