25 [Healing Series] Anger
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/25
Haley Radke: You’re 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.
I had an episode ready, scheduled to go up this Friday, and I just finished recording this. It is one of the best interviews I've ever had. I immediately thought, ‘this is so important. I have to get it up right away.’ I had so many light bulb moments. I just wanna say, maybe this is not the best episode to listen to on your commute, on your way into work. Rather, do it on your way home, or when you have some quiet space to yourself to think. I hope you have as many takeaways as I did. I don't want to waste any more of your time, let's get to it. It's so important, so good. I'm so thankful for all the information that was shared, and we're gonna tackle a really great subject that I think a lot of you are gonna identify with. Let's listen in.
Pamela Cordano is a fellow adoptee and psychotherapist who specializes in helping you to discover meaning in your life. Welcome back to Adoptees On, Pamela.
Pamela Cordano: Thank you. I'm so happy to be with you today.
Haley Radke: I'm so glad to be speaking with you. We are tackling a big one today: anger. And I bet everyone listening has at some point in their life been told, “You sound kind of like an angry adoptee.” So, that's kind of triggering for me, and probably for a lot of the people that are listening. So would you start out by just talking a little bit about what anger is and why adoptees get accused of being angry all the time?
Pamela Cordano: Oh my gosh, yes. This is a huge subject and I actually am excited to be talking about it even though it's so big, because it's one of my favorite subjects, actually. And I definitely grew up very angry, so anger's been something I've had to look at a lot over the 52 years I've been alive. So what I say to clients about how to define anger is: anger simply means ‘I don't like this’. There's a lot for us adoptees to not like about what's happened to us or how the culture is with adoption, or how the system is, or contact with our adoptive families and biological families, and how we feel inside about ourselves. There's plenty for us not to like, so there's plenty for us to be angry about.
Haley Radke: Definitely, I mean, I'm an angry adoptee, too.
Pamela Cordano: Hello, angry adoptee! So anger and fear are closely linked, and I would then say that there's also a lot for us to be afraid of as adoptees.
So, if you think about a bear in the woods who has cubs –this is a bear who's keeping her cubs, by the way, sorry, that's a little angry thing to say– but if someone comes and threatens her cubs, she doesn't like it, right? And she's afraid that her cubs are gonna get hurt. So she growls and gets fierce and her anger is saying, “I don't like this.” And she's also afraid.
So fear and anger are closely linked, and in fact anger is often considered to be a secondary emotion that follows a primary emotion. And the primary emotion could be fear, or it could be shame and humiliation. It could be sadness. Some people really are afraid of getting sad or despairing because they can sink into a pit and feel like they can't come out again, and anger at least, is more bolstering and can make us feel like we have some power. So anger is often thought of as a secondary emotion. So anger means ‘I don't like this’, and anger and fear are closely linked. And, like I said, there's a lot for us adoptees to be afraid of, and to not like.
One of the things about adoptees and anger is that– I believe in the primal wound, and I believe that when we're born, our brains are not formed yet. And when we change mothers, families, environments, that it's a trauma to our developing brains, and that we go into the fight/flight/freeze mode in our brains, and that's very, very stressful for us.
And so, rather than just basking in a nice nap or nursing with our mother, or whatever happy, content, safe babies do, we're in a trauma already making this adjustment. So our brains are not developing the same way that a baby-who-feels-safe's brain is developing, and the stress just has gotten going right away.
So our bodies are emitting stress hormones, and there are new ways our brains are being wired because of this stress, and it's just like the beginning of our brain development is done– I mean, I feel this on the inside of me. I don't know if you can relate to this, but I feel like deep, deep down in me, there's a chaos and a fight/flight thing just ready to happen very easily, and I look at my friends who are from intact families, who are not adopted, and some of them have later traumas and I know what their traumas are like, but there's something in me that feels like it's just from the very beginning. And I don't say that because I know it, I say that because I feel it.
Haley Radke: I think one of the ways that shows up for me is that I startle so easily and it's a big reaction. That's really interesting.
Pamela Cordano: Yep, me too. Yep. And a lot of adoptees have sleep problems. At one time, a teacher said to us –it was like a development class– that when babies don't feel safe, they have a really hard time sleeping the way that safe babies sleep.
So a lot of adoptees have sleep problems. And I just think that this primal beginning lack of safety is with us through our lives, I just happen to believe that. I don't need people to agree with me, but that's what I believe, and it's the basis of where some of this anger comes from –or maybe a lot of the anger comes from– in us, living in a state of biological, neurological fear, and it being very easy for us not to like how things are going, or things not to feel right to us with what's happening.
Haley Radke: I'm just, like, nodding along and thinking, ‘Yes, you're describing me right now.’
Pamela Cordano: Yeah, it's really sad, isn't it? I mean, can I read a quote to you by a doctor named Bessel van der Kolk?
