Protecting others

October 7th 2023. 52 years old

My relinquishment wound is so huge that it feels like The Void.

When I’m in touch with it (not all the time) I can sense that other people can sense it. It’s terrifying, depressing, hungry, raw and deeply magnetic. And so I am careful not to pull back the curtains on it. It is a place of carnage and utter horror.

Yet I know that this place has so much potential. If a tiny bit of grit in an oyster shell can produce a pearl, imagine what the most monstrous thing that can happen to a human without actual killing them (mostly) can produce: enormous, creative, meaningful, colourful and powerful things. (I say ‘mostly’ because the relinquishment trauma can get to a lot of people in the end – look at the suicide and death by addiction rate in *adoptees).

When I have, in later life, attempted to talk to my adopted mother about the depth of this feeling (only because another adopted family member attempted suicide for the second time in their life and I was trying to explain possible triggers), there was a sense of blank incomprehension and then horror. I felt cruel to even mention it to this, my primary caregiver, now in her eighties, even though I attempted to talk gently and with rational reference to academic studies. Yet, just to be clear; I was not the adult originally making the decision to adopt in this relationship! The emotional legacy of adoption for the adoptee can be particularly cruel since our physical survival has felt dependent on ‘fitting in’ (adaption). Therefore, as I attempted to offer the aforementioned explanation to my own adopted mother my adaption process had already kicked in; no surprise, then, the rational tone of voice whilst I put my own feelings (and need to be heard and held) in a tightly locked box.

I honestly feel, sometimes, that to attempt to MAKE my mother see the emotional and psychological truth of adoption, even a little bit, is akin to torturing a Nazi War Criminal with images of what they did to others whilst living in delusion and fear during the Third Reich! It feels that big. It is that big.

The void IS BIG. The Primal Wound that connects me to it is massive because its creation violated the laws of nature: newborns need their own kind or they will die. Imagine dying and yet living. I think the Catholics call that Purgatory. Maybe that’s why I have nightmares and night terrors of unspeakable violence even though I have never watched horror films and hate war films.

*e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3784288/