295 Lee Herrick

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/295

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AO E295 Lee Herrick

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. We are starting off the year with such a delight. Lee Herrick, the California Poet Laureate, is joining us again today. Lee recently released his latest poetry collection, In Praise of Late Wonder, which is focused fully on the topic of adoption.

Today, we talk about what it means to feel significant as an adoptee, why writing prose felt a little more comfortable than a whole memoir, and we word nerd out a little on crosswords and wordplay. Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today [00:01:00] 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. 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 back to Adoptees On, Lee Herrick. Hi Lee!

Lee Herrick: Hi, Haley. Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. I'm so glad we get to talk again. So you were a guest on the show all the way back in 2022. Can't believe it's been so long. And you shared a bit of your story with us then. So I'm going to encourage folks to go back and listen to it.

But for anyone who is new to you, would you mind sharing just a little bit of your story with us so we can get to know you?

Lee Herrick: A quick version would be that I was born in South Korea. Daejeon, about late 1970, and I was adopted into a white [00:02:00] family who were living in the Bay Area in California when I was about 10 months old, and raised in the Bay Area and then later the Central Valley, have done a birth family search, have not been reunited.

And I've been back to Korea a couple of times and yeah, doing well now I'm a professor and a poet and I live in Fresno, California.

Haley Radke: So I recently saw that you were the Poet Laureate of Fresno before now you are finishing up your two year term as the 10th Poet Laureate of California.

Lee Herrick: Yes. Yes. It's been a really incredible journey and honor. I served for Fresno 2015 to 2017 and then in late 2022 after about an eight month period of waiting and not thinking it would happen because [00:03:00] California is a massive state with some great poets, but in late, 2022, I was notified, so appointed by the governor to a two year term that'll conclude in spring 2025, and it's been incredible.

A lot of travel, speaking to all different kinds of groups. Organizations that I never thought would have a connection to poetry and the arts, but they see the value in it. So everything from political or civic or environmental organizations to state prisons and adoptee organizations and schools. So it's been great. It's been a lot of fun.

Haley Radke: How does it feel to be a professional poet? I just think when, you think of writers and the grind it is to make it, whatever that means and poetry, it's so unusual to [00:04:00] become such a well known poet you've been very successful in your writing and I think that's of course due to your skill and expertise and you've done a lot of education and all of those things and you teach as well but there's something so vulnerable about your work that people just are really able to connect with it. That's what I see anyway.

Lee Herrick: I really appreciate that Haley, I, what comes to mind that I'm not just saying this to, to placate, but, I'm thinking about your podcast and the reach it has. And how it impacts audiences from all different walks of life related to adoption. And if I were to ask you, and maybe I could, what is that or how does one create such a thing?

I think about success and poetry in similar ways that, that any other endeavor and what it [00:05:00] requires, and at the root of it is some, not just a strong desire or passion or life or love for the work, but a necessity to do it, that for me has nothing to do with accolades or acclaim or praise. It has to do with some kind of partly internal.

But also, maybe ancestral, or familial, or ephemeral sort of thing that merges together that creates a kind of work and love for what we do. That's one way to answer it. Another way to say it is just, quite frankly, some longevity. I'm, I've been writing for a while, I've been teaching for a while, and it's been joyful as much work.

And of course there are setbacks with any kind of relationship, be it with work or other people, but it's been [00:06:00] deeply joyful. I, I've been asked that recently at a high school, somebody asked me about being successful and it felt pithy to say, doing what you love and then being able to do it with and for other people who are doing that work is really joyful to me.

Poetry is not the most lucrative genre nor is teaching, at least in terms of monetary things. But just, incredibly expansive. I feel very joyful. The last way I could answer that is just to say that it's much more visible. And that's taken me a while to get used to. It's a much more social position.

California is the largest state in the country by over 10 million people. We're almost 40 million. And there's a lot of visibility and events that come with it and I'm an introvert. So that's been [00:07:00] an area of growth for me and how I've done it or how I've tried to approach it is to be present and really enjoy the visits and the people as much as I can.

Haley Radke: I love that now I promise the whole interview, I'm not going to keep saying these things to you that may make you feel uncomfortable because I don't think you like to be, praised in this way. But I heard this, my last question on this line, just so you know I heard you talking on a different interview and you were, referring to a couple of other poets and you said something like, called them something like poets of significance.

And I thought, oh, wow. And so now I would say that you've reached that as well. And as an adoptee, many of us have these beginnings where we're relinquished there may be a deep woundedness there, [00:08:00] like not good enough to keep or discarded or, those kinds of things that kind of settle into our identity for better or worse.

And when I say that knowing that your name is equated with a poet of significance, you'll have this on your bio forever, Poet Laureate of California, the first Asian American as well to hold the position. What does it mean to you to be an adopted person and take on a title like that?

Lee Herrick: I said to a group once, and I found myself saying it and thinking it quite frequently, and it was a group of adoptees, and what I said was that what I hope for us is, first and foremost, to be okay. And by that I meant to have whatever we need to make it through, in terms of, [00:09:00] shelter, some kind of stability or support for any kind of mental health or physical health or anxieties or depression or things like that.

To be frank, I had, especially in my youth, especially in high school, which was quite difficult for me in terms of mental health and anxiety specifically. I think once we can make it through some of those rocky patches, the turbulence stabilizes, if you will. The, I call it sometimes the rattle. If that can stabilize for us, I think from there really good things can happen.

So, I've also, I think I've been fortunate to have a couple of very dear friends, some family members and authors and teachers who support, and I think that can be very helpful too. [00:10:00] It's humbling, and I don't take it for granted, if, and it's a good feeling, being the first Asian American California Poet Laureate, or to be seen as an adoptee author, or an adopted author.

I hesitate to say, Haley, and I used to bristle when I would hear people say, if I can do it, anybody can do it. And I don't want to say that today either because I don't know what other people are going through. And also, I don't think of myself as person of the week, I don't know that I've done anything extraordinary.

I've done what I've loved. I've tried to do my best. And it's not always been so great, but I think maybe this goes along with the adoption question and flaws and things like that is Another thing that was very helpful for me, and this probably happened maybe in or after college, maybe in my [00:11:00] mid twenties was not only did I let go of this perfectionism idea and a fear of failure but I realized that I was quite imperfect and that failure was not only necessary, but good in terms of that stabilization for me.

It's a fragile, frail impossibility in my mind to progress if we think we have to be perfect. And that might be put on us, right? I'm not victim blaming here or shaming anybody, but for me, once I realized that I was flawed and am and will be, and also it allowed me to see the humanity in others, that they didn't have to be perfect.

I think that was good for me. And, um, I know I'm slightly off your question about being seen as a significant poet. If that's the case, I'm very grateful. I hope I [00:12:00] answered that.

Haley Radke: I promise I won't keep going on that track. I know it's uncomfortable.

Lee Herrick: No, I appreciate it.

Haley Radke: I wonder what you think about the, I'll call it the theology of place. You wrote, I think it was published in 2012, the My California poem. That there's some videos of you and other folks reading your work and talking about My California. And I'm wondering about that also of course, everything's tied back to adoption on this show, right? I know it's not for everybody, but.

Writing that poem, your role in California now. And then also as a person, we talked about this last time you were on the show, discovering that the city that you thought you were born your whole life actually wasn't. And so thinking about this idea of place and how meaningful place is to you. And now you've said you've lived in Fresno for many years now as an [00:13:00] adult. How many years have you been there?

Lee Herrick: About 28 years.

Haley Radke: Yeah. So over a quarter century, like that's significant to, to love somewhere enough to stay and have roots grow deeply in a place, especially. Do you have thoughts about that, about place and those things?

Lee Herrick: Yeah, that's. When I think about the word place or the idea of place, another word that I think of in the same breath is displacement.

And in terms of the adoptee's circumstance, it could be considered displacement, but certainly place takes on a different idea for us. A home, an orphanage, a courtroom, a different city. different families and things like that. So with place, I think many people first go to the environment [00:14:00] or the landscape.

So I've always felt very home in California, whenever I'm on the coast and I might be on a beach. It's always on my mind that I'm as close in terms of land that I could be to South Korea. And I don't know, I wonder if other adoptees think about that, if they were, let's say they were born in, I don't know, Wyoming, and they live in Ohio, and they go back to Wyoming, do they feel some kind of visceral reaction?

I don't know. I also think about, of course, family. And that kind of thing. I think about place in terms of home, and how we can feel at home, and what makes us feel at home. Of course, adoptees have, I think for a thousand adoptees, you'd probably have a thousand different takes, or opinions, or experiences with home.[00:15:00]

What it feels like to be at home or completely alienated and outcast. So, part of me wants to chalk it up to some kind of larger purpose, but it also could just be complete chance. For example, in the Korean adoption community, I think about adoptees born in Korea that were raised and live in Australia or France or Sweden and is just it seems or feels somewhat random, but I connect with that a lot.

Whenever I see a Scandinavian, Scandinavian adoptee speaking, let's say fluent Danish or something. I really feel a kinship with that person, even though I don't know him or her or them. Whenever I see a homeless or unhoused person, I feel some kind of familiarity. And maybe this goes back to [00:16:00] poetry and adoption, but I think poetry is a space where there's a lot of room for questions.

And, nuance, which the adoptee circumstance definitely gives us.

Haley Radke: In your latest collection, In Praise of Late Wonder, you have this piece called Stars. Could you read that for us?

Lee Herrick: Sure, I'd be happy to. Stars. I am one of approximately 200, 000 Korean adoptees, or adopted Koreans, in the entire world. A small subset, the 83 million Koreans.

Other small populations like ours include the Ambonese from Indonesia, Blaan of Philippines, Damara from Namibia, and Sioux Lakota from the United States, and Otomi from Mexico. We're rare, like shooting stars, [00:17:00] double rainbows, scratched diamonds.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I remember reading that, and my first go to was like, where? Lee, I talk to so many Korean adoptees all the time. In our community, there's so many. And I love this reframing of it, like in the grand scheme of things and thinking about these different population groups. And when you wind up with the scratched diamonds, I was like, oh, I don't know. You got me. I love that line.

Lee Herrick: Oh, good. Thank you, Haley. Yeah, I think at a certain point, we start looking and hoping for each other. Because we aren't around one another. And as a result, you host a wonderful podcast, so like you say, you're [00:18:00] talking with adoptees regularly, or many of them. It might even be, a good portion of your world, your thinking, your life.

Yeah. And I started to think about it because I know at least with Asian adoptees, I think Koreans are still the majority, but I know there are a lot of Chinese adoptees as well and things like that, even though that just formally ended, but I started looking up other populations around the world that were about the same number as Korean adoptees.

And except for the Sioux Lakota, I have not heard of them. I had never heard of the Ambonese, for example. So it was fascinating to, yeah, like you say, to reframe it and just how few of us there really are. And I know that there are other numbers such as one in six families in the United States has some relation to an adopted person and things like that.

But [00:19:00] I think because of the small numbers, shows like this, books, films, it's really meaningful work anytime people have the opportunity to learn more about adopted folks.

Haley Radke: Absolutely agree. I live in a bubble, adoptee bubble, and I take it for granted. And I'm always encouraging community building and finding fellow adoptees to connect with and you and I have been blessed with that for a number of years.

You longer than I. I'm curious in relation to that, as you go and speak and you're introduced and part of your intro is that you're an adopted person from Korea. How many folks come up to you and talk about adoption that are adoptees and perhaps maybe they're hearing some of these thoughts about adoption for the first time [00:20:00] from a fellow adoptee.

Lee Herrick: Oh it's one of the great gifts of this experience. Traveling and speaking as an author, of course, there are some where I think chances are high I'm going to meet an adoptee. For example, if I'm in Los Angeles or San Francisco or something like that, but I've been in towns that are probably 80, 90 percent white and someone will come up to me invariably they might be Asian American, but often they aren't. And they'll tell me that they were adopted, or, a sibling, or it might be an adoptive parent. But what's really neat is when it's an adoptee who is a little nervous and tells me that they've really never met an adoptee before. Or they've never met an adoptee author.

And I really love that [00:21:00] because whatever journey they're on and it's not my purpose or point to direct their purpose but I can see it when they're telling me that's really wonderful. Yeah, and there are a lot of other connections to it, too. You know I had one woman say to me after an event that she really resonated with a poem I was reading about names and name changes and identities, because even though she wasn't an adoptee, she said that when she was a young girl, her father had committed a very grisly, heinous crime, and she and her mother had to go in hiding through a witness protection program, and they had to change their name.

And she said even though she wasn't adopted, she really felt some connection with that. So it's been. It's been exciting and eye opening, the different ways people connect with adoptees. And then, of [00:22:00] course, there's sometimes one that's not so pleasant. I hesitate to talk too much about this one publicly, but just.

Haley Radke: Please, Dish, we're desperate. I want to hear it.

Lee Herrick: If you insist No. I was doing an event recently and my new book is the most I've ever written about adoption. It's the most bare and honest and vulnerable in many ways I've ever written about my adoption. There's probably 20 to 30 pages of poems, very specific and autobiographical. So I was reading one of these poems, and afterwards, during the Q& A, the first person to ask a question.

She raised her hand and said that, she said to me, in your reading, and you even said it, you mentioned sadness. You mentioned feeling sad [00:23:00] and grief, but you were adopted into such a loving family. She said, I think you may have misread your adoption experience. I couldn't believe it. Here's a woman, I'm a grown man, I'm not new to this, and and it also flies in the face of my philosophy, or one of my philosophies, and that is to let each person have their own traumas and joys.

She tells me that I misread my experience, and I took it in for a minute when I could feel the audience looking at me, wondering, how is he going to respond to this? And I told her that I really hesitate personally to tell anybody how to feel or what to make of their experience.

But I told her, I said, I take great great umbrage [00:24:00] at being told that my lived experience and sadness around loss related to adoption was a misreading. I take great umbrage with that. And then I, that was it. And some of the audience started clapping. So it reminds me how little sometimes people know, but also how forcefully some people feel that adoption is very simple and positive and unemotional.

So we have a long way to go, but in the vast majority, it's wonderful folks coming up to me telling me, they might tell me their adoption story or things like that. I'm speaking in a few weeks to a group in the San Francisco Bay Area. And so I love meeting [00:25:00] with groups of adoptees of all ages. It's been interesting.

Haley Radke: So initially when you're telling that story, I just started laughing because it's so absurd. And then I got really emotional towards the end because It's I want, I would love for you to tell us why now the prose section of this book, why the full, fully themed adoption book, even though in all your prior works, there's always, of course, some pieces about adoption and in your, some autobiographical work.

But I just, God, we just, we give it all, the whole story, pour out our heart, your books out there, you're walking around naked in the world feels like cause people can see all your innermost thoughts and hurts and it's and even that, you won't even believe that?

Lee Herrick: Yeah.

Haley Radke: It's so deeply painful. So I'm very sorry. That is [00:26:00] really egregious.

Lee Herrick: Yeah, I, I appreciate it. This is actually the first time I've talked about that. It only happened a couple of months ago. I think as a writer, at least in my experience as a poet, as an author, before I put a poem out into the world on the page, for example, or published

or read at an event. I have worked through and with those experiences, and I've also worked through and with the poem, so much so that I almost feel, I wouldn't say impervious, but I fully understand, as authors often say, that it's no longer mine. And so a person can praise it, and that's her praise, and a person could also critique [00:27:00] it.

Or not believe it or dislike it, and that's also for the reader. And so what that allows me is a little bit of distance when that woman said that. It threw me off because I've never had somebody tell me that. That I misread it. It's a unbelievable audacity to say that to someone.

Haley Radke: I'm still laughing about it again.

Lee Herrick: Yeah.

Haley Radke: It is. It's so absurd.

Lee Herrick: Yeah, I just couldn't believe that and, I didn't want to make it personal and attack her and whatnot. But I think that's maybe just part of the time spent with it, there, there have been times when I was much younger when I allowed everything to affect me, but I'm just at the point in my life where I'm not that impacted by someone's take on it.

Unless it's really violent or [00:28:00] aggressive or harmful to what I think an adoptee or a person's experience is then I will engage, then I will definitely push back. I'm not someone to just. Take it passively. And I think that's a turning point too for us as adoptees. And usually I think it starts first with the family conversations or the comments, because if it's something on television that's offensive we could bristle or take umbrage or maybe even take some action, but there's a real distance with media, but with the family or friends.

That was a big turning point for me, when we can stand up for ourselves with language and we can stand up for our sense of who we are as adoptees, I think that's deeply meaningful. And whether a person goes on to host a podcast or write a book, that's another subject, but I think just being able to defend ourselves and [00:29:00] have a boundary in terms of what hurts us. That's very meaningful.

Haley Radke: I, I love the title. There's a poem in the book called In Praise of Late Wonder. And there's another poem called Wonder, and I was just thinking about the word again, like we were talking about place before, What a great word, wonder. What does that mean for you? And how do you see it? There's a that's one of those words that can mean a few different things.

Lee Herrick: Yeah, Haley. I love your questions I feel like we could and I know there's a time frame here but I every time you ask a question, I just think Ooh, I could really play around with that question and have fun with it.

So I love etymology and so word origins, and I love the sound of words and wordplay. So with wonder, a word that I think of in tandem with wonder is wander. And I wonder [00:30:00] about other adoptees experiences with wandering. Even mentally, what do we dream of, or do we think about what our birth parents looked like, or things like that.

But also, just literally there was a span of about maybe 10 or 12 years where I traveled. And backpacked for about two or three months at a time each year. And I would just wander and love the feeling, not so much of being lost, but not knowing exactly where I was. I could find my way back. But I loved just exploring, and I felt at home a lot. It helped me, I think, feel at home wherever I was. And maybe that's a rationalization for the adoptee's sense of displacement. I don't know, but and I just love the sound of the word wonder. One of my favorite speeches was Steve [00:31:00] Jobs, commencement speech that he gave at Stanford and Steve Jobs, as you may know, is adopted. And he talked about staying foolish. He said he encouraged graduates and young people to stay foolish, which I read as keep your curiosity. Keep your sense of wonder. That's partly what I was thinking, and then with the title, In Praise of Late Wonder, it's just as it sounds, really I praise the idea and the gift of being able to wonder. To know some things, but if we don't know some things that we can still wonder and be okay with that. We don't have to know everything to be okay.

Haley Radke: Just an aside, one of the later poems you talk about crosswords, watching someone do a crossword on a plane, and I was really sick a couple months ago, so sick. I joke with friends. There was only one day I really thought I was actually going to die, but the rest of the time it was just, I [00:32:00] was really sick and I had double pneumonia.

That's another story. But I got into doing crosswords. I was watching this lady do crosswords on Tik Tok and she taught me how to do crosswords. And so now like I read the poem with as a person that does crosswords, I love your wordplay and all those things like I'm totally getting into that now.

Lee Herrick: Oh, I love it. I love it. And I hope you're feeling better.

Haley Radke: Yes. I am totally 100 percent better. All good That was the reason for my like two months of trying to fill space with something to do. That was less effort than my normal life.

Lee Herrick: Yeah. I love them. And they also slow us down. Don't they don't crosswords and there's nothing flashing at us saying in five seconds, here's the next one coming along or there are no banner ads.

It's just. It's just you and the puzzle, it's fun.

Haley Radke: And you can't do anything else. Like I, as a chronically online person, [00:33:00] I absolutely, I'm usually doing one thing with something going in the background and it's you're not successful at a crossword if you're also trying to listen or watch something else, you can't do it. It's true. Focus. Yeah.

Lee Herrick: It's true.

Haley Radke: Would you mind reading the poem that's called Wonder on page 20.

Lee Herrick: Wonder. For a period of time in my late 20s. I thought every Korean woman 15 to 50 years older than me could be my mother. I'd imagine walking up to her and asking, Did you ever give birth to a boy and then lose him or give him away?

