A Stranger Took Care of Me

These challenges include understanding unconditional love in the context of a designed family and dealing with post-traumatic stress.

The story is not only about the tragic side of adoption, but about a new frame of mind that gave me peace of mind as well. Perhaps, it also provides a more general insight into the process of healing from a trauma and the creativity and resilience of a human being.

In this article I will explain my journey on how I dealt with the traumatic experience of being adopted. I turned my post-traumatic stress into post-traumatic growth. I turned the detachment disorder into a gift to be able to connect with people. That does not happen in isolation. My gratitude to make that happen goes to the stranger. The stranger took care of me unconditionally.

This line of continuity I discovered was a key for reframing and re-experiencing my story of adoption into a positive light.

Most cultures value the importance of family. What does family mean to you? Please hold that in mind during this read.

In this article I want to share my story adoption with you. Adoption is a story of people who seek family. Prospective parents and orphans are both looking to fill the void that family provides. And that is how my parents found me. When I talk about my ‘adoptive parents’, I simply refer to them as ‘parents.’ Because that is what they simply are to me.

For many adoptees this means that they have no information about their background including, biological family, when and where you are born and so on. That was the case for me as well.

Foster care and adoption differ from one another. Foster care means that the child is taken care of in a family for a finite period of time. Adoption means that a family make a commitment to the child forever. I am legally cut off from my country of birth. The ‘clean’ legal cut makes it possible that I have a Dutch passport, inherit my parents possessions, and have godmother in case something happens to my parents.

For me, the notion of family and what it means to be a family is a little more complex. I think family is not about whether you have the same blood in one’s veins. It is about connection. It is about feeling you belong to somewhere and feeling safe. It is about who is giving you unconditional and voluntary love. I think that this same desire is something everyone can (hopefully) relate to. And love is a verb; it needs to be reinforced by expressing that unconditional love to one another regularly.

The matching process is a traumatic experience for a child. And so was that for me. We stayed a bit longer in the place I was handed to my parents. That allowed me to get used to my new parents first. Afterwards I would be exposed to a whole new cultural context as well.

The trauma had expressed itself in frequent night mares. My parents would held my hand till I slept and held me in case I woke up in sweat from a night mare. The nightmares disappeared over time.

In the literature of psychology, these nightmares are recognised as a symptom of the post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). Another symptom of PTSD in adoption children is the potential development of an attachment disorder. Although it is over almost 20 years later, I discovered that mental wound had been sitting there over the years.

The lizard brain is associated to regulate automatic functions, including breathing and heartbeat. The monkey brain is associated with the sub-conscious. We have little direct control over that subconscious. We can only influence it. The sage brain is the conscious, the quality with have with which we can decide and be aware to do things differently.

When I was handed over to my parents, my monkey brain (over)reacted. The idea of being abandoned and the emotions that come along with them, went straight into my monkey brain. It is a problematic program that got stuck in my subconscious.

Many adoptees have difficulties dealing with it. The stories adoptees tell themselves could include negative, sad, and / or depressive narratives in which they understand themselves.

But from a young age I found out that there is alternative option for accepting a negative, sad, and / or depressive narrative. I remember well that I learned about stoic philosophy as a teenager in high school. The stoics basically argued that you cannot control external factors.

In my case I would perform a thought experiment. What if my background story about why I am adopted contains shitty, noble or horrifying reasons? I would examine it for each imagined reason and realized that the stoics were right. I cannot do anything about that.

What the stoics failed to explicate is how my body still has remembered the emotion from the abandonment that I experienced. Remember, the three brains? The subconscious is harder to change. And that is what I have been dealing with up until today.

For example, when there is a meeting planned and don’t show up without notice, it would trigger the feeling of abandonment in me. I would feel extremely disappointed. I realized this when I talked to other people who were not so triggered by this.

But here comes the cool part. By being able to catch myself when I get triggered, I can in that very moment, when my somatic experience of abandonment is still fresh, reprogram myself. I can re-perceive what is happening, therefore triggering a different type of emotional response and in this way retraining my sub-consciousness.

And there is more. I discovered another way of rethinking my situation. On a very concrete level, the source of unconditional love has been scattered. First my biological family, then the orphanage, then my parents. But what these people have in common is that they have started out as strangers. So the stranger have taken care of me.

I now found a sound conceptual framework that helps me to cope with the difficulty to possibly attach to someone new. In every stranger lies the potential for unconditional love and you are always taken care of by someone. I have proven it myself over time that I am able to connect with others.

The following quote elegantly sums up the process.

In other words, within the problem lies the seed for its solution.

So the whole previous idea that I ‘suffer attachment’ disorder — having distrust to connect with others because of trauma — dissipated. The post-traumatic stress turned into post-traumatic growth.

I had never seen my adoption from the point of view that ‘strangers’ took care of me until I realized it. When I see it from that perspective, there is not a ‘broken’ line of unconditional love, scattered over people who ‘gave up on me’ and then found new ones. I can perceive it as a line of continuous unconditional love received from the stranger.

Hence to me, the stranger is familiar to me. The stranger and unconditional love are to constant here. The people around me embody this and hence, the greatest gift I can give back is unconditional love. Even if that person hurts ‘me’ I want them to have experienced what unconditional love could be.

This is a story about tragedy in life, the need for belong, and unconditional love. The stranger, the other person, are around us everywhere. These may be people that can provide unconditional love or need the experience of unconditional love.

The question I ask myself and you is how do you treat those people around you? Do you show the unconditional love you express to our your family to other people as well? How hospital are you to receive a stranger? How kind where you to that homeless person? Did you say hello with a genuine smile to the person next to you in the bus?

When you observe those in public transportation, many people are take notice of what the other person is doing. We are curious human beings and many love talking. Most train conversations I had, turned out into a good chat and laughter’s.

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