Dian Wellfare Adoption Rights Campaigner (1951-2008)

Beyond Pain (Observations from a Dissociated Mind)

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Beyond Pain:

 

Observations from within the dissociated mind

 The body has its own wisdom and its own truth. If an illusion is presented to you and you believe it, you can find that the body does not believe it. The body will tell you it is not true. You listen to the order and the harmony of the body s an integrated whole. Your body is a truth detector. If you  present a lie to the body as fact, it will resist it.

Anon

My presentation today will focus on dissociation.

The description of Dissociation as a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a persons thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity. During the period of time when a person is dissociating, and where certain information is not associated with other information as it normally would be, is an apt description of the defence responses of a large number of mothers who lose a baby to adoption.

For example, during a traumatic experience a person may dissociate the memory of the place and the circumstances of the trauma from his ongoing memory, resulting in a temporary or long term mental escape from fear and pain of the trauma and in some cases, a memory gap surrounding the experience. Because this process can produce changes in memory, people who frequently dissociate often find their senses of personal history and identity are affected.  (Sue Wells)

I will describe some of the effects of living in a dissociated state from my own personal experience.

Before I describe my own experience of living with a dissociative disorder I wanted to mention that in my capacity as support facilitator with Origins over the past 8 years I have come to know many hundreds of mothers who have lost a child to adoption. In almost all cases they have lived with various depths of dissociation for varying lengths of time. Even those mothers who didn’t dissociate from the memory and were constantly tormented by their experience, and had to rely on antidepressants, alcohol or  non prescription drugs to  block out their pain, dissociated  from fragments of  their experience too.     

While on the outside a person seems to function normally, inside they are in turmoil but don’t realise anything is wrong until something pulls them out of their dissociated state. 

On  one occasion a mother who had lost a daughter to adoption and went on to marry and have more children, explained how she had lived dressed her third lawful child, a daughter, as a boy, until she was of school age. Because she was not allowed to keep her first daughter, her mind had manifested the notion that she was only allowed to keep sons but not daughters. 

Another mother went blind for a year after her baby was taken from her.  Another developed a stutter she didn’t have before her child was taken. But for most of us the scars are on the inside.

As we’ve already heard, of those mothers who went on to have other children a common response is to become either fiercely possessive of the children they are allowed to keep, or they find they cannot bond with their next child at all in protection against losing them too. One mother said she was afraid to love her own children because it can only bring pain. An estimated fifty percent had no other children.

Others never entered into any sexual relationship again, some looking to the Church for a reason to give their lives meaning.  In many instances mothers do not recognise the reasons for their complicated responses to interpersonal relationships until they begin to deal with their adoption loss.

Tortured dreams are a constant source of torment for mothers who lost a child to adoption and dissociate in consequence.  A common dream theme surrounds death and torture. One mother had repetitious nightmares of leaving her baby on the back veranda and forgetting it was there. She would wake up and find the baby torn to shred by the family dog, its parts strewn around the back yard.

Her dream always ended with the police knocking at the door to take her away. Another mother was tormented be dreams of rows of grey faceless babies hanging by meat hooks on the ceiling. Another kept her secret baby in a matchbox in her underwear draw and in her dream she would take it out and nurture it and hurry to put it back into its secret place when a knock on the door threatened to discover her forbidden child. 

Shoeboxes are another common hiding place for our secret babies. While another was tortured by dreams of digging her baby out of a lonely grave on the side of a hill so she could finally get to hold him. I could write a book just on the dreams alone.

While in my own case I don’t recall dreaming when I was dissociated, in those 5  after I found my son and before we met,  if I didn’t know his new address I would  dream of

My own experience was no different to many thousands of mothers whose babies were taken for adoption. In 1968 at the age of 16 my only child was stolen from me while I was giving birth to him.  Because I was forbidden to see the baby I gave birth to, I was left suspended in a state of torment created by unfinished business not belonging to the human condition. There are no words to explain how it feels to be unable to complete the birth of ones child on a psychological and physiological level.

