122 Dr. Tracy Carlis
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/122
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You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 122: Dr. Tracy Carlis. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Dr. Carlis is a clinical psychologist who I've had the absolute honor of learning from in person, two times, and today I'm thrilled to introduce you to her.
She shares her personal story of search and reunion with some DNA search updates that have just happened this year. Then, we are really going to take a turn in the conversation and focus in on her work in forensic psychology in the area of adoptee parricide. Yeah, that means we are talking about adoptees who have killed their adoptive parents.
We are gonna discuss violence graphically. At some points during this episode, there's also a mention of sexual violence, so please make sure you're listening without little ears around, and that you're in a safe headspace if that topic is difficult for you. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be mentioning today are on the website, adopteeson.com.
Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Dr. Tracy Carlis. Welcome, Tracy.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Haley.
Haley Radke: I was just saying to you that I have waited two years for this interview, and it's not because I asked you and you made me wait two years. It's because I saw you speak two years ago.
And I just thought, "Oh my goodness, you're so thoughtful and insightful and have such fascinating work (which we're gonna get into).” I’m like, “I have to talk to you." So it’s happened! I'm so excited. Can I ask you to start out the way we always do, and would you share your story with us?
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Sure, I'd love to.
So, I was adopted back in the dark ages–when social workers were telling adopted parents that you ought to tell your child they were adopted early on, and then once you tell them, you don't have to talk about it anymore.
And the reason that social workers at that time were telling parents that was because the decade before I was born, social workers were saying, "You don't have to tell your child. They're not gonna remember the event, so why tell them?" So, of course we have learned that especially through our dear adoptive parent, Nancy Verrier, that the child was there and they had the experience of being handed over to strangers and that they suffer a profound loss.
And that it's not in the telling your child they're adopted, but more that they had that experience. So, social workers began to get that. And I remember–I do not remember my parents telling me that I was adopted. I do remember that they told me something that was very big and that impacted me and stayed with me always.
I think they probably told me when I was about three or four years old. I was adopted into a Jewish family; I was also adopted… I had a younger brother who was adopted after me. He was two-and-a-half years younger. I like to say that my therapy career started when I was about two-and-a-half or three, where I had a lot of people in my family who needed a lot of help.
The story that my adoptive parents told me about my birth mother was that she was 15 years old at the time, and that she loved me very much, but she was too young and didn't have enough money to keep me. And that didn't make any sense to me cuz I thought, even as a child, "Well, I would help her. Why couldn't I just, you know…? I would've been able to earn money and I could have just helped her.”
So it didn't make a lot of sense to me. And also the fact that she loved me made me feel really frightened about their love. Because if my first mother relinquished me, then perhaps they would, too. So I did a lot of hiding. I had a profound kind of sadness about being adopted that really wasn't acceptable in my family.
It was not okay to miss my birth mother. It was certainly not okay to talk about her. And so all that had to be very hidden and repressed. The only time I would be able to let out those emotions was maybe when I was in the shower. I could cry so no one could hear me, or if I was laying in bed with my dog at night and I would cry into him.
So that really affected everything I felt about myself. My birth mother didn't want me. I thought, “She probably forgot about me. What was wrong with me? Was I not lovable? Was I just born to someone who abandoned me and never thought about me?” That really plagued me.
When I was about 16 years old, I got the nerve up to ask my adoptive mom if there's a possibility I could find my birth mother. And that created a very big scene in my home where my adoptive mother was quite upset and crying, and my adoptive father didn't like that when she was upset. And that question was met with some violence in my home towards me, and I moved out the following year.
When I was 17 years old, I left home. And while I had nothing and no money; however, I had been working since I was about 13 years old, saving up money. Cause I knew that one day I'd probably have to leave. I had a peaceful place. I had a place where I could just be myself where I could cry and be who I was.
When I was 18 years old, I sent for my background information from Sacramento, which gives you all of your non-identifying information. So they–on one side they told me that my birth mother was 15 and her family constellation. It said also on there, the circumstances for my placement, for my relinquishment. And what it said was that my birth mother had been walking in the park and that she was raped by a series of boys in the park.
And that was quite difficult to read. However deep within me, I had this feeling that that story was not true, even though it was really devastating to look at. On the side of the paper that talked about my birth father, that was empty because she didn't know which of these boys had been the father.
