Adoption in Australia

GROUND ZERO - TRAUMA

0.1 Every Adoption Starts with Trauma.jpg

TOPIC 0.1 | Every Adoption Starts with Trauma

Trauma in Adoption

Sara-Jayne King speaks to psychotherapist Paul Sunderland about the psychological impact of adoption on adopted people.

Adoption is trauma and creates a wound that is stored in the limbic 'emotional' brain (Figure 1) says psychotherapist Paul Sunderland

Sunderland says in his work as an addictions counsellor he has seen that adoptees are overrepresented in addiction counselling.

Play the Mp3 emedded below to listen to King's conversation with Paul Sunderland on the link between adoption and addiction. Length 33 mins

Fiigure 1.

The limbic system is a collection of structures involved in processing emotion and memory, including the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus. The limbic system is located within the cerebrum of the brain, immediately below the temporal lobes, and buried under the cerebral cortex

It's time to reframe traditional narratives around adoption as being a 'win-win' for everyone in the adoption triad and instead acknowledge the reality that adoption is, for many adopted people, a very real trauma.

So says Cape Talk host and adult adoptee Sara-Jayne King who shared her own experience of being adopted.

On Weekend Breakfast, King was joined by psychotherapist and addictions counsellor Paul Sunderland who agrees unequivocally that adoption is trauma.

Sunderland says the separation between mother and baby creates a wound so deep that it feels 'life-threatening and catastrophic' to the adoptee.

He says his interest in the 'pre-verbal trauma' and relinquishment wound began several years ago when he began to notice that adopted people were overrepresented in addiction treatment facilities.

The first problem, says Sunderland, is that the word 'adoption' does not aptly describe what is happening. A more appropriate term, he says, would perhaps be 'relinquishment'.

The word 'adoption' is a cover-up. It makes everything seem jolly nice and it gives the impression that life began at that moment, but there's all sorts of memory in the infant, especially in the third trimester.

Sunderland talks about the trauma of the separation between biological mother and child and explains that the 'wound' is stored in the limbic part of the brain.

The trauma is pre-verbal, happening often, so early in the child's life that they have no words to recall and describe it.

The brain registers that separation as a catastrophe, life-threatening and that's why the instances of suicide are so high for adoptees.

These pre-verbal traumas are complicated because they are remembered but not recalled.

There is no pre-trauma personality.

For the adoptees with relational problems, they are presenting with this real hunger for attachment, but at the same time there's this contradictory fear of rejection.

In addition to being overrepresented in addiction treatment, according to a University of Minnesota study conducted in 2013, adopted people are four times more likely to have attempted suicide than non-adopted people.

They are also overrepresented in jails, and psychiatric facilities.

Those thoughts of suicide are actually a flashback to the feeling of 'I'm not going to survive' [the separation.

Paul Sunderland, Psychotherapist and addictions counsellor

A successful adoption can be defined with objective positivity

If 2 things are taken into consideration.

The acknowledgment of relinquishment trauma &
Invalidation of that trauma is in itself an additional trauma,

Only then should a positive adoption be acknowledged, anything else is just ignorance or gaslitting.

Paul Sunderland's Full Lecture on Adoption
Length 53 mins