Religious Trauma, Being Relinquished & Sinning Since The Beginning

While the trauma of separation is rooted, by the time anyone is adopted, the consequences and aftermath can reverberate in an adoptee's life for a lifetime.

Photo by Horst Joachims on Unsplash

While you might wonder what these dynamics have to do with each other, I aim to shed light on how they are intertwined in my journey and how each has impacted me. First, I save space at my table for people who don't believe like me, and I would like to ask before you go any further that you consider doing the same. This isn't a space where I will discuss why my beliefs are correct, and yours are wrong. I am sharing MY personal experience. Please don't go further if you want to change my mind or prove me wrong, but continue if you can accept me despite my beliefs. 

LIFELONG IMPACTS OF BEING RELINQUISHED 

Being adopted is a by-product of being relinquished or separated from our birth mothers. It's essential to distinguish they are two different experiences. Before every adoption occurs, no matter the reason, trauma from separation from our birth mothers occurs FIRST. Usually, this trauma isn't acknowledged or addressed, it's swept under the rug, and the adoptee is considered a "blank slate." Relinquishment creates a large primal wound that has almost killed me many times because I had no tools to work on it and was gaslit to be grateful. Being adopted, secrets, lies, and half-truths are added to it, making it more destructive.

Consider Reading: Relinquishment Trauma: The Forgotten Trauma.

Fellow Adoptee Marie Shares in Her Article: 

What are the Characteristics of Relinquishment Trauma?

Relinquishment trauma is one type of separation trauma. When trauma occurs, it can change an individual's brain chemistry and functioning. This causes individuals who have experienced trauma to view and interact with their world as if the trauma was happening in the present. An example is an adoptee that perceives their world as unsafe resulting in them having difficulty with trust. Developmental trauma disorder symptoms that adopted persons frequently experience include[7]:

• Emotional dysregulation – Children are easily upset and reactive. They stay fearful, angry, sad, or withdrawn due to difficulty recovering from emotionally-provoking situations.

• Problems with sleeping, eating, elimination, overactivity to sound and touch

• Hypervigilant, extreme risk-taking

• Problems with goal-directed behaviors

• Low self-worth, feeling defective, helplessness

• Reactivity with physical or verbal aggression

• Poor capacity for self-protection, drawn towards relationships with individuals who repeat the pattern of poor attachment

• Difficulty in school, few peer relationships, and turbulent family relationships

Due to these struggles, difficult transitions and separation anxiety are common experiences. - Marie Dolph.

Because of this, the psychological, emotional, and physical implications of maternal separation are never exposed. In return, the adopted person, no matter what age, suffers and suffers greatly. I am one of those adoptees. I had to fight tooth and nail for my truth and uncover my healing tools to figure this out. No one handed me a book or shared that it was okay to grieve my losses for the rest of my life. 

Consider Reading: Do You See a Baby as a Blank Slate? 

I have been sharing for years that society and those who support and advocate for adoptions need to acknowledge these realities, and we need a shift in the nature of adoptions. What if we focused on relinquishment that happens before adoption and put it on the table? 

From personal experience, I can share that the entire concept and experience of being separated from my biological mother created a deep wound, that my entire life has been filled with immeasurable grief. This created a deep hole inside I have spent an entire lifetime trying to fill. It altered my view of love because love is abandonment, and love is leaving. It destroyed my self-love because the one person on earth who should love me the most deserted me and signed the dotted line that she never wanted to see me again in this lifetime. 

It doesn't matter how anyone in the adoption industry wants to sugarcoat this reality or dress it up with bells and whistles vowing, "Adoption is God's Plan." Separation trauma impacts many adoptees in different ways. I have yet to meet one adoptee who hasn't been negatively impacted by being separated from their biological mother at the beginning of life.

Consider Reading: Why Love Isn't Enough or A House Full of Stuff. 

While the trauma of separation is rooted, by the time anyone is adopted, the consequences and aftermath reverberate in an adoptee's life for a lifetime. Some of us navigate healing and find some tools along the way. Some of us can't live with the pain; we leave the world. Some of us struggle daily for an entire lifetime and never find any tools because they are almost nonexistent for adoptees. 

While adoptees are all at different levels of healing, for those of us born and adopted into Christian homes, many of the teachings don't help us. They hurt us. I remember growing up always hearing about God, the Bible, and what sinning was. My adoptive mom claimed she was a devout Christian, and we did devotionals, prayed at meals, and discussed the Bible a lot. 

Consider Reading: The Narcissistic Adoptive Mother.

At 12 years old, she gave me a Christian Covenant and asked me to sign it. If I signed it, it stated I promised God that I wouldn't have sex before I was married or drink alcohol, ever in my life. I remember being so confused because, at 12 years old, those two things were the farthest from my mind. 

I also started to learn that I was born in sin, but at that time, I didn't know the story of my beginnings. I was a child. The Bible teachings also backed this theory that I was born in sin. Knowing that my birth mother gave me away and that I was born in sin, and everyone is born a sinner, left me with this deep level of badness. It stuck around most of my life. 

