If you are an adult survivor of childhood abuse, you might be feeling angry about having to discuss your history with a social worker during the adoption home study process. You might rail against the unfairness of it all. This reaction is very normal and, in my opinion, healthy. It is what you do with your anger during the adoption home study process that matters.

There is a lot to be angry about. Your abusers took away your innocence and your ability to trust, and now they are potentially taking away your ability to become a parent. (Even though you will not be prohibited from adopting a child just because you were abused, these fears are very normal.) Childhood abuse comes with many losses: It is normal to feel angry about potentially losing anything else because of the people who harmed you.

Other couples who were not abused do not have to discuss such deeply personal and painful memories. They do not have to spend an extra hour or two undergoing scrutiny for something over which they had no control. There is nothing fair about being abused, and there is nothing fair about the abuse continuing to affect your life today. It just plain stinks.

All this being said, you will still have to talk about your abuse history if you want to adopt a child. There is no getting around it. As I discussed in my post Abuse Survivors: How Parenting is Affected, this line of questioning is a necessary part of protecting children from suffering the same painful experiences that you did. While you are not a threat to a child, some people are: The social worker needs to weed those people out.

Abuse survivors do not always know how to process their anger, so I will provide you with some tools that you can use to get the anger out of your system in a safe manner. Here are some methods that have worked well for many abuse survivors:

• Beat the ground with a baseball bat


• Blow up a bunch of balloons, write your abusers’ names on them, and pop them


• Do the lion’s breath yoga asana


• Scream


• Take a kickboxing class


• Throw things at the wall that won’t damage it (popsicle sticks work well)


• Write an angry letter to your abusers (or the social worker) and then either tear it up or burn it

Once you process your anger, allow yourself to feel whatever feelings lie beneath the surface, such as guilt, shame, grief, or worthlessness. Reassure yourself that you have just as much of a right to become a parent as anyone else. Most importantly, be kind to yourself as you process your emotions.

Related Topics:

• Emotions of Adoption: Anger




• Surviving the Wait: Dealing with Unresolved Issues




• Top Ten List: Adopting an Abused Child (Abuse survivors might struggle with some of the issues outlined in this series about adopting a child who has been abused.)