Why Adoption is Traumatizing Even At Birth

were you adopted i'm a psychotherapist and i specialize in working with all adolescents and yet by chance about a quarter of my clients were adopted at birth with their parents there right away to pick them up why is this when i meet these families almost never is the adoption considered a contributing factor to what they're struggling with right now and the reason they're coming to therapy what i find interesting is why does this keep happening over and over again and why were so many kids who are adopted coming to see me for therapy as teenagers so because so many of my clients were adopted i've been doing as much research as i can i was talking to lisa stern one of the pediatricians here in santa monica and she had an interesting theory her and i share quite a few clients and by chance again quite a few of them were adopted and she said you really have to put yourself in the position of a mother who's pregnant and know she's going to give her baby up for adoption if you consider that in other cases the mom is so excited is reading to the baby is playing with the baby already there's maybe some brothers and some sisters who are um playing with it and watching it kick and they're so excited and everything's great but when you know you're going to give the baby up for adoption you try not to bond to it and there are also many chances of domestic abuse so many of them are very poor they do not have good prenatal care they're very stressed out when you are created in the womb that's full of cortisol and full of stress that gets innately embedded inside of you and so that's sort of one of the things we consider when we see teenagers or even children coming to therapy later in life but our instinct is to say but why why would this have anything to do with adoption we were the first people to hold the hold them the second they were born it shouldn't matter the second theory i have comes from the book primal wound primal wound is by far the best book and the best resource i've found for families who for parents who adopted their children as well as the child who you probably have to be about a teenage teenage or older to be able to read it and understand it one of the theories she talks about is when a baby is created in the mother's womb there's a pla there are hormones shared there are the baby can hear its mom's voice there are um it's used to its heartbeat and then when it's born it's separated and it's given to another mother who is extremely excited and very in love with it however this baby doesn't understand that they only know that the hormones and the extreme dose of oxytocin they shared with the birth mother has been broken that bond is gone worth mentioning here that throughout this whole video i'm usually referring to babies who were adopted at birth and their birth families were there immediately to pick them up there it goes without saying and i think pop culture is much more understanding of kids who were adopted at orphanages at two years old five years old 10 years old that they're going to be much more traumatized but i think we miss how traumatic it can be for these babies who were adopted at birth in a different way okay so the third theory i want to talk about is one that's adolescent specific when you get to the phase of adolescent development it's ages 13 to 24 based on brain development your brain finishes at 24. so specifically when you're in that phase it's healthy for teenagers to be somewhat angry with their parents and push against their parents and want to rebel and go do things that they consider to be more independent that's healthy but what we see many times with these adopted children is they have this disdain and very deep-seated hate for their adoptive parents and even the clients that i see the kids in my office will say to me i hate my mom so much and i don't know why she didn't do anything really like logically i can see there's no reason for me to be angry with her but i'm just so angry and i hate that sometimes i express it the guys will say i hate that i get so angry at my dad i punch holes in the wall he really didn't do anything i don't know why but i'm just so angry according to the book primal wound she writes all about this phenomenon and says that it's likely to be unconscious anger that's actually towards the birth parents for leaving them for abandoning them for leaving them with so many unanswered questions the hate belongs on that parent but since that to so many kids doesn't make any sense maybe the adoption's been talked about but they've never thought of it as something traumatic um they hate their real parents and the parent is like i don't understand i've gone wrong somewhere they are so angry at we me i can tell that they're in pain i want to do something but i don't know what i don't know what's wrong that brings me to another book that i found that is actually my favorite parenting book ever it's called parenting in the eye of the storm and it's specifically for parenting teenagers that were adopted but even if your kids weren't adopted i highly recommend this book just skip the adoption part she gives an example or a metaphor of the baby sea turtles a lot of people see these turtles and think oh let's save them they're going to get eaten or something bad's going to happen so they pick them up and they carry them to the ocean and put them in now when these sea turtles have been rescued they're actually much more likely to not survive because they get to the ocean and they're not prepared they needed that time and that struggling to crawl across the sand and get stronger that struggling makes them strong enough to be able to swim when they get there same thing with teenagers and same thing with adopted teenagers one of the recommendations i would have is to educate yourself read these books read whatever you can find maybe talk to another therapist or talk to somebody who knows things about adoption trauma educate yourself so that you know what's going on you know that this is coming from a place of hurt not a place of wanting to just plain destroy you and hurt you and it's not personal towards you as the parent you want to arm yourself so that you're able to contain your child's anguish to contain how sad they are how angry they are and listen to them and empathize with them and help them understand what might be going on so that these unconscious struggles they're having can be made conscious and they can grieve the process of losing their biological parents that's the that's a lot of the goal with this type of therapy and this type of struggles that the kids are going through as their parents you can't take this away to rescue them is not going to help it will make it worse you need to try to set appropriate boundaries while being as empathetic as you can to what their actual situation is that wraps up this video through all of my research with reading other books and articles and talking with other professionals these are the top three theories i've been able to find that really resonate with my clients in specific if any of these stories seem to bring up anything in your family or make you realize anything leave me a comment below and let's start a conversation i'm elizabeth kromhout a licensed psychotherapist and adolescent specialist i put out videos weekly for mental health tips if you are interested and you found this video useful please be sure and subscribe and hit the notification bell as always thanks for watching and i'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Elizabeth Kromhout

Views: 34,355

Keywords: adoption, adoption trauma symptoms, adopton trauma, depression, mental health, adolescent mental health, la teen therapist, elizabeth kromhout

Id: 3zvsLtZYUk4

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2019