Can the Wound of Adoption Relinquishment Ever Heal?
I have the deepest faith in nature’s and the human body’s capacity for healing. It’s a faith born out of personal and professional experience and observation. I contemplate the nature of the primal wound as experienced by adoptees, and I wonder if this wound may be the wound that never completely heals.
The healing of a skin wound and probably spiritual and emotional wounds too, happens from the lower levels upwards. Some wounds are kept open on the hospital ward to make sure this natural order is preserved. Trapping unhealed parts of ourselves, whether physical, emotional or spiritual, under a surface gloss of apparent wellness, is always a recipe for disaster. Sooner or later, the surface breaks down to reveal the truth beneath, that all is not well.
The temporary surface scab protects the physical underlayers as they mend. When the deeper layers are mended the surface scab falls away to reveal a fresh new layer of scar tissue that is different in various ways from the original, but does the job nevertheless.
With emotional and spiritual wounds, the protection comes from our own resources, and from our ability to connect to those close to us and lean into whatever support they can offer. Healing non-physical wounds is not a linear process, and progress towards wholeness moves in fits and starts, but the natural imperative is towards health. Our own patterns of thought and behaviour can work against this of course, but the natural order supports our progress.
What mysterious energy is directed by some positively aligned and intelligent force towards the organisation of tiny cells into a state of cohesion with one goal…the restoration back to wholeness?
I’ve seen this energy at work, in fact I’ve seen it accomplish the impossible. I’ve felt it fill my being with light, brightness, lightness. I’ve also seen this energy being thwarted, usually by our own destructive or unhelpful actions which have at their core a disconnection to the internal supply of that mysterious life-fuel. I have witnessed and personally experienced that disconnection, and how it leads to the seeking of other kinds of fulfilment, other kinds of fuel to light and warm the dark hollows within. Alcohol was my fuel, or rather addiction is my fuel. My addiction now is to sugar and scrolling, although I can also connect to the source for periods of time and work to let the rest go.
We leave the womb to begin life on this planet very early in our body’s development. Other baby mammals can get up from their place of birth and follow their mothers on foot, feeding as they need but otherwise good to go. Human babies can’t do that. Human babies continue to develop their bodies and their psyches for many years before the gradual process of becoming independent beings. Nature has ensured that our mothers will support and nurture and love us through this time when we are completely vulnerable, by designing the process known as bonding.
Bonding begins in the womb where we are surrounded by her, her sound, her smell, her taste, privy to the secret rhythms of her life. And after the most tumultuous and seminal event that is our birth, we are programmed to be soothed by her warm soft skin, her familiar voice and her same heartbeat now heard from the outside. The immense power of this time is downplayed in our culture, which doesn’t recognise the importance of the dyad.
A dyad is one thing that consists of two parts. Every part of the mother’s physiology needs her baby and the baby, of course, needs the mother. Our mothers are us, and we are them. Breaking the dyad…can that ever heal? I don’t know.
Human babies need a parent who can love us through the tremendous burden of work we place upon them. We need a Mother. We need her softness, her responsiveness, her tenderness. To be well, we depend upon her selfless generosity with her time, her body, her milk. Her face is as far as a baby’s eye can see, and this is for a reason. We need to see into her eyes and locate our own selves in the warm universe they open into. From this inky space we learn attention. We learn what it is to receive attention, and we learn how to pay attention. How to hold a thread of thought from one synaptic gap to another to another for this is how things get built, and mended. Maybe here is where we receive our attunement to divine source, where we get wired in to the grid so that we will forever be able to find our light in the darkness.
This isn’t completely a one time deal, there are opportunities over a short period of time for this interaction to take place…but at some time in our early months on earth, that window closes.
Cows milk is designed to grow a big, sturdy body, and human milk is designed to support brain growth, for that is what us humans are all about, the brain…the size of it is why we have to get ourselves born so early in our development. As a baby feeds, and also whilst they sleep, a ferocious amount of growth is happening in the brain now that it is able to expand in size, free from the confining space of the womb. Is abandonment being stitched into those inner pathways where relinquishment has occurred?
Is our wound a special kind of wound because it isn’t something that happens to a whole person with a pre-trauma personality, that they may then heal from, but more like a blueprint inside every part of us as though we are one big wound, along with all the other sacred gifts we bring in.
I know I feel like that sometimes.
I know that I have to parent myself at times. I have to exercise patience and love and the ability to hold space for my own inner screaming, shaking, sobbing little self. Now that I know consciously, intellectually, what it is that I never had, or had for too short a time and lost, I can reach back down through the inner architecture to my core structure to make adjustments, to offer manna as if from Heaven. I know that from somewhere inside my core a healing process has begun, as I abandoned alcohol and allowed myself to shiver in the dark and wait in hope and faith to grow my connection to the light.
So as I heal, from deep inside, I wonder how much healing I can do in this lifetime. I acknowledge that there is still a place of unbearable tenderness, a place that can’t stand to be touched, still.
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