288 Bruce Porth Part 1
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/288
288 Bruce Porth
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're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I often share on this show that a great way to build your adoptee community is to join my Patreon group. And today's guest is someone that I have gotten to know over the past few years exactly because of that.
We are so fortunate to hear from Bruce Porth today. He is one of those people that only speaks when he's got something thoughtful and insightful to share. And today's conversation is no exception. Bruce shares about his childhood, some difficult relationship circumstances, his path to uncovering the impact adoption and [00:01:00] family separation had on his life, and what reunion has looked like.
This is part one of two, and don't worry, next week we'll release part two, where Bruce shares more about the healing modalities he's used, including breathwork and psychedelics. I want to give you a trigger warning, we have brief mentions of suicide and sexual assault in this episode. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson. com and next week we will share our recommended resources. Let's listen in.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On. Bruce Porth. Welcome, Bruce.
Bruce Porth: Thank you, Haley. It's really good to be here.
Haley Radke: I'm so glad we finally get the [00:02:00] chance to have a one on one convo. I feel like I've seen you in lots of my Patreon events and gotten to know you through those, but let's deep dive. What, do you want to share some of your story with us?
Bruce Porth: Sure. Yeah. And this is, yeah, this is great. Just me and you, Haley, and the millions of your followers. I can start with a little bit of my story. It's interesting. I just picked up Peter Levine's most recent book called an Autobiography of Trauma. He's really an amazing guy, but he's got a quote in there that I just came across the other night that really resonates with me.
And I think it comes from a Jewish proverb, but the quote is "what is truer than truth", the story. And the meaning of it is that our stories are really important and they can reveal more about us than any specific facts, or evidence based information about us. And people's stories are what I really love [00:03:00] listening to.
They can be extremely healing, and they have been for me. And there's a different take on telling our stories too, Anne Heffron's take on it is, it's like pooping a watermelon. And more specifically around writing our story, I think but I can relate to that as well. So a little bit of background for me, I was adopted at 10 days old in Chicago, Illinois, through a Booth Memorial Salvation Army Hospital.
And my mom was 16 years old and didn't have any resources. This is at the tail end of the the baby scoop era. The decision was made for her, like a lot of women in her situation. And so she went off to Booth Memorial hospital in January or February of 1967. I was born in April and I was adopted at 10 days into a family [00:04:00] that was a young couple, infertile couple, as is often the case, and I came into that family when my adoptive mom was, struggling a little bit with depression. She had just, suffered a few losses in her own life. She was struggling and I found out much later that was the answer to her dilemma at the time, and that I cured her of her feelings at the time of sadness and depression. And that was the way that I started out in that family. My, my adoptive father was pretty emotionally unavailable. He was prone to some volatility growing up for me, and he was a hollow dictator.
And not what I really needed, not what any adoptee or any child needed to grow in a healthy way. My dad grew up in a family that was, there was a great deal of pain there. And, his mother had, [00:05:00] attempted suicide a number of times. Her sister actually died by suicide. Unfortunately, there was a real, legacy of pain that my dad never had the ability to deal with.
And in the absence of any kind of intervention, a lot of that pain just slid right into the next generation, which was me. The family was really shame based and, that was the environment that I grew up in. When I was 10 months old, they, ended up getting pregnant and this is often the case, in some families when there's infertility as I've come to understand from listening to a lot of other people's stories.
And that was the situation with them as well. Not only did I cure my mom of her depression at the time, but I also apparently cured them of their infertility. And I've been thinking a little bit about [00:06:00] that. And being a proponent of family preservation, I was thinking of ways that we could support more family preservation.
And I don't think anybody's ever studied this, but I had the idea that perhaps what we could do for a mother who is under resourced and pregnant and not in a position to care for and raise her baby. Maybe we could match them with some prospective adoptive parents who are struggling with infertility and these prospective adoptive parents would provide financial emotional support through the whole, pre and perinatal period and, get to know the mom really well, go to doctor's visits, things like that and build some kind of, intimate relationship and then see if, any of that would [00:07:00] modulate their fertility, just, being around somebody who is able to get pregnant and being around a young child and having a part in the process of nurturing that, that child, and the mother through the pregnancy, but then the child, in the early stages of infancy, perhaps, I don't think anybody's ever studied that.
But I would be really curious to see if anything would become of that and see what the data would say. I know in my case, my parents had 10 months with me and that was enough to change their biology so that they could become fertile.
Haley Radke: Did you ever experience like feeling different than their biological child?
Bruce Porth: Oh, completely. Yeah. I always felt different.
Haley Radke: And treated differently?