The classy businesswoman wearing expensive shoes. The dry cleaner who wanted to teach me Korean. The woman who shoved kimchi in my mouth and said hers was the [00:34:00] best in Seoul, the homeless one, I could be part of each one. This lasted for about five years, until I realized I was wrong, that not knowing who a woman was did not mean she was likely who I thought.

I began to study logic and reason and devoured philosophy. I began to see Korean women as a source of pride and strength and wholeness rather than a mystery or a curse. I began to see people everywhere around the planet in full dimension rather than through my singular and limited lens. This changed everything.

Haley Radke: I love that one. Thank you for reading that.

Lee Herrick: Of course.

Haley Radke: Can you talk to us about why now a collection fully about you, autobiographical, [00:35:00] adoption themed, and the first whole chunk is prose, like fully prose, which is different from your other works. And it's a totally different style.

Lee Herrick: Yeah. For a while, I'd say over the last maybe 10, 12 years, I've thought about a memoir and I was asked by a couple of agents if I would consider or would I consider writing a memoir.

And, people will come up to you saying, oh, I'd love to read a memoir. But I never really took it all that seriously. And then I started writing these little vignettes. I was thinking of them as little stories or vignettes about my adoption. And it just didn't take shape as a memoir.

I thought for a while about writing a YA book, as I'm sure There's a real need for YA literature [00:36:00] about adoption. And, but I couldn't do that either. I just couldn't access that genre. So then I thought about making them prose poems, which is how I see these prose like pieces or these poems of sorts.

Really, I don't know what to call them. They're little vignettes maybe, but I just decided to put them into this book. I feel most at home as a poet. As far as, why now in terms of readiness? I think, for me, it just got to the point where I was comfortable enough with myself to put these kinds of things out there, regardless of what may come, regardless of reception, or criticism, or anything else.

For example, I thought if I don't have a real section praising my family, will they be upset? Or, there are a [00:37:00] couple very personal among all of them that are personal, but there are two letters that I wrote for my birth father and birth mother. And even though they're letters to them, they're still created a little bit.

I still think of them as creative writing, but those are very personal. You just get to a point where it's not for anyone else, and I'm, it's felt liberating to do Haley. It just felt good to write that stuff because we're asked it so many times. I can only imagine how many times you've been asked certain questions about your experience.

I know a little bit about your background, having read about you, and in reunion, and in and out of reunion, and different things like that. For me, it just felt good to write it all out. The opening poem is about a time I was taking a shower, scrubbing my skin to see if I could turn my skin white.

And as I said in the piece, not because I wanted to be white, but because I wondered why I wasn't white. And [00:38:00] why now? It's just, we get to a point where we need or want to say these things. There it is.

Haley Radke: Do you feel more free? And can you attribute that to aging? Or what?

Lee Herrick: Yeah, it's a good question.

Some of it might be aging. You know how a lot of times you, and I'm not generalizing, but it happened with some of my grandparents or other folks who are wonderfully seasoned and experienced where they give less concern about judgment or opinion or what the cashier says. And, so my, some of it might be age.

Yeah. Yeah. Also it's, it. I think it also depends on if something's eating away at a [00:39:00] person, I think that stuff is best aired out to someone, somehow. It could even just be in a journal, privately. But that's the kind of stuff that the poet Audre Lorde says. That's tyrannical. That stuff is the thing, the sort of thing that can really harm us, I think. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Maybe this is my last question before I do our recommended resources section. Is you write about doing the search and part of it is on a TV show and those things. And it feels like to me that you've come to terms with, I'm probably not going to get my answers. And again, with both of you living in this space where we are connected with so many fellow adoptees, like that's what we see. Lots of people search, don't find anything. Lots of [00:40:00] people search, find things maybe they didn't want to know and, or have, some happy moments. And yeah. What does that look like for you now and in your fifties, thinking about that, being public about it.

And if you're able to give folks something to like, I don't know, hang on to can peace come if you feel like you're actually never going to get answers.

Lee Herrick: Yeah, so I hesitate to say to anybody what they can receive or get I just don't know enough about it to tell anybody else what to, what they can do.

But in my experience, I can speak from my own experience. Is that I feel like I not that I had, maybe that I had to, because if my sense of, quote, peace, if my sense of being okay, was [00:41:00] contingent upon one, the one thing that I had great odds against me finding, Then what would that mean for me?

So I think there are a lot of different ways that I've been able to make it through, and one of them is doing some kind of earnest search in my experience. I went back to Korea. I've been back twice. I think those things help. I've worked, it's been quite some years, but I probably had a year of good, solid work with forgiveness.

And so there's a mental health aspect to all of this. And, yeah, I think there are a lot of ways that we can make it through and find a sense of peace or wholeness. I also used to think that I was not whole because I didn't have this. [00:42:00] Part of my family or my birth family history now, and I might be deluding myself.

I don't think I am, but I say now that we've always been whole, at least we are certainly capable of wholeness without every fact of every person in our families. It's also helped me to fight and advocate where I can. As my time and energies and spirit allow, we all can't do everything all the time for everyone on their terms, but there are some things that I am trying to be a part of, for example, California, becoming one of the states that allows adoptees access to their birth records.

I think there are somewhere around 20 states now that have passed that. I'm hopeful that the citizenship amendment to the congressional bill, Adoptee Citizenship Acts, will be passed [00:43:00] that will allow adoptees citizenship retroactively so we won't keep being deported and things like that. But in the meantime, I think as much as the adoption work is core and central, just other things, trying to work through fears was a big part of my life.

That's been probably the biggest thing that has helped me feel liberated is working through fears, which I tell my students keep us from living our fullest lives. Fears keep us from being our truest, fullest selves. Turning the corner on those, the whole world opens up. It felt very liberating and has been very liberating for me, moving beyond some of those fears that I used to think would cripple me.

Haley Radke: And to see you as an introvert stepping what looks like to us confidently onto [00:44:00] stages that are bigger than likely you've taught before is so amazing. It's so impressive and exciting for me to follow along with that. I love that I had this recent conversation with an adoptee therapist and she was talking about how we have our true identity within us. And so I'm thinking about that as no matter what, if we want to search or not, if we get a reunion or not, if we're able to really truly get to know ourselves, like some of those answers are within. And that feels a little bit like woo to say out loud, but I really think it's true.

And the last time you were on Lee, I was telling you, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm really trying to figure out my preferences. So embarrassing in my late thirties to figure out what kind of perfume I like. I don't know if you remember that, but we talked about that and now [00:45:00] it's a few years later, I absolutely know what my favorites are.

I have more pieces of my identity. I feel like nailed down and those passions and loves within you and the joy that you found through all your writing, like those are pieces of your identity that you found and claimed. Like it's so I hope for people listening. I hope that is liberating to hear.

This is possible for me too. Your book, this one, In Praise of Late Wonder, you can't see behind me, but that's where my hundreds of adoptee books live, and I have two of your other poetry collections there. They're on my desk now, but normally live there. I love this so much, Lee. It is evocative. And I got mad at you when you were saying you didn't want to really write a memoir. You couldn't do it because I was like, no, I do want the memoir. Could you write, could you also write a memoir? No, but we so get to know you, especially through [00:46:00] the beginning of the book and all these prose pieces.

It's just so lovely that you let us in and allow us to into these really deep places. And I, and you mentioned in our interview the letters, I was going to mention that now, the Dear Korean mother and Dear Korean father. I think many of us will have written a letter like this. So to be able to read yours, that's so deeply personal is really special. So thank you. Thank you so much.

Lee Herrick: Thank you, Haley.

Haley Radke: You're welcome.

Lee Herrick: That means a lot coming from you. That means a lot to me.

Haley Radke: I mean it.

Lee Herrick: Yeah. Thank you. I feel like we're very much in the same world, and grateful for what you do and, for your reading of the book and for the interview. Yeah, it's wonderful to be here with you.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Yeah, I know for some people poetry can be intimidating and this is [00:47:00] like such a great way in my opinion, especially through prose. I'm at the beginning and you get to know Lee a little more And then I love having pieces of some of your other collections in there and you touch on really important things.

You talk about suicide, you talk about adoptee citizenship, you talk about many of the themes that are really important to us, particularly as adoptees and also just as humans. So yes, I hope folks will go out and grab this. And the other cool thing that you are working on is, are these collections of poems from Californians. I was clicking around through the website for Our California today and I found like poems from grade 5 kids and poems from adults. And it's really a special thing, project that you're doing. So we'll link to that too for folks to explore. Yeah. What a great project.

Lee Herrick: Yeah, thank you. That's been [00:48:00] fun. In the governor's office and the California Arts Council were really supportive. It's just my, a way to give any Californian a chance to write a poem about their place or town or their vision of their state. Yeah, those have been fun to read.

Haley Radke: That's a nice light. Not always light, but that's a cool thing to click around on, especially if you're from California and I'm not, but I found it interesting.

Lee Herrick: They're fun.

Haley Radke: What did you want to recommend to us today, Lee?

Lee Herrick: It's not a book, or a film, or a podcast even, but I would like to recommend the Adoptee Literary Festival.

It was the first one held about a year and a half ago, maybe. And it's archived, and anyone could watch it and they're planning another one. It is a wonderful literary festival online and the next one will be coming out later this year and they've got wonderful writers and panelists in fiction, [00:49:00] creative non fiction, poetry, and young adult writing.

Some of the panelists you've had on your podcast, and so I really highly recommend that. It was co founded by the adopted writers Alice Stevens and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, and it's just fantastic.

Haley Radke: I went last year. It's such a great event. Awesome recommendation. We'll link to that. It's scheduled for end of March, 2025. And so I'm sure lots of our listeners will get to enjoy that. Thank you so much, Lee, for this very stimulating conversation. I enjoyed it so much. Where can we follow your work and catch up with you online?

Lee Herrick: You could keep up with me or be in touch through my website. It's just LeeHerrick. com. I'm also on Facebook and that's the extent of my social media at this point, but I'd [00:50:00] love to be in touch with anyone.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Lee Herrick: Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: I don't know what it is about Lee, but I just have this super comfortable feeling talking with him. And, I think I've described other folks like this wholehearted way of being, and I really get that from Lee and his poetry as well. So even if you're not super into poetry, I think this is a great collection to get started with.

And yeah, I just, I love hearing people be vulnerable about the real stuff that we're all going through. And it's so special to see an adoptee get to have the stage that [00:51:00] Leigh has access to right now as California Poet Laureate and talking to so many people. And I was thinking you told us that really shocking story, but I was thinking how special for so many young adoptees to see someone that they can aspire to be and whether or not they want to be a poet, but to write down and heal through some writing work to share their story and in some sort of way, whether it's for themselves or to share publicly like that.

I just think it's so powerful to have that to look up to for young people and for us olds. Yeah, I just, yeah, well done Lee, we are cheering you on and thank you for being vulnerable with us and modeling that for us and for the future generations. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again [00:52:00] soon.

294 [Healing Series] IFS for Adoptees with Kathy Mackechney

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/294

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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. I can't wait to introduce you to today's guest. We're doing kind of a hybrid healing series episode with adoptee and adoptee therapist, Kathy Mackechney. Kathy shares part of her story with us, including how she was prepared for rejection during her reunions, but was instead surprised by eager acceptance.

Getting into the therapy of it all. Kathy is an Internal Family Systems practitioner and has developed the idea that not all of our parts get adopted. We unpack what that means, including what I think is quite a joyful idea that somewhere inside [00:01:00] us, we can access who we may have been had we not been separated from our original families.

Kathy is one of the first, if not the first, adoptee therapists to have an entire chapter published in a clinical text that focuses on how to work with adoptees. It is literally the chapter we should assign our therapists to read. Before we get started, I want to invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

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

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptee on Kathy Mackechney. Hi Kathy.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Hi, Haley. Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: I'm so excited to finally talk to you. I'd love [00:02:00] it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Sure. I will just start at the beginning. I have always known that I was relinquished and adopted. My adoptive parents started telling me that before I even knew what those words meant.

And there was. A book. It's a really old book. I think it might be called The Family of Adoption, but I'm not sure. I still have it on a bookshelf somewhere. Really old book. This was the baby scoop era. 1968. They had this book that they read to me, and I remember actually sitting on this green vinyl couch in my parents home hearing this story and I guess I would say now wondering exactly what that meant.

Like hearing the words and [00:03:00] taking it in but not fully getting it. Joined this family. My parents have, my adoptive parents have two sons who are, they're biological sons, and they are eight and nine years older than me. Actually, one of them died a couple of years ago, so I have one remaining brother, but my parents tried for several years after my brothers were born to get pregnant again and were unable to do so and my mom really wanted a girl and yeah, common story. And my parents knew some people who had adopted and because they knew people, other people who had done it, they felt comfortable with the idea of it. So they decided to pursue adoption and being white professionals, I think that was easy for them.

So they adopted [00:04:00] me through the state of Oklahoma. And I was plopped into this family. We didn't talk about it growing up because at that time, when my parents adopted, they were instructed, as I think all adoptive parents were then, to tell me, and then just, treat me like they treated my brothers and act like I had come into the family the same way, so we didn't talk about it, and then I went to college, and in my freshman year of college, I was in this orientation class, this freshman orientation class, and I had an assignment to write a personal essay.

And seemingly out of nowhere, I mean we know these things don't come from nowhere, but seemingly out of nowhere, I suddenly was writing about having been adopted. And so I went to my mom with some questions and [00:05:00] she told me again what she knew, which was just the non identifying information that my parents had been given about my original parents heights and weights and religious preferences and hair color and I think that was it.

So I wrote my paper, turned it in, we didn't talk about it again. And then fast forward several years, and I had gotten my undergraduate degree in journalism, and I was working at a media relations agency, and I discovered that my boss had also been adopted. So she was a woman about my age, And she was pregnant with her second child and I don't even remember how it came up, but I learned that she had been adopted and that she had decided to do a search when she was pregnant with her first child, which we know is a common time for women to [00:06:00] decide to search for female adoptees to decide to search.

And she asked me if I had ever thought about that. And at that time, I was still in the fog. And I said, no, I know who my parents are and that was that, but I would say it was around that same time or shortly after that, that I started exploring adoption related issues in therapy. And I, I don't know how I learned about The Primal Wound, but that was one of the first books that I heard of and I read that and I read a couple of Betty Jean Lifton's books, Journey of the Adopted Self and Lost and Found, and I was starting to explore the impact on me.

And when I read The Primal Wound, I was like oh yeah I just, it was as though I could, point at page, at what was written on page after page and [00:07:00] say, yeah that's my experience. And, I started thinking somewhere in that same timeframe, so I was in my late 20s, I was thinking about turning 30, I was thinking about what I was doing at that time, friends of mine were having children, my first husband and I were, considering when we might do that, if we did that.

And I was also thinking about, like I said, what I was doing career wise and what else I might like to do. And I started thinking that I might like to become a therapist and I, this was coming partly from my experiences in therapy where I was having to educate my therapist. So I'd started [00:08:00] exploring these issues, I'd done that reading and I was going to therapy to talk about it and none of my therapists got it.

None of them had done any of that reading. None of them were familiar with it. Common issues for people who are adopted. And so I was having to educate them and I thought adoptees need someone who gets it. And I would, I had already been thinking about going back to school and getting a degree in social work and becoming a therapist.

So I decided before I spent all that money on grad school that I wanted to make sure that was going to be a good fit for me. Which is really typical of me as a result of how my brain works to take this very rational approach. And so I went to career counseling and I met this woman, Sandy, who is a psychologist who did testing [00:09:00] so she could administer all the tests for career counseling.

And through that process of meeting with her and doing the testing and learning, yes, it would be a good fit for me to be a therapist or any kind of helping professional. I also figured out that for me to know what I really wanted to do, what I most wanted to do, I needed to know who I fully am. And for me, that meant finding the pieces, the missing pieces and the missing people from the beginning of my life.

So I searched, I did a search. I started it in the summer. And I think this is so interesting. Nine months later. The gestation period later, I had the information that allowed me to send a letter at that time, a letter to my birth mom. [00:10:00] And I had prepared mySelf for every possible worst case scenario, like that she would be dead. She would be incarcerated. She wouldn't want to hear from me. Every possible form of rejection of some sort. And when I did not hear from her for weeks and weeks. I don't know how many weeks went by, a few months went by. I was prepared for that. I thought, okay. And then, one day, I think I started my search in August, and then one day the following June, the phone rang, and my first husband answered.

This was like pre the proliferation of cell phones. And he said, yeah, hang on a minute. And he handed it to me and said, it's your mom. And I talked to her. I got on the phone. The first thing that happened is I got on the phone and she said who she was. [00:11:00] And she said, are you my daughter? And I remember that moment because I hesitated because inside me, there was this yes response.

And at the same time, there was a well, no not exactly because I've been raised by someone else. And I called someone else mom. And anyway, so she and I talked. She had the information that allowed me to contact my birth father because he had contacted her when I was 18 because he had decided he wanted to look for me and he had given her his like address at that time and he was still in the same place so I was able to contact him and what happened is in both cases with each of them I experienced acceptance.

And wanting to be known and I hadn't prepared for that and so [00:12:00] that was totally overwhelming for me and my system and all my parts to have these people feel so happy to hear from me and want to meet me and have extended families that wanted to meet me and I was like, whoa, though I did meet my mom. She lived in Iowa. I was here in Colorado. We both drove halfway and met in Kansas. A couple weeks later, I flew to Connecticut and met my birth father. And then two weeks later, I started grad school. And so it was a whirlwind.

Haley Radke: Literally this is what I was so curious about. What is it like processing reunion while you're in grad school?

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: It's such a great question, and I think there was not a lot of processing of it. There was some to some degree, but yeah, [00:13:00] grad school is all consuming, or at least it was for me. Reunion happened, but it also got put on hold. And I didn't, so I met each of them. I didn't meet anyone else beyond that at that time.

And I didn't see either of them again until as it turned out, 20 years later.

Haley Radke: What?

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: I know. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Wow.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Cause, as life goes, oh, there was like, one of my brothers had a stroke. My mom had heart issues. I got through grad school and my first husband and I divorced shortly after that.

All of these major life events happened and time just, kept passing. And then a few years ago. Both of my adoptive parents died. My dad died suddenly and unexpectedly, [00:14:00] and that was a significant loss for me. And then 80 days later, my mom died. That was more expected. And that I'm sorry to say was also not as much of a loss for me as a result of the character of my mom.

But the next year, I think it was after they both died. I saw my mom again, my original mom, and there was more family there, all this extended family. And so I got to meet my uncle, I would say my beloved uncle, her brother and his wife and their kids, my cousins, whom I adore. And in another reunion, I met my birth father's sister, my aunt, with whom I'm in touch multiple times a week and is a real dear to [00:15:00] me and I've met both of her kids too. So I met extended family just a few years ago and that has been a whole other reunion that I could, spend a whole episode talking about, but won't.

Haley Radke: I do want to pause there because I think I've mentioned this before that in our Ask an Adoptee Therapist events that we have for Patreon, that question, or I should say the answer to a question has been given by several different therapists. If we're not getting, I'm not saying this is the case for you, but if we're not getting like what we need from our relationship with our first mother or biological father or they're not accessible to us, whether it be by their choice or they're not here, they've passed on or any of those things like there are extended family members who may have answers to some of the questions we have.

Or it may feel a little more free about talking about some of the [00:16:00] stories and those kinds of things. So it can almost be sometimes like a safer person to talk through some of those things because they're not so close to it.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah, absolutely. I agree 100 percent just based on my personal experience. My mom, I would say, was never really able to go deep with me about it.

I don't think that's entirely because she can't go, I think it's I don't know. She was in the, she was in the fog herSelf for a long time. And when I first met her, she was still very much in the fog and believed that she had made the right decision. And actually she stayed in the fog until her dementia started setting in further.

