16 [Healing Series] Why Me?
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/16
Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radkey, 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.
Make sure you stick around until the end of the show for some details about next week's episode and info about our current giveaway. Okay, it's time to get started. Today, we address the question, "Why me?" Let's listen in.
This is Pamela Cordano, a fellow adoptee and a psychotherapist who specializes in helping you to discover meaning in your life.
Welcome, Pamela.
Pamela Cordano: Thank you.
Haley Radke: Please, would you just give us a quick bio so we can get to know you a little better?
Pamela Cordano: Sure. It's hard to start with my bio any later than day one, which was when I was separated from my biological mother. My mother had mental illness. And so she was 18 when she had me, back in 1965, and I was… For six months, I was in three foster care homes and then finally adopted by a couple who were infertile, and I was their only child.
So, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area with my adoptive parents, and I think because I felt so disconnected from myself and life in general… I've just been a sort of a seeker my whole life, trying to put pieces together and make sense out of life and things didn't make sense. My first profession was teaching English as a second language to international students, and I realized later that I was kind of being a bridge for them.
“You came from this one world and now you're trying to adjust and adapt to a new world.” And that was something that I think I wish I had had when I was an infant. Somebody to escort me across a threshold of, "This is your new world and let me help you make sense of it."
So I did that for 11 years and then I realized I wanted to go deeper. So I went into psychology and I work a lot with people who have had devastating circumstances. They've had cancer or they've become paralyzed or they've lost somebody precious to them. And it's a place where I feel like because I'm adopted and my history of feeling so disoriented and disconnected, that I can really show up.
I see people who are very lost and distressed and have lost a sense of what is meaningful to them. I think that who I am and how I work–it all goes back to my history of being adopted and growing up in a family that didn't make sense to me.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. So, I recently saw a thread in one of the adoptee groups I'm a part of where the adoptee was relinquished, and she was the middle child of four other kept children.
And I was thinking of May Anna King. I don't know if you heard her interview. She was a guest in season one, episode seven. She was adopted at a bit of a later age, but some of her younger siblings were relinquished at birth. And then I was thinking about just any adult adoptee who's reflecting on why we were available for adoption in the first place.
And the question that we all keep coming back to is, "Why me?" We can fixate on that and it brings up a lot of ugly things for me, personally. Pam, help us move forward. Why us?
Pamela Cordano: Boy, that's a really painful question, and it's one that I feel very familiar with myself and I think there's a child version of that question that we grow up with and we live with at some level, whether we're aware of it or not. That we're different from other people, and that something got broken for us, and “Why us?”, and “Why not other people?”
So something that, you know, that people may realize or not is that children are just naturally self-centered, not in a bad way, but in a normal way. Whatever goes on, a kid thinks it has to do with them. So if parents get divorced or if a parent dies, if parents are fighting or the house burns down, kids just think it has something to do with them, personally.
They don't know that it doesn't; they don't have that abstract thinking and that complexity of abstract thought. So, when adults try to explain to a kid why they're adopted, like oh, you know, I was told that my parents really didn't know, but, "Oh, your mother just, she was too young. She couldn't really take care of you."
As a child, to me, that makes no sense. All I know, I just feel the wound in my body at some level. I just feel the pain of it. It doesn't make any sense. And anyway, the same thing happens when parents get divorced parents say to the kids, "It''s not your fault. Mommy and daddy just blah, blah, blah…"
But kids always feel like it's their fault. And that's what I see coming into my office is people who have been carrying this burden of feeling like there's something inherently flawed about them, that this happened to them. And it's so powerful and we grow up with it for so many years, day in and day out, as we compare ourselves to what we see on TV, or in the movies, or with friends who have their biological families intact, that it makes a huge mark on us.
And it's a huge thing to try to really hold differently in the self as we get older and we are capable of that more complicated thinking. I guess that that's the first part, is just that it's natural and it's painful, and when adults try to talk to kids as if kids can think in a complex way, it just doesn't really connect.
It's a place where kids go underground, because where do you–-what are we supposed to do with that? We feel like it has something to do with us and our inherent flaws, but people are saying it doesn't. So what do we do with that gap?
Haley Radke: I'm nodding and I'm realizing, yes, no one can hear me nodding!
Yes. It totally makes sense. And that's one of the reasons why so many of us struggle with shame, right? “We are the problem.”
