235 JaeRan Kim, Ph.D.
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/235
Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
(Upbeat music)
You are listening to adoptees on the podcast where adoptees discussed the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Happy 2023. What a way for us to begin the new year. One of the people I'm most highly esteem in the adoptee community is here, Dr. JaeRan Kim. JaeRan shares her personal story and a brilliant new model to help us move beyond "out of the fog" language and instead come into adoptee consciousness.
Dr. JaeRan Kim is an adoptee scholar and community leader, author of the prolific blog Harlow's Monkey, and as one of the very first adoptees, I had the great honor of learning from when I was first experiencing a rupture and dissonance in my understanding of adoption to use their new adoptee consciousness model language.
Before we get started, I wanted to invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We have a ton of amazing events coming up. I'll talk about that at the end of the show, so stick around to find out about that.
Dr. JaeRan Kim and I wrap up our interview with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
(Upbeat Music)
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Dr. JaeRan. Kim, welcome JaeRan.
JaeRan Kim: Thank you, Haley. I'm so honored to be asked to be on your podcast.
Haley: Okay. I'm gonna gush a little bit because you are one of the very first bloggers I ever followed back when I was first in reunion with my father, which was almost 12 years ago.
And you are one of the main reasons I started processing adoption in a different way. And so you were at, you know, on my bucket list. This is a bucket list interview for me, so I'm very, very honored to speak with you and I'd love it if you would start the way we usually do and share some of your story with us.
JaeRan Kim: Sure. I think most people probably know, if you've read my blog or listened to some of my other podcast interviews that I've done that I grew up in Minnesota. I was adopted in 1971 to a family there and you know, just had kind of what I would describe a pretty non-descript typical childhood. I had two younger siblings.
My parents were just, you know, kind of your typical, average suburban Minnesota family. We grew up, I grew up kind of having all the childhood experiences that most kids really thrive in. And what I typically say is that my parents were actually pretty good when it comes to talking about adoption. I didn't, I never felt really any different.
I never felt singled out. But the, the challenging part for me was we didn't talk about that I was a transracial adoptee, that I was Korean and that when I came I was almost three years old. And so there was just kind of a lot about that aspect of my identity that was never really touched on growing up.
And you know, I think like a lot of other adoptees, and I know we're gonna talk about this model that I did with some other adoptees, it took me a long time. I was like, typically in college before I really started thinking about and processing what it meant to be a transracial adoptee. And mostly that was because of the exposure I had to other people that had different experiences, well shared experience with me, but different from what I had experienced growing up.
Haley: And I saw that something happened to you when you were 30 years old that prompted something for you.
JaeRan Kim: We all have these catalyst moments, right? Where something specifically happens. I reconnected with a friend of mine that I had met, that known very briefly as a child and she said, I'm going to Korea.
I would like you to come to Korea with me to do a birth family search. And so we did. And that was really kind of what opened everything up for me is starting to meet other adoptees and getting connected to that community. At first it was Korean adoptees and that prompted me to come back and go back to school and think about becoming a social worker.
I really wanted to understand, you know, how could a child like me who was in these orphanages in South Korea end up in a white middle class Christian suburban family. It doesn't just happen, you know, the adoption narrative is kind of like, oh, you know, these parents need a kid and these kid, this kid needs a parent. It just happens and it all works out. And I knew that, that all these other things had to have happened for our family to be what it was.
And I wanted to understand it, and nobody could really explain it. My parents couldn't explain it. They didn't understand the mechanics of it other than their own personal experience.
So meeting other adoptees, hearing their stories, seeing the differences and the similarities really helped me think broader. Helped me think about, okay, so what are the systems? What are the push-pull factors? What happened in Korea? What happened in other countries? Oh, what happened in the United States?
You know, I only knew my own experience. I didn't really know anything about domestic adoption either. . And so going to school and getting my social work degree gave me the opportunity to really learn about how adoption's been practiced in the United States in other countries. It was, it was really, it was a catalyst for me.
Haley: So you started blogging around 2006?
JaeRan Kim: Mm-hmm.
Haley: And I have a quote that is from your blog, so I'll read it to you.
"It sounds cliche, but 10 years ago I was a totally different person from who I am today. I was a shy, timid, private, introverted person who believed that I'd never figure out how to do anything meaningful in my life. Everything I've done in these past 10 years has been because I had supportive and loving people in my life who believed I could amount to something in this world, even when I didn't believe them myself."
Now that was from January of 2010.
JaeRan Kim: Mm-hmm.
Haley: And so now we're 13 years later. So can you tell me about your evolution from, I guess age 30, from that pivotal moment to now, in your understanding of adoption and, and its personal impact on your life and, and the adoptees that you researched.
JaeRan Kim: And I would even have to say that I'd have to go back a little bit further than 2000 when I was 30 because, well, actually in 2000 I was 30, almost 32. I'm 54 now. So I'm trying to do the math here quickly, because in my twenties, I, I got married really young. My husband and I we're still together. We eloped when we were 20 years old.
