Nancy Verrier

Nancy Verrier is an American psychotherapist, author, lecturer and adoptive parent. She is perhaps best known for work in the areas of adoption and adoption reform, and has published two books concerning the psychopathology of adoption. They are The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child (1993) and Coming Home to Self(2003).
The core premise of the "primal wound" theory is that a child separated from its mother at the beginning of life, when still in the primal relationship to her, experiences what she calls the primal wound. This wound, occurring before the child has begun to separate his own identity from that of the mother, is experienced not only as a loss of the mother, but as a loss of the Self, that core-being of oneself which is the center of goodness and wholeness. The child may be left with a sense that part of oneself has disappeared, a feeling of incompleteness, a lack of wholeness. In addition to the genealogical sense of being cut off from one's roots, this incompleteness is often experienced in a physical sense of bodily incompleteness, a hurt from something missing. However, this view is at odds with well-accepted evidence about emotional attachment, like that put forward by John Bowlby, in which emotional responses of babies to caregivers are not thought to become intense until after the sixth month of postnatal life ( seeMercer, Understanding Attachment, 2006). Verrier's approach appears to be based on that of Otto Rank rather than on more recent views of early emotional development.
Verrier posits that the experience of a baby being relinquished by its mother sufferes a trauma which is in fact most similar to post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) experienced by people exposed to trauma so significant that they cannot directly cope with the overwhelming stress. As a result, adoptees deal with their own significant trauma in many ways that are similar to that of non-adoptee PTSD sufferers. These manifestations include anger, denial, acting out, numbing, anxiety, distancing, and a host of other manifestations common to many adpotees.
In addition to this, a major complicating factor in most adoptees attempting to deal with the healing of this wound is that it occurred at a time when they were not only preverbal and but preconscious. In spite of this Verrier, backed by significant research and insights, maintains that the adoptee "was there" and experienced the most profound rejection possible, that of being relinquished by their mother.
Because of this experience most adoptees exhibit one of two two basic survival strategies (subliminal or not) in order to deal with the deep pain and anxiety they are suffering. One is that many adoptees tend to act out as a way of testing to make sure their “new” parents fully intend to not re-abandon them in spite of how badly they might act. An alternative strategy adoptees exhibit is that of becoming compliant, attempting to be “good enough” to be “kept” as opposed to relinquished again. Verrier points out that this latter manifestation in particular comes from a “false self” the adoptee has created and although society may interpret this compliant behavior as “adjusting well to their circumstances”, in many ways this compliant approach might actually be more damaging to the adoptee who rather than express their true feelings, has locked up or denied the rage, sorrow, anxiety, etc. of their “true self” in order to insure they are being "good enough" to not be relinquished again.

The Primal Wound draws on work done by many experts on the psychology of loss, abandonment and even experts in pre and post natal development (including B.J. Lifton, J. Bowlby, T.B. Brazelton, R. Maduro, E. Neumann, D. Stern, and many others). However the unique gift of this book is the author’s ability to pull together the prior research in this field with remarkable insights based on her academic work, her professional research as a counselor to adoptees, and her own personal experience of being a mother to one daughter who was adopted and one who was not.
The initial work for this book was part of a master’s thesis in psychology, and this shows at times in the book’s lack being "highly polished" and also the lack of the "sanitized distance" present in most more research related works. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, The Primal Wound offers absolutely unique insights into the affects of relinquishment and adoption as experience, and it has become perhaps the seminal work in the field of relinquishment, adoption, their significant and far ranging affects on the adoption triad and on the adoptee in particular.

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