ROBERT J. LIFTON; A CALM VOICE OF REASON

One of the highlights of Betty Jean Lifton’s book, Twice Born, is the conversations she relates with her husband, the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton. His is a calm voice of reason as hers is sometimes not.    I particularly like the following quote because it puts being an adoptee in perspective. 

“Everyone survives some kind of trauma in early life….In that sense

 every one is a survivor.  But an adoptee does have a particular kind of separation,” he conceded.  “It can be debilitating or it can give special insight.”  

What I object to in some of Betty Jean Lifton’s writing is that I hear the whine of self-sorrow.  That particularly annoys me because she was adopted at the age 2 ½ without any background of serious neglect or abuse.  And yet she describes her own adoption, as do others in the search and open sealed records movement, as a Holocaust.  I find that an exaggeration and the use of an historic and tragic event as an inappropriate metaphor.  She was not, as my two-year-old younger sister Janey, an abused or seriously neglected child.  She did not, as Janey did, spend 26 months in an impoverished and understaffed county orphanage that could barely provide for the children’s physical needs and had no time to address their emotional needs.  What would she call Janey’s history?  An Armageddon? 

On another topic, Betty Jean Lifton asks her husband,

“Why do some adoptees have to search for their natural (her own special word for biological) parents while others do not?” 

Robert J. Lifton answers that some of an adoptee’s need to search has to do with relationships with the adoptee’s parents.  I am sure that is true.  I think my recovery from a background of abuse and abandonment is largely due to my intelligent, sensitive and loving adoptive mother.  It’s hardly a secret that Betty Jean did not enjoy a good relationship with her adoptive mother nor was her relationship with her biological mother, once she managed to find her, any better. In her own words, “I had two mothers instead of one, but since both had disappointed me, I had none.”

But she does not simply ask her husband about those who have little or no interest in connecting to their biological origins.  She slurs them, describing them as “eternal children,” “artificial,” even “Uncle Toms.”  She brands them with such psychobabble terms as “self-denigrating” and sees them as full of “internalized guilt.”  

On yet another subject her husband, Robert Jay Lifton, says:

 “I would say that if one is twice born (adopted), one has to carve out a new self distinct from the one society has assigned you.”  

Carving out a new self is precisely what I did.  Sooner or later in life we learn that we all create our own identities, an insight that comes from Erik Erikson, the “father” of American identity studies.  I do not believe knowledge of our biological origins is necessary to that process.   In fact, it can be harmful.  In my case, while my adoptive parents were influential in my creation of my own identity, I see myself as something other than they were and certainly very different from my biological family.   Betty Jean Lifton finally comes to the same conclusion when she tells her husband,

“It (adoption) allowed me to create myself.”   

A DIALOGUE WITH BETTY JEAN LIFTON

I had lunch with a local social worker last week.  A month ago I talked with an outstanding young woman who directs the CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) program in our county that does so much to protect children in foster care.  While we covered many subjects, I asked both of them; do you recognize the name Betty Jean Lifton?  They did not.   Betty Jean died last November and I suppose those whose books were written a generation ago cannot be expected to be remembered forever.  But I can’t think of anyone more responsible for the creation of what we are now calling open adoption. 

When I retired from my career as an American diplomat over a decade ago, I had for the first time the leisure to explore and reflect on a subject that has long been important to my self-understanding.  My adoption.   I read a small library of books at that time.  I read Brodzinsky and Kirk, Tresiolitis and Sorosky, Kemertz and Toth, and Weger and Verrier and others whose names you may or may not recognize.  But above all, I read Betty Jean Lifton.  I found her an intelligent and gifted writer.  She raised many issues in a provocative way in her books ---Twice Born (1975), Lost and Found, the Adoption Experience (1979), and The Journey of the Adopted Self (1994.  Her books challenged me to think deeply about my own experience and to write down my reaction to her theories and conclusions, which were quite different from my own.    

They may have been different because she did not have my history of biological family abuse and neglect.  Nor had she spent two years in a county orphanage as I did.  While my adoption was also “sealed and secret,” I did not have to wonder about what family and culture I had come from.  I had memories and I was glad to be freed of that family and that culture. 

Lifton wrote as if she was speaking for all adoptees, a noun she sometimes capitalized.   Her books are sprinkled with such inclusive phrases as “As adoptees,” “Nearly all adoptees,” “We adoptees.”   She seemed to think the adoption experience extended only as far as her own experience and that of other adoptees she interviewed or counseled.  But she did not speak for me and I can suspect she did not speak for the majority of adoptees.       

