Aug. 28th, 2010

[personal profile] 7rin
As posted by Lizzy Brew in You know you're an adoptee when ...


Pathological Grief, suffered by mothers separated from their baby, in Submission of Dr G Rickarby, consultant psychiatrist, to the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry - highly recommended read for those wanting to understand the experience of the loss of their 'birthmother':

"Pathological grief refers to distinct and major failure of (the normal grieving) process. After loss of the baby, the first stage of shock, numbness and disbelief may persist because the mother cannot face the finality of loss of her baby and the feelings of rage, guilt, depression that might overwhelm her. The numbness and disbelief are protective against this emotional second stage of grief. This may persist for a long time and may be associated with naive beliefs that the baby will be returned or some `nice' social worker will appear to help the return.

Many find the next stage, which they enter after they accept finality of the loss, produces such anger and despair they revert to the first stage, and I have seen this see-saw between the two occur over two or three decades, and associated with decompensation in Major Depression.

Others stay in the second stage of major feelings: they cannot accept the implications of their loss and thus cannot mourn. This arrest is not understood and people readily become irritated with them as they return to the issues of their arrested grief. At The Inquiry there will be many with this type of damage and their presentations will represent for them the first attempts to look at implications of their loss in the social world. Such damage is to be seen in the context that when a mother loses a child from babyhood to middle age, and the loss is untimely and has other bad outcome features, the most stable and mentally healthy person becomes similarly afflicted.
Others are stuck in the stage of mourning, going back again and again to the same issues where they cannot get satisfactory answers."

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