This is so interesting. So she's pretty far into dementia now. And now the last time I saw her earlier this year, [00:17:00] this is what I expected. She no longer remembered who I am and that she had a second daughter or not a second daughter, a first daughter whom she did not raise and gave up her adoption.

She no longer remembered that. But the previous visit, which was about a year ago, or maybe it was two now, the dementia had set in like just enough that it's like it had wiped out the fog. And she said to me, I, my experience was that I got a more authentic version of her. I got more of her authentic Self.

And she said to me, and she had never said anything like this to me before, I wish I had raised you. And, like I said, that was the first time I'd ever heard her say anything like that. And it was a, I'll say for lack of a better way of saying it, a gift of her dementia [00:18:00] for me. She and I never really talked much about it, but my uncle and I have been able to talk a good bit about it and about the, and about what Linda my mom had told me that her mother had said to her in 1968 when she was pregnant with me, which was, you will not come home with that baby.

And my uncle and I were able to talk about what he thought my grandma would say now if she were alive and she could meet me and how sorry he thinks she would be that she said that. And my aunt has asked me, my aunt on my birth father's side has asked me lots of questions about my experience and both of them have just included me in those families and welcomed me and like my aunt is wonderful about keeping me, she's just giving me so much information about the family, [00:19:00] so much education and includes me like in sharing photos, family just everything, past and present.

Haley Radke: I love that. You have that. That's really special. That's really special.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: It is. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.

Haley Radke: So you became a therapist. You're trained in IFS. And I have some questions related to that for you, and okay, so we'll say Internal Family Systems is that's what IFS stands for, and can you in brief for people who might not be familiar with that style of therapy, if you could just say what that means. And you might have heard how Kathy's already talking, like, all my parts and like you have like little references to IFS. . But yeah, just for, just like a little primer for people who maybe are unfamiliar.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah. I'll do my best. In IFS, we believe that we all consist of different parts. [00:20:00] And the reference I like to make is to the film Inside Out for those of you who have seen it, that is a great depiction of what it's like to have different parts of us that simultaneously coexist and have competing thoughts and feelings and perspectives, and not one of them represents or has to represent who we really are. There's no such thing because we consist of all of these different parts and we all also have what is called Self with a capital S and Self is our essence and we are born with it. It is fully intact when we are born and Self could be considered the internal attachment figure for parts and it's through the facilitation of a Self to part relationship between Self and parts that parts are able to heal and release the burdens that they took on as a result of [00:21:00] the traumas they experienced and be liberated. And that is what opens up space inside of us for us to experience things differently and start to do things differently in our lives.

Haley Radke: What a fantastic explanation. I think that's very clear. Okay, so as I was reading your chapter in Altogether Us, which is, I mean to me it's groundbreaking to have an adoptee talking about adoption issues finally in some kind of psychological text that experts are going to use and refer to and to like actually talk about us. So thank you for that. We'll talk about that more a little bit later too. However, what I was like, I got really stuck on is thinking about this Self, capital S Self, the core of us, And for adoptees so [00:22:00] many of us struggle with identity literally, who are we? And you mentioned the Self can just be fully hidden from us can you talk about that? Because reading that, it broke my heart, yeah.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah. Yeah. I'd be happy to talk about that. Because our trauma happens so early, you could say it starts happening in the womb, but certainly at birth or right after birth parts, our parts don't get to experience any of life knowing Self with access to Self before that trauma happens.

So if the trauma were to happen later, so this would be the case, perhaps for some adoptees who aren't relinquished at birth, but are removed later after abuse and neglect, maybe parts have a little bit of time to experience [00:23:00] some access to Self before the trauma happens. But in, for those of us who were relinquished right at birth, that doesn't happen.

And so parts, they never have an experience of getting to know Self and who Self is. And having Self there. And also, we're so young when, we are newborn when that happens. And it's not that Self is young, and this is where it gets harder to explain the concept of Self, but parts are young, and that, so they're not as, I'll say, resourced in their ability to access Self.

And what happens I believe what happens is that parts believe that Self must be bad, and [00:24:00] that's why we were relinquished. That Self at its core is bad, and that's what got us relinquished. And there it is, right at birth, right after birth, this this belief that sets in. It's not that Self is bad. No Self is bad. It's impossible for Self to be bad. But that's what parts think and they think it early and then they grow up believing that often. And Self is there. Self is still there. Parts just don't know that it's there or they believe Self had to be exiled. And so they exile Self to keep Self out so that Self doesn't get us abandoned again.

Haley Radke: Okay, so I'm hearing, I'm going to say self hatred, but little s [00:25:00] self, right? So that's what a lot of us would be familiar with, like a self hatred. And then the other thing, what I understand from IFS is everything like Self should be like our energy source and we should be living out of that. And that's what like a wholehearted life looks like. And so if we've pushed Self to the side or are allowing like other parts to lead life without accessing that, like that's like a lot of our problems, right?

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Am I getting any of that right?

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah, actually, I think that is a beautiful description of what happens. And the thing is, even if we are living our life like that, there are moments when we access Self, like we often liken Self to the sun behind the clouds. We even when the clouds are there, you know when it's a cloudy day, we know the sun is [00:26:00] still behind the clouds, it's still there. In IFS, we think of creating relationships with parts that are like the clouds in order to get the clouds to clear a little bit and open up some access to Self.

And so even if we have been living our lives like you described, there have still been moments I can promise you when you have accessed Self, you've experienced a little bit of access to Self. Some Self has come through, the sun has shown through the clouds. And we start to identify times like that and that becomes a foundational base for realizing, oh, I do have Self and it's not bad, in fact, it's good. And I would like to access that more often.

Haley Radke: So [00:27:00] much of probably for adoptees who are doing IFS work, parts work, you're examining that as you're meeting your parts and processing things. We're going to set aside IFS just for a second. When you communicate with other therapists and professionals about adoptee needs what are you finding is most effective? Because I want to give adoptee's language that they can use with their friends and family when they're like processing these things and everybody around them, still sees adoption as like the best thing ever. And in your chapter, you talk about this, like there's two traumas, right? There's a relinquishment trauma and there's also the trauma of being adopted. Those are two separate things. And I love how you describe it. So what are you finding is the [00:28:00] most effective way to explain that to the biologicals, as you say, or the kept, we were calling them the kept. So.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: The kept, Oh, I love that. Yeah. I want to say right off the bat, a lot of them are not going to get it, or at least some of them are not going to get it no matter what. No matter how we say it, and our culture has been so steeped in the adoptive parent centric perspective, that's the water in which everyone has swum, and it's hard for people to see things another way.

And I don't know that I have a great answer to this, but for me personally, focusing on the infant mother separation and that this is a baby, a child who lost their mother their mother, the person that is, [00:29:00] was, and is their mother, that for me is the place to start. And that's, that seems to be what people can connect with at least a little bit. Like I describe in the chapter, this client of mine who refers to her trauma or to herself as a survivor of infant mother separation. And I love that because that, I think that captures it. And, if people want to hurry to, but then, but then the adoptive mother was there, then, That's where I slow them down and I'm like wait a second.

You, you can't skip over the impact of the infant mother separation. Let's linger there. We need to stay on that. What would that, what do you think that would have been like for you? Kept person, [00:30:00] if that had been your child, if that had been your mother, what if your mother hadn't been able to keep you?

It makes me think about my husband and I watched Adoption Reckoning the other night, and, about South Korean adoptees, and when they were describing how workers would go into hospitals and maternity homes and snatch children, I said to my husband, because his first child was born with a major physiological issue that was corrected shortly after birth, but that required intensive hospitalization and care right after he was born, I said, can you imagine if a hospital worker had come to you and told you that Zach was gonna have to be sent somewhere else for care and that you were [00:31:00] That and then he would have to be adopted to get can you I don't know that I'm doing a good job of describing how it could have gone. But my husband got it. He could only imagine what that would have been like and apply that and that helped him to even further understand and I think he was already there thinking about that before I even said anything, but let's stay on that let's stay on that infant mother separation let's just focus on that a while and what it's like to lose one's mother at birth and I don't want to give short shrift to the fathers. There's another family here, too. There's a father who was lost and the whole paternal family, too.

Haley Radke: And the other part that we don't talk about that much is looking at adoption as a trauma. So being put in most cases say stranger adoption, and then saying, [00:32:00] okay, Self, now we are going to act as though we were born here.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Right. Exactly. Yeah, just like I described, in what the social worker said to my parents, just, treat her like you treat your sons, but I wasn't like them. And that burden as is the case for all of us, it fell on me to try to fit into their family and be like them and sacrifice, I'll say, myself, that's not exactly Self in the way that we think of it in IFS, but it's applicable.

Haley Radke: Yeah. This is the perfect part. So you have workshops where you talk about, not all parts are adopted. Can you talk about that? Because that's such a brilliant concept. And so, let's just say for people who haven't done IFS work, like we have all these parts, which you mentioned. Let's give some examples. So I might still have like my infant self,

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: abandoned baby.

Haley Radke: [00:33:00] Yeah, so I did a little IFS session with Ridghaus, which we recorded for Patreon, by the way. Goodness. What was I thinking? Anyway, and met a part who was like a protective part and was, protecting a, an age of Haley that something happened, bad, and so there can be all of these different parts. So with that being said, please go ahead.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah. So that's great. I love that you are naming some of the common parts that us adoptees have, that we adoptees have, like the abandoned baby. For me, one of the first parts I discovered was an eight year old who, so she was at that age where there's a shift, there's further cognitive development, and it's right around that age that we start to figure out, wait a second, in order for me to have been adopted first, someone else had to give me up, [00:34:00] and she thought that it was her fault.

That was one of my young parts that I discovered. We tend to have, or it's not uncommon for adoptees to have a people pleaser part. A chameleon part that figures out like what the rules are and norms are in any given group so that we can fit in. A part that likes to know what's going to happen and tries to predict what's coming so that they feel in control of that. A perfectionistic part that tries to do everything really well and be all put together.

Haley Radke: I don't relate to that one either. None of those.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: No. Not you, Haley. A caretaker part. So those are some of the common ones that we tend to have, any part that helps us fit and belong and be accepted and not rejected and abandoned.

And so one day I [00:35:00] was walking, I was just walking through my house and it literally just popped into my head. And not all parts get adopted. And I just paused and I thought, yep, like I just felt the truth of that and I kept going. I went on with my day and it stayed with me and that evening at dinner I mentioned it to my husband. Hey, this thought came to me today and I shared it and he got it. He is not an adoptee, but he is the son of an adoptee. And I started sharing it with other adoptees I know, and they would all do the same thing. They would start nodding like it resonated and that felt true to them. And so I knew I was onto something and I needed to flesh it out because my first instinct was that's it. That's all you need. That's what you need to know. Here it is, this [00:36:00] essential truth. Not all parts get adopted, but I started fleshing it out and exploring more about what that means and I did a workshop on it at the IFS conference that year and then I turned it into this workshop that I give about every other month and just speaking for myself personally, when that first came to me, it was significant because it was, it alerted me that there were parts of me that had not been impacted by relinquishment and adoption.

And it felt like such a relief to realize that. And for me, it was celebratory hooray, not all parts are adopted, not all parts experience that trauma. And these parts are available to me to tell me all this information about my innate gifts and, all that good stuff. They are, [00:37:00] as Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS might say some of the juiciest parts of me, of an adoptee.

Haley Radke: I think, just to pause there.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah.

Haley Radke: That is so hopeful because I think a lot of us think our original me who I was supposed to be is lost forever and that can't be recaptured. And so this is a way of thinking about those things that's no, they're still there.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: That's right. That's right. Yeah. And in IFS, when we go through the process, there, there are a lot of steps to it and I won't go into all those. But one of the things we do is we find parts and they are usually in or around our bodies. We usually find them somewhere inside us or right around our body. And my experience has been that with these parts that did not get adopted, they can be farther away.

So they can feel farther away from [00:38:00] us, from our bodies, but they are still connected to us as though by an invisible string, an invisible thread. For me, it was hopeful, and it is hopeful, and I've learned in giving these workshops it's not the same for everybody, and everybody's system is different, and so it's not a positive for everyone that there are, to find the parts, or that there are parts that didn't get adopted.

There are some parts that didn't get adopted that are upset about that. Who feel left behind.

Haley Radke: I could see that as like, right? When, if your adoptive parents are like, rejecting this part of how you act or this way you are. Cause that's not like them.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Exactly.

Haley Radke: No one in their families is like that. That's not welcome here. So that's where we put away those, again, put away those parts of our identities in order to be safe and fit in.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Exactly. Yep. You got [00:39:00] it. You nailed it. And that's something I talk about in the workshop that is one of the reasons some parts don't get adopted because the adoptive parents don't adopt them. They reject those parts either overtly or inadvertently.

Haley Radke: Yeah, that totally makes sense. Okay, I don't mean to interrupt. Is there anything else that you want to tell us about that? I think just having that knowledge, I think really can. Free us a little bit and like maybe we do at some point go and explore that about ourselves.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah.

Haley Radke: I'm totally drawn to IFS.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yay. I love that. Yeah. And it's not for everyone. And that's okay, too. All parts are welcome, as we say.

Haley Radke: I think, I don't know. The more we can give adoptees the sense of agency, the more empowered we are and we can take control of whatever our, quote unquote healing journey will look like.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: That's [00:40:00] right. Yeah. And I believe that the more we can connect with all of our parts. Those that were adopted and those that weren't, the more we know all of our parts, the more actually we can access and know Self.

It's through those connections, those Self to part relationships, that we do get a fuller, richer sense of who we fully are or, what has been called Self.

Haley Radke: Yeah, perfect. I love that. Thank you so much. I want to make sure to recommend your chapter in Altogether Us. It's called IFS and Adoptees, Healing Parts Burdened by Relinquishment Trauma.

And you talked about this in our interview, you mentioned it a little bit in here, you're in therapy and you're going to train your therapist on how to work with adoptees. How unfair. Now [00:41:00] folks, even if you're not going to an IFS therapist, you can recommend to your therapist that they read Kathy's chapter in this book to familiarize themselves a little bit more with what it looks like to work with an adoptee.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: That's right. And in fact that was the intent of the chapter and all the chapters in that book to write it for someone who may work with an adoptee and is not themselves an adoptee and doesn't have that personal experience.

Haley Radke: It's so good. You touch on all the things. I pointed out a few things during our conversation, but thank you so much. You mentioned my friend Reshma's, Dear Adoption work. You have quotes from that in here. You mentioned Adoptees On in your resource section. Thank you.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Oh, thank you. You're welcome and thank you. [00:42:00]

Haley Radke: I think it'd be so cool if you've taken Kathy's workshop, will you comment in our like social posts about this because I'd love to hear from folks who've taken it. It sounds really amazing. I haven't personally done that with you, but I know that you're unpacking things for folks that was in a really helpful way. So yeah.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: And I would love to have you in one of them. That would be awesome.

Haley Radke: Great. Okay.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: You should come.

Haley Radke: We'll make sure to tell people where to find out when the next one is before we wrap up. But what did you want to recommend to us?

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: I'm laughing because you and I talked about this a little bit.

Haley Radke: I'm pressuring her. I'm pressuring her to recommend this. It's not fully under her. It's under duress. Okay.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: That's right.

Haley Radke: If you feel weird about it. Yeah.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: I in full disclosure, I will [00:43:00] name, that my husband, whom I mentioned, this is my second husband, is the son of an adoptee, and he made a film several years ago, this is actually how he and I met, called Father Unknown, about his and his father's journey to try to find his father. His father was born and adopted in Switzerland. His father actually spent the first three years of his life with his mother before she gave him up to a Swiss orphanage for many years and then reclaimed him when he was 12 and brought him to the United States. So trauma upon trauma.

And then David and his dad, gosh, more than a decade ago now, went back to Switzerland to try to find information on his birth father about whom his mother would never tell David's dad. I mentioned, I said to you, but I feel weird recommending that because he's my [00:44:00] husband and it was recommended a long time ago.

Yeah. By someone else and you graciously said that I could also recommend one other person.

Haley Radke: Yes, but can you wait one second?

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yes.

Haley Radke: Okay. A Father Unknown is so powerful and I love that it captured sorry to be sexist and grossly, stereotyping. I love that it captures all of this male emotion on this journey. It's really amazing to see on screen and it has been out for a little while. It's on YouTube now.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Yeah.

Haley Radke: There's no barrier. Folks can get, we'll linked to it in the show notes and yeah, it's really beautiful. And I can't, I'm not going to spoil anything because I feel like you and I talking is like a really cute part too. Like it's like a, I don't know, I can't say that if once you watch it, you'll get it. But anyway, no [00:45:00] spoilers. Okay, now go ahead. Go ahead. What's your other recommendation?

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: My other recommendation is Carl Smith's Instagram account because it is such a great source of all the news in the adoption world. I think that might be where I first read about the PBS frontline documentary on South Korean adoptees.

And it's also where I learned about president Biden's apology for, the Indian native American boarding schools in the United States. It's just a great source of all the latest news and I love that and I am deeply appreciative to Carl for staying so up on all of it.

Haley Radke: Amazing. We will link to that. Carl's handle is DECSmith50 but we'll make sure it's in the show notes for [00:46:00] you. And speaking of that, where can we connect with you online and find out about any of your future workshops or writings that you have out in the world? . .

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: The best place is Instagram @adopteetherapy.

Haley Radke: And what's your website?

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Adopteetherapy.com.

Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you so much, Kathy.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Thank you, Haley.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for sharing part of your personal story and you've been a guest on several other shows. We'll link to a couple of episodes for folks to hear a little bit more. I was thinking especially of Adoptee Crossing Lines.

You're talking about with a couple of other adoptee therapists and really deep diving this. That's another great place to hear a little bit more from you.

Kathy Mackechney, LCSW: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: My pleasure.

One of the questions I get asked the most often by listeners [00:47:00] truly is are there any retreats for adoptees? And there's a few out there. I've never gone to one. So I'm not in like the habit of recommending them, but Kathy is having her first ever, not all parts get adopted retreat. And if you're listening, when this drops, you have a couple months and It is in May of 2025. So May 22nd to 26th of 2025. And she is having it in Colorado. We are going to have a link to all the info in the show notes. So if you're interested, you can get in touch with Kathy and she'll have more details. So in the show notes, we should have a link in there. And if not, it'll be coming shortly, I promise.

I am so excited for the opportunities that many of our fellow adoptee therapists are [00:48:00] making available to us as a community. And if we want those things to continue, we got to support them. Anyway thank you to Kathy. And part two to that is, I'm going to say it out loud just in case you didn't realize the gravity of what the work Kathy is putting into the world how many of us have gone to therapists who have no friggin clue about adoption trauma, adoptee issues, they gloss over adoption stuff, like it's just like nothing. And we have to educate them. Right? How many of us? So I've heard from so many people, it's like their number one reason why they're like never going to go to therapy again because they wasted all this money trying to quote unquote educate their therapist unfair.

And so Kathy is doing that work for us. And hopefully the ripple effect, like we might not get to see it [00:49:00] right away, but it's coming that so many more practitioners will be trained to be helpful to us as adoptees. I'm so thankful and so excited. My plan is to be back with you guys in January. So we'll have a little bit of a holiday break.

And let my team rest up and me, God, I know I keep saying, I was sick for two months. It's been a real trip trying to get back on track with everything. So I think we'll be back in January. No, like for sure we'll be back in January. We may have one more episode in December, probably in January, but just so you know, transparent, haven't decided quite yet.

But probably will be back in January with new episodes and some of the people I have booked. Oh my goodness. I'm so excited. We're celebrating Kathy and the work she's doing in the world. There are [00:50:00] so many adoptees publishing books next year, 2025, like a fantastic resources for us, fantastic academic work, poetry, memoir, like so many amazing things are coming.

