75 [Healing Series] Brainspotting

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/75

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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 are talking about brainspotting. First of all, what is it? And why is it so helpful for adoptees in particular? Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Dr. Julie Lopez. Julie's a trauma-informed practitioner whose primary clinical specialty is working with trauma and PTSD. Welcome back to Adoptees On.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Thanks so much for having me.

Haley Radke: I am so excited to talk with you today because we are going to touch on brainspotting. I've seen it all over Facebook, all the adoptee groups are talking about brainspotting. I know it's not brand new this year or anything, but it seems to be getting really popular, especially in the adoptee community. So do you want to just give us a brief overview, like, what is brainspotting? It sounds like such a funny word, like, what is that?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Yeah, so brainspotting was developed by David Grant up in New York, a psychologist, who had long been doing EMDR and was an EMDR practitioner. And he noticed, especially, I think the story that he tells when he first started researching what was going on with eye positioning, was when he was working with a professional level figure skater. And she was having trouble mastering this one particular move. I'm not sure I'm gonna get it right, it was like the triple toe loop or something very challenging. And every time she went to do it, she wasn't landing it. And so she came to him to do the traditional EMDR, and he realized when she was doing some of the eye movements, that her eye position, when they were going over the move, was always in the same area.

So he started to get curious about what that relationship was, and by having her stay in that one area where it seemed more activated or there was some area of distress, he realized, and they realized together, that there was another experience stored in there, and it was mapped into the way she was focusing for that move. And when they resolved that, she was able to land the move. So, does that sound–

Haley Radke: You didn't see me shake my head and be like, ‘Wow!’

Dr. Julie Lopez: Yeah! But I can see you!

Haley Radke: You can see me, that's why you're laughing.

Dr. Julie Lopez: But yes, so it's really fascinating. The premise behind brainspotting is that our eye position actually maps to spots in the brain where some of this material is stored, that's in our unconscious. It would seem nonsensical that this distressing experience she had prior would have anything to do with her physical mastery of a move in ice skating. But it was from there that he started to research the way that you could actually work with a brain spot and change someone's here-and-now present day experience.

Haley Radke: It’s pretty amazing to just think about this spot in your visual field being connected to some kind of memory or experience or something. Like, that sounds a little bit woo-woo, but I know this is all scientifically–

Dr. Julie Lopez: It totally does.

Haley Radke: Yes, okay. Go on.

Dr. Julie Lopez: It would be even more woo-woo if we were doing video for this podcast, because I would bring out some of the materials that go with it. Like, there's a wand that you use that has a ridge– it looks like, I don't think you're old enough to know about this, but an antenna off the back of a TV, that you can stretch. So it's a stretchable wand.

Haley Radke: I have seen an antenna before!

Dr. Julie Lopez: Well, it was a major part of everyday life when I was growing up. Anyway, there's this red wand, and you actually use it to hold the spot when you find a spot in someone's range of vision. And theoretically the spot is then correlating back through our brains and accessing a neural network where material's been stored. And so by using the gaze, you're actually accessing some of that material and the processing goes faster.

It's very similar to EMDR in that you're looking to access where some of this emotional and psychological mapping may be stored, and it's particularly effective for reducing physically held symptoms.

Haley Radke: Can you walk us through, so you're working with a client and you found the spot– how do you find the spot, I guess? How do you find the spot? And then what are you doing when you've got their gaze in that one section?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Every question you just asked has multiple answers to it, so I'll give you all those answers. I don't want to confuse people, but I'm just going to start out with this disclaimer that in this interview, I'm basically giving you a commercial– I'm giving the Cliff Notes of a commercial about a show that's for a whole series. So I'm going to really just give you the high level overview. Basically, I'm sitting with you and you say, “Every time I hear my first mother say, ‘I didn't have a choice,’ or ‘I couldn't help it about giving you away,’--” and I'm sharing that because this used to drive me bananas every time. Every time my first mother would say something like “powerless” or wasn't taking responsibility, I would become enraged. And I knew all the logic behind it. I knew about the time period, she was part of, the Baby Scoop Era. I knew about the dynamics with her parents. I knew about the dynamics of the conception. I knew everything intellectually, but my body would just go bananas, and I was so pissed. And there was a time period I just wouldn't see her because I knew I would get triggered every time to that feeling, and I knew I wasn't going to be kind. I wouldn't take it head on –sometimes I did– but it just was very unpleasant for me. And it would really upset me, it would affect my sleep, things like that.

So let's just say, pretending you're me, you've come in and you've said, “Oh, I just can't take it, and it's really affecting my wellbeing, and it's affecting my relationships, and I really wish I didn't have this big reaction. And I know all the intellect behind it, but I'm still having it. My throat closes up, like, my face gets red, my adrenaline starts running.”

I would have already explained brainspotting and you would've already said, “That sounds really woo-woo to me and crazy.” And we would've agreed we're going to try this different kind of approach, and we could find a spot by using an “outside window”, is what it's called. So I would take the wand and I would have you think about that feeling and pull it up, and I would take it across the x-axis of your vision. So I'd have your eyes watching –and actually you just did it right now– I'd be looking for areas of response. So like right here, you had a little response to that. Look, this isn't even real because we're talking about my issue, not yours, but you had a little response.

And I would say, “Oh, okay,” so outside window, I'm looking for where you have a response, where there's some area of agitation. And I would stop there on the x-axis and I'd say, “Okay, now I want you to follow my little wand up and down,” so we'd be looking at the y-axis. And I would be deciding where you had– I would say, “Okay, it looked like right here. Does that feel about right?” I'd be getting your input. And then actually, once you've done the brainspotting level two, there's also a z-axis, so closer, further. So we've done x, y, z, I'd be identifying it: outside window.

Another way is inside window. That's your own experience. So I would say, “Okay, pull up that feeling,” and we'd do it again. But it doesn't matter what I'm seeing in your physical response. You would say, “Oh, right about there. It feels most active,” y, z, right? And we'd be looking at that. So that's how we identify it.

And then I would just hold it there. You'd already be active into that neural network, so I would just let you be in that heightened space with that experience.

I think what's hard when I'm training people –students, or I'm training supervisees– is a lot of healing professionals want to be helpful and they want to be “value-add”. And the challenge with some of these more brain-based therapies is actually the best posture is to get out of the way as much as possible. Because our bodies want to heal. So you're basically opening a window, like a direct hit, into a felt experience and without all the intellectualization or the cultural norms. We're really trying to get into the space where the body's going to do what it wants to do anyway.

So, believe it or not, I don't do anything. I hold the space where we've already accessed an activated spot for you and let you have your process. And people will naturally start to process the visceral experience.

Haley Radke: Like, will they talk about it? Will they say what's going on for them? Or are you just sitting there feeling sick, or what?

Dr. Julie Lopez: It depends on the person. So for some people, they are talking about it or they're even moving. They're like, “Oh my gosh, my neck is killing me.” I basically encourage people to listen to their bodies. So while I'm holding the spot, they might move around. Their processing might be non-verbal. And if you think about the power of being able to process something, and especially for an adoptee that's pre-conscious or pre-verbal, it's not even stored in our system with language. So how in the world are you going to use language to process out an experience that wasn't stored that way? So you’re right, they might not be talking at all. They might be saying –or not saying but just feeling– ‘I'm gonna be sick,’ and I'm watching how they process. And when it looks like they're through a segment of processing, which could be 100% non-verbal, it could be just their eyes are going, or they're crying– and I've told them already, “Once you feel like you want to share something, then share it,” and if it's a very verbal thing that they're processing, they may be just telling me, “Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm remembering this thing,” or that type of thing. People process very differently.

Keep in mind, I'm just giving you a demo, but when you're doing it, you're actually looking for the most activated space. So you're already in that place, and then we let the body do what it wants to do anyway. My job as a practitioner is to help the process keep going, to make sure the person doesn't get flooded in case they need resourcing. Because our ideal on the healing path is that we're stretching, but not torturing ourselves. There is an ideal space to manage healing. We don't want someone to get so overwhelmed or flooded, and I firmly believe the body brings up what it can handle. So a part of it is just helping to provide the container for the person to do their work, and to intervene if it starts looping or not moving through like we would want to.

Haley Radke: How long would that sort-of take? What's the range? I mean, I get it, it's different for everyone, but is this like a–

Dr. Julie Lopez: It is so different!

Haley Radke: Like, a five minute moment, or is it like–?

Dr. Julie Lopez: No, it's not. And I'm a little bit biased on this one because I do work with a lot of adults who've had developmental trauma, and especially with my special connection and interest in working with adoptees. When you have the earlier experience that's hard for your system to take in, or that hasn't been fully metabolized or digested, whether it's having an impact today, the longer it might be to process. And it's complicated because the way that you could have a twin sister that went through everything quote-unquote “the same as you”, but there are so many factors that play a part in how it's stored in your system.

Sometimes people think I have a crystal ball, which I absolutely do not. It's just as mysterious for me, how you as an individual are going to have these experiences stored in your body. So it could be within a normal session kind of timeframe. A little bit of time to set up, and then we're looking to work with each spot. So you process a whole spot and then you might move on to another spot, depending on what's evolving.

I do take some notes while I'm doing the work because things are not linear in our system. They're stacked, in usually a more complex way. So you may be– I gave you that example about working on the anger, and the kind of beliefs held with it might be that ‘I don't matter,’ right? Or that ‘I'm being diminished.’ And in that process, other themes may come up like ‘I'm all alone’ or ‘I'm gonna die,’ or something like that. It might not seem logical, but there's schema that can all be attached to one root target, so it can get complicated. And you would just desensitize each spot as you go.

Haley Radke: That sounds magical.

Dr. Julie Lopez: The other thing is having a center like this where we do a lot of advanced brain-based therapies, we've actually found that a picture's worth a thousand words, and even more so the experience. So sometimes we'll do empowerment-based free workshops in the community, just so people could see, touch the equipment, ask the questions, hear the history, understand the theory. Especially like with something like neurofeedback, which has the big computer system and you're hooking electrodes up to your brain, it seems crazy that you can change your brainwaves by playing a video game where there's no words, and the reward system is helping encourage your brainwaves to operate at a different level. It's very hard to conceptualize without sitting down, having it attached to you and seeing what happens. But it's pretty amazing. So I know you say it sounds magical, and it does, if you saw the equipment. And even us, like, I've been doing EMDR for 25 years, and brainspotting, it's only been a couple years now, two or three? And when I first got the equipment I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ Because I've got these goggles that are half black on the right eye and on the left eye, because you can do single eye training. They encourage bilateral sound, so there are special CDs that do that. I could go on and on. Like I said, this is the Cliff Notes of the commercial about the show that's a series. It's a very short, condensed version. But it does seem pretty incredible. Our brains are amazing..

