289 Bruce Porth Part 2
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/289
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. Today is part two of a two part series that we began last week with my friend Bruce Porth. Today we talk a little bit more about reunion and what it looks like when someone is being dishonest with you.
And we also chat about using breathwork and psychedelics as healing modalities. Have you ever met one of those people that when they speak, you just have to listen to every word? Bruce is one of those people for me. So I hope you enjoy getting to know him better along with me. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on [00:01:00] adoptees on.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.
We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adoptees on.com. If you miss part one, I would recommend going back and listening to that first. Okay. Let's listen in.
Did you ever think about looking for paternal side? I know for a lot of us, that's like the second afterthought. It's it's the mother. They're the one that carried us. They're the, that's the first connection it feels like.
Bruce Porth: Exactly. Yeah. And I, I did find my father, as soon as I found my mom, she was more than happy to share that information with me along with a caveat that he was not a trustworthy person and they were actually both still living in kind of the same general area just to the west of [00:02:00] Chicago, but they, had didn't really have any relationship anymore.
At that point in time. I do know that at the time of my birth. He did want to stay with my mom and I think he wanted to raise me. She would not even let him anywhere near the hospital when I was born. I think he, he wanted to be there. I got his name and found his address pretty quickly and he was receptive to having a relationship, but I haven't really talked much about that relationship because it's a difficult one.
Especially considering that, my adoptive father was not the person that I really needed. And it turns out that my birth father was also not really somebody that could show up. I always sensed in our exchanges and it was started out by, regular snail mail and then transition to email.
But I always sense that there was something untrustworthy about him, so I never really felt compelled to go out to the Midwest and actually meet him [00:03:00] face to face. But he would tell me these elaborate stories about all the things that he had done in his life. He claimed that I, he had a daughter, half sibling of mine that was a famous movie actress and actually wove these really elaborate and detailed stories about how they were estranged from each other now.
And just a lot of detail about her life, as if it was real. And eventually I was able to get the name of this actress out of him. And, even a casual internet search, she did come from that same general region of the country, but nothing really lined up with, it'd be consistent with him being her father.
But the interesting thing was this actress, almost identical to my oldest daughter when she was about eight years old or so, so I couldn't really totally discount the story, but there were others, other stories that he shared that were glorified him, in his life and long story short, I found out that all of it was, [00:04:00] or most of it, I'm sure it was lies and I did actually end up contacting this actress.
Actually, she reached out to me through a mutual friend of ours, and it's a story that would take way too long, and it's too silly to even go into, but she was trying to explain some things in her own family. I was trying to get some kind of verification that, my father was telling me something real and so we both had different narratives and we both validated that neither one was accurate.
So that was the final kind of closure that I got that he was completely untrustworthy and had created this fantasy life for himself. And as it turns out, and I'm assuming that this isn't a lie, he is also an adoptee. So I suspect that he had to create a fantasy life for himself as a way to compensate for the pain of relinquishment that he was not able to face and to work through.
Haley Radke: [00:05:00] Thanks for sharing that because. So many of us go into reunion and have no idea what to expect, and we might have ideas of what it'll look like. And hopefully it's the open arms and willingness to share information and all of those things. But I would be naive enough to take it all hook, line and sinker. That's wild.
Bruce Porth: And I did for a while. And I was, I was telling other people that I had, my half sister was a famous movie actress.
Haley Radke: Okay when we're done, I hope you name names to me.
Bruce Porth: I'll be happy to share that with you Haley. Yeah, so there was, there was a period of working through a lot of those feelings of betrayal after that period of time. So I pretty much have worked through that. It doesn't surprise me that given his history that this is something that he would do.
It's unfortunate that people do end up [00:06:00] doing this, but I'm no longer taking it personally at all. This was really entirely about him.
Haley Radke: After your mom passed, did you have any extra support, like grief supports and things like you had said? I felt nothing, but I'm assuming something came after that.
Bruce Porth: Yeah I was doing therapy, I had found a therapist that I had started working with and it actually came out of doing some couples work and there was this resonance between me and this therapist that we started doing some work on our own and she was incredibly empathic and was a really a great witness and I could work through a lot of grief, with her.
But the problem was that she really had no skill at all in dealing with trauma and it feels to me like I was living in this really narrow world. And so I did not [00:07:00] really know anything different. And I didn't know really what was available out there. I wasn't aware of the various modalities at that time.
