The Primal Wound Reexamined (Take Two)-- written with Pam Cordano

Panache Desai has pretty much been screaming his way through his morning Call to Calm pre-meditation talks the last couple of days because he’s so excited about his revelation: all the people who come to him for advice have one thing in common: a fundamental belief that they are powerless to fix something wrong with a parent. 

He asked us to think back to when we were young and to remember a time with either our mother or father where we had the terrible understanding that we were powerless. (I’m not doing the greatest job of summing up his teachings, but I’m getting across the point I want to make.) I was listening and thinking, “Oh, brother, yet again I’m on the outside looking in because my moment of powerlessness happened when I was born and separated from my mother.” You know, the adoptee “primal wound” story of This is when my life and I fell apart. 

Later in the day I was trying to convince the chickens to take pieces of collard greens from my hand when it hit me: my narrative of the trauma I experienced as a relinquished child was only the first event that made me feel powerless: I also felt powerless when I saw that my mother needed me to make her happy and I didn’t know how to do this.

Just last week I tried to quit Spirit Hill Farm because I felt overwhelmed by the thought that this place has unending needs and that I am not equal to the task. I felt angry at Spirit Hill (mind you, this is a place, not even a person!). I felt small, worthless, sad, lost. I am even trying to make two and a half acres of land happy!! Luckily, the woman I report to is smart and kind and she brought me back to Earth (You’re doing a great job, Anne. You don’t have to give 150% every day to prove your worth.)

Uh. Yes, I do. My sense of self-worth is so tightly tied to what I do and what I produce that just a few hours of feeling non-productive can put me in a deep funk where I feel worthless and afraid of becoming homeless and then wasting away to nothing. If I am not making someone’s life better then what is my justification for using breath that someone else might need? 

I first read The Primal Wound when I had dropped out of college for the second time, and it felt like medicine. This is why I am such a mess! I have a wound! I have been building on that narrative ever since. I am different because I have a primal wound. I will never be like you because I have a primal wound. You will never understand me because I have a primal wound. There is nothing I can do about this primal wound because it happened to me when I was born. The primal wound is like an essential organ deep in your abdomen: you are born with it and you can’t just cut it out. It is part of you.

I wrote a whole book on the repercussions of living with the primal wound. One Amazon reviewer called me Eeyore. I assumed she was not an adoptee, because adoptees generally understand the primal wound and give each other a lot of space. We are wound buddies. We are all damaged. Almost all the other reviews of You Don’t Look Adopted are positive. The book is raw, people say. They say I write what many other adopted people feel but don’t know how to articulate. I pretty much nailed the languaging of what it is like to walk around with a wound.

I was not as happy as I thought I might be after writing the book. I didn’t walk around with a lift in my step: I did it! I realized my dream and wrote a book! Instead, I slept on the floor for a while. I scraped around for quarters so I could buy some tortillas. I didn’t work much because I was too wounded. I walked for hours and hours and hours, trying to feel okay, trying to find a way into a life that felt essential and energetic and like, well, me, whoever that was. 

Buying into the wound narrative is dangerous. Even life threatening. Reading The Primal Wound felt empowering because I felt seen, but the root issue is that the book says the wound is mine, and I want to say it is not.

I am adopted, but I am not wounded, primally.

Writing that last sentence feels like walking out of a prison cell that I thought was locked.

When Pam Cordano went to Cambodia and met a schoolful of children orphaned by the atrocities in that country, she saw hope in their eyes, confidence, excitement, and she was surprised. Why was their attitude so different from the attitude of the orphans, the adoptees here in the U.S. and England and other countries? (I know I am speaking in generalities and that there are so many exceptions, but I am also arguing that I feel confident in my generalities.)

What Pam saw was that these orphans had been taken into families and supported, but these children had kept their names, their stories, their pasts—even though the pasts involved terrible trauma. What she saw was that these children were using their stories to catapult themselves into futures they felt free to dream for themselves because they weren’t tied to the stories that were created when there were brought into a family and told they were now this person, the son/daughter of this mother, this father. The children’s brains didn’t have to spend any energy wondering about their secret past because there wasn’t one.

The problem I have with being adopted is that the story I told myself has turned into a kind of prison, a tension in the body that keeps me in fight or flight: When I was born my mother was not able to keep me, and so I was sold to a couple who could not make a baby of their own. A more painful version of this story is: I was a mistake and my mother didn’t want me but some other people wanted a baby and because they had red hair in the family line, they were given me. The most painful version is really short: I am a mistake.

I told myself these stories because there was a gap in the story I got from my parents (We adopted you when you were ten weeks old and now you are our daughter.) Even if my parents had known all the details of my conception and my birth, if I am taken into a family and told I am their daughter now, really, really, really, that is a lie, and part of my brain has to always be negotiating with life in terms of what is actual truth. My address for example: sometimes I forget it, and I believe it’s because part of my brain feels like the numbers that are on my house are a story that could be changed at any moment by anyone. There are no rules for truth when you are adopted. The truth is water and it is used in ways that serve whoever needs to construct the story.

The truth is water because someone was wounded and needed me to help mend their wound.

What if, gentle reader, the original primal wound is not mine, for I was not the one who needed a hole to be filled. I needed to be loved and kept alive, yes, but that did not involve trickery with language. I needed to look into someone’s eyes and for their gaze to hold mine with adoration until I looked away. I needed someone to show up consistently even when I acted like a baby who had experienced the trauma of losing everything she knew.

My mother once said, sobbing, “You are my child, mine,” when there was a report on the news about a birth mother fighting for and regaining custody of her child from the adoptive parents. I saw that the foundation of my mother was perhaps even more unstable than mine, and that my job was to prove to her that her narrative (you are my child, mine) was true so she would stay alive and by proxy, so would I.