Haley Radke: Wow, you've definitely inspired me to seek out a practitioner in our area here, so thank you. That was a great explanation. I'm excited to hear from listeners if they try it out and what it's done for them.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Great. And I would just say, too, if I can, there are many different ways to change the way that your brain is mapping information in some of those automatic responses to inputs that we get in our everyday, whether it's relational, or just inputs from the outside environment. And if it works for you, great. If it doesn't, it's not the only way to do nonverbal work on your system. We are exploding with information about different ways to access the nonverbal part of our lived experience.

Haley Radke: That's so important to note, right. There is something that's gonna work for everyone, and we've talked before about how adoptees have stored that trauma non-verbally, and it's important to address it in that same way. So, thank you. Thanks so much. That was so helpful. How can we connect with you online?

Dr. Julie Lopez: My center's website is www.vivapartnership.com, and from the site you can connect. We have a lot of great information that goes out in our newsletter, really empowerment-based. We have a Facebook page and Twitter.

Haley Radke: We'll link to them all in the show notes.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Perfect. Actually. But I will say, I would like to get the word out there about the Resilient Brain Project, which is a free online resource for folks. So another way to start feeling empowered around how to make change as an adoptee is to go to that site. It's www.resilientbrainproject.com.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much for your expertise in this area.

Links to everything we talked about today are over on Adopteeson.com, where you can find all the past episodes of the Adoptees On podcast, links to all of our social media accounts, you can sign up for our newsletter, and you can also support the show at Adopteeson.com/partner. I want to say a big thank you to my monthly supporters. You are literally making it possible for me to continue producing this show for you every single week. Thank you, and thanks for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

73 [Healing Series] The Resilient Brain Project

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/73

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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 are talking about a new free online resource that is going to wow you. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Dr. Julie Lopez. Julie is a trauma-informed practitioner whose primary clinical specialty is working with trauma and PTSD. Welcome to the show, Julie.

Julie Lopez: Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Haley Radke: I'm so excited to finally connect with you. I first heard about you because I saw a poster on Facebook that you and Kathy were doing a really special event for adoptees, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness. Here is another expert who is adopted and who knows all about trauma and is working on healing.’ And then when I went a little further, I saw this amazing thing that you're building, the Resilient Brain Project, and I messaged you right away. I was like, “I have to hear about this.” So that's what I invited you on the show to talk about today. But because it's your first time, I would love it if you would share a little bit of your story with us.

Julie Lopez: Sure, I will definitely share a little bit of my story, but I just wanted to note, because I know you were looking a little deeper, did you happen to notice that Adoptees On is referred to in the Resilient Brain Project?

Haley Radke: I did and I was so happy.

Julie Lopez: Yeah. And I'll get more into that, but I thought that was great that you reached out. Thank you. So I'll give you the backstory. Before the relinquishment, my first mother was 15 years old when she was dating a cool older guy from a different school. They had a little summer romance and she experienced statutory rape.

She never talked to him again, and then found out a couple months later that she was pregnant with me. So she dropped out of school. She was one of the “mothers who went away” and told family and friends that she was going to study on the West Coast of the US. She lived on the East Coast, but she was about 20 minutes away at a home for unwed mothers, had me, and I stayed in an orphanage type of setting for about two months, and then was adopted by my family in Washington, DC.

I have been in reunion for 24 years with my first mother and I'm mostly in reunion with my first father's family, but not him so much, although I've met him. At the time I met him, he didn't know who I was, and that's a much more complicated story. So that's a little bit more recent. And I would say I've just been on a journey for more than half my life. At the time when I first even thought it was something that I needed to look into, I wasn't really awake yet. And I was actually working as an engineer. I have my first degree in systems engineering and sometime in that journey I went back to school, got my master's, and then my PhD focused on clinical social work. And in that whole time period of therapy and personal discovery, I came to just understand how profound my own personal experience had been on my sense of self and my place in the world. So that might not be the version of my adoption story you wanted to hear, but I think it's relevant to my personal passion for working in the healing field and the types of things that I commit my time to and what I've been studying for the last couple-decades-plus.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. That's exactly what I was hoping to hear as your story, and it's so interesting to me what drives adoptees to go into the healing fields like this. And you mentioned this word “awake”. Can you talk a little bit more about that? I hear everyone saying “coming out of the fog”, but I think maybe that's what you're referring to there.

Julie Lopez: Absolutely. When people talk about “the great sleep” or “coming out of the fog”, they're talking specifically about the adoptee’s journey, and I was referring to it on a bigger scale because a big part of how I coped with what I now know was my own relinquishment trauma, was through performing. I got straight A's. I was the captain of the swim team. I did everything perfectly, and it was incredibly stressful and very unhealthy. And it was all based on the fear of being relinquished again, which was not a conscious thought in my mind. It was a little conscious, but not very, and it definitely was not as clear as what I'm saying right now. And through that posture that I was carrying in my life, I went to engineering school, and because I was competitive, I graduated and I got a fantastic quote-unquote “fantastic job” out of school, but it was not my path and it was not my passion. It was teachers and parents that pushed me in that direction, and I was very willing to comply out of that compulsion to perform.

So when I say awake, it's awake on every level. ‘Who am I? What's important to me? How do I feel?’ And that's really important, I think, to negotiating life and to negotiating relationships. And I think it's bigger than coming out of the fog of the dominant narrative around adoption in our country and all of those messages. So that's what I meant when I meant coming more awake. And it's a journey and it's a multifaceted journey. I think that is bigger than just being the identity of being an adoptee and the experience of growing up adopted.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. There's a lot there. We know all about that. We do. We really do.

But I really want to devote our time to the Resilient Brain Project. Can you tell us how did you come up with this idea? I really want to give listeners this resource. I really want to share this with them because it's free. It's amazing. Okay, I'm gonna let you talk about it.

Julie Lopez: Okay, so I do have a center here in Washington, DC called the Viva Center, and I have an amazing group of people who are part of our operations team who make things run. We have a vision, we have a mission, and in one of our annual retreats –which was not last year, but the year before– we were talking about ‘How can we really live our vision?’, which is to create a world that is ready to heal. And we looked at the different aspects of what it means to be ready to heal. And so a part of it is people that are fully empowered to understand about how our human systems work, and that healing is possible; about reducing barriers to access around some of this information and hope and de-stigmatizing mental health.

So it was out of discussions with these key players that are part of my center that we envisioned capitalizing on the accessibility of the internet and creating basically a pretty extensive and action-oriented resource library that's free as long as people have the website address, which I'm happy to share.

Yes, it's www.resilientbrainproject.com and that's where it came from. And the person that we're really hoping to reach is the one who has tried everything that they think is available to them and that they're feeling broken or feeling hopeless or feeling like there's no way to change what's going on in their body or the lens through which they're seeing their life, and that person gets access to something that begins to empower them to recognizing that there's a whole big world out there around opportunities to heal.

Haley Radke: One of the things that I joke about often on the show is just how expensive therapy can be and it's this ongoing joke and yet it's really not funny because it can be really a barrier for people to enter into the healing space if they think, ‘I just can't even afford that. It's just not– I don't have coverage–’ whatever it is. This is like a stepping stone towards that.

Julie Lopez: Exactly. And our hope is that also some of the resources that people are directed to or some of the action tasks that they might see would help them to be able to mitigate some of the symptoms that they're feeling in the moment.

There are definitely some very proactive resources around dealing with stress or anxiety that are here and now. Resources that you can literally look at, go through a checklist and see does this impact the way my nervous system, you might not think of it that way– ‘What's going on? Can I exhale? Can I shift down so that my body is more relaxed?’ Our bodies are complicated, so every person does not experience change in the same ways. Someone who might be very oriented towards, trauma-sensitive yoga, someone else may feel that another type of approach could be better for them. So I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all when you think about the journey of healing, something that's stored in the body.

Haley Radke: So you just mentioned one of those sections is like action. So you've got five different categories throughout your whole site, which has multiple categories for people who are looking for help. And this isn't necessarily all adoptee-specific that we're talking about today.

And yet you do have. That as a I saw it in multiple places. Yes. Things that adoptees could access that are adoptee specific? Yes. Or other people that are a part of the constellation. Going back to that, those five categories: “Actions For Now”, “For Allies”, “You're Not Alone”, “Master the Subject”, and “Advocate.” Can you talk about those five and why you felt those were so important to include?

Julie Lopez: This was such a complicated process because we wanted the end product to be simple. So every single section –and there are 12 different areas of mental health that we look at– has those five subcategories that you just mentioned. And the reason we picked those is because we were looking at the whole person in community and looking at what are the elements that would help get someone that much closer to feeling hopeful around their own experience. So actions for now is here at now. Tips, connections, apps, active, things that people can do to shift their felt state, and they've already been pre-created, so it's just a matter of following steps or downloading an app. They're all accessible. And the thought was, if someone feels a change or notices, ‘Wow, I didn't realize my body worked that way,’ or ‘I didn't know this was something that I could do’, it might inspire them more to think, ‘Wow, there might be a lot of other things that could help me shift and change’.

And there are people out there that know this stuff because they created it. So it's a bigger sense of hope for allies. Unfortunately, all too often a helpful family member or friend or partner can say and do things, or even out of their own fear insist on something and not understand the bigger picture. A great case example, because I do a lot of trauma work, is often when people self injure, cut their arms, do something, it's not at all about suicide yet. People get hospitalized, totally misdiagnosed with very pathologizing diagnoses that have nothing to do with the very normal and correlated act of self-injury, which comes in many different forms. Suicide's another very good example when someone's suicidal, oftentimes, or an eating disorder. Actually, I could go on and on. There are so many times where a loved one means well and wants to help and says 100% the wrong thing. And since we're on Adoptees On, I'll say, when someone says something like, “But your life was so perfect, why would you feel bad?” They don't want you to feel bad, and they care about you and love you, but when they do that, they're totally negating and not validating. A very normal experience. So the For Allies section was really about trying to help prevent those type of ruptures by giving a bigger context and resources for the allies that truly have good intentions but are missing the boat and that they can get support.

Because it's hard to be in that position where you don't have direct power.

You're Not Alone. Also, very important around normalizing an experience when people actually feel like, ‘wow, I'm not the only one,’ or ‘so-and-so's talking about something and it's my story, but I didn't tell them the story, so maybe my experience of it doesn't mean I'm broken or crazy or really out there’. And we find that all the time in our adoptee communities where we hear someone else's story and they feel really alone, like no one's gonna get it. And then someone– I'm a member of a number of closed Facebook groups that are just for adoptees, and there are so many times where someone says exactly the right thing, and I feel that it's because there's a shared experience and that alone is so incredibly powerful.

