What if Trying to Explain the Effects of Motherloss to Nonadoptees is A Waste of Time?

I have a vision of adopted people as a mass trying to explain to non-adopted people why being adopted is so terribly complicated and often blindingly painful.

This is what I see: I see a whole flood of incredibly beautiful people repeatedly banging their head against a brick wall. I see these people throwing themselves against the wall, gnashing their teeth, crying, yelling, whispering, begging, holding out money and gifts. And then, over and over again, returning to smashing their heads against this unmoving, uhearing wall.

The wall is not bad or evil, it just doesn’t feel or see what’s going on—because it’s a wall.

I read a lot in search of ideas for how I can live wholeheartedly in a body that has been programmed by early-life trauma to tell me I am in nearly always trouble. Right now I am reading/listening to on Audible Love 2.0 and The Power of We: Awakening in the Relational Field. 

 This is a reoccurring thought I have about how to express to non-adoptees what it is like to be adopted as I read these books: I am spending so much energy banging my head against a wall! 

I believe we know we exist when we are born because we see ourselves in relation to the mother’s (the mother who created us) gaze, skin contact, voice, heartbeat, and energy field. Without the mother, I am nothing. Do you get this? What if before there can be an I there has to be a we? What if the I first blooms in the relational field of we?

And this is the crux of the issue, I believe. Those who kept their mothers do not know what it is like to not exist. They can’t even imagine it! The brain has not been created to know what it is like to exist without being born into the mother bubble. It’s like asking you to imagine living without a brain. You can’t!! 

And so people who lost their mothers are asking those who did not to be able to imagine something the brain can’t imagine unless it is a brain that was created through motherloss!

What does this mean for us a culture of adopted people? I believe it means we stop trying to explain ourselves to people who are not biologically equipped to understand. I believe it means we turn our energy onto believing and understanding ourselves. If we fully accept that our brains were changed when we lost our mothers, we don’t have to beat our heads against the wall trying to convince those who don’t get it. 

Instead we can just get to work and define what we actually need and work at fulfilling those needs. You need weekly therapy? Find a way to get it. You need skin contact and to be rocked nightly, ask your husband if he can strip and rock you nightly without trying to have sexual relations afterwards. If you say, But I need my husband to understand me perhaps you are saying something like But I need to go back in time and have my mother keep me. If you say, My husband would never do such a generous, nurturing act without the promise of intercourse afterwards then get a new husband. 

Would you behave differently towards your husband if 10000% you understood his brain just can’t understand motherloss? Would you be kinder to him? Would you be kinder to you? Would you create a community of motherloss people around you so that you could feel understood on demand?

It is not our job, I think, to get people to understand us. It is our job, I think, to understand ourselves and fall in love over and over and over again on the daily, with everything.