If I was born bad, that might be why my birth mother gave me away. I always wondered how an innocent baby was born sinning, but that's what the Bible teaches. I was bad if I was already a sinner before I knew what sinning was. I felt defective, and I developed internal hate for myself. In my pre-teen years, I had no clue who was looking at me in the mirror, who I was, or where I came from. 

Being told, I was a sinner since the beginning has an undertone of evil on top of bad. Was I born evil too? Being raised to believe these things about myself has sabotaged any self-love I would have ever had, which lasted most of my life. 

In the last 12 years, I have been working diligently at my internal relationship with myself, breaking down all of these barriers stacked against me since I've been sinning since the beginning. 

Within six months of being presented with the Christian covenants from my adoptive mom, I started having sex and drinking alcohol. My drinking career with alcohol lasted 27 years, and it created a fast-track avoidance tool from walking in reality. I ran from feelings and never slowed down. Sex was just a deterrent like alcohol was. 

Something about God, Religion, OR my Adoptive Mom telling me what to do sent fury in me from a very young age. The feeling of BADNESS was soul-sucking, at the least. No one on this earth would have authority over me, and I spent my teenage years proving this true. The more anyone told me NOT to do something, the more I did it. Looking back, it's so wild to think about. 

Consider Reading: She's Bad

I acted out to the fullest and was a runaway at 13. I was in the streets more than I was at home, and I experienced a lot of trauma in the streets. I was in and out of group homes, detention centers, drug and alcohol treatment, and pregnant, all by 15 years old. I tried to take my own life as a teenager. 

The realization that the dream of my birth mother coming back to get me was a false reality set in. She wasn't returning. I hated the world, myself, and everyone in it. 

RELIGIOUS TRAUMA

I think religion plays a massive part in the shame countless women have carried due to having pregnancies out of wedlock. It's no secret that hundreds of thousands of babies were relinquished to adoption because they were considered "bastards" for being born in sin. If only we could count how many mothers and babies have been separated in the name of God, the Church, Religions, Christianity, and the Bible, I am confident the numbers would be enormous.  

By the Bible's standards, I was born a sinner. I was terrible, evil, and a bastard. I might as well act like it. To top it off, as a teenager, I went to the school for "bad kids," so the label "BAD" added to my feelings of badness, and internally, I was just fucking bad.  

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

I was told very early on that I was going to hell for being a sinner for dating outside my race, with my adoptive mom never considering that I didn't even know my ethnicity. The whole point for me was to date someone that looked nothing like me because that was the only way I would be 100% certain they weren't a BIOLOGICAL RELATIVE. It was the only "safe zone" I had, but I was going to hell for it. I was also going to hell for having sex and drinking alcohol. 

The concept of hell has hung over my head my whole life, and when I reached my adult life, it was hard to see past all this conditioning that I was bad. I could never see the goodness in myself. I got involved in the church for years, trying to be good enough to somehow, in all my badness, get into heaven. 

I have spent most of my life trying to be acceptable by God's standards, but in my situation, I always seemed to miss the mark. I sincerely wanted to be healed from the mother wound and to have my broken heart healed, and I would do anything not to feel the pain from relinquishment anymore. I prayed, fasted, served 3-4 days in the church, tithed, mentored, led a small group, stayed in recovery programs for years, sponsored other women, and so on. 

I was more focused on being healed than actually feeling the feelings that I was trying to feel from. This is where I went wrong, and I can thank SPIRITUAL BYPASSING for the root cause. Between the religious trauma I experienced growing up, never feeling worthy or good enough, the trauma of relinquishment, and being a sinner since the beginning, I never had a chance to see past my badness. I learned religion wasn't set up that way.

What is Spiritual Bypassing? 

"Spiritual bypass or spiritual bypassing is a "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."

My experience with religion set up to make me feel guilt and shame every day, to make me feel like a sinner who isn't good enough. I was conditioned never to trust myself or my intuition and that my flesh was terrible and unholy, meaning I was immoral and sinful. And to rely on God for all things, which caused me more harm. 

I needed to sit in my pain and trauma and feel it 100% to heal it. Then, somehow I needed to figure out how to learn to trust myself, love myself, and feel good about myself. Coming out of the fog about religion has been similar to coming out of the fog about adoption. I finally realized to heal fully; I needed to leave the church, religion, and God. The harm from a lifetime of religious trauma would also need to be unraveled and healed, and I had to walk out of the doors of church and Christianity to do it. 

Consider Reading: Disseminating my Deconstruction with Religion, Christianity, Church, and Adoption.

It's no wonder there is a high suicide rate among pastors around the USA. Having my own experience, I can completely understand what it's like to be told I am never good enough. I have been told I will always be a sinner and might never enter heaven, and I was one sin away from hell. This belief system wasn't healthy, yet very toxic and destructive. It kept me captive, thinking I could never be whole by myself and needed to rely on a source outside myself to be healed, acceptable, and worthy. This was a religiously traumatic experience for me, lasting about 45 years of my life. At 48 years old, I have decided to save myself from this belief system and am now thinking for myself, and I am no longer a believer.