I don’t think anyone can speak for all adoptees. I think each one of us experience the wonderful institution of adoption differently.  The three siblings with whom I was adopted (four of us into one family on the same day) had a different experience from mine.  I was five years old when we were abandoned to a county orphanage and eight years old when we were adopted.  I had many memories and attachments to two members of my biological family.  My younger siblings were two and three years old when we were placed in the orphanage and had no memories of that family at all.   In sum, I think Betty Jean Lifton did not pay enough attention to the diversity of what it means to be adopted.    

I also think Betty Jean Lifton was too hard on adoptive parents, romanticized biological relationships and blamed most of the psychological problems of adoptees on “the closed and secret system” of sealed records while paying little or no attention to other causes such as the stigma once attached to adoption, which though weaker  today continues to exist.  The other and most important source of problems for adoptees is a poor adoptive experience.  I think unhappiness in her own adoption led her at times to be critical of adoption altogether.  I find in her writing little of the positive, of the joy, of the fulfillment that most adopters and adoptees (85% to 90% in most studies) take from the experience.  Too often she writes as if adoption was only a sorrowful business full of perils that creates mostly unhappy human beings.   She did not believe that adoptive families can be “as strong and as enduring” as biological families.  I think they can.   In future blogs I will present another, more positive view of the amazing institution of adoption.  

But before I begin to disagree with her on some fundamental issues, I want to honor Betty Jean Lifton.  She had great influence on the practice of adoption today, especially open adoption.   She probed the depths of her own experience honestly and was right sometimes as well as wrong sometimes.  In her books she included the voices of those such as psychoanalyst Erik Erikson who disagreed with her.  Please keep that in mind in the blogs that follow when I disagree with her in this new series I will call, “A Dialogue with Betty Jean Lifton.”       

HOW HENRY MORGAN STANLEY FOUND HIS FAMILY

Of all the basic human drives surely one of the most fundamental is our need to belong to a family.  I described in an earlier blog how that drive was so strong in Stanley that after being rejected repeatedly and then totally abandoned by his biological family, he created a “false family” that included his legal adoption by Henry Love Stanley, a wealthy cotton broker in New Orleans.   Stanley had never even met Henry Love Stanley!  It was a fiction he managed to conceal from prying journalists and the world’s public for thirty years.   

 I also described how Stanley came to believe he had found in Livingstone the father figure he had been seeking all his life.   Biographer Tim Jeal confirms that “The father and son aspect of their relationship did not exist solely in Stanley’s imaginings.  Livingstone came to think of Stanley in precisely that role.  ‘That good brave fellow has acted as a son to me,’ he would write to his daughter, Agnes.”  And when Livingstone asked Stanley to find the grave of his son, Robert, who had died fighting with Union forces in the battle of Gettysburg, and to erect a memorial stone over his body, Livingstone was entrusting to Stanley a filial task.  One reason for Stanley’s highly positive description of Livingstone in his book, How I found Livingstone, was his desire to tell his friends he had been cherished, as a son, by a truly good man.  But Livingstone died a few years later and in any case, could not fulfill Stanley’s undying quest for his own family.   

Stanley’s hunger to belong to a family never seemed to end and nothing else seemed to satisfy him.  A major reason Stanley had become an explorer in Africa was to become rich and famous. But when fame arrived he found it “was useless to him.”  The relatives who had rejected him as a child and young man were now after his sudden wealth and became ever more grasping.  More generally, Stanley came to see himself as surrounded by the envious. “I can count my friends on my fingers but my enemies are a host” he wrote.  He received threatening letters.  He hated being stared at in the streets and had to take expensive hackney cabs everywhere to avoid that.  He loved dogs and had five of them, three rescued from a pound.  But they could not fulfill his desire for a human family. 

Eventually, in his 50s, Stanley married Dorothy (Dolly) Tennant, an attractive 36- year-old woman twenty years his junior.  After many medical consultations and attempts to produce what she called “my great expectation and deepest desire,” they were faced with the fact they would have no children from their own bodies to love.   

But Henry would not give up.  In l894 he pleaded with Dolly to agree to adopt a child.  She refused.  But by the autumn of 1895 she had at last become aware of how deep was his wish to adopt and gave her permission.  Without the hope of one day raising a child, Stanley believed that the rest of his life would be very bleak.

An opportunity arose when a son of one of his first cousins died, leaving a widow who was too poor to support her six-month-old-son.  At least that’s the story Stanley and Dolly would tell close friends.  However, biographer Tim Jeal writes, it is more likely that the boy was actually the illegitimate grandson of Stanley’s half sister Emma.  Why, once again, did Stanley make up a cover story?  Most likely, writes Tim Jeal, he wanted to spare the boy the stain of illegitimacy which Stanley had suffered through during his own youth. 