I have details I add to these stories: my mother never touched me after I was born. I lay alone and was not held often in the ten weeks before I went to my new parents. I tell myself I cried. I tell myself I was devastated as a newborn. I tell myself I was inconsolable. I feel these things in my body. I’m not sure if I tell myself these things because I feel them as true in my body, or if I feel these things because I tell myself these details.

I don’t have any proof that I cried, that I wasn’t held. I don’t know where I was, and so there is no one to fill in the blanks for me. Because my brain likes to look for the negative, I don’t tell myself that I was with loving people for the ten weeks who never put me down, who sang to me, who crawled into a soft shell and slept with me in the warmth of their shelter. 

I can make myself cry pretty much at will just by thinking how sad I was as an infant, and Nancy Verrier’s primal wound sealed the deal. It gave my negativity bias something to hang on that locked the wound in me instead of seeing the larger picture: I was adopted to make a woman, a couple, happy, and I failed. 

I hate to think about my mother’s eyes because more than anything I wanted to make her happy, more than anything I wanted to see the desolate distraction leave her blue eyes. The thought of my mother’s eyes brings me straight to desolation: I did not save her. 

Meeting Pam Cordano was a game changer. We do this funny thing together where we both respect and see each other’s fragility and also, at the same time, we both believe in our own and each other’s incredible strength. In other words, we can be ourselves with each other. When we are adopted we often feel we have to do Herculean tasks to earn our place at the table. With Pam, I can be myself in a way I hadn’t been able to before because I needed to be mirrored. I needed to see myself being myself. Pam tells me I make her happy, and she sure makes me happy. That’s how babies attach and grow. I get to grow up with Pam. This kind of friendship, I see now, is a key element in the unmarked forest where adoptees learn to grow into themselves—and there are no Herculean tasks required!  

What if the most dangerous wound adoptees carry is from the Herculean effort they have to make to leapfrog from one world to another where the focus goes from I am a baby developing into myself to who do you need me to be?, for when you look into your mother’s eyes and see she cannot give you what you most need: an accurate and loving mirroring of yourself, you are either going to adapt or die. 

What if the trauma of losing your mother at birth is a neurological catastrophe that can be handled? What if it is not a wound but a situation that becomes a wound when it is not tended properly by the truly wounded? What if there were protocols set in place for dealing with mother/child separation? First of all, the neurological disaster would have to be recognized (i.e. it would be accepted as common knowledge that when you separate a child and a mother, the damage to the brain and nervous system of both is life-threatening if not addressed). Secondly, this would not be one of those if non-adoptees believed it kinds of things. The existence of the trauma would be seen as a law of nature. (For example: if you drop a china plate from a great height, the plate will shatter.)

If I take the primal wound narrative out of my body, I am someone who can be empowered because I was not disempowered at birth. This mean, actually, that I am empowered.

I am a person, not a situation, not a problem, not a lack. If I see the primal wound as the moment I realized I could not save my mother, I can discharge that story, see it for what it is—a story, and begin to empower myself. If I no longer have to wrap my sense of well-being and safety around the childish belief that I will die if my mother (even if she is dead) is not happy, then I can focus on things I can affect—my own happiness.

I am going to walk around with this idea that I was not nearly mortally wounded when I was born. I am going to see what I do when I take the power back that I gave to my mother when I put her happiness above my own. Adoption is something that happened to me. It is not who I am.

So many people suffered because I was adopted. My parents suffered because they felt not good enough, not “parental” enough as their kids struggled in ways the kids of their friends did not. My first mother told her children once that if someone named Anne called and said I was her daughter that I was lying and to refuse the call. They did not question her. I don’t think families do well with lies drifting about the house. First moms have groups to help them feel seen and supported. First moms commit suicide. 

My mother’s wounds are not mine. And here, in this doorway of an idea, freedom exists. 

 I do not have to fix my mother (even now, still, after she is dead).

I do not have to do anything Herculean.

I can be myself.

It’s like I’m a seed, not even a person yet, and it will take willpower and deep curiosity for me to grow into myself, to find out who I am when I am not a band-aid for someone else’s wound.

I am working with Robyn Gobbel on a 6-part webinar addressing the idea of the story beneath the story when it comes to adoption. We are inviting adopted people, adoptive parents, and first/birth moms to participate because we both believe the more those in the triad live their own truths, the less they will need terms such as primal wound. The webinar will be conference style, so people will not see each other, but we will be holding space for each other’s presence, for it is in community where we find empowerment, instead of huddling in our separate corners, licking our wounds, wondering where things went so wrong.

Implicit memory is strange—you get feelings but no specific images to remember. This is what I think I carry in my body: twice the fabric of being in connection between mothers tore: once when I was separated from the first and again when the second wasn’t able to show up in a fully realized way that made me feel safe and seen. I then carried the fundamental belief of I am not wanted , and this put a gap between me and the rest of the world.

But the thing is, this situation isn’t a wound: it’s a misunderstanding of the world and a subsequent neurological wiring that sets my brain up to look for proof all the days of my life that I am not wanted. When you put on crazy glasses, you see crazy.

I am not wounded. I am not wounded. I am not wounded.

I just have a lot of feelings to process. And if the people around me, the mothers, the fathers, friends, family, also processed theirs, I believe life as we see it would get a lot lighter and more delightful, and the miracles that are called presence and connection would begin to bloom.

In the end, adoptive parents may think they benefit if their child is wounded, for then the parent is needed and can focus on a wound in another instead of the one in themselves.

What if none of us is wounded? What if all we need to do is find and live the truth of who we are, and, from that place of self-love, connect deeply with others and make wonderful things happen.