Homing in on Adoption: Dreaming, Drawing, and Telling Stories in Relational Psychotherapy

ABSTRACT

Adoptees and their families long for a relational home in which they can feel safe and accepted. Parents’ and children’s divergent histories, experiences, and visions of the future can make that vision a challenging one to achieve. As an adoptive mother and a clinical psychologist, the author is deeply familiar with seldom considered aspects of the adoption experience, including mismatched rhythms, struggles for recognition, loss aversion, and uncertainty borne of absences in family stories. This article presents a relational model for treating adoptees and their families that highlights parent engagement and employs both nonverbal and narrative modalities so that a joint vocabulary can develop, leading to new stories that are co-created, coherent, and sustaining despite the gaps they inevitably contain. Adoption thus construed becomes not just a loss, but also an opportunity for growth for all three of the parties to the adoption triangle. The article outlines key developmental dilemmas, presents a repertoire of techniques for drawing out nascent self-experience, and employs illustrative clinical vignettes to assist clinicians in encountering the often overwhelming affects and impasses common in working with these families.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented as a talk at the annual conference of the Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy on November 19, 2022. The author expresses her appreciation to Elizabeth Howell, Ph.D., Irene Studwell, LCSW, Jane Bloomgarden, Ph.D., and Kathryn Naftzger, LICSW, for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes

1. Narrative and mourning are inextricably intertwined. In infancy, babies form proto-narrative structures for experiences of building excitement, excessive arousal, and dwindling satisfaction (Stern, 1995). In later life, people manage loss by telling stories about the person, place, or thing that is missed. This process, known as mourning, is a way to make meaning out of deeply painful and disorienting experience. Since meaning is found between people as well as within individuals, these symbolic acts ideally take the form of shared remembrances (Niemeyer, Klass & Dennis, 2014). Sharing stories restores a sense of well-being, providing solace to mourners. As creative acts, stories recall what is missed even as they create something new (Segal, 2012).

Making sense of tragic loss involves finding a way to re-emphasize the attachment bond to the lost person rather than relinquishing it (Pivnick, 2014). At an individual level, it is helpful to establish stories for the bereaved about their resourcefulness. Such narratives are, in turn, nested within cultural frames for grief like eulogies that depict who has been lost and who remains. The process of organizing stories into plot structures that sequence temporal experience, with episodic memories of mourning rituals like funerals eventually coalescing into autobiographical memory is biologically based but also requires communal support (Pivnick, in press).

In adoption, what and who has been lost is ambiguous and there are no mourning rituals. Although the adoptee has lost a birth family, an origin story, and a more complete context for the development of a sense of self, he or she generally has difficulty identifying their personal experience as one of loss. Adoptive life can feel more like being surrounded by an impinging world of strangers and strange places. As a result, stories in adoptive families are often constructed as a way to discover what is missing rather than as an afterthought following a loss. That is what makes storytelling in families and in psychotherapy so enriching and so imperative. enriching and so imperative. A more extensive discussion of the benefits of taking a narrative stance in the treatment of adoptees can be found in Pivnick (2009) and Pivnick (2013).

2. Another approach to using a narrative approach in treating adoptees is detailed by Naftzger (2017).

3. See Pivnick & Hassinger (2021) for a discussion of a case of an adoptee who threatened school violence in an attempt to be recognized.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Billie Pivnick

Billie Pivnick, Ph.D., is faculty/supervisor in the William Alanson White Institute Child/Adolescent Psychotherapy Program and Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Co-Chair of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Committee of APA’s Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Division 39), she is co-creator and co-host of the Couched podcast (www.couchedpodcast.org), which features conversations between analysts and influential cultural figures. She is also co-founder of the Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory, a web-based seminar and project incubator for psychoanalytically-informed projects focused on innovative interdisciplinary responses to significant community problems. Additionally, she is Consulting Psychologist to Thinc Design, partnered with the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the OnePulse Foundation. Author of some thirty professional articles, she was winner of the SPPP’s 2015 Schillinger Memorial Essay Award for her essay, “Spaces to Stand In: Applying Clinical Psychoanalysis to the Relational Design of the National September 11 Memorial Museum,” and IPTAR’s 1992 Stanley Berger Award for her contribution to psychoanalysis. On the Board of Directors of the Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, she is also an Associate Editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis.