Recovery from Relinquishment: Forgiving my Birth Mother. My Journey from 1954 to Today

Adoptees carry the burden of shame for being “given up, abandoned, unwanted, not right,” and birth mothers carry the weight of shame for succumbing to external pressure to relinquish their children. There is ample literature addressing recovery for both adoptees and birth mothers (Buterbaugh & Soll, 2003; Franklin, 2019; Lanier, 2020; Soll, 2005, 2013, 2014); however, there is little recognition of the co-shame and need for forgiveness. Utilizing autoethnographic methodology, I discuss the issues of misogyny prevalent in the 1950s, the “Baby Scoop Era [BSE],” and my ongoing process of forgiving my birth mother after five decades of rage. This piece attempts to provide insights into the questions: Did my birth mother voluntarily “give me up” because she didn’t want me? Who was she, and are we alike? Is it possible to stop being so angry? My findings include an understanding of the situation in which my mother struggled and forgiveness of her decision. While we share commonalities, the chasm between the social construction of reality in which she lived and mine is vast; however, we are “others of similarity” (Chang, 2008). My anger has shifted to the patriarchal and misogynistic system that permits the involuntary separation of mother and child.

Toward a general theory of infantile attachment: a comparative review of aspects of the social bond

This critical appraisal of contemporary interpretations in the area of infantile attachment begins with an outline of the principal features of the Bowlby-Ainsworth ethological theory, the instrumental/operant learning theory of Gewirtz, and Hoffman's classical conditioning model. Some attention is also given to Cairns's contiguity learning analysis and the Hoffman-Solomon opponentprocess model Discussion of these theories is followed by a review of representative data from infants at four phyletic levels (precocial birds, dogs, monkeys, and human beings), with an emphasis on three aspects of social bonding: (a) the formation and persistence of social ties in the infant under conditions of maltreatment, (b) the role of the attachment object in the adjustment of the infant to the broader environment (the so-called secure base effect), and (c) the infant's reaction to involuntary separation from the attachment object.An attempt is made to judge how well each of the interpretations accounts for all or part of the data, with the conclusion that current theories do not accord completely with documented attachment phenomena. The following criticisms are highlighted: Ethological theory emphasizes that infants' behavior systems have been shaped by the ordinarily expectable environment and depend on that environment for their functioning, yet infants of many species form bonds to objects not typical in any species' environment, or even to sources of maltreatment. Learning theory is faulted for making predictions contradicted by the maltreatment data and for a lack of formal mechanisms to account for the secure base and separation effects. The contiguity analysis is criticized for its inability to account for the emergence of certain response patterns during separation, and the opponent-process model is called into question because of its failure to fit important affective dynamics of social separation (a central focus of this theory). Recommendations for future theories of attachment are offered.