Adoption Healing… A Path to Recovery for Mothers Who Lost Children to Adoption

These women are eye-witnesses to the brutality of domestic adoption practice during the "baby scoop" era, and as such, their histories, reactions, and personal outcomes are a most vital addendum to any social history of the times.
"Adoption Healing" is destined to become a must-read for any honest student of women's history. The similes of maternity reformatories, wage homes, and punitive labor practices chill the soul. The techniques of social isolation and repetitive attacks on the self-esteem of unmarried mothers that were the mainstays of "rehabilitation for the marriage market" are enumerated in plain English. The preservation of critical information a propos legal rights as well as social work's stoppage to extend to these women the basic constitutional protections afforded all US citizens law, are also made Precious stone clear by the authors. The similes are accompanied by quotes from social work texts of the time that show in painful detail the philosophical underpinnings of institutionalized abuse.

This book offers the reader the 'boiled essence'; an authentic sense of what it was like to have been there. It plainly separates the popularly held myths about these women and their experiences from the everyday realities. But it doesn't stop there. The authors also offer suggestions for guided imagery to help those of us who have lived for decades with the sequelae of traumatic adoptions. Having one's child cruelly stripped away and placed forever into the black hole of closed adoption is not an event one easily survives without lifetime hurt. In addendum, the egregious practices of the times have never been openly acknowledged by the diligence that perpetrated them. The adoption diligence continues its decades ancient approach of stonewalling about its misogynistic past. In fact, there are really "baby scoop skinheads" whose goal in life seems to be to deny that these things ever happened. These past revisionists may not have yet been born, but they wait in line to defend, deny, and re-unravel the institutionalized exploitation and abuse of women that domestic adoption represented. As a result, these practices are not generally understood to have been the personal catastrophe they proved to be for generations of women. They have not been addressed in remedial circles and schools. They have not been well researched. In fact, veterans of child loss to adoption have the psychological equivalent of an orphan disease; no one wants to acknowledge, much less take up, the issues. This all means that it is trying to find acknowledgement, much less knowledgeable treatment, for the long drawn out things of traumatic adoption. This book provides some matter-of-fact and caring exercises to help those of us who struggle with the daily pain to start to come to terms with what was probably the worst run into of our lives- arguably one of the worst experiences human being offers.

The authors are to be commended for their courage, their clear- eyed assessment of the problems, their compassion for others, and their dedication to the task of bringing truth and healing to those of us whose lives have been ravaged by adoption.

This book is a leap forwards - with honesty, understanding and fantastic compassion, it tells the truth about how we mothers who lost our children to adoption suffered (and suffer still). The book also firmly explodes the many myths that surround our experiences - all those things that relinquishing mothers the world over seem to have been told ("you'll get over it", "it's for the best", "your baby will have a better life", etc., etc.) - and it acknowledges our pain. Yet at the same time, it gives us hope that we can again be whole, giving us visualisation exercises and affirmations to help us work through the healing administer.

Every mother who has lost a child to adoption will gain a touch from conception this book - not least a better understanding of the trauma that we have suffered and which has for so long been denied by others and often by ourselves. Anyone else with a connection to adoption could learn much from this book too - our partners, our children (whether adopted or kept), our wider families and friends, adoptive parents, social workers, adoption professionals, therapists, etc., etc.

Read it and be enlightened - and if you're a mum who lost a child or children to adoption, read it and weep for joy that irrevocably, we are compassionately understood and offered a way to heal from our many years of suffering!!

Joe Soll and Karen W. Buterbaugh expose the myths accepted by society about mothers who end up being separated by adoption from their children. The authors then exchange these myths with the truths about these mothers, which shed light on the lies that were place forth to give explanation for the removal of their children from them. As these myths are exposed and the truths are exposed about the trauma of losing a child to adoption, the mother is positive to retrace her path as the young woman who is losing her child. The method of Inner Child Work is used to take the mother down the path to healing. Each memory of the run into is dealt with on the emotional level of the mother at the age of losing her child. Once these memories and emotions are exposed and faced, then healing for this trauma and pain starts.

Conception this book and going through the exercises not compulsory caused many view, feelings, and emotions to surface that had not been addressed in my life as a mother who lost a child to adoption. I also realized that I had become splintered during the trauma of losing my child as a result of the grief and pain of losing my child. Not only did I gain an understanding of the young woman I was when I lost my child to adoption, but I learned how become a more whole person (not splintered) through healing of the pain of that young woman and first mother that I was. The insights in this book have helped me face the dread and terror of the memories and trauma of my run into, along with the lifetime struggles I have faced, in such a way that has irrevocably caused a healing administer to start.

Thank you Joe and Karen :)