Adoption and Unexpressed Rage

What if there was an unexpressed rage MRI? One that could look into the body and identify all the heavy, unmoving areas that fed the body with a steady drip of poison?

I have the feeling a lot of us would be surprised by the results. Also not surprised. 

What if in first grade there was a class on rage? What if you were not told to sit quietly at your desk but instead taught how to use words to express anger and rage and then given ways that did not involve setting the school or yourself on fire to physically release the feelings? There could be a bunch of six year olds beating pillows. You know how this would end, right? Tears, yes, maybe. After the tears? 

Laughter. 

Soft bodies.

Sleep.

It’s inevitable. Maybe not every single time, but you give a bunch of kids some pillows and the tools to express their feelings, the end result is going to be lightness and play because that’s the body’s natural state.  

I have no idea how to express rage in a way that doesn’t also involve fear and guilt/shame. 

I was taught to eat rage before I was taught to eat solid foods. 

Shhhhhhh. Hush. Everything’s alright.  

I was taught to eat rage before I was taught to drive.

Calm down. Behave. Control yourself. You are too wild, too loud. You are scaring us.

I was taught to eat rage before I was taught how to be married.

Hold on. I was never taught how to be married. 

 I was never taught how to express needs, and so along with rage, I worked at swallowing those things, too. 

 I’m fine. But how are you?  

It can seem like a smarter, more relational choice, to leave rage darkening in the pit of your guts. Why make a mess when everything can stay tidy and quiet? Why disrupt the waters when everyone seems to be floating along, happy?  

Why be you when you can be plastic and rigid? Why be you when you can be Barbi or Ken? Those guys don’t rage. They tan. And everyone loves them and they love themselves.

What if they made raging Barbies and Kens whose heads spun around and who kicked and screamed? What if they made Barbies and Kens who could fall to the floor and sob?

Even the original Barbi and Ken, Adam and Eve, were rage swallowers. Instead of popping off to the serpent or God, they packed down their fury and went into collapse, practically crawling out of the Garden of Eden. Come on. You guys were set up.  

Want to see rage? Go to a Red Sox/Yankee playoff game (when we can gather in groups), and watch what happens when the ump makes a bad call and the Yankees win. 

Give a child an ice cream and then, two licks in, take it away.

Go to jail and tell someone she is free, and then say you were kidding. 

Go home to your spouse and say you are having an affair.

Spend all day cooking a special meal for your family, and then drop it on the floor on the way to the table. 

Stand in line at Whole Foods and have someone cut in front of you. 

What’s behind all this rage? 

Heartbreak.  

Confusion. 

Life was not as you thought it would be. This is terrifying and disorienting. 

When you are born and what you need to survive, skin contact, mother milk, and a feeling of nervous system regulation, disappears, rage is an appropriate response. Rage causes your muscles to tense, your heart rate to accelerate, and adrenalin to course through your system.  

When rage is not met with understanding and appropriate mirroring and attunement, it can settle into chronic discomfort, into problems with sleep, problems with digestion. 

My dear, sweet, adoptee friends, do these things sound at all familiar to you?

In my eyes, adoption is a problem of unaddressed rage, and, under that, unaddressed heartbreak. 

Adoptees, from what I have noticed, as a whole are people whose stomachs and heads hurt.

We are now, collectively, raging against the machine. You can hear it on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. The gasket has blown and we suddenly have an audience: each other and, by proxy, those who adopted us, those who love us, those who disdain us, those who wish they were us. 

We are so pissed. 

What’s happening is that there is a lot of raging going on without the next step, finding our new truth. We keep telling the same story over and over: she abandoned me. I think I am garbage. My family did not mirror me. I never felt safe, but we do not have many examples of what to do next. What does an angry adoptee do when they have dropped the anger to reveal the heartbreak and then dropped the heartbreak to find peace and even humor? 

That’s what I love so much about my time with Pam Cordano. We rage in ways that feel productive (we get to say our feelings and feel heard by the other), but mostly we laugh. It’s such a relief. We both did it: we wrote books and told our stories. We felt buried wounds and now we are learning to create rather than react. This is an hourly, daily, weekly practice. It’s easy to fall back into old habits and beliefs. I am garbage, so I am going to feed my body garbage, stuff like ice cream and pizza that make it feel sick. I want to die. Nobody would love me if they really knew me. I don’t even love me. 

I see Pam, and when I see her, I see love and acceptance. I see her seeing me. When I saw my mother, I saw love, but, perhaps equally, I also saw worry and fear. I saw her seeing her concerns in me. My job was to make sure my mom was okay. This is also not an uncommon role for an adoptee to play. How can we address our own rage when we were adopted by people who had buried theirs? Or, how can we address our own rage when we were adopted by people who lived out their rage and used us as bandaids? 

What if being adopted was like getting your driver’s license and you had to learn certain skills before you were certified to drive yourself around the world? What if, for example, there were a series of classes: Rage 101, Heartbreak 101, Selfcare 101, Woundology 101, Grief 101? What if these classes all had a 102, a 103, a 104, and on? What if being adopted involved a lifetime education program both for those who were adopted and those who adopted? 

What if there was an understanding that relinquishment meant breakage and that follow-up care was mandatory? In baseball (back to the Red Sox!), when a batter gets hit in the head by a pitch, the team doesn’t just leave him lying there. They get him help! 

For a baby to lose their mother, the damage is even more violent and yet there is no medical team to support him or her. There isn’t even an ice pack! 

The natural responses? Collapse. Rage. 

 Both are hideous to experience without support. 

If you had to draw your rage, what would it look like? Where is it in your body? What would happen if you let it out? Who would suffer? What’s the worst thing that could happen if you expressed what was inside your body?

What’s the best?