Haley: Oh.
JaeRan Kim: And yeah. Yeah. And you know, part of that blog post that you just read, was about him because he really supported my whole journey.
When he met me, I wasn't thinking about adoption at all. I was barely thinking about race. You know, I was just, I look back at my little baby- adoptee/ adult- adoptee self and I just think about all the things I didn't know. And you know, a lot of partners when they marry or start, have re having relationships with their adoptee partners who go through that evolution sometimes there's a lot of questions like, why now? Why was this not an issue before? You know, what happened? And so having somebody who's really open to being able to say, yep, just tell me it's okay. I'm not, you know, non-judgmental. Okay, we'll figure this out together. I think it's really huge. So I, I'd just also like to give a shout out that part of going back to school, becoming a social worker, starting my blog, was really supporting, it was supported by him. He, he came up with a name Harlow's Monkey by the way.
Haley: Which is so brilliant. We love that.
JaeRan Kim: It's still great. Cause I was talking about in my social work programs, I was talking about Harlow's Monkey and then, you know, I wanted to start doing this blog and I couldn't come up with a catchy name and I was anonymous at first, so I didn't want anyone to know it was me again, that's that shy, introverted self. I didn't wanna be public. So he said, well what about Harlow's Monkey as as your moniker? And it was brilliant.
I think I just didn't really think that much about adoption outside of my own experience. And I had a lot of questions. My parents first of all were very open with my adoption records, what they had of it, and I didn't know to ask for more or to dig further.
And I would say that like a lot of people, I was just kind of going along for the ride. I just accepted everything that had happened to me as well. That just must have been the way that it needed to work out. I grew up in a very evangelical Christian family, and so there was a lot of talk about things that were meant to be.
It was God's will, that sort of thing. And so as I got older and started questioning things like, well, it's not, I didn't think personally it was God's will. I was really starting to uncover that there were people involved and they may have been doing it based on what they thought was God's will. But it was really impactful to me, and I don't, I didn't necessarily go along with, with that mindset, right?
Because I had left the church in my early twenties and was kind of going through my own spiritual identity at the same time. And because adoption was seen as so tied into Christianity in my family growing up it was kind of this, the rupture from being part of this organized religious community.
Also, the rupture around the way I thought about adoption happened at the same time because there's a lot of talk about saviorism and there's a lot of talk about, you know, I, I remember growing up there was a friend of mine who got pregnant when she was in college and everybody in the church wanted her to place the child for adoption.
And I said, I don't think she should do that. She's an adult, you know, she should be able to raise her child. And everybody kept saying, well, it's God's will for her to place that child for adoption. And that was the first time I think I really remember disagreeing, but I didn't feel like I had the power to really strongly argue for that.
Right. In the end, she did keep her child and she raised him, and so it, you know, things worked out, but just the whole narrative around the church saying this, this was in the best interest of both the child and the, and the parent. And that was really my first kind of inkling that, no, I think I have a different belief, but it wasn't fully formed yet.
It was really going to school and re- reading about the Native American boarding schools. Really looking at adoption policies and histories, reading lots of historical books about how adoption practices evolved over time. I was a child welfare student, so I knew I was gonna work in the field of child welfare and seeing how it was practiced, these things really changed how I saw adoption in really significant ways because I think I really learned if you support families, cuz most families love and wanna raise their kids, but there are obstacles and barriers to them being able to do that. And my experience working in child welfare wasn't that all these parents were abusing their kids.
Some did, but many times there were many other things that were preventing them from being able to raise their kids. And it's just everything learning about adoption subsidies. And not that I think that adoptive parents shouldn't receive subsidies necessarily, but why is all this money being spent on supporting kids in their adoptive homes when that money could have supported, you know, families of origin to keep their kids?
When I started working in child welfare, there weren't that many kids being raised by their relatives to keep them intact in their larger families and communities where they had that continuity of history and family. Now that's changed, but when I was working in child welfare in the two thousands, early two thousands, it wasn't the priority.
And I was really influenced by folks like Kevin Campbell who did the Family Finders work. And he would take youth in foster care that supposedly were cold cases, they had no known family members. He would be able to find an average of 40 to 60 family members for these youth in foster care and helped them get connected.
And so I knew that there were people out there doing this work that had kind of the counter narrative to what I had always assumed, you know? And that also then really shaped how I thought about it, and I wanted to, I really wanted other people to know this information too. That was part of the reason why I started the blog.
I was documenting my own journey and I wanted other people to, to have the same information that I had because information is powerful.
Haley: Absolutely. And so you have this moment in your twenties of being like, oh, family preservation. Like of course this, this woman should parent her child. Even when everyone else was like, oh, you know, you should give... and then you see all these systemic practices that have promoted adoption over a preservation.
And, and I, I'm, I'm making some assumptions now, but you see the lack of actual academic studies past childhood for adoptees. Can you talk about that? Finding the gap in the knowledge?
JaeRan Kim: When I was working in child welfare, I was working in foster care adoptions. These were youth that had already experienced a termination of parental right.