That piece of paper, I put away for another decade. I locked it up in a cabinet, never looked at it for another whole decade. Then I had a big crisis in my life. Actually, it was with my brother, who turned out to have schizophrenia. And I had always taken care of my brother and I, in fact, I was his conservator for all my adult life, but he also became quite violent with me and it was a pretty big deal and sent me into therapy.
And that therapist happened to be an adoptive parent, and she told me that I could search for my birth mother. Back in those days, there was no Internet. There was, you know, no DNA. It was sort of the old school way of getting records. And I belonged to an organization called ALMA (the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association), who helped you, like, if you got your petition for adoption, where your name was listed on it or the birth mother's name was listed, which was whited out and blacked out. It was–you couldn't really see through it, but they had the special formula that kind of picked up some of the letters and you could count the letters.
And so it was really old school kind of sleuthing.
Haley Radke: I love that detective work.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: It was real detective work and even though it was so difficult, I found her within about a four month period and I made that first call to her with a lot of trepidation. I didn't know how it was gonna be received, but when I got to the, the date of my birth– "Does the date May 13th mean anything to you?"
She started to cry and said, "Yes. That was the day my daughter was born." And we both cried for a long time on the phone together. And then we met a week later, and that meeting was amazing. First of all, again, it was before a lot of the technology we have today. So I didn't know who was gonna be sitting there, just that we were gonna meet at a hotel lobby and I walked in the hotel lobby and I sort of scanned real quickly and I saw one little woman sitting kind of in the back, all perched on her chair.
And when she saw me, she didn't know me, but she must have thought, "Okay, that looks like her." She got up and started walking towards me, and I started reluctantly walking that way too. And she gave me a hug that–I had never really felt a hug like that before in my life. You know, somebody who felt like me, who… It was just so embracing and big, I don't even know how to really say what a big feeling it was for me.
And then we sat for about four hours together, talking. And she told me that when she got pregnant, she ran away from home. One of her neighborhood girlfriends, she [my birth mother] asked her, "You wanna run away?" And the girl said, "Okay." So they....
Haley Radke: “Sure! Sure, we’ll run away.”
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Yeah. And actually I found that woman, too.
She lives not far from me, and I found her after I found my birth mother. But they went down–They, first of all, they dyed their hair black in the gas station parking lot and went down to the bowling alley and found a couple of guys who were heading up to Washington, D.C. and they hitched a ride.
And I think when the young men tired of the girls, they left them in Washington. And then my birth mother and her friend Tanya asked a man who had an apple orchard if they could pick apples and get a little money. So they did that. They'd go to the local liquor store and buy (what she told me), tuna and beer. That was my diet early on. And they would sleep underneath the apple orchard.
And eventually, they got caught by the authorities and brought back to Los Angeles. And when her parents came to pick them up at juvenile hall, they saw that she was visibly pregnant. And then the remainder of the pregnancy, she was locked up in the house. And she told me that the only time that she was allowed out was at nighttime. She could walk between the sheets that were hanging to dry out in the backyard. She could walk up and down there, and she told me that she would talk to me and she named me, privately, for herself. And then she went into labor. She was taken to the hospital. She delivered me alone, by herself. And during those years, new moms were kept on wards and all the babies came at one time to the moms and then taken back.
And she was not getting her baby, but one nurse befriended her and took me to her one night before I left the hospital. And she told me that she just whispered in my ear that we would be together again. And I feel like that really penetrated and impacted me, because when I did my search, although I was very scared to do it, there was some sense internally deep within that it would be okay. That she would want me.
When she went back home, no one talked about adoption or what had happened to her and she was not able to stay at her home anymore. She kind of went on the streets of Hollywood and from that point, she hooked up with a lot of people who were also down and out and living on the streets, and they told her, "Well, let's help you find your baby."
And when I was about four years old, she had gone back to the doctor that delivered me along with her mom and her grandmother. They all used the same OB-GYN. And her mother went to one exam room, and the grandmother went to another exam room, and the nurse left her station. And my birth mother went behind the desk and opened the file and got her file out and found my adopted parents' names.
