On my post, Which Behaviors are Adoption-Related and Which are Not?, Lisa, our Guatemala Adoption blogger, left the following comment:

Sensitivity in humans varies of course, but I truly believe that the separation from their birth mother, and later from their foster mother (as in children from Guatemala) is a trauma our children never get over. Our love and consistency will help them learn how to live with it. Lisa S.

Many people do not want to hear this message. They do not want to acknowledge that our children experience loss when they are separated from their birthmothers. People want to believe that a newborn baby is too young to remember that he ever had another mother and that being moved to a new environment where not one sound or smell is familiar does not affect a child. That simply is not true.

I do not buy into the hopelessness that permeates the book Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier, but I do agree with the basic premise that all children who are placed for adoption experience some form of loss. This is doubly the case in situations like Lisa mentions where children are first separated from their birthmothers and then from their foster parents. Those losses need to be acknowledged and grieved.

I also do not believe that loss is to be avoided at all costs. I was never separated from my abusive birthmother, and I have had many issues to deal with in adulthood as a result. While I am sure I would have had issues of loss to work through if I had been placed into foster care (which definitely should have happened), those issues would pale in comparison to the issues I had to face by not being separated from my abusive mother. We have to make choices about the best interests of children. In many cases, a child is better off working through the loss involved in being separated from birthfamily than working through the issues he would face had he not been adopted.

Whether a child is better off being raised in a particular adoptive family or not, he still experiences loss, and he still needs to grieve that loss. I agree with Lisa that children do not "get over" those losses. Instead, they must work through them. I have experienced many losses in my life that ran just as deep as adoption loss. While I will always have residue from those losses, they no longer define or shape who I am. Anyone can heal from pain if he chooses to do so. However, before someone can heal from a loss, that loss needs to be recognized. When adoptive parents refuse to acknowledge that a child has experienced loss and pain from being separated from birth family, even as an infant, we make the process of healing that grief so much harder.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt