22 [Healing Series] When You Don't Find Answers with Katie Jae Naftzger, LICSW
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/22
Haley Radke: 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 discuss what to do when you search and you don't find any answers.
Let's listen in.
Katie Naftzger is an experienced psychotherapist who works with adoptees through the lifecycle, adoptive parents, and families. Welcome to Adoptees On, Katie.
Katie Jae Naftzger: Thank you so much.
Haley Radke: I would love it if you would just spend a couple minutes introducing yourself to us.
Katie Jae Naftzger: Well, I am a Korean adoptee. I've been a psychotherapist for almost 20 years. I was someone who didn't necessarily consciously think about my birth parents throughout my childhood, and it was really the first, they called it the first international gathering of Korean adoptees, which was in the year 2000, that I was sort of interested in going to, which was in Korea and there were like 400 Koreans who went to that. And it really felt like it made sense to at least initiate a search at that point. And so I was just starting grad school, I think. And so I basically made the decision to initiate something and they didn't come up with much at that point, and so it was a pretty short process. But I actually initiated a second search a little bit later or several years later, which I can also talk about.
Haley Radke: What I know of your story is that you actually haven't really found anything and that's one reason I really wanted you to talk with us today because there's a lot of adoptees, especially international, but not even completely international, some domestic as well, that have searched and just come to roadblocks. And can't find the answers that they're looking for. They've done DNA testing, they've hired searchers, the works. They've done everything that they can think of, and it just looks like they're not gonna find anything. So can you just tell us a little bit more about that part of your story and what do you do to reconcile that in your own mind? Like maybe I'm not gonna find the answers that I really want. Katie Jae Naftzger: It was a really interesting trajectory to that point, cause I, I do think I have gotten to that point where I feel content with what happened or didn't happen. And so fast forward several years later, I became interested in writing a book. It's a different book than the one that I'm, I actually wrote, but back then it was a book about a young adult being a young adult adoptee. And so I approached Betty Jean Lifton, who is now passed away, but she was in the Cambridge area, so I did approach her given that she had written two books and I wanted to get her advice on how to write the book or just pick her brain a little bit about what the experience was like for her. And when I met with her, it was interesting. She really hammered home that I need to search, which is also interesting because I had already searched and I did tell her that, but somehow that didn't really change anything. She still just kept talking about how I needed to search again, and that I needed to do it because I was a therapist and I needed to do it because I needed to get my, get my hands dirty if I was gonna understand the search experience and if I was gonna work with a lot of people who have either searched and found or searched and haven't found that I needed to have as much experience in that area as possible.
I took her seriously and I started doing some research and literally a week later there was something that came up on one of the feeds on a service trip in Korea over Thanksgiving. It was the week of Thanksgiving, and I just jumped on that. And so that became the catalyst for me putting in the paperwork again and just wondering if I was going to come up with something because the hard thing about international adoption, and this may be true in domestic adoption too, is that sometimes they don't tell you everything the first time. Sometimes there are things in the file that you didn't know were there. Sometimes they make sort of fabricate things that you thought were true, that aren't true.
Just because I didn't get any information before didn't necessarily mean that I wasn't going to get information the second time. So I made this journey to Korea. Actually, my adoptive mom and I went together and it was a tour. And I hadn't found anything by the time the tour happened, I think I might have had a kind of a hope that something would've come up, that they would've taken my request seriously.
And I had heard that they take requests seriously, especially if you are coming to Korea, so that can sometimes help your case a little bit for them to prioritize you. But anyway, they didn't come up with anything. And so I went on this tour and really, most people on the tour were meeting their birth family and so initially I just felt completely alienated, maybe even more lost than I was before the trip. And I was wondering whether this was even a good idea. My daughter was very young at the time, she was three years old. And I just was thinking, I left my family for this, and why, how is this gonna be good for me?
How is this gonna help me? And we were on the same floor. Our room, our bedroom was on the same floor as the infant care unit in the adoption agency which was Dylan Adoption, which is not, was not my agency. But anyway, that was the agency sponsoring the tour. And it just so happened my flight was late and so I came in really late and I went straight to bed. But throughout the night, I could hear all of this crying from the infant care unit, which was a few doors down, and I literally almost heard it also because I was jet lagged almost the whole night. There was almost no time where there wasn't someone in that infant care unit crying.
And it was really intense and it happened actually almost the whole week that I heard this crying. And I became aware of this urge that I had and and the urge was for me to run in there and say, they're not gonna choose you if you cry, like shh. They're not gonna choose you if you cry. And that alone really helped me to just really understand how embedded these issues are.
I was doing fairly well, I was doing fine in, family, career, blah, blah, all that stuff. And just to realize that was so embedded inside of me was pretty raw actually. And I guess also pretty helpful to me as a person, but also as a therapist.
Haley Radke: That's so interesting, Katie. And it, you say that and my heart just breaks a little bit because you said in your intro that you didn't ever think of searching or, but that's to come to that realization that yeah, there's still this piece that's kind of broken, like hurting,
Katie Jae Naftzger: Yeah. I think it's hurting and then it's also I guess, I was also realizing how much of a survival issue adoptees can feel like they're in the middle of it. It's not just a story of abandonment, or relinquishment, it's also a survival story. And so when we as adoptees don't wanna feel vulnerable, or don't want to express vulnerability, or don't wanna cry or don't wanna show certain things, it's not just because we're embarrassed or shy or reserved. It's because deep down we also feel like this could be a risk, that this could be a risk for our life in some way. Yeah so that happened and then we actually had two meetings with birth mothers in Korea and during the first meeting, again, a lot of people were meeting their birth mothers.
And I wasn't, and my mother was also, I don't know, she was very emotional about the whole thing as well. One, during that meeting, one of the moms asked me directly. I just, I think that we had just forged a connection somehow. She asked me directly, what's the hardest part about being adopted? She asked through a translator. So it wasn't a quick interaction, but, and I just completely broke down, which I can never tell when that's gonna happen. Exactly. And so I, I just got really upset and said, not knowing any information, that I don't know anything. Then there was all this, there was all this chatter back and forth that, which I couldn't understand because it was in Korean.
And they're talking to the translator. The translator are talking back and I'm thinking, what's going on? And then the translator explained to us those of us on the tour, they're saying, why wouldn't she know that's wrong? They're really upset about it. She deserves to know her story. She deserves to know what happened to her.
There was something about that moment where at that moment I could let go my need to search that. There is something about being heard by mothers who are also birth mothers, even if it wasn't my mother. And there was something about having a witness to that. And the power of the group, you know that there were a group of them, one of them actually put their baby on the table in a in a hold, in a kind of crib kind of thing. One had their hundredth day birthday party for their baby, and they were all there because they were trying to make a decision about whether or not to relinquish their child. And so they were there in the kind of remainder of the days that they were pregnant and making these decisions with the support of one another.
So there was something about that really for me and once I felt like I had that witness and once I heard them say she, why is she, why does she have to go through that? She doesn't deserve that. I really just was able to let go and it also affected my work. I also now say, look, you don't deserve that. You deserve to know the answers. You deserve to know who you came from. You deserve to know why, what happened and there is something really validating about that. And it's so interesting how we often don't say that, and I'm not sure why, but we don't often just say, look, you didn't deserve to go through that, and you shouldn't, that should, that's not fair. That's not just.
Haley Radke: What a powerful moment. What can you tell us about creating that moment for ourselves? Like maybe we're not maybe the ones I'm really thinking of, a lot of them are baby scoop era and there's closed records and they're just, all the doors are shut and so they don't get a chance to go on a tour like that possibly but what are some ways that they can create some of those moments for themselves to really come to that place of healing and feeling understood.
Katie Jae Naftzger: I think it's really hard to feel empowered alone, and there is something about the power of group and so that that's one thought is that, if you can do it in a group of people who also understand and if you can talk to people who are in a group who also understand, that was really part of the power for me.
One of the ways I talk about adoption is that it's an experience with no words, no witnesses, and no documentation. And so part of the first challenge is just being able to find the words to describe the experience because it's actually really hard to capture the experience in words.
It's sort of an abstract thing that a lot of people say that's just human, that's just about being human. No one wants to be abandoned or whatnot. But it is so much more than that and that is where I start with my clients, let's just try to find the words together for what you're going through and what you're describing without even trying to fix it or help or change it or, do anything with those at right away, but just to find the words. And then I, let's say as a therapist, I become that witness. I am that witness to their scariest fears and their, the things that they feel are intimate and that they feel a lot of maybe shame or kind of despair about. And then the third piece is the documentation that, one positive of social media is that people can choose to express their experience in ways that last like the books and like podcasts and like other kinds of writing and films and documentaries, and so I think that really is the next step. And then I think the final step is possibly trying to help other people who are going through things that you know that you can understand.
