Those of you who know me will know that a little over a year ago I met my natural mother for the first time. It’s been a huge upheaval in my life and nothing has stayed the same. I’ve had to analyse and reconsider pretty much every aspect of my life, which has been a consuming and exhausting process.

This post is about the trauma healing process, support groups and how dangerous getting triggered can be. (If you’re not aware of the post-trauma issues that adoptees can suffer from then I suggest starting with Nancy Verrier and her excellent book The Primal Wound).

I started joining a few support groups on Facebook a matter of months ago. I wanted to be able to reach out to other adoptees, share my story and compare it to the experiences of others. To not having my suffering acknowledged is, to me at least an almost unbearable form of violence. I needed to be heard, and to feel safe to express myself. I desperately wanted to feel vindicated, and to know that I am not the only one who feels as I do.

And I was vindicated. I met lots of other adoptees who feel the same way, lots of adoptees who were happy to acknowledge the lasting effects of pre-verbal trauma. I learnt a lot about myself from these people and their stories, and about how good it can feel to reach out across the void and connect with someone else’s experience, how positive I feel when I know that I am able to help someone.

I also became exposed to the language of post-trauma communities and how it is used to protect and support vulnerable people. I learnt about triggers, and trigger warnings. I learnt about how dangerous it can be to be triggered after reading peoples suicide attempt stories after they experienced something upsetting. I continued to dissect my identity and it felt empowering to be able to pick apart some of my behaviours and fears and figure out what my triggers are, and what being triggered does to me.

And I get triggered often. It happens at least once a week. Sometimes I get triggered every day, or multiple times a day. Most of the time it’s a minor event and I feel a bit sad or a bit peeved and move on with my life. Most of the time getting triggered isn’t that big a deal.

But sometimes it is. Sometimes getting triggered is a very big deal indeed. Getting triggered can make me feel like I am the shittiest person in the world and that I have no value as a human, it can make me so sad that I can’t think about the positive things in my life at all, all I can see is the negative things, it can make me so sad that I want to die. It can also make me incredibly angry, it can make me so angry that I just want to smash things and burn them, so angry that it makes me want to fight anyone I set my eyes on.

One group I follow is called Is Adoption Trauma? It is not a closed group, so it is not a safe space where I feel able to share my experience, but it is an excellent source of news and reading material and it has a large and active community of posters and commenters. There is a lot of value in that group but it can also be very triggering.

Lots of adoptees get triggered by babies. I don’t, but I do get triggered pretty regularly by adoptive parents, especially ones with really shitty attitudes and one evening as I was browsing this group I encountered exactly that.

Someone had shared a screenshot of someone’s status. The status was written by an adoptive parent who had three children, all from the same mother. Her adopted children’s natural mother was pregnant again and was living on the streets, and the news was that CPS had decided that the child would be removed from the mother and would be placed with it’s siblings, potentially adopted. The tone of the status could be described as “gleeful”.

Now I understand that the arrival of a new child in an adoptive family that has waited for a long time is a very joyous moment for those new parents, but it is a moment of joy that should also be a moment of sadness because at that moment the child in question has just had everything taken away from them. They are at their most vulnerable, traumatised and alone at the point at which they arrive with their new family.

And this situation, with the poor, homeless mother soon to have another child taken from her, and the unborn child blissfully unaware that it is soon to lose the only person it knows in the world and it’s only source of warmth, love, food and safety, is a very sad situation indeed. When I read it I felt so bad for that child, and for that mother. It reminded me of how much I lost on the day when I was separated from my mother, how my entire life changed, and how little of what I once had I will ever be able to get back.

And I also felt angry. I felt such a great surge of anger at this stupid woman who was gloating and rubbing her hands together with joy at the prospect of this family being torn apart. It seemed to me that this must be the most selfish person in the world who is willing and eager to profit from such a tragic situation.

And to top all that off the woman whose status it was was there, posting in the thread. She had appeared to defend herself and, when confronted by hundreds of upset and triggered adoptees, had decided to wind us all up instead of backing down. So there she was, posting away. Posting terrible, cruel things. She said that we were all ungrateful people, and that it was no wonder that our natural parents had not loved us enough to keep us. She said that she found it very entertaining to see how upset we were by the things she said. She said that the natural mother of her children was scum who didn’t deserve to be allowed children.

I was triggered. Triggered, triggered, triggered. I think I left the house at that point and didn’t return until there was nowhere open to buy a drink. That night I felt like the worst, most worthless and disgusting piece of scum on the face of the planet. I wanted to die. I felt like I had nothing, and was nothing. It took me days, maybe even weeks, to recover from that experience.

I recently took the decision to stop spending time on Facebook. This isn’t necessarily a permanent thing and I haven’t shut down my page. It was a decision that was influenced by many factors, but one of the main reasons is that I get triggered when I go into those groups and read about things like that. The realisation that every day people still do this shit to babies is an uncomfortable one. On a good day I can handle it, but on a bad day I can’t.