Rejection versus abandonment…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between abandonment and rejection. I know that many adult clients come to me wanting to work on their issues of early abandonment by parents who failed in their parenting duties due to addiction or whatever it was that ailed them. Well, I’m not one to tell my clients how to label or catagorize their trauma – they need to create and give word to their own narratives in a way that works for them. However (I always have a however – I bet that word gets chiselled onto my tombstone), I question how much the trauma is from abandonment or if it’s actually trauma from rejection.
I think that sometimes people in the helping professions try to be too nice about the crap that our kids and other victims have experienced. We try to coat it in nice words so that they don’t get further hurt by the ugly reality of their pre-adoption lives. Are we actually doing them any favors when we do that? After all, they have lived their lives, they know what they experienced and what they felt. Their memories don’t get erased when the move in with us, 
but I’m sure they get confused when we start using euphemisms to deal with our discomfort about their pain all in the guise of trying to protect them.
I think that abandonment is about a parent leaving a very young child or infant to fend for themselves forever – it’s not about failing to do whatever is necessary to keep the child safe and cared for on a daily basis -that is rejection. When the parent chooses drugs or a negative lifestyle over the child, then it becomes rejection.
After that, each foster home that lets the child move on is another rejection. I know, I know, foster homes aren’t about permanency, they are about ……temporancy (yup, I made the word up just now because I had the need of some power and control and word creation is all I had). But, the child doesn’t understand that – to most kids, each foster home is about another set of parent figures who don’t choose/want him or her – its’ about another rejection.
I think it’s time to stop being so nice about that and give children or adults the option of using that word. I think we need to be saying, “Yes, I think it must have really sucked that 2 or 5 or 10 or more potential parents rejected you.” I think that could save some people a lot of time and money in therapy if they weren’t trying to overcome the somewhat passive act or having been left, as opposed to the more active act of having been repeatedly rejected.
Oh, who knows, maybe I’m just in a bad mood…but that’s what I think today.
Have your best day possible and feel free to stop by my other blogs.
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It’s very hard to use terms like this and still embrace the PC notion of always respecting the first family…or second, or third…or eleventh. My kids don’t respect the choices of their first family. They remember being rejected so their parents could party. They remember that their parents couldn’t afford to care for them, but they also remember that there was money for a huge TV, etc. Their accounts, not mine. How much more do we mess them up by insisting they use gentle terms to describe how much they were screwed over by their families?