In Appreciation of The Primal Wound

by Marcy Axness, Ph.D.

This article is excerpted from Volume II of Dr. Axness’ Adoption Insight Series, entitled What Is Written on the Heart ~ Primal Issues in Adoption.

…enrolled in fate like all the others…
—Rilke

Pain That Has a Name Is Easier To Bear

A few years ago my husband was suffering from a mysterious, ever-worsening pain in his heels. The pain, and its intrusion on his lifestyle, was depressing for him, and even more depressing was the sense that this seemed to be one of those things that might never get explained but would rather, hopefully, go away on its own. It didn’t, and he continued chasing down relief. One day he came home from the podiatrist happy and hopeful. He had seen his problem on the X-rays, he had seen in black and white exactly what was causing his pain. Real, tangible. There was a name for what was hurting him.

There are no X-rays for hearts, for souls. There are only courageous people willing to step forward and speak of certain difficult truths. I’ll never forget the evening when I first read Nancy Verrier’s preliminary paper on her theory of the primal wound, in which she illustrates how abandonment and loss is indelibly imprinted upon the unconscious minds of those who have been separated from their biological mothers at birth. Verrier invokes established research to propose that bonding doesn’t begin after birth, but is a continuum of physiological, psychological and spiritual events beginning in utero and continuing throughout the post-natal bonding period. It is the interruption of this natural evolution, due to post-partum separation of mother and child, that creates a primal wound, according to Verrier, who went on to publish her findings in The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child.[1]

The descriptions I was reading in Verrier’s article sounded chillingly familiar, and I felt relief down to my bones, a tearful epiphany of Oh God, someone finally knows me, sees me, understands this impossible ache/not-ache, this me/not-me that I’ve been living all these years, in solitary, the loneliness of not being understood, and moreover, the exasperation of the narrow halls. One walks narrow halls of life when one is not conversant with one’s full spectrum of being. Confined, and puzzled as to why…

And yes, for that night, and weeks of nights thereafter, I felt that I’d found The Key to me: “Ah ha, so this is my core issue, and all those years of therapy, of dancing around the ancillary issues, was simply a prelude!” For awhile I suppose I did become “over-identified” with the primal wound, which is a concern that some critics have over this kind of ideological theory. They believe that to ascribe to any one theory the genesis of a person’s essential make-up is a grave mistake. In the long run, I agree, as I will discuss later.

Archetypal Truth or Invitation to Wallow?

One Jungian scholar, Dr. Randolph Severson, points out that Verrier invokes the power of the Mother/Child archetype inherent in her ideas, an archetype which carries tremendous emotional appeal and therefore tends to lead readers of The Primal Wound to naturally find its precepts overwhelmingly true. His concern is that other ideas, images, and insights equally relevant to the individual may then not be integrated in a healthy, well-balanced manner, but rather, eclipsed by the primal wound and its powerful archetypal image.[2] One of the functions of an archetype, as I understand it, is to strum deeply-buried feelings. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes tells us that archetypal stories present us with the knife of insight, and set the inner life into motion—particularly important where the inner life is wedged or cornered.[3] So many adoptees whom I’ve met, corresponded with, and read about have inner chunks of themselves bound up in archaic chains; the tumult of powerful feelings that a relevant archetype can call forth may in itself be therapeutic—an emotional cathartic.

Then comes the work of integration, but not, I believe, before one has had the opportunity to wallow, to swim deeply and languorously in this place of long-craved empathy. We’re parched cisterns needing to be filled to over-flowing and then some, and then some, and then some, and then…slowly…we can begin to integrate, to be sensitive and receptive to other ideas, other influences, other forces which have relevance in our lives.

Paradoxically, the comforting containment of Verrier’s insights allowed me to open my eyes to myriad other important forces in my life, forces which I’d always dismissed as irrelevant to that overwhelming core ache.

