Things Attachment Therapists Want Adoptive Parents to Think

A very sensible, well-educated, and dear friend of mine and her husband adopted a little boy from another country some years ago. He did not come to them straight from his birth mother, but was with a foster family until he was about ten months old. The new family settled down quite quickly, and the boy has developed nicely in every way. They’ve followed everyone’s directions about his transition, kept a life book for him, and stayed in communication with the foster family.

I was surprised a few months ago when the mother, whom I’ll call Mary because that isn’t her name, told me she was concerned that the little boy was experiencing grief for his birth mother. I asked why she thought that, and she said she had been reading that all adoptees have this problem. She also described conversations in which he had expressed concern for what had happened to his birth mother and why it was that she couldn’t take care of him. But it seemed to me that he expressed a lot of concern about many people, animals, bugs, and caterpillars, and that he didn’t seem especially preoccupied with the birth mother-- nor did he seem greatly worried about the foster family to whom he had had some chance to attach.

Recently I had a chance to visit Mary and her husband and son and to see once again what a great job they’re all doing. And Mary solved a puzzle for me by showing me the book that had caused her concern: Sherrie Eldridge’s Twenty things adopted kids wish their adoptive parents knew. In my opinion, this book would be better titled “A bunch of things attachment therapists wish adoptive parents believed”, because people who hold the beliefs Eldridge proposes would be very likely to accept both the theory and the practice of attachment therapy. As neither attachment therapy practice nor its underlying theory have any support in conventional mental health information, it is not surprising that Eldridge’s “things” are also unsupported claims. It would be excellent if adoptive parents knew about these issues, but they need that information in order to avoid inappropriate choices, not so they can follow Eldridge’s advice.

Let me comment on a few of Eldridge’s twenty things. First, we see that Eldridge is a proponent of the “primal wound” theory, claiming that all adopted children are suffering from the grief of separation from the birth mother, and need treatment that focuses on that loss. However, all the facts about early development and infants’ emotional attachment tell us that babies adopted into a stable family in the first months of life show no sign of distress or grief over the separation from the birth mother. Babies’ attachment to adults takes time to develop, and it’s based on a history of social interactions and emotional maturation, not on prenatal experience or genetic relationships. The birth mother may miss and grieve over her lost baby, but the baby does not respond in the same way, as he or she is physically, mentally, and emotionally very different from any adult. Relationship or mood difficulties in adoptive families benefit from pretty much the same kinds of treatment that would help non-adoptive families. Where a different focus is needed, it may involve the needs of the adoptive parents rather than the children, because a history of infertility or loss of children can cast a long shadow on a family.

A second point is that Eldridge proposes that young babies exist in a form of shared identity with the mother, a state described as symbiosis by Margaret Mahler and others, years ago. Eldridge does not refer to Mahler, and appears to have picked up this idea from Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s 1992 book Boundaries, from which she also took some of Mahler’s language (like the term “rapprochement”). The idea of symbiosis suggests that separation would be traumatic. There are some problems for this argument, though. One was that even Mahler did not propose that symbiosis was in place at birth, so it becomes irrelevant to early separation from the birth mother. Second, much of what we now know about communication between mothers and babies tells us that even the very young have some capacity for intersubjectivity, or knowing that another person is not the same as the self. I’ve recently come across people commenting on blogs who say that “it’s accepted” that babies identify self and mother as the same, but, as I just argued, that acceptance, if it ever existed, is certainly no longer the case, and for that reason it is not “accepted” that early separations are traumatic.

I’ll just add one more item to my list. Eldridge gives the standard checklist for identifying children with attachment problems--- the checklist seen on many an attachment therapy website, the one that suggests that disobedience, lying, preoccupation with blood and gore, and so on, are indications of the need for attachment therapy. This simply is not the case, for two basic reasons. Those behaviors have nothing to do with Reactive Attachment Disorder, and may or may not have to do with other mental health problems. In addition, whatever the family’s problems may or may not be, treatment that focuses on infant attachment alone could not solve the problems mentioned.

A look through Eldridge’s bibliography shows that at least half of the sources she cites are attachment therapists. There are several citations to Foster Cline, who is [in]famous for his claim that “all bonds are trauma bonds” and that a child’s emotional engagement with his adoptive family must involve traumatic experience. It’s clear that, without referring to holding therapy or related practices, Eldridge produced a book that reflects the attachment therapy “party line” as it existed in 1999 when the book appeared.

If Eldridge’s material seems to speak to your condition, use it as you find appropriate. Strange things can help people, I know. But please don’t accept all her statements without careful examination, and don’t assume that there must be problems with your child for which there is no visible evidence.