In my last post, I shared my experiences about discussing my painful childhood in my first adoption home study. In this post, I will talk about my significantly more painful second adoption home study.

People who were abused as children often have painful memories and emotions triggered when their children reach the age that they were when they were abused. This happened to me. I had always remembered the “lesser abuses” that I had suffered as a child, and I had spent my entire adult life healing from them. However, when my son became a toddler (the age I was when my abuse started), I started having flashbacks about the sexual abuse.

See the following posts for more on flashbacks and repressed memories:

• How to Soothe a Child Through Flashbacks


• Understanding Repressed Memories

Unfortunately, the flashbacks started just a few months before I was invited to do our home study for our second child. The timing could not have been worse. I knew that I was a good mother and that I would provide a second child with a loving home. However, I feared that a social worker would have reservations about placing a child into the home of a woman who was “crazy enough” to be in therapy.

By state law, the social worker was required to ask if I had been sexually abused. I could have just lied and said no, but that is not who I am. To deny my truth was to deny myself, so I took a deep breath, said yes, and braced myself for two excruciatingly painful hours of talking about my past.

The pain was so raw, and I had not shared my experiences with many people yet. I did not know the social worker well, which made talking about what happened doubly hard. I spent a lot of this time crying as I bared my soul, and when we finished, I asked her to consider how happy and secure my son was when deciding whether to approve us to adopt again.

The social worker seemed surprised that I was worried that I would not be approved. I was clearly a good and experienced mother with a very well-adjusted child. I had flown through the home study process with flying colors. She seemed taken aback that this was even a concern for me, so she spent the next 15 minutes telling me about a social worker’s side of this conversation.

She said that, as a social worker, she sees therapy as a good thing. She thought I was amazingly strong to have created such a stable life for myself and my family in light of all that I had endured as a child. All she needed was a letter from my therapist stating his confidence that my abuse history would not affect my ability to be a good and loving parent, and she would approve me with no reservations.

When I got home, I sobbed for over an hour. Actually, the word “sob” does not encompass the depth of the tears I shed that afternoon. I experienced and processed pain from such a deep place within myself that I found it hard to believe that someone could feel that level of pain and survive it.

I saw my therapist within the next few days, and he was thrilled with the level of healing I had achieved through talking about my past in the home study. I thought it was a bad thing that I had felt such deep pain. He responded, “Don’t you get it? You are feeling! You have spent your life numbing yourself, but now you are in touch with your emotions again. This was a huge leap in healing for you.”

I lamented having to choose between numbness and excruciating pain, but my therapist told me that I would feel much better in a few days. He was right. I had focused so much energy on repressing those emotions. Now that I had poured them out of my soul, my emotional wounds could finally heal. Within a week, I felt better than I ever had in my life.

While I still had a lot of healing work ahead of me, I learned that I could face the pain without it breaking me, and I learned that I would feel much better afterward. Facing the pain of an abusive past is the secret to healing from it. When you repress the pain, it grows more powerful. Once you pour out the pain, it loses its power, enabling you to heal your emotional wounds.

Related Topics:

• 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.)