I contacted experts on adoption and attachment issues. Several of them agreed to talk to me about the disorder and what was being done to help the children and their parents. Nearly all of the experts were either adoptive parents who struck out on their own as I did, or were adoptees trying to understand themselves. I learned that attachment begins with the trusting bond formed between a child and mother or other primary caregiver during infancy. This bond becomes the blueprint for all future relationships. The British psychiatrist John Bowlby, widely considered to be the founding father of attachment theory, says that at birth a baby cannot automatically self-regulate. Her emotional state is as simple as stressed or not stressed. When she is stressed—from hunger, a wet diaper, insufficient sleep, or fear—she cries. She is brought back into balance when the caregiver responds with soothing sounds, gentle touch, and loving looks. Nancy Newton Verrier, an adoption specialist in Lafayette, California, provided me with her own analogy of mother-child separation.
