Are Theories Dehumanizing?
Attachment theorist John Bowlby says, “in living creatures variation of response is the rule and its explanation is often hard to fathom.”[5] There are always a complex of factors contributing to any human circumstance, and to reduce any human experience to a single explanation inevitably falsifies and dehumanizes that experience. Borrowing from Betty Jean Lifton’s theory of “cumulative adoption trauma,”[6] rather than descriptive of a single event or circumstance, I tend to consider the primal wound as referring to cumulative experience, encompassing the heavily ambivalent, anti-connection, prenatal mother/fetus relationship; the subsequent separation of the child from its biological mother; and adoptive parenting styles and subsequent experiences which may compound the earlier trauma. What is equally false and dehumanizing as oversimplification of the causes of an individual’s make-up, is the act of “protecting” that individual by shielding them from their truth through lies of omiss
