236 Shannon Gibney

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/236

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Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to adoptees on the podcast for adoptees, discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke we are so excited to welcome Shannon Gibney back to the show. Shannon is an award-winning author of multiple books in her brand new release. The Girl I Am Was and Never Will Be, is a speculative memoir of transracial adoption.

Today Shannon shares some of her reunion story with us, how her lifelong friends supported her through some pivotal life events and how her relationship with her adoptive family has evolved over the years. We talk about the brand new book and try to be mostly spoiler free. And the most exciting announcement is that you look at the opportunity to join Shannon and me for an adoptee's only book club event in February.

So stay tuned for details about that towards the end of the show. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today on AdopteesOn.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adoptee on.com.

Let's listen in.

(Upbeat music)

Haley: I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On Shannon Gibney. Hi Shannon.

Shannon: Thanks for having me, Haley. It's always wonderful to talk to you.

Haley: I'm so excited to talk with you. In our last conversation, I think it was in April, 2021, so a couple years ago.

Shannon: Mm-hmm.

Haley: You briefly mentioned, like, oh, well now that I'm in my forties or whatever, , and I was like, this is the year I get to join you,

Shannon: Yeah. The forties are a, you know, it's a different road.

Haley: I'm ready. Different road. Yeah. I'm ready to be released into freedom.

Shannon: It's a, it's a good road. It's a go, especially for women. But but it's, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things, there's many, yes.

Haley: Well, we are celebrating with you cuz you have your brand new book out into the world: The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be. And it is spectacular .

Shannon: Oh, thank you.

Haley: So we'll get to that, but will you start and just give us a little snippet of your story to catch people up if they haven't heard from you.

Shannon: Yeah, my name is Shannon Gibby and I was adopted by a white family in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was about five years old. And this was in 1975. Five years old, five months old, haha. In 1975. I have two white adoptive brothers. One is two years older than me and one is a year younger than me. And then I did my birth search when I was 19. And at that time my birth mom, Patricia Powers, had put her name on the central registry.

And so we were able to make contact and we had a, you know, complicated on again, off again relationship for many years until her death from a rare form of cancer about nine or 10 years ago. And when I did my birth search, I also found out that my African American birth father had died when I was six as a result of a high speed police chase. Well, I should say complications he sustained from that, in Palo Alto, California in 1981 when I was six.

So I think that's sort of as far as my adoption story. My adoption journey. I'm 47 years old. I have two children of my own. One is almost 13, one is eight, and I think, I think that's it.

Haley: You've told it so many times, you've been able to just like snap it in this little photo for us. But this is your first book that really unpacks that story more fully.

We talked briefly about See No Color when you were here last time and that was fictional with some autobiographical elements I think you told me then. So what was it like, how difficult was it to get like some of your real, real you on the page this time around?

Shannon: Yeah, it's It's been very emotional, like, I mean, not while I was... so the book before this, the novel before this was Dream Country, which is about five generations of a Liberian and Liberian American family.

I think you all were kind enough to, to read that in your book club as well. And had me on to talk a little bit about that too. But you know, that book has a ton of Liberian and Liberian American protagonists my children's father's Liberian. And you know, there's a lot of sort of like personal connections, but the point is I'm not Liberian.

And that, that book is really about the chasm between continental Africans and those of us in the diaspora. But I had to do just a ton of research, you know, to get those voices right and to get all the details right. And so that book took me a very long time to write and this book just kind of, the new one, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, I mean, it just sort of poured out of me and was actually very fun to write cuz I could really tap into these other parts of my, like, you know, like really embrace, like the full on black girl nerd and just with abandon and, and it's such a weird book. I mean, I, I, I tell people, you know, it's. This is definitely the weirdest thing I've ever written.

But, but I mean, and, and, and you know, and, and I say that, you know, I said that to, I think it was like Carrie Miller, who's an NPR host. She's like, you say that with such pride. That was. Yeah. I was like, yes, I do. So it was a very interesting experience to go into this book, which is something, as you say, that is so deeply personal.

I mean, it's, it's so, my story and my birth mother's story, you know, the letters are in her voice. I, I have you know, photos of myself, photos of my birth mom, photos of my birth father. I've got his death certificate. I've got, you know, letters from the adoption agency. I've got all kinds of stuff in there.

And so to go from something, you know, was really hard to write Dream Country because it was so outside my personal experience to something that is so deeply close to me. Was that, yeah, that it was, it was a lot. But yeah, so I had a lot of fun with it. I honestly feel like Haley, right now is going to be the most emotionally intense experience for me, having it out in the world because now this is my third novel, and again, novel memoir. I call it my novel memoir. What the f--k? I don't know what it is. But but you know, sort of like me, you know, a mixed black, what the f--k? You know, I don't know. But adoptee, I don't know, you know?

But yeah, I always say, you know, my experience anyway, writing and publishing has been, you're this this book and this piece of, of art for years usually. And then, you know, and if you're lucky, like I have a really good editor, Andrew Carr, this is our third book together. And so if you know, if you're lucky to have another person that you can work closely with, you know, you are working with one other person for years, and then it's like a child. It goes out into the world when it's published and it, but it doesn't belong to you anymore. People take it in, they interpret it based on their own experiences and their own lens and their own perspective. And then they, they, they put it back out, but it comes back to you different, you know, in different, in different ways. And so that process start early.

I mean, I sent drafts to my black bio family, my white adoptive family, somebody from my, my birth mother's you know, white Irish American family reached out to me and I sent her a draft and she just got back to me. And, you know, it's just been a lot of crying, like good cry, good crying, but you know, those deep wounds that you just, it's not like you overlook them, but you keep, you, you have to keep moving forward, but they're still there.

Haley: Well, and now you're doing things like this where someone has now read your book and seen all your, you know, deep thoughts about your experiences and then is gonna poke at them like this. I could see why this might be the most, the most painful time.

Do you have any great comebacks that you've crafted over the years, especially when non- adopted interviewers are asking you questions?

Shannon: Hahaha! You know, my dear friends Sun-Young Kim,, who is a, a wonderful Korean American transracial and transnational adoptee and also a poet, she's like, Shannon, just wait.

She's like, it's just, somebody's gonna ask you, you know especially, particularly with this book, somebody's gonna be like, would you rather have been raised by your birth mom or your white adoptive parents? She's like, just, just wait. Just wait for that. You know? And I'm like, and you know, and I told that to my editor and he just rolled his eyes, you know, and it's like, you know, so I'm, I'm sure that there's gonna be some, you know, interesting questions from time to time, and I just always reserve the right to not answer certain things.

It's just, part of, I feel like my prerogative as a writer, as an adoptee. Yeah. Because this book is so autobiographical. Yeah. There's going to be, there's gonna be, I think a lot more opportunities for like the digs to go, to go a little deeper. But also, I mean, I have to say too, that like people, so far people have been incredibly generous, you know?

And so I, I, I, that's. That is what I'm, that's my expectation. I had a boss who would say that. I was like, that's my expectation.

Haley: You can hold us to a higher standard. That's all good. Okay, so I guess I'll start where everybody else would probably start if you weren't adopted. So don't hold it against me, but at one point you share in the book that your adoptive parents were hurt when you were first searching, and I'm curious now what your relationship is like with your adoptive family? Because you, as you shared, you have artifacts from your life in the book, including letters that your, Patricia, your birth mother wrote to your adoptive mother.

Shannon: Yes. So I, I've been on quite a journey with my white adoptive parents and my white adoptive family. And actually one of the, the crying moments that I had earlier, this, I mean, last week I guess it was my older brother John, my white adoptive brother, he read the book and texted me he's like, Sis, this is really beautiful. And he was like you know, and I hope it does well.

And, and then later I overheard him talking to my parents on video chat, and I heard him say, I think also what she's trying to show in the story is that in the, in the book is that adoption is a loss. And he's like, and I never realized that before. And yeah, yeah.

Haley: Shannon's reacting to my face.

Shannon: Yes, I am.

Haley: Which you can't hear.

Shannon: Yeah, no. So I mean. When I was searching, when I did my search and I did my re- you know, and I was 19. It was a very isolating experience. It was a very, it was difficult. It was really difficult. And I mean, I will say that I think part of what the book is about too is, is the power of female friendships, you know, and how they can really also help many women what we need to do in the world when everybody else is sort of like, what? What the f--k? Like, why do you need to do this?

When I was doing my search and reunion, you know, my, I have a very supportive family, overall, but they did not understand why I needed to do this. And you know, I say in the book like, they lent me, their car, you know, I have, they gave me some money for, you know, gas and some other things. So did Patricia, and you know, there it was, it was a whole community. You know, my, my best friend Bobby went out with me and my friend Dagney went part of the way and yeah.

So, but, honestly, and we've talked about this before, one of my, one of my biggest, I love your face. What? I love podcasts, but I love watching your face, Haley. You know, one of, like, one of my biggest assets and life is that I'm honest and it's also one of my biggest liabilities. And I think also it's why I'm a writer too, because, you know, I always say like, if you're not telling the truth as a writer, as an artist, like I don't know what you're doing, but the way that it felt when I was going through search and reunion, I did not feel supported at all from, from my, from my white adoptive family.

The, the, the people that I really felt supported by were my three girlfriends, platonic Girlfriends, Bobby Dagney, and Karen. Those were the people that were with me every step of the way. Those were the people, you know, who went with me to the records office and found my birth father's death certificate and laid down in the middle of a cornfield with me, like crying and just, I don't even know.

Like, I just was like, I don't even know what to do. I don't, I don't even know. Those were the people, you know, like in the book sitting with me as I called my, my black biological grandfather and talked to him, you know, and told him who I was. How do you, what do you even say? What do you do? Those were, but most importantly, those were the people who were like ..." you're not doing anything wrong. There's nothing wrong with you, and you're not doing anything wrong and"

oh, I'm getting all verklempt. I'm getting emotional talking about it, you know, but it's just like, I do feel like as adoptees, a lot of times we feel very deeply that there's something wrong with us.

And, and a lot of it is not verbal. You know, a lot of it is really somatic. It's like in our bodies, in our responses to things. And so to have people who love you unconditionally, tell you, you're fine. And I'm with you through this all the way. I know it's hard. I know that people don't understand who you're, you're close to and have held you up in other things, but I'm not going anywhere.

That's really powerful. And you know, I've been friends with Bobby since I was six, so 41 years. Dagney I met when I was 14 , so that's 33 years. And also Karen, 33 years. And so I was telling all of 'em this week. You know, it's like, that's the other thing that's really sort of watching over me right now, you know, is just how lucky I, I've been with those relationships.

My dog is barking. I'm sorry. She sees somebody walking on the sidewalk and has to go.

Haley: You know what? We love a dog cameo. All good. I appreciate you sharing that so much. I'm bringing my personal experience and I know many adoptees experience as well when we've searched or found or found some information.

And to see the adoptive family. And Anne we're very good at detective work and seeing people's faces, but also what's underneath, right? So the adoptive family saying, yes, I support you, but all the other cues are like, Ooh, I, this, not really. So to have the people that show up for you is just like, I like my, my, my heart feels full for you to know that you had those friends by your side.

Shannon: Yeah, and I'm, I mean, I will say, I do wanna say, you know, and so my, neither of my brothers either really understood why I needed to search along with my parents, but I will say, they have changed. All of them have grown and changed through the years. They have evolved. And, you know, I, I just wanna be clear about that because people don't have to evolve.

You know, they, they can make other decisions and that is what has kept us close through the years is is those choices that they've made.

Haley: What was it like asking your mom? Get the letters and cards or like, how did that go? Did you ask her like, Hey, I just need my, the papers, whatever is associated with me, or what did, what was that like?

Shannon: Yeah, you know, that was easy actually. That part was very, you know, I knew that she would give me everything that she has. My parents have been always so supportive of my writing. They've, and I think after we sort of got over this hurdle, you know, of search and reunion and my mom said to me, you know, she, she really maintained the relationship with Patricia throughout all those years after we first made contact. Even in the times when she and I weren't really communicating and, and so that's why she had all those letters and all those things, and obviously she had a really different relationship to Patricia than I did.

So when I was like, you know, yeah, I'm writing this book, this is what it is. Can you send me any and all letters, documentation, pictures that are relevant, any anything. She's like, yeah, absolutely. And she got all that together and you know, the next time I was home, it's like this box of stuff and just, sort of like we were talking before the, the formal podcast.

You know, I had a sinking feeling because I read a lot of those letters in years and so a lot of the tensions and frankly hurt between Patricia and I, you know, it's just, it's rekindled. And I have friends, dear friends, reading the book now, who it's very, it that's also very interesting. They're like, oh my God, I just wanna take you and like hold you and like give you like this hug and like protect you. Like, like I know you already went through this, like it's 19 year old you, but I just, I just. I just wanna keep you safe. I just want you, you know, which is interesting. That's just interesting, you know, that that's their response.

Haley: Well, I think in, in our last podcast episode that was on the main feed, you were talking about how you're really most connected with other adoptees of color and, and how that community has grown over the years and now, like it's grown so much that I can think of several other adoptees who have white mothers and black fathers and whose white mothers are also racist AF and like, like unpacking that as a, a biracial woman and figuring out, oh my gosh, where is my place in this and where, how can I have a relationship? And you've done so much education on anti-racism and you know, all of those kinds of things. Like I've learned so much from you over the years and I just think, wow. Like even that, like the very bare minimum of acceptance. That was really painful to read in the book.

Are you willing to talk about that a little bit? And

Shannon: Of course.

Haley: Okay.

Shannon: Of course,

Haley: Because, I mean that's, that seemed to me as a reader, like that's the big fracture at the beginning.

Shannon: Yeah. So as we know, there's many fractures, as I say in the book, when the bond between mother and child gets, gets broken in any way there, there's gonna be fractures.

And then on top of that, if you have racial difference on top of that, it's just gonna be even more. And so yeah, this dynamic emerged between Patricia, my birth mom and I, where, you know, I found out pretty early on that she was queer, that she was a lesbian, and that that had also created a lot of tensions within her Irish Catholic family and in fact was in many ways why she was like, promiscuous with, with men for a while because they just couldn't accept that about her.

And so I had this idea then that sort of her status as a cultural other, because she's a lesbian, would allow her to better understand my experience as a cultural outsider, as a mixed black woman. And that wasn't true at all. That was not true at all. So in the book I, I talk about, you know, the first reunion and you know, Bobby and I drive up there and you know, Bobby goes to see her boyfriend at the time, and I'm, you know, staying with Patricia and her, her girlfriend Josephine, who's delightful.

The next morning, it's like we're we're having breakfast and I mentioned something in passing about being a black woman and she's just like, it's like the, It is, it's like this physical change in her body. Like she just get all tight and and she's just like, you know, it erases me when you, when you, when you say that.

And, and that's bad because I already feel erased. And then of course I have this physical response to that, which is just like, oh s--t. Like , what where am I, where have I come to? How can I get out of here? Like, this is not what I signed up for. Like this is not, I don't feel safe. I don't feel, I certainly don't feel seen or heard, and then I just sort of like changed the subject, you know?

And but that became as you say, like a primary fracture between us, because then I wrote actually an essay about that for a anthology and this was when I was 25 and I was developing, I would say, an ethics of publishing. So I had this very quaint, naive idea that I should share whatever I write with whoever I was writing about.

And so. Yep. And so I sent it to her and she completely freaked out and was like, cuz it was also about her family. Right. And some of the, you know, I go into some of the microaggressions that her family, I experienced with them as well. And she's like, you know, I put that in the essay too. And she's like, it's all lies, you know?

It's all lies. And I really, I just really wish the audience could see your face right now, Haley, cause it's like there's so many words contained in that particular frown. Yeah. Yeah, she was like, it's all lies. And she threatened to sue me and she was like, you need therapy. And you know, just like all this stuff.

And basically was like, I felt like my, I had two choices. Either I could pull the essay from the collection, which was, it was like St. Martin's Press, which is like a small press. So like, she never would've seen it if I hadn't shown it to her. I could either pull the essay, or I could have a relationship with my birth mom.

Like that's, that's, that was how I viewed the situation, so I pulled it. Of course, what I learned then was that my relationship with my birth mom at that point was already pretty much over because there was no trust there. Of course, I felt abandoned again. And she was, in my view, sort of like very sort of self-righteous and you know.

So, yeah, it was, it was kind of a mess. Yeah.

Haley: Well, I, I, you know what it did for me? Is it, it reading, you know, your experience with her and then, you know, I think of Rebecca Carol's memoir where her birth mother is...

Shannon: oh, a train wreck.

Haley: Okay. Yes.

Shannon: A complete train wreck. Yes. Oh my God.

Haley: Yes. But it, you know, these, these examples have really broken this fallacy for me, like, that, well you're, you may have had white adoptive parents. I'm, I'm generalized, I'm not talking about yours specifically, but like, that were parenting children of color. Didn't get, didn't get it. And then while at least of course, the person who gave birth to you would get it. Like, no, no, no.

Shannon: No, no, no. This is, this is the power and the, like, the pernicious power of whiteness.

Haley: Mm-hmm.

Shannon: You know, is that it makes white people monstrous if they are not aware of how it's working on them, particularly if they have power over other people like, like their children, you know, like parents do. And so that is why I know in my own experience as a, a mixed black transracial adoptee, I have so many friends who are, are mixed identify as mixed black too, women. And even though they're not adoptees, we have a lot of things in common that we, that we talk about in terms of, you know, issues with our, the white side of our family, issues with our white moms, all kinds of things like that. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of crossover.

Haley: I'm so glad you shared that because that's, that feels like a another key where people could unlock friendships. If you're looking for people to support you outside of the adoptee community, that's...

Shannon: Oh yeah. That's been huge. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Haley: Okay. Let's go to motherhood. You say, this is a quote from the book, the Daily satisfaction of finally having a family that looks like me. When I see you write about your kids on Facebook, I like, I just feel this joy from you and just like, oh, I don't know. I just, I always, I'm just like, yes. Now this is a mother.

Shannon: I love being a mom. I do, yeah. It's, it's exhausting and, and stressful. Cause I'm basically a single mom, but but my, my kids. Not like they bring me so much joy, they just like ground me.

You know? Like many writers and artists, I have a kind of brain that can kind of spiral off, which is why I can create things like books, right? But then the other side of that is that, you know, it can spiral into unhealthy things too, right? And so it's just very good to have people around you who are like, yeah, mom, dinner, dinner is what's going on.

You know, what, what is for dinner? Also, I had a bad poop. Also, you know, like I'm not sure how to do long division and the dog ate the cat's food again. You know, or whatever. Like, just these, these daily very ordinary experiences, you know, of mothering and caring for others and, and cohabitating with others. Yeah. I'm very thankful for, for my children every day.

Haley: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . . All right. I dunno how to ask this without being spoiler-y. So we're riding like the edge here. I feel like

Shannon: Riding the edge of spoilerdom . Okay. Yes.

Haley: Okay. So I find it amazing that both Shannon and Erin, who is also Shannon, have, have no idea about their father. This father figure is like, not present through the story and yet is right. There's this like, and I thought, yeah, isn't this like an adoptee? Even in the like imagined, where I would have the answers, I can't even summon up the father on that side.

Shannon: Yes, yes, yes.

Haley: Now, is that too spoiler-y or is that? Without giving...?

Shannon: Okay. No, that's not spoiler-y no, I mean, and I don't think, I mean. The book is interesting because it's basically, like in the prologue, I tell you the whole story of the book. I tell you, I tell you my whole life in two pages, right? And then I'm like, okay, now I'm gonna do something else for the rest of the book.

