81 [Healing Series] Grief Part 1
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/81
Haley Radke: Before we get started today, I want to let you know that fall is back. My kids are back in school and preschool. So thank you so much for your patience over the summer where we had a bit of a not regular schedule. We're back to every single Friday coming into your feed, and today's episode is so good. I can't wait for you to hear it.
You're 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 are talking about grief. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Janet Nordine. Welcome, Janet.
Janet Nordine: Thank you. So great to hear your voice, Haley.
Haley Radke: Janet is a fellow adoptee. She is also a licensed marriage and family therapist who works with foster children who have experienced trauma. I'm so glad to chat with you and I have had the privilege of getting to meet you in person.
Janet Nordine: Yay, in San Francisco.
Haley Radke: Yeah. We got to hang out in San Francisco, which was so fun. And I'm just so curious about how you decided to become a therapist. And so why don't you start out and just share a little bit of your story with us and what led you to becoming a therapist?
Janet Nordine: Sure. Well, my biological parents met at the Golden Nugget here in Las Vegas in 1965, and I was born in November of 1965.
And at the time of my birth, my mom, my birth mother had five boys already in foster care. So she felt that she wasn't going to be able to raise one more child. So she placed me for adoption.
So my story, and I've always known this just because of history and Nevada adoption and I was adopted through Catholic Charities, is when babies were born at the Catholic hospital, the mother never got to see them. So she knew I was a girl, but I went out one door and she went out another door. That's just kind of how they did things.
So I've been searching. I had been searching for my birth family for many, many years. I've testified in front of the Nevada legislature for open records with an organization called Nevada Open, which I'm still involved with.
I’ve been very involved politically, and it wasn't until the horizon of DNA for all of us adoptees that are finding families that way, that I was able to finally connect with them. And a first cousin I messaged and she messaged me one evening on Facebook. And this is all in a span of about 45 minutes. So I get an email, she messages me and she said, here's the phone number. Your birth mother's waiting to talk to you.
So I looked at my husband and I said, what do I do? And he said, well, I think you should call. So I called and we had a conversation and I was able to meet her in September of 2017.
And then just this year in February, 2018, I have a paternal biological sister who also found me through DNA testing. She'd known about me her whole life because she'd been with her dad and my birth mother and seen that she was pregnant and knew that she had another sibling somewhere. So that's kind of a cool part of the story.
So all in all, with all my siblings, there's 15 of us between my paternal and maternal side. So it's quite a big group of people to know where they fit and get to know. So that's kind of it in a nutshell.
Haley Radke: Wow, that's a lot of kids. And so what led you to become a therapist and specializing in working with foster children?
Janet Nordine: Well, I was working in the hotel industry in Las Vegas, and then when 9/11 happened here in the United States, I lost my job. I was an executive manager at a hotel and I decided to go back to school. And when I had originally gone to college, I really wanted to go into social work or something with writing something kind of creative.
And so I decided to go back to school, and I went to school seven years straight and I graduated with my master's in counseling, marriage and family therapy. And a psychiatrist that I work with that owns the company I work for, she approached me. They were starting a new project. The project was to help foster children be on less medication, because historically children in foster care are given astronomical amounts of psychotropic meds.
And she asked me to be part of a pilot program, and I'm still doing that now. It's a full project, almost six years later. So it's been an amazing opportunity to work with foster kids, and I'd always known I'd had brothers in foster care. So it was kind of a pay it forward feeling of my heart because I knew about them.
Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. That is such an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. So we are going to talk about grief today. And you are an expert in grief because you're adopted, right, I think?
Janet Nordine: Yes. I think it comes with the certificate, right?
Haley Radke: Oh, that's right. It does. Yeah. It's on the second page.
And so, first, can you just tell us a little bit about what grief is. I mean, we kind of know what it is, but how do you define grief? And when you think about grief, what do you want to talk to us about?
Janet Nordine: I think grief is really any loss we've experienced, and as adoptees, I believe we start grieving the second we're relinquished when we're removed from our mother.