 

24 years after I lost my son I was diagnosed with severe dissociative disorder which had lasted 22 years, my diagnosis included Psychogenic Amnesia and major features of Depersonalisation, all manifesting eventually into Major Depression.  All were attributed to the profound state of Nervous Shock caused by the process and circumstances of my son’s abduction.   

 

During those dissociated years, while on the outside I got on with my life, ran my own business, travelled etc, inside I was a mess. I lived in a state of constant distraction.

I was either off daydreaming or distracted by something niggling at my mind that I was trying to remember but I didn’t know what it was.  It resulted in living a life of being disconnected, never giving too much, never getting to close, never quite fitting in. I seem to have lived as an observer of my existence, never being able to feel whole or part of the world in any real sense. Those years are now a fog.  

  

I don’t remember signing the consent but still have that sensation of getting sucked down into a black abyss as the pen was put into my hand.  Like a bomb ticking quickly in my head, I recall equating the age he would be to mine. When he is one I’ll be 17, when he is 5 I’ll be  21, when he is 10 I’ll be 26  and so on until I reach the age of 40. And then my mind split and I felt myself sink, shut down, and die. My next memory was of being someone else. I find it interesting to note that I woke up at exactly the same age my mind had split off at, age 40.

 

From then on, that part of the brain responsible for speech is what was affected most of all by my traumatised state. I lost my capacity to speak coherently for many years after the loss of my child.  I could not concentrate on what it was I was saying and would drift off on tangents, aware that it was happening but being unable to stop it. I would reply to people in thought but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. 

 

It was as if I was harbouring a big secret that was stuck at the base of my throat and if I opened my mouth to speak I would vomit it out and go mad.  I didn’t know what that secret was for 23 years, but I now realise the person I was keeping the frightening secret from, was myself.

 

Some years after the loss of my son I began scouring death columns in newspapers in search of dead babies. Whenever I found one I would become euphoric and would then begin weeping inconsolably for "the mother of that dead baby" wondering how she could live with the pain of losing her baby, and yet I never associated it with my own loss. It seems my mind had managed to find a way to express my own grief without facing the loss of my own as if dead baby. 

The silhouette of a baby with no face, who would occasionally float around in the back of my mind. When this  tiny faceless shape floated into my conscious mind somehow I knew he was mine but I couldn’t understand how that was possible as I had  blocked out all memory of being pregnant and giving birth. And then it would float away and I would put it away.              

Whenever friends had babies I cut off contact with them but I didn't know why I did that at the time. I was unable to see young children around me let alone relate to them. I would look straight through them as if they weren’t there. I avoided anything and everything to do with children and pregnancy.

 I broke off relationships whenever the man I was seeing began discussing  children.  There was a sense of shame about thinking about children.   I gave no reason for not wanting to see my friend again, perhaps because I didn’t know why myself. I do now.  I realise that I have spent a good deal of my life avoiding the memory of losing my son.

Whenever I was asked why I didn’t settle down and have children I laughed the notion off with quips about being too young, not having time to fit a six year old or ten year old in my schedule. It never dawned on me that motherhood begins with a baby. So deep was my denial of my experience. 

Once I obtained me social worker records the hospital almoner’s words came flooding back: “Babies don’t stay cute and cuddly forever you know. How do you think you would manage taking a six year old to school and do you really want to cope with a ten year old?” I realised that I had spent my life parroting her attempts to talk me out of keeping my child.

When the adoption information regulations were about to be introduced in 1991, allowing mothers and adopted adults the right to find each other, my mother asked if I was going to look for my son. This was the first time anyone had ever acknowledged in my presence that I had even had a baby or that my son had ever existed.  I collapsed both emotionally and physically as everything came flooding back to me. I could no longer function in my day to day life.  From then on I gradually began to recall all memory of my pregnancy, birth and the loss of my son. I had to find him.

