289 Bruce Porth Part 2

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/289

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] 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're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today is part two of a two part series that we began last week with my friend Bruce Porth. Today we talk a little bit more about reunion and what it looks like when someone is being dishonest with you.

And we also chat about using breathwork and psychedelics as healing modalities. Have you ever met one of those people that when they speak, you just have to listen to every word? Bruce is one of those people for me. So I hope you enjoy getting to know him better along with me. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on [00:01:00] 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 are on the website, adoptees on.com. If you miss part one, I would recommend going back and listening to that first. Okay. Let's listen in.

Did you ever think about looking for paternal side? I know for a lot of us, that's like the second afterthought. It's it's the mother. They're the one that carried us. They're the, that's the first connection it feels like.

Bruce Porth: Exactly. Yeah. And I, I did find my father, as soon as I found my mom, she was more than happy to share that information with me along with a caveat that he was not a trustworthy person and they were actually both still living in kind of the same general area just to the west of [00:02:00] Chicago, but they, had didn't really have any relationship anymore.

At that point in time. I do know that at the time of my birth. He did want to stay with my mom and I think he wanted to raise me. She would not even let him anywhere near the hospital when I was born. I think he, he wanted to be there. I got his name and found his address pretty quickly and he was receptive to having a relationship, but I haven't really talked much about that relationship because it's a difficult one.

Especially considering that, my adoptive father was not the person that I really needed. And it turns out that my birth father was also not really somebody that could show up. I always sensed in our exchanges and it was started out by, regular snail mail and then transition to email.

But I always sense that there was something untrustworthy about him, so I never really felt compelled to go out to the Midwest and actually meet him [00:03:00] face to face. But he would tell me these elaborate stories about all the things that he had done in his life. He claimed that I, he had a daughter, half sibling of mine that was a famous movie actress and actually wove these really elaborate and detailed stories about how they were estranged from each other now.

And just a lot of detail about her life, as if it was real. And eventually I was able to get the name of this actress out of him. And, even a casual internet search, she did come from that same general region of the country, but nothing really lined up with, it'd be consistent with him being her father.

But the interesting thing was this actress, almost identical to my oldest daughter when she was about eight years old or so, so I couldn't really totally discount the story, but there were others, other stories that he shared that were glorified him, in his life and long story short, I found out that all of it was, [00:04:00] or most of it, I'm sure it was lies and I did actually end up contacting this actress.

Actually, she reached out to me through a mutual friend of ours, and it's a story that would take way too long, and it's too silly to even go into, but she was trying to explain some things in her own family. I was trying to get some kind of verification that, my father was telling me something real and so we both had different narratives and we both validated that neither one was accurate.

So that was the final kind of closure that I got that he was completely untrustworthy and had created this fantasy life for himself. And as it turns out, and I'm assuming that this isn't a lie, he is also an adoptee. So I suspect that he had to create a fantasy life for himself as a way to compensate for the pain of relinquishment that he was not able to face and to work through.

Haley Radke: [00:05:00] Thanks for sharing that because. So many of us go into reunion and have no idea what to expect, and we might have ideas of what it'll look like. And hopefully it's the open arms and willingness to share information and all of those things. But I would be naive enough to take it all hook, line and sinker. That's wild.

Bruce Porth: And I did for a while. And I was, I was telling other people that I had, my half sister was a famous movie actress.

Haley Radke: Okay when we're done, I hope you name names to me.

Bruce Porth: I'll be happy to share that with you Haley. Yeah, so there was, there was a period of working through a lot of those feelings of betrayal after that period of time. So I pretty much have worked through that. It doesn't surprise me that given his history that this is something that he would do.

It's unfortunate that people do end up [00:06:00] doing this, but I'm no longer taking it personally at all. This was really entirely about him.

Haley Radke: After your mom passed, did you have any extra support, like grief supports and things like you had said? I felt nothing, but I'm assuming something came after that.

Bruce Porth: Yeah I was doing therapy, I had found a therapist that I had started working with and it actually came out of doing some couples work and there was this resonance between me and this therapist that we started doing some work on our own and she was incredibly empathic and was a really a great witness and I could work through a lot of grief, with her.

But the problem was that she really had no skill at all in dealing with trauma and it feels to me like I was living in this really narrow world. And so I did not [00:07:00] really know anything different. And I didn't know really what was available out there. I wasn't aware of the various modalities at that time.

That are designed specifically to deal with trauma in a really effective way, the somatic modalities that Peter Levine had come up with and then Dick Schwartz coming up with internal family systems, which I think is just a remarkable model and really applicable for me as an adoptee because it feels like the experience, caused all this fracturing.

And having a model that I can work with these different fractured parts of me has been extremely useful, but it took me a long time to get to that point of finding those resources. Because I was locked in with this one therapist, and it's a subtle point, but she was all about integration, and the big thing that she was missing was the differentiation of the various parts, and then the linkage of those parts. [00:08:00] Or the integration. So she was skipping over a whole lot of work that I needed to do and was really clueless about it. But there's a great, I think he calls himself a neuroscience Daniel Siegel that talks specifically about that differentiation and then linkage. And when I started learning about that it made complete sense.

And then I happened to come across a pamphlet for a, it was actually sent to my wife, who's a clinical psychologist that was advertising for a workshop. And it was featuring a woman named Janina Fisher and talked about her book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. And just reading that description almost brought me to tears because I was resonating so much with it.

And I immediately got the book and started diving into it. This was my introduction into internal family systems.

Haley Radke: Okay. You married a psychologist?

Bruce Porth: I did.

Haley Radke: That's [00:09:00] funny. No, when you earlier, when you were talking about university and you're like, Oh, I went to engineering school. We didn't have any psych books. Like I, I took psychology because didn't know who I was. Like, and you just married one. So there you go.

Bruce Porth: And before I married one, I dated one.

Haley Radke: That's good.

Bruce Porth: So I think there was some part of me that was so desperate for safety. And I think I was making an assumption that a therapist would be a safe person to get close to. And that may or may not be true.

Haley Radke: Earlier you referenced oh, back then they didn't know as much, about adoption for therapists and stuff. And I was thinking they're still not training in school for that either, or if it is, anything about adoption it's a very brief period. And so I think you and I, and probably a lot of our listeners we're steeped in it.

And so I think there's this an assumption that, oh, [00:10:00] way more people know about this stuff now. And some more people know about it now, but not everyone. So even saying that to you, I bet she didn't have much training about adoptees when she went to school.

Bruce Porth: Oh, there was none. There was none at all. Her training was through me, really. And, to be honest, there was a lot of struggle for me because I wasn't feeling seen as an adoptee. That, that part of me was not recognizable to her and it was a drain on the relationship too. And so it was difficult to work through some of that. And I, I think we're on the other side of a lot of that now.

And a lot of that just has to do with my own healing and not having parts of me that were unconsciously looking to her for emotional sustenance. Because early in the relationship that was happening, in kind of an unconscious way, in a way that I eventually, even once I got conscious of, I couldn't necessarily control [00:11:00] it. I had to do a lot more of my own healing work.

Haley Radke: It's interesting that seeing the words fragmented self, you're like, whoa, that's me. Like you can, even recognizing that is a big thing.

Bruce Porth: That was a huge thing. Just, yeah, just, like I was saying earlier. In the absence of having language, I would just shut down, and I wouldn't say anything, and now I was coming across these very descriptive words and terminology to describe my experience.

And it was, yeah, it was just so validating. It was like crawling through the desert on your knees, repenting for all those years, to paraphrase Mary Oliver. And then, coming across these oases with this incredible validation. And I was harvesting all of these, bits and pieces. But still at the time wasn't, I hadn't totally found the adoptee community at that time.

And so as I did, [00:12:00] that was a whole nother level of validation and connection.

Haley Radke: Because you said you, your adoptive mom passed in 2020? And when did you first hear Adoptees On?

Bruce Porth: It was January or February of 2020.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Bruce Porth: So that first episode just came up in my YouTube feed and I have, never really gravitated to social media and I've just like never had time for it or, the drive to, dive into it.

But I was interacting in, in YouTube space a little bit and one of the episodes popped up there and I didn't know how the algorithm found it, but it did. And I listened to it.

Haley Radke: Do you remember which one it was?

Bruce Porth: I do not remember which one it was.

Haley Radke: No. Okay.

Bruce Porth: But then that opened the door wide open. Now, I had been part of a smaller group of adoptees, centered around New York City.

We would get together periodically and do workshops, [00:13:00] but the therapeutic approach. was a little bit limited for what I needed, and it was a self contained group. So I, it, that group didn't lead me into the broader adoptee group. I had to find it on my own.

Haley Radke: Did you just start listening? With, I don't know, I know you jumped in pretty quick.

Bruce Porth: Yes I did. So I, then I found your website and I found the back catalog and I did start binging some of it, but what it opened up for me was not just the, the podcast, but the literature. I had been familiar with a lot of the classical literature, Nancy Verrier, Betty Jean Lifton, I had read all that stuff, but I don't know, to me, it felt, a lot of that's still certainly still valid, but a lot of it felt a little bit dated to me.

And so now I was. I was discovering these other authors, and so a lot of these books started arriving at the door. And I think the first book I got was Anne Hefron's You Don't Look Adopted. [00:14:00] And that just blew the doors open for me. And from there, it just continued to lead into the community in a deeper way.

Haley Radke: Once you heard people talking about more, really, we talk, tell our stories here, but a lot of the time we're talking about the emotional side of things, the psychological side of things, and that sort of personal side. Once you started hearing more of those things, were you like, oh, this is more what I need to dive into? Or it sounds like you were already investigating that from your reading and things about therapy modalities and stuff.

Bruce Porth: I was, but it felt like I was only accessing a narrow portal of what was actually available and what I actually needed. Because as I'm discovering that, the internal landscape is extremely vast.

The pervasiveness of this wound, it doesn't occupy just a, a corner of my being. It's like it had over the years infiltrated my entire being. And so I needed validation from lots of different [00:15:00] sources and each author brings a different, slightly different angle of the experience to the table and I was really eating all of it up and needing it.

So now I'm at a point where I feel like I have, I finally have all the resources that I need, and the healing, the different healing modalities, including more recently some expanded states work, which is really exciting territory to explore. And so this part of my nervous system that was always searching and looking for a connection and healing can finally relax.

And even though I still have, I feel like I have a lot more healing work to do. I know I can just put one foot in front of the other and follow the path. And I will find the healing that I need. And there's just an incredible amount of relief from that.

Haley Radke: If someone is listening, and they're like what you just said, like you have access to the things you [00:16:00] need that feels that has probably felt out of reach for a lot of people and what are like one or two things that now looking back you've got a big history with all kinds of different modalities that you've tried out and what are one or two things that If somebody's new that you'd be like I would have started here or I would have read this first, or I would have tried this first, or I don't know. That's a tough question. But what do you think?

Bruce Porth: There's a lot out there. And I think what one person needs is going to be, individual so for me, I needed to start with internal family systems and I did a lot of, one on one therapy with internal family systems. I did a lot of my own reading.

I watched a bunch of videos of Dick Schwartz. I also even, before I found IFS, I had gravitated to Gabor Mate. And so I [00:17:00] was watching as much of his material that I could find. And there's just something, deeply validating about what he had to say. And I was able to see him like three times, live and in person.

And I would actually, I remember one time talking to him about adoption specifically, because he does reference it periodically. And he has a history that involves similar abandonment to a relinquishment, although he was reunited with his mom at some point after or maybe partly during the war. So not quite the same, but he had a certain sensitivity to it that I really resonated with.

So all of that was important, but where I had gotten to, I was still feeling this sort of internal sense of what I called non negotiable unlovability. Where I knew that there were still places inside me that were heavily defended that I really, I was having a lot of difficulty accessing, even with the therapy that I was doing.

Haley Radke: I think I remember you asking a question about this in [00:18:00] one of book clubs.

Bruce Porth: I might have been trying to understand it, myself at the time, because that was that phrase just was very descriptive of my internal experience.

Haley Radke: I think it was with the Lisa Olivera conversation.

Bruce Porth: Oh, yes. That was a really good book club. And she's such a gentle soul. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Easy to resonate with, I think, for fellow adoptees.

Bruce Porth: Yes. And quite a story of her own. I had so much compassion for all of us, but especially those who were foundlings. So I was just deeply moved to listening to her story. Yeah, so that was the progression that I followed.

But, like I said, there's still these spaces inside of me that I was having difficulty accessing and finding a way through. And it wasn't like these were neutral spaces. These were spaces that were haunting me. And really kicking my butt and I was having difficulty finding my way through it.[00:19:00]

I did eventually find holotropic breathwork, which is really profound and an amazing tool. I've been doing this for, about a couple of years now, and this is. It's a practice of deep breathing in a kind of continuous pattern. You're in a group setting, you have a partner, and it's usually anywhere from 10 to 30 people, in a given workshop.

And the breather will lay on a mat and their partner will be what we call the sitter. And we'll be there to attend to the needs of the breather as they go into their process through that breath and along with a, a soundtrack that is designed to be quite evocative. You enter into an altered or expanded state of consciousness, and I've been able to access the spaces inside of me, especially, my grief with holotropic breathwork [00:20:00] I seem to go and be able to access my grief quite directly. And another aspect of this breath work is it's focused body work. Your sitter might be involved in that, or the facilitators, for the workshop might be involved in that. It could be as simple as just having your sitter hold your hand, or it could be more involved than that.

It's funny for me. A lot of times I'm a sitter and I end up not really having to help the other person out. But for my sitters, I take advantage of every minute that we have, because there's so much in the way of tactile deprivation that I think I missed out on, I was being touched by my adoptive mother, but it was the wrong mother who was touching me.

And in effect, I wasn't being touched by the mother that I needed to be touched by and there's still these empty spaces associated with that. And so I did one breathwork session where, you know, and this was an 80 minute [00:21:00] session. I sat up partway through it and I, I asked my partner for a hug and I just entered this really deep state of grief and sobbed in her arms for about 10 minutes, extremely powerful experience. I had another experience in a different workshop where I was able to see my mom, my first mom, and she was. She took the form of a divine spirit. Of course, she, she, that's all she could be at this point in time, having passed away in 2003, but in my process I saw her there and I reached out and I was holding her hand and her other hand was reaching out and connected to this infinite source of universal love. And as I was holding her other hand, I was just downloading this love. And I could almost literally feel it filling in my heart. And I just stayed with that for, it [00:22:00] must've been a good 20, 20 minutes or so. And afterwards, as we were processing it, I was realizing another aspect of this is doing integration work afterward with the group.

And I was realizing that this is what happens for an infant with a mother. That I think I mentioned earlier about the communication between a mother and an infant primarily being energetic and it's just this download of love just being in the presence of the mother. I mean there have been studies with heart cells that you know as you bring two separate heart cells together they start to beat in unison and I think that's the case when mother and baby heart get into proximity with each other as well.

So that was a really powerful experience. The next workshop I was really hoping to continue with that and actually it was quite a different experience and not one that I should really talk about because it revealed a great deal of the violence of relinquishment and I was [00:23:00] able to go into a space where I could viscerally see that I see evidence of it, even though I wasn't so I wasn't like, reliving it, but I could see that it had happened and I could see what happened and it was an experience of incredible empowerment because as I showed up as an adult in that scene, I was really adamant and vocal advocate for that infant that I was and yelling out to the world can you see what happened? Can you see what happened? So it was a really powerful experience and I've had other remarkable experiences with breath work as well, including one where, I went back and revisited my mom at the time of her death. Because it was still felt abstract to me.

And so this was a process where I was able to go back and really make it a little bit more real. The day after that workshop, I realized that workshop was the eve of the date of her death too, which I didn't for some reason realize during the workshop. [00:24:00] Yeah. So I did, I had another really good experience as well, where I saw myself as a child through different developmental stages and my mom was showing up on the scene in these, in various situations and the message that I got from that was that, that's not really a question of, am I lovable? It was like, I was always loved, I just didn't know that. And through that process, I was able to actually experience her love in a more direct way.

And sometimes in the process of breathwork, we finish up by saying an affirmation that we took from the experience and in that particular event, I ended up out in space and just realizing initially how dark it was and how expansive it was. But then I started to see all of, the stars and all of the light that exists in outer space.

And the affirmation that I came up with at the end of all of that was that the universe is luminous and I belong in [00:25:00] it. This is a modality, like I said, that I've been working with for the past couple of years, and I'm really excited to see where it takes me going forward. I also think doing sacred plant medicine or psychedelics is also an incredible tool, and so I've been able to do some of that work as well with MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine.

And my first experience with MDMA and psilocybin was a little bit less than a year ago. And the experience was one in which, as I was doing the integration afterwards, I realized that what had happened was that all of these rusty locks that represented this non negotiable unlovability had been broken open through this process and the medicine works inherently on its own, but there's also a lot of work that I had to participate in as well, both in terms of the prep work ahead of time and the integration work [00:26:00] afterwards, but the medicine itself is, it's compassionate enough that it's not going to blow open the doors that were, behind these rusty locks.

That was up to me to do, but it blew off the non negotiable part. That prevented me from opening those doors. So the 3 or 4 months after that 1st session brought me to a, a level of pain that I had not experienced before that was, it was both extremely scary, but also felt extremely productive.

And then at about 3 or 4 months, I emerged into a space of greater freedom that I have never experienced before and also entered a space where it feels like I never have to go back to some of these really dark places that I inhabited in the past. And so one of the things that came out of my breathwork was after one of my sessions, one of the facilitators said that she really admired my [00:27:00] grief stamina.

And she meant it, with the best of intentions. And she's really a really wonderful person and a talented facilitator. But in my breathwork group, I'm the only adoptee. And I have become increasingly aware of how much I wanted to do this work with adoptees. And when she said that, it just really validated that because from my standpoint, it's I'm an adoptee.

