being married to an adoptee

Whoo boy...I don't know that I have anything to offer that would be "help" but a couple of things kind of popped into my mind while reading the post. Bear in mind that these are just ideas, that I don't know any more than anyone else does, and should all be taken with a grain of salt...like the size grain that comes in a 50 pound bag. That said, it's true that adoptees CAN have abandonment issues. It's also true that kids who were not adopted can have the same types of issues so I don't necessarily think it's a given that what's causing his behavior is adoption related. You said you've been married for 7 years. Was he like this when you were first married? Or before you got married? If the answer to either one of those questions is no, then I would again question to what extent his being adopted is a factor. Adoption can influence a person's personality a great deal later in life. I was adopted at birth and I doubt that anyone who knows me today would consider me hugely outgoing or the life of the party, but I don't think my adoption has much if any bearing on that. Were I to hazard a completely uneducated guess, I would guess that something else is the major factor in his behavior, with adoption being maybe somewhere down the list. Hopefully you can find some resources and help to sort out the issues. Best, PADJ

I'm with PADJ, it's never easy to know if it's from adoption or not. I have figured out that sometimes being adopted can add a special spice to other typical emotional things that can come up in life. Does he talk about his adoption with you? Has he at some point gotten deep at all about it? Does he know about his original family? Does he say he wants to find them, curious about them? Do you have kids? Has there been any major changes in your lives? Do you have any idea why he is self medicating? Is that something normal for him, or something new? I don't know how else to say it, but do you think he might have "the seven year itch"? Worried about getting older? Has he lost a friend, job, family member? Has something knocked him down recently, something to make him feel bad or sad? He's obviously thinking about wanting to know more about love, deep love and maybe he doesn't know what it is or how to go about finding out. Maybe he doesn't know how to love himself? I'd try talking to him more about that. And maybe do some research on the mastery of love. A good dose of that can only help. I've been married for 29 years. Since our marriage survived my reunion with my family, my husband would suggest no one should marry an adoptee LOL It's his first question to friends when they say they've met someone new... Are they adopted? He's only partly serious! He hung in there pretty well, it wasn't easy on any of us. He is the kind that doesn't talk much, and rarely anything deep. Lately maybe about 10 words per day :rolleyes: and three of those are "what's for dinner", "where's the remote". So I feel for you there.

I've actually only registered to reply to this thread. My fiance was adopted, and he also tends to "zone out" emotionally. His case is a bit more difficult though, as both his adoptive parents passed in away in his young adulthood, and he never had any siblings so he's completely alone. You could say there are some severe abandonment issues there. It hurts me a lot when I see him crawl into his shell from time to time (his "medication" is online gaming) and doesn't share his feelings. I guess for me it's easier to understand what's going on with him because I had it pretty rough too: my parents were teenagers, then my dad passed away when I was 9 and my mom pretty much went emotionally AWOL after that. I guess you could say I'm no stranger to being left to my own devices, so I have abandonment issues as well. What I'm trying to convey here is that there must be a reason you were attracted to each other in the first place. It may help you to look closer into your own relationship with your parents, and what it's taught you. It might seem scary but in my case, I realized that our major issues actually keep us together - we're really into commitment and having a stable family. But most importantly, not letting anything threaten that commitment... this means that some boundaries need to be set, like realizing when "self-medication" is going on and what to do about it (otherwise it becomes co-dependency). Once in a while you're going to have to put your foot down and let him know that he needs to communicate his feelings and find a different outlet. I wouldn't give him ultimatums (although I admit I've done it in severe cases), because threatening an adoptee with yet another abandonment is like dealing a psychological low-blow. It takes a really strong person to be in your position, trust me you're not alone :)

