329 Alex Blum

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/329

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Alex Blum, author of An Accident of Birth. Alex shares his story of how he reconnected with his three full biological brothers through DNA testing. We also talk about seeing yourself reflected in biological family for the first time, nature versus nurture, and what Alex has come to believe about adoption in recent years.

Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Alex Blum. Welcome, Alex.

Alex Blum: Thanks, Haley. I'm so happy to [00:01:00] be here, and I really appreciate the opportunity, frankly.

Haley Radke: Your voice has been in my ears for the last couple days. I've been reading your book on audio. I've been listening to you on other podcasts, but I- for my listeners who maybe don't know you, would you mind sharing a bit of your story with us?

Alex Blum: Sure. I'd be happy to. I was born in the '50s, right? And so I was adopted in the mid-'50s, and I'm sure everybody knows that at that time, adoption was completely closed and firewalled and, it was impossible to get any kind of information without lawyers and a court order, and people used to hire private detectives and all the rest of it.

And so that was my history. So I knew nothing about my birth family, mother, parents, nothing. And, that was my experience for most of my life. And as I got older and when I had kids, I started to get a little more curious about the whole situation and about my history. [00:02:00] And then about seven years ago, I was on 23andMe for quite some time.

My wife actually got it for me as a gift. And about seven years ago, in 2019, I came home from vacation and I opened my computer and there was a message there from a young woman named Brooke, who is my niece now, and she had gone on 23andMe and bought a kit for her husband, and they sent her another one by mistake, which speaks to, for me, how important coincidence and randomness is in life, right?

And so she sent in the kit, and next thing she messaged me and said, "This is weird. It looks like we have," I can't remember exactly, but 24% shared DNA. And the result of that was that- within a day or two, I found myself on the phone with three brothers of mine. They're my full brothers.

I'm the oldest of the four of us, and I had no idea they existed, [00:03:00] and I had no point of view or understanding of this until it happened. So it was one of those sort of amazing kind of miraculous things that kinda fall from the sky, and it's a very... It's a really good story. It's all upside for us, for me and for my brothers, and all of a sudden I had all of a sudden I have four brothers and their spouses, and I have six nieces that I didn't have before, and everybody's really all connected.

So it's been a really miraculous experience. And what happened was that very... almost immediately after I got connected to my brothers, we started doing this thing, which they were doing already, which is we have a Zoom call every Friday. In fact, this morning. And we started talking, and of course, we're comparing stories because it's all about parallel lives, this whole thing, right?

When you have this experience, I'm sure you've heard lots of people say this. And what it does is it gives you perspective, and you get to rewind the tape and fill in the blanks. So we [00:04:00] started doing this, and it came to me very quickly. I thought I have to write a book.

I have to write about this. This is something. So I said to them, are you guys cool with this?" And they were, as they always are, they were like, "Yeah, great. We're all in." So I started writing the book, and it took me about four years to get to A, something I was prepared to say was a finished draft, and then of course several more years of editing and fixing and dealing with the whole publishing experience, which is a whole other subject that I don't even wanna get into and all of that.

So that's a basic background for all this, and, what it's really done is it's, it really expanded my understanding of the whole adoption environment, if you will and I've been exposed to the experiences of a lot of other adopted people, which cover all sorts, that really run the gamut from people who are traumatized by it, people who have had joyful connections, [00:05:00] people who haven't, people who've had disappointing efforts to connect with their birth relatives.

All sorts of stuff. So it's been a really big learning experience for me, without a doubt. So that started the origin of the whole thing.

Haley Radke: Can you tell me a little bit about doing the DNA test? In your book, you alluded that you probably wouldn't have searched. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Alex Blum: Yeah, that's an interesting question. At one point I said to my wife, after I'd been on 23 for years, and I think I was starting to resign myself to the likelihood that, my parents... And in this situation, I think it's normally or it's more common for people to talk about their mother than their father, for whatever reason, and I had resigned myself, like, that, my mother had probably passed away and my father and all the rest of it.[00:06:00]

I didn't really focus too much on the, on siblings for some reason, even though the story everybody loves is Steve Jobs finding his sister Mona Simpson, who was a famous author, so you hear that story. But I hadn't really focused on that very much, and I said to my wife, "You know what? I'm not gonna go searching around and make a meal out of this.

If they're out there, they'll find me." And I don't even know really why I said that, but that's what happened.

Haley Radke: So you tell a story of a moment of holding your first child, which is a moment for a lot of us if we choose to become a parent, and I'm curious if you had curiosity throughout your life.

And I get that stance of if it happens. If it doesn't," but just talk to me a little bit about that. Your... did you have wonderings about where you came from and your story and those kinds of things? [00:07:00]

Alex Blum: Yeah, I did. I did. But I also, to be honest, it was pretty clear to me as I was growing up that My mother, my adopted mother and my father to a lesser extent, but my, my mother, it was very clear that she took a dim view of people that were pursuing, people who wanted to find their birth parents, people...

it's like she framed it almost like it was some form of neurosis. Like, why would you do that kind of thing. And I think whether rightfully or not, I think I internalized that. So I think that, yes, I was curious, no doubt, and I became more and more curious as my children were born and they asked me question- medical history and these kinds of questions and all that sort of stuff.

And then, my parents both passed away. My mom died in 2001 and my dad died like '90, I don't know, '98 or '99, something like that. My adopted parents, and that kind [00:08:00] of cleared the decks for me a little bit because I knew that they had a very dim, negative view of that and I was sensitive to that.

So I think it created a little space for me at that point because I felt like there was really no downside for anybody, and that made it easier. Because yeah, for sure I was curious. Although, I didn't really anticipate what actually happened. But absolutely, I was curious and I wanted to know.

And I had a funny experience which I talk about pretty often. I don't know if you're a fan of the show Mad Men.

But it's that's my dad basically, Don Draper. And that whole, that's the '50s. That, like my dad's office looked like that and I knew people like that and, and there's a... we were big fans of the show and we were watching the show and there's this thing that happens in the show where Peggy, who is a groundbreaker in advertising as a woman and transitions from being a secretary to being a, creative person and she's a very dynamic character. And she has this moment with this guy and she [00:09:00] has sex with a guy in the office and she gets pregnant.

And it's the '50s and she comes from I think classic Irish family in Queens which my dad's secretary was 100% that person. And so she has to, she agrees or decides to give up her child and there's a scene in the show that happens in the hospital after she's given birth and Don goes there to see her and they have this conversation in which she says, "This is not your life.

This didn't happen. So you're gonna get up and you're gonna go on with your life and that's that." And at that moment when that happened, I didn't know that was gonna happen on the show and this, this scene happened. I turned to my wife and I think my kids were sitting and I said, "I can't watch this." And I had to stand up and leave the room.

It was like I, this is way too close to home for me.

Haley Radke: It's accurate.

Alex Blum: 100%.

Haley Radke: That's what doctors told their patients who were mothers that were relinquishing. That's what they told them.

Alex Blum: Yeah. "

Haley Radke: Forget [00:10:00] this ever happened."

Alex Blum: Yeah.

Haley Radke: And don't tell anyone 'cause it's gonna ruin your life.

Alex Blum: It felt very real to me. I thought, "Here it is right here. This is it. This could be my mom right here."

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Alex Blum: It was, I... It was impressive, I thought.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Alex Blum: What they did. So I had moments like that, for sure, where I thought, "Wow." And we didn't know. My wife and I used to talk. Maybe your mom was a drug addict. Who knows? You know what I mean? You just don't know. You don't know.

Haley Radke: I think it's been pretty common for me hearing from adoptees who wait till their adoptive parents pass before they feel safety enough to really examine that part.

Alex Blum: I'm sure that, I think that's true. And it was on the other side of the coin, talking to my brothers, our birth mother, she...

And this gets into the importance of this book, Relinquished, that I also kinda wanna talk about a little. But she, I think, there's a good deal of [00:11:00] evidence, and if you saw that in my book, the little note that she wrote. It's pretty obvious she was pretty tortured by her experience, and I don't think that's in the least bit uncommon.

I think that is a super common thing for moms who give up their children. So on a certain level, my brothers and I have, I think we all feel that it was just as well that all of the parents were gone, because I can't even imagine what it would've been like for her, after the life that she lived, for me to suddenly pitch up in front of her as a 60-something-year-old man and go, "Hey, I'm your kid, the one you gave up, you remember?"

That doesn't feel like it would've been super comfortable for her, or probably me, or anybody, frankly.

Haley Radke: Can we talk about this, how you... she's passed already once you reunite with your brothers. But how you build this picture of who she was through the [00:12:00] eyes of your full brothers.

Alex Blum: These phone calls that we have were super important, and we, 'cause we just talked for an hour.

We talked a lot about her, and they would tell me stories about her. A lot of those stories are in the book, in other sections where they speak in their own voice, and we talked about all that. My brother Hank's wife, Jen, had a lot of personal, had some personal experience of her, so Jen told me some stories about her.

Jen is always saying, "Wow, you remind me of her," which is so interesting. It's a interesting thing to hear. So it's just really, it's assembled just from conversations with people, mostly my brothers, to some extent their spouses. Our mother, she was alienated from most of her family members, so there really wasn't any of that kind of input, aunts and uncles and people like that.

And she was very volatile. She [00:13:00] was not very reliable. She was a serious alcoholic. You know what I mean? So there was, like, this sort of- unreliable narrator feature of her personality, so we just assembled... we just talked and basically just assembled a kind of a spoken word picture.

And I'm sure there's stuff we don't know and stuff that I don't know, stuff that we've missed, but yeah, we just did the best we could, to fill in the blanks.

Haley Radke: And your father died much sooner than her. So how old were your siblings when he passed?

Alex Blum: My brother Hank is the oldest of the three, and then Pete's two years younger, and then Bill is another four or five years younger.

Hank was 10.

Haley Radke: Okay. So it's... I wonder how learning about your father has been different than you have years of experience with your mother and so many stories [00:14:00] to tell you. How have you assembled that together for yourself?

Alex Blum: Of course of the four, my adopted parents and my parent- my birth parents, he is the biggest mystery, not only to me, but frankly to my brothers as well, because they were so young.

Bill really doesn't even remember him. So that was weird. But the, the context is intriguing because he and my adopted father were very similar. They were both in marketing. They were both, marketing and advertising. My birth father was a, an executive at Pepsi and Canada Dry. My dad was in charge of sales promotion, public relations for Macy's, and he worked for Unilever.

And they both had a lot of international or sort of global connection. So in, at least in superficial ways, they appear to have been very similar in a funny way, which is interesting. But in terms of him and what he was like, it's hard to know. [00:15:00] There's not that much to work with. He was in the military in the Second World War.

He was, from what I understand a little bit of a war hero. There's not a lot of detail there to work with, to be honest.

Haley Radke: And the thing about that is if you had searched sooner he would've had passed anyway. There's no, no time that would've helped-... with that. Yeah.

Alex Blum: That wouldn't have filled that space.

Haley Radke: No. Thank you for sharing that because a lot of us search and find a grave, and the complexity of trying to fill in knowledge that feels like is owed to us in some way, and it's so difficult when they're not here. So it's really neat that you have your brothers and this extended family to fill in some of those gaps for you.

Alex Blum: It is. And it, I guess there's a feature of it which is great because it's coming to me from my brothers. So it's I don't know if I can explain this clearly. It's a little [00:16:00] bit like it's my experience. What they're telling me is a large part of what I would have remembered if I had grown up.

You know what I mean? So there's some sort of consistency there, if you will, because what they're telling me is I was two years older I don't know how much that would've changed things, but it still feels like their perception is in some way similar to what my perception would've been, so it feels accurate to me, right?

And we all know all memory is unreliable in some way, right? Your brain is constantly sifting and creating and filling in blanks and doing all sorts of stuff. So all you can do with memory, and with a memoir if you write one, is just try to be as truthful as possible. You can't promise that everything you say is something everyone's gonna agree with. It's impossible.

Haley Radke: Yeah, absolutely. I think for... I remember when I first learned, it must've been in my psych undergrad, something about every time you access a [00:17:00] memory in your brain, you're overwriting that part. You're st- like, you're changing it every time you access a memory. It's a little weird to think about.

Alex Blum: Th- actually, that's a kind of interesting way to look at it. Yeah, because you are. You're inevitably and every time you tell it, you know how that is where we refine the stories we tell all the time? Which goes back to what I was saying before, because one of my experiences is that when people say that thing to me, "Oh, I read your book. I know that story," it's like I think, "Wow, I gotta come up with some new stories." I can't keep telling the same stories again and again. It's kind of a challenge. It's funny.

Haley Radke: Yeah. I have that happen with the podcast. I have a, a Patreon show, too, and I'll say something, and then I'll have my in real life I'll be- recount something that I've already shared on the podcast, and they're like, "I've already heard that." I'm like, "Okay that's weird. That's a weird part."

Alex Blum: Like, all that material that I was using is I used it already. Now I have to come up with new material.

Haley Radke: And your book covers a lot of ground. It does. It does, so that makes sense. Let's talk about nature [00:18:00] versus nurture. And I hear you when you say your biological mother was an addict or an alcoholic, very complicated. Sounds like there was some difficult things happening especially once her husband had passed, your father. And also, your adoptive family, I'm like, whew. Okay, they were wealthy, but they didn't seem like super nurturing people either if I'm being candid with you.

Ready to send you off to boarding school. It's a... I know it's a different time, but also, it's... it was a wild thing to read about. Let's... Can you talk about nurture versus nature?

Alex Blum: It's funny what you said because at one time I was being as, again, as you read, I was being difficult as a teenager.

I was in high school and I was... I went to high school in New York, but for two years after I was trying out a school, and I remember I was being really a, pain in the ass. And my mom looked at me and she said, "You're not even supposed to be here." And I [00:19:00] thought okay, that's pretty honest."

Haley Radke: Wait, what did you take that as?

Alex Blum: It was so typical. I just figured I'll just put that in a file of things like that she used to say. It was like I get it."

Haley Radke: Not in this family?

Alex Blum: I'm supposed to be at boarding school, and I'm here.

Haley Radke: Oh, boarding school.

Alex Blum: You're supposed to be at boarding school.

Haley Radke: Okay. Okay.

Alex Blum: You're not supposed to be here. I didn't plan on having a teenager in my life. I thought somebody else was gonna do that for me. But the nature versus nurture thing I think is fascinating. I've had interesting conversations with people about it, and I think when you have kids, I don't know if you have kids of your own, but the nature thing becomes so obvious immediately when you have kids because this idea that people seem to have, and unfortunately, I think this is an unfortunate thing that some people who adopt do, which is this idea that a kid is a blank slate.

You're gonna mold that kid. You're gonna create that kid. It's like it's [00:20:00] an empty glass that you're gonna fill with all of this stuff about you and your family and your expectations and all that. And once you've had kids, you know that's baloney. They come with their stuff. They're people already, and they bring a lot to the party.

So I'm a real believer in nature, and I'm clear on how real that is. But on the other hand, also, it's your life. It's your story, and you have to figure out what you're gonna do in that life. So I think there's this incredible balance basically between nature and nurture or nature and experience or DNA versus, the random nature of the universe.

However you wanna look at it, I think there's a real interplay always between the power of coincidence and things that happen and how it affects your life and who you are and how you respond to the experiences that you have versus the stuff that you come [00:21:00] with. It's like there's something that people describe, and actually it's a lot...

It's always brought up in, when they, people talk about Bob Dylan, right? And he was born in Minnesota, and- he left home very young, and he describes this experience of looking at his parents and thinking, "Who are these people?" "How did how did these people get to be my parents?" kinda thing.

He just felt there was some... and I'm just telling the story as best I can. I've heard a lot of different versions of it, right? But that sort of thing. So there's so many different versions of it, but I think, without a doubt, as, when you're born, you bring a lot of stuff to the party. And I've heard some difficult stories, adoption stories, about people who have adopted kids who've had very unrealistic expectations or perhaps didn't fully think about what they were doing, and they don't like the kid they got.

And it's like, "Get [00:22:00] a life. Pull yourself together." "You shoulda thought of that before you did this." I've heard some really unfortunate stories, and I just think, "Wow, what were you thinking?"

Haley Radke: There's also an impact that maternal separation just has on our brains factually and that actually came to mind immediately when you shared the story of like a medical emergency when your tendon got severed, in that you were, like, super cool, collected in an emergency, and that's exactly how I am. Two of my best friends, we're all adopt- we've all talked about how adopted people, on the whole, are very great in emergencies 'cause our brain is trained from the jump, "It's an emergency. Where is my mother? Survive." And I don't know, maybe I'm making a grand generalization, but I think that's pretty accurate. What do you think about that?

Alex Blum: That's so interesting. I've never heard it described that way, but [00:23:00] that's interesting. And I've thought about it another way, which is there is this experience also that I...

And I've heard a lot of adoptive people say this, where it's like you have this sort of inherent critical distance. You feel a little bit outside of things. You know what I mean? You tend to be looking at things, and in your head you're thinking about the situation, and you're having an opinion about it even though it's happening to you.

And I think it may be a little bit of a version of what you're saying, which is... and I still remember what it felt like, and I remember holding up my foot and looking at my foot and thinking, "Yeah, this isn't great." In a very detached kind of way. Oh, and then looking at the people around me and thinking, "They're hysterical," and that I need somebody to, this is not a problem I can solve, so I need some people around me who aren't paralyzed by the whole situation. And I had that experience quite a few times, so it's interesting to hear you say that. I never really connected that with the adoption thing, but I think that's [00:24:00] interesting- ... for sure.

Haley Radke: Okay, I'm going along the same vein, I think, where you're talking about that disconnected kind of feeling. So you share in the, your memoir about your adoptive mother and this legacy and land and farm and this very importance to her, and it's so important she tells your adoptive father "You gotta take care of this with me," before they get engaged or right at the engagement point.

Alex Blum: Yeah.

Haley Radke: I can't recall exactly.

Alex Blum: Exactly right.

Haley Radke: And I think, and it ended with you. How did you feel? Did you feel like you were a part of this legacy that was passed on? Or when you're adopted, it's like, "I don't know, it's not really my history." What do you think about it?

