56 [Healing Series] Foster Care and Complex Trauma
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/56
Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke, and this is a special episode in our healing series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee.
Today we tackle, what are the psychological and emotional impacts of growing up in foster care, as well as multiple practical tools for working on different pieces of adoption trauma? This is another one you're gonna wanna listen to more than one time because there's so many great takeaways.
Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Jeanette Yoffe. Jeanette is a child therapist with a special focus on adoption and foster care issues. Welcome to the show, Jeanette.
Jeanette Yoffe: Thank you, Haley, for having me. It's great to be here.
Haley Radke: So it's your first time on the show and I'd love it if you would start the way I always ask my guests too, if you would just share a little bit of your story with us and how you came to your career path.
Jeanette Yoffe: Well, I was born in New York City and I lived with my birth family for the first 15 months of my life. I then went into foster care. My mother had some mental illness at that time and needed to be hospitalized.
And then I was in foster care for a duration of six and a half years. And what happened was I was supposed to go back and live with my aunt, maternal aunt in Argentina because my first mother is Argentinian. And it fell through the cracks. So I remained in foster care for a while. The New York City foster care system took some time to figure out what to do, and then I left that foster home and went to another foster home, another home to be adopted.
And so I was adopted at the age of eight years old. And I have two siblings who were also adopted. And I had reunion with my biological brother who was also adopted, but in a separate family and we didn't even know he was in the Bronx and I'm in New York. We didn't know each other growing up, so we got to know each other as adults.
And I've also had reunion, I did find my birth mother 10 years ago and I had reunion with her, which was amazing. And then I only recently had reunion with my birth father, and that was last year. And that's a whole 'nother story and a whole 'nother episode that we can talk about.
Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. Yes.
Jeanette Yoffe: Yes.
Haley Radke: So you are in two separate foster homes, is that right? So like one foster home for a long period of time and then adopted in the second placement?
Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. Correct.
Haley Radke: And so now you are a child therapist and this is your specialty, is working with children that have been in foster care. And can you tell me a little bit about how you came to do that?
Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. I actually came from New York to Los Angeles to be an actress. Because I was very confused. I had an identity crisis. I didn't know who I was. So being an actress, oh, it always gave me a script of what to do and what to say. But coming here, I started volunteering with an adoption support center in Los Angeles.
And so I moved here, started volunteering at a group, and this little girl had come up to me and she was so surprised to know that I was adopted too. And I just looked at her and I thought, well, this is odd. And I got down on my knee and I said to her, yes, I am adopted. And it was a extremely profound experience for me because I thought in that moment, Wow, I need to do more about this.
I need to be more involved in helping kids today recognize that, yeah, you're gonna grow up and you're going to be okay. So that was what inspired me to go into psychology and study and have a focus on children, and especially in foster care and adoption. And I just became, I was compelled to do the work, and it also allowed me to do my own healing work and really focus on this piece so that I could be a resource and support to others who have also lived the experience.
So it's been amazing. It's been an amazing journey and I'm just so grateful and I feel so blessed that I can do this work and. It's amazing to be a healer and help people. And also be aware of my own process. Because this is a lifelong process. But I think as an adoptee you're so much more informed. You understand. And parents, when they hear from an adoptee, the reality of their experience, they're more likely to understand and have greater compassion for their children. So when I see that happening, that's the work.
Haley Radke: So many of the guests I've talked to prior have been adopted as infants and we sort of go from, you know, hospital to the adoptive family and we talk about all the issues that come up with that.
There's a huge emotional impact even when you were adopted right as an infant. And then foster care adds another layer onto that, because as you said, there was two different placements. You were with your original family for 15 months, and so there's different pieces of transition there in your formative years. Can you teach us a little bit about that? The psychological and emotional impact of growing up in foster care versus, and or including the infant adoption. What is, what's sort of the differences for you?
Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. So what I've discovered is as an adoptee who's separated at birth, that is considered a trauma. It's a traumatic incident for that baby. Okay.