Of course, there's going to be this much grief get over it, and but I, from that point, what I realized is that I need to do this kind of work in community with other adoptees. And so I did more recently have an opportunity to do a medicine journey with a group of other adoptees. That was truly magical.

Haley Radke: Wow, that's really interesting. I think it's so amazing to hear what unlocks things for people, and I've heard from many of our friends that, that [00:28:00] truly has, but I also think you're a really great example of this. You've done a lot of other things to prepare. So I think when people hear that, they might be like, Oh that's my first step, right?

And I don't think that's true because there's so much integration work and things to do after, like you said, and if you're super new to therapy, I think some of that might feel challenging. I don't know. You have thoughts on that?

Bruce Porth: Oh, most definitely. I, I went into my first psychedelic session feeling like, oh, this is something that everybody should do.

And I got partway into that session and it became very clear to me. That's not true. This is definitely not something for everybody. And for those that it is something for my recommendation is take this very slowly and make sure of course, that you're working with somebody who's reputable and trustworthy.

And then also, like I said before, [00:29:00] there has to be a huge emphasis on the prep work going into it. And then during the session, the set and the setting, the set, meaning the mindset that you go into it and then the setting, making sure that there's robust safety that is really essential for having a, a good experience from my perspective and then the integration work afterwards be prepared and have a plan for doing that integration work.

That's definitely key and a lot of people, this is just not something that they ever have to do. And wouldn't gravitate to and that's a beautiful thing, too.

Haley Radke: I just put my hand up. Nobody can see that. It freaks me out so much. It would take a lot to go down that path for me. It feels very, it's like, interesting, exciting. I hear the vast benefits and learnings that so many people have had, and it also freaks me out. So there you go.

Bruce Porth: It did. It [00:30:00] certainly freaked me out the first time and I, and it, that did impact my experience because I wasn't able to fully let go and let myself have the experience. And I had a set idea of how it was going to unfold.

And I, I just, I remember the compassionate words of my guide at the time on numerous occasions. She said, Bruce, don't get ahead of the medicine, don't get ahead of the medicine. And it took me a while to understand what she was saying with that. Eventually I got it. So.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing. All of these things that you've done and I know that there will be things that resonate with someone.

All kinds of pieces of your story will resonate with someone. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to make sure we get to before we do recommended resources?

Bruce Porth: If I had a final comment I might quote Mary Oliver in one of her poems where she says, don't waste time looking for an easier world.

And [00:31:00] I did spend a lot of time looking for an easier world, and it really postponed a lot of the healing that I'm doing now. I was certainly doing the best that I could, but this process of really coming out of the fog, I believe it's a long process. And I may be doing it for the rest of my life certainly there's plateaus, but there's always deeper levels to explore. And so I think it's important to find community, find some hands that you can hold through the process, and then hang on and lean in.

Haley Radke: Well said. I have a really great chap, poetry chap book to share, and it's from a fellow adoptee, of course, and it's by Karen Wangare Leonard.

She also goes by Kay, and this isn't her first poetry. Her first poetry is available on her website. We'll link to that too. This is called Going Unarmed Into the Wail, and it [00:32:00] is so beautiful. I'm going to show you, no one else can see, but she has these really beautiful poems, but also art that she's gone ahead and added in of herself. She does like collage work. Sorry for all my paper noise by the mic, but there's these like poems where some things are like erase, erase your poems, and there's another one like that. This one. It's overwritten a bunch of times. So she's this really incredible artist, plus her poetry is so very moving, and I really enjoyed this collection.

So her first one is called Lightning on My Fingertips, and this is called Going Unarmed Into the Wail. So I'll link But I also just want to say, Bruce, you're one of my favorite people and you have showed up in Patreon for so many [00:33:00] different book clubs, other events that we have. And whenever you come, I'm always so excited to see you.

And people will just be able to tell from our conversation how smart you are and how observant you are and thoughtful. And I said earlier, you come to everything with this wholehearted energy. And I'm so glad I get to know you and introduce you to more people today. It's exciting for me. And so I hope people will follow along with the ways you're now serving in the community.

I know you're on the board of another adoptee organization. You are doing some other interviews for podcasts. I know you're doing some writing that's going to come out. And so I think with all of the things that you've been doing and working on in yourself, like now it's like out coming out and is able to pour out of you as [00:34:00] well.

So I see that. I don't know if you see that in yourself yet, but that's what I see. So I'm really grateful for you. Yeah, I just I'm so glad we got to talk today, but before I don't want to skip to the end.

Bruce Porth: Thank you so much for that. The thing, that I've been realizing the best thing you can do with a gift is just receive it. And so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take that in.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Bruce Porth: And thank you for that.

Haley Radke: You can listen to it again whenever you like. That's the bonus of a podcast. What do you want to recommend to us today?

Bruce Porth: So I would like to recommend not so much a product as a process. I would like to recommend community and community has just been really important for me in the adoptee space. And, there's certainly a lot of opportunities for virtual connections, but I have more [00:35:00] recently found the value in person connections and the power in that is just enormous.

And and there's lots of ways that I've been doing that, for one, I participate in Adoptees Connect, which is something that Pam Karanova started some time ago. And there's chapters that are all over the world now, and you can just search online and find something near you. The closest one to me is 3 hours away by car.

And so I usually do not hesitate to drive 3 hours there and 3 hours back for a 2 hour dinner. To connect with these people that have become so meaningful for me, but there's also conferences and I recently did a in person conference and the face to face connection there was just really wonderful for me, but it also is leading to other events that I'm getting together with other adoptees to do and then volunteering as Haley said I'm on the board of Adoption [00:36:00] Knowledge Affiliates and I love serving the community that way and staying plugged in to the community that way, and building it, deeper and more connections through that as well. And the other big piece of community is the Adoptees On Patreon group. And this has, brought so much, so many connections for me, and has opened up so many doors for me both virtual and in person. And so I'm just I'm filled with gratitude for that.

Haley Radke: Thank you know, I was thinking before we were talking today. I was thinking this morning I was like, oh man, I think a lot of people when they first come like to patreon events, they're like oh, that's how do I get to know people from this but like I have over time, like I've gotten to know so many new friends through it.

And it's really cool. I don't know. I never pictured that, when I started the show to have it's a friend maker, it's fun. So [00:37:00] anyway, and I got to meet you, which is so great. Where can people connect with you online and follow what you're doing and bringing into the world?

Bruce Porth: My email address is briankeithswanson @gmail.com and that's my birth name. Yeah, I was named after two members of the Rolling Stones. It was 1967. I'm on Facebook under the name of Brian Swanson. I'm on Instagram with the name @Bruce_Porth, P O R T H. I'm also on LinkedIn at Bruce Porth as well. I don't have a whole lot of content on social media, I basically use it for a vehicle for connecting with other people.

Haley Radke: Which is perfect. When I googled you today, you're like a patent holder. You're like a smart dude. In case anyone didn't know that. That's pretty cool. Just a random fact for folks.

Bruce Porth: [00:38:00] Yeah, I think there's 15 or so patents that you can find out there.

Haley Radke: Yeah. That's pretty cool. All right. What a pleasure to talk to you, Bruce. Thank you.

Bruce Porth: Thank you, Haley.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for being here. I just feel so thankful for these conversations and relationships that we're able to share over a podcast and I'm just, I don't know, I feel full of gratitude today for all of the special adoptees that I've gotten to meet through making Adoptees On. And I hope you do too.

I know that many of you will listen to episodes and reach out to the guests and connect with them and build friendships and extend your own community. For some of you, these podcast episodes are some of the first times you've ever [00:39:00] heard adoptees speak about their experiences in such a candid forthright manner. And so I hope you gain courage to start sharing your own story. And even if that's just with yourself or with a close friend or a fellow adoptee, and so you can start reclaiming parts of your identity. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for listening to Adoptee Voices, and I appreciate you.

Please come join us on Patreon. adopteeson.com/community, or you can click through to the show notes and there'll be a link right there where you can click through to join us. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again soon.

288 Bruce Porth Part 1

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/288

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288 Bruce Porth

Haley Radke: [00:00:00] 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're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I often share on this show that a great way to build your adoptee community is to join my Patreon group. And today's guest is someone that I have gotten to know over the past few years exactly because of that.

We are so fortunate to hear from Bruce Porth today. He is one of those people that only speaks when he's got something thoughtful and insightful to share. And today's conversation is no exception. Bruce shares about his childhood, some difficult relationship circumstances, his path to uncovering the impact adoption and [00:01:00] family separation had on his life, and what reunion has looked like.

This is part one of two, and don't worry, next week we'll release part two, where Bruce shares more about the healing modalities he's used, including breathwork and psychedelics. I want to give you a trigger warning, we have brief mentions of suicide and sexual assault in this episode. 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. Links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson. com and next week we will share our recommended resources. Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On. Bruce Porth. Welcome, Bruce.

Bruce Porth: Thank you, Haley. It's really good to be here.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad we finally get the [00:02:00] chance to have a one on one convo. I feel like I've seen you in lots of my Patreon events and gotten to know you through those, but let's deep dive. What, do you want to share some of your story with us?

Bruce Porth: Sure. Yeah. And this is, yeah, this is great. Just me and you, Haley, and the millions of your followers. I can start with a little bit of my story. It's interesting. I just picked up Peter Levine's most recent book called an Autobiography of Trauma. He's really an amazing guy, but he's got a quote in there that I just came across the other night that really resonates with me.

And I think it comes from a Jewish proverb, but the quote is "what is truer than truth", the story. And the meaning of it is that our stories are really important and they can reveal more about us than any specific facts, or evidence based information about us. And people's stories are what I really love [00:03:00] listening to.

They can be extremely healing, and they have been for me. And there's a different take on telling our stories too, Anne Heffron's take on it is, it's like pooping a watermelon. And more specifically around writing our story, I think but I can relate to that as well. So a little bit of background for me, I was adopted at 10 days old in Chicago, Illinois, through a Booth Memorial Salvation Army Hospital.

And my mom was 16 years old and didn't have any resources. This is at the tail end of the the baby scoop era. The decision was made for her, like a lot of women in her situation. And so she went off to Booth Memorial hospital in January or February of 1967. I was born in April and I was adopted at 10 days into a family [00:04:00] that was a young couple, infertile couple, as is often the case, and I came into that family when my adoptive mom was, struggling a little bit with depression. She had just, suffered a few losses in her own life. She was struggling and I found out much later that was the answer to her dilemma at the time, and that I cured her of her feelings at the time of sadness and depression. And that was the way that I started out in that family. My, my adoptive father was pretty emotionally unavailable. He was prone to some volatility growing up for me, and he was a hollow dictator.

And not what I really needed, not what any adoptee or any child needed to grow in a healthy way. My dad grew up in a family that was, there was a great deal of pain there. And, his mother had, [00:05:00] attempted suicide a number of times. Her sister actually died by suicide. Unfortunately, there was a real, legacy of pain that my dad never had the ability to deal with.

And in the absence of any kind of intervention, a lot of that pain just slid right into the next generation, which was me. The family was really shame based and, that was the environment that I grew up in. When I was 10 months old, they, ended up getting pregnant and this is often the case, in some families when there's infertility as I've come to understand from listening to a lot of other people's stories.

And that was the situation with them as well. Not only did I cure my mom of her depression at the time, but I also apparently cured them of their infertility. And I've been thinking a little bit about [00:06:00] that. And being a proponent of family preservation, I was thinking of ways that we could support more family preservation.

And I don't think anybody's ever studied this, but I had the idea that perhaps what we could do for a mother who is under resourced and pregnant and not in a position to care for and raise her baby. Maybe we could match them with some prospective adoptive parents who are struggling with infertility and these prospective adoptive parents would provide financial emotional support through the whole, pre and perinatal period and, get to know the mom really well, go to doctor's visits, things like that and build some kind of, intimate relationship and then see if, any of that would [00:07:00] modulate their fertility, just, being around somebody who is able to get pregnant and being around a young child and having a part in the process of nurturing that, that child, and the mother through the pregnancy, but then the child, in the early stages of infancy, perhaps, I don't think anybody's ever studied that.

But I would be really curious to see if anything would become of that and see what the data would say. I know in my case, my parents had 10 months with me and that was enough to change their biology so that they could become fertile.

Haley Radke: Did you ever experience like feeling different than their biological child?

Bruce Porth: Oh, completely. Yeah. I always felt different.

Haley Radke: And treated differently?

Bruce Porth: No, I wasn't treated differently that I'm aware of. Although I was keenly tuned into whether or not I was going to be treated differently. I know at Christmas time, I would studiously, [00:08:00] count the number of presents, that me and my sister would get, I don't think that was entirely something I did.

I think my sister did it as well. And I think there's some aspect of just normal, sibling rivalry associated with that. But I never felt a sense of attunement in my family, but I also wasn't really, there wasn't much conversation around adoption with me. What my adoptive mom has told me was that she told me that I was adopted, but I think it was when I was around the age of three or four.

And the way that it was, told to me was in a very positive, tone and so I, that's pretty abstract thinking. I would not be able to understand what it meant. It's one thing to know that I was wanted, but, it requires abstract thinking to be able to figure out that the other side of that is that somewhere else I wasn't wanted and wasn't [00:09:00] kept and I wasn't capable of doing that during the period that she was telling me that and then I think she told me a couple of times and then she thought that her job was done. And so the way that I, I did find out that I was adopted was at least in a way that meant something to me was when I was about six or seven years old playing in a sandbox and a neighbor kid was making fun of me for being adopted and so I came home.

I was in tears. I was really in a state of despair and I asked if this was true. I asked my mom if it was true and she confirmed it. And then I don't remember much after that. I think it was, there's a lot there that I probably blocked out, but I do remember asking questions about my, quote unquote, real mom and she had no answers and the question seemed to be difficult for her to answer and it was [00:10:00] clear to me that it was bringing up pain for her.

And so I learned how to not ask questions about it and be quiet. And so we never really talked about adoption since that time, not in any really meaningful way. In fact, my mom passed away in 2020, ironically on my birthday, and in the couple years leading up to her passing, I really wanted to still have a real conversation about adoption with her.

And I'm a full grown adult trying to ask just a basic question, and it took so much effort on my part to even, raise the topic. And what I got back from her was these trite, cliche answers that she loved me as if I was her own and really what it told me is that she's extremely uncomfortable about discussing the topic still after all these years.[00:11:00]

And so unfortunately, I was never really able to in her lifetime have that conversation because it. I really wanted to connect with her around that issue, and I recall reading or hearing something that Anne Heffron once mentioned that really meant a lot to me, where she said that all she wanted from her adoptive mom was to grieve together the loss of her birth mother.

And when I read that or heard that, it really hit me like, yes, that's exactly what I wanted from my mom as well. So in my dad's case, there really was no emotional availability to have any kind of conversation like that about adoption or about, really anything else. That had any depth to it.

So I did grow up without a father, at least the emotional [00:12:00] presence of a father.

Haley Radke: You're a super unique individual in that every conversation I've ever had with you, you seem to lead with your heart and you're so emotionally vulnerable and I know these are skills that you've worked on over the years. Is it because you're like I'm not going to do that. Did you make a decision at some point about how your adoptive father was and like pivot? Or is this more innately you, which I know is a hard question for an adoptee to answer.

Bruce Porth: That's a really good question. There were times I do remember that I would be really frustrated with my dad, and I remember telling my mom on a few occasions I don't want to be like him.

And so there was, some consciousness around that. That I clearly didn't want to follow [00:13:00] in those footsteps to some extent I think it's unavoidable. That's the environment I was steeped in. I'm going to pick up on some of that children map to the state of their parents, regardless of what they say.

And so to some extent, I was, I think I was doing that. But I do have the benefit of having started a healing process pretty early. It was not too long after I left the house that I was forced into starting down some sort of healing path. And so I've been at it intermittently for quite some time.

What really got me into it was when I was a freshman in college, I knew that there was that I was struggling a lot and I had successfully gotten up in my head in the year prior to leaving the home to go to college and I did that with, literature and the type of friends I would hang around with and [00:14:00] it seemed like it was probably some kind of survival mechanism that I knew that I would be out on my own and I needed some kind of foundation to stand on and I knew there was a lot of pain inside me, I think on some level, but I didn't know how to deal with it or what to do with it.

But one thing that I could do was get up in my head and that did carry me through part of my 1st year of college and then it became unsustainable anymore. And a lot of that raw pain, that was lodged in my body going all the way back to relinquishment. I no longer had internal defenses against it.

I think partly just because it was so much. And over the course of a few weeks or so, I started losing my grip on who I thought I was and who I had made myself out to be. This part of me had taken over in an effort to survive. I don't like the term false self because I, it's a very legitimate part of myself that [00:15:00] was engaged in that process of saving my life, but that part can only do it for so long.

And then the authenticity in my body, that real visceral pain just came to the surface and I was literally overwhelmed and had no language for it either. And really had no idea that it had to do with adoption and relinquishment.

Haley Radke: How would you describe your pain? Were you depressed? Were you like having an existential crisis? It's if you don't have oh my gosh I wish I knew who my parents were or like if you're you know, if that's not in your gaze what's the I don't know. Could you describe to people what was happening for you? I remember feeling like I was going crazy at one point. Actually crazy.

Bruce Porth: There was definitely a feeling of that. That feeling of losing my grip [00:16:00] on what I thought was reality. And the orientation points that I think I had established for myself weren't really deeply rooted in who I was authentically. And so without those orientation points, it felt like I was starting to drift out to sea.

But on a physical level, I was. I was feeling nauseous and sick. There was throbbing in my head. On an emotional level, I was feeling, yes, depression. Mostly, at the time, I was feeling a great deal of rage. And it was rage that presented itself in a way that felt way too big to contain. I also didn't know really where it was coming from, and it felt extremely primitive.