And from there, she found me. We– At that time, we lived on a cul-de-sac and all the kids play in the cul-de-sac until you were called in for dinner. And she would watch me on the street that was perpendicular to my street. And interestingly, I had a dream that started when I was four-and-a-half that lasted well into my twenties. And that was that I would be playing outside with my friends and that somebody was coming to try to take me away and I would have to fly up above the houses to be safe and to get away, but I never knew how to get back, get back home. So, that was pretty big. Hearing all that–while it made me sad to hear how my birth mother had suffered, inwardly, it made me so thrilled.
It was transformational, really, to know that she thought about me. She mourned for me, like I mourned for her, and that I was loved and lovable. So it was really a transformational experience. Yeah.
Haley Radke: So did you ask her about your conception, then? Because you had read this terrible thing in your non-identifying information.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: How would you possibly bring something like that up? I did. I just told her that this is what the background information said, and I wanted to know if it was true. And she said, "No, it wasn't true." But she was so afraid to tell the truth that she lied and made up that story to the social worker. Yeah, but that led to asking her just a little bit about my birth father.
I said and I– When I first met her, I didn't think that we looked alike. As I'm getting older, I see myself more in her. But I asked her about my birth father, "Did I look like him?" And she said, "Well, no, actually, you look a lot like my daughter." So she went on after those years that she was in the street at about 20, her mother said, "You know, you've gotta stop all this. Here's this nice guy that wants to marry you. Get married."
So she did, very early on to the relationship. She told her new husband–I guess he woke up one morning, saw her crying, and she said, you know, “I have a baby." And he didn't know what to do with that. So he said, "You know, just forget about it. We'll go on, we'll have more children."
And I think that was very impactful in their relationship, not feeling understood and not having, you know, an advocate there. But he didn't know what to do with that. But she did go on to have three more children. My sister, in particular, was very impacted by my relinquishment because she and I are born in the same month and we look very much alike, and my birth mother had a very hard time. So, when I came into the picture, my sister (for the first time) really began to understand what had happened to her and her relationship with her mom.
Through the years, I searched for my birth father. My birth mom had already said he was in the service. And again, it was sort of this old-fashioned way of searching. I found some ships that were in port during the time that I was conceived and then this friend that ran away thought it was a minesweeper. And then I was looking at muster rolls and it was crazy. I found three men that remembered her.
I paternity tested with one, but he was not my father and my birth mother just wasn't able to tell me or remember who my birth father was. I think there was a lot of shame about that period for her. So it just got really buried. So it wasn't until I met you at that conference that– And I was speaking on, I think, disenfranchised grief at the CUB Conference that I met Richard Weiss, who does a lot of work with Ancestry and said, "Why don't you try DNA testing?"
So I did, and I got back the results that said that I was 54% Ashkenazi Jew, which really thrilled me. Because when I met my birth mother, I got my background information, said that she was Christian and I was raised in this Jewish family and I never really felt Christian. I always felt Jewish.
I thought maybe it's just how I was raised. So I was really quite delighted. I found a couple of second and third cousins, but I couldn't really figure out how to go forward and find my birth father.
Last year again, when we saw each other at the AAC conference in Washington, I was fortunate enough to sit next to Kris Gilbert, who's a genealogist, who said, "I can help you," and she did. And God love her, I'll be grateful forever. And it was a crazy story too, because my birth father had changed his name. There's a lot of anti-Semitism back when he was getting into the workforce, so he changed his name. So that was really crazy. But I ended up finding him and that was an interesting call because how do you say to somebody…? His wife answered the phone.
How do you say, "I think your husband might be my father."? And I knew on that conversation– So I had to go very gingerly, saying, "I found some DNA. I'm not really sure how I'm gonna say this," but I gave her some, "So-and-so is my first cousin once removed, which means that her mom is my first cousin, which means that her dad is my uncle." And there were only two brothers in that family. Which I kept saying, "So that means that… " (kind of leading into it). Finally she was like, "Oh, my, what…!"
Haley Radke: What decade are these people? In their…
Dr. Tracy Carlis: So my birth parents, my birth father and his wife are both 85 years old. And they had been married for 65 years. They were high school sweethearts, but they were disconnected for a very short time. And during that time is when I was conceived. And in fact, later that afternoon, she called me back and she said, like, "Well, exactly how old are you?"
You know, really trying to do the math. But this experience, oh my goodness, it's very new. I just found them; it's been a couple of months. I've only seen them twice–once by myself, and once I brought my whole nuclear family. But it has been absolutely the most transformational point of my life.
When I first found my birth mother, the first night I spoke to her, I went outside and I looked up at the stars in the sky and the moon, and I thought, "Oh my goodness. Somebody who gave birth to me is on the other side–somewhere in this world." And I felt like I grew roots in my feet.
Like I really belonged to the planet. When I first talked to my birth father, I felt– I looked at the same stars and moon that night also, and I thought, "Oh my goodness, I was born. I am like everybody else in the world." It was just wild and they have been so embracing. More than embracing! They love me like their own.
In fact, they— I call her number three, my number three mom. It’s just been like, “I thought my life was complete before, but since you've come along, I really realized how complete it is and how blessed we are.” And they just, in fact, they, they live about an hour from me and they're talking just this morning we're talking about they wanna move closer to me.
They have another daughter, actually, they had two boys, and they adopted a girl. That daughter and I live not too far from each other. So it's just been unbelievably wonderful. I'm just thrilled..
Haley Radke: That's amazing. I'm like a fresh reunion, like all these years later. Wow.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Yeah. It's amazing. But all that pain that I suffered as a kid really is what prompted me to get into private practice. You know, my practice has been…I have a full practice. I see a lot of people, but primarily, my focus is on adoption, my specialty. And I do a lot of work with families, so I work with a kind of a psychoeducational model.
I do a lot of work with the parents, trying to help them understand the special circumstances that adoption brings to their families and the sort of normal developmental crises that all adoptive families go to, which Joyce Pavao, you know, wrote about that. I try to help them understand Nancy Verrier's work about the primal wound and how that is everlasting.
And, you know, no matter how good the adoptive family, nothing will take away that first experience. So I do a lot of that and then I really help kids, and I advocate very much for opening adoptions. So I have to get parents to a place where they feel confident that, you know, they're the parents, they’re always gonna be the parents, but that this will be really important for the child.
And I use a lot of my own story when I talk to parents and I help kids really do the grief work and the reunion work. And so that has really fed me. That's been–I've had a very nice private practice that's brought me a lot of joy and, yeah, I've really enjoyed that piece. Oh, and let me just also say that–cuz I've heard some other people on podcasts that you know, what kind of modalities we use as therapist and you know, I have a lot modalities that I use: EMDR, you know, where we use eye movements, emotionally focused therapy, where we look at more childhood, early childhood stuff, voice dialogue, where we talk to parts of self.
But really what I think is the biggest piece of my practice is being my authentic adopted self. And studies have actually shown us that the major positive outcome in therapy is a good relationship with the therapist. So it's more than using any kind of trick you might have in your bag. It's just really the relationship and I think people come to therapy to be heard and to be understood, you know, to do the reparative work from childhood, where they may not have been heard and understood.
So that, too, brings me a lot of happiness that I can help other families and other children not go so deeply into the kind of grief and wounding that I felt.
Haley Radke: I love what you shared at the very beginning of your story. You know, talking about being a therapist, you know, from age two-and-a-half.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Yeah.
Haley Radke: And, you know, even as you were sharing those things with us about those feelings that you were having and just the fact that you were able to identify them as such a young person and understanding like you had this longing for your roots and it's amazing that you've, you know, brought this all into–it’s not amazing, it’s of course. Of course you would bring all this into your work with clients. Absolutely. Okay, so you have this part to your practice. You also have another specialty. What else do you do?
Dr. Tracy Carlis: So, about 10 years ago, I was contacted by the Los Angeles Public Defender's Office regarding a case of a 19-year-old boy who had murdered his adoptive mother, father, and 16-year-old sister. And they found me and wanted to know if I would meet with him and, let me just say, the forensic work that I do is all death penalty cases. In California, the murder that I just spoke about has special circumstances, and that would mean that this 19-year-old was, would be a death penalty if he was found guilty.
His story…Well, it's the first time that I'd ever been in a jail, or actually…Yeah. First time I'd ever been in a jail. (I was gonna say prison, but it wasn't a prison.) I have been in prison, too. That's really daunting. I've been on death row, which is really, really daunting. So I said yes to the public defender's office and I went down to the jail.