Haley Radke: Oh, absolutely.
Pamela Cordano: I'm not sure if you've heard of him or not. Okay, here's a quote about trauma. And this is about a quote about anybody, it's not directed toward adoptees.
“Trauma is much more than a story about the past that explains why people are frightened, angry, or out of control. Trauma is re-experienced in the present, not as a story, but as profoundly disturbing physical sensations and emotions that may not be consciously associated with memories of past trauma. Terror, rage and helplessness are manifested as bodily reactions, like a pounding heart, nausea, gut-wrenching sensations, and characteristic body movements that signify collapse, rigidity, or rage. The challenge in recovering from trauma is to learn to tolerate feeling what you feel and knowing what you know about being overwhelmed. There are many ways to achieve this, but all involve establishing a sense of safety, and the regulation of physiological arousal.”
So that's a big quote, but I think what I'm trying to say is that I really believe that the deepest basis for anger in us has to do with our trauma.
Haley Radke: Okay. So to address the anger, then, we're going back –cuz you said it was a secondary emotion, also– then we're going back one level, so there's that sadness, fear, shame, and those are things that are coming from the trauma.
Pamela Cordano: Yeah, that's actually living in us in a neurological and biological kind of way.
Haley Radke: Let's talk a little bit more about anger. So you defined it as, ‘I don't like this.’
Pamela Cordano: Right. And so it's a powerful, necessary– We need anger. Animals need anger. Humans need anger. We need to be able to draw lines and express ourselves when we don't like something, when something's scaring us and we don't like it. So it has a very healthy component to it, and it preserves us, and it defines us.
So I just want to name a few polarities of anger. There's connected anger, where, let's say an adoptee is talking to their adoptive parents about their experience and what they're frustrated about. And if the adoptive parents can make space for what's being said, for their child, the adoptee might feel connected in the conversation and connected in the anger they're experiencing.
But there's also disconnected anger, and I grew up being angry in a very disconnected way. Like I would just rage at my mother and I would just, you know, say, “You're not my real mother,” you know, “The courts decided this, my number came up when your number came up,” and “This is BS and I can't stand it.”
And she would just be crying and be feeling helpless. But we weren't connected. You know, there was not a conversation happening, it was one-sided, I'm raging, she's collapsing, and then, you know, 10 minutes later I'm feeling terribly guilty and, you know, whatever happens. But so there's connected versus disconnected anger and connected anger can be a very satisfying and healing experience.
And hopefully if people see therapists or have supportive partners or friends, when they express what they're angry about, they feel connected with. And they don't feel like they're saying something and they're just being stared at, like they're an alien or they've committed blasphemy or something.
Haley Radke: I think that's a part of what was so healing for me when I was in the room with other adoptees, because we can be angry about the same thing and just like you said, you feel connected,
Pamela Cordano: So it actually settles us down, if we talk to other adoptees who understand about something that really makes us angry, or we have a take on something that isn't going to fly, culturally, very easily, and someone can hear us, it really settles our nervous system down so it's healing. And so as far as a practical thing, finding people that we can share our anger with, who can stay connected to us and make space for us and care for our experience is a very healing thing.
Haley Radke: So the disconnected anger is what we often get because we will talk about something that we're upset about, and then people are like, “Well, you can't feel that way. You should be happy.”
Pamela Cordano: Right. And so we get judged or blamed or pathologized, for our experience. And then we're angry in a disconnected way and the response to us actually harms us. And that makes me mad.
Haley Radke: Me too! Okay, is there any other kinds of anger you want to talk about?
Pamela Cordano: Yeah, there are others, too. This is sort of saying the same thing, but there's grounded anger versus ungrounded anger. So there's anger where we feel like we have our feet on the ground, we know who we wanna talk to about whatever, and we know what we wanna say and we have room for the other person to have their own experience. We have room for the conversation to be maybe a little difficult. That's grounded anger.
Ungrounded anger is kind of when we're flying off the handle, and that's more like the disconnected anger. So that's just another way I was describing a healthy kind of anger, grounded, versus a more unhealthy kind of anger, ungrounded. By unhealthy, I really mean: there's nothing wrong with the charge of the frustration and the rage or whatever we feel, but if we're gonna express it in a way when we're not balanced, and we get a bad response, it's gonna hurt us, you know. We're gonna be hurting ourselves in getting the bad response or bringing it to somebody who's not really capable of caring for our experience. So it's a bit dangerous when we're ungrounded and we take it somewhere unsafe.
And then there's integrated anger, where we know what we're mad about, we know why we're mad about it, we also have other emotions, we have our sadness, we have grief, we have fear. Whatever we're feeling angry about is integrated in a larger way into us, versus when people express anger in a sideways kind of way. Like, one sideways way of expressing anger is addiction. So rather than being straight with anger: smoking, drinking, eating, shopping, gambling, whatever. Another way of doing sideways anger is being passive aggressive or indirect with what really is being brought to the table. So, does that make sense? Sideways anger?