That means legally their, you know, their families, their first parents were no longer had any legal physical rights to make decisions about their lives, right? So my job was to find adoptive families for them. And I would read home studies and I would say, I would think, is there a script for home studies?
These parents, all their home studies, all look exactly the same. I used to joke in Minnesota that the families were all married, they all lived outside of the city. They were active in their church. The mom was liked to read and sew or read and quilt, and the dad liked to go fishing and hunting. It, it was almost like a script.
and I had the opportunity to, as part of my work, to attend prospective parent trainings and kind of support groups. And I just really felt like there wasn't, we weren't preparing adoptive families very well and the practices that we were doing every day, I had questions about what's the research evidence on this?
Because talking to the youth, and I worked mostly with youth who were like 12 to 17 years old and they're very vocal and they, they would tell me what they thought about the ways that we were practicing child welfare when I would talk to them about adoptive, prospective adoptive families and what they wanted in an adoptive families.
You know, really listening to them and hearing what they had to say, I thought we're not doing a good job on the end of trying to find adoptive families for these kids that are really gonna listen and who are gonna affirm their identities, who are going to see them for who they are. So I started looking at the research and I have to say I was really disappointed in how the combination of my own personal experience and then my professional experience working with youth who, adopt or foster youth, and really kind of wondering like, where is the research that kind of talks about what everybody is saying, who's had this lived experience of being either in foster care or being an adoptee.
Because at this time I had also been, again, like meeting all these other adoptees, Korean adoptees and black transracial adoptees and Native American adoptees. And so I was meeting many, many more people who had foster care or adoption experiences and I didn't think the research really spoke to our lived experiences.
And I remember saying to my husband, I think I need to go to a PhD program, because I, I want to ask the questions that nobody else is asking, cuz most of the questions were asking young kids about their experiences and they could tell you what it was like to be an eight or a nine year old, but they couldn't tell you, you know, when they're 30 or 40 or 50 or 60, what it was like being a kid.
You know, kids wanna please their parents, they don't wanna say anything wrong. You know, I just, I was always a little concerned about how much assurance adults were placing on what kids were saying when they hadn't gone through their whole adoptee development yet. You know, like all of us do. So they were making placement, like professionals are making placement decisions based on what little kids are saying without thinking about how that might impact us when we're much older in our lives.
And youth, especially if you're adolescents, there's so much negativity around what they say and what they want. And I just really felt like we weren't listening, we weren't listening to, to what youth in foster care were saying about their experiences and how they thought about adoption. They're constantly being told you don't know what's in your best interest, but they're, they will tell you what they think and it has to be nuanced.
You know, obviously, like when you're an adolescent, you don't know everything yet, you know. So sometimes adults do have, you know, that wisdom to share about what might, what they might wanna anticipate in the future. But I really felt like we weren't listening to foster youth at all.
Haley: So I know you've done multiple different studies that have added to the, you know, wealth of knowledge now about, well, maybe not wealth, but like, the start of knowledge about adult adoptees and our experiences.
And, I, I do, I'm we're gonna get to the model that you developed with some adoptee peers. I first wanna ask, how has it been now in recent years working in this field as an adult adoptee and wanting to add to the conversation about adult adoptee experiences and looking back to childhood and et cetera?
I mean, I was at a conference that you presented at last year, early in the year with I think probably a student of yours. And you know, there's other people presenting at the conference that are adoptive parents or are still working in adoption and perpetuating some of the problematic, you know, system that you have, you know, shared like you're like discovering as you were going through your, you know, blogging and, and academia career.
So what is it like for you and how do you deal still being and working with colleagues that are still doing this problematic stuff?
JaeRan Kim: There's, there are. Yeah. It, it can be challenging. There are biases, but I think, well, first of all, there have been adoptees doing research and doing the work long before me and I am where I am because they, some of them reached out or recognized me or mentored and supported me. I was highly influenced by a number of adoptees who are doing research. You know, Dr. John Rabel and Amanda Baden, and Dr. Gina Samuels. So there have been lots of others who I read their articles when I was in grad school and that helped me kind of think and formulate strategies for how I'm gonna do my own research.
I think one of the things that is the hardest for me is, and a lot of adoptee researchers are pretty good about, and kind of insistent on talking about our positionality and talking about how our lenses and our experiences inform the questions that we ask and the, the way we design our studies and the topics that we wanna explore.
And it's always been frustrating to me how few adoption researchers who are adoptive parents and they don't disclose it, or they think that it doesn't provide a, a bias or any specific lens to their work. And I've always really just wondered like, what is what that is? I, I constantly hear new like, oh, did you know so and so is an adoptive parent?
And it's, of course, it's somebody that does adoption research and I didn't know . I just learned of another one. And I'm always like, why don't they ever talk about it? I mean, we talk about it. And what that does is it creates a sense that adoptees are biased and that when we do our research, we're doing it because of our own, you know, oftentimes they think it's our own bad experiences with adoption.