When a child has gone through that early separation and then experienced multiple placements, or have lived in their original families for some time, and then were adopted and separated and gone into foster care at a later time, what happens is it becomes more than just a single incident trauma.
It becomes complex trauma. So that is the key term when we're talking about children in foster care to adoption. There is still that primal wound, however, it's much more complex because of the multiple placements, the multiple layers, the memories, the implicit early memories that are stored in the body.
And then there's the explicit memories. What I remember about living with my family and what may have happened when I was there. So children in foster care are carrying so much in their bodies and in their memories. So complex trauma is the biggest piece to understand.
Another piece for foster adoptees, is we tend to self blame and blame ourselves that it was our fault that these things happened. And that's because a child's brain is egotistic. They believe everything happens because it's within their power.
Haley Radke: Yes.
Jeanette Yoffe: Totally normal. However, what I've found working with foster adoptees is they wear it like it's a condition. Like, I'm adopted or I'm in foster care and there's something wrong about them. And what's hard is they cannot separate themselves from their experience. So they have difficulty with this condition that there's something wrong about them, that they were responsible and they should have fixed it. So what can happen is shame can develop, which is very difficult for a child to understand. So there's a technique that I'm gonna teach you later on if you feel that you have experienced pervasive shame. Because you'll find that you're very hard on yourself. You can't, when you make a mistake, you feel like the mistake. When there's a problem, you're the problem. You take things very personally.
So that's a piece for foster youth. So we need to learn how to let go. Separate. And see our experience with objectivity so we can make sense of it, learn from it, and walk, work through it.
There's another piece that is important to understand is that because foster youth have had multiple transitions, they've had multiple relationships, so they have difficulty with attachments, and especially if there's been abuse, neglect, there's been trust that has been broken. There's attachment trauma. So it's so difficult to be able to have a new relationship, feel safe in a relationship, trust that relationship because the blueprint. What's been stored in that memory in the mind and the body will become the blueprint of relationships for the rest of their lives, unless deemed otherwise.
And a lot of the work that I do is attachment focused family therapy. I'm very much working on the attachment, repairing the attachment, and allowing children to feel safe in a relationship again.
We do have a heightened sense of perception of any sense of rejection in others. We're always scanning the environment. There's this hypervigilance going on. Is this safe, is this not safe? And there are the seven non-verbal cues which are very important to recognize and they are eyesight, the way someone looks at you, the facial characteristics, what they're showing in their face. Are they squinting at you? Are they questioning you? Tone of voice, posture, gestures. Timing and intensity of response.
And we're always looking and relying on these seven nonverbal cues for what's safe and what's not safe. And if you think about this, 90% of communication is nonverbal. So when trauma is experienced, the first sense to go offline is sound. So I have to teach parents and workers working in this field to be very aware of their seven non-verbal cues because if you are not aware, you could be causing more distress, more trauma for that child. And we need to create a place of safety and comfort because of what they've been through.
There can also be a learned helplessness that develops for foster adoptees because especially if they remember and have memories of their families. That they could have done something and they feel helpless inside this powerlessness. So they go through life thinking that if I couldn't even help my family, how can I even help myself? So they'll learn helplessness that can occur.
Now these characteristics, some are more heightened for some foster adoptees, some are less. It's all based on temperament, personality, their ability to be resilient, to work through experiences. The amount of support they've received. Therapy is very important.
So these are variables. A big piece, also, is they have experienced a lot of ambiguous loss. And ambiguity for any child is very difficult to contain because there's a lot of questions. Especially if they've had the early implicit memories of trauma where they don't know what happened, but something happened to them.
And then there's the explicit memories of what happened to my family? Or why did I leave this placement to go to this placement? Was it my fault. Did I do something wrong? Did they not love me? So it can be very complicated to work through this ambiguous loss and have even greater questions, especially if someone's not there to help you make sense.
And one of my interventions that I do with kids is we create a question box. Just to hold and acknowledge all of these questions. So they're externalized, released from the mind, placed in a container, providing a sense of, okay, somebody's looking out for these questions, someone's acknowledging, someone's hearing me, and someone's helping me make sense of my story.