And I just didn't know what to do with it. I was completely flooded, to use an IFS term. I did struggle for a couple of days. I found myself in the library of my school, [00:17:00] in the psychology section, trying to heal myself as perhaps any good adoptee would do, feeling like I'm alone in this world and I have to fix things, including myself, on my own.

It was an engineering school, so they didn't have a very big psychology section in the library, so I really didn't get that much in the way of resources there. Plus, it wasn't really what I needed. And unfortunately, at the time, I didn't know what I needed, but I did eventually find my way to a school counselor and really sweet, gentle guy.

And we started out doing sessions once a week, and we got to a point where I just. I had no words anymore. There was no language. Somehow I must have let him know. And I think it was an unconscious form of expression that I was adopted. So he knew that, but I didn't know that's what I was struggling with and [00:18:00] so he asked me at one point, do you think this has anything to do with being adopted? And I just remember, just almost violently saying, absolutely not. And so those defenses were extremely strong and I, I think in an effort to justify those defenses. I was perceiving a hostile reality to that was what I was experiencing.

So I would often just sit there in silence and not say anything. And at one point, he asked me if maybe we shouldn't continue and I was just shocked by the question. And I said, no, we need to be doing this. And looking back on that, I, what I was finding there was just a, a sense of safety, whether I was saying anything or not.

And I wasn't fully aware of how much I needed that safety. Because it literally felt like the world was hostile.

Haley Radke: So when did you come to really unpack for yourself? That adoption was like [00:19:00] even impacted your life in some way.

Bruce Porth: It was actually many years later. I did continue to struggle through my college years I knew I wasn't ready to go out into the world when I graduated and I did really well in school I think because all of my self esteem depended on doing and not being, which I think perhaps has its roots in, the commodification of adoption, that there's value in doing and not necessarily in being.

So I, I did really well, but I knew I wasn't ready to be out in the world. And so I went to graduate school and found a group of friends there that I really seem to resonate with, but I was also starting to drink quite a bit as a way to just put the pain somewhere else because I hadn't kept up with the counseling that I was [00:20:00] doing after that freshman year, I went back home and tried to get through that summer without showing how much pain I was in my family, and even before that's the first school year ended. The therapist was going into private practice and he asked me at that time just let your parents know and we can, I can get the insurance information and we can continue to work together.

And I couldn't bring that to my parents. It didn't feel like an option. It didn't feel safe enough to do that. And the option was to just try to struggle through on my own in isolation. And so that's what I did. But I, I couldn't mask it entirely through that, that first summer home. And I did just break down at one point and ended up, my mom did find me a therapist.

But this was. A while back, and there really wasn't that much [00:21:00] awareness of adoption as an issue, and certainly not, the depth of grief and anger that can come with that maternal separation. And it was around the time, I think that Nancy Verrier was probably thinking about her master's thesis and, starting to put that together and eventually turning that into the primal wound book, but none of these therapists had discovered that yet.

And actually, at one point, again, because I didn't have words, there was no language. I was just acting in. All the feelings that I was having the therapist asked me to just draw what I was feeling. And so I started to draw this picture of the view that someone would have if they were falling headfirst from a really tall building towards the pavement and I didn't totally appreciate, the significance of that until more recently, [00:22:00] but that was illustrating the nothing place that Pam Cordano and other people in the flourish experience have talked about. And for me, the nothing place is not a neutral place. It's a, feels like a really scary place where there's a lot of anger and a lot of terror and a lot of just no orientation whatsoever and just drifting out in space or falling head first towards the pavement, but I wasn't really in a position to continue with the work that I was doing, and instead I started drinking quite a bit. I did get through grad school and then I wasn't really willing to go through and do a Ph. D. I knew I wasn't Ph. D. material and I had seen some friends of mine, fail the qualifying exam to get into the program.

And I knew I couldn't survive a loss like that. So I did set out at that point in time and got a job and stepped out into the world. Totally ill equipped to be out in the world. [00:23:00] It took about, 2 years or so before I did find a recovery path. And I was drinking quite a bit, and I would typically drink about a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at a time, and that would happen a few times a week.

Sometimes what I, I would just, I would be drinking at home, and I would be watching movies, and one of the movies that I would watch was a movie that I had seen back when I was in grad school. And this was probably the first time that I was emerging from the fog, because we had a ritual of every Tuesday night a small group of us would go out to the movies And I was never in charge of picking the movie.

So it was always a surprise to me and this one week we happened to go see this movie called Immediate Family with Glenn Close and James Woods and we got about 20 minutes into that movie before I realized what it was about and then I was just flooded with grief, [00:24:00] but couldn't express it. And so I was biting the insides of my cheeks, just to hold it together.

And it was probably a few weeks after that, when we were out at the bar and I, it was closing time and we were leaving. And I left with a friend of mine walking back to our cars, but we stopped, short of our cars and just started talking. And I had been carrying so much of this pain and never really had a place to express it or find an empathic witness to validate it and as the conversation proceeded something about it must have felt safe enough for me to, disclose that I was adopted, but it wasn't just a conversation about it. There was all of this pent up grief that just flowed right out of me.

And my friend was right there for me. In a really amazing way, and it was the first time that I really felt held in a deep way by anybody. And the next morning I walk into my [00:25:00] office and there's a single rose in a vase that she had left me, as additional validation. And to me, what I was learning through that process was that love exists because there was a part of me that did not believe that love existed at all.

And it wasn't a small enough part of me that I could just set aside and move on. It was a significant part of me. And I, up until that point, had to keep it contained. Because I was never able to find a safe harbor to express it.

Haley Radke: So that was in your early 20s or mid 20s by that point?

Bruce Porth: That was my, yeah, my, my early 20s at that point.

So I was, I was coming out of the fog as early as that period of time. But then I, I did end up finding a 12 step recovery and I actually did an outpatient treatment and [00:26:00] this was another moment of coming out of the fog where part of that process was doing a family tree. I remember when the facilitator that day was drawing my family tree.

And put this dotted line from my family to me, and it was like, oh my gosh, like I don't belong there. I only belong there by a dotted line, not a continuous line, and it just validated that for all of my life it felt like I was connected by just this tenuous thread that could easily have been broken. If I didn't behave, if I didn't get good enough grades, it felt to me like it would jeopardize that connection there.

I think that's probably a common experience for a lot of adoptees. And the, just the amount of emotional labor that we have to do, to get through childhood is just astonishing to me. [00:27:00]

Haley Radke: We were talking before we started recording and mentioning oh, my kids probably get this vibe from the situation that is happening here. And I was like, yeah our adoptive parents don't have to say. We're not talking about adoption. We get the vibe. They don't have to say, I'm emotionally unavailable for you. We just get it. And kids are so perceptive. And we're uniquely so because we're literally looking for life or death resources as soon as we're separated from our mothers. Yeah.

Bruce Porth: Exactly. Infants don't really have any other way to communicate except through the energy that they experience with the parent. And I think it was Einstein who said that the sole governing agency of matter is energy. Everything comes down to energy, I think, including in, relationships.

And, of course, I'm [00:28:00] trying to, energetically bond with, somebody that I can attune to. And I did not have that.

Haley Radke: So going through recovery, also starting to examine this, like starting to come out of the fog is what you were saying, like, when did you first really dive into adoption stuff. I've heard you say some internet things from the 90s, late 90s. Is that right?

Bruce Porth: Yeah, it was interesting that I actually found my mom, but I, I still feel like I was pretty deep in the fog for many years.

Haley Radke: Did you search on purpose?

Bruce Porth: I did. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Bruce Porth: And.

Haley Radke: What made you want to do that?

Bruce Porth: It was the end of a relationship and so this was the kind of relationship that burned really hot, but not necessarily for a very long time. [00:29:00] And so I got more vulnerable in a relationship than I had ever done, up to that point. And when we both had significant issues, it really needed to end, but I wasn't ready for it to end.

And when it did, it threw me into a, a level of pain that I really didn't know what to do with. And even though I had support, I was doing some 12 step Al Anon work and had a pretty tight and close community. But this was territory that they couldn't relate to. And I didn't even know this territory or what to do with it either and how to navigate within it.

So it was at that point when it just became really clear to me that I have to find my mom and I had never really thought about it up until that point. But then it was just like neon flashing lights that it was time. And so I went about doing that. I did [00:30:00] get on the Internet. This is the very early days of the Internet.

And so there was no Facebook, no Instagram or anything like that, but there was. And I don't even remember how I found this, but I found this internet mailing list called AIML Adoptee Internet Mailing List and people would post things and it would go through a moderator and then they would eventually get, get posted.

And so every night I was coming up from work and I was reading through it. And occasionally I was taking the risk to post something and through that I. I'd already started to, I had sought out my non identifying information, which was basically worthless. But through that mailing list, I did find and get connected with an investigator.

And so after thinking about it for a little while I went ahead and decided to pay him his fee, which was 375 dollars. And then in a really short amount of time, literally like three days, he had an enormous amount of information about [00:31:00] me and about my birth family. Including birth certificate numbers, not only of my mom, but her sister and her other children, current and previous addresses.

It's still astonishing to me that other people have all this information that is denied us. And so I, I got that information and I sat on it for 6 months. Because it felt like I had, I found this nugget of gold. And I just wanted to hold it for a little while, and I was preparing for the next step.

And I'm always impressed by people who just, they get the information and they get on the phone like right away. And I needed to move slowly, through this whole process. But I did eventually, I wrote her a letter that coincided with my 30th birthday. And then waited and then two weeks later, she did write back and she was very receptive.

And a year later, I went out and met her face to face along with my 3 siblings, 3 half [00:32:00] siblings. And and we started a relationship and it was really good. She really. She did not want to let me go and hearing that was so validating because I was, I had been telling myself a story that I wasn't wanted.

And so there was the revelation that I got just from the reunion was it, it wasn't that I wasn't wanted. It was that I couldn't have been kept and that lifted a burden off my shoulders that I really did not know I was carrying. And it was just, it was really significant. And so we started a relationship and I was really impressed.

She was, the gifts that she bought me were like, exactly what I wanted. She just she knew me, like, energetically, we were just really on similar wavelengths. By that time, my, my first daughter had come along and she loved being a grandmother and we're slowly getting to know each other.

And unfortunately, just, 4 years or [00:33:00] so after we had met I got a call from my aunt. One morning that there had been a house fire and she was not able to get out and I remember getting that phone call and not feeling a thing almost as if she was a stranger. And I think, at that time, she still was a stranger to me because I still had a lot of work to do with thawing out, from that original wound of the relinquishment before I could actually feel her, her, the second loss of her.

And so that was, it was a really difficult time, getting through that because I really hadn't gotten to know her yet. And what I'm still grieving over is the fact that, what that relationship would have become because she was, so invested in it, in us getting closer. I do feel a sense of gratitude in that she has a twin sister and I have a very good relationship with my aunt.

[00:34:00] And through that relationship, I was able to get a lot of information about my mom that she would, that my mom would have told me, but didn't have the opportunity to do and that information was so incredibly healing for me. And just even little bits and pieces, like discovering that she and my aunt, shortly after I was born, that they were plotting to come find me.

And kidnap me or unkidnap me. And when I heard that it was so validating and I'm still integrating that now with what I, the new material that I'm learning and specifically around attachment and how it's important for the child as I've been learning, just recently for the mother to, to look for and find the child over and over again.

The child needs to know that they're findable and then they can go about the business of finding themselves. And [00:35:00] so knowing that she wanted to find me and take me back. Was really incredibly validating to me.

Haley Radke: I'm really sorry for your loss. That's devastating. I'm so glad you have your aunt. Are you still connected with your siblings?

Bruce Porth: I met all of my siblings when I went out to the Midwest to meet them and somehow we never really connected in a way that led to a sustainable relationship. I'm totally open to it and maybe it's just up to me to reach out and I just haven't done that. So I, I don't know what the future holds there.

I certainly would like to nurture those relationships a little bit more and make stronger connections.

Haley Radke: Did you ever think about looking for paternal side?

I hope I, I [00:36:00] don't gush too much, you just have favorite people or people you're drawn to. And I think. A lot of the friends I've made over the years are folks that are thoughtful, empathetic, kind, and have this thirst for knowledge and have a curious spirit. And I'm just so drawn to folks like that.

I think that's one of the reasons I so enjoy any conversation I ever get to have with Bruce. So I hope you'll come back next week to listen to part two of our conversation. And in the meantime, come join us on Patreon. That is one of the ways the show keeps living, keeps existing and helping adoptees around the world.

adopteeson.com/community. And I'd love to have you. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next [00:37:00] Friday.

287 Ande Stanley

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/287

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] 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're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. On today's show, we are welcoming Ande Stanley, creator and host of the podcast, the Adoption Files. Ande is a late Discovery Adoptee only finding out accidentally when they were already in their thirties.

We talk about how that happened and the reactions of adoptive family members to Ande finally being in on the secret everyone knew, but them. We also discuss how Ande found their way to the adoptee community and how some initial bad interactions, instead of deterring them, [00:01:00] led the way to Ande becoming a community builder.

I do want to give a trigger warning for today's episode. We mention suicidal ideation at multiple points during this conversation, and there are also mentions of sexual violence. Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adoptee 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 are on the website, adoptee on.com. Let's listen in. I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Fellow podcaster, Ande Stanley. Welcome, Ande!

Ande Stanley: Hi, it's a pleasure to be here, thank you for inviting me.

Haley Radke: I'd love it if you would share a little bit of your story with us.

Ande Stanley: Okay I am a late discovery, baby scoop [00:02:00] era, intercountry, same race, adopted person. And I can remember when I first started interacting with adoptees and seeing things like LDA and BSE and ICA and realizing I had absolutely no idea what people were talking about. Thankfully, over the last four and a half years or so, I have met a lot of really wonderful people who have been willing to help me become more educated, which has been really nice.

Haley Radke: Four and a half years ago, what made you start looking around for adoptee info?

Ande Stanley: I found out by accident in 1999 when I was 33, but unfortunately, at that time, and for a very long time afterward, I lacked the resources that would have allowed me to feel safe, asking questions [00:03:00] about what I believed about adoption and to begin processing my feelings around the betrayal trauma and the adoption trauma and the rejection trauma and all of the feelings.

And my role in my adoptive family and in my married into family and in my church was a very narrow, very well prescribed role. And when I began receiving messages that my very reasonable questions and feelings were making people uncomfortable and upset, I did what, the little good little Christian soldier that I was at the time.

I basically shut down and did my job, which was to be selfless and to make myself available for the needs of other people and to make them happy. And then in [00:04:00] the early 2000, I became disabled and in 2013, they told me it was permanent. So I began seeing a therapist, not for anything to do with all of the adoption stuff, but to manage how I was feeling about my mobility issues and my chronic issues that I was experiencing and as I began to talk more with him about boundaries and about trauma, some of the adoption stuff started to creep into the conversations and around that same time, I was leaving the evangelical church that I had been a part of for 30 years. And I was also spending a lot of time flying back and forth to Indiana to take care of my adoptive [00:05:00] mother, whose health was failing, and I was realizing that I had a very limited amount of time left to ask her all the questions that I wanted answers to and a lot of things came out during that period between about 2015 and 2019 that were extremely painful for me to navigate. I did not have a support system. And I had attempted for about two years post discovery to really reach out to receive the support that I needed without success.

I'd had some very unpleasant experiences in a purported adoption support group that consisted of primarily adoptive parents who jumped all over me. And so it just left me really leery [00:06:00] and I got to a point where I was in a very dark place and I was actually considering ending my life. And my therapist had been encouraging me to end the isolation that I had put myself into because I just didn't trust people and I was desperate.

So I just went online one day and started typing in, Adoption and kept getting all this pro adoption stuff. And then I thought, okay, adoptee and I just fell into an adoptee space, but I didn't know how to behave in that space. And I had become incredibly good at what I call the three C's, being calm, capable, and just composed, and those are pretty deadly.

They allowed me to survive [00:07:00] in the context that I grew up in, but they were not a good coping mechanism for being able to interact in a support space. And I behaved badly and I got kicked out. And I deserved it. I actually

Haley Radke: Would you say what behaved badly means? Because to become capable and composed would, yeah, say more.

Ande Stanley: I have a background, my degree is in psychology and I have a drug and alcohol counseling certificate and someone in the group who I did not know was also very fragile had asked a question and I had responded from this position of kind of authority. Because my role in my family was also to be the smart one who had all the answers and I [00:08:00] was used to as a, female presenting person having my credentials challenged all the time, we have a credibility problem as adopted people and as female presenting people in our culture.

And so I felt I have to tell people why I know these things. And I was, they reached out to me and said, you need to stop this. And I said I don't understand. They asked a question. I'm just trying to answer it. And they said, if you don't stop, we're going to have to remove you. And I said, but I just, I don't understand.

And I said, I'm sorry. I upset him, but I still don't understand why I'm in trouble because, and they just finally said, you know what, you're gone. It was actually a really good thing. Cuz i had to choose how i was going to respond to that and i had to think about why did I default to that when [00:09:00] I was also

just incredibly fragile at that point but nobody knew that because i was so good at putting on this front. And I decided that instead of talking, I would sit back, and I would listen, and I would read, and I would talk to people, and I would begin to interrogate all of those beliefs that I had about adoption because I had been immersed in this pro adoption narrative and because of a background with family members in medicine and in law enforcement and my own work with at risk kids, I knew that there are circumstances where children do need alternate child care.

I [00:10:00] didn't understand the laws. I really didn't know what I was talking about. And I needed to either withdraw and isolate myself again, or begin to engage in a more thoughtful, considerate way. And I knew that if I withdrew and isolated again, I wasn't likely to survive. And I don't think the people who are listening who know me will have ever heard this and I am forever thankful to the people who listen to my story of having behaved badly and listened to and believed my commitment to change and to learn how to interact respectfully and from a more trauma informed [00:11:00] perspective.

