94 [S5] Sophia
/Transcript
Full show notes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/94
Episode Transcription by Fayelle Ewuakye. Find her on Twitter at @FayelleEwuakye
This show is listener supported.
(intro music)
You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 94, Sophia. I’m your host Haley Radke. Today Sophia and I discuss her journey of sobriety, reunion, and years of experience building healthy boundaries. After a whirlwind reunion, Sophia and her first father developed a very deep connection. And one of the ways was through an understanding of addiction and recovery and what it took for both of them to hold on to their sobriety. Sophia also gives us some wise advice about navigating the reunion relationship when a first parent is in active addiction. Just a content warning for you, we discuss several adult themed topics in this episode including a brief mention of sexual assault. We wrap up with some recommended resources. And as always links to all of the things we’ll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com. Let’s listen in.
(upbeat music)
Haley - I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Sophia, welcome Sophia!
Sophia - Hi there.
Haley - Hi! I’d love it if you would start out and share your story with us.
Sophia – Sure. I was born in San Francisco and relinquished immediately. I was in foster care for about 2 and a half months and adopted into a family where I grew up outside of San Francisco and was able to reunite with everyone in my first family around the time that I turned 21.
Haley – Wow. How did you find them all?
Sophia - Well I was in a triad group, as they called them then, where first family, second family, and adoptees were sharing together about the experience of adoption as a lifelong journey. And my second family was very comfortable with the idea of reunion. And I felt really encouraged to explore reunion. However at the very same time I was grappling with feeling very uncomfortable in my skin, around knowing I was gay and not quite knowing how to come out in high school and how to come out to everyone in my family that I knew. And I was really nervous about discovering homophobia in my first family. One of the only things I knew about them was that they were Catholic. And so I actually delayed searching for a couple of years while I was really going through the whole coming out process. And then my first mother contacted the social worker that was involved with the agency where the adoption had taken place. And the social worker contacted me because I had a note in my file saying that if she had ever come looking, I would be receptive. So we pretty much met immediately. There was no search.
Haley – Oh my goodness! Mutual consent! It’s like, this is the first time this has ever worked.
Sophia - Right, yes! It was remarkable! It was absolutely remarkable. It was, you know, I got a call from the social worker, I went in, and she said, here’s all of the identifying information. And here’s the name! You know, it was such a trip because of course I’d heard about reunions and searches and so much pain between other family members trying to find one another. So mine seemed like a miracle, really, really fast.
Haley - And so that was with your first mother. And then you’ve also found the paternal side.
Sophia - Correct. So then a couple of months later, it was actually my first mother’s idea, let’s find him, it was actually Father's Day. We just called information and asked for his name in the town where he’d been living the last time we knew of him. And there was no one of that name in that town. And then we moved on to town number 2 where we knew that he had had family in a different town and there it was. His first and last name, and the actual physical address. So we sent him a card saying essentially, Happy Father’s Day. Yeah. And you might recognize people in the photo. It still feels like it was yesterday. It was so remarkable and his response was entirely positive. He responded immediately and said, let’s get to know each other. So again, there was really no search.
Haley - Okay. Well, this is all a little bit unusual, I think.
Sophia - Yes, indeed. I really know that now.
Haley – So this sounds like the happy, positive really easy kind of situation but I know there’s more to this story than that.
