Adoption Healing ...a path to recovery

by Joe Soll

In this unique book, the reader is provided with a description of the unfolding of the adoptee's personality from birth, detailing each developmental milestone along the way, followed by different methods of healing the adoptee's wounds, including inner child work, visualizations, healing affirmations, and anger management. Every chapter includes a Myths and Realities of adoption section, a summary of the chapter and exercises to do on one's own.

Genres: Adoption

215 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2000

Reviews

[LuAnn · Rating 4 out of 5]

While addressing adoptees and birth mothers, this book would be helpful to adoptive parents or those who work in adoption or who counsel adoptees because it addresses the trauma caused by adoption. The author provides practical advise and practices for acknowledging the losses and finding healing, mostly through an inner child approach. However, the author takes the view that all adoptees and birth mothers are traumatized and need healing which may not be the case: each person needs to be seen as an individual and not have their experiences and emotions generalized and almost dictated. He also seems to speak against adoption which in this imperfect world is a sometimes a better option. He does not address international adoption where the circumstances and opportunities to reunite with birth parents are very different, though this book would still be helpful for those who need healing.

[Diane Dressler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't read it cover to cover--it's that kind of book for me, that I won't be done with it for a while. I learned a lot about myself that had been a mystery to me.

[Patti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first became acquainted with Joe Soll when he occasionally posted to the adoption newsgroup I was in in the late 1990s. My adoption journey and discovering who I am has been a long road. I remember reading this book once before, along with a number of other adoption books. For some reason, though, when I reread this recently, it hit me a lot differently.

Soll is a social worker, as well as an adoptee himself. He has been through what I’ve been through. The “baby scoop” era of post-World War II through the 1970s was a time when women who found themselves pregnant didn’t have much of a choice except to give away the child for adoption. If they said they wanted to keep the baby and raise it themselves, they were threatened with incarceration in a mental hospital, because no sane woman would want to do that. Abortion was available, although illegal, and many women died this way as well.

The children of the Baby Scoop era are the main subject of Adoption Healing. Soll details the messages that have been present throughout our lives, both from society and often from those much closer to us, that have often conflicted with how we felt inside. Our ideas around adoption are often shaped by those encounters, and sooner or later, no matter how many times you tell an adoptee that he or she is “special,” they come to realize the mechanics of just how they came to be in life.

To read my full review, please go to: https://thoughtsfromthemountaintop.co...

[Lisa Laba]

an interesting book

[Sarabeara]

If your an adoptee or are close to an adoptee this book is very beneficial in understanding and detailing the feelings an adoptee feels and the thought patterns they go through. Well worth the read!