So the second I was taken by someone that wasn't my mother through a door into I don't even know where I went then, that's when the grief started. And it's a biological change in your body with your brain. There's parts of your brain that are affected by grief. And it affects language, it affects reasoning and it affects your ability to eat and to sleep.
So it really affects all areas of your life.
Haley Radke: And so the traditional five stages of grief, probably everybody's has heard of them. And I was looking them up and now there's seven. Did you know what? There's seven stages of grief you could go through because five wasn't quite enough.
Janet Nordine: Five wasn't enough.
Haley Radke: Do you wanna talk about that a little bit?
Janet Nordine: Sure. So Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was the originator of the five stages of grief and they are denial, anger, bargaining, depression or sadness, and then acceptance.
And I don't believe they're linear. I kind of think about grief as a big ball of yarn that has a lot of knots in it and you're pulling the string and sometimes your day is going fine and it's just coming out smooth. And then one day there's a big clump of knots and then you have to untie all that, and that's part of whatever stage happens to come up.
And grief is a lifetime process. I really look at grief as a gift that we can give ourselves because if we are grieving, it means that we really deeply love something and we're going to miss that for quite a long time.
And so people that say, we'll get over it and grief shouldn't last this long, or you should be better by now, they're really not honoring the process of love, I think.
Haley Radke: And so grief can be any kind of loss. So we're experiencing grief for different things all through our life.
Janet Nordine: Right. Yes. The obvious grief is when a loved one passes away. Some things are not as obvious, and that's called disenfranchised grief.
So for me, if I lose a pet, it devastates me. I have a hard time with that. I'm very attached to animals. For someone else that may not even be a big deal, or they may not even think about it. Oh, dog passed away, we'll just get another dog. So it just affects people in different ways.
Haley Radke: Okay. So disenfranchised grief. This is a big one for me. The first time I heard it defined, I was like, oh my goodness. This is huge for adopted people. So can you talk about what that definition is and really what it means for us as adopted people?
Janet Nordine: Right. So disenfranchised grief is a term that was coined by Kenneth Doka, who is a PhD professor in New York State, in the 1980s.
And it came about because of the AIDS epidemic where people were losing loved ones to AIDS, but society wasn't recognizing that because there was some shame and other emotions around the AIDS epidemic at that time. So that is where the term came from. So it really is a term that describes grief that's not acknowledged by society.
And of course, as adoptees, we're supposed to be grateful because we're adopted and we're not supposed to worry about what came first. And so society views adoption as a wonderful blessing that you should be just so happy that you're in a good family.
And yes, maybe we are in a good family, but where did we come from? Can we honor the place that we were before we came to this family? And that's the disenfranchised grief that a lot of society and people don't understand.
Haley Radke: And so we have the normal, if your mother passes away, everybody will come to the funeral and they will bring you your casseroles and they will….
Janet Nordine: Yes, the food chain will happen.
Haley Radke: Yes. That's the acknowledgement and you have time. You could even have a few days off of work. People might call you on her birthday to check in on you. Or the holidays that are coming up, there's acknowledgement. It's acceptable for you to be sad for a certain period of time. Right? I mean, until people are uncomfortable.
And then with disenfranchised grief, you don't get any of that.
Janet Nordine: No, it's really not recognized. And I was thinking about disenfranchised grief and society, and recently we lost two major celebrities. People had a hard time with that, but a lot of people didn't understand.
You've never met these people. Why would you be so concerned about these people you've never met? And that's a form of disenfranchised grief. Suicide is another one. People say, well, that was their choice, and you should be angry. People want to “should” all over you instead of being open to letting you feel how you feel.
Haley Radke: So what do you think is the effect on us if we're experiencing disenfranchised grief, which I believe we are if we're adopted. What's the effect of not having that grief acknowledged?
Janet Nordine: If it's blocked, disenfranchised grief can turn into clinical depression, anxiety. There can be PTSD symptoms. If we don't view it in the grief model that you typically would, like you were talking about a passing of a parent, it really makes the grief that we have pathological. It turns it into a depression or an anxiety instead of acknowledging this is really grief and how can I help you heal and how can I support that?
