274 Julian Washio-Collette
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/274
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] 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.
You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Julian Washio-Collette. A writer and monastic spiritual seeker whose story includes the rarity of being relinquished and adopted twice. Julian shares what he hears when someone says the term, forever family.
How building community was difficult here when seemingly no one else has had the same experience of being a double adoptee. And we ponder what the spiritual implications of adoption may mean. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community [00:01:00] today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We also have a seven day free trial, so you can check us out. We wrap up 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. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Julian Washio-Collette. Welcome, Julian.
Julian Washio-Collette: Thanks, Haley. It's great to be here.
Haley Radke: I'm so glad we finally get to chat. I know you've supported the podcast. You've been a listener for a long time, and I would love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.
Julian Washio-Collette: Yeah, thank you. So I am a baby scoop era double adoptee. So I was relinquished and adopted twice. So first as an infant, I was formally adopted at 14 [00:02:00] months. I have no idea where I was before that or when I arrived at the house of my adopters. So that's a black hole. And so my first adopters also adopted a baby girl when I was five years old, which is a little confusing to me because sometime shortly after that they got divorced and my sister and I were with our adoptive mother and things really went downhill from there, things that I remember or have been told this was when I was around eight years old. She was certainly dating a lot. She was doing drugs, going out dancing, and on the other side taking us to what I would call fire and brimstone fundamentalist churches on Sunday, which is a really confusing mixture that left an imprint.
But at some point, [00:03:00] she decided that she did not want to have children anymore, and so she placed us for adoption. And what that process looked like was my sister and I were scooped up by a social worker and taken to the house of who would become our second adopters. I think there was two or three visits.
And then one day we were dropped off and that was it. And so it was another closed adoption. The dynamics mirrored my first adoption. Both were closed adoptions. My birth certificate was changed. Anyone from my first adoptive family could not legally have contact with me until I was 18. So I've been thinking about this a lot because, for many reasons, people [00:04:00] have to disown or repress or deny parts of themselves, right?
People who experienced various kinds of trauma. So for me I had to do that. I had to disown the first nine years of my life and on top of that, the whole world mirrored that. The whole, the whole world mirrored the role that I was forced to take on. I basically did not exist for the first nine years of my life.
And all the evidence was hidden. Anyone from that time period was not allowed to contact me. So again, it, that happened when I was a baby and my system internalized it at it as it did then. And then I underwent the same process again, this time at a very different developmental level. I had some comprehension of what was happening to me.
I basically had to deconstruct and reconstruct myself as a nine year old child. [00:05:00] So unfortunately, that was not the best family again. I feel like this is another systemic failure. This was not a family that had any business raising children. My second adoptive family. So my second adoptive family parents had adopted a boy as an infant. So they already had one adopted child. So my sister and I arrived and so there was three children and the dynamics of that family, I think are very common among abusive families, but I think my sense is even more common among adoptive families. So the mother had all the markings of a malignant narcissist.
The father was her enabler, their first adopted child was the golden boy who could do no wrong, and I was the scapegoat. So one of the common [00:06:00] refrains I heard was, whenever he got into trouble, he didn't do that until you got here, and I heard that up until I was a teenager. So on top of having my identity completely stripped from me in order to be part of this family, all of us.
There was no room to be a person in this family, all of us had to organize around my second adoptive mother and the emotional chaos that she constantly stirred up. And so that was basically my life until just before my 17th birthday, when I was thrown out of the house. Those parents also divorced, I think when I was about 16.
And so my mother, my second adoptive mother made it very clear that she wanted me out of the house. So as soon as I graduated high school and I managed to graduate a year early, not unexpectedly, she threw me out of the house and given [00:07:00] the, the childhood that I had, I was not at all ready for independence psychologically or practically. And I am extremely grateful that I got out when I did. So I've never regretted that happened, but I also recognize that like I was still a child, even today I'm in my early fifties, but I just feel like that sense of not being ready. for life is so deeply ingrained.
I was not ready when I was an infant. I was not ready when I was nine years old. It was not ready when I was 16 years old. And I still feel that, oh my God, I'm not ready. Like it's too much. So that's my adoption story in a nutshell.
