The Adoption Journey: A Unique Kind of Loss
Adoption is a lifelong journey. The adoption process can be cumbersome, and it is common for adoptive parents to experience feelings of helplessness, grief and loss, even after a successful adoption completion. There are several available resources and strategies to help your family during this transitional time.
After years of engaging in the adoption process, your family is finally complete. You love your adopted child and are thrilled to be her legal parent, yet you continue to experience moments of incredible sadness and grief. These feelings are completely normal for adoptive parents to experience. A hidden secret of adoption is that some adoptive parents still grieve the child they never had -- the child they had hoped to give birth to. These feelings of grief can catch parents by surprise and often fill them with guilt. Many adoptive parents feel shame and guilt in the face of this grief. Adoptive parents often describe feeling disloyal to their much-loved, adopted child. You may always feel the loss of experiencing pregnancy or having a genetic connection to your child, but it need not be overwhelming.
Carole LieberWilkins, a therapist specializing in adoption and family building options, summed it up well:
“The hardest thing about reproductive loss is saying goodbye to someone we never said hello to. Our sadness and depression over the loss of our genetic offspring is grief. But unlike the grief we feel when a real person dies, infertility grief means saying goodbye to someone who was never really here. When there is an actual death, we have ritual around it. We have funerals and wakes, or we sit Shiva, and make social calls. We go to church or temple, and often light candles. People bring casseroles to our homes and say, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’
But when we are told that we need genetics from someone else in order to conceive, when we need to confront that our child may not look like us, be like us, laugh like our grandparent, or have our partner’s intelligence, no one brings us a casserole and no one says they are sorry for our loss. There is no name to give to a person who died, even though we feel exactly like a real person has passed. That’s because the person has been so real to us for so long, even if we didn’t realize it.”
Parents may also be uncertain about their identities and roles in their adopted child's life. Adoptive parents may not feel like "real" parents or like they are entitled to be parents. These identity issues may change over time due to various factors, such as formal changes to contact arrangements between adoptive and birth families or the adopted child’s wishes. These feelings can also come up during the search and reunion process when adopted people and birth parents or other birth relatives decide to search and/or reconnect. Adoption reunion registries, both private and State-operated, are a source of information when searching for birth relatives. No matter when or how the feelings emerge, they are a normal part of the grieving process and do not reflect your love for your adopted child.
Some adoptive parents may find comfort in sharing their experiences with others in the same position. Adoption support groups are also a great resource to help you connect with other parents who are going through the same transition. Many adoptive parents find lifelong friendships through these types of groups. If you would like support but would prefer a less public option, adoption-competent therapists are a great resource to help you and your family process feelings related to the adoption experience. These therapists receive specialized, advanced training in issues that impact adoptive parents and their children. Above all, know that you are not alone in your journey. BenefitBump’s Care Navigators are available to listen and provide referrals and resources to support you through all of the ups and downs of adoption and parenthood.
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