Haley Radke: So not just society not acknowledging, but even just the people around you, right?
Janet Nordine: Right. Yes. For so many adoptees even their closest relationships, they can't understand or they have a difficult time understanding, or they want you to explain it in a different way how you feel about being adopted and what that loss feels like.
So often in society, the adoption is focused on. What we've gained, not what we've lost. You've gained a family, you've gained an opportunity, but we've lost, I mean, I lost 15 siblings that some of them I'll never know because they passed away before I found them. I lost relationship with cousins that I'm very close to now that I could have grown up with.
I'm not saying I haven't had a great life in my adopted family, but I missed out on a lot of things and I wish I would've had those opportunities.
Haley Radke: Do you have ways for us to get that grief acknowledged? I mean I'm especially thinking of our immediate family or spouse or close friends.
You're a supporter of the show. We have a secret Facebook group and a lot of people have shared at separate occasions about the ways that they are so misunderstood by that close circle to you, right? And how much of that is disenfranchised grief really?
Janet Nordine: And also, in the adoption community I'm in several adoptee Facebook groups because I'm interested in learning what people are feeling. I don't always comment, but I'm there often reading. And the thing that I think that even adoptees don't recognize is that they're grieving.
They're so focused often on anger or depression or loss. The relationship is terrible or this thing has been done wrong to me, but they're not recognizing their deep, deep grief.
And then often I think about people that have searched and they found somebody, their birth family had passed away, their birth mother was gone, or their birth father was gone.
And how are they grieving that? They never met this person, yet they're gone and what do they do with that? You're not going to get a bouquet of flowers at your door because you found a grave. It just doesn't happen. And how can people be supportive of that?
Haley Radke: So it's not just getting other people to be supportive, you have to figure that out, that you're in the grieving process.
Janet Nordine: Yes. You need to recognize it in yourself, because so often you're in that second stage of grief, in the anger. You're angry that you're adopted. You know, the angry adoptee that so many people like to point out, that we're all angry. But really we're grieving and we're in that stage of grief. And that's okay.
Haley Radke: And like you started out saying, the grief is kind of a lifetime thing. So even if you searched and you found a grave ten years ago, or you've never searched because you're not interested, you can have grief.
Janet Nordine: You sure can, yes. And people don't recognize it as grief, and I think especially with the children I work with, I'm very careful to honor where they came from.
Some of these children won't be able to go back to their parents or parents have passed away, and that's their traditional grief, but they've also lost contact because of what's happened with their parents. There's a sense of loss that we can't put a finger on. It's really hard to describe a loss of something you never had.
In my situation with my birth mother, I fantasized about who she would be for 51 years, and then I found her, and I grieved the loss of that fantasy because she wasn't Carol Burnett or who I thought she might be. I had to remind her what year I was born and where I was born, because she'd been told to forget me.
So I had to grieve the fact that she had forgotten who, where I was and where I fit into her life. So once I was able to grieve that and I was able to meet her, that experience was wonderful for me. It was a one-time meeting, but it was seven hours of my life that I waited for. And I grieved that I only got those seven hours.
Haley Radke: So if you're listening to this show and you're thinking, am I just angry? Am I grieving? What's your next step to think about this and explore this? Like how do you realize, actually I'm in the middle of a grieving process, which is not linear.
Janet Nordine: Right. It's a big ball of ugly yarn.
Haley Radke: Yeah. How do you sort of awake to that, I guess?
Janet Nordine: I think you just have to really sit and think about is this grief? If I get under my anger, what's under my anger? Because that anger is a secondary emotion. All kinds of things fuel the anger. Fear can fuel the anger, sadness, all of those things. So what's really under that? What is it that I'm missing?
And for me, in my own process of healing, grief was the missing piece. I had to recognize that I'm really grieving so many things in my adoption. I'm a happy person. I mean, I'm really a positive person, but there's this underlying, always has been a river of melancholy I call it, where I just kind of floated in that sadness and then I recognized I'm really grieving.
