I’ve been struggling so much. Deep depression, a grief that I can’t adequately explain. Everything became worse when I discovered how abusive and corrupt my adoptive mother is. I’ve always known I was adopted, my twin brother and I were premature, I have cerebral palsy, and our parents were unfortunately drug addicts and weren’t fit to raise us (doesn’t mean I don’t grieve them). After we were taken by CPS, our biological mother entered a University of Oregon affliated reunification program that offered education and resources to families involved with CPS. My brother and I were entered into the program too.
As it turns out, our future adoptive mother was in charge of the program and it wasn’t just to provide resources to families involved with CPS; we were actually test subjects being researched on. My future adoptive mother’s dissertation was in early intervention with children with disabilities, of which I was one. Within a year of entering the program, my brother, and I started living with this woman and she formally adopted us a few years later when we were 6. She always told me that nobody else wanted to, or could take care of us since we were challenging kids, and she told us she had the tools to help us.
She was pretty abusive…physically and mentally. She started telling everybody when I was four years old that I had reactive attachment disorder, and that I was incapable of understanding love because of early trauma in my life. I didn’t find out until I was 28 that there was never an official diagnosis, she lied to me and everyone else for over 24 years and basically used her PhD to diagnose me herself, although again there was never an official diagnosis. She also enrolled me in experimental surgeries to “correct” my cerebral palsy. She told me she even wrote papers about it. This is getting long and to make it short. I’m going to skip to the end.
I started trying to look into my past. My biological parents died when we were 14. Our adoptive mother let us see them for a bit over the years, but she stopped allowing visits because she said that our behavior would be really bad afterwards. Anyway, I started looking into this program. It no longer exists, but I found all of my adoptive mother’s research, including research of other students who based their work off what my adoptive mother did. I found her PhD dissertation and realized that I clicked all of the boxes for her avenues of research. I was failure to thrive, premature and with cerebral palsy. I know that from the outside people probably think that she did have the tools to help us, but I actually think that she just knew how to work the system to benefit herself in her career. It strikes me as really unethical for someone to adopt their own research subjects. Not only that, but I realized that other children were adopted out of the program too. The University of Oregon literally had a partnership with child protective services, and they were researching on families. There has been a lot of corruption and cover up with this, and I am struggling so much.
I went no contact with my adoptive mother in 2021 because of how abusive she was. I’m talking physical abuse that was borderline torture. I don’t want to get into the details here of the physical abuse but it caused me complex PTSD. I told her through email that I remembered a lot of what she did to me, and she responded through her university of Oregon email that I was missing key information that would give me depth of understanding. I got curious and started looking through my email and realized that I had 10 years worth of abusive emails from her, calling me a criminal and a mastermind manipulator, and referencing the fake attachment disorder.
So I have all these emails she sent me, I have all this research she did, and I’m just broken. Why did this happen? Why did the University enable so much against me? I was used for data collection and my humanity was stripped from me, and I was separated from my entire biological family by someone with a PhD who never should have been around children in the first place. She literally made me think that I had reactive attachment disorder for over two decades, the cruelty of that is staggering for me. I don’t know what to do now. There’s not a lot of mental health available for adult adoptees, and I have so much abuse to heal from.