As part of our image of the month series, we are continuing to feature artist and adoptee Paul Brian Tovey’s deeply moving drawings.
Paul is an adult adoptee who was abused by his adoptive parents as a child, and now campaigns for adoptees to have the legal right to revert back to their birth identities.
Paul uses his art to channel and process his pain, and in doing so creates emotionally powerful canvases.
The featured image on Researching Reform’s banner is called Going Home: The Istol Fire Lion Talk.
Thank you to Paul for allowing Researching Reform to showcase his art.
Researching Reform 
I love this drawing, especially the mane and the body markings. I was having a look at it last night. I’d like to know the message behind it.
It would be lovely to see all the artwork Brian has created, go into a book with a brief message underneath each one.
Well done Brian, great artwork, which many will appreciate 😘🕊️🦋 Xxxx
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I am primarily a seriously traumatised Adoptee (abandoned several times) that was child abused but also my senses were fragmented and shaken to bits that went around my head looking for sense ….I still have some sensory states where I am jiggering and shivering around in broken senses ..I do not care what other think anymore who told me to forget the past when in fact it was only a mountain of pain to climb made for me and my life to resolve .. I have no fear of it anymore..
Complex post trauma comes from adults being nightmares to children (child abuses) and that’s part of my subject matter … The re-creation of “narrrative senses” of ones inner life , feelings, memory, and griefs really matters in CPTSD … If one does it in Arts such as drawing and poetry one can negotiate awful states and grieve through them better resolving them gradually ..It’s what I did to survive it all ..You have to bear in mind I closed right down in trauma for nearly 30 years and stored all feelings … I mean oceanically heaving ones ..One’s that would kill you ..
“ISTOL” is the broken sense of my birth place in Bristol and the Bucket is always handy for tears or sands of Time in sense-plays and feelings .. In fact it’s serious therapy work and I have remained in life only because of 30+ years of private therapy and a damn good therapist named Hansjorg Messner in London ..
When birth mom died suddenly in 1986, Hansjorg and my partner saved my life … I was without proper sense of my early life then and it kept reaching up for me to wrap words around it all …Overpowering really .. A deep need for integration and integrity of feelings … Mom died though and I had never grown up with her .. I had only one kiss from her 4 days before she died .. The next time I saw her was in the Coroner’s Offices on a slab frozen .. She’d switched off … They could not find an exact cause but she had epilepsy and looked as though she died as a fit came on ..
I’ve always known I took back the “bullet” of what she and other’s did to me and received it tragically and her system died … I felt it, because she’s my mom and first sensory room and I knew the message of my pain was seen by her in 1986 because then I was two years into therapy and even showing her some powerful abandonment pictures .. Poor lady .. Poor us .. There was an inevitability about it all .. I could feel that … We have all suffered and she did too .. x
I had a supremely hard trek then after her death for sense and creating a “lifebook” place so I could hold all my feelings inside it … I did a formal one of history and photos for myself. . However Art was like a wandering child force in me often smiling too and also goading me to find our “other” pictures of soul that no-one had taken ..
So really I am a child in Arts taking Soul Kodak pictures for a soul album that never existed but now does ..With one aim ….. Becoming the resolution of senses and damages … I like that … My child inside does too … And is laughing ..
Why “broken words” and scattered “betics” ? … Because little “alpha-soul” was snapped in half and left to a world without senses (no words) … Being child abused came with all of that and it twisted me into disfigured identity compliant with my abuser-adopters who in the main were sad unconscious creatures ….I make senses… Sense …. I had to …
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Thankyou both … Thankyou Natasha…. Heart matters for sure ..
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Over 10 thousand unmarried mothers had their baby
forcibly taken from them and adopted in 1967.
its always been about the profits from baby removal.
See documentary here.
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The question is now will the “Forced Adoption” enquiry by the Human Rights Committee result in what exactly ? (I have made submissions to it) … Probably an apology for many mothers (1949 – 76 parameters) but little else maybe – but the sticking point is going to be on adoptees affected by the abuses of the State and even inside adoption itself ..
This is why some of us are submitting evidence of abuses to the Human Rights Committee ( deadline is Oct 28th 2021) and have supported mothers of current Forced Adoption too… In fact Parliamentarians have received our proofs of current Forced Adoptions on mothers (a survey) and also child abuses INSIDE adoptions (July survey) … So far all’s quiet on the State front on Adoptee abuses .. It usually is when child abuses are involved ..
Adoption itself is dubious for many who are now speaking out more, and falsifies identity forever .. Some of us want “Revocation” for adult adoptees to be eased so we can walk away from the paperwork appointed identity – legally ending “adopted”..
In all the Forced Adoption story I wonder if adoptees will actually be listened to who want to leave that legal status of altered identity ? That would really be a sharp critique in the over-worshipped institution of Adoptions ome of us have to be inside for a lifetime of altered identity…
I hope there’s more than an apology and some better remedies for those of us child abused inside Adoption . x
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