So, you know, I, other readers might have like a different experience and I'll be glad to hear from them. But I don't think of it as that kind of book that you can like spoil cause just because those aren't the kinds of questions that it's sort of after. But yeah, I mean it's sort of like the Boise Collins Jr., who was my birth father, I mean, he is like, he and his family, that's like the black side of my family. So it's, it's like they've, they're lost and erased, in a way, for both Erin and Shannon. And that is a profound loss. You know, both of, you know, his role as her father, her birth father, but also in terms of, you know, the, the, the cultural loss of, you know, black culture.

And so I think both characters feel that keenly. One thing that I was really actually surprised by and talked with my editor about as I was writing this, is that I think in many ways though Erin is more alone than Shannon is in terms of her ability to navigate someof these difficulties and the supports that she has, you know, she's got this really close. Erin has this really close girlfriend Essie but other than that, she's really kind of on her own.

Haley: How does it feel writing about that loss knowing that, you know, he, he died when you were six years old and so there was never going to be an opportunity for you to meet him. And then how have you connected since I know you shared you were able to speak with your grandfather and how has that been?

Shannon: Yeah, so, my, my uncle, Boise Collins Jr. who's also is a character, actually big character in the book. He, I, I've sent him multiple drafts of the book. And the first thing that he said, which also brought me to tears this was the summer, was he's like, I feel like this is, yes, the story is about this journey. You know, like this, these, this young woman, these young women are trying to, you know, piece these things together. But he's also said, I feel like this is also, it's, it's for your father, it's for your dad. It's something that you made for him. Which of course yeah. Was incredibly moving to me because I'd never, again, I've never really, I didn't think of it consciously that way, but of course, you know, since other people have been reading it, they've also told me that same thing. And of course, you know, in life I never got to meet him, but in art I can, you know? Yeah.

Haley: I love that. That's the, that's it. That's perfect. I, again, no spoilers. I love how you write about him in the book. It's just tremendous.

Shannon: What do you, what do, what do you like about it? Can I just like why do you specifically

Haley: Well, when he's described as this like brilliant person and the accomplishments, I just went straight to, oh, of course. That's why Shannon is so brilliant and, you know, has written these like tremendous books and, and I thought, oh, this is the through line this, this is, you know, so to discover that and then. Actually really when I see you write about your son online and what he, I was gonna say precocious, some of the things that he's put, but it's, it's not that he, he's so wise beyond his years in the way you portray him online.

And you know, he pushes back on things that, you know, some of us would be too Shy to do, and I just think, oh yeah, that's the line. So I love that that's the piece you wrote, right? It's again, like this myth busting of like what we have in our heads sometimes about adoptees, birth parents, like Right, it's the stereotypical kind of like, whatever, low income, don't have enough resources so of course the baby has to get adopted out and you know, like all that kind of stuff. But that's not how you write him. Like he's a real person and he was brilliant and Yeah. Yeah, that's what I see. Yeah.

Shannon: Yeah. And complicated. You know, like, I mean, there's like part of this family that's like, yeah, he was bipolar and then there's another part of the family that's like, no, he just, he just had issues, you know, like on like, you know, and so it's just like I, and yeah, and I think that that's the other thing that, you know, sort of racialization and/ or sort of putting people into these stock categories, you know, like birth parent or whatever it does, is it takes away their individuality, you know?

Haley: Yeah. And their human, like, their humanity. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else you wanna share before we do our recommended resources?

Shannon: I just wanna thank, something that my, my friends and I call Planet Adoptee, you know, all the adoptees out there who are sharing their stories and connecting with each other and trying hold all the holes in our stories together and to, and to sit in those holes. Because I think it's a paradox that that's the only way that we, we will become whole. Mm-hmm. And so, or, or healed, you know, at least in moments. And so I just, yeah, I just wanna thank all of you for who you are and how you approach this life and and yeah, engaging with my, with my work. And love to hear, love to hear from you about it.

Haley: I, I think that's so powerful, right? Like, you know, you're in the podcast, you've written multiple books now. This is your speculative memoir that's out in the world. And there's, you know, so many of us that we're not, we're not gonna, we're not gonna write the book as much as we might want to, we're not gonna write the book. And so to have our stories represented and to be able to find pieces of them through you and other adoptees is just so magical. I think. So as I was reading your new book, I mean, I've read, I think I've read pretty much everything else that you've put out in the world. But because this was one, this was so deeply personal to you, it also was deeply personal to me as an adopted person. As you shared, there's all these documents like from the adoption agency, the letters from your birth and, and I mean like actual, you know, scanned copies of them. So people can see the handwriting and all of those things. It felt so real and ...

Shannon: I know probably sometimes too real, like sometimes Yeah.

Haley: It. Some of it I was like, oh my God, is this what my birth mother wrote about me? Is this what, like just so many like connection points I felt with you. I, I just, it's so good, Shannon. And I'm not just saying this cuz we're looking, you know, face to face here.

Shannon: Yeah. Thank you.

Haley: This is the thing that people wanted and we haven't really talked too much about, like, the whole premise. It's like, who the characters in the book. It's like, it's you and your story. And also what if you had stayed with your mother? Yeah. And so, and in looking at that kind of going back and forth, and that's what we always dream about as a kid.

Like so many of us think about like, well, what, what did we have been if we were still with our biological family? And so to have it like interspersed like that, The surprise. I mean, so good. I don't wanna say. this is the hard part. Like, how do you say that without saying the thing?

Shannon: Yeah, yeah. Right, you gotta read that part. Yes. You gotta read the book to, you know, get at the, sort of the, the, the ending, which is, you know, sort of like my nerd finale. But but yeah, I mean, I, I think so many of us, as you say, go about our lives with this. These dopplegangers, you know, this, this sort of, this, this person living on this alternate timeline.

That's me. But it, it's not me. And what does that mean for my own identity for my relationships, particularly, you know, probably with my adoptive family, but, but not just that, right? Like my sense of, of reality and. And so this was really sort of my, I mean, it's kind of a gift, but it's just sort of also just like this experiment, you know, of like really, you know, I, I described the premise of somebody, a non- adoptee one time, and they're like, oh, it's like sliding doors.

And I'm like, no, it's not... . No, it's not at all like sliding doors because sliding doors is this sort of, And I don't know if people know that it's an old movie with Gwyneth Paltro and it's like, oh, she did this. She went in this door. Then like her whole life would've been different, but she went in that door or whatever.

But it's like, you know, and there's many stories like that, but with this, it's sort of like, I wanted to really just like sink deeply into the, the other reality. For me, Erin Powers, you know, the, that was my name at birth. No, what is her daily life like, really? What is her life like with Patricia and you know, her white biological family, you know, and you know, with, with Shannon, you know, like how does she think about Erin and how do they intersect and what kinds of new knowledge or information can we get sitting deeply in those two realities.

That was really kind of the premise of the book. Because also, you know, another thing that my friend Sun Young said was that, you know, we, we have stories of search and reunion, but we actually don't have a lot of stories about the longitudinal experience of search and reunion, and she's like, and so I think it's also important that you wrote this book in your forties because it really shows the intergenerational sort of effects of this.

And you know, it's not seamless and it's not easy. And it's not, you know, like all these things, right? I mean, there's still all these ruptures that, that keep popping up.

Haley: Absolutely. And you, and there's this, the one thing that you do, that there's the whole chapter of this whole, you know, story, whatever, and then a little bit down the way you're like, oh, okay, that wasn't actually true.

Shannon: Yes.

Haley: Like struck through.

Shannon: It's like, oh yeah.

Haley: How many times has that happened to us? Yep. Yeah, it's so beautifully written. I mean, I know people have read your other work and so I'm sure they, they have an expectation. It what lives up to the expectation exactly of what you think this might be. And I love that you talk in our last interview that you're writing it like at that time and you tell us a little bit about it.

So anyway, that's just like a special little like breadcrumb trail to where we are now. Yeah. I just, I love that it's in the world and I think so many adopted people will feel very seen. No matter what their experience is, even if you've not had the reunion, even if you're, if you don't wanna search any of those things, it's like the speculative nature of it, like the what ifs.

I think that's very relatable. What do you wanna recommend to us?

Shannon: My friends at the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture they have a journal and it is, hard copy and online. The hard copy edition for this particular special edition isn't out yet, but it's available online and what it is is various critical adoption scholars, many of them adoptees talking about the Dobbs decision, which of course, you know, is taken away the abortion, women's right to abortion and nationally, and so critical adoptions, study scholars writing about how that intersects with issues of adoption.

And so I've read, you know, just a, a few of the pieces, they're all a thousand words or less, and you don't, you don't have to be an academic to appreciate them. And so I just, yeah, I just would encourage folks to, to check it out online.

Haley: Awesome. Yeah, I'll definitely link to that. Oh my goodness. So many brilliant people writing over there.

Shannon: Yeah. Oh my. Yeah, it's, yeah. Yeah. Kind of amazing. Yeah, they've, I think they have 12 up right now or some, something like that. That's a lot.

Haley: Okay. Well, and. What I find is when we read pieces like that, that can just help us in our everyday, if we're talking to people like it, it can give us language as well to express some of the things that probably have been turning around about those, right? Yeah. So yeah, and I agree, like you don't have to be academic to access any of those things. It's. readable. We're trying to like, help people access those things.

Shannon: Yes. Well, academics, it's like, it, it, it's a problem for academics too, right? Like, I, I mostly write creative stuff, but I do write some scholarly stuff and, you know, I've got a, a piece on little fires everywhere with, you know, Dr. Kimberly McKee coming out in feminist formations, you know, a little later in the year. And I mean, yeah, it's got some academic elements, and we're looking at little fires everywhere through a reproductive justice lens, right? We want, we, we don't just want academics to read it, you know, like we want to hear from just regular people, you know? So it, it, yeah. It, it is a problem that, you know, sort of, things get siloed into these places and people are like, oh, well that's not for me. But it's like, what? Not necessarily, you know, like.

Haley: Yes, it can be for sure. It can be. Okay. Can you tell us where we can connect with you online?

Shannon: Okay, so my website is probably the easiest way, and it's just my name ShannonGibney.com. And I try to keep that pretty up to date particularly with events and such. And then I'm on IG and it's Shannon at ShannonElaineGibney. My full name with my middle name and then Twitter is at Gibney Shannon and Facebook is Shannon Gibney.

Haley: Perfect. We'll link to all those and I'll definitely link to your events page cuz you've got lots of stuff coming up with the book release into the world. So there's live events, I think some virtual things coming to you, and we are going to have book club with you in February.

Shannon: Yeah, I'm so excited about that. I'm really so excited. So yeah, thank you.

Haley: You had mentioned earlier that in that in 2022 we, we read Dream Country, we also read See No Color, but we had you come for a Dream Country to have a conversation with our adoptee readers. It was so good. So can't wait for that and hopefully people will come and join us.

Shannon: That would be fantastic. Yeah. I love, I love book, book club, so thanks for telling me . Yeah.

Haley: We love adoptee writers and there's so many books we just, there's, you know, can't even pick them all, but you're our first repeat author.

Shannon: Woohoo.

Haley: In book clubs.

Shannon: Woohoo.

Haley: Love it. Love it. Thank you so much, Shannon. Congratulations on your brand new work, and I know there's more coming from you.

Shannon: Oh yeah. It's a busy, it is a very busy time right now, but a good time. Too. Yes. So yeah. Yeah. We like to be busy writers, like to be busy, so yeah, for sure.

Haley: Wonderful.

Shannon: Thank you Haley and everyone really appreciate it.

Haley: I totally missed asking Shannon about this, but I do wanna let you know, Shannon read her own audiobook. So if you are an audiobook fan and you want her to read this book to you, she will, which is so amazing. I love hearing authors read in their own voice and there's just something about that personal connection and they know what they meant when they wrote a sentence.

So you'll get the exact tone that they intend for you to get when you're listening. So I love. Shannon is so amazing. I think I mentioned in the show that this is gonna be her second book club with us, so we have that event coming up in February. If you wanna join us, it's adopteeson.com/bookclub has details about all the upcoming book club events and it is a live zoom.

So we usually have a one hour interview with the author, and it's me and my co-host Carrie Cahill Mulligan is gonna be doing that interview with Shannon and I take questions from the chat and read them out. And that's an hour on Zoom that is recorded, and then later the audio only is released into the podcast feed for patrons, so you can listen anytime if you're not able to join us.

Our book clips are usually Saturday mornings on North America time. And yeah, if you wanna join us, we would love to have you. We have some other book clips coming up right away. We are reading Already Enough by Lisa Olivera this month, which we have a book club with her at the end of January. Lots of great stuff happening over on Patreon for supporters of the podcast who help keep the lights on over here.

So AdopteesOn.com/community. If you want to learn about the other things about Patreon. If you have your calendar handy, our adoptee's only book club with Lisa Olivera reading already enough is going to be January 28th, 2023, and our book club with Shannon Gibney for her brand new speculative memoir is going to be February 25th, 2023 and both of those are Saturday mornings. Thank you for listening, and let's talk again next Friday.

235 JaeRan Kim, Ph.D.

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/235

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Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

(Upbeat music)

You are listening to adoptees on the podcast where adoptees discussed the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Happy 2023. What a way for us to begin the new year. One of the people I'm most highly esteem in the adoptee community is here, Dr. JaeRan Kim. JaeRan shares her personal story and a brilliant new model to help us move beyond "out of the fog" language and instead come into adoptee consciousness.

Dr. JaeRan Kim is an adoptee scholar and community leader, author of the prolific blog Harlow's Monkey, and as one of the very first adoptees, I had the great honor of learning from when I was first experiencing a rupture and dissonance in my understanding of adoption to use their new adoptee consciousness model language.

Before we get started, I wanted to invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We have a ton of amazing events coming up. I'll talk about that at the end of the show, so stick around to find out about that.

Dr. JaeRan Kim and I wrap up our interview with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

(Upbeat Music)

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Dr. JaeRan. Kim, welcome JaeRan.

JaeRan Kim: Thank you, Haley. I'm so honored to be asked to be on your podcast.

Haley: Okay. I'm gonna gush a little bit because you are one of the very first bloggers I ever followed back when I was first in reunion with my father, which was almost 12 years ago.

And you are one of the main reasons I started processing adoption in a different way. And so you were at, you know, on my bucket list. This is a bucket list interview for me, so I'm very, very honored to speak with you and I'd love it if you would start the way we usually do and share some of your story with us.

JaeRan Kim: Sure. I think most people probably know, if you've read my blog or listened to some of my other podcast interviews that I've done that I grew up in Minnesota. I was adopted in 1971 to a family there and you know, just had kind of what I would describe a pretty non-descript typical childhood. I had two younger siblings.

My parents were just, you know, kind of your typical, average suburban Minnesota family. We grew up, I grew up kind of having all the childhood experiences that most kids really thrive in. And what I typically say is that my parents were actually pretty good when it comes to talking about adoption. I didn't, I never felt really any different.

I never felt singled out. But the, the challenging part for me was we didn't talk about that I was a transracial adoptee, that I was Korean and that when I came I was almost three years old. And so there was just kind of a lot about that aspect of my identity that was never really touched on growing up.

And you know, I think like a lot of other adoptees, and I know we're gonna talk about this model that I did with some other adoptees, it took me a long time. I was like, typically in college before I really started thinking about and processing what it meant to be a transracial adoptee. And mostly that was because of the exposure I had to other people that had different experiences, well shared experience with me, but different from what I had experienced growing up.

Haley: And I saw that something happened to you when you were 30 years old that prompted something for you.

JaeRan Kim: We all have these catalyst moments, right? Where something specifically happens. I reconnected with a friend of mine that I had met, that known very briefly as a child and she said, I'm going to Korea.

I would like you to come to Korea with me to do a birth family search. And so we did. And that was really kind of what opened everything up for me is starting to meet other adoptees and getting connected to that community. At first it was Korean adoptees and that prompted me to come back and go back to school and think about becoming a social worker.

I really wanted to understand, you know, how could a child like me who was in these orphanages in South Korea end up in a white middle class Christian suburban family. It doesn't just happen, you know, the adoption narrative is kind of like, oh, you know, these parents need a kid and these kid, this kid needs a parent. It just happens and it all works out. And I knew that, that all these other things had to have happened for our family to be what it was.

And I wanted to understand it, and nobody could really explain it. My parents couldn't explain it. They didn't understand the mechanics of it other than their own personal experience.

So meeting other adoptees, hearing their stories, seeing the differences and the similarities really helped me think broader. Helped me think about, okay, so what are the systems? What are the push-pull factors? What happened in Korea? What happened in other countries? Oh, what happened in the United States?

You know, I only knew my own experience. I didn't really know anything about domestic adoption either. . And so going to school and getting my social work degree gave me the opportunity to really learn about how adoption's been practiced in the United States in other countries. It was, it was really, it was a catalyst for me.

Haley: So you started blogging around 2006?

JaeRan Kim: Mm-hmm.

Haley: And I have a quote that is from your blog, so I'll read it to you.

"It sounds cliche, but 10 years ago I was a totally different person from who I am today. I was a shy, timid, private, introverted person who believed that I'd never figure out how to do anything meaningful in my life. Everything I've done in these past 10 years has been because I had supportive and loving people in my life who believed I could amount to something in this world, even when I didn't believe them myself."

Now that was from January of 2010.

JaeRan Kim: Mm-hmm.

Haley: And so now we're 13 years later. So can you tell me about your evolution from, I guess age 30, from that pivotal moment to now, in your understanding of adoption and, and its personal impact on your life and, and the adoptees that you researched.

JaeRan Kim: And I would even have to say that I'd have to go back a little bit further than 2000 when I was 30 because, well, actually in 2000 I was 30, almost 32. I'm 54 now. So I'm trying to do the math here quickly, because in my twenties, I, I got married really young. My husband and I we're still together. We eloped when we were 20 years old.

Haley: Oh.

JaeRan Kim: And yeah. Yeah. And you know, part of that blog post that you just read, was about him because he really supported my whole journey.

When he met me, I wasn't thinking about adoption at all. I was barely thinking about race. You know, I was just, I look back at my little baby- adoptee/ adult- adoptee self and I just think about all the things I didn't know. And you know, a lot of partners when they marry or start, have re having relationships with their adoptee partners who go through that evolution sometimes there's a lot of questions like, why now? Why was this not an issue before? You know, what happened? And so having somebody who's really open to being able to say, yep, just tell me it's okay. I'm not, you know, non-judgmental. Okay, we'll figure this out together. I think it's really huge. So I, I'd just also like to give a shout out that part of going back to school, becoming a social worker, starting my blog, was really supporting, it was supported by him. He, he came up with a name Harlow's Monkey by the way.

Haley: Which is so brilliant. We love that.

JaeRan Kim: It's still great. Cause I was talking about in my social work programs, I was talking about Harlow's Monkey and then, you know, I wanted to start doing this blog and I couldn't come up with a catchy name and I was anonymous at first, so I didn't want anyone to know it was me again, that's that shy, introverted self. I didn't wanna be public. So he said, well what about Harlow's Monkey as as your moniker? And it was brilliant.

I think I just didn't really think that much about adoption outside of my own experience. And I had a lot of questions. My parents first of all were very open with my adoption records, what they had of it, and I didn't know to ask for more or to dig further.

And I would say that like a lot of people, I was just kind of going along for the ride. I just accepted everything that had happened to me as well. That just must have been the way that it needed to work out. I grew up in a very evangelical Christian family, and so there was a lot of talk about things that were meant to be.

It was God's will, that sort of thing. And so as I got older and started questioning things like, well, it's not, I didn't think personally it was God's will. I was really starting to uncover that there were people involved and they may have been doing it based on what they thought was God's will. But it was really impactful to me, and I don't, I didn't necessarily go along with, with that mindset, right?