Sophia - Right. So then comes the story of addiction. And I would say that addiction also is a lifelong journey much the way adoption is. And in my experience, I learned about the truth about addiction through stumbling through a long hallway of, what is very often called, denial in literature and counseling settings and support groups among people who are feeling the effects of addiction. And very often for me it’s like my eyes are closed or I can’t see or I’m blindfolded and I’m bumping into furniture. And I don't know what it is that I’m bumping into. I barely even know that the sensation that I’m having is that I’m blindfolded and that I’m stumbling around and can't see where I’m going. That stage of recognizing that there’s something here, we don't quite know what it is but there’s something wrong, is often referred to as denial. And I don't know if you’ve ever heard the acronym for that – Don’t Even Know I Am Lying – is the acronym some people use to describe what denial is. It’s this very pervasive feeling of being lost and yet at the same time, in need of something that’s almost difficult to articulate what it is that I need. It reminds me of the process of coming out of the fog around being an adoptee. It seems like everything is rosy, you know, everything is okay. Everything is just the way the storybooks say that they are. And yet wait a minute, there’s something different in this family that’s not quite like the picture books. So, the way I started to come out of denial is that, I was dating somebody in high school who was already a member of Alateen which is a support group connected to Al-Anon which is for family and friends of alcoholics. So my friend had experienced her mother getting sober in AA and her mother took her daughter to Alateen. So I started hearing about sobriety before I even knew how to identify what alcoholism was. And it was as a result of being in that relationship that I got to hear about her mom being a sober person and then I heard stories of what her mom had been like when she was drinking. And at that time, I didn't identify that as anything in my life, it seemed very unusual and yet at the same time, I was drawn to something that was happening in their home that I would say was openly discussing something is wrong. And finding alternatives to the thing that’s wrong. And I was very drawn to that. There was something about that was very appealing to me. And so then I started dating someone who was a member of AA. And he was drunk much of the time and then going to meetings and we would go to the meetings together and I would hear about these people who stopped drinking and then were living better, living different, something different was happening. So I was getting, there was this mismatch between my boyfriend’s behavior outside of meetings and yet stating that he wanted to get sober when we were in the meetings. And incidentally he was also an adoptee.
Haley – Of course.
Sophia – And I had a very strong connection with him. Yeah. Right. I had a very strong connection with him. And so I would go to these meetings with him and because I had been introduced to Al-Anon already, I knew that I would go to Al-Anon in order to deal with my feelings about his drinking. So that’s how I experienced like, the beginning of understanding. Like the light was going on and I was starting to see that what it was that I was bumping into, was something about alcoholism. Couldn’t tell you then what exactly it was. But I knew that I belonged in Al-Anon. Because when I went to Al-Anon meetings and I talked about how worried I was about him, I was hearing really good information about how to deal with the things that he was doing that were worrying me. And by the way, I realized I had told you I was really concerned about my own sexuality and my coming out, and at the time I thought I was with a lesbian and it turned out that my partner transitioned to male. And so I was with a trans guy. So I was very much in the queer community and very open and just really immersed in the queer community and got very involved in the LGBT sober meetings. And it was there that I started to identify that my own drinking had been unusual. It wasn’t what I would call normal drinking or social drinking. From the first time I had a drink, I felt like I wanted more and more and more to the point of drunkenness. And it was always like that, every time I drank. I drank that way from the time I got drunk for the first time when I was 9. Anyway, I soon realized that there was a seat for me in the AA rooms. And soon after that I started to be able to identify that I had learned to seek out the drug or drink to cope with the feelings that it had growing up that largely had to do with being gay, and that had to do with being adopted and many other things. I would someone who turned to drugs and alcohol to cope.
Haley - And so you started going to the meetings as a partner of someone with a problem. And then you were kind of realizing, oh, maybe I have something myself going on here.
Sophia - Yes. But my way of drinking was very different from my partner at the time. And it was very different from my second family, my adoptive family. There were people in my family growing up who also used alcohol and drugs in order to cope with their feelings. But they used and drank, they acted really different than I did. And what’s so interesting about that now, is to discover when I reunited, and met my first father, I discovered that his pattern of how he felt that led him to use, how he acted when he used, and how he coped from the time he started using until he got sober, was very similar to me. So when he and I met, we had almost exactly the same amount of sobriety. Which was profound and synchronous.
Haley - Oh my goodness, that is profound.
Sophia - It was.
Haley - So what, how did you come about to talk about that? ‘Cause you know, in reunion, we’re essentially getting to know strangers and this, I don't know, how does this topic come up about addiction when you’re first getting to know somebody in your family?
