Complex PTSD as an official diagnosis

CLICK: Complex PTSD as an official diagnosis

For many of us adoptees, this PTSD diagnosis is reason enough to seek immediate help... Trace

What adoptees do to survive (some call it walking in a fog)

my first memory

By Trace A. DeMeyer

The adoption industry is so fricking clever at marketing itself.  They hide that adoptees are in therapy more than any other human, and that adoptees are institutionalized more than any other person, and that adopted children today are often drugged into submission for their acting out or behaving badly.

Ask yourself: Why would anyone do this (do a stranger adoption) to a child?

This is my life, my own experience.

The breakdown I had as a baby was fear-based. I’m born, mom disappears. I am in an orphanage then foster care then adopted. This sets my adrenals into fight-or-flight. Emotionally I’m scared. A part of my mind shuts down to protect me. As an infant, I deaden myself. I want my mother but she is long gone, never coming back. Read The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier.

The science of birth psychology hasn’t caught on with the public yet but it states that babies in utero are sensing everything.  We need contact with our moms (and dads) to grow and become fully functioning.  If that bond breaks, we break.  [Read http://birthpsychology.com if you don’t believe me.  For example: stress hormones in womb may be linked to neurodevelopmental diseases such as autism and schizophrenia, which affect males more frequently or more severely than females. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130304151811.htm]

So eventually I get adopted by strangers and I adjust. But I am not fully functioning. My ability to grow and trust was damaged. That’s why it’s called the primal wound.

I get along, graduate college, work as a musician. I make more bad decisions than good. I am smart enough to know I am sick. It took years (and therapy twice) to actually see how I was half-alive. The part of me I’d buried wasn’t going to walk out of the fog unless I was really safe.  It happened in my late 30s in Seattle.  When I start to feel again, it’s like I walked back in to my own body. As I told my holistic doctor, this was a serious emotional illness, what Indians call the splitfeathers syndrome. My mind protected me because it had to, for a long time. I got well. I walked out of the fog.

Are their adoptees out there who are not well?  Definitely.  Some self-medicate since we know something is wrong with us.  Some adoptees are drug addicts, alcoholics, even criminals.  Some kill themselves. Adoptee suicide rates are very high, another fact the adoption industry doesn’t mention in their forever family ads. (Read http://www.amfor.net)

So whoever invented “closed adoption” and “stranger adoption” was pretty sick themselves. Certainly after the world wars, there were war orphans. For Indian Country, there were these human experiments called the Indian Adoption Projects and ARENA Programs. Thousands upon thousands of Native children were placed into stranger adoptions, building the booming adoption industry it is today in the USA. The damage to us Lost Birds is rarely mentioned in this bad history.

Believe it or not: there are very few orphans in the entire world but the adoption industry has decided to keep selling babies -- they just call them orphans to grab our attention.

Why? The Adoption Agency morphed to serve a bigger ever-growing market: infertile couples. There are thousands and thousands of couples who can’t get pregnant.  Infertility is a silent epidemic. One thing leads to another, right? Toxic environment = infertility.

As I wrote in my op-ed for Indian Country Today published yesterday, the supply of infants is diminishing.  The adoption industry makes more than a billion dollars every year.  Where do you think they’ll go next to get a fresh supply of babies?

Excerpted from NATIONAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, NCJS Journal Abstract, "ADOPTION AND MURDER" (from Psychology and Law" p.274-280, 1997, Santiago Redondo and Vicente Garrido et al, NCJS 176632)

“…although adopted children commit murders more often than commonly believed, there is resistance to making an issue of this fact. This may be because of the secrecy associated with many adoptions and the failure of criminal justice agencies to record the nature of an offender's family background. From a legal posture, an adopted child is simply the child of his adoptive parents. …the psychodynamics of adoption are easily overlooked in forensic mental health evaluations.” 

Excerpted from "ADOPTION FORENSICS: THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ADOPTION AND MURDER" by David Kirschner, PhD

“Of the 500 estimated serial killers in U.S. history, 16 percent were adopted as children, while adoptees represent only 2 or 3 percent of the general population. Adoptees are 15 times more likely to kill one or both of their adoptive parents than biological children.”

And my earlier post in 2012 about Adoption Propaganda and Dr. Phil: here

Killers Walk

Ivan Skorobogatov/Nathaniel Craver Case Update: Killers Walk

I have to say that this story has upset me so deeply, I'm crying. I'm crying for Ivan and for all the other adoptees who were murdered by their parents. This is the month to portray all aspects of adoption, and this is certainly one of the most disturbing aspects to me and to many others... Trace

The unhappy politics of interracial adoption (1989)

[SOURCE: U.S. News & World Report, November 13, 1989]

“…Unfortunately, the world of interracial adoption is governed by a tangle of emotions and public policies that defy simple logic. The adoption community today is haunted by a bitter debate over whether interracial adoptions rob children of their cultural heritage, sowing identify crises and low self-esteem. A small but vocal group, led by the National Association of Black Social Workers, goes so far as to assert that interracial adoptions are “cultural genocide” and that only a black family can equip a black child with the psychological armor needed to fight racial prejudice.

“No one disputes that, everything else being equal, matching the racial and ethnic backgrounds of children to their adoptive families would be preferable. But due to the decreasing stigma of bearing children out of wedlock and a surfeit of Third World orphans, the number of non-white babies available for adoption has soared in recent years.

“Of the 60,000 children adopted by U.S. families in 1988, about 20,000 were minority children and about 10,000 of them were from abroad, estimates William Pierce, president of the national Committee for Adoption, a research and lobbying group. But while there are a hundred applicants for every healthy white infant in the United States, thousands of black, Hispanic and Third World babies still are going homeless. With such a statistical mismatch to contend with, social-service agencies’ traditional notions of what constitutes a “model” adoption are increasingly impractical.

“…For Native American children, a longstanding dispute over interracial adoption was resolved legislatively, but some troubling issues persist. The children fall under the jurisdiction of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, passed into law because tribes felt they were being used as baby breeders by child-welfare agencies and state courts. The law generally gives tribal courts exclusive power to make custody and foster-care decisions for children considered legal residents of a reservation. But critics, including Pierce of the National Committee for Adoption, have raised questions about whether the law’s application in thousands of custody cases best serves the interests of Indian children or merely gives tribes extra clout in their quest to remain independent and self-governing.

[I will be publishing more of my research (since 2004) in coming days on this blog...Trace]