285 [Healing Series] The Seven Insights into Adoptee Attachment with Pam Cordano, MFT
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/285
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 episode 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.
We are joined by Pam Cordano talking about the seven challenges of adoptee attachment, which include profound ongoing chronic misattunement, disconnection from our instincts and commodification. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to our [00:01:00] Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We'll link to everything we'll be talking about today on the website, adopteeson. com. Let's listen in. I am so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Pam Cordano. Welcome, Pam.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Thank you. It's so fun to be here with you again after a while.
Haley Radke
I know we get to talk regularly and you come to a lot of Patreon events, but you're not always on the main feed. We got to have you back on the main feed more. Yes. I know that your insights for adoptees have been so tremendously helpful and one of the things that we've relied on for years as adoptees looking at adoption with a critical lens and how it's impacted us has been the Primal Wound, which is a little bit [00:02:00] controversial sometimes, because it was written by an adoptive parent.
And so when I heard you. Do this talk on seven challenges in adoptee attachment. I was like, oh, finally, like an adoptee is breaking these things down for us. And you put into words a bunch of things for me personally, and I know others who've heard you share this. So do you want to share a little bit more about this and I don't know, do you think it relates to primal wound at all?
Pam Cordano, MFT
I do. Actually, that book was really important to me when I read it and the Primal Wound, it gave a structure and started to outline something that really resonated with ways I had been feeling inside that I didn't have language or concepts for.
And [00:03:00] so I was really grateful for that book actually when it came out. That was such a long time ago, but as I've lived more into my own healing as an adoptee and having been a therapist for a long time I've been really, grappling with our leading ideas about attachment theory and specific ways that I think that leading attachment theory is inadequate for us adoptees.
I just started to think about trying to name some specific things that are actually, that have substance to them that are in the way of us feeling comfortable attaching. Not just to other people, but to the world at large and to our own selves. Just attachment as a whole thing. Maybe how this relates to the primal wound is maybe some of what I'm trying to figure out has to do with looking under the hood of us.
And it's not just more external and conceptual, but it's looking under the hood.
Haley Radke
Every [00:04:00] time I get one of those new books, like What Happened to You or, all the the leading Gabor Mate book or Bessel van der Kolk or something like that. I literally always flip to the index first and see if they have adoption in it or adoptee and I keep looking for them to talk about us we're good case study. And they don't.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah. I think that I think it's very hard for somebody not adopted to understand what it's like being us under the hood, they're just describing cars, but we're like in the engine of, we live in the engine of us and it's complicated in here.
Haley Radke
Okay. So even Nancy Verrier with a Primal Wound, right? She's looking from the outside. It's not her personal experience. Yeah. Okay. You're under the hood.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Under the hood. And I'll just say psychedelics have been huge in helping me get under the hood and [00:05:00] helping other people get under the hood who are trying to understand these huge defense structures that have been keeping us alive from the beginning. It's very complicated in here.
Haley Radke
Before we get into the seven, can you just set up why attachment is so important? And I know you talk about the limbic system and the brain and that, can you set that up for us?
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah. Trauma attachment 101. This is what I guess, what I would think is important to say right now is that we have our amygdalas.
The amygdala is the fear center of the brain and the amygdala is telling us that something dangerous is going to happen or something dangerous is happening. So it's looking for danger and the amygdala is part of the larger system called the limbic system. The limbic system is a larger system.
The amygdala is part of the limbic system and the limbic system stores highly charged memories and manages all of our sleep and appetite cycles and our moods [00:06:00] and our ability to bond. So the limbic system is where we bond from and the limbic system is where we need to connect with other people. With them and their limbic systems connecting with us. So that's where the party is of attachment, the limbic system. Okay.
Haley Radke
Okay. We're in the attachment party. Got it.
Pam Cordano, MFT
And that's one reason that when adoptees get together, we don't even have to make a decision. We, people can just feel the difference that the safety being with another adoptee, even if our stories are very different because there's a certain kind of mutual understanding that helps our systems relax and then bonding can happen more comfortably and easily among adoptees. That's why adoptees are so important to each other.
Haley Radke
That's cool.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah. So there's this therapist up in Seattle who is not adopted. He's an attachment [00:07:00] specialist. And I just said to him straight up like I'm an alien. I was like okay, explain attachment to me from your point of view. And he said, so I wrote down what he said.
He said this, he said, the baby needs the mom's limbic brain to attune to the baby's limbic brain. When attunement happens, we feel safe. The baby learns she can be found by the mother. She is findable and worthy of being found. If someone finds her, she's not alone. If she is found, someone worked to find her.