Sophia - Well, and this is where the exact details of my reunion are unique to me in ways that I have yet to find in another adoptee, first father relationship. I’ve yet to find anyone who relates quite like this. When I met him and I was so nervous as I had said earlier about coming out, as lesbian. I was lesbian identified at the time. My partner had not transitioned to male so I thought we were both lesbians. And it just, the complicatedness of identity and gender, sexuality, sexual orientation before and after reunion, sometimes all of these things change. When I was first getting to know him, there was a great outpouring of feeling in a way that I would describe as very, very openhearted. My heart and his were finding in one another a kind of match. The way that we were able to be vulnerable with each other and go from you know, your eyes are exactly like mine, to oh my gosh, you also get drunk when you were under 10 years old for the first time? Or, these were the things that we were revealing to each other and saying, oh I relate to that, I have felt like that. Or oh, you do that in a way that’s really extreme, just like me. You know, we went from that’s just like me to, oh my gosh, how did you survive when you have such a devastating illness? Addiction is an illness. And the answer was, getting sober. You know, finding others like me, finding a solution to this devastating survival strategy and finding that there’s more to life than only trying to survive alone, up against these feelings. And so it was very natural for us to say yes, the addiction was terrible, and the years of fighting it alone were painful and not understanding what the denial was doing to me, was harming my relationships with everyone. And yet as terrible as that was, there’s also this equal and opposite relief that can come from identifying what the problem is doing, what can be done to make life as positive as possible. You know, and then this whole world of recovery, this joy we can share in recovery with each other when we’re able to rise above our demons, our internal demons, is very, very powerful. It’s like a different kind of family. And I felt like oh my gosh, now I can share with a first family member, this other chosen family that I had found.
Haley - That is such a special connection that you have. So how do you both build a relationship while in recovery and then what kind of happens from there?
Sophia – Well that’s just it. Some of the common ground that he and I shared at the time, I didn't know the words for it until really getting to know each other more, getting to integrate into my sense of self, what it meant to relate to him. It took me quite a while to realize that one of the things that he and I have in common, is actually bipolar disorder. Very often, people who find themselves in alcoholism and in recovery from addiction, find out that we were self-medicating for a mood disorder. That’s just one of the things that often goes along with addiction. And I’m not sure what came first, you know, the chicken and the egg. Because my first father had been using very young and it’s possible that he had a predisposition for bipolar disorder and addiction. And that his use triggered the inevitable expression of those. And that his doing so, may have affected me in utero and I may have come in with a genetic predisposition. Very often, science is showing that trauma can bring out addiction in mood disorders in us. So it's possible that my own bipolar and addiction were perhaps inevitable expressions of both his trauma that led to my trauma, if that makes sense. That there can be this sort of chain reaction. For instance, he was abused severely as a child. He was violated sexually as a child. He began developing self-destructive tendencies as a way to cope in order to survive emotionally. And that contributed to his inability to provide for me. And his way of looking at it was that he ended up having to run out on me and he felt terribly guilty and ashamed. And that snowballed. Then I inherit that whole experience in the ways that I inherited it and then I express them in different ways as a result of the things that I went through. So the added experience of having bipolar disorder that was yet undiagnosed and untreated in me, heightened many of the sensations of meeting him. So here I was with this giant open heart, similar to many adoptees, looking for the long lost puzzle pieces that I think I may be able to put those broken puzzle pieces together and have a whole in some way that there’s, I had a magical expectation of reunion in some ways. And in some ways, I got that, you know? Look, I have not only a dad who’s a lot like me, I also have a sober dad who’s a lot like me. But there were also ways that that connection was so much larger than life, because at first, reunion can feel, at least in my case, can feel very much like, oh, otherworldly. There can be a dimension to it in my experience where, it’s like, we’re gonna be able to heal something in a way that is sort of grandiose. That somehow because we connect and we understand each other so much, we’re gonna be able to sort of fix something that is actually impossible to do quickly. Like, there’s a grief process, right? There’s a, yes it’s wonderful to find someone that you can relate to, and feel some of that genetic mirroring that was missing in childhood. And yet, it takes time to feel out an actual relationship. And all relationships depend upon building trust slowly over time. And I think that, what was so unexpected for me, because I had experienced myself as so gay, is that for me, I felt like I was falling in love with the man of my dreams, in a way that I didn't know I was capable of feeling. So I know that GSA is something that you recently covered on your podcast, and it’s not totally unknown to your listeners. But at the time, when I reunited, it was totally unknown to me. and it added a level of complexity where the greatness of sharing, you know, this deep desire for healing and wholeness that we were expressing in recovery and in reunion, was also something that was not sustainable, I would say. Like romantically, we couldn’t go off and have a baby and live happily ever after. Where I get to be the mother that I didn’t get to keep, you know, from my own birth. There was no way to resolve my desire for a different past with him as a romantic partner and yet the desire to do that was very strong. And so confusing, just so confusing. ‘Cause then how can I be a sister to my siblings and part of my first family on the other side, and remain partnered to my adoptee partner who has not gone through reunion and also belong in my adoptive family? It was too much. I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t do all of that.