To expect a set of newly-introduced (and, as in the case of the primal wound, profoundly powerful and empathic) ideas to go to a place of ready integration is like me expecting my child to be fully independent before she’s had her fill of being dependent. It ironically stunts growth rather than hurrying it along. And to worry that a struggling adoptee will remain in the grip of this archetype-based idea of the primal wound, so that everything for that person will forevermore be explained by that theory, is to reveal a cynicism about the emotional and spiritual resources of the adopted person to continue the process of integration, the process of pursuing wholeness along whatever paths lead the way.

Destiny and Compassion Can Co-Exist

There is a certain philosophy on the rise, no longer safely confined to California and the New Age, which proposes that we “choose” everything that happens to us. Currently promoted by Jungian analyst and author James Hillman in his recent bestseller The Soul’s Code, this notion states that each of our souls has a blueprint, or “daimon,” which selects life experiences and circumstances for that individual which will forge his or her soul to its true, rightful shape and hue. [4] Hillman has little patience for theories of early trauma determining behavior or personality, believing that such theories insult the integrity of the individual and his or her singularity. Hand in hand with this kind of self-determined fatalism, it seems, goes the attitude, “You chose it, so it’s trivial and degrading folly to seek to amend it.”

I would propose—regardless of whether we are living according to such an individual destiny or to one accorded us by God—a supreme paradox which requires that we step out of our black-and-white, linear ways of thinking into a more inclusive, lateral-thinking mind-set: What if, for my true self to become manifest, I not only needed to experience being separated from my original mother at birth, but also needed to be given acknowledgment and empathy for that very painful experience? For that has been my experience: prior to reading about and addressing the primal wound in my own life, I felt simply bound up by a vague malaise, a deep constriction, what Estes calls “the grinning depression.” Since Verrier’s words set a healing process in motion, I now truly feel like the unfolding self I was designed to become, unfettered now, and able, as Hillman challenges, to “notice the fathering and mothering afforded by the world every day in what it sends” my way.

Burden or Blessing…or Both?

A longtime student of Hillman’s, Dr. Severson is an eloquent and passionate philosopher, author, and therapist in the field of adoption. He has cautioned, with regard to the primal wound, that “too much psychologizing about the burden and wounds of adoption alienates those who have suffered genuine pain and losses from their own psychological resources and spiritual strengths. Too much pathologizing of adoption forgets that every burden can also be a blessing. The psychological/spiritual goal is for the two to coexist, with one feeling or idea prevailing for a time and then the other, without either ever being negated or ignored.” (Severson, p. 105.)

I believe these to be very wise words indeed. But to truly own that feeling of a burden, one needs to understand the nature of the burden, to have stared in its face and down its throat. However, many adoptees have gone through their lives in the grip of something that vaguely echoes of a burden, in the shadows of an intangible burden which have cast themselves about their lives, but with no definition, no resolution. It isn’t coincidental that to resolve means to render distinguishable the individual parts of an object, and it also means to solve. One, I believe, must precede the other.

But there have been precious few opportunities in the lives of adoptees to achieve the first kind of resolution. All eyes in our adoptive families were on the blessings, so ours had nowhere else to look. “We were so blessed that you came to us” was never balanced with “It was hard for you that you had to leave your other mother.” “You’re a precious part of our family” didn’t allow for, “I wonder if those blue eyes come from your birth mother or birth father.” The burden, experienced by the adoptee pre-verbally and pre-cognitively, had no context, no language through which to be recognized as such.

Dr. Severson says “to separate [blessing and burden] adds to the internal blights that we know as depression and denial.” (Severson, p. 105.) But we are pressed into separating them through the simple non-acknowledgment of the burden. No one named our burden! Well, social worker Florence Clothier did way back when, but no one seemed to listen; then came Reuben Pannor and Annette Baran, speaking of “emotional amputation,” and now Nancy Verrier and the primal wound.

Are Theories Dehumanizing?

