I was proactive at a very young age. Ok, full disclosure: I am wordy-nerdy. I have been thinking about how we define ourselves as either adopted or as adoptees. Both of these words feel very much about action that happened TO us. One EFL site referred to adjectives ending in ‘ed’ as words that “show […]
Tag Archives: victimization
In Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, at one point he remarks on the irregular origins of birth for heroes in many sacred traditions: The hero is not born like an ordinary mortal because his birth is rebirth from the mother-wife. That is why the hero so often has two mothers. As Rank has shown with a […]
I hope, if proposing this question re-treads material already exhausted previously, that revisiting it has also a quality of refreshing it. But also, to avoid taking up a lot of space with any sort of startled “discovery” of the issue on my part, I intend only to submit it to the collective intelligence of the […]
The controversy over Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird remains, but for me the central image of the novel still holds: A birdcatcher paints one of his flock in bright colors; seen as foreign by the other birds, it is attacked and killed. This is the image that occurred to me after reading a news […]
We are familiar with this I think from our childhoods, someone calling us out as “adopted!” which becomes a disparaging term. What about from adults when we were children? What about from adults when we reach adulthood? I’m interested in hearing from adoptees your experiences along these lines.
This is quoted from a “comment” from a grad student in clinical psychology. What do you think of those who want to “study” us? Your participation is valuable to my desire to bang my head against a wall.
In the post discussing the devolution of adoption [ link ], at the heart of what was either seen as horrifying or else a cause for viral reposting was the mediation of an adopted child for public consumption. I am intrigued here because I have often been threatened by adoptive parents either directly or via […]
I keep thinking about this Adoption Horrow Show [ link ] and how it sets back humanity on all levels a couple of thousand years. And I keep re-reading what I initially wrote when I saw this: Adoptees have no will. Adoptees do what they need to do to survive, even if at the expense […]
A few years after I arrived in Beirut, a French-language daily published an overview of us as adoptees looking for our roots in Lebanon. It was very “poor orphans” in tone, and it didn’t really communicate what I was feeling at the time. Later, when the Arche de Zoë scandal broke in Chad/France, I wrote […]
On an adoption web site I recently saw a topic concerning a child who was being bullied by another boy. The discussion seemed to be more concerned with whether the bullying was racially motivated [the child is from Guatemala], or whether it was even bullying to begin with, and not just “normal” child’s play. I […]
Do people who have been adopted blame others all their lives for their adoption? I see it a lot on this section where a person will put the blame on others who choose to adopt, for themselves being adopted and having a bad experience. I also see a lot of I was treated like this, […]
Transracialeyes 