Because I had left the church in my early twenties and was kind of going through my own spiritual identity at the same time. And because adoption was seen as so tied into Christianity in my family growing up it was kind of this, the rupture from being part of this organized religious community.

Also, the rupture around the way I thought about adoption happened at the same time because there's a lot of talk about saviorism and there's a lot of talk about, you know, I, I remember growing up there was a friend of mine who got pregnant when she was in college and everybody in the church wanted her to place the child for adoption.

And I said, I don't think she should do that. She's an adult, you know, she should be able to raise her child. And everybody kept saying, well, it's God's will for her to place that child for adoption. And that was the first time I think I really remember disagreeing, but I didn't feel like I had the power to really strongly argue for that.

Right. In the end, she did keep her child and she raised him, and so it, you know, things worked out, but just the whole narrative around the church saying this, this was in the best interest of both the child and the, and the parent. And that was really my first kind of inkling that, no, I think I have a different belief, but it wasn't fully formed yet.

It was really going to school and re- reading about the Native American boarding schools. Really looking at adoption policies and histories, reading lots of historical books about how adoption practices evolved over time. I was a child welfare student, so I knew I was gonna work in the field of child welfare and seeing how it was practiced, these things really changed how I saw adoption in really significant ways because I think I really learned if you support families, cuz most families love and wanna raise their kids, but there are obstacles and barriers to them being able to do that. And my experience working in child welfare wasn't that all these parents were abusing their kids.

Some did, but many times there were many other things that were preventing them from being able to raise their kids. And it's just everything learning about adoption subsidies. And not that I think that adoptive parents shouldn't receive subsidies necessarily, but why is all this money being spent on supporting kids in their adoptive homes when that money could have supported, you know, families of origin to keep their kids?

When I started working in child welfare, there weren't that many kids being raised by their relatives to keep them intact in their larger families and communities where they had that continuity of history and family. Now that's changed, but when I was working in child welfare in the two thousands, early two thousands, it wasn't the priority.

And I was really influenced by folks like Kevin Campbell who did the Family Finders work. And he would take youth in foster care that supposedly were cold cases, they had no known family members. He would be able to find an average of 40 to 60 family members for these youth in foster care and helped them get connected.

And so I knew that there were people out there doing this work that had kind of the counter narrative to what I had always assumed, you know? And that also then really shaped how I thought about it, and I wanted to, I really wanted other people to know this information too. That was part of the reason why I started the blog.

I was documenting my own journey and I wanted other people to, to have the same information that I had because information is powerful.

Haley: Absolutely. And so you have this moment in your twenties of being like, oh, family preservation. Like of course this, this woman should parent her child. Even when everyone else was like, oh, you know, you should give... and then you see all these systemic practices that have promoted adoption over a preservation.

And, and I, I'm, I'm making some assumptions now, but you see the lack of actual academic studies past childhood for adoptees. Can you talk about that? Finding the gap in the knowledge?

JaeRan Kim: When I was working in child welfare, I was working in foster care adoptions. These were youth that had already experienced a termination of parental right.

That means legally their, you know, their families, their first parents were no longer had any legal physical rights to make decisions about their lives, right? So my job was to find adoptive families for them. And I would read home studies and I would say, I would think, is there a script for home studies?

These parents, all their home studies, all look exactly the same. I used to joke in Minnesota that the families were all married, they all lived outside of the city. They were active in their church. The mom was liked to read and sew or read and quilt, and the dad liked to go fishing and hunting. It, it was almost like a script.

and I had the opportunity to, as part of my work, to attend prospective parent trainings and kind of support groups. And I just really felt like there wasn't, we weren't preparing adoptive families very well and the practices that we were doing every day, I had questions about what's the research evidence on this?

Because talking to the youth, and I worked mostly with youth who were like 12 to 17 years old and they're very vocal and they, they would tell me what they thought about the ways that we were practicing child welfare when I would talk to them about adoptive, prospective adoptive families and what they wanted in an adoptive families.

You know, really listening to them and hearing what they had to say, I thought we're not doing a good job on the end of trying to find adoptive families for these kids that are really gonna listen and who are gonna affirm their identities, who are going to see them for who they are. So I started looking at the research and I have to say I was really disappointed in how the combination of my own personal experience and then my professional experience working with youth who, adopt or foster youth, and really kind of wondering like, where is the research that kind of talks about what everybody is saying, who's had this lived experience of being either in foster care or being an adoptee.

Because at this time I had also been, again, like meeting all these other adoptees, Korean adoptees and black transracial adoptees and Native American adoptees. And so I was meeting many, many more people who had foster care or adoption experiences and I didn't think the research really spoke to our lived experiences.

And I remember saying to my husband, I think I need to go to a PhD program, because I, I want to ask the questions that nobody else is asking, cuz most of the questions were asking young kids about their experiences and they could tell you what it was like to be an eight or a nine year old, but they couldn't tell you, you know, when they're 30 or 40 or 50 or 60, what it was like being a kid.

You know, kids wanna please their parents, they don't wanna say anything wrong. You know, I just, I was always a little concerned about how much assurance adults were placing on what kids were saying when they hadn't gone through their whole adoptee development yet. You know, like all of us do. So they were making placement, like professionals are making placement decisions based on what little kids are saying without thinking about how that might impact us when we're much older in our lives.

And youth, especially if you're adolescents, there's so much negativity around what they say and what they want. And I just really felt like we weren't listening, we weren't listening to, to what youth in foster care were saying about their experiences and how they thought about adoption. They're constantly being told you don't know what's in your best interest, but they're, they will tell you what they think and it has to be nuanced.

You know, obviously, like when you're an adolescent, you don't know everything yet, you know. So sometimes adults do have, you know, that wisdom to share about what might, what they might wanna anticipate in the future. But I really felt like we weren't listening to foster youth at all.

Haley: So I know you've done multiple different studies that have added to the, you know, wealth of knowledge now about, well, maybe not wealth, but like, the start of knowledge about adult adoptees and our experiences.

And, I, I do, I'm we're gonna get to the model that you developed with some adoptee peers. I first wanna ask, how has it been now in recent years working in this field as an adult adoptee and wanting to add to the conversation about adult adoptee experiences and looking back to childhood and et cetera?

I mean, I was at a conference that you presented at last year, early in the year with I think probably a student of yours. And you know, there's other people presenting at the conference that are adoptive parents or are still working in adoption and perpetuating some of the problematic, you know, system that you have, you know, shared like you're like discovering as you were going through your, you know, blogging and, and academia career.

So what is it like for you and how do you deal still being and working with colleagues that are still doing this problematic stuff?

JaeRan Kim: There's, there are. Yeah. It, it can be challenging. There are biases, but I think, well, first of all, there have been adoptees doing research and doing the work long before me and I am where I am because they, some of them reached out or recognized me or mentored and supported me. I was highly influenced by a number of adoptees who are doing research. You know, Dr. John Rabel and Amanda Baden, and Dr. Gina Samuels. So there have been lots of others who I read their articles when I was in grad school and that helped me kind of think and formulate strategies for how I'm gonna do my own research.

I think one of the things that is the hardest for me is, and a lot of adoptee researchers are pretty good about, and kind of insistent on talking about our positionality and talking about how our lenses and our experiences inform the questions that we ask and the, the way we design our studies and the topics that we wanna explore.

And it's always been frustrating to me how few adoption researchers who are adoptive parents and they don't disclose it, or they think that it doesn't provide a, a bias or any specific lens to their work. And I've always really just wondered like, what is what that is? I, I constantly hear new like, oh, did you know so and so is an adoptive parent?

And it's, of course, it's somebody that does adoption research and I didn't know . I just learned of another one. And I'm always like, why don't they ever talk about it? I mean, we talk about it. And what that does is it creates a sense that adoptees are biased and that when we do our research, we're doing it because of our own, you know, oftentimes they think it's our own bad experiences with adoption.

One of the things that I talk about is like, I don't have like a bad adoption story, right? I think I have kind of the classic adoption story for a lot of adoptees, meaning that there were some things that, you know, were hard and challenging growing up, but like I, my adoptive parents weren't abusive and you know, so all those things.

But there is an assumption that, because I like to research the things that aren't talked about in adoption. For example, adoption disruptions and displacement and adoptee estrangements from their adoptive parents. This isn't necessarily driven just because I had this experience. I talk about it because so many adoptees have told me their stories and nowhere, it's not found anywhere.

And in fact, when I bring it up with other child welfare or adoption researchers, I often get this, well, there's no data on that. They discount it. Well that's such a small percentage, we just don't have enough information about that. But until we start to actually do research on it, we never will. And all those people who have had those experiences, their voices are never gonna be documented.

They're never, their experiences are never gonna be taken seriously. And I think that that's terrible, for lack of a better word. I think that that's, that's abhorrent. We need to be documenting all of the experiences that adoptees have, not just the ones that make it look like everything is great, and so we should continue the practices and the status quo.

And I don't, even if it's only 5%, even if it's 10%, we need to be re-looking at our practices. If there's five or 10% of the adoptees that are not being, if they're adoptions harm them, we need to take that seriously. I've said this to other folks too. You know, when there's something else that's kind of a public health crisis, the threshold is much less than that.

But when it comes to adoptees, we tend to say, well, unless it becomes like the majority, then it's fine. But we have made, we have changed laws for a much smaller percentage of people who have been harmed by things. I just think that we need to be thinking the same way when it comes to child welfare and to the, to adoptees.

Haley: Absolutely. So we're so thankful that you are like, oh, we don't have data on that. Okay, let's get some. So you're. The people doing that. And I appreciate too, you know, this acknowledgement of all those who've come before us, right? So for me, I look at you and I'm like, oh my gosh, she came before me. And in your blog you were always highlighting and continue to do so, all of the folks that you learned from and, and you would reference and all, all of those things.

So I appreciate that, trying to bring all that knowledge to the next gen and the next gen after that, et cetera. So before we talk about the model you developed with your colleagues, you know, the language that we've used for years is adoptees coming outta the fog. Meaning some form of when we realize the impact adoption has had on our lives and the implication that people that are still, you know, air quotes in the fog, haven't woken up to that yet.

Awaken awakened from the great sleep as Betty Jean Lifton would say. But something that you pointed out to me before we started recording when we were planning the interview, that you mentioned that you didn't want adoptees to feel shame if they didn't know about the complexities of adoption because the system was built to support keeping us in the dark.

JaeRan Kim: Yes.

Haley: Can you talk about that please?

JaeRan Kim: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is something that I learned, you know, when I was going through my own awakening or out of the fog or however you wanna call it, we would call it moving into rupture. Yeah, we know there's so much about the process of adoption that is hidden. You've raised I mean, our whole identities as adoptees are kept secret.

And Tony Corsentino, who you had on your podcast, I loved how he phrased the difference between privacy and secrecy, right. And how, who it benefits. I thought he did such a great job of articulating that. And that's, I think that that's a huge part of what I mean by this, that statement. Because so much of an adoptee's life is shrouded in secrecy with this kind of assumption that it's meant to protect people, but it really doesn't, it's actually quite harmful for us to not have our information and know our identities.

And so it, because we're constantly told these paradoxes like, this happened for your own good. That when we start to really explore and think about it and understand, oh, all these adoption practices, some of them are really, really harmful. The idea of falsifying our birth certificates, for example, and that we don't have access to our original birth certificates.

And these are really damaging to a person's sense of identity, but it's also just damaging to all the things that happen when we live our daily lives. Like every, we're, well, you know, this, you know, adoptees are the only people that, that don't actually have true identities because they're all built on false documents.

Haley: Isn't that, it's wild to think about, right? Like you just paused there, like uhhuh . It is, yeah. And you're talking about original birth certificate access and you're someone that actually doesn't even know when your actual birthday was. You know?

JaeRan Kim: Right, right. Like or where I was born at all right.

Haley: You're like, I think I came, I was around three. I mean, who, who gets to decide how old you are?

JaeRan Kim: Well, that's just it. Exactly. Who gets to decide all of it? Who gets to decide? You know, who our parents are going to be? Who gets to decide what our names are going to be? Who gets to decide if our birth dates are accurate? Who gets to decide how much of our past family history we are entitled to know? All of that. And as you know, especially in the United States, but it happens everywhere, because there's more of a demand for especially young children, babies, and, and infants. So many people have done really unethical and illegal things in order to become parents.

Adoption professionals and I really say that social workers in particular need to be held accountable for how they've participated in falsifying records, in obscuring information and advocating for legislation that perpetuates this harm of us not being able to have access to our own information. Right. I mean, that's just it there, and I'm not even talking about then once we're placed in families and what, how we screen and the narratives around who's believed.

You know, as we know there are adoptive parents, it's like there's other parents who are not always providing safe loving homes for their children, but because they're adoptive parents, the scrutiny isn't there. And in the same way that it is for families of origin, if there's any allegations of abuse or neglect.

My research found adoptees would often tell other adults that they were being abused or neglected in their homes and they were not believed. Or people would kind of throw their hands up and they say, well, you know, there was this assumption that adoptive parents are always better parents because of who our first parents are and the fact, you know, that there was a reason why we were with the adoptive parents instead.

All of this is just a complicated way of saying that the system all the ways that laws and policies and practices have kind of purposely kept us away from this information. You know, when we aren't informed about our own structural systems that that had a hand in how our families were put together, then it's really easy of course for us just to believe all the platitudes and the media and what everybody has said.

You know, adoptive parents tell their kids, "oh, your, your first mom loved you so much she placed you for adoption", or "we got to choose you" knowing that actually all those different things are probably not true. They don't actually really know most of the time, you know, organizations, agencies, professional staff, they did the matching.

They worked with the first families. You know, it might be a little bit different now in with open adoptions and and stuff, but at least for most of us who are of a certain age, it was really kind of random about how we ended up in the families that we ended up in. And so once you start to uncover and, and dig in and learn about all this, that's when you have what we in, in our model called the rupture, right?

All of a sudden you're like... and then you can feel a huge sense of internal shame, like, why didn't I know? Or, this is partly what we're hoping this model is going to do is help other adoptees, not be so negative towards adoptees who haven't learned this yet. Right. Because I think that we can cause lateral harm to each other when we say like a good adoptee is one who is anti- adoption or wants to abolish adoption or whatever.

We have a lot of diversity in our experiences. And so I think that all of our experiences need to be taken into consideration. And so some adoptees might be starting their path towards becoming more critically aware, but if they feel like they're not doing it fast enough or in the same way that other adoptees do, they might actually just close down and shut down and go back into a more convenient status quo phase and not do that exploration.

And so I, I want us to support every adoptee. Mm-hmm. who's go going through that.

Haley: Well, it feels like it's not. Safe, then it's not safe to explore cuz you're just gonna get shut down. And when you were describing earlier, the word that was in my head of, of the experience of us growing up and being told all of these things and the societal pressure was just indoctrination.

JaeRan Kim: Yes.

Haley: Like we have been indoctrinated. So to unpack years and years of that, I absolutely, like, I'm, I'm so glad you used the word shame. Like it does feel, it's like once you see it, you can't unsee it. And so this, this idea that you're like, how come I didn't see it? Like I'm not, am I not a stupid person? I don't understand.

Anyway, let's, let's, can you go through the model and the different pieces for us? Cuz I think that will help just frame our discussion about this. So Yeah, I'll, I'll let you go ahead and do that.

JaeRan Kim: So we, of course, you know, some of our. Adoptee ancestors as you know, Betty Jean Lifton, and we looked at the model that Boarders, Penny (JM) and Borders (DI) had done, kind of, and then we, we kind of looked at other groups of people, specifically Paolo Freire and his pedagogy of the oppressed, working with folks who you know, like conceptualizing the idea of what happens when people start to question and they develop a critical consciousness about their oppression.

Gloria also, you know, writes about the process of, in her specific case, what does it mean to be mixed race? What does it mean to be mestiza? What does it mean to be a multilingual, multiethnic and queer and try to embrace all of these identities in these, in this world that wants to put you in these narrow confines.

And as adoptees, we all know, right? We are used to knowing that we're from multiple families, that we have these really these experiences that are not singular. And so we wanted to kind of talk about that as well as kind of think about identity development, because there's been several identity development models around like adoptees throughout their, their lives.

But identity development models tend to be really kind of like you're in this phase and then you're in this phase, and then maybe you come over here. And oftentimes there's a judgment about one, phases being good or bad.

Haley: Right, the linear and like ..

JaeRan Kim: The linearness of it.

Haley: You gotta go from one to two and and number four is the highest Uhhuh.

JaeRan Kim: Right. Right. And here's where you should be and here's where we don't want you to be anymore. And again, that causes a sense of shame if you are not there yet, or if you haven't had experiences that have challenged you to think about the paradoxes or to think about both/ and. So we really wanted a model that was, more holistically show kind of demonstrated what many of us go through, which we think is more of a spiral because you might learn something like, let's say you realize, oh, it's actually problematic that my birth certificate says that I was born in a place that I was not born, to people who I was not born to, right?

That's, that's actually not true, and yet I don't have access to that true information. So it may start there. You may not be ready yet to be thinking about, did my adoption agency falsify? Maybe I'm not truly an orphan, or maybe this information my parents received about my first family isn't accurate. Or maybe I was kidnapped or stolen, or you know, whatever the situation is.

You may not be ready to go there yet, but maybe you're ready to start just thinking about what are the ethics around having a birth certificate that's not true and accurate. You can go through all these different stages and kind of circle around and go back. You might feel like you've resolved one part of your adoption experience, but again, it may be a while before you have a rupture that kind of propels you to be thinking about something else.

So that's why we conceptualized our motto as spiral instead of as linear, and we wanted to kind of say like, status quo is just like when you just don't question what's been told to you. It's accepting, accepting it without any kind of curiosity. Right. And a lot of adoptees do this because it's safe.

And you're validated by larger society and it's a protective measure, right? So one of the things that I sometimes tell people who kind of question that is like, you know, well they seem fine and they don't seem to care and they, they're uncritical. And I'm like, well, maybe they had to be uncritical.

Maybe it was the safest thing for them to be uncritical because they know that they're in a family or they can sense that their environment wouldn't be supportive of them exploring that. So maybe it will take, that's why I think a lot of us, as the older we get, the more we're able to be critical and to, to look at adoption and with a critical lens.

Because the older we get, the more resources we have, the better we know ourselves. We oftentimes have supported people in our lives and so it's a safer way for us to do that. But that's why I think it's also really, it can be really challenging for some because they may, may not have that safety around them to do that exploration.

So the status quo is kind of where I think many of us start out. And then rupture again is where something happens. We learn a bit of information, we meet somebody who had a different experience. It's what kind of is the catalyst or the instigator to us starting to have questions and start to think like, oh, maybe what I knew isn't the way it is.

And then dissonance is that time period where you're really struggling between what you thought, you know, knew the information you're starting to learn. And it's really what I, I kind of call it like struggling with the paradoxes because there's so many paradoxes and adoption. So for example, we said if somebody says your birth mother, I don't like to use birth mother, but it's common for people to say, your birth mother loved you so much, she placed you for adoption cuz she wanted a better life for you.

So struggling with that, that's the time of dissonance. Like, is that really true? And maybe at that point you've searched for your first family and maybe you've met your first family and you find out that's not true. And so it's that real struggle around what can I believe? What should I believe? That dissonance is like, I need to do something about it, but you don't really know what.

And the expansiveness is where you start to kind of dig deeper into it and say, okay, I, I need to do more thinking of this. I need to do more research on this. I need to explore this dissonance more. I need to see if I can find ways to help me come to terms and understand what has happened. And then the last stage we call forgiveness and activism.

And that's really where we've done a lot of the work in our expansiveness time. We start to formulate some ideas about what it means to us. And then oftentimes it's where we wanna join in with other people now and start to think about the broader sense. So it's a little bit of a pullback from our own individual experiences and now where we're starting to say, let's join these other groups.