Bruce Porth: No, I wasn't treated differently that I'm aware of. Although I was keenly tuned into whether or not I was going to be treated differently. I know at Christmas time, I would studiously, [00:08:00] count the number of presents, that me and my sister would get, I don't think that was entirely something I did.
I think my sister did it as well. And I think there's some aspect of just normal, sibling rivalry associated with that. But I never felt a sense of attunement in my family, but I also wasn't really, there wasn't much conversation around adoption with me. What my adoptive mom has told me was that she told me that I was adopted, but I think it was when I was around the age of three or four.
And the way that it was, told to me was in a very positive, tone and so I, that's pretty abstract thinking. I would not be able to understand what it meant. It's one thing to know that I was wanted, but, it requires abstract thinking to be able to figure out that the other side of that is that somewhere else I wasn't wanted and wasn't [00:09:00] kept and I wasn't capable of doing that during the period that she was telling me that and then I think she told me a couple of times and then she thought that her job was done. And so the way that I, I did find out that I was adopted was at least in a way that meant something to me was when I was about six or seven years old playing in a sandbox and a neighbor kid was making fun of me for being adopted and so I came home.
I was in tears. I was really in a state of despair and I asked if this was true. I asked my mom if it was true and she confirmed it. And then I don't remember much after that. I think it was, there's a lot there that I probably blocked out, but I do remember asking questions about my, quote unquote, real mom and she had no answers and the question seemed to be difficult for her to answer and it was [00:10:00] clear to me that it was bringing up pain for her.
And so I learned how to not ask questions about it and be quiet. And so we never really talked about adoption since that time, not in any really meaningful way. In fact, my mom passed away in 2020, ironically on my birthday, and in the couple years leading up to her passing, I really wanted to still have a real conversation about adoption with her.
And I'm a full grown adult trying to ask just a basic question, and it took so much effort on my part to even, raise the topic. And what I got back from her was these trite, cliche answers that she loved me as if I was her own and really what it told me is that she's extremely uncomfortable about discussing the topic still after all these years.[00:11:00]
And so unfortunately, I was never really able to in her lifetime have that conversation because it. I really wanted to connect with her around that issue, and I recall reading or hearing something that Anne Heffron once mentioned that really meant a lot to me, where she said that all she wanted from her adoptive mom was to grieve together the loss of her birth mother.
And when I read that or heard that, it really hit me like, yes, that's exactly what I wanted from my mom as well. So in my dad's case, there really was no emotional availability to have any kind of conversation like that about adoption or about, really anything else. That had any depth to it.
So I did grow up without a father, at least the emotional [00:12:00] presence of a father.
Haley Radke: You're a super unique individual in that every conversation I've ever had with you, you seem to lead with your heart and you're so emotionally vulnerable and I know these are skills that you've worked on over the years. Is it because you're like I'm not going to do that. Did you make a decision at some point about how your adoptive father was and like pivot? Or is this more innately you, which I know is a hard question for an adoptee to answer.
Bruce Porth: That's a really good question. There were times I do remember that I would be really frustrated with my dad, and I remember telling my mom on a few occasions I don't want to be like him.
And so there was, some consciousness around that. That I clearly didn't want to follow [00:13:00] in those footsteps to some extent I think it's unavoidable. That's the environment I was steeped in. I'm going to pick up on some of that children map to the state of their parents, regardless of what they say.
And so to some extent, I was, I think I was doing that. But I do have the benefit of having started a healing process pretty early. It was not too long after I left the house that I was forced into starting down some sort of healing path. And so I've been at it intermittently for quite some time.
What really got me into it was when I was a freshman in college, I knew that there was that I was struggling a lot and I had successfully gotten up in my head in the year prior to leaving the home to go to college and I did that with, literature and the type of friends I would hang around with and [00:14:00] it seemed like it was probably some kind of survival mechanism that I knew that I would be out on my own and I needed some kind of foundation to stand on and I knew there was a lot of pain inside me, I think on some level, but I didn't know how to deal with it or what to do with it.
But one thing that I could do was get up in my head and that did carry me through part of my 1st year of college and then it became unsustainable anymore. And a lot of that raw pain, that was lodged in my body going all the way back to relinquishment. I no longer had internal defenses against it.
I think partly just because it was so much. And over the course of a few weeks or so, I started losing my grip on who I thought I was and who I had made myself out to be. This part of me had taken over in an effort to survive. I don't like the term false self because I, it's a very legitimate part of myself that [00:15:00] was engaged in that process of saving my life, but that part can only do it for so long.
And then the authenticity in my body, that real visceral pain just came to the surface and I was literally overwhelmed and had no language for it either. And really had no idea that it had to do with adoption and relinquishment.