Haley - That’s a lot going on.
Sophia - Right.
Haley - Yeah.
Sophia – I just wanna say that I did reach out to the adoption experts at the time, you know. I reached out to Barbara Gonyo who wrote the book on genetic sexual attraction.
Haley - Yes.
Sophia - I received feedback from her.
Haley – Now, just a second. She was a first mom who reunited with her son. Is that--?
Sophia - Correct. And I called and said hey, this is happening to me with my father, I’m wanting to go off and have a child with him and I realize that’s entirely unrealistic if nothing else. And, she could not relate at all. So even though she could talk about what it was like for her, she could not understand how a female adoptee, gay identified, could fall in love with my father. And so I turned to Nancy Verrier. And I said, Nancy, I'm experiencing something different in reunion that I didn't know was humanly possible for me, do you have any suggestions? And she was able to connect me with others like me who had turned to her for help. And we created a cyber network of companions who could essentially create our own support group where we could maintain our anonymity, our privacy, even secrecy because it was such a very, very challenging topic to cope with and we had each other. We built a network. And I’m very, very grateful that I was able to have that at the time. And I'm also just to have to just say, that that feels like it’s miles behind me, you know. Decades past, my first father is more and more part of my life. It’s not so overwhelming, I'm back to being sort of a garden variety gay. It’s no longer terrifying, see what I mean? It’s not longer terrifying, it’s no longer so, it’s not a secret because he can talk about it with me in a way where we can keep the boundaries and we can be father and daughter. And we can be on each other’s wavelength. And we’re, you know, way beyond that now. But that can be a huge stumbling block at first and I therefore feel a tremendous responsibility whenever I’m talking about adoption and reunion, I always feel, I must say something about it because I don't want anyone else to be as shocked by it as I first was.
Haley – Right, and because the shame and isolation that people feel, like, you can just feel like you’re the only person in the whole world that’s ever felt this way. We talked about some similar themes when I did that GSA episode in season 4. Yeah, and there’s some research in there. I’ll make sure to link to that episode in the show notes.
Sophia - Thank you.
Haley - ‘Cause I think we recommend your forum on that.
Sophia - No.
Haley - Oh it’s not?
Sophia - That wasn’t mine.
Haley - Okay, okay.
Sophia - So mine is long gone. We sort of buried our tracks in the snow as we went because it was such a very, very stigmatized issue.
Haley - Absolutely. I mean, even in that episode right? I changed my interviewee’s voice, and I understand that like, you know, you might not want the world to find out about these things because you don't know how they’ll react.
Sophia - Exactly.
Haley - Okay, so let’s shift a big because –
Sophia - So back to addiction.
Haley - Yeah, but this is great context for us because, wow. You have great experience putting up boundaries in order to maintain a healthy relationship.
Sophia - Yes.
