134 [Healing Series] Cross-Cultural Intergenerational Trauma
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/134
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You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke, and this is a special episode in our Healing Series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee.
Today we have a returning guest, [Marta Isabella Sierra]. Marta uses the Internal Family Systems model, which you may hear us refer to as IFS during the episode, and she taught us about IFS in episodes 69 and 71 of the podcast. If you want to go back and check those out, it's very interesting.
Today, Marta gives us an insider's view of her year-long trip to Colombia and what barriers there can be to a cross-cultural reunion. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, [Marta Isabella Sierra]. Hi, Marta.
Marta Isabella Sierra: Hi, Haley.
Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. A lot of time has passed since you were on the podcast and a lot of things have transpired. So can you give us a little snippet of your story? it's been like well over a year since you were on just to orient us to your story, and I'd love to hear what's been happening for you.
Marta Isabella Sierra: So I was born in Bogota, Colombia, and adopted by white parents from the States, grew up in Connecticut. That's some of what I had shared before. I started searching for my mom probably in 2015, 2016.
And found her in March of 2017. We're coming up on our three-year anniversary this March. And so that had pretty recently happened, I think, the last time that I recorded. But I think I had already gone down. I was about to leave, I think. When we last spoke.
Haley Radke: I think you were prepping for your trip. And you had shared that you had done DNA testing, but actually how you found her was through a private investigator, so that was pretty interesting.
Okay. So preparing to do a trip down there. How was that? What does a trip mean? Because it's a little different than what I pictured in my head.
Marta Isabella Sierra: I just want to back up and say the reason that we decided to go live down there, which is “we” as me and my partner and our two animals as well, we took our dog and our cat, really was because I unraveled after my first trip back after my reunion trip. I had a really, really hard time.
I just want to say that in case any of your listeners relate to that and just normalize that the first connection can be super dysregulating. I had a really hard time being away from my mom.
Haley Radke: So just to clarify, you mean, you went down to meet her and then as soon as you came back you were out of sorts.
Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes.
Haley Radke: Okay. Wow.
Marta Isabella Sierra: I was just crying every day. It felt so excruciating to be away from her. My IFS lens on it, right, is that my little baby part was in a panic, right?
Last time I left her it was 30 and a half years, and it's really hard to explain to the preverbal traumatized baby that lives inside of you that it's not the same thing that's happening. So I was having a pretty hard time. Yeah. So eventually my partner offered that maybe we need to just go spend some time down there.
Maybe that's what I needed. So we started looking into it, started planning, and yeah, the plan was, so a year, a little over a year, we figured it would be, not exactly a year, but yeah, we left May of, gosh, what would it be? 18? Yeah. Through July of 19.
Haley Radke: Wow. And what did you think when you were planning that trip?
I mean, that's sort of like a huge, that's not sort of, it's a huge life change. For a whole year. What were your expectations? Did you have any?
Marta Isabella Sierra: I don't think I had any. Actually, I don't think at that point I would've said I had any concrete expectations. I came to learn over the course of my time there that my secret wish was to be cut and pasted back into my family, right? What we all wish. I just want to be reacclimated and put back in. And it's just so impossible that that's how that's going to go. So I think it was many months, though, before I realized that.
I would say the first big adjustment was, compared to your reunion trip where everything's about you, right? It's almost like you're a baby again, right? Everyone's like, welcome to your new family, and you meet all the people and there's parties for you, and everything's “what do you want? Oh, you like fish, we'll make fish.” And you're so celebrated. Of course, living down there, everyone has their lives, they're doing stuff.
And just even navigating how much time are we spending together? Who's initiating that? Who's not? What does that look like? Feeling really uncertain about that all the time. Kind of some of my earlier memories of just navigating what is it to just be here and what do these relationships look like right now?
Haley Radke: So broad picture first, you are raised in the States. White family. And then you go to Colombia. What is that like for you, just culturally being in a different culture?
Marta Isabella Sierra: It was amazing. Mostly, I mean, it's different, of course, and I have lived other places. I have experienced culture shock before. There was certainly some of that.
But for me being a Colombian woman and being surrounded by Colombian people, being in the majority for the first time in my life is still something that's so comforting to me and so great. And then you have the layers of that though, right? That I'm easily still identified as “other” in an interesting way.
Even though I look like I belong there, it's like people can smell it on you. It's interesting. I had to tell my story multiple times a day. If I leave the house, I have to tell my story. People are always asking questions and I have a very American and bougie-looking dog that draws a lot of attention to herself.