Emotionally, I had reverted back to the time I lost my son. Time had stood still and I was 16 again when I began searching for my son. I had finally been given permission to go back and get him. For a time my mind he would still be at the hospital waiting for me to come and get him. I was finally allowed to see my baby which both exhilarated me and frightened me.  It came as a great shock to gradually realise that he was no longer a baby but  had become a twenty three year old man. My baby had been stolen again, but this time by the passage of time.  We finally reunited when he was 28.

I met my son in 1996 when he turned 28. We spent 4 days ethereal days together in a dream like state, as if I was meeting someone who  had come back from the dead. Nothing seemed real as I was transported back to being a 16 year old mother once again. It was the same ethereal state of shock I was in after I’d been sent away from home, frightened and pregnant. 

It was leaving him that I remember most.          

When it was time to return home to Sydney I boarded the plane at Coolangatta and my mind caved in. It was as if I was leaving him at the hospital again. All the feelings I would have had 28 years earlier but had repressed for all those years came flooding forth - I was going insane. I could literally feel my mind splitting, being torn in two.

I was imploding. Uncontrollable racking despair engulfed me. I couldn’t breath.

I was losing my mind.  I could feel the brain in my head twisting into a knot. As it twisted tighter and tighter it felt as if my hair was being pulled back into my scalp. I was at risk of screaming myself into insanity. I was mad with grief.

 

Somehow, another part of me took over. Instinctively, I knew that unless I distracted my self.  I was at risk of losing my mind altogether. To try to compose myself I began repeating the alphabet over and over again in my fragmented mind, trying to de-focus from the fact that the plane was taking off without my son being with me. I was leaving him again.

 

I tried to concentrate on saying it backwards. I counted numbers in any order until I was thinking sheer gibberish. I was delirious with the magnitude of my anxiety. I tried to remember how to say different things in other languages. I counted in German and then tried counting it backwards. I was trying my hardest to obliterate all thought, anything to stop from screaming myself to death.

 

I was in a terrible state. I gripped the armrests. I began digging my nails into my arms and drew blood to provide some distraction from the emotional pain I was in. I felt trapped – sinking into an abyss. I was reliving my past. Feeling what I didn’t feel 28 years earlier. 

 

Once again I couldn't run back and get him. And then the plane touched down in Sydney. It was an hour’s flight, the worst hour of my life. But I finally understood why my mind had shut down for so long. I would have been unable to cope with walking out of those hospitals without my son. My mind had done a good job of protecting me from the pain of remembering.   

By breaking down I have come across my own reality and can longer accommodate the inane pretence of adoption and the foundation of lies it is constructed on. I have come to realise that breakdowns are not to be feared because I believe they are really breakthroughs. They breakthrough what it is that we are trying to repress, to hide from, to avoid. They let us feel what we need to feel in order to connect with ourselves again, as painful as the journey is.

Aside from losing my son, the hardest part to deal with is that the adoption profession knew the harm they were causing and they were too negligent to care. They didn’t care because their agenda was to provide babies for childless couples. So they carried on encouraging young mothers to surrender their babies, continued ignoring the harm, and continuing the practice of forbidding them access to their babies at birth and beyond for decades, fully aware of the mental health legacy we would live with, in consequence, for the rest of our lives due to the abhorrent and unnatural act of separating mother and babe.

At this point I would like to share just a few examples of what this monstrous system knew about the effects of surrendering a child to adoption during the peak adoption era and much earlier.

 

In 1968 M Nicholas of the Anglican Adoption Agency Carramar outlines the effects caused to the mother in relinquishing her child to adoption and the criteria that social workers should look for when referring mothers on for either diagnosis or treatment.

In her paper The Natural Parents Needs after Placement of her Child, she lists depression and anxiety with their varying symptoms along with loss of self confidence, self-esteem, undue weeping, strong feelings of rejection, social isolation and mothers who become incoherent after the loss of their child, just as I did.

 

She notes changes in behaviour such as withdrawal from people, loss of interest in her appearance,  lack of self esteem, self respect and self confidence may be very low; there are  marked feelings of unworthiness, attempted suicide, fear of being alone, self destruction, personality disturbances,  obsessive and compulsive behaviour,  aggression and hostility.  Another concern she mentions is the repetitious, destructive dreams about babies being tortured. 