Attachment theorist John Bowlby says, “in living creatures variation of response is the rule and its explanation is often hard to fathom.”[5] There are always a complex of factors contributing to any human circumstance, and to reduce any human experience to a single explanation inevitably falsifies and dehumanizes that experience.

Borrowing from Betty Jean Lifton’s theory of “cumulative adoption trauma,”[6] rather than descriptive of a single event or circumstance, I tend to consider the primal wound as referring to cumulative experience, encompassing the heavily ambivalent, anti-connection, prenatal mother/fetus relationship; the subsequent separation of the child from its biological mother; and adoptive parenting styles and subsequent experiences which may compound the earlier trauma.

What is equally false and dehumanizing as oversimplification of the causes of an individual’s make-up, is the act of “protecting” that individual by shielding them from their truth through lies of omission. There are some in the adoption field who seem to feel as if an embrace of the validity of the primal wound—by acknowledging what appears to be an unavoidable truth in adoption—would cast an unacceptable blight upon adoption and the adoptive family. That kind of mentality is what leads to the various ills of the dysfunctional family, for as the late psychiatrist Dr. David Viscott simply defined it, a dysfunctional family is a family who runs from its pain.[7] Runs to alcohol, drugs, over-work, perfectionism—all the handmaidens of denial, all the enemies of a sound inner life.

Fostering Victim Mentality or Acknowledging A Difficult Truth?

Many people worry that the notion of the primal wound fosters victim status in birthparents and adoptees. I propose that it simply acknowledges an existing condition through which we often already feel like victims!

There are those who consider the primal wound to be a platform for adoptees to do yet more blaming and complaining, rather than “getting on with their lives”. The message I’ve gotten all of my life is “Count your blessings, stop whining, get on with it.” I have had a fundamental problem with most self-help modalities and methods which stress changing behavior, changing attitude, and “re-framing” as their primary bases. They only added to my frustration and self-flagellation because I just couldn’t make those changes and re-framed realities “stick.” Yes, these approaches have been incredibly useful to me, but only after having walked into that emptiness inside me, and felt it—finally, deeply—and grieved it. This, in my hard-won experience, is what effective healing work is about: not “fixing” it, but facing it.

To try and pick oneself up by the bootstraps and “get on with it” before having the chance to lick one’s wounds, to even see one’s wounds, that is when one’s life vitality is siphoned off, by any of myriad defensive coping mechanisms, by overwhelming feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, depression, and sometimes by thoughts—or more than thoughts—of suicide. (So many of the soul’s painkillers are truly suicide in installments: smoking, alcoholism, drugs…)

By the way, let me state here that I absolutely do not claim this territory as solely belonging to the adoptee, but to anyone who has turned away, through coercion, collusion or self-delusion, from one’s deep truth.

I believe that the newborn adoptee has a deep—yes, primal—knowledge that his original mother isn’t the woman who’s holding and feeding and cooing at him. Plenty of solid research shows us that a newborn knows its mother and will work very hard to obtain her over anyone else. And while Brodzinsky et. al.[8] assures adoptive parents that recognition (and in fact, demonstrated preference) doesn’t equate with attachment, I believe that is a semantic distinction irrelevant to a newborn.

Throughout our childhoods, although this deep knowing prods us down deep, telling us that the emperor is naked, we come to embrace, out of our existential survival instinct, the position that the emperor is fully clothed, because that’s what everyone else is saying, everyone upon whom we depend. We gradually become alienated from our own inner knowing, which leads to a hollowness inside, a hollowness that can’t be filled by the noisy details of our lives, our school plays, our swim meets, our slumber parties, and 20 years later, our own kids’ soccer games, our promotions, our exciting plans for the new house, our baby on the way. The hollowness just feels more hollow when none of these blessings can seem to fill us up.

Denying v. Affirming A Child’s Experience

I fear that as long as experts equivocate about whether or not it is traumatic for an individual to be separated from his or her mother at birth, many adoptive parents (and grown adoptees themselves, equally entangled in society’s denial of adoption’s deeper issues) will opt to turn a blind eye. “Our child doesn’t suffer from that primal wound business.”