Haley - So why don't you, so okay, you know what I’m gonna ask you about. I’m just gonna let you go ahead and share the second part of that story.
Sophia – Sure. So I think that as an adoptee, raised in a closed adoption system and someone who was scared to reveal that I was gay growing up. I wasn’t so sure my family was going to keep me no matter what, because my first family had relinquished me, and I felt very insecure in my second family. When I was starting to show signs of addiction and I could tell that what was happening to me was different than the two different people in my family who were able to drink and use without having the consequences I had. Their consequences weren’t the same as mine. I got depressed when I drank. I got depressed when I smoked pot. That from the get go was different than my second family. But the fact that I had practiced being different, knowing I was different, and then coming into support groups and getting a counselor who could talk to me about what those issues were like for me on the inside and then how to be truthful on the outside, all of that prepared me for when I had my first family. And by the way, I grew up in a tiny second family with a totally different ethnicity, and really demographic then the first family, where I have so many cousins I can't even count them. And a just really different, very, very different, to have lots and lots and lots of family. But I feel like I was prepared to at least be able to work with being as open as possible about my feelings and staying in touch with my inner world while bridging to the outer world. And that’s where, sometimes it’s support groups, sometimes it’s counseling. Sometimes it’s one on one counseling, sometimes it’s group counseling. And I have had a couple of therapy sessions with my first father. I can't say that the therapists were adoption competent and I wish that I were more confident about that when it comes to first fathers. And I can say, that practicing openness about feelings with anyone who’s safe, and right now I’m in an adoptee support group that is facilitated by a therapist who is an adoptee ,and I would she models that for us. We can be open with each other and practice being open in a safe setting. And that helps us to be able to be open with the people who can be as open as we want. And then set limits when we do not feel safe in certain relationships where, either because of behaviors or because of values that are really radically different. We may be in harm’s way and need to practice keeping safe and making choices to raise our sense of safety if we start to feel like a relationship is pushing us into unsafe territory.
Haley- Do you have an example of that?
Sophia – Many. I mean, I have so much trial and error in this way. So I mean, the first thing is, I said to you that I started in Al-Anon, I started in a 12 step program for family and friends of alcoholics. That program is not necessarily equipped to look at the difference between an adoptive family or a birth family, step family, or spousal relationships. Parents versus children. Even though that’s the case, there are groups that cater to more of a specific topic. One versus another. For parents for instance, or children of alcoholics. Each one of those different settings really allows for a place to go where we can speak openly and in a boundaried way about what’s happening for us. Where we can practice saying, I feel like this. And people will listen. I think that that’s one of the most important things. I personally have been able to do that in a room where I was for instance, with a therapist. When a therapist is present, very often the therapist is maintaining the safety in the room by setting certain expectations around privacy and confidentiality. And the person who is doing the sharing gets to be heard ,100%. And the therapist’s not there to get their needs met emotionally. In a 12 step program in particular, where the emphasis is on helping a loved one to take care of themselves in a relationship with an alcoholic or an addict, there are a variety of group norms that have come through trial and error to keep the room safe so that individuals can say, hey this is what I’m facing today. How do I, I need to get some feedback later or I need to brainstorm about what my options are about how to handle this. I’ll give you an example of one that is pretty common but might be different in a relationship between and adoptee and first family. And that is being in the car with somebody who’s under the influence. If I’m getting in the car with somebody who’s drunk, I can say, hey, I’m not gonna ride with you right now. Would you please give me your keys, I’d like to do the driving. Well between and adoptee and a first family, there may be like, on my part, as an adoptee, I may feel an extra added fear that if I assert myself and say hey I’m not comfortable with this, I may lose favor with the other person and that can bring up all of my fears of abandonment. So there’s that extra added feeling of vulnerability in setting boundaries. And my experience, this is where it gets really complicated is that, because I know everybody sometimes I’m applying kind of family rules that I learned in my first 20 years life before I knew the first parents. And those sort of communication patterns may not work with part of my first family or another. One part of my first family spent years outside of the United States. They’re social norms are really influenced by all of those years. But I wasn’t there. So you know, reading the room becomes a little bit more complicated when I’m assessing, how do I communicate this part of the way you’re behaving isn’t okay with me. I don't feel comfortable doing it. But I don't want to threaten this relationship by setting a boundary, you know? Because I’m not entirely confident that we are at the point where we’re secure enough to be able to be really different from each other and for me to say I want something really different from you right now. So I think I made a mistake by actually moving in with part of my first family at one point before I’d gotten to know them well enough to know how complicated that was gonna be. So I caution people against being too enthusiastic too quickly.