So it can feel extremely overwhelming for a foster adoptee to experience all of these pieces. I do six hour trainings on trauma informed best practices in trauma informed care for children and adults, and I have had adults, foster youth alumni and adult adoptees come to me after the training and go, I wish I had this training when I was a kid.
So we also need psychoeducation. We need somebody to teach us these pieces and then teach us how to help us work through and heal and comfort and support these pieces. So there you have it in a nutshell.
Haley Radke: Well, and I mean of course you explain like there, we all have different levels of intensity for each of these pieces. And you know what I'm thinking about the typical older child, in foster care, like teenager. I mean, how many placements have they had? And so those layers, when you get to the teenage years and you're supposed to be forming your identity, I mean, it's complex for adoptees as it is. And then compounded with all of these different relationships and attachments, as you said, it's big stuff. Really big stuff.
Jeanette Yoffe: Yes, it is. Big stuff. So the psychoeducational piece is we need to understand that we are having a normal response to an abnormal event. So that we don't judge ourselves. Like of course our body is trying to work through these memories and that's why they keep coming up over and over.
So we need to learn to accept that piece.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Is there anything else that you wanna teach on this? We could. Talk about how some of these express themselves as we reach adulthood and beyond, if they're not dealt with?
Jeanette Yoffe: Well, we'll have difficulty trusting in relationships, in feeling confident, and building our self-esteem and feeling confident enough that we can go out and take a risk.
Because if we're not feeling secure and safe within our bodies, we're not gonna be able to take risks. We're going to feel held back, unsure of ourselves. And we really need to be a part of a community that understands us, that we don't have to explain ourselves over and over about our vulnerabilities. We, we need to be around other people that have also experienced similar experiences.
So sensitivity within ourselves, and we also will have difficulties in attachments and trusting others. It's really learning how to manage all of these pieces and have a daily practice. You must honor what you've experienced and see it for what it is.
It's there. We can't just make it go away. We get to, is what I always say. We don't have to. It's how we look at it. We get to do this healing for ourselves. We get to repair what happened to us because it's not what's wrong with us. It's what happened to us. We get to learn how to be more compassionate.
We get to re-parent, re mother ourselves. It's an opportunity for growth because we're either in two modes of functioning. We're either in protective mode or growth mode. And we get to decide which one we wanna go move towards, but we also do need to have a community that understands us and supports us in our growth.
We do need to be with an adoption or foster care competent therapist. Because they may say they understand the experience, but they do not. Okay. So I teach County Social Workers, department of Mental Health therapists here in Los Angeles to be adoption and foster care competent because it is, you're dealing with complex trauma.
I also suggest to adult, foster youth alumni and adult adoptees to go to trainings, read books on adoption, read, Coming Home To Self by Nancy Verrier. Really get to know these pieces and parts of you. It's not all of you. There's pieces and parts of you that need to be explored and examined.
And when you find that person that you feel that you can open up to, that you feel safe with, the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to tap into that primal wound. And I remember the day that I did it . I was probably about 21 and I was in therapy . I could feel this abyss like coming up from inside of me, and I allowed myself, because I felt safe enough with my therapist, to go there and I just cried and I cried and it was like a well of tears.
I tell kids that I work with, we're gonna cry buckets. And you know what? When we do that, we're gonna feel better. It's not gonna completely go away. I'm, I am real with kids and adults. It's not gonna go away. However, the way you can see if you're working through your primal wound is it will decrease the in intensity, frequency, and duration. It won't be as intense.
So really see it as an investment in yourself, because the more you go in there, the less it actually will become, and you'll be able to tolerate it more and manage it more because that is the condition. Not having been adopted or having been in foster care. The condition is learning how to manage these psychological and emotional impacts, effects of having lived this experience.
That's the condition. I'm all about helping us see things differently. Because when we can see things differently, change our perception, we can start to trust and go down the road of healing.
Haley Radke: Yeah. That's so powerful. Shifting our mindset to one of healing and what are we gonna do about it, right?
