28 [Healing Series] Is Adoption Trauma?
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/28
Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke, and this is a special episode in our Healing Series, where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves, so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee.
Today is a heavy topic. I know I say that every single time it's a Healing episode. We tackle: Is adoption really trauma? Let's listen in.
This is Lesli Johnson, a fellow adoptee and licensed therapist who works to help other adoptees connect the dots of their story and live authentically. Welcome to Adoptees On, Lesli.
Lesli A. Johnson: Thanks, Haley. How are you today?
Haley Radke: Great. I'm so excited to talk to you again. You have really made an impact on our listeners so far, so I'm really excited to tackle this topic with you today.
I've had some adoptees contact me and they've been surprised by some of the stories on the podcast. We sometimes mention adoption as being a traumatic thing, that there's this thing about “adoption trauma”, and I was hoping that you could address that today. Do you think being adopted means that there's some kind of traumatic wound? What are your thoughts on that?
Lesli A. Johnson: I certainly also get contacted a lot with questions related to adoption and trauma. I think trauma is sometimes a hard word to hear, but I do think the process of separating an infant or a baby or a child from their biology, it is traumatic.
The word trauma, I mean, there is a negative connotation about it, but I'm advocating more for just truth and transparency, so that's why I use words like trauma. I don't think that that means that a person has to have a lifelong trauma, but if we're addressing the event as a traumatic event and then saying, “Okay, so now what do we need to do to help this person be calmer, work with their nervous system, work with integrating adoption into their story, to alleviate the symptoms of trauma?” I think a lot of times when people hear the word trauma, they're like, “Oh, that's so negative.” No, it's a word. It's a word. It's a word describing some symptoms that happen to most people when they're separated from their mother.
For a lot of adoptees, there are multiple traumas if they are placed in foster care, or if there are multiple placements. And I think that sometimes when an adoptee has had more than one placement or more than one foster home, that it's sometimes easier to use the word trauma in that situation. And maybe it’s deeper trauma, but I don't think so, I think it's okay to use the word trauma to describe the separation between a baby and their birth mother.
I always use the analogy, most of the time if you're going to get a puppy, you're not really supposed to take a puppy away from its mother until it's six or eight weeks old. But it's somehow okay to have a baby separated from– Not “okay”, I'm not using the word okay lightly, just supporting that idea that there is a traumatic response.
What we know about the brain and the nervous system today –that maybe wasn't evident, you know, 20 or 30 years ago– was that the process of separating a baby or an infant from his or her biological mother, is coded in the nervous system and in the mother's nervous system as traumatic. The only part of the brain that's fully developed at birth is the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight, flight, or freeze. And when the familiar mother isn't there to soothe the baby, the baby's levels of cortisol shoot up. And if this event of separation happens before the language receptors of the brain are developed, which is between 0-3, the event is just encoded in the nervous system. So we call that an ‘implicit only’ memory, meaning it happened before there was language, so there are no words to describe it.
What I've found in working with adult adoptees, and even teenagers and kids, is that they often –adults who maybe have a little bit more access to their experience and relating it– say things like, “I have this sense of just feeling lost or unrooted or like I don't know where I am, but I don't know what that's from.” And we might be able to relate that back to the separation before there were words to describe what happened. You know, the sense of rootlessness or the sense of where they say, “I don't remember exactly what happened, but I just have this felt sense.” That implicit memory.
Haley Radke: So what's the difference between a biological mother relinquishing right in the delivery room versus a biological mom taking her baby home? So there's that feeling like, ‘Where's my mother?’ What part of that is the traumatic?
Lesli A. Johnson: What we know now in 2017 –that you know, when I certainly was adopted, oh my gosh, almost 50 years ago– is that there's so much that the baby hears and smells even in utero. So, the baby knows the mother's voice. The baby knows the mother's gait, you know, the way she walks. The baby knows the mother's smells. So when that separation happens, everything that was once familiar to the baby is gone. It activates the sympathetic nervous system –the baby's– in fight, flight, or freeze. ‘What do I do?’, you know, not that they're thinking this logically, but their nervous system gets activated.
Whereas if the mother is able to be with the baby and act as the parasympathetic nervous system, the soothing agent, the familiar mother's able to calm the baby and soothe the baby. I mean, there are studies where crying babies are given a piece of clothing that the biological mother– you know, has her scent on it, and the baby is soothed by just even that familiarity.
Haley Radke:There's a connection that's been built, all over the time that the biological mother was carrying the baby–
Lesli A. Johnson: Essentially for the baby's entire life, yeah.
Haley Radke: Right, so then that's what's been severed. Can you talk a little bit about what does that mean? So it's traumatic, and so what does that mean for our brains? What's different between my brain as an adoptee who is relinquished as an infant versus someone who was parented right away?
Lesli A. Johnson: To clarify, a baby taken home from the hospital by their adoptive parents is parented from this start. But there still was that separation. So speaking in general terms, because I don't know if it's a hundred percent, but speaking in general terms, what I see in my practice is a common theme of separation anxiety. Separations and transitions are difficult. There is activation sometimes of just the nervous system so that there's hypervigilance. Sometimes adoptees talk about feeling anxious around separations and transitions. But just a heightened vigilance in the nervous system.
Sometimes people may not even relate that to adoption or the separation. But I certainly would say that most adoptees that I work with in my practice have a significant amount of anxiety and activation of their nervous system. Difficulty self-soothing would be another thing, too.
Haley Radke: So you say some adoptees, they don't even realize that this is connected. So how do we connect those dots?
Lesli A. Johnson: Well, I think you just named it: connecting the dots. I really believe good mental health is the ability to connect the dots of your story and have a coherent narrative.