So everyone's always asking about the dog, which sort of outed us as American pretty quickly. And people don't understand adoption there at all. So the questions would always be kind of interesting. I learned over time how to set boundaries and not tell every single cab driver my entire life story if I wasn't in the mood.
But I also tried to use it, when I was able, to educate a little bit about the process. But, yeah, it was really amazing to be immersed in my culture and also, of course, really hard. Not everything about it is amazing, of course.
Haley Radke: So where did you live when you were there?
Marta Isabella Sierra: We lived in Cali. My family lives in Cali, which is the third biggest city in Colombia, and we lived in a pretty downtown area in a neighborhood called San Fernando in Parque del Perro, which is a really nice little park. It's kind of touristy, really. There's lots of restaurants and things, but it was a nice area to live in.
We had a two bedroom apartment. We had a lot of space for not a lot of money. And yeah, that was its own decision, right? Whether to live with family or not. For people that have done this before, that's a big decision piece. And I think if I went down as a single person, I would've probably lived with my family, which would've been a whole completely different experience for sure.
I'm glad that that's how I did it. And that's what my experience was, even though I know in some ways that it meant a trade-off. We spoke English at home and so my Spanish didn't get as strong as I would've liked it to get if I were completely immersed in it.
And with technology, like, I was still watching Netflix in English on my computer. So I wasn't as immersed as I might have been in a different situation. But aside from that, the support of having my fur babies and my person with me was just incalculable in how much that helped me navigate a lot of grief, really.
It was just another layer of grief work because it's all around me every day right? What I lost.
Haley Radke: So here's what I'm picturing in my head. You go and you're with your family for a meal or something, and then you go home to your apartment with your partner and your animals, and then you're like on your own again.
What is that feeling like? Even knowing you can go back again and see them tomorrow? But just even that little separation?
Marta Isabella Sierra: That piece felt okay and felt kind of needed. Even on a short little trip, my first trip, it was like, okay, I have to go back to my Airbnb, right? I need a moment.
So it was actually really grounding. I came to really love my apartment and feel safe there and need to go there sometimes to just bring it back down a level because everything's so intense.
Haley Radke: I guess I don't yet have the same experience. I'm not transracially adopted, transculturally, transnationally. I don't have any of that. And so reunion for me as a domestic adoptee looks so very different.
Like you literally moved countries to build this relationship. Can you teach us a little bit about the challenges and the things that maybe someone like me wouldn't even have considered or known about?
Marta Isabella Sierra: It's all this little stuff. And what I came to learn really is that Spanish is one of three language barriers, I would say. And the second one out of those two is definitely culture and misunderstandings about that. And even if we understood exactly what the other person was saying, like literally saying, it was still confusing.
And I'm really lucky to have had some great supports down there, including some bilingual friends and a translator that I worked with who also helped me with some documents and legal kinds of things, but she would come around and help with translating, and I found that ultimately more what she was translating than Spanish was cultural stuff that I didn't understand.
A really easy small example is that Colombians put themselves together pretty specifically. Colombian women, especially, like no matter the socioeconomic status, you can see the difference, right? But even a woman with not a lot of money probably, her sneakers match, her shirt matches her earrings, and her hair's done and her makeup's done. It might not be done the same way as someone that's higher class, but that's what you do. And that's not who I am.
Haley Radke: Are you a little bit of a casual girl, Marta? Sorry, I should say casual woman.
Marta Isabella Sierra: I lived in Seattle. I came from Seattle. So even the transition from Boston to Seattle, the American listeners will think this funny, was a downshift for me and a letting go of what's appropriate in public.
And I just don't care. And certainly if I'm emotionally dysregulated, right? Like, I don't care at all. And so some early conflicts with my mom would be about her asking me questions I didn't understand why she was asking me, or criticizing how I showed up, or my hair?
And, but her assumption sometimes, like I'd wear a lot of messy buns. I have really long hair and I mostly wear it up in a messy bun on the top of my head. And her assumption if I showed up like that was that I didn't shower that day and, like, why aren't you taking care of yourself? And it was like, what? I showered like before I left. I don't understand.
So we just had to navigate that one piece. But it was, of course, being criticized by your mom. It’s a trigger. So it was difficult. At first I didn't understand. And finally we had to come to this piece of her belief is you put yourself together and you look nice because it's nice for the other people.
And my view is I don't care about the other people. I'm not going to do something for other people that's not authentic to me, right? And that's specific to me, but it's pretty American, too, I think in some ways. And that's an easy in-way into that. Colombia is a very Catholic, patriarchal country and that's difficult for me.