Master the Subject. All about science, all about how our bodies work, all about statistics, all about information, and all about being empowered to advocate for yourself, which leads to the fifth one, which is about advocacy.

Because on the journey to healing anything, oftentimes when people get to the other side or they really feel more at peace, they want to advocate, they want to bring others along because they see themselves and the struggle they had and they feel compelled as the final step in really integrating experience to improve the lives of others. So these are bigger organizations that are usually poised to do that or to facilitate that and allow people a vehicle to get involved. So those are the five areas, and it's all free and it's all there.

Haley Radke: Okay, so you said 12 areas of mental health. So you've got all of these different ones. And can you, oh look, you have a list ready to go.

It's just our little postcard so you can, do you wanna just give us a couple of those and then talk to adoptees specifically? Yes. What are the things that we can be going there and looking and finding for resources for ourselves in any of those five categories that you were talking about?

Julie Lopez: So specifically for adoptees, I'm going to start there. You would look in the section under “Trauma and PTSD”. And it's listed as relinquishment trauma. And there's a subsection under each of those five categories. So you'll see very specific resources there.

And this is just a little bit about my journey as a clinician and as I was an adjunct professor for 10 years in a master's program for social work, and I always integrated my own knowledge and understanding and identity as an adoptee and as a trauma practitioner. So because the course I taught was a fall to spring sequence, I just wrapped it in because I think that's a part of normalizing and experience. And so I love that personally about I. This particular resource is that it's just wrapped in as one of many different types of things that people can experience instead of it being a big taboo subject or very threatening to the popular narrative.

And so that's where you would find the resources that are adoptee-centric and adoptee-specific. I'm going to be honest with you, because we're people and we have these complex lives, every section could be a benefit to an adoptee. But that's where you're going to find the language that really speaks to the adoptee experience, and I think importantly validates the concept of relinquishment trauma and some of what it means to grow up adopted, which are two separate things that people can, depending on the way that it metabolizes in their day-to-day life, experience a lot of symptoms around.

Haley Radke: Definitely. What are some of the other 12 areas?

Julie Lopez: Stress; Relationships and Sexuality; Confidence; Grief and Loss; Life Changes; Depression; Anxiety; Addictions; the Trauma and PTSD section, which I already mentioned; and then Identity and Discrimination.

Haley Radke: Yeah, so I think we check a few of those

Julie Lopez: Yeah. And especially now it's very accepted and normalized that eating healthy and exercising is good for your system. Our system also has emotional and psychological mapping and the way that our bodies work and our minds work, and how we relate to ourselves and others. Is what we're going after when we're talking about being mentally healthy.

So like I said, a big part of the Resilient Brain Project is giving it a title that has some biological connections to it, because we really do know how to rewire our brains in different types of ways and how to improve brain function, not just through psychotropic medication, but through other brain-based interventions.

And kind-of saying, “Hey, this is a part of our body and this is a part of our human system and it's resilient and we can make changes, and this is how we integrate experiences that can be traumatic, disempowering, that impact our sense of selves.” Our identity was really important to the mission of putting together this resource.

Haley Radke: And what does being resilient mean to you?

Julie Lopez: Resilience to me is about having the tools and the ability to get through something that's difficult. Getting through a difficult time, getting through a difficult experience, and being able to find your way to not just survive it, but pull the pieces back together to be able to thrive. Not as if something never happened, but in spite of, and because of finding ways to really thrive in your current day life.

Haley Radke: I love that. I love that. And so many of us just feel like we're always just treading water and trying to get by, and so this whole idea that we can heal our brains and heal our systems, taking these small steps towards that, I just get this big sense of freedom when I think about that.

Julie Lopez: That's awesome. I love it. And I will say, because you said something and you said it was part of what compelled you to reach out about the Resilient Brain Project. It is free and it's completely accessible, but I will say some of the more advanced therapeutic approaches that we have now are expensive.

They're expensive to be trained in. Some of the equipment is very expensive and it's an investment. One of the pieces of equipment we have here, which is a neurofeedback system, was over $20,000 for us to purchase, and then each person who got trained, which is beyond a master's or PhD, spent another couple thousand dollars and it's best practice to do ongoing supervision.

So it's all expensive. I worked at the DC RIP Crisis Center back in the nineties, and it’s a nonprofit. All the services are free. We got grants and foundation money to cover what we were doing, and that was actually how I got my first level of EMDR training, because there was a humanitarian assistance program that was part of the EMDR International Association that sponsored the training because they wanted to make it more accessible to the frontline where people had experienced trauma.

And these tools can make profound shifts and they're shorter. I just wanted to say that because I know money can feel like a big barrier, but most people would get heart surgery if they knew they needed it or they would get pretty radical about losing weight or about exercising if they had a heart attack and they're recovering, when it's really a serious thing.

And I unfortunately have seen people who've their lives cuz they're in a lot of pain or they're having really extensive symptoms that put them in the hospital. And I would just like to add one other thing is that some of these very effective treatments can be short. They're not long. They're not, like, a five-year investment in insight-oriented type of therapy, relationally based. They can be shorter. I've had clients for two months, three months, depending on the presentation, so I don't want to oversimplify it but it's been pretty radical, the changes that can be made in a shorter amount of time.

Haley Radke: That's fantastic. It's there's different levels for all of these.

I'm just like this huge range, right? You can go on the website. If you're just feeling really stressed out, you can find an action right now that's going to take you back to a more mindful state. Exactly. And then we can also think, ‘Okay, I really just wanna really address this head on and I'm going to go and get neurofeedback or EMDR, brain spotting, something like that and like really address the problem.

This is just a huge range. And I think you mentioned earlier, we just want to have accessibility and also normalize that mental health care is just one other facet of being a human.

Julie Lopez: Totally. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And one of the things that was fun was when we were first developing and selecting some of the materials for the Resilient Brain Project is I would just try it out with my family and close friends, I'd say, “What do you think of this resource?” Or I would say, “Hey, if you're stressed out, can you try this out?” And so we got real live feedback and it was great because part of what we're also trying to do is share information so that people might be able to use what we have there. Which is more cookie cutter than a custom tailored individual kind of therapy treatment, but it might do the trick and it might be enough, and then it goes in the toolbox and it can be used. We were really trying to add in the types of things that we also share in the more expensive individual therapy sessions where someone could just apply it to themselves. I will say this about adoptees and about relinquishment trauma is, it's much of it, especially if someone was relinquished as a baby or if some of the pieces around being with different primary care providers, maybe a number of them, foster care.

And then is that the mapping in our brains around how the world works is not stored in our explicit memory system, it's in our implicit memory. So the sensations and the feelings and the behaviors are coming out of a space that we don't have any conscious memory of. And so although the cookie cutter approach, which is what the Resilient Brain Project is, it's like a plug and chug. There's no one looking at you and saying, “Hey, this is gonna be helpful for you.” You're saying, ‘Oh, I need this and let me pull this out.’ If you have a workout tape and you put again, and it's just one size fits all, is that one of the challenges of having trauma that's stored as implicit memory is that while we might see the symptoms, it's very hard to see what the mapping is without professional help.

So I think of this as like a great tool that can be used and hopefully avoid a bunch of expensive therapy experience. But if you really want to get into the custom tailored piece, and you think that some of what you're storing is from your implicit memory, then you're going to need or probably be inspired to do a little more custom tailored work for a little time. But our goal is to try to cut down the amount that you have to do that.

Haley Radke: Thank you, Julie. That was a really great overview of your site and a lot of little insights here and there in our conversation. How can we connect with you online and how can we find the Resilient Brain Project? Do you want to give us that website address again?

Julie Lopez: Yes. So the Resilient Brain Project is www.resilientbrainproject.com. If you want to see some of the work that we're doing in DC, the center’s address is www.vivapartnership.com.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

You can find show notes for this episode and every episode of the Adoptees On podcast on our website, Adopteeson.com. In there you can also find links to our social media profiles. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find a spot to subscribe to the monthly newsletter and also there is a spot there where you can support the show. I want to say a big thank you to all of the people who have generously partnered with me on a monthly basis so that I can keep providing content like this for you for free as well. So thank you so much to my generous Patreon supporters. I couldn't do this without you. Thank you for listening, let's talk again next Friday.

71 [Healing Series] Romantic Relationships

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/71

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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 are going to tackle intimate partner relationships. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Marta [formerly Drachenberg]. Welcome, Marta.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Hi, Haley.

Haley Radke: Marta is a fellow adoptee and licensed mental health counselor, who is trained in internal family systems, a model she believes to be especially powerful in helping adoptees learn to love and welcome all their internal parts.

So Marta has taught us before about internal family systems, but today I asked her back, because we're gonna talk about just the challenges of being adopted. And being in a romantic relationship with someone and all the fun things our partners get to deal with with us. Is that right, Marta?

Marta Isabella Sierra: That's correct. It is a rollercoaster ride to sign up to be with one of us, for sure.

Haley Radke: Yes, yes. It is no secret that my husband deals with a lot, but, I mean, why is that? Why is it so tough to be with someone who's adopted? What is it about adoptees that can make it a challenge, for just being in relationship?

Marta Isabella Sierra: So, I think one of the most damaging pieces of adoption trauma and that initial severing of that relationship with our first mothers, is that it steals from us any innate sense of trust. If you are with your biological mom and you create that secure attachment in early childhood, you have an innate sense of trust in yourself, in other people, in the world. You have a sense of safety.

And that's something that was taken from us, that was broken very, very early. And so to the point where we sometimes don't even have a concept of what trust is, and almost don't believe that it's a real thing. And this most pervasively affects relationships.

But before I say more about that, I wanted to give a brief example of the difference between an adopted and a non-adopted person, regarding this sense of innate trust. I have a close friend, a dear friend, who went through a pretty brutal divorce this past year, and she was so, so crushed. And part of it was that she had never even thought about the idea that they wouldn't be together forever. It had never occurred to her.

She took all of it at face value and trusted in it so deeply, and it was such a loss for her and such a grieving of, "Oh, sometimes things fall apart, right?" Or sometimes, you trust someone and maybe they weren't worthy of your trust, and that's painful. And there were points in my loving and supporting of her that were challenging for me, because I can't even conceive of that level of innate trust.