Alex Blum: I think that sometimes adoptive parents betray themselves, [00:25:00] because there is a gap between what they say and what they do. Or else they say things that they're not thinking about, and they don't think about what that's gonna sound like to you. And I think I reference this in my book, but my adopted brother, who was three years older than me, he and I... She used to do this thing. Her maiden name was Phelps. Old New England WASP family thing, whatever, been there since the 1600s, whatever.

And she used to say, "I'm the last surviving member of my family." And my brother and I used to look at each other and go, "Yeah I'm pretty clear where that leaves us." You know what I mean? And even though what she was saying was logical and we understood the, from a factual point of view what she meant, it was such a weirdly insensitive thing to say.

It was like... And she didn't just say it once. It's something she used to say. And you feel like, "Wow, okay. I get it. I get that's how you feel. What you're showing me is how you feel, not what you [00:26:00] think." You know what I mean? And as kids, people don't give kids credit for being as instinctively smart as they are.

And you're gonna make your own judgment about what you're hearing. It's like you don't get to control what the other person thinks, even if it's your kid. So they say this stuff. And then when they started with protecting the land and giving the land away and all that, in the beginning it was great, because we had 600 acres of land that was mostly wilderness.

Not completely virgin wilderness from, whatever but still. And we gave away 300 acres of it, and it was combined with some other land and made into kind of a nature preserve, and I was psyched. I thought that was so cool, right? That was great. But then, and I guess I said this in my book, it's like, you know the thing about cosmetic surgery?

The people that do it, and it becomes a little bit of an addiction, and they keep doing it, and in the beginning it works, but after a while they're just like Joan Rivers. They're freaks. It's like you look at them and you think, "Don't [00:27:00] you see?" "What are you doing to yourself?" It was like that. My mom, and my dad just went along with it, whatever.

It became an obsession. And so from that, then it became historic preservation easements on the buildings. And it was like, okay, I understand, and, we would have these meetings. Of course, they would've already decided what they were gonna do, and then they would have a meeting with me and my brother as if we were being consulted.

And it becomes clear very quickly, you're not being consulted, you're being told. So they started doing that, and we were like, "Okay." And, but, we would say "Okay, we gave all that land away and we created the Phelps Research Area, and that's really great. Why do we need to do this?" And it, but, and it just didn't stop.

It was like easements on the pro- and then there were easements on the remaining property, and then there were... And it just didn't stop. And so at a certain point, again, there's a message that's being delivered, and you think, Okay, who exactly are you protecting it from? [00:28:00] Because we're the ones that are gonna inherit it.

So if you really wanna protect it, what you should be doing from an inheritance or an estate tax point of view, is conveying it to us so that we already own it and we have an investment in it, but that's not what you're doing. What you're doing is you're putting all sorts of legal frameworks around it.

And if there's one thing that we've seen, particularly in our government today, there's a world where legal frameworks don't seem to make much difference, right? It seems like there's always a lawyer ready to figure out how to undo something that isn't supposed to be able to be undone. You know what I mean?

And so it's it feels weird, and you think, "Okay I get the message," and it's not the message you think you're delivering.

Haley Radke: Tell me how your view of adoption has shifted over these last few years.

Alex Blum: I think I've become a lot more conscious of... in the course of writing the book, actually, it was part [00:29:00] of... it was a, a learning process for me in terms of discovering my own feelings and having more of a developed point of view about it, and then all the things that I've heard from other people, and I've been on Louise and Sarah's Adoptee Cafe, and I've listened to people talk and stuff like that.

And the first thing is that adoption is complicated and people have a real desire to oversimplify it and not to appreciate there's two groups of people that are experienced it to the largest extent, and those are the people it seems like nobody wants to listen to, and that is the mothers who give up their child and the child themselves.

Regardless of whether you're adopted as an infant, there's still, to your point there, there's a dynamic there. There's something going on there as a child and it's-- I think this, the [00:30:00] adoptive parents that recognize that are doing a really good thing and being really smart. You have to be open to the child's experience of it and their point of view of it, and you have to be as honest as you can be, and you have to not be overly invested in your own perception of what it's supposed to be.

"Oh, I adopted this kid and they're gonna go to Harvard." Yeah, not their problem. That's your problem, kinda thing. So I guess in that sense, my perception has really evolved in terms of the complexity of it and I think it's very challenging for adopted-- it's-- parenting's challenging anyway.

I think adoptive parenting can be every bit as challenging, if not more, and I think people have a tendency to just the, old truism. It's like, "Oh, you're so lucky because they chose you," that thing that everybody wants to say who isn't adopted, or has never given up a child. It's yeah, [00:31:00] great.

That's an insight that's just about very small. It's just about this thick. It's a very shallow insight if you're the person that's experienced it.

Haley Radke: What have been some of the reactions to your book now that it's been in the world many months and also some of the media coverage that you and your brothers have had?

Alex Blum: It's been great. It's been a, it's been a great experience. The New York Post article and the People article both, they were really fun. The meeting up in New York thing that we did for the New York Post was just fabulous. It was so fun, and it was so fun for the four of us to be in the same place because we don't... my brother Pete lives in Florida, my brother Hank lives in Baltimore, and in the beginning, my brother Bill was living in London, so getting everybody all together in the same place was not always all that easy. So that was a great experience. It was super fun and the, the People magazine thing was fun.

My experience also, [00:32:00] and it isn't wholly related to the adoption thing, is that people have reached out to me that I haven't spoken to in years, in decades, like people that I've known or people I was friends with or whatever, and that, those kinds of communication have been emotionally satisfying. I guess I don't know. There's something about the book where people have reacted to it in a really emotional way. People I've known for a long time have reached out to me and either written me long emails or even you know when you get one of those texts that's a mile long where somebody's like poured their heart out in a text kind of thing.

And also people that I didn't know that have read it and that have wanted to talk to me about it, that have responded to it and wanted... I have a friend, my neighbor, and he read it, and he was like, "You gotta come over. We gotta talk about it." We had a two-and-a-half-hour conversation about it right off the bat, and now we have a completely different relationship than we had before.

You know what I mean? So in that sense, that's been really [00:33:00] fantastic. The whole thing has been really positive, and I'm sure that there are people that have read my book that don't agree with me and think that I'm a jerk and whatever. Okay, everybody's entitled to their opinion, but I haven't really had a lot of interaction with those people.

There's a few people that went on there's somebody went on Amazon and gave me a one-star rating. It's like, okay, great, whatever. That's how you feel. It's okay.

Haley Radke: In podcasting, that's how you know you made it.

Alex Blum: Yeah, right? Yeah. If nobody... Yeah, exactly. That's great. I love that. That's true.

Haley Radke: I'm curious if you've thought about this. People love the reunion story, right? That they're obsessed with it. It's heartwarming. I call it reunion porn. People- love it. And why? Because they ultimately understand it's really [00:34:00] difficult that you were separated from your siblings for your whole life.

Alex Blum: It is. And I spent so much of my life thinking, because I think I was told to think this, that like it's no big deal, right?

And again, people who don't, who aren't connected to this issue, that's always with you. "Oh, what's the big deal? You were adopted. You grew up," and they're like, "What's your problem?" kinda thing, right? And and I carried that opinion around with me for a long time so what?" And only when this happened, I started to realize actually how significant it is and how much of an emotional landscape there is there.

And, there's so much to discover about yourself and other people and the situation and to have my three brothers and there was a funny thing that happened the first time we spoke. We talked for an hour and a half, and I hung up the phone. I was like, "Ah," I turned to my wife. I said, "I love these guys."

And she goes, "Of course you do. They're just like you." Which was such a funny, perceptive thing for her to say. But it is this amazing thing where all of a sudden I felt like I got three best [00:35:00] friends kinda like overnight. Like there was... and this goes to the nature versus nurture issue that you raised before.

It was just different. Here they were, these guys, and there it was. We settled in immediately to this sort of interaction. And we have a good time, we make fun of each other, we have this sort of funny, sarcastic, but very open, emotionally open kind of relationship with each other, and it was just there.

It like, we didn't have to build it. We didn't have to create it. I didn't need anybody to, give me a resume and explain to me who you are and can I trust you? You know what I mean? It, none of that. It was just like, there it is.

Haley Radke: Is Bill the oldest of the three?

Alex Blum: Bill's the youngest. Hank is the oldest of the three.

Haley Radke: He's the youngest. Pardon me. Okay, so Hank.

Alex Blum: Yeah.

Haley Radke: How did Hank feel about being usurped as the oldest brother?

Alex Blum: Ah, he was thrilled. It was hilarious. He was like, "I was never supposed to be the older brother." She, it was really, he's so funny about it. He's "See, you weren't here. I shouldn't have had to deal with this [00:36:00] stuff. That's you. You should have been there," which I just loved. And actually, Andrea, my wife, is really funny because she conversely, she says to me, in my adoptive family, I was the younger brother, and she said to me, "You're, you've always been an older brother personality. You were, you're not a younger brother. You're an older brother personality. You're kinda the person that's in charge and deciding things, and you were born a grown-up," this kinda thing. So it's very funny because on the one side I have Hank saying, "I shouldn't have had to do this stuff. You should've been there. I wish you had been there. I wish I had an older brother," and on the other hand, my wife's saying to me, "You're not a younger brother. There's no way. You were meant to be a younger brother," right? So on both sides, we sorta have that going on, which is kinda funny.

Haley Radke: How has this impacted your relationship with your adoptive brother?

Alex Blum: It's great. I just love him. He's so funny. So when this whole thing happened, my kids, I have two stepkids and three of my own kids, and so we have this [00:37:00] whole blended family going on. And so my stepkids and my kids and everybody, they were brought into it, and COVID happened pretty quickly after this happened, and we started doing Zoom calls with everybody.

So we'd have my nieces and my brothers and their spouses and my kids, and it was like this whole free-for-all. It was really, it was great. But I was a little bit worried because I hadn't really brought my brother, my adopted brother, into the situation, and I was a little worried because I was afraid...

I didn't want him to feel in some way that he had been replaced or that he was not part of it. And so I was a little bit worried. And so I called him, I said, I, there's something I gotta tell you." And so he's like, "Okay, sure." And so I tell him the whole story about what happened and all the rest of it, and he's listening, and he's not asking any questions, and I'm telling the whole thing, and I get to the end of it, and I'm like, "So what do you think?"

And he looked, and there was a pause, and he goes, "You gotta have a party." And that was that. Which [00:38:00] of course I should have known because that's who he is.

He was never gonna be all tortured about it, but I was worried about it. And it was so funny because there's this thing I sometimes say, which is that everybody's always in character, and he was so in character.

That's exactly... I should have known that's how he would respond. He wasn't gonna have a big problem with it.

Haley Radke: Did you guys ever talk about being adopted growing up?

Alex Blum: Not very much, because the message that we were given from the start was my adoptive parents did the right thing in that they told us when we were very young, and that I am convinced, and I'm sure you agree, that is the right thing. Do not wait. That's a bad idea. So we were told very early on, and I give-- and I'm sure that's what the adoption agency told my adoptive parents and all, and that was good. But what went with it was this, "Yeah, so this is it. You're adopted. It's no big deal, and that's it. Let's move on." And there was no discussion, and there was, there were, [00:39:00] my, my adoptive parents were 100% not interested in any discussion of who our parents might be or anything like that.

So my brother and I took that on. It was "All right. Whatever." And that was the end of that. We knew we were not brothers, right? We had no DNA connection, and we knew that, and that made kinda sense 'cause we didn't look alike particularly or anything like that.

But yeah, we just accepted the sort of party line, which was, "It's no big deal. Doesn't matter. Let's move on."

Haley Radke: I am really excited for people to read your book, An Accident of Birth. You include so many historical events throughout, and I think fellow baby scoop era adoptees will really enjoy it. And this really unique thing about your book is you include the chorus of your bio brothers chiming in-

Alex Blum: Yeah

Haley Radke: and sharing what was happening for them throughout the same [00:40:00] times, and I really appreciated that. That's one of the most difficult things, I think, for me in reunion is you know, seeing the family pictures and I'm not there-

Alex Blum: Yeah ...

Haley Radke: and wondering, where was I during that time? It's like the sliding doors moment of like we're in parallel lives, but-

Alex Blum: Yeah

Haley Radke: So yeah, I think folks will really enjoy reading your memoir. I'm really excited to share it with folks.

Alex Blum: I'm glad. That's so great. I, and I really appreciate that. I appreciate your point of view. And I have found that a lot of people, regardless of their age or what generation they are, even whether adoptees or they're not, the one thing I have found that really makes me happy is that people tell me all the time, "I see myself in your book."

They find something to attach to and there's a lot of variety in terms of what that is, and that makes me happy- ... 'cause that, I feel like [00:41:00] if that's the case, then I feel like I did something right, which is good.

Haley Radke: And I read portions of it physically, but I also listened on audio to prepare for our conversation today, and I love hearing all your voices. I think that's really special.

Alex Blum: That was genius, the moment when we figured out to do that. It was like we were at the recording studio and we were there and it was like how do we do this? They're not here. We can't put them all together in the same place. And we set the whole thing up and I just was so happy we were able to do that.

I'm glad that's your reaction, and that's exactly what we were after, which it was, and I think you described it this way, as like they're kind of a chorus, and so to hear their own voices rather than me, I was so excited about it and I was so glad it worked. It just, I think it's great.

Haley Radke: And you all sound similar, which is pretty special too.

Alex Blum: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Alex, what did you wanna recommend to us today?

Alex Blum: I read this book. There's a lot of books out there about adoption obviously, and there's a lot of how-to books and stuff like [00:42:00] that which I'm suspicious of just to put it nicely. But I read this book called Relinquished, which is written by this woman Gretchen Sisson, and it's a study that she did where she, it's where she interviewed mothers who gave up their children over a period, a long period of time repeatedly, and she talks about their experience and why they gave up their kids.

Most of them gave up their children not because they wanted to, but because they had to for either financial reasons or... there's a young woman she talks about, and she said literally, if somebody had given me $1,000, I wouldn't have given up my kid. She said, "I couldn't even figure out how to buy a car seat. Forget about a car. I couldn't even figure out how to buy a car seat. I just didn't see any way that I could get through this. So I gave up my kid, and I've regretted it [00:43:00] every single day since then. And Gretchen Sisson points out that the fact that a mother says that I'm sorry, and maybe this is a little political, though I don't think it is.

It's a failure of our society that a woman who has a kid has to give that child up because she, there's, there is no societal support and she can't get any help. I think that's wrong.

Haley Radke: Yep.

Alex Blum: So I think that book really... those stories are incredible, and I think she says some very valuable things about misperceptions of adoption and the politics of it nowadays and all of that. I just thought it was an incredible piece of work, like really impressive.

Haley Radke: Agreed. Yes. She's a sociologist and scholar and yeah it's fabulous. I'm working on a project myself called On Adoption this year, which is a podcast covering the same themes as Gretchen covers in [00:44:00] her book, and I'm really referencing her book quite often, and she's gathered so many facts and statistics to share with people. It's just excellent. So great recommendation. Thank you.

Alex Blum: Yeah. I was so impressed by her, and the one thing that really struck me, which made me a little bit angry, was the politicization of adoption and people relating it to abortion and all this other stuff that's gone on is infuriating, and she's so informed and she's amazing. I just think it's amazing what she did.

Haley Radke: Agreed. And she's a, a great example of an adoptee ally 'cause she never-

Alex Blum: Yeah ...

Haley Radke: speaks over us and she's always in support of adoptee advocates. I really appreciate that about her, too.

Alex Blum: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for sharing part of your story with us, Alex. I'm sure folks will check out your book, An Accident of Birth: A Story of Adoption and Identity, [00:45:00] and we'll make sure to link to that in the show notes.

And in the meantime, where can folks follow you and connect with you online?

Alex Blum: That's great. Thank you so much. This has been really great. It's a privilege to meet you, and I really appreciate the whole conversation and and you're out there with your podcast, which I think is great. I think that's really good.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Thank you. Do you have Instagram, website you wanna shout out?

Alex Blum: There's a website which is talexblum.com, and on the website, that's the website for the book, and it's, there are links to all the podcasts and everything like that on there. And the Instagram, which is talexblum as well, so it's pretty easy to find.

Haley Radke: Great. We'll make sure to link to those in the show notes for folks as well.

Alex Blum: Great. Thank you so much.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

I am so glad to be back with you [00:46:00] friends. Thank you for your patience as I had a bit of a, in quotation marks, summer break. Actually, I have spent the balance of my time working on my new project On Adoption, which I'm very excited to share with you soon. I'm still looking for your support. We are having an adoptee read-a-thon put on by our friends at Adoptees For Family Preservation, and we will have the dates, how you can attend and participate up on social media.

Please check for that. We will also link to any information we have for you in the show notes, so please click through and I would love to have you come and hang out with us. There's also going to be a silent auction as a part of that, and all the proceeds go to Adoptees for Family Preservation. They are [00:47:00] a registered 501[c][3] and all donations will be tax deductible. Tax deductible. That's tricky to say. Anyway, I'm so glad to be back and podcasting and talking to fellow adoptees for Adoptees On and just know we are so hard at work behind the scenes getting On Adoption ready for the public and my team is so incredible. I can't wait to tell you all about them, and we have so many good things coming up to share with you soon and all of that is only possible through your support, your generosity sharing with your connections that we're working on this show and I would love for you to support Adoptees for Family Preservation, which in turn helps On Adoption come and exist in this world.

When I dreamed [00:48:00] up making a narrative-style podcast that told the adoptee experience and the birth mother experience and what's happening right now for birth parents in contemporary adoption I had no idea the things I would learn and the depth of work it takes to make a really excellent, listenable audio documentary.

And I've learned so much and I can't wait to share that with you. In the meantime, Adoptees On is back sharing adoptee voices and we have a lot of great folks lined up for this fall season and I'm also excited to share those interviews with you. So thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again [00:49:00] soon.

328 10 Years of Adoptees On with Haley Radke, Sullivan Summer, and Kristal Parke

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/328

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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'm the creator and host of this show, which aired its first episode on July 1st, 2016, a full decade ago. When I started Adoptees On all those years ago, my teens were a toddler and a preschooler and I podcasted in a corner of my basement with a laundry rack behind me that I'd toss a quilt over top of for better sound quality.

