Adoptees and Origin Wounds

I love the work of Vienna Pharaon. As a therapist and a person, I have found her work on origin wounds to be brilliant. Everyone read The Origins of You, please and thank you.

So what are Origin Wounds?

• Prioritization

• Worthiness

• Belonging

• Safety

• Trust

  
  

Bet you can't guess what origin wound(s) an adoptee has. No, really you can't. Why? Because we are all different, duh.

The shadow belief of prioritization is that I am too much. You cannot put me first because my needs are too much, I am too much. This is my personal, ginormous, gaping wound but doesn't it make a ton of sense? I think most of us adoptees get told stories about how our mothers couldn't care for us. It often times gets told in all the ways she wasn't capable but we internalize that we were too much.

The shadow belief of worthiness is that I am not enough. I can imagine ways that an adoptee could internalize a belief of not being worthy to be kept. I personally haven't seen it show up in terms of the reliquishment itself, that one tends to be "I was too much." But I have seen adult adoptees internalize worth with their adoptive families. A sense of always having to prove oneself so as not to be abandoned again.

The shadow belief of belonging is I will never be known and/or I will never be accepted. I think most people would assume all adoptees have a belonging wound. This one doesn't resonate with me. My "never be known" feels more like the garden variety existential concern of isolation, not a wound. But I do hear this wound in transnational and transracial adoptees whose adoptive parents do not honor their adoptees differences or worse, pretend the differences don't even exist.

Safety doesn't really have a shadow belief, I don't think. It's pretty straight-forward and tends to have more to do with physical safety than emotional safety. If you are raised in an unsafe environment, you might have a safety wound. But this would be anyone, adopted or kept. I would imagine for foster adoptees who experience unsafe environments before or after adoption would have this wound.

Trust. This one also feels pretty straightforward. I don't trust you. It could be a primary wound for adoptees for sure but I also don't know how every adoptee wouldn't have this wound to some degree. I mean the whole thing is a lie. Even if you always knew you were adopted (I did), you're always kind of living in a lie.

I think the work of naming these wounds is really valuable for everyone but maybe especially for adoptees. But maybe I am biased. Ok, yes, I am definitely biased. But seriously, get the book or search out Vienna Pharaon on YouTube and listen to her talk about her work. Again, please and thank you :-).