Haley – Okay, Sophia, I was gonna ask you, do you have advice for other adoptees who are navigating relationships with first family members who are in addiction. So I know when you first met your first father, he was in recovery and you guys had the same length of sobriety.
Sophia - Right.
Haley - Which is so cool. But can you talk a little bit about that, about your relationship and what happened kind of, you know, down the line from that. And yeah.
Sophia - Absolutely. The situation I was just describing about one part of my first family versus another is an example of how complicated this is for me because when it comes to my first father, I am able to talk openly and I have been able to talk openly with him at each step of the way over these last decades. When each of us has been at a different point in our healing process or our recovery work. It was a time when, he became I would say, attracted to and involved in a particular community that was very involved in drugs. And in order to do part of the work that was involved in that group, he ended up feeling pressured into actually using meth in order to do these long fall motorcycle rides. He felt that he couldn’t really sustain, the hours were such, that he couldn’t do it without being high.
Haley - Right.
Sophia - And I was speaking with him about this and it was shocking to me at the time because I felt like we had both bought, hook line and sinker, that once an addict, always an addict. Like if a cucumber becomes pickled and it is now a pickle, it can’t go back to being a cucumber. That’s one of the ways that I’ve heard people describe what happens once you’ve crossed that line and you’re in addiction, you really can’t go back to temporary use or moderate use. And one could argue that’s never possible with meth but some people argue that if you’re not an addict, you can take or leave certain substances. So I was afraid that I was gonna lose him to addictive use if he went down that road and that he would return to heroine and some of the other things that he had used. And at the time, he was so motivated by the group he was involved in, he was not willing to resist the expectation that he was to be using that way in order to do what was expected of him. And in talking with him about how he justified that, what I'd come to hear and to learn is that the group that he was attempting to participate in, was really, had become an addiction. It had fallen into the same hole that the drugs had fallen into inside him, which were attempting to fix something inside that is missing. Whether that’s feeling a sense of worth or a sense of identity or a sense of being able to cope with one’s emotions, there are a variety of things that can get restimulated even in the life of somebody who has committed to recovery or sobriety. And that’s what I was seeing that was happening to him.
Haley - So then what do you do, what do you do when you know he is using, how do you protect yourself and your recovery or your relationship? Like, what do you choose? Do you have to choose?
Sophia - The same thing that I was saying about what addicts do when they go to a 12 step program and they get into a room where they talk about what they need to do to protect the recovery. That’s what family members do when family members go to a family member program, is we focus on how do we stay safe, stay sane, no matter what they do. So there are a lot of family programs that emphasize the following: cause, what is happening to another person and the choices they're making. I can’t cure it. I can't control it. All I can do is choose my own attitude and what attitude I bring contributes to their outcomes and mine. If I think he’s doing something that’s going to end him, I get to say, I want you to stop. If he’s getting on his motorcycle high, and asks me to go with him, I can say no. That’s challenging to do in a relationship with first family. In my experience, as I was saying, each family relationship is distinct. The trust that I have grown with him, comes from moment, to moment, to moment, I get to say, this is what’s true for me and that each time I settle in it, then I get to see whether or not he keeps showing up in my life. And hopefully he’s not gonna die one of these times when he’s acting in a way, that is addictive and potentially life threatening. And then like I said, I practice it, whether it’s in my adoptee support group, whether it’s in an Al-Anon meeting, whether it’s with a therapist. I practice saying, this is how I feel, this is what I know about myself, this is what my values are and this is how I’m gonna protect myself in this relationship. It’s not something I do all at once, it’s something I do moment, by moment, by moment. You may have heard that people in AA stop drinking a day at a time. It’s not something that involves swearing off alcohol forever. Because an alcoholic can feel overwhelmed by the prospect of promising to never use permanently. Same thing is here, I can’t swear off any contact with my father as long as he’s behaving addictively, because what I know is that he has switched addictions, he has been addicted to more than one thing. It was a stage of his early life, he used smoking or he used sniffing glue. He was telling me that in his early teens, he was sniffing glue when he was building model airplanes. Those behaviors switch. There’s been a time when he switched to food. He said he was using food in a way that filled that place in him that is not entirely full or healed. And so I get to, with each specific situation, set a limit and then I may change my mind about what my limit is depending upon what the danger is.