I'd met a few adoptees on Twitter, and I wanted to have more in-depth conversations about reunion, grief, mental health, identity and [00:01:00] healing. I just didn't know that thousands of you wanted that, too. Thank you for building this show with me. This milestone moment is for every single guest who trusted me with their story, every listener who felt seen while listening, and all the folks who have supported the show, Patreon, sharing episodes with a friend, leaving me comments or reviews.

I am so deeply honored to be in community with all of you. Thank you. Today, I've invited a couple of friends to turn the microphone on me, and we run the gauntlet of tears to laughter in a very short time. I hope you enjoy. Sullivan Summer and Kristal Parke of Adoption Pop are here to celebrate 10 incredible years with us today.

Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. We [00:02:00] 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 back to Adoptees On Sullivan Summer.

Hello, Sullivan.

Sullivan Summer: Hello.

Haley Radke: And Kristal Park. Hi, Kristal.

Kristal Parke: Hi, Haley Radke. Hi, Sullivan Summer.

Sullivan Summer: Hi, Kristal Park.

Haley Radke: Welcome, friends.

Kristal Parke: Thank you for having us. I'm so excited to be here. Today is such a special day.

Sullivan Summer: It's an incredibly special day. How do you feel, Haley?

Haley Radke: I cannot remember the last time feeling nervous before a recording, and today I am I think I want to be able to remember all the things, and I'm fearful I will not be able to.

And that feels sad, [00:03:00] right? When it used to be when I even edited the show myself way back in the day, I knew every guest. I knew their story. I remembered everything. And now I don't anymore because there's been so many, like hundreds of people I've, had the privilege to talk to, and all of their stories are important, but I don't wanna forget something.

So I don't know. I feel this pressure to hold everything in my mental archive, which I'm pretty good at usually, but there's a lot packed in there of adoptee things now.

Sullivan Summer: Do you think there's gonna be a quiz?

Haley Radke: Yeah. Didn't you write a quiz of what was episode 262? I'm not sure.

Sullivan Summer: I feel like, so Kristal and I obviously prepared for this episode, but now I'm feeling like we did not use our prep time the way we should have.

Kristal Parke: But we did do some prep, so we're not [00:04:00] freewheeling it here.

Haley Radke: Okay. All right. I'm so glad to allow you to interview me. Did my voice shudder? That was like... yeah. No, I'm ready. I'm excited to talk about 10 years of Adoptees On.

Kristal Parke: This is big. This is big, and it's emotional. For me even, to think about the impact that Adoptees On has had on my life and the lives of so many who have shared publicly that you have impacted their journey, it's emotional. And here she goes, everyone. Haley's... I can see the emotions coming to the surface.

Sullivan Summer: What was the over-under on minutes it will take Haley to cry?

Haley Radke: If you get under three, you win.

Sullivan Summer: So Haley, at what point did you realize that this podcast was clicking [00:05:00] into something? At what point did you realize, oh, wait a minute, this is actually a thing. It's not just kinda something that you started, a personal hobby or anything like that, but this is actually, this is gonna be a thing.

Haley Radke: I think somewhere between six months to a year in of recording the stories, yes that was a thing for me. But it was when listeners started really commenting or wanting to share with me or emailing me and giving feedback. To, to your point earlier, Kristal, of "Oh, this is the first time I'm hearing these things. I feel so seen," and like that. I was like, oh, it really isn't just me having an impact from hearing these stories. It is going to be a thing. But I had no idea how big it would get really.

Kristal Parke: Was there [00:06:00] ever a moment that you felt like you were in, over your head? Whether it be an interview or when Adoptees On started to get a lot of feedback, did you ever feel like you were in over your head? What did I create here?

Haley Radke: I think I can think of two different pieces. So I never knew... I used to have seasons, and I had what I would call season one, season two kind of thing, and I never knew how many episodes I was gonna make in a season. I was just like, I- that's what you do. You call it season one and I think editing, I don't know, seven, eight I can't remember the exact number, and I was like, Ugh, I need a break. This is all so much emotions. And then listening it, to it back multiple times, make sure the edit's good, right? You're really taking in all the feelings. That was one piece where I'm like, "Okay, I gotta wrap this and have a little break." So that was one. The other was, I don't remember exactly the timing of this.

I would say it would be within the [00:07:00] first two years. I got my first really harsh critique. I don't even remember what it was now. But I took it so deeply personal, and I went to the Facebook group of listeners at the time, and I was like, "How could she say these mean things to me?" And it really kinda shook me a little bit, because to that point, all I had was good feedback.

And I've told other creators who have thought about starting a podcast this before. You don't really get a lot of bad feedback in podcasting. If you post something on Instagram, your keyboard's right there. People can tell you how ugly you look, and you shouldn't have worn that, and why do you, why did you vote for who you di- you know.

But on podcasting it takes a few steps for someone to find your show, play it, and then also to find you to give you [00:08:00] feedback. So if they do all those steps, they're ready to really lay into you. But that really was such a good experience for me now, because I think about all the terrible things people have said to me in the last, years since that.

I don't care. I just don't even care. I'm thick-skinned now. And also, we're recording this, I have a very dark burn on my arm, sunburn which has a thick demarcation line. I look like I taped off a rectangle for some reason, and I feel like it's gonna be permanent. So that's where my thick skin is, right there.

Sullivan Summer: So it sounds like for sure getting that harsh feedback was a hard moment. Was that the hardest moment? Or if you think back over 10 years, what's, what was the hardest [00:09:00] moment?

Haley Radke: I think I've had a few. One was I was a couple of weeks out from interviewing someone, and he passed away. And I didn't even know him. I hadn't interacted with him really. I think someone recommended that he come on. I can't even remember his name at this mo- so here, that's one of those oh, shoot, I wish I knew what his name was. And I was like, "Oh, no," now his story won't be preserved for the record. And I've... and that was really difficult for me to wrap my head around.

And then when my first guest who I had on passed, Dr. Sunny Reed, that was brutal. I remember grieving for her for a really long time because she was in a doctoral program. Her research [00:10:00] was going to benefit and has benefited adopted people in a large way, and I knew her future and trajectory. And so when she died, it was so devastating.

So those hard moments, I think, were all community related when I think of the other items 'cause I don't know how... I guess I feel like I'm like a adoptee historian collecting all these stories and trying to preserve them forever and highlighting the books and articles that adoptees have added to the collection of our stories and the documentary.

Like, all those things I wanna be the collector. There used to be this thing called the Adoption Museum Project, and ultimately that shuttered. But I was like is this the new digital adoption museum of, oral histories and that kind of thing? Anytime something's lost, that was [00:11:00] really hard for me.

Yeah. It's not necessarily podcast related, but that's just me being in this space more.

Kristal Parke: Yeah, that makes sense. And of course, loss, it's a theme in us, in our, us adoptees', our lives, right? And yeah to lose a story or a life or any of that's a lot. It's a lot. Do you wanna come up for air and for me to ask you something a little lighter?

Haley Radke: Sure.

Kristal Parke: Okay. What do you wear from the waist down? Are you wearing shorts, granny panties, slippers, socks?

Haley Radke: I'm always wearing underwear. I'm always wearing pants. Occasionally a skirt. I will definitely wear shorts in the summertime, but... And I'm 98% of the time barefoot, and that might be [00:12:00] surprising 'cause I hate feet, but I choose to be barefoot. Yeah.

Kristal Parke: I love the format of Adoptees On because we don't... it's not video, right? And so there's a real casual comfortability about recording with you. I do appreciate that.

Haley Radke: You know what? I remember one guest, I think his name was Bernie, and he wasn't really public adoptee. I can't recall exactly how we got connected to have him on the show, but he showed up in a suit, and he was ready and it was... I remember just being, like, so struck by that. He's taking this very seriously, and he's very prepared, and he had a full suit on.

Kristal Parke: Oh, Bernie.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Kristal Parke: I love that.

Sullivan Summer: That makes me feel that makes me feel warm inside.

Kristal Parke: Me too. I think.

Haley Radke: Oh, that's 100% how I took it ... yeah. Yes. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. It... And that's such a good memory for me.

Kristal Parke: [00:13:00] Wow. I just wanted to say, it... we do this, and Haley, you've been doing this now for 10 years, and I think we can get a little desensitized to just this whole experience. But for some people, it's their very, maybe their one and only time that they ever share their story, and it means a great deal to people. And I know it means a great deal to you as well. I certainly don't think you take that for granted.

Haley Radke: Yeah, I've had some really special opportunities to be the first person someone's ever told their story out loud to. And that's such a privilege, right? What a privilege to be so trusted.

And then for them to trust you as a listener with it,

Kristal Parke: yeah,

Haley Radke: so special. And so I've had times where [00:14:00] I've had open-to-guest applications, and I think folks get a little bit salty sometimes when, with some of my questions or they're like I don't have a platform or I wanna be anonymous. She's not gonna take me. Absolutely, I will. Absolutely. It's not about who has the biggest following. I wish I could interview everyone. I wish everyone's story could be preserved for all of us to learn from.

Sullivan Summer: So Kristal and I can see you in this conversation, and we can see you tearing up and getting emotional just thinking about some of the guests that you've had over the past 10 years. Can you share some of the most unforgettable on-air moments?

Haley Radke: I remember one, one gal we had on who shared about how she snuggled up with her birth mother every [00:15:00] night for months, and would lay... They would lay together. I think she described it as laying on top of her somet- like, and I thought, "Oh, my gosh. I'm so glad you said that out loud." She wasn't embarrassed by it, and I thought how there's gonna be many people that are like, "I wish I could climb into my birth mother's skin. I wish I could have that experience." When I was interviewing Jane for the genetic sexual attraction episode, I remember thinking like, "Wow, I'm never gonna have a conversation like this again."

The moments where people I'm gonna use the word overshare. I don't mean it that way because they're just, they're so open and vulnerable and willing to say the things that most people would keep secret, and we're so much [00:16:00] better for it. Because there's so many people who have had those experiences and have felt so completely isolated, I think... What other memorable... We've certainly had some funny moments or embarrassing moments. My favorite are when pets make an appearance even though most people are so careful to put their pets away and we're not gonna hear any jingling and And which my dog is upset with me right now. I don't know if you can hear that either. But yeah, I'm trying to think if there's any other... I don't know. I've cried with so many people, and the thing that gets me the almost every interview I always ask at the end "Is there anything that you shared that you maybe overshared 'cause you felt like you were just talking to me, a friend, but you don't really want the rest of the world to hear about this, and you want me to edit it out?" And almost everyone is "No leave it in. That's the real." And [00:17:00] so that's pretty special, too.

Kristal Parke: I don't know about you, Sullivan, but there's episodes of Adoptees On, like that one that you just mentioned about the adoptee crawling up with her birth mom, that I can remember where I was in the world listening to. And I think that is many people's experiences with Adoptees On.

Sullivan Summer: There's an episode with Pam Cordano as part it was part of the estrangement series in 2021, and I literally remember where I was on the sidewalk when I heard Pam say certain things in that episode.

Kristal Parke: I remember where I was when I first heard your episode, Sullivan. Oh. You were one of those episodes. I was I was walking on my treadmill in my basement. I can fully go back to that [00:18:00] memory, so it's the impact,

Sullivan Summer: I remember when Haley met you because she left me a voice note the day that you met and told me that she met someone special.

Kristal Parke: Aw. That's Oh my gosh. So that brings me to my next question then, which would be what are some of your favorite memories of meeting listeners in real life?

Haley Radke: Oh. That one really makes me cry. That's a, that's such a joyful thing to think about. I remember when I went to a conference in 2017 and David Boll came up to me and he told me that he had been listening to my podcast and he loved it, and I was like, "Oh my gosh."

A real life listener in [00:19:00] person. That really felt like the podcast was real and that strangers were listening, it wasn't my, 10 friends and family that I could, summon up to, even though I know, knew the numbers were higher than that, but that was a good moment.

And Nick and I went to San Francisco on a holiday, and so we had arranged to do one of Anne Heffron's writing workshops, 'cause she lived nearby at the time, and then do a listener meetup. I think, I don't know what the year that was now, maybe 2019. And I had listeners come from, I wanna say six states, traveled from out of state to, not just like local people, but traveled from out of state to, yes, visit San Francisco, and then do a writing workshop with Anne, and then hang out with me and the other [00:20:00] adoptees for the evening.

That felt really wild. Like I'm trying to think of who would I travel to hang out with that I listen to on a podcast. I don't know. And then the other really fun meetup I had was when I spoke at a conference in Washington DC and we had a listener meetup. I think there was like 30-some people there and there was like a lineup formed to meet me and take pictures with me.

And I was like, what is happening? That was wild. And that was, I tell you what, that same day, that was a, such a low moment for me because I had this peak experience. I met all these listeners, and we spent time together and took pictures, and we took a big group photo, and I don't know if I've posted that.

I should post it in with the celebration kinds of things. And that night, Nick had made [00:21:00] plans to go see a sporting event. I can't remember which kind. And everyone kinda left and filtered away and had their own dinner plans or whatever, and I was all by myself that evening in the hotel, and it felt so Oh, okay, and now I'm by myself. It was a weird swing

Kristal Parke: I think at the end of the day too, you're like, "I'm just me." I'm still just me, right? Every- I think sometimes people look at you like you're this, I don't know, this like they put you on a pedestal, right? And then at the end of the day it's no I'm still me, right?

Haley Radke: Still Haley just waiting for someone to ask her out for dinner.

Kristal Parke: There you go.

Haley Radke: Can I come to your group dinner? No. Okay. Okay, bye.

Sullivan Summer: Do you find that people have misconceptions about you?

Haley Radke: I think people think I'm... I'm gonna, I'm gonna say the thing and then I'm gonna also be like, but that's actually kinda true.

People think [00:22:00] I'm too busy or like I might not get back to them or, they want something from me and like a lot of the time I'm not too busy and I can reply to the things and I can interact for a brief time period. I'm not inaccessible, except for this year. This year I really am.

But in the normal times when I'm not working on several shows at the same time, I do comment back to listeners and I do message them and I wish I could replicate myself. But I've always hoped that when people contacted me looking for community that I could send them out outwards to build community for themselves and to make their own friendships and all those connections outside of me.

What other misconceptions? I think people think I know every single adoptee that's ever made some kind of media or book and I... someone [00:23:00] on this call might DM me regularly saying, "Do you know this person?" And I'm like, "No. I wish I did." Okay, two people on this call might do that regularly. Okay, there you go.

Now you've both outed yourselves. Sorry, they're like pointing at themselves and stuff. Yeah, I don't know everybody, I don't know every book. I continue to discover new interesting adopted people on the regular.

Kristal Parke: All right. Who are your dream guests? If you could have anybody in the world, and I won't even make you pick one, you can pick a top three.

Haley Radke: I think here's another misconception. I think people think like I want big celebrity guests on or something, but so many of them are so private and closed off and they don't wanna necessarily talk about those things. So I can name one. I'd really like to interview Sarah McLachlan. I think she would be a really fascinating adoptee interview [00:24:00] if she was willing to be public with the real, which is what the majority of my guests are willing to do, really be authentic.

And I don't think celebrities are already asked so many intimate personal questions and have so little privacy and anything to themselves that to ask them to do an interview like one of mine feels so incredibly intrusive. And like truthfully, I haven't gone after too many. I think the most famous person I've interviewed probably is Mary Gauthier, and she's been very public with her adoptee experience, so I didn't feel like I was overstepping when I was asking her my questions, so yeah.

Kristal Parke: I love Sarah McLachlan. I love her music. I grew up on that.

Haley Radke: Yeah. And she's Canadian. Come on.

Kristal Parke: Yeah. Yeah, she'd be a perfect guest.

Sullivan Summer: [00:25:00] Haley, what's been the greatest sacrifice you've had to make in bringing Adoptees On to life or continuing it over 10 years?

Haley Radke: I have a couple things going through my mind.

I was a stay-at-home mom, and this led me to be a working parent, and so I think I sacrificed time with my kids when they were young. That's a deep cost, as mothers know. And saying the things that I know deeply to be true, but can be very controversial when critiquing adoption, has cost me some relationships.

That's a tough one. And then I don't actually know if this is true or not, [00:26:00] but this is the story that I tell myself, to use that phrase, is that I think by doing this podcast, like I think it, it might have cost me a chance to reconnect with my birth mother. I'm assuming she's heard it, and that's something that I've always had in my head that's "Oh, if I do this, then this might be a bridge too far for her."

Kristal Parke: So if you could go back 10 years and know what you know now, with that in mind, but as a whole, Adoptees On as a whole, would you do it again?

Haley Radke: Yeah. It's it's changed me so profoundly. I've learned so much from my guests and my [00:27:00] listeners. I've learned so much about myself. It has pushed me to heal things I didn't know needed to be healed until somebody said something and I'm like, "Oh yes, I gotta go back to my therapist."

That happened so so many times. And I think I'm... Like I think I'm a better person now than when I started 10 years ago. I hope I've become a better human. But from the feedback I've gotten I can't... like I can't believe things people have shared with me about how the show has changed their life or... I think at this point I'm probably up to, I think I can think of maybe 15 people now who've told me that they decided to stay alive on this planet, from hearing Adoptees On. And I... who could trade that, all of every sacrifice is worth it for [00:28:00] that.

Sullivan Summer: I know I can't imagine my life without Adoptees On. I can't. It's been in my life for five years, and I can say with confidence that my life would have been not just different, but not as full if I hadn't have Googled, "Is there a podcast about adoption?" One day and found Adoptees On.

What about you, Kristal?

Kristal Parke: Yeah, I would say the same, the very same thing, and I also Googled.

I was looking for a Canadian adoptee connection and yeah, I found Adoptees On and I think the, and this is, I think this is the antithesis of what Adoptees On has done is just opened adoptees' eyes and given them the courage [00:29:00] to be able to look at their own journey And so thank you.

Sullivan Summer: Thank you.

Kristal Parke: We love you.

We love you. We love you so much.

Sullivan Summer: We love you.