Haley Radke: I'm so sorry. I've heard You share your story in other ways, and I still hear it, and I just think, oh, it's so unfair and difficult, so difficult.[00:08:00]
What do you hear when people say the words, forever family?
Julian Washio-Collette: Oh, God, I don't know. That's an interesting question. So what comes up for me immediately, I'm thinking adoption people use the, that terminology when referring to adoption, right? So it's already, it's a false narrative because there is no forever.
You've already, an adopted person is someone who's already lost part of their forever. So to me, being an adopted child is having to take on a false identity. And it certainly was for me, absolutely the language that we use such as forever family just obscures the reality. It creates a kind of false veneer over something very tragic and broken.
Haley Radke: Thank you. I've been thinking about that since knowing we were going to talk because I just, [00:09:00] whenever I hear that phrase, it makes me so upset because I know it's not true. And I think of exactly what you just said. This falsehood, really, that we're like putting someone in this like perfect home that is so much better than what they were originally intended to, live out.
And it's just not the case.
Julian Washio-Collette: Yeah. One thing I would add from my own experience is the, I think maybe every adoptees, but certainly many adoptees secret fears that they're going to be given up again, so there's always that, there's the promise of a forever family. And then there's that underlying anxiety.
And so for me, that was not just an anxiety. It was a reality. So I know that's not a guarantee. There's no security.
Haley Radke: So going out, launching into the world, unprepared, with [00:10:00] no support system behind you. What was that like? What were your next years like?
Julian Washio-Collette: Fortunately the mother of an acquaintance of mine gave me a place to stay.
I spent a week just couch surfing, and then I had a place to stay for about a year. After that, one of my cousins from my first adoptive family actually tracked me down because I had turned 18. So I have a lot of reunion stories. And it can get very complicated.
Haley Radke: Wait, how is that possible?
Julian Washio-Collette: I have a lot of stories. I don't know how true they are. But when I reconnected with members of my first adoptive family, namely my cousins, aunt and uncle, they claimed that when I was placed for adoption, they were not told until after the fact, or at least until it was too late to do anything to intervene. They claimed that they would have taken me in.
I do not know if that's true. But it [00:11:00] sounds like they had no say in that process. They also claimed that they just, they found out where we lived and they found the phone number of our new home, which happened to only be seven miles away and that they tried to call the house once and got my younger sister on the phone, but decided to let, just to back up back away and trust that things will work out.
So it sounds like they already had some information on us. I have absolutely no idea how they could have acquired that. So I don't know, but they tracked me down. I think they got ahold of my sister at our adopter's home. And then she contacted me. So that was a really gosh, so here I am.
I'm meeting my aunt, uncle, and cousins for the first time in eight or nine years. And, my God here I was, like, I had to disown who I was for the first nine years of my life and become a completely different person. And now I am with the people [00:12:00] who did not know me as that other person. They only knew me as the person I was supposed to disown.
And it caused, it caused such incredible internal turmoil. So during that time, my drug of choice was punk rock music. So I just remember like I would visit them and then I would just drive home and just have to turn up, just listen to this incredibly aggressive, despairing music at full blast just to know that there was something in the world that mirrored my insides. It was way more than I can handle and I didn't have any support or guidance. Yeah, it was very overwhelming.
Haley Radke: How do you get from there to I'm picturing you rocking out to this punk rock music to the simple monastic lifestyle that you live in now, that's is, I'm picturing like a wide gap, but maybe it's closer than I think.[00:13:00]
Julian Washio-Collette: Oh gosh. So just for the record, I don't live in a monastery now. I did. I was actually a Catholic monk for four and a half years. I also lived in Buddhist monasteries and my wife and I just moved from living in a monastery for five years. We were the housekeepers there. So I do have a lot of experience in spiritual community and monastic communities.
So yeah, so that is quite a big shift. I think in part because of the turmoil I experienced, I had a lot of big existential questions. that I had to face. And so I was very spiritually curious from a fairly young age, which is to say I also want to say there was no, especially in my second adoptive family, There was no real religiosity or spiritual or intellectual curiosity, so I really had, it really had to come from me.
