This essay briefly explains the benefits of combining two different cutting-edge ideas to provide a new tool for working with transracial adoptees and their families. I’m looking forward to sharing this technique with adoptees and their family members at adoption camps and conferences in the coming months.
From Family Focus Adoption Services in New York, I borrow the idea of inducement, which Family Focus practitioners describe as the “language of adoption.” From Augusto Boal, the creator of Theater of the Oppressed, I borrow the idea of Image Theater as a set of techniques for actors and non-actors (or “spect-actors”) that can be used to generate empowering responses to oppressive relationships and conditions.
Inducement: the non-verbal ‘language of adoption’
According to Family Focus, inducement begins once an adopted child finally feels safe enough to express the subjective emotions she carries with her that stem from relinquishment, which is often perceived or experienced as abandonment. As the child comes to accept the adoptive parents as her parents, she tests the strength of the parent-child connection by inducing in her parents the previously unexpressed negative feelings she has carried for years. By acting out her intense emotions through challenging behaviors, the child sets up situations in which she can observe how her current parents deal with negative emotions such as rage, hopelessness, grief, and powerlessness.
Children are highly attuned to the buttons that trigger parental rage and anxiety. By inducing these emotions in parents, adopted children begin to express their own volatile emotional state. For example, they figure out that stealing, lying, hoarding food, running away, or becoming sexual with a sibling can often set off intense responses in parents.
Naturally, when a child appears to be acting out in extreme ways, parents, teachers, child welfare workers, and other caring adults tend to react in ways that, ironically, may feel rejecting from the child’s perspective. If adults respond as if the child is incorrigible, beyond help, or unadoptable, adopted children’s worst fears are confirmed: “I always knew I was unlovable.” Family Focus believes that if adoptive parents can learn to understand inducement as the language of adoption, then acting out behaviors can be reinterpreted as signs of attachment and resilience. The trick is to support parents to stay connected to their children as they go through inducement behavior. Parents need and deserve support in order to respond appropriately, and to help their children manage their adoption-related emotions. Unfortunately, adoptive placements are often jeopardized when parents do not receive the support they need, and family ties may become strained, irreparably damaged, if not altogether broken.
I am hopeful that Theater of the Oppressed (often referred to simply as T.O.) techniques can offer adoptive families an opportunity to practice appropriate responses to inducement before it threatens to disrupt family life.
Theater of the Oppressed: giving voice to the voiceless
Theater of the Oppressed is a method that was designed for actors and non-actors to empower the disempowered and to give voice to the voiceless. The main goal of Image Theater, one T.O.technique, is to raise awareness of oppression by engaging with complex ideas at a non-verbal emotional level so that we can begin to take action to improve the conditions of our lives. Taking part in T.O. exercises, then, is a rehearsal for social change. Since the language of adoption often remains pre-verbal, it makes sense in the adoption community to employ Boal’s non-verbal Image Theater games and exercises to practice appropriate responses to intense adoption- and race-related issues. Under skilled facilitation, T.O. draws out the inner expertise that each of us possesses, individually and collectively, with the long-range goal of transforming oppressive conditions.
It goes without saying that not every adoptee will present extreme inducing behaviors. Nevertheless, I have seen enough evidence to convince me that plenty of transracial adoptees and their families struggle to address complex race- and adoption-related issues. This is why I believe T.O. can be useful in discussions of transracial adoption, precisely because we get very little opportunity to practice talking about race and adoption or in responding to inducement behaviors. Since such heavy topics are often hard to talk about, and therefore avoided altogether, and since it behooves us to prepare ourselves to respond effectively to inducement, it makes sense to use T.O. methods to give families practice in responding to predictable—but ultimately addressable—topics and issues.
To request more information on training sessions offered by John Raible, send an email to: john.raible@gmail.com