Haley Radke: I love you too. Thank you. We did it. Okay, that was... I feel like I did have my answers in order. Good job, Haley, mentally prepared enough. But you two have been on my screen a lot lately because, the three of us started a whole new thing this year, which is Adoption Pop, and I would love to just get the chance to tell Adoptees On listeners about it. Sullivan, why don't you share how you came up with the idea for Adoption Pop?

Sullivan Summer: [00:30:00] I watch a lot of TV. I think so many of us where, you know, you're home, you're watching your Netflix, you're watching your YouTube, you're going to the movies, and you just get blindsided by adoptee storylines in all these films that you didn't know they were...

it was in there. And I feel like the reason I say blindsided is because it always felt like the stories were always told very poorly. And I don't recall what the most recent one that I had watched, but I had this flash of oh, we should have a podcast where we get to just talk about talk about this media really thoughtfully and really deeply with other adoptees who watch it too and just share our opinions of it.

And I reached out to the two of you, and I left a voice note, and at the time I left the [00:31:00] voice note, it was what I call a fake fantasy job. I have a lot of ideas all the time, and I sometimes will be like this is a fake fantasy, and I was like this is a fake fantasy thing.

And so I got... I just left you both a silly, long-winded voice note about we should do this, but I didn't think it was serious, and the two of you responded immediately very seriously and already were like we could do this, and it could do this. It could look like this. And I remember thinking oh, I think they're serious, and I think, I actually think I'm serious too.

Haley Radke: I've been the recipient of many of your fake fantasy Voxer messages. I didn't hear that message as a fake fantasy. I heard it as, "I'm presenting this idea that we're doing."[00:32:00]

Kristal, did- what did

Kristal Parke: Oh my I'm over here just laughing, cracking up. I've got my audio on mute because I'm laughing so hard. Yeah I didn't think that either. I thought, "Wow, this is a great idea." And I loved the opportunity to be able to create with two females and fellow adoptees, and two individuals that I have a lot of respect for.

And I just was like, "Yeah, sure." And I remember, I actually remember vox-ing you back and being like, "I don't know if I have much to offer, but I could do this."

Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah.

Kristal Parke: That's crazy, Kristal.

Haley Radke: I think Sullivan and I are laughing because of the three of us, Kristal lifts the most for this show

Kristal Parke: I don't know

Haley Radke: next to Sullivan, and I just, roll up.

Kristal Parke: But that [00:33:00] was all predetermined. That was all predetermined because we knew that you were, taking on a big project with On Adoption, and I think both Sullivan and I were so happy to do what we could so that you could be a part of this.

Sullivan Summer: And you also come, Haley, for the production of each individual episode, which we do, we have weekly episodes, and so for the production of each individual episode, while Kristal and I are doing the lifting on those, you're coming with a decade of experience. So you have already done the work for Adoption Pop, you just did it over 10 years, what Kristal and I are doing, in these seven-day rounds.

Haley Radke: So we always watch a piece of media every week that more than not, likely more than not, [00:34:00] gets us very upset and ready to roast the creators, the writers, whoever's participating in these trashy projects. Not always, but most of the time. And so I've never watched so many things that I have just had huge angry feelings about.

I do hate watch things. I, that's true. That is true about me. I do hate watch things. Never in my life have I watched so many things I hated for the purpose of this podcast. Kristal, has it changed your viewing habits at all?

Kristal Parke: My viewing habits? How do you mean?

Haley Radke: Of any... do you view things for pleasure anymore? Or you just think, "If I have to turn the TV on, it's, I'm just gonna watch this next triggering thing and- ... have to write down all the terrible things about it so I can repeat them to Haley and Sullivan in a couple days."

Kristal Parke: Y- yeah. I feel like, there's... I'm either watching adoptee, [00:35:00] Adoption Pop content or I'm watching The Real Housewives to get my mind off of anything sort of adoptee-related, but they alway- they somehow slip it in there somehow.

There's always some sort of adoption storyline that that makes it into reality TV, too. Yeah, I don't watch TV the same way. I feel like I don't even see life in the same way after being around the two of you. You two are actually the ones that taught me what the term hate watch meant. I'd, I had never even heard of that before.

Haley Radke: I'm an expert. I'm an expert hate watcher.

Sullivan Summer: Haley is an expert hate watcher. I don't like to hate watch. I'll just shut something off, which I can't do now with Adoption Pop.

Kristal Parke: Yeah.

Sullivan Summer: But I think Adoption Pop... So I, you both know, I do a lot of literary criticism kind of outside my Adoption Pop life. And so [00:36:00] turning now to television and film criticism for me was not that big of a leap. It's just I'm taking in the media in a different way. But the podcast has really challenged me to speak thoughtfully about why I'm having the reaction that I'm having. And also- something that we were really thoughtful about when we started the podcast, because it was more than simply a voxer, we prepped, I think it was it six weeks- or so between the idea and when we recorded our first episode. So we put a lot of work in the front end, and also thinking about, what do we want this podcast to be. And we were... We have been very intentional to say we hope and assume we will have an adoptee audience, people that feel validated perhaps by... that may share our opinions of pieces of media. [00:37:00] But I think we were really conscious about perhaps wanting a broader audience to include adoptive parents and families of adoptees, whether biological or adoptive as well. Because I grew up in a family where talking about things was not really what we did.

And so I feel like I would have wished for perhaps an entree, if people are watching TV or a movie or something, to use that as the anchor point for having what is otherwise a tough conversation about the way that somebody might be feeling. And I feel like I've been challenged in the podcast to think about the language I use and how I present my own ideas, because just saying, "I hate this," is not helpful for anyone, myself included

Haley Radke: Okay, fine. That's all I did the last episode we recorded. But [00:38:00] no, I think to your point it's the Big Daddy one for anyone who wants to listen. I'm not sure if it'll be out when this airs, but-

Kristal Parke: Sullivan's "Fix your face."

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Kristal Parke: Is your face gonna be like this the whole episode?

Haley Radke: Yeah. That was my most sour episode so far.

No, wait, to your earlier point, I think we had feedback within, I wanna say, the first two to three weeks of someone saying just that. "Thank you so much for doing this episode. I was able to watch the thing and talk about it with my adoptive family," and it created those conversations that a lot of us wished we were able to have when we were growing up.

And it's also this, I'm gonna call it, like it's a sideways safe way to have a conversation. We're talking about this movie or TV show and how they're portraying adoption. We're not talking about our family or adoption, how it impacts us personally. [00:39:00] So it is like this ease into how can you have those more deeply personal conversations, which is really helpful I think anyone in relationship with an adopted person.

Kristal, who do you think should listen to Adoption Pop? And also comment to people who might not like to watch all these things we're talking about.

Kristal Parke: Yeah. One thing I think that we do really is I feel like we definitely give a very compassionate place for birth mothers to land here I think that the way that media portrays birth mothers is terrible, to say the least.

Look at we're about to do Shrinking. And I can imagine as a birth mother watching media that, oh, I don't wanna I don't wanna watch Adoption Pop because, media has done me dirty [00:40:00] already. But I think that for first mothers and and fathers for that matter to come, they can... I think they can come and watch this and really feel seen, and yeah, they should have done that differently.

I would also say non-adoptees, because I think it gives... and I have lots of friends that are not adopted, but maybe have a connection to adoption, and they watch, and then they're like, "Oh my gosh, I never thought about it that way," which is so cool 'cause that's what we're trying to do. So my answer is everyone.

But I know that, your audience can't just be everyone, but yeah. My vote is everyone.

Haley Radke: I think I agree. And I think I just wanna say that you don't have to have watched the thing-

Kristal Parke: Yeah ...

Haley Radke: to learn from our conversations and laugh with us at the creators of some of these terrible items. And [00:41:00] not everything we've covered has been terrible. We have had some gems. So you can look forward to, watching those along with us, I think.

Sullivan Summer: I think I'm always really proud and excited when someone will tell us that they went out and watched the media because we talked about it.

Haley Radke: Yes.

Sullivan Summer: They had never watched it before, and so now they went and watched it. And some of those have been things that we were very harsh about.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Sullivan Summer: Others, people have watched after we've said very positive things about them. And I think we should also say that the three of us don't always agree- on depictions, on, there are some pieces of media that, that one or two of us are incredibly activated by. And one or two of us had no problem with it, maybe even enjoyed it and other times where we disagree about the depiction [00:42:00] of whichever characters.

And again, I'm proud of that as well because I think, we represent different backgrounds and different life experiences and some of those overlap and some of them don't. And we also don't represent every adoptee experience either. And so I'm hopeful that listeners and viewers, 'cause we're on YouTube as well, but listeners and viewers of Adoption Pop can see something in every episode that resonates with them

Haley Radke: Agreed. Adoption Pop is definitely one of my recommended resources for folks because we can be your friends critiquing the shows that you like to watch or hate to watch alongside of you. So that's pretty fun. You can add us as a trio to your friend [00:43:00] crew if you watch Adoption Pop or listen.

And you guys have so many things going on. I do, too, but I wanna make sure folks know about all of them. I'm working away at On Adoption. We are writing and editing episodes right now. It is some of the most difficult work I've ever done in my whole life because of the subject matter. I interviewed birth mothers for 18 months and hundreds of... not hundreds. Hundreds of hours of thinking about it, dozens of hours actually recording, I should say, and now putting everything together. It's very emotionally taxing, and I hope that people will really learn a lot from what we're working On Adoption. And Kristal, will you tell us about your film and your new [00:44:00] film and what you're bringing into the world in the adoptee space?

Kristal Parke: Yes. I still have my film, Because She's Adopted, out there. It's still being invited to be screened at various places and events, and we will actually be showing it at CUB this year on the 10th of October. So if you are going to CUB, come and see Because She's Adopted, and we'll do a Q&A after.

Haley Radke: That's the Concerned United Birthparents retreat. It's gonna be in Seattle, Washington this year.

Kristal Parke: Yes. Yes. And my film's also available to rent on my website, kristalparke.net. And then I kinda, I said I wasn't a real filmmaker until I did my second film. So I do my second film. It's called Life's The Mother.

It's a short film. It features Monica Hall. She's an adoptee, a first mother, [00:45:00] and she shares some very deep and personal and intimate experiences of her life. So that should be completed by the end of summer, and we'll do the film festival run. And yeah, hopefully it'll be available for everybody to see as, as soon as that's done.

And I'm actually gonna be... I have another project coming up, another doc as well, but I can't talk about it yet. So I guess if I do three docs, then I am a real filmmaker.

Haley Radke: Do you keep adding real? Yes. You're just real. Eventually it's just R-E-E-L. It's just film reels. Okay.

Kristal Parke: As you can tell, I have bad... i've got imposter syndrome big time, but that's all right.

Haley Radke: We don't have that for you. We believe you're a real filmmaker, an excellent one, and I'm so excited to see Life's a Mother when it comes out soon. And your, of course, [00:46:00] your film Because She's Adopted is incredible. Sullivan, will you share with us all the things you have going on?

Sullivan Summer: Yes, and before I do, 'cause I'm making a face at Kristal's imposter syndrome- ... that I mentioned that Adoption Pop was on YouTube. Kristal is entirely responsible for the editing and production of our YouTube show every single week, and I gotta be honest, we look fantastic. And and that's a result of Kristal every single week.

Kristal Parke: Thank you. I appreciate that. I really do. Okay, I'll never talk about myself that way again. Thank you.

Sullivan Summer: That's what, that's what we're here for.

So I have a couple of things going on. One is related, Haley, to your project On Adoption, this amazing limited series investigative podcast that you're putting together that I know [00:47:00] you've talked about before on Adoptees On.

But to produce something of the quality that you are doing costs a lot of money to do it well. And so Adoptees for Family Preservation is a 501[c][3] organization that is responsible for raising funds to support On Adoption, bringing On Adoption into the world. And we have been... so I was, I serve as the president of Adoptees for Family Preservation, alongside my other board members, Lora Alegria and Lilly Anspach.

We are all adoptees, and we've been working really hard for over a year to fundraise for On Adoption. And I have been blown away by the commitment and [00:48:00] generosity of so many people in this community who have given of their financial resources in small amounts and in large amounts to support the work that you're doing.

And so as we come into the latter half of 2026, we're in our final fundraising push and so people may see and hear us talk about fundraising more as we're coming into the end of the year. I would encourage listeners, you can go to our website adopteesffp.org. We're also on Instagram @adopteesffp. And certainly if you're able to give any amount fin- financially, we are incredibly grateful for that.

If you are not in a position to give financially, you can sign up for our [00:49:00] newsletter and you can follow us on Instagram. Both of these are free ways to support. Tell a friend also. Sign up and tell a friend as well, and again, we're grateful for that sort of support as well. So that's one thing I'm involved in.

And then I mentioned before I do quite a bit of literary criticism, but I also like... none of us, one podcast not good enough for any of us. So I also have another podcast. I have a podcast called Additions to the Archive. I interview Black authors writing Black history across genres.

That drops weekly. It is a New Books Network podcast. And so I'm really talking to historians and thinkers and people in the broader community talking about predominantly US history, politics, pop culture, literary criticism, and the like. And I will say while that is not [00:50:00] overtly adoption related, I'm thinking, Haley, when you were talking before about Adoptees On and the interviews that you're doing as being this archive of, adoptee stories.

I named my podcast Additions to the Archive because I think about a historical archive, a Black historical archive. And for me as an adopted person whose- not in reunion with either biolo- both of my biological parents were passed by the time I found them. So I have a hunger for this personal history and this archive.

And so my identity as an adoptee and as a transracial adoptee and a Black transracial adoptee is really at the foundation of Additions to the Archive, even though it is not a, quote unquote, "adoption-related podcast."

Haley Radke: Thank [00:51:00] you. I am so honored to create alongside of you two brilliant women. And, we celebrated Sullivan's chapbook launch last fall of Performance Anxiety, and I think folks would also like to read that.

We will link to all of those things in the show notes for you so you don't have to remember where to find Kristal and Sullivan. We'll have that there. But Kristal's website, kristalparke.net, and sullivansummer.com. And you're on all the places. IG, Sullivan's got a Substack. No worries, we got you covered on the links.

Thank you so much, both of you, for joining me to celebrate 10 years. Such an honor to get to speak with you and share you as my friends with all my listener friends. I'm so grateful that you agreed to come on and interview me. Thank you.

Sullivan Summer: [00:52:00] Congratulations.

Kristal Parke: Congratulations, and it is such an honor to be on Adoptees On and celebrate with you.

Love you.

Sullivan Summer: Love you.

Haley Radke: Love you too.

Thank you so much for listening to me all these years. I know there are some of you who've listened to the show since the beginning, and you've heard me evolve over the last decade, and I'm sure you have, too. And it's so incredible that you've stuck with me all these years, and I know I'm thankful for the new listeners, too.

New folks find the show every day. I hear from you that you binge the back catalog, and I love that all those hundreds of episodes are available in perpetuity. I've joked before that it's in my [00:53:00] will that someone will keep paying to keep the lights on the podcast feed when I'm long gone from this world to be able to preserve these stories for generations to come, and I hope that does happen.

I'm so proud of everyone who was brave enough to share their story and all the folks who have been inspired by my guests sharing to share in their own ways and share on Instagram and start their own TikToks and start their own podcasts and write their memoirs and workbooks to help adoptive parents and all the resources that folks have created out of listening to adoptee stories.

All the people who listened to the show and [00:54:00] went back to school to become therapists for adoptees. When I think about the ripples I'm looking at my wall of cards and letters right now. I've said it before, but whenever I'm recording at my desk, I see all the cards and notes people have sent to my PO Box, and when I have a difficult work day, I just look up, and I remember who I'm doing this for.

And I'm so Honored to be a part of such an incredible community, the adoptee community who spent, decades in activism work, and I just came alongside and learned from, all of the academics and adoptees before who have put their work out into the world. I came in as a newbie and [00:55:00] really gave myself a crash course in all that is adoption.

I don't know how many books I've read now. It's gotta be close to 300, maybe 350 adoption-related books, and all the hours of reading the academic articles that have been published, the conferences I've attended in person or virtually. If anyone wants to give me an honorary PhD in adoption, if that's a thing I think I'm ready for it.

I remember early on when somebody called me an adoptee expert, and I would kinda be like, Ugh, and now I can embrace that. I am an expert in listening to adopted people's stories, and they really stay with me, and I've carried all of your stories along with me in this world, and it powers me to [00:56:00] do the work that I'm doing now.

If you haven't heard, I'm working on this show called On Adoption. We are editing and writing the episodes right now. I've finished the majority of my recording at the time you're hearing this, and speaking to mothers who've relinquished their children is going back to how painful it was in the beginning when I heard adoptee stories and the difficulties people had and I identified with.

And now hearing the mother stories and fathers who have lost children to adoption in recent years is so deeply painful, and I have been strengthened through hearing all of your experiences and [00:57:00] knowing that there is hope for change. And I really believe that sharing our stories empowers all of us to share our stories, which impacts people's views of adoption.

And we have been changing the societal narrative together as a community for years and years, and our voices are more amplified now than they ever have been in history. And I believe that continues to happen. It continues. The amplification is growing. People are listening to us. Some are believing us.

And the more of Gen Pop, I've been calling them, that believe adoptee stories and believe stories of mothers and fathers who have [00:58:00] relinquished children, the more we will be able to support family preservation, vote for things that mean family preservation, all the upstream problems that cause adoption to happen in the first place during a temporary crisis situation.

I believe we will turn this ship around, and we are doing it. On Adoption is one of those projects that I hope will have a great impact in that work. And if you wanna learn more about it, you can go to onadoption.net. You can sign up for the Adoptees On Podcast newsletter. I share about it there, and you can look for Adoptees for Family Preservation, as Sullivan mentioned, if you'd like to support that brand-new project.

Thank you for doing that, and thank you for all the folks who have already done so. [00:59:00] You're helping power this work, this new project of mine, which will be my fourth podcast. So started with Adoptees On, went to Adoptees Off Script, which is my Patreon podcast. Now we have Adoption Pop and On Adoption's number four, and I hope to have good news about that for you soon.

