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Recently I watched a video interview with an international adoptee. She said she had always known she was abandoned in her home country and that she was adopted by her family in the US. She talked about how this had created issues for her, she had a hard time attaching with people because of her fear of abandonment. It got me thinking- what's the best way to talk to your child if they were abandoned? On one hand I feel that telling your child they were abandoned is very poor wording and could cause a lot of trauma. But telling your child that their birth mother loved them and wanted better for them, so they left them at the orphanage they were adopted from is potentially problematic as well. The idea of being left because they're loved could be very damaging, and there's no way to know the whole story, so putting one spin or another in it might not be true. It also might make the adoptee I feel invalidated, and hide their feelings of abandonment for fear their adoptive parents might leave them too. What do you think is the best way to talk to a child who was abandoned?
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