Early separations“T. Berry Brazelton cautioned us not to ignore the amazing forty weeks in the womb by treating the neonate as if he had “sprung full-blown from the head of Zeus,” because by doing so we are ignoring some important history, a history shared with his biological mother. Why is it that so many adoptees are out there looking for these mothers, whom they do not consciously remember? Is it just medical history or genetic curiosity, and if so, why is it specifically the mother for whom they search? (For, in my research it was most often the mother whom adoptees wanted to find.) As one woman told me, “Oh, he (the father) was just someone who loved her. She was the one I was connected to…………………………
If the mother cannot be counted on to be the whole environment for the child, what happens is that he begins to take over for her. This phenomenon is often referred to as premature ego development. Rather than a gradual, well-timed developmental process, the child is forced by this wrenching experience of premature separation to be a separate being, to form a separate ego before he should have had to do so. Even though this can have “survival value” for infants in a world which, because of their abandonment, is often found hostile, it is not appropriate at this stage of development and is even considered pathological under age three months by some clinicians. The compensating factor of survival value brings with it hypervigilance and anxiety and takes away the serenity and safety of that primal mother/child relationship. Although this survival value aspect of premature ego development may no longer be necessary when the child is placed with the adoptive parents, he does not perceive this. His experience is that the protector may at any time disappear. The child becomes hypervigilant, which means that he constantly tests the environment for clues to behaviour which will keep him from a further abandonment. One adoptee described this as “walking a narrow ridge in the middle of the Grand Canyon.”
THE PRIMAL WOUND: LEGACY OF THE ADOPTED CHILD
The Effects of Separation from the Birthmother on Adopted Children (Nancy Verrier, M.A. April 11-14, 1991)