Jeanette Yoffe: Yes.
Haley Radke: Oh my gosh, yes. That's so important. Okay, so you had mentioned that you were gonna share a couple of tools with us. You mentioned a shame technique. Can you go into that? What do you mean by that? And maybe before you do, just, one more, just addressing the difference between guilt and shame, cuz a lot of people say they feel guilty, but if you could explain that would be helpful. I think.
Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. This is something I have to explain a lot. Okay. So shame, it's like, and this is how I explain it, shame is like a bubble that surrounds you and in the bubble you see a mirror. And all you see is your bad self. You feel, you see your deficiencies. You see you are not worthy. You see, you're unlovable.
There's something wrong about you. Okay? So because it's a bubble, you cannot see past the bubble. Okay? People who experience pervasive shame who live with this feeling that when someone points out to them a mistake, they can't separate themselves from the mistake. It's all in meshed in one. When you point out my mistake, I feel in that bubble, I'm the mistake.
Okay? Shame will impede the development of guilt because guilt is feeling sorry and acknowledging the other person. You're not only looking at yourself. So that's why it's very difficult for people who experience shame. It's very difficult for them to apologize and take responsibility, and this is a common red flag that you are living in shame because you cannot go to that person and say, I'm sorry, because what you're saying I'm sorry for is, I'm sorry I'm so bad. I'm sorry I'm so wrong.
And I know this because I lived it, and my mother would, oh, I'm gonna teach you responsibility. And she would sit me on the stairs and you're gonna go and apologize to your friend. And she would tell me to do this, and I would fight her to a T because she didn't understand what was going on with me.
It wasn't that I couldn't take responsibility. You're asking me to go to that person and reaffirm how bad I feel about myself. And a lot of kids and adults who've experienced foster care have this pieace. And so how we do this is... and the research shows people with pervasive shame have low levels of the ability to show remorse, take self responsibility. People with high levels of guilt have more empathy for others, are able to show more empathy.
So what we wanna do is help the person separate themselves from their behavior. And so there's a metaphor called the sandwich metaphor. And so the bread on the bottom is the stroking. Okay? So if I'm talking to an adopt foster youth out there, when you have recognized that you've done something wrong, okay, you made a mistake, you showed up late or you blew the stop sign, whatever it is, okay?
The first thing you need to do, the bread on the bottom is say to yourself, you are a good person, okay? You matter. Like you would talk to a good friend. You are a good person, and you put the emphasis on the behavior. And I made a mistake about this.
And that's the burger and the sandwich, that's the lettuce, the tomato. I made a mistake about this and I can learn from this mistake. I'm not the mistake. The mistake is the mistake and I'm gonna learn from this.
And then the piece of bread on the top is the, I love you. You are a good person. You matter. You're gonna get through this. So again, stroking because, and we need people around us.
If you are married or have a spouse or a partner or boyfriend, that this is a vulnerability for you. If you're gonna point something out to me that I've done wrong, can you just tell me first that I'm lovable? I love you and honey, can you not leave the plates hanging off the shelf because they broke today our new plates?
I and I love you, honey. So the emphasis goes on the behavior. And most of the families that I've worked with, I worked with, I had one family who said, Jeanette, that was a single most important piece you helped me understand. It shifted everything in my relationship with my child. So we get to do this work now for ourselves.
When I make a mistake, I do this for myself. I go, okay, you are a good person. The mistake is a mistake, and you are learning. This is how we learn by making mistakes, and I'm gonna learn from this, and I love you. I do the ho'oponopono, the Hawaiian Prayer.
Haley Radke: Oh yes.
The, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. You do that for yourself. That's the difference between shame and guilt. So guilt is the ability to go to that person and say, you know what? I'm sorry that I left the plates on the shelf. I'm gonna learn from that. I won't do it again. I'm sorry that I did that, and I'm sorry that it affected you and the glass broke all over the floor and you got hurt. I'm sorry about that.
