Maternal Separation Is Traumatic, and The Adoption Machine Is Fueled By It.

Maternal separation is traumatic by definition. Individual experience does not override biology nor the majority of adoptees who do feel completly traumatized by maternal separation.

Photo by Austin Lowman on Unsplash

We live in a culture that insists adoption begins with love, hope, and good intentions.

That insistence requires a kind of collective forgetting.

Before the paperwork.

Before the smiling profiles.

Before the agencies, the lawyers, the waiting lists, the promises, and the reassurances.

Before hundreds of thousands of dollars is exchanged for a human being to claim ownership over.

There is one unavoidable event that must occur for adoption to exist at all.

A mother and her baby are separated.

This is not an opinion.

It is not an adoptee grievance.

It is not an emotional exaggeration.

It is a biological rupture.

And yet, maternal separation remains one of the most minimized, misunderstood, and deliberately softened realities in the adoption conversation. We talk around it. We rename it. We spiritualize it. We collapse it into vague language that protects adults and institutions while leaving adoptees to carry the consequences in their bodies.

Maternal separation is not symbolic. It is physiological. And adoption does not happen without it.

Maternal Bonding Does Not Begin at Birth

One of the most damaging myths in adoption culture is the idea that bonding starts after birth and can simply be transferred from one caregiver to another.

That belief is not supported by science nor the majority of the adoptee experience.

Bonding begins in utero. Long before a baby has language, memory, or conscious awareness, their nervous system is forming in relationship to the body carrying them. Heart rate, stress regulation, hormonal balance, circadian rhythm, and sensory familiarity are shaped inside the mother’s body. The fetus learns her voice, her movement, her emotional states, her safety cues.

This is not poetic language. It is neurobiology.

Research in prenatal psychology has demonstrated that babies are perceptive, responsive, and affected by their environments before birth. The work of David Chamberlain, particularly in Babies Remember Birth, fundamentally challenged the long-held belief that infants are blank slates. Babies are not passive. They register stress, fear, rejection, and calm long before they can name or understand them.

Consider Reading: Secret Life of The Unborn Child.

This matters deeply in the context of adoption, because maternal separation does not always begin at birth.

It can begin during pregnancy.

When a pregnancy is surrounded by secrecy, shame, coercion, pressure, or the instruction to emotionally detach, the mother’s body does not remain neutral. And neither does the baby’s. When a woman is encouraged to view her pregnancy as temporary, transactional, or already lost, the fetus experiences that rupture somatically. The body learns disconnection before language ever enters the picture.

Maternal separation can be emotional before it becomes physical.

Birth Is the Moment the Rupture Becomes Irreversible

At birth, every mammal expects continuity.

Human infants are biologically wired to remain with the body that carried them. The mother’s smell, heartbeat, voice, temperature, and nervous system are regulatory tools. They help stabilize breathing, heart rate, digestion, and emotional regulation. Remove those inputs suddenly, and the infant’s stress response escalates rapidly.

When a newborn is separated from their mother, cortisol floods the body. Crying intensifies. When no relief comes, the infant eventually shuts down into conservation mode. The crying stops not because the baby is comforted, but because the nervous system has collapsed inward to survive.

This is not soothing.

This is not resilience.

This is not adaptability.

This is trauma.

Because it happens before language and conscious memory, it is dismissed. Our psychological frameworks privilege recall. If you cannot narrate it, it is assumed not to matter. That framework utterly fails adoptees.

Pre-verbal trauma lives in the nervous system, not in memory. It emerges later as patterns rather than stories. Hypervigilance. Chronic grief without a clear source. Panic around abandonment. A persistent, embodied sense of being lost.

Not confused.

Lost.

The Body Remembers What the Adoption Machine Tries to Erase

For me, the feeling of being lost is not metaphorical. It is visceral. When it is triggered, my body reacts as though the original separation is happening again. There is panic, grief, and a sobbing that has no language. Because the original trauma had no language. Being lost is only one of a million triggers associated to maternal separation.

I cried when I was separated from my mother. I cried until my body learned that no one was coming. At some point, my spirit broke in order to survive. From that moment forward, I lived with an internal searching that never stopped.

I searched for her in dreams.

I searched for her in people.

I searched for her in belief systems.

I searched for her in myself.

I felt untethered, floating between worlds, never fully anchored. When I finally found my biological mother at 21, it did not erase the wound. It explained it. And with her rejection, new wounds were stacked on top of old ones.

But explanation did not come from the adoption system. It came from my own research, my own digging, my own refusal to accept vague reassurances as answers.

Adoption’s Willful Ignorance

What continues to shock me is not only cruelty, but ignorance.

I once sat across from an adoptive mother who founded an adoption agency in my city. I asked her directly about maternal separation and the primal wound. She had no idea what I was talking about.

Read that again.

This was not a hostile encounter. She was kind. Open. A good sport. She simply had never been required to understand the biological consequences of the separations her work depended on. The same work that fills her pockets with outlandish adoption fees.

That moment crystallized something for me.

Adoption does not fail to acknowledge maternal separation by accident. It fails because acknowledging it would destabilize the narrative it relies on.

Despite claims that professionals now recognize adoption trauma, my lived experience tells a different story. In over 51 years, not one therapist or psychiatrist proactively named maternal separation trauma to me. Not one framed my lifelong struggles through the lens of early biological rupture. Even with a 30 year drinking career, and spending a decade in recovery circles, no one helped me get to my root issues, with maternal separation being the biggest root issue I had.

I had to find the research myself. I had to step outside adoption-approved materials and study prenatal psychology, attachment science, and adoptee-authored work to assemble a coherent explanation for what my body had always known.