Another member of another support group that allowed me into their space read some of the things that I had been writing and recommended me to a women's adoptee writing group and they welcomed me and were patient with me and kind. And I've become friends with some of them and they know who they are.

And I really want to encourage people to make connections because those connections are what allowed me to still be present. I think so many of us are going through things that nobody knows about.

And if we can come to conversations, With people with the understAndeng that there may be a lot more going on under the surface that we don't know about,[00:12:00]

then perhaps we can come from a kinder place.

Haley Radke: Thank you for being so candid about that. I know you're not the only person who's experienced that. I was just talking with a friend of mine, and she was like, the first time I went into adoptee spaces, I said some things that were from the, naive perspective.

She hadn't unpacked everything yet. And she was like, I got so scared to engage because of all the vitriol that I received. And she was like, I don't even want to be in those spaces anymore, because it can be push someone fully out and who knows what their mental state is at the time, like I, I've seen that damaging stuff too.

It's really tough. So thank you for sharing. And I'm so glad you had those folks come alongside you. It's so interesting to me to hear you share that journey. And now, like I've heard a lot [00:13:00] of episodes of your show and I'm sure your perspective has really changed. Sometimes we talk about becoming radicalized adoptees here and it sounds like you may identify with that as well.

But can you take us back a little bit? Because you said you found out that you were adopted when you were 33 and there's a gap in there before you're like really processing some of that. Can you, do you, are you comfortable sharing how you found out? And I know you had to put it away for a while, but since then, how have you unpacked that?

I'm sorry, I don't have a late discovery experience, but when I hear people that have had that, it makes me so angry.

Ande Stanley: Yes, I agree with you. I'm of the opinion that anything past day one is late. And the amount of damage that causes exists on a spectrum. So the longer you go without that information, [00:14:00] I believe the greater the harm.

I found out by accident, my adoptive mother was downsizing and had decided to send each of her children a box of photographs. She accidentally sent me the box that she intended for her daughter. And in the box was a photograph, dated a month before I was born, and she was clearly not pregnant. And I had been questioning my identity for years.

I felt very wrong in the space that I was raised in because I was so different from the rest of the family. And whenever I would ask questions, I was treated as if I was making things up. I was fantasizing. I was trying to cause problems. And [00:15:00] I learned to be silent and just carry that around with me. So I had finally decided to embrace the identity that I had been told for decades belonged to me.

And then I see this picture and I could not, I couldn't deal with it. So I put the picture back in the box and I put it on a shelf. And then my adoptive mom came out to visit and she wanted to go through the pictures with me and my kids. And I thought, oh, this is going to be interesting. So I brought the box out and she's sitting next to me and our, my two kids are sitting on the couch with us.

And I opened the box and I hand her the picture. And she said, where did you get this? I told her you sent it to me and she got up, got her purse and left. And then she called me later that [00:16:00] day and invited me to lunch at a very popular lunch spot. I arrived, she had chosen a table in the very center of the room, surrounded by people with their families.

It's the middle of the day. And I sit down and she looks at me and she said, you're adopted. And I locked myself in the restaurant bathroom for 30 minutes and just sobbed to the point where I could hear other people in the bathroom, like little kids going, mommy, what's wrong with that lady? And that was how I found out, and there was a tremendous amount of pressure to accept the idea that I had been lied to for a reason, they were protecting me, it was better for me, they were keeping me from the pain of what came before, and eventually over time I realized that [00:17:00] these were just stories that my adoptive mother told herself to make herself feel better.

About deceiving and manipulating me for years for her own ends.

Haley Radke: Didn't you have a younger adoptive brother? I know he passed, but did he know he was adopted? Did you know he was adopted?

Ande Stanley: No, he never learned that because he passed away when he was 12. Our adoptive father died when I was 12 and he was 11, and then he died, my brother died.

And the thing that I find really interesting that out of the four children in the home, two were biological, two were adopted, the two adopted children, we had a very strong bond. The two biological children had a very strong bond with one another, but out of the four of us, the only two children in the home who had night terrors were [00:18:00] myself and my adopted brother.

We both had recurring nightmares. I would patrol the house at night looking for intruders. My younger brother would sleepwalk. So I, in retrospect, looking back, I can see that there were clearly these signs. And when I began going to therapy for my disability, my therapist was talking about PTSD and CPTSD.

And I had always attributed my insomnia and my nightmares and my flashbacks and a lot of these things to the trauma of having lost my adoptive father and my adoptive brother at a very crucial point in my life. I was in puberty. I was entering middle [00:19:00] school, sexual attraction was beginning to be a thing, I found myself attracted to both girls and boys, I was raised in a Catholic space, so this was absolutely not okay, and I knew that if I talked to my adoptive mother about this, she would send me away.

And she subsequently became an alcoholic following the death of her husband. So I'm being parentified from the age of 12. I'm the one calling the ambulance when she's falling down drunk and breaking her face. And I'm still having to go to school and be a good student and present as being calm, composed and capable.

So when I was speaking with my therapist. He asked me, how old were you when you were patrolling the house? Nine. And he said, [00:20:00] that's before these things happen to you. And that's when we began to talk about my being adopted. That is actually the point at which. I began to think, oh, maybe this has affected me more than I realized.

So we began to explore that. And he was the first therapist I had been to who actually described what had happened to me as a loss. He was also the first therapist to acknowledge the religious trauma that I had experienced in the Catholic Church. And then as a member of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches.

He was the first person who really gave me permission to begin talking about the fact that I had always been discouraged from associating with other adopted people. My adoptive mother, when I [00:21:00] was growing up, she always described adoptees as weird and that there was something wrong with them. Yes, she had a brother who he and his wife had adopted two children and they grew up knowing.

And they knew I was adopted. Everyone knew I was adopted. My in laws knew I was adopted. Everyone knew, but nobody told me.

Haley Radke: Your in laws knew you were adopted?

Ande Stanley: oh, everyone. My, my adoptive brother and sister, Adoptive parents, biological children, their spouses knew, everybody knew, neighbors knew, and

Haley Radke: Wait, so your in laws, brother in laws, sister in law, whatever, it's like they knew, did they think you knew?

Ande Stanley: No, they knew that I did not know. They had been told that they couldn't tell [00:22:00] me. And my sister in law actually told my adopted brother, you need to tell her. And he would not. In fact, to this day, he will not talk to me about the fact that he participated in lying to me for years and years and we no longer have a relationship.

Haley Radke: Sure.

Ande Stanley: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Shocker.

Ande Stanley: I know they think I'm a horrible person because if

Haley Radke: I guess they kept secrets from you.

Ande Stanley: Yeah I was told that I need to apologize for becoming upset With people lying to me. I know. That's not at all messed up.

Haley Radke: I'm still stuck on the photo. What about the photo? How did you know? Like I could see myself looking through a box of pictures and like you said it was a month before you were [00:23:00] born. Was there something written on it or like how did you know the date?

Ande Stanley: My adoptive mom was the most organized person I have ever met in my entire life.

She was a bank manager and on the back of all of the photos that she took, she wrote the date that the photo was taken. And, I am, I used to say I'm the elephant in the family, because they are all teeny tiny people. So I'm looking at a photograph of her and her daughter, and she is wearing your typical 60s Jackie Kennedy sheath dress.

With a swing coat and she weighs all of maybe 95 pounds. There's absolutely no way that this person is pregnant. The baby would have had to weigh like a pound and a half and I've seen pictures of myself starting when they, I was in the hospital for 2 weeks after I was [00:24:00] born and then I was taken home with them.

They were my foster parents initially and so I've seen pictures of me starting when I'm about two or three months old. And I was not a little baby. I was a chunk.

Haley Radke: Same. Same. You're a young mom at this time. And my kids are 10 and 12 now. And I'm thinking, you're getting this life shattering information.

It's impacting all of these relationships, and of course you got to put it away. You got, you have a hat to wear you've got roles to, you, you said this earlier you're like, I, this is too much, I have to put it away. I get that now, I really get that, you have to, there's no way to dig into that until you're safe to do so.

Ande Stanley: Yeah, the, I had an 8 and 11 year old. [00:25:00] My husband was working 60 to 100 hours a week. I, I was in a leadership position in my church. The church was very, oh, it's wonderful. You're adopted. Who cared that they lied to you? This was God's plan for your life. It was just reinforcement. And my family was also used to me being very calm in most situations.

The problem when you've been taught to sublimate your emotions is that when you do let your emotions out, they often tend to be too big and too much. So I would swing between numb and just a mess. So they were used to me most of the time being very outwardly having it together. When I fell [00:26:00] apart after discovery, it scared the crap out of my spouse and my kids.

And at that point, I just didn't think there was any reason to really begin. I had never even dealt with the grief from my earlier losses. So this was just another trauma to stick in my, I have this imaginary airplane hanger, and in my hanger are all these containers stacked up full of all of the things that I have shoved into them over the years.

And occasionally I will visit my hangar and some of the containers will wobble around and make strange noises. And for the longest time I was absolutely terrified of opening any of [00:27:00] those containers because I honestly believed it would annihilate me.

Haley Radke: I love that language because we've, I'm sure guests have said before oh, have a little box.

I'm going to tuck away in my closet, but the enormity of scale of these things, like that feels right. There's a train storage yard really near here with those giant sea cans. I'm picturing those, I'm picturing those stacked up in your hangar. It's

Ande Stanley: Yes, in fact, one of the effects of therapy and beginning to deconstruct is this goal I have one day of finding an animator who's willing to work with me to take that imagery and portray myself [00:28:00] because I always wanted to fly. I took flying lessons and I wanted to be a pilot and then I became disabled. And the medication I have to take, I'm not allowed to have a pilot certificate. So I have this picture of kind of being dressed in this sort of steam punky kind of pilot's outfit with the hat and the goggles and my tool belt and dragging these containers out into the light and eventually repurposing them into this plane that I can fly away in.

And to take those things and create something that allows me to soar. And I just haven't found that person who's willing to work with me, dirt cheap.

But that's something that kind of illustrates for me that process of deconstructing of [00:29:00] critically beginning to analyze. What the adoption narrative is and how it has impacted me and how the intersection of all of these different kinds of traumas have added layers to. What I need to navigate in order to have the coping strategies, because I know that the triggers and things will be lifelong, because every stage that we enter into adoption impacts us in an additional or a different way.

So to think that we can just be done with it is, in my opinion, unrealistic, but I think that the process of healing. Is that we learn how to better integrate the things that happen to us and to create new neural pathways so that when we're confronted with those triggers, [00:30:00] we don't default to the ones that worked for us to help us survive when we were younger.

And that's why, when people talk about the fog, I actually prefer the language of safety. That it's not that we were in some kind of walking through some kind of mist or fog, it's that we did not have the safety to begin looking at our beliefs and our feelings. And as we acquired that support system and the feelings of safety, that's when we can begin to look at those things.

And that there's nothing shameful or bad about being in the fog, because I do see people criticized for it, and I've probably done it myself on occasion, [00:31:00] but they're just not in a place where they have the safety to be able to consider things. And maybe they never will. And that's their journey.

Haley Radke: I know you've been a moderator in creating some adoptee safe spaces online.

And I really appreciate that because it serves the community and hopefully does make that space for people to start exploring some of these things, and as they unpack all the different things we go through, whether it's trying to access records, or if we do get access to a reunion, navigating that, and all those kinds of things.

I'm, I feel really thankful for all the people that are willing to do that kind of work, because it's so emotionally taxing. And I'm curious about that for you. How I guess I'm seeing it now oh, you're experiencing [00:32:00] community and then stepping back and listening, I think all of those things probably added to your skills in that area to be gentle with people now when they're wanting to unpack those things. Is that any of that ring true for you?

Ande Stanley: I really do think so. The first person who allowed me back into a support space was incredibly gentle and kind, and also very willing to provide me with pointers, tips, information I had also, as I said, I had a degree in psychology and I had a drug and alcohol rehabilitation certificate.

I had facilitated groups for people struggling with substance disorders and as a survivor myself of sexual assault, I had facilitated groups [00:33:00] for people who had experienced sexual violence in their lives. I didn't know how to translate that to the adoptee spaces, because I didn't really know much about how other adopted people were impacted by adoption.

I really, I tell people I may be 58, but in adopted person years, I'm barely 25. So I really had to listen and learn and I do think that those things have helped me along with the skills that I already had for working in human services. I used to do intake and get to ask people endless questions, which I loved and so I brought those things and then I had [00:34:00] to learn the language and the impacts of adoption, because unfortunately, when you get a degree in psychology and in human services the only time we visited the topic of adoption was when we talked about the heinous twin studies that were carried out. We discussed that, which was horrifying, and we discussed the plight of the Romanian orphans because they were talking about nature versus nurture. It had very little to do with how these children themselves were impacted lifelong.

Being adopted was seen as the solution to their problem, rather than just another trauma and another step that they had to go through that may or may not end up being beneficial [00:35:00] to that child, so it was very disconcerting to realize that I was so ignorant. And, but that's okay. None of us are capable of knowing everything.

It has been difficult at times because people in these spaces, we're all coming into them with our trauma. And many of us are in highly activated states, which if you spend a lot of time studying the nervous system, you'll learn that when a person is in an activated state, they're not operating with their prefrontal cortex.

They're operating from this hind brain that's saying, do whatever you need to do to survive. And they're not really capable of taking in a lot of what might be shared with them or said to them. And they may not realize that the things that [00:36:00] they're saying and doing are they're valid, but those of us who are moderating or who are admin, we also have the potential to become very activated by the things that we're hearing in this space.

One of the best things that one of my professors told us in class was know the things you cannot manage and ask for help when that happens. So we had to spend time identifying our biases and the things that we absolutely could not tolerate interacting with. So for me, for example, I could not deal with, I'm trying to find the most politic way to say this I attended Catholic camp during the summers growing up, and some people familiar with the Catholic church might know where this story [00:37:00] is going.

The founder of our camp, who was there, who knew me, who I have letters from him, he visited our home when I was growing up, was one of the first pedophile priests tried and convicted in the Catholic church in the United States. I have difficulty dealing with clergy members and pedophiles, so that was something that I had to know, that if somebody came into my practice and said, I'm here because I did such and such to these people, I needed to be able to say, I need to step away.

I need to find somebody else to deal with you. So in working in these spaces with adoptees, I've had the tremendous advantage of being able [00:38:00] to say to the other moderators admin, I can't take this one and that has kept me, I think, from completely just burning out at times.

Haley Radke: That's so wise and helpful for other people who are working in the same kind of spaces, because, yeah, it's a lot in and now I see where you're some of your interviewing skills come from and all that you're using all your tools from your life to do the work. I identify with that. I do. You're also a caregiver and you have a lot on your plate, but I've seen, so that's an understatement.

That's an understatement. How about that? I've seen you do things to like, take care of yourself in other ways. I saw you post about your embroidery on Facebook and what other things are you doing to like, take good care of yourself? [00:39:00]

Ande Stanley: Oh, gosh. So this will sound familiar to a lot of people with small children.

Sometimes I just sit in my car.

I've been working on this manuscript for years and I keep joking that I'll dedicate it to the Starbucks drive thru when the time comes. Because I'll sit in the Starbucks drive thru and write. I garden. And I also, because of my disability, I have to stay physically active. I can't sit for very long, so I walk.

A minimum of, several miles a day, and I've done some marathons and some other activities. I write. I do the podcast. It's a struggle actually to find time to care for myself. So ongoing therapy has [00:40:00] been a huge part of that as well, but I realize I'm privileged too, because not everybody has access to therapy.

Haley Radke: Yes, or the, I heard you reference this when you were talking about going to a recent conference and it's not everybody has the money to travel somewhere or like the time to take a weekend off and do those kinds of things, and I'm in that same space, like a privileged space to, yeah, to do this work, even all of those things.

And so hopefully some of the things that we're making will support people in those ways and fill in some of those gaps. I think my understanding of Adoption and critiquing the system, so much of it has come from listening to, hundreds of adoptees share their stories and experiences with me and I'll say with us because you've [00:41:00] had the same opportunity to chat with so many fellow adoptees and hear their stories. And we're, I will just go to recommended resources cause I absolutely want people to listen to your show, The Adoption Files. And I love how you talk about access to our records and you share. We didn't really, we didn't really even touch on this today.

So hopefully people will go and listen to your story about trying to access your records in the UK and the hoops they make you jump through and therapists and just like all this nonsense. It's really outrageous. And so you share a lot of that in your show. But you also talk to other impacted members of the constellation and one of my favorite conversations you had was with my friend, Katie Nelson Burns, who runs the Family Preservation Project and is a part of the Board of Saving Our Sisters.

And that was just like, so good. I just [00:42:00] love that conversation. And thank you for bringing all those things into the world. I just love more adoptee voices, more people talking about the complexities of adoption and the problems in adoption. And the other thing I want to link to in the show notes for people is you wrote this really amazing piece for Severance and I think it will be really helpful and relatable for especially late discovery adoptees.

So I'll make sure to link to that. Is there anything you want to tell us about your show? What led you to create it? And, maybe talk about the name a little bit because I loved X Files.

Ande Stanley: This is funny. People think that I named it after the X Files, but I've never actually watched that show.

Haley Radke: No! You said it somewhere and I was like, oh, it is like the X Files.

Ande Stanley: Somebody else called me like, oh, you mean like the X Files? And I was just, no. What happened is, I was on my own figuring all of these things out, it was 1999, computers, [00:43:00] it wasn't a thing, and I learned that I could apply for my, not just a copy of my original birth certificate, but my adoption file.

Because the UK allows adoptees at the age of 18 to apply for and receive their certificate and a copy of their actual files, and so I was pursuing my adoption files. When I was welcomed into this women's writers group, I listened to other adopted people talking about how they had been denied access to everything.

And I had naively assumed that of course everyone has access when they, at least when they turn 18. Why wouldn't they? It's their information. And I began to hear the emotional and financial and physical consequences [00:44:00] of being denied this most basic human right, knowing who we are and where we come from.