Combining the religiously traumatic part of my life story with the reality of relinquishment trauma that consumed me most of my life, it was no wonder I felt so negative about myself. The cards were stacked against me so I wouldn't feel loved, whole, or exhilarated. In adoption, "Love is loss," and your birth mother gives you to strangers because she "loves you so much."  

God never healed my mother wound. No matter how much I prayed, fasted, served, and tithed, it was never enough, and I was told I must be harboring unforgiveness, so it was all my fault. I tried my whole life to "give it to god," but because he was looked at as a "Father," he could never replace the hole left by the primal wound. He didn't even compare it to it.

The moment I came out of the fog about religion, it felt very similar to the fog I came out of regarding adoption. Slowly and gradually, the fog lifted, and I started piecing things together. Most of what made sense to me that helped me heal were things I found inside myself, so I walked away from the church, God, and religion and went to find myself. 

This was my first step to healing. I had to deconstruct and decondition.

One of the many things that helped me heal tremendously was rejecting the idea that I was born a sinner, out of wedlock, unwanted by my birth mother. I might have been unwanted by my birth mother, but I wasn't an innocent baby born a sinner. I refuse to allow that to be attached to me. 

I learned to honor myself by honoring my feelings and putting myself first instead of anything outside myself. Once I could remove the self-hate, sabotage, and loathing that religion kept me in, I could blossom into true self-love and get to know and love myself like I never had before. 

I accepted my adoptee pain was here to stay forever. Instead of praying it away, I welcome it now with open arms, knowing it will be a frequent visitor forever. I've learned to process my feelings without substances or running from them. I love myself, and I can love others more genuinely too.

GOING INWARD HAS BEEN THE KEY

The minute I looked inward is the minute I started healing.

"You can change your location, meet new people, and still have the same old problems. To truly change your life, you need to look inward, get to know and love yourself and heal the trauma and dense conditioning in your mind. This is how you get to the root. Internal changes have a significant external impact." – Yung Pueblo.

One of my favorite authors, Yung Pueblo, hit's the nail on the head for me regularly. I am so grateful for his writings, teachings, and wisdom, and I find myself delighted and energized when I read his materials. 

One of the pivotal healing components for adopted people is the ability to get to the root. Our lives are birthed out of separation from our biological mothers, and we're given new identities and told to go along with the new plan, never questioning who we are or where we come from. 

When we don't know our truth, we don't have the information to get to the root. In return, we don't know what we are healing from. We don't know how to go inward because we don't know who's looking back at us when we look in the mirror, and for many of us, our internal self-dialogue is filled with self-doubt and pain. 

For my fellow adoptees, I encourage you to keep fighting for your truth and never give up. You deserve to know who you are and where you come from. Once you fight like hell to get it, it might not be pretty, as I have learned it's usually not! Many of us trade the tormenting pain of the unknown for another pain of reunion or rejection. They are both enormously painful but different types of pain. 

But if we keep pressing, we will eventually see the light, which will get brighter and brighter. We learn who we are and are not, and healing comes gradually. If we start to share our stories, healing comes even faster. If we connect with other adoptees, it comes even faster. 

Today, I have a genuine love and care for myself that I never had while I was believing in things outside of myself. I am free of the dogma of the religion that kept me captive, and I have removed “sinning” from my life and vocabulary. I’m simply a human being, living my life and making some human mistakes.

You won’t see me in heaven or hell when I leave the earth. You will see me in the memories we made together here on earth and in the heartfelt, deep conversations we’ve had together. You will remember me in the sky, the sunrises and sunsets, and the forest and the trees. Butterflies will kiss you, sent as a gift from me, and my spirit will always be in nature and the trees.

I don’t need a supreme invisible being to twist my arm into being good, always missing the mark in the end.

TODAY, I AM GOOD ALL BY MYSELF AND SO ARE YOU!

Photo by Clyde RS on Unsplash

Q & A

For my fellow adoptees, can you relate to this article at all? Has being relinquished by or separated from your birth mother caused you deep-rooted feelings of badness? Has religion played a part? How have you been able to find healing and self-love? Drop your comments below.

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.

I have compiled a list of recommended resources for adoptees and advocates. You can find it here: Recommended Resources for Adult Adoptees and Adoption Advocates.

Thank you for reading.

Understanding is Love, 

Pamela A. Karanova 

ASK ME ANYTHING COLUMN

Each month, all subscribers receive an “Ask Me Anything” newsletter — which will answer one or two adoptee-related questions from paid subscribers. Think: What adoptee healing tools have been the most valuable to you? How have you navigated the grief and loss process? What made you want to search for your biological family? How was your reunion once you searched? Do you regret searching? If you have a question for me, please email it to: pamelakaranova@gmail.com

Here are two recent questions:

When Speaking to Adoptive Parents About Adoption

Ways to Better Understand and Support Adopted Teens

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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