Relinquishment and Intimacy

by Ronald J. Nydam, Ph.D.

Despite the romantic idealization of loving in our Western world, the truth is that most all of us bring lots of history, with lots of baggage, to our closest relationships. Sooner or later, to one degree or another, we see our most beloved in varying shades of gray, and inevitably in our most important connections we make a mess. This is true for most everybody to some degree. More than half the marriages in 1995, for example, will someday end in divorce. Sustained intimacy is not easy to come by. How might relinquishment, the primal rejection that precedes adoption, figure into the mix of messed up relationships? Adopted adults need to know.

Once a relinquished and adopted man came for counseling because his marriage of nearly 20 years was failing. For reasons he could not understand he seldom said the words, "I love you" to his wife. Over the past few years he had, in truth, fallen in some kind of love with his 28 year old secretary. They spent lots of lunches together - he deeply enjoyed her company. The relationship was dear to him but indeed not sexual because, in his words, "It just doesn't have to be." As days and months went by, this connection, this quasi-affair, deepened. He was both excited and terrified by the feelings he had toward his secretary and puzzled by why his marriage seemed to mean so little. Marriage counseling went nowhere for months . . . until the story of relinquishment and adoption came into the room for discussion. After years of resisting the power of these stories this man came in and presented his yellowed, 41 year old adoption papers which included a physical description of his then 28 year old birth mother. When he was told that his description matched that of his secretary nearly exactly, awareness dawned and he wept deeply. With tears in 41 year old eyes he cried, "Why didn't she love me?"

This man came for marriage counseling . . . but his marriage was not the problem. His relinquishment was. He had never grieved. He had been a man among men, staying far away from his feelings, his emotional life inside. But inside he was hurting and longing, longing for his birthmother/secretary, secretly (even to himself) wishing he could leave his wife/adoptive mother and return to the longed for primal connection of Winnie - the birthmother he later searched for and found. It was no coincidence that he had never mourned, never accepted his relinquishment and that his marriage was in trouble. In fact, like all of us, he used his marriage to recreate his trouble so that he could fix it, could finally grieve his ungrieved grief, and get on with adult acknowledgment of reality. Today he and his wife are happy together. And, by the way, that have a son by adoption whom they understand much better now, especially when he acts depressed and lonely. Relinquishment hurts. There may well be a secret part of a relinquished person, a part still connected to birthparents, which is never presented to a mate in marriage. It stays hidden and disconnected from the marital relationship. But, inevitably, it plays itself out in a powerful fashion in the love relationships of adopted adults.

Unresolved grieving of relinquishment can have profound affects on an adopted person's adult attempts at closeness in many ways. Issues around the primal rejection of relinquishment can become the organizing principle by which an adopted person enters, manages and avoids intimate relationships. To some degree adoptees sometimes develop an artificial ("as if") self which serves to keep their more authentic self carefully hidden and protected from discovery and review by others. This process is a partial explanation for the comment that adoptees sometimes make about not feeling "real." Such lack of a sense of realness is not only the result of not knowing the full reality of birthparents and birth history. It also may be the case because adoptees don't allow themselves to be too real. It's too risky. The result, though, is that intimacy is seen as a threat. Getting (really) close to someone else means taking the risk of being discovered as bad (rejectable) or unworthy (ashamed) or unreal (partial) and so avoiding the risk looks like a good idea to many adoptees.

What sometimes happens, then, as a reaction to the risk of discovery is that relationships are formed with built-in compromises in a variety of patterns. Of course some people elect not to do relationships at all and stay very isolated. They are safe but alone, sometimes lonely. But most people get into some relationships, even if they make a mess. Physical intimacy, for example, in adolescence can be especially charged for adoptees as a way to create the illusion of love and connection in the face of feeling rejection and disconnection in one's story of relinquishment. Sometimes as adults, adoptees enter marriages secretly convinced that they will be rejected and they end up making sure it happens. Or, as a defense against a second rejection, adult adoptees will marry someone incredibly safe who is dependent and would never leave. In whatever fashion, the point is that for adoptees relationships get formed around issues of relinquishment which may be unsolved in adult life.

The way out of such relational difficulties is to relinquish one's one relinquishment, to let go of being let go. If an adoptee can really accept his or her own relinquishment rather than fight it because of its pain, that person becomes free to relate to others without the baggage that relinquishment sometime brings.