Haley Radke: Once you've come to this place of peace. What do you say to someone like me who keeps probing and thinking like, are you sure you don't wanna find are you gonna not gonna have another trip to back to Korea? Like, how can you just stop looking? I don't understand that, because I've found my biological parents, which is, I'm very fortunate that my search was easy. But yeah, what do you say to someone like me who keeps probing those things?
Katie Jae Naftzger: It's, I think there, there might be, a style difference too, that, everyone has their own just way of trying to come to terms with these things, and I think there are people who will go to the ends of the earth to, to possibly find what they need to find, even though the odds are still low.
I guess I also know that older Korean adoptees, I, and I'll put myself in that category in the sense that it seems like a lot of Korean adoptees in their twenties and let's say early thirties, have had a lot more luck. And so for me, there's always a cost to searching. I was away from my family. It was extremely expensive. It takes a lot of time. There's a lot of turmoil and it's really far away. So if it was a domestic adoption, I might feel a little differently that I can just continue. And in a way that makes it more complicated because there's not a clear boundary about that, that I can't be just putting my life on hold and traveling back and forth to Korea.
And I think also the other part of people's personality is that I'm not gonna go on TV and you know, put my name all over the Korean papers and get a detective and all that stuff. I'm just not, that's not, I'm not gonna do that especially because I know the odds are so low.
Haley Radke: Korea has quite an established program and there's a lot of adoptees now from some of the really a lot poorer countries that there is no, there's just no way, like even if you traveled there, what would you find?
Katie Jae Naftzger: It really is like trying to find a needle in the haystack. And I think that was true for Chinese adoption too, that it's still extremely difficult and maybe even more difficult because they have even like less documentation and evidence than witnesses and all that stuff. And then the film Somewhere Between happened which was a wonderful film and it was really exciting to have that be become so mainstream, that it was so popular, but it also skewed the idea of the search a little bit. And I do think it opened things up for Chinese adoptees who had been able to close that door, that look, there's no chance. And then they see Somewhere Between, and now they're really in a lot of anguish because they still know that there's barely any chance.
And so how much of their emotional psychic energy are they going to spend? How much of their money are they gonna spend? And time? And these are also, at least let's say my clients, they're also emotionally vulnerable anyway. And so they're always trying to balance, how do you take care of yourself and also leave yourself open to that at the same time.
Haley Radke: And I think that's such a good thought to end on. You gave us those few different steps that we can do. But yeah, just coming to that place, where am I gonna keep looking or I'm gonna, just gonna close this door forever or for right now. Katie, thank you so much for sharing a part of your story with us and for those wise words. Where can we find you online?
Katie Jae Naftzger: My website is adoptiontherapyma.com.
Haley Radke: And I will link to your social media accounts on our show notes as well. And you have a new book that's coming out that's called Parenting In the Eye of the Storm: The Adoptive Parents Guide to Navigating the Teen Years. And this book is for adoptive parents, but I'm finding a lot of insights for adoptees as well to read it. Yeah, check out Katie's book. You can find info about that on her website and it's also on Amazon. So thank you again for your time. It was so nice to introduce you to our listeners.
Katie Jae Naftzger: Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.
Haley Radke: Whether or not you're in the position of coming to a dead end with search, I think those four steps that Katie laid out for us could really be helpful for coming to terms with a lot of adoption issues. First, find the words, find someone to be a witness to our story, document our story in a tangible way, and finally help someone else along the same journey.
Friends, I feel like this is a lot of what we are doing here together on this podcast. Adoptee On has been getting some tremendous support from our Patreon supporters. So a big thank you to all of you. You know who you are and if you wanna join them and become a partner of the show, you can access our secret Facebook group, which has some really lovely adoptees in it.
They are incredibly understanding and supportive. AdopteesOn.com/partner is where you can sign up now. Today, would you tell one friend about this podcast? Do you know someone who has had a really difficult time searching? Maybe they'd be interested in hearing Katie discuss how to find that sense of peace.
Thanks for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