And so in my early 20s, I was invited to [00:14:00] come to a Zen Buddhist meditation group. And so in my 20s meditation became a very big part of my life, to the extent that I eventually moved into a Zen Buddhist community, spent some time at a monastery. I do want to say I think when I think about the things that I've done in my life and the things that have been very meaningful, there's the sense of ambiguity about them because like on one level, I think I am a very, I have a strong spiritual orientation and I may have made similar choices if I wasn't a double adoptee and yet, for instance, like I had this strong interest in community living in part because I had this deep hunger for the holding environment that I never had.
I didn't feel ready to be an individual, to be an I, like I was looking for that foundation of we, where's the we to which I belong, to [00:15:00] whom I belong that can mirror me, nurture me so that I can be an I in the world. So I came to community living with this kind of dual consciousness. And one, part of that was like, hey fill up what I didn't get, right?
I think that was the kind of unconscious agenda. And of course that never works. It doesn't work in individual relationships. It doesn't work in relationship to communities. And so I struggled a great deal. I struggled in individual relationships, but I also struggled in community living because I was plagued with this sense of I don't belong.
I'm not sharing in what other people are sharing in. At the same time, I found it very meaningful and I found the spiritual practice very meaningful, and that eventually led me to becoming a monk.
Haley Radke: When did you, I don't know how to put this, because it's probably something going on in the background, right?
But when do you realize [00:16:00] I don't know who I am.
Julian Washio-Collette: Oh, God.
Haley Radke: And it's because I've had these disruptions. These familial disruptions,
Julian Washio-Collette: I lived that implicitly my whole life, obviously. And so that was part of, like part of, going from community to community and not finding on the surface I thought I wasn't finding my place in the world, but I wasn't finding me. I wasn't finding a mirror, a stable mirror that reflected who I was, I don't think that I got really explicit about that until honestly, discovering Adoptees On in 2020, when I really started to learn about how adoption impacted me.
I've definitely had other experiences and other understandings. Like I, I definitely knew I had a lot of identity confusion, but I didn't appreciate the depths of [00:17:00] it until I started learning about the impacts of adoption and working with an adoptee therapist in particular.
Haley Radke: So how did you find Adoptees On? What were you looking for?
Julian Washio-Collette: Sure. So again, this was in 2020, September of 2020 during the pandemic. I was about, gosh, I was about a year out of re, not out of reunion, but like I, my reunion started in winter of 2018, and I met both sides of my birth family, including my mother and father in 2019. My wife and I actually went, spent a summer renting a house in New York and the Finger Lakes region where I could be closer to my family.
And that was a big deal, obviously. And there's a lot that we can talk about there, but I just want to say, I was a year later and the dust had settled from reunion, so to speak, and [00:18:00] it was definitely it, it answered a lot of my questions. It really filled in something for me.
I feel it physically because for me, especially as a double adoptee to know people and to meet people with whom I'm irrefutably related to no matter what the quality of relationship is, was profound. Like it, it's almost, like it's almost a physical sensation. It's okay, like I actually exist on planet earth.
And there's the proof. And yet reunion was also in some respects disillusioning. Like it, it didn't fill the ache. It didn't give me that sense of belonging and identity that I craved. And so I was in that space, when I happened to be listening to another podcast, a storytelling podcast that had nothing to do with adoption, but this woman was talking about her experience [00:19:00] of trying to adopt two brothers, eight, nine years old, out of foster care, and it was a very painful story to listen to because it did not work.
And these two boys were just abruptly whisked away one day without any warning. And that, hearing that story just pierced me to the heart. And so it just opened up a whole other level. It's hey, I'm adopted. I'm still suffering. What do I do? Like I need community. That's the, that was my first thought I need to meet other people.
And as soon as that story ended I got on the computer and I googled Adoptee Podcast, because I was, yeah, I was actually at the monastery. I had a job that didn't ask for a lot of mental energy. I could listen to as many podcasts a day as I wanted to. And Adoptees On was the first one that came up.[00:20:00]
So I, I started binge listening. And I think I, I actually contacted you because I, and I do have this kind of, yeah, this kind of dual relationship to the adoptee community because on one level I relate to what people are sharing and that was incredibly inspiring. relieving, healing, and I don't hear stories that sound like mine.
