Effects of adoption on the birth mother other important milestone in the child’s life. Reports show that a birth mother feels grief when she has more children because this evokes the memory of the child she gave up. If she is faced with future infertility, she may believe it is a form of “punishment” for relinquishing her parenting rights over a child. Many birth mothers continue to mourn the loss of their child but with varying intensity. It is not until a mother actually places her child for adoption that she experiences what Julie Axelrod believes is similar to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining,
Susan Anderson (psychotherapist) of being spurned in a romantic relationship can create a trauma powerful enough "to implant an emotional drain deep within the self that if left unresolved, leeches self-esteem and creates self sabotage". She refers to this as abandonment trauma. Anderson uses / adapts the five phases of grief in the Kübler-Ross model to abandonment. Her framework describing abandonment recovery breaks it down into five phases: Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage and Lifting (SWIRL). The acronym is designed to depict the cyclonic nature of the grief. While Kübler-Ross, Anderson, and others have attempted to define discrete stages of grief, such as an