And I'm really excited because I get to interview some of those fantastic folks who are putting that good work into the world. Look forward to that and thanks for listening. Let's talk again very [00:51:00] soon.

293 Healing Series: Dr. Julie Lopez [The problem with labels]

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/293

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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. This is a special episode in our healing series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves, so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee.

Today I'm so pleased to welcome back Dr. Julie Lopez, author of Live Empowered. We are talking all about how labels. can be highly problematic for adoptees. We discuss how nonsensical the term reactive attachment disorder is, when in fact, most of us are just having perfectly normal reactions to an abnormal situation.

Dr. Julie is an expert [00:01:00] in implicit memory, and she continues to inspire us that change and growth is always possible always achievable and how we can access our pre verbal traumas. Before we get started, I want 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. Let's listen in. I am so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Dr. Julie Lopez. Hi, Dr. Julie.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Hi, amazing goddess Haley, you're amazing. I love what you've done for our tribe of people who are so amazing, too.

Haley Radke: Thank you. This is

Dr. Julie Lopez: pro adopted people.

Haley Radke: Yes, we're both very pro adoptee. This is your fifth time on the podcast. Did you know that?

Dr. Julie Lopez: oh my gosh, I [00:02:00] didn't. It's been a long time. We took a little break, but. Yes.

Haley Radke: It has been.

Dr. Julie Lopez: I believe that.

Haley Radke: Yes. You are a therapist, an expert in all things implicit memory and neuroplasticity. You help us to shift out of our stuck modes, I think.

I think you're so excellent at that. But just as a refresher, can you just tell us a little snippet of your personal adoptee experience for people who might not know you yet?

Dr. Julie Lopez: oh my gosh, like every adoptee story, I'm going to give a trigger warning right here because my basic story is 15 year old mom dating a 17 year old guy who date raped her.

She never talked to him after that day and found out a few months later she was pregnant with me and was one of the baby scoop era moms who was sent [00:03:00] away and she gave birth to me, changed her mind, said she wanted to keep me. She'd met this other really cool teen who was going to keep her baby, even though the Catholic church was telling them what sinners and terrible people they were.

And then her parents made her give me away. So that was very traumatic for her and she's amazing and incredible. She passed away right before the pandemic. That was hard. And then I basically got reunited with her when I was 23. I never really thought about it before then. And I think a big piece of that was now that I'm 54, I look back to my years up until I was that age and I think I was just really dissociated and really unaware of myself in a lot of ways. And I can talk more about that later, but reunion since that time. Maybe six years in reunion with my biological father's family. And honestly, that trauma story just pervaded my life in a lot of [00:04:00] ways. I never really wanted to know my biological father.

And I'm going to tell you something super obvious. It didn't dawn on me before that time of reunion that it's not just him. It's a whole family and I got connected to brothers and sisters and aunts and cousins and some people I don't really care for but some people are really amazing. Like families are complicated, but my in my little oversimplified adoptee mind it was just thinking yeah, biological father, but it's a whole web. It's really a big loss and a big journey, this complicated journey of finding our biological people. So that's my adoption story in a nutshell. There's a lot more ripples out into my life that's had impact on, but I don't know if I kept it short enough. It's always so hard to simplify it down to a really short story. Story, but that's it.

Haley Radke: I know. Can you take your decades and just compress them in two minutes? No problem.

Dr. Julie Lopez: That was decades

Haley Radke: [00:05:00] Thank you.

Dr. Julie Lopez: And what a mess of decades those are.

Haley Radke: Well, and you've been a practicing clinician for a number of years also and.

Dr. Julie Lopez: That's very nice of you. A number of years like 30.

Haley Radke: Okay, decades. Yes, so I know you've worked with a lot of adopted people and continue to do but also you work with normals also. What do you call the kept?

Dr. Julie Lopez: I don't know. I haven't really named them. My favorites are the adoptees, though. And you know why? Because it's really a hard experience to go through. And so anyone, no matter how they're functioning, and some of us are functioning super, externally high, right?

Because we have had to go through really hard stuff and have really good risk tolerance and tenacity and all those things. But Regardless of how cruel or kind life has been or how much we've [00:06:00] struggled, I see strength in every adopted person, every single one of us. The others, I don't know, I'm starting to learn as I go and go.

And I mentioned this even before we started that there are commonalities of experience, even in those people who weren't relinquished. And those include a lot of times people who've had other traumas in their lives that I've learned how to work through being dissociated, how to reclaim parts of themselves, how to leverage some of the pretty cool science of the nervous system and the human system and brain science, which I'm very into and love to share to be able to make changes, because I think one of the biggest things that I see in these private adoptee groups that I'm part of across the world is sometimes people have thrown in the towel and they just feel hopeless or they feel like this is it.

I've had a few rough draws of the cards and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm just this [00:07:00] label or I'm just this thing or I'm just broken and there's no use in trying anything new and that's really honestly what my life is about is that I have found through rigorous study a lot of in person practice and life experience that in fact, there are so many ways that we can have breakthroughs on a big scale breakthroughs on a small scale life changing interventions and experiences that can literally change the felt experience in the day to day.

And I am all about that. And for that reason, I am against labels. I am all about empowering people. I believe that every single one of us is sovereign. Every single nervous system is complex and has just as much magic as someone else's and that we can leverage a lot of really cool realities about this incredibly sophisticated Supercomputer that is our body and our [00:08:00] mind and our energetic receptors that we have in our system to do cool things. So if we're going to talk about that, which I'm sure we are, then I'm all in.

Haley Radke: Yes, absolutely. So you recently started a podcast called the Viva View and I was a guest on it. So we'll link to that so people can hear our discussion there too, but what I wanted to ask you about briefly before we go into the how to change things is we talked, you and I, about reactive attachment disorder and I told you what a skeptic I was of that diagnosis and how harmful it is. And can you talk a little bit more about your thoughts on that? And then also tell us more how, why you hate labeling, why you hate putting these things on us.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Okay. So here's a thing. And we, I think all of us adoptees can relate to this one way or another. I've experienced so many personal transformations [00:09:00] and personal changes in my own life.

And I think some of that comes just from being plopped into a family that isn't biologically related and figuring out, oh, how do I survive this thing? How do I find myself? How can I be myself? And it requires a lot of flexibility, right? And then, becoming awake to the reality of what it means to be biologically related to other people that aren't right in front of you, but to have had a childhood and a developmental trajectory with all these other people. It's really like I really do feel a lot of adoptive people. Adopted people are very Adaptive. And so when we throw on a label, any label and keep in mind, I have 30 years as a licensed practitioner and we use this horrible book called the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, and it gives all these labels and insurance requires it to reimburse.

So it's tied into finances and those [00:10:00] labels, in my opinion are damaging and so reactive attachment disorder is a label. And when you put that label on it can feel like, oh, this is just who I am. This is what I've got. I've got this diagnostic code and it means that I can't move and change. And that is literally not true.

I can't tell you the number of times I've had someone referred over to me or they've left a medical doctor or another practitioner who was labeling their behavior, not understanding why it might be normal. And that by understanding why it's normal, you can start to move into relation with that person.

Again, holding them as sovereign and understanding that their body is doing what it needs to do to adapt, to survive, to be okay, given whatever cards they were dealt. And then that you can move it because our systems are adaptable. And when you throw a label on, even [00:11:00] if it feels validating oh, finally I knew something was wrong with me.

Here's a label. I can be this label. It starts, it can be interpreted in such a way where someone then feels just stuck. That's, I can't get close to you because I have reactive attachment disorder. It's not true. And people get hopeless and hope losing hope is a very big struggle in the journey to making change.

So I wouldn't be saying this lightly. Change is absolutely possible. And oftentimes people get into these therapeutic ruts where they're just saying the same old things over and over experiencing the same stuff and not realizing that there are different techniques and tools that can make a drastic difference in the way that someone is perceiving danger and safety.

I could actually I want to say a little bit more about reactive attachment disorder because it's a label if you think about what happens for all adopted people, [00:12:00] because anyone who's adopted has to have been given away has to have circumstances where they were removed from their family.

Anytime someone has circumstances where they were removed from their family, there's some overlying massive stressor of, if not incredible, like trauma and disaster families killed in a car accident, some financial problems, some. societal shaming, some heartache and pain. There's usually, people don't just, if everything's fine and good and safe and well, people don't give their babies away.

There may be mental struggles. There may be political str it just goes on and on. So there's some messages that are pretty common that people take in on an unconscious level. And one of the major ones is, I'm not safe. The people that are supposed to be there for me, even if they were killed in a car accident, it's like the world's not safe.

And what does our [00:13:00] body do? It's adaptive just to be okay in the world. As we look around consciously and subconsciously and we tag things very quickly tag. oh, if I touch the stove, it's going to burn. Don't do that. oh, if I talk to this person, they're dangerous. Don't do that. All these people, all those people, all this situation. And it keeps us safe. So if primary caregivers or the world in general has a message that when you get connected or feel vulnerable with someone, it's unsafe, then the most adaptive thing you can do is push people away or create a cocoon to keep yourself safe.

And this collection of normal and adaptive responses to what I would say is abnormal and traumatizing conditions when it gets a label makes the person themselves feel broken. And that's where the stuckness comes in and it goes against [00:14:00] everything I know and that I'm committed to in terms of facilitating change and breakthroughs and transformations.

Haley Radke: Thank you for going so in depth into that. It's so important. Actually, to prepare for this, I was listening to another podcast where an adoptive mom was interviewing someone who facilitates rehoming. And they were talking about reactive attachment disorder. And the person that runs this rehoming agency was talking about how all these children, they can be so manipulative.

She kept using the word manipulative. And I just had this gut just disgust reaction to hearing adults talk about children that way. Trying to stay safe, trying to like, survive? Is that what you mean?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Yes. Okay. I'm going to tell you something. That word was used on me [00:15:00] yesterday in a board meeting because I'm part of a couple boards and this group is so beautiful and I love them.

And the guy who used it is actually a really good friend of mine. And I happen to know he has a trauma history and he is so beloved. Because he's wicked charming and he's wicked charming because he grew up impoverished and he had a lot of trauma, right? And so he said something about because I'm really charming and I'm really well spoken and I've had to do that because I feel like I had to tap dance and juggle and at least in my little kid adolescent young adult self, I felt like my life depended on people liking me.

And that's why I had all these like problematic like perfectionistic problems and anxiety struggles and but I was like you know we could go into so many topics, but you know the whole theoretical model of the good adoptee and the bad adoptee. It's not that one is good or bad but one uses a collection of performance to feel safe like they're not going to be thrown away and bad uses a collection of [00:16:00] push away tactics burn down the house to see are you still there for me?

It's the same thing I just want to know am I safe and how can I manage safety? And he said to me, oh, I said something really brilliant. I'm going to be honest and he was like, there you are just trying to manipulate the situation and I was like, hey, it takes one to know one and I know you came by that honestly and so you can call it manipulation, but if you're super sensitive as a lot of adopted people are we're high empaths because it's a safety mechanism like very attuned to other people's emotional realities, then you hear a word like manipulation and it's like bad and negative and I would rather someone, again, that's what it means to hold people as sovereign.

Wow, you really accentuated the positive in this situation and encouraged a behavior that you want to have happen. And you did it so adeptly. It was smooth and beautiful. [00:17:00] Wow. You should really think about going into branding and marketing because those skills are excellent. Or why aren't you the Speaker of the House, because those kind of communication skills are well received, or you should think about a career in politics, because being able to do that is a skill, right?

As opposed to giving this negative kind of shaming, label on a skill set. Survival skills are awesome. And I love to use the analogy of a war veteran who has come back from the war and had friends who didn't, right? So really got that very deep messaging on a sensory level, sight, smell, sound, that if you don't act quickly and do extreme things you're not going to survive and here they are back in civilian life and their sensitivity rating is still very high and they hear a car backfire and they knock their three friends to the ground and they're like, dude, you crazy.

Something like that. No, you're [00:18:00] not crazy. You're just have an amazing. reaction time and incredible speed. And maybe what's happened is that your sensitivity to noise is still ramped up from the couple years that you were overseas in this war battlefield type of environment. And it's not that you're crazy. It's that you have an adjustment internally that can be adjusted so that you reacclimate to the reality of the level of safety and danger that you're in now. Cause right people get labeled with reactive attachment disorder because someone wants to attach to them and they consider themselves safe and they want someone who has a trauma history not to have the trauma history. They're like, oh, we want it to be the little bow that we signed up for and paid, $80,000 for, or whatever. We want it to be a blank slate. And so rather than look at maybe you're [00:19:00] not a blank slate, maybe you are an actual living, breathing human being with all the incredible resources that we have to adapt and survive our circumstances.

Maybe like the war veteran, your sensitivity scale is moved way up because extreme loss has been part of your history before you came here. And if we wash over for me, I was adopted at three months. I know younger people may have been adopted the day of their birth, whatever. But we still have all this scientific evidence about prenatal trauma about the well being of the mother and what gets transmitted in the womb.

And usually when someone is going to be giving up their baby, even if it's at their first day of birth, they're not having a relaxing pregnancy. Their stress hormones are part of this experience. I think what happens with any label is we're oversimplifying something that we really just don't wanna deal with being so [00:20:00] complicated. And when we do that, we're doing a disservice to the people's lives who are impacted.

Haley Radke: Yes. So well said. Thank you. I am gonna ask one more thing about labels and then we're gonna get to the how to and the

Dr. Julie Lopez: Okay, cool.

Haley Radke: And the good stuff. This is one more upsetting thing that I didn't really know even was a term until this year. And it's this concept of blocked care. So as an adoptive parent or caregivers who are experiencing some kind of burnout or are maxed out in some way, or they're, they have a child who is doing the push back to all of their advances. They get labeled with, this is blocked care. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Am I explaining it right?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Totally. Yes. Okay. I'm being subjective on the podcast because that's what's happening. I don't like [00:21:00] it. I don't like any labels whatsoever. I think they do a person a disservice. So the label of blocked care is about reactive parenting. It's just the flip side of the same kind.

And it's basically saying, oh, label, you have blocked care. And again, what I think when you throw a label on it like that, it discourages. any more movement. But why is someone having what someone would call blocked care? They're burnt out of a situation, their own personal history of rejection or abandonment or failure or whatever those stories are that they hold within their nervous system are getting triggered.

So rather than actually work through what can be moved and adjusted, right? What because the dials like the example I gave with the war veteran, for someone who gets a label of blocked care, it means that their system has maxed out of a limit. They don't [00:22:00] have any more patience. They don't have any more resourcing.

They don't have, they've come to the end of what they know. So that parent, rather than giving them a label, I would want to give them empowering tools to be able to stay engaged, even in their distress and to be vulnerable about what's getting picked up for them, what's happening in their history that maybe needs some adjustment in order to stay in relation.

Because whether it's the adoptee or any child, because it's not just adoptees that get that label of reactive attachment or someone who's got a blocked care label, it just means that their system needs some love and support to be able to move and bend because it can. People can learn to be more resilient.

People can learn skills around how to engage. People [00:23:00] can learn how to be more vulnerable, right? And it can be like a perfect storm. You've got someone labeled with block care, someone labeled with reactive attachment, and there are ways to change that story. And that's just my fear with labels is it's oversimplifying something that's way more complicated and has a lot more to do this time with the nervous system of the parent.

Haley Radke: Right? So let's move into talking to adult adoptees. What would you say to someone who was diagnosed with rad as a child or was told, oh, you were really manipulative or had those attachment issues and has brought that identity with them into adulthood.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Okay, so you preface this by saying let's move into the how to. So the first thing is, it is so important to look at your environment. The first thing I would want to change is your [00:24:00] exposure to the people and how they're relating to you. So I would highly advocate being in relation with resources, groups, and supports that also see you as sovereign and that recognize that you have ability and capability to move and adjust.

And so that is like the first thing I would say. And what are those things look like? There's all these private Facebook groups, where people are treating you with respect, looking at your whole person, giving you compassion. For the ways that you've learned to adapt and adjust, and even celebrating your gifts and your strengths.

Because what I've noticed as a trauma expert is that everyone who's been through something really distressing actually develops a whole host of strengths and abilities. And so being around people that are accentuating those, because in those environments you to get to a neutral [00:25:00] space where your system itself and in an authentic way is gonna feel more open to the process of change. And actually, I know we're not meant to talk about this much or you weren't talking about this, but for 20 years now, I've been doing transformation retreats and I've been hired in to do transformation material with people. And the first step is preparation.

And a lot of that has to do with speaking to the cells of our body. Just like an athlete would stretch. And have certain types of nutrition in order to really perform if we're going to do make change in our identity and in the way that we're working in the world. And we really want that. We really want closer connections, or we want to work more in harmony with our nervous system around what it means to be vulnerable and to be really intimate with another person.

Whether that's a friend or a family member or a lover or a partner, [00:26:00] then it starts with preparing for that. And the labeling really messes up the preparation. It's like a swimmer who's about to have a race and someone's screaming you're a really terrible swimmer and you're not really supposed to be here and you are too short or too fat or too whatever.

Or, it's it's not the right preparation to really be making a change. So you have to really There's so much that goes into preparation, right? I was using an athlete, which is like stretching, nutrition, mindset, but even listening to this podcast, I would argue is a part of preparation. It's oh, I never heard of that.

Or I didn't even know that door could open or that there's possibility here. That's part of the preparation. Oh, I guess I am around an environment. Actually, I'm working with a therapist that labels me all the time and doesn't seem to understand at all where I might have come from, or I've never even heard about having this compassion for loss and grief and danger and all this kind of stuff.

It's really, I [00:27:00] can't overstate how important that is, that kind of preparation piece. And then the second thing I would say is that even the most dire of messaging that's encoded deep in our body can be changed. I have literally, I witnessed that with people and I would look for, and I know there's a lot of resources already out there, coaches, therapists, people who are already versed and adoptee centric in their work.

So they're not going to minimize or they're not going to even sometimes people, intentioned people don't even know they're minimizing because they're just not exposed to what the reality looks like for someone who's had the experience of relinquishment because it looks really good from the outside.

Like we really literally cannot change the things we cannot see. So if you're wandering [00:28:00] around and you're holding the story that relinquishment didn't have an impact on you or that your system didn't take in messages of whatever they took in, people are very different worthlessness, being broken, being unwanted, being unlovable, being defective, being all alone.

Deeper things. I've worked with so many people who don't think that with the frontal lobe of their brain. They're like intellectually, I don't even believe that. But my behavior show that there's a deeper part that does right. I know, partner, that you're safe and I see physical evidence that you love me and care for me.

But my body doesn't seem to adjust to that message because I do things that push you away or that indicate I don't trust you, right? These things can be moved, but it is very hard to move them if someone isn't aware of them, and I'm saying it that way specifically because I know a lot of my fellow adoptees feel like, gosh, I'm pretty sure I know [00:29:00] intellectually, theoretically, these things impacted me.

My transracial adoptee friends who were adopted from Korea, age two, don't remember because we don't have conscious memory till we're three and over. It's all an implicit memory. This unconscious memory I'm super into and wrote a book about blah, blah, blah. You don't have to know the person doesn't have to consciously know their story to work with an expert who can get to the mapping of what's in their implicit memory without words.

I know this is all like abstract concepts and move it. It's what I do with my intensives. I do these half day full day or two day intensives where we go in there, even to material that someone doesn't know. I've had people move the outcomes of material that came from their grandmother. I know this all sounds so crazy and people think it's crazy because afterwards they're like, what'd you do to me?

I didn't do anything. I just know how implicit memory works and I can pull the material out and change it. You don't have to [00:30:00] know what happened to you day to day in that orphanage. I don't know what happened in the first three months of my life. I don't but my body knows it my cells know it and an expert and implicit memory or this deep unconscious can move it. I have seen it many times and this is maybe in whole other podcasts Haley because I'm going off topic but it can impact the way we're experiencing our body physically.