Haley Radke: How would you describe your pain? Were you depressed? Were you like having an existential crisis? It's if you don't have oh my gosh I wish I knew who my parents were or like if you're you know, if that's not in your gaze what's the I don't know. Could you describe to people what was happening for you? I remember feeling like I was going crazy at one point. Actually crazy.
Bruce Porth: There was definitely a feeling of that. That feeling of losing my grip [00:16:00] on what I thought was reality. And the orientation points that I think I had established for myself weren't really deeply rooted in who I was authentically. And so without those orientation points, it felt like I was starting to drift out to sea.
But on a physical level, I was. I was feeling nauseous and sick. There was throbbing in my head. On an emotional level, I was feeling, yes, depression. Mostly, at the time, I was feeling a great deal of rage. And it was rage that presented itself in a way that felt way too big to contain. I also didn't know really where it was coming from, and it felt extremely primitive.
And I just didn't know what to do with it. I was completely flooded, to use an IFS term. I did struggle for a couple of days. I found myself in the library of my school, [00:17:00] in the psychology section, trying to heal myself as perhaps any good adoptee would do, feeling like I'm alone in this world and I have to fix things, including myself, on my own.
It was an engineering school, so they didn't have a very big psychology section in the library, so I really didn't get that much in the way of resources there. Plus, it wasn't really what I needed. And unfortunately, at the time, I didn't know what I needed, but I did eventually find my way to a school counselor and really sweet, gentle guy.
And we started out doing sessions once a week, and we got to a point where I just. I had no words anymore. There was no language. Somehow I must have let him know. And I think it was an unconscious form of expression that I was adopted. So he knew that, but I didn't know that's what I was struggling with and [00:18:00] so he asked me at one point, do you think this has anything to do with being adopted? And I just remember, just almost violently saying, absolutely not. And so those defenses were extremely strong and I, I think in an effort to justify those defenses. I was perceiving a hostile reality to that was what I was experiencing.
So I would often just sit there in silence and not say anything. And at one point, he asked me if maybe we shouldn't continue and I was just shocked by the question. And I said, no, we need to be doing this. And looking back on that, I, what I was finding there was just a, a sense of safety, whether I was saying anything or not.
And I wasn't fully aware of how much I needed that safety. Because it literally felt like the world was hostile.
Haley Radke: So when did you come to really unpack for yourself? That adoption was like [00:19:00] even impacted your life in some way.
Bruce Porth: It was actually many years later. I did continue to struggle through my college years I knew I wasn't ready to go out into the world when I graduated and I did really well in school I think because all of my self esteem depended on doing and not being, which I think perhaps has its roots in, the commodification of adoption, that there's value in doing and not necessarily in being.
So I, I did really well, but I knew I wasn't ready to be out in the world. And so I went to graduate school and found a group of friends there that I really seem to resonate with, but I was also starting to drink quite a bit as a way to just put the pain somewhere else because I hadn't kept up with the counseling that I was [00:20:00] doing after that freshman year, I went back home and tried to get through that summer without showing how much pain I was in my family, and even before that's the first school year ended. The therapist was going into private practice and he asked me at that time just let your parents know and we can, I can get the insurance information and we can continue to work together.
And I couldn't bring that to my parents. It didn't feel like an option. It didn't feel safe enough to do that. And the option was to just try to struggle through on my own in isolation. And so that's what I did. But I, I couldn't mask it entirely through that, that first summer home. And I did just break down at one point and ended up, my mom did find me a therapist.
But this was. A while back, and there really wasn't that much [00:21:00] awareness of adoption as an issue, and certainly not, the depth of grief and anger that can come with that maternal separation. And it was around the time, I think that Nancy Verrier was probably thinking about her master's thesis and, starting to put that together and eventually turning that into the primal wound book, but none of these therapists had discovered that yet.
And actually, at one point, again, because I didn't have words, there was no language. I was just acting in. All the feelings that I was having the therapist asked me to just draw what I was feeling. And so I started to draw this picture of the view that someone would have if they were falling headfirst from a really tall building towards the pavement and I didn't totally appreciate, the significance of that until more recently, [00:22:00] but that was illustrating the nothing place that Pam Cordano and other people in the flourish experience have talked about. And for me, the nothing place is not a neutral place. It's a, feels like a really scary place where there's a lot of anger and a lot of terror and a lot of just no orientation whatsoever and just drifting out in space or falling head first towards the pavement, but I wasn't really in a position to continue with the work that I was doing, and instead I started drinking quite a bit. I did get through grad school and then I wasn't really willing to go through and do a Ph. D. I knew I wasn't Ph. D. material and I had seen some friends of mine, fail the qualifying exam to get into the program.