The first time, I went with his attorney. But then I ended up meeting with this young man for weekly visits for quite a long time. He had maintained his innocence all through it, and the evidence was overwhelming that he did it. There was just no question. He came home late at night after being out with friends and his brother (adopted brother) was stewing about something.
The idea is that he came into the house and went upstairs to the parent's bedroom, where the father kept the gun. A wrestle, a struggle, ensued with the father. They were sleeping at the time, but he woke up and they wrestled with the gun. The father sustained one, non-fatal gunshot wound. This young man, I'm gonna call him “Brad,” he ran downstairs to the kitchen and grabbed a 13-and-a-half inch kitchen knife.
Parents came downstairs. Father was stabbed 17 times in the foyer. Mother was stabbed three times. The 16-year-old sister woke up when she heard the gunshot wound. She was found in the backyard with a cordless phone in her hand, trying to call 911. And she was shot and she was stabbed in the back three times.
Interestingly, adoptees, when they commit parricide, have dissociated from the experience. So that means that they almost don't know that they did it. So the next thing that happens is that they called 911 for help. "Something's happened to my parents." The police came out; they were looking at the crime scene.
They began to talk to Brad, and pretty soon thought that he probably was the person who did it and arrested him. I have been on eight cases since that. I've traveled to Kentucky, and to Arizona, and Sacramento, Texas… In Texas, I was on death row, which was quite an experience. Even Los Angeles County Jail was a very big deal.
You walk in, and there's like a cage. You first get into the cage, you have to leave everything that you have: keys, phones, you know, I was allowed to take a pen and my pad. Then when you're cleared and you're given a badge, you go outside of the cage, and then you're actually in the prison. And then they said to me, "Okay, well your room is down there," and I was like, "You want me to walk down there by myself?"
I had to walk past the medical unit, which had men. Each person in county jail is a different color, depending upon their crime. Like the murders, big murders like I was dealing with were in orange, but there was a whole unit of people that were in like a light green. Those were the medical people, but they were walking around.
So, I was instructed to go way in the back to a little room that had one little tiny window, way up top. (Not that anybody could see me.) I had quite a bit of fear that, you know… I kind of sized up the table that we were sitting on, like, "Could he reach across the table and, you know, strangle me or something?"
They brought him in in shackles, full shackles, feet and hands. I knew that if I was gonna be able to gain his trust, that I was gonna have to get him out of these shackles. Which was also scary, but I knew that it was just gonna be part of the developing a relationship with him. So after much ado, we did get him out of the hand shackles and he was kept in the feet.
So I met with him for quite a long time. But his dissociative amnesia for the events was so set in stone that he was really unable to tell us what happened, or admit to it. And he– The reason I met with him for such a long time was that his public defenders really wanted to save his life. He was gonna get life imprisonment without parole, that was a given, but at least spare him the death penalty.
But because he kept insisting he wanted to testify, they brought me in. And so I really did a lot of therapy with him. At the very end, right before trial, he finally conceded that he would plead guilty, and he did. So I learned a lot during that time about adoption psychopathology.
The way that I looked at adoptees while I did my private practice, where we look at what we call an object relations approach, an attachment model, a grief and loss model, was just not enough for this population. So I really had to dig and do a lot of reading about why.
And let me just also say that this young man had an IQ of 130, had never had any kind of criminal matters previously, was raised in a middle class family, you know, adopted a birth, wanted, loved. So it doesn't quite make sense when you see somebody like that and then you look at the crime.
Haley Radke: Well, I think one of the things you pointed out in your presentation was that we have this picture that, you know, these are people that have been abused in some way by their adoptive family and, like, this is their event. But that's not necessarily accurate.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: No. Actually, Between 2 and 3% of the population in the United States is adopted, yet adoptees are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, and the juvenile justice system, in drug and alcohol rehab centers, and were more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, oppositional defiant behavior, conduct disorder, eating disorders, all those kinds of things.
So we really are an at-risk population and what I found was from doing a lot of reading and seeing a lot of these people who, in one swift cataclysmic explosion, murder their entire families is a couple of things. I wanna talk to you a little bit about Dave Kirschner, who did probably the most work in adoptee parricide.