If this happens consistently, she does not need to doubt her value. She can be found in the deep, young places. As she is found, she also learns to find more of herself. This paragraph has become very important to me because it just names the magnitude of what didn't happen for [00:08:00] me and I think what doesn't happen for most or any adoptee, because how can pause, pause right there.
Haley Radke
How can a stranger fill in for that?
Pam Cordano, MFT
How can a stranger with a, with an entirely different agenda, the agenda maybe is becoming a mother, becoming a father, starting a family, adding to a family, conquering infertility. I don't know what the agenda is, but it often isn't the agenda of simply opening one's system to a horror of pain in a baby.
Like when I think, I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but when I think about the day I arrived, to my adoptive parents, I probably needed the Red Cross to show up, like with the helicopter and that silver wrap stuff that they wrap people in to keep them warm. I was a wreck looking back and hearing stories from my grandparents, like I'd stopped crying, I was, I'd been through six months of [00:09:00] hell and had shut down natural systems like crying just to stay alive.
That was the day that was so exciting to my parents. They, they had the neighbors come over and it was like a celebration, like a brand new, gotcha day kind of situation. So it was just It's not just like the limbic resonance wasn't there, but there was this massive misattunement, actually, and I don't know how that couldn't be the normal story. Do you?
Haley Radke
I'm just, I'm trying to put this together for myself, because we have all kinds of different adoptee experiences, and I was like born in a hospital left in the hospital for, say, 10 days before I went to my home with my adoptive parents. And you have this interruption, right? You're with your birth mother, but she was neglectful and you were [00:10:00] removed. That's your personal story that you've shared here a little bit before. And there's other adoptees who are, with. Their families for longer, and then they get removed, right? So at any point, there's always this gap in care.
And we're with new people who are supposed to help us regulate in some fashion. But whether it's kinship or a full stranger. It's not the same.
Pam Cordano, MFT
And first of all, it's hard enough for us. I'm almost 60 years old and I'm just starting to understand and feel into the magnitude of the trauma from my infancy. And in a really bodily way, as hard as I've been working on this I've just started to make more progress in the last couple of years. What adoptive parent younger than me, A, can understand something about losing one's whole lineage and the primal [00:11:00] wound, and then Secondly, do enough work on themselves to be at a place where they can resonate with a baby in a limbic kind of way, open up to that kind of trauma. It just doesn't really make sense that would be something available.
Haley Radke
Is that even possible? That's maybe just like a hypothetical we can't even, say, but say an adoptive parent is so prepared and they know what they're getting into and they've done all the work and things. In my mind then they don't adopt, because then they know. So I don't know if those things can even coexist. Having a human so ready for a baby that suffered this catastrophic loss.
Pam Cordano, MFT
And I've talked about Cambodia before when I went to Cambodia and I met some orphans there that, that were teenagers, but had been orphaned when they were babies and in [00:12:00] Cambodia following the genocide.
The baby's names and stories were kept intact and were known by the families that took them in. Nothing was put on the babies to like, to now I'm your mom and this is your dad. It was like, we're here, we're a family taking care of you and you can call us what you want. You can call us, auntie or first name or mother, father, if you want to, but that's up to you like it's your life. This is yours. It's it was very baby child centered and I think that and then the families had known what the and had felt with the children what they've gone through because I guess they had all gone through the genocide.
So they all knew, but I think that was better for them than what happens here with such a it's a one two punch. It's like a loss and now this fiction.
Haley Radke
We've had this talk before, right? There's this, yeah, there's the relinquishment and trauma. And then there's also a trauma of, okay, now you have to fit where you've been put. [00:13:00] Right. And I think, should we go through the seven? Cause I think some of that is like absolutely addresses that.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Seven areas of challenge specific to adoptees and attaching. So the first challenge is the adoptee body. The adoptee body is where the story lives. A theme in our community is all these ways that adoptees bodies are not well, like digestive problems, sleep problems, autoimmune disorders, headaches.
I've had cancer. It's just the body is my body has been fraught with stress and it seems like almost all of the adoptees I meet have a lot of this kind of stuff. For an adopted child, there are two stories going on. There's how well they're masking the trauma and trying to fit in and doing whatever, however they're doing that.
And then there's what the body is doing. The adoptee body is really where the story lives. And the adoptee body is talking to us and to our families the entire time. [00:14:00] So I know for me, I didn't sleep well at all as a kid. I still don't. And I also didn't eat that well either. I was just eating was tough. Everything was tough. Eating was tough and sleeping was tough. My parents wanted to be good parents and they saw these problems as reflect reflections that they were not doing something right. So it became centered on them. And so they weren't curious why? Why is Pam having such a hard time sleeping and eating? What's going on? Let's try to get underneath this. I'm sure there are some adoptive parents that would, that care about the body and are paying attention to the body. But for my parents, it was really about a reflection of them that they were doing something wrong or they weren't, they wanted me to show them that they were doing a good job, basically.
The body is where the story lives. What story is the body telling and who wants to listen to it? And that really matters. Even for us now that those of us who are adults, adoptees who are adults, like we, we want to really start to care about what the story our body [00:15:00] is telling. And we want partners and friends and family to care about our bodies and the stories that are, because the body tells symbolic stories.
If I can't be conscious of something that's going on and express it in words, that's one way that it shows up as a symbolic body thing. You know what I mean?
Haley Radke
Because we've talked before about pre verbal trauma, so we might not have words for it, but it's like living somewhere.
Pam Cordano, MFT
And it does show up. It does, there's the body doesn't, the body doesn't lie or the body keeps the score. It's. The body tells the truth. I think that a lot of adoptees are under so much stress to deal with the trauma that they may not even be aware of, but it's there. And then be fitting in and masking and functioning as best they can as children and as adults.
I don't think listening to the body is necessarily a high priority when we're trying to survive. So it goes, it gets deprioritized. But I think that [00:16:00] when we're really talking about attachment, we have to include the body. The body is a really wonderful truth teller. And it can be a nightmare to enter, but it's the place that we need to attach from.
So we have to start to value the stories our own bodies are telling and then be close to people who also value the stories our bodies are telling so that we can at least be in reality. There's the quote by John Bowlby, British psychologists and psychiatrists that I think was like the father of attachment who said, "what cannot be said to the mother cannot be said to the self."
And so if we adoptees have nobody, we can tell the truth to about this implicit trauma and it's running rampant in our systems. We can't tell ourselves either. And that's where it has to go into symbolism has to go into body problems, addictions. Things like that, more indirect, but real signs of what we wish and needed to be able to tell to maybe both mothers, but can't, so that [00:17:00] we can't tell it to ourselves.
Haley Radke
That sounds to me like so much of this is subconscious. Mhm. And even for those adoptees that don't acknowledge that adoption is problematic or has had challenges or comes from a challenging system in place, like all of those things, like there's still something happening underneath the surface that just isn't safe to surface.
Pam Cordano, MFT
And it comes out eventually because it gets very hard over decades and decades to, to hold these defenses in place to keep us alive and things start to break down. As we get older and often that's a nightmare, but it's a gift because then we have a different, a new chance to have some access to it and to work some things through that could never be worked through before.
Haley Radke
Okay, what's number two?
Pam Cordano, MFT
Okay, the second one is the enormity [00:18:00] and value of belonging to lineage. When we lose our lineages, it's a massive loss. And I used to think of lineage as being a line, like there's me, there's my birth mother, there's her mother, there's her mother, like it went down a line. But now I think of lineage as a giant spider web with many points of connection and orientation for us.
So to be removed from that entire spider web is a massive loss. And our culture doesn't treat that as a massive loss. There's a devaluing of remaining in one's lineage, the value of that. And so the loss of that, which happens in one minute or one hour or one day is huge. We used to, I used to call it separation trauma or attachment destruction.
I thought attachment destruction was a really bold way of saying something about this primal wound. But even that is it's a moment attachment destruction. But when we think about the loss of a spiderweb lineage, [00:19:00] we're like with, we're like in a free fall out in the world without that net that holds everybody into place.
Haley Radke
So even you and I have talked about this before and picturing the web, it's if we're gone, the impact of our absence also impacts the family of origin, right? Their web is changed. Yeah, and then I was thinking about say transnational adoptees. And so our web is in a certain place and so if you're from a different country and your web is in a different country and that's You know, that's also a place of comfort and safety and those kinds of things right?
We remember where we were and where our family has been. And so there's also that loss that's just compounding on
Pam Cordano, MFT
It's huge.
Haley Radke
Yeah.
Pam Cordano, MFT
It's huge. The smells. It's yeah, [00:20:00] if it's a place, it's not just all of the people, the points of, and the stories and the qualities of the lineage. But it's, yeah it's the place.
That's a whole big part of the web too, is the place. Or, trans, transracial adoption. Same thing.
Haley Radke
Yeah. I was just going to say, yeah, race, ethnicity, culture, all of those things are pieced together as a part of the web, maybe.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yep.
Haley Radke
Okay. Okay.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Totally. Number three. When we are plucked from the, or kicked out of, whichever, however we leave that massive lineage web, we're in a freefall, in a sense.