So shortly after I started listening, I became a Patreon supporter and I went to an event. I don't know if you remember, but it was some kind of celebration. I think it was like 150, 000 somethings. And I was, I was conspicuous because no one knew me. So at some point someone asked like, what do you want to introduce yourself?
And I felt such a weight because I, on one level, I was feeling relief okay, I found my people. And at another level, I still, I have, and I had a lot [00:21:00] of shame. Like I have to say not only that I was adopted, but that I was adopted twice. And so that was really difficult for me. Yeah.
Haley Radke: I was trying to think if I've, if I know anyone else, I still don't think I know anyone else. Have you met other people that have been relinquished twice now?
Julian Washio-Collette: I haven't. I've met people who've been in multiple foster care placements, but to me that's a very different thing because when you're in foster, I wasn't foster care. I don't remember when I was a baby. When you're in foster care, they don't change your birth certificate. They don't make it illegal for anyone you've known to have contact with you. So I think, I do think that's a very different experience.
I
Haley Radke: hope that if someone listening has had that same experience as you, they will reach out to you. So you can, [00:22:00] unfortunately, relate to it. I don't know what to say, but I do feel like, I, I remember you asking me at one point did I know? And I'm like no, you're a unicorn. Oh.
Julian Washio-Collette: Did you know that Astrid Castro? Named me an adoptee unicorn. Okay. She actually, I was on one of Adoption Mosaics We the Experts panels. And it was, the topic was adoption, disruption and dissolution. And there were three of us on the panel, but even there, our stories were so wildly different, that she ended up naming us adoptee unicorns. So I do own that name.
Haley Radke: Can I ask you a speculating question, and I want to go back to your reunion.
Julian Washio-Collette: Yeah, sure.
Haley Radke: Do you think it's because, I know there's other adoption disruptions, I know that. And I know there's a lot of re homing situations. Do you [00:23:00] think that it's, we don't know more adoptees that have that story publicly because they don't know, these things haven't been done legally, they're really struggling people and are just not
online and in community because they're having other difficulties. What's your, if you had to make guesses on the reason why?
Julian Washio-Collette: I don't know. I re, I really don't. I think what comes up for me is how I carried my adoption story until I started connecting with other adoptees. Like I, In a way, I bought into the dominant narrative I didn't think it was a big deal that I was adopted as a baby, so I didn't think that I, I thought that my experience is very unique, which it is, but at the same, at the same time, I didn't think I had much in common with people who were [00:24:00] only adopted once, until I started understanding better the impact of relinquishment and adoption trauma. So that could be part of it. My attitude was like, Oh, you were adopted once. Like big deal. I understand better now but I ha I had to be educated and I had to face the impacts of my own adoption as an infant.
Haley Radke: I really appreciated you saying how reunion didn't fill in everything for you and there was still this longing.
Julian Washio-Collette: Yeah.
Haley Radke: You know what I was thinking when you were sharing that? I was like, Oh my gosh. How did you tell your birth mother that you?
Julian Washio-Collette: Oh, God.
Haley Radke: And did it take you a while to have the courage to tell her that you had two placements?
Julian Washio-Collette: When I, I found my family through DNA testing, and when my ancestry [00:25:00] results became available. My birth mother actually contacted me before I had the opportunity to contact her because she was already on Ancestry, which was really powerful, and she sent me like the sweetest notes, the sweetest messages, the kinds of things that I wanted to hear.
I, I've thought about you and prayed about you every day of my life. And so at first I was in that elation, I was just talking to my therapist about this, but I think what's really important, I want to say for us, but certainly for me is disillusionment because I lived with this I call it the prime directive, which is find mom. I can't survive without my mother, right? So I've had that in my system since I was a baby. And because of that, I carried [00:26:00] inflated expectations, inflated hopes, inflated desires of what a mother could give me. So all of that. Came out of the box, came out of the box when I discovered my birth mother.
