Journey of the Adopted Self
Betty Jean Lifton, whose Lost and Found has become a bible to adoptees and to those who would understand the adoption experience, explores further the inner world of the adopted person. She breaks new ground as she traces the adopted child’s lifelong struggle to form an authentic sense of self. And she shows how both the symbolic and the literal search for roots becomes a crucial part of the journey toward wholeness.
Becoming Patirck: A Memoir
When Pat McMahon risks the love of the mother who raised him by seeking out the mother who gave him away, he transforms from a mild-mannered engineer into a frenetic detective. After he overcomes the challenges of existential angst, bureaucratic roadblocks, and unemployment, the phone call to his first mother releases a torrent of long-buried feelings. During a sometimes turbulent long-distance unfolding, he absorbs her shocking revelations and comes out as gay once again.
LITERATURE is one of the most valuable resources for adoptees who are looking to gain deeper perspectives relative to the impacts of adoption. Although adoption related literature slowly started percolating their way onto the scene in the 1990s over the last ten years there has been a tremendous growth of adoption related material finding it's way to print. Today, adoptees can find literature ranging from memoirs of adoptees to literature more focused on the psycho-social aspects of being an adoptee. Or you may find a score of adoptee blogs exploring perspectives and opinions to books that are more general to adoption. All of the books should be available through amazon, but if you're short on cash to buy the books, do try your local library. For RI residents use this link to search the Ocean State Library's online catalog.
Deing Adopted:
The Life Long Search for Self
Like Passages, this groundbreaking book uses the poignant, powerful voices of adoptees and adoptive parents to explore the experience of adoption and its lifelong effects. A major work, filled with astute analysis and moving truths.
Coming Home To Self
Coming Home to Self is a book that can help anyone who has had early childhood trauma or who feels as if he or she is living an unauthentic life. It is a book about becoming aware of the reasons for certain attitudes and behaviors
RIARG Library
Adoption Nation
Adoption Nation represented the first comprehensive overview of adoption issues facing America, pulling together and sorting out the confusing and contradictory masses of information relating to adoption’s politics, policies, and practices. In this completely revised and updated edition, Pertman continues where he left off, disentangling the myths and prejudices surrounding adoption, foster care, and nontraditional family structures.
Adoption: Uncharted Waters
Nothing ever before written about adoption can prepare the reader for the revelations in this book. With the precision of a forensic psychologist in a coutroom drama, David Kirschner sheds light on a dark subject - adoptees who kill: David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), Joel Rifkin (serial killer of 17 women), Steve Catlin (serial wife and mother killer), Jeremy Strohmeyer (the "casino" killer) and parricides Patrick DeGelleke, Matthew Heikkila and Patrick Niiranen.
LOST & FOUND
The Adoption Experience
Twice Born: Memoires of an Adopted Daughter
The Primal Wound
The Girls Who Went Away
In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.
The Primal Wound is a book which is revolutionizing the way we think about adoption. In its application of information about pre- and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding, and loss, it clarifies the effects of separation from the birth mother on adopted children. In addition, it gives those children, whose pain has long been unacknowledged or misunderstood, validation for their feelings, as well as explanations for their behavior.
"Why did you write Adooptee with a capital A? I was asked afther this book came out. It seemed so obvious to me at the time that I was making a political statement. I felt that most adopted peopled were not visible enough: that no one saw their sense of abandonment and loss or understood the idnetity struggles they were going through."
In this significant and lasting account, Betty Jean Lifton, acclaimed author of several books on the psychology of the adopted, tells her own story of growing up at a time when adoptees were still in the closet. Twice Born recounts her early struggle with the loneliness and isolation of not knowing her birth parents;