Haley Radke: Yes, guilty.
Pamela Cordano: Yeah, of course, I'm sure. I mean, many of us have anger so big it's hard to keep it all. It's a daunting challenge to be connected, grounded, integrated.
And then the other one I wanted to talk about is there's anger that comes from our internal child that can be very chaotic and overwhelming, and we can feel overwhelmed when we feel it, it's like a tantrum, almost, where there's not even words sometimes, it's just this physiological rage that, that something feels so terrible. Versus anger that comes from our inner adult, where we might know we have that huge charge, but we also know we have choices about how we manage it.
Haley Radke: That is so interesting because in reunion, that came up for me, the inner child rage. Which I bet is common.
Pamela Cordano: Yeah. I think that's one of the hardest things about reunion is that the adult ‘us’ is in reunion –if we're lucky enough to be able to make a reunion– and then we're bringing along this hurt, disconnected child who hasn't been heard or seen or understood, and hasn't had her or his say yet, you know? And doesn't even know if there's room for the say to happen. So it's like two of us are going into the reunion, the young one and the older one. And it's very, very complicated. Parenting ourselves while we're in reunion is an overwhelming challenge.
Haley Radke: Oh, it's all so fun. Okay.
Pamela Cordano: Yeah. And then the last one I was gonna say, is that there's also a social justice kind of anger, and this is really coming from the adult. Often. It's not always coming from the adult, but often the people who are the most effective at social justice, who wanna go and change laws and petition and fight the system. It's a very useful kind of anger, the push to change things that are unfair and that are discriminatory. It's a very important and useful kind of anger in society for justice and equality. But that works best when it's coming from the inner adult and not the inner child. It's the most effective.
Haley Radke: That's so helpful. Thank you, Pamela. I wanna start with that societal concept of adoption and how we can be so angry at that.
Pamela Cordano: There's a quote by Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, and he says, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” And I feel like, ‘Thank you.’ Like, my anger at the societal concept of adoption is huge. I just feel like I'm furious about it, and the idea that it's so hard to shift the cultural perspective, and to just get blamed or knocked down when we try. It's so hard.
Haley Radke: So I would say that the societal concept of adoption is this happy fairytale thing where these “poor, poor babies” who don't have a home get scooped up by loving homes and sheltered and are happy forever, and it's the best thing ever. That's what I think society thinks of as adoption.
Pamela Cordano: Yep. Yep. It's almost like we should be getting all these congratulations cards. You know, “Congratulations, you were adopted.”
Haley Radke: “You should be so grateful. How could you be unhappy that this happened to you? It's awesome. Like, where would you be if your parents hadn't adopted you?”
Pamela Cordano: Yep. I don't think I mentioned this in our last conversation, but I got a letter from one of my mom's friends when I was, like, seven, and it said, “Dear Pam, you're so lucky to have been blessed twice so early in life. First by a mother who loved you enough to give you up for adoption, and second by parents who loved you enough to take you in as their own.” And I just remember being completely confused.
Haley Radke: I mean, what? Oh my gosh. I'm sorry. I feel like I want to throw up right now. That is– oh my gosh. “I loved you so much, I don't wanna keep you.” Oh my goodness. Ugh.
Pamela Cordano: Yes. Yeah.
Haley Radke: And how old did you say you were, seven, when you got that?
Pamela Cordano: Yeah, and it was on this really pretty paper with, like, a moon and a little bunny rabbit, and it was like it was supposed to be this letter I was so, I don't know, lucky to get? Like, maybe I was blessed three times, cuz I got that letter.
Haley Radke: So, yeah, so probably a lot of us have this anger at this concept, and we hear it from all sorts of people who have nothing to do with us, had nothing to do with adoption even. How do we deal with that?
Pamela Cordano: Well, can I read you a quote about this that is a bit edgy? Because this is the anger day. So I saw this in the Huffington Post, and you might have seen it, but it was written by Mirah Riben, and it's a quote by somebody named Desiree Smolin. She said, “An abducted child is expected to retain fond memories of and long for reunification with their ‘real’ families of birth, and reject the abductor raising them, while adoptees are expected to bond unquestioningly to non-related strangers, and in some cases are expected or encouraged to abandon any thoughts or talk of seeking out their roots.”