There's, we're not being held by all of the points that hold us. More and more, it's gotten out this new phrase called the nothing place. And the nothing place is a phrase we're using to mean no orientation points, free fall, [00:21:00] terror. And a friend of mine shared this nothing place thing with me.
He'd done psychedelics and he'd found himself in the nothing place. And when he described it, I totally recognized it. And so at the time it was in 2021 Anne Heffron and I were doing a year of Flourish 50 people, two days a week, weekly meetings with adoptees. And I brought this nothing place concept. Concept ha. It's it's not a concept, it's real. To all of them and ask them to try it on and I was shocked because everybody resonated with it. And knew in some way that they were avoiding something about this terrifying free fall into nothingness without the web, but we haven't had language for this that's been adequate. And so it's just like this monster that we're avoiding something. I think that's the monster is a free fall.
Haley Radke
I [00:22:00] was thinking that I've been watching this like travel show lately. And I was thinking like, if you were as an adult transported to a fully a different country and you had nothing with you, so you had the clothes on your back and you had no money, no passport, and you didn't speak the language and you didn't even know where you were and like how disorienting that would be.
But yet, you still have your brains and experience with you, and you can figure out okay, I need to, I need to get help from somebody I need to figure out where I am. You can figure out how to communicate and whatever. So you have some of those skills. And I was thinking about how a baby or a young child is just like just alone.
And when you describe it as the nothing place, like I think of myself, like alone as a baby and it's too scary to go there, right? It's just too scary to like, even think about that.
Pam Cordano, MFT
[00:23:00] Totally. And what you just said about the show I may not have this totally accurate, but I think with the highest level military people, Navy SEALs , they do an exercise where they drop somebody off in a foreign town and they have to survive for four days.
And there are some enemies. I think there are quote enemies that are looking for them. So it's like this four day trial of survival. And I don't know, I think about us as babies and well, there's a primal wound, right? We're already like reeling from this loss of lineage and then we don't recognize anything. And we, yeah, we can't talk, nothing.
Haley Radke
Because babies are, and really small children, right? We're fully at the mercy of anyone, anything around us. There's no competence whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah. I was just trying to think of other ways to [00:24:00] explain this to someone who's not adopted. Huh. And I just, there's nothing like it, right? There's nothing like
Pam Cordano, MFT
What's the movie where somebody gets lost out in space just spinning around out in the middle of nowhere, like an astronaut?
Haley Radke
Interstellar is that the right one? I don't know, there was a couple space movies?
Pam Cordano, MFT
It's funny because just, I think that for non adopted people, they might say you have loving people that want you, that want to make a home for you, that have paid a lot of money for you that, that, have decorated a room for you, like you're not out in space, there's people here, but that's from adult humans that don't understand loss of lineage.
I think the value of talking about the nothing place is getting back inside the adoptee and being adoptee centric and not non adoptee centric.
Haley Radke
It's interesting. I have a whiteboard full of ideas and everything for shows and things next to me that you can't see, but it's here. It's always there. And I've had The Nothing Place written on the board for several years, actually. [00:25:00] And I could never bring myself to ask you to do a full episode about it because it is so depressing to just think about that and I was like, God, I don't think I can talk about that for half an hour. That just is it's too much.
Pam Cordano, MFT
And you know what, trauma, the definition of trauma is too much, too muchness. It is too much. And it was too much. And that's what we're trying to say to the world. It was too much. It is too much. And it was too much for us.
Haley Radke
Yeah.
Pam Cordano, MFT
You might have been fine. We weren't. And aren't. Yeah.
Haley Radke
Yes. I was just thinking, we're talking about, different adoptee experiences and even open adoption has been seen as this like panacea like but you still know who your birth parents are like you still get meetings with [00:26:00] them sometimes or whatever. However open adoption agreements have been structured if they remain open by the way but it's interesting because I was thinking like nothing place that still exists for open adoption.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Oh totally Because the death in place happens when we get separated from lineage, and then if, when the birth family comes back in, whether it's a six months, one year, every five years, not till the child's 13, whatever they just, whatever the decision is, all of this trauma has already happened.
And so then, what part of the child is meeting their birth family? I don't think it's an open limbic system. It's, I imagine it, from the adoptee's point of view, I imagine it being pretty scary to meet the people that let you go.
[00:27:00] Haley Radke
Even if it's regular? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All the way along. Yeah. Okay, we got to move on from that.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Okay. The next one falls right into place, which is adaptation becomes the primary survival mechanism. So we're in the nothing place. We got to survive. Every living organism wants to survive. The replacement for orientation is adaptation. And we are doing everything we can to adapt to what's in front of us to survive. And we're really good at it. Adoptees are super adapters. That's why Paul Sunderland, in his video about addiction, said that adoptees really surprised him when they would seem so put together and intact, and then the littlest thing would happen and they would, lose it. Because we can adapt, but that doesn't mean that we [00:28:00] feel okay and filled in inside.
