83 [Healing Series] Grief Part 2
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/83
Haley Radke: This show is listener supported.
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're coming back to the topic of grief. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Janet Nordine. Welcome, Janet.
Janet Nordine: Thank you, Haley. Great to hear your voice.
Haley Radke: Janet is a licensed marriage and family therapist who works with foster children who have experienced trauma. I'm so glad to have you back on the show again, Janet.
We talked about grief last time and you taught us all about disenfranchised grief and some stages of grief that really are not linear and we really dove into that. And now we're going to talk about grief again, but we're going to talk about living through another loss that brings up grief for us again as adults.
So do you want to just share a little bit of your story and why this topic is so important to you personally?
Janet Nordine: Yes, so as I shared before, my biological parents met at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas in 1965, and I was born at the end of 1965 in November. My birth mother had already had five children in foster care, and recently I found out my birth father had three children as well at the time of my birth.
So I was able to connect with them or connect with my maternal side of the family using DNA. And one evening, it was February 1, 2017. It was the day I came out of the fog when I got the message that, here's your birth mother's phone number and she's waiting for you to call. A cousin sent that to me. And I called her, and in the process of our conversation, she was telling me about her life and she was telling me about her children.
The five boys, they were in foster care when you were born, which I had already known because I had my non-identifying information. And she said: Then I got married and I moved to Texas and I had another son, and then I had a daughter and I had to place a daughter for adoption, and then she had three more boys after her.
And I was so excited because I finally had a sister. I just couldn't even believe it. So she gave me her name because I grew up with one adopted brother and so I've always wanted to have a sister. So I was really excited. She gave me my sister's name and in 30 seconds while I'm still on the phone with her, I'd found her on Facebook and I saw her picture and I was like, it's like looking at myself.
We look so much alike. So I sent her a message that evening on Facebook and I said, are you the person that's related to this person that was adopted in this year and this place? And the next morning she wrote back and she said, I'm that person. We must be sisters. And from that moment on, we couldn't talk enough through Facebook Messenger.
We spoke on the phone several times and it was a feeling I think those that have found siblings and become close will understand. I just immediately was in love with her. I was so happy that she was going to be part of my life. And fast forward 38 days later, I got a message that she'd passed away and my life was devastated.
I was so…shocked is the only word I can still come up with. It just shocked me. She suddenly died. It wasn't expected. It’s just she was gone. One minute she was there and the next day she wasn't. And so I entered this place. It was a new kind of fog. I entered a place that was uncharted territory for me.
I'd lost grandparents before and you expect that, and I'd lost pets and things like that. But I never experienced such a tragedy as I felt this was. It just was overwhelming. It's the only thing I can call it.
Haley Radke: I'm so sorry. I can't imagine. I mean, you found her, you found her, you have a sister. I mean, like, you don't even have two months.
Janet Nordine: No, 38 days.
Haley Radke: So you say you enter another fog and this is like full on grief, big time.
Janet Nordine: This is the real deal grief. There weren't enough tissues in the house, kind of grief. I was home. It was a Saturday afternoon and my younger son who was 23 at the time was here and I got this message and I was in my kitchen and he was around and I just immediately sat and he looked at me and he said, Mom, what's wrong?
And I said, my sister is dead. And he just came and he grabbed me and he held me. And that was just, I was so thankful he was here because I don't know what I would've done with no one home. And he immediately called other family and they came and they were supportive.
Haley Radke: Okay. So your sister has been gone a year now.
And you're talking about it when it just happened. What else do you want to share about your story about experiencing grief as an adopted person?
Janet Nordine: I just felt so cheated. Not only that she was also adopted and never knew that I existed, but she was gone that fast.
I just still, a year and a half later, have a hard time describing that feeling. I just have a hard time with it. Overwhelming, like I said, is the only thing that makes sense to me.
Haley Radke: So can you tell us what did that look like for you? You've had this shock. Your family comes and then what were the next things that you did? I mean, did people acknowledge that grief from afar, the people that didn't know you like close family?
Janet Nordine: It's just my adopted parents and I had an adopted brother, but he also passed away in 2000. So the next day I have a close-knit group of women that just came to my home and I needed that female energy and they just kind of scooped me up.
And we'd spent several hours just talking about my sister and about who I am as a person. And they reminded me, you're strong, you've been through hard things before. This is gonna be okay. We're gonna help you. We're not gonna leave your side.
My employer was wonderful. They gave me the time that I needed to recoup and kind of get myself together because I do hard work. The trauma work that I do with kids is very hard and it takes a lot out of me emotionally. So they gave me that space.
Her family was so gracious in allowing me to come to where she lives and to attend her funeral and to say some words at her funeral that were meaningful to me, and that was so healing.
They barely knew who I was. They only knew because of Facebook. We just met each other. And this is gonna sound like a crazy thing to say, but I'm so happy there's Facebook. That's how I found everyone, and that's how we've been able to stay connected. And without that platform, none of that would've been possible.