So guilt is expressing concern and empathy for the other person, and also having a regard for yourself. We're human, we are imperfect, and the gift of imperfection. Brene Brown's book is a beautiful book to read to help honor and grow that part of yourself so that you can have that empathy for yourself.
I think what happens with kids and adults with shame is they haven't had someone be empathetic towards them. I cried a lot as a kid and my mother would say, stop crying. What are you crying about? And I have approached her as an adult and I said, mom, that wasn't helpful.
What I really needed you to say is, Honey, I'm so sorry. You're feeling so sorry about yourself. I know a lot happened to you and I'm gonna be here and you're sorry and in your sorrow. And the parents get confused. They don't know how to read, and as adults, we don't know how to read our behaviors. We misinterpret our behaviors and we get stuck in our behaviors.
So, and I'm sure the listeners or some are gonna identify and go, yes, that's me. So the tool is really doing that sandwich metaphor with yourself. You are a good person, we're all good people. All good people make mistakes. You're not the mistake and you can learn from it and that's how you grow. But be kind to yourself.
That re mothering. Reparenting because children who've been in foster care and adoption have a lot of unmet needs. So we get to meet these needs and reparent ourselves today.
That's a very helpful exercise. Thank you. Is there anything else that you wanna touch on before we wrap up, jeanette?
Jeanette Yoffe: Yeah, I think there was one piece that is important and that is I use an acronym called pace. It's called PACE Yourself, and it actually comes from attachment theory, P a c E. So you apply these attitudes towards yourself.
P stands for Be Playful. Okay? Be playful so we can lessen the harshness we have on ourselves. Do something fun. Go try something new. Go out of your comfort zone, be playful, laugh at yourself. Laughter releases stress.
A is be accepting of yourself. You may not be accepting of the action you took or the mistake you made, but accept yourself; that you are doing the best that you can. We are all doing the best that we can at any given moment. I hope I'm doing the best that I can in this moment.
Be Curious, C. Be curious. Okay. Be curious about what you're feeling in your body. Trauma gets stored in the mind and the body. So it's through the body that we get to be what's called a sensory detective because trauma gets stored through the five senses. And trauma also can get soothed through the five senses. So the five senses are a sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. So a sensory detect, detective use, look, and explore. Okay. Which sense is heightened for me because that's my vulnerability and I need to learn how to soothe that sense. So be curious. You ask yourself, where am my body? Am I feeling this? What does it look like? How can I help soothe this part of myself? What do I need to do with my hands? Do I need to just squeeze some Play-Doh? Sand? What do I need to do? Do I need to drink some nice warm tea to sooth myself? I use lavender all the time in my practice. I use it before I see a client. I use it with a client. Breathing, teaching myself to breathe and slow down. Okay. And listening to calm, soothing sounds, providing yourself with sensory comfort is very important if you've experienced trauma.
And then E is have empathy. So PACE yourself. Treat yourself with kindness. You're doing the best that you can and do that sandwich metaphor. Whenever you make a mistake or do something wrong, you're learning from it. You'll explore it and go deeper and you can make a difference. And make changes, small changes. Cuz the way we change is in small doses. We can't just jump in the pool and expect everything to just change.
The last piece about healing. I say healing is like being in a whirlpool. Okay. Because you're being asked to change and shift and transform what you're experiencing into something different. Well, if you think about a whirlpool, everybody's going in one direction for a long time, and then you're asked to turn around and go in the other direction. Well, that's what change is gonna feel like.
It's gonna be very difficult at first to put these pieces of practice in your daily routine. And the more you do it, the more you stick to it and just push through and put in that effort. You can have a new rewiring in your brain, a new felt sense of relief, cuz that is the goal for treating and healing trauma.
It's feeling a sense of ahhhh. So the more you can find that relief in your life and it's through the senses using these, some of these tools, you'll be able to feel better and then you will do better. Trust me. And I've done a lot of work on myself and I do practices every day. So it's important.