One of the things that I talk about is like, I don't have like a bad adoption story, right? I think I have kind of the classic adoption story for a lot of adoptees, meaning that there were some things that, you know, were hard and challenging growing up, but like I, my adoptive parents weren't abusive and you know, so all those things.
But there is an assumption that, because I like to research the things that aren't talked about in adoption. For example, adoption disruptions and displacement and adoptee estrangements from their adoptive parents. This isn't necessarily driven just because I had this experience. I talk about it because so many adoptees have told me their stories and nowhere, it's not found anywhere.
And in fact, when I bring it up with other child welfare or adoption researchers, I often get this, well, there's no data on that. They discount it. Well that's such a small percentage, we just don't have enough information about that. But until we start to actually do research on it, we never will. And all those people who have had those experiences, their voices are never gonna be documented.
They're never, their experiences are never gonna be taken seriously. And I think that that's terrible, for lack of a better word. I think that that's, that's abhorrent. We need to be documenting all of the experiences that adoptees have, not just the ones that make it look like everything is great, and so we should continue the practices and the status quo.
And I don't, even if it's only 5%, even if it's 10%, we need to be re-looking at our practices. If there's five or 10% of the adoptees that are not being, if they're adoptions harm them, we need to take that seriously. I've said this to other folks too. You know, when there's something else that's kind of a public health crisis, the threshold is much less than that.
But when it comes to adoptees, we tend to say, well, unless it becomes like the majority, then it's fine. But we have made, we have changed laws for a much smaller percentage of people who have been harmed by things. I just think that we need to be thinking the same way when it comes to child welfare and to the, to adoptees.
Haley: Absolutely. So we're so thankful that you are like, oh, we don't have data on that. Okay, let's get some. So you're. The people doing that. And I appreciate too, you know, this acknowledgement of all those who've come before us, right? So for me, I look at you and I'm like, oh my gosh, she came before me. And in your blog you were always highlighting and continue to do so, all of the folks that you learned from and, and you would reference and all, all of those things.
So I appreciate that, trying to bring all that knowledge to the next gen and the next gen after that, et cetera. So before we talk about the model you developed with your colleagues, you know, the language that we've used for years is adoptees coming outta the fog. Meaning some form of when we realize the impact adoption has had on our lives and the implication that people that are still, you know, air quotes in the fog, haven't woken up to that yet.
Awaken awakened from the great sleep as Betty Jean Lifton would say. But something that you pointed out to me before we started recording when we were planning the interview, that you mentioned that you didn't want adoptees to feel shame if they didn't know about the complexities of adoption because the system was built to support keeping us in the dark.
JaeRan Kim: Yes.
Haley: Can you talk about that please?
JaeRan Kim: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is something that I learned, you know, when I was going through my own awakening or out of the fog or however you wanna call it, we would call it moving into rupture. Yeah, we know there's so much about the process of adoption that is hidden. You've raised I mean, our whole identities as adoptees are kept secret.
And Tony Corsentino, who you had on your podcast, I loved how he phrased the difference between privacy and secrecy, right. And how, who it benefits. I thought he did such a great job of articulating that. And that's, I think that that's a huge part of what I mean by this, that statement. Because so much of an adoptee's life is shrouded in secrecy with this kind of assumption that it's meant to protect people, but it really doesn't, it's actually quite harmful for us to not have our information and know our identities.
And so it, because we're constantly told these paradoxes like, this happened for your own good. That when we start to really explore and think about it and understand, oh, all these adoption practices, some of them are really, really harmful. The idea of falsifying our birth certificates, for example, and that we don't have access to our original birth certificates.
And these are really damaging to a person's sense of identity, but it's also just damaging to all the things that happen when we live our daily lives. Like every, we're, well, you know, this, you know, adoptees are the only people that, that don't actually have true identities because they're all built on false documents.
Haley: Isn't that, it's wild to think about, right? Like you just paused there, like uhhuh . It is, yeah. And you're talking about original birth certificate access and you're someone that actually doesn't even know when your actual birthday was. You know?
JaeRan Kim: Right, right. Like or where I was born at all right.
Haley: You're like, I think I came, I was around three. I mean, who, who gets to decide how old you are?
JaeRan Kim: Well, that's just it. Exactly. Who gets to decide all of it? Who gets to decide? You know, who our parents are going to be? Who gets to decide what our names are going to be? Who gets to decide if our birth dates are accurate? Who gets to decide how much of our past family history we are entitled to know? All of that. And as you know, especially in the United States, but it happens everywhere, because there's more of a demand for especially young children, babies, and, and infants. So many people have done really unethical and illegal things in order to become parents.
Adoption professionals and I really say that social workers in particular need to be held accountable for how they've participated in falsifying records, in obscuring information and advocating for legislation that perpetuates this harm of us not being able to have access to our own information. Right. I mean, that's just it there, and I'm not even talking about then once we're placed in families and what, how we screen and the narratives around who's believed.