Thank you to everyone who keeps asking me, "When is it gonna be out? I wanna listen to it." I wanna listen to it too. I do. I do. We're working on it, promise. Thank you so much for your celebrating with me. If you would like to give me a gift today, here are the ways you can celebrate. You can, A, tell a friend about Adoptees On, especially an adopted person that you might know. There's plenty of people who've never heard of Adoptees On. I think [01:00:00] now people assume you have, but you might not have. So tell a friend about Adoptees On. B, you could leave a podcast review. I always ask for that on my actual birthday, but this year you could leave me a review when you hear this episode. That would be so great. It helps build the credibility of the podcast and also helps people find the show a little more easily and helps in the podcast rankings of it all. And C, if you would subscribe to my newsletter and support Adoptees for Family Preservation by doing the same, that would be incredible because we will need your cheerleading and listening ears when On Adoption releases into the world to make sure it amplifies and gets out to as many folks, many listeners as we can.

[01:01:00] Those are the best ways to celebrate with me, or you can come and congratulate me on Instagram and leave a thank you for all of the guests who've shared their stories over the years. Thank you so much for listening for 10 years. Let's talk again soon.

327 Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/327

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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. On today's episode, I'm talking with Beth Yu Simpson, a therapist, educator, and founder of AIRE Roots. Beth shares how mentorship, community building and her own lived experience as a Korean adoptee have shaped her work, including her focus on ancestral healing and adoptee-centered care.

We also dig into the gaps in social work education around adoption and what meaningful change could look like. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. [00:01:00] We wrap up with some recommended resources for you and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com.

Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Beth Yu Simpson. Hi, Beth.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Hey. Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad to get to talk to you. You have appeared on Patreon for Ask an Adoptee Therapist, but this is our first time having you on Adoptees On. So I'd love it if you would start, if you don't mind sharing a bit of your story with us.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: I'm a transracial Korean adoptee. I was adopted when I was 10 months old. I grew up in the Seattle area, so in the suburbs, so the Coast Salish people. And I also had a stepparent adoption around maybe 10. I have two brothers who were not... who were biological to my parents, and I'm the only girl. But I am estranged from my adoptive parents.[00:02:00]

And the other thing I think is interesting about me is I'm married to another Korean adoptee, which is unique, but actually not so unique, which is interesting. And he is not estranged from his family and is really close with them and it's been really healing for me to be part of their family and even to witness the way that he was raised.

And for me, my family has really been my chosen family, so that's other adoptees and my best friend growing up. Her family really took me in and so that's actually the other family we do a lot of our holidays with. And I owe a lot to my mentors and teachers. So for my adoption, I would say I was interested I realize now I was actually really interested in my Korean culture. So when I was in eighth grade we moved to Federal Way which is- has a ton of Korean people actually. And I asked my mom if I could go to Korean school or do TaeKwonDo, and she was like, "No." And so I kinda just dropped it. But I really got [00:03:00] immersed into the adoptee community around 2005. I did Holt Camp. And I had grown up doing camps. I grew up really Christian, and I had grown up actually being a camp counselor. And it was perfect, because it was the first year Steve Kalb, it was his first year, and this was the year that Holt was moving from the cultural camps to identity. And that really resonated with me, because I had also just started the, my undergrad as a social worker.

And this is so powerful. You're just immersed into it, and it's so transformative. You spend a whole summer with all these adoptees. And for me, I love working with young people, so it was really perfect for me. And that just kinda launched, my work with the adoptee community and my adoptee community family actually.

And then I went into the MSW program right after that, the School of Social Work at University of Washington. And that, I think, is where I was more politicized and really embraced my identity as a person [00:04:00] of color and as a Korean person, and also continued to learn about the industry of adoption and the structural things at play.

And I was really lucky to be surrounded by adoptee community at that time, and tons of mentors. I went into public child welfare. So I went into this program. It's a Title IV-E program, so they pay for you to go to your MSW, but you work in public child welfare in return. And I actually ended up working for that program as a teacher for 10 years.

But I think a lot of people go into that thinking they're going to be doing adoption or be doing adoption work, and I actually think I thought that too, and then quickly you're like, "I actually don't wanna do adoption. I wanna do family preservation." But I did that, and I worked in child welfare for 20 years actually.

And then in that time, when I was around 30, I also did my, I did my birth search then. So I did find my birth family, and around the same time I decided to go to Korea. So [00:05:00] I had never left the country, ever. I went to Canada. But I just got up and I moved. I went Do the EPIK program as a English teacher.

I actually can't believe I did that. I think I was, like, 33. But I had already worked in child welfare for a little bit and I just, I moved and I was there for a year and a half.

Haley Radke: You just moved to Korea?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: I totally just moved to Kor- I, I look back and I can't believe I was able to do that.

Haley Radke: And you didn't travel there first? You just your first step there you were moving there?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yeah, exactly.

Haley Radke: Wow.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: I look back at that and I can't believe I was able to do that. But it was also financial. It's such a privilege to be able to go to Korea and travel there, but I just was like, "I'm gonna just do this." And I was really encouraged by some mentors who were like, "You should go back. If you wanna go back." So I went there and that I had also been in contact with my birth mother and I can talk about that later. We ended up meeting and then she kinda ghosted me which is fine. I think at that point [00:06:00] I, because I was a social worker, I understood the cultural dynamics and the pressure.

But I did, I lived in the country because I decided I didn't... I was really connected with the adoptee community at that time, but I actually wanted to learn about the culture, so I decided to live in the country. And so in that time I got connected with an orphanage there and that is where my full circle was.

I started a, like, where the foreigners would come and teach English and I did some programs there which was special. Because for me being from Seattle, there's so many social workers so I, there's a lot of people doing a lot of community work, but there I was the only one. So it just forced me to, that, that's where I learned to organize and do events and if you want something done, just do it. So that's where my full circle was I think, is the orphanage and the director there, the Wonjeong. And then I came back. Actually, I was there for just over a year and a half. I came back. I went back into child welfare.

But at that [00:07:00] time, that was when I started with a group, with AAAW, Asian Adult Adoptees of Washington. That's when we started our AMP program, the Adoptee Mentorship Program. That was the vision of Sarah Kim Park who was the president there at that time and then Jenny Kelly really supported it, the new president and that went on for 10 years and that was for Asian adoptees.

And I think what was significant about that program, and it was with a group of people, is we really realized, and it'll, this'll come back later, but we really realized the mentors actually needed what we were doing for the mentees. So then we started really working on identity development, racial, anything we were doing with the young people we actually did with- The mentors.

And then we started doing a parent program. We called it PAIR, I think. But that ended and we kinda tried to hand it off because then we s- started AIRE Roots, which is the BIPOC adoptee group that I'm doing now. I'm the principal of it, but it's with a [00:08:00] group of other adoptees, and we do capacity building.

The goal is actually to support other BIPOC groups with using our privilege and knowledge to actually hopefully support other adoptee groups that wanna do things, or individuals that have a vision. And then, so yeah, I can talk about our work later, but I just wanted to say, I owe a lot of my adoption work actually, and adoption identity to my mentors.

First AAAW had been, I think, 10 years old when I came around, but Amy Pak and Saul Tran-Cornwall. So Amy was, like, this Korean auntie to me and encouraged me to really immerse myself in Korean culture and go to Korea. And then Saul actually, I would say, was a mentor through actually just working together.

And I think what's so powerful about our community is the multi-generational and we can mentor one another. We love each other. And so I've learned... I wouldn't be here without my mentors. And not just them, but the community. And so [00:09:00] now professionally, I worked in public child welfare for 20 years doing child welfare and then training students.

And then recently I just moved. I work in the Department of Psychology in a master's program as the Associate Director of Educational Equity and Student Wellbeing, so basically doing social work there. And through that, it's part-time. I also do a pr- I have a private practice, so AIRE, and that's where I do my therapy, and I focus on BIPOC people, adoptees, and doing a lot of somatic EMDR because of your podcast, and ancestral healing.

So I think I approach healing both... the work we do is both spiritual and emotional. And so that brings me up to now, where I'm really focusing on, for myself and also in the work I'm doing, I'm diving more into our ancestral healing that we have access to. And, I do it with everybody, [00:10:00] but I think it's really powerful for the adoptees that I'm working with. So that is kinda where I am now.

Haley Radke: Can you... I just w- before we go to ancestral healing, I wonder about your step parent adoption. Not that you have to go into the personal of it, but I've had, folks who were adopted by a step parent compare their experience to an adoptee who's been severed from both biological parents, and I wonder if you have thoughts around that.

Because to me it's- different. There's still a connection there, but y- for you, it was adoptive parents are s- there's a new stepparent to take over one of the adoptive parents', empty spots, I'll call it. Do you have any thoughts around that?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yeah, that's interesting. I think the first thing that made me think about is for us as adoption, because it's a stepparent adoption, but really adoption, the, a lot of the trauma [00:11:00] for us in adoption is from the separation. And so if there isn't a separation from your first parent or the non-stepparent, I think, yeah I think it is different. I think it can be connected, but I do think the experience is different. There, and depending on the situation, so maybe it's a stepparent adoption because they were a child and th- one of the parents l- left or passed away.

So I can see how it would be very similar, and also I can see how it could be very different.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: But I say I had a stepparent adoption to just normalize that, and also say that it can happen for adoptees as well.

Haley Radke: Totally, and I appreciate you bringing it up, because I think there's this traditional fantasy that if an expectant parent chooses a hopeful adoptive couple to adopt their baby, that this is the couple that is going [00:12:00] to parent and raise this child forever. But people get divorced. There is a diff- there could be a new, person in town. There's no, no guarantees in adoption, as we like to say.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: I actually thought back in the day adoptees, we're... Sometimes I think it's just the same as if we were born into a family around if we're going to have, what our experience is going to be like. It's just a crapshoot. The same, and I think I was thinking that because people always think we have a better life. But then you, when you pull out a little bit more, it's even someone navigated and facilitated that, so it actually should've been a lot better than a crapshoot. But I was just thinking, yeah, maybe we're just average.

I think I thought that as a child. I was like, "Oh it's just the same." But actually, I hold the industry responsible to, it shouldn't have been a crapshoot, though.

Haley Radke: Yes. Yeah. Where were our guarantees? I'd love to know that. The other thing I'm really [00:13:00] curious about is your work as a social worker and as an educator of future social workers.

I wonder if you've seen any changes over all these last years. I remember- A few years ago now, but I connected with this lady in my city. She was going back for her, second career, and she was studying social work and we were connected through podcasting. And she told me in her program, basically almost no content related to adoption.

And it was so disappointing to me that they're not teaching about the trauma involved in family separation, which can often be a large part of a social worker's role. So have you seen any changes? I'm assuming you've got you and, other adoptees experienced or care experienced folks in your program there. I don't know. What's going [00:14:00] on there?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: I do think that there's more classes being offered. So I know ... I think it's Cam Small. They're doing something with Portland University or Portland State with BIPOC adoptees, I think. I think it is so dependent on the instructors themselves being educated and knowing that adoption is a trauma.

So I'm lucky because I worked in the Child Welfare Training and Advancement program. And so part of that we teach, our students and there's a class on child welfare. So we do talk about the trauma of separation. I think in the child welfare community in general, there's a lot more awareness around the trauma of separation.

So there's a new policy that came out in Washington State, the Keeping Families Together, which really makes people articulate why are we separating this child and how is that [00:15:00] actually not as bad ... how is the safety so much more that it would actually be greater than the trauma of separating the child?

So they actually have to articulate that at removal. And that's been really advocated by first parents, adoptees. AIRE is actually I don't know, we're an advisory, so if we- if they ever need us to say something, we can. So I think there's a push in general in child welfare around family preservation and the harm of separation.

But I would say it's still not there. So there's not a class on adoption. I talk about this all the time with JaeRan who teaches at UW Tacoma, and I'm like, "Why don't we ... You should teach a class." I know she actually has the curriculum. But there's always this tension around who's gonna take the class, the money.

And so I just, I don't think ... it's not where it should be. And so many social workers, especially people that are working with children, youth, and [00:16:00] families, they actually have a connection they'll be working with young people that were in care or were adopted. So it really should be more integrated actually, I think, into all the classes, but it's not.

We did start a group in the School of Social Work when I started BAC now, BIPOC Adoptee Collective. And so we do, one of the things that we do if the students wanna do it is psycho-education. So we brought in Angela Tucker and JaeRan to talk. So we try to do it on our own through these workshops, but it's better the child welfare community in general is, knows more about it, but there's always pushback too.

"Oh, but it's better actually for the kids to be with this other family that can provide them with the picket fence." So there's always pushback, especially if something happens and they say, "Oh, that's because of this policy." There's always the tensions, I think, of child safety and family preservation. But of course, it's in the context of capitalism and white [00:17:00] supremacy culture.

Haley Radke: Thank you for your thoughts on that. And I find it interesting, like of course an organization like the one that you've been working for, like you have adoptees working there and teaching there, and so there's some influence there.

But like, how much can you do that? And that's your personal life and, you don't wanna, put your professional life at risk going too you don't wanna be seen as that one that's pushing too far. So I can see the balance needed, especially when it is your career on the line.

And then I think about all these other organizations all over the country, your country, my country, who have no one there to just put their hand up and be like, "Wait, why are we still doing this?" Yeah, sounds like it's slow. Slow to change.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: It's slow and I think a lot of adoptees, some of us talk about it. We're like, "Why is it exactly the same now that it was 10 years ago? All of this work [00:18:00] that we've been doing?" And it's interesting in social work, I think there's 10... maybe that's an exaggeration. When you look at the faculty and staff, I think there's eight of us that are, adoptees, and then there's actually also a lot of adoptive, some adoptive parents. But we're overrepresented in social work, for sure.

Haley Radke: Yeah, just gotta get in those helping careers.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Why would you do social work?

Haley Radke: Classic. Classic. Okay. Let's talk about Beth as therapist, and you mentioned that you started doing EMDR because of this show. That's wild. What do you mean by that?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: I love it. I refer people all the time to your podcast. I love the attachment series. But yeah, so I remember I was working with adoptees and I was doing, a lot of mindfulness and somatic ther- so I love somatics and, just becoming embodied. I think for us as adoptees, so much is held in our body.

So I was [00:19:00] listening to your podcast, I was on my way to work, and the therapist, it was the therapist series, she was saying, "EMDR is an amazing modality for adoptees because it gets to the pre-verbal trauma, and our trauma is pre-verbal." And I think I ha- I had another friend who was an adoptee who had started doing EMDR, and that was all I needed.

I was like, "I'm doing it." I think I signed up maybe a few weeks later, and I've been doing EMDR since. And I actually love it. And it is true. It really does help get to that pre-verbal trauma, because you can reprocess feelings. It really is an incredible modality, and it is really powerful for us as adoptees.

Yeah, so I'm really grateful for that. And I tell people that all the time. I say, "EMDR is great. You should do it, and this is why... how I learned about it."

Haley Radke: Oh, cool.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: And I have people listen to your podcast. So adoptees, when I give them information about EMDR, I actually [00:20:00] send them that episode and I say, "Listen to this episode, and then we can talk about it, and kinda what, our process is going to look like."

Haley Radke: That's awesome. I love that. I still use EMDR when I go see my psychologist, as a recipient of that, and it's been really impactful for me personally. So- yeah.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yeah, I love it. I actually started doing it. I was working with my therapist, my non-EMDR therapist, and I was starting to do EMDR with people, and I was witnessing all of these incredible foundational transformations and I was like, "What is happening?"

And I'm like, "I have to get into EMDR," so then I did it myself. I kinda moved it up and it's been incredible.

Haley Radke: Can you talk about what you mean when you say ancestral healing? What does that even mean? It's Haley from the future. Beth wanted to add a little bit to her answer to my [00:21:00] question, so you're gonna hear a slight change in audio while she does and then we'll get right back to the interview.

Here's Beth.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: I think that this is a really difficult question and complex, and also partly because I'm learning this and I am a new student, but I can talk about what I believe it is and really what my experience has been. It's also really unique to each of us, and so I encourage people, if they're interested, to seek it out on their own, because really I think it's important.

That whatever we do when we are thinking about ancestral healing or healing in general, is that it feels aligned for us and that it resonates with us. So no one can really tell you what it is. I think we have to feel into it what it is and feel that alignment. But for me, I think about it as the healing that's done through connection and building relationships to our ancestors, learning about them, their practices and beliefs, like our [00:22:00] connection and relationship to the land, and also the healing that occurs on an individual, ancestral, and collective level.

So for me, this has looked like learning about my ancestors, who they were, what their experience was, what their practices and beliefs were, our origin stories, and then allowing that to impact my life and the way I live. So really incorporating those beliefs and practices into my life and just talking to them.

So as part of the Korean diaspora and an adoptee, a big part of that has been first believing that I have ancestors and that I am connected to a lineage. And I've learned that it's a lot larger and deeper than just blood, but the connection to our ancestral field and making this connection, which really anchors me to the land and the people.

A part of this healing also is through making these [00:23:00] connections, is the healing that we do as descendants of our ancestors. And actually, for me, this has been the deepest but also the most difficult part of it, and where a lot of my liberation and freedom has come from too. So the best way to explain this, I think, is when we talk about we talk a lot about generational trauma and how it's passed down.

This is part of it. It's held in our bodies and also other ways of knowing that, that trauma. And so it's a healing of that trauma and pain that occurs that's not just ours, but it's been passed down through us, so through many generations. Our mothers, fathers, grandparents, and way further back.

And again, it's not just our direct lineages, but the ancestral field. And I think this has been a big part of me learning about our people and what they've endured and also their resistance. So as we [00:24:00] metabolize this trauma, it means, the healing is that it isn't held in our bodies anymore.

It's not held by us anymore. And another big part of it is it means it's not passed down, so we don't pass it down to our children I think that as an adoptee, this is really significant as we already ... First, that we're connected to anything, but also to know, as adoptees, we already know that we've inherited some ancestral trauma directly through our parents being separated.

For many of us also, if we just, read about our histories, we know that our communities and countries have also experienced a lot of trauma. And so there's so much healing to do that has been inherited. And as I move through this, honestly, I have felt resentful, like kinda mad. Like, why am I the one healing up my family lines when they're the ones that, in my mind I would say rejected me?

It really feels [00:25:00] like that, and I had to really, and I still sometimes really grapple with that. But now, a lot of times I'm in a place of awe because there's also so much joy in the healing especially my last recent trip to Korea, that I as an adoptee have this opportunity and have been the one to come back and begin the healing for my ancestors, after I don't even know how many generations.

