Adoption Support
Adoption is a process and an identity, as well as an act. Born of the intent to care, it is
not a psychological disorder. While the birthparents set in motion a process through which the child is born, adoptive parents and maturing adoptees must together find ways to manage being borne by one another. Often distressed and disoriented by the sense that they were “left without a word,” adoptees can enact unexpectedly disruptive feelings that lack words. Because the sense of dislocation in adoption packs the shock of trauma while evoking the chronic sadness of bereavement, an important function of the therapist is to bear witness effectively to the patients’ suffering and successes so that predictable interpersonal ruptures can be repaired. Psychotherapy can not only provide the containing, caring, and exploration that facilitates maturation and growth, but can also scaffold continuity, bridging occasional gaps in self experience that otherwise lead to inhibited curiosity or calamitous enactments of disorienting, unexpected behavior.
What members of the adoption triangle need from mental health professionals is supportive relatedness during the inevitable developmental delays that give time for integrating complex and multiple narratives about self and others. It is hoped that with the help of psychotherapy modified to accommodate multiple perspectives and developmental complexity, adoptees and their families will move from feeling “lost in translation” to feeling “found in relation,” thereby beginning a process that will enable them to thrive.
Based on my research and experience as an adoptive parent I developed a novel way of treating adoptees and their families, described more fully in the following article:
- Pivnick, B.A. (2018). “Likening” the “Other”: Identifying and dis-identifying in adoptive parenting. In Adelman, A. (Ed.), Psychoanalytic reflections on parenting teens and young adults: Changing patterns in modern love, loss and longing. NY & London: Routledge
- Pivnick, B.A. (2013). Being Borne: Contextualizing Loss in Adoption
- Pivnick, B.A. (2010). Left without a word: Learning rhythms, rhymes, and reasons in adoption. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 30, 1, 3-24.