I went to where she was from. I went to the funeral. I was there where she has her final resting place. I took pictures so I can look at those and I can reflect back. But, you know, I still have these moments of grief spurts, I call them. A song can come on the radio that we talked about, and I immediately get teary, break down very easily.
Somebody can ask me about my reunion story and I'm very open about it. There's nothing really that I have shame about. There's nothing to be ashamed about in my reunion story, and I tell them about her. I sometimes will see something beautiful like a sunset or a sunrise, and I'm like, wow, my sister would love that.
And I think about her a lot and I try to honor her and things that I do. Any adventure I have, I'm like, yeah, we're doing this together. I really carry her with me. So I don't feel I'm ever going to be over the loss of her, but I can certainly celebrate her in different ways, in the ways I'm choosing to live my life.
Haley Radke: So how do you think experiencing these losses is different for us as adopted people? Do you think there's a difference?
Janet Nordine: I do because we all experience loss from the minute we're born or the minute we're taken away from our biological family. I was removed right at birth. I never was touched by my birth mother.
She never even saw what I looked like. I never saw what she looked like. And so that loss is so immediate and we start grieving immediately as soon as we're born. So I think that we have that deep-in-our-bones loss already.
So when there's another tragedy such as the loss of my sister, or there's a typical loss like a loved one or a family member, parent, we are going to go deeper because we have just sat in that loss our whole life. From the get-go there's been loss.
Haley Radke: Do you think that when we experience a loss like this that it can bring back the other loss, like especially if we maybe haven't dealt with it?
Janet Nordine: Sure. I think it can get very confusing. The lines are pretty blurred with grief and loss like this when we've had a tragic loss, like where do I start and where does the grief start?
And is there a space in between? Am I the grief now, or is it over there? Can I put it in the corner? We're just so enveloped in it. It almost, and this might sound odd, but it almost feels familiar because you're used to grieving. So you're like, oh, there's that feeling again. Now I understand what it is.
Haley Radke: Oh, that's interesting. That's really interesting. Do you think that a sudden loss like this could bring somebody awareness of like their previous adoption losses, shake them outta the fog, I guess?
Janet Nordine: Possibly. Yeah. Yeah, possibly. Yeah.
Haley Radke: That's interesting. In our last episode when you taught us about grief, you talked about some of the stages. What can that look like for an adoptee going through another loss as an adult?
Janet Nordine: For me, the stages of grief, as I said before, are definitely not linear. I think I'm still in the little bit of the depression of grief, the sadness. Actually, I know I am in the sadness because I still, even if I'm not, don't have a trigger reminder, I can think about her and I can get emotional talking to you.
I'm feeling emotional about her and just that she's not here. I also lost my birth mother this year and she's not here. But I felt like I've lost my birth mother so many times. I lost her at birth. She initially rejected me, so there was a loss. Then I went to meet her and we had a wonderful afternoon, and then I had to leave and there was a loss, so I felt like I lost her over and over again.
But meeting my sister, I had her for such a short time, and I knew, and we had promised we would always be in each other's life, and then she left. So I went through that anger about her leaving and then I was in denial, that she could even possibly actually be gone. I would go back to Facebook and check. Oh no, it still says in memory of. It's just, you go through all this confusion.
Grief is pretty confusing and I think for adoptees, because we've experienced so much loss, it does get even more confusing. Really, where am I? What's going on with me? Am I going to be able to function? Can I get up in the morning and go to work? Am I always going to feel depressed? Is this always gonna be my life?
And I would say there's hope. There's definitely hope as we're able to heal and talk about the things that we're feeling, if we keep it inside, that's the most damaging thing we can do.
Haley Radke: We talked before in our previous episode on grief about disenfranchised grief. And so we're talking about now a situation where it's not just disenfranchised grief, it will likely be something that our friends and family will understand and accept, and we'll get the casseroles and people may come to support us at a memorial service or something.
How can that help us accept our disenfranchised grief? Can it? So having people support us through this grief that they can see, of course this is a loss. Can linking that to our initial adoption loss, losing our biological family, can linking that help us process that initial grief?
You can just say, this is too confusing.
Janet Nordine: No, I would hope it would be able to kind of help us understand and link that we can make the connection.
Nobody's gonna make it for us. I can't tell you, of course, Haley, you're having this grief because, you know that's not how it works. We have to recognize it in ourself and if we're confused by it, find a helping person that can help us sort it out. I have seen a therapist for quite some time that really I processed grief with, and she was an expert in grief.
I didn't have to be the therapist in the room. She just held the space for me and helped me figure things out, helped me get through that initial shock. And then the anger that came afterwards. And really that was a big part of my healing, but I also didn't shy away from telling people how I was feeling.
And I think adoptees, we don't feel entitled to share how we feel, or we've had our feelings shut off for a long time, or we've been told as children, we need to be seen and not heard. And I think that's part of the stigma that comes with being adopted because we just don't speak our truth. We haven't learned to speak up for ourself.