When the 13-month-old baby boy was brought to their home, Stanley was ill in bed.  Dolly, who described the boy as “a delicate featured beautiful little boy with a finely shaped head,” carried him upstairs to their bedroom and laid the baby down beside Stanley.  Dolly and Stanley smiled as they looked at each other and Stanley said:

“We will keep him forever.  He is ours.”  

From then on Henry Morton Stanley’s happiness became almost entirely bound up with giving his adopted son the love he himself had never known as a boy.  Stanley finally had his family. 

How an Abused and Abandoned Child Became a Famous Explorer

In the last blog I discussed the incredible life of the famous 19^th century journalist-explorer and naturalized American, Henry Morton Stanley.  We learned from Tim Jeal’s new biography of Stanley that he was an abused child rejected and abandoned by his mother and her family, and that he survived nine years in an English workhouse, essentially an orphanage where adults and children paid for their board and room as laborers.  Despite this difficult and emotionally painful beginning, Stanley eventually became a highly successful journalist, a world renowned explorer, and an author whose books were best sellers and made him a wealthy man.  How did he possibly do it?  Would it surprise you to learn I think his early years were in some ways a good beginning for an explorer of Central Africa in the 19^th century? 

Take isolation and loneliness, for example.  Exploring in Central Africa in the l9th century was an unusually lonely business.  Explorers were far from home in an often hostile environment. They were surrounded by, travelled with, and sometimes were threatened by people of very different cultures and customs who spoke no English.  But Stanley, who eventually learned to speak Swahili, was used to social isolation.  His family had rejected him.  He was an introvert and socially awkward with strangers. He had established a pattern of seeking solitude when he was unhappy.  Moreover, he was used to operating alone.  He learned early in life that he could depend only on himself.  He had developed that self-trust in his own capabilities that those with such backgrounds sometimes do. 

Exploration in Africa in the 19th century was dangerous.  Stanley was aware when he went looking for Livingstone that in four previous English-sponsored explorations of the Niger, Nile, Congo and Zambezi rivers, the mortality among British subjects was over 60 percent!  There was, first, the danger of disease, especially malaria and its complication, black water fever, which killed so many of the Europeans who dared go to Africa at that time.  Stanley, like David Livingstone, had an excellent constitution.  It’s not that he was never ill during his African journeys.  He suffered debilitating fevers and dysentery like everyone else but his bouts with fever and dysentery were less severe and not fatal.  While he probably owed some of this good constitution to his genes, it is also likely that his immune system was frequently challenged and strengthened by germs and contagious diseases in the conditions of poverty in which he lived as a child. 

There were many other dangers.  African wildlife, for example, presented some:    highly poisonous snakes, stalking lions and leopards, frisky hippopotami, and rivers crammed full of crocodiles.  Other dangers came from hostile, slave-seeking tribes.  There was also the danger of being drawn into tribal warfare, of being made to choose which side to join.  On his way to finding Livingstone Stanley had to pass through the territory of one hostile tribe that was known to practice cannibalism. 

Stanley was a high roller.  He took great risks against the odds, partly because of the sense that his deprived childhood had left him with precious little to lose.  He had no family to speak of.  This background helped him endure misfortune, since reversals did not surprise him as they would more fortunate men.  Eventually he came to believe his survival after close calls with death was due to “Lady Luck.”   He was a fatalist.

Tim Jeal’s fine biography of Stanley identifies yet another element of Stanley’s background that contributed to his success as an explorer.  Unless they were ill and had to be carried in a litter, European Africa explorers moved on foot.  And if there is a single characteristic that is indispensible for an explorer in 19^th century Africa, it is his capacity for endurance, his ability to face every challenge and slog on.  The following paragraph in Jeal’s book nicely sums up the answer to the question we began with:  “How did he possibly do it?”  

“For a man like Stanley, who needed to prove himself after his childhood rejection, mastering Africa was a test that could scarcely be bettered.  The task would have an epic dimension, involving power, pride, and above all, endurance as he battled with the African environment and with his own human limitations.  At the heart of the non-conformist Christian education of the workhouse had been the idea of redemption through suffering…becoming a new man.  In the vastness of Africa, as ruler of his small party ---away from the social distinctions of north Wales, from the greed and materialism of the slaving owning Deep South, from the helpless boy he had once been---there might emerge the new, perfected Stanley.”  

