My reaction was visceral.  I adore Anne Heffron and am very fond of Pam Cordano.  As I have navigated ,”all things adoption,” they have been my spirit animals.  Nancy Verrier has been my Dali Lama.  When I read Anne and Pam’s blog post on Debunking the Primal Wound, I was shocked.  This was personal.  They were taking away something that had saved me.  They were taking something that had provided me and many others with an understanding of something we inherently, WERE.  What exactly was the point here?  

I read the blog post several times.  I read the revised version a couple of times, too.  I went back and read how Nancy Verrier defined the term.  I looked up the various definitions of primal and the various definitions of wound.  I talked to Anne about it.  Of course, she told me to write about it, but I am still not exactly sure what she/they were trying to say.  I asked if anyone else had commented about it and Anne answered, “Not really.”  So maybe, just maybe, this is just me, but I don’t think so.

It seems to me, this is really about language, framework, and coping.  When Anne and I talked about it, she said she wrote it to take back her own power. She did not want to be labeled as wounded by a concept outlined by an individual who is not an adoptee.  This wasn’t an attack on Verrier, but a critical look at who was wounded, who did the wounding and how we rely and behave in the context of the story of the wound.  Verrier’s theory has been criticized for not being empirical.  While that is true, I have never ever met an adoptee who has  read the book and doesn’t feel something very deeply.  It’s a theory, right?  Since there isn’t too much research on adoptees, my observation is equally anecdotal, but in a world of adoptee generalities and duplicities, aren’t we a curiously similar lot of anecdotes?  

My first thought on Anne’s piece was, “maybe she thinks the term is wrong.”  In my mind, the word “wound,” might be laden with a certain kind of judgement.  Something happened to me.  Wound may be perceived as a victimization, and I think that is part of Anne’s premise.  The thing is, something definitely happened here.  What do we call it if not a primal wound?  

What factually happened to us is that we were biologically, genetically and culturally disconnected from our birth mothers very close to the time of our birth.  An emotional charge comes from what I lovingly call, “The Puppy Thing.”  We don’t take sentient baby animals from their mothers at birth.  If you do, they die.  If there is food and shelter, they may not die, but they become unable to cope and connect.  You keep a puppy with the mama so she can care for it and teach it how to live with others.  It learns how to play and negotiate feeding, etc.. if  you have ever had a puppy, you know that even when a pup is properly whelped, the first night in the home of new humans is distraught with wailing until the puppy connects with said humans.  It is heartbreaking.  Why, oh why, would this situation be any different with humans?  Something definitely happened here.

Adoptees are disconnected from instinct, as is the birth mother.  Webster’s defines instinct as, “ a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason.”  So, if an unalterable response is altered, are we wounded?  Maybe the word is wrong.  Maybe we should just leave “primal,” and “wound,” out of it.  Maybe we should simply stick to the facts.  There was a separation.  A physical separation.  Contextually, this separation came at a time when instinctual behavior happens.  Is it trauma?  Something definitely happened here.  There was a change and it wasn’t managed.

Nigel Nicholson, a professor of organizational behavior at the London School of business, uses evolutionary psychology and applies it to business behavior, most specifically change  management.  One of his postulates is that humans participate in something he calls, “classification before calculation.”  Humans order things before making decisions.  I’d like to simplify this and call it what I think it is - sense making.  Our instinct was interrupted and we need to make sense of it.

When we are born and are taken away from our mother, our instincts are challenged, our change isn’t managed, and we develop a pattern of trying to make sense of it in order to survive.  Personally, I think The Primal Wound, and Nancy Verrier, provide us with a Framework of understanding.  As adoptees, we have unconscious memories, indescribable feelings, and gut knowledge that something doesn’t feel quite right.  We don’t have a way to label, understand or know what all of this is.  We can’t make sense of our own lives.  Something definitely happened here.   The Primal Wound points this out.  It is our table of contents.  We all start, as Dickens wrote, “I am born.”  But what happened?  

