Guest Post - Where Is The Exit? - by Anne Heffron

Welcome to another 'Who's Wally?' takeover!

The second Book about adoption and its trauma that I read was By Anne Heffron called ‘You Don’t Look Adopted’.

I found the way she described her life fascinating. Anne writes as if she is holding a conversation with the reader and I like that, it's comforting to digest.

I asked her if she would like to guest blog for ‘Whos Wally?’ and even though she is currently in the middle of writing two books she kindly agreed, and I couldn't be more thrilled!

Thank you Anne, Over to you…

Sometimes I think being adopted is like wearing a condom all the time. You get to feel, but not completely, and both your vital energy and the ability to connect with the vital energy of others is blocked.

My body aches to feel completely. Human beings, I believe, are wired to feel love, to live for it, to work for it, to dream about it, to sacrifice for it, to exist for it. I’ve heard that when a soldier is dying, they often call for their mothers, the original fountain of love.

How can you feel love wholeheartedly when you can’t trust, when your body is on guard for danger, for loss, for the next shoe to drop? Maybe I should use “I” and really own that sentence. How can I feel when I can’t trust, when my body is on guard for danger, for loss, for the next shoe to drop?

When my dog looks at me and I look at him and it seems like we love each other, my thought is, One day he will die and leave me. When I talk to a dear friend on Facetime and it feels like we’re really connecting, I wonder when they will start to hate me.

Now that I understand more about myself, I see myself as a Lego with some of the circles missing. The more technical term for “circles” is “studs”. Because I have the sense of humor of a sixth grader, I find this very funny. My studs are missing.  

Isn’t that the truth!

All these years I’ve had it in my head that Nancy Verrier was saying the primal wound was something physical, I don’t know why, when I say that now I feel stupid, but that’s how ideas are. I have them and sometimes I don’t examine them. I create glasses out of these ideas and look out at the world with them.

It has not been uncommon for me to have ideas about adoption that keep me from actually looking deeply at the core issues. My brain tries to keep me from touching the hottest part of the wound because it wants to protect me, but a ‘me’ protected from my own deepest thoughts is not much of a ‘me’. 

In having this belief about the Verrier’s vision of the primal wound, I was able to distance myself from her and her writing. 

What feels safe can actually be a cage. 

Verrier talks about the primal wound as a preverbal wound in our subconscious that is a result of mother and child separation. I feel that in my body. In You Don’t Look Adopted, I wrote about feeling like a Mexican jumping bean—the hard little seed pods I bought as a kid that jumped around and banged against their plastic box. 

At the time, I hadn’t done any research about Mexican jumping beans, I just knew their erratic movements made me laugh, and I didn’t know that essentially the bean is a kind of chrysalis for the larvae inside to eat until it becomes a moth and can break through the round doorway at the end of the bean and fly away. 

Are we all at some point, or maybe our entire lives, banging against our cages trying to fly?

You can find Anne Heffron's Website here.

Image: © Anne Heffron