And it feels not only like an honor, but a miracle. As for many of us, it's a journey just to get to that place of healing, so it took me so long to even go to Korea, and then it took a long time to learn about healing and spiritual healing, and then to come to this point of going to Korea and doing this healing work, it was a miracle in itself.

I think for many of us that's true. And there's also so much joy and resilience that we inherit from our people. That's part of the healing as well, and I've [00:26:00] learned that this is so big and so joyful, but connecting to the resilience and joy of the people, many that have survived, we're proof of that as their descendants, that they're strong.

We're here, and we are proof of the resilience and joy and strength of our ancestors by being alive, and that we had to do a lot of work to get here. And we were led to this, so I believe that when I went back to Korea, it was, to do the ancestral healing work, it was because I had been led and guided by my ancestors.

And Daeyeon talks a lot about reclamation, and I believe this is a big part of it. It's part of the healing. It's also reclaiming of what was lost, our inheritance, what was severed, not just for us, but for our people. And she recently reminded me and talked about, the reclamation, the healing I think too is a process, and this [00:27:00] also resonated with me.

And I think what's so great about it is- We don't have to have access to our first families. We can still do this work. The healing that comes from connecting to our ancestors, our ancestral field, which is bigger than just our lineage, but it's the collective ancestral field, so our histories, our spiritual practices, and reclamation of that, especially as adoptees.

But the healing that can come from that connection. So that could be like doing an altar. It could be, and if that's healing for you because you feel like you're honoring or calling in your ancestor, your well ancestor. So if that's healing for you, that's a ancestral healing. If it's asking for support.

So sometimes I just, when I first started, I was like, "Okay, I'm just gonna give it a try." So I would literally be driving and I would say, "Fine, can you help me teach this class?" Or, "Can you help me figure out this [00:28:00] issue?" And I would feel supported. And the healing that comes through that by being like, oh, there is someone, there are...

There is this entity, whatever. If you call it spirit, the universe, I think that's healing to also feel like we have something in our past or in our lineage or that is somehow connected to us that isn't connected actually to our first family, our bloodline. And you can of course have ancestral healing through your bloodline, but that is difficult for us as adoptees.

So the healing that can come from that, I think it's even connected to the land. So if the land is here, and like getting energy, that's ancestral because I think if you go far enough, all of our ancestors were connected to the land, and actually were connected to their bodies. And so I think any healing that comes from that connection, I would consider ancestral healing as well.

Haley Radke: I think I like the idea of this so much because [00:29:00] many of us feel like we were just, dropped, I guess- from the proverbial stork or just from out of nowhere into our adoptive families. And that can feel very disconnected. Like-

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yes ...

Haley Radke: and so whether reunion is even on the table you mention that you were able to find birth family through a birth search, but for many Korean adoptees, I understand the stat is 95% don't or something like that.

It's very unusual. And for a lot of us, we maybe did get a reunion, but there's no connection now. And so there's this longing for information or just I'm gonna keep saying the same word, connection, that feels like it's not possible.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yes.

Haley Radke: And so I like this idea of maybe I can build it in a different way.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yes. And that is what I'm so glad you said the word [00:30:00] longing, because ... So I have two thoughts. So the first one is actually, I was talking to Daeyeon, the director and founder of Ancestral Korea, and my friend and teacher. And one of the first things she said in her, in one of the workshops that was so powerful for me and multiple people that I talked to after, is she said that longing, which I think for us, it feels like an untethering.

We're longing for connection. Yeah, I think sometimes I think of myself, I used to think of myself just literally in space, like with no connection. It's ... You talk about that, too. It's called, there's a whole episode that, on the un- the nothing place, the nothing-

Haley Radke: The nothing place, yep.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: The nothing place. And Daeyeon said the longing is evidence that we are connected, and this can be seen as an anchor. So there's this reframe. The longing is evidence that we are connected, and we are being called to be connected [00:31:00] to our roots, our ancestors. And that reframe was so powerful. So instead of thinking of it as this emptiness for me, it actually, I had this vision of it becoming like a light, like this connection.

Why else would I have gone to Korea and done this gone on this mountain? It was this longing. And actually, that longing has always been there, but it has felt so empty because I didn't have an entry point. And I think that the other thing is it's so powerful for us as adoptees, and I used to always say that "Oh, we can connect to our ancestors," because the way that Daeyeon, I was sharing this with her, I'm like, "This is so powerful for adoptees."

She's not an adoptee. And the way that she described it that I now share with others is she says it's most people have acce- if there's an ocean, think about an ocean, and that's actually our collective ancestral field. So not just our lineage, but the whole field of all of our ancestors.

Adoptees maybe don't [00:32:00] have access to five feet of it, but actually, there's this whole ocean that we have access to, and it's just as hard to get to for us as other people. And so the other thing I share with clients and people I talk to is I say, "It's the great equalizer." We're all on the same ... it's just as powerful and also just as hard for us, actually, as it is for non-adoptees.

And that feels actually really great. And then you know for native adoptees, there's research, for indigenous adoptees, the power of finding, connecting to their origin story. Suicide ideation goes down and ... But it's the same for us, and I think we're so used to thinking like, "Oh, indigenous practices."

I remember looking a long time ago for- what are the indigenous practices for Korean people? But it's just been wiped out on purpose. It's political. But we all have it, so it's the same. We can all do it as adoptees, even, BIPOC adoptees and non-BIPOC [00:33:00] adoptees, we all have those.

We just have to seek it out. So if you feel that longing and it resonates, just ask for guidance and see what happens. I really believe you'll find it.

Haley Radke: The other thing I feel like is connected to this is I've had a few different conversations with adoptees over the years that mention in some way they've gone back to somewhere they knew their biological family had lived, or either literally a house or just the area they were or those kinds of things.

And of course, I think of transnational adoptees going back to their country of origin and just having a shift, just... You were talking about this connection to the land as well. And I know it kinda sounds woo-woo, but I don't know, I think there's something to that. A lot of people have had this big mental shift happen when they all of [00:34:00] a sudden are in the same place that they know someone literally connected to you by your DNA also was here before you.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yes. Yeah. It's so powerful. I'm just thinking how we went to Taebaeksan. So one of the things that we did in this reclamation is we go to this mountain. I'm not athletic. We climb this mountain that is the spine of Korea, and it was so powerful. I... because you f- I felt like when I returned, when I went to that mountain, I had returned to Korea I don't know, 17 years before that and have gone back, but I felt like I was returning for real this time.

I don't know. I had been open to being received by my ancestors and the land, and I think that what Daeyeon says is that actually they're waiting for us. The land, if you think of the land as something alive, which I do, and even those places, they still have the [00:35:00] energy of our ancestors and the people who cared for us.

Even if it's going back to the place where our orphanage was or our group home there's something there. Yeah. And so I think it calls us back. Yeah, it's an embodied experience and a spiritual experience. It is woo. I love the woo. Actually, I live, I kinda embrace the woo.

Haley Radke: Can you share with us what was it like when you moved to Korea as a 30-something?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I re- I think I was, like, so brave and maybe a little disassociative because I wasn't- ... as I am now. Because I really, I struggle to cry even now. I really... So I, that actually might have helped me get through it. This is so significant. I think about this. When I left, some of the people that showed me off were actually Amy and Saul, who I talked about.

And Amy's husband is a [00:36:00] musician and was singing this Somewhere Over the Rainbow song on a ukulele, and I'm waving, and it's I feel like I'm in a movie. And I literally get through the gate and I start bawling. I'm like, "What am I doing?" But then I got on the plane, and I remember eating Korean food, like bibimbap, which I've gotten every single time now since I've flown.

But the first time I ate it, I'm like, "This is amazing." Everything felt so sensational. Like, when I moved there, it was hard. Sometimes I say it was, like, the hardest thing I did in my whole life, and after doing that, I feel like I can do anything. But also, it was so heart-wrenching to be there, and it was really hard the way I was treated sometimes.

And also, on the flip side, I received so much love, and it was so powerful and transformative, and everything feels special, I felt. And I built a [00:37:00] community there. So when I look back, sometimes I don't know how I did it, actually, but I think the orphanage helped. By the time I left Korea, I was going there every day after school and just hanging out with the babies, and then hanging out with the Wonjeong.

I didn't speak good Korean and she didn't speak that much English, but we would just sit there together. And I think for her, she saw me as maybe a child that she raised kinda coming back. And I think what's... I think about now as I'm, as I go back now, I have a landing place. So I call it my Korean hometown.

So when I go back to Korea now, I will go there and I have places to stay and I have friends there, and I realized, oh, I created a life there. And I feel so privileged by that because it is so meaningful for me. And then I also think about other adoptees who go to Korea, which I've also done, and you don't know anyone, and I know what that's [00:38:00] too.

And my yearning is actually for all adoptees who want it to be able to go back and have some sort of landing place. It was the hardest thing I did, but it was one of the most beautiful things I did, and made me feel more Korean, actually. Which is bad, because you say, "We are Korean," but I felt so adopted there, and when my birth mother- kind of stopped talking to me because what happened was when I told her I was moving there, before when we first made contact, she was, she wrote a lot of letters. And then when I told her I was moving there, her letters actually stopped, which was strange to me, but now I understand it.

And then when I moved there, we had some contact, but what happened was I, as I was living there, I realized, oh, there's these ... She had told me my first father had passed away. So as I lived there, I realized, oh, I actually wanna go to his site, his grave site. That's a thing. So I asked her about [00:39:00] it, and then she didn't talk to me I think for six or nine months.

And then I saw her right before I left, but what I realized is her family didn't know about me. So I found this out through my cousin, my birth cousin. She said, "Oh, yeah, we didn't know about you." But she told me stuff like my birth mother couldn't have a child, so my sister who I met, who was 20 years younger than me, she is actually adopted domestically in Korea.

So she told me that my first mother, she couldn't have any children, so she ended up adopting, which I heard actually is not uncommon of, the trauma of the separation of your child. But I just think it was so hard for her, and she was scared, I think, of me derailing her life. And so I kinda just let it be.

And I understand adoptees that don't, but then I just immersed myself in the orphanage. And since then, I think after I left for [00:40:00] Korea, I went back and I think I saw her one more time, but she hasn't responded to emails or anything recently. And I just sent an email maybe a year ago because one of my friends, we were talking and she said, "You know how adoptees, we're, like, ready for rejection, so we're like, 'Oh, if you're gonna reject me, I'm just gonna let it go.'"

And she was like, "Are you..." She didn't say, "Are you doing that?" But she brought it up and I thought, "Okay, I wanna make sure I'm not doing that." So I emailed her again and I didn't hear anything, I'm okay. It's that secondary rejection, and I had to process it when I was in Korea, which was intense. But I don't know. It is what it is.

Haley Radke: Yeah, I experienced secondary rejection as well. This is interesting. Do you know much about domestic adoption in Korea?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: A little bit, because I volunteered at the orphanage, but that was 15 years ago, and I was a child welfare worker already.

I'd already worked in child welfare. So I was like, "What the heck is happening here?" There was, like, no court structure. [00:41:00] Here we go to court in the States at least every six months. We have to say, "This is how the child is doing. This is what we're doing to try to reunify the child with their families."

But there it wasn't like that at all However, now, with everything that's happening and the new child welfare agency, the federal agency, the orphanage, there actually is a lot more structure for the kids. I don't know that they're really going back to their families often, and I also don't think they're getting adopted as much as here, but it is increasing.

I don't know the statistics, but I do know, adoption internationally has basically ended in Korea, which is good. But I think it's hard because there's so much emphasis on the bloodline. You even have to give your gajog your family bloodline when you go to school. So I think it's really around the old Confucius.

So I think it's the cultural piece that prevents adoptions. But [00:42:00] one thing that is interesting that's changed in the last 15 years is when I lived there, they were telling me a lot of the children, some of the kids had family still, so they would go to their families for holidays, which I thought that would be so difficult.

And they were adopted, they were in the orphanage being single parent, a single mother. And so I was thinking, gosh, these are all this could be prevented. But now they were telling me it's a lot of times from abuse or neglect, so it's actually changing a little bit. This is just from the story I heard a month ago talking to the new director of the orphanage.

But I think it's changing, and hopefully the kids would be less kids being really, separated from their families and then more adoptions for those that have to be adopted.

But there is more oversight, which is good, because I remember thinking, "I could literally take one of these kids with me and nobody would know."

If I could get them through customs, the court wouldn't know. The orphanage would know, but there was just no [00:43:00] oversight, I felt, and that was interesting for me and hard for me to see as a, as a social worker.

Haley Radke: Think about all the years of them just making stuff up on forms, and let's just name this kid the next, name down our list that we just rotate through, and what day were they found on? I don't know. Which police station steps were they found on? Oh, my God.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yeah, and it was sad to see the kids still there. So a lot of the kids that I saw in the baby room are the k- I just watched them grow up actually and age out. Yeah. And that broke me.

Haley Radke: God, there are just so many downstream issues from upstream problems that I really hope we can work on as society. Geez. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you wanna make sure we talk about today

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yeah, what about [00:44:00] my name? What do you think about the name and the saju?

Haley Radke: What about your name? I think your name is changing. What? Tell me more.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Okay, so the name change is connected to the ancestral Korea, but first, it's connected to my birthday as well.

So I'm in transition, I believe, and my friend Daeyeon said, "It's like your process of reclamation, like the reclaiming and healing." And also part of, I think, what you asked around ancestral healing. But when I was in Korea last time, through ancestral Korea, I was able to get my saju read, which is our birth chart, which has always been a trigger for me.

I've heard you talk about it. I think adoptees, it's like one of the table talks we have. It's "Oh, what-"

Haley Radke: Do you know your real birthday? What's your horoscope?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yeah, and what time were you born? And so I actually said, "I don't know my time." And she said, actually, in the saju, which is the Korean birth chart the time is later, so she said that's okay.

But she read my saju, and she, through reading the saju, because, I'm [00:45:00] 45, she was able to figure out when my birthday was. So that's actually part of the process of reading the saju, for adoptees at least, is I said my birthday, I was always told my birthday, my legal birthday is October 26th."

But when I met my first mother, I was asking her about my time. I said, "Oh, do you know what time I was born?" Because of course I wanted to get my chart read. And she said, "No, I don't, but, you were born on October 28th." And I, my Korean's not good, so I was like, "Wait a minute, what did you say?" And she said, "Oh, yeah, you were born on October 28th."

So I always wondered, who do I believe? My birth mother, my first mother, who was probably very traumatized, or, the paperwork. So I've always wondered. So part of the saju was we went through the dates, and she... you can tell which date is yours. So I think for October 26th, the characteristics were, like, you have a lot of siblings, which I don't.[00:46:00]

You are really harsh, like your words are, they slice, which definitely is not me. So she went through the days, and actually, we went through the whole week, I think. But October 28th was definitely me. In my saju, in this... So not only did I find my birth date, but what can be healing about the saju is it makes you realize a lot of the things that you've experienced, it's actually part of our healing and journey.

So in my saju, it ha- it shows the endings of my mothers. It actually shows- endings with my first mother, my adoptive mother, and then it actually shows this coming in of the mothering I received from my mother-in-law and then actually I think Tracy's mom, my best friend's mom. But it's in my Saju.

My adoption basically is in my Saju. So I found my birthday. So now on the 28th I get Korean food, and that can be really powerful for us as adoptees. And then the other thing that we can do as adoptees is our names have always been, I think, tricky. I [00:47:00] actually asked my birth mother, "Did you name me SooJin?"

And she said, "No, I didn't name you that." And I said, "Oh did you name me?" And she said, "I didn't name you." Which is so sad, right? But what you can do in your Saju, there's actually a tradition in Korea, it's called a Ho, and it is a new name you get. I think it's like a spiritual name, but it's a name that's actually supposed to support you in your journey and whatever you wanna support.

And the Ho, the idea with your Ho is when you say your name like Yu SooJin, when I say that I'm calling in the energy of that name, which I think is connected to the elements. So what your name holds, you're calling that energy. And so what she does is she reads your Saju and then you can get a Ho.

You can get a new name that actually supports your Saju and supports you in what you need. So they do it so it's completely balanced and your name is balanced. So actually it's interesting, she said Yu SooJin is actually a really balanced name, so I didn't change my name. [00:48:00] And she said it seemed like the orphanage, it was intentional.

And I thought, "There's no way that was intentional," because it was through Holt, which is Christian. But I was watching my friend Michael Tessier's talk, and he said that actually the social workers in the orphanages, they do, they did create our names. Some of them did create our names on purpose using our Sajus.

So I think whoever created my name put a lot of intention in it, and so I'm actually continuing to use my... I'm not changing my name, but I'm in process of slowly, I think, starting to go by SooJin.

Haley Radke: Okay. Interesting. When I was making light of the list of things before, I didn't mean workers were thoughtfully, choosing based on these different things. I meant that they used to have these spreadsheets where they'd be like, "Oh, baby number two this one, this year gets this name."

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: I [00:49:00] think a lot of them do.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: But I think some, maybe they didn't. And I think it shows you how actually even though they're Christian, it kinda shows you how our ancestral and indigenous practices are actually really mainstream and they, it's just like- intertwined.

But yeah, that surprised me actually. And I didn't believe it, and then I actually had to verify with my friend. Did they? They told him that at Holt. They said, "Oh, no, they do that." I had no idea. I wouldn't have thought. And that might have been a very rare thing, and I don't know how much they did it, but yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay. SooJin. I like it.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Oh, yeah, I, yeah, I think it rings nice.

Haley Radke: Lovely. We didn't talk too much about AIRE, but for recommended resources, I wanna make sure people know a little bit more about your organization. So can you tell us a little bit about it and why you started [00:50:00] it?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yes. AIRE Roots. So AIRE is my therapy, and also AIRE Roots is the community mobilizing leg of it.

And so this is a group of adoptees, BIPOC adoptees, and we started it to support other BIPOC adoptees. We realized that we have so much privilege and knowledge, a lot of us as Korean adoptees, so we wanted to support other organizations or upcoming organizations or individuals with capacity-building to actually create their own organization or mentoring program.