You know, as we know there are adoptive parents, it's like there's other parents who are not always providing safe loving homes for their children, but because they're adoptive parents, the scrutiny isn't there. And in the same way that it is for families of origin, if there's any allegations of abuse or neglect.
My research found adoptees would often tell other adults that they were being abused or neglected in their homes and they were not believed. Or people would kind of throw their hands up and they say, well, you know, there was this assumption that adoptive parents are always better parents because of who our first parents are and the fact, you know, that there was a reason why we were with the adoptive parents instead.
All of this is just a complicated way of saying that the system all the ways that laws and policies and practices have kind of purposely kept us away from this information. You know, when we aren't informed about our own structural systems that that had a hand in how our families were put together, then it's really easy of course for us just to believe all the platitudes and the media and what everybody has said.
You know, adoptive parents tell their kids, "oh, your, your first mom loved you so much she placed you for adoption", or "we got to choose you" knowing that actually all those different things are probably not true. They don't actually really know most of the time, you know, organizations, agencies, professional staff, they did the matching.
They worked with the first families. You know, it might be a little bit different now in with open adoptions and and stuff, but at least for most of us who are of a certain age, it was really kind of random about how we ended up in the families that we ended up in. And so once you start to uncover and, and dig in and learn about all this, that's when you have what we in, in our model called the rupture, right?
All of a sudden you're like... and then you can feel a huge sense of internal shame, like, why didn't I know? Or, this is partly what we're hoping this model is going to do is help other adoptees, not be so negative towards adoptees who haven't learned this yet. Right. Because I think that we can cause lateral harm to each other when we say like a good adoptee is one who is anti- adoption or wants to abolish adoption or whatever.
We have a lot of diversity in our experiences. And so I think that all of our experiences need to be taken into consideration. And so some adoptees might be starting their path towards becoming more critically aware, but if they feel like they're not doing it fast enough or in the same way that other adoptees do, they might actually just close down and shut down and go back into a more convenient status quo phase and not do that exploration.
And so I, I want us to support every adoptee. Mm-hmm. who's go going through that.
Haley: Well, it feels like it's not. Safe, then it's not safe to explore cuz you're just gonna get shut down. And when you were describing earlier, the word that was in my head of, of the experience of us growing up and being told all of these things and the societal pressure was just indoctrination.
JaeRan Kim: Yes.
Haley: Like we have been indoctrinated. So to unpack years and years of that, I absolutely, like, I'm, I'm so glad you used the word shame. Like it does feel, it's like once you see it, you can't unsee it. And so this, this idea that you're like, how come I didn't see it? Like I'm not, am I not a stupid person? I don't understand.
Anyway, let's, let's, can you go through the model and the different pieces for us? Cuz I think that will help just frame our discussion about this. So Yeah, I'll, I'll let you go ahead and do that.
JaeRan Kim: So we, of course, you know, some of our. Adoptee ancestors as you know, Betty Jean Lifton, and we looked at the model that Boarders, Penny (JM) and Borders (DI) had done, kind of, and then we, we kind of looked at other groups of people, specifically Paolo Freire and his pedagogy of the oppressed, working with folks who you know, like conceptualizing the idea of what happens when people start to question and they develop a critical consciousness about their oppression.
Gloria also, you know, writes about the process of, in her specific case, what does it mean to be mixed race? What does it mean to be mestiza? What does it mean to be a multilingual, multiethnic and queer and try to embrace all of these identities in these, in this world that wants to put you in these narrow confines.
And as adoptees, we all know, right? We are used to knowing that we're from multiple families, that we have these really these experiences that are not singular. And so we wanted to kind of talk about that as well as kind of think about identity development, because there's been several identity development models around like adoptees throughout their, their lives.
But identity development models tend to be really kind of like you're in this phase and then you're in this phase, and then maybe you come over here. And oftentimes there's a judgment about one, phases being good or bad.
Haley: Right, the linear and like ..
JaeRan Kim: The linearness of it.
Haley: You gotta go from one to two and and number four is the highest Uhhuh.
JaeRan Kim: Right. Right. And here's where you should be and here's where we don't want you to be anymore. And again, that causes a sense of shame if you are not there yet, or if you haven't had experiences that have challenged you to think about the paradoxes or to think about both/ and. So we really wanted a model that was, more holistically show kind of demonstrated what many of us go through, which we think is more of a spiral because you might learn something like, let's say you realize, oh, it's actually problematic that my birth certificate says that I was born in a place that I was not born, to people who I was not born to, right?
That's, that's actually not true, and yet I don't have access to that true information. So it may start there. You may not be ready yet to be thinking about, did my adoption agency falsify? Maybe I'm not truly an orphan, or maybe this information my parents received about my first family isn't accurate. Or maybe I was kidnapped or stolen, or you know, whatever the situation is.
You may not be ready to go there yet, but maybe you're ready to start just thinking about what are the ethics around having a birth certificate that's not true and accurate. You can go through all these different stages and kind of circle around and go back. You might feel like you've resolved one part of your adoption experience, but again, it may be a while before you have a rupture that kind of propels you to be thinking about something else.