That are designed specifically to deal with trauma in a really effective way, the somatic modalities that Peter Levine had come up with and then Dick Schwartz coming up with internal family systems, which I think is just a remarkable model and really applicable for me as an adoptee because it feels like the experience, caused all this fracturing.
And having a model that I can work with these different fractured parts of me has been extremely useful, but it took me a long time to get to that point of finding those resources. Because I was locked in with this one therapist, and it's a subtle point, but she was all about integration, and the big thing that she was missing was the differentiation of the various parts, and then the linkage of those parts. [00:08:00] Or the integration. So she was skipping over a whole lot of work that I needed to do and was really clueless about it. But there's a great, I think he calls himself a neuroscience Daniel Siegel that talks specifically about that differentiation and then linkage. And when I started learning about that it made complete sense.
And then I happened to come across a pamphlet for a, it was actually sent to my wife, who's a clinical psychologist that was advertising for a workshop. And it was featuring a woman named Janina Fisher and talked about her book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. And just reading that description almost brought me to tears because I was resonating so much with it.
And I immediately got the book and started diving into it. This was my introduction into internal family systems.
Haley Radke: Okay. You married a psychologist?
Bruce Porth: I did.
Haley Radke: That's [00:09:00] funny. No, when you earlier, when you were talking about university and you're like, Oh, I went to engineering school. We didn't have any psych books. Like I, I took psychology because didn't know who I was. Like, and you just married one. So there you go.
Bruce Porth: And before I married one, I dated one.
Haley Radke: That's good.
Bruce Porth: So I think there was some part of me that was so desperate for safety. And I think I was making an assumption that a therapist would be a safe person to get close to. And that may or may not be true.
Haley Radke: Earlier you referenced oh, back then they didn't know as much, about adoption for therapists and stuff. And I was thinking they're still not training in school for that either, or if it is, anything about adoption it's a very brief period. And so I think you and I, and probably a lot of our listeners we're steeped in it.
And so I think there's this an assumption that, oh, [00:10:00] way more people know about this stuff now. And some more people know about it now, but not everyone. So even saying that to you, I bet she didn't have much training about adoptees when she went to school.
Bruce Porth: Oh, there was none. There was none at all. Her training was through me, really. And, to be honest, there was a lot of struggle for me because I wasn't feeling seen as an adoptee. That, that part of me was not recognizable to her and it was a drain on the relationship too. And so it was difficult to work through some of that. And I, I think we're on the other side of a lot of that now.
And a lot of that just has to do with my own healing and not having parts of me that were unconsciously looking to her for emotional sustenance. Because early in the relationship that was happening, in kind of an unconscious way, in a way that I eventually, even once I got conscious of, I couldn't necessarily control [00:11:00] it. I had to do a lot more of my own healing work.
Haley Radke: It's interesting that seeing the words fragmented self, you're like, whoa, that's me. Like you can, even recognizing that is a big thing.
Bruce Porth: That was a huge thing. Just, yeah, just, like I was saying earlier. In the absence of having language, I would just shut down, and I wouldn't say anything, and now I was coming across these very descriptive words and terminology to describe my experience.
And it was, yeah, it was just so validating. It was like crawling through the desert on your knees, repenting for all those years, to paraphrase Mary Oliver. And then, coming across these oases with this incredible validation. And I was harvesting all of these, bits and pieces. But still at the time wasn't, I hadn't totally found the adoptee community at that time.
And so as I did, [00:12:00] that was a whole nother level of validation and connection.
Haley Radke: Because you said you, your adoptive mom passed in 2020? And when did you first hear Adoptees On?
Bruce Porth: It was January or February of 2020.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Bruce Porth: So that first episode just came up in my YouTube feed and I have, never really gravitated to social media and I've just like never had time for it or, the drive to, dive into it.
But I was interacting in, in YouTube space a little bit and one of the episodes popped up there and I didn't know how the algorithm found it, but it did. And I listened to it.
Haley Radke: Do you remember which one it was?
Bruce Porth: I do not remember which one it was.
Haley Radke: No. Okay.
Bruce Porth: But then that opened the door wide open. Now, I had been part of a smaller group of adoptees, centered around New York City.
We would get together periodically and do workshops, [00:13:00] but the therapeutic approach. was a little bit limited for what I needed, and it was a self contained group. So I, it, that group didn't lead me into the broader adoptee group. I had to find it on my own.
Haley Radke: Did you just start listening? With, I don't know, I know you jumped in pretty quick.