My whole life I am bracing for things to fall apart, for things to go badly, for people to die, for people to leave. And so the idea that she was just walking around the world, living her marriage with this level of trust, and for her… To watch her lose that, was so interesting to me and kept bringing me back to, Wow, I have no idea what that would be like to trust something so innately.

So personally and professionally, I feel like I see adoptees struggle so much with all of their relationships (family and friendship included), but intimate relationships are different, because intimacy/romantic relationships are our most vulnerable space. It's the most vulnerable space that we exist in as humans.

It's the closest we let people get, and in that it's the most vulnerable. It's where we work out our family of origin issues, which as an adoptee is so, so complicated, and there's also… Because of all the fear that we're carrying in our systems, there can often be this really strong desire, deeply rooted desire, even, for control.

And I'm gonna quote C.S. Lewis really quickly, who said, "To love at all is to be vulnerable." And we're asked in romantic relationships to be the most vulnerable that we are in our lives, and when vulnerability as an adopted person is linked to feeling unsafe, that gets really sticky and really complicated.

Haley Radke: I definitely have often struggled in relationship. And yet, I've been married for, oh dear, Nick does listen to the show. So he's gonna–12 years. No, it's more than that. No, it's more than that. It's going to be 14 years this year. But I've said before, he's this really stable force in my life. And I'm the one that's up and down, and up and down. And I feel like I bring the challenges to the relationship.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. And that can be a really hard feeling. Feeling… You know, the clinical term for that in a couple's therapy way would say that one person in the couple feels like the "identified patient," like the one that's got all the problems. But it's also of high value, actually, as an adopted person to find someone who is securely attached, to partner up with, which leads me right into talking about attachment styles a little bit.

So, I wanted to recommend a book called Attached, that explores specifically how attachment styles affect adult romantic relationships. And it's really a great book. You can do a self-assessment, you can do an assessment of your partner (if you have a partner currently), and really learn about the different attachment styles.

And the most important thing that the book is bringing forward, from the research that they did, is the idea that our attachment styles are fluid (which isn't how we always thought about attachment styles in the psychology world). At one point, we thought of them as really defined in infancy and childhood, and then that's your attachment style.

But what we're learning is they're actually much more fluid than that. So, the good news of that is that if you aren't partnered yet (as an adopted person) and you seek out someone who's “securely attached,” they can pull you into “securely attached.” You can develop that together. The con of it is, if you're an adopted person and you're super dysregulated and you find a secure person, you can also pull them out of secure attachment and bring them into your world.

Haley Radke: Don't tell them that. I'm looking around…Nick's upstairs. It's fine.

Marta Isabella Sierra: So, I appreciate your vulnerability in speaking to that, Haley, that you feel like the one that has all the ups and downs. But the upside of that is, it's like slinging pudding at a wall and it just falls down, instead of someone catching it and throwing it back to you. Because securely attached people, when we're having our dysregulation are just like, “Hey, there's no fire. What's going on? Everything's fine.”

Like you said, he's this stable force in your life, and so they can reflect that back and it helps us see the places where, Oh, what I'm feeling isn't actually happening in this moment. Or, Something else is coming up from me. I'm not present moment right now.

And there are those of us (myself included), who read this book and learned these things when they already have fallen in love with someone who has the opposite attachment style for them. And they talk about that in the book as well, which is really helpful. I happen to already have fallen deeply in love with someone with an opposite attachment style and someone with their own trauma history as well (that is very different from my trauma history), which provides a whole other myriad of challenges that we get to navigate. Which sometimes is really helpful, and sometimes we really speak the same language, and sometimes we just trigger each other in all of these really terrible ways, and have to work through that.

But that's also not impossible. And so even two people with opposite attachment styles, even if they're not secure, can move towards “secure” together. And it's a lot of work, but I think it's worth it.

Haley Radke: So you mentioned this book Attached, and you're talking about different attachment styles. Can you just give us Cliff’s notes of what that means?

Marta Isabella Sierra: It means how we are in relationship; that's the simplest way that I can put it. A general way of what comes out of us, what parts of us show up when we're in relationship, and again, especially in this intimate, romantic space that can be so vulnerable.

Haley Radke: And can you give an example of a couple different attachment styles?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I do not have the book in front of me, but I believe it's “anxious,” “avoidant.” There's a mixture of those that's a very small percentage of people that are “anxious-avoidant,” and then “secure.” There's some really beautiful examples of how this plays out in attachment styles in this new show that's on HBO–I don't know if anyone's been watching.

It's called Here and Now, so (spoiler alert), I'm gonna talk about a couple of different scenes with one of the characters. It features a family structure of two white adoptive parents, three adult adopted children (one from Liberia, one from Vietnam, one from Colombia), and they also have a biological child as well (a teenage girl).

So, I'm gonna be talking a little bit about Ramon's character, who is the adult child that's adopted from Colombia. And we watch his relationship in the first season with Henry. And there's these two specific moments that I think they did such a beautiful job of really showing what can come up for us: a) that he gets so close, so fast. And that's really common, I think with adoptees. We have really strong feelings, and we're craving that love so deeply that we can run really fiercely towards someone. And you see that side, and then you also see the other side, which is this urge to run, and this urge to end things really quickly, really unilaterally.

So, the first kind of trigger is: he wakes up in the middle of the night one night, and Henry's not there. You really see how he comes undone. Like, Where did he go? And you can see how hard that is for him, and his impulse is to end the relationship. And they work through it with a conversation, but you could see that it could have ended there, had Henry not fought a little bit and said, “No, I want you to know what really happened, and why I did that, and why I'm sorry.” And they move through it. But there's already one point, right? Where they could have gone a different way.

And then there's a later piece where Henry had potentially been unfaithful. And without getting the actual story, without asking any questions, Ramon goes to the worst-case scenario (like we often do, like we're hardwired to sometimes), and just assumes the worst and ends the relationship, unilaterally. And I think there was a lot lost there. And that's getting into my opinion of what I saw these two characters sharing, but I think they did have a shared history of trauma. I think there was a lot of love there, and it was lost in a really fear-based way. So, both of those examples are examples of Ramon being incapable of trusting, of innately trusting. He goes to the worst-case scenario; he goes to the fear response.

And so that's again, that piece where, if we're unable to trust, is going to constantly come up in our relationships, and potentially do a lot of damage to our partners and to us. And so that needs a lot of attention from us, and us doing our work so that our partners aren't being hurt, and also so we can build–even to build something.

And so, you asked me in the last episode, “How did IFS change my life?” I waited for this episode to speak to it, but I wouldn't have the partner that I have today if I hadn't found IFS. I started my training right when we were just starting up, and the dysregulation in the beginning of something new, I think, is really intense for us.

That first year was very intense for me, navigating my feelings and not blowing it up. I have this part that gets so afraid of the realness of it and would blow it up. And when I was younger, certainly, blew up many a connection out of fear. And there was a lot of work to do with my parts in that first year about: it's okay, a lot of comforting, a lot of overwhelm, and that work continues now. Four-and-a-half years later, I'm still doing a lot of work to make, to try to make sure (and I fail epically all the time), that this doesn't affect our relationship.

And so, in the beginning, we used to get in this conflict, that I would say, “I trust you,” and he would say, “You don't trust me.” And we would go round and round with this, really often. And as I was starting to do my first adoption readings about adoption trauma, was right around that same time that we had been starting to date. And so I started learning about this, and really learning about this broken sense of trust, especially from primal wound.

And I was able to sit with him–I still remember sitting on the porch with him. And I was able to say one day, “You know, I think that you're right. I think that I don't trust you. I think that what I mean when I say that is, ‘I want to trust you, and I trust you more than any man I've ever been with.’ But you're right. A lot of me, a lot of parts of me don't trust you at all.”

And that was so validating for him to hear. I just remember his relief and him thanking me for speaking to what his parts already knew was true, which was that I did not trust him. And that's okay; it was a little too soon. And so, the other piece is that trust is a big spectrum. It's not black and white. We don't trust or we don't trust. It's a big spectrum, and I continue to try to move towards that trust. But again, four-and-a-half years in, I still struggle with it today and up through a week ago, moving through a conflict, and him saying, “When have I not been here for you? Since we've been together? When have I not been here?” And I have to ask all of my parts to step back and calm down and acknowledge: Never. I don't have any reason that's real. I just have my traumatized parts that are reacting out of fear.

Haley Radke: One thing I remember I did when I was dating my husband (many years ago), was I would really push him away, big time. And what part of that has to do with trust? Like, I can't really–I don't have the words for it. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. So a polarity that exists inside of everybody, when it comes to relationship, is: we have parts that want to run towards the other person, and we have parts that want to run away from the other person. I believe, in adopted people, those parts get very extreme. So again, we have those behaviors of running towards someone, making up a whole kind of story, and making it more intense, and rushing it and all of that, right? Like, I have to get so close to you that you're my skin. That impulse is so deep.

And then we also have, Oh, but now we are this close, and now I feel really unsafe, and I need to get the F out of here immediately! And there's the running. And so there's these opposing energies that I think (again) get really extreme with us: the parts that want to run towards, and the parts that want to run away, which can feel… Again, that rollercoaster can feel very upsetting to the other person, if they don't understand what's happening.

Haley Radke: Yeah, yeah, for sure. We can see all of these things, I think, hearing you explain this. Probably a lot of us are like, Oh my gosh, listen, I've been sitting here thinking you have cameras in my house. So we're all kinda feeling that way. But then, what are our next steps? If we see it, then how do we work on building that trust, and how do we work on saying to our partner, “Okay, I am working on this. Can you work on this with me?” And those kind of things? How do we navigate that?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yeah. So, again, what comes up in our intimate relationships is a lot of family of origin stuff, which we have two families of origin (really), that we're working with. Two loads of crap that we're trying to get…

Haley Radke: Twice the fun.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Twice the fun. So, there's–it's honoring that, right? That a lot of what's coming up for us is maybe about our adoptive parents, maybe about our birth parents, but that (generally) it's not about that.

When I do couples work, the first thing I say is, “90% of what's coming up between the two of you isn't about the other person. You're hitting wounds, and they're coming up, but they're not–you didn't create them together. They were already there, and you're hitting upon them.” So, I would say step one as an adopted person, is a huge amount of curiosity about what's happening for you and what your feelings are and what's going on in your body, in your heart, in your mind. And really attuning to that so that you can recognize when you're having a really intense emotion and start to be able to recognize when it might be disproportionate to what just happened.

And that's my first signal, personally, is Oh, I'm having a really big reaction to this. I need to slow down. I need to see what's happening. I need to listen. One way that I do that, especially if I'm super escalated, I generally journal on my phone and not in my journal. And it's interesting to go back and read and I can see, “What's about my adoptive parents?” “What's about my birth mom?” And in the journaling, I think I'm writing to my partner, but I read it later and I'm like, Oh, I see who that was about.