 

Sister Berromeo of the Catholic Adoption Agency in her presentation to the  inaugural preceding to introduce the adoption of Children Act 1965,  acknowledges that the separation from a child through the process of adoption is comparable to separation from a child through death because the loss is irrevocable in terms of relationship, and that such a loss can be viewed as a  traumatic event..

 

Often, she explains, the mother cannot put the past behind her and move on.  That her ability to do so is dependent on her ability to do just this, and so she is under double pressure to suppress her grief. In cases where this is not possible it is not unusual for a mother who loses her child to suffer severe breakdown around the time of the child’s first birth day.  Berromeo acknowledges that forbidding the mother to see her baby appears to encourage the re-enforcement of the strong elements of denial of her pregnancy and so, in the long-term view, prevent her from coming to terms with the whole experience.

 

And another, in her 1968 paper titled Are We Stereotyping the Unmarried Mother? Burnstein acknowledges the professionals own part in fostering a state of denial in the mother to make her experience as unreal as possible so that  “she can  resume her place in the community as though nothing has happened.  What we interpret as pathology, she says,  may be the girl's valid fear of a frightening  reality. She is behaving the way society requires in order to avoid permanent impairment of her social functioning.”

 

In 1954, The author of The Unmarried Mother in Our Society, Sarah Edlin, discussed the two year study her agency conducted on  the  unwed mother seeing or not seeing her baby. She states that the girl who did not see her baby was much more disturbed after her return home, than the girl who had spent a few weeks with her child.

 

 "It is obvious,” she said,  “that in these cases the girl is merely carrying out  her own pattern of unreality, and is trying to negate the whole  racking experience by refusing to recognise [her babies]  existence. We try to make this clear to her, and urge her to change her decision.   But we cannot and do not always succeed in making the girl understand the turmoil and conflict she is storing up for herself by not seeing the baby.” 

 

Because they have always known the harmful effects of their practices, but were too negligent to care,  we find ourselves here at this conference, today.   

 

Culpability of the Adoption and Medical Professions  

 

While today’s apologists will argue that the practice of forbidding mothers to see their children was to make the separation easier on the mother, the evidence suggests otherwise.

 

 

In reality, the tidy closed adoption system was an act of mental torture, an act of unimaginable cruelty which put thousands of vulnerable young mothers into the same distraught state of mind  as that of a mother whose child  is kidnapped for ransom and the body never found.  In order to survive she must dissociate from the reality of her loss lest she go out of her mind by the torment of it all.  Many did.  And many more will.

 

A most damning indictment of all, is that adoption legislators never bothered to conduct any research into any damaging effects that might result from such a cruel and unconsidered Government policy, but carried on regardless for decades. Their negligence has cost us all dearly.

 

Thank you

 

1.      McLelland, Mary, M.A., Dip.Soc.Stud., Social Work and Adoption, in Adoption Services in NSW: Proceedings of a Seminar held on Friday, 3rd February, 1967.

 

 

Adoption - From the Point of View Of the Natural Parents. by Sister

Mary Beromeo R.S.M.,B.A., Dip.Soc.Wk. 1968.(b)

 

2.      Nicholas, Miss M, The Natural Parent's Needs After Placement of Her Child, Course for Adoption Workers, "Carramar", Sydney, NSW, 1966.

 

3.      Edlin, Sara B, The Unmarried Mother In Our Society: A Frank and Constructive Approach to an Age-Old Problem, Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, 1954.

 

O’Collins, Maev, Some Aspects of Research in the Field of Adoption, Australian Journal of Social Work, Vol 19, No 1, 1966.

 

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of  Women Who Run With The Wolves appropriately describes the historical situation for mothers who were forced to give up their babies. In her chapter - The  Collapsed Mother, she writes:

 

 

         Social Worker to Our Lady of Mercy Home, Wiatara NSW. Child Care

         Committee A.A.S.W.(NSW Branch)

        

       1. "The natural mother must be given all information and assistance

           about her sole right to keep or surrender her baby as she

           decides is best. 

