Loss and grieving (for adoptees and everybody else) Part 2 of 4
This post began as a paper given at the New Jersey Let’s Talk Adoption Conference on April 1, 2017 to a group of adoptive parents, adoptees, adoption social workers and others interested in adoption who had gathered as part of a day-long conference. As I explained in my first post in this series (and you are encouraged to take a look at part one if you haven’t already), the organizers were interested in a presentation on loss and how it figures into the experience of adoptees and this had become a deep interest of mine. I am a psychotherapist who treats adults who were adopted as children and I had noticed that certain kinds of losses, either adoption related (difficulty in reunion, or wanting to search and not finding, or the deaths of birth or adoptive family members) or other not necessarily adoption related losses (loss of a job, moving, being dropped as a friend, divorce, loss of an ideal such as difficulty in a marriage or other close relationship) were regularly among the most pressing issues bringing adoptees into therapy. I had also experienced in my own life a loss that stopped me short, and felt related to my adoption history, and that connection became an invitation to do some deep healing in my own therapy.
In this post I will be talking more about the classical conception of grief and mourning in psychotherapy, which comes from Freud, and then about some of the more contemporary modalities that draw on Freud’s concepts to help people resolve their grief when they are having trouble moving through it, and how that might apply to adults who were adopted as children and who are having difficulty moving through grief or loss.
Theories of Mourning and Facilitating the Process
Freud’s famous paper, “Mourning and melancholia” is the basis for many therapist’s conception of grief, loss, mourning and depression and rereading it I was shocked to see how much it speaks to the experience of unresolved adoption loss. Mourning, Freud contends, is a normal, and the work of mourning is to accept reality, withdraw our libido (desire, attachment), from what is lost so it becomes free for a new connection. “When the work of mourning is completed, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.” Contrast this with melancholia, or depression, or the state of stickiness in unresolved, ambiguous loss, in which the loss is of a more idealized kind, the object has perhaps not actually died but for whatever reason is no longer available as an object of love, or maybe you cannot see clearly what the loss is. This resonates for me with how we talk about loss in adoption, and how difficult it is to go through the “normal process” of grieving an adoption loss, especially when it happened at an age when you did not have words to understand what was going on.
In the gestalt therapy model that I practice, we see that there is a tendency to try to distract yourself from the suffering of really working with the loss and what it means in your life, but the person who is fully committed to their own experience
engages himself in the suffering, calls up the past, sees his present hopelessly frustrated; he cannot imagine what to do now that the bottom has fallen out of everything; the grief, confusion, and suffering are prolonged, for there is much to be destroyed and annihilated and much to be assimilated, and during this time he must not go about his unimportant business, deliberately suppressing the conflict. Finally, the mourning-labor is complete and the person is changed, he assumes a creative disinterest; at once new interests become dominant. (Gestalt Therapy, Perls Hefflerine, Goodman)
For Perls et al, the work of mourning is to separate and identify what needs to be taken in to the organism and what needs to be rejected, and to fully participate in both acts. Creative disinterest here is actually the ideal we are aiming for, to be in a place where you are able to act without being overly interested in a particular outcome, where the person who mourned is now fully present and ready to make new choices in their life that takes into account but are not determined by what they have lost and what they have suffered. The widow is neither determined to live alone nor determined to marry again immediately in reaction to the loss she has suffered, but is open to the possibilities . She is available, when the work of mourning is completed, to be fully in her life.
Later writers on grief and loss have gone along with Freud and Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, and stressed the need to complete the incomplete, and the work of mourning as an active doing. There are lots of modalities out there that help us take an active approach to grieving, but I’m most familiar with the Grief Recovery Handbook by John W. James and Russell Friedman. After situating grief work in a culture that does not know what to do with grief and mourning, the authors encourage the grieving person to figure out what they wish had been different, better or more. When you identify these things that are unfinished and that you wish were different, better, or more, you acknowledge and take action with apologies, forgiveness and significant emotional statements. Notably, these verbal statements in which the grief is processed and shared are delivered to your partner in the grief work, who could be a peer or a therapist, not to the lost person, who may not be accessible, or if they are still living and could hear these things, may not be able to truly listen or respond.
