Publishing Information
Riley, Debbie and Dr. John Meeks. Beneath the Mask: Understanding Adopted Teens (Silver Springs, MD: C.A.S.E. Publications), 2006.

About the Authors
Debbie Riley has twenty-three years of experience as a marriage and family therapist. She now focuses on adoption issues as Executive Director of the Center for Adoption and Education, Inc. in the Washington D.C. area.

Dr. John Meeks has over forty-five years experience as a child and adolescent psychiatrist. The author of several classic books in his field, Dr. Meeks won the 1998 Schonfield Award for lifelong achievement from the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry.

Beneath the Mask
Debbie Riley, a therapist and mother of adopted children, wondered why so many adopted teens entered therapy. Even though only 2% of American children are adopted, they make up one-third of the teens in therapy.

The author also noticed that her fellow therapists mostly ignored the issue of adoption. Usually the issue never came up. When it did, therapists tended to dismiss it with, "How nice for you and your parents."

Riley believes that this is the wrong approach. Indeed, the thesis of her book is that adopted children endure a special set of unique emotional issues that surface during adolescence. Unless therapists and parents understand and deal with the wounds of adoption, teens cannot heal and become healthy adults. Her book provides a template for understanding these issues and a set of therapeutic tools for dealing with them.

Like all teens, adopted children have to fulfill the tasks of adolescence such as creating values, finding their identities, separating from parents, and dealing with increased sexual and physical aggression. Yet the unique emotional challenges of adoption make these tasks harder.

A child placed for adoption has feelings of inferiority and unworthiness. She cannot help but believe, "My birth parents did not want me; therefore, there is something wrong with me." This in turn creates anxiety that her adopted parents will abandon her someday too. Because she feels gratitude that her parents adopted her and fear that they will abandon her, she is not free to rebel and separate from her parents in a typically teenage way. Riley writes that dealing with "relinquishment issues" is more painful and traumatic than dealing with the death of parents.

Adopted teens typically think about their birth parents often, even if they never discuss the subject with their parents. In their quest to discover who they are and what adults they most resemble, they consider that their attributes came from both sets of parents, not just one. At this point in their lives, they often want to reunite with their birth parents. Without therapeutic intervention, these reunions can be painful: no long-lost parent could live up to the fantasies that an adopted teen may have set up in her mind.

An adopted child may have endured years of ugly questions such as, "If your parents are white, why are you Asian?" or "Where are your real parents?" For years, they have pretended such questions did not hurt or that having a transracial family did not matter. The author writes that issues that have been "percolating" for years now boil over.

Riley writes about six "Stuck Spots" for adopted teens and their parents. These are reasons for adoption, the missing parts of the adoption story, loyalty to adoptive parents, differences between parents and child, abandonment issues, and personal identity. Both parents and teens must deal with each of these in therapy. Usually parents assume one of three stances: blindness - adoption has no issues; blaming - adoption is to blame for all our issues; or balance - open communication about the "stuck spots."

Riley outlines how therapists can help teens grieve over their losses and come to terms with the "stuck spots." She has teens create expressions of their pain such as masks and "loss boxes." The emotive masks the teens create illustrate her book. Some of these children endure years of sexual, physical and verbal abuse and violence in foster care and orphanages. Their "case studies" are truly heart breaking.

Riley says that so many parents stop reading books on adoption once their child is out of babyhood. Her book may be one they want to read when their child enters the teen years. She contributes both wisdom and common sense to a profound problem.

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