It's almost never about him. And so, it's starting to recognize that narrative: “How does that show up for you?” And these are a few triggers, abandonment kind of narratives that I've noticed in myself that maybe your listeners will relate to and hear for themselves.

But if I hear any of these statements inside of myself, I know that it's adoption trauma stuff that's coming up for me. Why aren't you here? Where are you? How could you leave? So short and simple, right? But all of those link directly to my traumatized infant part, and I'm not in the present moment if I'm thinking those things.

If I'm feeling those things, I'm not in the present moment, and I have to ground myself before I can move forward. And so the practical piece of that is, when I notice that coming up and I notice where that lives in my body. I know that a lot for me is right under my rib cage, right in my diaphragm, that a lot of my fear lives there.

So I might place my hand there, and just take a really deep breath and just say, “We're okay. Everything's okay. I'm right here.” And depending on how much I know about what part of me is showing up, I might reassure it in different ways. “We're safe now,” or I might remind that part that my partner is a safe person. “You know that Tyson loves you. Everything's okay. You're in a safe space.”

I might remind that part that my birth mom loves her (which is a gift of my reunion), which I didn't have before to say to her. But now I can say, “She loves you, and you'll see her again. It's gonna be okay.” So that part's really specific, individually, how you calm down the parts of you that got stirred up in the moment. But recognizing is definitely the first step, so that I'm not running out and saying out loud, “How dare you leave? How could you do this to me? Again?” And then we're in a whole thing, right? And now I'm in a one to seven day fight that I don't know what's gonna be said, and what I can't take back.

Haley Radke: So that's if we're already in a relationship.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes.

Haley Radke: And I know several adoptees personally, who kinda go in and out of different relationships and you just sorta see them bouncing from one person to the next. And to me, I look at that from the outside and I think, This is a little bit dysfunctional. How does someone like that, you know, look at themselves and say, “Okay, what am I gonna do next? Do I want a partnership that's gonna last for a while?” I mean, what do you say to someone who's experienced that?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Well, you know, part of me wants to say, partnership isn't for everybody. It's okay if you don't want a partner, too.

Haley Radke: Fair enough. Yes, yes.

Marta Isabella Sierra: But yes, if you want to build a healthy partnership, it's essential that you're doing your own work (ideally with a therapist). I strongly recommend that any adopted person–once you're in a relationship, that you think this might really be something (even if you think, Maybe just for a year, but this might be something); get yourself in couples therapy as soon as possible. People use couples therapy as a Hail Mary at the end, and typically, couples seek help six to seven years past when they needed it.

So part of it is honoring that this is hard for us. This is an area that is difficult for us and we need a little help. And finding a partner that's okay doing that work with us, that's also interested in growth and building healthier relationship and just really honoring.... Again, it's not a place that we're broken, it's not something we can't have, that's just for the other people, but it's a place where that's very challenging for us, and we need a lot of help.

You know, I know for my partner and myself, we didn't have healthy examples growing up. And so we're trying to build something that we haven't even seen, and so we need help with that, and that's understandable. And then to the way other side, I would say for anyone that's single and just dating around, and wants to live that casual life and isn't really ready for something serious: if that doesn't feel safe, don't do it. Definitely don't do it if it doesn't feel safe.

But even in casual encounters, as adopted people, we can get very deeply wounded. And so, it's being careful about our hearts, and our safety, and making sure that anyone we spend time with (even if that's somebody for two hours, that we're gonna be intimate with), that it's safe and that we're clear with our parts about what's happening.

If we're just seeking physical comfort, again, that's totally fine, and we have deep needs for that (generally, as adoptees). But are we being clear with our parts that this isn't our forever person, and we might be leaving them really soon? Are we being clear about our own intention with ourselves, going into it? Or are we gonna let ourselves run wild after, and really get hurt all the time?

Haley Radke: Thank you. Thank you. I think those are all really great things to think about and it's a lot of self-reflection. This whole time, I'm like, Man, you're hitting a little close to home for me, here. Thank you. Thanks for that. It's good. It's good.

Marta Isabella Sierra: It's a very difficult thing to talk about. You asked me to think about examples to share, and it's vulnerable. I have shaming parts about how much I'm still doing my work in this most vulnerable area. I'm very much still doing my work, and it's very much still affecting my partner, and I wish that it wasn't. I have parts that are really angry that it still affects him day-to-day, and that's what's happening.

So, what do we do? We ask for help. And we try to do our work, and it goes as fast as it goes. But if we can say to our partners, “Part of me felt this…,” or even in the repair. Sometimes we can't resolve it in the moment, right? We have to come back later and say, “I think that part of me that got really angry that you left and went to go hang out with your friends, really was feeling that separation with my birth mom. I think that's why I was sobbing. I'm sorry that I put that on you.” That's so different than anything else than any other way we might deal with that.

Haley Radke: But that really goes back to just what you said, a moment ago, about going to couple’s therapy, and how we leave it till this is like seven or eight years late. You know, doing those repairs as you go is so important.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. And I can't tell you how many people (even therapist friends that I have) have had reactions. I casually talk about our couple’s therapy often, and people say, “What's wrong?” “Nothing. Things are good. That's–I want them to stay good, and we're building a foundation, so it's important that we have help.”

Haley Radke: Yeah, I am a big believer in therapy (obviously). I mean, I think it's so amazing to be able to go into a session with Nick and my psychologist (that's who I see). She is just able to help us hear each other, you know? And sorta uncover some stuff, and really have a good conversation about what it's really about. And sometimes in, whatever–in the heat of the moment, you just aren't able to do that. So I love that you just said, coming back later to just do that repair is so good.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Marta. Is there anything that we didn't cover yet that you really want to get to?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I don't think so. That's it. I didn't think I'd get through everything that I wanted to say, but I did.

Haley Radke: Oh, and this was really good. And I did; I felt so uncomfortable talking about this. I don't know why. I had that–Season four, we're talking all about relationships (as we're recording this). And I did this bonus preview episode with my husband Nick, and he relayed all of these things to me about how my reunion with my dad affected him.

And that whole time he was talking, I was like, Oh my gosh. I was so selfish. And I just, I didn't see it till later, and then just reliving that, it brought so much stuff up. And this conversation too, I'm like, Whew! So, you know what? We need to go there. We can't hide these things. This is really what's happening for me, for you, for people that are listening. It's really important to talk about. Thank you.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yeah, you're welcome.

Haley Radke: Marta, where can we connect with you online?

Marta Isabella Sierra: There will be links in the show notes to my personal email. If you just wanna talk to me, that's totally fine, I'm open to that. And also my professional website as well, where my practice information is. And yeah, feel free.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

I am so thankful for each one of you that tells me how much the show has changed your life, and I can't believe it. I still get these emails daily, or messages on Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook. And it means so much to me that you are finding the show so helpful in your own life. So, one of the ways that you can help support the show is by just telling one or two people about the impact it's made on your life, and to encourage them to listen.

So, I know that some of you have been sharing in your adoptee support groups, which is awesome. What a great idea. And also, I've heard from some of you that you're actually bringing the show to share with your therapist, and they are getting more insights from listening to the Adoptees On show. And think about it, if they are able to help more adoptees through their struggles, I mean, it’s like full circle.

It's just so exciting to see this change shifting in the world. So, thank you so much for sharing the show in that way. And one other way you can help me to continue making this show for you is with your financial partnership. So adopteeson.com/partner has details of how you can support the show monthly, with a small gift.

And I have some thank you gifts as well for you for supporting the show in that way. So, I have a secret adoptees-only Facebook group, which is filled with past guests, and other supporters of the show, and they're all really amazing people. Let me tell you, we've had some really great conversations in there.

And also, I have another level of support with some unedited episodes of the podcast. And often I have a guest (Carrie Cahill Mulligan) come on, and we talk about what's happening behind the scenes of the show, and also what's going on in our own lives. Carrie's fantastic. She was a guest in…She was my very first guest, actually, season one, episode one, and then she came back to interview me all about my story (which is the season one finale), episode 13 of that series.

So, if you're all caught up, and you're looking for a few more shows, that's another great way to support the show. And fill your podcast queue. You can sign up for that, adopteeson.com/partner. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again, next Friday.

28 [Healing Series] Is Adoption Trauma?

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/28

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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 is a heavy topic. I know I say that every single time it's a Healing episode. We tackle: Is adoption really trauma? Let's listen in.

This is Lesli Johnson, a fellow adoptee and licensed therapist who works to help other adoptees connect the dots of their story and live authentically. Welcome to Adoptees On, Lesli.

Lesli A. Johnson: Thanks, Haley. How are you today?

Haley Radke: Great. I'm so excited to talk to you again. You have really made an impact on our listeners so far, so I'm really excited to tackle this topic with you today.

I've had some adoptees contact me and they've been surprised by some of the stories on the podcast. We sometimes mention adoption as being a traumatic thing, that there's this thing about “adoption trauma”, and I was hoping that you could address that today. Do you think being adopted means that there's some kind of traumatic wound? What are your thoughts on that?

Lesli A. Johnson: I certainly also get contacted a lot with questions related to adoption and trauma. I think trauma is sometimes a hard word to hear, but I do think the process of separating an infant or a baby or a child from their biology, it is traumatic.

The word trauma, I mean, there is a negative connotation about it, but I'm advocating more for just truth and transparency, so that's why I use words like trauma. I don't think that that means that a person has to have a lifelong trauma, but if we're addressing the event as a traumatic event and then saying, “Okay, so now what do we need to do to help this person be calmer, work with their nervous system, work with integrating adoption into their story, to alleviate the symptoms of trauma?” I think a lot of times when people hear the word trauma, they're like, “Oh, that's so negative.” No, it's a word. It's a word. It's a word describing some symptoms that happen to most people when they're separated from their mother.

For a lot of adoptees, there are multiple traumas if they are placed in foster care, or if there are multiple placements. And I think that sometimes when an adoptee has had more than one placement or more than one foster home, that it's sometimes easier to use the word trauma in that situation. And maybe it’s deeper trauma, but I don't think so, I think it's okay to use the word trauma to describe the separation between a baby and their birth mother.

I always use the analogy, most of the time if you're going to get a puppy, you're not really supposed to take a puppy away from its mother until it's six or eight weeks old. But it's somehow okay to have a baby separated from– Not “okay”, I'm not using the word okay lightly, just supporting that idea that there is a traumatic response.