So for smaller children, it would be helping the adoptive parents view adoption as trauma. I think one of the first books written on this would be Nancy Verrier's The Primal Wound. I remember reading that book in graduate school and kind of putting it away and I didn't wanna have that wound, you know, ‘that wasn't me’. And then realizing, ‘Oh wait, this completely explains it. This really is–’. I think she kind of was a pioneer in that respect, of calling adoption what it is, it's a trauma. So working with that is working with the trauma. Every person might display different symptoms, but talking about it for what it actually is, I mean, the truth is your friend.
Haley Radke: Okay. It is so interesting that you say that thing about The Primal Wound. Because I remember when I was reading it, too, I was like, ‘Nope, nope! This is not me.’ I've had a few adoptees contact me, one in particular I'm thinking of emailed me and he said, “Just so you know, I love your podcast and I listen all the time, but I'm an in-the-fog adoptee,” is what he said. “I'm good with adoption. Like, you know, it's interesting to hear these stories but it hasn't really affected me.” So is that true? Like, some of us are just super affected and some of us are fine?
Lesli A. Johnson: I think that certainly there are people that are: a) maybe more resilient, b) maybe are better able to use coping mechanisms like denial –and I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all– but work at a different level where maybe they're not either making the connections to adoption or they truly don't feel that adoption has had any impact on their lives.
I wouldn't challenge that person. I might challenge them if they were my client and I really saw themes that I've seen with clients. But yeah, I think maybe to each their own. But I've definitely seen it in clients that I've worked with where adults come in and don't think things are related to adoption, and then really start to connect their dots and have a real eye-opening, a lot of ‘aha’ moments, and are able to integrate how adoption has shaped them and add that piece to their story because it is a part of their story.
Haley Radke: It's true, I would never want to “lead someone out of the fog” –so to speak, that lingo– to realize maybe there is a traumatic aspect, because one of the discussions we've been having in one of my Facebook groups is like, “This is too hard. Let's go back in the fog. We don't wanna deal with these things.”
Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, denial and repression are super powerful. They're super powerful coping mechanisms.
Haley Radke: So what else can we use to not just cope, but heal from this trauma?
Lesli A. Johnson: Acknowledging it as such, and then working with it like you might other traumatic events or events that are perceived by the individual as traumatic. So, working with establishing a coherent narrative; support groups; therapy; you mentioned Facebook groups. I think when you're able to have a supportive group of people to run ideas by, run thoughts by, have your feelings and thoughts and experiences validated, that can be really healing. And as you know, we've talked before, I'm a huge proponent of EMDR therapy, which is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. It's an integrative therapy that I use in my practice. That's been really helpful.
Haley Radke: Yeah, and we did a whole episode on that, so you can go back and check that out for a deeper dive.
Lesli A. Johnson: Other tools and things that I've seen work with my clients: having a mindfulness program, working with the body in mind again. When traumas happen, the event is stored in the brain in a maladaptive way, so we really wanna work on connecting the mind in the body and integrating. So things like yoga, mindfulness, anything that helps connect the mind and the body.
Haley Radke: That’s really good. Trying to put it out of our head is not necessarily– if it's all repressed, that's fine, but if it's like coming out in different ways, we should probably deal with it.
Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, I think so. I think it's good to acknowledge it, because I think for most people there are parts of their adoption story and adoption experience that do kind of leak out as they go through life and move through life.
Haley Radke: Like having your first baby. For some people, the midlife kind-of crisis-y stage. Those are two separate things I've heard from multiple adoptees, when they have kind-of “woken up”-- I don't know how to say that.
Lesli A. Johnson: I think adolescence is another time, too. I mean, adolescence for all people, adopted or not, is a time of finding out who you are. And for adopted teens, that can be difficult if they don't have the pieces of their story. And part of finding out who you are is knowing where you came from. I think that's another life transition that's sometimes difficult for adoptees.
Haley Radke: Can you direct us to any particular books or research that we could kind of dive into a little further if we're interested in deeper study? You already talked about The Primal Wound, but is there anything else that would be helpful, to learn a little bit more about maybe the effect that it has on the brain, anything like that?
Lesli A. Johnson: One of my favorite books on trauma in general, that I think addresses what happens in the brain and the nervous system, is The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk, that's an excellent book.
Another of my favorite books related to adoption and the not-so-wonderful parts is called Adoption Therapy, and it's an anthology of essays by written by adoptees, many of them who are also therapists. That book was edited by Laura Dennis, it's called Adoption Therapy. Have you read it?
Haley Radke: I just got it. I had saved up a bunch of money and I ordered, like, 10 different books. So it's literally upstairs on my nightstand right now.
Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, it’s another one of those –in my opinion, similar to The Primal Wound– where it's not exactly what I would call a pleasant read, but every bit of it is so informative and it's a wonderful book.
Haley Radke: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your insight on this topic, which is very hard. Where can we connect with you online?
Lesli A. Johnson: You can connect with me, probably the easiest way is through my website, which is www.yourmindfulbrain.com, and then there are links to my email, Facebook page, Twitter account, and Instagram.
Haley Radke: Oh, perfect. Thank you so much, Lesli.
Lesli A. Johnson: Sure, my pleasure.
Haley Radke: If you have other topics that you'd like to see addressed in an upcoming Healing episode, please come find me on Twitter or Instagram, @adopteeson, and let me know.
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Next week's episode is with Marriette Williams. She's an international adoptee who searched and found her biological mother, only to find out that her adoption was non-consensual. Make sure you're subscribed in Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts, so you don't miss it.
Let's talk again next Friday.