I strongly identify as a feminist and there's a lot of things that are norms there that were difficult for me, and I would say this was one layer of it, right? That as a woman, I owe it to the world to be like nicely packaged every day and be something that's nice to look at. And I just was never gonna tow that line.
But we had those conversations and she came to accept that about me. But you know, still, the preference is still under there that I would make more of an effort.
Haley Radke: Okay. Okay. That's a really great example. I'm kind of getting a picture here. Do you have another example of something that was just really lost in translation?
Marta Isabella Sierra: Well, everything's in its own little compartmentalized box. Colombia has been through a lot of war, a lot of really terrible times. I was born in the middle of that. There's a lot of us that were born and adopted out during the time in which there was so much violence and other things happening in our country.
And so anyone around my generation, when we're coming back, our families that were left there experienced all of that. It deeply affected them. Besides other legacies of intergenerational trauma around single moms and not being able to move up in socioeconomic status sometimes, no matter how hard you work. The caste system there is pretty set.
It's hard to advance. The economy is difficult. So there's lots of complex political and socioeconomic stuff going on. And then there's this history of war and trauma that's so normalized. People that visit Colombia are like, Colombians are so amazing, they're so happy. They always have a smile on their face.
That's a survival mechanism. There's a lot underneath that. That's how we survived. That's how my people were strong and kept moving forward. But in that, there's this denial of the trauma and of things that have happened, and things just kind of get put in neat little boxes and left there.
So, one example is my mother's father, my grandfather passed six or so years before I found her, my abuelo, and the story that I got about him at first. I had a lot of grief because he was presented by my mom as this great man and he was a professional musician his whole life. And I always sang and danced and did theater and so I saw this photo of him and I just grieved for that, that I had this amazing abuelo that I would never get to meet.
It was a solid many months in to being down there that I started to hear other stories, that he was pretty abusive, that he was unfaithful, that my mom's older sibling actually is not from my grandmother. And that there's more, and that who knows how many more there are, right? And all of these different things that I didn't hear at first because it's just not normal.
It's not normal to share all the things, you just share the things that are more comfortable and everything else goes in little boxes. So I rarely got all of the information upfront, which for me, and I think for a lot of adopted people, it's: Tell me the truth! Like we wanna know the truth.
Haley Radke: Yes.
Marta Isabella Sierra: So what is truth? What's a cultural definition of truth? It's just all so layered and so more than anything, this affected my relationship with my brother, my oldest brother who's younger than me. If you had asked me six months in to my time down there who I was closest to in my family, I would've said him.
We were really close for a lot of reasons. He's a little separate from my family for the reasons that I'll tell you in a moment, but also he just lives separate from them. He has a partner of 11 or so years who has a daughter, so he kind of has a stepdaughter. They have two dogs. The only other person in my family that had dogs. Once or twice a week we would go down to where he lives, just 20 minutes, half hour in a cab, and take the dogs to the park.
And I just spent the most time with him, I would say, week to week. And we're close in age. There's lots of things that we have in common. He was just really, really special to me. And there has always been this lingering story about if he had a daughter or not, and the story that he had always told me was that he didn't believe that it was his daughter. This happened when he was 16.
And so in April of last year, it was time for us to take this big trip to Llanos. That's where my family is from. It's out in the eastern plains. It's a pretty big journey and it's a very different part of Colombia. And I was going to meet her.
I was going to meet my niece, and I just needed to know the truth from him before I went and before this stopped being a concept and started being a real person. I had also kind of gone to battle about it for him, and I felt protective of him because this specific topic had caused so many rifts in my family.
And it all came spilling out when I saw him before the trip, that this is his daughter, that he refuses to look at any of it. He won't take a test, he won't be in her life. He sort of blames her for the sins of her mother. They were 16 when they were together. I think she was maybe not good to him and possibly cheated on him. And he blames her for it.
And so she's not being raised by her mother either. My niece is raised by her maternal grandmother, so she's essentially an in-family adoptee, right? So I go there and I meet this girl and I fall head over heels in love with her. She's 14, she's super smart. She doesn't understand why this is happening to her. She has a lot of questions and there's so much vulnerability there.
But she's tough and I see a lot of myself in her. And I just felt bonded to her really quickly and we had a lot of talks about it. And, she's a teenager, so she didn't spill her guts or anything, but I made sure that she knew that I'm here for her for always and for whatever she needs.
And so even since coming back, I've just taken a little bit more of an active role in her life and she's really important to me. So after that trip, my relationship with my brother really split. I couldn't accept it. It just was so painful for me that he could turn her away when he had been so loving and accepting to me.