And I was absolutely appalled at the rhetoric that was being used to deny people their documents because I'm thinking. Adopted people in the UK are receiving their documents all the time and I'm not familiar with any riots or any problems that have been caused. By us having access. This is. This is crap, and one of the reasons why I left the Evangelical Church, it's not the only reason, but one reason was in the 90s, I began to hear this very pro adoption rhetoric being used in the churches, and because I had read the Bible many times, and eventually went to school to be a pastor, I knew that the scriptures they were using to justify this were being used completely out of context.

And [00:45:00] they were not promoting plenary adoption and I had been doing some writing anonymously because I still wasn't ready to talk publicly about things and one of the women in the group said you should write a blog. So I started a blog and then she said, I listened to podcasts all the time and I don't hear anyone talking to adopted people about the actual laws in the state where they were adopted or in the country where they were adopted and all of the things they've had to go through to try and get their information. She said, why don't you do a podcast? And I said, I hate computers. And she said, you can just do it. Just try it. So I did. And I constantly blame her for this whole thing. I'm like, crap. She's the adopted genealogist. It's her fault this whole [00:46:00] thing happened. I know she's fantastic. And she's one of those people that I have to thank for still breathing.

But I thought this is ridiculous. So I began interviewing people with the intention of talking about their adoption files. I had received mine. The fact that most people are not allowed to do that. It's just so heartbreaking and then as I began to speak with more and more adoptees about the laws in their state and how those laws have impacted them and how they cope with that, I began to understand that this is not something that ends with the adoptive person because I'm looking at my own children and my grandchildren and how this has impacted them.

And Jamie Weiss, who's fantastic, she's been a part of the Georgia Alliance for Adoptee Rights. She said one day to me, those documents that have been falsified follow you your whole life. [00:47:00] Your marriage certificate, your death certificate, all of this contains information that's not actually real.

And so when your descendants are trying to find information, if they don't know that you're adopted, Then, to them, they're using documents that contain untrue information. So I began to see how family members are also impacted by this. And so I started talking to family members. And then I had a couple of first mothers introduced to me.

Renee Gellin was the first one. She and I spoke. And it began to change the way that I perceived what my own mother had gone through and what other, pregnant people in crisis are experiencing. And that began to make me think if we want to change the laws, if we want to shift the narrative, [00:48:00] we can't just address obtaining unrestricted access for adult adoptees. We have to go back to the root of the problem, which is the cultural beliefs around family, around entitlement, around race, around nationality and ethnocentrism about sexism and misogyny. We have to look at the religious ideologies that are shaming people and coercing people.

It has to be, for me, a more holistic approach. And I absolutely respect the people who are addressing narrow aspects of this topic, because it's so huge. It's impossible for one person to take on all of it. But in talking with different people, I hope to just [00:49:00] jumpstart maybe some conversations among some people who may never have considered that if we ultimately want to change this.

We have to go all the way back to before a child is born and we have to interrogate our beliefs around who should be a parent. And how parenting should occur and how the actual people who experienced the family severance are going to be impacted lifelong.

That's and it's evolving, it's funny because my most popular episodes have actually been the ones where we talked about how adoption is a little bit culty.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Ande Stanley: And that really seems to resonate with people. And the more I've talked with people, the more I've realized there's that intersection between religious trauma and adoption trauma, because so many of us are adopted into [00:50:00] religious spaces.

Haley Radke: Right.

Ande Stanley: And there are so many messages that we receive in those spaces. There's, there are a number of people who are beginning to work in the fields of religious trauma, religious abuse. This is not cult abuse, though there are adopted people who have been adopted into or who have joined cults and they do need that assistance.

This is trauma that occurs in what we would consider mainstream religious institutions. And there's a lot of harm. Some of the people who are addressing that, one of them just read her book, it's When Religion Hurts You, by Laura E. Anderson, PhD. And in reading this book, I would encourage people, even if they, haven't experienced religious trauma to read this book because a lot of what she talks about [00:51:00] embodiment about the neural pathways, we form coping strategies, how we're impacted by the living legacy of trauma, which is a theory put forth originally by Janina Fisher.

About how trauma we received in the past continues to be something we live with throughout our lives, how we manage that, how we set boundaries how we become more in touch with our own bodies so that we can recognize when we're activated and understand how that works. She touches on all of these things.

In her book. So there's a lot there.

Haley Radke: Sarah Edmondson endorsed it. That's perfect because she's the podcast, as A Little Bit Culty.

Ande Stanley: Yes, and that's where Lynn was like, let's call it that. We're both we [00:52:00] both listen to their show all the time. And I think I had to. I think I had to put a disclaimer in there.

We're sorry. We're not trying to rip you off. It's just and we've had the privilege of being invited to participate in a network of professionals and others who are working in the field of coercive control. Some people who are listening may be familiar with Janja Lalich, who is a very well known sociologist who works in the field of cults and cult recovery.

You'll see her on a lot of different Netflix specials, The Program and some others speaking about cults, she is the kind of the founder of this group that I'm a part of. And it's been really great to be able to begin introducing the concept of how adoption involves coercive control [00:53:00] from beginning to end.

And the other members of the group had not considered that, and now we're starting to receive feedback like, oh, yeah, I can absolutely see that because of how many adoptees are in the troubled teen industry. I can absolutely see that because I'm watching how when we do assessments for family placements, how the default is to just take the child away and give them to someone else.

And it just feels like a tremendous privilege to be able to participate in that space and hopefully, again, shift the narrative so that people understand that this is a failed experiment.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. I look forward to seeing what comes out of that. It sounds like that's, talking about [00:54:00] shifting the narrative.

That's a big piece of it. Thank you so much, Ande, for coming on and sharing some of your story with us. And thank you for your work and how you're supporting the adoptee community. Where can people find your show and connect with you online?

Ande Stanley: As I said, I'm not a huge fan of computers. They intimidate me.

So I can be found at the Adoption Files podcast. It's hosted on Spotify, Apple, Amazon. I was so excited when Audible accepted it because I'm a huge Audible Books fan. And then I have a Facebook page called the Adoption Files. oh, WordPress. I have my old blog posts and my podcast are also on WordPress under the adoption files.

Haley Radke: Perfect. We will link to all of those things in the show notes so people can find you [00:55:00] and listen to your show. Thank you.

Ande Stanley: Thank you so much for having me and thank you for everything that you do and for everything that you continue to do.

Haley Radke: I just feel such a sense of gratitude whenever I talk to someone who has made a great effort to give back and to serve the adoptee community in some way.

And, there is always a time when it's our time to come and receive things from community, especially when you're new in community and you're exploring this and you're the one asking the questions and taking advice from people and taking. So to be the receiver, and I know that I have been a receiver of wisdom for many years from folks.

And I feel so thankful that [00:56:00] they're willing to share that. And then to see the receivers become the givers and leaders in community is so amazing. Because what would we have done if there wasn't anyone who went before us to give that info? And the more adoptees that come of age and are finding out like, oh my gosh, there's more adoptees out there and they're finding our podcasts or community from whatever, Instagram or Tik Tok, the more of us they need giving back in this way, the more blogs we need, the more social accounts we need, sharing about our experiences. So thank you for all of you who are willing to do that and be givers of information and sharing sharers. I was going to say, as we as your time in the adoptee community evolves, right? It's pretty [00:57:00] special if you can give back in that way.

So thank you so much, Ande, for what you're doing. I really appreciate it. And I know you're representative of many who have been moderating Facebook groups and starting their own podcasts or blogs or TikTok accounts or whatever it may be. Thank you so much for listening. We are going to have two more episodes in August.

We're going to have a two parter with one of my favorite people coming up in a couple weeks here. So let's talk again very soon.

286 Grace Newton, MSW

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/286

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] 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're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Grace Newton, a Chinese adoptee, author of the prolific blog, Red Thread Broken, and one of the co authors of the Adoptee Consciousness Model. We discuss the reasons for the rise and fall of international adoption from China and how the critical adoption scholarship of Chinese adoptees is on the rise, including Grace's own contributions.

Grace also gets more personal sharing about her relationship with her Chinese American fiance and how their love story and family have helped her on her racial reclamation journey. Before we get started, I want to personally invite you [00:01:00] 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 wrap up with some recommended resources for you, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Grace Newton. Welcome, Grace.

Grace Newton, MSW: Hi, thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad that we finally get a chance to chat. I'd love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.

Grace Newton, MSW: Sure. My name is Grace Newton and I am a Chinese transracial transnational adoptee.

I was adopted from Nanjing in Jiangsu province, China in 1997 when I was three years old. And I was adopted to Madison, Wisconsin. My parents are both white, and I have no siblings, [00:02:00] so I grew up as an only child, and I guess I actually grew up a little bit outside of Madison, in a suburb that's predominantly middle upper class, white, I oftentimes talk about, I think my while I always was really proud to be Chinese American, my early childhood understanding of my ethnic racial identity, I think, was honestly more of a pan Asian one.

As I saw what Asian friends of mine did at home, I would pick up little things, like leaving the shoes outside the door, eating whatever spicy foods, or just little things I would notice and I'd be like, oh, this must be an Asian thing. And I would tuck it away. And so I really was able to explore my identities, both as a Chinese American person and as an adoptee when I was in college, which I think is a pretty common experience for a lot of adoptees because we're finally [00:03:00] on our own for the first time.

And I think that for me, I really realized, that people were seeing me as this Asian woman independent of my family because they didn't know my parents or my upbringing. And so I really had to grapple with, I think, this internal way that I saw myself and the external ways I noticed the world was seeing me.

And I also, when I was in college, I took a class on transracial and transnational adoption that was taught by a Korean adoptee professor. And this class really opened my eyes to a lot of the complex history and, lesser told stories within adoption. And so that was really the catalyst for me to create my blog, which is called Red Thread Broken, where I really used that as a tool to continue processing things that I had learned from that class, [00:04:00] and I've continued writing and thinking about adoption and I'm currently in a PhD program in social work. And my area of research is adoption.

Haley Radke: What led you to pursue your master's and then go into studying adoption?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, I think for me, a lot of it really comes back to the class that I took in undergrad. And my blog during college, I took a class that was called like the psychology of, or maybe it was Asian American psychology and then this adoption class.

And I think those experiences were the first time that I really saw my identities as an Asian American woman and as an adoptee reflected in the research. And I think that. That was a really empowering experience for me. And so in undergrad, I had toyed with the idea of going into academia, but I think I wasn't really [00:05:00] sure if I really liked the idea of academia or if it was just somewhat comfortable because all I'd ever known was being a student.

And so after college, I worked at an insurance company for a little bit. I did an AmeriCorps position with United Way as I was thinking about what I wanted to do. And during this whole time, I had continued writing on my blog. And I think in the back of my mind, I'd always thought still about this idea of academia, but I think simultaneously I had avoided social work for a while because my mom was a social worker and I didn't want to be mini her.

But I realized that I think with my interests and passions and the ways that I wanted to be involved at social work really fit. A lot of those well, and I really like that the field of social work is a values based profession that's [00:06:00] rooted in social justice. And so I decided to pursue my MSW and I knew I wanted to work near in adoption in some capacity. And I'd also been told. Just pragmatically for the academic path, it's recommended to have at least two years of social work, field experience, post masters before starting a Ph. D. And so I went to Washington University in St. Louis for my MSW, and after that, I worked in public adoptions in the state of Wisconsin for a couple of years.

So I worked primarily with foster youth who were being adopted by their current foster parents, as well as some hopeful adoptive parents who were interested in adopting specifically from the public foster care system. And so a lot of [00:07:00] my just like personal engagements have been with international adoptees and a lot of the my own experience as a Chinese adoptee, of course, is an international one.

And so I think that my experience working in Wisconsin in public adoptions was in a part to also complement my other knowledge and just see where are all of these similarities and the differences and in all of these adoption stories. And so after, yeah, about two years working in public adoptions, I started my PhD program to continue looking at these questions from like the research lens.

Haley Radke: If you're comfortable sharing. How was that personally for you to work in adoption for two years. Did that take a toll because we'll get into this within a little bit you were a part of working on the adoptee consciousness [00:08:00] model and it sounds like that to me that you had already come into some consciousness about adoption and saw some of the difficult things in it. And of course, now you've gone on to study it even further. So personally, as an adoptee, with some of those formed opinions and I'll let you say what they are. How was that? I'm like, Oh my gosh, how did you do that?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, it was definitely challenging at times, and I think while I had worked informally in adoption spaces as, like a facilitator for small groups or teen support groups, in those circumstances, the adoptee themselves were, like, who I was primarily working with. But in my role, public adoption social worker. My clients were both the adoptive parents or prospective adoptive parents and the soon to be adoptee. And I think that it was really [00:09:00] challenging holding this kind of dual identity as both an adoptee and adoption professional. And there were certainly some situations that, that I felt less certain about than others.

I think I always tried to just really reflect a lot of care for the children that I was working with and answer their soon to be adoptive parents questions. With all of my background information, I did not disclose to I don't think any of the adoptive families actually that I was an adoptee based on my Anglo name. Some people may have been able to guess. And there were definitely comments made by some of the adoptive parents regarding birth family that were really difficult to deal with. And I would try to interject or again, intervene in ways that were really beneficial to the child because at the [00:10:00] end of the day even the adoptive parents who I would say, maybe didn't have a complete understanding of all of these complexities of the system they were entering.

I could genuinely see that they wanted the best for the child and their care. And I think trying to work together to create that as the outcome is the goal. And I think that, in terms of, my own knowledge too, I think at times it's been really easy to see all of the corruption and cases, particularly in international adoption, where I feel like international adoption as an intervention was completely unnecessary.

And I think, working with some of the kids that I did really learning their stories too. And I think. It did become quite apparent to me that some of these situations the children would never and should never go back to the circumstances that they were in originally. [00:11:00] And so I think it did also force me to think in a more, more holistic and more complex way to of adoptions will always exist in some capacity.

It may not be international forever, but kinship care, informal adoptions, even formal adoptions. And yeah how do we make this experience the least harmful as possible. Because I think it is unrealistic to say end adoptions altogether.

Haley Radke: I think from someone like me who comes from a family preservation standpoint, and it sounds like that's your perspective as well, it is so helpful to see there are the asterisk cases where, and I think the public sees all of them as these asterisk cases these ones really are necessary.

But truly, there may be some that are necessary. And we are looking to the whole and [00:12:00] seeing the problems in the system and trying to fix the upstream things and I know it's like it probably is always going to be around maybe not how do I say this? I think there's a lot of people that talk about the things you mentioned like kinship care informal adoptions, legal guardianship, and making sure we're not changing the child's identity and having access to their medical history and all those kinds of pieces as well.

So there's there's a huge thing to look at. And it's not just like family preservation is the only way and that that just is excluding such a grand part of the problem. I mentioned that you helped work on the Adoptee Consciousness Model. And so I love when I see adoptees working in the research, because we've talked about this before so many times on the show what's talking about us? Who's researching us? And we need to make sure we have [00:13:00] evidence for the things that we're talking about anecdotally. So can you talk a little bit about how that was to work on that? And also thank you for your work on that. And my second part of that is how have you seen it now in use in adoptees vernacular? Have you heard people say that to you?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, it's been a really exciting project for me to work on. And so I guess I've been working primarily with Dr. Susan Branco and JaeRan Kim, who approached me after I published my first peer reviewed article called The Trauma and Healing of Consciousness, which was an autoethnography that looked at, or I guess it used my experiences as an adoptee in academic settings to propose this trauma and healing of consciousness framework.

Where I and so [00:14:00] that paper came about because I had been looking at a lot of literature about trauma in my MSW program. And there's a lot on historical trauma and collective trauma, intergenerational trauma, but I was thinking about the ways in which just coming into this knowledge about the history, complexity, different child removal projects was traumatic.

And I didn't need to be intergenerationally, like connected to these other groups of adoptees by a shared lineage to all of that trauma that's embedded in this community and in these adoption practices and so yeah, Drs. Branco and Dr. JaeRan Kim reached out to me after reading that because they had already been working on the first paper or like the Adoptee Consciousness Model.

And so I was able to join in that [00:15:00] project. And I think that I really have seen an uptick in the use of just consciousness language around the adoptee community. And I feel so fortunate that this work is really resonating with people. We draw upon some other models of adoptee awareness. And then of course, the kind of ubiquitous language of coming out of the fog and our, the adoptee consciousness model, instead of just, like a pre and post state proposes these five different touch points that adoptees work through in different stages of coming into consciousness around this identity.

We view this as a kind of a in a spiral, but not necessarily a linear way that you have to go through all these steps in order, just that you can bounce around the spiral and different events, like overturning Roe v. Wade or having a child [00:16:00] or any other like large major events might send you through that spiral once again.

And that it's just, it's not really this pre and post thing, it's the never ending process. And so I'm really excited that this has been received so well by adoptees and we did a study with a number of focus groups and I felt really privileged to hear all of those stories of our participants and just to see how these different touchstones are reflected in each of their experiences of coming into consciousness around their adoptee identity.

Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for your work on that. I had a whole episode on the adoptee consciousness model. So we'll link to that in the show notes if people want to hear a little bit more about it. And we'll link to the paper as well, because it's very accessible for folks to read. And I love how earlier you were like, I went to [00:17:00] this university class and that probably brought you right to one of those touch points, right?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, definitely.

Haley Radke: So I think it's neat that your autoethnography led into working with Susan and JaeRan. That's awesome. I'm curious about some of the things I saw you present about at a recent conference as well. So I got up very early one Saturday morning when you and a group of your peers were presenting.

And I don't know, maybe I was the only one on Mountain Time. You guys were on Eastern at least, but it was called Carving Out Space Chinese Adoption Studies. And one of the very first things that your group was talking about was how, because there's so many Korean adoptees, and that program started earlier, that those folks have been doing research and working in the field for longer [00:18:00] and have, dominated some of the space in terms of adoptee research and of course, as they should because they've been doing this long and there's a lot of work on it.

