The Cult of Adoption

TLDR: Adoption, as practiced today, is a cult.

“The Cult of Adoption” by Rebecca Peacock Dragon

Jane was a child raised in a religious cult. She was told her entire childhood, “our leader is benevolent and beautiful and only allows things to happen to you that are the best for you. In order to be protected from the harms of the world, and to know your True Self, you must thank him every day, validate him as the one REAL vessel of truth on this earth and in heaven, and never imagine what the world outside of (the cult) is like…because your alternative would be nothing but weeping and gnashing of teeth or being shuffled around from one painful destination to another, even unto death.

“Jane grows up and she becomes a missionary for the cult. She writes social media posts about these beliefs, and shares her testimony with others. She fundraises for the cult, and sometimes goes door to door trying to share her cult’s beliefs. The more she shares what she believes, the more she protects herself from the big bad “alternative” which would mean destruction and even death for her.

Pictures of the leader adorn every room in her house, and whenever Jane struggles with anything, she blames herself entirely. She has even received psychiatric and medical diagnosis that prove she has problems unrelated to the cult, because other people outside of the cult also receive these diagnoses, so the cult is obviously not a contributing factor. It can NEVER be the fault of the cult or the belief system she is clinging to…because the belief system is what gave and gives her life.

She is a good cult member, and everyone else who shares these beliefs and world view praise and laud her. When she shares her testimony, it makes the other cult members weep tears of joy, and feel so incredibly good inside of themselves. It strengthens THEIR worldview and participation in the cult’s beliefs. The cult strengthens itself by only sharing and validating approved testimonies that reflect their theology.

If a member struggles, they are immediately reminded to focus on the Truth, and that any struggle they have is because they just aren’t seeing things clearly.

As Jane grows more into adulthood, she starts experiencing life events that cause her to start evaluating these beliefs she was raised with. She falls in love with someone outside of the cult, and for the first time has intimate access to a family that isn’t inside the cult. She has her first child. Because she loves her child so much, she can, for the first time, see how these beliefs are harmful (because often parents can see harm to their children but not to themselves). She starts to see, from her new vantage point on the border of The Outside, how some of these beliefs actually caused her harm, some are even the direct source of things she struggles with.

She begins to see the outside world, The Alternative, and it isn’t what she was led to believe her entire life. At some pivotal moment, she now truly faces the life she has spent paying fealty to: a worldview and belief system that is not only false, but actively harmed her and gave her life-long psychological, emotional, and physical outcomes that they now have to reckon with.

She may still love the people in the cult, desperately. She may try to keep relationship with them because of her love for them, hoping that one day they might join her in living an autonomous and independent life that embraces reality. Or, she may reject them completely out of hand because she also realizes that they were complicit in harming her and have no intention of rectifying and reconciling that.

Society celebrates the person (in this case Jane) leaving the cult. We make documentaries about leaving harmful belief systems. We laud the hard work it takes for the adherent to deconstruct their false idols and worldview. We see their reclamation (or claiming for the first time) of their autonomy and independence as something beautiful, important, and profound. We want to learn from them: “how did you manage to leave such a powerful delusion?” We know instinctively that these people who were able to leave a cult have gone through a healing process, even though what they share is often uncomfortable, and off-putting. Their painful reality is a lesson to the rest of us on “what not to do”.

The only people upset about, offended by, or arguing with Jane when she is actively leaving (or has left and is speaking about it) are the people still in the cult, or holding some of the cults beliefs even if not a member.

SO: Why the celebration for and fascination with people leaving harmful systems like cults, but not for the adoptee leaving their delusions placed on them by a quantifiably harmful system? We know when a group is a cult, quantifiably. And we also know when other systems are harmful, quantifiably. All we have to do is look at the stats, the outcomes, and listen to the victims of the system to know this. Harmful religious cults are not “equally as valid as any other religious or social group” “because there are happy cult members inside of it”. Cults are defined by their external observable characteristics…NOT by the happy cult members. We need to offer our systems of relinquishment and adoption the same treatment: objective and quantifiable evaluation and characterization along with a very LARGE platform given to those who are awake and aware to how that system has harmed and continues to harm them.

Now, let’s apply this to how society views adoption vs. kidnapping/displacement in a war/IVF mix-up “oops we put the wrong embryo in you” etc…. We treat each of these situations radically differently, even though the experience of the CHILD is the same. So this begs the question (which in answering we will start honestly evaluating the institution of adoption as practiced today):

HOW DO THE INTENTIONS OF THE BIO AND ADOPTIVE PARENTS CHANGE THE EXPERIENCE FOR THE CHILD?

A child being removed from its mother, no matter the mental or moral state of that mother, no matter the intentions of the birthmother/birthfamily, or the adoptive parents….STILL EXPERIENCES THE TRAUMA OF LOSING THEIR MOTHER AND THEIR BIOLOGICAL FAMILY/CULTURE/HOME/LANGUAGE, etc…. When this happens to small infants, it is assumed the child “doesn’t remember”, but the trauma is written into the relinquished child at the cellular level, compounded by the pain of being told there is “no way” they could have trauma because they “don’t remember”. (For more on this, please watch Paul Sunderland on YouTube)

Then, the adoptee will frequently grow up struggling in various ways because of that cellular trauma, but NEVER equating any of it to adoption. Because adoption is beautiful, your adoptive family is your REAL family, you are blessed, and that happens in bio families too. And your birthfamily was (too young, too poor, too abusive, too morally corrupt, etc…) And since all of these things are true because we say they are, therefore adoption is not a harm to you…it is a gift. And if you cling to the “gift” aspect, you won’t have to experience the harsh unknown of the outside world.

So, adoptees live the outcome of their adoption trauma, all the while being the biggest champions for adoption, celebrating it even. Why? Because to validate the preferred narratives of your adopters is how you SURVIVED. To say anything else but “that’s beautiful” and “love is enough” is a critical threat, and means annihilation. Until such a time that an adoptee finally allows themselves to look at their lives critically, honestly, and holistically (usually well after leaving their adoptive family’s home). Then, they finally start to heal, and part of that is talking about it authentically. What happens at this stage is that instead of support, they are met with such defensiveness from every direction….people who insist that the adoptee MUST reflect the “happy” narrative that they clung to to survive, even though that narrative was also their greatest injury to self. Or, even worse…many see the adoptee expressing the hard and the painful and are told this is a sign that they “need therapy” as opposed to an actual SIGN OF THEIR ACTIVE HEALING.

Ironically, for those of us adoptees who still hold relationship with our adopters AFTER this awakening are usually the ones whose adoptive families allowed them the space to awaken, without defensiveness. But for adoptive families and others to allow this…they have to be so willing to sacrifice their own needs of the relationship, and admit their own complicity in and benefitting from the system.

Adoption, most notably as it is practiced in the U.S., is a quantifiably harmful system, even though it is still filled with “happy” adherents to the system. To put the happy adherents of the system against those who have left and deconstructed in an attempt to prove that “6 and one-half dozen of the other” is to neglect the civil rights, safety, mental well-being, and wholeness of victims of the system. It also allows the system to continue, despite the harm. And most profoundly, it allows the ongoing gaslighting of and imprisonment of those who are still stuck in the system, without any help to see any alternative.

I am more of a persuasive philosophical writer, so I merely present to you a challenge to your thinking. If you are interested in learning more about how relinquishment and adoption as practiced today are *quantifiably* harmful, I recommend following The Silenced Adoptee who has an academic approach, and includes studies in much of their work.