So even in grief, we need to ask for what we need.
Haley Radke: What do we need? What are the next things? Especially if you realize, okay, this is actually gonna have a really significant impact on my life.
Janet Nordine: Right. We need to be able to have healthy coping skills. I wouldn't say alcohol and drugs is a healthy coping skill.
We shouldn't be turning to something that's going to alter our emotions when we're already altered. We need to look for things that will bring us comfort. If that is laying on the couch and crying and that's comfortable, do it. If you need to be out in nature and that's something that helps you, do that.
If you need to listen to music, that's a great coping skill. I listened to the same Broadway musical lyric for several weeks. That helped me get through because it reminded me that in deep grief there's been deep love. And that was important to me to remember that this wasn't just somebody that I knew for 38 days and then she's gone.
And that's okay because I deeply loved her and I know that I was loved in return. I needed to honor that. And I think honoring also heals ourself. And we need to honor ourself and our grief, not tell ourselves we need to hurry up and get through this.
Haley Radke: What are some signs that we might need a little bit more intervention?
We might wanna book an appointment with a therapist or seek out a grief support group?
Janet Nordine: When we become unable to do things that we normally would do. If we feel like we can't get out of bed, we feel like we can't leave our house, we feel an overwhelming fear that you're going to lose everyone. And we, adoptees, were wired to feel loss.
If it gets to be debilitating, that's when you need to be seeking help. If your anxiety is so big, if your depression feels so big that you're not coping, that's when you can reach out and find someone. And if you feel like you can't leave your house, use telemental health, there's several different options that you can Skype, just like we're doing now, and be able to see a therapist that way.
Haley Radke: And there's several adoption-competent therapists who do consults on video as well.
Okay. Because we're so used to loss, we're experts at stuffing it down, and we may not have allowed ourselves to grieve for different things over our lives. Maybe we've lost a loved one before and didn't really give ourselves permission.
How do we acknowledge that and maybe go back and we need to heal from those things, right? We can't just keep shoving it all down. What are some symptoms of that, or how would we know that we've done that? What can we do about that?
We're not talking about a recent loss here. This could be maybe 10 years ago you lost a loved one, but you just were like, hey, I'm just gonna get over it and keep moving forward.
Janet Nordine: I'm gonna pull myself up by these two bootstraps and move on. Because I'm tough and I don't need to deal with this right now.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Can you talk to someone that's done that?
Janet Nordine: Yeah. I say often in therapy what we resist persists. So it's not gonna go away just because we're pushing it down or we're putting it in a box and bearing it somewhere else. It's still gonna keep coming up. So the sooner we can acknowledge that, oh, you know what, I'm really having a hard time. This is really starting to affect me.
The loss of my loved one last week, 10 years ago, was really starting to weigh on me. Grief can have other health problems. It affects your breathing, it affects the way your brain processes memories. If you start feeling like you can't remember things.
I had a time period where I couldn't remember where I put things. I would go into one part of my house looking for something and forget completely why I was there. Grief is an odd bedfellow, for lack of a better word, but when you're walking around in that space and that different kind of fog than the adoption fog, it's really important that you acknowledge it and you seek support.
Haley Radke: Okay. I didn't know it could have those side effects.
Janet Nordine: Yes. I mean, when we're grieving, the sensory part of our brain is really affected, and what the sensory part of our brain wants to do is protect us from that grief and protect us from those feelings because it doesn't want to become dysregulated.
But so what's really happening is the other parts of our brain are kicking in and they're like, pay attention. Don't you see that I'm having a hard time with deep breathing? Don't you see that I'm having a hard time with my emotional regulation? Can't you feel these physical symptoms you're having? Lots of people have bowel problems and all kinds of physical symptoms.
So if some of those things are going on with you and there's not a medical reason, possibly looking at the grief that you have experienced is something you should consider.
Haley Radke: Wow, okay. I totally did not know that. That's, wow. Yes. Our bodies are amazing things. Wow.
Janet Nordine: Right. If we're overeating and undereating, that's another symptom too.
Haley Radke: Okay. That was really interesting. Thank you so much, Janet. That was, that gave me a lot to think about. Things I didn't, I really had no idea of. And we never know when we could have an unexpected loss. And then we also don't know if maybe something in our past could be affecting us even today.
And this is a call to action, maybe just to spend a few minutes on thinking about is there something that maybe I shove down that maybe I need to think about?
Janet Nordine: Right. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Thank you so much. And is there anything else that you want to share with us about this?
Janet Nordine: Well, just being humans, you know, the price for love is loss.
It's just part of being human. And if we love deeply, we're gonna lose deeply and acknowledge that and be open to whatever comes. Don't try to avoid something because you're afraid of loss.
Haley Radke: So good. So good. You're so wise. Thank you. How can we connect with you online?
Janet Nordine: I am on Facebook under Janet Nordine. And also on my blog at experiencecourage.com.
Haley Radke: Thank you, thank you so much.
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