Let's coalesce. Let's you know it's where you might do some activism. And people sometimes ask about the forgiveness part. And when we talk about forgiveness, we don't mean like carte blanche, just say like, oh, like the adoption system was abusive towards me and caused me harm, but it's okay, I forgive them.

It's about, again, taking that larger, broader view in saying things happened and yes, we should hold people accountable, but also I use the example of like adoptive parents; kind of understanding that our adoptive parents were told the same lies that everybody else was told, right? And so sometimes the things that they did that were not supportive are because they really believed what other people had told them and they wanted to believe that.

And so we can understand that they did or said things that were harmful to us, but not because they were intending necessarily to be harmful to us, but that it was part of the larger system that intentionally tried to keep us all in the dark. So I don't know if that helps some of the listeners with that aspect, but I know that's something that we get asked about.

Haley: I think it's, I, I, I appreciate that you brought it up cuz I did have a question about that. . And when I read the paper as I read it, it doesn't mean like, oh, you have to have forgiven. Especially for, I mean there's lots of us that are, as you mentioned earlier, are estranged from adoptive parents or had a bad situation, and it's not like forgiving for that.

It's, it's more this piece of the participation in the adoption industry as a whole versus like our personal kind of relationship with them. Am I getting that correct?

JaeRan Kim: Yes. I mean, because people still need to be held accountable for their behaviors and their actions. So we're not saying, oh, if you had abusive parents, just forgive them.

Not at all. Understanding you may have been placed in that family because of poor adoption practices by an agency who didn't do their due diligence and vetting your parents, for example. You're not necessarily even forgiving that adoption agency. Like they should still be held accountable if they committed some unethical practices.

But for us to be able to work together and move forward, I don't say move on because I don't think we need to forget what happened to us, but moving forward, meaning to, to be able to help change the system, to change society, we also need to be able to kind of just say like, yes, things happen. Like history is filled with terrible things that have happened and I just, I think we felt like we need to be able to have a sense of, for... and one more thing, a sense of forgiveness for ourselves for also not knowing as well, right?

The forgiveness is like a larger sense of just like trying to heal ourselves. Not saying people aren't, shouldn't be held accountable for the things that they did.

Haley: Mm-hmm. , it's kind of like, there isn't quite the right word. Like, it's like trying to find a sense of peace in it. Not necessarily, yeah, like, like you said, not necessarily forgetting, like forgive and forget or that kind of a thing, but some sense of coming to terms with it so that you can be an activist and change things, if that's your vibe or not.

JaeRan Kim: Or not. Well, you know, it's also, it's like the difference between wanting to change the system out of a sense of revenge versus out of a system of collective community care.

Haley: Mm. Oh, that's good, right? Mm-hmm.

JaeRan Kim: Because, because anybody can try and, and be an activist out of a sense of revenge. There's this Nietzsche quote that was, really instrumental to me back in the early blogging days, which is, it's a paraphrase, but it's like, 'be careful fighting monsters lest you become one.'

And so sometimes you can see people who are really trying to change things using the same kind of tactics that were really harmful to us to keep us oppressed. And so for me, it's a reminder that we always need to be thinking about, how are we moving forward and changing the system out of a sense of community care, not in harmful ways that are just gonna perpetuate the oppression that we've experienced.

Haley: Hmm. I love that. I think that's something we definitely need to be mindful of. Can you just share who your co-authors are of this, Out of the Fog and Into Consciousness: A Model of Adoptee Awareness.

JaeRan Kim: Yep. So Dr. Susan Branco is the lead author. We worked on this together with Grace Newton, who is a Chinese adoptee. And then the other two co-authors is Dr. Kripa Cooper-Lewter, and Paula O'Loughlin, who works in education. And we're all adoptees. We're all transracial, transnational adoptees. And we're thrilled to talk about our model cuz we hope that it's helpful for people.

Haley: Well, and one of the things that you chose to do is have it accessible. So like for lots of academic articles, if folks don't know, you can click on a link and then you're... pay walls.

JaeRan Kim: You're asked to pay $40 to look at an article that you may not find meaningful to you.

Haley: Yeah. So to have this gift to the community is so amazing. Like. Hats off. Like I'm just really impressed by that.

And I really love this spiral model, and you share more about this in the paper and about how you can be in two different touchstone pieces at once and you can move back and forth. And as you said earlier when we were explaining the it's, it's not that, you know, stage one, stage two, stage two, stage four kind of thing.

It's very fluid. And I think we all really heard from you like, this is more about not having judgment for where other adoptees are in the process. So I really appreciate that. So can you say before we do our recommended resources, I mean we are so in the habit here of saying, coming out of the fog or like, oh, I know people don't like that, but you know, when you come out of the fog, like, how do you picture us, if you do, adapting this language into, you know, our regular vernacular when we're talking about this?

JaeRan Kim: That's a good question. I think, you know, if people know the different kind of touchstones or experiences, so again, we don't say like you're in this stage, but we talk about them as touchstones. So like if you've experienced rupture and that's a touchstone for you, that's kind of.. Rupture is the, the word that kind of describes your feelings and your thoughts and your actions at that particular point in time.

Like it's kind of a represent, representation of where you might be at. So if people can start to think about like, oh, I just experienced this rupture, or I'm experiencing dissonance right now because I'm having a hard time understanding the information that I had versus this new information I just received and I don't know where to, what to believe anymore.

That could be one way of helping it. Again, it's not like we want to force people to stop saying you're in the fog or outta the fog, but I think for our, for what we were talking about is the quote unquote, out of the fog time in your life, it's, it's not just a static one way of being. There's so many other iterations of what happens and you can be out of the fog, so to speak, in one area of your life and not in another area.

And so then how do you describe yourself that way? Right. So I think for the fog metaphor, I can see why people like it. It's just so concrete. You can imagine it. We've all experienced what a fog is like. And so I think I get why we use that term. We just wanted more nuance, I guess, is, you know, we wanted more, more descriptors for the different ways that we understand our adoptions.

Haley: I, I, and it absolutely does that for me. I see, I love the, how you said that, like, oh, I'm outta the fog. Okay. Well, I feel like I was outta the fog six years ago and my , I've been podcasting for six years, my perspective on adoption has totally shifted even from men. And so I love being able to see all of these different pieces in this model.

I just think it's brilliant. So my recommendation is that people will, will link to it. There's a few different places, I think a couple of you have shared on your blogs or your websites where you can download it. And like, I sat down with it with a highlighter and I wrote notes on it, like I was a nerd. I'm back in university. And that's what I hope people do. I think it's really helpful, honestly, I'm not just saying that cuz you're like right there. But JaeRan, I really think it will be so impactful for the community and already has been.

JaeRan Kim: We are going to be doing some focus groups after, you know, sometime in 2023 we're gonna be launching some focus groups so that we can hear from more adoptees about what this model might look like in different people's lives. So hopefully people will continue to check in with us so that we can get the information when we start to do our focus groups and potential surveys.

Haley: Oh, perfect. Yes. Okay. We will let people know where they can connect with you for sure. . I also, I've recommended your blog so many times on the show. I know other guests have, but y if you go back , I was doing that this morning. I was like, holy moly, you, you had a lot of posts there, Harlow's Monkey, and I was, I was scrolling back through, you know, how you go like, next post, next post, next post. And I was like, oh, I never heard of that. Like, I was still like finding think gems. So I hope folks go check that out. I mean, if you haven't yet, where, are you here? I guess so.

JaeRan Kim: I have a link. I have one page that has a link of kind of some of the more popular posts that people have either commented on or shared over, you know, since 2006 and they're kind of categorized. So that might be helpful for somebody who's new because as you said, like I've been posting since 2006.

There's a lot of content and, you know, if you want kind of a quick summary for people to go to, if you wanna hear my thoughts about race or child welfare or, you know, different things.

Haley: The angry adoptee post from 2007, right, when no one told me about adoption '09, anti-racism work from, you know, decades ago, like we're, oh yeah. Yeah. There's so much there. Thank you. Thank you so much for your work. I, I can't say enough. Really, really appreciate your commitment to the adoptee community and highlighting adoptee voices first. I think I must have learned that from you by osmosis, but you have it written down multiple places where that is your top priority.

What do you wanna recommend to us?

JaeRan Kim: Yeah, so I wanna recommend another really kind of old school resource because it was so helpful for me. I found it when I was doing some of my grad school work around 2006, 2007. It's called the Adoption History Project, and it's by author Ellen Hermann. She wrote a book called Kinship by Design, which anybody who wants to know about kind of the way modern, by modern we mean like from the 19 hundreds till today, modern adoption practices developed, who were the main influencing people in, what's kind of the science behind that?

She wrote this great book and when she was doing it, she kept this website, this adoption history project website, and it's, there's so much information cuz she would go to the archives and then she would, you know, find documents, primary documents. Anyway, it's such a great resource and it's an old school website, so it's not as easy to navigate as, as they are today.

Haley: Is it back in style now? I was like, oh, is this ? What's old is new again.

JaeRan Kim: Yeah. I, I would just give it a chance because I think it's such a great way for any of us to start to look at adoption, the way adoption has been conceptualized and practiced in the United States. So she also has stuff around transracial adoption and Native American adoption and international adoption.

There's, there's a lot of stuff there. So I think that's a good place for anybody to start. It will give you a little bit and then you can look for more.

Haley: Totally. The timeline. Yeah. With starting with the you know, orphan Train and the adoption of children act, and I mean, timely also. Right. She's writing about ICWA which is now under review for 2023. There'll be, you know mm-hmm. some ruling on it. And yeah. Again, talking about those who've come before us and have been documenting these things. I mean, it is on us not to be ignorant about it, honestly. So if you're in the, which, which touchstone? If you're in the forgiveness and activism touchstone, expansiveness. It could be expansiveness.

JaeRan Kim: Expansiveness, yes. I would say it's a good resource for that.

Haley: Okay. Well, we are gonna practice using the touchstone lingo here and our great thanks. I will. I can't speak on behalf of the community, but I'm going to right now, our great thanks on the community for all the work that you've done for us.

Dr. Kim, it is just honor to be able to talk with you.

JaeRan Kim: Well, thank you, Haley, for being part of the community and for all the work that you've done on your podcast. Been very important to elevate adoptive voices.

Haley: Thank you. Where can we connect with you online?

JaeRan Kim: So I would say Harlow's Monkey. My blog is probably the best place to start cuz I have links to all my social media there.

But I am on Instagram, I have a Harlow's Monkey Facebook account. I'm on LinkedIn. , I'm on Twitter, but not really. Not much. And that was even before , the recent changes happened. But you, yeah. You should be able to find me in multiple ways. You can also, I've started doing what I'm calling lab notes, which are these kind of weekly summaries.

And so you can sign up on my blog, website and you can get it to your email if you like that better.

Perfect. And

Haley: I'm assuming that when the time comes for your reaching out to people, that you'll be posting about that in all those spots?

JaeRan Kim: Yes.

Great. Thank you again so

Haley: much.

JaeRan Kim: Thank you.

Haley: Wow. I can't wait to hear more from JaeRan and her co-authors of the adoptee consciousness model. It is so fascinating and I think it will be really, really helpful for the community. As I already said in the episode.

I want to let you know about some of the awesome adoptees on events that are coming up. Patreon supporters are folks that support the show monthly or by a yearly subscription. And we have Zoom events through the year here and there. And if you're listening the day this came out, we have an adoptee's off-script party on January 14th with our, one of our favorite therapists, Pam Cordano and we're talking all about how to be a bad adoptee which I think is very funny.

We also have book club meetings coming up. With Lisa Olivera. We're talking about her book Already Enough. We are going to be reading Shannon Gibney's brand new speculative memoir, the Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be. And we're gonna be talking about Harrison Mooney's book, Invisible Boy. I'm telling you, the next few months, it is a happening place on Adoptees On Patreon.

So if you wanna join us, Adoptesson.com/communithy has details of how to sign up and we would love to have you join us. Our live Zoom events are only for adoptees. And most of them are recorded and released in audio form later in a podcast form. So if you're not an adoptee, you can listen later, but you just aren't invited to the live event. Those are adoptee only.

Okay. Thank you so much for listening. Excited about the new year, and let's talk again next Friday.

234 [Healing Series] Positive Racial Identity

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/234

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Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

(upbeat music)

Haley Radke: You are listening to adoptees on the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption. I'm Haley Radke. 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. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps to support you and the show to support more adoptees around the world.

Today we are talking all about developing a positive racial identity and links to everything we'll be talking about are on the website, AdopteesOn.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to Welcome to Adopetes On, Dr. Abby Habserry! Welcome Abby.

Abby Hasberry: Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: I would love it if you would start. This is the first time you've been on and in our healing series I always love for folks to get to know the therapist a little bit. So would you share just a little bit of your story with us?

Abby Hasberry: I am a transracial adoptee, adopted in 1971, so in the baby scoop era, I am a black adoptee adopted by a white family who already had three biological children. So I was the only black child in my family.

I have lived all over the place, all over the world, all over, the US and the world, and have had a lot of experiences just with growing and learning and just becoming the person that I am now. To include, I'm also a birth mom. I was a teenage mom in 1988 and placed a child for adoption there. I consider myself a victim of adoption coercion in that instance. I am also in reunion on both sides of my biological families and with my son as well. I'm a trained educator, former principal, and now a therapist, and I work predominantly with adoptees and specifically have a kind of a special niche for transracial adoptees who are working on racial identity development and working through racialized trauma,

Haley Radke: Which is so needed. Oh my word. How many adoptees have come to me and been like, I need a therapist who gets, who gets me, and, have you heard this before? I have several friends that have said this to me in private, transracial adoptees, black and otherwise even will say "I feel white. I look in the mirror and I see a white person."

It is very hard to, just get back to, or they feel like they're appropriating culture if they do any sort of exploration into racial identity work. I imagine you have folks saying that to you too.

Abby Hasberry: Yes That is actually the exact reason why I decided to switch from education and become a therapist. I was doing some work in just some of my own healing in adoption groups and on Facebook and Instagram, and just kind of introducing myself to the adoptee community, and I started to have black transracial adoptees, specifically females, approached me and asked how I was so confident in my racial identity. They talked a lot about feeling like they were uncomfortable around other black women and uncomfortable in their own skin and didn't feel like they fit in in the black community, but also recognized that they didn't fit in completely in the white community.

And so that is exactly why I decided to become a therapist, because I realized that there was an increased need or just not an increased need, but a need, a huge need in that field, especially with transracial adoptees. And so when I sat down to support them and talk through them and trying to see what was there, what was there for support, there were just weren't many, if any, black racial identity development trained therapists who really understood adoption as a trauma.

Who understood what it means to really identify racially and be proud of your racial identity, who have done that kind of work. And it just so happened that as an educator, my PhD was on the experiences of black teachers in predominantly white and affluent private schools. And so my work was around identity development before I even came into therapy.

And it was around feelings of tokenism and feelings of invisibility. At the same time being highly visible, the heightened visibility of being the only one. And so it just kind of happened that that unicorn space was something that I was able to fill once I went to school and, and got that, got a degree in marriage and family therapy.

Haley Radke: Can you go back a little bit to your junior high, high school years, because I've listened to several interviews and appearances that you've done and, and read some of your writing, and I found it really interesting how you, in those age ranges, you were seeking out black friends and then going home and putting on your, like assimilated- into- white- culture voice and going back to that and like living two different sorts of identities at the time.

Can you talk about that? Because I think it's probably a pretty common experience and also not. I think a lot of folks don't even realize that they could experience that too. So I'd love to hear more about that.

Abby Hasberry: Sure. So I think it even goes back further because we moved so much, I grew up from first to third grade in Egypt, and my primary identity at that time was as an American.

My mom taught at private schools where my, my family and I all attended, my siblings and I all attended, so I never had an adoptee identity at that time. And just growing up, because everyone always knew. So it wasn't something I talked about or anything I even explored because I was just Mrs. Madera's daughter and everyone knew who my family was.

And so there was never that kind of question of reintroducing myself or any of those questions because it was such a small expat community in Egypt. But I was very aware of being American in a different, a different country. And so in middle school, when we moved to Miami, Florida, I still attended the school where my mom went.

So that identity was still, my adoptee identity was still something I didn't really explore, but all of a sudden I was black in America. So I really started to explore what that meant to me. And I think the thing that stood out the most to me was that there was a whole culture that I could see on BET specifically, as that came out, like Black Entertainment Television came out in the eighties and I started to really realize that there was a whole culture that I had not been introduced to and that I did not have any access to. And so I kind of kicked the door open and decided to find my own access, which meant going to the mall and meeting black friends and going to black teenage clubs and going to the roller skating rink and places where I could meet kids who were outside of my school because I was the only black kid in my grade for many years.

Other than that, there was one girl who was Haitian who identified as Haitian, not as African American, and there was another African American girl who really identified more with her white adoptive parents and I had to kind of go out and find that identity on my own, through music, through tv, and just through social interactions.

And then I had to come back to my school, to my family and really code switch backwards. So when you think about code switching, usually that is someone who's in a minoritized position going into white society, whether that's professionally or in school or whatever and switching to standard English, Standard cultural norms.

And I did the opposite. When I went outside of my community, outside of my home, that's where I felt more comfortable. That's where I felt more me. That's where I explored my racial identity. And when I came back home, I code switched back to kind of that white community, white norm white feeling. And so that just became kind of part of who I am and, and even today, I still see myself do that when I go to family gatherings or spend time with my adoptive family. I still feel myself doing that switch and my kids will actually tease me about putting up my white voice around my parents.

Haley Radke: Oh, that's so interesting. And I think I, I thank you for explaining that. I've heard, you know, as I work through my white anti-racist education pieces for myself in the last few years, I've heard so many things from transracial adoptees that as far as code switching or, or being, being in the workplace as a person of color, they have to put on that identity and, and there's no safe place at home to go back and, you know, be who I really am. And so I find it really interesting I remember, I remember when, when I heard you first say that I would just like, something like went on in me, and I was like, oh, that's really different. That's very interesting.

Can you talk a little bit more about what you think led you to do that? I, I, I'm struggling to ask you those questions because I think it's unusual and as a white person, I don't necessarily understand. I just, I just, I don't know. I just, I don't understand how in a person, in a black body can't realize that they're black?

Like they're, they're not safe enough to realize that. And so for you as a young person to go out and seek out your own cultural people, it's just interesting as a young person to do that, cuz I feel like the most folks I've talked to don't really kind of do that until their twenties or mid twenties because they're still in the white household of adoptive parents at home and they wanna make sure they're, you know, kind of falling in line and don't feel safe to do so.

So do you think there was anything different about you that you were able to kind of do that exploration?

Abby Hasberry: Yeah. So I think that, as I mentioned, the fact that I started to explore my black identity in adolescence as opposed to in elementary school or earlier, I think that that has one that's part of it.

But while I kind of give, like, take credit away from my mom for a lot of the decisions that she made, I have to give her credit for the fact that when things happened in our environment that involved race, she discussed them with me and gave me really great perspectives on my identity as a black person in the world.

And so there was this weird dichotomy with my mom where I am very aware that she wanted me to be a, just part of the family, a brown, a darker skinned child with the same norms, the same culture. And she did not, she was not aware of kind of what I needed to identify as a black person. However, she was very aware of how society would look at me and how I would interact with society.