And I knew I couldn't survive a loss like that. So I did set out at that point in time and got a job and stepped out into the world. Totally ill equipped to be out in the world. [00:23:00] It took about, 2 years or so before I did find a recovery path. And I was drinking quite a bit, and I would typically drink about a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at a time, and that would happen a few times a week.
Sometimes what I, I would just, I would be drinking at home, and I would be watching movies, and one of the movies that I would watch was a movie that I had seen back when I was in grad school. And this was probably the first time that I was emerging from the fog, because we had a ritual of every Tuesday night a small group of us would go out to the movies And I was never in charge of picking the movie.
So it was always a surprise to me and this one week we happened to go see this movie called Immediate Family with Glenn Close and James Woods and we got about 20 minutes into that movie before I realized what it was about and then I was just flooded with grief, [00:24:00] but couldn't express it. And so I was biting the insides of my cheeks, just to hold it together.
And it was probably a few weeks after that, when we were out at the bar and I, it was closing time and we were leaving. And I left with a friend of mine walking back to our cars, but we stopped, short of our cars and just started talking. And I had been carrying so much of this pain and never really had a place to express it or find an empathic witness to validate it and as the conversation proceeded something about it must have felt safe enough for me to, disclose that I was adopted, but it wasn't just a conversation about it. There was all of this pent up grief that just flowed right out of me.
And my friend was right there for me. In a really amazing way, and it was the first time that I really felt held in a deep way by anybody. And the next morning I walk into my [00:25:00] office and there's a single rose in a vase that she had left me, as additional validation. And to me, what I was learning through that process was that love exists because there was a part of me that did not believe that love existed at all.
And it wasn't a small enough part of me that I could just set aside and move on. It was a significant part of me. And I, up until that point, had to keep it contained. Because I was never able to find a safe harbor to express it.
Haley Radke: So that was in your early 20s or mid 20s by that point?
Bruce Porth: That was my, yeah, my, my early 20s at that point.
So I was, I was coming out of the fog as early as that period of time. But then I, I did end up finding a 12 step recovery and I actually did an outpatient treatment and [00:26:00] this was another moment of coming out of the fog where part of that process was doing a family tree. I remember when the facilitator that day was drawing my family tree.
And put this dotted line from my family to me, and it was like, oh my gosh, like I don't belong there. I only belong there by a dotted line, not a continuous line, and it just validated that for all of my life it felt like I was connected by just this tenuous thread that could easily have been broken. If I didn't behave, if I didn't get good enough grades, it felt to me like it would jeopardize that connection there.
I think that's probably a common experience for a lot of adoptees. And the, just the amount of emotional labor that we have to do, to get through childhood is just astonishing to me. [00:27:00]
Haley Radke: We were talking before we started recording and mentioning oh, my kids probably get this vibe from the situation that is happening here. And I was like, yeah our adoptive parents don't have to say. We're not talking about adoption. We get the vibe. They don't have to say, I'm emotionally unavailable for you. We just get it. And kids are so perceptive. And we're uniquely so because we're literally looking for life or death resources as soon as we're separated from our mothers. Yeah.
Bruce Porth: Exactly. Infants don't really have any other way to communicate except through the energy that they experience with the parent. And I think it was Einstein who said that the sole governing agency of matter is energy. Everything comes down to energy, I think, including in, relationships.
And, of course, I'm [00:28:00] trying to, energetically bond with, somebody that I can attune to. And I did not have that.
Haley Radke: So going through recovery, also starting to examine this, like starting to come out of the fog is what you were saying, like, when did you first really dive into adoption stuff. I've heard you say some internet things from the 90s, late 90s. Is that right?
Bruce Porth: Yeah, it was interesting that I actually found my mom, but I, I still feel like I was pretty deep in the fog for many years.
Haley Radke: Did you search on purpose?
Bruce Porth: I did. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Bruce Porth: And.
Haley Radke: What made you want to do that?
Bruce Porth: It was the end of a relationship and so this was the kind of relationship that burned really hot, but not necessarily for a very long time. [00:29:00] And so I got more vulnerable in a relationship than I had ever done, up to that point. And when we both had significant issues, it really needed to end, but I wasn't ready for it to end.
And when it did, it threw me into a, a level of pain that I really didn't know what to do with. And even though I had support, I was doing some 12 step Al Anon work and had a pretty tight and close community. But this was territory that they couldn't relate to. And I didn't even know this territory or what to do with it either and how to navigate within it.