He's not adopted, but he does have a private practice, where he sees a lot of adopted people. And so he says that there are certain characteristics–he calls it the Adopted Child Syndrome-–that certain adoptees, at the far end of the spectrum, are likely to do more poorly. And he says that– Okay, I just wanna talk about a few of the things that are common characteristics, I guess I'll say. That adoptees do not kill their parents because they've been abused. They murder because of the unresolved, underlying adoption psychopathology. Okay, so while the murder is about an evil act, it's also about loss, and abandonment, and rejection, and pain, and the search for oneself.
It's really about a quest for love and to be loved when… yet it evolves into something really malignant, a fatal quest to hurt. Biological children also commit parricides, but they come from families where typically they have been abused for many years. The characteristic there is, that they're abused by either alcoholic parents or mentally ill families.
And those children often murder their parents while they're sleeping, because they're so afraid of the parents. So the choice of weapon for a biological child, when they commit parricide, is a gun. For an adoptee, it is strangulation, or it is using a knife. So those are more like crimes of passion.
Haley Radke: Wow. I don't know. I almost don't even know what to ask you, because I spend a lot of time on my podcast, you know, trying to de-stigmatize talking about mental illness, or help adoptees not be pathologized all into one. So I know we're talking very small, you know, portion of adopted people that would do this. However, like, the cultural story of adoptees, right? Whatever's out there is like we're some crazy people– I read a lot of thrillers, and psychological mysteries and you know, the twist is often it's the adopted person, coming back to either kill their first parents or whatever.
Even as we're recording this right now, one of the big movies that's out is the Joker movie and (spoiler alert), you know, fast forward a few seconds if you can't already figure out what I'm gonna say. He was adopted and then, I think (I haven't seen it), but that he goes on to kill his adoptive mother.
So how do we balance this out? Tracy, I don't wanna pathologize adoptees and be like, "If we don't deal with our grief, we're gonna commit parricide." Like how–what are the things that we need to be doing? What we need to be paying attention to, from your research and work in this?
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Okay. So again, you know, I think that all adoptees are an at-risk population. Most of us, the majority of us, resolve to one degree or another, those issues. We do that through therapy, through search and reunion, through getting married, and having our own children, and filling up our own little island with good stuff. So the preponderance of us do resolve most of our issues, but we have to learn from those few.
And it's not few–I'll just say adoptees are 15 times more likely to kill an adoptive parent than a biological child. So it's not just a few of us at the end of the spectrum, yet, number-wise, it's not as many as people who resolve their issues. But we have to look at that population to really understand what are the underlying issues.
I know for myself, when I feel a partner may be abandoning me, or leaving, like in the middle of a fight, that can produce some pretty big feelings in me. And I can really understand how someone could lose control when there are certain things in line with this. The biggest reason that the event that happens before parricide happens, is that an adoptee may feel or perceive an abandonment.
So Brad that I was talking about before was not doing very well in school. His father had said, "I think I'm gonna send you to the military. You need to get your life together." That was one of the events that happened. Another young, (well, this is a little older man)-- The man on death row in Texas told me that his wife and children had moved out while he was at work.
He came home to an empty house. He went to go where his wife was to talk to her about reconciling, about not divorcing him. And they started to argue, and she went to close the door because she didn't want the children who were inside to hear. She closed the door, which left him on the outside, and he perceived that she was locking him out of his life. That he was gonna lose his children and lost his wife.
Another young man, 14-year-old, who came home from school. He was expelled. His mother came home, started yelling at him, was threatening to send him to one of these treatment centers. While she was yelling at him, spit came out of her mouth and hit his face, which was something that a foster parent used to do.
She used to sprinkle water on his face when he was bad, when he was very little, and that triggered him. So, are we a population of murderers? No, I don't think so. But do we all have some profound kinds of experiences that could make us vulnerable to that kind of violence? Yeah, there is a subset of people who get there.
Haley Radke: So what do you say to someone who is adopted and doesn't have a desire to search, or doesn't feel like adoption has affected them? Do you think they do have some buried grief and possibly repressed anger, or have they resolved that in themselves and are just okay with it?
Dr. Tracy Carlis: I don't know. That's, you know, that's the million dollar question, right?