And so she gave me that. So I remember there were times when people would look at our family differently and my mom would say, that's their ignorance. You know, just, just look at it as their ignorance that has nothing to do with you or, or who you are. There was a time that I often talk about where I was invited to a country club to go swimming with friends in Miami and then disinvited or uninvited the night before because the country club didn't allow people of color to come and swim on the weekends there. And my mom reacted to that by first telling me the truth. She was honest with me, even though I think I was probably like 11 years old, but then also saying to me that my friend was allowed to come to our house and do whatever, you know, hang out with me as often and as much as I wanted to, but that she no longer was allowing me to go to the friend's house because she did not believe that it was a safe environment for me if my friend's parents were okay being members of a country club that was exclusive in that way. And so giving me that perspective and that love of understanding one, that things are taught in that, you know, you can't, you can't hold people, I couldn't hold my friend and their values to, to question just because of what their parents were doing. We were still allowed to interact and have that, have her at my house, but that I also needed to hold the people accountable for their own actions. And so therefore, like my mom was like, yeah, this isn't a safe environment for you.

And so, there were plenty of times like that when I was pulled over, while, while driving my car in high school and questioned about who owned my car. It was late at night. I was dropping a friend off and the police was follwing, the police officer was following us for quite a while, about 10 minutes or so before he pulled us over and called for back up, after separating us, bringing me to the back of the car, and my friend of the front of the car and the officers questioning about like my name and where I lived over and over and over and over again.

I finally realized it clicked in my head that they knew that the car was registered to a white male, my dad, and they were questioning why I was driving it. And so when I went home kind of flustered from that, my mom was just so angry and talked about like perceptions and how people have narrow minds and can't, you know, my, my, my license had the same last name.

I kept giving the same address, I kept giving the same story. It, it was, there was no reason for them to continue to question us. And so she really talked about, you know, other people's ignorance and other people not understanding and how that wasn't something that I should take on as part of who I am and how I should still proudly go into spaces and be my authentic self.

So she really instilled a lot of that self-esteem, that identity awareness just as, as me as an individual. And then I then was given the freedom to then explore further my racial identity, because that is something that she, that she, she failed in. I did not have racial mirrors. She, they didn't have any friends of color all the time that, that I, that I was, you know, part of the family.

They did not frequent black salons, black doctors. They didn't do any of the things that we know are super important, but she did instill kind of that sense that it was okay to be me, and that I should be proud of who I am and that other people will never define who I am.

Haley Radke: Okay, well good job, mom. Now.

Abby Hasberry: Yes.

So what I'm hearing is there was a sense of safety that exploring these things was okay and probably, for the thing people I'm thinking of, there wasn't necessarily that sense of safety, and so there was more of a focus on just trying to fit in in the adoptive family and trying to, you know, act as though you were born to the adoptive parents. So for folks who've had that experience and are now coming into their twenties, their thirties, their forties, and are looking at identity, and are, a racialized person, whether in America or anywhere. What are some of the things that you're seeing with your clients or what are some of the things that you tell people, some of those first steps, like I mentioned earlier, people can be afraid that their culturally appropriating their own culture.

Haley Radke: Can you speak to that?

Abby Hasberry: Absolutely. So, so first I wanna say, I don't think that my environment was safe to identify my black identity. My environment was safe to explore my identity as a human being, but not my black identity. There were times where my mom definitely felt threatened by the fact that I was exploring this identity, and she made that very clear so that it wasn't safe necessarily for me to explore my blackness.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Abby Hasberry: I just was so safe to be me, that I didn't care or no, I don't wanna say I didn't care, but I did it anyway. I did it anyway. But as far as like, one of the things that I always tell my clients is there's no way, one way of being anything, there's no one way of being black. There's no one way of being American.

There's no one way of being a female. There's no one way of being. . So as far as appropriating something, that is who you are. You are a black person. I am a black woman. There is no one way for me to be black. And so there is no appropriating. If I think about like the culture of an African American culture, there is not one way of being black.

Black people are everything on the spectrum. And I talk a lot about my own children, who, I have a son who is a swimmer and a skateboarder. I have a daughter who just got married this last weekend, who was married to a man who is, he's half Vietnamese and half white. I have a daughter who is a soccer player and is absolutely in love with Billy Eilish.

There are, is no one way for my kids to be black, although though they are raised by two black parents, they are just on the spectrum of any teenager, any 20 something. And so I think that that's kind of step one is just accepting there is not one way of being anything. There are black cultural norms that you can learn, that you can feel comfortable with, but regardless of how you adopt those or not, your identity as a black person is your identity as a black person, and there is no one way to do that.

Haley Radke: Mm-hmm. And you know, I'm sort of asking this very broad question, which probably really the answer is it takes a very long time and there's not just like this switch to flip, but when you're going into that, what is, what are some of the first steps? What, what do you see people kind of doing? What do you see as most helpful?

I know you work with people to do this, and I imagine that some of the, the roots are really deep and there's psychological trauma there from internalized racism from white family members and just living in a white culture where white is, you know, the standard of beauty and making all the decisions and all of those things.

There's so many things being raised in, I'll just say North America's, cuz I'm Canadian and we have the same problems, so. Can you talk a little bit about kind of delving into that and if people are interested in it and because it's a big process right?

Abby Hasberry: It is, it is, it's a huge process. And I think safety in, in who you are is kind of the number one thing. And I am a marriage family therapist, so of course relationships for me are, are step one, finding relationships where you feel safe. Finding relationships where you can explore those, just those parts of your identity. Finding racial mirrors and people who can nurture and love and, and understand you, right?

That, that's number one for me is, with my clients, is kind of starting with, A) who are the people in your life who are representative of your culture and your identity that you are close to? And you can start to really talk through things with. And if there aren't any, which often there aren't, with transracial adoptees, I often become kind of that person where we are talking about identity and we're a safe place to talk about, safe space, to talk about racial identity and just all of the cultural things that people are uncomfortable with.

We often start talking about music and we start talking about stereotypes and stereotype threat and just all of the things that, for one, in or in order to normalize a feeling, an identity, a behavior, you have to give language to it. Because once someone understands that the things that they're feeling are things that other people are feeling, it kind of helps normalize that experience and make it a little bit more safe.

And so that is one of the things that I definitely try to do is, is talk about terms, talk about phenomena, talk about kind of what, what people are experiencing and how this, this experience is more broad than just you. And then connecting adoptees with other adoptees, with other adoptee organizations, with support groups.

All of those things are, are part of that constellation, part of that support group. Part of that kind of getting back that sense of belonging and identity that that is lost. And then also definitely name, naming the trauma. Naming the racialized trauma. Naming the adoption trauma. Naming the trauma in your life that we've all experienced as adoptees.

Haley Radke: I had another therapist teach us a little bit about the experience of having internalized racism and how painful that can be to untangle and come into a place of confidence and happiness and joyfulness in who the person is. Have you seen folks do that sort of internal work and can you talk about that? I think it's probably really difficult and challenging because it's like core identity work.

Abby Hasberry: Yeah. So often as transracial adoptees, one of the things that is taught in internalized is that you're different from whatever group you belong to. You're different because you're raised by a white family. You're different because you speak differently.

You're different because you have gone to a school with people who don't look like you. And so removing that label from yourself and, and seeing yourself within a group that has been othered by your own family, is very, very painful, very difficult. I see it with my clients, but I also experience some of that myself and seeing yourself no longer as separate from that group, but included is just so important to doing that work and internalizing now your new identity because it is a new identity, although it was one that you were born into. I often use the, the language with my clients, the person that you were born to be, like, who you were supposed to be when you were born, and who, that was changed because of your adoption, your adoption experience.

And so when we talk about it in those words, it helps them to understand that like, it it un- others, the community becomes their community because this is the community that you were originally beloned, born to, that you originally belonged to, and you were taken from that community as opposed to the belief that I'm different and somehow almost better from the community because I was raised by this white family who's told me that I'm different.

It, it's painful work. It's undoing lies. Seeing your parents as human beings who may have had flaw ed perceptions of the community that you were born into. All of those things are very, very hard to do, but super important.

Haley Radke: How do you work with someone who is moving towards that but still feels like, I'm gonna use the word imposter because visibly, if you've, if you've been able to cultivate a group of peers who you're similar to, and and like you're all eating out at a restaurant, and I look over and I just see, um, a group of happy, say Koreans, who are all excited to be together and are enjoying a meal together, but there's a Korean adoptee at the table who is raised with white parents and feels internally like, an imposter like, well, I'm not a real Korean. Have you seen that? What does it take to move towards feeling, like accepting that about yourself and and to a place of full inclusivity?

Abby Hasberry: Yeah. So definitely, and not only in adoptees, you can see it also in some second generation, immigrants, especially if their parents in the, in the kids were taught not to speak their language and not to, um, identify with their culture, but to assimilate as much as possible.

You can see that also with people who are removed second, usually second generation removed from immigration, then going back and now trying to find your authentic self and feeling like an imposter because you don't speak Spanish because your parents didn't teach it to you, even though you were raised in a, a household that is a Spanish speaking.

That imposter syndrome surfaces in so many places in our lives, not just in our, our identity, our racialized identity or our ethnic identity, but it can surface in our professional identities. And so that is kind of a universal syndrome that I think most people can relate to. I, I relate to it when I, you know, first got my PhD and just was waiting for the first couple weeks afterward for them to call and say that I missed a course or I didn't do something right.

Because just identifying myself with different group is, was really hard for me to even understand that I had earned that right. And I think that the thing to do is to understand when it comes to your identity as a ethnic racial being, there is no earning your right. You are that person just because you are that person, just because of, of your, your blood, your dna, and that's something that we talk about in counseling and therapy a lot, is that how can I be in a imposter of black identity when I have black skin?

I need to learn more about black culture. Perhaps, you know, I need to identify more with my black identity. Yes. That all of that could be true, but I am still a black person and deserve the, you know, full rights respects and all of that as being identified as a black woman. I do think it was a, it has been easier for me because I did start that process so early and so it from around 11 or 12 years old, it's always been part of my black identity and I've been code switching for forever.

But regardless of the age, it's just claiming who you are and standing in your space and being authentically yourself. One of the things that I love to, one of the phrases that I love to give my clients is to take up space. Whatever that space is, whatever that identity is, just take up space and and know that you belong.

And then the other phrase that I really love to give to them is don't defend yourself. Define yourself. So decide who you are and be that person and don't feel like you have to defend being any part of you. Just live in who you are and just have that define who you are.

Haley Radke: Without breaking confidentiality, what are you most proud of some of the clients that have been doing this work with you? What are you seeing that you're just like, oh my gosh, I'm so excited I get to help folks walk through this?

Abby Hasberry: I think when clients have that kind of aha, self acceptance moment, I think that when I see them all of a sudden, drop their shoulders and relax and feel confident in who they are and feel safe in who they are.

Those moments where it's like, okay, everything that I've experienced is normal. I hear you saying that other people have experienced it. There are terms for it, and just kind of that realization that everything's going to be okay because I'm going to be okay like I am okay. Just that moment of accepting themselves for who they are, accepting themselves for their experiences, for everything that has happened to them and by them.

I think I'm most proud when I see a client just step into their identity and take up space and just be kind of fully present and fully themselves.

I know

Haley Radke: when people start to get into identity work period, because it's at the core of our, our being and can be very world shifting, it can be really challenging, deep, painful work. It's hard work, like so much hard work. And I see some people offering like coaching and stuff like that online, and I know that you trained to become a therapist, so you would have more tools and skills to help folks do that. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of having a therapist guide you along this deep internal work versus maybe someone that is not as credentialed or trained in doing some of that stuff.

Abby Hasberry: Sure. So trauma is, is complex. Trauma is deep. Trauma runs in all the spaces in our body that we try to hide it in. And if you have someone who is working through trauma with you, who is not understanding and respectful and really just kind of aware of, of trauma and how it impacts the brain and how it impacts the body, that can be re-traumatizing.

You can actually have trauma from working with someone working through your trauma who does not have experience or knowledge of how trauma affects the brain and the body, and just the physical parts of you, as well as the mental parts of you. When people ask me about the difference between coaching and therapy, the one thing I try to impart on them is when you see someone who is working as a coach, that person should only be working from where you are now to where you wanna go in the future.

And so if you think of like a professional coach works with your professional identity, whether you be a teacher and you want to be a principal, and let's work with the leadership skills and the skills that you need to get to the goal that you want to be. Whereas as the therapist works back from your trauma to untangle the things that are affecting who you are right now in order to heal those things so that you can then move forward.

And I think that that is the thing that you should be thinking about when you're thinking, deciding if I wanna see a coach or a therapist, is what are your goals? Are your, is your goal just to move forward from where you are to that new thing? I had a professional life coach who helped me when I decided to step down as a principal and then move into different realms of my professional identity.

And she talked about my why and my passions and my motivations, and we did lots of work on that and my personality traits and all of those things. But when I needed to do work on myself as an adoptee in the trauma that I've been through and as an a victim of childhood sexual abuse and all of the things that I had to work through in order to be more whole, then I looked for a therapist who could do that work and understand how it has affected my health both physically and mentally.

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh. Great answer. I love that. It's so illuminates the differences. I appreciate that. Thank you. I would love to hear you just talk about any strategies you think are best for specifically transracial adoptees or black adoptees in starting on this journey.

Whether it be things they can do on their own or if they're looking to work with like a therapist like you, if they're lucky enough to get an appointment. Any steps you wanna share as we're wrapping up any other thoughts that you have for, especially our folks in our community who are racialized and who have grown up in white adoptive families.

Abby Hasberry: So one of the things that I definitely love to do personally and have done for a long time, and that I suggest to my clients to do is when you read a book about trauma, about adoption, about anything, when you see a movie, when you listen to a podcast and you have a question come up or something is like an aha, write that down on the top of a first piece of paper and then something else comes up, turn the page, turn the page and write whatever that is on the top of a piece of paper and just have a notebook of things that kind of spark your curiosity or hit you to your, your core or just make sense or don't make sense and you wanna question it. Write those things down as on the top of a piece of paper and then go back to them in your kind of sacred, safe, reflective space and write your responses to those things. And, and that's just kind of the start of journaling.

It's almost kind of making your own guided journal. I do that often when I hear, so for example, when I first heard this, the someone say, don't defend yourself, define yourself. That just struck me in the core. And so I wrote down that; Don't defend myself. Define myself. And then I wrote about like one of the times that I've found myself defending myself, one of the times that I've felt good about defining my space, what does that mean to me? And so I just then just took that one thing that I wrote down and a few days later went back and journaled through that. And that was me doing my own work and really thinking through those things that hit me to the core or questions that I think I didn't understand, or questions that just peaked my curiosity.

Um, I would suggest listening, reading, watching all of the things that have to do with whatever it is that you're working through, whether it's racial identity, adoption, trauma, just trauma in general. Just listen to people talk and when someone says something that strikes you, write it down and then go back later and journal about it.

Haley Radke: That's a great first step. Love it. Okay. On a personal note, I'm curious how you take care of yourself in this space. When I imagine lots of questions you're getting are from white adoptive parents who are trying to do better, but they want you to do their work for them. And folks like me asking you about these hard racial issues and, they're like, oh my gosh, sure, I'll talk about this again. How do you best take care of yourself in our community and in the work you do as a black woman who's a professional, highly credentialed and is still being asked lots of deep things about herself to, you know, be in space?

Abby Hasberry: So I am very, very, set in some of my boundaries. For sure. So, and I think that's something I didn't learn until after my forties, is that, first of all, I can say no just because I wanna say no, and I don't have to have a reason or an explanation or an excuse.

If I don't feel like doing something, there's a reason and just say no. So I think definitely establishing boundaries around my time. That has been, that has changed my life. Deciding when I will work and how long I will work, and that's something that's been afforded to me over the years. I definitely could not have been in this space 20 years ago where I say like, I'm only gonna work three hours today because what I'm doing is heavy.

I, I just, I wasn't in that space before, so that has been an amazing gift to me to be in a space where I can afford to just kind of claim my time. But also really staying grounded and centered in my why. And so I had an experience where I was around a, a lot of transracial adoptees and their parents, and their parents wanted a lot from me.

They were taking a lot from me, and I had to reground myself in the fact that I'm doing this for their kids. For little me to think about the experiences that I went through to hope that they don't have to go through some of the same pitfalls. I have to constantly reground myself in my why and and in my passion, and that's something I definitely learned as a principal.

I, I always told myself it's whatever's in the best interest of kids. Any decision I made any hard days, I just kept regrounding myself in that. And so as I've transitioned to this work, I had to find that same kind of grounding, that foundation, my why, and it's for transracial adoptive kids, adoptees in general.

Adult adoptees. It's just for adoptees, like that is my kind of my why, why I do this is because I've gotten to a space where I feel like I've done my work and I just wanna reach back and help other people do their work, whether that be adoptees or their parents to provide a more safe environment for them to do their own work.

Yeah, just, just that and then also spending time with my family, reminding myself of kind of who loves me and, and where, where I get that sense of just home.

Haley Radke: I love that. I was picturing all the needy parents you had to deal with as a principal and now they're just all adoptive parents. You were really trained. You practiced. Oh my gosh. Wow. I'm sorry. My kids go to a Christian school and our principal gets lots of calls. So yeah,

Abby Hasberry: So many calls.

Haley Radke: So many calls. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. Is there anything I did not ask you about that you wanna make sure to mention before we talk about where folks can connect with you?

Abby Hasberry: So we didn't talk about my, my identity as a birth mom, and so I just kind of wanna mention that as well, just for those who are listening. That while I do a lot of my work for adoptees, I also do work with, with birth moms and kind of their, their ability to, to heal their own trauma and to understand what happened and their experience with the adoption system, the adoption institution as well. Um, so yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay. Thank you. So good that you're well, it's not good. It's not good that you lost your son to adoption. I'm sorry that happened. But you're a multi- experienced person in all of these different areas, make you really a tremendous resource for the community.

So if folks do, I've listened to you and are like, oh my gosh, I wanna work with Abby. Are you taking new clients? And how can we connect with you and tell us all the things?

Abby Hasberry: Sure. So I am taking new clients in Texas. I'm taking a couple more and I can be reached at dearabbycounseling.com. Abby is a b b y, so dear abbey counseling.com is where I can be reached and social media and Instagram, all of those places, I think that we will have kind of linked to this as well. Because I, while I am taking new clients in Texas, I am also open to just kind of speaking with people as well. And I do do some coaching as well too. So, and coaching is national, although therapies only in Texas at this moment.

Haley Radke: Yes, but you're a trained therapist, so, yes. That's amazing. Yes. We will have all your links in the show notes, so people can follow you. And I love some of the things you're sharing on Instagram and they make me think and, so yes, I think there's great value there and hopefully you'll come back and we'll talk about something else and that'll be awesome

Abby Hasberry: Absolutely.

Haley Radke: Okay. Thank you so much, Abby. Such a pleasure to talk with you today.

(upbeat music)

Haley Radke: All right, it is time for our annual holiday break. I take about a month off to spend time with my family and prep shows for the new year. So we will have brand new episodes starting back in January, on the 13th of 2023, and I'm really excited to announce our first episode will be with Dr. JaeRan Kim, who is a amazing adoptee researcher, and we are going to be talking about the newly launched paper that Dr. Kim and four of her adoptee academic colleagues have written that is about the adoptee consciousness model. I cannot wait to share that with you. We had such a great conversation. Coming soon. Coming soon, January 13th, and in the meantime, if you are looking for more Adoptees On content, I would recommend going back through our Healing Series episodes to look for surviving in the holidays and those conversations with Leslie Johnson if you need a little more support in that area. Or if you're a reader, you can listen to some of our book club episodes over on Patreon. We have so many conversations with fabulous adoptee authors and we will be talking more about that in the new year as well.