And so in talking about Chinese adoptees, starting in the early nineties, that's when the Chinese adoption program internationally started up as 91. Is that right?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, the Chinese adoption law was, it was signed like December 29th of 91. So functionally it started around 1992.

Haley Radke: Okay. Okay. So 92. And so one of you mentioned that it's we're all now coming of age and to having our masters and PhDs and coming into the adoptee research space. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I never thought of that. So can you share a little bit more about that? And what was it like to present with your peers at the [00:19:00] ASAC conference? Cause I was like, I wish I could be in that room. Cause it felt like really something special.

Grace Newton, MSW: Thank you for getting up early and joining us virtually since you couldn't be there. I think, yeah, it was, it's, it was really wonderful being at ASAC. It was my first time there. And I think that in several years, I just have seen a lot more leadership and involvement from Chinese adoptees, which is really exciting to me as a Chinese adoptee. I have been on the advisory council of the KAAN Conference, the Korean American Adoptee and Family Network.

So I've been on the advisory council there for about six years as a Chinese adoptee. And I remember my first time attending. I was like, oh, I don't know if this is like a space for me because like it's so Korean and I have felt so welcomed there. And I think in the last couple of years, [00:20:00] the Chinese adoptee attendance has really increased at KAAN specifically, as well as Chinese adoptees leading workshops and presenting there.

And I think that part of this, is because there aren't really big established conferences for Chinese adoptees yet. And so I, I think that this is a way for us to get involved in what is already existing, but I have seen changes too, in terms of the families with children from China, New York.

Group is the first FCC group, I think, to turn over leadership to Chinese adoptees, and it's rebranded in the last couple of years as the Chinese Adoptee Alliance, and they're hosting events. And so I think that we are going to see a big increase in Chinese adoptees in these spaces. And I know of at least a couple of, I know there's LiLi Johnson, [00:21:00] who's a Chinese adoptee professor.

She was at UW Madison for a while, and I think she's somewhere in Canada now. So there are a few Chinese adoptees who are on the older side of the, Chinese adoptee cohort who are in these academic spaces. And I think part of the rationale for the conference round table that we shared at ASAC was just, yeah, I think that because the Korean adoptees are so large in number and have been so active, that in some way, they've served as this blueprint of who Chinese adoptees might be, because we are also a huge cohort, East Asian, who've been primarily adopted to the U. S., but I think, there are really specific and unique factors involved with Chinese adoptions that will make us and our group inevitably different from the Korean adoptees.

Haley Radke: One of the things you spoke about, [00:22:00] sorry, I'm using the collective you. My notes, I don't have indicated who said what every time.

I have a couple points where I know it was you, but one of the points someone made was that as Korea was winding down, then Chinese adoptions picked up. It was like the right quote unquote right timing and so there's several hundred thousand Korean adoptees and then the Chinese adoption program.

Could you speak to this a little bit like how it has it's not fully closed but how it has wound down over the last few years because of some policy decisions and then what would your estimate be of how many chinese adoptees there are.

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, I think the current estimates are about 160, 000 Chinese adoptees globally and about 83, 000 of [00:23:00] those Chinese adoptees have been adopted to the United States.

China allowed foreigners of Chinese ethnicity to adopt and some foreigners to adopt on kind of an ad hoc basis before 1991. But really, the Chinese adoption law in 1991 was what formally opened China to international adoption. And yeah, I think that when we talk about all of these international adoption systems, we have to remember how interconnected they are and, the 1988 Olympics was really what kind of started the end or major decline of Korean adoption and the just like shame around the article that came out during that time about how Korea was like exporting undesirable children. And 90, 1991 when China really opens to international adoption is not very far away from 1988 when Korea starts winding down. [00:24:00] And I think, yeah, there's a lot of factors. So Korea, which had been a major, source of adoptable children no longer is a source.

I think we'd already seen a number of adoption and trafficking scandals in Latin America, but China at this time was considered a clean country for adoption because all of these, predominantly at the time, infant girls who had been abandoned on the streets were viewed as genuinely orphaned, and I think that the fact that so many of the girls from China were abandoned anonymously due to China's policies were also attractive to adoptive parents who, a lot of parents had some concerns or hesitations about potential birth parent involvement from that would be involved with domestic adoption, but because these girls in China [00:25:00] were abandoned anonymously on the street, there's really no possibility of birth parent involvement there. So there are a lot of factors that kind of created this really desirable group in China. And so throughout the 90s and early 2000s, Chinese adoptions were on the rise. I think the peak of Chinese adoptions is about 2004 or 2005. Around that time is also when the Hunan scandal is made public to the world where there were, it was discovered there were a number of children, girls from Hunan province all trafficked among and circulated among several orphanages in that province when one orphanage's supply ran low.

So I think that particular scandal was really what turned this view that China was this entirely like legitimate [00:26:00] adoption program from all these voluntarily relinquished girls and of course under the one child policy where families, were punished through loss of income jobs, second children, unregistered children not having access to citizenship or schooling.

It's really hard to legitimately claim that any of these relinquishments of children were voluntary. And I think another turning point for Chinese adoption is around 2009, at which point China becomes basically entirely a special needs program. And so in the 1990s, when China opened adoption, the population of adoptees was 98 percent girls.

And then, yeah, by 2009 it's pretty much entirely special needs, I think in 2010, the US [00:27:00] State Department stopped keeping track of which children adopted from China had disabilities, because it was pretty much understood that they all did. And yeah, so China, yeah, post 2005, adoption from China overall has been on the decline, but the percentage of children who are being adopted, the special needs has increased, and then I think another particularly important demographic shift in this is also the number of boys who are being adopted.

As the number of special needs adoptions from China increased, the gender skew of who was being adopted really evened out too. And so around 2016, that was the first year that actually more boys from China were adopted than girls at 51 percent of the children were adopted. And so I think because a lot of the early research on Chinese adoption really involved the girls of 1990s, there's a just In some ways, a kind of flattening of [00:28:00] Chinese adoptees of that's who Chinese adoptees are.

But after the 2000s, there really is this kind of like second wave of special needs kids. And then also that about maybe like 13, 000 boys adopted from China who I think are just erased from Chinese adoption research because there's been, probably first huge group of Chinese adoptees was nearly all girls.

Haley Radke: I don't know if this is in your wheelhouse or not so I'm gonna ask you like I don't know if this is your area of expertise I know, you know a ton about this, obviously. I'm curious about the attitude in China about adopting children and so one thing that was mentioned in the presentation is that if you were to seek for your biological family, a lot of parents [00:29:00] would not want to be found because of the shame of abandoning a child, and that would be not a good situation to come into.

But, in my estimation, it's like this, the one child policy and then the two child policy and three and now that's been abolished, but that was the impetus right for abandoning children. And so I don't know how many children are available for adoption in China now, and culturally, is that something that's accepted?

I, was just at this screening of a film about Indian adoption and there's, some talk about culturally, if Indian people want to adopt and those kinds of things. So can you speak to that at all?

Grace Newton, MSW: I think Kay Ann Johnson's book, China's Hidden Children does a really wonderful job complicating the one child policy and notions [00:30:00] of like cultural preference for sons in China.

And I think what her book really shows is that there has been a longstanding pattern of domestic adoptions within China, some of them formal and some of them informal, but the 1991 Adoption Law of the People's Republic of China. The goal of that really was, in part, to crack down on domestic adoptions and promote international adoptions. And so part of the requirements of that original law was that adoptive parents had to be over the age of 35 and also had to comply essentially with one child policy by not having any children in their home. And so culturally it would be pretty uncommon for Chinese families to be 35 years of age and not have started a family and so I think that the adoption policy [00:31:00] essentially did what it was meant to do.

And in shaping who was able to adopt and a lot of western adoptive parents who participate in international adoption, a lot of them do happen to be older and do happen to have had infertility issues, which may be delayed their, family creation strategies. And so I think. That and then we see again, and I think around a 2007 reform, which is around, I think, the time that China's beginning to realize there's going to be some population issues from the one child policy, there's like a relaxing of domestic adoption laws. And so I think that one of the common issues that we hear about in terms of Chinese adoptions is around not telling the adoptee that they are adopted, which is something that, is much more possible when it's like a same race [00:32:00] adoption versus in my case, which was like a transracial international adoption, and I think that personally, in my experiences when I've gone back to China, I've come across a lot of people who, perhaps weren't necessarily aware of the extent of international adoption.

And then also, I think an interesting response is just in line with like dominant narratives of adoption. Just oh these are my family now and my parents here in the US and that's my family. And to be grateful to them that they've raised me which I am. And that, but also, there's this family in China that exists, and so I find that kind of interesting given Chinese cultural beliefs around filial piety and importance of ancestors and paying homage to that.

But I think the kind of sense that this is my family now. And yeah, I guess I wonder, one of the things that I wonder though is, we talked about [00:33:00] how all these Chinese adoptees are coming into age now. What that also means is that the siblings, of adoptees who were kept are coming into age.

And I wonder if things that were too hard or too shameful for parents to talk about are going to be exposed in terms of the siblings who want to know who and where their siblings are. And I have seen in some Chinese adoptee, or searching groups that, yeah, there are some siblings of adoptees who are searching for this missing sister..

Haley Radke: Wow, that's so interesting. I'd never thought of that, in zooming out to like the 30, 000 foot view. And one of the comments made in the presentation was that the Chinese government was using international adoption of their children to build [00:34:00] relationships with other countries. And all the powers that be in Korea or China or any of the other countries that have been exporting their children, there's no thought of the impact it has on the child in their personal well being and, all of those things. Before we do recommended resources am I right that you're getting married very soon?

Grace Newton, MSW: I am August 31st of this year less than three months away.

Haley Radke: So when we're recording, you have just a few months to go. Congratulations. So excited for you.

Grace Newton, MSW: Thank you.

Haley Radke: You wrote about your fiance on your blog. Would you just mind sharing a little bit about your relationship and how that's maybe helped you reclaim a little bit more of your ethnicity?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, sure. The starting point of that is that I experienced a breakup [00:35:00] before I started dating him. And I think in my early twenties, I was fairly open to just, meeting new people. And I think I didn't really think about what I wanted in a family life or home life. I was just like focused on my schoolwork and, Figuring out like that process and enjoying friends and, and yeah, just exploring meeting, meeting new people.

And then I think when I had a breakup and it was a relationship that, I had talked about future oriented things with and the possibility of a marriage and family and those things what would that really look like? I think I was in my late 20s, 27, I just finished my master's program, and I had started to think about those things differently.

And I think what became apparent to me was [00:36:00] that it was important for me to have this identity, like collective identity as Asian Americans. I think I was prioritizing like Chinese American. But Asian American identity, and I think that in my relationships with white men, I had also, when envisioning a family, I realized, that the burden of passing down Chinese culture, or holidays, or language, all of that would be on me, and related to, this culture that sometimes I feel like very inadequate in and the idea of having a partner who could share that responsibility, but also the joys that come with that became more important.

And so I really did prioritize at that point, dating Asian men, which was harder in Wisconsin and I was like, oh, I'm going to have to move to New [00:37:00] York or California or somewhere if I really want to prioritize this, but I met my now fiance right in, in Wisconsin. And of course, we connected about it, like a lot of.

Just like silly things and food and interests, but I think a lot of the ways that we connected initially were cultural too, in terms of being able to talk about trips back to China and for me, how I'd say, like, when I was in China, I was like the most American and simultaneously the most Chinese I ever felt, and to have someone like look back at me and totally understand that feeling was really chill and I think for me in I yeah, you mentioned I had written about this and I think being with a Chinese American person, I think there was a lot of internalized racism that I had to undo within myself in order to really think about the why I would want to [00:38:00] prioritize that in a relationship.

And I think that also there was a lot of internalized racism that came undone just being in this relationship. I think about my eyes or moles on my face and things that were like different and that made me different. And loving my fiance who has, similar features, like loving that on him I think it's made it easier to really like wash away some of those things like about myself. No, I love this on him. Why wouldn't I love this on me too? And so that's been a really remarkable part of this. And I think also being embraced by his parents here has been really special. And so I think you know, so much of adoption, we talk about this like loss of family, loss of culture, loss, so many losses.

And I think more than just my fiance himself, gaining like a family, a Chinese [00:39:00] family that, that has been really a profound thing for me too. And I think that. I recognize given the structure of the Chinese street abandonments and the complexities of and language barriers and the time that has elapsed since I left China that it may not be possible for me to find birth family.

But having this like intimate relationship with a Chinese family that has embraced me has been a huge gain for me. And I think, yeah, it's allowed me, I think also to just see so many different ways of being Chinese and Chinese American and I think watching my fiance's interactions with them and thinking about okay maybe there are some things that I wouldn't have known about Chinese culture or whatever even if I had stayed in a Chinese family, I'm like, oh, okay. I don't need to burden myself with that worry so I think yeah [00:40:00] it's all been a healing process.

Haley Radke: That's so lovely. I'm so happy for you. Congratulations. I would love for folks to check out your blog, Red Thread Broken. Congratulations on 11 years of keeping a blog going. That is impressive, Grace. Oh my goodness.

I love seeing the progression. You write about all kinds of things, like personal things, academic things, media critiques, or things that are happening right now and social critiques, I guess I could say. And there's even a post from your mother who we didn't talk about this, but you alluded to that they're supportive and.

Grace Newton, MSW: Why I as an adoptive parent.

Haley Radke: Why I an adoptive parent yes, I'm not pro adoption. I'm from 2014, and that got picked up in several places and had a huge audience. That's really a neat one to read for folks. And in 2014, you were talking about China's one [00:41:00] child policy and writing academically as a university student. So it's really neat. You have this whole history of things there.

I was like, I'm going to read your whole blog. I couldn't cause there's so many things. So I'd love for folks to check it out if they haven't already. And is there a good spot? What do you send people to when you're like, I have this really impressive blog that thousands and thousands of people read. Do you like, where do you send them?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, I don't have a specific spot and I probably should make a, here's a good starting point. Read these 10 pieces. So maybe I'll do that this summer.

Haley Radke: Okay, perfect. I have to do that too for Adoptees On. Once you have a couple hundred posts, it's it can be overwhelming for new people.

So I know they'll come in and check that out. And we'll link to a couple of the highlight pieces in the show notes for folks. What did you want to recommend to us, Grace?

Grace Newton, MSW: A book that's just been really sitting with me this year is China's Hidden [00:42:00] Children, which I talked about a little bit earlier. And I think that It's a little bit older, I think it came out in 2016, and unfortunately, Kay Ann Johnson, the author of this book, has since passed away, but I think this book is really a remarkable piece of her legacy that she's left to the Chinese adoptee community specifically. It's a difficult, I, okay, I would say it's an easy read in terms of the book, and then the content, I would say, is very difficult, and for Chinese Adoptees, especially, who do decide to read it, I would say, take care have good people around you, but it's, I think, a remarkable book that really complicates the notion of Chinese adoptions and the one child policies role in that and this overarching, I think, myth that surrounded early adoptions from China that, there's this kind of disdain towards girls within Chinese culture or [00:43:00] and what Kay Ann Johnson really shows in this book is how wanted girls from China really were within China, and how many people sacrificed and went to great lengths to hide girls who they had given birth to, and even girls who they had adopted within China who were quote unquote, over quota children.

And I think that while it can be difficult, really the resounding message to adoptees from the book is that whatever people say on this side of things we really were wanted by people in China.

Haley Radke: Thank you, that sounds wonderful to read and illuminating. I was trying to think of the name that someone else recommended this documentary about the one child policy and we also gave trigger warnings for that because it is there's just so much hurt and trauma and [00:44:00] I think it's just good to be well informed frankly, it's easier to put our head in the sand, but we shouldn't be doing that. So.

Grace Newton, MSW: Was the documentary One Child Nation?

Haley Radke: Thank you. Yes, it was. And that is yeah, so hard to watch. Thank you so much for sharing some of your expertise with us today and your personal story and for your work on Red Thread Broken and The Adoptee Consciousness model and other things I know you have coming out soon.

I'm so excited to follow your academic career as we go on through these years. I'm sure I'll be reading lots of things you've put out. Where can folks connect with you online?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, so as you mentioned, I have a blog called Red Thread Broken, so you can find that at redthreadbroken.com and then on Facebook and Instagram, you can also find me, my Handles Red Thread Broken.

And I guess on Twitter, I'm @GracePingHua. So G R A C E P [00:45:00] I N G H U A. That's where I am.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thanks so much, Grace.

Grace Newton, MSW: Thank you.

Haley Radke: We send you our congratulations, Grace, as you get married this summer. So excited for you. And Grace is continuing on in her PhD program and I'm just cheering everyone on who is working on critical adoption scholarship. It is so important. It is so important based on some of the recent trash research that I've seen coming out from supposed organizations that purport to support adoptees, and it's no, you're actively fundraising to support more families to be separated.

So let's be listening to adoptees who are doing this work. Some of the [00:46:00] questions that people come up with who do not have lived adoption experience personally are just outrageous. Honestly, I don't even know how they pass through some of the legal hoops and things that, that academic scholarship needs for them to go through, right?

Questions are supposed to be unbiased, impartial, not leading in some way when you're doing academic surveys. So when you see things come out that are very skewed or slanted one way, make sure you put your reading glasses on and you dive in personally to make sure you understand what's happening.

So anyway. As I was saying, I'm cheering on the adoptees who are looking at these issues and are able to give a perspective that is often unheard. And speaking of unheard, thank you for those of you who are supporting the [00:47:00] show, either by just sharing the episode with one fellow adoptee, maybe, a Chinese adoptee and they want to get hooked into adoptee community.