I've seen people with diagnosed chronic pain type of conditions, chronic inflammation type of conditions have their symptoms abate because the trauma load in their body was moved and changed.

Haley Radke: That's amazing. It sounds like a miracle, right? And I've heard people talk about these big things shifting for them when they've been using psychedelic assisted therapies. And you're not talking about that.

Dr. Julie Lopez: No, [00:31:00] but I will say I do a lot of cross referring to psychedelic assisted therapies. Ketamine assisted therapy has been great for trauma, treatment resistant depression. Bessel van der Kolk, a lot of people love that book, The Body Keeps the Score. It really advocates the use of non talk based therapeutic approaches, which I'm all about and my mental health center is all about that.

Everyone there is only doing non talk based therapy because it's what's required to move what's in your implicit memory. And yes, mine doesn't use any chemicals, but it's very compatible with what happens with psychedelic assisted therapy. And to be honest, some people, and I believe this very strongly, we're all like little snowflakes. We're all different. And the way we come by healing is different. Like someone may love art therapy and someone else loves brain based therapy and someone else loves ketamine assisted therapy. And frankly, I didn't even finish my topic [00:32:00] because I have ADD. Like a lot of us trauma survivors and Bessel has been involved with a lot of research around the use of MDMA and he has called that one of the most supportive chemical assisted types of therapeutic interventions for trauma survivors.

So there's just really been a lot more research and a lot more positive outcomes for people that are all based on, in my opinion, the science of being able to move what's stored in our deeper unconscious in these unknown regions of our experience called the implicit memory.

Haley Radke: Okay, so I don't know if you can get into this or not. Can you like, explain what it looks like doing an intensive or like going into some of that implicit memory. Like we've talked on the show before about EMDR or brain spotting or neurofeedback and those kinds of somatic types of [00:33:00] therapies where you don't necessarily have to know what happened or you can get to that. Can you talk more about that? What you're talking about.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Yeah,

Haley Radke: it sounds really woo woo right. Yeah. So

Dr. Julie Lopez: I know it's so abstract. It's literally it is so not woo. It's all based in brain science and the way that your brain and your spinal cord communicate. So everything is encoded in our system very quickly.

And you can Google some of this stuff. You can look at infant studies around like infant and mother attachment. And you can see one of the classic studies where a mom just does a deadpan and doesn't smile anymore. And the baby starts getting really distressed because these cues are giving them information about their own well being and safety.

And if you think about a baby, if your primary caregiver isn't doing well, that's literally a life or death [00:34:00] situation. Never mind a baby who's had trauma. Oh my gosh, Haley, this is like a whole other podcast, but there's a couple of main ways that stuff gets stored in implicit memory. You can get it through epigenetics, actually cellular transmission from grandparents, parents to you.

So this is of course, like not in your conscious brain, especially if there's something that hasn't been talked about, same types of things can impact you based on. behavioral learning and modeling. Again, let's just talk about the war veteran. They never talk about the war with their children. They know they've been to war.

They're geared towards safety. They don't go out of the house. That gets modeled. No one ever says, I don't know, some terrible story, like some, like that person never shares a horrible story of losing their friend in the bunker or whatever. But they don't go out of the house and they're basically saying without words, the [00:35:00] world is an unsafe place.

And so the child is oh my gosh, the world's an unsafe place. I shouldn't go out of the house very much. I listened for sounds. Just because that's what we do. That's what we do. We learn how to adapt and survive and those codes are deep down and your question was like, what happens in the moment. So by the way, there is talk at the beginning because we figure out because your life is telling a story and so there's something that you want and you'll notice even if by external measure, you're super successful, you will want something to be different.

You're like, hey, yeah, I do want to be closer to my husband. I do want to be more confident about my ideas. I know intellectually they're really good, but I quiet down in the board meeting or in whatever. So we'll go in based on a present day goal. But once we target the way it's held in your body, which will be through how your body's experiencing something, we stop talking.

I like to leverage bilateral. [00:36:00] I use all of my tools, right? I was trained for many years to do EMDR brain spotting. I'm trained in neural feedback. I've done a lot of training on somatic interventions different types of inner weaves, expressive work. Integrative manual therapy. I could go on and on, but it's basically human system stuff.

So depending on what your body brings up, because we'll do sets using bilateral stimulation, I'm not talking, you're not talking. And I'll ask what are you getting now? Because your body without the talk, without the focused energy on the frontal lobe of your brain, you're going to start to be getting other data.

And that other data looks like sensations, thoughts, feelings. visualizations, like things will come up. It's almost using your periphery vision, but you're getting it internally because our bodies are holding all these things and our bodies want to move to what's more adaptive. So by setting the goals, having the objectives [00:37:00] at first, we're priming the pump to pull up anything related.

And it gets really wacky, really fast, which is why I like psychedelics also, although I don't use them within my intensives. Is that the mapping of our implicit memory isn't based on logic. So material might actually come up that's coming from your system, trying to unknot these knots that aren't serving you in the present day.

And if we're not acutely listening and paying attention and without the framework of understanding how it all might fit together, it's not going to make any sense, which is why the expert needs to be there. It's, the person is expert in their body, but like my role is pulling all the pieces together.

So to make it more concrete, here's an example. There was a woman I worked with and she really wanted to improve her relationship with her adult daughter. And she realized that [00:38:00] her daughter was estranged from her because there were things in their relationship that weren't working out well, but she wasn't really clear what was happening.

Of course she had a very traumatic childhood. She had actually been in the hospital for a couple of years to the point where she stopped growing because of some acute childhood stress. Your body really has to go through something, but she didn't know what it was. It wasn't in her conscious memory.

While we were doing these sets and I said, Hey, what's going on? She's I don't know my cousin. This isn't related. I don't. And I'm like no. Tell me everything because you just don't know. And her cousin had sent her a letter. And her cousin was really into her pretty aggressive religious group that she was a part of and a big part of their journey in their, this religious kind of order was proselytizing and converting people to their religion.

So [00:39:00] she said, I just remembered a letter that my cousin sent to me and it started out with all the things that were wrong with me and all the things that I needed to change to and all this different kind of stuff. And she's and I think it's really distracting from what's going on. And it took me a moment, but I was like, no, tell me more.

I want to understand this. And she was like I got, did you read the letter? Because it was like five pages long. She's I didn't even read it. I didn't even need to read it. It just made me feel bad. I wasn't open to her message at all. And she always does this to me. Guess what? I'm going to fast forward the story.

This is what she was doing to her daughter. She was so anxious about being value add as a parent, I think because of some of her childhood trauma and this like very severed and physically abusive relationship that she had with her parents that she wanted to be helpful. She wanted to be, but what she ended up being was really scared and critical.

And so her daughter was doing to her what she was doing to her [00:40:00] cousin. We got to that by her really reflecting on what would make her be more open to her cousin and me being willing to stay with the material that came up. So it's really a fascinating journey of association and this nonlinear connective map called adaptive information that's in our nervous system that we tap into that can come out with these nonverbal type of interventions.

Haley Radke: That is fascinating. That is wild.

Dr. Julie Lopez: It's wild.

Haley Radke: And just say the next thing, like having these things brought up and being able to your body to reintegrate. How do I say this? You're not like learning the lesson in a verbal way. It's encoding in your body, right?

Dr. Julie Lopez: It's encoded in your body. So for this person, A, she didn't know what happened to her as a child.

So she always felt just doomed I don't even understand. She felt powerless, [00:41:00] helpless, don't understand why these things are happening in my life. Didn't realize what she was contributing to it. That's number one. Number two, she was used to dismissing her body, even within our session, which was, a half day long.

She was dismissing messages that her body was giving her. And that was a memory. Sometimes it's physical. Sometimes it's a contraction. And we have all kinds of tools to interpret and rework the messaging. And that was important because it's not me telling her what to do or it's not like I'm even, I'm important, but I'm not important because I'm going to tell you what to do.

I'm important because I'm facilitating you figuring out what to do with yourself and your body wants that anyway. And so for her, it made all the difference because she'd had this light bulb and she could actually see her daughter better. And we did a whole bunch of other stuff.

Don't even think that was the whole thing. But what happened was the outcome was it was so much easier for her to make a behavioral change. [00:42:00] That's the problem with self help books. They're all appealing to your frontal lobe of your brain, an intellectual idea, and it might be helpful to learn and grow, but it's not going to change all the forces within your body that can make it feel a world away, like a person who's anorexic, right?

But you can't just tell them or show them the stats that. You're actually underweight if what they really feel is in danger, right? The statistics aren't going to have them be like, oh, I should eat my next meal. It doesn't work that way. And this cuts through all of that resistance, which is incredible.

And there's different ways to do it. That's a very, intensives work in tandem with someone who's doing coaching or doing therapeutic work with someone else. My intensives, I actually require that so that people can do the behavioral changes afterwards, but there are a lot of other different ways to facilitate breakthroughs and transformations.

And [00:43:00] we have them already, don't we? We have them all the time in our adoptee groups and in these awesome conferences and retreats where really profound things happening and I would argue if you're looking in hindsight, a lot of those most profound experiences happen when there's an intervention beyond words.

It's a relationship, it's something it's something you feel. It's an experience that you have.

Haley Radke: Yes, I love that. Thank you so much. Okay, as we wrap up, is there anything else you want to say to adoptees in particular who may be like, oh my gosh, that sounds really amazing. What's my next step? We talked about getting connected into groups and those kinds of things, finding a practitioner. What are your last thoughts that you want to leave us with?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Information is power. The more that you know, the more that you see, the more that you have guides and mentors, [00:44:00] coaches, therapists, whatever it may be an accountability partner programs that can support you. That's feel good to you where you feel like you're really seen and your strengths are maximized.

I am all about it. And I would say down with labels. One, one fun fact is that our Viva View podcast is very new, but we're going to change the name of it in January. We only do recordings once a month. What are you up to, Haley? Do you do them all the time?

Haley Radke: As I've just been on a break because I've been ill, I'm actually every other week right now because I'm working on a second show. So yeah.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Amazing. Yeah. So we're once a month, but we're going to change the title to You Make Sense. Because our really big thing is about all the riches of the human system and how you can learn to read them and adapt to them. And we just want to empower everyone about all the great data that you already have in what I like to call your inner sage.

And we all have one. So that's [00:45:00] the main thing is just the big message is you're awesome and you can do it. And there's a lot of support and resources out there and keep listening to Haley because she's amazing.

Haley Radke: Okay, so we're going to link to your podcast and whatever it's named when people are listening to this.

And folks should also check out your book Live Empowered because you talk a little more in depth about some of these things that we've talked about today about understanding implicit memory more and you have exercises in there and

Dr. Julie Lopez: I totally do.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Oh, you know what? I had something new come out. I have a journal. It's called Each New Hour and it actually is like a little guide that guides people through my five step transformation methodology. So that's out there too.

Haley Radke: Oh, cool. Another tool. Amazing.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Another tool. Very low cost. tool.

Haley Radke: Where can we find all your things, Dr. Julie, and follow you to find out more about your [00:46:00] intensives and your books and all the good stuff?

Dr. Julie Lopez: I think the easiest place is drjulielopez. com. It links to all my things, including our mental health organization. We've got a few online groups that can be supportive to people and free resources. The Resilient Brain Project is all free and that links from there. It's a whole mental health repository.

So talk about empowering. There's a whole bunch of stuff on there to learn more about your amazing human system and actual tools and apps and things that can support your journeys all free. So those are the things I like to start with.

Haley Radke: Yes Thank you so much. I love talking with you.

Dr. Julie Lopez: I love talking to you too, and I hope you keep feeling better and I'm excited to hear about your next show, too.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

Okay. We super hyped up Dr. Julie's intensives and we did it to such a degree that I think I'm going to [00:47:00] do one. And I'm going to be super candid, psychedelic assisted therapy. I know it's helped many people in our community. It has always made me really nervous. Like I'm a very straight laced person.

I don't know if it'll surprise you that I've never taken any kind of drugs of any kind besides, a glass of wine. So I'm really excited about doing some like deep work with no substances involved. And when we were talking about it in our conversation today, and we were talking about EMDR and stuff like, I was like, oh my gosh, I have done a lot of those things.

I'm like experienced in some of those things, but I've never done like a really a long period of some inner work. So I'm really excited about it. And I promised to report back in future months what this looks like. Keep your eye on this space ears on this space [00:48:00] and we will talk a little bit more about it in the future.

Okay. Thank you so much for listening and valuing adoptee voices and let's talk again soon.

292 Shelby Redfield Kilgore

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/292

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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. oh my gosh, Haley, where have you been? It's been so long since you published an episode. You listen, I had double pneumonia. You guys, I'm so sorry. I was sick for two whole months and I was thinking to myself, I think this is.

I think it's the first, maybe second time ever that I missed a podcast drop date in eight years. So I'm trying really hard to give myself a pass. And I think it's been a while, but I think last time it was like, oh, I didn't hit publish. And [00:01:00] so it was up, Friday midday instead of Friday morning or something.

So that's a little different than ghosting you for six weeks or whatever it's been since I published it. I think it's been like two months. My apologies. We're back. We have all new shows ready for you. I want to thank you for all of you who sent your well wishes my way. I appreciate it so very much.

And we have brand new shows coming in every other week starting today. And it's so exciting to start back in with today's guest, Shelby Redfield Kilgore is a Korean adoptee and filmmaker. I'm going to call her a YouTuber since you can watch her documentaries and videos alongside 800, 000 other folks who've already had the pleasure on YouTube, we talk about Shelby's passion for sharing adoptee stories and how that has shifted in tone over the years.

And we also talk about her health struggles [00:02:00] and the impacts those have had on her reunions. And a recent motherhood. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community over on adoptee on.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

And 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 Shelby Redfield Kilgore. Welcome Shelby.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being a guest on your amazing podcast.

Haley Radke: Aw, thank you. I'd love it if you would start the way we usually do. Would you feel comfortable sharing a little bit of your story with us?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Sure. I am a Korean adoptee. I was adopted in 1983 when I was about [00:03:00] 11 months old to a white adoptive couple. And I was raised in a loving family. Where they allowed me the space to talk about my conflicting emotions about adoption in the sense of missing and grieving the loss of my first mother and talking about, just feeling like there was a hole in my heart, that there was something missing.

And so that was, I was fortunate to have that. And I also have another connection to adoption because my adoptive mother, and I'm okay to share this because of her she shared her story with me on my YouTube channel about being a birth mother. She was sixteen when she had to relinquish her child for adoption.

And they were reunited 47 years later. So I've known about that since I was 11 years old. So we've had a very close relationship in that sense, [00:04:00] because I just remember her telling me that I wanted to be the adoptive mother that I hope my son had. And when I was 17, I was able to meet my first mother in Korea with my adoptive parents, and that sort of, at the time, felt like closure to me, because I thought that's all I ever wanted, but what really happened was I started to have more questions and I started to process my adoption in a different way.

And so I it was a difficult process for me really, because I also struggled with identity issues as a Korean adoptee living in a very predominantly white community, which I hadn't really addressed as a kid, which is hard to when you certainly don't have this space at home to talk about that, because it's not that they probably wouldn't have been comfortable talking about it.

I just never brought it up and they never thought to bring it up. So [00:05:00] when I was in my late twenties is when I decided, because I am a producer in documentary work, I decided that I wanted to launch my own channel and share other adoptee stories, adoption stories too. And that's when I really started really realizing that I was in somewhat of adoptee fog, that term, and that I was experiencing a disruption.

But each time I was talking to a new adoptee and their experiences about reconnecting with other biological family members. So not just their mom. And I was like, oh, cause I knew from my adoption paperwork and meeting at least the maternal side of my biological family, that I had these half siblings, two half brothers.

So I started wondering about other family members. And that's where my adoption, [00:06:00] my personal feelings and evolution started really taking flight was when I started the channel. So that's my story.

Haley Radke: Okay, so I've been doing this podcast for a little over eight years. You've been telling adoptee stories for over a decade.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Yes, over a decade now.

Haley Radke: Okay, yeah. It's interesting how you know, community story sharing and things really shifts our opinions over time when you look back at your work from the early years. Can you do that now? And how has that changed for you? What do you think about having those? Early storytelling. Do you have cringe moments? You're like, ooh, I don't think that anymore. Do you have anything like that?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Yes, when I am looking back at my earlier [00:07:00] videos I came with a lens of I know there's trauma and severe grief in adoption because of the separation of mother and baby. I grew up with that my whole life and processing that, but that was only one dimension of my adoption grief and trauma and but I thought I have these loving parents. I have a great relationship with them and so there is something good that came out of that. So is this idea of making something good come out of something bad and I wanted to share that with other adoptees and adoptive parents, and I think it was challenging for me because I was joining all these adoptee spaces on Facebook at the time, and so I wasn't necessarily ready to hear everything that they were saying about adoption through the lens that [00:08:00] it's an industry.

It's a billion dollar industry and children are looked at as like commodifying children basically. So it's very hard to look at it in that sense. And looking back on it now, there's some adoption stories that I was thinking do I need to take some of these down because some adoptees I interviewed were children and I know that as a child you progress and you change your views on adoption from your own personal experiences, especially big life events that may trigger your adoption.

And, but I, I remember reading this one adoptee that I follow on social media, and I love everything she says the Diary of a not so Angry Adoptee, which I know that you interviewed on your podcast and I listened to that. She said, she wa s considering or thinking of, should I remove some of my posts from when I first started out blogging, but it's the evolution of her journey as [00:09:00] well.

And so my sharing these stories, like keeping them there in the beginning, like from the beginning is I think so important because that's also the evolution of my adoption story and how I started seeing things differently. And I still will always be grateful because in the beginning, it was adoptive parents and adoption lawyers that wanted to tell me their story.

And it was adoptees that saw that. And then they came forward and they said I want to tell my story because adoptees should be centered in this narrative of adoption. And I was grateful that the videos that I did have, they're very varied perspectives on adoption, that it allowed, for other adoptees to come forward to tell me their story.

And that's how it started. It all started from people watching my videos and then reaching out to me on social media to ask if they could be a part of it and [00:10:00] I, it just, it's been an incredible experience and I feel so honored to be able to share these stories and I try very hard as a filmmaker to let them tell their story whatever stage they are, because I'll still find adoptees that see their adoption probably the way that I did a decade ago, and there was one time when I remember I struggled and I was really trying to, and I apologized about doing that. It was, what is the term you would call it, but being almost forceful, like a way about, are you sure you think that way? And I'm like, oh no, I'm stepping out of my non judgmental seat basically, or.

Haley Radke: Yeah. As a I just was talking to a qualitative researcher and she's talking about how she's interviewing adoptees and you have to be neutral, right? And you can't give your side or add in bias, especially when you're doing [00:11:00] research for academic work. So you have that stance as a filmmaker.

You don't want to insert yourself into the story. Yeah, I totally get that. I'm so biased, Shelby, I know that comes across. No, I appreciate that. I love having documents that can show our progression. I know if people go back and cringe, listen to the first season of my show. And you can hear me in real time unpacking so many things with the people that I'm interviewing.

So I so relate to you on that. Can we go back to childhood? I know you've shared before that you. grew up as a person of color in a very white community and you were experiencing racism, schoolyard situations, those kinds of things. And it's interesting to me that growing up with a mother who [00:12:00] is also mother of loss as a birth mother and I'm sorry that your adoptive mom experienced secondary infertility.

That's really common for a lot of birth moms. I don't know if our listeners knew that, but super common. Anyway, so she was able to give openness and language about talking about adoption, but not to the potential for you to be experiencing racism. Are you comfortable sharing a little bit more about that?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Of course. So what happened was, as I was a young adult, like in my 20s, I started talking about it with them, and then I started writing about it when I started filming other adoptees. And I had forgotten that they really didn't know that I hadn't told them when I was a child. Because I never had the tools when kids in elementary school would call me flat face.