And I just felt like, ‘Wow, someone said that.’ And furthermore, what she was saying was that to the child, it's really kind of the same. So this is a really provocative thing to say. And I have friends who have adopted babies and I would never wanna hurt them, and this is the bind we get into. I don't wanna hurt anybody I love, and yet my truth is probably hurtful to the culture, to the society's view of adoption. Well, what do we do about that? I mean, you're asking me the question, “What do we do?” and I'm asking you. I'm saying it's very difficult, because I don't wanna– it’s kind-of like I walk around with a zipper, zipping my mouth shut, because if I say what I truly think about adoption, I'm gonna hurt people. And so then I have to circle my anger in on myself or, I don't know, eat Ben and Jerry's or something, because I don't know how to make room for it.
Haley Radke: I mean, I think that's so true for so many of us that we've been invalidated so many times that it's too scary even to say anything negative about adoption in front of anyone that's not adopted– even happy adoptees, right?
Pamela Cordano: I know. And I understand there's a variety of experiences. And my goal is really more for inclusion of all the voices. I feel really clear about mine, deep down inside.
I have a new friend named Kathy, and we were having dinner together and we were talking about adoption. She's not adopted, and she's Italian, and I'm married to a guy who's Italian. And she said, “Oh, I get it! I know why you're married to an Italian.” She said, “Italians never give up their babies. They find a cousin or an aunt, or someone from another village, because the baby's precious. The baby's a nephew, the baby's a niece, the baby's a grandchild. The baby's a great nephew. You know, we Italians don't give up our babies.” And I don't know that's, like, empirically true, but I just loved her saying that to me like she culturally got it. Like, I was a baby that didn't wanna be given up. I wanted my biological family, whoever they were, to have that passionate, you know, “She's mine, she's ours, she belongs to us. We'll do anything for her, to keep her. No one's taking her.” So it was very refreshing to hear my Italian friend’s take.
Haley Radke: That's so nice. And unusual.
Pamela Cordano: Yeah!
Haley Radke: So I don't know, I'm just thinking, like, what's the antidote of this one? Is it the social justice anger? Like, we have to be pretty strong to be out there. I feel like my podcast is that sort of expression of social justice anger, but there's lots of people in my family don't know about this, you know, so I'm like, ‘Well, I'm not quite brave enough to be really out there.’
Pamela Cordano: I think it probably is. I think the Flip the Script movement is really powerful. I think what you're doing, helping people's voices get out there so that the collective can hear it. Even the collective of adoptees with different experiences can try on new ways of thinking, and maybe for some people that feel like– I felt like my life was happy and my adoption was fine until I was about 21. And then I went through, you know, a process and realized actually it was entirely different than I thought it was. Not that everyone has to do that, but I think you're right. I think it's the social justice, and the writing and expressing oneself and putting ideas out there. But ideally from a grounded and connected place. Like we're not trying to make enemies– I'm saying “we”. I'm not trying to make enemies, but I want to continue to try to make more and more room for myself, inside myself and in the world.
Haley Radke: No, and I think that's a really good point from the grounded perspective, because I see Twitter fights quite a bit from adoptees that are angry and they're trying to get the truth across, but you know, it has to come across in a certain way for anyone else to hear it. And when we're just shouting, that's not getting heard. So I really appreciate that thought.
Okay, so another kind of anger that a lot of us have is just anger at the money-making business of adoption and the agencies that are preying on mothers in crisis, and see that infant and see dollar signs. So let's talk a little bit about that kind of anger.
Pamela Cordano: Oh, it's just such a terrible– The system is so corrupt, it's so upsetting. And I think that in a way, this is where the first topic and the second topic are connected because I think each of us has our own strengths and the things we're comfortable doing and less comfortable doing. Some people are really good on the political front. You know, they're good with legal language, they're good with gathering people together or communicating in such a way that it's influential. And other people are better at speaking about their own experience and putting it out there in memoirs or in articles or in blogs or podcasts.
I just think we each have our different talents and our different inclinations about how to engage with this. But I think many of us just live with anger at this. I live with this all the time. I'm angry at this all the time. There's never a moment I'm not angry at this.
Haley Radke: I just got to sit in front of two different birth mothers who told me their stories and told me what the agencies had done to them, to essentially trick them to relinquish. I mean, that's the simplest way to say it, but some of the things they were saying, I was like, ‘You cannot be serious. This did not happen to you.’ And their children that were relinquished, we're talking about a six year old and a two year old. This is happening right now in this decade. I'm not talking 60’s Scoop. This is right now.
Pamela Cordano: Yep. It's just, it's hard even to find words about how horrific it is.
Haley Radke: Oh, I was so mad. If the person that took their baby from them was in the room, I mean, I would probably be in jail right now. I was –I still am– like, I'm just furious just thinking about it, and I want to find a way to make an impact in that area now. It's so real to me. I knew what was happening, but to hear, to see those women right in front of me and I can touch them and hold their hand–
Pamela Cordano: Yeah. So when you're even speaking about this, Haley, like, what I feel in my body is I feel, like, a column that comes from like the bottom of my abdomen, all the way up my chest to my throat. I feel a column of energy. And the good thing about anger is it's energizing and it's moving, it's heat, it's life, it's energy.
