Author : Joe Soll Screen Reader : Supported Works with : Source : Status : Available | Last checked: 3 Hour ago! Size : 35,397 KB |
The director and founder of the Adoption Counseling Center in New York City, Mr. Soll is also an pproved adoption counselor for the United Kingdom Department of Health, and a former member of Matilda Cuomo's 1993 Adoption Task Force. He is a fellow of the American Orthopsychiatric Association, the American Association of Grief Counselors and a member of the Council on Social Work Education.
Since 1989, Mr. Soll has organized and coordinated seven international mental health conferences on adoption, has been an expert witness in court about adoption related issues and has lectured widely at adoption agencies, social work schools, mental health facilities and mental health conferences in the U.S. and Canada.
Joe Soll has appeared on Radio and Television over 300 times, given over 150 lectures on adoption related issues and has been featured or quoted in over five dozen newspapers, books and magazines. He was portrayed as a therapist in the NBC Made-For-TV movie The Other Mother and recently played himself in the HBO Special Reno Finds Her Mom.
Imagine what it's like to grow up hearing these mixed messages. For six million adoptees in the U.S. alone, they are a pervasive, and fiercely debilitating, fact of childhood. Their long-term impact is an existential catch-22 in which adoptees are forced to choose between the socially unacceptable reality they experience and a distorted, but socially sanctioned, interpretation of their reality as determined by others. "Warding off early pain leads to amnesia about one's childhood... The thread to the child one once was is broken, leaving no trace of past experiences. Consequently, the wounded person is unable to experience her own feelings because her capacity to feel is no longer available to her." The Abandoned Child Within Kathryn Asper
Based on 18 years of daily empirical research with literally thousands of adoptees, (children, adolescents and adults) Adoption Healing explores the crippling effect of this dilemma on adoptees' attempts to develop a healthy, authentic psychological and social sense of self. The ideas and theories expressed in this book are the result of the research, extensive readings, seminars and conversations with other adoption educators/mental health professionals.
From infancy, adoptees are bombarded by verbal and non-verbal messages from the outer world that directly negate and contradict their inner feelings and experiences. They are expected to be happy on their birthday, often the anniversary of their separation from their birthmother. They are told that their birthmother loved them so much that she gave them away a statement that must certainly leave them wondering about the desirability of being loved, to say nothing of the motives of their mother. They are given to understand both that their real mother gave them away and that their adoptive mother is their real mother. Most damaging of all, they are assured by the rest of us that they felt and continue to feel no sense of loss, no rage at having been abandoned. "Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent. Neither the child's soul nor her psyche can accommodate this." Women Who Run With the Wolves Clarissa Pinkola Ests
Caught between these conflicting messages, adoptees are stuck in an emotional limbo, unable to accept either their inner, private reality or the fictional reality presented by those around them. Instead of an integrated whole, the adoptee's sense of self splinters, or fractures, into separate pieces. Since adoptees must function in the outer world if they are to survive, their inner world can become increasingly repressed, eventually slipping out of reach. Survival is purchased at a heavy price, however, for without access to their inner feelings, adoptees are unable to live authentic lives.
"Wow, there really was a woman who gave birth to me!" Marc, adoptee, age 37, upon learning the name of his birthmother.
Adoption Healing has been written in an attempt to provide adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthparents with knowledge and tools that can be used in healing this fracture. Vignettes from the lives of actual adoptees are presented throughout the book to illustrate the real-life manifestations of adoption-related problems and the successful growth and healing possible when these issues are understood and tackled correctly.
More than fifty thousand children are adopted into non-kinship American families each year. Since the 1970s, an increasing number of these adoptions have involved the placement of children with families from a different cultural and/or racial group. The special problems of these adoptions are addressed throughout the book.
Adoption is a family issue; thus, its effects extend far beyond the triad of adoptee, adoptive parents and birthparents. For this reason, Adoption Healing has much to offer the many others siblings, spouses, grandparents, and children of adoptees who are also struggling to cope with the impact of adoption.
This book is intended for both professional psychotherapists and the general public. While it would not be possible to bridge these two audiences in writing about most subjects, the nascent field of adoption psychology is an exception in that professional and lay groups overlap. Unlike other areas of psychology, in which professionals have led the way, the thinking expressed in this book has been generated to a significant degree by the efforts of adoptees and birthmothers to understand and define their own experience. Arising in large part from the grassroots search/reunion movement, the field of adoption psychology is therefore unique in the degree to which lay people have contributed to the development of psychological theory. In recognition of this, Adoption Healing is directed to all the "therapists" in adoptees' lives professional counselors, adoptive parents, birthparents, spouses and family members, and, finally, adoptees themselves
This book is an attempt to educate, an attempt to understand one of the most misunderstood subjects in the world. This book is not about finger pointing. It is about learning from our mistakes so that we can perhaps reduce suffering in the future, especially for those who are separated from their children and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers.