"It's harder to think about a bigger trauma than relinquishment" - Paul Sunderland on adoption

"It's harder to think about a bigger trauma than relinquishment" - Paul Sunderland on adoption

Paul Sunderland joined the adoptee community to talk about the effects of relinquishment on adopted people and why they are over-represented in addiciton, mental health, the prison system and suicide.

He also talked about a deliberate and systematic cover up by society and adoption agencies to deny that adoption is a trauma.

Organised by the Adult Adoptee Movement, Paul Sunderland spoke for 40 minutes followed by 20 minutes of Q&A.

Paul is an addiction psychotherapist with 35 years experience. Much of his talk centered around the effects of relinquishment on the autonomic nervous system. Paul talked about codependency as a manifestation of cptsd and said he has never met an adoptee that didn’t also have complex post-traumatic stress disorder (although he acknowledged that people self-refer to his clinic so he was cautious not to pathologise). He said that CPTSD should be called developmental trauma disorder. It happens over a period of time and nearly always during childhood development. It’s when our nervous system thinks the trauma is still happening.

“You were preparing to meet someone who wasn’t there.”
— Paul Sunderland

Paul talked about clinical implications of what it feels like to have possibly the biggest trauma there is which is to be separated from mother. “You were preparing to meet someone who wasn’t there and that was life threatening.” He said that those people who lost faith in other humans to help them regulate tend to become compulsively self reliant.

When our systems are disregulated and we feel threatened, we go into one or more of the four Fs: flight flight freeze faun. These responses are adaptive responses to stress and understandable in small doses in relevant situations, but they get locked in the ON position if you have CPTSD. We get locked in a state of protection rather than connection. We become hypervigilant. We cannot connect or be present while in this state.

He quoted Anna Freud: “The horrors of war pale beside the loss of a mother”.

Attachment theory says we need:

  • To be seen

  • To feel soothed

  • To feel safe

  • To feel secure

All traumas have two things in common: 

  1. Captivity

  2. Powerlessness 

Relinquishment and subsequent adoption has both these things. What it also has is a deliberate and systematic cover up by society and adoption agencies to deny that it is a trauma in order to satisfy the needs of the adults, including adoptive parents. “Yours is one of the few trauma that you’re supposed to be grateful for.” The lack of acknowledgment from society makes it hard to be seen. We need to call something by its proper name or we can’t get better.

When we have a so-called ‘disguised trauma’ where we are not seen and ours reality is questioned, all we can do is learn to self soothe. Addiction, for example, is a sensible adaptive self-soothing response that becomes maladaptive.

“Yours is one of the few trauma that you’re supposed to be grateful for.”
— Paul Sunderland

Relinquishment is an enormous trauma that cannot be recalled but is remembered. Clinicians say that ‘the issues are in the tissues’ which means the trauma lives in our bodies. Often relinquished babies have dermotological / gastrointestinal issues etc - the body expressing itself as babies cannot communicate any other way. This can lead to somatic issues.

Symptoms of CPTSD

  1. Hypervigilance - we cannot be present, we are always on alert

  2. Catastrophic thinking - there has been a catastrophe already so we expect another one

  3. Binary thinking - trauma is about life and death. “Either I get it right or I get it wrong.”

  4. “Unreliable witness” - Unless the other person is smiling and nodding they must hate me / their actions must have negative intentions. Unless I get my way, they win: no sense of co-creation.

  5. Impaired self-care - The only part of self-care that may be attended to well is the sense of presentation or how we look to others.

  6. Interpersonal problems

  7. Retraumatisation - we put ourselves in harms way. Addition is one of these. We don’t know why people retraumatise.

  8. Anxiety 

  9. Depression 

  10. Exhaustion and immune issues 

  11. Shame - there’s something wrong with me (it’s a defence against there’s something wrong with them! Who will look after me!) better to think self as there’s hope you can change and get better

  12. Flashbacks / triggers - a neuroception that throws us into protect before we can even notice 

There is a big overlap between ADD and CPTSD.

Codependency

When you are codependent, you are dependent on the anticipated or perceived reactions or responses of the other = it’s an addiction. It comes from two parts of the autonomic nervous system:

  1. The fawn response - I manage my anxiety by putting you at ease

  2. The fight response - I manage my anxiety by putting the other at unease and/or by making them wrong and moving the goal posts.

How can we help ourselves 

Paul gave a few tips:

  • Train your nervous system as if you were training for a 10k!

  • The most effective thing you can do is elongate the out breath (most of us shallow breath because we are in fight/flight) 

  • Chanting 

  • Singing

  • Somatic therapy such as cranial sacral therapy and equine psychotherapy

  • Only work with practitioners who acknowledge that being relinquished is ‘a thing’

  • Do the thing that never felt safe: put your trust in someone. Self-regulation doesn’t work without co-regulation. “We get better in relationship.”

  • Start to speak our truth in order to treat ourselves as valuable. That’s when things change.

  • Have choice and a voice = the opposite of captivity and powerlessness

  • Community peer support

Thank you Paul for pledging your support to our community. Thank you AAM for this brilliant webinar.

Watch the Paul Sunderland adoption webinar here

Further reading and resources:

Adult Adoptee Movement

Paul Sunderland letcure on adoption and addiction

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (who came up with cptsd as a term)

Alice Miller - The Enlightened Witness 

An adoptee's experience with somatic therapy

An adoptee's experience with somatic therapy

What is a brother? What is a sister? An adopted person's thoughts

What is a brother? What is a sister? An adopted person's thoughts