That's what that feeling is, and it's not going to take me out. It's not going to take over my life, but I acknowledge it. I'm able to work on it. I went to therapy. I still go to therapy. And I really want to be able to process it in a way that makes sense for me and my body and my brain.
Haley Radke: So as we're talking about this, the thing that's getting stuck in my head, Janet, is that phrase that we all talk about “coming out of the fog.”
This feels kind of linked to me. Is coming out of the fog meaning you're just waking up to grief?
Janet Nordine: Yeah, it really does. But once we grieve and acknowledge the grief, we can move on to something else. I mean, it's still going to be there, but we can still be happy in our lives.
We can still have joy. It doesn't have to overcome us every day of our life.
Haley Radke: Okay. So acknowledging the grief. What does that look like?
Janet Nordine: Well, I really work from a holistic Gestalt perspective in therapy, and that's kind of how my brain works. So when your body and your brain can work together and you can acknowledge I fully accept myself, even though I'm still grieving. I fully accept myself even though I still feel I was cheated out of years with my family.
It's acceptance of self and acknowledging your emotions. It doesn't make you a bad person because you're grieving. It doesn't make you incapable of getting out of bed or incapable of leaving the house. Some days it might, and that's okay too, but acknowledging where it's coming from and not letting it become debilitating is the key and seeking out support and help.
Haley Radke: And it doesn't make you weak to acknowledge that you're grieving.
Janet Nordine: No, absolutely not. In fact, the opposite. It makes you stronger. When you can acknowledge your emotion, I feel like you become a stronger person because you're recognizing who you are.
Haley Radke: That's good. Recognizing who you are. I like that.
Janet Nordine: Yeah. And really, isn't the most counterintuitive thing we do as humans is to, when we're in pain, is to just not let it happen. I'm not gonna have this pain because it's just too much. Our instinct is to resist, but really, when you let the pain happen, it'll help you more than it will hurt you if you can just walk through it.
Haley Radke: Are you saying some of us try to numb pain? Is that what you're saying?
Janet Nordine: Possibly, yes. Possibly yes. Myself included. But the other point of that is pain is inevitable and misery is optional. We can feel the pain, but we don't have to remain miserable in it.
Haley Radke: So if we've acknowledged that, maybe what we're experiencing is grief. And we're ready to look underneath. We're ready to do this thing.
Janet Nordine: Pick up that little rock.
Haley Radke: The tip of the iceberg, right?
Janet Nordine: Right. Yes, absolutely.
Haley Radke: What are the next steps?
Janet Nordine: Well, seeking support. If you have a supportive network of friends that will just sit with you if you need to cry.
Do you have a helping professional, a therapist, a social worker, somebody that you can see? Can you go to a support group? Lots of places have support groups for grief.
Can you find a ritual that works for you? I'm a writer. I'm a blogger, and that's the thing. Most of my life since I was a child, I have written stories and I have just written for myself. And that's something that's very healing.
People can do rituals. My birth mother passed away this past September of this year and my therapist suggested that I do some sort of a ritual because there wasn't a funeral, there wasn't something that you can go to and then pay your respects. So what I ended up doing was just doing a ritual by myself in my yard where I created a space where the memory that I have of her can be. And if I need to, I can go and stand in that space.
One thing I do with my kids is we create a timeline and a history of their life. You can do that for yourself. You can write a timeline of your life, and then you can creatively tell that story in pictures. You can cut out things from magazines to represent your life.
If you're that kind of creative person, using your brain creatively really awakens your limbic system and it'll help you heal as well.
You need to also tell people you need support. You just can't sit around saying, why don't they notice how sad I am? Or what I need. You need to say, hey, I'm feeling kind of lousy today. Could you maybe just give me a little extra attention, or can I talk to you about this?
You need to be honest with people about how you're feeling. They can't read your mind always. For me, pets, as I said before, is a big thing. Getting enough rest, some sleep is good. The other thing is self-compassion, and that's different than self-care.