Haley Radke
I'm stuck on this sentence. The replacement for orientation is adaptation. This just feels so profound to me just because it's going back to the lack of orientation we have. It's frankly
Pam Cordano, MFT
And it could be very confusing then what's the real me versus what's just adaptation? It gets so Confusing. It takes so long to figure that out.
Haley Radke
Can you just say some examples of things that are adaptations? Literally just being the child of these new parents just having that identity is an adaptation, right?
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah. Being very perceptive. What do they want? What makes them smile? What makes them what makes them love me more? Which would make me safe? I, okay I'm less worried about saying something really offensive compared to how I used to be when I first met you. I was really worried about [00:29:00] upsetting people, but I'm less worried about that now. Several years ago, I saw an article in the Huffington Post, and I forget which adoptee, I wish I knew which adoptee wrote it.
She said something like, I feel like I've said this on your show before, that when a baby is kidnapped, they are expected to remember their parents and reject the kidnappers. And then when a child's adopted, they're expected to forget their birth family and bond with the adopters. And so if I were kidnapped, I would be paying.
I would be using all my energy to survive. I would be trying to figure out the kidnappers. What makes them mad? What makes them happy? What makes them calm down? What keeps them from harming me, I'd be looking for everything I could do to maximize my survival. I think we do that from the get go. We just start getting very perceptive to survive because we've already had this huge threat to our life by this relinquishment. [00:30:00] We're under, it's quote attachment, which is an attachment under duress.
Haley Radke
You already said it. That's the literal survival mechanism.
Pam Cordano, MFT
I guess it goes without saying everything we're naming is a challenge in our ability to attach. So trying to unwind these crisscrossed patterns and confusions to figure out like, let's say, I don't know, since we're such good adapters, because we had to be, how do we attach when we get into a romantic relationship where we have to watch where am I adapting or what's real and can the person I'm with tolerate the real me and how about now and how about now like it's a process to start, to become real with people so we can attach.
Haley Radke
What's coming to mind and I don't know if this is the right place to comment on it, but I still see people sharing about reactive attachment disorder, which from the therapist that I know and respect, that's [00:31:00] not a real thing.
I think about so for people who don't know, it's sort of like if there's a child in your care and they're so to speak acting out and you're, they're troublesome in some way to you as the adoptive parent, they'll often get diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder. And now I'm, as you're talking, I'm thinking like. These kids are the ones saying the truth out loud. I don't belong here. What am I doing here? Get me out of here. How do I get out of here? Do you have comments on reactive attachment disorder? Do you think that's a real thing?
Pam Cordano, MFT
Look at this. I'm just looking up symptoms, right? Avoidance of physical touch or comfort when distressed.
What I have heard a lot of adoptees say is it was the wrong hands. It was the wrong bodies. I didn't want those hands. I didn't want those bodies. I wanted someone who felt right. I remember my mom would always say to me, oh, I can't do anything right. I can't do anything right. It was [00:32:00] like, Yeah, I didn't want you. I wanted her, I didn't even know who her was at that point, but I knew I wanted her.
Unaffected when left alone. I found it a relief to be left alone because then I had less adapting to do. I could call, I could just relax.
Emotional detachment. Yeah. Why emotionally attach when our deepest truth is absolutely unknown. It's very hard to attach when we have to keep most of us and ourselves in the closet.
Rocking or self comforting excessively, inability to show guilt, remorse, or regret. Some kids are mad for good reasons. So they don't feel guilty for being mad. Tantrums, anger, sadness.
Haley Radke
Yeah, so the cure, quote unquote, for reactive attachment disorder, or like your, what you want to have happen, is that they adapt better, and fit in better, and behave.
Pam Cordano, MFT
[00:33:00] Yeah.
Haley Radke
That's the fix.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Victor Frankl said, an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal. I think that sums it up. We can put a DSM diagnosis on it or we can just say normal.
Haley Radke
Yeah.
Pam Cordano, MFT
And then the child has to carry, The adopted child has to carry the abnormal instead of the situation, the institution carrying the abnormal.
Haley Radke
Yeah.
Pam Cordano, MFT
That's what's abnormal.
Haley Radke
So medicating the child, sending them off to whatever home
Pam Cordano, MFT
Bootcamp.
Haley Radke
Yeah. Yeah. All of those things. It's never the fix on the situation. And not that every situation can be fixed, but adoptive parents anyway, that's a full aside, but I thought that kind of went, okay, what's our next one? Number five.