Pamela Cordano: Exactly. “We are flawed.” Yeah. “We are flawed.” I know that for me, and I think that probably many adoptees listening, my shame about being adopted and relinquished is so deep from that child place, that I really–I've met adoptees who think that it's a specific thing about them.
Like I thought, "Oh, it's because I feel ugly. I must be ugly. I was thrown away because I was ugly." Some people think it's because they're stupid. "I was thrown away because I was stupid." And people, kids will make up stories about what is inherently wrong with them, that they were discardable, whereas other people were kept.
Haley Radke: Oh, for me, my adoptive parents told me that I was really colicky as a baby. And I thought, "Oh my goodness. Maybe that could be a reason why. If I never stopped crying–why would you want a baby like that?" I mean, as a kid, you don't really get that. "Of course, all babies cry and they need things and…
Pamela Cordano: And most colicky babies are kept. Parents deal with it and they keep the baby.
Haley Radke: That's right. Yeah. Okay, so as a child, we can't understand this complex thing. So what do we do with that as an adult?
Pamela Cordano: Well, we have to grow an adult part of our own selves. Over the years I've worked really hard to have some kind of coherent adult part of me that can talk to the younger part of me that doesn't get it, because there is still a part of me that just doesn't get it.
And there's the angry part of me that doesn't want to get it. Like, "Why should I have to get this? It's too hard." But the adult part of me can say to myself with conviction, and with authority, that, “My parents did not have the capacity to keep me.” They just didn't. My mother was mentally ill, my father was doing his own thing at 19 or whatever he was.
And there were not relatives in the picture, to step in. There's the system that is, which supports adoption, and if I really– My adult part can really see the infrastructure was really weak. It was not set up to keep a baby. And so I have some ability inside to soothe myself to say, to be– From my adult inside, to be with the part of me that just is sad and suffering and doesn't get it, and doesn't know how to make sense of it. It just doesn't make any sense.
Haley Radke: I guess the thing that's coming to mind is…so, we have to reconcile that. We can't go in the past. We can't change it. We have to move forward.
Maybe this, I mean, for me, personally, I'm thinking these feelings are what stirred up a passion in me to make a change for future… Hopefully, there won't be so many future adoptees that are having these struggles that we've experienced. Is that part of healing, is working for change?
What can we actually do to reconcile that? Is this something that we need to be talking with someone like you about? Going to see a therapist, and it sounds like it's a lot of deep work that's needed.
Pamela Cordano: Yeah. One thing that I–one of the best things I've ever heard about parenting (and I'm a parent myself), is that it's not things going wrong that cause the deepest wounds in our children.
It's the things that happen that are not addressed and repaired. The thing about being adopted, where we don't have a culture that's holding us. Our culture tells us that it's not– that we're lucky, and we should be grateful, and we don't remember anything because we were babies or whatever the culture tells us. There's no one there holding a space for us to repair the pain and the rupture we've been through with this whole thing.
So it's hard to heal without the hurt part of us getting addressed directly. So for me, yes, it's been going to see good quality therapists, but it's also… When I listen to your podcasts, I always cry, and I'm not a big crier, actually. I'm more of a shutdown person with my grief in that way? Even though I'm a therapist, and people cry around with me all the time.
But there's something about hearing the resonance of people speaking to something that I understand deep in my bones (I keep saying in my bones because it's such a physical thing to be carrying grief like this), where I don't feel alone. And so it's part of the repair, I think, is in connecting with other adoptees and people who, from the inside, understand this experience, so we don't feel alone.
But I do think that the hurt part of us needs direct care. And at first that might come from a sympathetic adult, or a wise friend, or a therapist. But eventually, I think it's helpful if it comes from ourselves, because we're with ourselves all the time and we can't always be with somebody who's gonna get it.
So the more we can really get it, we can have a dialogue inside and try to talk ourselves down.
Haley Radke: Next steps for us: we're not in therapy and we're just dealing with the feelings. What do we do? Set aside half an hour and just think about it?
Pamela Cordano: I remember being in my twenties. I'm 51 now. I remember being in my twenties and I used to work across the San Francisco Bay. So I would drive across the bridge every day and I would– and of course, I was learning psychology, but I would practice talking to my, the baby of me out loud in the car by myself. So I'd be in traffic and I would just be growing and practicing like a new muscle, this adult voice.