That said, After those first few messages, it was becoming quite apparent that things were not ideal. So for one, sadly, because of social media, I knew her politics, I knew her religious convictions, I knew that she was a Christian fundamentalist, and that we were at very opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of our political, cultural, religious convictions.
And that was going to make it difficult. So I knew that going in, but. As we were communicating at first through email, it was becoming apparent that okay I'm not sensing [00:27:00] a lot of capacity for emotional reciprocity and availability. So those, that, that burst of elation quickly diffused, I, I would say and, and one of my frustrations was that she wasn't really asking questions about my life and to me, it was this incredible weight. Like I, I can hardly say anything about my life without opening up the fact that yes, like I had this these incredible ruptures that I endured and so one day I just frankly, I just got frustrated and I just wrote her an email kind of spelling it out.
Just telling her what happened and sent it and she did respond and the response was disappointing. But I was ready for that, because I, at that point I tempered my expectations, but she [00:28:00] heard it. She definitely understood what I endured to, to the capacity that she could, but that was hard.
That was definitely hard. And I'm sure it was hard for her. I don't know that she knows how to communicate that, but absolutely. I'm sure it was really hard for her to hear too.
Haley Radke: Again, thanks for sharing that the hard parts because we like so many of us have these glorified ideas of what reunion is gonna look like and it's just not always gonna live up to our ex it's maybe never gonna live up to our expectations actually depending on what you go in with, but thank you.
Julian Washio-Collette: Yeah.
Haley Radke: I'm curious, you said you have an adoptee therapist, and I know that you've done some other work in adoptee community. How has that been going for you, and what are some things you want to share with folks who might be [00:29:00] nervous about joining in an adoptee community.
Julian Washio-Collette: Two things have been really important to me since discovering adoptee community, discovering you and Adoptees On.
So very early on she was actually at that celebration where I met you, I met Sara Easterly and she's the author of Searching for Mom and her new book Adoption Unfiltered which I was interviewed for, but she was, she and I connected because we have some things in common and one day I started writing, I started a blog, and I really wanted other adoptees to write with and so I just sent her a Facebook message. Hey, do you know of any adoptee writing groups that I could join? And she replied funny you should ask because I've been thinking of starting one myself. And I think I'll do that. So [00:30:00] she started Adoptee Voices and I've been a part of every cohort since then. And so that, yeah, that surprises you.
Haley Radke: That's a lot of writing, sir.
Julian Washio-Collette: It is. Yeah. And I will say, so that's been really important. And for one reason I You know, I write a lot about some really difficult stuff that I experience. And one of the things that's been so healing for me is that people who haven't had the same experience, adoptees who haven't had the same experience of me, read what I write and say, yeah, me too.
So that's incredibly powerful. So that's been a really important part of my journey. Early on as I was binge listening to Adoptees On I discovered the person who is my therapist and she's a regular guest on your healing [00:31:00] series and yeah, so I, I just, I started listening to Adoptees On at the end of September by mid October I had my first session with her. And I've been working with her ever since. So I really hit the ground running.
Haley Radke: Oh, I didn't know it had been going for so long. Okay. Okay.
Julian Washio-Collette: Yeah, so for one, and I did send you a Facebook message about this it was so helpful to be able to get to know someone through your healing series, to actually develop a real appreciation and respect for a therapist and to know like oh, wow. Like I would love to work with this person before I even contacted her. So that was a great service and I'm very grateful to you for it. So yeah, we started working together and I'll say a few things like I've been in therapy a few times prior to this and it just [00:32:00] wasn't that helpful.
So on one level, those therapists weren't quote unquote adoption competent. So there's that. But I think it goes deeper than that. Like when I started working with my current therapist, I immediately had a sense that she sees me, she understands me, or has the capacity to see and understand me in a way that no one else I'd worked with can, and that she's really invested.
And that made all the difference, not just being adoptee competent, but that she understands the depths of my wounds, the depths of my pain, and that she's invested in making this journey with me. So that was really powerful. And then the other part that's really important, given all of that, she put [00:33:00] attachment front and center.