This episode is a great way to start and following Grace's blog and the ways she's sharing to connect with fellow adoptees. Another way to support the show is to share it on social media, to comment on our Instagram or share our posts when they go out or folks that are sending donations through PayPal or supporting on Patreon.

You're keeping the show alive. So it just, thank you so much for that. Thank you for listening to adoptee voices and let's talk again very soon.

285 [Healing Series] The Seven Insights into Adoptee Attachment with Pam Cordano, MFT

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/285

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Haley Radke [00:00:00] 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. Today's episode 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.

We are joined by Pam Cordano talking about the seven challenges of adoptee attachment, which include profound ongoing chronic misattunement, disconnection from our instincts and commodification. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to our [00:01:00] 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'll link to everything we'll be talking about today on the website, adopteeson. com. Let's listen in. I am so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Pam Cordano. Welcome, Pam.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Thank you. It's so fun to be here with you again after a while.

Haley Radke

I know we get to talk regularly and you come to a lot of Patreon events, but you're not always on the main feed. We got to have you back on the main feed more. Yes. I know that your insights for adoptees have been so tremendously helpful and one of the things that we've relied on for years as adoptees looking at adoption with a critical lens and how it's impacted us has been the Primal Wound, which is a little bit [00:02:00] controversial sometimes, because it was written by an adoptive parent.

And so when I heard you. Do this talk on seven challenges in adoptee attachment. I was like, oh, finally, like an adoptee is breaking these things down for us. And you put into words a bunch of things for me personally, and I know others who've heard you share this. So do you want to share a little bit more about this and I don't know, do you think it relates to primal wound at all?

Pam Cordano, MFT

I do. Actually, that book was really important to me when I read it and the Primal Wound, it gave a structure and started to outline something that really resonated with ways I had been feeling inside that I didn't have language or concepts for.

And [00:03:00] so I was really grateful for that book actually when it came out. That was such a long time ago, but as I've lived more into my own healing as an adoptee and having been a therapist for a long time I've been really, grappling with our leading ideas about attachment theory and specific ways that I think that leading attachment theory is inadequate for us adoptees.

I just started to think about trying to name some specific things that are actually, that have substance to them that are in the way of us feeling comfortable attaching. Not just to other people, but to the world at large and to our own selves. Just attachment as a whole thing. Maybe how this relates to the primal wound is maybe some of what I'm trying to figure out has to do with looking under the hood of us.

And it's not just more external and conceptual, but it's looking under the hood.

Haley Radke

Every [00:04:00] time I get one of those new books, like What Happened to You or, all the the leading Gabor Mate book or Bessel van der Kolk or something like that. I literally always flip to the index first and see if they have adoption in it or adoptee and I keep looking for them to talk about us we're good case study. And they don't.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. I think that I think it's very hard for somebody not adopted to understand what it's like being us under the hood, they're just describing cars, but we're like in the engine of, we live in the engine of us and it's complicated in here.

Haley Radke

Okay. So even Nancy Verrier with a Primal Wound, right? She's looking from the outside. It's not her personal experience. Yeah. Okay. You're under the hood.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Under the hood. And I'll just say psychedelics have been huge in helping me get under the hood and [00:05:00] helping other people get under the hood who are trying to understand these huge defense structures that have been keeping us alive from the beginning. It's very complicated in here.

Haley Radke

Before we get into the seven, can you just set up why attachment is so important? And I know you talk about the limbic system and the brain and that, can you set that up for us?

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Trauma attachment 101. This is what I guess, what I would think is important to say right now is that we have our amygdalas.

The amygdala is the fear center of the brain and the amygdala is telling us that something dangerous is going to happen or something dangerous is happening. So it's looking for danger and the amygdala is part of the larger system called the limbic system. The limbic system is a larger system.

The amygdala is part of the limbic system and the limbic system stores highly charged memories and manages all of our sleep and appetite cycles and our moods [00:06:00] and our ability to bond. So the limbic system is where we bond from and the limbic system is where we need to connect with other people. With them and their limbic systems connecting with us. So that's where the party is of attachment, the limbic system. Okay.

Haley Radke

Okay. We're in the attachment party. Got it.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And that's one reason that when adoptees get together, we don't even have to make a decision. We, people can just feel the difference that the safety being with another adoptee, even if our stories are very different because there's a certain kind of mutual understanding that helps our systems relax and then bonding can happen more comfortably and easily among adoptees. That's why adoptees are so important to each other.

Haley Radke

That's cool.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. So there's this therapist up in Seattle who is not adopted. He's an attachment [00:07:00] specialist. And I just said to him straight up like I'm an alien. I was like okay, explain attachment to me from your point of view. And he said, so I wrote down what he said.

He said this, he said, the baby needs the mom's limbic brain to attune to the baby's limbic brain. When attunement happens, we feel safe. The baby learns she can be found by the mother. She is findable and worthy of being found. If someone finds her, she's not alone. If she is found, someone worked to find her.

If this happens consistently, she does not need to doubt her value. She can be found in the deep, young places. As she is found, she also learns to find more of herself. This paragraph has become very important to me because it just names the magnitude of what didn't happen for [00:08:00] me and I think what doesn't happen for most or any adoptee, because how can pause, pause right there.

Haley Radke

How can a stranger fill in for that?

Pam Cordano, MFT

How can a stranger with a, with an entirely different agenda, the agenda maybe is becoming a mother, becoming a father, starting a family, adding to a family, conquering infertility. I don't know what the agenda is, but it often isn't the agenda of simply opening one's system to a horror of pain in a baby.

Like when I think, I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but when I think about the day I arrived, to my adoptive parents, I probably needed the Red Cross to show up, like with the helicopter and that silver wrap stuff that they wrap people in to keep them warm. I was a wreck looking back and hearing stories from my grandparents, like I'd stopped crying, I was, I'd been through six months of [00:09:00] hell and had shut down natural systems like crying just to stay alive.

That was the day that was so exciting to my parents. They, they had the neighbors come over and it was like a celebration, like a brand new, gotcha day kind of situation. So it was just It's not just like the limbic resonance wasn't there, but there was this massive misattunement, actually, and I don't know how that couldn't be the normal story. Do you?

Haley Radke

I'm just, I'm trying to put this together for myself, because we have all kinds of different adoptee experiences, and I was like born in a hospital left in the hospital for, say, 10 days before I went to my home with my adoptive parents. And you have this interruption, right? You're with your birth mother, but she was neglectful and you were [00:10:00] removed. That's your personal story that you've shared here a little bit before. And there's other adoptees who are, with. Their families for longer, and then they get removed, right? So at any point, there's always this gap in care.

And we're with new people who are supposed to help us regulate in some fashion. But whether it's kinship or a full stranger. It's not the same.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And first of all, it's hard enough for us. I'm almost 60 years old and I'm just starting to understand and feel into the magnitude of the trauma from my infancy. And in a really bodily way, as hard as I've been working on this I've just started to make more progress in the last couple of years. What adoptive parent younger than me, A, can understand something about losing one's whole lineage and the primal [00:11:00] wound, and then Secondly, do enough work on themselves to be at a place where they can resonate with a baby in a limbic kind of way, open up to that kind of trauma. It just doesn't really make sense that would be something available.

Haley Radke

Is that even possible? That's maybe just like a hypothetical we can't even, say, but say an adoptive parent is so prepared and they know what they're getting into and they've done all the work and things. In my mind then they don't adopt, because then they know. So I don't know if those things can even coexist. Having a human so ready for a baby that suffered this catastrophic loss.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And I've talked about Cambodia before when I went to Cambodia and I met some orphans there that, that were teenagers, but had been orphaned when they were babies and in [00:12:00] Cambodia following the genocide.

The baby's names and stories were kept intact and were known by the families that took them in. Nothing was put on the babies to like, to now I'm your mom and this is your dad. It was like, we're here, we're a family taking care of you and you can call us what you want. You can call us, auntie or first name or mother, father, if you want to, but that's up to you like it's your life. This is yours. It's it was very baby child centered and I think that and then the families had known what the and had felt with the children what they've gone through because I guess they had all gone through the genocide.

So they all knew, but I think that was better for them than what happens here with such a it's a one two punch. It's like a loss and now this fiction.

Haley Radke

We've had this talk before, right? There's this, yeah, there's the relinquishment and trauma. And then there's also a trauma of, okay, now you have to fit where you've been put. [00:13:00] Right. And I think, should we go through the seven? Cause I think some of that is like absolutely addresses that.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Seven areas of challenge specific to adoptees and attaching. So the first challenge is the adoptee body. The adoptee body is where the story lives. A theme in our community is all these ways that adoptees bodies are not well, like digestive problems, sleep problems, autoimmune disorders, headaches.

I've had cancer. It's just the body is my body has been fraught with stress and it seems like almost all of the adoptees I meet have a lot of this kind of stuff. For an adopted child, there are two stories going on. There's how well they're masking the trauma and trying to fit in and doing whatever, however they're doing that.

And then there's what the body is doing. The adoptee body is really where the story lives. And the adoptee body is talking to us and to our families the entire time. [00:14:00] So I know for me, I didn't sleep well at all as a kid. I still don't. And I also didn't eat that well either. I was just eating was tough. Everything was tough. Eating was tough and sleeping was tough. My parents wanted to be good parents and they saw these problems as reflect reflections that they were not doing something right. So it became centered on them. And so they weren't curious why? Why is Pam having such a hard time sleeping and eating? What's going on? Let's try to get underneath this. I'm sure there are some adoptive parents that would, that care about the body and are paying attention to the body. But for my parents, it was really about a reflection of them that they were doing something wrong or they weren't, they wanted me to show them that they were doing a good job, basically.

The body is where the story lives. What story is the body telling and who wants to listen to it? And that really matters. Even for us now that those of us who are adults, adoptees who are adults, like we, we want to really start to care about what the story our body [00:15:00] is telling. And we want partners and friends and family to care about our bodies and the stories that are, because the body tells symbolic stories.

If I can't be conscious of something that's going on and express it in words, that's one way that it shows up as a symbolic body thing. You know what I mean?

Haley Radke

Because we've talked before about pre verbal trauma, so we might not have words for it, but it's like living somewhere.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And it does show up. It does, there's the body doesn't, the body doesn't lie or the body keeps the score. It's. The body tells the truth. I think that a lot of adoptees are under so much stress to deal with the trauma that they may not even be aware of, but it's there. And then be fitting in and masking and functioning as best they can as children and as adults.

I don't think listening to the body is necessarily a high priority when we're trying to survive. So it goes, it gets deprioritized. But I think that [00:16:00] when we're really talking about attachment, we have to include the body. The body is a really wonderful truth teller. And it can be a nightmare to enter, but it's the place that we need to attach from.

So we have to start to value the stories our own bodies are telling and then be close to people who also value the stories our bodies are telling so that we can at least be in reality. There's the quote by John Bowlby, British psychologists and psychiatrists that I think was like the father of attachment who said, "what cannot be said to the mother cannot be said to the self."

And so if we adoptees have nobody, we can tell the truth to about this implicit trauma and it's running rampant in our systems. We can't tell ourselves either. And that's where it has to go into symbolism has to go into body problems, addictions. Things like that, more indirect, but real signs of what we wish and needed to be able to tell to maybe both mothers, but can't, so that [00:17:00] we can't tell it to ourselves.

Haley Radke

That sounds to me like so much of this is subconscious. Mhm. And even for those adoptees that don't acknowledge that adoption is problematic or has had challenges or comes from a challenging system in place, like all of those things, like there's still something happening underneath the surface that just isn't safe to surface.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And it comes out eventually because it gets very hard over decades and decades to, to hold these defenses in place to keep us alive and things start to break down. As we get older and often that's a nightmare, but it's a gift because then we have a different, a new chance to have some access to it and to work some things through that could never be worked through before.

Haley Radke

Okay, what's number two?

Pam Cordano, MFT

Okay, the second one is the enormity [00:18:00] and value of belonging to lineage. When we lose our lineages, it's a massive loss. And I used to think of lineage as being a line, like there's me, there's my birth mother, there's her mother, there's her mother, like it went down a line. But now I think of lineage as a giant spider web with many points of connection and orientation for us.

So to be removed from that entire spider web is a massive loss. And our culture doesn't treat that as a massive loss. There's a devaluing of remaining in one's lineage, the value of that. And so the loss of that, which happens in one minute or one hour or one day is huge. We used to, I used to call it separation trauma or attachment destruction.

I thought attachment destruction was a really bold way of saying something about this primal wound. But even that is it's a moment attachment destruction. But when we think about the loss of a spiderweb lineage, [00:19:00] we're like with, we're like in a free fall out in the world without that net that holds everybody into place.

Haley Radke

So even you and I have talked about this before and picturing the web, it's if we're gone, the impact of our absence also impacts the family of origin, right? Their web is changed. Yeah, and then I was thinking about say transnational adoptees. And so our web is in a certain place and so if you're from a different country and your web is in a different country and that's You know, that's also a place of comfort and safety and those kinds of things right?

We remember where we were and where our family has been. And so there's also that loss that's just compounding on

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's huge.

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's huge. The smells. It's yeah, [00:20:00] if it's a place, it's not just all of the people, the points of, and the stories and the qualities of the lineage. But it's, yeah it's the place.

That's a whole big part of the web too, is the place. Or, trans, transracial adoption. Same thing.

Haley Radke

Yeah. I was just going to say, yeah, race, ethnicity, culture, all of those things are pieced together as a part of the web, maybe.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yep.

Haley Radke

Okay. Okay.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Totally. Number three. When we are plucked from the, or kicked out of, whichever, however we leave that massive lineage web, we're in a freefall, in a sense.

There's, we're not being held by all of the points that hold us. More and more, it's gotten out this new phrase called the nothing place. And the nothing place is a phrase we're using to mean no orientation points, free fall, [00:21:00] terror. And a friend of mine shared this nothing place thing with me.

He'd done psychedelics and he'd found himself in the nothing place. And when he described it, I totally recognized it. And so at the time it was in 2021 Anne Heffron and I were doing a year of Flourish 50 people, two days a week, weekly meetings with adoptees. And I brought this nothing place concept. Concept ha. It's it's not a concept, it's real. To all of them and ask them to try it on and I was shocked because everybody resonated with it. And knew in some way that they were avoiding something about this terrifying free fall into nothingness without the web, but we haven't had language for this that's been adequate. And so it's just like this monster that we're avoiding something. I think that's the monster is a free fall.

Haley Radke

I [00:22:00] was thinking that I've been watching this like travel show lately. And I was thinking like, if you were as an adult transported to a fully a different country and you had nothing with you, so you had the clothes on your back and you had no money, no passport, and you didn't speak the language and you didn't even know where you were and like how disorienting that would be.

But yet, you still have your brains and experience with you, and you can figure out okay, I need to, I need to get help from somebody I need to figure out where I am. You can figure out how to communicate and whatever. So you have some of those skills. And I was thinking about how a baby or a young child is just like just alone.

And when you describe it as the nothing place, like I think of myself, like alone as a baby and it's too scary to go there, right? It's just too scary to like, even think about that.

Pam Cordano, MFT

[00:23:00] Totally. And what you just said about the show I may not have this totally accurate, but I think with the highest level military people, Navy SEALs , they do an exercise where they drop somebody off in a foreign town and they have to survive for four days.

And there are some enemies. I think there are quote enemies that are looking for them. So it's like this four day trial of survival. And I don't know, I think about us as babies and well, there's a primal wound, right? We're already like reeling from this loss of lineage and then we don't recognize anything. And we, yeah, we can't talk, nothing.

Haley Radke

Because babies are, and really small children, right? We're fully at the mercy of anyone, anything around us. There's no competence whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah. I was just trying to think of other ways to [00:24:00] explain this to someone who's not adopted. Huh. And I just, there's nothing like it, right? There's nothing like

Pam Cordano, MFT

What's the movie where somebody gets lost out in space just spinning around out in the middle of nowhere, like an astronaut?

Haley Radke

Interstellar is that the right one? I don't know, there was a couple space movies?

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's funny because just, I think that for non adopted people, they might say you have loving people that want you, that want to make a home for you, that have paid a lot of money for you that, that, have decorated a room for you, like you're not out in space, there's people here, but that's from adult humans that don't understand loss of lineage.

I think the value of talking about the nothing place is getting back inside the adoptee and being adoptee centric and not non adoptee centric.

Haley Radke

It's interesting. I have a whiteboard full of ideas and everything for shows and things next to me that you can't see, but it's here. It's always there. And I've had The Nothing Place written on the board for several years, actually. [00:25:00] And I could never bring myself to ask you to do a full episode about it because it is so depressing to just think about that and I was like, God, I don't think I can talk about that for half an hour. That just is it's too much.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And you know what, trauma, the definition of trauma is too much, too muchness. It is too much. And it was too much. And that's what we're trying to say to the world. It was too much. It is too much. And it was too much for us.

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

You might have been fine. We weren't. And aren't. Yeah.

Haley Radke

Yes. I was just thinking, we're talking about, different adoptee experiences and even open adoption has been seen as this like panacea like but you still know who your birth parents are like you still get meetings with [00:26:00] them sometimes or whatever. However open adoption agreements have been structured if they remain open by the way but it's interesting because I was thinking like nothing place that still exists for open adoption.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Oh totally Because the death in place happens when we get separated from lineage, and then if, when the birth family comes back in, whether it's a six months, one year, every five years, not till the child's 13, whatever they just, whatever the decision is, all of this trauma has already happened.

And so then, what part of the child is meeting their birth family? I don't think it's an open limbic system. It's, I imagine it, from the adoptee's point of view, I imagine it being pretty scary to meet the people that let you go.