You matter. You are worth it. I say that to all my clients, over and over. You are worth the effort. We're all worth. We're all worthy. We're all deserving of worth and value. We're here. We get to be here. You have a seat at the table too, so it's reclaiming, naming what you're feeling so you can tame it and work through it.
So I'm pretty serious and very direct with the clients that I work with, that how important it is to put in these daily practices because you matter and we're never going to fully heal. You know, this is a lifelong process. So right at that actually gives me a sense of, oh, okay, great. I mean then this is a process.
You don't have to put all that pressure on yourself. It actually gives you a sense of, you know what, okay. I am going to accept that I get to do this re mothering, reparenting rewiring for myself, and I'm gonna do it, and I'm gonna do it the best I can and that's good enough. And give myself permission to do this work.
And you know, a lot of adoptees, they come usually when there's a life, big life stressor, there's a loss they experience and it just opens up that primal wound. And everybody's in their own, on their own journey. Let's not judge each other. Some people are more advanced than others. Cuz like me, I went into therapy when I was 13 years old and I'm still in therapy and I'm a therapist.
It's okay. It's important. We need to take care of ourselves. It's self care. Because of what happened to us and take responsibility and we get to then go into the world and utilize our many strengths, because I also say we also have many strengths. You know, there's all these issues and core issues and well, where are our strengths?
We're very strong-willed. We're very determined. We are deeper thinkers. We feel the world on a much more profound level. That's what makes us amazing creators, visual and performing artists, writers, painters. We can see things that other people don't see because we are very observant. And once we can tap into that strength we actually can do things that we never thought or imagined we could.
And so it's exciting. I always want to inspire adoptees, fellow adoptees and foster youth alumni to, to go... and I created this training... be the archeology of you and go in your primal wound. That is actually an exercise we did. Okay? Walking in the desert, there's a hole cuz it's a desert out there. And you, before you go to the hole as an archeologist does make sure you have your backpack, your flashlight, some boots, and extra set of clothes. Whatever you need, because you're gonna go in your primal wound right now and put the flashlight on.
We're gonna look in this big hole and we're gonna talk about what's in there, and we're gonna redecorate it. We get to go in and explore this part of us, examine it, and redecorate it.
So I've literally done this exercise with many adult adoptees, and we climb in our primal wound holes with our headset on, with our hammer. We're all ready. We climb in there and we create a space of comfort because we need to get to know this part of us. The more we avoid it, the more it's gonna be enacted out and reenacted out in the real world. So going in there and listening, feeling, befriending this part, putting a picture on the wall.
Putting a floor on the bottom and learning how to feel the bottom of it, because we can plant ourselves in there and examine it and be with it and know we're going to be okay.
Haley Radke: And that, and just having the bottom, like as you're saying that I'm like, if we don't go there, we picture it as like the never-ending abyss. Right.
Jeanette Yoffe: Exactly. It gives it some footing. It gives us a, just a grounding because, and that's another exercise that I do, is the grounding tool where you imagine from your belly button to the center of this planet, there is a cord and that cord cannot be broken. And it is extremely powerful. And when you feel that pull. And you have to be standing. You just stand arms at your side. Just go in your mind's eye, in your imagination, and imagine there's a cord from your belly button to the center of this planet. You feel that connection, and then you ask somebody to give you a little push. Your body feels this newfound strength and you feel this connection that you've never felt before.
And for me when I first did this, and I teach this to everybody, is it helped me feel a sense of belonging and connection. And that's that footing, feeling a sense of being grounded.
Because when you're uprooted-- I don't know if you've ever seen the sign language for adoption, but it's literally, oh gosh, it was a little scary to see it. But literally it's like, they're holding their hands together, they're pull something up, they put it to the right and they put it down. That's sign language for adoption. And when I saw that, it just reminded me of this image of a plant being just pulled out by its root, pulled out and put in another, just smashed in another pot.
And there's no sense of this. You know, you're uprooted, literally. So we need to ground ourselves, put that lining in our primal wound so we can get a footing. So we can see it for what it is, and befriend it. And get to know it and live there. Not live there literally every day, but go in there and not be afraid of it. And honor it.
