The five stages of reunion healing go hand in hand with the five stages of grief.

I had searched for my natural family for 2 years before I found a grave. It was a bitter sweet time for me. I felt relief as I found my natural mother after my long and frustrating search. After standing at her grave on that cold winter day I tried to resume to my life as if nothing had happened at all. There were some powerful emotions brewing inside me during this time. It is this time period that I was denying that I had found a grave and denied that I need to adjust to the reality that my natural mother was deceased. After a few months of ignoring the importance of this change in my life I began to get flashes of strong feelings about my search.

Shortly after meeting my sister for the first time I began to feel immense anger about a number of things related to my natural mother. I felt angry that I had ever allowed myself to feel rejected by my natural mother. I felt angry about being relinquished to adoption and that I would never know how she arrived at her decision to give me up for adoption. I was upset that some questions I had would not be answered and I had not other way to find these answers and I didn’t know what to do with these emotions. I felt guilty about feeling angry or sad or frustrated about any of this. I felt guilty that my adoptive parents had to experience any discomfort and pain surrounding my need to know more about my natural family and myself.

It wasn’t until after the fact that I realized I was trying to come to terms with my past. I had to work through the guilt, frustration, confusions and anger. It was hard but was able to find a way to get on with my life as I sorted through these anger and guilt issues and put them to rest.

After a few months of experiencing the second stage I moved into the third where my first response to all the anger and guilt was to pretend that I didn’t have them. When I wasn’t able to do this any longer, I bargained with myself to allow a certain amount of time to have these feelings. When the time expired I was going to put the issues away and move on with my life. I decided to created PARR and get more involved in the adoption community. At first I viewed this as “work” and it would get it all out of my system. The reality was that I couldn’t rationalize the strong impact that finding a grave actually had on my life. I thought that I was suppose to feel happy and complete but I didn’t and I didn’t understand why. No one had told me that I’d still be feeling like I did.

As I realized that this bargaining with myself wasn’t working I finally let myself feel said and depressed. I realized that I would be able to find peace with finding my natural mother deceased. By allowing myself to experience the pain and acknowledge and the very real feelings of loss I knew I would come out feeling strong and more whole in the end.