So that's why we conceptualized our motto as spiral instead of as linear, and we wanted to kind of say like, status quo is just like when you just don't question what's been told to you. It's accepting, accepting it without any kind of curiosity. Right. And a lot of adoptees do this because it's safe.
And you're validated by larger society and it's a protective measure, right? So one of the things that I sometimes tell people who kind of question that is like, you know, well they seem fine and they don't seem to care and they, they're uncritical. And I'm like, well, maybe they had to be uncritical.
Maybe it was the safest thing for them to be uncritical because they know that they're in a family or they can sense that their environment wouldn't be supportive of them exploring that. So maybe it will take, that's why I think a lot of us, as the older we get, the more we're able to be critical and to, to look at adoption and with a critical lens.
Because the older we get, the more resources we have, the better we know ourselves. We oftentimes have supported people in our lives and so it's a safer way for us to do that. But that's why I think it's also really, it can be really challenging for some because they may, may not have that safety around them to do that exploration.
So the status quo is kind of where I think many of us start out. And then rupture again is where something happens. We learn a bit of information, we meet somebody who had a different experience. It's what kind of is the catalyst or the instigator to us starting to have questions and start to think like, oh, maybe what I knew isn't the way it is.
And then dissonance is that time period where you're really struggling between what you thought, you know, knew the information you're starting to learn. And it's really what I, I kind of call it like struggling with the paradoxes because there's so many paradoxes and adoption. So for example, we said if somebody says your birth mother, I don't like to use birth mother, but it's common for people to say, your birth mother loved you so much, she placed you for adoption cuz she wanted a better life for you.
So struggling with that, that's the time of dissonance. Like, is that really true? And maybe at that point you've searched for your first family and maybe you've met your first family and you find out that's not true. And so it's that real struggle around what can I believe? What should I believe? That dissonance is like, I need to do something about it, but you don't really know what.
And the expansiveness is where you start to kind of dig deeper into it and say, okay, I, I need to do more thinking of this. I need to do more research on this. I need to explore this dissonance more. I need to see if I can find ways to help me come to terms and understand what has happened. And then the last stage we call forgiveness and activism.
And that's really where we've done a lot of the work in our expansiveness time. We start to formulate some ideas about what it means to us. And then oftentimes it's where we wanna join in with other people now and start to think about the broader sense. So it's a little bit of a pullback from our own individual experiences and now where we're starting to say, let's join these other groups.
Let's coalesce. Let's you know it's where you might do some activism. And people sometimes ask about the forgiveness part. And when we talk about forgiveness, we don't mean like carte blanche, just say like, oh, like the adoption system was abusive towards me and caused me harm, but it's okay, I forgive them.
It's about, again, taking that larger, broader view in saying things happened and yes, we should hold people accountable, but also I use the example of like adoptive parents; kind of understanding that our adoptive parents were told the same lies that everybody else was told, right? And so sometimes the things that they did that were not supportive are because they really believed what other people had told them and they wanted to believe that.
And so we can understand that they did or said things that were harmful to us, but not because they were intending necessarily to be harmful to us, but that it was part of the larger system that intentionally tried to keep us all in the dark. So I don't know if that helps some of the listeners with that aspect, but I know that's something that we get asked about.
Haley: I think it's, I, I, I appreciate that you brought it up cuz I did have a question about that. . And when I read the paper as I read it, it doesn't mean like, oh, you have to have forgiven. Especially for, I mean there's lots of us that are, as you mentioned earlier, are estranged from adoptive parents or had a bad situation, and it's not like forgiving for that.
It's, it's more this piece of the participation in the adoption industry as a whole versus like our personal kind of relationship with them. Am I getting that correct?
JaeRan Kim: Yes. I mean, because people still need to be held accountable for their behaviors and their actions. So we're not saying, oh, if you had abusive parents, just forgive them.
Not at all. Understanding you may have been placed in that family because of poor adoption practices by an agency who didn't do their due diligence and vetting your parents, for example. You're not necessarily even forgiving that adoption agency. Like they should still be held accountable if they committed some unethical practices.
But for us to be able to work together and move forward, I don't say move on because I don't think we need to forget what happened to us, but moving forward, meaning to, to be able to help change the system, to change society, we also need to be able to kind of just say like, yes, things happen. Like history is filled with terrible things that have happened and I just, I think we felt like we need to be able to have a sense of, for... and one more thing, a sense of forgiveness for ourselves for also not knowing as well, right?
The forgiveness is like a larger sense of just like trying to heal ourselves. Not saying people aren't, shouldn't be held accountable for the things that they did.
Haley: Mm-hmm. , it's kind of like, there isn't quite the right word. Like, it's like trying to find a sense of peace in it. Not necessarily, yeah, like, like you said, not necessarily forgetting, like forgive and forget or that kind of a thing, but some sense of coming to terms with it so that you can be an activist and change things, if that's your vibe or not.
