The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child

This is a useful read for potential adoptive parents, or even the parents of children who have been separated from birth parents for any reason.

However, I found that the author wildly idealised and exaggerated the connection and understanding of birth parents with their children. Birth parents do not automatically know and understand their children and their baby's needs. This is learned, through successive children and also through getting to know the individual child. The author's experience of the challenge of of parenting the first child, who was adopted, then the inevitably easier task of parenting the second child (birth child), has overly coloured her views. She is also promoting her catch phrase concept "primal wound" as a slogan, by regularly italicising and emphasising this phrase in a manner that is not justified by the written context.

She is clearly anti-adoption as a solution for children without a home, and homes without children, but does not address the equally damaging effects of children remaining in abuse situations.

She also presents the harm to adopted children as inevitable, whereas that does not reflect the many many well-balanced adopted adults that I know, some of whom are curious about their birth families and have contacted them, some of whom have no interest or curiosity whatsoever.

This book is why adoptees are seen by the public as "troubled". Not all of us feel the so-called "Primal Wound", and I for one, am insulted by almost every sentence in it.

My birth mother thinks this book and its author are akin to the second coming, but I say, why not think for yourself? You don't need a book (and a poor one at that) to tell you how you feel.

As an adoptive parent of an older child, I've found this book to be a complete and total validation.

No doubt there are adoptions that go off without a hitch, and I also have no doubt that some children adjust quite well, thank you very much.

But our experience, while wonderful, has also been quite difficult, for all the reasons explained in this book. My child most definitely has transferred anger directed at the birth mother to me. I've become a more patient and much more mature person as a result.

But I do wish that someone had advised us before adoption that the process is indeed fraught with risk, not the least of which is the child's complete and total envelopment by fear of another abandonment.

Besides describing the emotional trauma of the child, this book also deals quite effectively with the pain and wounds suffered by the birth parents and adoptive parents.

Normally, science requires blind studies and control groups. Verrier's work was not done that way, obviously because there is no way to scientifically measure the things she is talking about.

Of course, it would be interesting for sociologists or anthropologists to set up long term life studies of the effects of adoption on children, adoptive parents and birth parents.

But until someone raises the funds to do such a prolonged and massive piece of work, this book is most definitely one of the best available on the subject of adoption, for it addresses all kinds of normal reactions that physicians and psychologists typically address as if they were pathological. When one considers, however, these reactions, of all members of the adoption triad, are really quite normal, and healthy.

I've read many books on adoption over the last decade-plus, and I wish this had been the first of them. But now that I've read it in its entirety, I cannot but recommend it to pediatrician and psychologist training programs as required reading.

Thank you Ms. Verrier.

---Alyssa A. Lappen

I am the adoptive mother of a four year old and and the bio mother of a 2 and half year old.
There are some interesting and helpful stories in here, but I am very concerned how the author takes her experience as first an adoptive mother, and then a biological mother, and assumes that she speaks for all adoptive parents.
I think she might not have dealt with her own infertility..because there is a really OBNOXIOUS statement in the books where she says "..and for those of use who are biological mothers, only we can know.." that doesn't ring true for me and friends I spoke to who have given birth.
From a scientific standpoint, her sample size and data analysis are quackery.
So, she is a psychologist> Big deal. So is Dr. Phil .
In an update version of the book, she states with certainty that any child born via a surrogate mother will have primal wound..a child who was in the NICU, and she is starts to hint that she believes children whose mother work full time are going to have a primal wound as well.

I am surprised that no one is addressing her inclusion of those children into this category as well.

She reminds me of a psychology student how happens upon a hypothesis or theoretical model and applies it broadly to everything.

Shy? Adopted
Perfectionist? adopted
Have Add? Adopted
Gay? adopted
Atheist? adopted
trouble with relationships? Adopted
trouble with change? adopted
Needy? adopted
Independent? adopted
Gregarious? adopted
sexually promiscious? adopted
drug addiction? adopted
never leave home? adopted
got a divorce? yup, you guessed it, its all because you were adopted

Certainly, seperation from your first mother is a trauma of some sort, but whether it explains the constellation of human behaviors she attributes it to, come on, lady!

Also, so adoptive parents might never be good enough? Parenting is a humbling experience, and I don't know if anyone of us will ever be enough ! To assume that your biological connection to your child guarantees an absence of pain or trouble is pretty ridiculous.

Simply amazing and wonderful book for anyone involved in the adoption triad. Opened up my eyes to things I never thought of before. Thank you for publishing this book. It is a hard read at times, but a must read.