For adoptees, our view of the world is structured differently.  We don’t fit into the normal family story.  For those of us (and others) born in the 50’s through the 70’s, our lives were shrouded in secrecy that was supposed to be normal.  Something happened here, but you can’t talk about it, you can’t even know about it, and you are more than encouraged to be grateful about it.  When Anne and Pam suggest confronting the concept of the primal wound, I feel my framework being challenged.  After years of not knowing a framework, then finding the Primal Wound, I feel threatened.  I don’t think that is their intent, but that was my feeling.

One of the things I like best about Anne and Pam is that they truly ask adoptees to look at things in non-traditional ways.  They are all about healing.  Let’s face it, many adult adoptees are mad.  Angry, mad, bitter and sad.  We have valid reasons.  We have a little community where it is ok to bang our drum, recognize the failures in the system, complain about our lives of confusion, secrecy and otherness.   This is a fantastic and supportive community, and it is heavy.  Heavy with people saying, “hey, hey, hey, this horrible thing made me broken,” while others support with a chorus of, “me too!”  There is nothing wrong with a group of people who’s common trauma draws them together for support.  There is, however, a great difference between a banging drum and an improvising rhythm section.  Discord and harmony aren’t far apart.  We could be dancing some of the time, not marching all of the time.  I think Pam and Anne want us to drop the crutches we picked up from the primal wound.  

Marianne Williamson has said, “remember the crucifixtion, but don’t dwell on it.”  I think of it as a refreshing way to accept that things haven’t been perfect, but we have to keep going on, recognizing that something definitely happened here.  Yes, this interruption happened, but that isn’t the only thing that happened to us.  Like everyone else on the planet, life happened to us too.  Adoption is truly part of us, but it isn’t all we are.  We will always be adopted, it is a stasis we are in.  In order to move ahead, we can’t dwell on all of it.  If we do, perhaps we should do it in a different, unwounded way.  

So, how do we understand this stasis with acceptance and understanding?  There really isn’t a road map.  There is a relative dearth of research on, for lack of a better term, “adoptioness.”  That’s probably because there really aren’t that many of us.  In the US, 2% of the population is adopted.  A similar percentage of people are born with cervical ribs.  We are as common as a relatively rare condition.  There is no cure for adoption, nor is there a “cure,” for cervical ribs.  They are both congenital.  The ribs and the symptoms they cause can be treated.  Do we have specific adoption treatment? Kind of, but not really.  

A study at Columbia in 2013 estimates that each of us knows about 600 people.  If 2% of the population is adopted and if both of those figures are true, each of us knows about 12 adoptees.  Adoptees may know more because we have sought each other out, are in families with other adoptees, or have met each other along the way.  That’s a critical mass.  It’s not a crowd, but if I have twelve friends with a common characteristic that effects their life, I would like to know more about it so I can understand them and interact with them in a way that is contextual with their needs.  I don’t want to offer the alcoholic a drink.  I don’t want to offer the addict drugs.  Adoptees are silently out there, are frequently misunderstood and we are searching.  We search for original families, understanding, support and truth.  We search for a safe place to put our, “mad.”  There is no one thing that will provide the palliative care that we need.  How do we give ourselves the best life possible while we navigate the complex circumstance we are in?  Something definitely happened here.  Society may not realize that something happened.  We will get no elixir.  We will be in charge of our reaction.  

Bessel Van Der Kolk, in discussing trauma therapy, suggests that therapy won’t work if our brain continues to live in the past.  Dani Shapiro, (in her memoir, Inheritance), just before meeting her biological father, visits an accupuncturist who reminds her of life’s three spiritual questions. Who am I? Why am I here?  How will I live?  If I can take the liberty of combining rudimentary knowledge of trauma therapy, and spiritual inquisition, I conclude that knowing what we know, the question of of how we live is the one that gives us the most freedom to control our own narrative and get beyond the Primal Wound, or the Interrupted Instinct, or however we want to label the Something that Definitely Happened here.  

Adoptees need other mental models to understand our stasis.  We need to embrace the ambiguity of what we are.