So that's where you're feeling called to do something about this. And that's where, you know, before anger comes out of the body, when it's just in our bodies as an experience, it's not yet in the camp of connected or disconnected, grounded or ungrounded, the adult part of us, the child part of us.
And that's where we get to make decisions about what do we do with this energy and this fury and this rising. What do we want to do with it? And what do we feel called to do? And that's where our adult selves need to come in and make some decisions with our younger parts, like, ‘What do we do? How do we do this? How do we be most impactful? How do we be most responsible and effective with this so that we make the maximum benefit of this anger, this righteous indignation?’
So, I'm Caucasian and I'm a 5’10” redhead, and my adoptive mother was a 4’10” Jewish woman, dark brown hair. We looked nothing alike. And I always got the question of, “Well, where did you get your red hair?” or whatever. And that was hard enough. And when I think about international adoption and some of the things that go on with corruption abroad, too, it's just so upsetting to me. I've been to Ethiopia three times, for reasons unrelated to adoption, and to see babies being flown out, it's just hard, you know? It's just painful for me. And again, that's where there could be some adoptees from Ethiopia listening to this and saying, “Hey, I'm happy. I'm fine. I'm glad I was adopted.” And I understand there's a multitude of experiences, but for me– I guess this is more the sad subject, not the anger. I feel sad when I see a decision being made for these babies. That just really upsets me.
Haley Radke: No kidding.
Okay. We've looked at kind of like those broad scope of things that a lot of us are angry at, and then there's, like, a person standing in front of us or tweeting to us saying, “Well, why aren’t you grateful?” What does that bring up in us?
Pamela Cordano: Or even people who say to me, “I wish I were adopted because my mother was–” whatever. As if it's something– I think this is a common thing that I'll just speak for myself and assume that many people will relate to this, but I have such a deep, profound experience of not being seen for the whole of me, and only being seen for maybe the outer two, three inches of me that, and I'm just used to living this way, and it's part of what makes me strong and capable, and it's also part of what makes me feel really lonely and alone and isolated, is that the whole of me isn't understood on a cultural level, and that people can have such a profound misunderstanding of what adoption can be like– or is like for me. And so the pressure to adjust to the outside, whether it's to fit into the family that's adopted you, or to comply with the new family so that they don't also abandon you, since you know in your bones that you're abandonable. Or to just fit in with society when you're kind-of this “bastard child”. That there's, like we talked about last time, something’s wrong with you, that you were given up by your family– or at least a child can feel that way. The pressure to comply inside of me was so huge, and what I did is I went the other way and I became the rebellious adoptee. Because I couldn't handle the pressure to comply. And I think that we tend to do one or the other.
Haley Radke: I'm the compliant adoptee. That's what I was.
Pamela Cordano: With your podcast!
Haley Radke: Well, I used to be compliant. Not anymore.
Pamela Cordano: So I guess I just want to say that the pressure to comply, which then can flip into rebel, from not being seen by others and being misunderstood in these overt ways like that we should be grateful or we're lucky or whatever– I experienced it as a huge force that I feel really angry about also. And I guess what to do about that, is to just keep learning about how to take that middle road of having the choice of, ‘this is when I wanna comply here because of this, and I don't wanna comply here because of that’. And having that inner adult in charge of the decisions, not just being, you know, the tail wagging the dog kind of a thing, where it's more of a reaction to comply or a reaction to rebel. It's more of a choice, a grounded choice with time and with healing, to comply or rebel or do neither.
Haley Radke: Right. Moving inward, from friends or acquaintances or even strangers who are telling us these things, to feeling angry towards adoptive parents, first parents. Let's talk about that a little bit.
Pamela Cordano: Well, there's just so much to say, right? I mean, there's so much to be angry about, right? There's a million stories about what people are angry at their adoptive parents for, their biological parents, or biological extended families.
Haley Radke: What I really struggle with is feeling angry that my adoptive parents adopted me. Yet, I was adopted in the early 80s –‘83, I was born– and it was just totally normal. They didn't know that, like, “the system”– They were infertile and this was just kind of a normal thing. So I feel guilty for feeling angry about that, because they didn't know any better. And then I feel angry at my birth mother's parents –-my maternal grandparents– for making her give me up and feeling like I was disposable enough or inconvenient enough that they couldn't support her to raise me. But again, it was early 80s, it was just on the edge of maybe teen pregnancy becoming somewhat accessible, like, it's still early. But those are the things that I feel angry about, and guilty because I'm like, ‘I'm not allowed to be angry at that. They didn't know any better.’
Pamela Cordano: I think that what I could be helpful with here is what to do about this kind of thing, because anybody could have a long list of things they’re angry at their adoptive parents about, and their biological parents. Me too, of course.