I mean, it's still, I mean, obviously I'm getting choked up talking about it. It still doesn't make sense to me. Emotionally and logically in my clinician brain it makes total sense. Whatever happened with my niece's mother was traumatic to him. He's put it in a box and he won't touch it and that's really normal there.
That's how you survive, right? You just keep moving forward. And, but it cost him so much. I think it cost him a lot and it cost him our relationship, which in his eyes, I've abandoned him. But I just had to do what was best for me. But that's a moment where I do have compassion about why he's doing it.
And I still ultimately decided to draw a boundary. Because it felt, for me personally, it feels disloyal to her to not hold him accountable for his actions. And it breaks my heart. I still miss him every day. So yeah, that's a big piece of my experience down there with trauma and with the denial of it.
And one of the last things he said to me when we were communicating over text was, let me know, let me know when you've resolved your traumas. It all got put on that I have a problem with this because of my trauma, instead of any ownership.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I'm so sorry. That sounds really challenging and I think this is so fascinating how you describe that in Colombia they just don't really get the concept of adoption when you're talking to strangers and whatnot.
And yet, you go down there, you are this professionally trained person and you can see trauma all over. How is that for you? And in general, or more specifically if you want to talk about your family, but even just in broad strokes, just looking at the culture?
You talked about how they've had all of these challenges in war and things, and I know that, especially, I mean I'm living in Canada, it feels like such a privileged nation, that I can just go to therapy and it's so different. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Marta Isabella Sierra: Again, it's just, there's so much going on underneath this surface. There's this image, that now I'm wishing I had pulled it up before we started talking, but about cultural awareness. It's like the image of an iceberg and I just really liked it because it talked about the top things, right? Like foods and the flag and the different pieces of it.
And then under the water were all of these other pieces that make up any given culture, right? Which is like histories of trauma and roles in the family. What do those roles look like? What are the responsibilities? And just all of this under-stuff, right?
I would say that there's just a lot of pain and people in pain that don't even understand. I'm super empathic and so I would feel everything. So like me saying my apartment was my safe space, like sometimes I would just get way too overloaded being around people and I had to go home and reground because I always feel what people are feeling even if they're not aware of it, which was a lot. It's a lot of information to get when no one wants to hear the feedback really.
And another example would be my baby brother who's my world. He has struggled his whole life with depression and anxiety, but has no words for it, right? And so we would have really deep conversations about that and about him starting to understand what it is. Why shame is a very, very common language there. A way of communicating, a way of controlling. It's a lot of shame that goes on and certainly in my family as well.
And so we've been naming that for him. There's a reason that you feel this way. This is when you're spoken to in this manner, over time this is what it creates inside of you. This might be part of what you're feeling. And I think he found that extremely helpful and has made a lot of changes in his life to take care of himself in a different way because of the conversations that we had. I'm really proud of him.
Haley Radke: I love that part. Like the influence you could bring down there and to your family and just your wisdom and sharing that with them.
Marta Isabella Sierra: But it is new information, like you were saying, like it's new information to them. It's something they don't have access to. They don't get any education around it.
And nobody goes to a therapist down there unless you have a serious psychiatric condition. Like your medical doctor has told you that you need to go. It's a completely different mental health culture and it's just not talked about.
So you had said what a great thing that you could teach that I think is so complicated. Not just that role, but specifically add on the layer of being an adoptee, right? Because I already have parts of me that feel responsible for other people.
And so you add that piece in, right? That I'm coming back into my family system, that I'm viewed as having more access to a lot of things, right? Financially, but also education, all of these things. And so there is a view that I'm to make an impact. So there's an overt feeling of that.
And then there's my own internal stuff of I'm supposed to make everyone's lives better. That gets so sticky, I think, and I have a lot of feelings of failure with my other brother. I feel like I failed.
And because I used my own story. I used research, I used all of this is what's going on for her. Is this really what you want to do? And I couldn't break the wall of his protective system that will not go near this trauma of his, right?
And so I do have parts of me that feel like I failed. That feel like I'm supposed to heal my family and like I failed in that manner. And so it has pluses and negatives, I think. But there's definitely a lot of my family that I have made an impact on and that does feel good, but I just want to name that has two sides to it and that I think when we go back into these family systems that have been dealing with so much for so long and that we can have that wish, that's a great wish, and we can certainly do some good.
But I had to ask at what cost at a point.
Haley Radke: Well, I thank you for sharing that because I've gotten questions from multiple adoptees who have higher access, they're more wealthy and then they will reunite. And then there's this expectation from the original family: oh great, you're gonna help us out of this.
And so I imagine that boundaries would be so challenging in that situation. And then even my question to you was, well, you're this therapist and you can come. But then I'm trying to be like, oh wait, you put yourself in Marta's shoes. That's not your role in the family.