CHILD ABUSE VICTIM BECOMES "GREATEST EXPLORER"

I spent some hours during a recent snow vacation in Central Oregon reading a new biography of Henry Morton Stanley who was described by author Tim Jeal as “the greatest explorer of the century.”  David Livingstone, the British missionary-explorer and Stanley, the naturalized American journalist, are no longer the celebrities and best-selling authors they were during the second half of the l9th Century in Britain and in the United States.  Younger Americans may never have heard of them.   But they interest me because I spent five years living and working in Africa as a young diplomat, mostly in East Africa where so many of the 19^th Century European explorations took place and where Stanley and Livingstone were still spoken of as legendary figures. 

I found this new biography by Tim Jeal fascinating for another reason.  Any victim of child neglect and abandonment tempted to feel sorry for himself should consider the case of Henry Morton Stanley, who began life in Wales not as Henry Morton Stanley, but as John Rowlands.  John’s early life was a nightmare.  Born to an unmarried 18 year-old who went on to have four more illegitimate children by at least two more men, John never knew his father.  His mother quickly abandoned him to her father who died when Stanley was five years old.  He eventually was placed in a workhouse, an 19th Century English orphanage, by a prosperous uncle who wouldn’t keep John in his own home because he was shamed by John’s illegitimacy.  An adult Stanley would never forget how his guardian fled and the door of the workhouse was slammed shut and he at age six “experienced for the first time the awful feeling of utter desolateness.” 

After nine years in the workhouse John eventually escaped and accepted an offer to become a cabin boy on a ship bound for New Orleans.  That voyage was the beginning of a new and liberating chapter in an incredible life story that biographer Tim Jeal has told so well.  He documents how Stanley fought with both the Confederate and Union armies during the Civil War, prospected for gold in Colorado, became a journalist and then a war correspondent, and how he persuaded the owner of the New York Herald to finance an expedition to find David Livingstone in the heart of Africa.  That was only the first of Stanley’s African explorations which he described in several best-selling books, beginning with How I Found Livingstone.  The books made him a wealthy man.   

But it is Stanley, the neglected and abandoned child and extraordinary survivor, that most interests me.  After being repeatedly rejected by his mother and biological family, Stanley spent a lifetime trying to find a family to which he could belong.  At age 21 he had still not quite given up on his mother.  He returned to his home town in Wales from the United States ill, penniless, and exhausted after walking the final 21 miles of the journey.  What his mother said to this anything but prodigal son was, “Never come back to me again unless you are in far better circumstances than you seem to be in now.”  To this the mother of five illegitimate children added that John “was a disgrace to them in the eyes of their neighbors” and ought to leave as speedily as possible."  

So eager was young John to belong to a family and to conceal his illegitimacy and impoverished background that he fabricated his adoption by a New Orleans businessman, and took the man’s name as his own.  Over night John Rowlands, the son of a former prostitute who refused to have anything to do with him, became Henry Morton Stanley, in a fictive adoption he managed to hide from most of the world for many years.

Once Stanley located David Livingstone the two men spent four months together looking for the sources of the Nile River, one of the great challenges for l9th century explorers.  During that period the two men formed a bond, the bond of father (Livingstone) and son (Stanley).  Stanley believed he had found in David Livingstone the father figure he had been seeking all his life as Livingstone began to consider Stanley a son.  One result of that relationship is that Stanley the journalist single-handedly restored Livingstone’s badly tarnished reputation after the tragic failure of the 1858 Zambezi Expedition during which his beloved wife, Mary Livingstone, among many others, had died. 

Is there any connection between Stanley’s painful beginnings and his world fame as a journalist and explorer?  What drove him?  What created his incredible self-discipline and will power?  That will be the subject of the next blog. 

THE AFTER SHOCKS OF CHILD ABUSE

When I refer to my physical and emotional healing after suffering a history of child neglect and abuse, I say I am “mostly recovered” and “mostly healed.”  Those who know me casually sometimes tell me: “You don’t act like an adult abused as a child.  You seem perfectly normal to me and you have had a successful career many would envy.”  I usually mutter something about resilience in children and I may well be among the 15% of abused children, some with histories far worse than mine, who seem to recover and live successful lives despite everything.   Even so, one reality of the tragedy of child abuse is that it always leaves after shocks.   

I agree with the Buddhists about causes and inevitable effects.  Every action we take in this life for good or ill leaves a result that cannot just be wiped away.  That is the iron law of cause and effect.   Christians teach much that same thing when they say that while our misdeeds can be forgiven, that does not mean the harm those acts cause can be nullified.

Those who know me well recognize what I call my residue of child abuse.    Here are some of the signs they see.  I have a powerful startle reaction to loud noise, so strong that those who observe it comment on it.  Furthermore, if anyone’s hand or arm comes near my head suddenly, even in acts of affection, I flinch so strongly I am usually asked, “What’s wrong?  Why did you do that?”