What's important is that if we, inside ourselves, negate our anger right away with that adult loving perspective of, ‘Well, they didn't know better’, which may be true, or is true. Or that ‘They did their best’ or whatever the forgiving, kind, compassionate response is, we're negating our own anger right away. So our anger never gets a chance to just have its own say.
So what's really important to do –and this could either be done in a with a therapist or could be done in a journal, or it could be done talking to yourself in your car, or in your room, or in your closet or wherever– is making a defined space for your anger about a specific issue and just letting it happen, letting it exist on its own, and not coming in with a ‘But they did their best.’ ‘But they didn't know better.’ ‘But what we know now, they didn't know then’ type of a thing. Because otherwise the inner adopted child never has a chance to be heard in their anger.
And we're probably the most powerful– we're the pioneers inside of ourselves leading the way about trying to unravel all of this jumble of trauma, fear, and anger and sadness inside of us. So the ‘this, but that’ negates it right away. And then we're in a bind: we can't feel this because of that, or we can't feel that because of this. And we're just stuck in a bind.
One activity would be, for example, to have a journal where, let's say you're right-handed –this is a little cliche, but it's effective– if you're right-handed, then with your left hand, write from the child adoptee perspective: “I'm so mad, I can't believe they bought me. Like, do they not care about me at all? They changed my name, they participated in this–” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And just let it have its whole say. And then with the dominant hand –let's say it's your right hand– then respond, just listening to yourself like, “Gosh, I hear how angry you are. Everything you're angry about is so legitimate. You deserve to have your say. You deserve to express yourself. You deserve to finally be listened to.” An internal space being made for your anger, and leaving this whole other adult, compassionate, can-see-both-sides part out of it completely. It's not gonna be helpful. It just gets in the way. It can come back later, you know, because you and me, we're compassionate, reasonable people. And that's where, Haley, have you ever heard of the expression called spiritual bypassing?
Haley Radke: Yes. But would you explain that please?
Pamela Cordano: Yeah, so spiritual bypassing: it doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with religion, but it's a way of taking the high road before the low road has been fully explored. And that's where I think we adoptees can make ourselves sick, like, literally sick. Like, stuffed with feelings and trauma that really never gets worked out. So we have to be with ourselves not to take the high road until it's really, really, really time to take the high road. And I think I mentioned Nelson Mandela in our last conversation, but recently I was reading this book by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and they were talking about Nelson Mandela being imprisoned unfairly for 27 years.
And one of them, I think the archbishop, said that it's great, in a way, that he was imprisoned for 27 years. Because it gave him 27 years to transform himself into an authentically mature, grounded person who could help heal the country, and run the country, and heal the division in the country. And that he had to go through, like, a transformation, really.
And so we can't jump to the high road just because it's nicer and it's more comfortable and it's more adult and people like it better. We have to really go through the guts of our own trauma and let it have space and be with ourselves in it, and connect to the world from that place as much as we can –even if it's only one or two people– before we go to the high road. The high road will come with time, naturally. We don't have to bypass the hard part to get there too early, or else we really hurt ourselves in the process.
Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. I feel like I'm having therapy with you here. Okay.
Pamela Cordano: Me too.
Haley Radke: Oh my gosh, that is so big. Oh my gosh, that's so– I'm gonna start crying again. That's so perfectly– Like, I've never heard that before. I've never heard that before. And that is so important for us to hear. When we are told to be grateful, we just feel like we gotta be at the other side right away, like we have to be on the high road. Oh my gosh.
Pamela Cordano: Right, and it fuels our anger because we're not really fully there. We may be 10% there.
Haley Radke: Well, that's a big light bulb moment.
Pamela Cordano: Okay, good. Good. Yeah, spiritual bypassing is a real problem. And it makes me really angry that there's even a pressure, that we have a pressure on us to spiritually bypass our true lived experience. Or biologically bypass or academically bypass or whatever bypass.
Haley Radke: I really have to spend some time thinking about this. That is so powerful. And do you have any other thoughts on this section?
Pamela Cordano: Two things. One is that, I wrote down a note that it's so hard being treated as an extension of somebody else's dream. A lot of adoptees talk and write about this, not being a person in one’s own right, with the beginning of one’s life story and lived-out life story, but being an extension of somebody else's dream, that makes me really angry.
And also [inaudible] called Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and her name is Jeanette Winterson. And I read an excerpt from one of her books and she was saying that once she had a reunion with her biological family, she realized that she's not fully, really in either family. Like she's really her own person in a way. And that she didn't really belong fully in either place, and that was herself saying that, not society.
I found that really powerful and it gave me a sense of permission that I don't have to pick, and I don't have to fit into my biological family fully. I can really be my own person with my own distinct history, and that's honoring all that I've been through. I can't just sort of slip in as if I'm, you know, the ugly duckling, and the geese, and I'm suddenly a goose or whatever. So, I really liked that and I feel less angry when I think about how I get to chart my own course.