Haley – So if I’m getting this right, you’re saying that you can choose each day, okay am I gonna have contact with him or not, but it’s not like, okay if he crosses this line, I’m never gonna speak to him again or I have to protect myself. And so it’s like it’s just a one day, case by case kind of thing? Because I know for adoptees right, we have often a lot of us, longed to know our first family, many of us have had a long search, and then to finally have this, oh my gosh it’s reunion, but then to find out, oh, there’s this whole added piece of having an addiction. How do I protect myself? And oh, like it’s just such another layer and to, I think for some people to be like, I have to walk away from that, that might just sound too terrifying. But if you could choose each day, that’s a little bit more manageable in your head. What do you think about that? Is that accurate?
Sophia – That’s one tool.
Haley - Okay.
Sophia - That’s one tool. I would say that’s a tool that people in AA and people in Al-Anon have in common.
Haley - Okay.
Sophia - Which is the alcoholic gets to decide whether to drink a day at a time, the Al-Anon gets to decide whether or not to get in the car with them. Whether or not to, you know, go out to dinner with them. Because sometimes going out to dinner with them, they order a drink, does that mean we’re gonna stay and finish the meal and watch them get drunk right in front of us? So that’s one tool. Practicing, discerning what our feelings are, to knowing what our values are, and where our boundaries go, that’s something else. That happens apart from the person whose behavior is bothering us. I would argue, that the issue isn’t the person’s addiction, I would argue that the issue for us is, our reaction to it. So as much as we can, turn our attention back to ourselves, to mindfulness, through keeping the focus on ourselves, is one of the tools in Al-Anon. One of the tools is detach with love. There are many many tools. And many of these tools are the same for coming out of the fog, as they are for coming out of denial about the presence of the addiction. And it’s described as a family disease. Which means that if one person in the family’s affected because they have the Substance Use Disorder is what it’s now technically called in the Diagnostic Manual. If that’s present in anyone in the first family, that is affecting the relationships between all of us. So they say that for every one addict, there are ten family members who are affected. I happen to have a first family where there is the presence of addiction on each side. First family, both sides. I also have it in my second family. So I have, I am invested in keeping myself safe from the addiction personally by not taking addictive substances and not behaving in addictive ways. And I am the only one that can be responsible for keeping myself in recovery. Very much like remission from cancer. There are a lot of different things I can do to keep myself clean and sober. And then when it comes to the rest of the people around me in my families, I have a responsibility for contributing the positive attitude. And whatever it takes to maintain that positive attitude, that comes back to the quality of my spiritual life. I am very biased in the direction of the 12 step programs, I know that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. It’s a spiritual solution for my point of view. And that is, the addiction was treating a spiritual malady and so I treat that with a spiritual solution. And that means, balance. That means, taking care of my physical health, mental health, emotional health, spiritual health. So it’s not that different than looking at our total health as adoptees in every other way. It’s an additional way. And I think that in its best sense, the presence of addiction and then the response with recovery can help with everything else. Bringing it into the light, you know? Looking at it directly and saying, what IS this? And I would say that the closed adoption system works very much in lock step with addiction because there’s so much about, don't talk, don't trust, don't feel in the family disease.