What we know about the brain and the nervous system today –that maybe wasn't evident, you know, 20 or 30 years ago– was that the process of separating a baby or an infant from his or her biological mother, is coded in the nervous system and in the mother's nervous system as traumatic. The only part of the brain that's fully developed at birth is the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight, flight, or freeze. And when the familiar mother isn't there to soothe the baby, the baby's levels of cortisol shoot up. And if this event of separation happens before the language receptors of the brain are developed, which is between 0-3, the event is just encoded in the nervous system. So we call that an ‘implicit only’ memory, meaning it happened before there was language, so there are no words to describe it.

What I've found in working with adult adoptees, and even teenagers and kids, is that they often –adults who maybe have a little bit more access to their experience and relating it– say things like, “I have this sense of just feeling lost or unrooted or like I don't know where I am, but I don't know what that's from.” And we might be able to relate that back to the separation before there were words to describe what happened. You know, the sense of rootlessness or the sense of where they say, “I don't remember exactly what happened, but I just have this felt sense.” That implicit memory.

Haley Radke: So what's the difference between a biological mother relinquishing right in the delivery room versus a biological mom taking her baby home? So there's that feeling like, ‘Where's my mother?’ What part of that is the traumatic?

Lesli A. Johnson: What we know now in 2017 –that you know, when I certainly was adopted, oh my gosh, almost 50 years ago– is that there's so much that the baby hears and smells even in utero. So, the baby knows the mother's voice. The baby knows the mother's gait, you know, the way she walks. The baby knows the mother's smells. So when that separation happens, everything that was once familiar to the baby is gone. It activates the sympathetic nervous system –the baby's– in fight, flight, or freeze. ‘What do I do?’, you know, not that they're thinking this logically, but their nervous system gets activated.

Whereas if the mother is able to be with the baby and act as the parasympathetic nervous system, the soothing agent, the familiar mother's able to calm the baby and soothe the baby. I mean, there are studies where crying babies are given a piece of clothing that the biological mother– you know, has her scent on it, and the baby is soothed by just even that familiarity.

Haley Radke:There's a connection that's been built, all over the time that the biological mother was carrying the baby–

Lesli A. Johnson: Essentially for the baby's entire life, yeah.

Haley Radke: Right, so then that's what's been severed. Can you talk a little bit about what does that mean? So it's traumatic, and so what does that mean for our brains? What's different between my brain as an adoptee who is relinquished as an infant versus someone who was parented right away?

Lesli A. Johnson: To clarify, a baby taken home from the hospital by their adoptive parents is parented from this start. But there still was that separation. So speaking in general terms, because I don't know if it's a hundred percent, but speaking in general terms, what I see in my practice is a common theme of separation anxiety. Separations and transitions are difficult. There is activation sometimes of just the nervous system so that there's hypervigilance. Sometimes adoptees talk about feeling anxious around separations and transitions. But just a heightened vigilance in the nervous system.

Sometimes people may not even relate that to adoption or the separation. But I certainly would say that most adoptees that I work with in my practice have a significant amount of anxiety and activation of their nervous system. Difficulty self-soothing would be another thing, too.

Haley Radke: So you say some adoptees, they don't even realize that this is connected. So how do we connect those dots?

Lesli A. Johnson: Well, I think you just named it: connecting the dots. I really believe good mental health is the ability to connect the dots of your story and have a coherent narrative.

So for smaller children, it would be helping the adoptive parents view adoption as trauma. I think one of the first books written on this would be Nancy Verrier's The Primal Wound. I remember reading that book in graduate school and kind of putting it away and I didn't wanna have that wound, you know, ‘that wasn't me’. And then realizing, ‘Oh wait, this completely explains it. This really is–’. I think she kind of was a pioneer in that respect, of calling adoption what it is, it's a trauma. So working with that is working with the trauma. Every person might display different symptoms, but talking about it for what it actually is, I mean, the truth is your friend.

Haley Radke: Okay. It is so interesting that you say that thing about The Primal Wound. Because I remember when I was reading it, too, I was like, ‘Nope, nope! This is not me.’ I've had a few adoptees contact me, one in particular I'm thinking of emailed me and he said, “Just so you know, I love your podcast and I listen all the time, but I'm an in-the-fog adoptee,” is what he said. “I'm good with adoption. Like, you know, it's interesting to hear these stories but it hasn't really affected me.” So is that true? Like, some of us are just super affected and some of us are fine?

Lesli A. Johnson: I think that certainly there are people that are: a) maybe more resilient, b) maybe are better able to use coping mechanisms like denial –and I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all– but work at a different level where maybe they're not either making the connections to adoption or they truly don't feel that adoption has had any impact on their lives.

I wouldn't challenge that person. I might challenge them if they were my client and I really saw themes that I've seen with clients. But yeah, I think maybe to each their own. But I've definitely seen it in clients that I've worked with where adults come in and don't think things are related to adoption, and then really start to connect their dots and have a real eye-opening, a lot of ‘aha’ moments, and are able to integrate how adoption has shaped them and add that piece to their story because it is a part of their story.

Haley Radke: It's true, I would never want to “lead someone out of the fog” –so to speak, that lingo– to realize maybe there is a traumatic aspect, because one of the discussions we've been having in one of my Facebook groups is like, “This is too hard. Let's go back in the fog. We don't wanna deal with these things.”

Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, denial and repression are super powerful. They're super powerful coping mechanisms.

Haley Radke: So what else can we use to not just cope, but heal from this trauma?

Lesli A. Johnson: Acknowledging it as such, and then working with it like you might other traumatic events or events that are perceived by the individual as traumatic. So, working with establishing a coherent narrative; support groups; therapy; you mentioned Facebook groups. I think when you're able to have a supportive group of people to run ideas by, run thoughts by, have your feelings and thoughts and experiences validated, that can be really healing. And as you know, we've talked before, I'm a huge proponent of EMDR therapy, which is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. It's an integrative therapy that I use in my practice. That's been really helpful.

Haley Radke: Yeah, and we did a whole episode on that, so you can go back and check that out for a deeper dive.

Lesli A. Johnson: Other tools and things that I've seen work with my clients: having a mindfulness program, working with the body in mind again. When traumas happen, the event is stored in the brain in a maladaptive way, so we really wanna work on connecting the mind in the body and integrating. So things like yoga, mindfulness, anything that helps connect the mind and the body.

Haley Radke: That’s really good. Trying to put it out of our head is not necessarily– if it's all repressed, that's fine, but if it's like coming out in different ways, we should probably deal with it.

Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, I think so. I think it's good to acknowledge it, because I think for most people there are parts of their adoption story and adoption experience that do kind of leak out as they go through life and move through life.

Haley Radke: Like having your first baby. For some people, the midlife kind-of crisis-y stage. Those are two separate things I've heard from multiple adoptees, when they have kind-of “woken up”-- I don't know how to say that.

Lesli A. Johnson: I think adolescence is another time, too. I mean, adolescence for all people, adopted or not, is a time of finding out who you are. And for adopted teens, that can be difficult if they don't have the pieces of their story. And part of finding out who you are is knowing where you came from. I think that's another life transition that's sometimes difficult for adoptees.

Haley Radke: Can you direct us to any particular books or research that we could kind of dive into a little further if we're interested in deeper study? You already talked about The Primal Wound, but is there anything else that would be helpful, to learn a little bit more about maybe the effect that it has on the brain, anything like that?

Lesli A. Johnson: One of my favorite books on trauma in general, that I think addresses what happens in the brain and the nervous system, is The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk, that's an excellent book.

Another of my favorite books related to adoption and the not-so-wonderful parts is called Adoption Therapy, and it's an anthology of essays by written by adoptees, many of them who are also therapists. That book was edited by Laura Dennis, it's called Adoption Therapy. Have you read it?

Haley Radke: I just got it. I had saved up a bunch of money and I ordered, like, 10 different books. So it's literally upstairs on my nightstand right now.

Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, it’s another one of those –in my opinion, similar to The Primal Wound– where it's not exactly what I would call a pleasant read, but every bit of it is so informative and it's a wonderful book.

Haley Radke: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your insight on this topic, which is very hard. Where can we connect with you online?

Lesli A. Johnson: You can connect with me, probably the easiest way is through my website, which is www.yourmindfulbrain.com, and then there are links to my email, Facebook page, Twitter account, and Instagram.

Haley Radke: Oh, perfect. Thank you so much, Lesli.

Lesli A. Johnson: Sure, my pleasure.

Haley Radke: If you have other topics that you'd like to see addressed in an upcoming Healing episode, please come find me on Twitter or Instagram, @adopteeson, and let me know.

I keep telling you about my secret Facebook group, but this week I want to let you know how you could have access to that and some unedited episodes of the podcast. If you are dying for more content, my second-level Patreon reward is a private RSS feed. That's techno-lingo for your very own personal podcast feed.

The latest unedited show I just released yesterday, is me chatting with Carrie about what I learned at the Indiana Adoptee Network Conference, and I tell her a humiliating story of something totally inappropriate I said to a complete stranger. So, if you would like to revel in my misery, that is the only way you can hear that story.

My link for Patreon is Adopteeson.com/partner. If you're ever looking for a supportive Facebook group and Patreon's just not something you can swing right now, come and find me on Twitter or Instagram and send me a message, because I have some places I can recommend for you.

Next week's episode is with Marriette Williams. She's an international adoptee who searched and found her biological mother, only to find out that her adoption was non-consensual. Make sure you're subscribed in Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts, so you don't miss it.

Let's talk again next Friday.

69 [Healing Series] Internal Family Systems

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/69

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Haley Radke: This show is listener supported.

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 going to learn about a type of therapy called the Internal Family Systems Model. I know it's a mouthful, but it's so helpful for adoptees, so let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Marta [formerly Drachenberg]. Welcome, Marta. So, Marta is a fellow adoptee. She's also a licensed mental health counselor who is trained in Internal Family Systems, a model she believes to be especially powerful in helping adoptees learn to love and welcome all their internal parts.

So today you are here to teach us what Internal Family Systems means. But first I'm going to ask you if you would just briefly share with us a little bit of your story.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Sure. I was adopted at two weeks old from Bogota, Columbia. I grew up in Connecticut, middle white class suburbia. I reunited with my birth mom just over a year ago through a private investigator.

So it's been a big year and I don’t know what else to say about that. Of course, a long story, I could say a lot more, but those feel relevant.

Haley Radke: Okay, thank you. And so, do you want to just tell us your decade of age? I'm just curious because you said it's just been a year ago.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes, I'm 31.

Haley Radke: Okay. Wow. How long did it take for the private investigator to find her?