Or they would pull their face back so that [00:13:00] their eyes would be more slanted. I just shut down. I didn't have the language to respond. And that's, sometimes even as an adult, when something like that might happen I will just shut down and internalize it. And as a child in elementary school, when kids were like that, I wanted so much to disappear and I did not want to be Asian.

So there's a lot of almost self hatred in a way of not wanting to look like you do. Seeing yourself in the mirror and feeling like this is not how I feel and also I remember, I think I was in high school, a friend of mine at the time called me Twinkie and I'm like I'm like, what? And she said, you're yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

And I, again, just, I shut down and internalized it. But I, I remember [00:14:00] very strongly feeling incredibly upset by that, especially like a friend. And it's really because I don't know how even to this day, how to tell someone, but I am Korean American. I may not have been raised with the values and cultures of Korean American, but what does that mean?

Would it be over in Korea? Cause that's quite different than Korean Americans. And I'll still have people say, oh, I consider you my white friend, but I am not, I, I still, it's very frustrating. And it's I don't even want to get into it because I also recently read the book by Angela Tucker, You Should Be Grateful, where she uses the word exulansis.

So it's basically a term where it's impossible for you to describe your experience for someone who hasn't experienced that, which would be adoption, [00:15:00] for them to understand. It's almost what's the point? But basically I do wish my parents had the education to at least start the conversation or let me know that this may be something I would face.

I also felt it in the church we grew up in. I grew up in. I was raised in an Episcopalian church and was very white. And I remember bringing that to my reverend. And I was doing this school report. In high school, I remember that because we were talking about racism and segregation and how to end self segregation and all that.

And I'm like why don't we just make these churches require for, a certain amount of people of color to attend? Because I didn't understand why there was a church right across the street that was an all black church. And then this is an all white church minus [00:16:00] myself and my adopted brother from Korea too. That we aren't biologically related. And I remember talking to him that, and then the next weekend, there was a social gathering between our churches. And then after a few times it stopped and I found out why. Because people in my church complained. And I'm like, besides having my own issues with faith at the time, because of being an adoptee, I was like, I think I'm just, I think I'm done.

That's how I felt, at least with that church, that was my experience. It very much stuck with me that why are churches like this? They're supposed to be loving and accepting of all people, yet here we have pretty blatant racism.

Haley Radke: Blatant, overt racism.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Not just subtle.

Haley Radke: No. oh my word. Okay. Thank you for sharing [00:17:00] that. I'm sure a lot of our listeners will relate to those experiences. You know what's making me so frustrated, Shelby, is that I'm like how much has changed since then? Not that much. You know what I mean?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Nope.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. Okay, so let's go to meeting your birth mother, which was like not gonna happen and then it happened and she had kept you a secret from her new husband and family. Can you share a little bit about that? That's another thing a lot of people can relate to for sure. Because when we're a secret, it's very hard to maintain a relationship.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Yes. I was 17 at the time when we were getting ready to go on a trip to Korea, South Korea, with [00:18:00] a group of adoptive families. And my parents took us to family therapy so we could all prepare.

And I was just focused on, whether or not I was going to get to meet my birth mother because they said that they had found her and they had asked her for a meeting and she said no. And I was so devastated. It felt like a second rejection for me because that's all I had ever wanted since I was five and understood what adoption meant.

And they also gave me this piece of information with more information about my biological family. That they had withheld for 17 years. So then I had this intense feeling of anger. Like why would you withhold this information? I have a right to this information. What I, it's. I didn't understand, especially as a child, why they would do that.

And I found out, I had several half siblings on my birth father's [00:19:00] side, and then two brothers on my mother's side. And, the kind of their story, I had both of their names, their ages. It's not like they were teenagers, they were in their mid to late twenties. And, just, this information, just one and a half pages of information.

And I felt like I, I learned so much in so little time that had, that my parents didn't know about. And anyway, so we went on the trip and I asked them to ask her again, just to tell her that we were there because I was, I, I was enjoying the trip, meeting other adoptees my age and sightseeing and, but it was an emotional rollercoaster.

They would make you cry and you would go to an orphanage or it was called Esther's Home at the time, but there was also an orphanage [00:20:00] attached to it. But you would speak with these birth mothers who were deciding to relinquish their baby the day that they're born and they're asking us do you have a better life?

Because this is the messaging that everyone is telling everyone. The adoptive parents, the birth mothers.

Haley Radke: You're part of the propaganda machine.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: I know and I know that I just, I couldn't say anything, at the time, yes, I love my parents and I I was for the most part very happy but you're telling me this while you're making this decision, but you're not a teenager and I don't think that you're you know you're single and you just I was trying to understand the culture because it was like a culture shock for me learning that the single unwed mothers in Korea are just ostracized by society even to this day to relinquish their child for adoption.

To find out that I would have grown up not being considered a citizen [00:21:00] because I was, my, my mother was unwed at the time that she had me, I don't know, it was just a lot of information to take in at 17 and I of course felt torn about seeing these children that would age out of the orphanage because their parents left them there since they couldn't afford to take care of them, but they wouldn't sign their rights away.

So that was also hard to see. Is it better for them to grow up in their country of origin in an orphanage, or to be sent to a loving home? I don't know.

Haley Radke: Or to be given the resources to

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Exactly.

Haley Radke: support their own children in their own home.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: I know. I know. But my birth mother relented in meeting me. She met me in secret and brought her sister along for support. And so I got to meet my aunt and she told me, I remember in the beginning, that I'm not going to cry. I'm going to stay strong. And I'm like, oh this is totally different because I am very emotional and I cry all the time. So she came across as very cold in the [00:22:00] beginning.

I remember asking her if she loved me, if she thought about me, and she said all of those things, that she thought of me every day.

I think I'm very emotional now because I am a new mother. So it's hard to imagine ever being parted from my son. And I asked her, did you struggle with the decision? She said she said no, that she always knew she was going to relinquish me for adoption, but she wanted to keep me for two months because she wanted to breastfeed me, which that's something cancer took away from me.

So as a breast cancer survivor, I had to have the bilateral mastectomy. But, so that was, I didn't really think about that until after the meeting because I had wanted to hear her say that she [00:23:00] was, I thought it was that she tried to keep me for two months and then decided it was too difficult and then to place me, but the plan was always to place me, at least in her mind.

And at the end, when we said goodbye. She cried. I think always goodbyes are very hard for me, even whenever I see it in, movies or TV series. That always gets me, for sure. But it's funny, I felt like my aunt was very warm. It's funny to me looking back why I didn't. My mom said that she did ask, about family health history at the time, but she didn't really give anything. She just said, oh, we're healthy. And that she just said my birth father had a good heart, so she didn't really talk about his health or anything or what she knew, but we didn't stay in contact [00:24:00] afterwards because I would have had to write a letter to the agency, then they would have to translate it, then it would have to be sent to my aunt who would give it or tell her the contents in secret since my birth mother had remarried and kept me a secret.

And she still keeps me a secret to this day because I have done two family birth searches. I did another one when I was filming an adoptee, a Korean adoptee, going back to Korea to find out more information about her biological family. And so I tried to do a second family birth search to find not just my birth mother or reconnect with her, but also my birth father and his side of the family, but it resulted in nothing.

I was at Eastern Social Child Welfare Society, they wouldn't let my husband, who was at the time my fiancé or Kathy, come in, the adoptee I was filming. [00:25:00] I had to be alone, and they wouldn't let me record it. And she said we feel that we were able to give the telegram to who we believe is your half sister at your father's house.

And I remember just bursting into tears because I was like, I'm in Seoul, Korea, and you're telling me, you're not going to give me the address and let me know, or, try and reach out. It felt so unfair to me, but I had to, I decided to just push it aside so I could focus on Kathy's story cause I was filming her story and I'm so happy that it has so many views now on my YouTube channel because her story is so important and I, it's, I feel like it's, it could have been a story also in the recent documentary on PBS, Frontline, the South Korea's Adoption Reckoning, because of her information being falsified.[00:26:00]

I did want to go into my third family birth search was after I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer right after the pandemic hit, I felt the lump and it felt like it came out of nowhere. And then it was just a whirlwind of tests, scans, and doctor's appointments. And because it was breast cancer, and it's so funny, an adoptee that I have interviewed and worked with on other projects, she asked me, what did your 23andMe say?

And I was like, that I didn't have BRCA1 or BRCA2. But I didn't realize that it only tested for a couple strands. And I did go through genetic testing after I found out about the cancer, and I did find out I'm BRCA2 positive. That's what prompted me to initiate the third family birth search.

And I got a letter from my [00:27:00] oncologist that I sent to NCRC, the National Center for the Rights of the Child. And because of the family health issue, they could be more aggressive in their search and in contacting them, and they reached both of them. My mother was very upset about being contacted again.

She said, please don't ever contact me again, because I'm still a secret. Which is still very painful for me. And she said that she doesn't know of any cancer in her family. And then the same with my birth father. And he actually wanted to get a DNA test, which at the time I was still going through breast cancer treatment, very aggressive, chemo, the surgeries, everything, radiation.

And I said, no, because I had already done three DNA testing. In the US. 23andMe, Ancestry DNA, and My Heritage. So I didn't want to have to pay for another test that they have [00:28:00] done in Korea. So I just let that chapter close for now. And then, I was feeling terrible headaches when, after all the treatment and surgeries and I was on the medication to help the cancer from returning.

And so they wanted to make sure the cancer hadn't returned or spread. And so I got a brain MRI and they cut a mengenoma, which is a benign brain tumor. Thank goodness it's benign, but because of the location in my brain, it's very close to a nerve. So it has no room to grow. Or else it'll cause very severe damage.

And I decided to do this Gamma Knife procedure, which is targeted radiation. To hopefully make the brain tumor inactive, or to kill it, which we think, it did, but I still have to have brain MRIs once or twice a year for the rest of my life, besides all of the other things for my health. And so that made me, once again, [00:29:00] I reach out to my family to let them know about this if maybe this has happened in their family or to let their children know this is a possibility that could happen to them. And I decided to do the DNA test with my birth father to prove that I was his biological daughter and so that he could maybe be more open about family health history.

And fortunately, they sent me the test. So it didn't cost me anything, but it did cost me shipping. And to ship to Korea is like $70. So it was still a decent amount of money. And so that made me very upset. But I got the results the night before I had the Gamma Knife procedure. And it was a match. And I got this phone call from someone in Korea and the person was talking Korean and I knew in my heart it was my birth father.

And I felt this immediate sense of guilt because I [00:30:00] had not learned the language. And that is just another loss I've had to come to terms with that I lost the language of my country of origin. And it made me think of my parents. They had a Korean babysitter for me up until I was about four. And my mom would say that I understood her.

Like simple things like go put your clothes in the drawer or those kinds of things, and then something happened that was dangerous with my babysitter's partner. He was very violent and he, the house. And so that's when they had to let her go. But there was also another incident where she left pills out and I got a hold of them and I swallowed them and I had to go to the hospital for my stomach to be pumped when I was a toddler.

So there, so after that second incident with her violent partner, they had to let her go. So that was very unfortunate. But the [00:31:00] knowledge that up until I was four, I still had someone speaking Korean to me, and that I understood that. I wish I had been able to keep that, that going, because I never, I remember in college, I, the college, didn't offer Korean, but they did offer Mandarin.

So I was like, oh I want to try and learn an Asian language, but it was so hard. And I'm like this is not natural to me at all. And I actually had to drop that class because it was the first time I was feeling something. But back to my birth father, he was talking in Korean to me, and I told him, I'm so sorry, I never learned the language.

And the next thing I do is I check my email, and the NCRC told me that he wants to communicate with me via an app called KakaoTalk. And then Papago is like a translator. And so we started talking that way, which has been a little bit challenging. But he told me his side of the [00:32:00] story. And that's where the stories don't match between my birth mother and my birth father.

He told me that he was injured and in the hospital. And that before he was in the hospital and estranged from my birth mother. They were in a disagreement about what to do with me. And by the time he got out of the hospital, I had been sent away already. He didn't know where I was. Learning that information, it was still something I'm processing and it's been a couple years. But I could have lived a different life.

Haley Radke: It makes it real, right? The other imagined life, it makes it more real, like a real possibility.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: And I learned from him, this is where I think I get my compassion from, is that he has, besides several half siblings of mine, like children, so half siblings of mine, two that live at home that are adults, one with [00:33:00] special needs, and so learning disabilities, so he's not able to live on his own, and then a daughter who had an injury when she was a child that the treatment was incorrect and they weren't able to have the finances to have it redone. So she was handicapped. I don't know the specifics, but so she has to live at home with him. And that makes me feel like he must be very compassionate to be taking care of his two adult children, that are special needs.

He has told me that he loves me, which is, means so much to me and that he accepts me and everyone knows about me. So completely opposite of how my birth mother is. I wish I knew the circumstances that if what is the fear of her telling her husband, would he leave her? Is she in, I don't know.

There's so [00:34:00] many, there's so many things that go around in my head for me to try and understand why to me, her silence, her inability to have a connection with me, it seems very cruel. That's how I feel. But I know that my birth father really wants to meet me in person, and it was really strange. There was a lady trying to call me, and she texted and left a message, and I'm like, I don't know who this is, but it was a Korean American lady who said that her husband was over in Korea, and met my father, and told my father told him this story, and so they want to try and help facilitate us meeting.

So I, I don't know when that will happen, but I hope maybe in a couple years. I just wasn't, I just haven't been ready because I don't know who he really is. To me right now, he seems like a wonderful person and compassionate, but I guess I'm just not quite ready to meet him in [00:35:00] person because we do have that language barrier and their stories don't match.

And I know that there are so many lies sometimes surrounding adoption. And also there's shame for the parents relinquishing for having to make that decision. And so maybe there's some truth in what they're both saying. I don't know. Or maybe I'll never know.

Haley Radke: I want to go back to that you're a new mother and you got super emotional when you were talking about your mother keeping you for two months in order to breastfeed and connect with you.

And this is just like totally an aside, shall we? And I don't know if it's welcome or not, but I know how much you wanted to be a mom and it was. You shared some of that journey publicly and challenging, of course, with health issues and stuff, but our [00:36:00] connection with our babies, you're giving your child nourishment, he is with you physically, you're getting the skin to skin and the connection you're building all the connections.

And I know you're missing that piece, but you're still giving him all of those. Yeah. I'm so sorry you're missing out on this extra experience that maybe you had hoped for, but he's still getting everything that he needs from you, in my opinion.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Are you comfortable talking a little bit about becoming a mom? We're the same age. I was thinking today, oh my goodness. If I had a baby right now, how would that be? I'm already tired. I gotta just tell you, I have two boys. They're 10 and 12. And I remember when I gave birth to my first son, literally one of my first thoughts was, how could anybody? Yeah, okay. [00:37:00] So can you talk a little bit about that and what, what's that done for your adoptee lens that you see things through?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Oh, that is, that's a very good question. I can start with when I was pregnant, I knew it would be emotional for me. And I knew that at six months, if I was feeling in distress or emotional so would baby in utero.

And so I wanted to work with my therapist as much as I could about grieving the loss of not being able to breastfeed him because of the cancer taking that away with surgeries. And I wanted to really also process being pregnant and being in the total opposite environment of what I know my birth mother was.

That I so desperately wanted this child and and I have a loving husband who so wants this child too. And, having that [00:38:00] support and I was thinking about her a lot and what she was going through. And also my adoptive mother, when she was just a kid at the time. And the desperation that they both must have felt.

So it was very, it made me think why aren't there more resources for mothers? If they feel they have no choice but to relinquish their baby for adoption. But there is still a desire. My mother, my adoptive mother I know, wanted to parent her baby. I know that for my mother, my adoptive mother, like for her trauma, she couldn't go to baby showers when she was younger.

A lot of times for my big events, her trauma would be triggered. I've always been sensitive to that, but at the same time, it's still hard for me that I would try and put her feelings before mine when it was something about my experience, if that makes sense. [00:39:00] And, by the time I was six months, And it was funny.

When I would watch movies or things that I would normally cry at or during for certain parts, I wouldn't. So I'm like, oh, I think my baby is very chill and he's making me more chill. Which I was, this is great.

Haley Radke: That's nice. I don't think I was chill when I was pregnant.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Really?

Haley Radke: I was busy puking.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Oh no. oh no. The shock for my husband and I was that Rowan came four weeks early. We were going to just a regular gyno appointment and they're like, oh, your amniotic fluid is low and you need to go to the hospital and be induced. And we're like, what? No, thank you. That would be. That was, I remember bursting into tears and he's like, why are you crying?

I'm like, we're not ready. I'm not ready. I was reading books up to the stage of the month that I was at in my pregnancy. So it was like, [00:40:00] I'm like reading a little bit about what labor was like, but not really. And I'm like, but I haven't studied enough. But we get to the hospital and it's, I'm not going to go into details about being induced and how long the the labor was, but when he was born and you could hear him crying and then after they dress him, they first put him on my stomach, but I was so like, out of it. I couldn't really be in the present when that happened because it was so quick too. And because they did take him away to clean him up and dress him.

But, and as he's crying and then they bring him to me It was just this incredible moment where he just recognizes me and he stops crying and looks at me. I just felt this incredible, huge emotion of just pure love. A love like we all say, [00:41:00] we've never known before. But it was just overwhelmingly, powerful and beautiful and I'm so I was so happy that I didn't have to have an emergency c section because I was preparing myself actually for a c section more than actual labor because in the groups that I'm in on Facebook support groups for breast cancer survivors most of the women that I saw had to have emergency C sections.

That went through my same journey of IVF before chemo. And then once it was safe to pause medications to help the cancer from returning. But then also when Rowan was handed to Travis, my husband, that was a beautiful moment of him recognizing his voice. I just, it was just, ah. I feel so grateful that I got to experience that.

I know some people don't. And then I knew just reading [00:42:00] adoptee memoirs and speaking with other adoptees that, the age that your baby is when you were relinquished will always be a difficult time for you. And so when Rowan was two months, cause that's when because that's when I was removed from my mom's or, I was relinquished and put into foster care.

I also had very loving foster care family and that I met my foster care mother in Korea too, when I was 17 and she had so much love for me. And she brought a picture of me in this bathtub, a wooden bathtub outside with my hair and a ponytail sticking straight up. It was so cute. And I remember thinking later after the trip, what, why couldn't I have stayed with that family?

They loved me, her husband and her child. It just took me a while to understand the culture about how children out of wedlock were just also ostracized besides multiracial [00:43:00] children and everything, but at two months it was definitely more emotional for me, but I knew it was coming and so I had prepared as much as I could with my therapist and I, Rowan now is eight months. No, he just turned nine months old. So I know at 11 months old, it's going to be another emotional time for me because that's when I left my foster family. And started a new life. But, I do my best to keep that separate because I know when you feel anxious, so does your baby. He just feels how you feel. So for the most part around him I'm very zen, or try to be.

Haley Radke: I think though, so you've mentioned, and I see it too, that you're, a compassionate, empathetic person, and I really think when we model, in front of our children, like [00:44:00] showing our feelings like that's what creates also kids that are in touch with their feelings and adults who are free to express their feelings, right?

You're just being a good example. Yeah, I see all kinds of conversations in your future with your son about what it's like to be an adoptee and what your experience was like and he doesn't have to experience that and you can give him his history and yeah, building the new legacy. Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. It's big stuff big feeling stuff and I can also tell that you've been working with therapists that you've processed a lot of these things and it's easier to talk about probably.

I really want to recommend that folks check out your channel. You have so many videos, documentaries, docu series, where you, we mentioned before that you document adoptee stories, adoptive [00:45:00] family stories. Do you know you have over 814, 000 views on your channel on the day we're recording?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: I did not know that. I didn't look at that. Usually I just look at, oh which video has the most views right now? So I'm just really glad it's my adoption documentaries from 2015. But those were a long time ago.