Pam Cordano, MFT
This bridge is right to the next one, which is [00:34:00] profound chronic misattunement. So adoptees are swimming in a fish tank of water that is profoundly chronically misattuned. And this is from inside the family and outside the family and inside their own selves with themselves. There's just this misattunement.
It is everywhere because we can't be understood in the steepest place and we can't understand ourselves in the deepest place easily. It takes, I think it takes decades. And then adoptive families don't know how to, we're barely learning how to understand our own selves, how our adoptive parents and families gonna understand what we're trying to understand about under the hood.
And then the culture at large is, has got, sparkles and rainbows on top of this. So I think I shared with you, Haley, that there's this public figure that I like, and she and her partner adopted a baby. And before they even got the baby, [00:35:00] they were calling the baby, their soulmate. And I felt so turned off and upset just that a baby is getting burdened with that story, that label without participating in an agreement of soulmates, or in an agreement of the narrative about soulmates. It sounds nice on the surface. But it isn't nice for the adoptee. What? Say it.
Haley Radke
I can't even.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Say it.
Haley Radke
You've said that to me before. It just makes me want to barf. And I'm just going back to adoption is this problematic thing that once you see it, once we pull up and show you under the hood, like how could you unsee that?
Ugh. Yeah. Yeah, I have all of these like things going on the back of my [00:36:00] head always. How can I show non adoptees, you like to call them muggles, the truth behind what our experiences is, what works most effectively to tell people to show people so that we can stop the madness. And I'm always looking for those things.
One of the things that just boggles my mind is, The like videos on Instagram or TikTok where it's like, oh, here's your new baby and everybody's oh my gosh, I can't believe you're adopting. This is wonderful. So amazing. And then the same people are like, oh my gosh, you're reuniting with your birth parents. Oh, it's wonderful. It's so amazing. Like, How can, how do you not see the disconnect? So you're talking about swimming in the chronic misattunement of society. Like it's like, who's pushing the rock up the hill? Who's that? That's what we're doing. The boulder up the, or whatever, it's [00:37:00] never gonna get there.
Pam Cordano, MFT
It's gonna run over us.
Haley Radke
Yeah, exactly.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Smash us.
Haley Radke
It has. It has run me over. For sure. I am smushed at the bottom of the mountain.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah. Yeah.
Haley Radke
Yeah. Even these Gatcha Day celebrations I had recently Cam Lee Small on the show and in his new book, he talks about the gotcha day misses "lost-ya" day it's very, it's incredible to me that people can see that and not see where did this baby or child come from they came from somewhere. How are you celebrating what could be the worst day of their life?
Pam Cordano, MFT
And you think the baby doesn't know this it hasn't isn't the one experience. We're bodies We're in a body like you think that we don't experience the entire things and it's [00:38:00] registered and it's the core of our nervous systems developing like we're not even there like we're a cartoon or something it's like cartoon life
Haley Radke
I'm picturing someone sort of new ish to this listening to us. We've become, so radicalized. We have our eyes wide open. It's just like this whole conversation might just come across as like wild. But it's like facts are facts, yo. I don't know what to tell you.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah. Like I'm, it is, I don't have the energy to twist myself inside out anymore and pretend it's something else.
Haley Radke
Yeah, exactly.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Okay. So the sixth thing, then the result of swimming in this profound chronic water of misattunement is we get profoundly disconnected from our own instincts and we start to say yes, where when we have a no or [00:39:00] no, when we have a yes, and we think things that are not dangerous are dangerous.
And we think things that are dangerous are not dangerous. We get really screwed up in our own instincts, maybe not entirely like the quote, angry adoptees that grow up. Like I was more of, I had both. I had compliance and I had anger. The anger was at least a remnant of connection still to some of my instincts.
Like I remember, being 14 or something and yelling at my mom in the kitchen where my dad could hear and saying, You're not my real parents. You're just my guardians and you bought me and and that was true, but it was blasphemy. I knew that I was going to get grounded and I was breaking their hearts and just saying the truth. But I got pushed to a point where I could connect back in to something I knew that was true.
Haley Radke
I'm going back to thinking about adoptees who have done their all to fit [00:40:00] in and to absorb the adoption is beautiful narrative. And even in fact, maybe like I did, I felt like I owed it and to adopt myself to pay it forward, those kinds of things.
And what a profound disconnection that was, to not see.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah.
Haley Radke
There's like mega shame there. For me, I know I've said that out loud before. I know that's not the first time people might hear me say that, but it's it feels so shameful now to think oh my gosh, I almost was complicit in this system. And that sucks. And then for folks who have gone ahead and done that, you can't admit it because it's not safe.