Marta Isabella Sierra: So I did all the DNA testing first, which is people's general first line of defense these days. It's a long shot, though, for internationally adopted people. The DNA testing and everything came back reaping nothing. So I hired a private investigator on a Friday afternoon and he found her Sunday morning.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. Wow. Okay. That is quite the story and maybe we'll hear more of it someday, but I like to give people just an orientation of how you're coming to this work with adoptees. And I know you work with other groups as well.

But why don't you start out and just explain to us, I’ve never even heard of this Internal Family Systems. What is that?

Marta Isabella Sierra: So Internal Family Systems was created by Dick Schwartz. He discovered it really organically. The basic concepts are that there are multiplicities inside of us and actually anciently, historically, this was always our way of thinking about ourselves. We lost our way somewhere along the way and have become kind of mono-minded. Meaning that we think all of our actions and thoughts and emotions and everything that we do is a reflection of who we are in this really singular way.

So we have to become really black and white and decide all of these things, instead of honoring that we're all walking contradictions and we have so many different parts of ourselves that feel so many contradictory things and irrational things, and that all of that is really human and really welcome.

And so we talk a lot about parts. Of course, parts of self may be an easier way to think about it. That's a question I get pretty early on from clients. What is a part? And it's varied, people's experience of their parts. It can be an emotion, it could be a feeling, it can be a sensory feeling, a thought stream.

Some people have really strong visuals of their parts. Some people really do experience them mostly in the body. But we have a multitude of parts. That's also a question I get early on. How many parts do I have? When people are starting to get to know their parts. And it's endless. And all I can say is that I've been doing this work for about six years now and I just met a new part in my therapy session this week.

So we have a multitude of parts and that's okay.

Haley Radke: I've heard some therapists, even on this Healing Series before, talk about, oh, maybe you're going to talk to your younger self or your childhood self. Is that an expression of something you're talking about?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. That is an expression and a lot of people have talked about that. It's really just opening that up, that's the entire lens, that's the entire language that we have all these parts.

Yes, certainly we have younger parts. And a lot of our parts are certainly created in childhood, but it can be even more open than that. Like, I have a part of me that gets angry at this. I have a part of me that judges this. I have a part of me that feels afraid when…. You could just fill that in over and over in so many different ways.

And a big mantra in the IFS world is “All parts are welcome.” That’s the work. How do we welcome all of our parts in a world where our parts are very often not being welcomed externally? How do we do that work internally to welcome our parts?

The cultural view, especially in America, is that we can shame our parts into being different, right? Whatever change we're talking about. But an easy one to go to is of course the diet industry. If we have a part that wants to eat, then we should try to control, shame, hate, disconnect from that part of ourselves, instead of what if that part of us needs the most love, the most compassion, the most TLC out of all of the parts.

And so how do we turn towards the parts of us that we hate or feel ashamed about or struggle with and open our hearts to them.

Haley Radke: Before you go too far down that, I just want one more clarification question for you. What is the difference between saying we have different parts versus we have different personalities? We don't call it this anymore, multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder. Can you make a distinction of that for us as well?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Sure. That is also an early concern sometimes from clients. What does this mean that I have all these parts? Does it mean that I have? Yes, exactly.

Clinicians say DID but most people still say multiple personality disorder. DID is really very extreme, it's when someone's system has had such an extreme reaction or been through such an extreme trauma that their parts have become essentially independent. So that's the extreme. But we all have parts.

Yes. And we all have, if you want to say it, multiple personalities. That's fine too. We all have multiplicities. And there is a stigma about that, and that's part of how we've gotten away from welcoming all our parts is that we have created this stigma about having multiplicities.

Haley Radke: But the difference is that in this level that would be considered disordered they're independent.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Correct. They're acting on their own, essentially, versus being in connection with them. But that's its own spectrum of being present with your parts, and that actually moves me perfectly into the next piece, which is the other really hugely different thing about IFS from other models of therapy is that we believe that everyone has a healing force inside of them.

IFS calls that self-energy. I don't always use that term with clients. I usually let clients define that on their own. My personal definition is pure non-judgmental love. But I have clients that define it as divine light. I have clients that define it as authentic self. Really, that we all have this innate ability to do our own healing.

And some people may have lived their whole lives never learning how to access that energy. And so it's a tool to access it. So we have the eight C’s in IFS of self-energy which are Calm, Creativity, Compassion, Curiosity, Courage, Clarity, Connectedness, and Confidence. But really, I always go back to that non-judgmental love piece, first and foremost.

And so the idea, the goal of IFS therapy is to get the parts of yourself in touch with that self-energy, in connection with it. How do we, again, I would say in my layman's terms, how do we open our hearts to the parts of us that are struggling, that are stuck in time, that are in pain, and help them do some healing?

And that we are most aptly equipped to do that ourselves. So the role of the therapist becomes helping you build relationship with your parts, helping you open your heart to the parts of yourself that you're struggling with the most. I'm not doing the work, I'm just helping you figure out how to open your heart and figure out how to help you when you get stuck and when there are other things in the way, essentially, between you and your parts.

Haley Radke: So you said that you really think this is powerful in helping adoptees, and why specifically would it be so great for working with adoptees?

Marta Isabella Sierra: So IFS is an experiential therapy, and what that means is that it's not a talking therapy. Most models of therapy would go under the genre of talk therapy but IFS is an experiential therapy.

And so one thing that means is that it's difficult for me to describe and give an example of, but I'm going to try. So I typically use the analogy of a guided meditation. That's not quite what it is. It's just my best analogy. 90% of my clients work with their eyes closed. That's not mandatory. But it's essentially an attunement process that I lead you through.

Clients more familiar with IFS need less guidance, right? The more familiar they are with their own system, with how they work and how this work shows up for them, which is different again for every person. I can't say that enough, that everyone experiences their parts differently.

But essentially through that work, I guide people through how to do that healing, and it involves a lot of internal ritual, which we call unburdening. Unburdening the pain and the beliefs and the wounds that have been being carried around by these parts that they're really overworked and trapped and they're doing their best. They need our help.

Haley Radke: And something we talk about a lot with adoptees is adoption as an infant or a very young child is preverbal trauma. This would be, because it's not talk therapy, this sounds like it would be powerful in that respect.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Exactly. Typically how I run my sessions is about 10 minutes of talking and then going and doing the internal work, and then I typically bring people out about 10 minutes from the end of the hour so we can do a bit more verbal processing.

But the trigger or the trailhead or whatever someone's coming in with might be like, I got in a fight with my husband this week and this is what I felt. And just slow that down. Okay, where did you notice that in your body? I might ask something like that. And then we go into that process and it would shock you how much that kind of surface content leads us right to where we need to go, which is typically parts that need our help and those can be preverbal parts.

So I started with an IFS therapist in 2012 and that work was very powerful and I still viscerally remember everything about this session where I met my infant part who was in a complete state of terror, crying, wouldn't even look at me for a little while, but eventually I got her to look at me and I held her in my arms and sobbed. And it was so powerful to comfort her myself. And yes, I had a witness in the room, but I don't know how much time went by. It's this other world sometimes when you're doing this work and it feels timeless.

It felt like I was with her for 10 hours, but of course it happened within the context of the therapy hour. But I got to say to her in that first session, and I say to her all the time, “I'm not going anywhere.” “I will not leave you.” And our traumatized parts as adoptees need to hear that more than anything in the world, and other people can offer it to us, but it probably isn't true.

People die. People leave. Things change. People move. People have other people in their lives. We're never fully sure and we can't ever fully be sure that other people won't leave. But we get to support our parts in this way, and this is so specific to adoption trauma. I get to say to my little parts, “I'm not going anywhere” and I get to mean it.

And I get to know that I will always show up for them and I get to give them that safety that they're not going to get from anybody else.

Haley Radke: That's pretty amazing. I have chills. Goosebumps. Wow. What a moment. So you have that moment comforting yourself as an infant. That powerful thing, is that what led you to decide to become a specialist in IFS, an IFS therapist?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. I signed up for Level 1 training, really to keep doing my own work because it was so powerful and it was changing my life so quickly. But the first day of my Level 1, I knew in my bones, in my gut, this isn't just about my work, this is about my future, this is everything.

The lens of IFS feels so aligned with how I already saw the world. It felt also very aligned with my graduate school training which was in expressive therapies and dance movement therapy. It felt really aligned with the somatic work that I had already been grounded in and it just already felt like my language.

Some people that are doing trainings have been working for years in the field and they have a lot of unlearning to do, and I started my training right out of graduate school and really dove right into this world. And I believe it's very powerful.

Haley Radke: So you also work with people who have disordered eating. That was your primary focus for a while, is that right?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Correct.

Haley Radke: And what are some of the things that you've worked with that population for a while, and what are some of those things that translate into the adoptee world? Is there anything? Is that a fair comparison?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I don't know about comparison. I will say that I work with eating disorders because I had an eating disorder.

I prefer the term active recovery, so I would say I'm in active recovery. And I believe now firmly that was a tertiary expression of my adoption trauma. I think that my adoption trauma set me up to develop an eating disorder. Like so many of us struggle with eating disorders, addictions, suicidality, all the things that you've already talked about in a multitude on your show.

And so just as a result of that, I've always had some percentage of my caseload that is adoptees. And so I've been going deeper and deeper into that work. But I do believe that our perfectionism, our really deep craving for worthiness can sometimes, of course, express itself in an eating disorder and our need for control.

And if eating disorders are about anything, they're certainly about control, being in control or being out of control. But there's a big theme there about control that I think makes sense, that an adopted person might be more susceptible to an eating disorder.

Haley Radke: And you mentioned that after your experience comforting your infant self that you felt some big changes right away. I think that's the wording that you used. Can you just talk a little bit about that? What changed for you?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Just my way of relating to myself. I just listened to the Healing Series episode earlier today, the most recent one. And I loved the way that I think it was Pam was talking about how do we speak to ourselves?

How do we speak to ourselves with kindness? And that's very aligned with IFS, with opening our hearts to these parts of ourselves. Everybody has critical parts, shaming parts that come in in moments of vulnerability and say that we're doing it wrong, that we should have reacted differently. And how do we say, Oh, hi?

How are we welcoming to those parts? Instead of, Oh, you're here again. Go away, or, I don't need this right now. Or, again, all of that kind of kicking our own butts, like shaming ourselves into change-energy. How do we shift towards, Oh, hi. Even just a hello. If you can't be kind to your parts that are showing up, just saying hi. There's some Buddhist themes in there, too, of just welcoming what is, but that shifts very quickly. That’s the first shift I invite clients to make is just to notice and say hello to their parts.