So you can join us there. You can go to AdopteesOn.com/community to find out all the ways to support the show and access our book club and other weekly podcasts with myself and fellow adoptees. Love to have your support. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, whatever you celebrate, and as I reflect back on 2022 and all the exciting milestones that I have been able to accomplish, only with the support of the community. I remain most grateful that I can support fellow adoptees in a myriad of ways of looking at other people's experiences, so we know we're not alone looking within ourselves to know what things we should be working on and looking at our history and becoming more knowledgeable about the systemic injustices and inhumane practices that continue to this day in the adoption industrial complex.

And I feel really fortunate that on that hard journey, I can do that alongside of you. So just know I'm always learning along with you. I, I am no expert because every single conversation I have, I'm always like, oh, I never thought of that. Oh yeah, that's so right. Like, I'm absorbing just as much from these conversations and I hope they feel supportive and helpful for you too.

So I'm grateful you're in this world. I hope that if the holiday season is a difficult time for you, that you are still able to find some sort of connection or something that you love to do to take extra care of yourself in this season. And I will be back with regular episodes starting January 13th in 2023.

And thanks for listening. I'm so glad you're here and let's talk again very soon.

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233 Patrick Armstrong

Transcript

Full Show Notes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/233

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Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

(intro music)

Haley: You are listening to adoptees on the podcast for adoptees, discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. We are so excited to welcome Patrick Armstrong to the podcast today. Patrick is a fellow adoptee community builder, and today he shares his experiences growing up as a Korean adoptee in all white spaces.

He's moved from rejecting his Asian identity to a period of reclamation of identity, language, and culture, and now feels that he's in a place of fully accepting himself. We hope this conversation will be encouraging, especially to those of you who have struggled to affirm your own unique identity in the.

Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adoptees on.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always links to everything we'll be talking about today, our on the website, adopteeson.com.

Let's listen in.

(upbeat music)

Haley: I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptee on Patrick Armstrong. Welcome Patrick.

Patrick: Hi Haley. Thanks for having me.

Haley: Fellow podcaster. Some my favorites. I, I said this before we started, but I'm just gonna say I am unwell and so if I sound lower, it's not to match you. It is just... Tis the season.

Patrick: I've already tweeted that you are trying to match me in vocal tone, so mm-hmm.

Haley: Okay. Good. Good. Let's get me canceled. Let's go. No. You have such a great voice for podcasting. I love listening to you. So how about we start with, would you share some of your story with.

Patrick: Absolutely. First I wanna say thank you for saying that. I do really appreciate it, but I am a transracial international intercountry Korean American adoptee. I was born in Seoul in 1990 and then adopted, I believe, nine months later.

I think it was November of '90 to a white family in rural Indiana, and that is where I spent the bulk of my, or that's where I spent all of my childhood growing up. My family did not have any children of their own, but they did adopt another Korean child in '92. My younger sister, Rebecca, she's not biologically related to me, but we are both Korean adoptees and the community we grew up in was predominantly white, again, rural Indiana, exactly what you might think It is.

Very small. 5,000 people .Cornfields at every turn. Everywhere you look, there's a field of some sort and not a lot to do. Definitely not a lot of racial mirrors, not a lot of diversity at all. Within the community and that goes for the things that we learned in school and stuff like that. So, grew up very typical Midwestern childhood.

I played a lot of sports, tried to be as social as possible. Struggled a lot growing up with my identity. And so I did a lot of internalizing of whiteness and of racism towards kind of being Asian and identified as white growing up and continued to do so for a really long time. Once I left my, the place that I grew up, I went to college at Purdue University and there I started to explore a little bit.

It was more diversity of thought than diversity of community, and I was really just trying to find my way in the world, trying to figure out who I was because all of that internalization I did growing up carried over into what I was doing in college and how I was trying to find my way through the world.

And so in college was just kind of doing what everybody does. Not really going to, well, not everybody, but what I was doing, not going to class really, just again, lost wandering, ended up dropping out and just went straight into the workforce. Worked a ton of different jobs and a bunch of different industries.

Never settling down for any one specific thing in particular. and then eventually found myself bouncing around city to city. Lived in San Diego, lived in Houston, and then with my now wife, ended up moving to Chicago in 2018. Spent a few years up there and in 2020, right as the pandemic kicked off and right as we were, as a society, going through the murders, or experiencing the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahau Arbery, ended up moving back to Indianapolis where we now are located. And really that was when I started my whole journey of unpacking my identity as an adoptee, unpacking my identity as an Asian American, as a Korean American, self racializing, and really starting to go through what would eventually lead me to sitting down with you, Hailey.

A lot of that. Started with the podcast, Dear Asian Americans, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But it's been a really accelerated journey. You recently had Tiffany Henness on, and she talked about when she started to do a lot of her unpacking, it was like drinking from a fire hose. A hundred percent resonate with that metaphor because that's exactly what I was doing.

It felt like I couldn't get enough, but at the same time, it felt like it was too much and it was really a struggle to find the balance where it wasn't also affecting everything outside of my, or everything that I was involved with outside of just this very new, very intense, but very necessary journey that I was on.

And so that podcast led to starting my own podcast, The Janchi Show, with two other Korean American adoptees. It led to facilitating community, not only on Instagram, but on clubhouse, when that was a thing. I think we shared a couple spaces on Clubhouse. I know I saw you pop into a few rooms for sure when it, especially when it came to podcasting, but really finding ways to connect with the Asian adoptee community.

And then from there, just continuing to work on myself, but also trying to find ways to uplift and amplify the voices of those who really aren't heard within our community. And a lot of that has to do with navigating the narrative, reframing, shifting, balancing, whatever you want to call it, but, taking a critical look at the narrative of adoption and finding not only my place within it, but how can we actually change the way that we talk about these things.

And so that's what a lot of my personal work is built on now, not only with The Janchi Show, but with the podcast that I do on my own, with the work that I do as a producer on Dear Asian Americans. A lot of different things, but generally, that's my story in a nutshell. Like, it's kind of bits, little bits and pieces, but I know we'll get into it. .

Haley: Thank you. Thank you for flagging Clubhouse for me. Those were some good few months. I absolutely remember being in rooms with you and I remember coming to a few of the rooms you hosted for Asian adoptees as a listener cuz I just wanted to listen and, and learn from people who have a different experience. For me, I continued to do that over the years. It's been very enriching in my life. And I really, I value the emotional labor people were doing in Clubhouse. And I remember in particular several moments where I heard adoptees, in real time, discovering the impact adoption had on their lives.

And it's like the mind blown emoji, you know you like to say the Great Awakening, Betty Jean Lifton's phrase. Yes. . Can you talk about witnessing some of those things and how that was for you in that time period? Because I think you've had a shift even to this day from a couple years ago on what you think about adoption.

Patrick: Absolutely. I'm really glad that you brought that up because it was one of those moments in particular that really affirmed to me or made me see the importance of our stories in storytelling and why it matters that we facilitate these spaces. Cause I'd been doing the podcast for a little bit at that time and we were having guests on sharing their stories and we were learning a lot through that.

And I was learning a lot through that personally. But in Clubhouse, being able to see somebody go, in real time, start to - at that time I was using the "coming out of the fog" language - but like start to wake up and think critically about adoption, in real time, was wild.

So there was one person, they were from a European country actually, so not somebody in America, but also a transracial Korean adoptee. And this was one of our earlier rooms. And so there wasn't a ton of people in there. I think it might have been 10. And they came up on stage and they were like, thanks for holding the space. It's been really incredible to hear these stories. And then they just started. and they started to list out examples of how they had felt isolated racially and as just an adoptee.

How they had felt really unheard and invalidated, not only from their own family but their community and just started to talk about these things. Shed a few tears, but really I remember cuz there were six of us that kind of started this club or this specific room, and I remember we have this text chain going and we're just texting each other.

Oh my gosh. This is, I, I think we're hearing somebody figure this out in real time and it was just, it was absolutely jaw dropping. Honestly, to think that we had created a space where somebody, a stranger, felt safe enough to do that, like I didn't really understand. , I didn't think I really, truly understand what it meant or understood what it meant to create a safe space in that way until that particular moment.

And I'll never forget it because I ended up meeting that person in our country of origin when I was able to go to Korea in October. And they are just on this wild, wild journey of embracing not only their the adoptee community that they've been able to find, but their. Their koreanness, their asianness and really leaning into it even sometimes even more than myself.

And it's just, I think they've been back to Korea like five or six times in this past year. I don't even know how they've been doing that. But that moment was definitely a moment of of realization for me to see the power in storytelling and in the fact of. Oh, people in our community need and are clamoring for spaces like this, not just on a, not just on like on a podcast, like on like yours or ours, but.

In a space where you can kind of do that in real time. And that's the unfortunate thing about Clubhouse is like people are still doing it, but it's just ha it didn't have the, or hasn't had the staying power, especially in like Twitter spaces. LinkedIn was doing something similar and it just kind of, this market got saturated.

But for those probably four months, between January and April of 2021 now, I guess we, we saw some beautiful things happen and we saw some beautiful community. grow out of that.

Haley: In listening to multiple episodes of the Janchi Show from before , when you were just getting started to now, I feel like people can also in real time see your perspective shift of both you and your co-hosts.

What's that like for you? Knowing the progression is out there.

Patrick: It's, I think it's equal parts scary, but really empowering. When we started the Janchi Show, I was very, very new, and so the idea for the Janchi Show happened two months after I started to wake up from this great sleep, from this deep sleep that I've been in around adoption, and it all started because I found that podcast, Dear Asian Americans, and then had the audacity to reach out to the first guest and say, Hey, I'm a Korean adoptee and I don't know anything about being Korean or being Asian, and I really loved your podcast is Can you help me, can you, can you point me in the right direction?

How do I get started? And he sent me a study called Two Korean to be White, too White to be Korean. He was super kind person and sent me that, and that was the first time I ever read anybody who had shared a similar experience to myself. And I say that with knowing that I grew up with another adoptee in the same house as me, but that never registered cuz we weren't thinking about that when we were growing up.

And that whole thing, like kick started, so this is in June of 2020, kickstarted this idea that I need to understand these parts of myself because there's something missing. There's something wrong, maybe not something wrong, but there's something missing that I need to explore. And so two months later, not only am I being invited to be a guest on Dear Asian Americans to share my story, but Jerry Won, the host of that show is suggesting that we start a podcast with two other Korean adoptee guests that he's had on the show, whom I've never met. The only knowledge I have of them is that they've been on the show, and that in itself was daunting and scary. But the amazing part of it was after we got over the initial awkwardness of our first meeting was that we were all coming to this space with fresh eyes and, and eagerness to explore this, but also from different points in our respective journeys. One of us had been in reunion, one of us was younger, but had been back to Korea. My, and then there was myself who was like the infant baby who had no clearly no knowledge.

Not to infantilize myself again, as adopts or want to be, but, just like have, have with nothing. And I used to say use this metaphor a lot, but like I went from running in the opposite direction of myself and who I was as an adoptee, as as an Asian American to full on sprinting, hopping on the jet plane, going in the opposite direction to try and catch up for the 30 years of.

I wanna say ignorance, but it's not ignorance. The 30 years of just no knowledge of, of rejection. I'll say I talk about those first 30 years of my life as the rejection phase that I was in and I was having to make up so much ground and so to have, I've, I've no doubt that if you listen from episode one to episode 111, which was released recently, , you'll definitely see that shift because I really was developing the language and learning the language.

A episode to episode because there was books that were being presented to me. Then we're talking to these guests who are sharing stories that I'm like, . Wow. Like I just, I'm like, I have to sit in this now and I have to like process everything that you just said, and then, oh wait, we have to go record another episode this next week.

And it's like, it was just a nonstop intake of information, of learning and then unlearning and unpacking everything that I had internalized from before, from those first 30 years. And so the Janchi Show, what it's been up until may of 2022 was the reclamation phase, and so you're seeing me go through reclamation and then you're seeing that development and then post May, 2022, you're seeing me in the phase of acceptance, and so that's how I talk about my story generally is in three parts for rejection, reclamation, acceptance and acceptance.

I think you can even see a shift in the language that I'm using, in the way that I'm thinking about not just adoption, but specifically adoptee experiences. The privilege, what I call the privilege of storytelling and sharing someone's story. And so to know that people are able to see that is nice because one, if somebody's willing to listen to a hundred, I mean you, I'm sure you know this, having way more episodes than us, but somebody's willing to listen to that many episodes.

Thank you. I mean, that means a whole lot to me, but also, from an adoptee's perspective, I think it's nice to see someone, and whether it's me or someone else, go through that progression because it also gives, I think, realistic examples and milestones of both the triumphs and the pitfalls that you can go through as you go on this journey for people to be able to look at or lean on or take in.

Because at the end of the day, All of our experiences are unique. No one, no two people have the same experience, but the themes that happen within our experiences can be similar. And so if there's a record of that and there's a record of someone going through something like that, you know, I think it, it means a lot.

It's, it's a huge privilege to be able to have done a hundred plus episodes and continue on and have that live in the ether. And while it is scary to think, oh, what are people gonna think as they hear me become more vocal, especially about anti-racism or just racial aggressions in general and just the state of our world and thinking about how do we, how do we talk about these things?

Or why are we not talking about specific things? You know, that's, it's scary to think about my friends and my family reacting to that and what they might think, but at the same time, it is empowering because not only is it, not only can I go back and look and see the growth that I've made but I know that it's out there for other people who, like me in June of 2020 had no idea what they were doing.

And there's a, there's a place you can go to catch up on that.

Haley: What is it like for you to have friends and family listening ? Has it impacted your conversations with them, your sister, anyone else? Like, that's one of the things about being a public figure being critical of a system that everyone else around us has praised and rejoiced in.

Flipping the narrative on them is tough.

Patrick: It is very tough. So with my sister, she was a guest on the show. I think she was episode 10. And that was great because we had never really talked about any of this ever. And we didn't really have a, so we're two years apart in age, year and a half apart in age, but we were four years apart in high school.

So we didn't have, we never developed like that super close sibling relationship. And now that I think about that, and I say that out loud, I'm like, I bet adoption played a big role in that. have an unpack that, that's for another time, but we when she came on the show. It was nice to have that conversation.

And you know, we talk about those things a little bit more now and we've developed a closer relationship through that. My parents definitely a different story, and so when I started all of this, it was , I think it was probably just treated as like, oh, here's another thing that you're doing, another project, you know?

And I don't think they really understood what it was until they started to listen to it. My mom, I know, has listened to every episode of our show, and this is the anecdote I always use, but, in March of 2021, March 16th, there was a shooting in Atlanta at three separate spas that resulted in the death of eight people, six of them being Korean women.

And it was really, it was a, it was a flashpoint in America, but I think in, in a lot of places and, at that time, you know, we had seen, it was, it was kind of like the boy, the tipping point of a lot of the anti-Asian sentiment we had been seeing since the pandemic started. And I felt like Atlanta was just this, it all came to a head and I, that night I was on clubhouse actually, and I went to an Asian American room and because I was just lost, I felt despondent.

I didn't know what to think. I, I. Like if, if at at the same time I felt super disconnected, but also felt, this is real. This is impacting me in ways that I don't understand. And so I went to this room and for the first time in an Asian American space, I felt like I had been heard and validated in my story.

And because of that, I think there was just this renewed resolve to talk about this. But one of the things that got me thinking about was like, why haven't I heard from my friends or family about this? Like why haven't people been checking in on me? And I realize cuz they don't see me as Asian, because I did not see myself as Asian for 30 years. I'd never identified as that way. The joke was, you're not really, oh, but you're not really Asian. You know what I mean? Like it was, that was what it was. But even with that realization, I was still very upset and I could not shake the devastation. that that shooting had left in its wake on myself, personally, in our community as a whole.

And I told my co-host, KJ and Nathan, I was just like, Hey, I gotta talk about this. And so on one of our episodes, I just kind of let it all out. I just stream of consciousness said, Everything that I had been withholding and laid it all out, talked about how upset I was, that nobody was reaching out, explained how I felt, not only in, not only not valid, but invisible.

In my own family, in my own community's eyes, and especially because I hadn't heard from my parents. Like you think those would be the first people that would reach out to you. And for all intents and purposes I grew up in with a positive adoption experience. I have a great relationship with my family.

I know that's not the case for every adoptee, but that was, that was my experience. But this had just really drawn up on all of those different times that I felt that, and I just kinda let all of that emotion out. About five days later knowing, and I, okay, so I did that knowing that my mom would eventually hear this probably.

So five days later I'm sitting at work and I get a text from my mom and she said, because in the episode I talked about, one of the things I talked about was like the colorblind way. White adoptive parents will raise transracial adoptees in because it's all about assimilation. It's all about lose the heritage, lose the culture.

Let's get you in here and make you feel seen or like you belong in this space. And my mom texted me and I looked down at this message and it said, she said, Hi, I just wanna say I'm sorry that we raised you in a colorblind way. She's like, I didn't realize we were doing that, but we did that. And she goes, I'm also wanted to say that I know that I will, I understand now that I will never understand what it's like to be. A person of color, essentially, she said Asian American, but like a person of color is what she was getting at. And I've, sitting at my cubicle, I just started bawling. And I turned to my boss and I'm like, Hey, I gotta go. I just had this, this moment and I've gotta leave.

And so I left and I'm just sobbing and we're, I'm just texting my mom back and forth, like thanking her for that. And like, just talking about, just reiterating kind of the things that I'd said on the episode. You know why I was feeling that way. And that moment was the first true step that we had taken to healing.

Truly. Not that we'd never, not that I realized that we had ever really needed to heal, but that was the first point in our lives together that it was like we've taken a step forward instead of just running in this parallel line towards a horizon, we'll never reach. We're actually going to, we can, we're taking steps to reach that horizon now, and it's been amazing and my mom and I have had wonderful conversations since then about this.

And she has become more of an advocate for adoptees being heard, adoptees, having their voices heard and amplified. She's also become more of a critical thinker about the industry of adoption and ask the question of why, like, why are we asking people to give up their children in the first place? Because when I was growing up, the story was your parents couldn't take care of you.

So they gave you up for adoption to give you a better life. And while that's still the story I have that we now know that that might not be the case for, especially for Korean adoptees, but just any adoptee from another country and actually any. Could be domestic, could be anything we don't know, because we're usually not given that information.

So to have my friends and family listen and know that and, and think these things, it's scary. But in the small and in those few moments of healing, it's been worth every moment of anxiety, every moment of fear that somebody might think differently of me or think worse of me. Like to have that moment with my.

Like it, it was worth, it's worth every lost friendship. It's worth every lost relationship because of that. Because at the end of the day, I don't wanna go through another loss of family like, and ruin the relationship with my adoptive parents because of this. But at the same time, I'm also not, I'm at a point where I'm not gonna give up this.

And work, and not only the work I do publicly, but the work I do on myself just to appease their minds and how they feel about what I'm doing. So, Yeah, it's that, It's the both end. It's the both end. It's scary, but it's empowering. It, it's, it's incredible. But it's also, it's, it can be tenuous. I guess that's another way to think about it.

It can be tenuous because at any point the bottom could fall out and you know, we might have to start over again, which would suck. But, you know, I hope, I hope we continue to move forward and take steps forward to that horizon.

Haley: It's amazing to me though, that your vulnerability has created this ally in your mom.

You know, like as she does her work and learns more about anti-racism and adoptee issues, and then when she's out in the world, she can speak up for those things as well.

Patrick: Exactly.

Haley: Because she's showing up for you who she loves though.

Patrick: Exactly.

Haley: Oh, I love that . Aw . You were talking about it and I was like tearing up when you were, you know, reliving the, receiving this text from her. Cuz it is. I don't know, but I, I grew up with people that would never admit wrong or say sorry, ever. And I'm a parent to two young boys. And I can't even count, count the number of times I've apologized to them for messing up because I'm a human and try be a good mom, but I super mess up all the time.

And that builds this deeper relationship. Right? And so for her to like, oh, that's, I'm so happy for you. Oh good.