How many beaming adoptive parents will gaze upon their bright, giggling, rosy-cheeked four-year-old doing cartwheels on the lawn, and embrace the idea that she’s possibly carrying with her a very deep, intangible hurt, which may be scarring over in ways which will cinch in on her life ever so slowly, ever so invisibly? Unless there is literature and counseling out there which encourages them, which challenges them to open up to the broader inner life of their child, how could we even expect them to?

Dr. Wendy McCord, a therapist specializing in pre- and perinatal issues, suggests that there are things adoptive parents can do to acknowledge and allow an adopted infant’s loss, hurt, and anger, and thereby begin a healing process. [Contact this author for further information.] These are simple, concrete things which, while perhaps challenging of parents’ idealized vision of the adoptive experience, will begin to establish an atmosphere of trust for their child. This trust leads to the kind of intimacy which, more than any piece of paper, decrees them as that child’s “real parents.” For parents who act not out of their own needs and insecurities, but rather out of a truly respectful, supportive commitment to child’s needs, those are real parents. And that is real love.

Instead of sympathy, which will foster victim status, what a hurting child needs from a parent is empathy. “I can see that you’re hurting. I wonder if you’re missing your other mother, that connection you had with her.” “It was sad for both of you that you couldn’t stay together. But it was happy for for both of us that we ended up together. I’m here for you and I’m going to stay here with you.”

When each of my children were very young, I participated in weekly infant/parent guidance classes. One of the most profound and valuable things I learned was to acknowledge a child’s feelings at getting hurt, or even just scared, in a fall, a pinch, a bump, whatever, without swooping them up in rescue fashion, and “making it all okay.” “You tripped over that toy and bumped your knee, and I can hear how much that hurt,” or, “That was really scary to fall off the swing.”

What I came to find with both of my children is that when their hurt was acknowledged they didn’t feel the need to cry much at all. I think that a child’s crying is often protracted in an attempt to convince the parents that “There is something to cry about, damn it!”

Adoptees often have a whiny, “Why me?” response to myriad things in our lives, and now here’s Verrier giving us one more really juicy thing to whine about. But I propose that Verrier’s ideas hold the promise of finally hearing our whines, like the wise mother who says to her hurt, crying child, “That really hurt, didn’t it? I hear you.”

Unspeakable Feelings

A frequently overlooked aspect of the adoptee’s experience, thoughtfully explored by Lifton in her chapter on “the antisocial tendency,” are those facets of the self that are girded by rage in its various guises. It is what leads to acting out behaviors such as stealing, lying, addictions, even suicide. While all of these behaviors involve complex nuances of motivation, I also believe they are ways of acting out the adoptee’s intangible (and therefore unspeakable) primal experience, which is explored in more depth in other articles by this author.

But even the so-called compliant, “always good” adoptee harbors these same unspeakable feelings. This shadow-side in adoptees, says psychologist William Emerson, is very deep and very denied, but will consistently reveal itself in adoptees’ hair-trigger response to everyday events that feel like persecution. “Often, they will find people around them to be stupid, incompetent, insensitive,” explains Emerson. ”’How can they do that?’ is a frequent refrain, directed to anything and everything that has any level of cosmic injustice to it, because what’s been done to them is cosmically unjust, that’s how it feels.”

Psychoanalyst and clinical psychiatry professor John Sonne thinks the hesitancy to recognize adoptees’ anger comes from an almost-universal wish to not be accused of being insensitive to birth mothers, or of blaming them, or of reinforcing an adoptee’s dwelling upon blaming. [9] But Sonne finds that is often the anger in the adoptee—deep, primal, and totally unacknowledged—which leads to depression. He reminds us of Freud’s observation that the depressed individual has repressed anger against an internalized object. There is no more internalized object than the mother.