How do you view yourself, oh, I'm a horrible person because I'm still grieving. I just can't get out of this funk I'm in. Can you give yourself some credit and maybe pat your heart a little bit and say, we're gonna get through this together.
Haley Radke: This is making me feel like we need to kind of loop back.
So we talked about disenfranchised grief. So when we are looking to others for support, maybe finding a support group for grief or going to our loved one and saying, I need some help with this. How do we explain it to them in a way that they can actually hear us and acknowledge that this is a real thing.
Janet Nordine: Well, typically if you're going to reach out to a support person, they already know you're adopted, so you don't have to make that announcement to them. If I was going to say to a loved one or a best friend, I'm really feeling sad today. Can you just sit with me? I would explain the sadness. Explain what's sad.
The reason I feel sad is because I'm really missing my birth mother, I'm really missing the idea of being with her and having that opportunity again. Sometimes we can't even explain what we're missing. You can just say, I'm just missing connection with where I came from. And that's kind of an overarching feeling.
And if somebody really, truly is your support person, they're going to be able to just hear that. But if you feel like they can't hear you, you may have to explain a little bit further and say, this grief, I've just recognized I have this grief. It's not anger. It's not sadness. It's really deep, deep grief. I feel it in my bones. You might have to get really descriptive so people can hear you.
Typically, society, people just want to tell us to shut up and get over it, and that's across the board, not just about adoption. A lot of people don't have the mentality that we can just move on or that we should just move on from whatever type of grief or whatever situation we're having.
But I think it's important for us to tell our story. No matter how many words it takes, tell your story. And I think adoptees are really doing that well, telling their story. And that's part of asking for support.
Haley Radke: So good. Okay. Is there anything that I didn't ask you about? Just kind of this broad concept of grief and disenfranchised grief, any of those things that you think that adoptees specifically need to hear, understand, look into more?
Janet Nordine: I think it's really about realization and acceptance. If we can think about grief in a different way, we can think about it as it's part of the adoption process. It just is. I don't know if there's any way around it. It just is. We are missing the loss of our identity.
And that's truly what it is. And recognizing in ourself that we have disenfranchised grief. Maybe go doing a Google search. Actually, Wikipedia mentions adoptees and adoption as disenfranchised grief, both for the birth mother and for the adoptee.
I'm sure some adopted person had edited it, helping other people understand it. And helping other people understand how we feel. It's up to us to explain how we feel and to find that person that will listen, even if we have to tell it a hundred times.
Haley Radke: Yes. I mean, I think that's such a good reminder for us, really.
People can't read our minds. And speaking up is so important. That's what you and I are doing here and so many other adoptees are starting to do more and more of that publicly, but also just with their friends or their spouses.
Just having these conversations with their partners and looking at these things at a deeper level is helping us heal.
Janet Nordine: I have been doing several trainings this year to enhance my therapy skills. Every conference I've been to that has brought adoption up incorrectly, I've raised my hand and corrected every time. I just can't keep my mouth closed.
I need to speak up and I need other clinicians to understand that adoption is trauma. And I've had some odd looks and some heads turn, and then people have come up privately and talked to me and it's been a really good experience.
So I think the more we speak up, the more the truth will get out.
Haley Radke: And it takes a number of times for people to hear it and actually get it. So there's not gonna be too many times to talk about it.
Janet Nordine: Right. And each time I do it, it heals another place in me, each time. Because I get more and more courage and more and more confidence in my own story and in my ability to share what it's like to be adopted and how I grieve.
And how adoptees grieve.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, speaking of courage, Janet, where can we connect with you online?
Janet Nordine: Well, I have a blog that I've been writing since I entered reunion and it's called experiencecourage.com. That has been my tagline for many years and just speaks to who I am as a person and how I try to live my life with experiencing new things and having courage.
Haley Radke: Well, thank you so much for teaching us about grief today. It was such a pleasure to speak with you.
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