Pam Cordano, MFT
And there, that's where there's a lot, so much shame too.
Haley Radke
[00:41:00] Yeah.
Pam Cordano, MFT
To be in your case, what you said about shame, about almost being complicit, I think that's evidence of how hard you had to survive, how hard you had to adapt.
Like we, we can just think it's a, it's an us thing, but it's the whole system that, that leads to that kind of a decision of or should I adopt? Or whatever. I know I've, I think I said this before somewhere, but when I was like seven years old, my mom's friend wrote me this really pretty card and mailed it to me with little bunnies on it and said, as I was going to sleep tonight, I was thinking about how lucky you are as such a young person that you've been blessed twice so early in life.
First, by a mother that loved you enough to give you away, and then by a mother that loved you enough to take you in. I just remember the, huh? Feeling what? And I knew I [00:42:00] was supposed to really cherish this card, but it didn't, my body was like, it had nowhere to go. Cause it just didn't fit.
Love is not giving people away. That is not love. Love does not give people away. And also my parents didn't love me enough to take me in. I was the next baby to come up on the five year wait list. That was a healthy white female, so that's why I ended up with them. It was all sequential, had nothing to do with me.
Haley Radke
This is back to misattunement soup.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah. Disconnection from instincts comes from that. Yeah. Okay, and the last thing, this number seven is, okay, commodification. We babies and children who get adopted are turned into a commodity. We're reduced to a commodity. A price tag is put on us based on what the context is for the adoption and money is paid and we're purchased.
[00:43:00] And without that purchasing, the parents wouldn't have the babies. That's a requirement. So even though a lot of adoptive parents might say, oh, I don't believe in commodifying humans. I don't believe in buying and selling humans. I don't believe in human trafficking. That's just how the system is. So that's just how it works.
That is commodification. That is purchasing humans. And the thing that's important about this for us under the hood is that commodification is a lived experience for us. It's not just a fact of a system. It's a lived experience and our body's experience being reduced to a commodity. And to pile on to this problem with disconnecting from our instincts is we don't even know who does this body belong to.
Is it me or is it them? Or is it society? Or who does this country belong to? Who does this planet belong to? Who does this cosmos belong to? If people are religious, who does God belong to? [00:44:00] Because there's such a disconnection from owning one's own body and self and life. Our life gets usurped.
And then we have to wake up, come out of the fog, and get the right help and enough of it to start. returning to a state of belonging to our own selves again. And other people don't have to think about this the same way. Might have had a strict religious or abusive family, but it's not nearly to the magnitude that we're talking about here.
Haley Radke
This continues into adulthood where adoptees who are looking for original birth certificates or adoption records, those kinds of things, they're like filed in, in the same place in the court. From what I understand, it's like items in the legal system we're commodified there too. [00:45:00] I'm not saying that very well, but I just even in adoptions that are public like mine was, there's costs being paid, even if it's by the government or any of those things. There's still financial transactions happening, whether or not adoptive parents actually are the ones to write the check. Just to, I'm just going to say that in case people are like nobody paid any money for me. Somebody did.
Pam Cordano, MFT
I was a county, I was a county adoption in California and my parents paid $5,000 for me. And then when I was 25 years old and I went to the court, to get access to my birth certificate. Um, I was told my dad, my adoptive dad came with me and I, we were told I had to leave the room [00:46:00] for him to be able to see the file of the case where he was the plaintiff. By adopting me. So I had to leave the room for him to see that my birth certificate and you probably know that in California, we still don't have access to our birth certificates. It's bizarre. And I think that, I could get hung up on that. But I think that for me the deeper place about all of that is in my own body and alienation from my right to my own life and my own self and living in a world where this has all been allowed and still is still allowed.
Haley Radke
So if you were to go on to a website today from most adoption agencies that are looking for mothers in a crisis situation and you were to chat or fill out a form for seeking help, they will ask your ethnicity to [00:47:00] determine the potential value of your baby. There's still a price put on or a value put on what your skin color is or if you're biracial or that's still actively happening.
So there's an added weight as well for our fellow adoptees who are people of color and are seen from the world's perspective as valued less than. I'm just saying it out loud because that's what's happening. And so, yeah. It's really
Pam Cordano, MFT
additional burden
Haley Radke
Yeah.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Layers of burdens.
Haley Radke
I don't know what to say. Cause this is it's I love having the words and language to describe all of the different issues that wrap up [00:48:00] into this ball of oh, this is why I might have some issues. It's hard though. It's really hard to think about it.