Because adoptive parents like to tell me, you know, "Oh, my child doesn't really wanna search and they don't need to know." But if I ask an adoptee, "How would you feel if your birth mother knocked on your door and wanted to meet you?" That question is met with, "That would be okay." I think searching is a really, you know, we're taking some risk there.
We were abandoned once, right? Human nature tells us that once an event has happened, it's more likely to happen again. So we think that we're gonna be abandoned, even in our adoptive families, right? Or by our boyfriends and girlfriends, or by the birth mother again. It's just human nature to believe that once you've had an experience, it’s going to happen again.
A lot of people have the ability to repress and deny some of their experiences. That, for me, is a little bit scary, because usually something will happen that kind of opens up the can and then all those feelings can come flooding out.
The extreme sense of that is sort of dissociating from that part of ourselves that has feelings so as though it's, you know, a different person that's in a different room. But dissociation is not fully effective for us all the time, either. Some new loss or event in our life can bring it all up.
Haley Radke: It's so interesting.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: I just do wanna say that there are certain characteristics that we see in these (usually) teenagers, I'm gonna say, that create or that commit these crimes. And one is that there is a history of sealed records and secrecy within the family, and there is no talking about adoption. Which many of us have, but really sealed down. Number two, the person doesn't feel like they fit in or measure up in the family.
That's a big one. I had a young man in Kentucky. He was the first born, then they got pregnant, and had a daughter. The daughter was the apple of their eye. She was very successful. She was going to school to become a doctor. He was like a handyman who couldn't get a lot of work. And the other sibling (the girl) came home from a school break, and they were doting on her, and had a party for her celebrating her getting into medical school.
And he just felt like he wasn't what they wanted; he wasn't enough. And ended up murdering the whole family. There's also, for these kids, untreated and festering adoption wounds. With little or no mental health. So the child has all these feelings, they don't know what to do with them, and you know, in puberty, we're trying to forge an identity, which is very hard when you don't have bits and pieces of yourself. So that's why adoptees tend to be more vulnerable in adolescence. And then just the, like I said before, the most significant piece is that the parricide happens usually when the person is triggered by either perceived or real abandonment. Someone's leaving them.
Haley Radke: Well, thank you for that list. It feels very uncomfortable to hear those things, because, I mean, I think a lot of us have felt those in some way or another throughout our lives. So I think it’s…
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Yeah. That's why it's so important for us to study why there is this sector of adoptees that this happens to.
You know, I'll also just say, when we look at serial killing and mass murders, they are primarily adoptees. I know it's hard to say, right? I can see your face. Of the 500 identified serial killers in the United States, 16% of those, which is a pretty high percentage, are adoptees.
Haley Radke: And as you said earlier, adopted people only are 2 to 3% of the population in the United States.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Exactly, exactly. So when you think about though, serial killings, it makes a little bit more sense, because typically a serial killer and serial killing is defined as a murder that happens– defined as a person who commits three or more murders, when there's a cooling off period between the murders. So it could be months or years.
So Charles Manson, for example, serial killer who murdered many people, along with a group of people that he did that with. He was born to a 15-year-old girl, Kathleen Maddox, who failed to give him a name at birth. Instead, put on his birth certificate, "No name, Maddox." She married a man several months after she gave birth to him, who gave Charles the last name of Manson.
She went to a bar one day and had Charles with her. And then the server thought he was really cute, and wanted a baby, and was kind of talking to him. And his mother said, "Well, for a pitcher of beer, he's yours." And the server of course thought she was kidding, but she actually finished the pitcher of beer and left Charles in the restaurant.
An uncle came and found him several days later. Then his mother was in and out of jail. He was tossed around from relative to relative. Mom, when she did get out, promised that they would be reunited, live together, but instead she put him into a boarding school, which he ran away from and ran to her.
The next day, she returned him to the boarding school. I mean, you can just see, you know– You can see how the object relations piece, the relationship, really can make for a underlying anger and hatred that can produce really horrible crimes. For adoptees, the birth parent, that all of the anger, or loss, or rejection, or confusion should be directed to– it gets directed to the adoptive parents when they fail to understand and address what the adoptee is really feeling.
Haley Radke: Not to be alarmist, but let's not repress our grief.
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Do not repress.
