SERIES: Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency – Rejection

This chapter starts out with Webster’s dictionary definition of rejection; my eyes scan the words typed on the first page:

“To discard or throw out as worthless; useless or substandard. To rebuff or fling back.”

Worthless? Useless? Substandard? My gentle heart sank and I instantly felt regret about agreeing to write this piece. I continued to read on: rejection is the very first spoke on Roszia & Maxon’s wagon wheel as defined in their book. It’s explained as the first thing “emanating from loss.”

“I can agree with that,” I thought to myself. After all, when you’re adopted, it’s instant loss and immediate rejection. Society never lets me forget that either: comments from family, friends, and strangers about my adoption almost always begin with asking if I know “why I was ‘given up.’”

“Given up” sounds gross when we’re discussing a human being. It sounds like rejection.

I was relinquished to the international adoption system immediately after birth, starting what sometimes feels like a lifelong journey of rejection. I went from my mother’s Chilean womb, to private foster care, and then to my parents’ home in America. Permanency has always felt foreign. It feels like a faraway objective that I left in Chile back in 1983.The book explains that adoptees, foster, and kinship care children can experience rejection not only from their initial separations and placements, but also from society, community, culture, and government or state as they navigate life.

As an adult adoptee, I speak to others in the adoption community who are looking to get legal documents from their local government agencies and they can’t. Records that are readily available to our non-adopted peers are somehow denied to us. You arrive at an unknown building with EVERYTHING they say you need to obtain your original birth certificate, and then they tell you no.

Rejection.

During search and reunion for our biological families, we are sometimes turned down or denied by parents, siblings, and other blood relatives.

Rejection.

Job applications denied.

College applications denied.

I’ve heard my adopted peers can have a super hard time with these unavoidable life “rejections.”

I’ll also choke on a bite of my own reality here and vulnerably admit that while I’ve lived 42 years struggling with “rejection,” I am also REALLY good at rejecting.

It sounds wild to say but I suppose rejection is also my safest form of self-protection. If I reject everything that comes close, I lessen my probability of being rejected myself. I am actually quite tired of rejection and also, I’m tired of constantly asking for reassurance to help alleviate my fear of being rejected. This creates difficulty for my family, my friends, all my loved ones. I am known to retreat when I’m afraid, essentially giving them their own experiences with rejection as I shut down. A clear picture of how these Seven Core Issues can affect ALL members within the constellation of adoption. In my experience, it’s a constant push and pull, often based on my level of comfort, the safety and security I feel within the relationship

Discarded. Useless or substandard. *My eyes roll* as I venture back to that original definition of rejection. The authors suggest that creating trust can help outweigh these underlying feelings (or fears) of rejection in adoptees. I happen to agree.

For me, consistency is the simplest key to creating a rejection worry-free zone. When people in my life are consistent in their presence, I feel at my safest. When people are inconsistent, it feels like punches of rejection, that feeling of NOT being chosen or being discarded hits me over and over again.

Rejection is a part of the adoption wheel that we cannot deny. It’s there. It exists. But if we continue to learn from one another and utilize adoption competent tools in daily practice, we can slowly begin to settle the wounds that sit within the Seven Core Issues of adoption and permanency.

The journey continues…