Patrick: Thank you.

Haley: Okay. I don't wanna miss what happened in May, 2022, so I gotta go back to that. What's May, 2022? What? What led you into the acceptance?

Patrick: I appreciate you asking. So in May of 2022, may is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month or Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month?

I was working my job, but Jerry Won, the host of Dear Asian Americans. I work with him pretty closely on his show and he does professional speaking on the side where he talks about the Asian American experience specifically in the corporate setting, but in a lot of different contexts. And he was going on a week long speaking tour that would be in Chicago, in southern Indiana and then out east.

And he asked me if I wanted to go and so, talked to my wife, worked it out with my work, and was able to go with him on this trip and. So two things happened when we were in the Indiana area. We spoke at Rose Holman. He invited me to come up and speak with him, and this was the first time I shared my story outside of the podcast medium, but in a professional setting.

And it was to a group of students, but also staff. And he was like, I think it's a good connection because you grew up in Indiana. This school is located in rural Indiana, so. They might have, they might kind of understand it a little bit more. And I did that and it went really well. But I was super nervous.

And normally for the first 31, 32 years of my life, I was, when I got nervous or did something like that, when I was done doing it, my stomach would not, there would be no butterflies, it would just be in knots and I'd be in physical pain like it would be. It's like, ugh. And after I got done speaking there, I was in that physical pain and I was telling him that as we were walking back to the car, I'm like, oh man, I'm hurting.

And he goes, well, if you're gonna speak professionally, that can't happen . He's like, we gotta, we gotta fix that. And so that stuck in my mind cause I was like, I think it was like a mental thing that was causing that physical stuff because it felt, cause I think for a long time I felt like I wasn't worthy of.

Sharing for any reason, whatever it was. But especially publicly, especially in real time. And then, so we do that and then we fly out east and the last part of the tour was a night market event. And so essentially what this was, was we found a, a space to have a bunch of Asian American vendors that were in New York City come and we had, we were raising money for a nonprofit heart of dinner, and generally just a, a, a time to build community, build relationships and support local businesses, local Asian American businesses.

And as we were going out there, he asked me if I wanted to host or mc this event. And so I was, Let's do it. I'm like, I'm gonna say yes because I think this is great opportunity. Had not hosted an event like this before. Done a little mc work, but nothing like this. And so we're prepping and we're, we're there and we're doing everything.

I'm meeting everybody and it's going really, really great. Events starts and I'm just like getting in my element, you know, I'm like walking around talking to everybody, introducing, I'm really, I love the, I love Heart of Dinner as an organization and what they do. They feed the older Asian American, but specifically Chinese American community in New York City with meals, they prep and prepare and deliver these meals to the, to these families.

And I just love that mission and I love the people who behind it. And so I was really hype about that. I'm like, You gotta, we were decorating bags for them. So that was my goal, was to get an X amount of bags decorated. So I was really getting into that, but then it came time to like really introduce the whole event, talk about the vendors a little bit, and just truly kick the event off.

And so I was up there spotlights on me on the mic, just talking about it. And I share a little bit of my story, like what led me to this point. And as I was in the middle of sharing, I felt the weight of all of that rejection, all of that just internalized self-loathing, leave my body like in the, I was literally on the mic holding it and like speaking like, oh yeah, and then like, you know, I'm an adopted and like, I was like, you never really thought of myself as Asian.

And now here I am doing, hosting an Asian American event with all of you with everybody here. And I felt this. the burden I, I guess is what I normally call it, the burden lift or leave my body. And at that exact moment I was like, I'm good with who I am. And it was, I was good with not only, not only being Asian American, Korean American and adopted, but all the combination of all three of those things.

And being good with who I am as a person, who I am as an Asian American, who I am as an Asian adoptee, and how I fit into the tapestry of all these things. I felt for the very first time, like I fully accepted myself and it was wild because I, very few times have I had an experience like that, and none of the, the other times are they related to this journey that I've been on.

And it was just, and it just went away. And like obviously those things still, those things don't go away forever. But in that moment, like I found again, acceptance and I entered, I moved from reclamation to acceptance. And so May 22, like that was, that was that moment. And ever since then, like I feel like at the trajectory I was on was like, it was for the listener, I'm using my hands to show a chart of how it was going, was like this, it was going up at an angle and then it just went almost to 90 degrees up. Like it ch it changed everything. Finding myself in that space.

Haley: That's amazing. I have heard your voice literally change over the years and growing in confidence, as a speaker and as a leader in the adoptee community. And you know, some of the ways you post, you just post with authority now on Instagram. You're like, this is how it is people. So get on board. No, I really appreciate that. I really do. I know how much personal work it takes to get to a point of confidence like that and the weight of responsibility.

So can you talk about that? Because you know, we, you know, you shared this moment earlier, like watching somebody come out of the fog in real time. And as people listen to my show, as people read the things you're writing in your newsletter or on Instagram or listen to one of your podcast. We are leading people into this new place for a lot of folks about being critical of adoption and understanding the impact it's had on their lives, and it can be upending for people.

Patrick: Absolutely.

Haley: So do you feel that weight?

Patrick: I I do feel that weight, I think that, so the way I've been sharing this and the way I've been thinking about it, especially recently, but what's just listening to podcasts, but then also being a part of one and bringing people on every week or week after week, and having them share the most intimate details of their lives.

Some people, for the very first time, it made me realize that not only is it a great opportunity for us, but it is an absolute privilege for any one person to tell you anything about themselves, like we are not entitled to any knowledge of anything else about anybody and the fact that people feel one, safe enough to share that with us, but two, empowered and brave and courageous to take that step.

It has made me understand why it's such a privilege and why I can't take that for granted or take that lightly in any sense, whether it's writing or podcasting or speaking. It's made me understand the significance of not generalizing our experiences, because I think when I first started in this space, It felt very much like it was all Korean adoptees and it was all Korean adoption, and it felt like that was all adoption was, was our collective experience.

And it took me a minute, but to get to get out of that. But once I did that was part of what kickstarted this realization of there's more to it than just the Korean adoptee experience. I don't care that we're the largest international group of adoptees. Like that doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, it's still affecting all of the other people who've been adopted from any other country. Or who have been adopted domestically within the United States or domestically within their own countries, like it doesn't matter. It's still affecting them in some way or another. And when we try to generalize that or try to take on an experience and claim it as our own, we are now perpetuating the invalidation.

Of the existence, the identity, the experience of other adoptees, and so understand learning to understand that and learning to sit not only in the privilege, but also the, again, the responsibility of not only sharing individual's story, but how I talk about and act as a representation of the community, the weight of that responsibility is that when I talk about the community or act as a representation of the community specifically, it has to be with that care, the kindness, the grace, and the nuance of this is my own experience and I can only represent the community from my own lens. I can't be the answer or the example of this is what an adoptee's experience is, or this is how an adoptee should be. Because at the end of the day, once we start doing that, we lose people from our community, and then that makes people not want to share. It makes people afraid to step into this because it feels like that's not my experience, so now my experience doesn't matter. And so especially when I write and especially when I speak, like that's what I want to impress upon people.

It's, particularly the people outside of our community, is that when you hear these stories or when you hear my story, it's one. Like I can, I can share again that there are common themes, but at the end of the day, you can't get everything from adoption or about adoption or the experience of an, of an adoptee from one single person.

You have to go out, and I hate the word diversify, but you have to go out and diversify those experiences that you're listening to and you're learning from, and you're hearing, because if you don't do that , then again, you're leaving people out and we don't, we as a society, I feel like have been conditioned not to ask who's missing.

We are conditioned to ask what we are missing personally, and so that allows us to pick and choose who we listen to, why we're listening to them, and then how we then reiterate or regurgitate that information. We have to be able to step beyond that. And that's the responsibility that I take in all of my work is that we have to be able to, and I have to be able to walk that line, but also be very firm.

And this is my experience and I don't sit here and say all these things to say this is how it is for everybody.

Haley: One of the things I've really appreciated about listening to The Janchi Show, and I haven't listened to all hundred plus episodes. . But I've listened to, I don't know, maybe 15, 20%. So that's a pretty good, pretty good.

Patrick: That's a pretty good number. I mean, even one. That's great. One. You know how it is,

Haley: I do. I do know how it is. I really do. One of the things I really appreciate is hearing men talk about deep things, and there's this stereotype where maybe there's less male adoptees actually diving deep into identity issues, or they're more likely to wait till their adoptive parents pass before even ever thinking about a birth mother, which I think are false, but can you talk a little bit about that, how important it is to have more representation? Talking about like, snacks. Yes. And. You have to explain that joke now for folks who have a nerdier show.

Patrick: Okay, I'm gonna work backwards. So the snack thing is for the Janchi show. Janchi and Korean means to feast.

And so at the end of our, each of our episodes, we try a Korean snack, drink food item with the guests, or if we have no guests with our. And we do that because a Janchi specifically taken from like a dol Janachi, which is like a first birthday celebration. We really wanna celebrate those aspects of ourselves and then our shared culture, heritage identities, whatever it might be.

And so that's where the snack thing comes in. But I really appreciate you asking me this because when we first started this, our number one hesitation was, what do three cis straight men have to add to this conversation? And we did not go out and get, do the market research to realize, okay, we should do this.

We just said, we don't have an answer. We're gonna do it anyways. And it wasn't until we had JaeRan Kim on, where she's the first person who told us, it's really refreshing to hear three men talking about this because I guess I, I knew, but I wasn't like really aware of the fact that it is very female dominated when it comes to the discourse or the public discussion of the adoptee experience, or it has been for a while.

Not that there haven't been men that do this work. Like Tobias Hübinette is a, is somebody who comes to my mind in instantly, but it just seems to be more skewed towards the a female's perspective. And we, after JaeRan told us that, it's like, okay, it makes us feel like, okay, we are doing the right things. Maybe that validation makes us push deeper into talking about masculinity, talking about things like that.

Something actually though that I've been thinking about, Recently, because I think we're gonna do a panel about this exact topic. So it's nice, I think to bring maybe a different perspective. I think something that we're really wanting to be even more intentional about is again, bringing even more diverse perspectives to our.

To continue to push forward. And again, that's not just other men, but specifically like queer and trans representation and biracial or mixed race, Korean adoptee representation. You know, reaching out to find other voices specifically and hopefully maybe specifically getting away from the gendered ideas of male /female from an adoptee lens.

I guess that's something that I've really been thinking about a lot, but I will say that, so JaeRan was the first person to tell us that Joy Lieberthal Rho multiple episodes later told us the same thing, . And I guess like those little affirmations I think help us to realize that what we do is important, especially from our particular lens or the way in the format of our show because we've kicked around.

The idea of bringing on a female or another host of the show were one of us to step away. How do we change? How does that change what we do? And I do think that hearing those things from other people to who tell us who have been doing this much longer than we have to say, you know, it's, it's nice to hear this particular type of conversation because it's not one that we've heard a whole lot of, does make it not easier to do the job, but it makes it, I don't know, fulfilling, I don't know if that's the right word either.

I think it pushes us, but specifically pushes me. To make sure that I am respecting the conversation and diving deeper. It drives me to dig into what that means to approach adoption in the adopt experience from a masculine perspective. And also, how can I get away from that? How do I get away from the binary, I guess?

Because when I hear about masculinity, that makes me think the binary or just binary in general. And one of the things I think that we've talked about on the show is pushing out away from that, pushing to multiplicity, pushing away from duality and realizing that it's not either or, but both and and more.

And so I guess when I think about being three men talking about this, you know, the fear of, are we doing this right, has went away and it's been more replaced by kind of the weight of responsibility that we talked about, the responsibility of we, if we do happen to get it wrong, that we can also model the behavior of either being apologetic or being accountable. Maybe not apologetic, but accountable to how we talk about things and how we go about maybe representing the male, a male's perspective from adoption because it would be really easy for us to get it wrong a bunch and then continue to get it wrong and not accept criticism or critical or constructive criticism or anything like that.

It would be very easy for us to do that, and I think one of the things that falls under that weight of responsibility is being willing to be accountable and then modeling what that accountability looks likea as a man.

Haley: Absolutely. I, one of your co-hosts, I can't remember who said it, but was like, oh, you know, wouldn't have that have been funny if we were just sitting around in the garage drinking beers and talking about these things. And I thought, I was like, would that be the thing, , like, I feel like you're, you have to talk about adoption every week at some point. Right? And so you sort of alluded to this earlier, but you were forced, on a semi-regular basis, have conversations that at some point refer to you being adopted, all three of you.

And I think modeling that for the community, and I absolutely agree should stay away from the, the binary, but modeling, having those deeper conversations with our friends and building community, for some folks, like they don't have any adoptee friends. And so when they listen to your show, they're, they're sitting there with you , right?

And you are their community. So opening those doors for them is a huge gift, and I hope that you guys do continue to do that. I love that you guys call it this. Okay. What's the apocalypse to you?

Patrick: Oh, the adoption apocalypse. That is, I cannot take any credit. That is all KJ. KJ Roelke came outta nowhere with that, and it was, it's great language, I think because, so for me, the adoption apocalypse is, I can't even, I'm, I'm definitely not gonna articulate it as well as him, but it's that post consciousness situation. And so the way he explains the apocalypse is, I'm pretty sure he ties it to like the book of Revelations and how that talks about the apocalypse. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just that things are different now. And so for me, the apocalypse is that difference. Like the apocalypse specifically for me started when I got that study and I read about that study and like the landscape shifted like, I won't say everything was burned away, but things were markedly different than they were even 24 hours before reading that study. And so the apocalypse is, it's massive change, but it's also change that it's massive change that you unfortunately can't go back from like here's, and so here's the difference between I think like the apocalypse and the fog.

I like the apocalypse because you go into the apocalypse and there it, there is no going back. Essentially with the fog, we talk about the fog, like you come out of the fog, but you can go back into the fog and I feel like that can be too ambiguous. And so I like the apocalypse for the simple fact that when you start to think about these things differently, it doesn't matter what you do after that, whether you not, whether you don't talk about it again, your life has changed in a significant way and you, no matter if you never, ever talk about it again, you're gonna be thinking about it internally.

And not to say that I'm a mind reader, know what everybody thinks. And not to say that I will tell everybody how they should be thinking, but it's like with the apocalypse it's like, you know, for a fact that something is now different. That can never be the same. Whether or not I go further out into the, the, the wasteland, or I stay here in the same spot that I was when the apocalypse happened.

That is such a good

Haley: metaphor. Our props to KJ. Okay. I absolutely want to recommend that folks listen to the Janchi Show, but you also started a new podcast, just you, Conversation Piece, and you've guests as well. I really liked your conversation with Laura. We'll link to that, but I just, I love what you are all adding to the conversation.

I love that you have a focus on highlighting adoptive voices, which is of course my number one, number one goal. But you've heard Patrick share today, like you know that he is a skilled communicator and your co-hosts are too, and some of the conversation, I like, I love the balance. Okay, so you have these really deep conversations about identity, and you shared recently about your first trip back to Korea and how impactful that was on you and how hard it was and, and all of those things. And, and your co-hosts are able to draw these questions out, these answers out of you about that experience in a very skilled way. And it feels like friends, you try a snack, a lot of them are different.

I couldn't believe the descriptions of some of the foods you've tried. Oh my gosh. That's not my vibe, but I love it for you .

Patrick: There have been plenty that have not been my vibe for sure.

Haley: Okay. Okay. Anyway, so. I'm not a Korean adoptee, but I really enjoy listening and I really appreciate your leadership of the community. So I hope people also follow your work on Instagram and your newsletter. You've got all kinds of places for people to connect with you. But what do you wanna recommend to us or tell us more about your podcast or the Janchi Show, whatever you'd like.

Patrick: Sure. So definitely go check out my new podcast Conversation Piece. That would be great. But the person. Somebody who I really look up to in this space and who I've had the privilege of being able to work on some things behind the scenes recently with is Cam Lee Small. So he's at therapy redeemed on Instagram, but he's a Korean adoptee and he does a lot of work on the mental health side, but also working with like younger adoptees who want to go through this process.

But the number one thing that I love about Cam that I think everybody should, who I would recommend everybody. Whether you're adopted or not, is that the way that he responds to comments, particularly ones that are super negative and directed at him? So Cam is the most empathetic, kindest person I have ever seen, respond to what would probably be considered a troll on Instagram, and he does it in a way that I believe I've seen a few who have left them those comments, like reply apologetically after he's responded to them, because I don't know how, it's just the, the, a testament to the work that he's done, but also like just who he is as a person, how he's able to navigate the negativity that comes out of these, some of these conversations, because he has tough conversations.

He does not shy away from talking about the difficult things and our adoptee realities, but when he is faced with what many of us would consider to be adversity from adoptive parents, even other adoptees, he navigates it with such grace and skill that I just, I cannot recommend him enough as a person to like learn how.

Learn and watch what vulnerable empathy looks like and and self-accountability. I think the way he does it is just incredible, and I've told him this on a number of occasions, but he is the person I look to when I am trying to navigate one of those situations myself. So if I'm dealing with a negative commenter or received like a real nasty dm, like I will go back and look at some of Cam's posts and find where he's responded to comments and just see how he navigates that situation.

And so as much as he has, he has a go find him on, I think it's therapy redeemed on WordPress. That's his website. But. Seek him out specifically for the way he interacts on the every on, on a day-to-day basis. I think that is why I wanted to highlight him as a resource, but also just truly why I am glad to be in the same community as him, because I've learned so much from him and also continue to do so.

And I think anybody could take away some really incredible lessons from the work that he does.

Haley: High praise for Cam. I totally agree and I appreciate anyone that is not me who can spend their time and energy educating adoptive parents. Good job team. Go . Good job.

Okay, Patrick, where can we connect with you online and find all the things?

Patrick: You can find me mostly on Instagram at PatrickInTheWorld, but you can find everywhere that I'm doing anything, including my newsletter at my website, PatrickInTheWorld (dot) me.,

Haley: And we'll link to your podcasts and everything of course. Thank you so much for sharing with us today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Patrick: Absolutely. I, I will not lie to you. This was a bucket list item of mine ever since I found your show was to come on here and have this conversation with you. And it's, it's really been a pleasure and a treat, and congratulations on a million downloads. That is a huge, huge feat.

Haley: Thank you.

Oh my gosh. He, Patrick is a stellar human. Just have to say, I hope you do go check out his podcasts and it, there's so many amazing adoptees doing fantastic advocacy work. It's just incredible to be working alongside these tremendous humans. So thank you so much, Patrick, for all the ways you serve the adoptee community, and also to thank you to all of my other guests and supporters and other adoptees who are doing their very best to make a huge difference in the world and sharing adoptee voices.

We are going to be going on a little holiday break here right away. So next week's episode is our last episode until mid-January we'll be back with new episodes. So make sure you tune in next Friday for a really amazing healing series episode also about identity reclamation. And I'm really, really excited to share that with you.

As always, you are invited to join our Patreon community, adopteesOn.com/community has details. If you were like, oh my gosh, the show's going on a break. No, I need more adoptee talk. There is another weekly podcast I do for Patreon supporters called Adoptees Off Script, and so we're not going on a break over there.

You can hear us every Monday, and we'd love to have you join us to support the show, which helps support more adoptees by keeping the show free and available for all. Thank you so much for listening, and let's talk again next Friday.

232 [Healing Series] Identity

Transcript

Full show notes: http://www.adopteeson.com/listen/232

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Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. This is a special episode in our healing. Where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves and they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on AdopteesOn.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

On today's episode, we are talking about identity development as adults. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptee on Marta Sierra. Hi Marta.

Marta Sierra: Hi Haley.

Haley: I just told you I listened to some of your past episodes last night. And I can't believe how impactful they have been for the community and still to this day have been for me.