Practices that resonate with adoptees
In the Grief Recovery method, you deliver these statements in the form of letters that are read aloud, which is an interesting correlation to the practice of writing letters to the birth parents has been a common recommendation for children in closed adoptions as a way of helping children express and deal with their feelings.
Another practice from the Grief Recovery method also has resonance with a practice in our adoption community and that is the loss timeline, which in its full form reminds me of lifebooks. Here we create a kind of biography in the form of a time line with a focus on loss. The loss timeline takes your life, as long as it has been up unto this point, divides it in 4, and then you connect losses big and small with a little description to look at the patterns and notice which ones feel unfinished.
For adoptees, I suggest doing the loss timeline with adoption related losses above the line, and ones that feel unrelated below the line. This is also work we do in therapy, whether we draw out a loss timeline or not, we are uncovering the losses that feel incomplete and have difficult feelings attached to them and starting to work on what they need to be completed.
Grieving adoption-related losses
For members of the adoption triad, it is important to know that all three positions come with loss as an integral part of the mix, and of all three triad members it can be important to do the work of completing a relationship that “never was.” The biological tie between adoptee and birth family is a relationship that was supposed to be in some way, and both adoptee and birth parent are likely to feel incompleteness (see part 1 of this blog post, for more details on how a variety of writers have talked about adoption loss for adoptees).
For adoptive parents, depending on how they came to adoption, the losses of infertility or other difficulties that may have led to the decision to create a family in an alternative way may be incomplete, also the loss of the child that would have been born to them if they had been able to have a child biologically may be in the mix as incompleteness, as well as the fact of not being the biological parent of their adopted child.
In the Grief Recovery Handbook, the authors recommend that for adoptees and people who lost parents or caregivers early, it can be important to work with contemporary losses that are conscious first. It is difficult, though not impossible, to complete something that is not fully conscious or is pre-verbal, particularly when you are using mostly verbal means. Their theory is that by completing present-day losses you begin to form a template of completion that can help with the work on early loss, and that the lessons of the contemporary work can translate into the work that needs to be done with the past.
My experience as a therapist is actually that people work on the contemporary loss and the early loss at the same time, in a fluid back and forth or even simultaneous manner. They just might not be able to talk about the early loss, at least at first, because it might come from a time that is before words or because something about it was traumatic and thus stored in a fragmented or non-verbal fashion.
The losses that really stick us to the wall and drive us to think about getting the support of a therapist or another kind of professional are the losses that connect in some deep way to these early losses, through the emotions, through body feelings, maybe through using the same thought patterns to deal with them. These habits of movement, sensation, emotion, thought are then called up ever more strongly when we are confronted with a contemporary event that is linked to the early experience as it is stored in us and it is these patterns that are living in both past and present and make up our own personal time machine that we can then explore with the help of a therapist who can help us notice in those patterns what is useful to us now, and what is not or even is hurting us.
As human beings alive in the world we are pretty good at getting what we need, otherwise we would not be alive without the very basics of air, water, food, shelter, and we can become equally good at letting go. With loss, we learn how to take what is nourishing from what is available and then let go when it is no longer available for us, so that we do not live stuck with something that is not there anymore. It’s a heroic task, actually, that I think all of us are called to wrestle with at one time or another.
Adoptees have this blueprint of loss that can feel cellular and primal, that can become so activated when there is a contemporary loss, especially one that feels linked to themes like the loss of an important or primary attachment figure, the loss of home and sanctuary, the loss of identity. The adaptation is to learn to live with it, not whether or not to get in there and struggle with it, until these current-life losses offer the opportunity to the being who, adult or not, has enough self-support and support around them to be able to engage. As adults, losses offer adoptees that potential path in. Sweet and bitter.
In the next post in this series, I will talk about the results of a survey I did for the paper to look at adult adoptees experiences of loss and how that might connect, or not, to having joined their families by adoption.
