Adoption, resilience and the importance of stories: the making of a film about teenage adoptees.
Adoption & Fostering › Vol. 32 Nbr. 1, March 2008
Linked as:
Summary
Report
See the full content of this document
Extract
Adoption, resilience and the importance of stories: the making of a film about teenage adoptees.
Introduction
It's hard to find your identity when you don't even know where you've come from really. And teenagers struggle enough with finding their identity, let alone being adopted. (Hannah,15) Adolescence brings into focus some of the most troublesome implications of adoption. At no other time in life are questions of identity and belonging so pressing, dilemmas at the very core of adoption. Why did my birth mother give me up? Do my birth parents think of me? How could life have turned out differently for me? Do I really belong in this adoptive family? Equipped with a greater level of understanding and under the influence of a wider range of perspectives, teenagers outgrow some of the simpler explanations of adoption given to them in childhood. They need to find a way of understanding their circumstances that better fits their developmental stage. Forming a sense of identity for adoptees is complicated by gaps and contradictions in autobiographical knowledge. It is difficult to establish a sense of self when one lacks information about the beginnings of life and the foundations of family relationships. The stories that adopted people tell of their lives reveal how they see themselves and how they connect themselves to the people around them. These stories make us who we are; they are the very essence of identity. As Bruner puts it, 'in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we "tell about" our lives' (Bruner, 1987, p 15). Stories are important. Yet it is not the events themselves that matter so much, but rather the way we make sense of them. Attachment theory, the resilience literature and neuroscience all concur on this central argument around the importance of narrative, although they come to this conclusion in different ways. This article explores why stories matter in adoption and what helps adoptees make sense of their lives. It draws on themes arising from a creative project in which adopted teenagers told stories abo...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