So it was at that point when it just became really clear to me that I have to find my mom and I had never really thought about it up until that point. But then it was just like neon flashing lights that it was time. And so I went about doing that. I did [00:30:00] get on the Internet. This is the very early days of the Internet.
And so there was no Facebook, no Instagram or anything like that, but there was. And I don't even remember how I found this, but I found this internet mailing list called AIML Adoptee Internet Mailing List and people would post things and it would go through a moderator and then they would eventually get, get posted.
And so every night I was coming up from work and I was reading through it. And occasionally I was taking the risk to post something and through that I. I'd already started to, I had sought out my non identifying information, which was basically worthless. But through that mailing list, I did find and get connected with an investigator.
And so after thinking about it for a little while I went ahead and decided to pay him his fee, which was 375 dollars. And then in a really short amount of time, literally like three days, he had an enormous amount of information about [00:31:00] me and about my birth family. Including birth certificate numbers, not only of my mom, but her sister and her other children, current and previous addresses.
It's still astonishing to me that other people have all this information that is denied us. And so I, I got that information and I sat on it for 6 months. Because it felt like I had, I found this nugget of gold. And I just wanted to hold it for a little while, and I was preparing for the next step.
And I'm always impressed by people who just, they get the information and they get on the phone like right away. And I needed to move slowly, through this whole process. But I did eventually, I wrote her a letter that coincided with my 30th birthday. And then waited and then two weeks later, she did write back and she was very receptive.
And a year later, I went out and met her face to face along with my 3 siblings, 3 half [00:32:00] siblings. And and we started a relationship and it was really good. She really. She did not want to let me go and hearing that was so validating because I was, I had been telling myself a story that I wasn't wanted.
And so there was the revelation that I got just from the reunion was it, it wasn't that I wasn't wanted. It was that I couldn't have been kept and that lifted a burden off my shoulders that I really did not know I was carrying. And it was just, it was really significant. And so we started a relationship and I was really impressed.
She was, the gifts that she bought me were like, exactly what I wanted. She just she knew me, like, energetically, we were just really on similar wavelengths. By that time, my, my first daughter had come along and she loved being a grandmother and we're slowly getting to know each other.
And unfortunately, just, 4 years or [00:33:00] so after we had met I got a call from my aunt. One morning that there had been a house fire and she was not able to get out and I remember getting that phone call and not feeling a thing almost as if she was a stranger. And I think, at that time, she still was a stranger to me because I still had a lot of work to do with thawing out, from that original wound of the relinquishment before I could actually feel her, her, the second loss of her.
And so that was, it was a really difficult time, getting through that because I really hadn't gotten to know her yet. And what I'm still grieving over is the fact that, what that relationship would have become because she was, so invested in it, in us getting closer. I do feel a sense of gratitude in that she has a twin sister and I have a very good relationship with my aunt.
[00:34:00] And through that relationship, I was able to get a lot of information about my mom that she would, that my mom would have told me, but didn't have the opportunity to do and that information was so incredibly healing for me. And just even little bits and pieces, like discovering that she and my aunt, shortly after I was born, that they were plotting to come find me.
And kidnap me or unkidnap me. And when I heard that it was so validating and I'm still integrating that now with what I, the new material that I'm learning and specifically around attachment and how it's important for the child as I've been learning, just recently for the mother to, to look for and find the child over and over again.
The child needs to know that they're findable and then they can go about the business of finding themselves. And [00:35:00] so knowing that she wanted to find me and take me back. Was really incredibly validating to me.
Haley Radke: I'm really sorry for your loss. That's devastating. I'm so glad you have your aunt. Are you still connected with your siblings?
Bruce Porth: I met all of my siblings when I went out to the Midwest to meet them and somehow we never really connected in a way that led to a sustainable relationship. I'm totally open to it and maybe it's just up to me to reach out and I just haven't done that. So I, I don't know what the future holds there.
I certainly would like to nurture those relationships a little bit more and make stronger connections.
Haley Radke: Did you ever think about looking for paternal side?
I hope I, I [00:36:00] don't gush too much, you just have favorite people or people you're drawn to. And I think. A lot of the friends I've made over the years are folks that are thoughtful, empathetic, kind, and have this thirst for knowledge and have a curious spirit. And I'm just so drawn to folks like that.
I think that's one of the reasons I so enjoy any conversation I ever get to have with Bruce. So I hope you'll come back next week to listen to part two of our conversation. And in the meantime, come join us on Patreon. That is one of the ways the show keeps living, keeps existing and helping adoptees around the world.
adopteeson.com/community. And I'd love to have you. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next [00:37:00] Friday.
