Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up

This is a book of great depth and investigation into the experience of being adopted, and is an invaluable tool to understanding and healing for adopted people, their family of origin and adoptive family.

Verrier presents accessible information of the way the brain changes when children are separated from their mothers at birth, and how they build a false self in order to survive, yet how this false self serves them not, as they become adults.

She speaks about adoptees retaining the fight or flight mode because they are unwittingly always affected by their initial separation trauma. How the false self that mantles many adoptees, also prevents them from having authentic relationships and makes intimacy difficult. The adoptee who uses the false self to prevent further pain, building impenetrable walls around their hearts, are also isolated by them.

This book is challenging, as it encourages the adopted person to recognise their choice to remain in victim mode and encourages them to take responsibility for their effect on others. Verrier points out that adoptees are often insensitive with others, yet ultra sensitive to any comments or action that they see might be derogative to themselves ...in fact, sometimes their agenda colors everything anyone says as potentially negative, and they may be always ready to rail against it. Verrier points out that this is because of the initial trauma of separation from the mother, which has kept the adoptee in a traumatised state.

Verrier encourages adoptees to reassess what is really happening in their present situation, in order for them to start healing their relationships and their lives.
This is powerful writing with clear and thoroughly researched insight.

Lina Eve http://home.austarnet.com.au/linaeve/


A Must Read For All Members of the Adoption Triad   September 22, 2004
Cynthia J. Dutton (Lake George, MI)
28 out of 31 found this review helpful

As a birth mother, this book was not only gut wrenching, but so enlighting. Everyone in the Adoption Triad must reconize him or herself at one point in this all too powerful book. For any member of the triad to deny the trauma a baby taken away from it's mother at birth will carry for the rest of his/her life is to live in a cave. Although Birth mothers have always known the pain of adoption, thanks to this book,and Verrier's insight as a adoptive mother herself, hopefully the adoptee will reconize his/her issues in life, such as the anger, guilt, rage, sorrow, and joy. To keep an open mind when picking up this book, is to find healing, compassion, and understanding of all members of the tiad.
Cindy Dutton/Birthmother



A must-read for all adoptee's   January 23, 2006
S. N. Smith (New Zealand)
17 out of 19 found this review helpful

I have found Coming Home to Self to be the perfect follow-up to Primal Wound. Whilst Primal Wound acknowledges and unfolds the affect of adoption on the triad members: Coming Home to Self provides members of the triad with the necessary skills to move forward. It provides extensive and perceptive coverage of the issues surrounding adoption and has become my close companion. It can easily be dipped into according to the need of the moment and provides sound advice to the reader. I find Nancy's voice throughout to be at once professional and warm and often find myself smiling at the encouraging, sometimes challenging comments interspersed which second guess what the reader may be thinking, they so often catch me out! This book is the kind of book which takes brokeness, acknowledges it with great empathy and then goes the next step: it provides the guidelines for putting that brokeness back together.


Should Be Read by Every Mental Health Care Provider   May 1, 2007
Andrew F. OHara
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

"Coming Home to Self" is an excellent follow-up to "Primal Wound" for those who want to know, "Where to from here?" It's heavier reading, to be sure, and should be approached studiously. In doing so, however, one finishes with a wealth of information on what happened to us when we were separated from our mothers, how it has impacted our lives, and how we can stop surviving and start living.

There's so much here that it's impossible to summarize. Suffice to say I was both abandoned as a baby and then adopted children, and certainly wish I had read Verrier's books before doing the latter. It would have made the experience far easier and, hopefully, helped avoid many of the traps she writes about--and that I experienced. This, and "Primal Wound," should be read by every mental health care professional.