Adoption Healing: A Path to Recovery for Mothers Who Lost Children to Adoption

Adoption Healing... a path to recovery for mothers who lost children to adoption is a unique book. The reader is provided with a description of the immaculate deception imposed on pregnant women and the ensuing tragedy of the loss of their babies to adoption and the profound effects on their lives. This is followed by different methods of healing the mother’s wounds, including inner child work, visualizations, healing affirmations, and anger management. Every chapter includes a Myths and Realities of adoption section, a summary of the chapter and exercises to do on one’s own.

Joe Soll, the author of the original "Adoption Healing... A Path to Recovery" for adoptees, and co-author of Evil Exchange, is a diplomate psychotherapist and lecturer internationally recognized as an expert in adoption related issues and a former adjunct professor of social work at Fordham University Graduate School. He is director and co-founder of Adoption Crossroads in New York City, a non-profit organization that helps reunite and gives support to adoptees, original parents and those who have adopted. Adoption Crossroads is affiliated with more than 450 mental health institutions and adoption search and support groups in eight countries, representing more than 500,000 individuals whose lives have been affected by adoption. Adoption Crossroads is also dedicated to educating the public about adoption issues, preserving families and reforming current adoption practices.

The director and founder of the Adoption Counseling Center in New York City, Mr. Soll is also co-organizer and co-chair of the New York State Adoption Agency Task Force; a member of Matilda Cuomo's 1993 Advisory Council on the "Adoption Option"; conference chair and board member of the American Adoption Congress and, a trustee of the International Soundex Reunion Registry. He's a fellow of the American Orthopsychiatric Association, the American Association of Grief Counselors, and a member of the Council on Social Work Education, the National Association of Social Workers and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Mr. Soll has appeared on radio and television more than 300 times, given more than 130 lectures on adoption related issues and has been featured or quoted in more than three dozen newspapers, books and magazines. In 1994 he was portrayed as a therapist in the NBC made-for-TV movie about adoption, The Other Mother. He recently played himself in the HBO original movie Reno Finds Her Mom. He was featured in the 2001 Telly Award winning Global Japan documentary, "Adoption Therapist: Joe Soll"

His own story as an adoptee has been presented more than thirty times on Unsolved Mysteries. He has walked the 250 miles from New York City to Washington, D.C. six times to create public awareness of the need for adoption reform. He resides in Congers, NY and maintains an office in New York City.

-- Karen Wilson Buterbaugh is one of seven exiled mothers whose personal experience of surrender during the "baby scoop era" of the 1960s was audio taped for Everlasting," a multimedia sound and video installation by artist Ann Fessler. The stories collected for this exhibition, which showcased the voices of mothers of loss from the1950s and 1960's, will become part of the women's oral history collection at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library.

In 1966, Karen was first interred in two "wage homes" with strangers, ironically without wages, before being deposited as an "inmate" at the Florence Crittenton maternity facility in Washington D.C. She completed her senior year at the facility before giving birth to her daughter, Michelle Renee, at George Washington Hospital, Washington, D.C., in July 1966. Both were returned to the maternity facility and then separated on August 1, 1966, after she and her baby had spent ten days together in the facility’s post-partum wing.

Thirty years later, she hired an investigative agency to locate her daughter, now named Maria. Their in person reunion took place in February 1998.

Karen has been writing about adoption since 1997 and is the author of two articles, "Setting the Record Straight," published by Moxie Magazine (April 2001), and "Not By Choice," published by Eclectica Magazine (January 2002).*

Karen is married and lives in Virginia. She has three grown daughters. Her oldest, Michelle Renee, was the baby she lost to adoption.