Feeling lost

Dear Chris,

At first I thought that your question would be easy to answer. After all, I have responded to a distraught young lady who had been adopted, and to a great many people who were struggling with depression. For something like seven years of my life, I was severely depressed myself.

But the more times I read your cry for help, the more challenging it became. With most depressed people, the problem starts with the fact that they do not acknowledge anything good in their lives. Listening to them, you get the idea that everything is wrong, life is an unmitigated misery.

In contrast, you have had nothing but good to say about your own circumstances. Your problem is that you hate yourself and feel miserable DESPITE all the good things you know about yourself.

You started by stating the fact of your adoption, and my guess is that this holds the key. How old were you when you found out that your parents were not your 'real parents'? That your biological mother had 'given you away'?

Seek out some children of that age, and study them. I don't know how easy it will be for you to have access to kids, but you might offer to do voluntary work in a kindergarten or primary school. The effort will be well worth it.

You will also benefit by going to the University Library and borrowing some books describing the work of Piaget. This concerns the thought processes of children as they pass through certain stages, and will give you an understanding of what you observe with the kids.

Chris, a child's mind is not a less competent adult mind. When you were a little person, you thought in qualitatively different ways from the way your mind works now. The very mechanics of reasoning are different.

Certain of the immature thoughts of that little person are still within you, still influencing your thoughts, actions and emotions. I heard little Chris in the statement 'I am adopted and even after reading the other stories on this page it is still hard not to feel rejected in some way. A person's mother is meant to be the personification of caring and nurturing, and for one's own mother not to convey this but rather give you away is daunting no matter what angle you look at it.'

The language and conceptual structure are that of an intelligent adult. The thought expressed is that of the little child.

I can prove this to you. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, then become someone else: a girl of 15 who has just found out that she is pregnant. Her parents are screaming at her. She is terrified of what other kids at school will say and do. She is convinced her life has been ruined. She is ashamed and perhaps suicidal.

She could have an abortion, and no doubt she struggles with the issue. The family may well be deeply religious, or there may be other reasons. Perhaps she was in denial for some months, passing off the physical signals of pregnancy until her belly started to swell, so it would now be a late-term abortion: involving the killing of a fetus that might already be sentient.

Chris, do you still think your mother gave you away because she couldn't be bothered to raise a child?

You don't know her circumstances. Don't judge her too harshly, as you did when you were a tiny person.

Why don't you seek her out? It is possible to track down your biological mother. A friend of mine is now over 50. When she was a teenager, she got drunk at a party, and the next day she found she'd lost her virginity. She had no memory of how, or with whom. She got pregnant, and after a terrible time of it (as I described), she decided to give up the child for adoption.

She got over her grieving, and eventually married and had two other children.

Twenty years later, she got a letter from a young woman named Anna: her first daughter. They got together, and have been best friends since. The two younger kids often visit Anna, though she lives interstate from them.

Chris, you could continue to have your evident good relations with your family, and also acquire a second one. And shut up the hurt little boy inside, the one that tells you that you are horrible and useless and worthless, otherwise how could your own mother have given you away?

Please consider these two courses of action: understanding the thought processes of the hurt little boy inside you, and tracking down your biological mother. I think that together they will kill your depression and self-hate.

Get back to me and let me know how these suggestions sit with you.

All the best,

Bob Rich