Today I woke up with such intense anxiety—you know the kind—eyes open wide, terror in the pit of your stomach, and you feel as if you cannot move. Your brain freezes in terror and panic—I’m talking about the all encompassing terror that consumes your whole being, the kind of fear and terror that only an adoptee feels. Abandonment.
Yeah, it’s a scary word—abandonment—everyone fears this at some point in their lives. But not in the way an adoptee feels abandonment. As an adoptee, I have been forever scarred and wounded by the harsh sting of abandonment since my birth. Some of you may think “what’s the big deal?”—well I will explain the big deal.
Imagine, a newborn baby, born in a maternity home in the 1950s. Just as you take your first breath, you are whisked away from your mother. Not just whisked away for a few hours—for the rest of your life you are separated. This newborn baby counts on its mother for life and support, but that support has just disappeared and you are left in a maternity nursery for thirty days until an adoptive couple comes for you.
This baby learned from day one that when you cry, mommy does not come. You have been left and you are on your own. Strange people that do not smell like your mother are taking care of you. You cry and cry and to no avail; your mommy never comes. The strange couple that come to pick you up and take you to their home are not your people. Babies know this.
Babies feel this abandonment in their cells and the reptilian brain goes into overdrive to protect the baby from the terror she feels with the loss of her mommy. Babies communicate the terror—they cry and cry and finally go into shock to protect themselves from the fear and loss of their mothers. For us adoptees, that magnified sense of abandonment is always with us. It clouds everything in our lives. The fear of abandonment is behind every door for us and we can never make that fear go away.
We can lessen the terrorizing affects of abandonment by learning to recognize its subtle (and not so subtle) triggers in everyday life. Once we begin to realize that the little baby inside of us is reminding us of the terror we experienced at the beginning of our lives, we can learn to calm the anxiety and terror when it erupts. We can remind ourselves as the terror rises that we are safe and nothing bad is going to happen—that we really are okay right now and to understand where it comes from. I regularly talk to that little baby and comfort her in her times of terror, which can spring up at any time and any place.
So—abandonment is an eleven letter word—but that word affects so many of us in so many ways. Abandonment is an eleven letter word that grew from an eight letter word: adoption.