You're not there to go and fix everybody. And even as a therapist, you're not counseling your friends and family here either, right? That's not a thing. So yeah, you got some layers there. Holy smokes.
Marta Isabella Sierra: So I have a little cousin that is being raised by my sister. They took her out of a bad situation and my sister is raising her. She's seven now. My little che, she's my little sweetie pie. She has experienced a lot of trauma in her young life. We're not exactly sure what, but that's part of why my sister took custody of her.
And I would be called in to kind of weigh in on things around that occasionally, which was always interesting. And I don't work with children. I don't specialize in working with children. I barely know how to talk to children in a casual setting, if we're being honest. So I didn't really have anything to offer clinically other than she needs to see a therapist.
But there's resistance around that and it's not the easiest thing to find, even if you are open to it. But her suspected abuser is her father and he is in Llanos. That's where I was talking about. So part of that trip was also that she was going to be around him. And I had a real problem with this, of course, being who I am and being a therapist and I had many conversations about it.
Ultimately, I had to let it go because I'm not her guardian. I don't get to make these decisions for her, and it's very complicated. But the view is she's never alone with him. So there's like this protective element, right? We're watching her. Don't worry, nothing will happen.
Nothing new will happen. And she's asking about him. She wants to see him, which I'm not around for that. I'm sure that's true, of course. Why wouldn't she want to see her father? We know that children in the face of tremendous abuse will still want their parents, of course.
And so their view is, yeah, well, that was a long time ago. He's changed a lot. And also a little tinge of that's just how men are. There's this acceptance of abuse from men in my country that upsets me deeply. And so, yeah, I had to let go. It's not my decision. I've said my piece, they listened to me and they ultimately decided what they're going to decide.
And so that's, again, a piece of yeah, a man did something horrible. It doesn't register. It's just so normalized. Similar with the stories about my grandfather and there's just so much around infidelity, around physical violence, around sexual violence. It's just what else is news today?
Haley Radke: Well, I thank you for walking us through a ton of different insights that you had through your over a year there. Year and a half, almost 14 months?
*Marta Isabella Sierra:** 14 months.
Haley Radke: Okay. Okay, man I'm struggling today. My goodness. Okay. Thank you for walking us through those insights. You've had well over a year you spent with your family and in Colombia, and I think this will really help a lot of adoptees that are considering searching and reunion, especially when it's in a different country and not sure what to expect. And I think we don't hear about these things in depth enough, so I really appreciate your thoughts on that.
Marta Isabella Sierra: I think that the other thing that I realized through going and being down there is that I think the whole periods of honeymoon and transition into regular reunion, when you're talking about international adoption, are so skewed because there's not a lot of physical time together.
And so I think the honeymoon could go on, I don't know how long, but I think that mine cracked open around April of last year. This big thing happened and then in the aftermath of it, I was like, oh, I think my honeymoon just ended. Like I hadn't thought I was out of it. I had more identified it with that kind of first three weeks, intense infatuation, can't-breathe-without- you kind of phase.
But actually I think it's like that first part of a relationship until you learn these are full human beings, which for me even was many months in to living there.
Haley Radke: I can't imagine. I mean, even as you were talking about staying down there and not knowing if you're going to get invited to this or are you going to see them then, like all that kind of real life.
Wow. It's just, I don't know. You had a huge life change in that time period. And I can't wait to hear more about what you learned. I'm so glad that you're coming back and you're going to talk to us a little bit more on the next Healing episode, a little bit more about your experience, and I can't wait.
Okay. In the meantime, let's press pause till we get to that episode next week. And where can we connect with you online?
Marta Isabella Sierra: My practice is (old link removed) and that's pretty much the best way to get in touch with me. There's an email on there. (email martasierralmhc [at] gmail [dot] com)
Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Next week Marta is going to be back on the podcast with us, as I said, and make sure you're subscribed because you don't want to miss that episode. She shares some very intimate and vulnerable things she experienced while in Colombia, and whether you're in reunion or not, there are some giant takeaways that we can learn from her experience and apply to whatever we have going on.
So I really appreciate her sharing and her willingness to open up that way. You don't always get that from therapists especially, there's so much of a “you're the client, I'm the therapist” kind of barrier with a lot of professionals in that capacity. So I really appreciate Marta opening up in that way.
And, I mean, wow, how much more valuable info can you get than someone who is literally living out how to do this, how to do this in a healthy way. I'm so appreciative. The other thing I want to say is, thank you so much to my monthly supporters. You guys know I say this every week, but it's honestly the truth.
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