Haley Radke: That's a big number, Shelby. One of the things we didn't get to talk about, but I wrote down a bunch of words because I wonder what you feel about them now, but these are some of the titles for either a series or videos. You have kindred, placed, surrendered, kismet, beyond biological, adoptee lens. You're making a face. God, I wish people could see your face. That's the beauty of video and the beauty of audio. There you go.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: I, that's why I'm like, I. Yeah, I wanted to explain some of my names that I've come up with. Placed was because [00:46:00] I heard this term in an adoptive parent support, where I came to speak at as an adoptee about my experiences.

And they were using this term I placed my child, that's the language we use instead of giving up my child or relinquishing. And I remember it not sitting well with me at all. It's because it's, you're taking all of the emotion out of this word where a child is being transferred from their parent to another, to a stranger essentially.

And this is a time in my life where I still struggle with people pleasing, which I've now learned is a trauma response called fawning. And so I use that because I wanted to make this a space, a safe space for people to share from all different aspects of adoption. And the reason why I did that was because of my adoptive mother, who is also a birth mother.

And I [00:47:00] am so sorry for using that term. It just, that's what I grew up saying. And I know that's offensive, but I'm only using it in the context of how I know these women are referring to themselves, that they use that word. So just because I've actually spoken with Karen Wilson, who coined the term, the baby scoop era, and she, I read her book and I've spoken with her a lot.

And she got me the interviews for my Surrendered Series, which is mothers of loss. But yeah, so that's where placed came from. And then. It's so funny, I remember thinking of the name for my next one. oh, and Kismet was this idea that adoption is meant to be. So I was still in the belief that things are happen for a reason and it's meant to be so that's where kismet came from and then for the Kindred what I was also thinking of calling it was tethered. And I used that word and everyone was saying no Shelby don't use that I'm like, [00:48:00] okay, I guess I'll do kindred

Haley Radke: I feel like I'm taking you trip down memory lane. Maybe you didn't want to go down.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: And then, okay, I know Beyond Biological may throw people off about what that series is, but I really, that is my really, that's a heart piece of mine. I interviewed all different sides of adoption, a trauma therapist, so in episode two, I really do hope a lot of people watch that, that are considering adoption, because it really does go into all the different faces of adoption, open adoption, international foster care adoption, there's it just has everything, but Beyond Biological comes from my name, or not my name, part of it, and, but from the Korean documentary called Yoonmei, Beyond Korea.

Because Yoonmei is my, the name my Korean mother gave me, and it means shining truth, [00:49:00] and that's the story of my life. I want to tell my truth, and I want to help other people tell their truths. In whatever stage of the journey that they're on, because it is so freeing and not only is it helpful to you, but someone who might need to hear what you have to say to connect or to realize that's what I've been trying to articulate for years that I haven't been able to.

Thank you for giving me that language to finally say that and understand it in myself. And Yoonmei Beyond Korea means your life beyond where you came from. And so it doesn't mean that, that biological roots don't matter. It means just what happens to you after you're adopted. And so that's what Beyond Biological means.

It means what happens after you were put into another home. So that's actually, I really [00:50:00] put a lot of thought into that one. And I know that may think people, or turn people against that. Because of the name, but that's where it comes from. And then Happy Girl is also one of my documentaries, but it's not what you think it is. If you watch it, it is, it'll take you down a very emotional journey, for sure.

Haley Radke: You also do the adoption education series where you touch on different things, which is super helpful. Like I, you have so many different things and of course people can tell, I'm sure, as an interviewer. The questions and the things that you draw out of your subjects, I relate to that. I guess we have similar jobs hey.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Oh, yes, definitely.

Haley Radke: Mine just has a lot less cameras. And so I know folks will learn a lot from you by checking out many of your videos. So we'll make sure to link to your channel in the show notes. And people, also if you Google Shelby's name, it'll pop up for you. [00:51:00] But what did you want to recommend to us today?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Oh, that was really tough for me to narrow it down because there's so many books and podcasts and I would love to recommend adoptee advocates, but I'm going to narrow it down to Adoption Unfiltered Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies.

I chose that one because I think it's the perfect book for anyone who's considering adoption or considering relinquishing their child to adoption, but also adoptees who are just beginning to look at adoption critically. I really think it's a great book that goes into that from all three perspectives from the triad, because they're all out of the fog, if that's the term you want to use, or disruption adoptee consciousness model.

Haley Radke: You're coming into consciousness. Yes.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: And that is a term from, I don't want to say her name wrong, JaeRan Kim.

Haley Radke: JaeRan Kim. [00:52:00] Yes. Yep. And Dr. Susan Bronco, there's several adoptees that worked on that model. We'll link to it in the show notes to make sure there's credit to all the authors of that model. It's super helpful, especially for folks who are new to that. And we have an episode with one of the authors and we talk all through the model, which is so cool. The other thing I just wanted to mention before we let people know where they can connect with you is that you also helped write a book with filled with adoptee stories Rooted in Adoption and so we'll make sure to link to that too.

Like I love that we're fellow adoptee advocates sharing adoptee stories I think we have a lot of things in common that you might not know we have. Yes, we have many things in common.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: We do, and I love it.

Haley Radke: Yes. My birth mother also did not want to stay in reunion with me. My birth mother also wanted to keep me a secret. We can relate to all kinds of things. [00:53:00] Anyway, it's been a delight to hear your story, and thank you for sharing it. Where can folks find your work and catch up with you online.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: You can just Google my name, Shelby Redfield Kilgore, and my YouTube channel will pop right up. And then I have a Facebook group or community group called Adoption Awareness.

And you can find me on Instagram @yoonmeichae. And I have a website called WeAreMirrorLight. com.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you so much, Shelby. Such an honor to talk with you.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Thank you again for having me on your podcast. I am so grateful and thank you for all the work that you do. I feel like there are times when I have to take breaks from my own filming of adoption stories because of it's just a lot of emotions go into it. And so sometimes I have to take breaks. And so I always feel okay doing that because there are always other adoptees out [00:54:00] there doing this work. And it's so vital. And thank you. Thank you for all you do as well.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

Okay. I just want to reiterate my thanks for those of you who send such kind messages and healing thoughts, and all of those things. As someone who must be reliable, slash perfect, lol, how are we all perfect? It's I know it's impossible. Being so incapacitated was so hard for me, hard for anybody. I get it.

I sent, I think, two different episodes to my editor where I was like, oh, hey, can you cut out these 45 coughing fits from an hour long conversation? Also, thank you to my [00:55:00] editor and it has been so nice to be feeling better. And I feel, frankly, I feel totally back to normal now. My energy took a long time to come back as well.

I feel totally back to normal and just so excited to be working. The other thing, I don't recommend this. This is not healthy, but I kept going on all the Patreon side of things. For all my Patreon supporters, they kept hearing me every single week. Bleak health or not. You can ask them if it was worth it to listen to Haley.

It was like, sometimes I was okay. And then I edited one episode and I was like, wow, I sound like really out of it. Anyway, I don't know if it's worth going back to listen to me being out of it, but I don't know. Anyway, thank you for your support. I'm so thankful to be back recording. I know I've already said that [00:56:00] and we have a brand new healing series episode coming up.

Not this Friday, but the Friday after. And yeah, so much good stuff coming your way. Really excited to share it with you and thanks for listening. Let's talk again soon.

291 Kae Wangare Leonard

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/291

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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, we welcome Kae Wangare Leonard to the show. Kay is a writer, athlete, an artist born and adopted in Kenya by white Americans. She shares some of her story with us, including what does home mean when you've lived in multiple countries.

We discuss what it means to be an adoption abolitionist, and we have a little disagreement whether Kae's art, poetry, and prose is therapeutic or not. Just a quick trigger warning, we do mention and describe self harm during the course of our conversation. Before we get started, I want to [00:01:00] personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com./community, which helps support you and the show to support more adoptees around the world. Kae and I wrap up today with some recommended resources for you. And as always links to everything we'll talk about are on the website adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Kae Wangare Leonard. Welcome Kae.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: Such an honor. I'd love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.

Kae Wangare Leonard: I am a Kenyan American adoptee. I was born in Nairobi, Kenya. And I lived the first couple months of my life in an orphanage. And then I was adopted into a family who had already adopted one other Kenyan child from the same orphanage. So it's just me and my sister. She is six months older than me. We are not [00:02:00] biological. And she was adopted, I think six months before I was. And my family lived in Kenya until I was four.

And then we moved back to the U. S. for seven years. So I did all of my grade school there. And then when I was 11, I moved back to Kenya for middle and high school. And after I graduated high school I went out to Oregon for a year and then I bounced around the East Coast and back and forth to Kenya a little bit. And now I live in the UK. I live in Brighton.

Haley Radke: This is an unusual story. So are you comfortable sharing a little bit about like why your parents were in Kenya and why the back and forth? I'm curious.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Both of my parents are Mennonite, actually. They grew up in Lancaster ish area, Pennsylvania. Grew up Mennonite.

Went to Harrisonburg, Virginia for university at Eastern Mennonite University. And then when they're both [00:03:00] teachers, so after they graduated college, and they could not have biological children, they started looking for different opportunities to teach elsewhere. They applied to a school in remote Alaska, they applied to school in Kenya and then they decided on the school in Kenya.

The school in Kenya is a Christian American education school, and it is owned and run by the Assemblies of God, Southern Baptists, and Mennonites. They went to Kenya and during that time in 1999, in and around there, there was an orphanage that a lot of people from the community would go to, to adopt children.

So I actually know, I think around 17 children adopted from that orphanage, actually same orphanage as me. And my parents, yeah, I picked out my sister and then six months later or so, picked out me from the orphanage as they did, like in the, as their friend group and as the community did during that time. And then [00:04:00] I had very severe allergies and asthma, was in and out of the hospital a lot with asthma.

So to get me medical help, the treatments in Kenya weren't suitable, especially for pediatric care. So we moved to Virginia so I could see some specialists and I did allergy and asthma treatment for seven years. Until I was able to breathe again, basically and such. And then, once the doctors gave the okay, then my parents decided to move us back to Kenya.

So we could reconnect with our culture a little bit more. So they went back to Kenya to teach at the school that they had taught at. When they had adopted me and my sister, and then we stayed there for seven years.

Haley Radke: Okay. I think you're uniquely suited to answer one of these questions that I think a lot of people throw at adoptees, who are like if we're going to abolish adoption, then what about all these kids languishing in orphanages? [00:05:00] So I'm sure you've thought about that a lot in your lifetime, and other kids adopted out of the orphanage. Were you able to ever visit the orphanage? Was it a part of the school? Was it around when you were living there? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah, when we lived in Kenya, we would go to the orphanage at least once a year. Back, I think, in the early 2000s when I was like four or younger. I think it was a lot easier to get there, traffic wise and such but as Nairobi has kept growing, it's a little bit harder to get there, but it's still very possible. Every time I'm back in Kenya, I also go to the orphanage.

I've been back as well with some of my other friends who were adopted from the orphanage. So we've all been back together. Not all of us, but some of us have been back together at the same orphanage. And then last time I went was I went on my birthday last year in 2023. And then I think I went in April as well, [00:06:00] back to the orphanage.

And yeah it's always been a very interesting. Very interesting, I think like pretty emotional experience when I go. I also think you don't always emotionally process. I just shove it in the back of a corner of my mind usually, when I go when sometimes I take some of my friends with me we volunteer we help feed the children we help do some of the laundry that kind of work. And then last time I went I was getting a tour of the place and then I talked to one of the social workers and a couple people have been there since the orphanage opened, so some of the workers and nurses and directors actually remember me.

On my birthday, I met the person who had driven me from the hospital to the orphanage when I was younger, because I think when I was like admitted to the hospital when I was an infant, I was four pounds. And so the person who ended up taking me when I was discharged from the hospital to the orphanage [00:07:00] happened to be there that day on my birthday.

So I ended up meeting him and a couple other workers. They have a mural at the orphanage with pictures of children's faces cut out and glued onto this mural, and it's suns and moons and caterpillars, rocks, flowers, along with the names that we had in the orphanage. They did it for one or two years only.

I can recognize, I think, at least 10 names on there, generally, maybe a bit more, this wall of faces, and I can see little me and some of my other friends, and yeah, that's usually my routine when I go back.

Haley Radke: What's it like for you to think about abolishing adoption and knowing I don't want to make an assumption, what would happen to kids who might stay in the orphanage for longer if they weren't adopted?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah. I think that's a hard one. And I think that, but I also think that comes with [00:08:00] understanding maybe a little bit more of what abolishing adoption like can look like as it can be like, hundreds of different solutions. And so instead of just like in my mind when I think about the abolition of adoption, it's a lot about family preservation and supporting families and supporting communities to take care of kids and how can we actually care for our kids and also avoid displacement.

And when I was talking to people at the orphanage and talking about different Kenya adoption laws to just one of the social workers, a lot of it was asking, like, how, what's the process these days in finding biological families for these infants? Because back when I was abandoned, when I was adopted.

They did not have solid records family reunification is very hard near impossible. And so then the question becomes now so what do we do now? How can we better keep track of where children come [00:09:00] from? Where children can return to? And then what are the reasons why children are in orphanages?

So if it's a matter of supporting families or getting people out of unsafe situations so that they can parent better, or if it's a matter of like housing or job security or all of these other, different policy failures, how can we change policies? How can we stop systemically failing our families for them, like for the children who do quote unquote need to be in an orphage or be separated from their biological families for safety reasons, for health reasons, for any of these other reasons? Then it's just a matter of like, how can we keep them in community? How can we take responsibility and honor in protecting, keeping our children safe, raising our children as community members and as people that take pride in our culture and passing it down as well.[00:10:00]

Haley Radke: What's the culture like in Kenya for adoption? Is it more kinship care? What sort of I know international adoption from Kenya has been fraught and it's unusual. So I think it's because your parents lived there for a while, right? That they were able to adopt you. Is that right?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I think laws like changed in 2016, 2017, maybe something like that, where international adoptions, they started banning them a little bit more and tightening legislation around international adoption. But back then it was very common, or pretty common.

Haley Radke: Okay, so what does, what's the public sentiment regards to adoption in Kenya?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I don't want to speak too much on that as I am I'm still learning. I'm still trying to get a grasp on public sentiment on adoption in Kenya. [00:11:00] When I was back in Kenya, back in 2023, I was working on, I'm working on another book and I was asking people around and asking people who worked at the orphanage and such and I think that so many places that you go on globally, kinship care when it comes to Indigenous cultures is a common practice.

And Kenya has many indigenous folks to the land, to the area, and so kinship care and community care is definitely something that does happen, and that happens quite a bit in Kenya. And yeah, I think it's always been interesting, at least for me and my story, in interacting with people and letting them know that I'm adopted and hearing their varied responses.

Because a lot of times I'll get the, oh, you're so lucky, but then there's a whole aspect of you're, you've been removed from us. You're not us anymore. So that's been something I've been trying to navigate whenever I go back [00:12:00] and

Haley Radke: Sorry, can you say more about that? Kenyan people would say that to you? That you're, you don't belong here.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah, I get that. I get that some from people. And I think it doesn't does not help that I don't speak Swahili. I'm working on it, though. I am working on it.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Kae Wangare Leonard: But there is an aspect of displacement that comes with adoption. And even though I lived in Kenya, then being raised by my family, who is they're white Americans, they're Mennonite, and then being in the international community that I that I went to school in as well.

Yeah, it's, at least for me, there's a one step removed, if not a couple more steps removed. And when I was younger, I wasn't prepared to move back to Kenya when I was 11. I did not want to move back. I thought that the whole country had rejected and abandoned me. And I did not know what to do with those feelings, with those thoughts.

And I didn't speak Swahili. And it was like, why would I [00:13:00] go back to a country that doesn't want anything to do with me? And so it was tough when I was 11 going back, and I didn't really start making an effort to try to understand my culture a little bit more until honestly, probably until kind of high school ish, and then probably until I started getting some more friends in Kenya, but it's tough.

It's tough when you're adopted and when you receive a lot of sentiment that you're lucky to not be it was sometimes positioned as an us versus them you've been saved from this population of people and brought to this like white, American, Christian, raising and growing up in, and that's considered you've been saved, you've been lucky, you've been chosen.

And that, that, that can be tough to navigate, tough to know how to deal with those messages, tough to figure out how to still reconnect with your people [00:14:00] when you're actively being told that you're somewhat better off without your people. I might not be making linear sense. Apologies for that but yeah, it's it's confusing.

It's confusing for an 11 year old. It's 12 year old 13 year old and still i'm 24 now. And it is still what do you do with all of these feelings and what do you do with the rejections that you deal with and with stepping into an Uber and then being told, Oh, you look Kenyan, but you're not really Kenyan because you've been Americanized.

Or, then there's that, but then there's other people who will call me by my Kenyan name, Wangare, and will tell me, we're calling you Wangare because we want you to remember what it's like to come home. And there's people in my life who specifically Kenyans in my life, who only call me Wangare, or really work with me on let's learn this about our our culture, and let's teach you these words, and let's help you integrate in these and these ways back home.

I think it's just tough. It's, it really is. There, there's always that grief of what did [00:15:00] I miss and what don't I know and why are these gaps here? Who's going to accept me? Who's going to reject me again? How do I deal with other rejection or what do I do with this acceptance when I still am one, one, two, three steps removed from really understanding?

Haley Radke: You said the word home a couple of times and I wonder what that word means to you as someone who's moved around quite a bit, especially in your young adult years, I'll say young adult, listen, I'm in my 40s now. So you're still young adult to me.

Kae Wangare Leonard: That's a hard one. It's always been a hard one. What home is to me. So I think if you would have asked me, when it was three, four, five, six years old, I would have said home is Kenya. And that's what I knew. And I knew Swahili up until, I think probably the age of four or five. And Kenya was very much home. And then I got used to the U. [00:16:00] S. And I started riding horses in the U. S. I started playing football soccer. And I was playing basketball, was very involved within all of that. And that was very much the I don't know any different, and I wanna continue seeing what my life looks like in this other home after I've been removed and, yeah, removed from my Kenya home.

And so going back to Kenya, so many people would tell me that it's a homecoming, it's a returning. And I don't know if I ever really felt that until adulthood. I think it was always oh, this is. It became my other home in a sense, but it never really was like a, oh, it's a pilgrimage or, oh, it's a homecoming until I was 19, 20 or so.

It just happened to be like another place that I live, another place that I call home, same with Virginia. And then these days, like, when I think about [00:17:00] going to Kenya, it very much is a homecoming. That's such a tough question. What a home means to me.

Haley Radke: You're international, right? You live in, you're living in England now.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Do you hope to have a permanent address somewhere? Do you want to live in Kenya later on? Do you have goals or dreams of going back there? Do you want to live in the U. S.? Do you know? Or do you just, are you cool with just playing it as it comes.

Kae Wangare Leonard: I think so. I've, so I've moved maybe close to 16 times in the past five, six years now.

Haley Radke: What? Oh my goodness.

Kae Wangare Leonard: And I still have two more years left of my degree here. We'll see how this, the next one, two years goes. I do dream of playing for the Kenya national team for football. So that is definitely a goal of mine. Would love to play professional football somewhere. It really is like wherever football can take me.

I don't necessarily see myself [00:18:00] as having like a house somewhere that I live like all 12 months of the year all around. Maybe that'll come when I'm in like my 30s or 40s, who knows? But yeah, I just I'm not 100 percent sure. I think it will depend on football quite a bit. And then, yeah, I can write anywhere. So it'll just depend on football.

Haley Radke: Is that what you're taking? Is, are you taking English or?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I'm doing anthropology.

Haley Radke: Oh, okay.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yes. So the study of humans. I am loving it. I, a lot of people thought I was going to do creative writing or English, and I did not really want to get burned out in that aspect.

