ABANDONMENT & ADOPTION

Does the body still participate?

STORIES AND HALF-TRUTHS
Stop moving out of fear

For decades adoption has been presented as an ultimate solution for childless adults and children without parents. Time has caught up with us and it turns out this solution isn’t as rosy and romantic as it has been imagined for a long time. Especially now that we know what precedes the process of distance, namely an involuntary distance of the child from the parents (originally) and the entire family system. It thereby loses its culture and everything that goes with it and with which the body and the soul are familiar.

In practice it’s shown that many adoptees seem to live a "borrowed" life [1], and are therefore not fully present and potentially available to themselves. That is a loss of quality of life. Together with the loss of their parents and family system, this makes it a double loss. It’s called a "living loss", a grieve of those who are still alive.

Systemic trauma work helps adoptees and those involved to gain insight into how to reconcile with this living loss. Constellations show us how complex relationships are between all those involved in this context and also what everyone struggles with and has to deal with. That’s why this method is not only special, but above all also helpful to release the tension and to face the suffering and possible sadness that results from it.

[1] Trenka, Jane J. - Language of Blood, 2003

Many people see adoption as something mental. As if it was born out of the brain; a thought that has been given hands and feet, an empty body that has been breathed into life. But nothing could be less true. The child that, against his/her will and knowledge, ends up in an adoption procedure is not incomplete and still to be formed, but already a complete human being. And yet it often seems that adoptees have to fill in something, as a substitute, or literally to replace a never-born child. These unseen dynamics, in addition to the embodied connections of an unknown lineage, affect adoptees in their hearts and souls.