 

       2. 

The Natural Parent, Sister Beromeo R.S.M. B.A., Dip Soc. Work,

 

The natural mother's right to SEE, HANDLE AND NURTURE HER CHILD

           IF SHE SO DESIRES, often requires protecting. No agency should

           refuse to disclose details of the child which she may request -

           e.g. weight, sex, colouring etc - even if her ultimate decision

           about the child is for adoption.

 

 

The Unmarried Mother in Our Society, chapter 23- Lakeside Girls.(Shall

     I look at my baby?) 1956 Sarah B Edlin. 362.72/3 Fisher Library

 

Some Aspects of Research in the Field of Adoption- Maev O'Collins BA

     Dip.Soc S. SW Catholic Family Welfare Bureau Melb. AJSW VOL19 No1 1966

 

The Unwed Mother editor Robert W Roberts, circa 1969 Chapter 8 "Are we

     stereotyping the unmarried mother" by Rose Bernstein chapter "Denial"

 

 Mothers who Lose a Child Through Adoption

 

Historically, mothers who lose their children to adoption have been the most neglected party in the adoption triangle: both in the literature and in the practice they have been afforded little attention compared with adopted people and the adoptive parents. It is estimated that less than five percent of all adoption literature deals with the consequences of separation on the  mother herself.

 

The bonding process between the mother and child in utero has been widely acknowledged in society and by the health profession. However those same principals have been lost on the mother and child who are separated by adoption, as if somehow that bond does not occur between them. The silence of the mothers and the refusal by the adoption profession to acknowledge the harm caused by severing the maternal bond  has compounded  into a general unawareness of the damage created by adoption to both mother and child.

 

I would like to thank the organisers of this Conference for  giving  me the opportunity to represent those silent mothers today.

 

An Overview of Adoption Practice

 

In order to better understand a mother who has lost a child through adoption it is important to know the background  to her adoption experience.

 

 A recent Parliamentary inquiry into adoption practices of two years duration titled Releasing the Past publicly exposed and confirmed the what had become routine adoption practices  throughout Australia, were unlawful, unethical and  have been known by the adoption profession, since 1965, to be harmful to both mother and child.

While the mother remained the legal guardian of her child “most  hospitals around  Australia took it upon themselves to introduce practices which discriminated against the unwed mother and  exacerbated her already traumatised state by imposing  upon her the most unnatural  expectation demanded of any mother during the process of giving birth and thereafter. The following practices were imposed upon her without warning and without consent.

They involved the rule of preventing bonding by forbidding the mother to see or touch the baby she had given birth to. This was accomplished by using pillows or sheets as a screen while the baby was secreted from the labour ward and hidden behind locked doors, immediately upon birth. Other hospitals transferred the heavily sedated mother soon after birth to another hospital or annex, without her baby.

Occasionally the mother was permitted to see her baby upon discharge but only on the condition that the adoption consent had been signed. The inquiry verified that most hospitals forbade the mother to be discharged until she had signed her baby away.

After birth her lactation was suppressed by the use of DES Stilboestrol in three times the legally recommended dosage.

Her treatment and adoption counselling consisted of a denial of her option, isolation, incarceration, suggestion, forced labour, repetitive indoctrination, humiliation, and moral coercion, including social role subjugation. These elements of damage were over and above the damage they were to suffer from the loss of their baby.

Heavy sedation during labour and  the post partum period  consisted of a lytic cocktail made up of  Sodium Pentobarbital, Amytal, Doriden, Chloral hydrate, and others,  to  be given as required until a consent was taken, further impeded the mothers cognitive processing of her loss.  

Adoption surrender involves a grief process not unlike death but with a marked difference.  While the closed adoption legislation was described in law as being “a separation so permanent as to emulate the veil between the living and the dead” there has been no attention given to  the trauma caused to the mother  who loses a living child forever in such a permanent and  unnatural way.

