The 6-Week Void in My Identity
By: Michele Merritt
Tags: Trauma, Mental Health, Self, Psychology, Adoption

Six Weeks

That’s the length of time unaccounted for. Forty-two days of life. Those are the completely dark days. Six weeks is the hole in my heart. The entire month of October and then some. I do not know where I was. I do not know who cared for me. I do not know what happened to me.

In his book, “The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessel Van Der Kolk argues extensively for a somatic understanding of trauma. When we face trauma, he suggests, our bodies encode the adverse experience deep within our nervous systems, and far below the level of conscious awareness. Increasingly, research surrounding PTSD is pointing toward a similar thesis, namely, that when we relive a traumatic moment, the memory is much more visceral, since it has been buried in our bodies, often never even having been explicitly recounted by consciousness. Our bodies remember, even if our minds do not recall.

This view of trauma has led therapists and other mental healthcare practitioners to rethink their approach. We should stop asking what’s wrong with you and instead ask what happened to you, if we really want to help people heal.

The problem is, I don’t know what happened to me for the first six weeks of my life and I might never find out.

I do know I was given up for adoption the day I was born, and then I was in the foster system until I was adopted by the people I now call Mom and Dad. Since mine was a closed adoption and all records were sealed, I grew up knowing next to nothing about my biological family, though I was always insatiably curious. I’ve located many of them, and have cobbled together a lot about my origins. I even reconnected with the social worker who handled my case nearly forty years ago. Though he is getting up there in age, he helped me tremendously. Still, no one can tell me what my first six weeks of life were like.

Related to Van Der Kolk’s work on trauma, researchers have also begun focusing on the ways early childhood traumas — adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), as they are called — impact development and health, both physiologically and psychologically. Abuse and neglect, for example, can manifest later in life as chronic illness. Growing up with an alcoholic parent can lead a child to develop all sorts of unhealthy coping strategies and in turn, those can become psychologically debilitating conditions. The body indeed keeps the score, as Nadine Burke Harris eloquently describes in this TED talk:

An adverse childhood experience (ACE) that is less often acknowledged is adoption. Not the part where the adoptive parents take you home and you might finally begin to feel settled and start forming trusting and secure attachments. That is, of course, if you are fortunate enough to be adopted by good parents. Countless adoptees out there suffered just as much or even more by the hands of their adoptive parents, some even being murdered by them. This fact alone renders the sweeping claim that adoption is always in the best interest of the child patently absurd.

Let me be clear: I had an amazing childhood and my parents absolutely did and admirable job. Nevertheless, the experience of being taken from my first mother and father on the day of my birth absolutely counts as an ACE. There are plenty of studies showing that babies placed in the NICU, for instance, suffer extreme stress and their nervous systems go into overdrive trying to compensate for being ripped apart from the only source of safety they have ever known. Even in utero, babies begin forming bodily memories, which is why, as soon as 24 hours after birth, they will show marked preference for the breastmilk of their biological mother over that of a genetic stranger. They will even show preference for music and sounds — like their mother’s voice — they were accustomed to hearing while gestating. Newborns have no way to conceptualize that they are a distinct human subject, different from their mother. This is why postnatal care has been increasingly emphasizing the importance of the “fourth trimester” in forming positive life experiences for the baby (and parents) as the transition from one body to two is made.

All of this is to say that the separation of newborn from its biological parents is a preverbal trauma, one that leaves its mark on the baby’s nervous system just like any other ACE. This sort of trauma happens prior to the capacity for linguistic representation, but this does not mean babies do not remember. It is arguably why so many adoptees suffer from debilitating mental illness, are more susceptible to auto-immune disorders, and are more likely to attempt suicide in the non-adopted population. This lecture by psychiatrist, Paul Sunderland provides an excellent overview of preverbal trauma and its impact on development and functioning in adoptees.

I’ve explored my own preverbal trauma as a potential source of some of the challenges I’ve faced in life. Despite an overwhelmingly positive childhood, it would be a lie to say I have not struggled with my mental health over the years. Having children really brought to the fore just how much being relinquished for adoption impacted me, and that is when I began searching for my biological relatives in earnest. Like I said, I found many of them and learned a lot about my genetic predispositions to certain conditions, including mental illness, and I even learned that my mom was volatile and stressed while she was pregnant with me, potentially a contributing factor to the high blood pressure and crippling anxiety I experience.

We all try to build a cohesive narrative to frame our lives, and I have been able to piece together so much more of who I am by learning about where I came from. Yet, I still do not know anything about those first six weeks.

Pictures or it didn’t happen!

Everyone likes to say this, in our image-obsessed culture. I take a ton of pictures of my kids and I think it’s to compensate for this gaping hole in my own pictorial legacy. I don’t have any pictures of me on the day of my birth. But my birthday most assuredly happened. Life most assuredly happened for me during those six weeks where I have no pictures, no stories, and no information about the people with whom I interacted.

Having my own children now, I realize just how much life happens in those first few weeks — the attachment formation, the mirroring, learning eye contact and gaze following, emotional regulation, sleep pattern formation, and bonding. What were all those things like for me? Did I bond with my foster family only to be traumatized again when I was abruptly taken from them? Or did they neglect and abuse me, the sad reality of so many fostering situations? Or was I basically in a modern-day orphanage? Was I scared? Was I fed enough? Did I scream out for attention like so many stressed babies, or did I simply collapse into silence out of fear I would be harmed if I was too much?

There is abundant compelling science indicating that babies remember things even if they cannot consciously recall them. An abused child, even at 4 weeks of age, will be impacted by that abuse. Yet, people who uncritically praise adoption tend to ignore these facts. They insist a baby is basically a blank slate, at least for the first few days? Weeks? A whole year? It depends on what agenda they have. Many well-meaning adoptive parents think as long as they shower their child with love, it will cancel out anything bad that happened in the first moments or even months of life. The child has no real memories or conscious mind — their life does not truly begin — until they are adopted. It’s the biggest lie in the industry.

If we really want to do adoption right — if that is even possible — we have to first stop insisting that there are no negative side effects to adoption. We need to admit that adoption is traumatic. We need to listen to adoptees when they tell us adoption hurts them. Not doing so is willful ignorance and it perpetuates the marginalization and harm adoptees experience.

I have a six-week void in my narrative construction of myself. Many adoptees I know have a far bigger gap. Some of them were so traumatized by being culturally uprooted, internationally transplanted, and psychologically abused that they have effectively fragmented themselves and suffer dissociations as a result of unconsciously trying to cope with the ACEs that mark their development.

If only I had pictures, or someone to share stories about me in those first six weeks, I could piece my story together even more and understand what happened to me, which would help me understand my behavioral schemas, drives, and non-conscious coping mechanisms. It would help me understand…me. Though I’ve spent a lifetime on this project, the frustration of knowing there are six weeks I will likely never account for and thus will always come up short is maddening. I’m a perfectionist and finish everything I start as perfectly as I can, but this is one task doubt I will ever complete.

And it is even more frustrating to hear “it doesn’t matter” or “just be positive” or “you got THE BEST family though!” All that gaslighting only makes it worse because it reaffirms the fears I have — that so many adoptees have — that no one will ever understand or take it seriously. My pain is mine alone, save for the adoptee comrades I have who feel it too.

As my 40th birthday approaches, I pull out the first picture I have of myself, the day I was brought ‘home.’ I look at this picture every year and wonder if I will ever feel fully home with myself. Because when I look at this picture I see a person who has six weeks of memories and life experiences already accumulated, but no one to share those with. I see this child and I want to talk to her and ask, what happened to you?