I have an adopted client who says she's a child of the universe. And I think there's a lot of freedom in that way of thinking, like the outside then has less power to be something to comply with.
Haley Radke: Coming around to our last point here: anger with ourselves. What I'm guessing you're gonna talk about is there's that root in shame: ‘What was wrong with us, specifically, that we got given away?’
Pamela Cordano: Yeah. There's that. And then, you know, as time goes on, something that I've gotten angry at myself about a lot is my own standards for myself. Like when I as a child and as a teenager, and even a young adult, buying into the cultural narrative that adoption is sort of just a good thing and it's no big deal. ‘Why am I so triggerable’, you know? And ‘Why do things get in the way of my progress that don't seem to get in the way for other people?’ And ‘Why do my insides not match the outsides of other people?’ And like, ‘What's wrong? Why can't I do it well enough?’ Sort of like the basis of, ‘What's wrong with me? What's my fatal flaw that caused all of this in the first place?’ morphs into this older version of, like, ‘Why can't I do things the way I want to?’ or ‘Why can't I do things well enough?’
Trauma can actually present a lot like ADHD or ADD, with or without the H. I certainly operate that way, like my attention can feel split in a hundred different directions and it can be hard for me to focus. But I don't actually believe I have ADHD, I believe I'm just a bit fragmented and a bit traumatized. I'm saying “a bit”, I don't know why I'm saying “a bit”. I'm traumatized. And so I do have trouble with things that other people don't seem to, or that I have thought, ‘Why should I have trouble with this? Why am I not more competent?’ Or ‘Why am I not able to follow through on this better?’ And then, becoming a parent, oh my gosh. I mean, all of this trauma, my history, even though I did not want it to, leaked into aspects of my parenting. And we have a very transparent household, so my kids are adults now and they understand about my history and they have an ability to look into themselves and see where they think they were affected by my trauma and my husband's different kind of trauma.
It's just really hard, you know, to make mistakes parenting or to not be that perfect parent that does everything right and, you know, keeps the babies and does it all right. And I can get really angry at myself there. I find parenting very challenging and I think things are pretty good, actually, in my house, but it takes more work than I could have ever imagined to be a good enough parent. For me.
Haley Radke: Well, and there's so many adoptees that just repeat the same cycle: adoptees that become first parents that relinquish.
Pamela Cordano: Statistically, right, there's a very high incidence of abortions and relinquishments by people who are adopted. As a therapist, it makes sense to me that we tend to repeat unconsciously what's happened to us and act it out. And that's one of the reasons why becoming more conscious of our pain, which includes our anger, is so important cuz the more we take care of inside of ourselves with our anger and our hurt and our fear and our anxiety and our despair and grief, the less we act out. Whether it's with society, or with our own children, or with partners.
And that's one of the things that drives me to heal, is I felt so much harm from my experience. I don't wanna be harmful to others if I can help it, and I have been harmful to others, and I'm just– I was gonna say I'm a slow learner, but that's just self-deprecating, you know, cultural talk.
It's like, ‘No, I'm actually not a slow learner at all. I've actually worked my ass off to heal as much as I can over 52 years.’ As long as I can remember, I've been trying to learn how to regulate myself and not blow up or cut people off, or do whatever angry things I have done.
Haley Radke: And I think for me my anger has been more like simmering in the background and just now in the last couple years it's really coming out more and more. And so I'm really realizing that there's definitely some things I need to address. Because I don't want this to eat me up inside. I don't wanna have that sideways anger.
Pamela Cordano: Right. That same guy, Bessel van der Kolk, that I read that quote from, he says that emotion is meant to be acted on biologically, like in our species or even among animals. So when we're angry, our body is organized to take action towards something, to address the anger, whether it's a fight, or drawing a line, or whatever we have to do. And when we don't feel we can act on our anger, when we feel like we have to keep it inside, we pay a terrible price because all of our stress hormones and our muscle tension and our heart rate and everything is organizing toward anger. But we're shutting the door on any action and then we're curling in on ourselves, and I honestly feel like it makes us sick to do that.
Same with sadness, same with grief, which is related to sadness. We actually have to find ways to uncurl these things and bring them out so that we don't pay the price physiologically and psychologically.
Haley Radke: Well, that's a pretty good call to action. What are the next steps for someone who is identifying with the things that we're saying here? “Okay, Pamela, I'm ready. What's my next step?”
Pamela Cordano: Well, I don't know that I could have done a fraction of what I've done without the help of a really good therapist. But I think that trying on the idea that we have a younger part of us –it's like arrested development– that got stuck in different places, even on the baby level. That we might not be at all conscious of, but our nervous system knows, and the alarm bells go off. That we need to make space for the younger parts of us who have been either stuck or silenced or immobilized, to find expression and mobility and connection to others.