Or even if it's we're an indigenous group of adoptees, or I'm an indigenous adoptee and I wanna just do a potluck and see who's out there, we wanna support that. And we can support, we support that through agenda-making, promoting, but we also have some money. So we received a grant through Asian Counseling Referral Services, and they so they've supported us to get [00:51:00] started.

We're also fiscally sponsored, so we can get grants, but we're not at that point yet. We need to start fundraising. But it's actually capacity-building for individuals or organizations. So if you're interested in, we're actually looking for projects. So if you're an adoptee, and it's BIPOC adoptees, but if you're interested and have an idea, we're open to it.

We're based in Washington State, but I think if it's something online, just please contact us. And we're also doing affinity group. So we're starting one for QTBIPOC adoptees and parenting adoptees. But really, our goal in it is to fill whatever gaps if there's any gaps that we see. So I think there, for me, I kept saying "There's a need for this," and it actually came out of a focus group.

But anyways, we do capacity-building affinity groups, and we're bringing in some speakers this year, I think two speakers. We're trying to find speakers that are representative of m- like, more marginalized BIPOC [00:52:00] adoptee groups though. So maybe not Korean or even Chinese But we're really trying to help other adoptee groups find one another and actually highlight the voices.

And then we are also, we did some work with JaeRan and Angela Tucker. We're doing a SAM project. We did a SAM project, so we looked at mentoring programs and what the training needed to be. So that was something we did. We try to collaborate also with other orgs. So the biggest thing coming up is the BIPOC Adoptee Conference in Portland.

We're working with Adoption Mosaic and the TIES program to do some events together. So we're also really supportive and try to collaborate as much as possible, because I think our community sometimes is really siloed. And so we're trying to collaborate, because we're stronger together.

Haley Radke: I love that. And you never said, but it stands for Adoption Identity Race Exploration, which I love that.

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: And the AIRE Roots comes from the monstera. It was a [00:53:00] monstera, but the idea is I thought of it before Roots is so popular now, but it was this idea of air roots, because I think of us as trees and we're growing, but actually later on in life, we create these roots with community and we get stronger.

And that's how I think of us as adoptees, growing these air roots. And so we're hopefully helping to support that. Yeah, 'cause we played around with AIRE Roots. We were almost AIRE Space AIRE Talk. And then I was in the kitchen and I was like, "What are those?" And my partner was like, "Those are air roots."

And I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's what it is. It's AIRE roots."

Haley Radke: That is awesome. That's a great story. Amazing. What do you wanna recommend to us?

I love, love, love the Adoptee Consciousness Model, and actually it's from JaeRan Kim, Susan Branco, and Grace Newton. If you haven't looked into the Adoptee Consciousness Model, they have a website now that is so great.

You can just look at the model and click on it and click on each of the stages [00:54:00] that are not linear, and it'll show you what it looks like, what support. But I love this model and I actually use it with clients all the time. I think it helps normalize our experience and it gives us a starting point to talk.

The other thing that can be found on JaeRan Kim's website, Harlow's Monkey, which I also love, because it's just this amazing website with tons of resources. And so I use that also. There's research, there's books, there's media, and I use that with my clients as well. Sometimes we'll go on and we'll pick a book to read together off of that.

But I think that those are great starting points for adoptees, and also not just starting points, but actually places that we keep coming back to with Adoptee Consciousness Model.

Yeah, totally. Totally. We've talked about those before here, and I loved hearing you're using them with clients, which is-

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Oh, I love it. I use it ...

Haley Radke: I think what they intended, right? To help us navigate This [00:55:00] be all these different layers to our experiences, especially over time. Thank you so much. This was such a good conversation. I really enjoyed speaking with you. Where can folks connect with you online, follow your work, and see what AIRE Roots has to offer?

Beth Yu Simpson, MSW, LICSW: Yeah, so you can just go to aireroots.com, and that's for the ther- I, I actually am full right now, but I'm really committed for any adoptee, not just BIPOC adoptee. If you're seeking therapy, I'll help you find a therapist. So I do consultations for free for adoptees. So even though I'm not open right now, you can reach out and I have a list of adoptees and we'll just work together.

So aireroots.com, and then I would also check out The Ancestral Korea. I think it's ancestralkorea.com. So that's where you can find us. We're on Instagram, AIRE Roots. We're not super active. We're working on it. But yeah, that's where you can find me, and you can reach out to me through the [00:56:00] AIRE Roots, and I'm always open actually to talking to adoptees.

Yeah, especially helping connect and find resources.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Thank you.

Friend, I have been talking about this all year, and it is finally here. If you are listening to this when it drops in real time, then please watch your podcast feed on July 1st for a special 10-year anniversary show before we take our summer break.

Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.

326 Sun Yung Shin

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/326

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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. My guest today is Sun Yung Shin, poet and author of the new book, Heart Eater, A Memoir of Immigration Belonging and How we Find Ourselves in Language. Sun Yung's work examines the complexities of transracial and transnational adoption identity and the limits of what some adoptees can ever truly know about their origins.

We discussed some of the pressures adoptees carry to make sense of their stories and why we need to move beyond the expected search and reunion narrative. Before we get started, I [00:01:00] wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.

Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Sun Yung Shin. Welcome Sun Yung. It's so good to finally connect with you.

Sun Yung Shin: Thank you, Haley. I'm so excited. I've been such a fan for so long, and I finally get to talk to you. I'm so grateful.

Haley Radke: That is so kind. We have recommended your poetry books on the show multiple times. You have had many friends appear, and now here you are. Would you mind by starting out and just sharing a bit of your story with us?

Sun Yung Shin: Yes, thank you. So I was adopted through the Holt International [00:02:00] Agency, the OG Korean Adoption Agency, and my paperwork says that I was found abandoned in January of 1975, and I seem to be about nine months.

One paperwork says found at a police station in Seoul. Another piece of paper that I got years later says left on the, steps of the Holt agency. And then I was processed through Holt and went into foster care for five months, something like that. My adoptive parents had been, in the pipeline and doing the paperwork.

So I came to Chicago, Illinois in June, 1975, came to Chicago and then grew up with a white adoptive family, Roman Catholic, in a suburb of Chicago. I have an older brother who's [00:03:00] also adopted. He's domestically adopted. He's a white American who was born in a hospital nearby where my parents lived, and he was adopted, I believe, before it was arranged, even before he was born.

Haley Radke: So you, you were both adopted, but you were visibly different.

Sun Yung Shin: Correct.

Haley Radke: Have you talked with him about his experience of being an adoptee who could blend in versus yours?

Sun Yung Shin: Such a great topic. I love this topic of siblings so much. I think it's so interesting and I have tried over the years to engage him in various discussions around adoption and he's so disinterested, but I talk about it in some of my writing that he. We believed at the time that he was the same or he, his paperwork said he was the same ethnic mix as our parents and he actually looks a lot generically like our parents, and he [00:04:00] absolutely blended in. It wasn't like, the brunette child and the all blonde family. So it was really interesting to see how people would respond when they would come over and then they would meet me if I was loitering around like a younger kid, and then, explain I'm adopted. And then he would say, I'm adopted too. But his friends wouldn't believe him. And so we had to go through that and it was really an interesting experience to be that like one person inside the family where absolutely no one is actually genetically related, but one person is passing as genetically related to the parents.

Yeah. And I know that's not all that unusual. Lots of adopted people I know grew up with other adoptees too. So those dynamics to me are so interesting.

Haley Radke: Do you know why the pivot [00:05:00] from domestic to international adoption for your family?

Sun Yung Shin: My parents were, I think, just, I think they were open to anything. They said they were open to anything. They I think someone from Holt came to their church. I need to confirm, which sounds right. And so I think they were attracted to the idea of, helping someone. But to me they've always said their main motivation was, they just wanted another child and it didn't matter where they came from.

So they didn't have an ideology like, we have to save the orphans of the third world, or we definitely, want to try to get another, we wanna try to get a girl this time, or something like that. They said they were open to either. So that's what I know. Yeah.

Haley Radke: And so what was it like growing up in their home? Like what was your perspective of what adoption meant and was it talked about much?

Sun Yung Shin: [00:06:00] I think that it actually was talked about at least a lot more than a lot of other adoptees that are in my generation, because my mom especially was really clear on. Race, nation and ethnicity, which is very unusual.

Because she is a wonderful person. She's very local. She's a very, she didn't go to college. She lived her whole life except until later when she remarried in Brookfield, Illinois. And her parents are immigrants and from an immigrant families from Poland. Anyway, she's not like a race scholar, she just doesn't, didn't have any particular reason to not buy into the, you are just basically white now. So she always would say, you are, your nationality is American, or you're a [00:07:00] United States citizen. After I was naturalized, and you're ethnicity is Korean, or your race is Asian.

She might've said Oriental at the time, but she was just very clear that, I wasn't a white person. I wasn't trying to be a white person, and I was shocked when I moved to Minnesota as a college student. Ended up meeting all these Korean adoptees whose parents told them to check white or Caucasian on forms, or who would say, tell people like, I'm white or I'm basically white, or things like that.

So that's how I grew up. And I grew up with, I think having a white brother who was adopted, definitely decoupled, race and family in a way. So understanding that it wasn't just [00:08:00] transracial adoption, but domestic adoption and kind of put us on that kind of equal footing in some ways.

So it wasn't like a everyday topic, but it was definitely not a shameful topic or hidden. And I also feel like I was, I'm either lucky or I don't remember, but I really don't remember any of my cousins like bullying me or making fun of me or my brother for being adopted. It seemed very like just accepted, and I think that's pretty unusual for transracial adoptees.

Haley Radke: That sounds like a really healthy dynamic. Even just the fact that adoption is not a taboo topic is really unusual. Especially for like our decades and earlier.

Sun Yung Shin: Definitely.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Do you remember? Having an interest in Korea, like thinking about where I [00:09:00] came from or any of those things. I know you're really interested in immigration as a topic, and I wonder when those kind of thoughts started for you.

Sun Yung Shin: I think I was always, there's such a, there's so much compartmentalization, I think just as. Kids, right? Because there's so much that is abstract or just gets put into a drawer 'cause you don't know how to ask questions about it or you sense and perceive that, some topics are there's a period at the end of the sentence and there's really not much more to know about things.

So I was interested, but it was very abstract for a long time. I think that there's a small Korea town in Chicago and we would, my mom, we would go and get kimchi and there was a Holt families group that we would, do some things with once in a while. And so I, I met other adoptees through there.

I did have another Korean adoptee [00:10:00] in my grade school and we were in the same class and we were friends. And I think that probably made a big difference. It made it normalized. And I didn't, I, was very aware of being an immigrant, a naturalized citizen, but that was also very abstract.

Yeah. So my parents signed me up for a homeland tour the summer after eighth grade. And initially I did not wanna go when it was brought up to me, maybe the year before do you wanna go on this Holt, motherland tour and. I didn't wanna go. It seemed I'm trying to be a, I'm trying to be American, or I'm American, or I'm not sure what that has to do with me.

I can tell now that looking back it was some kind of concern around is that going to, how am I gonna integrate that? What is that gonna mean? What am I gonna do with that? It felt something solid that couldn't necessarily be metabolized. If [00:11:00] that makes sense.

Haley Radke: Did you end up going?

Sun Yung Shin: I did. I ended up going and it was amazing. I loved it. It was so interesting and because it was this, what was also unusual is, from what I can tell, is that it was just adoptees and then we had our guides. Our guides were a Korean immigrant couple family who had american born teenage kids. And so there were like six or seven of us who were ages 13 to 21 from the Midwest, and we were all adoptees.

And so we went with this family as our guide, including their two teen kids without any of our parents. And so to me that made a really big difference because as I got older then, and I heard other stories from other adoptees or watched, started watching documentaries as they started being produced of reunion and things like that, where the adoptee [00:12:00] is really taking care of their adoptive parents' feelings and worrying, navigating a lot of kind of loyalty subtleties and making sure their parents don't feel threatened. And then also, if they're in reunion or starting a reunion or, meeting their remeeting, their biological Korean birth family, then navigating that too, while being, yeah. So I feel like that was such an interesting experience and I feel like all adoptees transnational adoptees should get to if they wanted to, or I just wish that was more of an option. For younger people. Going back, I did not want my parents to come with me. I, by that age was also, I had just, I think because of the adoption, it's impossible to know, but I was always pretty independent. Like I was, I went to sleep away camp from a young age.[00:13:00]

I never got homesick. I'm a little bit detached. So even going then, I did not feel like, oh, I need to have my parents with me or, yeah. So it, that was a really good experience and started a new kind of chapter of being in relationship to Korea.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that and I, I love this observation of certainly when adoptees have their adoptive families around them for whatever of the moments, there is a piece of caretaking that we feel obligated to do. And I'm saying that as a blanket statement 'cause I don't know anyone who didn't have that in the back of their mind. Oh, they're right there, so I need to also perform for them too.

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah. And I think it shows, it can show how adoptees in general have a burden of performance that is just different than non-adopted [00:14:00] people, or certainly overlapping, but there's these distinct performance pressures. Yeah.

Haley Radke: I think one of those you talk about in your new memoir, Heart Eater, and that is a form for me because I'm gonna ask you the question like, did you search, have you searched for your real parents? Your real parents? Have you searched for your birth parent, whatever language people impose on us. And I'm not asking you that question. What I'm asking is you comment in your book about our stories when there's no search or an interest in search, or there's no reunion or a resolution, any of those kinds of things, and you share.

Which I agree the majority of memoirs or documentaries about Korean adoptees include search and reunion if there is a reunion. So can you just maybe talk about that a little bit as an adoptee who doesn't necessarily have [00:15:00] the reunion story and the pressures that we can feel to have that give, that, give answer that.

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah, it's I love this topic so much because people this dichotomy of the general public thinking like you should be fine, just not knowing. But then everyone wants to know if we know and then if we know they wanna know all about it immediately, even if we've just, met them, that's, it's really the first thing that they wanna know and that I've just been asked that my whole life. Constantly. And so I'm constantly disappointing people and at this point I'm just laughing about it. My friend, JaeRan Kim, Dr. JaeRan Kim, who I know has done a lot of disability research and so I'm not saying that it's like having a visible disability at all, but in terms of being genetically and socially related to the family you're being raised in. If that's considered normative [00:16:00] and non-pathological and non right and it is normative, then to me, it reminds me of when friends who have visible, quote unquote, visible, quote unquote disabilities are just, that's the only thing people see and that's the only thing they wanna know.

They have don't know. They haven't been given permission, they haven't been given any encouragement. It might not even be the topic on the table. And they'll be asking immediately like, how did this happen to you? Or what is that? Can you tell, so this constant navigating this interrogation and divulgences and it's of course racialized. That surveillance is racialized too in this place and many other places. And so I don't mind talking about it at all and I end up talking about being adopted a lot, even when the topic of whatever it is not adoption. That affects everything in my life and I'm [00:17:00] not trying to hide it, and I also wanna advocate.

So to me it's very much, I think if we could harness this phenomenon as proof that actually it's a, a human right to know your origins. If you're gonna be in a society that defines rights in any way. That this is proof that it's something that we should be caretaking better for current and future generations.

'Cause we're always having to also defend why we wanna know. Because pushing on that really threatens the whole ecology, the transnational adoption industrial complex as. Dr. Kim McKee has coined, so I would love to see more of that. I've done like a not most thorough search ever, but [00:18:00] I've been back to Holt agency twice. I've asked for my paperwork. I have done two commercial DNA tests, and I haven't gotten any closer to any, yeah, viable relatives. So I completely understand why memoirs and documentaries focus on, or include or are initiated by the inciting incident of a reunion process. So I'm not knocking that at all.

But the vast majority of Korean adoptees, certainly my age, and just in general at this point, have not found. Original family members. And so we're this, not like we're invisible or silent, but I think I might've written like, oh, people think there's no there. There's nothing to talk about. There's no spectacle for voyeurs to spectate. They're not getting the, what they think is gonna [00:19:00] be the Oprah reunion. They want the sentiment, they want to see that what they think of as melodrama. It's of course like the very most real thing in people's lives who are involved. I'm not saying it's melodramatic, but I'm saying that the hunger for that, especially when it's racialized, because it fits into the whole ideas of empire and white saviorism and all that stuff.

Haley Radke: On the personal side, when you have searched and done, the steps that are available to you at this time, how do you think about like not finding, do you have a hope still? Do you put that to the side? How do you deal with that? If it was a want to find answers?

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah. Oh definitely. I definitely wanna know. I would definitely do, whatever was required, if there was more to [00:20:00] be found. I think the only I didn't go on. I didn't try to get on a TV show, but there, I don't think I would have gotten on the TV show 'cause I don't have enough. I didn't have enough information even.

Haley Radke: Which is it's like that for people who don't know, that's a really common way to search in Korea. It sounds whoa. That's what. TV show, but.

Sun Yung Shin: Find this person or who and I, I'm not knocking that at all, you know at all. Or any of the ways that people search or don't search or don't want to, I definitely would like to, I would love to know, it's a profound curiosity that's beyond cognition, especially since I have two children that I conceived, gestated, delivered and raised, and their dad is an adoptee, a white domestic extended family adoptee. And it's a long story, but he reunited with his Mexican side of his family. His dad [00:21:00] was a Mexican national and he reunited with them through DNA through ancestry.com, in his early fifties, and it's a long story, but he got to meet his birth father, some of his relatives. He got to meet some first cousins and like I think his birth father had a younger child too. He got to go to Mexico to meet him and then he tragically passed last year before our kids could meet him, meet their grandfather. And and that was the only grandfather, biologically related grandfather who they know of or could have met. Because his birth mother, who he was in contact with was in the family. Long story. Her father was gone before my kid's dad was born. And then I haven't found [00:22:00] my biological family, so my kids don't have any access to those people.

Haley Radke: It's totally another layer of impact that most people don't think about is how our children also lose connection to their ancestors.

Sun Yung Shin: Intergenerational loss and disorientation. So it's a continued, I feel like also I've accepted I've really, I fully cognitively accepted that I probably won't, and I feel like also emotionally I've accepted it is still painful and upsetting. I mean it's very politically, it's a political impetus to continue working for family preservation slash reproductive rights slash you know, social welfare slash anti-war. All the reasons that people are [00:23:00] separated and or not supported in their family systems.

