My relinquishment affects me less than the meaning imputed to it and my reaction to the interpretation. That our society abandoned its soldiers in Vietnam affects those veterans less than their interpretations and reactions to that fact. What we do affects us more than what others do to us. Typically my guys assigned blame and attempted to correct injustices. That position produced an endless string of crises tracking their rage.
Anger can abort grief and interfere with letting go.
Grief leads us out of Unhappy Valley. We cannot control the facts of the past but can alter our interpretations of those events and thereby modify our reactions. In therapy we look for interpretations that favor letting go rather than reparation, i.e., grief rather than anger. With the vets, viewing society as intentionally profiting from Vietnam produces a different reaction than seeing it as ineptly misconstruing world events. For adoptees, seeing our birthmothers as carelessly casting us aside leads to a different experience than seeing her as too weak to act with courage.