Haley Radke: Aw. Thank you so much, Tracy, for walking us through some of those things and teaching us some about this. Is there anything that we didn't talk about yet that you really want to get to before we do our recommended resources?
Dr. Tracy Carlis: No, I do know it's a difficult conversation and I know that it scares a lot of people.
And I just want to say that most of us are not murderers and, you know, therapy, and talking is really the way to understand ourselves and our feelings and just having listening ears to… Even if it's not your adoptive parents, a good therapist that can help normalize all your feelings.
Haley Radke: Absolutely. Thank you. Okay, so for recommended resources, I'm actually gonna share two of the books that you've mentioned. One of the authors as we were talking, and then you shared this other one in your presentation at the AAC conference. So if you are super interested in this topic and you want to read more about it, there's Adoption Uncharted Waters by David Kirschner. And then there's also Adopted Killers. I mean, you guys, even the cover–it is very… I'm laughing cuz it's just, you know, like I find this really fascinating, but I also, as you said, right, it can be really upsetting. But I don't think you know this, probably, Tracy, but I'm obsessed with true crime podcasts and I listen all the time.
Yeah. Just one more thing to add to my to-be-read pile. I haven't read it yet, but it is definitely on my list. All right. What would you like to recommend to us today?
Dr. Tracy Carlis: Well, you know, again, I am a big believer in therapy. So, in here in Los Angeles, we have Jeanette Yoffe, who was a foster child for a lot of her growing up and then adopted a late age, has the Celia Center named after her birth mother, where it– She provides groups for, not only for teenage adoptees, but also for all members of the constellation.
So birth parents, adopted parents, and also for adoptees. So I think that's a really good place, here in California, anyway. I also just–if anybody here is listening, that is thinking about doing a degree and becoming a licensed therapist, I just really encourage you to do that. Because we need more adoption proficient therapists.
Other than the one therapy experience I told you about when I was searching for my birth mom, all of my other therapists, I've had to educate about what adoption means. And that can be tough, because we're really looking for someone to validate what we feel and not just have to educate. So if you're thinking at all about being a therapist, stay in school or get to school and we need you. We need more people to do this work.
Haley Radke: Absolutely. Oh my word. Absolutely, I can't agree with that more. Thank you so much for your time today. And where can we connect with you online?
Dr. Tracy Carlis: So, my website is drtracylcarlis.com. Also on Facebook, same: Dr. Tracy L. Carlis. Can connect with me either one of those ways. Email is a little bit longer. It's drcarlis@drtracylcarlis.com.
Haley Radke:Perfect. Thank you!
Dr. Tracy Carlis:You're welcome. Thank you for having me. I just wanna say the podcasts are amazing. I have–I'm pretty new to them, but I have been binge listening, I guess you say, to them, and they're fabulous. So, doing a great job. I really appreciate your work.
Haley Radke: Aw, thank you. That is so kind of you to say.
Every time I have seen Tracy speak, I just sit there in rapt attention, taking notes furiously. You should see the notes I have from her session in Washington. It's two pages of typed notes. Such a fascinating topic and I'm so intrigued by all the layers and I feel like we could have talked for like two more hours about her expertise in this area.
Anyway, I'm so grateful that she was able to come and talk with us, and I got so excited recommending the books that she shared in her presentation that I think I forgot to say the name of one of the authors. So the author for Adopted Killers: 430 Adoptees Who Killed–How and Why They Did It is by Lori Carangelo.
But, of course, the link to that is in the show notes, so you can go ahead and find that over on adopteeson.com. And I just wanna say a big thank you, again. I'm so grateful to all of my monthly supporters who make this show possible. Thank you. If you wanna join them and stand with them and say, “Yes, I believe this is so important and we want Adoptees On to continue to highlight adoptee voices,” go to adopteeson.com/partner and you can find all the details of how to support the show there. Another great way to support the podcast is just by telling one person about it. Maybe you have a friend that's into true crime podcasts like me. Maybe this is a good one to get them interested.
I don’t know; it's not funny. Like why am I laughing so much at adoptees murdering? It's not funny. I think I've listened to too many girlfriend chat true crime podcasts. I think maybe that's why. Anyway, if there is one person that you think would really find Dr. Carlis' work fascinating, just like me, maybe recommend this one episode to them and help share the show in that way.
Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