So we're gonna link to Marta's past appearances on the show so you can go back and listen. Um, but especially we were talking about estrangement and loyalty as a trauma response. And you unlocked something for folks I think, has been bottled up for so many of us for years. So I'll just express my appreciation from the community to you for that.

But I wanna start where we kind of left off and share a little bit of your story since then.

Marta Sierra: Sure. Thank you so much for that feedback, Haley. It's, you know, it's truly an honor and I'm very public about so many parts of my story because I really believe in representation, which we'll probably keep talking about in this episode.

But I also, yeah, you've heard me talk about it a bunch, like what community is the medicine? I just feel so strongly about that, and I think that your show and other platforms are community activism and I just feel really passionately. This work. So yeah, we last talked about estrangement and, and that was interesting for me to look back to and, and revisit some of our past episodes because that was such a beginning for me, is what I was thinking about in reflecting on us talking about identity more today and coming back to.

Identity development as an adult adoptee or identity development over long term reunion. And for me, estrangement really was such a beginning to be myself, find myself, be myself, stand in myself. We were talking about our purpose being to, you know, on this earth to give and receive love. You and I, last time we talked, Haley and, and you said, you finished my sentence.

There was this moment and you, I said something about giving and receiving love, and you said as who we really are. And yeah. Turns out what I learned post estrangement is who I am is gay and polyamorous . Which...

Haley: Is that a surprise to you?

Marta Sierra: ...were some big discoveries. Uh, it sort of, and sort of not and, and my journey with, with my queerness and my journey with polyamory have been, you know, didn't just start then, but it was, you know, when I look back now, it really was the beginning of, I don't, I'm not beholden to anyone except myself, and I can really be free to explore myself and express myself without fear. And that was just brand new.

Haley: Isn't that fascinating? I think that is. Of the biggest takeaways from our last conversation, I shouldn't even say that cuz there's so many.

But coming into ourselves and having our own identity, like I've had so many conversations over the last decade with friends being like, oh yeah, I finally figured out what I like, in terms of perfume or a preference? Yes, just, just like, just preferences. Where, I don't know. I see my kids and being like, oh, I really love this, or I really love that.

And I think, I think, did I even have the option to really explore preferences when I was little? I don't know.

Marta Sierra: Right. Did I have enough of a context on myself to even choose those choices from an authentic place?

Haley: Yes. Or are you choosing. Because this is the family environment you are in. This is what they like. This is what was modeled. This is what's acceptable. This is what's not acceptable and not safe. And so are you just fitting into this, like trying to pour yourself into a mold that is not for you?

Marta Sierra: Right. The need for belonging supersedes the need for authenticity. So if, if I need to be an authentic to belong, that's gonna trump who I am really every time.

Haley: That's wild. Like That's so wild. Okay, so identity development in terms of becoming our own authentic selves, like who we really are, is that, can you talk a little more about that? What do you see as identity development for adult adoptees?

Marta Sierra: You know, I see memes all the time, I feel like on, on Instagram about traumatized people in general, but how, you know, if you feel like you're behind your peers on whatever life step, right? Whether that's career or owning a home or having children, That some of that I is about our delayed development. When you are a person who has experienced trauma, we do get stalled out in different places and that looks different for every individual of course.

But there is this very real delayed development because if you spend most of your childhood disassociated, there's just all of this lost time. Right? Like you're saying as a kid, like when we were supposed to, Like, oh, do I like purple or do I like pink? Or, which sport do I like to play? We were like, how do I survive? How do I survive? How do I survive like that?

If that's what your nervous system is running on, you don't have the space for that exploration. And you know, I even, I give a disclaimer to new clients, especially in groups, but even individuals, um, especially if someone comes in, you know, one toe out of the fog.

I know we're like retiring that phrase soon as a community, but I'm just gonna keep using it today for lack of a replacement. But, you know, I, I try to be as transparent as possible and, and one of those disclaimers is, You may want to make a lot of changes in your life as you move into this work. And I don't want that to be jarring.

You know, a lot of people moving through their trauma work, change careers, move to another country, get married, end of marriage. You know, there's all of these big shifts as we realize like, oh, I'm not that person at all that I thought I was. And now that I'm finding myself, I gotta make some changes to align my insides with my oustides.

Haley: So you are just telling clients up front, this is a disclaimer, like if we address these things, you may be upending like, wow. Yes. I never thought of that before, Marta. Like sincerely. I guess I've seen that too. I've seen so many people come into our community and change their name. Move across the country, change career, just as you said, end of marriage.

I can, I mean, I know one person that does all of those things, um. Wow. Okay. So that's identity.

Marta Sierra: You know, and even thinking about us talking today is I sometimes it's hard for me to go back and listen to the first recordings that we did, Haley, because it's my dead name. My dead name is on those interviews.

And, and even that as what, but I, I think about, I feel like my voice is even different then. Like, there's just been so many shifts in adulthood for me and so many transformations, and I think that's what, yeah, when, again, when our system's driven by fear. And when, when losing anybody or anything is the most important thing. I don't have space to be myself in that. Right.

Haley: I, I was kind of talking about this with a friend this morning and what I mentioned was when we're in reunion, if we're, you know, fortunate enough to have that with our genetic family, can we be ourselves, and if we even know who we are, but at this point, I think I feel like I know who I am and am I showing up there as myself, because if I'm rejected, then they're really rejecting the real me.

Marta Sierra: Right.

Haley: Versus if I'm there and I'm trying to still Mm. Shape shift a little. Yes.

Marta Sierra: The chameleon thing.

Haley: Then if I'm rejected, they're just rejecting the, you know, costume I put.

Marta Sierra: So right. That really highlights how we have to have done enough healing where the other people leaving and rejecting us doesn't cause chaos. Where if I'm fiercely choosing myself, I no longer need that outside of me. I mean, I need some people to choose me. Right. We need, we need people, but I don't need, it's not as, it's not all as serious as I had previously thought. It's okay. That's, we are supposed to be in a place where people can move in and out of our lives without us, you know, teetering on the edge of sanity, ideally.

Haley: Right? I mean, we're laughing, but also for real. Right?

Marta Sierra: For real,

Haley: For real.

Marta Sierra: Totally for real.

Haley: Okay. So since you became estranged from your adopters and you have been doing identity, you know, exploration and finding these things out about yourself, Like, oh, I'm queer. Oh, I, I want to live a polyamorous lifestyle. How has that impacted you and the people around you? Because I know you've done a lot of internal work, you're an IFS therapist, so it's like, uh, required, I guess, um. But can are, are you comfortable sharing a little bit about that?

Marta Sierra: Yes, absolutely. I. And I, I, I can mention it again at the end too, but I did do an episode on my queerness and polyamory specifically, so I will talk about that at the end if your listeners wanna hear a ton more about those things.

Again, all of that wasn't, wasn't brand new, but I really did just feel this new level of freedom to pursue, yeah, the level of, of freedom I wanted and freedom of choices of partnerships and, partners and to explore my queerness. I mean, as a straight presenting pansexual woman that had been with a man, you know, in this really long relationship, and the only way for me, without ending that relationship that I did not want to end at all to explore my queerness is, is to be a non monogamous. And that was everything, like starting to lean into that and, falling in love with a, a woman for the first time. You know, I had been with women very casually throughout my adulthood, never had the permission to really date a woman to fall in love with a woman.

And for me as an adoptee, there felt something really powerful for me in a relationship with another woman that I had not experienced in my other relationship. Something particularly healing, something particularly sacred and, it just, uh, I don't, I don't, still don't have words for like, the amount of healing that I experienced in that relationship.

Haley: Can I just press in on something? Cuz I, I think I keep saying, oh, this is new for you, but you're like, no, no, I, I knew something. Can you, can you say that, like, looking back, what did you know that you're only noticing you know now? Or I don't know. Can you talk about that?

Marta Sierra: Yeah, I, I identified as bisexual from like as early as my teen years, I would say, but I never gave myself permission to really claim that or to pursue women romantically, and it was just something I didn't feel allowed to do.

I don't know if I can say it any other way. And then also this piece, Being in a straight presenting relationship, um, being a straight presenting them, and that I just didn't think that I was ever gonna get to have that and, or, or even that I was allowed to want it. Definitely felt like I wasn't even allowed to want it.

Haley: Because if you actually shared that identity out loud with the people that were in your life, that would not have been safe for you?

Marta Sierra: Yeah, just, uh, I think just as adoptees, I feel like we take this really quiet vow so young to like not want or need anything. And so this is about like right, my hunger for healing, my hunger for connection, my hunger for joy and pleasure, and to be brought alive from this like ghost existence that I was living and that hunger feels, can feel really selfish, indulgent, elicit whatever words you wanna put to it that, that shame our very human wants and needs.

Haley: I dunno how you do that. You say so many, like one line, one off things. This is, that's where people are gonna pause. We take this quiet vow like, yeah.

Marta Sierra: You know, ideally I would've got to experiment when I was younger and date girls and date boys and like see how I thought all felt, but I didn't know enough about myself.

So, you know, I see this, we talked a little bit about this before we started recording. I see this in, in so many adult adoptees that are learning really big things about themselves in their thirties, in their forties, in their fifties, and then trying to figure out how to course correct big decisions they've made in their lives to realign around the truth that they're discovering about themselves.

Haley: I think you said to me, we think we know who we are. . . Yeah. But then we don't really, uh, okay. So, so to me, I'm hearing those things and even though I've been sort of in the midst of this for the last 10 years or maybe a little more, Figuring out who I am. It can sound really scary. Like yes, you're talking about like, well, if we look at this and you explore, like you might decide you're not gonna be married anymore, you might decide you're gonna change out, like that's big stuff and that's world shifting stuff, so that sounds terrifying.

Marta Sierra: Yes. Yeah, it's really scary. And all of healing though requires a risk. Right. You're taking a risk that if you turn towards something really painful, maybe something good will be on the other side, and that's the discovery. I think for me post estrangement is that every risk I take there is something powerful on the other side.

You know, something that queer adoptees have in Reunion have to sit with, right? Is whether or not to come out to their birth families and international transracial adoptees. There's added scary cultural elements to that sometimes. Sometimes we're from birth countries where homosexuality is illegal, like really intense things to be up against.

Really terrifying as you're saying, right? To think about risking this connection that is essential and fragile and can feel fragile. And so I hadn't, I hadn't come out to my mom because it didn't feel that relevant when I was living in a monogamous partnership with a man. Why? Right. It didn't, I didn't feel like I was particularly hiding it, but I never really addressed it directly either.

But I, I hit this point where I was living poly amorously. I had a very serious girlfriend who I loved very deeply, and I was starting to think about bringing her down there at some point. And so, I realized step one before that is I have to come out to my mom. And that was really terrifying.

Haley: What, when what do you do? Like you're, you're like, am I gonna lose the relationship I worked so hard and we've worked so hard to build? Is this gonna cost me everything? Mm-hmm. . Yeah.

Marta Sierra: Yes, and I, you know, Columbia is a very patriarchal Catholic country, as I've talked about on here before. So it's, it's not really okay to be gay still culturally, and it's definitely not okay to break the rules around monogamy and structure like that.

So, you know, I knew that I'm, I'm presenting something that's outside of, of what she knows and her culture. So, yeah, it, and, and, and also, this is still in my, in my second language that I, I, I identify as functionally fluent right now. But it, it's clunky. It's not perfect. There's lots of things I still don't know.

So I actually practice in my, I do one-on-one Spanish tutoring, so I practiced for weeks about this. So we would mock do the conversation and I tried to prepare for questions that I thought she might have and. When, when I got down there, so this was last Christmas, we were walking maybe the second or third morning that I was there, and it, I, it felt like the moment it was calm, it was early morning, it was really beautiful where we were walking and I could feel that it was the time and it was like starting to like burn up the center of my chest and I was starting to shake and I, I just jumped right into kind of what I had prepared and....

The most shocking part was I had prepared how to explain polyamory in Spanish ad nauseum. And I said, do you know what that is? After I said, we have been practicing polyamory, of course she knows my partner. And uh, she said, yeah, I know what that is.

And I was like, oh, 30 minutes of material out the door. Okay, and, what she ended up asking me the most about was my queerness. When did I know and, and my history with that, which I had not prepared emotionally or linguistically to talk to her about at all. And so that was, you know, a big surprise. But she was, she was absolutely incredible. She. That's what she always says, which is lo que es mas importante que tollo que estas feliz, like the most important thing is that you're happy, and I know that's her value as a mom, but I still of course, feared that this would be the thing that was outside of the bounds of that because my experience of caregiver support is that it's so unstable and unsafe that I didn't trust that. But she has shown me over and over that her love is boundless and that I do not need to fear her.

And yet I am still so afraid because of my childhood that she'll hurt me in moments of vulnerability especially.

Haley: Mm. Thank you for sharing that like intimate story. I'm so thankful you got the response you did, and the other thing I know about you is if you hadn't got that response, you're still you and still confident in you and still like, I feel like I made all the right choices here.

You know? I'm assuming, did you prepare yourself for the other reaction?

Marta Sierra: I did, I did, and I, I forgot to say this part of my lead in before, before my disclosure and really what got me to the point also of deciding to come out to her was, I already hid who I am to gain entrance into one family system in this life, and I feel like it almost killed me, so I just can't do it that way Again, I can't hide just to belong to this family.

And so I led with that and, and that I was trusting her to not require that of me.

Haley: And she showed up for you?

Marta Sierra: She showed up.

Haley: We love her. Um, so I've been in Reunion for 11 years, I think at this point with my dad and my siblings and his wife. And I just recently came back from a family wedding and I didn't realize the, uh, fear I was going in with, because there's all these moments at weddings in particular, right? That you see who's in and who's not, right?

Like and, you know, let, let me just like, no fear anyone, like it's a happy ending for this. Like going in, are we gonna be in the family pictures? Is there gonna be one where you're like, okay, now you guys step out. So we just have the OGs, you know, like

Marta Sierra: mm-hmm.

Haley: That did not happen at a speech at one point, my brother said, my three sisters including me with no asterisk.

Right? All of those things that I think for them, didn't, they didn't even think twice about it.

Marta Sierra: Right.

Haley: But I came in with these fears of that. And then the other example I'm gonna give is more talking about how I think I really am authentically me when I'm there. Cuz at one point I, I was helping with a couple different things here and there. You know, food stuff and whatever. Um, my dad's wife, I call mom. At one point we were discussing something and then she said, I'm just gonna make an executive decision just like you do. You make a, you know, I was like, okay, I know I'm real here because I do that all the time, and that really is me.

Marta Sierra: Yes.

Haley: So, I don't know, there's just this, I feel like it's two parts of my story sharing with you this, it's like I still was afraid. I didn't even know I was afraid, but it came with relief after the pictures, I went back to the car with my kids, I teared up again. Right. And I cried and I was wearing sunglasses and I'm trying not to show my kids I'm crying cuz it was a happy, I was like, oh, okay.

Like it was happy. And then same with the reception. He's, you know, it was just an offhanded comment. It wasn't really even talking about us specifically, but it was just like, oh, like to be included is just really amazing and it's still like lots of people would just never think twice about that. Right. I dunno.

Marta Sierra: Mm-hmm.

Haley: That's the adoptee experience, right?

Marta Sierra: Well, they see you and they claimed you. In that simple way, I think that biological families do, because like you're saying, it's not, it's not out of the norm for them, but we are not expecting it.

Haley: Which is so sad. We're not expecting it, you know, but it's, it's true. That's how we grew up. Like if you felt unsafe and you know, I just wanna say there's a few times where you were like, um, mentioning these thoughts that were going through our heads as children. And for a lot of us that's unconscious. So I, I'm, I'm meant to kind of come back to that.

Those are unconscious thoughts that are just kind of circling around and we're acting as though those things are true cuz they are, am I safe here, do I belong here? All those things. But to have them below the surface and not visible to us now, hopefully they're visible to us. I don't know. Anyway, this is so, these conversations are so hard, but so good.

I feel very up-ended sometimes when I talk to you because you're unlocking things for me too, just along with you who are listening. So

Marta Sierra: Yes. I mean, your example's really powerful, Haley, because by in, in a different space and time, if you were listening to parts of you that were sabotaging the connection with your family, right, that were saying like, they don't really want you there, they just invited you out of obligation.

You know, you're not really one of them. Like you shouldn't go, you know, you might have not even gone. From a place of paralyzing theory maybe wouldn't have gone. And these corrective experiences where we are loved and accepted as we really are require vulnerability. And that vulnerability requires an internal sense of safety.

Haley: So I'm extrapolating. Does that mean somehow deep down, uh, you and I both are, have experienced this safety and we're sort of trusting that, that even if something had happened, like even if your mom had rejected what you told her, or I had got the, uh, Okay now you guys step out. Let's have the real, they're just the real family now, um, and we would've been, okay. Would've been painful, but we would've been okay.

Marta Sierra: It would've been very painful and we would've relived a lot of trauma, but we would've been Okay. Yeah.

Haley: Go us. I'm growing up. Look at that. . . No, I think it, it demonstrates, that some measure of healing work we've done has been effective.

Marta Sierra: Yes. Yeah. Mm.

Haley: Okay. I'll take that. Thank you. I'll take that in. . Is there anything else you wanna say to us about identity development, especially as adults? Like, huh? Do we need to do this? Like I think we do. It's obvious to me from the folks I've talked to who are coming into their adoptee consciousness and processing these things.

Marta Sierra: Yeah. You, I, again, I can't say community is the medicine enough. Right. But if we think about that, we need to find community for all the different kind of parts of us or all the different identities that we hold. You know, I need, I need other adoptees for sure, but coming into my queerness, I need other queer people.

And some of coming into my own queerness is, uh, creating community in my personal life, but it has also been running my first LGBTQ group for adoptees and confronting my own internal imposter stuff with that about like, am I queer enough to even run this? Which is its own interesting layer of identity work.

And that group space has been really powerful and , you know, we need community for, for all the pieces of our identities. Safe places to explore, safe places to say the hard things. And so, you know, why am I so public about all of this? I, because representation matters so much.

Haley: Yes. Thank you. And I, you know, I said before, like, I thanked you for sharing these deeply personal parts of your story because it comes at a cost and it's so amazing that you're so generous with that and letting us in. And I really believe it brings freedom for other people to be who they are. So thank you. Okay. Where can we connect with you online? Marta,

Marta Sierra: MartaSierraLMHC@gmail.com.

Haley: Perfect. And then you mentioned that there is another podcast episode, right, where you talk more about, um, your queerness and polyamory, and we can link to that in the show notes, but you wanna talk about that?

Marta Sierra: Yes. So that is my dear friend Tasha Hunter's podcast called When We Speak. You can find that on Spotify or anywhere you listen to your podcast. And there is an episode on queerness and polyamory from me. Also one on adoption trauma that your listeners that have listened to all my episodes might not feel like brand new material, but that's out there as well.

Haley: Oh yeah. But more Marta is more good. Thanks So we'll, we'll link to both of those episodes.

Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. Really appreciate it.

I am so thankful. Full of gratitude for every single therapist that has come on the podcast and shared some of their hard earned wisdom with us. I really, really appreciate it. So thank you, Marta. She's been on the show multiple times and has really guided a lot of us through some very challenging themes.

So I know today's episode was no exception, and I'm just really, really thankful. If you wanna connect with other adoptees and support the show, if you go to AdopteesOn.com/community, you can find out how to get started in our Facebook group or listening to our off-script episodes. Or join us for book club or off script parties.

We have a whole range of options for you. If you are looking to get into some adoptee community to talk about some of these things that Marta and I talked about today, we would welcome you in. Thank you so much for listening and supporting adoptee voices, and let's talk again next Friday.