@cfiedler, if you are still following this thread... I might be able to offer some perspective on your husband. I'm a 39 yo man, adopted at birth, and married/divorced twice. In recent years I've come to realize that I definitely have issues stemming from my adoption, which have influenced all my relationships, be it family, friendships or romantic. I have always kept people at a distance to varying degrees, never really opening myself up completely to anyone. I've always sort of stood alone, even when I wasn't. I have a great adoptive family, have and have had great friends, and have had great romantic partners in my life, BUT I still stand alone. The only exception being my daughter. While both women I was married to had some issues of their own, which contributed to our problems as a couple, if I'm honest with myself, my emotional detachment from them is what ultimately lead to our divorcing, or at the very least, started the ball rolling in that direction. Like you mentioned about your husband and you, in the beginning of both relationships/marriages I was different. I will just focus on my second marriage, as it was the most prominent, and most life changing... In the beginning we were best friends, talked about everything, I was completely open and comfortable, deeply in love with her, and felt like I had finally found the person that would "complete" me (in retrospect no one should need another person to complete them, IMO). Within a couple of years, probably less, I started to pull away, was often unhappy, depressed or worried, self medicated with alcohol and was very isolated emotionally. The more I pulled away, the more she tried to "fix" it, with sex, elaborate meals, kindness, compliments... whatever she could think of to get through to me. And I know now, that it made her feel like I didn't love her anymore, or that I wasn't attracted to her etc. None of which was the case, none of it had anything to do with her, or what she was/wasn't doing for me. I didn't love her any less than I had before, and until it became apparent to me that she had given up and was pulling away herself (I'm sure it started long before I realized it), I never for a second even considered that we wouldn't spend the rest of our lives together. So why did things change? The bottom line is that I have always struggled with self worth issues, self doubt, fears of not being good enough, and fears of losing everything. In the beginning of a new relationship you can't help but be happy... You're in love, this amazing person wants to be with you and loves you. Those feelings temporarily masked all those fears and doubts, and propped me up emotionally, but they were still there. And once the excitement and newness of the relationship started to fade, and we settled into our life together, they slowly made their way back to the forefronts of my thoughts. I cant offer any logical explanation for why I pulled away and cocooned myself emotionally, as it only served to make my fears come true, but I guess subconsciously I thought I was protecting myself. I wanted to be a good husband, and in some ways I was, but I could never really bring myself to be who she needed me to be, or who I wanted to be for her. We had a very loooong, drawn out breakup, filled with short lived reconciliations, and once it was finally over for good, I had a complete emotional breakdown, with extreme feelings of abandonment. I literally felt like a little boy who couldnҒt find his mom. I was lost and scared, and felt more alone than I ever had. And I can remember thinking to myself, this isnt normal, this isnҒt how you are supposed to feel when a relationship ends. I certainly had reason to be sad, hurt and lonely, but what I was feeling went way beyond any feelings I had in the past when a relationship ended. I dont know how else to describe it other than I felt like an abandoned child. It wasnҒt until then that I ever acknowledged the negative feelings about being adopted that I had been dragging behind me my whole life. And I realized that I had in fact let her inӔ, more than I had ever let anyone in, which I think is why it was so devastating I just never showed her, or rather I showed her too late. You mentioned that your husband seems to lack on the emotional side of things and never wants to talk about issuesŅ I cant speak for him, but me personally҅ I would consider myself very emotional, and feel things deeply, maybe more so that the average man. Youd be hard pressed to find anyone who agrees with that statement about me, but itҒs true none the less, I just typically have an inexplicable mental block when I comes to showing it. So just because he doesnt show it, it doesnҒt necessarily mean he isnt feeling it. You also mentioned that it is like he is comfortable where he is at, in regards to you trying to find help for him. Being comfortable = safe, or a perceived notion of safe, but it does not necessarily mean happy. Confronting your issues and dealing with them is scary, itҒs easier to ignore them and pretend like they dont exist. When you do confront them, you might not feel ғsafe so to speak, but it is empowering and very much worth it. Taking that leap from denial to confrontation can be extremely difficult to do. I donԒt know what ways, if any, my feelings and experiences mirror your husbands, but hopefully some of it resonates with you and helps put some things into perspective. The best advice I could offer is to do whatever you can to get him to start dealing with his issues, the start of which is acknowledging that they exist. Talking to a psychologist can be very liberating, if you can get him to go. I would caution you though, that trying to force or pressure someone to confront their issues, can drive them away further, BUT most people will not confront them until they have no choice. I would also google ғpsychological effects of adoption, or something similar, if you havenԒt already. Once I started reading clinical papers written on the subject, and heard what other adoptees had to say, I was really able to start identifying all the different things Ive felt throughout my life, and it has helped me understand my own behavior. If you can get him to read some of it, it may help him to acknowledge his own feelings, which is easier to do when you know youҒre not the only one who feels that way. Most people have some issues in one form or another, and to varying degrees As husbands and wives, I think itŒs important to be supportive, patient and understanding of our spouses issues, and it sounds like you are, but no one should be expected to bear the brunt of those issues permanently, IMO. Your husband needs to acknowledge that they exist, and want to work on putting them to rest, so that you both can have a happy and fulfilling life together. This post got away from me, but I wanted to be as thorough as I could be. If you have any specific questions, or want to talk to me, feel free to message me.

I am living the same thing with my husband. He has become cold and distant over the last five years of our 16-yr marriage and I recently discovered that he was visiting a strip joint and had established an intimate emotional relationship with a stripper. That put me over the edge; we went to couples therapy for awhile but he would not do any emotional work. We are now separated and he is in therapy on his own. He told me last night that the topic of conversation during his last session was his adoption and how he felt abandoned by his bio mom (he sought her out many years ago and she told him he was a 'secret' and that his siblings did not know about him and that it had to remain that way). He also thinks that his adoptive parents cannot possibly love him the way biological parents love their children.I am waiting patiently to see if he will take this emotional journey with his therapist and come out OK on the other side. He feels that it will kill him. In the meantime, I have realized that he is unable to commit to marriage, address conflict or be transparent or self-accountable in his relationships. I get the fact that the stripper is just another form of self-validation and self-medication; I am more interested in WHY he did it, not necessarily WHAT he did.

I am living the same thing with my husband. He has become cold and distant over the last five years of our 16-yr marriage and I recently discovered that he was visiting a strip joint and had established an intimate emotional relationship with a stripper. That put me over the edge; we went to couples therapy for awhile but he would not do any emotional work. We are now separated and he is in therapy on his own. He told me last night that the topic of conversation during his last session was his adoption and how he felt abandoned by his bio mom (he sought her out many years ago and she told him he was a 'secret' and that his siblings did not know about him and that it had to remain that way). He also thinks that his adoptive parents cannot possibly love him the way biological parents love their children. I am waiting patiently to see if he will take this emotional journey with his therapist and come out OK on the other side. He feels that it will kill him. In the meantime, I have realized that he is unable to commit to marriage, address conflict or be transparent or self-accountable in his relationships. I get the fact that the stripper is just another form of self-validation and self-medication; I am more interested in WHY he did it, not necessarily WHAT he did.

Hi. I’m late to join this site and read your comment. It’s really helpful. Have things improved for him at all? How are things for you now? X

You just shared my life story 63 yr old male. Just starting adoption therapy

You also mentioned that it is like he is comfortable where he is at, in regards to you trying to find help for him. Being comfortable = safe, or a perceived notion of safe, but it does not necessarily mean happy. Confronting your issues and dealing with them is scary, itҒs easier to ignore them and pretend like they dont exist. When you do confront them, you might not feel ғsafe so to speak, but it is empowering and very much worth it. Taking that leap from denial to confrontation can be extremely difficult to do.