Dear Jo,
Thank you for your letter which resonates with the experience of so many adult replacement children. Your letter is very important: to claim your truth and to speak your truth is essential towards reclaiming your life. Making sense of what happened and finding meaning in your life is the process towards healing. Your letter is also an important contribution to the community coming together in the replacementchildforum.com and it is heartening to know that our initiative reaches you and others in need.
Our objective is to help replacement children as well as counsellors and therapists to understand the many facets of this condition whose effects are still felt in adult life. The different aspects of the specific suffering of the adult replacement child are often overlooked even in the consulting room, just as the child was once overlooked as a person in her own right. To make yourself seen and heard is the first task ahead. Give yourself and your process of healing value, with other words: value the process of self-discovery! Some adult replacement children even give themselves a new first name when their given name resonates with the disappeared sibling’s first name. And grieving for the little girl you were and the losses that occurred is also a very central phase in the process towards healing. Tears are a solution, they solve whatever hardened grief you may carry.
May I ask you, Jo, is there something, some insight, some thought, some depth of feeling or existential pondering that came to you because of the condition? In my experience, light and shadow go together, and since there is so much shadow in the replacement child condition, I wonder where, for you, there may be some of the light to be detected?
And last not least, how did you find us and the information on the replacement child condition?
With warm wishes,
Kristina Schellinski