03.10.10
Karl Rove, LDA
Karl Rove, LDA:
http://familypreservation.blogspot.com/2010/03/karl-rove-was-adopted.html
12.20.09
Adoptees who are found… and told they are adopted
Adult adoptees are all over the map when it comes to search and reunion. Some adoptees begin the process of search as children, gathering what facts they may have at hand and actively imagining an eventual meeting with their first parents. Other adoptees never feel the need to search. Some toggle between the desire to search and feelings of ambivalence. And then there are adult adoptees who are found.
The difference between searching and being found can be profound. “Ithaka” by Sarah Saffian and “The Mistress’ Daughter” by A. M. Homes, reunion memoirs by adult adoptees who had not decided to search when they were found by their first mothers, map this terrain. While Saffian and her first mother eventually develop a positive relationship and Homes does not, their descriptions of their emotions and psychological states as they process being found are very similar. Lingering feelings of loss of control and subsequent attempts to regain control through the pace of reunion. Lack of trust and communication. Feelings of mixed loyalty. Identity shift similar to Late Discovery.
Since the inception of the Late Discovery Email list in 1999, I’ve been contacted by first mothers who searched and found their adult children and discovered that they had not been told they were adopted. All of the complicated dynamics of contact are at play in these situations, overlain by the discovery.
We have a cliché in our culture, “Don’t kill the messenger”, which, if anything, reveals a profound, if unconscious, desire to do just that, to punish the bearer of traumatic information. A first parent who informs an adult adoptee that they are adopted risks becoming forever linked with the trauma of discovery.
There are no easy answers to the dilemma of search, contact and reunion. Whether initiated by adoptees or parents, reunions are relationships without maps. The dilemma of telling LDA’s that they are adopted is complicated as well. From an ethical standpoint, adoptees should be told, but ethical frameworks seldom account for the vagaries of human emotion.
It is my opinion that first parents who find and inform their reunited adult children that they are adopted have given them the gift of truth.
I suppose I’m a pragmatist at heart. If I have a toothache, I go to the dentist. If I develop a squint, I get a new prescription for my eyeglasses. And so, when I found myself in a state of chronic depression two years after I discovered I was adopted, I sought help through medicine and therapy.
Eventually I started posting stuff on the web about LDAs and founded the Late Discovery Email List. LDA’s began to contact me since I was one of the few resources available. Some had come to their own terms about what had happened to them and just wanted to reach out to another like them. Others were deeply traumatized; depressed, anxious and troubled.
I believe in the power of peer support groups, in the trust and compassion built from shared experience, but I also believe that some things we deal with need individual care and attention. I also know that I’m unqualified to offer psychiatric or psychological evaluations or treatment.
Occassionally I have suggested therapy to some of the LDAs that have contacted me. My suggestion is not authoritative, but based on my own life experience.
What’s interesting to me is that recently some folks on the LDA list have shared about their, mostly, negative experienes in therapy. A lot of their bad experiences stem from a general lack of understanding about LDA, or general adoption, issues on the therapists’ part.
I had thought at one time of posting a list of therapists I felt were sensitive to LDA issues on the Late Discovery website, but then quickly came to the conclusion that I had no criteria by which to judge their suitabilty. I had brief liabilty nightmare fantasies of being haunted by LDAs, “you said they were good, now look at me! I’m more messed up than ever!”
I suppose the bottom line for me is that therapy is more art than science. How many artists do you really like? How many would you trust with your psyche?