[00:27:00] Haley Radke

Even if it's regular? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All the way along. Yeah. Okay, we got to move on from that.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Okay. The next one falls right into place, which is adaptation becomes the primary survival mechanism. So we're in the nothing place. We got to survive. Every living organism wants to survive. The replacement for orientation is adaptation. And we are doing everything we can to adapt to what's in front of us to survive. And we're really good at it. Adoptees are super adapters. That's why Paul Sunderland, in his video about addiction, said that adoptees really surprised him when they would seem so put together and intact, and then the littlest thing would happen and they would, lose it. Because we can adapt, but that doesn't mean that we [00:28:00] feel okay and filled in inside.

Haley Radke

I'm stuck on this sentence. The replacement for orientation is adaptation. This just feels so profound to me just because it's going back to the lack of orientation we have. It's frankly

Pam Cordano, MFT

And it could be very confusing then what's the real me versus what's just adaptation? It gets so Confusing. It takes so long to figure that out.

Haley Radke

Can you just say some examples of things that are adaptations? Literally just being the child of these new parents just having that identity is an adaptation, right?

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Being very perceptive. What do they want? What makes them smile? What makes them what makes them love me more? Which would make me safe? I, okay I'm less worried about saying something really offensive compared to how I used to be when I first met you. I was really worried about [00:29:00] upsetting people, but I'm less worried about that now. Several years ago, I saw an article in the Huffington Post, and I forget which adoptee, I wish I knew which adoptee wrote it.

She said something like, I feel like I've said this on your show before, that when a baby is kidnapped, they are expected to remember their parents and reject the kidnappers. And then when a child's adopted, they're expected to forget their birth family and bond with the adopters. And so if I were kidnapped, I would be paying.

I would be using all my energy to survive. I would be trying to figure out the kidnappers. What makes them mad? What makes them happy? What makes them calm down? What keeps them from harming me, I'd be looking for everything I could do to maximize my survival. I think we do that from the get go. We just start getting very perceptive to survive because we've already had this huge threat to our life by this relinquishment. [00:30:00] We're under, it's quote attachment, which is an attachment under duress.

Haley Radke

You already said it. That's the literal survival mechanism.

Pam Cordano, MFT

I guess it goes without saying everything we're naming is a challenge in our ability to attach. So trying to unwind these crisscrossed patterns and confusions to figure out like, let's say, I don't know, since we're such good adapters, because we had to be, how do we attach when we get into a romantic relationship where we have to watch where am I adapting or what's real and can the person I'm with tolerate the real me and how about now and how about now like it's a process to start, to become real with people so we can attach.

Haley Radke

What's coming to mind and I don't know if this is the right place to comment on it, but I still see people sharing about reactive attachment disorder, which from the therapist that I know and respect, that's [00:31:00] not a real thing.

I think about so for people who don't know, it's sort of like if there's a child in your care and they're so to speak acting out and you're, they're troublesome in some way to you as the adoptive parent, they'll often get diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder. And now I'm, as you're talking, I'm thinking like. These kids are the ones saying the truth out loud. I don't belong here. What am I doing here? Get me out of here. How do I get out of here? Do you have comments on reactive attachment disorder? Do you think that's a real thing?

Pam Cordano, MFT

Look at this. I'm just looking up symptoms, right? Avoidance of physical touch or comfort when distressed.

What I have heard a lot of adoptees say is it was the wrong hands. It was the wrong bodies. I didn't want those hands. I didn't want those bodies. I wanted someone who felt right. I remember my mom would always say to me, oh, I can't do anything right. I can't do anything right. It was [00:32:00] like, Yeah, I didn't want you. I wanted her, I didn't even know who her was at that point, but I knew I wanted her.

Unaffected when left alone. I found it a relief to be left alone because then I had less adapting to do. I could call, I could just relax.

Emotional detachment. Yeah. Why emotionally attach when our deepest truth is absolutely unknown. It's very hard to attach when we have to keep most of us and ourselves in the closet.

Rocking or self comforting excessively, inability to show guilt, remorse, or regret. Some kids are mad for good reasons. So they don't feel guilty for being mad. Tantrums, anger, sadness.

Haley Radke

Yeah, so the cure, quote unquote, for reactive attachment disorder, or like your, what you want to have happen, is that they adapt better, and fit in better, and behave.

Pam Cordano, MFT

[00:33:00] Yeah.

Haley Radke

That's the fix.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Victor Frankl said, an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal. I think that sums it up. We can put a DSM diagnosis on it or we can just say normal.

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And then the child has to carry, The adopted child has to carry the abnormal instead of the situation, the institution carrying the abnormal.

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

That's what's abnormal.

Haley Radke

So medicating the child, sending them off to whatever home

Pam Cordano, MFT

Bootcamp.

Haley Radke

Yeah. Yeah. All of those things. It's never the fix on the situation. And not that every situation can be fixed, but adoptive parents anyway, that's a full aside, but I thought that kind of went, okay, what's our next one? Number five.

Pam Cordano, MFT

This bridge is right to the next one, which is [00:34:00] profound chronic misattunement. So adoptees are swimming in a fish tank of water that is profoundly chronically misattuned. And this is from inside the family and outside the family and inside their own selves with themselves. There's just this misattunement.

It is everywhere because we can't be understood in the steepest place and we can't understand ourselves in the deepest place easily. It takes, I think it takes decades. And then adoptive families don't know how to, we're barely learning how to understand our own selves, how our adoptive parents and families gonna understand what we're trying to understand about under the hood.

And then the culture at large is, has got, sparkles and rainbows on top of this. So I think I shared with you, Haley, that there's this public figure that I like, and she and her partner adopted a baby. And before they even got the baby, [00:35:00] they were calling the baby, their soulmate. And I felt so turned off and upset just that a baby is getting burdened with that story, that label without participating in an agreement of soulmates, or in an agreement of the narrative about soulmates. It sounds nice on the surface. But it isn't nice for the adoptee. What? Say it.

Haley Radke

I can't even.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Say it.

Haley Radke

You've said that to me before. It just makes me want to barf. And I'm just going back to adoption is this problematic thing that once you see it, once we pull up and show you under the hood, like how could you unsee that?

Ugh. Yeah. Yeah, I have all of these like things going on the back of my [00:36:00] head always. How can I show non adoptees, you like to call them muggles, the truth behind what our experiences is, what works most effectively to tell people to show people so that we can stop the madness. And I'm always looking for those things.

One of the things that just boggles my mind is, The like videos on Instagram or TikTok where it's like, oh, here's your new baby and everybody's oh my gosh, I can't believe you're adopting. This is wonderful. So amazing. And then the same people are like, oh my gosh, you're reuniting with your birth parents. Oh, it's wonderful. It's so amazing. Like, How can, how do you not see the disconnect? So you're talking about swimming in the chronic misattunement of society. Like it's like, who's pushing the rock up the hill? Who's that? That's what we're doing. The boulder up the, or whatever, it's [00:37:00] never gonna get there.

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's gonna run over us.

Haley Radke

Yeah, exactly.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Smash us.

Haley Radke

It has. It has run me over. For sure. I am smushed at the bottom of the mountain.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Yeah.

Haley Radke

Yeah. Even these Gatcha Day celebrations I had recently Cam Lee Small on the show and in his new book, he talks about the gotcha day misses "lost-ya" day it's very, it's incredible to me that people can see that and not see where did this baby or child come from they came from somewhere. How are you celebrating what could be the worst day of their life?

Pam Cordano, MFT

And you think the baby doesn't know this it hasn't isn't the one experience. We're bodies We're in a body like you think that we don't experience the entire things and it's [00:38:00] registered and it's the core of our nervous systems developing like we're not even there like we're a cartoon or something it's like cartoon life

Haley Radke

I'm picturing someone sort of new ish to this listening to us. We've become, so radicalized. We have our eyes wide open. It's just like this whole conversation might just come across as like wild. But it's like facts are facts, yo. I don't know what to tell you.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Like I'm, it is, I don't have the energy to twist myself inside out anymore and pretend it's something else.

Haley Radke

Yeah, exactly.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Okay. So the sixth thing, then the result of swimming in this profound chronic water of misattunement is we get profoundly disconnected from our own instincts and we start to say yes, where when we have a no or [00:39:00] no, when we have a yes, and we think things that are not dangerous are dangerous.

And we think things that are dangerous are not dangerous. We get really screwed up in our own instincts, maybe not entirely like the quote, angry adoptees that grow up. Like I was more of, I had both. I had compliance and I had anger. The anger was at least a remnant of connection still to some of my instincts.

Like I remember, being 14 or something and yelling at my mom in the kitchen where my dad could hear and saying, You're not my real parents. You're just my guardians and you bought me and and that was true, but it was blasphemy. I knew that I was going to get grounded and I was breaking their hearts and just saying the truth. But I got pushed to a point where I could connect back in to something I knew that was true.

Haley Radke

I'm going back to thinking about adoptees who have done their all to fit [00:40:00] in and to absorb the adoption is beautiful narrative. And even in fact, maybe like I did, I felt like I owed it and to adopt myself to pay it forward, those kinds of things.

And what a profound disconnection that was, to not see.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah.

Haley Radke

There's like mega shame there. For me, I know I've said that out loud before. I know that's not the first time people might hear me say that, but it's it feels so shameful now to think oh my gosh, I almost was complicit in this system. And that sucks. And then for folks who have gone ahead and done that, you can't admit it because it's not safe.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And there, that's where there's a lot, so much shame too.

Haley Radke

[00:41:00] Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

To be in your case, what you said about shame, about almost being complicit, I think that's evidence of how hard you had to survive, how hard you had to adapt.

Like we, we can just think it's a, it's an us thing, but it's the whole system that, that leads to that kind of a decision of or should I adopt? Or whatever. I know I've, I think I said this before somewhere, but when I was like seven years old, my mom's friend wrote me this really pretty card and mailed it to me with little bunnies on it and said, as I was going to sleep tonight, I was thinking about how lucky you are as such a young person that you've been blessed twice so early in life.

First, by a mother that loved you enough to give you away, and then by a mother that loved you enough to take you in. I just remember the, huh? Feeling what? And I knew I [00:42:00] was supposed to really cherish this card, but it didn't, my body was like, it had nowhere to go. Cause it just didn't fit.

Love is not giving people away. That is not love. Love does not give people away. And also my parents didn't love me enough to take me in. I was the next baby to come up on the five year wait list. That was a healthy white female, so that's why I ended up with them. It was all sequential, had nothing to do with me.

Haley Radke

This is back to misattunement soup.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Disconnection from instincts comes from that. Yeah. Okay, and the last thing, this number seven is, okay, commodification. We babies and children who get adopted are turned into a commodity. We're reduced to a commodity. A price tag is put on us based on what the context is for the adoption and money is paid and we're purchased.

[00:43:00] And without that purchasing, the parents wouldn't have the babies. That's a requirement. So even though a lot of adoptive parents might say, oh, I don't believe in commodifying humans. I don't believe in buying and selling humans. I don't believe in human trafficking. That's just how the system is. So that's just how it works.

That is commodification. That is purchasing humans. And the thing that's important about this for us under the hood is that commodification is a lived experience for us. It's not just a fact of a system. It's a lived experience and our body's experience being reduced to a commodity. And to pile on to this problem with disconnecting from our instincts is we don't even know who does this body belong to.

Is it me or is it them? Or is it society? Or who does this country belong to? Who does this planet belong to? Who does this cosmos belong to? If people are religious, who does God belong to? [00:44:00] Because there's such a disconnection from owning one's own body and self and life. Our life gets usurped.

And then we have to wake up, come out of the fog, and get the right help and enough of it to start. returning to a state of belonging to our own selves again. And other people don't have to think about this the same way. Might have had a strict religious or abusive family, but it's not nearly to the magnitude that we're talking about here.

Haley Radke

This continues into adulthood where adoptees who are looking for original birth certificates or adoption records, those kinds of things, they're like filed in, in the same place in the court. From what I understand, it's like items in the legal system we're commodified there too. [00:45:00] I'm not saying that very well, but I just even in adoptions that are public like mine was, there's costs being paid, even if it's by the government or any of those things. There's still financial transactions happening, whether or not adoptive parents actually are the ones to write the check. Just to, I'm just going to say that in case people are like nobody paid any money for me. Somebody did.

Pam Cordano, MFT

I was a county, I was a county adoption in California and my parents paid $5,000 for me. And then when I was 25 years old and I went to the court, to get access to my birth certificate. Um, I was told my dad, my adoptive dad came with me and I, we were told I had to leave the room [00:46:00] for him to be able to see the file of the case where he was the plaintiff. By adopting me. So I had to leave the room for him to see that my birth certificate and you probably know that in California, we still don't have access to our birth certificates. It's bizarre. And I think that, I could get hung up on that. But I think that for me the deeper place about all of that is in my own body and alienation from my right to my own life and my own self and living in a world where this has all been allowed and still is still allowed.

Haley Radke

So if you were to go on to a website today from most adoption agencies that are looking for mothers in a crisis situation and you were to chat or fill out a form for seeking help, they will ask your ethnicity to [00:47:00] determine the potential value of your baby. There's still a price put on or a value put on what your skin color is or if you're biracial or that's still actively happening.

So there's an added weight as well for our fellow adoptees who are people of color and are seen from the world's perspective as valued less than. I'm just saying it out loud because that's what's happening. And so, yeah. It's really

Pam Cordano, MFT

additional burden

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Layers of burdens.

Haley Radke

I don't know what to say. Cause this is it's I love having the words and language to describe all of the different issues that wrap up [00:48:00] into this ball of oh, this is why I might have some issues. It's hard though. It's really hard to think about it.

It's hard to look at it because it feels that's too big. That's too big. I don't want to address that. I want to hide from that. That's scary. It's easier to put that to the side. I want to blend it in society. I want to I can't be looking at this right now.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah.

Haley Radke

Do you want to just talk to adoptees that might feel that way? Or give us I don't know, one next step because this is like overwhelming.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. It's interesting, like, When Haley, when you and I hang out, we usually have a lot of fun. We, this isn't like what we talk about. We have fun.

Haley Radke

Yeah, we do. I know. I was like, this is depressing.

Pam Cordano, MFT

We have online parties. Yeah, this is depressing. But I think that I don't think we necessarily have to dwell in all of these things. I think it's just good for us to start of, some of this could be helpful in just clicking [00:49:00] our awareness. Maybe clicking some confusions in ourselves back into the right spot so that we just feel more lined up in a way that makes sense and maybe more ground underneath our feet.

But first of all, we adoptees need limbic resonance. And that's it's hard to even I didn't even 7 years before I was in a go 7 years ago before I was in adoptee land. I did not understand the value of hanging out with adoptees. I did not want to be part of this club and I didn't want to talk about adoption and be with, I just wanted that to go away.

But actually adoptees need each other so much. And that's why this show and adoptee events are so powerful because our nervous systems can relax and we can feel much more limbic resonance that we're used to feeling with each other in places that are very important and also maybe heavy and difficult.

But once we can connect on the difficult stuff. Or even knowing that the difficult stuff is a place of connection, we can relax and [00:50:00] having fun it's also a whole part of the picture. When Anne Heffron and I did adoptee retreats, we started a little heavy, but then quickly it lightened up and we laughed harder than I usually laugh anywhere because there's a lot to laugh about, too, and enjoy. It's fun to enjoy just feeling connected, in a new way without the stress of that barrier between people who get it and people who don't. So limbic resonance is huge. Also if you're seeing a therapist, make sure your therapist can feel you and you're feeling felt because without that, it's, there's no point really in therapy.

Haley Radke

Interesting. I think our intuition is very good on that. And so I hope people can have permission to like, like trust that.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah, I agree with you. And then the next thing is [00:51:00] just that, uh, I just said two things at once limbic resonance and adoptee community. Those two things are, I think, essential for us for our healing.

I just, I don't know a better, faster way to heal and feel more comfortable in our skin than that, than those two things. And then psychedelic assisted therapy is huge. I think that the walls that keep us outside of the hard places are so thick and they're built to keep us out and going to see a therapist once a week and talking about it. We can talk about things, but it's hard to get underneath through the wall into the hard places. And especially where the body is where the body has taken over the pain and the trauma, and we're not even aware of it anymore. And so I encourage people to research psychedelic assisted therapy. MDMA, psilocybin, and others too, ketamine for some help to get under the hood.

Haley Radke

Okay. Thank you.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah.

Haley Radke

Pam, you [00:52:00] have you and I have been friends for, seven years since the first time you came on the show and you've said so many amazing things to us that have opened up opportunities for connection and healing. So thank you. I feel like this is like a culmination of all of these conversations we've had and all the work you've done in the adoptee community. I'm so appreciative. Thank you.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Thank you Haley. Thank you.

Haley Radke

Where can people connect with you online?

Pam Cordano, MFT

The best way, I'm off social media five years now. My kids taught me some things and I got off social media. So I'm

Haley Radke

lucky.

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's nice. So my email is the best way, pcordano@comcast.net.

Haley Radke

Okay, perfect.

And we'll have that in the show notes for you. Also, if you don't have a pen handy right now, you can click back through later. Thank you [00:53:00] so much, Pam.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Thank you. It's a pleasure being here and hello to everybody out there. I'm happy to be here talking about this with you.

Haley Radke

It is always such an honor to have Pam on the show. If you want to hear the other episodes she's been featured on, we will link to those in the show notes for you along with her email address and she regularly is a guest on our Ask an Adoptee Therapist events and our Off Script Parties, which is an opportunity for you to meet fellow adoptees who want to talk about these things and build that community that she was talking about today. That is so important. And I'm so truly, deeply grateful for her wisdom and the way she shows up for us in those spaces. So my big [00:54:00] thanks to Pam, and I hope that you'll consider joining us, adopteeson.com/community. And if you want to see any of the upcoming live events we have on for these things, we'll have more things going on in the fall, but you can go to adopteeson.com/calendar and see a link of all the past things we've done and then all the upcoming Off Script Parties, Ask an Adoptee Therapist events, book club, documentary club, all those good things great opportunities to meet fellow adoptees. Okay, friends, thanks so much for listening and let's talk again soon.