Bruce Porth: Yes I did. So I, then I found your website and I found the back catalog and I did start binging some of it, but what it opened up for me was not just the, the podcast, but the literature. I had been familiar with a lot of the classical literature, Nancy Verrier, Betty Jean Lifton, I had read all that stuff, but I don't know, to me, it felt, a lot of that's still certainly still valid, but a lot of it felt a little bit dated to me.
And so now I was. I was discovering these other authors, and so a lot of these books started arriving at the door. And I think the first book I got was Anne Hefron's You Don't Look Adopted. [00:14:00] And that just blew the doors open for me. And from there, it just continued to lead into the community in a deeper way.
Haley Radke: Once you heard people talking about more, really, we talk, tell our stories here, but a lot of the time we're talking about the emotional side of things, the psychological side of things, and that sort of personal side. Once you started hearing more of those things, were you like, oh, this is more what I need to dive into? Or it sounds like you were already investigating that from your reading and things about therapy modalities and stuff.
Bruce Porth: I was, but it felt like I was only accessing a narrow portal of what was actually available and what I actually needed. Because as I'm discovering that, the internal landscape is extremely vast.
The pervasiveness of this wound, it doesn't occupy just a, a corner of my being. It's like it had over the years infiltrated my entire being. And so I needed validation from lots of different [00:15:00] sources and each author brings a different, slightly different angle of the experience to the table and I was really eating all of it up and needing it.
So now I'm at a point where I feel like I have, I finally have all the resources that I need, and the healing, the different healing modalities, including more recently some expanded states work, which is really exciting territory to explore. And so this part of my nervous system that was always searching and looking for a connection and healing can finally relax.
And even though I still have, I feel like I have a lot more healing work to do. I know I can just put one foot in front of the other and follow the path. And I will find the healing that I need. And there's just an incredible amount of relief from that.
Haley Radke: If someone is listening, and they're like what you just said, like you have access to the things you [00:16:00] need that feels that has probably felt out of reach for a lot of people and what are like one or two things that now looking back you've got a big history with all kinds of different modalities that you've tried out and what are one or two things that If somebody's new that you'd be like I would have started here or I would have read this first, or I would have tried this first, or I don't know. That's a tough question. But what do you think?
Bruce Porth: There's a lot out there. And I think what one person needs is going to be, individual so for me, I needed to start with internal family systems and I did a lot of, one on one therapy with internal family systems. I did a lot of my own reading.
I watched a bunch of videos of Dick Schwartz. I also even, before I found IFS, I had gravitated to Gabor Mate. And so I [00:17:00] was watching as much of his material that I could find. And there's just something, deeply validating about what he had to say. And I was able to see him like three times, live and in person.
And I would actually, I remember one time talking to him about adoption specifically, because he does reference it periodically. And he has a history that involves similar abandonment to a relinquishment, although he was reunited with his mom at some point after or maybe partly during the war. So not quite the same, but he had a certain sensitivity to it that I really resonated with.
So all of that was important, but where I had gotten to, I was still feeling this sort of internal sense of what I called non negotiable unlovability. Where I knew that there were still places inside me that were heavily defended that I really, I was having a lot of difficulty accessing, even with the therapy that I was doing.
Haley Radke: I think I remember you asking a question about this in [00:18:00] one of book clubs.
Bruce Porth: I might have been trying to understand it, myself at the time, because that was that phrase just was very descriptive of my internal experience.
Haley Radke: I think it was with the Lisa Olivera conversation.
Bruce Porth: Oh, yes. That was a really good book club. And she's such a gentle soul. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Easy to resonate with, I think, for fellow adoptees.
Bruce Porth: Yes. And quite a story of her own. I had so much compassion for all of us, but especially those who were foundlings. So I was just deeply moved to listening to her story. Yeah, so that was the progression that I followed.
But, like I said, there's still these spaces inside of me that I was having difficulty accessing and finding a way through. And it wasn't like these were neutral spaces. These were spaces that were haunting me. And really kicking my butt and I was having difficulty finding my way through it.[00:19:00]
I did eventually find holotropic breathwork, which is really profound and an amazing tool. I've been doing this for, about a couple of years now, and this is. It's a practice of deep breathing in a kind of continuous pattern. You're in a group setting, you have a partner, and it's usually anywhere from 10 to 30 people, in a given workshop.
