Attachment isn’t Love – Even in Adoption
There is a lot of talk about attachment and bonding in the world of adoption. After going through my healing journey, I know as a newborn baby, I was bonded to my biological mother before birth. When I was born, I was expecting to meet this person I already knew. When she wasn’t there, I was terrified and plunged into grief. The bond was broken and I was catapulted into a void. Doctors and nurses of the time thought if a mother held her child when they were born, the baby or the mother would get “too attached”. So, they took the baby straight from the womb, away from the mother.
The first place I read about “near enemies” was in Brenè Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart. The idea of “near enemies” is rooted in Buddhist psychology and Brown expounds on the work of Jack Kornfield, author and Buddhist practitioner. Kornfield says the near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment says you will love a person because you benefit from them. “This isn’t the fullness of love. Instead, there is attachment—there is clinging and fear. True love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aims to possess.” (https://jackkornfield.com/love-vs-attachment/)
This struck me immediately and reminded me of my adoption experience. For any newborn baby, attachment is not love, it is survival. But for an adopted baby who has already suffered preverbal trauma and knows mother loss, that baby knows not attaching to adoptive parents means death. I did not bond with my adoptive parents. I only attached to them out of survival. I needed something from them, and I had no control or say in my situation. This attachment could easily be mistaken for love in the eyes of an adoptive parent.
The contract of adoption continues as we grow, and there is no option to leave. This is not connection and love – this is attachment out of desperation and necessity. “The near enemy of love is attachment.” Attachment is a facade of adoption.
Maybe this is why I have struggled to understand and know what love is my whole life. Because I never really loved my adoptive parents or family, nor did I receive love from them. I was forced to stay with them until I could take care of myself. Babies do not agree to the adoption contract, but are forced and obligated to fulfill it. I can look back on past friendships and relationships and see the clinging I felt. I was attaching – not loving – because that was all I knew.
“True love allows, honors and appreciates.” If adoption meant true love, there would be no secrets, lies, money, manipulation, ego or control. Love cannot grow in the presence of these – “attachment is the near enemy of love.”
Adoptive parents, ask yourself this – are you controlling your child? Did you get your child to fulfill a need for yourself? Does your child know the full truth of their beginnings and heritage? Did you change your child’s name? If you had the opportunity to speak to your child’s mother before relinquishment, did you ask her how she felt about giving her child to you? Did you ask her what it would take for her to keep her child? Did you benefit off a temporary crisis in her life that will cause her and her child lifelong pain? If you cannot put your own ego and insecurities aside to give your child what they really need, that is not love – it is desperate attachment and the path to separation.
As an adult adoptee who has had to work through the untangling of trauma, grief, guilt and shame that come with the experience of adoption and the reconciliation of how I really felt as an adoptee versus what society expected of me, I ask you to consider the desperate, obligatory, demanding, possessive nature of adoption. For some, attachment from the need to survive turns into love for the adoptive parents. But that’s not what happened for me.
Do not mistake attachment for love. And do not attach and cling to adoptees out of a desperate need for us to fulfill something for you.
Make room for “true love to allow, honor and appreciate” all of the complexities that come with adoption.