Counseling about Adoption Tracing

We have been doing adoption tracing since the year 2002, with more than 100 cases to date, so we have quite a lot of experience with adoptees, adoptive families, and biological mothers and their families.

It is often recommended, especially by formal government processes, that some counseling be offered before stepping onto the road of adoption tracing. Governments typically take extra conservative positions, but these are of course nonbinding. Basically, it's best that people take some time to prepare themselves and read up on the topic before setting out, rather than just rushing out looking for their birth parents. It is my opinion that most people don't need to visit a counselor if they just have an internet connection and educate themselves about what they might find. This is something we try to address in our process. However, if an individual feels that they have psychological issues which need to be better understood or dealt with and need more preparation, then they should seek a local professional psychologist or counselor.

I, Mark Prado, the Director and only expat in our adoption tracing team, normally handle most of the internet communications with adoptees into western civilization and their adoptive parents, and in the process provide explanations, interpretations, and analyses of Thai situations based on my 20+ years living in Thailand and what my staff convey to me. This correspondence often includes counseling, too -- before, during, and after tracing.

As a disclaimer, I should note that I have no formal qualifications for being a "counselor". (Actually, I'm a physicist by degree.) However, my father was a Ph.D. psychologist who had a thriving private practice, taught at a major university and a private college, and also worked for the federal government, whereby he helped me learn about human psychology, the diversity of people out there, and how to best deal with various situations. My sister was so mentored that she also got her degree in psychology, but despite my love of the field as well, I branched out into other frontiers with my formal education, though I did land a summer job counseling troubled kids and am often sought out for advice by my peers... However, I usually do not give much advice unless it is solicited.

If you wish to discuss any adoption tracing issue further, after reading this website, you can contact me.

For example, I had a fairly common kind of discussion with an adoptive parent (for whom I must protect identity, of course) which I will describe below.

In this case, we had found the biological mother (who had been out of contact with her own parents for years at that point, in a distant location as a migrant worker) who was living in rural poverty with some of the adoptee's siblings, whereby the biological father had already passed away at a young age. I had thought that the case result was fairly good, not great but good, in that the biological mother very much wanted to see her child again someday and had placed the child into the care of an orphanage mainly because of extreme poverty and a hopeless family situation at the time.

However, the customer thought that the mother had not adequately explained why she had abandoned their beloved adopted daughter, and was "desperately sad" about this. This articulate customer also made it clear that their daughter had some issues with having being "abandoned" (more accurately, given up for adoption). Kids sometimes want their parents to give them a solution which will tell them what they want to believe and thereby make everything better, and sometimes parents turn to me for the same.

Instead, I give a paradigm shift they hadn't really considered fully.

It is difficult for people from wealthy western countries to relate to extreme poverty because they have never experienced it themselves, and usually have never seen poverty like this. The poverty you see in western civilization does not compare to the poverty found in parts of Thailand. Furthermore, there is no government safety net here nor social security, and social services are minimal. The pressures of poverty include family pressures to support members of the family in old age. (There is no significant pension for the vast majority of Thais, though some can get $15 per month from the government, i.e., half a dollar per day.) It's not like in the west where children normally do not need to support parents in their old age.

This lack of a full understanding applies not just to adoptive parents, but even moreso to young children in western civilization. We can see and understand it in a cursory way, but we can't really understand it much without experiencing it ourselves.

I might add that I had never experienced poverty myself until after the 1997 Asia Economic Crash. I had worked hard only to have multiple employers months behind in paying, and then the crash happened and everybody found out they wouldn't be paid. I went and lived in the province with my wife and baby daughter at her parents home. We went down to less than $5 to our names at one point. I came out working at Thai pay rates in odd jobs, my higher technical skills being largely canceled by my weak Thai language skills at that time. (Incidentally, this is when and why I started the private investigation business.) I lived like a Thai in a small rural village for about a year, something I discuss further on other websites of mine such as my personal website and also the Thailand Guru website.

Ramadan is a good tradition for making people appreciate what they have and better understand the state of existence of the have nots.

Fast forward back to this adoption tracing case, I tried to get the customer to understand an extreme poverty neither he nor his daughter ever experienced.

I had made clear that the situation was further hurt by the biological father's alcoholism. Many people try to escape depression by the bottle. When somebody shakes for need of a drink (as the biological mother described it), that is extremely serious, and there could have been drug addiction. She said that she eventually left him because there was no future with him, only spiraling further down. When you already have children who you already cannot support, plus the burden of supporting the older members of your family, pressures coming from everywhere, and you cannot work yourself due to nursing and raising a baby, then you can understand why a person can make the decision to put a child into the care of an orphanage, which to them looks like relative luxury and care, and then return to work oneself to survive and support the other children. She had planned to come and get the child back if her situation improved (but so many say that at the moment yet never do).

I sensed a little bit of frustration from the customer towards me, kind've like I had not come back to them with a better solution to satisfy their need for their daughter to have a biological mother who had some better explanation, perhaps who had to give up the child for reasons beyond her control.

When frustrated it is easy to displace your feelings to the person you can deal with. It wasn't as bad as coming home and kicking the dog on the front step after a bad day at work, but I sensed there was frustration that I had not come up with a solution and I was being pressured towards doing so.

It is not my responsibility to right a wrong. It is also not right to make up a story that's not accurate just to satisfy the needs of the adopted person or their adoptive parents. I must explain reality as I objectively perceive it. We can't change the past. We can just come to terms with it. This is done as sensitively as we can. However, this is usually done with an emphasis on understanding the biological parent(s), a minimum of judgement, and a maximum of broadening their understanding of the realities of life in Thailand and the Thai experience.

At some point, we need to appreciate the good luck we've had.

For example, an adopted child may envy siblings who were not abandoned and wonder what's wrong with themself that they were abandoned, but you the lucky siblings in Thai poverty usually see it quite the opposite way.

There is so much beauty in life, the world, and the universe. It's great to just be alive and have all these opportunities. Especially when you look at the state of existence in much of the rest of the world. Nobody's perfect, and why obsess?

It is also sometimes difficult for us to characterize the personality of some biological parents and siblings in poverty. They don't have much of a chance to develop any talents. People in poverty are sometimes not particularly engaging and are often very, very simple people, as you often find in the countryside, and they had chores and things to do before her new husband came home from work. Sometimes, you think that extremely poor people don't have the luxury of abstract mental problems, as they are focused on survival and the basics, just don't have time for it, and after years this becomes their habitual modus operandi.

A good way to understand this is by reviewing Maslow's Scale of self realization.

Other times, we find colorful people. We've had biological parents and siblings turn out to be musicians, artists, former university students who started a career (unburdened), and just happy go lucky country folks who were down on their luck at the time of the adoption but are very engaging. We actually have gotten quite a wide range of characters. However, most of them are very poor.

One adopted boy, during their visit to Thailand to meet his Thai father, insisted that he wanted to stay overnight with his Thai father. We simply explained to him that his Thai father lived in a tiny cement room about the size of their storage room, slept on a thin mat, no air conditioning, and no modern conveniences except his one luxury, a small TV, but of course only a few Thai channels. We had photos of that from our previous tracing. Every day, every week, every month, every year. We mentioned a few more things that did not exist in the Thai father's home and the boy was eventually convinced. The fantasy met the reality.

In that case, the boy got to enjoyed watching the Thai father working as a street vendor and saw his pleasant demeanor with everybody and his little Thai social group of street vendors there, poor but happy. However, it was much better times than in the past.

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