And the breather will lay on a mat and their partner will be what we call the sitter. And we'll be there to attend to the needs of the breather as they go into their process through that breath and along with a, a soundtrack that is designed to be quite evocative. You enter into an altered or expanded state of consciousness, and I've been able to access the spaces inside of me, especially, my grief with holotropic breathwork [00:20:00] I seem to go and be able to access my grief quite directly. And another aspect of this breath work is it's focused body work. Your sitter might be involved in that, or the facilitators, for the workshop might be involved in that. It could be as simple as just having your sitter hold your hand, or it could be more involved than that.
It's funny for me. A lot of times I'm a sitter and I end up not really having to help the other person out. But for my sitters, I take advantage of every minute that we have, because there's so much in the way of tactile deprivation that I think I missed out on, I was being touched by my adoptive mother, but it was the wrong mother who was touching me.
And in effect, I wasn't being touched by the mother that I needed to be touched by and there's still these empty spaces associated with that. And so I did one breathwork session where, you know, and this was an 80 minute [00:21:00] session. I sat up partway through it and I, I asked my partner for a hug and I just entered this really deep state of grief and sobbed in her arms for about 10 minutes, extremely powerful experience. I had another experience in a different workshop where I was able to see my mom, my first mom, and she was. She took the form of a divine spirit. Of course, she, she, that's all she could be at this point in time, having passed away in 2003, but in my process I saw her there and I reached out and I was holding her hand and her other hand was reaching out and connected to this infinite source of universal love. And as I was holding her other hand, I was just downloading this love. And I could almost literally feel it filling in my heart. And I just stayed with that for, it [00:22:00] must've been a good 20, 20 minutes or so. And afterwards, as we were processing it, I was realizing another aspect of this is doing integration work afterward with the group.
And I was realizing that this is what happens for an infant with a mother. That I think I mentioned earlier about the communication between a mother and an infant primarily being energetic and it's just this download of love just being in the presence of the mother. I mean there have been studies with heart cells that you know as you bring two separate heart cells together they start to beat in unison and I think that's the case when mother and baby heart get into proximity with each other as well.
So that was a really powerful experience. The next workshop I was really hoping to continue with that and actually it was quite a different experience and not one that I should really talk about because it revealed a great deal of the violence of relinquishment and I was [00:23:00] able to go into a space where I could viscerally see that I see evidence of it, even though I wasn't so I wasn't like, reliving it, but I could see that it had happened and I could see what happened and it was an experience of incredible empowerment because as I showed up as an adult in that scene, I was really adamant and vocal advocate for that infant that I was and yelling out to the world can you see what happened? Can you see what happened? So it was a really powerful experience and I've had other remarkable experiences with breath work as well, including one where, I went back and revisited my mom at the time of her death. Because it was still felt abstract to me.
And so this was a process where I was able to go back and really make it a little bit more real. The day after that workshop, I realized that workshop was the eve of the date of her death too, which I didn't for some reason realize during the workshop. [00:24:00] Yeah. So I did, I had another really good experience as well, where I saw myself as a child through different developmental stages and my mom was showing up on the scene in these, in various situations and the message that I got from that was that, that's not really a question of, am I lovable? It was like, I was always loved, I just didn't know that. And through that process, I was able to actually experience her love in a more direct way.
And sometimes in the process of breathwork, we finish up by saying an affirmation that we took from the experience and in that particular event, I ended up out in space and just realizing initially how dark it was and how expansive it was. But then I started to see all of, the stars and all of the light that exists in outer space.
And the affirmation that I came up with at the end of all of that was that the universe is luminous and I belong in [00:25:00] it. This is a modality, like I said, that I've been working with for the past couple of years, and I'm really excited to see where it takes me going forward. I also think doing sacred plant medicine or psychedelics is also an incredible tool, and so I've been able to do some of that work as well with MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine.
And my first experience with MDMA and psilocybin was a little bit less than a year ago. And the experience was one in which, as I was doing the integration afterwards, I realized that what had happened was that all of these rusty locks that represented this non negotiable unlovability had been broken open through this process and the medicine works inherently on its own, but there's also a lot of work that I had to participate in as well, both in terms of the prep work ahead of time and the integration work [00:26:00] afterwards, but the medicine itself is, it's compassionate enough that it's not going to blow open the doors that were, behind these rusty locks.
That was up to me to do, but it blew off the non negotiable part. That prevented me from opening those doors. So the 3 or 4 months after that 1st session brought me to a, a level of pain that I had not experienced before that was, it was both extremely scary, but also felt extremely productive.
