As part of our image of the month series, this month’s featured artist is Paul Brian Tovey.
Paul is an adoptee who was abused by his adoptive parents, and now campaigns for adoptees to be able to revert back to their birth identities as a legal right.
Channeling his pain through his art, Paul’s drawings are unique, poignant and very beautiful.
The featured image on Researching Reform’s banner is called Going Home Key, but we are also adding a gallery of several other paintings by Paul, below.
You can follow Paul on Twitter at @PaulWal56321013.
Researching Reform 
Well done Paul. You have suffered I can see and you know what life is and you are finally home with your loved ones. I wish someone with a human heart can help my disabled to come home to his loving family. It’s been almost 9 years that all the professionals forbid my son from having any form of contact with us even though he WANTS to.
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I did find some of my people ..I naturally wish you the best.
By the time some of us Adoptees find our more receiving kin (I did in 2020 in OZ) some of us have become so exotic in mentality..Or quite different by experience. We have to make extra efforts to accommodate to their norms because they cannot always stretch to our senses of isolation and oddity .. That is a weeping cost too because of Adoption and its splitting off from birth family ..Such a shame ..
This can be a hard cross to bear… My birth mom died in the year (1986) I went back to her for examination of all the details of her separating from me .. One kiss I had . One kiss, from her four days before she died..
“I have always loved you” Were her last words… I was aged 32 ..
Then she died … I saw her body at the Coroners next .. Exactly opposite the Family Court where she had me adopted as a little boy of 6 (I was left by her at 3)…
For 2 years after her death I traveled in a darkness inside and my therapist and wife saved me often..I even went to the childhood railway I used to look down for my birth family and put my head on the rails .. Then I hallucinated a laugh of the adopter mother .. I got up before the train came ..Went home .. Wept ..
For some of us Adoption is deadly ..Keep faith with eventually giving Adoptees all the facts and help and family photos and talks .Your journal too of missing them. If you can bear tears too then cry them with each other if it’s appropriate… We Adoptees store oceans of tears up sometimes .. xx
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All adoptions should voluntary and also be” open” so that birth parents know where their child is going and” forced adoption” (adoption ACTIVELY opposed by a parent) should be abolished and made illegal.
I invented the phrase “forced adoption” back in 2002 and named my site accordinglly “forced-adoption.com” .
Of course adoptees should know (if possible) who their parents are or were.
I cannot understand how anyone can be so wicked as to take babies at birth from sane ,law abiding mothers and give them away to strangers who may abuse them or even kill them !
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Ian you are a good man … You are right about so much ..
I would not wish the strange dislocating identity states on anyone that I have re-experienced as organically as others feel physical pain … Adoption can be a deep sensory hell .. I knew who I was, but was forced to prostitute myself to a grooming lady who made me spoon her from the back when I was 3 and 4 ..She interfered with my genitals too ..
Telling me also her husband did not love her enough .. I had no erection or anything like that and was just obedient at those ages because real mommy had already abandoned me several times by then and she kept parting my sister from me too ..
I am very lucky not to have fragmented so badly that I became schizophrenic but I did split into parts all trying to be heard and to come back .. I listened eventually as a more centralizing Self and cried with each in therapy .. Not once but hundreds of times .. There was no other way to unite me to me properly .. Emotional damages need emotional therapy to rest the levels of great grief stored ..
I am glad there’s people like you .. We are the rare integrity-hunters and bearers of painful light for others to hold .. It is a great shame of a world we are in .. xx
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Fantastic work Paul – both the art and the campaigning. I pray many more adoptees will seek out their real parents and find out the truth about why they were taken. Things may well not be as the social workers have reported as it is a profession in which the truth does not seem to matter at all.
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Thankyou …I am touched . We all have to Kilroy about and make sure we make a little mark for our small beings to have been here and I hope with some reforming light …I so hope that insights wake up sometimes in the dark child-care trance policies we often see out there ..
FYI –
I have a 15 page set of “Concerns For Response” to send to the All Parliamentary Group On Adoption APPGAP soon – to show them the defunding of the Early Intervention Funds did not help Birth Parents from 2013 onward and has helped to force adoptions all too clearly .. We have a survey supporting this too ..
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Well fancy that …I am really moved thankyou – I nearly wept then … It’s nice to be seen and heard isn’t it ? Wow .. What a lonely valley though some of us are inside because of social systems that still do not wish to hear enough about the dark sides of Adoption / Child Care…I love making pictures and poetry it’s childlike and gives me a grip backwards on special creativity even inside pain ..
Other people on Facebook told me you’d posted this Natasha . What a mercy you are ..I have suffered from child abuses because of Adoption all my life, because of the depth of them, and the pain will always be there one way or another…I am old now so I have nearly done my time, and I helped others in pain too..Box-time will be a well earned rest ….It’s been a sad life.. Cancer helped me actually to appreciate I must do what I can …It threw me into a sense of accepted vulnerability better too .. Knowing I just had some more time to do some more empathic fighting in ..
I have a 15 page set of “Concerns For Response” to send to the All Parliamentary Group On Adoption APPGAP soon – to show them the defunding of the Early Intervention Funds did not help Birth Parents from 2013 onward and has helped to force adoptions all too clearly .. We have a survey supporting this too ..
There is also that rather wonderful Barrister named Julie Pepper too whose papers I have read on Civitas (2018) which I have quoted.. What a good writer she is too .. You must know her .. You are probably really Natsha Pepper – yes I’ve guessed it – you are sisters 😉 in spirit .. I am glad I uncover things .. (smiles)
You know – I never had children because I recognized I was too damaged and needed care myself and a good partner has saved my life really .. Most of my Art glues me together and balances my sanity since I suffer sensory states of the past and they are really something to feel ..Grim often, and dire.. There’s no cure, only grieving and mourning – living with the facts organically impressed as the “core of me” ….
Hey – I am gonna live under my Flag Of Kid all my life because that’s what I was given and that’s what I will rise too … And as the Lone Ranger might say:
“Natasha ! Hiyoooo Silver Reformmm Awayyyy !!!”
(God I so love champions and sadly championing about – it’s funny too 😉
Thank you – sincerely …. Natasha .
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Thank you for your lovely note, and while I’m sometimes accused of being various people around the net I am really just Natasha Phillips and a drop in the ocean.
In awe of your courage and grace, thank you for allowing me to share your paintings.
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“A drop in the ocean” …. Yes perhaps , as are we all – but you are one that sparkles with the original light of a good star that creates life and truth ..
“Natasha Sparklet Phillips” … Distant relative to Kemo Sabay and Silver ..
Lone too, but strong … Take care of yourself ..
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xxxxxxx
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Natasha, is there some way to contact you privately I have a question to ask??
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Hi, yes – email is Sobk 13 at gmail dot com
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Lovely lovely work. I am adopted too.
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Fantastic artwork Paul. its good to express your feeling through the creative arts. ive done the same via Songwriting although none of my songs are in recorded form yet.
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