Haley - Yes. Oh my goodness, that is so well said, thank you.
Sophia - Thank you!
Haley - We have talked a lot and I wanna make sure we have time to do our resources.
Sophia - Yes.
Haley - Okay, so is there anything I missed out on asking you about, Sophia, that you wanna make sure you say before we do recommended resources?
Sophia – I would say that if there is the presence of a self-destructive behavior or an addiction or both, in a first parent, chances are, that gives us a clue into our own sense of self. It’s not, it doesn’t always mean that we’re gonna have the same exact sort of addiction. It’s simply a good question to ask ourselves, is there any way in which that person’s acting out behavior may give me a clue into my own nature, my own habits, my own genetic predisposition?
Haley – Okay, something to think about.
Sophia - I don't think I already said that, yes.
Haley - Alright, why don't you go first in our recommended resources since yours is on the same theme as what we’ve been talking about today?
Sophia - Okay, so there isn’t yet a specific 12 step approach to the experiences of growing up as an adoptee after relinquishment with all of the different facets of our lived experience. What there is, that I like best, is the adult/child recovery program. It’s called ACA, it stands for Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. So it’s no longer limited to simply having an alcoholic parent. But the thing about this particular approach to the family, that I really think applies well to adoptees, is that there is something that happened in the generation before us that affected us as we were growing up and applying the recovery to that has profound transformational power.
Haley – Absolutely. That’s great. So the website link that you sent me for that, is adultchildren.org and I’m sure you can find more information about a group near you, if you head over to that website and get connected with them. Okay. Well this is, hm, this is a little out of character for me, to recommend something like this. Because I usually like to wait to see sort of, when there’s a new resource announced, I kind of wait and see, okay, are they gonna keep going, what’s happening with this, but there is a brand new YouTube channel started by a fellow adoptee named Blake Gibbins. And it is called Not Your Orphan: A new channel all about adoption. And so his little promo video for the channel that he’s starting was so good, it was shared all over Facebook, he’s got a ton of comments on the YouTube video, it’s very well produced and insightful and it looks like it’s gonna be really, really good. So I’m kind of hyped up about it. So that’s why I wanna share it, so that you can follow it right now, so you don't miss when he posts his first or full length video. So you can look for, Not Your Orphan on YouTube, that’s the name of the channel. And in the posts he’s been posting on Facebook, he uses #notyourorphan so you can follow that as well. So that’s my recommendation and you can all wait with me to see what’s gonna happen with this YouTube channel. Alright well, thank you so much, Sophia, for sharing part of your story with us. And for giving us some really great advice on how to navigate some very tricky situations. And yeah, I think it’s gonna be really helpful for our listeners especially, if they are in relationship with someone who is either in sobriety or in addiction at this time.
(upbeat music)
Friends, I wanna leave you with this message from Sophia. The last thing she said to me, right before we hung up was, Haley, the secret is, don't do it alone. If you’re navigating a relationship with a parent in recovery or in addiction and you’d like to connect with Sophia, you can email her at adopteesrecovering@gmail.com and I’ll have the link to that in the show notes. I’m taking a few weeks off over the holidays. If you have young children you can surely empathize that recording while your 4 and 6 year old boys are at home is nearly impossible. Don't worry though, I have a few healing series episodes lined up to replay for you each Friday, to get you through the holiday season, including some really practical advice for surviving the holidays and what to do when you get triggered. So watch for those in your feed in the next few weeks and I’ll have a new fantastic episode available for you on January 11. As always, thank you so much to my monthly partners, I couldn’t do this podcast without you. I'm sending you my deep love and gratitude as you make it possible to share the message of Adoptees On around the world. If you’d like to join them, head to adopteeson.com/partner. Thank you for listening, let’s talk again next Friday.
(exit music)