JaeRan Kim: Or not. Well, you know, it's also, it's like the difference between wanting to change the system out of a sense of revenge versus out of a system of collective community care.
Haley: Mm. Oh, that's good, right? Mm-hmm.
JaeRan Kim: Because, because anybody can try and, and be an activist out of a sense of revenge. There's this Nietzsche quote that was, really instrumental to me back in the early blogging days, which is, it's a paraphrase, but it's like, 'be careful fighting monsters lest you become one.'
And so sometimes you can see people who are really trying to change things using the same kind of tactics that were really harmful to us to keep us oppressed. And so for me, it's a reminder that we always need to be thinking about, how are we moving forward and changing the system out of a sense of community care, not in harmful ways that are just gonna perpetuate the oppression that we've experienced.
Haley: Hmm. I love that. I think that's something we definitely need to be mindful of. Can you just share who your co-authors are of this, Out of the Fog and Into Consciousness: A Model of Adoptee Awareness.
JaeRan Kim: Yep. So Dr. Susan Branco is the lead author. We worked on this together with Grace Newton, who is a Chinese adoptee. And then the other two co-authors is Dr. Kripa Cooper-Lewter, and Paula O'Loughlin, who works in education. And we're all adoptees. We're all transracial, transnational adoptees. And we're thrilled to talk about our model cuz we hope that it's helpful for people.
Haley: Well, and one of the things that you chose to do is have it accessible. So like for lots of academic articles, if folks don't know, you can click on a link and then you're... pay walls.
JaeRan Kim: You're asked to pay $40 to look at an article that you may not find meaningful to you.
Haley: Yeah. So to have this gift to the community is so amazing. Like. Hats off. Like I'm just really impressed by that.
And I really love this spiral model, and you share more about this in the paper and about how you can be in two different touchstone pieces at once and you can move back and forth. And as you said earlier when we were explaining the it's, it's not that, you know, stage one, stage two, stage two, stage four kind of thing.
It's very fluid. And I think we all really heard from you like, this is more about not having judgment for where other adoptees are in the process. So I really appreciate that. So can you say before we do our recommended resources, I mean we are so in the habit here of saying, coming out of the fog or like, oh, I know people don't like that, but you know, when you come out of the fog, like, how do you picture us, if you do, adapting this language into, you know, our regular vernacular when we're talking about this?
JaeRan Kim: That's a good question. I think, you know, if people know the different kind of touchstones or experiences, so again, we don't say like you're in this stage, but we talk about them as touchstones. So like if you've experienced rupture and that's a touchstone for you, that's kind of.. Rupture is the, the word that kind of describes your feelings and your thoughts and your actions at that particular point in time.
Like it's kind of a represent, representation of where you might be at. So if people can start to think about like, oh, I just experienced this rupture, or I'm experiencing dissonance right now because I'm having a hard time understanding the information that I had versus this new information I just received and I don't know where to, what to believe anymore.
That could be one way of helping it. Again, it's not like we want to force people to stop saying you're in the fog or outta the fog, but I think for our, for what we were talking about is the quote unquote, out of the fog time in your life, it's, it's not just a static one way of being. There's so many other iterations of what happens and you can be out of the fog, so to speak, in one area of your life and not in another area.
And so then how do you describe yourself that way? Right. So I think for the fog metaphor, I can see why people like it. It's just so concrete. You can imagine it. We've all experienced what a fog is like. And so I think I get why we use that term. We just wanted more nuance, I guess, is, you know, we wanted more, more descriptors for the different ways that we understand our adoptions.
Haley: I, I, and it absolutely does that for me. I see, I love the, how you said that, like, oh, I'm outta the fog. Okay. Well, I feel like I was outta the fog six years ago and my , I've been podcasting for six years, my perspective on adoption has totally shifted even from men. And so I love being able to see all of these different pieces in this model.
I just think it's brilliant. So my recommendation is that people will, will link to it. There's a few different places, I think a couple of you have shared on your blogs or your websites where you can download it. And like, I sat down with it with a highlighter and I wrote notes on it, like I was a nerd. I'm back in university. And that's what I hope people do. I think it's really helpful, honestly, I'm not just saying that cuz you're like right there. But JaeRan, I really think it will be so impactful for the community and already has been.
JaeRan Kim: We are going to be doing some focus groups after, you know, sometime in 2023 we're gonna be launching some focus groups so that we can hear from more adoptees about what this model might look like in different people's lives. So hopefully people will continue to check in with us so that we can get the information when we start to do our focus groups and potential surveys.
Haley: Oh, perfect. Yes. Okay. We will let people know where they can connect with you for sure. . I also, I've recommended your blog so many times on the show. I know other guests have, but y if you go back , I was doing that this morning. I was like, holy moly, you, you had a lot of posts there, Harlow's Monkey, and I was, I was scrolling back through, you know, how you go like, next post, next post, next post. And I was like, oh, I never heard of that. Like, I was still like finding think gems. So I hope folks go check that out. I mean, if you haven't yet, where, are you here? I guess so.
