Adoption Matters (Tutorial)

SUNDAY February 2, 2025, 17:00-20:00 TUTORIAL MICHAEL TROUT ON ADOPTION

About Michael Trout (source: https://www.infant-parent.com/michael-trout)

Breaking Peaces: Babies Have Their Say About Domestic Violence

Represents what prenates, infants and toddlers would say — if they but had a voice, and if we would actually listen — about experiencing domestic violence.  Formed around a poem, with some of the words spoken by young children, this video presumes that domestic violence is an intensely up-close-and-personal phenomenon for babies, and teaches that babies have little choice but to respond, in some way.  They may pull back, they may attempt to control, they may become compliant, they may become rageful, they may become perpetrators, themselves.  But they will respond. Suggestions are made, at the end, about action steps for grownups. (7 minutes)

Family Transitions: Young Children Speak Their Minds About Divorce

An effort to collect in one place, and then put into words the many things children “say” — in their drawings, in their behavior, and sometimes even in their words — when their families are coming apart. Designed for use by mediators, judges, support programs for divorcing couples — and parents, themselves — as they examine the feelings of young children of divorce. (16 minutes)

Gentle Transitions: A Newborn Baby’s Point of View About Adoption

Suggestions on what we grown-ups should think about — and do – to make the adoption experience work best for a baby. Presented as if written by an infant, this ten-minute video may be useful for birthparents, adoptive parents and adoption training. Covered are issues ranging from the importance of the adoptive family having a chance to be pregnant for their adopted baby to the importance of some sort of ritual to mark the transition from one family to the other. Explanations are offered from some of the adopted baby’s subsequent behavior and a plea is made (by the baby, of course) for us to remember that he is watching us. (10 minutes)

Multiple Transitions: A Young Child’s Point of View on Foster Care and Adoption

Employs the unique format used in the first film: there are no adults — or even adult voices — to be seen or heard. The script attempts to distill what children would teach us, if they had the chance, about what being moved around feels like, how and why their behavior begins to change, and what happens to their availability for new attachment. The film ends with a few suggestions on how we might be able to do it better. (16 minutes)

Is Anyone In There? Adopting a Wounded Child

Companion video to “Multiple Transitions: A Young Child’s Point of View on Foster Care and Adoption.” This video is designed for the support of foster and adoptive parents, as well as for the training of professionals in child welfare. It acknowledges that caring for, and falling in love with a child who has been traumatized by abuse, loss or profound neglect bears little resemblance to the romantic stories about adoption often told to unsuspecting parents. (11 minutes)

Special Note: Regarding “Is Anyone In There? Adopting a Wounded Child” – This video was designed to tell a very specific and personal story: that of a parent who is startled to discover that she has just adopted a child who gives very little back, and whose behavior will challenge everything the parent thought she knew about parenting, and about love. It is NOT an easy film to watch. It is NOT a good recruiting film for adoptive parents. It is NOT about the joys of adoption. It does NOT tell every adoptive parent’s story. It IS a breakthrough film for parents who have been struggling to find words to describe what is wrong. It IS an opportunity to forestall adoption disruption by demonstrating that the family’s struggle makes sense, that they are not crazy, that there is help.

Adoption Matters Handouts

An Interview with Michael Trout on Adoption

Baby Verses: The Narrative Poetry of Infants and Toddlers by Michael Trout: It is a compilation of 18 poems as if written by prenates, babies and young children, describing their experiences with life: from living with an alcoholic mother, to circumcision; from losing a twin in utero to the joys of individuation. Eight of the poems are recorded on an included CD, using voices of very young children.

A podcast with Michael Trout
https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-azqrp-cb8de8

QUOTES FROM MICHAEL TROUT’S BOOK, FOUR DECADES IN INFANT MENTAL HEALTH: THIS HALLOWED GROUND, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2021

• “If I ever doubted before, Sarah taught me a permanent lesson: that inside most of us are traces of what happened before.” (p. 140)
• “…what must it be like to be Rudie? What must it be like to not know your own story, or to have bits and pieces of yourself littered incoherently all over the landscape?” (p. 142)
• “This is the story [the adoptive parents] told their little boy about life inside his drug-addicted mom’s womb: We know that the place where you grew up, for the first nine months of your life, while you were still inside your first mom, was a confusing place. It may have gotten loud, sometimes. We think your mom didn’t know too much about resting, even though she needed it, and you needed it. She was putting things in herself that made her mind race, and made her body race, and may have even made you race. You were too young to race.” (p. 143)
• “Rudie said: ‘Is that what makes me feel frazzled?’ None of [us] could believe our ears. Had he—in these few minutes of storytelling—already started putting together a narrative about his life (all 4 years and 9 months of it) that was starting to make sense to him? Did he just come up with a working model for what ADHD feels like?” (p. 144)
• “…Rudie’s life of placement failures ended on the day his body remembered, his moms saw, and they all took in their new, shared narrative.” (p. 145)
• “It can’t be scientifically established whether or not prenates engage in the construction of internal working models…But I found myself respectful of the coherence between Jonathon’s dream, his lifetime of longings, and his lifetime of self-doubt. I find myself, to this day, unable to be dismissive of such stories and such dreams, and the fidelity sometimes noticed between what people once thought about themselves and how they have lived out a model of self.” (p. 151)
• Speaking of the womb inside which she once lived: “The only dangers inside had to do with the limited supplies of air and food. Those dangers, she explained, were manageable. All she had to do was make herself as small as possible, to curl up in the corner, breathe shallowly, and not make a peep…The real dangers were on the outside. And so, for the next 50 years, this defined her posture, her affect, and her interactions with others: small, curled up, trying not to make a peep…” (p. 152)
• “I’m often asked about prenatal life. How much credibility should we give to patient’s stories, or dreams or ideas that seem to hint at prenatal memory, even prenatal working-through? My answer usually is that I don’t know. But not for a second would I ever scoff. Never would I doubt the possibility that our minds are active in defense of life, and of self, before we happen to come out here where everyone can see us.” (p. 154)
• “John never stopped moving in the womb, [mother] said. It was as if he were deeply troubled about something. After a most difficult delivery—Mom said he did not want to be born, that he ‘put out both hands, pressing against my bones, holding himself in’—John emerged. As a newborn, he would not sleep. He nursed around the clock for weeks; he could never get enough. He suffered from near-constant gastrointestinal pain. In some ways, Mom said, this general pattern never changed: at age seven, she still experiences him as ravenous in his needs. And she still experiences herself as unable to meet them.” (p. 168-169)
• “Asking patients about their obesity is always touchy, but that doesn’t give us license to ignore it entirely…she [the patient] began to speak of her mother’s pregnancy for her. Her Mom was 14, and deeply troubled to be pregnant, as she thought it might make her ‘fat’. So her mother stopped eating. She said her Mom remains proud, to this day, that she could still snap the same, tight jeans she had worn before she got pregnant, on the day she delivered John’s mom. John’s mother had been starved, in utero…So what sort of uterus was she prepared to offer her own firstborn?” (p. 171-172)

  “To adopt a child is a great work of love. When it is done, much is given, but much is also received. It is a true exchange of gifts.” – Pope John Paul II