Haley Radke: Thank you. Those are some real, some really good tools. I really appreciate that. I love having really practical things that we can do and your wisdom at on just this needs to be a daily practice and it's a journey. And it's a lifetime of moving forward with that. So thank you. Thanks so much for speaking to those things.
Jeanette Yoffe: You're welcome.
Haley Radke: I'd love it if you would share with us how we can connect with you online.
Jeanette Yoffe: I wrote a book about all the interventions that I do with children and teens and families in adoption, so that you can find that on Amazon. It's called Groundbreaking Interventions, Working with Traumatized Children, Teen and Families in Foster Care and Adoption.
My website is Yoffe therapy.com. I also have a YouTube channel, Yoffe Therapy, and there's a lot of videos on that. And that's how you can find me.
Haley Radke: Thank you. That's so great. I was just on your YouTube channel this morning and watching a bunch of the different videos. You've explained these exercises in depth. It's, they're so good. So good. It's a great resource for people to check out. Thank you so much for sharing with us today, Jeanette. It was just an honor to speak with you.
Jeanette Yoffe: Well, thank you. You too. Thanks so much. It's been an honor.
Haley Radke: I've been on a bit of a break from the show prepping and recording for season four, so I wanna give you a quick update on that.
And I sent out my monthly newsletter last week where I revealed the theme of season four as chosen by my monthly supporters. Thank you guys.
So if you're curious about what the theme is, you can go back and find the back catalog of my newsletters. There's three, so it's not like a ton of things to go through.
Adopteeson.com/about is my bio page, and I have a couple of links there to articles I've written, and there's also a link for the newsletter. And so if you click through on that one's got the back issues. So you can check back on the latest one to see what the theme is for season four. But before I start releasing season four episodes, I'm gonna have a few more healing episodes for you, including the one next week where I invited Jeanette back and we talk about support groups and how to start your own support group, which is perfect timing for me because we have started one here in my city in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
So if you're a listener and you live in the Edmonton area, please get in touch with me so you can come to our next meetup and I'll send you the address. It's at my house, so if you're ever curious about where I record, you can come to my house and see.
Anyway. Tune in next week because you really wanna hear what Jeanette has to say about starting your own support group. This show is literally brought to you by the support from my Patreon partners, and I couldn't do it without them. Truly, Patreon is a website that allows. Creators like me to raise monthly support to help me keep producing this podcast for you.
And as a special thank you for a monthly pledge, I have a secret Facebook group for adoptees only, where we support each other through search and reunion issues, and we get really real about all the things we're struggling with. So come and join us. AdopteesOn.com/partner has all the details. I'm so grateful to be able to do this for you, and I couldn't do it without that financial support. Thank you. Thank you so much.
So if you wanna come and support the show, monthly, adopteeson.com/partner has the details. I also have a one-time donation link on my adopteeson.com page for PayPal, if that's something that you. You're not really interested in joining the group, but maybe you would like to give a one-time donation that is so appreciated and helpful also.
Thank you. Okay. I have a special message from a fellow adoptee to share with you. Let's listen.
(Voice Recording of Christie) Hi, my name is Christie. I discovered that I was adopted at the age of 18 in a fight. And for many years I wasn't allowed to have any feelings about that. In fact, growing up I wasn't really allowed to have many feelings at all.
So I internalized a lot of my emotions and now I was ready to let those emotions out. Through writing and let my story be known. So the past year I've been working on my book, and yesterday it officially became available. Right now it's only available on lulu.com, but in six to eight weeks it will be available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and that's l u l u.com. The name of the book is, Why Aren't You Like Me? The brochure said you would be. I hope you read it and I hope you enjoy.
(Haley Speaking) Thanks, Christie. If you are an adoptee and would like to tell us about your book or blog or whatever you're working on, head over to adopteeson.com/connect and click on the microphone at the bottom of the page.
Don't email it to me. I wanna hear your voices. This is a podcast, right? Thank you for listening, and thank you for being so kind during my break. Let's talk again next Friday.