In other words I'm already deeply committed to inner work, I'm very articulate about my inner life, so I'm good at therapy, I can show up and present really well. And that's what I did with other therapists, and they didn't take it much deeper than that. And so it wasn't very helpful because I wasn't attached, I wasn't attaching, and I didn't know any better.
Because that was just how I lived. So with my current therapist, she would interrupt me and ask okay, like, where are you right now? Because I'm not feeling connected. And really dig into okay, where am I? Am I connected? If not, Where, so really paying attention to relationship, connection, attachment, and that is what cracked me open.
Haley Radke: She's a good one. Wow. My goodness. I love [00:34:00] your writing. It is, I do connect to so much of it and I've read many of your pieces over the last couple of years since you've been putting things out publicly. And, I get why they're so resonant, like it's like I totally get it, you're a beautiful writer and I think all the inner work you've done all through the years shows up in your writing now and whether it's just with your current therapist or all of your silent meditative time, I'm, I see your writing and I see you have come through a lot of things, and I think it shows. I don't know. Do you think that's true?
Julian Washio-Collette: I do, because writing is where it comes out. My writing is a really good reflection for things I might not be aware of. It's a place where I experience my own strength, [00:35:00] power, integrity. And get to see it reflected back to me, not just in my own reading of it, but in other people's reading of it.
Haley Radke: I have one more question for you before we do recommended resources, and it's a big one. So I know you're a very spiritual person, and I'm wondering if you have a thought about, where do you think the spiritual aspect what is the impact of adoption on spirituality.
Julian Washio-Collette: Oh gosh. Yeah. So this is a huge question that I could spend a lot of time talking about, but just to be brief I really do think of adoption, which includes relinquishment as a spiritual wound.
And by that, I mean that I believe that it disrupts our [00:36:00] spiritual capacity for deep trust in existence, in life, in, in that which holds us. So I think a, certainly a big part of my own spiritual journey has been seeking that deep holding, mending that rift that I experienced right after I was born.
And I also that's the relinquishment part. And I also believe that adoption in itself is deeply traumatic. Our systems have already been, have already internalized this rupture through relinquishment, through separation. And then after that, we have to adapt to something completely foreign to our systems.
So we become, there's a kind of falseness built into our developmental process. So coming back to ourselves, which [00:37:00] includes reconciling ourselves with that disruption of what we've lost, and then developing some kind of faith. And I don't necessarily mean that in a religious sense, but just a basic internal faith in existence is such a profound and difficult journey.
And adoption puts a lot on our shoulders to make that journey. I think it's very easily, it's, I think it's a real temptation or vulnerability for adopted people to spiritually bypass either through, I would say, maybe in a more theistic or Christian vein. God loves me.
Everything's fine. Or, I. In a more Buddhist or Eastern sense, I meditated all the time more than I should have, I would say because I couldn't find a sense [00:38:00] of connection, an adequate sense of connection and safety in life. So I wanted something else like I wanted another transcendent plane that I could exist on.
So to speak, so I, yeah, I think that temptation is very strongly present for a lot of us. So it's really tricky adoptees and spirituality. We have that deep wound. We have this fervent. Need to escape the pain that we're in. And it can, it can go toward bypassing or it can go toward really delving into that rupture and finding healing.
And it's, it can be very tricky.
Haley Radke: Thank you. So well said. I'm gonna recommend that folks follow along with your blog, which is Peregrine Adoptee, and we'll link to it in the show notes and I'm sure they can hear from hearing you and how you speak. You are so articulate, and you have this [00:39:00] beautiful way of expressing things that some of us haven't been able to express yet.
I was wondering, can you just read a portion of your piece, A Mirror Infant, for us?
Julian Washio-Collette: Sure. Yeah, and I'll give a little background. Lori Holden, who's an adoptive mother, and she has a podcast called Adoption The Long View. On her website, she has a blog, and I met her, and she appreciated my writing and asked me if I would contribute.