Why Language Matters: Separation Trauma vs Adoption Trauma

This is where precision becomes essential.

Separation trauma and adoption trauma are not the same thing.

Separation trauma occurs when a child is severed from their biological mother. Adoption trauma occurs within the adoptive experience itself. These are two distinct events with different origins, timelines, and impacts. They interact and compound, but they are not interchangeable.

When we collapse them into one vague category usually seen as “adoption trauma,” we lose clarity. When we refuse to name separation trauma at all, adoptees are left chasing symptoms without understanding causes.

Terminology is not semantics. It shapes treatment, understanding, and healing.

Consider Reading: When Society is Uninformed On Seperation Trauma, Education is Essential.

Photo by Zero One on Unsplash

Animals, Biology, and the Double Standard

We know what happens when baby animals are separated from their mothers. We do not debate it. We legislate against it. We understand that early separation leads to failure to thrive and death.

Yet human infants are separated at birth and expected to adapt.

Not because the biology is different.

Because the story is.

Human babies survive separation, but survival is not safety. The body survives while reorganizing around loss. That reorganization shapes attachment, stress response, and identity for life.

Spiritual Bypass Does Not Heal Biology

Spiritual frameworks are often used to soften this truth. Gratitude is encouraged. Meaning is imposed. Faith is offered as a substitute for biology.

But in my expxerience, no spiritual figure can replace a maternal bond.

God the Father could not replace my mother. No matter how loving, no matter how sincere. This is not a rejection of spirituality. It is an acknowledgment of physiology.

The maternal bond is regulatory. It is embodied. It is irreplaceable.

Mothers are not interchangable. Yes we can have substitutes, but its is not the same and we need to stop acting like it is. Just like a biological child isn’t the same as an adopted child. Adoptees know this, because we live it every day and we feel it in our bones.

Why I Studied Maternal Bonding to Understand Separation Trauma

I could not understand my trauma until I understood what had been lost.

To identify the wound, I had to study the bond.

That meant engaging deeply with work like Babies Remember Birth, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, critically revisiting The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier, while holding complexity about authorship and perspective, and grounding myself in the clarity and respect for adoptee experience found in the work of Betty Jean Lifton.

Understanding bonding illuminated separation.

Separation explained my body.

The Cost of Continuing to Gloss Over This

Adoptees are dying.

Some loudly.

Some quietly.

Some through addiction.

Some through suicide.

Some through decades of nervous system dysregulation that is never properly named.

Even adoptees who do not feel traumatized must recognize this truth.

Maternal separation is traumatic by definition. Individual experience does not override biology nor the majority of adoptees who do feel completly traumatized not only by maternal separation, but the adoption machine.

If adoption discourse is to mature, it must start at the beginning. Not with gratitude. Not with placement. Not with intention.

But with the truth.

Adoption begins with loss.

That complex loss leaves a biological, emotional, and psychological imprint and profound wound for those who experience maternal separation.

And we can no longer afford to pretend otherwise.

It’s Your Turn to Spill The Tea: Let’s Talk About Maternal Separation

This is where I open the floor and invite your voice into this space. If you are an adoptee, what lands in your body when you hear the words maternal separation, and have you ever felt that deep, wordless sense of being lost or untethered that seems to follow you through life without explanation? Did anyone ever give you language for pre-verbal trauma, or did you spend years trying to explain feelings that had no story attached to them?

If you are an adoptive parent, were you ever taught that separation itself is traumatic, independent of how loving or stable the adoptive home may be, and how does it feel to sit with the reality that good intentions do not undo biological loss?

If you are a first or birth parent, were you encouraged to emotionally detach during pregnancy, and how did secrecy, shame, or pressure shape both the separation and its aftermath for you?

And for anyone reading, regardless of where you sit in the adoption constellation, what stories have you been told about adoption that made it harder to see or name this first loss, and what might change if maternal separation were spoken about honestly and without defensiveness?

This is your invitation to participate, to share what you know in your body and your life, and to add your voice here at The Real Adoptea Moxie. Drop your thoughts below.

Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash

I see you; I feel your pain for all the adoptees who feel forgotten, lost, and alone. Please don’t give up, and know you aren’t alone in feeling like you do.

If you are a USA adoptee experiencing a mental health crisis, please take immediate steps to ensure your safety. Contact a licensed mental health professional or text #988 for immediate assistance.

For adoptees around the globe, please reach out to The Mental Health Helplines: International Global Help Hotline Directory here.

I have compiled a list of recommended resources for adoptees and advocates. It can be found here: Recommended Resources for Adult Adoptees and Adoption Advocates.

Thank you for reading and for supporting me and my work.

Understanding is Love,

Pamela A. Karanova

Here are a few articles I recommend reading:

100 Heartfelt Transracial Adoptee Quotes that Honor the Truth of Adoption by Pamela A. Karanova & 100 Transracial Adoptees Worldwide

What Are the Mental Health Effects of Being Adopted? By Therodora Blanchfield, AMFT

10 Things Adoptive Parents Should Know – An Adoptee’s Perspective by Cristina Romo

Understanding Why Adoptees Are At A Higher Risk for Suicide by Maureen McCauley | Light of Day Stories

Toward Preventing Adoption- Related Suicide by Mirah Riben

Relationship Between Adoption and Suicide Attempts: A Meta-Analysis

Reckoning with The Primal Wound Documentary with a 10% off coupon code (25 available) “adopteesconnect”

Still, Grieving Adoptee Losses, What My Adoptive Parents Could Have Done Differently.

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