I think before. Before my arm was disabled when I was 17, I was going to go to art school. That's what I wanted to do. And then a lot of things shifted. And now I'm doing anthropology. And I want to have a focus to be able to use anthropological findings, whether or not that be my own research or other people's research [00:19:00] to bring into creative writing projects to be able to create, if not writing multimedia pieces for it.

Haley Radke: Okay, cool. Are you comfortable about talking about your disability and how that came to be? It's totally cool if you don't want to talk about that. And also, I'm so curious about how your art has evolved since then. I've seen some very cool videos of you painting in an unorthodox way.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yes absolutely. Yeah I Severed my radial nerve in my right arm and ended up pretty much paralyzing my right arm from just above the elbow, and this was my dominant arm as well.

I was put on some antidepressants and they lowered my inhibitions and I was dealing with some other shoulder pain from basketball and wasn't sleeping either. And so one night [00:20:00] I thought, if I just give myself pain somewhere else, I won't think about my shoulder, I'll just be able to go to sleep. I ended up stabbing myself in the arm with a knife at midnight.

Accidentally severed my radial nerve. Didn't know where my nerves were in my arm, nothing like that. And ended up having to have surgery the next weekend. For it. I had complete wrist drop, lost the use of my thumb, middle finger, and pointer finger in my dominant arm, and I was at AP Art Studio at the time.

Some art teacher had a talk with me and said, if you need to drop the class, nobody's going to blame you, but if you are going to continue, then you need to learn how to create art with your other hand. So we had maybe three months or so to work on doing art with my non dominant hand learned how to do that.

I was doing everything one handed with my left hand at the time, and then finished my art year with my left hand got overuse injuries in my left hand. My right hand [00:21:00] was, I was slowly starting to regain function, but it has never come back 100 percent fully, and so both of my hands don't work properly, and I took about a year or so off, thinking if I just give them some rest, some time off art, it'll be better, and they never improved.

So I took another couple of years off, upset about it all. And I finally decided I was going to create art by any means I could. So I put a paintbrush between my feet, between my toes and I got to work. So I paint with my mouth and my toes now.

Haley Radke: Do you do that as a relaxation? Is it more, I'm focused on creating art?

I know a lot of adoptees who use art as a part of a healing modality for them. They're getting the feelings out. It's like a physical expression of, unsaid things that we have in our body. What is it for you, Kae?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I think I use [00:22:00] art to story tell whether that be, visual art, or whether that be writing. I don't necessarily think of my writing or my art as therapeutic in any sense, really.

But the the process of thinking through what I want to what I want to convey, and then how I want to convey it, and the intentions in which I have behind it, and the thoughts that I put into my work. I think I take a lot of pride in that. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say it's necessarily therapeutic or anything like that for me, but it is a way for me to think through some things. And maybe a way for me to draw out some things that I might need to go to therapy about.

But unless I'm doing like a really quick sketch or a really quick little piece, which I don't do as much right now, generally, I'm doing like bigger pieces and bigger meaning pieces or just like heavier meaning pieces as [00:23:00] well.

Haley Radke: I saw that you really love sunflowers. That's my favorite flower all time.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yes.

Haley Radke: And we also have another thing in common. I grew up in a very small Mennonite town. So when you say Mennonite, like I get it.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Can you talk a little bit about if you're comfortable. What it was like to grow up in a fairly religious environment and where you are today. You addressed some of that in some of your writing. And I know it's complicated. A lot of us were adopted into Christian families with a sense of social justice in some way. And it, it can leave some woundedness in our thoughts about God and those kinds of things.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah. I think complicated is I think that summarizes I think a lot of my thoughts around religion, adoption, growing up in religious communities with adoption.

[00:24:00] I feel like I was taught and when I say taught, like maybe not directly from my parents, but also by from communities and such that like adoption was God's plan, or it was or was a straightforward like there was a biblical answer or there was a saving or there was like a, oh you're better off this way, or at least you're adopted into a community of what they like believers, which, when I think about that word, I'm like, believers in what, and

my family, so my family was more, was and is, or my immediate family at least, was and is more liberal Mennonites, like not as like old order Mennonites. In a lot of ways, I grew up with like my parents on a ledge of do we let them wear leggings? Do we let them wear a skirt?

Like or like shorter skirts and we let them wear skinny jeans. Do we let them drink like there was all of that. And like with me and my [00:25:00] sister me and my sister were and are very different but like I would clubbing back when I was younger when I was in high school and like I was partying and I was doing what?

You know when my homework was done my parents wanted to at least know where I was, so I wasn't sneaking out and lying. I was about to do what I wanted to do. But the school that my parents taught at was an international Christian school, and I lived on campus at the school as well, so on the compound of the school.

And I think if you're not careful, that becomes your whole world. And that messaging, in the messaging for people who go to the school, who work at the school, the other teachers, the community can be sometimes all you've received in. And you consistently, I think, be told, you were given up because you were loved so much.

And then you were chosen because you were loved so much. And it aligns with God's plan and God's [00:26:00] teaching, or this is part of fixing the brokenness of the world. Or all of these different messages that you can receive to justify mother loss and abandonment. Instead of just letting people sit with the hurt and sit with the grief.

I think that was maybe some of the most confusing for me. And then I came out as queer. In so many ways. The abandonment trauma that I had from adoption sprung back up because I was then abandoned again by a lot of the community that welcomed me because of adoption and it was almost like a betrayal and sometimes was told to me was a betrayal of my parents and of God and of adoption and a like. You were saved from this and brought into this like white American family who are believers, but now [00:27:00] you want to like, go live a life of sin, and you don't want to like, whatever else I and I think that was hard for me to navigate and losing people that I loved and losing people that I thought really loved me because I came out.

That, that was hard. That brought up a lot of, I think, adoption trauma and wounds and abandonment trauma. These days, I say I'm a lot more spiritual than religious. I think the Bible can be used as a tool of liberation. Should be used as a tool of liberation. I don't think it's the only vessel for truth. I don't know if I'd call myself Christian or not, but I do think that there is a lot of beautiful theology and lessons and liberating theologies and lessons like we can get from the Bible if we choose to use it that way, but it's not necessarily all of my focus.

So I do enjoy taking lessons I've learned and I do enjoy taking what I [00:28:00] was taught to be true about God and God's love and God's welcomeness and doing poetry around that. And spicing things up a little bit and trying to use it to free myself more than to constrain myself. If any of that makes any sense.

Haley Radke: I think our spirituality or religion or whatever, however you want to categorize it, it's so deeply personal, right? And I think my question is because I'm curious about how adoption has impacted that part of our unpacking as adults. And when we're looking back on what impact adoption has had on our lives, It's interesting that it twists that up too, so as you mentioned, you came out as queer and I've asked this of many of my queer guests before, so, forgive the repeat, but I'm curious as a member of the queer community where so many folks [00:29:00] will automatically think of adoption as the first family building tool available to them. How you. Navigate that in queer spaces. And do you feel some kind of pressure to be like hold on a second. It's complicated. We can't just go straight there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Oh, for sure. Yeah, it's, that's been a journey. Yeah, I think like for me, a lot of things come down to we're not entitled to have a child and what do we think family is?

I think it's like another one of my questions always, and are we being, like, child centered? Whose child are you trying to get? I think when I think about queerness, when I think about what queerness demands of me, and how queerness, for me is a way to figure out how to exist and how to love in this world, in other, in alter in alternative ways, [00:30:00] I also have to bring that into family structures.

So what have I been taught about family and what have I been taught about what family is? Correct, quote unquote, or not. And then how does that, how do I bring that into, the future and into my conversations with others and what have they been taught? Because if we're taught that family is just, okay, you get married and then you have kids.

Oh, of course people are going to be thinking about okay, then I guess maybe next step could be, could we adopt. We could be trying to do that as like family building. But to also recognize. Family could be your friends, could be chosen, could be who you love, you can mother in a, gender expansive way, mother in many different ways, you can mother the kids down the street, the kids you coach, the kids you teach you can parent and be a part of all of these kids lives in a way that could also be fulfilling for you in terms of what family is for you.

Where is that voice and that pressure saying that [00:31:00] you have to have a child that you like legally have that responsibility slash own is like, where is that coming from? And if it's not coming from like you and you're want of just It may be a biological connection or, I don't know, something internally or connection.

Then, how can you go against that? And, how can you find other ways in which you can parent? And then it is just a, okay, maybe you're dead set on the fact that, okay, we want a child in our lives that we're on their birth certificate and we've adopted them and whatnot. Then, what are ways in which we can do this in more harm reductive ways?

And ways in which are more child centered, ways in which we don't displace kids as much, ways in which we're not putting as much value and price tags. on kids lives and expectations [00:32:00] then, I think, is a lot of my follow up questions.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I didn't ask you this at the beginning but I I'm curious. You said that there's, not really a lot of paperwork from the time that you were put in the orphanage and those kinds of things. Do you have a desire to find out more about your biological family? I know lots of folks go right to, oh you can just DNA test, which is tricky and complicated, especially for adoptees from other countries.

And it's not, I think a lot of domestic adoptees like just put that as oh, that's easy. That makes everything so much easier, but it's not necessarily the case. Are you comfortable sharing a bit about that?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah, no, I appreciate you mentioning, yeah, it's not as straightforward because I think Kenya is now having a database from what I've [00:33:00] heard maybe or trying to start a database of DNA or searching for reunification, but I have never put my DNA in there just because there's so little that I know and so little that I know about My biological family anything and yeah, for me, I don't see a point necessarily, at least for myself. I don't really think that it would be on that. I'll be able to find anybody and I think there's a large part of me that even if that was the case that I'll be able to find somebody. I don't know if I'd be ready, but I don't think I really, even when I was younger, I didn't necessarily have in my mind this dream of reunion or biological family or anything like that.

Even when I would daydream when I was younger or think about what things might be like, I'm not sure that it was ever really an option in my mind to think about biological family.

Haley Radke: [00:34:00] So growing up with a sister who's also adopted, did you guys ever talk about what it's like to be adopted? What it's like to be black in a white family? Going back and forth do you ever talk about those things?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I think we talk about it slightly more now that we're a little bit older. I don't, I wouldn't say that we were that close growing up either.

So I don't think we would talk about that much when we were younger. When we moved back to Kenya, we all, we got to know other adopted kids from our orphanage as well. And so I think sometimes we'd have those conversations separately with our other like friends who were adopted from the same orphanage as me. Yeah, I don't think that we really talked about it much growing up.

Haley Radke: And now your views and the things that you write about can bring up a lot of [00:35:00] very big topics. Does she read your writing? Does she have thoughts? Are you guys on? For a lot, I'm asking because so many of us come into adoptee consciousness at very different points in our lives, and want to examine those things, and lots of people don't and sometimes that can create the conflict or the divide, or come on, just get over it already, or whatever.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah. I, we definitely have. My sister is, she's a lot more degreed than I am. And she is currently, she's currently going into law school. I do believe that she does believe in like adoption abolition as well. She's very intellectual about things too, so we come at things from maybe a different angle.

I'm sometimes more of a burn all this beep down and, you know, come in blazing, but my sister, I think is a lot more diplomatic when it comes to [00:36:00] things, maybe a little bit more reserved, but I also think at the end of the day, our politics are like a little bit more similar than people might think, but we also don't talk about it that, that much, but yeah, like she, she will back like a lot of what I'm saying. If she's asked, I would think. Maybe she'd listen to this episode and be like, that's not true. But I do think that yeah, she would agree with a lot of things.

Haley Radke: It's nice that you have some support there in your family. I'd love to talk about your writing and this came about I recommended your chapbook already on a previous episode just a couple of months ago when people hear this.

Going Unarmed Into the Wail, and you also have just such a beautiful book on your website that folks can read, Lightning on My Fingertips, and I was rereading it yesterday to prepare, and I just thought, [00:37:00] some of your writing, it's so raw and vulnerable and insightful, and I know a lot of adoptees will really connect to some of the ideas that you're sharing. And I was wondering, would you read something from your work for us?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Absolutely. Ah, thank you so much for all of those kind words. I'm going to read the poem, Going Unarmed Into the Wail. Poetry, prose, and I wrote this back in, I'm pretty sure this was back in 2023 when I had just booked my ticket to go back to Kenya again and I was going to be in Kenya for a couple months and I was trying to reckon with, what it might mean to try to go back to Kenya. And remember,

I grew up in a family of hunters, I've never touched a gun, yet I've been [00:38:00] perfecting killing all my life. That memory, they always tell me where I ran faster than anyone had seen for a kid at age four, dead. The recollection of that story when I wore rainbow knee socks with pink cowboy boots and a tie dye shirt and walked away from potential friends. Gone. Ages 5 through 11, killing doesn't have to be quick. It doesn't even need to be intentional. Sometimes you're just trying to survive. Sometimes you book tickets to your mother's country and realize your tongue has died in your mouth, but you're not sure when it happened. What does it mean if the closest my voice sounds to home is the wail I make when I think no one is listening?

What is home other than haunted? Haunted as in memory, as in hunted, as in the estranged noise in my throat as I try to call forth belonging. What do I name the gasp I make when I suck in air between the howls? Is that not also home? I know I exist in the clamor of [00:39:00] grief, but I think I can also fit in the relief of the release.

My therapist says trauma can leave you an unreliable narrator. She also says we can't always decide what stays and what goes. She says a lot of other things I try to pay attention to, but retaining knowledge is hard when you're struggling for air. I grew up in a family of hunters. I've never touched a gun, yet I've been perfecting killing all my life.

I sever language from the images that stumble their way by the place I go when my eyes close. Anything that hurts too badly I try to embrace. I haven't learned how to keep the good alive. I'm not sure I can decide how to make the joy stay. I scorched my earth. I'm nothing like my family who takes down deer in the forests of Pennsylvania and uses their kills to nurse us in the winters.

I'm more concerned with forgetting. I don't share my takedowns. There's no feast at the end of my [00:40:00] hunt. Only hollowness and a wail that reaches into the abyss, sounding something like I'm still here. My family adopted me from Kenya when I was eight months old. I think. There's nothing more traumatic than mother loss.

There's nothing more I'd like to pretend to forget. But some days when I'm not threatened by the magnitude of sorrow or the asked attention of anger, I wonder what it would be like to capture without killing, to have a path I don't run from. If home is a haunting and a haunting is memory and I am the hunter of memories, that doesn't keep my prey alive.

Will anything remain? God, I've done so much in the name of survival, but I'm trying to move beyond. I'm not sure if it's possible, but I bought myself a ticket, a chance, an invitation to stop making prey out of my memory and to try to leave home and return home. I'm going unarmed into the wail. Don't come [00:41:00] after me.

You aren't invited into my intimacy. Wait for me and the gasp for air. I will come back up. I will come back up. I will. Remember.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Oh my goodness. So powerful. I think this is such a great example for folks to hear from you. So I know they'll go out and pick up your book and read some more of your work on your website.

You also have a lot of art pieces on your website that are just really amazing. I don't know why. I love the self portrait. It's yeah, it's so good. Anyway, people have to go and look because this is audio.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Thank you. I just, I think for me, but with writing and art and so much of it feels like an unearthing feels like looking in the mirror and figuring out like what I can see, what I can discover. A lot of my work focuses on me [00:42:00] in my relation to like the outside world, but like. Centering myself first, hence I do a lot of portraiture, and I do a lot of talking about myself, my own story with mother loss, and with proclamation, and with what it means to, the homecoming, and return home.

I don't know. I think that there's so much that adoption takes from us, and especially when you don't have knowledge of where you came from and you don't always have the ability to gain that knowledge of biological family and lineage and histories. You gotta, you don't have to, but I have decided that instead of birthing children, instead of wanting more of a biological lineage, it's going to be my art and it's going to be my storytelling and it's going to be what I can pull out of myself while I'm alive here and now, that. That's what I'm going to, labor and birth into the world and leave it at that. [00:43:00] That's the closest I get to understanding.

Haley Radke: I'm, as you're saying that, I'm thinking back to you being like, yeah, no, it's not therapeutic. No. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Kae Wangare Leonard: I need to redefine therapeutic. I'll say in the sense of I think people think Yeah.

That I do work and it might make me feel better or feel maybe more healed or feel, I don't know, any kind of resolve or closure. And my work usually does the opposite of that. It's, I think it's tough when you're pointing towards wounds and when you're pointing towards loss and when you're pointing towards grief.

And especially when you're trying to acknowledge it yourself or when you share it with the outside world to also see if they also see, where it hurts. And I think in that sense, there's not, it's not necessarily a relieving experience for me because it's something that, that you bring up and you unearth and you relive.

And then on, even on the flip side when [00:44:00] you think about joy, or when I think about joy, when I write about love, when I write about happiness, there's also always a, this is great, and there's still, there's something still missing. And I don't know, on one hand I think that it is part of what the burden I carry, as with mother loss, and with adoption, and with trying to rebuild.

And oftentimes, it just leaves a lot more questions than any answers, and maybe that's the point of therapy. Maybe I've been doing therapy wrong my whole life. But, yeah, for me, it really is kind of excavation.

Haley Radke: I think you're getting more feelings out than you may imagine. I think it's maybe more beneficial than you may imagine if I'm to be prescriptive in some way. I'm not a therapist. Okay. What do you want to recommend to us today? Kae.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Today. I want to recommend We Are Holding This. We Are Holding This is [00:45:00] actually what I published my chapbook, my second book with, but We Are Holding This is like a media hub for adoption abolitionists, people that have been adopted, trafficked, impacted by these family policing systems.

Their website says, We are holding this as an invitation for people directly impacted by systems of family regulation, surveillance, and policing to gather our creative expressions and to know one another through the liberatory practice of independent publishing. As this space grows, it will feature zines, newspapers, manifestos, and other printed materials you can hold in your hands.

The only theme is abolition, and I think there's something so beautiful and something so comforting to not hold who we are and what we've been through and what we've been put through alone. And to be in spaces with other people [00:46:00] who also believe in the liberatory practice of abolition, and adoption abolition, and the and, fighting against family regulation, surveillance, and policing.

There's something so hopeful to know that you're not the only one who believes what you do and who holds hope and who works towards this future that we hope is that we hope is coming quick.

Haley Radke: Thank you, yeah, I love of course I ordered through there to get your chapbook and I know they've got a lot of awesome things happening over there so that's a great recommendation.

Thanks so much. Speaking of where can we find your work and connect with you online to see your art and read your beautiful writing.

Kae Wangare Leonard: You can find me on my website, https://www.karenwangareleonard.com/, and I also have a free [00:47:00] newsletter. It's supposed to be weekly. It is weekly ish. But I have a free newsletter that comes to your inbox.

And that is the most consistent writing I am doing right now. I also can be found on Instagram @karenwangareleonard and I do put stuff out on my Instagram. A little bit less so now that I am working on other writing projects and I'm in school and in my football season, but I am able to be connected with people through there as well. Those are my two main.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you. I look forward to seeing more football soccer videos, too. We didn't even talk about your athletics. Thank you so much, Kae, for talking with me today, sharing some of your story and your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Thank you so much for having me and yeah, for reaching out for inviting me.

Hope that my, my ramblings made some sense [00:48:00] and, ha! And just thank you for the work that you do. And the work that you do with connecting adoptees together and bringing us into this space and knowing each other some more. Very vital, very receiving.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

If you're listening in real time when this episode gets posted, you'll know it's cold and flu season. Classic. Haley's sick again. I've been so sick. So apologies for the voice. I'm sure my editor took away all kinds of things that would have made it harder to listen to me. But so thank you so much, Jen.

I loved my conversation with Kae. And such an unusual story to be in and out of your country of origin and I love the dynamics of how she writes about that in her poetry and prose. So [00:49:00] I hope you'll grab her chapbook and check out her website and newsletter. Thank you so much for listening and let's talk again soon.