Why Adoption Doesn't Erase Trauma: The Role of Memories

Join us for a conversation with Thomas C. Rector, the founder of Accrescent Institute, addressing some common and important questions adoptive parents face:

• How does an adopted child's past trauma influence their behavior today?

• Can an adopted child ever truly "get over" their past?

• What tools can adoptive parents use to help their children navigate their new life while honoring their past?

  
  

Thomas shares how BioSocial Cognition provides a framework for understanding that adoption does not erase past memories, experiences, or trauma. Instead, he offers insight on how parents can work with their children to attach new, positive experiences to old memories, allowing them to create a wider, more positive perspective.

Why Adoption Doesn't Erase Trauma, Interview with Thomas C. Rector

Adoption and Trauma Interview with Thomas C. Rector (Transcript)

Shannon: 

So we've been talking about adoption and in talking about adoption, we've talked a lot about your story, but we were also talked a little bit about how BioSocial Cognition can help adoptive families understand what's happening with their adopted kids.

And one of the things that as we were just talking about was that adoption does not wipe away all those past memories and all those past experiences and all that past trauma that our kids have had. That comes into the adoption experience. 

Can you speak a little bit to how BioSocial Cognition helps that process of working with your adopted child, as they are navigating both their new life and their past life?

Thomas C. Rector: 

So, the fundamental place is first and foremost to truly have a understanding of how the brain uses the memory of trauma and its processing to decide how it's going to behave, how it's going to promote the person's survival. And so within the BioSocial Cognition information is the basic understanding that this decision, this behavior that we choose to make occurs after the memory, the trauma has been brought up. The memory is a trauma. Trauma is a memory, sorry. And after that's brought up and processed. 

And what's important then is to understand that memories don't sit there in isolation and only themselves, the memories are connected to other memories and other memories and other memories. It's completely an association kind of thing. 

So what we can walk away from a training in BioSocial Cognition is the understanding of acceptance. The trauma memory is there. It's not gonna go away. It's always gonna be there.

What we get to do is we get to impact its meaning. We get to be able to make it not such a sharp, tight thing, but more of a experience thing that has other knowledge attached to it. 

So within the context of parenting, what we want to do is to understand: in the environment that the child lives in, what are the things that are going to trigger it and be conscious that we don't want to trigger it if we can help it, but we can add to the experience. 

So the there is a DMPS model that we use within BioSocial Cognition that helps us get clear about how the environment and the components within the environment are filtered through to arrive at a place of perception.  We all perceive the world rather than know it because we're always filtering it. 

Using this DMPS model is a way of getting clear about the impact of the natural survival instincts, the genetics of the individual, the memories that are there and the age/development stage of the person, child or person or adult. 

So when you can take it apart and see it in pieces, then you can go back to the environment and see how you're going to shape that to create a particular perception. 

So you can't make trauma go away. That is a memory, the memory sticks and stays. And the brain is specifically designed to remember more acutely things that have threatened us. That's why it has memories is to be able to adapt our behavior. 

So what we want to do is we want to attach new memories to the existing one, which creates a wider perspective of how that memory is being responded to, that trauma memories being responded to.

And the tools that we have of that is first and foremost, knowing, just knowing. It exists. Knowing how it's being used. And the second tool is we can shape the environment to help process and learn and evolve past that trauma.

There's people that have been in trainings, adults that have been in trainings and they say, you know, when I was a youngster, was deathly afraid of water., I just totally was, I just deathly afraid. But today as an adult, I'm not afraid of it. I enjoy it and whatever it is. And yet I still remember, I still remember that fear, that afraidness, but that isn't my experience today. 

And so we talked through that and reality was Yes, that was the memory and it stays, it doesn't go away, but her experiences in life have expanded it and given it a different context, the context only itself, context of that event within a larger perspective. 

Our opportunity for our foster adopted children, actually for anybody, is that we can get clear about the trauma, the triggers, the environments that cause that to happen. And we can grow beyond the immediacy of that reaction. We can grow to understand it in a larger context.

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