Nancy Verrier’s book goes on to discuss dissociating which is a way of escaping their own bodies and anesthetizing what is happening to them. In the natural state the body produces natural opiates to calm the distress. When adoptees or natural mothers can not seem to dissociate spontaneously then they often turn to alcohol or narcotics to relive the pain. She say that at that point anything is better than feeling that pain.

There is research that supports in natural mothers what is called secondary infertility. Nancy states that 35-60% of natural mothers never again conceive. It is also not uncommon for adoptees to chose not to have children of their own.

Are you a triad member that has spent a large part of your life believing some how you deserved what you are going through, that you aren’t worthy of someone who treated you well? I think that is how my natural mother felt. I think she imposed on herself a life sentence and with that life sentence she felt so much guilt, pain, shame, and unworthiness that she needed to find a way to escape the feelings that she experienced.

In thinking about this I realized that Nancy Verrier and BJ Lifton both describe two common coping skills that adoptees develop. Some adoptees develop almost a perfectionism syndrome (they become the good adoptee). Others develop out or testing syndrome (they become the bad adoptee). It is explained that both really operated from the same premise of fear. The good adoptee tries to be perfect and believes that if he or she is good enough then their parent won’t leave them. The bad adoptee acts out saying in effect prove you love me or if I act out enough their parents will leave them which supports the idea that their life is to be left. Some may go back and forth between the two. Trying to be good all the time and when the sheer exhaustion of feeling like they mustbe good all of the time wears them down they act out.

When I learned that my natural mother life in 1993 I had a difficult time separating what happened to her as somehow being my fault. I know now it is common for some adoptees to blame themselves for things that aren’t their fault because we have in our minds that there is something flawed or wrong with us. My thought process was that the blaming myself was if she would have never gotten pregnant with me then none of this would have happened, she would have had a happy productive life.