And then at about 3 or 4 months, I emerged into a space of greater freedom that I have never experienced before and also entered a space where it feels like I never have to go back to some of these really dark places that I inhabited in the past. And so one of the things that came out of my breathwork was after one of my sessions, one of the facilitators said that she really admired my [00:27:00] grief stamina.
And she meant it, with the best of intentions. And she's really a really wonderful person and a talented facilitator. But in my breathwork group, I'm the only adoptee. And I have become increasingly aware of how much I wanted to do this work with adoptees. And when she said that, it just really validated that because from my standpoint, it's I'm an adoptee.
Of course, there's going to be this much grief get over it, and but I, from that point, what I realized is that I need to do this kind of work in community with other adoptees. And so I did more recently have an opportunity to do a medicine journey with a group of other adoptees. That was truly magical.
Haley Radke: Wow, that's really interesting. I think it's so amazing to hear what unlocks things for people, and I've heard from many of our friends that, that [00:28:00] truly has, but I also think you're a really great example of this. You've done a lot of other things to prepare. So I think when people hear that, they might be like, Oh that's my first step, right?
And I don't think that's true because there's so much integration work and things to do after, like you said, and if you're super new to therapy, I think some of that might feel challenging. I don't know. You have thoughts on that?
Bruce Porth: Oh, most definitely. I, I went into my first psychedelic session feeling like, oh, this is something that everybody should do.
And I got partway into that session and it became very clear to me. That's not true. This is definitely not something for everybody. And for those that it is something for my recommendation is take this very slowly and make sure of course, that you're working with somebody who's reputable and trustworthy.
And then also, like I said before, [00:29:00] there has to be a huge emphasis on the prep work going into it. And then during the session, the set and the setting, the set, meaning the mindset that you go into it and then the setting, making sure that there's robust safety that is really essential for having a, a good experience from my perspective and then the integration work afterwards be prepared and have a plan for doing that integration work.
That's definitely key and a lot of people, this is just not something that they ever have to do. And wouldn't gravitate to and that's a beautiful thing, too.
Haley Radke: I just put my hand up. Nobody can see that. It freaks me out so much. It would take a lot to go down that path for me. It feels very, it's like, interesting, exciting. I hear the vast benefits and learnings that so many people have had, and it also freaks me out. So there you go.
Bruce Porth: It did. It [00:30:00] certainly freaked me out the first time and I, and it, that did impact my experience because I wasn't able to fully let go and let myself have the experience. And I had a set idea of how it was going to unfold.
And I, I just, I remember the compassionate words of my guide at the time on numerous occasions. She said, Bruce, don't get ahead of the medicine, don't get ahead of the medicine. And it took me a while to understand what she was saying with that. Eventually I got it. So.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing. All of these things that you've done and I know that there will be things that resonate with someone.
All kinds of pieces of your story will resonate with someone. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to make sure we get to before we do recommended resources?
Bruce Porth: If I had a final comment I might quote Mary Oliver in one of her poems where she says, don't waste time looking for an easier world.
And [00:31:00] I did spend a lot of time looking for an easier world, and it really postponed a lot of the healing that I'm doing now. I was certainly doing the best that I could, but this process of really coming out of the fog, I believe it's a long process. And I may be doing it for the rest of my life certainly there's plateaus, but there's always deeper levels to explore. And so I think it's important to find community, find some hands that you can hold through the process, and then hang on and lean in.
Haley Radke: Well said. I have a really great chap, poetry chap book to share, and it's from a fellow adoptee, of course, and it's by Karen Wangare Leonard.
She also goes by Kay, and this isn't her first poetry. Her first poetry is available on her website. We'll link to that too. This is called Going Unarmed Into the Wail, and it [00:32:00] is so beautiful. I'm going to show you, no one else can see, but she has these really beautiful poems, but also art that she's gone ahead and added in of herself. She does like collage work. Sorry for all my paper noise by the mic, but there's these like poems where some things are like erase, erase your poems, and there's another one like that. This one. It's overwritten a bunch of times. So she's this really incredible artist, plus her poetry is so very moving, and I really enjoyed this collection.
So her first one is called Lightning on My Fingertips, and this is called Going Unarmed Into the Wail. So I'll link But I also just want to say, Bruce, you're one of my favorite people and you have showed up in Patreon for so many [00:33:00] different book clubs, other events that we have. And whenever you come, I'm always so excited to see you.