And I wrote this piece, I thought okay, like I'm assuming that most of her audience are adoptive parents. So what would I want to say to an audience of adoptive parents? And so this is I think this is the first or second paragraph of that piece. Oh, I should say, so I'm speaking as an infant,
Some say I'm a blank slate. That [00:40:00] biology is not so essential to identity and belonging. But I am already charged with the dreams of my ancestors, communicated to me through my mother's blood, bone, voice, inflections, moods, and the rhythms of her sleeping and waking, movements and stillness. I emerge from her womb, and I know. My senses reach for her like tuning forks seeking a common vibration.
My whole body aches for the living field of energy that has enclosed me since my conception. I am born full of my own being, still inseparable from my mother.
Haley Radke: Beautiful. Thank you. I know folks are going to go check out more of your work. I just thank you, Julian. Just wonderful. What did you want to recommend to us today?[00:41:00]
Julian Washio-Collette: I want to recommend an author. Her name is Susan Anderson and the book I have in mind is called The Journey from Abandonment to Healing. She is not an adoptee, and to my mind, to my knowledge, she doesn't write explicitly about adoption, but she writes a lot about loss and abandonment, and the impacts of loss and abandonment, even when we're infants.
So her work really speaks to me. And in particular, so I can say that I used to be what she calls an abandaholic, which means that I had this uncanny intuition to find women who would abandon me in some way or just not be available. And I would form these intense attractions to them. And so I had a relationship with one such [00:42:00] woman who abandoned me in a very painful way.
And I was just crushed afterwards. And I, that's when I discovered Susan Anderson and she helped me incredibly to understand why I formed these attractions, how I get out of these, how do I get out of this loop? And also helped me to understand that At the time, if I would have met someone who is just simply available to me without an agenda, without a push and pull, I would probably feel indifferent because I was so wired to recreate that abandonment experience.
So without her, I don't know if I would be happily married right now. She was incredibly helpful. And I would say, even if you don't have that relationship pattern, She talks about how when we experience a significant loss in our lives as adults[00:43:00] it reverberates all the way back through all of our losses, even into infancy.
And so she, she really walks the reader through the different stages that we go through which is really helpful because certainly I felt like I was crazy. Like I am losing my mind. Because I've lost this person. I am completely out of touch with reality. Surely I'm the only person who experiences this.
And so I've just found her incredibly helpful and I would definitely recommend her to other adoptees.
Haley Radke: Amazing. It looks so good. Yeah. I think I told you. I was like, I'm going to order it when we're done.
Julian Washio-Collette: Totally.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Julian, for sharing part of your story with us and for your wisdom. Where can we connect with you online?
Julian Washio-Collette: I'm not a regular blogger, but I do maintain a blog. It's called Peregrine Adoptee, and that would be the primary place to connect with me. [00:44:00]
Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you so much.
Julian Washio-Collette: Yeah, thank you. This was great. Yeah, I think of how much Adoptees On and you have impacted my life. And it's pretty amazing to be here after all of that.
Haley Radke: My honor. Thank you.
Julian Washio-Collette: Thank you.
Haley Radke: I really hope you will reach out to Julian if you have had a similar experience to him, or if you know of others who have been relinquished and adopted twice. I think it would be really amazing if you guys could find each other, so you could talk about your commonalities. I'm so grateful for this community, and I know it has shortcomings, and so many of us have had a multitude of different experiences. And yet, when we have one or two of those [00:45:00] things like for sure in common like it helps so much to just deepen our friendships and relationships if you're looking for community I'd love to have you join us we have a weekly podcast for patreon supporters on adopteeson.com/community and we have live events a couple every month.
So we have off script parties where you can get together with fellow adoptees and we give you some questions to think about together and chat together. We have book club events where you can meet fellow adoptees who are interested in the same things that you're interested in. And we have ask an adoptee therapist events, which were brand new last year and we're continuing them monthly where you can submit questions anonymously to our adoptee therapists and we will answer them [00:46:00] on air for you live in a zoom call so you can ask for clarifications and we always have a little time to hang out with a therapist and interact with them and ask further questions, follow up things. And then the audio recording is available in podcast form following those events.
So amazing resources for you guys. I'm so proud of what we've built over there on Patreon and would love to have you join us. That supports this show to keep existing in the world. So thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