And that unwinding of our feelings and our experiences is what's healing. We need to connect with ourselves and with others, including those parts of us, even if they're not sophisticated and they don't have that adult, compassionate, and reasonable quality to them. They don't have to, that'll come later. That can get integrated later, but we need to make space for our truest, deepest experiences, even if we feel like we're being outrageous. Actually, sometimes those are the most fun. If we can find someone who can be with us, those are kind of fun to unravel because it's a relief, you know, to let some of these things out that are being held in, and we finally get to be a bit of a troublemaker with select trusted people.
Haley Radke: Well, and I kind of found it funny that you said it was cliche to write with your non-dominant hand as a child. I was like, ‘What? I've never heard that before. It's amazing. I'm totally gonna do that!’
Pamela Cordano: Yeah, it's kind of nice. What's really cool about that is because, you know, we have our two brain hemispheres and if we're right-handed, our right hemisphere crosses over to the left side of our body and our left hemisphere crosses to the right side. So our emotions are in our right hemispheres– I mean, that's simplified. But basically, when we write with our non-dominant hand, we have more access to our emotional writing, and our dominant hand has more access to the logic and the ‘distinguishing this from that’, the linear thinking. So it's useful to write the emotional stuff from our non-dominant hand, even biologically it's useful.
Haley Radke: Well, thank you so much. There's, like, 30 amazing takeaways in here, so many. Thank you. Is there anything else that you want to say to us before we wrap up?
Pamela Cordano: I'm just really so appreciative, Haley, that you have this podcast. I just feel like it's such a gift to people, for us to have a platform to share experiences and thoughts and healing and to resonate with each other. I think that it's very powerful, and I'm grateful, so thank you.
Haley Radke: Aw, thank you. Thank you. I'm so, so thankful for how you've prepared for this today. It is gonna help a lot of people.
Pamela Cordano: I hope so.
Haley Radke: I know it. I can tell you right now, it's gonna help a lot of people. Where can we connect with you online?
Pamela Cordano: So online my website is www.pamelacordanomft.com,
Haley Radke: and you're on Twitter and I think your new handle is @meaningpilgrim. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us.
[Transcriber’s note: In the time since this episode was released, Pamela Cordano has taken down her website and social media accounts, and is available only via email: pcordano (at) comcast (dot) net. This information was fact-checked with Pamela Cordano on May 12, 2023, and may change in the future.]
Pamela Cordano: Thanks, Haley, have a great night.
Haley Radke: Wasn't that incredible? Pamela, thank you. I don't know how else to say thank you so, so much for what you shared with us and for being so candid. I know this is going to be so helpful to so many of us, myself included. I feel like I had a free therapy session with you and now I can just replay it whenever I need to have some of those reminders.
I want to invite you guys to join my secret Facebook group. It is such an awesome place where we can discuss issues like this. We have had some really interesting conversations happening. I don't want to divulge anything, because everything we share in there is confidential, of course, but it's been so amazing to watch everyone in the group come around and support each other, and share their different stories and feelings and experiences. It's this really beautiful thing to watch.
And speaking of that, I just got back from the Indiana Adoptee Network Conference, which was amazing. Thank you, Pam Kroskie, for organizing that. And for your board, your helpers, oh my goodness, what an incredible experience. I did some live recordings from there, I have so much great stuff to share with you guys and not enough time, so that's gonna be coming up shortly. I have an interview with a fellow podcaster coming up. So many awesome things coming your way, please make sure you're subscribed. And iTunes is now called Apple Podcasts, so when you are looking for the show, you can find it in Apple Podcasts, and of course, anywhere you find podcasts, even on YouTube.
I would just love it, I would be so honored if you would share this show with someone. I was able to tell so many people about my podcast at the adoptee conference, and so many of them hadn't heard of it yet. So guys, please don't assume that your friends, your adoptee network, knows about the show. There's so many people who don't even know what a podcast is, so if you could tell one person, that would be the biggest favor to me, thank you. Tell one person, tell them your favorite episode, grab their phone, subscribe them to it. I literally did that at the conference, that was the best. Sherrie Eldridge let me subscribe her to my podcast, so that was so fun.
Anyway, I'm so glad to be back with you. If you want to join that secret Facebook group, go to Adopteeson.com/partner. I talked with so many of you at the conference, I'm just– I have no words. I was so honored. So many of you came in and told me how much you love my show, and how much it's meant to you, and how it's changed your life. I mean, come on, how amazing that I can do this for you? I'm so, so honored, so grateful. I just loved meeting you all. I wish there was another conference this weekend, but my husband probably wouldn't appreciate that. Anyway, thank you again for listening, so thankful for your support, and let's talk again next Friday.