JaeRan Kim: I have a link. I have one page that has a link of kind of some of the more popular posts that people have either commented on or shared over, you know, since 2006 and they're kind of categorized. So that might be helpful for somebody who's new because as you said, like I've been posting since 2006.
There's a lot of content and, you know, if you want kind of a quick summary for people to go to, if you wanna hear my thoughts about race or child welfare or, you know, different things.
Haley: The angry adoptee post from 2007, right, when no one told me about adoption '09, anti-racism work from, you know, decades ago, like we're, oh yeah. Yeah. There's so much there. Thank you. Thank you so much for your work. I, I can't say enough. Really, really appreciate your commitment to the adoptee community and highlighting adoptee voices first. I think I must have learned that from you by osmosis, but you have it written down multiple places where that is your top priority.
What do you wanna recommend to us?
JaeRan Kim: Yeah, so I wanna recommend another really kind of old school resource because it was so helpful for me. I found it when I was doing some of my grad school work around 2006, 2007. It's called the Adoption History Project, and it's by author Ellen Hermann. She wrote a book called Kinship by Design, which anybody who wants to know about kind of the way modern, by modern we mean like from the 19 hundreds till today, modern adoption practices developed, who were the main influencing people in, what's kind of the science behind that?
She wrote this great book and when she was doing it, she kept this website, this adoption history project website, and it's, there's so much information cuz she would go to the archives and then she would, you know, find documents, primary documents. Anyway, it's such a great resource and it's an old school website, so it's not as easy to navigate as, as they are today.
Haley: Is it back in style now? I was like, oh, is this ? What's old is new again.
JaeRan Kim: Yeah. I, I would just give it a chance because I think it's such a great way for any of us to start to look at adoption, the way adoption has been conceptualized and practiced in the United States. So she also has stuff around transracial adoption and Native American adoption and international adoption.
There's, there's a lot of stuff there. So I think that's a good place for anybody to start. It will give you a little bit and then you can look for more.
Haley: Totally. The timeline. Yeah. With starting with the you know, orphan Train and the adoption of children act, and I mean, timely also. Right. She's writing about ICWA which is now under review for 2023. There'll be, you know mm-hmm. some ruling on it. And yeah. Again, talking about those who've come before us and have been documenting these things. I mean, it is on us not to be ignorant about it, honestly. So if you're in the, which, which touchstone? If you're in the forgiveness and activism touchstone, expansiveness. It could be expansiveness.
JaeRan Kim: Expansiveness, yes. I would say it's a good resource for that.
Haley: Okay. Well, we are gonna practice using the touchstone lingo here and our great thanks. I will. I can't speak on behalf of the community, but I'm going to right now, our great thanks on the community for all the work that you've done for us.
Dr. Kim, it is just honor to be able to talk with you.
JaeRan Kim: Well, thank you, Haley, for being part of the community and for all the work that you've done on your podcast. Been very important to elevate adoptive voices.
Haley: Thank you. Where can we connect with you online?
JaeRan Kim: So I would say Harlow's Monkey. My blog is probably the best place to start cuz I have links to all my social media there.
But I am on Instagram, I have a Harlow's Monkey Facebook account. I'm on LinkedIn. , I'm on Twitter, but not really. Not much. And that was even before , the recent changes happened. But you, yeah. You should be able to find me in multiple ways. You can also, I've started doing what I'm calling lab notes, which are these kind of weekly summaries.
And so you can sign up on my blog, website and you can get it to your email if you like that better.
Perfect. And
Haley: I'm assuming that when the time comes for your reaching out to people, that you'll be posting about that in all those spots?
JaeRan Kim: Yes.
Great. Thank you again so
Haley: much.
JaeRan Kim: Thank you.
Haley: Wow. I can't wait to hear more from JaeRan and her co-authors of the adoptee consciousness model. It is so fascinating and I think it will be really, really helpful for the community. As I already said in the episode.
I want to let you know about some of the awesome adoptees on events that are coming up. Patreon supporters are folks that support the show monthly or by a yearly subscription. And we have Zoom events through the year here and there. And if you're listening the day this came out, we have an adoptee's off-script party on January 14th with our, one of our favorite therapists, Pam Cordano and we're talking all about how to be a bad adoptee which I think is very funny.
We also have book club meetings coming up. With Lisa Olivera. We're talking about her book Already Enough. We are going to be reading Shannon Gibney's brand new speculative memoir, the Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be. And we're gonna be talking about Harrison Mooney's book, Invisible Boy. I'm telling you, the next few months, it is a happening place on Adoptees On Patreon.
So if you wanna join us, Adoptesson.com/communithy has details of how to sign up and we would love to have you join us. Our live Zoom events are only for adoptees. And most of them are recorded and released in audio form later in a podcast form. So if you're not an adoptee, you can listen later, but you just aren't invited to the live event. Those are adoptee only.
Okay. Thank you so much for listening. Excited about the new year, and let's talk again next Friday.