There is yet another residue of child abuse.  My wife, who came from a loving family and had an unusually happy childhood, likes to relate her wonderfully delightful dreams.  Almost all of my dreams, on the other hand, are unhappy and filled with anxiety.  Many are full blown nightmares.  Only rarely do I have a happy dream. 

So these are some of the visible and rather obvious signs of child abuse.  There are, of course, other and invisible symptoms among adults abused as children.  But that’s another discussion.  

I am not complaining.  Despite my early history of abuse I have had an exciting and fulfilling life and may well be a more compassionate and sensitive person than if I not been abused.   I write this only to underline the seriousness and tragedy of child abuse.  It can never be entirely undone.    

IT TAKES A SCHOOL TO HELP HEAL A WOUNDED CHILD

One of my chief tasks when working with children as a volunteer CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) was to prepare a comprehensive report about the children to whom I was assigned for court hearings. The report was addressed to the judge who would make critical and often difficult decisions about the children’s futures.   A CASA report is not meant to replace the reports of social workers, therapists, and others who worked with or represented the child but to give the judge an additional and independent source of information.

Preparing this report involved getting to know the children through regular visits to their homes.  It also required interviewing social workers, therapists, the children’s teachers, and anyone else who saw the children in question on some regular basis.

In my experience the most productive interviews were with teachers.  They were the best source of objective and accurate information about the children whose cases I was assigned.  That’s hardly surprising.  Apart from parents and foster parents, no one spends more time with children than their teachers.  They were keen observers.  They knew the children through the children’s behavior in their classrooms and when that was a problem, were usually aware that the child in question had a difficult home environment. 

In Children of the Manse I describe the contribution our school, a university teacher training school, made to our recovery from abuse, neglect, and two years in a county orphanage. Next to our home, Rufus Putnam School was the most important arena of our activity and our mother, herself a teacher, knew she had strong allies there in her campaign to restore our physical and emotional health.

Putnam teachers were observant witnesses of our behavior and development, a second opinion to our mother’s own of how we were doing. In the monthly written reports our teachers prepared, (Putnam did not give letter grades to elementary students) the four of us were often described as “easily over-stimulated,” even after we had made the initial adjustment to life in our new home.  At one time or another that first year, the reports described all of us as “tense.” “Mark is unable to lie still during midday rest periods. He plays with his hands and feet.” And of Janey, “She is gradually overcoming the tenseness she shows in all her work.”

Our teachers note that we were all abnormally self-critical and that I especially found failure difficult to accept. “He is likely to be discouraged when things do not work out the first time.  He needs to learn patience,” one teacher wrote of me. Mark’s teacher wrote of him, “Billy needs to develop more patience. He is so anxious in beginning  anything  that is new to him that he does not think as well as he can.” High levels of anxiety (clear evidence of a lack of confidence) as we undertook new tasks or projects were common to the four of us. We had other traits in common that were documented during our first years at Rufus Putnam.  Janey was the most difficult to understand but we all had speech problems. I wrote in the student’s section of a Putnam report, “I am trying to talk so people can understand me better.” Also, our ball handling skills were mediocre or worse because of the lack of any sports equipment at the orphanage. (That’s hard to believe, but true.) One playground supervisor at Putnam wrote of Mark, “He needs training in catching and pitching, and lacks coordination.”

But it was not just in observation that the teachers at Rufus Putnam contributed to our recovery.  We immediately responded to the emphasis at Rufus Putnam on the creative arts, none of which were given any attention at our former school near the orphanage.  We all responded to music in Ms. Morley’s twice weekly music classes after no music classes in our former school or at the orphanage.  “Janey is very musical,” Ms. Morley wrote. “Her dance interpretations are beautiful, graceful.” “Lewis is a good singer. He is much interested in all music activities.” “Mark works so hard in music and he is very musical.”

Of our fine Putnam teachers, my personal favorite was the art teacher, Mary Leonard, and her class my greatest delight. At that time I seemed to have more talent for art than anything else. Mary believed all children are natural creators, which is true, and that all children have artistic talent, which may be true.

Leonard exemplified a major John Dewey principle, building educational programs on the interests of the student.  Because she believed artistic creativity in the young was innate, it followed that the role of a good teacher, like that of a good coach, was to be an encourager and to create the conditions in which the student’s inherent talents could emerge. I believe Mary Leonard was one of the truly great elementary teachers of America.  She and all our Putnam teachers were talented educators and contributed much to building our confidence and restoring our mental health.