Unintentionally Cruel

For this adoptee with the bad luck of being placed in an extremely dysfunctional family during the evil closed Era, the writings of psychoanalyst Alice Miller are a revelation.

My adoptive parents were unintentionally cruel and abusive.

I spent most of a year blogging, getting it all down, writing about my a-parents behaviors before recently discovering Alice Miller, thanks to an adoptee on the Chosen Baby forum. It has been an enormous relief to chronicle the bits and pieces of my childhood and adolscence that I can remember. There it is, in black and white, for me to reread and for others to comment on, providing the witnesses or neutral third parties that failed to step forward when I was a child. Not one blogger who has so kindly taken the time to comment has ever said, "Oh, but they loved you." Thank God. It is this response that makes me crazy with frustration. "Weren't you listening?" I want to cry. But I don't. It's better not to talk about the past with certain people because of the unquestioned belief that parents always act in the best interests of their children, even when they do not.

So brainwashed was I that I never thought of my adoptive parents as cruel, unintentionally or not. But according to Miller, they were. But what's even more important, my body and all my behaviors and reactions tell me that they were.

My a-mom was only capable of conditional love, as that is the only kind she received by her cold and domineering and deeply unhappy mother. When I did something to make my a-mom unhappy, she would refuse to look at or speak to me for days on end, pretending I wasn't there. Any expressions besides happy and grateful seemed to threaten her very existence. I was once slapped and sent to my room for "scaring" my mother because I cried when my boyfriend broke-up with me. I was not allowed to ask questions about my adoption or my first mother because my a-mom liked to pretend I was biologically hers. I was forced to play this pretend game, too.

My adoptive father is also incapable of empathy. He is a narcissist. I am in my mid-forties and he's never allowed me to talk or express my opinion without mocking me. He is not capable of anything else because he was horribly abused by an alcoholic father and is still tortured by the knowledge that his beloved mother did nothing to prevent the beatings. My a-father could not parent because he was still a child in desperate need of attention. He is still that child. He is 80-years old.

Of course, they were not all bad. They did not beat me or starve me. They laughed, took me to Disneyland, drove me to high school functions, let me choose my favorite take-out. And then reminded me of it all later, as if I owed them for parental duties performed. As if to say, we didn't enjoy any of these things, we just did them because we had to.

I am no longer confused by all this. It's all out in the open now. My adoptive parents were unintentionally cruel. They were ignorant. I no longer wonder why I'm not a better daughter, why I didn't love them more. There is nothing wrong with me. I did the best I could. Under the circumstances. I don't have to feel guilt or shame. I forgive myself. I am working my way toward figuring out to do with all the anger and resentment that has built up over the years. But it is beginning to seep out, to be released. I am not in any rush to do this. It is, I believe, important to experience all those feelings that had to be bottled up.

Alice Miller, your work is a gift.