And I would just say things to myself that no one had ever said to me, like, "Pam, you didn't deserve this. This wasn't about you. Of course you're sad. Of course you're mad. Of course you're confused. Things are hard; things feel hard for you that don't seem hard to other people. You feel alone with this. I'm here. "
It's like dividing myself into an older part in a younger part, and having someone with me. And this isn't just for adoption, I met a woman with ALS. She was diagnosed and she was given two years to live and on the same day that she was diagnosed, her boyfriend proposed marriage to her.
And she was really scared because she thought, "How could he possibly love me? I'm gonna become disfigured, and I'm gonna be drooling, and I'm gonna be unintelligible with my speech." And she had to grow this part of her, this big part of her to say, "Mariah, you are lovable. This is so scary. It doesn't–he loves you. Even if your face gets contorted and you drool and whatever else, it…." And some part of her had to hold her goodness and her worth to even marry him. And she did. And she's still alive and they're still married. But she said that without cultivating that inner adult, she couldn't have done it. And I feel that way about myself. If I didn't have that person having my– if I didn't have my own back, how…? Life would be so much harder. I have to have my own back.
Haley Radke: I love that exercise. That is something all of us can do. I think that would be really helpful. Any other thoughts?
Pamela Cordano: Yes, there's another thought, which is, there's maybe what I would call the spiritual side of this, which is, “Why do bad things happen to good people and whatever the bad thing is?” I think what happened to me with my adoption was a terribly traumatic thing that affects every part of me. So, "Why me?"
I don't know, "Why me?," and I don't know that I'll ever know, but I do have the sense that…I do love the work I do. I love meeting people when they're in a terrible crisis. And I love showing up for people when they're at the end of their rope. They can't bear it anymore and it means a lot to me to do that.
So I wouldn't have any interest in doing that if it hadn't been for my history. And it– there's a way I connect with others in my life that feels really nourishing and meaningful at the end of the day, when I'm on my deathbed, I'm gonna look back and be really glad for some of the things I've been able to give to other people because of the pain I've gone through.
So that's sort of a higher level of–it's not, “Why me?,” but it's how this pain informs us, if we can work at using it. I think I mentioned to you in a different conversation that Nelson Mandela– Okay, he was in prison for 27 years. It was unfair and he found a way to work with the pain and the injustice of that and whatever else he'd gone through as a child to come out and to give to the world in important ways. I think that all of us have in some ways the potential for superpowers because of this– because of what happened to us. Like the, "Why me?" can turn into cultivating superpowers of empathy, and strength, and resilience, and compassion.
Haley Radke: I'm tearing up because I'm like, "Yes, yes, yes. We are resilient and can do awesome things because of the hurts that we've experienced."
Thank you. That's a wonderful thought to end on. Pam, where can we connect with you online?
Pamela Cordano: I have a website, which is pamelacordanomft.com. MFT stands for marriage and family therapist in California.
Haley Radke: Excellent. Thank you so much for your wisdom and sharing that with us today.
Pamela Cordano: Thank you. My pleasure.
Haley Radke: Wasn't that amazing? I still have tears in my eyes from some of the profound things that Pam shared with us. Can I challenge you to listen to this again, maybe one or two more times? Listen for anything that Pam said that really rings true for you, and actually commit to spending some time to work on those things.
If we're gonna heal together, it's gonna take some work. I promise, I am doing that work alongside of you. If you're a part of our secret Facebook group, come and let me know what you're working on. I'll share what I'm working on there, too. What's the secret group all about? It's for partners of the show to have a safe place, and it's a secret group, so no one but myself and the other members will see you're a part of it.
Our members include many of the guests we've had share their stories with us. It's a small, intimate group, so your voice will not get lost in hundreds of comments. Adopteeson.com/partner has all the details. If you have any questions about being a partner, send me a note on the website, adopteeson.com. Don't forget to enter the giveaway I mentioned last week for that trio of books.
I think there's still a couple of entries left, so go to adopteeson.com/survey and help me get to know you a bit better and then you can enter to win three of our recommended resources. You Don't Look Adopted by Anne Heffron, Bastards by Mary Anna King, and A Series of Extreme Decisions: An Adoptee's Story by Liz Story.
Next Friday, you'll get to hear my interview with John. If you've ever had a hard time relating to your adoptive parents, you don't want to miss this episode. We talk about some really challenging feelings and John doesn't hold anything back. Make sure you're subscribed in iTunes, Google Play, wherever you listen to podcasts, or even on YouTube.
Last thing, would you tell just one friend about this episode? Maybe they could be that trusted adult in your life that Pam was telling us about. Don't keep this to yourself. We really need each other to move forward in healing together. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