Condon. John of Flinders University explains how existing evidence suggests that the experience of relinquishment renders a woman at high risk of psychological (and possibly physical) disability. Moreover very recent research indicates that actual disability or vulnerability may not diminish even decades after the event.

Few had contact with the child at birth or thereafter. Nor did they receive sufficient information to enable them to construct an image of what they had lost. Masterson (1976) has demonstrated that mourning cannot proceed without a clear mental picture of what has been lost.

 Because the child continues to exist and develop while remaining inaccessible to them, the situation is similar to that of  having a child kidnapped,  or relatives of servicemen "missing believed dead". Similar disabling chronic grief reactions were particularly common during the war, in such relatives. (Condon Flinders University 1986) 

 

 

In her training courses for Adoption Workers in 1968, Miss M Nicholas of the Anglican Church Adoption Agency outlines the effects caused to the mother in relinquishing her child to adoption and the criteria to look in referring natural parents on for either diagnosis or treatment.

 

In her paper The Natural Parents Needs after Placement of her Child, Nicholas acknowledges depression and anxiety with their varying symptoms along with loss of self confidence, self-esteem, undue weeping, and strong feelings of rejection, social isolation and mothers who become incoherent after the loss of their child.

 

Changes in behaviour such as withdrawal from people, loss of interest in her appearance,  lack of self esteem, self respect and self confidence may be very low; there are  marked feelings of unworthiness, attempted suicide, fear of being alone, self destruction, personality disturbances,  obsessive and compulsive behaviour,  aggression and hostility.  Another concern with some were repetitious destructive dreams about babies being tortured. 

 

Sister Berromeo of the Catholic Adoption Agency in her presentation to the inaugural preceding to introduce the adoption of Children Act 1965, acknowledges that the

Separation from a child through the process of adoption is to a great many intents and purposes comparable to separation from a child through death.

 

The loss is irrevocable in terms of relationship and that such a loss can be viewed as a traumatic event indeed. Often, she explains, the mother cannot put the past behind her and move on.  That her ability to do so is dependent on her ability to do just this, and so she is under double pressure to suppress her grief. In cases where this is not possible it is not unusual for a mother who loses her child to suffer severe breakdown around the time of the child’s first birthday.

 

 Berromeo acknowledges that forbidding the mother to see her baby appears to encourage the re-enforcement of the strong elements of denial of her pregnancy and so, in the long-term view, prevent her from coming to terms with the whole experience.

 

Rose Burnstein in her 1968 paper Are We Stereotyping the Unmarried Mother? acknowledges the professionals own part in fostering a state of denial in the mother to make her experience as unreal as possible so that  “she can  resume her place in the community as though nothing has happened.  What we interpret as pathology may be the girl's valid fear of a frightening reality. She is behaving the way society requires in order to avoid permanent impairment of her social functioning.”

 

Symptoms

The primary source of pain for the mother who loses her child to adoption has been in the area of trust and loss. Trust was lost to her through the process of adoption rhetoric which told her adoption was in her child’s best interest and that she would recover and move on, only to be reviled by the same society which had encouraged adoption and gave her little alternative but to comply. The consequence which resulted in a lifetime of shame filled sorrow and silence.

The loss  she has suffered has not only been the loss of her child/ren, but the total loss of trust in herself and other,  the loss of  her sense of wholeness, her sense of control over her life, and loss of self-esteem. In some cases she has lost a home or has lost or suffered damaged relationships with members of her family.

Often she has lost identification with her mother as a role model. She has suffered loss of being accepted by society and loss of her adolescence, as well as loss of her sense of trust and self-worth.  For approximately half who had no other children she has lost her right of passage through the evolution of life as a mother and eventually a grandmother.  What most people take for granted, she will never know. 

This magnitude of loss is difficult for her to overcome. Sometimes the mother survival relies on remaining in denial and numbness for the rest of her adult life, unconsciously encumbered by her silent loss and sorrow. For those mothers who eventually seek help, it is up to the mental health community to validate their loss which in turn gives them the permission to grieve that which they have long been denied.   

Symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Sue Wells 1993 explains that many mothers say they split themselves off from their trauma as a coping mechanism. This avoidance as a strategy is one of the key symptoms of PTSD which may be caused by the trauma being internalised to avoid immediate pain. Many say they escaped into drugs and alcohol especially in the immediate years after relinquishment. Most say they felt numb, shocked, empty, and sad and many said they felt the same way many years later.

The distress associated with the loss may cause Psychogenic Amnesia which many mothers have verified by saying they are unable to recall important events associated with the birth or adoption.  Many who had no further children  had blocked out the memory of giving birth and the adoption process entirely, until legislative changed open records and allowed them to find their child.

Strategies for reducing distress means that exposure or events associated with the trauma, e.g. anniversaries, child’s birthday, Christmas, family gatherings etc, are experienced by most mothers as  painful or causing "intense psychological distress".

Psychic numbing, where the mother feels detached or estranged from others who have not been through the same experience is also substantiated as an isolating factor. The burden of secrecy can perpetuate this.

The description of Dissociation as a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity, during the period of time when a person is dissociating, and where certain information is not associated with other information as it normally would be, is an apt description of  the defence responses of a large number of mothers who lose a baby to adoption.

For example, during a traumatic experience a person may dissociate the memory of the place and the circumstances of the trauma from his ongoing memory, resulting in a temporary or long term mental escape from fear and pain of the trauma and in some cases, a memory gap surrounding the experience. Because this process can produce changes in memory, people who frequently dissociate often find their senses of personal history and identity are affected.

In addition, individuals can experience headaches, amnesias, time loss, trances, and "out of body experiences." All are definitions that can be attributed to  these mothers.

Anniversary reactions also feature strongly in the post adoption experience. These reactions are time specific psychological or physiological events which occur or reoccur in response to traumatic events in the individuals past, or in the past of a person with whom the individual is closely identified. The individual attempts to relive or re-experience the traumatic event again in a repetitious way, in anticipation of being able to master the trauma which was not mastered previously.

Depressive disorders, ranging from very mild depression to psychotic level disorders, may occur on an anniversary basis. Heart attacks, pleurisy and pneumonia, suicides, and phobic fear are also attributed to anniversary reactions. Pollock (1971) has written extensively on the subject. He believes that these reactions are due to incomplete or abnormal mourning over a personal loss or disappointment

Infant at birth adoption was a social phenomenon, an experiment, that came and went within a period of 40 years. Never in the history of mankind were mothers expected to relinquish their newborn children en-masse to strangers in any other period in history

 

 

 

  1. The natural parents needs after placement of her child: Course for Adoption Workers. Anglican Adoption Agency - Carramar Home. Miss M. Nicholas 1966

 

  1. Adoption - From the Point of View Of the Natural Parents. Sister Mary Berromeo R.S.M.,B.A., Dip.Soc.Wk. 1968.

 

  1. The Unwed Mother editor Robert W Roberts,  Chapter 8 "Are we  stereotyping the unmarried mother" by Rose Bernstein chapter "Denial" 1969

 

  1. Anniversary Reactions, Jesse O Cavenar,jr.,M.D. Jean G. Spaulding, M.D. Elliot B. Hammett M.D. 1976

 

  1. Psychological disability in women who relinquish a baby for adoption. John T. Condon (Medical Journal of Aust.) Vol 144 Feb 3 1986

 

  1. Relinquishing Mothers in Adoption - Their Long Term Adjustment, R  Winkler, M VanKeppel Melbourne Institute of Family Studies Monograph  No.3, 1984

 

  1. Post Traumatic Stress Disorders in Birthmothers, Sue Wells  (conf. Amsterdam) Adoption and Fostering Vol 17 No 2 1993

 

8.      The New South Wales Parliament,  Standing Committee on Social Issues Inquiry into Past Adoption Practices,  Interim Report No.1 G.A.Rickarby MB BS FRANZCP Member.of the Faculty of Child Psychiatry RANZCP MANZAP Consultant Psychiatrist 1998

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