And people will just be able to tell from our conversation how smart you are and how observant you are and thoughtful. And I said earlier, you come to everything with this wholehearted energy. And I'm so glad I get to know you and introduce you to more people today. It's exciting for me. And so I hope people will follow along with the ways you're now serving in the community.
I know you're on the board of another adoptee organization. You are doing some other interviews for podcasts. I know you're doing some writing that's going to come out. And so I think with all of the things that you've been doing and working on in yourself, like now it's like out coming out and is able to pour out of you as [00:34:00] well.
So I see that. I don't know if you see that in yourself yet, but that's what I see. So I'm really grateful for you. Yeah, I just I'm so glad we got to talk today, but before I don't want to skip to the end.
Bruce Porth: Thank you so much for that. The thing, that I've been realizing the best thing you can do with a gift is just receive it. And so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take that in.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Bruce Porth: And thank you for that.
Haley Radke: You can listen to it again whenever you like. That's the bonus of a podcast. What do you want to recommend to us today?
Bruce Porth: So I would like to recommend not so much a product as a process. I would like to recommend community and community has just been really important for me in the adoptee space. And, there's certainly a lot of opportunities for virtual connections, but I have more [00:35:00] recently found the value in person connections and the power in that is just enormous.
And and there's lots of ways that I've been doing that, for one, I participate in Adoptees Connect, which is something that Pam Karanova started some time ago. And there's chapters that are all over the world now, and you can just search online and find something near you. The closest one to me is 3 hours away by car.
And so I usually do not hesitate to drive 3 hours there and 3 hours back for a 2 hour dinner. To connect with these people that have become so meaningful for me, but there's also conferences and I recently did a in person conference and the face to face connection there was just really wonderful for me, but it also is leading to other events that I'm getting together with other adoptees to do and then volunteering as Haley said I'm on the board of Adoption [00:36:00] Knowledge Affiliates and I love serving the community that way and staying plugged in to the community that way, and building it, deeper and more connections through that as well. And the other big piece of community is the Adoptees On Patreon group. And this has, brought so much, so many connections for me, and has opened up so many doors for me both virtual and in person. And so I'm just I'm filled with gratitude for that.
Haley Radke: Thank you know, I was thinking before we were talking today. I was thinking this morning I was like, oh man, I think a lot of people when they first come like to patreon events, they're like oh, that's how do I get to know people from this but like I have over time, like I've gotten to know so many new friends through it.
And it's really cool. I don't know. I never pictured that, when I started the show to have it's a friend maker, it's fun. So [00:37:00] anyway, and I got to meet you, which is so great. Where can people connect with you online and follow what you're doing and bringing into the world?
Bruce Porth: My email address is briankeithswanson @gmail.com and that's my birth name. Yeah, I was named after two members of the Rolling Stones. It was 1967. I'm on Facebook under the name of Brian Swanson. I'm on Instagram with the name @Bruce_Porth, P O R T H. I'm also on LinkedIn at Bruce Porth as well. I don't have a whole lot of content on social media, I basically use it for a vehicle for connecting with other people.
Haley Radke: Which is perfect. When I googled you today, you're like a patent holder. You're like a smart dude. In case anyone didn't know that. That's pretty cool. Just a random fact for folks.
Bruce Porth: [00:38:00] Yeah, I think there's 15 or so patents that you can find out there.
Haley Radke: Yeah. That's pretty cool. All right. What a pleasure to talk to you, Bruce. Thank you.
Bruce Porth: Thank you, Haley.
Haley Radke: Thank you so much for being here. I just feel so thankful for these conversations and relationships that we're able to share over a podcast and I'm just, I don't know, I feel full of gratitude today for all of the special adoptees that I've gotten to meet through making Adoptees On. And I hope you do too.
I know that many of you will listen to episodes and reach out to the guests and connect with them and build friendships and extend your own community. For some of you, these podcast episodes are some of the first times you've ever [00:39:00] heard adoptees speak about their experiences in such a candid forthright manner. And so I hope you gain courage to start sharing your own story. And even if that's just with yourself or with a close friend or a fellow adoptee, and so you can start reclaiming parts of your identity. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for listening to Adoptee Voices, and I appreciate you.
Please come join us on Patreon. adopteeson.com/community, or you can click through to the show notes and there'll be a link right there where you can click through to join us. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again soon.