“Adoptees’ anger has to be dealt with,” explains Sonne. “Their mothers hurt them. What is denied by adoptees, and often those around them, is not only their grief, their feelings of hurt and loss, and their feelings of being second class, but their anger also. Their anger needs to be validated as understandable for them to feel first class. Only then can they not feel guilty for their anger. Then they can be free to grieve, love, forgive, and to realize how wonderful they really are, despite the fact that their mothers gave them up.”[10]

Even as I write these words, I can feel something basic in me rise up—most likely along with my readers—to defend birth mothers. “She had no choice.” “She had no support.” “She was sixteen.” This is perhaps the most difficult terrain of the adoption world, reconciling the primal feelings and experience of the adoptee, and the motivations, feelings, and experience of the birth mother. In most cases, it simply cannot be done. Rational understanding and even acceptance by the adult adoptee of the facts regarding the difficult situation faced by his or her birth mother cannot eclipse that foundational, primal imprint of rejection. Regardless of how a birth mother felt about the relinquishment of her child, regardless of the circumstances under which it “was the best for everyone,” that child—on a primal level—experienced being given away, abandoned, left behind.

Dr. Sonne points out that when we gloss over this very painful, irreconcilable reality, we short-circuit the healing process for adoptees as well as birth parents, and leave them feeling “unreal.” Raja Selvam, a BodyMind therapist, says that before one can transcend any particular feeling or circumstance, one needs to experience it in all its truth.

I believe that along with anger at the birth mother, there is also anger toward the adoptive parents, not only for taking the place of the birth parents, or “stealing” the adoptee, but also for not seeing and easing the pain that the newborn adoptee suffers in the wake of this wrenching separation. Indeed, the adoptive parents are usually, by contrast, tremendously happy and celebratory. This can prove to be a tremendous barrier in the foundation of a relationship between parents and child, for it’s very hard to feel loving feelings for or to accept love from someone towards whom we are harboring unexpressed anger or deep-seated resentment.

Not to Blame, But to Understand

I have never met a birthparent who feels that Nancy Verrier has assigned blame to her; only those who appreciated the difficult truths she has finally spoken, which often validate their own instinctive understanding of the profound effects of relinquishment on their children.

This is not about guilt, and it is not about blame. It is about information. It is about knowing what really happened to you. That is what makes you sane.

I feel that no one is responsible for my journey other than me. I feel blame for no one, which is only possible after good, empathic healing work. I hold adeeply cosmic and karmic view of my adoptive experience. And I agree that to treat our adopted children as victims would cripple them in their ultimately solitary task of reconciliation and healing. But even courageous lone travelers need the guidance of honest folks offering directions, reliable guideposts by which to find their way.

I am grateful to have been offered just such a beacon, a map of one kind of injured soul. I thank Nancy Verrier for having the guts to stand up and speak aloud, finally, a gritty truth about adoption that has been lived silently and painfully in the hearts and souls of far too many.

Resources

  1. Verrier, N.: The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Baltimore: Gateway Press, Inc., 1993.
  2. Severson, R.: Adoption: Philosophy and Experience. Dallas: House of Tomorrow, 1994, pps. 95-106.
  3. Estes, C.: Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
  4. Hillman, J.: The Soul’s Code. New York: Random House, 1996.
  5. Bowlby, J.: Attachment and Loss, Vol. II: Separation, New York: Basic Books, 1972, pg. 5.
  6. Lifton, B.J.: Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness, New York: Basic Books, 1994.
  7. Viscott, D.: Overcoming the Pain of Childhood. Audio Renaissance Tapes, 1990.
  8. Brodzinsky, D., Schechter, M., and Marantz, R.: Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self, New York: Doubleday, 1992.
  9. Sonne, J.C.: “The psychological consequences of ignorance: adoptees’ right to know who their biological parents are,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, 1997, 2(1): 105-114.
  10. Sonne, J.C.: Personal communication, 1998.

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This is not about guilt, and it is not about blame. It is about information. It is about knowing what really happened to you. That is what makes you sane.