Oh, that's a part of me. There's a part of me that shows up in this situation. There's a part of me. Oh, that's a part. Once you start noticing, it's like we stay in training. It's like popcorn and you start noticing your parts, other people's parts. It just becomes your lens of how you see things.

And the first step is just saying, hello. Hi. Okay. You're a part of me. I'm okay with that. You're a part of me, or I'm trying to be okay with that you're a part of me.

And the other piece of “all parts are welcome” is that all of our parts have positive intention for us, even if we can't see it. Even parts that do really destructive, dangerous things, there is a positive intention in there.

It's trusting that there is some positive intention that even the shamers and the criticizers up through self-harm and suicidal parts have positive intention for us. And so when we say, shut up, I don't like you, go away. I don't wanna think this way right now. When we push them aside, we don't get to learn why are you here? Why are you doing this? What are you afraid would happen if you didn't do this right now? And we don't get to the healing.

Haley Radke: So, in order to work in this way, do you need to go see an IFS therapist? It sounds like there's a lot of guiding even in that first 10 minutes of the appointment, you said, to find where you're going in that hour.

And it also sounded to me like that's the kind of work that you wouldn't want to do on your own. I'm picturing you holding yourself as an infant. That is an incredibly vulnerable position. And you're opening up a traumatic wound, and so you don't want to do that stuff by yourself. Am I correct in saying that?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Absolutely correct. And the longer you do it, the more you can do on your own. And the goal is that the hour that you spend, or two hours a week even, in therapy becomes just this touchstone, and that you're really learning, again, how to build this relationship with your parts on your own and support them on your own and move through triggers and all of those things.

But yes, absolutely I think being with someone who has been trained in this is crucial because what I haven't talked about is our protective system, because I could spend so long talking about that, but it links to what I was just saying about honoring that our parts have positive intention for us.

So most of our parts are trying to protect us in some way or another. There's kind of two classifications of those. I won't go into it here, but essentially one is proactive and one is reactive. Our protectors will jump in, especially in the internal work. So if I'm moving towards a wound with a client, I trust that their protectors will show up. Their protectors will show up, and the work will only go as safe as the system says.

I don't say how deep we go or how fast, the client's parts say how deep we go, how fast, and because of that I have never had a client come back and feel overexposed, even through some very deep trauma work because I'm not saying if it's safe or not. The client's system is saying if it's safe or not.

Haley Radke: So are there any exercises that are safe to think about this, practice on our own in some way?

I guess I gave that example earlier of saying some kind things to your younger self if you're in a moment of fear or triggering or something. Is there anything like that or are we specifically saying this all needs to start in an IFS therapist’s office?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Again, I think the starting point is what I was talking about, which is just saying hello. Just noticing your parts is a huge, huge, huge piece of work that can be months long of starting to notice your parts and just say hello.

If you can say something kinder or something more loving, that's great but it's not necessary. It's enough to say hello. I think everyone has an experience of being in a room or talking to someone and feeling invisible. And how painful that is.

Some of our parts that have been neglected for years, for maybe our entire lives, the power of just saying hello to them, of acknowledging that they exist and they are a part of us, and that we care a little bit, even just we care that they exist can be hugely powerful. And that's something that everybody can do starting whenever they would like. Because the goal again is that we are the primary caretaker of our parts and that's the goal to move towards.

And that the therapist, again, is just a facilitator in that. What can be dangerous for adoptees, I think, in a traditional therapeutic relationship is that there's often a reparenting or a mimicking, right? I will be this love and compassionate mother maybe that you didn't experience, and that can feel really healing.

But that's one hour a week, and then all of the other hours of the week if I become your safe base, then you're dysregulated the whole rest of the time. That's a lot of hours of the week to be dysregulated and have this one hour of comfort a week. So yes, it's still a therapeutic relationship and of course we still develop attachment and bonds with our clients that are important, but I'm only being that self-energy in the room if the client has access to none of it at all.

Ideally, I'm in a witness role, mostly witnessing and guiding and keeping my own heart wide open, attuned to what's happening for the client.

Haley Radke: Okay. That sounds really interesting. I'm curious, how does somebody find an IFS therapist?

Marta Isabella Sierra: The website will be in the show notes. There's an IFS website and you can look for an IFS therapist on there.

Not all of us are on there. I'm actually not even on there because I've moved around a lot in the past few years and have been in and out of private practice. I have a small practice right now. So even to reach out to the ones that you find on there, they may know other IFS therapists in their area that they can refer you to.

It's a difficult choice. I know you talk on the show a lot about finding an adoption competent therapist. I could not agree more. And I, myself, am in this difficult position often. Am I going to find somebody who specializes in adoption or is it more important to me to have an IFS person? Because the IFS therapist specialized in adoption is definitely an emerging subgroup of us. I am not the only one.

Haley Radke: Marta, I was just gonna say, are you the only one?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I'm not the only one. I'm not the only one. And it's important to me to continue to educate my community of IFS therapists so that they're more attuned. But that piece that I was saying about the work goes only as deep and as fast as the system wants.

Any skilled IFS therapist is attuned to that, and I think there's this piece where, again, it's really about your parts and you and you validating your parts’ experience. So yes, do we still need safety and compassion and empathy from a provider? Of course, but I'm the one saying to my parts, I know that was really hard or I know that was traumatic or I know that left a deep impact on you.

I trust any skilled IFS therapist to work with adoption even without specific training, though, of course, that's ideal.

Haley Radke: I was going to say, because so much of it is yourself doing your own kind of work with you present as a therapist, it's like they're learning from you as well, right?

So it's not like traditional therapy where they're not supposed to give you advice but, you know, you're having a conversation and they may steer you in a different direction if they don't realize that adoption is a trauma.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. And we emphasize so strongly in training space, so strongly, that the most important thing when providers are learning this model is to be in their own IFS therapy, to be doing their own work.

We learn it by doing our own work. Half of training, if not more, is them doing their own work in a safe space and learning this really by doing it. And so part of the training, too, is us being in touch with our parts, noticing them.

I will speak for parts in session, but it's very clear. I will say a part of me just felt this. I don't know if that's mine or that's yours or, does that resonate? It might be my part just reacting. So we use modeling in that way. We use transparency in that way, even up through a rift or something that can go awry.

I've had repairs with past IFS therapists that have been extremely powerful. When I come back the next week and say, this didn't feel good to me, and the therapist says, I'm so sorry, I definitely had a part come in that wanted to rescue you or wanted to caretake you, or whatever the thing was, and then we get to do this repair around it, which also shows the power of this in relationships, and there's so much safety in that.

And I'll give you another example of what you were just saying, which is I recently started with a new IFS therapist. A big fear that I have is that my therapist will align with my adoptive parents. I think that's a fear that a lot of us carry when starting with someone new.

Is it going to be safe for me to unpack these really complicated feelings that I have about my adoptive parents? And he got it within the first session. I was describing this sensation in my body and he reflected back to me: It sounds like she's really dangerous to you. And just this wave of calm went over my whole body.

Okay, I don't have to worry. He doesn't have any parts that are aligning with them. I'm safe here and I can say the really difficult stuff and I can be honest about what's happening inside of me.

Haley Radke: I could tell there could be this pressure to pretend otherwise. And you can't do the work if you're pretending. Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. Right. Exactly.

Haley Radke: Okay. Wow. Thanks Marta. That was really in depth and I think I got a really good picture of what IFS is and can do. Is there anything that we didn't touch on that you really feel is important to tell adoptees in particular?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I'm gonna think about that for one moment.

I think that you can do it. That's from a cheerleader part of me. You can do this, you can do this work. You can reparent yourself in a way that you weren't parented and you are capable of doing your own healing.

You have this force inside of you that's capable of facilitating the healing. You may need a little help learning how to do that, but you are capable and all of your parts are positively intentioned and beautiful and welcome.

Haley Radke: Oh, that gave me a nice feeling. Thank you, thank you. I think that was really helpful. I think that people who this kind of speaks to, I'm sure there's gonna be a few that this really speaks to, can go check out the website. As you said, it's going to be in the show notes to find an IFS therapist, but how can they connect with you?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Those links will be there as well. My personal email as well as my professional website. And I'm available for therapeutic work and consultation. Also, if there's any therapists that don't specialize, I do that work a little bit, as well, educating other therapists. I'm available for that. And the other thing I would just say about looking for an IFS therapist, there's a bookstore on there.

And if you want to start your reading about IFS, if you're curious about this, my strongest recommendation is to start with You Are The One You've Been Waiting For by Richard Schwartz, the creator of IFS. It's technically about couples work, but it was my first IFS book and it's what I start all my clients on because I think it's a really great mix of layman's and clinical terms and examples. I just think it's a really nice starter roadmap and whether you're in or out of relationship, I think it's really useful.

Haley Radke: Okay. That sounds like a great resource to check out. And just even if you're wanting to dip your toe in and you're not quite sure if this might be right for you.

Awesome. Thank you. Thanks so much Marta. It was a pleasure chatting with you. Thanks for teaching us about Internal Family Systems.

I wanted to let you know what's happening for the next few episodes of Adoptees On. It's almost like a little mini-series. So today Marta talked to us about IFS therapy.

Next week I have an adoptee coming on who is married to an adoptee. So we're talking about their relationship and the special connection here is that she already does IFS therapy and her husband does as well.

So we talk a little bit about how that has impacted their relationship and the things that they've learned through IFS. That's a really cool connection.

And then after that, I've invited Marta back and we talk about romantic relationships through the lens of IFS. But also just romantic relationships as adoptees. The things that we struggle with and things that we can work on with our partners.

So that's what's coming up in the next couple weeks for the podcast. And I also just wanted to let you know that I have a monthly newsletter that you can sign up for to stay connected with me and for news about the show. Adopteeson.com/newsletter has the details for that.

And the very last thing for today. Would you consider partnering with me financially to help cover the production costs of the show? It is such an honor to be able to do this work for you, and I'm so thankful for all of you who are already partnered with me and supporting the show monthly or with one-time gifts.

You are making it possible for me to carry on this work with you. So if that is something that you have been thinking about, oh yeah, I should sign up for Haley's Patreon. I'd love to join the Secret Facebook group, or I want access to the extra unedited versions of the show.

If that's something that you've been on the fence for, I'd invite you to consider signing up today. Adopteeson.com/partner has the details for monthly support. And if you're able to give a one-time gift, adopteeson.com, right in the homepage, has a little spot for one-time donation. Both of those things help sustain the show, and I'm so grateful for your support.

Thank you so much, and thank you for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.