Adults still challenged by childhood adoption experiences
Adoption is a childhood experience but the psychological consequences of the process can last a lifetime doctoral
research confirms.
Concerned by the over-representation of adult adoptees among clinical populations in health settings, including mental
health services, Doctor of Philosophy graduate Denise Blake from Massey University’s School of Psychology, interviewed
adoptees to discover how they experienced the adoption process.
They articulated the loss, grief and dislocation that characterised even the most successful adoptions among the
participants.
Dr Blake, who graduated last month, examined the language that adoptees draw on and the processes that govern their
experiences in her research. It showed that even as adults adoptees still struggled to understand their challenging
experiences of being removed from the care of their birth mothers to another
family.
“Adoptees have a normal response to an abnormal event,” she says of the experience many adoptees struggled with
throughout their lives.
Dr Blake interviewed 12 adoptees, aged between 26 and 52, born from the early 1960s to late She identified the passing
of the Adoption Act (1955), which legalised closed adoption, where birth parents had no physical or written access to
the children (who in turn had no way of tracing their birth parents) after an adoption was completed, as producing
feelings of loss among those adopted out.
Although it aimed to remove the burden of illegitimacy and dependence on the state while offering hope for childless
families, the inherent secrecy of the act created other issues for many adoptees.
“Many adoptees interviewed had similar experiences of feeling second best and incredibly sensitive to rejection.”
While the passing of the Adult Adoption Information Act (1985) went some way to removing the secrecy surrounding the
process, the fact it did not replace the earlier legislation, which is still on the statute books, meant adoptees still
felt a stigma about being adopted, Dr Blake says.
“It didn’t stop feelings of illegitimacy among adoptees,” she says, describing their situation as living in a ‘no-man’s
land’ emotionally. Adoptees experience the tension of wanting to learn more about their original identity without
disturbing the environment created by their adoptive parents, she says.
Such feelings dated back to childhood days, with classroom family tree exercises proving “incredibly painful” for some,
while reunions with birth mothers were described as “tricky” for adoptees trying to manage the “highly complex social
relationships between them and their natural parents.”
One study participant spoke of the pain they experienced when their adoptive parents divorced, a situation they
described as being like ‘a double rejection.’
Dr Blake notes that the Ministry of Justice has started work on reforming the legislation on five separate occasions but
has never followed through.
“The issue of adoption matters in terms of how we understand kinship and family.
"For me, adoption needs to be open and transparent and have the interests of the child at the heart of it.”
ends