It's hard to look at it because it feels that's too big. That's too big. I don't want to address that. I want to hide from that. That's scary. It's easier to put that to the side. I want to blend it in society. I want to I can't be looking at this right now.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah.
Haley Radke
Do you want to just talk to adoptees that might feel that way? Or give us I don't know, one next step because this is like overwhelming.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah. It's interesting, like, When Haley, when you and I hang out, we usually have a lot of fun. We, this isn't like what we talk about. We have fun.
Haley Radke
Yeah, we do. I know. I was like, this is depressing.
Pam Cordano, MFT
We have online parties. Yeah, this is depressing. But I think that I don't think we necessarily have to dwell in all of these things. I think it's just good for us to start of, some of this could be helpful in just clicking [00:49:00] our awareness. Maybe clicking some confusions in ourselves back into the right spot so that we just feel more lined up in a way that makes sense and maybe more ground underneath our feet.
But first of all, we adoptees need limbic resonance. And that's it's hard to even I didn't even 7 years before I was in a go 7 years ago before I was in adoptee land. I did not understand the value of hanging out with adoptees. I did not want to be part of this club and I didn't want to talk about adoption and be with, I just wanted that to go away.
But actually adoptees need each other so much. And that's why this show and adoptee events are so powerful because our nervous systems can relax and we can feel much more limbic resonance that we're used to feeling with each other in places that are very important and also maybe heavy and difficult.
But once we can connect on the difficult stuff. Or even knowing that the difficult stuff is a place of connection, we can relax and [00:50:00] having fun it's also a whole part of the picture. When Anne Heffron and I did adoptee retreats, we started a little heavy, but then quickly it lightened up and we laughed harder than I usually laugh anywhere because there's a lot to laugh about, too, and enjoy. It's fun to enjoy just feeling connected, in a new way without the stress of that barrier between people who get it and people who don't. So limbic resonance is huge. Also if you're seeing a therapist, make sure your therapist can feel you and you're feeling felt because without that, it's, there's no point really in therapy.
Haley Radke
Interesting. I think our intuition is very good on that. And so I hope people can have permission to like, like trust that.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah, I agree with you. And then the next thing is [00:51:00] just that, uh, I just said two things at once limbic resonance and adoptee community. Those two things are, I think, essential for us for our healing.
I just, I don't know a better, faster way to heal and feel more comfortable in our skin than that, than those two things. And then psychedelic assisted therapy is huge. I think that the walls that keep us outside of the hard places are so thick and they're built to keep us out and going to see a therapist once a week and talking about it. We can talk about things, but it's hard to get underneath through the wall into the hard places. And especially where the body is where the body has taken over the pain and the trauma, and we're not even aware of it anymore. And so I encourage people to research psychedelic assisted therapy. MDMA, psilocybin, and others too, ketamine for some help to get under the hood.
Haley Radke
Okay. Thank you.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Yeah.
Haley Radke
Pam, you [00:52:00] have you and I have been friends for, seven years since the first time you came on the show and you've said so many amazing things to us that have opened up opportunities for connection and healing. So thank you. I feel like this is like a culmination of all of these conversations we've had and all the work you've done in the adoptee community. I'm so appreciative. Thank you.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Thank you Haley. Thank you.
Haley Radke
Where can people connect with you online?
Pam Cordano, MFT
The best way, I'm off social media five years now. My kids taught me some things and I got off social media. So I'm
Haley Radke
lucky.
Pam Cordano, MFT
It's nice. So my email is the best way, pcordano@comcast.net.
Haley Radke
Okay, perfect.
And we'll have that in the show notes for you. Also, if you don't have a pen handy right now, you can click back through later. Thank you [00:53:00] so much, Pam.
Pam Cordano, MFT
Thank you. It's a pleasure being here and hello to everybody out there. I'm happy to be here talking about this with you.
Haley Radke
It is always such an honor to have Pam on the show. If you want to hear the other episodes she's been featured on, we will link to those in the show notes for you along with her email address and she regularly is a guest on our Ask an Adoptee Therapist events and our Off Script Parties, which is an opportunity for you to meet fellow adoptees who want to talk about these things and build that community that she was talking about today. That is so important. And I'm so truly, deeply grateful for her wisdom and the way she shows up for us in those spaces. So my big [00:54:00] thanks to Pam, and I hope that you'll consider joining us, adopteeson.com/community. And if you want to see any of the upcoming live events we have on for these things, we'll have more things going on in the fall, but you can go to adopteeson.com/calendar and see a link of all the past things we've done and then all the upcoming Off Script Parties, Ask an Adoptee Therapist events, book club, documentary club, all those good things great opportunities to meet fellow adoptees. Okay, friends, thanks so much for listening and let's talk again soon.