So it's feels, of course, it feels like a real collective intergenerational wound. It definitely doesn't. Even though it's personal and feels very, individual in the way that any of us are an individual, it feels like a collective global wound to me, in terms of anyone who's been separated through state machinations or through misogyny, through violence, all of those things that are part of culture and that are part of social relations that we could work on.

In, we could work on more conscientiously if we listened to the people who are impacted most by family separation, which are, people in the family themselves, people who've survived foster care or in foster care. All those things. All those different aspects of [00:24:00] loss and disruption, displacement.

Haley Radke: I think this is related, so you may have a similar answer, but again, the fact that you're paperwork. This one says, oh, doorstep or steps here. This one says, oh no, it was this, place you're not certain of your exact birth date. These things that domestic adoptees don't really connect with, I think is important to talk about, because I don't know what it's like to literally not know your exact birthday. And we've talked about this before on the show and people who are interested in whatever it is. What planets were aligned when, I landed on this earth. Do you have thoughts around those kinds of things?

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah, that's, so I am so interested in this because also like longview birth date only started mattering, with calendaring, with [00:25:00] counting time, keeping time with, I think increased infant survival rates. Like I think about the, I think like anthropologically about how we mark the arrival of a new member into a society or culture or tribe or group, and really interested in how different groups throughout time and place have used rituals around that, right?

It's been so funny with the millennial rise in astrology practices and then having to disappoint people with, I don't know. This is all some astrological guesswork. It is what I want people to understand on a political level. Also of course like there's the psychological, emotional, but on the political level, those kinds of fungible facts about personhood within a state [00:26:00] makes those children so vulnerable.

And I want people to understand how incredibly vulnerable children who are born into an adoption situation or enter the adoption process pipeline are so vulnerable to any one person or a machine, or now ai in that long process, making some either decision, deliberate decision or mistake in one number or one letter, and that can erase a person forever and it can make that person.

Be un findable forever for the people who would like to find that person. So the statelessness, the fact that no one who is blood slash genetically related to this child will ever be able to find them. [00:27:00] Not that those kinds of biological relations guarantee any level of care. Of course, commitment, attachment, or safety.

But to not have those when everyone else has those, and if not values, those values knowing. I really want people who think adoption is great and awesome and 100% a okay to understand these issues of vulnerability and how paperwork and documentation are incredibly easy to falsify at any point.

There's no chain of custody, there's no accountability. I'm sure that, in the United States there's a patchwork of laws from state to state, from county to county, from, patchwork of policies, hospital to hospital. There's private adoption [00:28:00] agencies, there's lawyers involved, there's disruptions, there's rehoming, there's all of this that goes on in the gray market and black market of children and just children are incredibly vulnerable and it's just the huge dark side of adoption that most people don't know about and don't wanna know about.

Haley Radke: That's it. Don't wanna know about too. You, one of your chapter titles, Parts of Me are Made of Paper and I thought, yeah, that is astute to observe you in your new book you have a lot of like documents included, and I love that because sometimes those are the only things that help us feel real. And to your point just now [00:29:00] these documents often are made up and it's like, how can that be the real that we're tied to? Do you have thoughts around that?

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah.

This, when did we, you know what humans didn't need literacy until they started trading and started having commerce needing numbers to keep track of things that were greater than what you could just see or estimate in front of you or so I think a lot in terms of why the function of paperwork, right? The function of literacy, the function of keeping track of people, and how it's changed over time. What it has to do with borders and the state and, belonging and how do we identify people? And then the, I feel like the contradiction or the paradox is [00:30:00] being a writer. And so that's, those are my tools, words, and also words on paper. And yet. Words on paper are also, it's just dangerous. It's just like fire, fire. It can be great and it can be terrible. And so language, I feel is the same way. It's something that, it's a tool that humans have. Not necessarily invented language, 'cause other species have language too.

But we've invented our own special ways of doing language and doing script and recording. So I think about how throughout history, paperwork has been used to oppress people. I feel like it's rarely been used to liberate people. Would people like oppress people fight back with whatever tools are at hand, but states are the ones who have the power to really tell you who you are and where you can go and what you can do. And [00:31:00] the way that they can make that traceable is through paper and then digital paper or digital language, or we're moving into this interesting stage of society where we're in like a twilight of literacy. We're going, images are more important in terms of bypassing our critical thinking, and so all like the bio surveillance and things that are going to more about our flesh and bones body in terms of keeping track of us rather than our signature or having a piece of paper that says this and it matches this.

So it's, I'm very interested in how we are going to try to maintain our humanity or, what is humanity? What is important about. Being human and being in relationship. And I just think adoptees and anyone who has [00:32:00] been rewritten just has more, has some interesting insights that I think our society, needs.

Haley Radke: When did you rename yourself?

Sun Yung Shin: 1995. So right after I graduated from college, I knew that starting in college, I started thinking about going back to my Korean name and one of the, I think the inciting incident I'm talking about, that's what I'm working on with my creative writing students. Inciting incidents is when I started working on the literary magazine in my college my sophomore year, and I ended up writing a poem and it was included in the edition, and so I was thinking about my name, like how do I want to be known if I'm going to publish something? Even though [00:33:00] then I really thought, I didn't have any sense of, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be a writer or I'm gonna keep pursuing this. But I'd always thought about my name and how obviously it was a Western name and obviously it was constantly surprising to people who would meet me or any adoptee who's clearly like Asian, and then they come in with an Irish name or a Polish name or a German name, like first, middle, and last are, all Western names. And so if there's a mismatch and there's a wait, this isn't the person on the menu that I ordered. Who are you? So it's not something that an adoptee, a transnational adoptee or anyone who's been renamed, I think can really ever forget 'cause you're using your name multiple times a day. Even, I remember in grade school writing my name. You have to write your name on paper. You are learning cursive, like all those things. Learning to write and always [00:34:00] feeling like it was just, it was, I was a little estranged from it yeah that's my name, but who's this person is a fiction, I'm sure I wouldn't have said it that way at the time, but like obviously I've just always known I was adopted.

I've always known that wouldn't have been my name. And then I had another name and it was still existing as a ghost. And that name itself was probably given to me by the agency, or that's what the agency says. I might have been one of these kidnapped people who did have records and they were just destroyed. Never know.

Haley Radke: Yeah that's just it. Who gave you that name? Is it the next one down on the list that they just rotate through?

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah.

Haley Radke: But I appreciate your observation certainly on what it would be like to experience that as a Asian person and then meeting sorry. I know someone just right now who I had the [00:35:00] same experience, like I met them and I was like, wow, this name just doesn't feel like it fits for you.

So it, walking around in the world like that you have included all of these other pieces from your childhood in the book and one of them and you always mark out your name. I think you may might leave an initial, if I'm recalling correctly, but one of the pieces that I was like, oh my God, Sun Yung, was a literal poster child in a textbook for being a immigrant. Do you wanna tell us about that? Because I thought that was amazing.

Sun Yung Shin: So yeah, I, yeah. So that picture of me right after my naturalization ceremony in Chicago was in the local newspaper and [00:36:00] then sometime I think in high school. Then my mom said, oh, you are like, you're one of her friends. Or either a family friend or maybe a cousin now I like, why don't I know this? But that was their textbook in high school and they, I like told their mom and their mom told my mom and then, 'cause it was from a high school that was like in a few suburbs away. And so it wasn't my high school's textbook, but it was being used somewhere else in some massive suburban Illinois, Chicago high school.

But the funny thing is, because I was in the newspaper, local newspaper, a lot. Also when things happen to you as a kid that aren't like super traumatic, you're just like, okay, whatever. Going on about my day. But I don't really know why I conjecture in the book I think it's, I think it was this multicultural. Oh, good. We've, we have an Asian kid in this [00:37:00] picture and a black kid and like six white kids. But I don't really know why I it's a little bit of a mystery.

Haley Radke: I like how you have taken that and now with your life said, this is actually what an immigrant does because there's a, there's I think there's a flag, like a American flag right beside you, right? It's oh yeah, no wonder this be a stock photo.

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah, and I, even though I was five, I don't have any memories of that, oh, I should try to get some, like hypnosis or something, but not that I need memories, but I was a happy kid, I was like a happy, very outgoing kid, apparently even on the plane from Korea, my report from the Baptist missionary's wife who got a free ticket or whatever to escort us six Korean adoptees to the US. She said I didn't sleep the entire time from Seoul, like from Incheon to Alaska [00:38:00] to Chicago, and I just talked the whole time.

Other kids were crying and upset and I feel like it's not necessarily a good si. That's not like a great quality that I was awake the whole time and talking to people, but they're, that's what the report.

Haley Radke: You're independent from the start. Wow. Oh,

interesting. Okay. Is it okay if I read a quote from your book?

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah, of course. Thank you.

Haley Radke: Okay. You write, this is on. Page 62 of my ARC. So forgive if it has somehow shifted when it comes out next month. If you're listing when this releases, "I want people to know that being an adoptee often means being haunted by a sense of being part of a deliberate human lottery. There is an underlying sense of meaninglessness. You are sometimes haunted by the question of [00:39:00] who else you could've been. It requires a certain kind of psychological effort to hold yourself together knowing that you could have been a number of other people in other places. You wonder if you can hold two possible identities in your psyche. If you could hold three or four or 200,000."

That I immediately I highlighted this 'cause I'm reading on a laptop, but I, this is stuck in my brain, this deliberate human lottery phrase. You nailed it. Can you talk about that?

Sun Yung Shin: Yeah. It's so common, right? I think every Korean adoptee that I have, read their work or interview or heard them speak.

And I think especially, maybe especially our cohort of adoptees and I think probably other adoptees think about this too, but just that we know that we were [00:40:00] just next in line, right? Like it was just a random, arbitrary adopters looking for a child, wanting to grow their family. And like my parents would've, I think, taken a child, said they, on their form, like anywhere.

They didn't care if it was boy or girl. They had a white child and then they got me. And then as I got older and got to know other adoptees from other Korean adoptees from other countries after my first, IKAA gathering in Seoul in 2004. But I think meeting all these other adoptees and from who grew up in France, who grew up in Sweden, who grew up in Germany, grew up in the Netherlands. Norway, it's they just happened to be available on that day for those people. And I also don't know what kind of, how much were they charging the Norway people, like how much were they charging? There's, [00:41:00] I'm sure this could be discovered more or less.

Were they giving, were the different agencies giving different types of people or different nationalities of couples, different kinds of children, right? Was it, oh, we're, this child is sickly. We're going to send them. We can't get as much money for this kid from this country, we're gonna send them there.

Or also in my paperwork it says like I had got like whooping cough, or I got had a cold for a few months and so I was supposed to leave earlier, but then my parents had to wait longer and I, when. I remember after learning, in adulthood, like year after year, learning about more of the corruption and abuses in the system, I did have a thought once wait, am I that person?

Then I'm like, re-looking at the [00:42:00] pictures, like in Diane Boucher's first documentary where she discovered she was switched with another girl. But it does, and not that it, that doesn't matter, but it's like. I, it, I could have gone anywhere, as far as I know. And so it just reveals the existential nature of adoption.

The existential nature of life, right? You, as you as a person get born with whatever combination of genes decided to combine that moment with that sperm and that egg, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the fact that these lotteries were managed by human beings and there was money involved, I want people to take some pause.

I also, I grew up, like Illinois has a really big lottery and my dad bought lottery tickets every week. So I think that probably I was always, it was like a constant of what the lottery numbers were. That week, and I'm sure that, I internalized that. I don't come [00:43:00] from a family of gamblers, thank goodness, and I am not interested in gambling. Thank goodness. That would be the end of me, I'm sure if I liked that. But I just really started to realize as all of this information was coming out of South Korea and the system and that, yeah, I could be speaking French, I could be really cool. I often think I could have free healthcare in Norway if I could have, if I had survived all that like weird Scandinavian racism, which sounds really terrible, it's just a different, it's different like obviously incredibly racist here, but learn hearing from other adoptees in other places, they felt much more isolated.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure folks will not be surprised that I'm gonna recommend your book, Heart Eater, a Memoir of Immigration Belonging and How we Find Ourselves in Language.

And it's your memoir, it's this [00:44:00] series of short essays and critiques. And of course I mentioned before my, one of my favorite things found documents, and you call them in your book Ephemera, which I love that word. And I too love language. And so I'm sure I've said this before, but I think poets often have the best grasp of words, this incisive use you have you're a perfect example of that. And I have Unbearable Splendor and The Wet Hex in my collection as well from you, but I know folks are really gonna enjoy Heart Eater. I loved it. I was so glad to be able to read it early and to get to know you better through your words was really special. So thank you. I'm so glad it's gonna be out in the world soon.

Sun Yung Shin: It's such a weird book, Haley. It's really a weird book. Thank you so much for wading through it. It's not your usual, it's not a narrative memoir started out as I called it field notes, but it's the things that, yeah, it's the things that I wanted to [00:45:00] say after these many years, and so hopefully it will connect with some folks and I hope to be able to talk to a lot of people and hear their stories too. Once the book's out. Yeah.

Haley Radke: It's wonderful. I don't think it's weird. I think it's great. What did you wanna recommend to us today?

Sun Yung Shin: Oh my gosh. I am really excited about novels coming out. Jenny Heijun Wills has a new book, the Canadian writer. I haven't gotten my hands on it yet. Oh, adoption world is just like bubbling with so many exciting new books. There's so many new adoptee poets, oh gosh, I should have made a list. But I do wanna recommend the Starlings Collective of adoptee poets and poetics and there's the Bipoc Adoptee Conference and Organization.

And of [00:46:00] course, I always recommend the anthology that Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung put together When We Become Ours. And it's great for, teen readers. And adult readers and it's all fiction. And so it gives us a break from memoir and documentaries, which are great, but we deserve, speculation in fiction too. And so that, there's just a great variety of stories in there. And so I'm, biased 'cause I got to be included, but I love all the other pieces in there. Matthew Salesses' memoirs also coming out, I think next year. So yeah, there will be, I think there's just an abundance. Not just from Korean adoptees, but from adoptees, from all walks of life, doing all kinds of writing. Not just necessarily focused on adoption, but.

Haley Radke: There's a lot of us doing a lot of great [00:47:00] things. Yes.

Sun Yung Shin: Yes.

Haley Radke: We will likely highlight a lot of those for folks, listeners coming up. Thank you. Where's the best place for listeners to connect with you to find your work and buy Heart Eater?

Sun Yung Shin: Yes, so on my website, sunyungshin.com can get links to all my books on Bookshop and or, any bookstore that you like. Instagram, my Link Tree. I keep up the events and news on Link Tree. I also, oh, my favorite thing is my Substack. It's called Heart Eater and I usually, it's twice a month. It's it's a little irregular, but it's definitely every month every couple of weeks.

And I always include a poem by a writer and then a creative writing prompt based on that poem or short piece or excerpt. And then some news, some [00:48:00] random things like the last edition of Heart Eater I talked about John Carpenter's The Thing. And I love. Zombie movies and robots. And so I talk a lot about pop culture too, as much as I think people might be able to stand.

And then I talk a little bit about my projects, but really it's mostly just other things in other people's writing that I wanna share and go into a little bit more of than I do like on Facebook or Instagram. Yeah, so Heart Eater, it's free. People can do the $5 a month thing, but I'm also just really happy if anyone wants to get into the Substack space, which I really enjoy.

Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you. And to find out you love zombie movies right at the end of our time. How cruel. I guess we'll have to connect about that another day.

Sun Yung Shin: Part two. Yeah.

Haley Radke: I love horror in general, so that's totally up my alley. Thank you. What a delight to get to talk with you today.

Sun Yung Shin: Thank you, [00:49:00] Haley.

You're doing, the Gods work, the gods of community. You're doing really beautiful work. I really appreciate how you make a space for storytelling and connecting amongst ourselves and beyond. So thank you very much and yeah, just I hope you feel good about the way that you're bringing your talents to the world.

Haley Radke: My honor. Thank you.

Oh my goodness. I really enjoyed my time with Sun Yung, and we didn't even mention I, this is totally my bad. I failed to mention she has authored multiple poetry collections. She has written books for children. She's got picture books. She is an editor. And she was one of the editors on Outsiders Within Writing on Transracial Adoption, which I think is one of the very [00:50:00] first collections ever published by transracial adoptees.

And it's something I've gifted to multiple adoptees. It is a classic. And, she has been in this world for such a long time writing, being an advocate. And activist is the word, activist is the word I was looking for for us. And I really appreciate Sun Yung's work. It was just a delight to have her on the show.

There have been so many tremendous guest this year and we're leading up to my 10 year anniversary. And to have someone come on like Sun Yung, who has contributed so much to the adoptee community, it's just, it's such an honor to get to hear more of her behind the scenes stories, things that don't necessarily come out [00:51:00] in all the poetry collections or those kinds of things.

Anyway. Thank you Sun Yung. Thank you so much to every guest who comes on and shares so deeply of themselves for us, so that we can just feel like we're not alone. I appreciate it so much. Thank you for listening. Let's talk again soon.

325 [Healing Series] Narcissism in Adoptive Parents with Katy Perkins, LICSW-S

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/325

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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 we are joined by Katy Perkins to talk about a hot topic in our community, narcissism in adoptive parents.

We discuss what it would've looked like to grow up in a family with a narcissistic parent, or one with narcissistic tendencies, the impact it could have had on us as kids and now into [00:01:00] adulthood. I was fascinated by everything Katy had to share in this conversation, and I hope it is helpful for you.

Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. 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 to Adoptees On Katy Perkins. Hi Katy.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Hi Haley. I'm really excited to be here.

Haley Radke: You are on the main feed. You've been on the Patreon feed. A lot of people don't know, but you've been around. Because you're such,

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: but it's the big time.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah. You really made it now. No not too many people get to be behind the paywall, but I'm so excited to talk to you today and we're doing a healing [00:02:00] series episode today.

But if you don't mind, would you just share just a teeny bit of your story with us and what led you to become a therapist?

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yeah, sure. So on the adoption side, my parents adopted me through the Gladney Center and it was a closed adoption, same race domestic infant the eighties standard I think for a lot of people.

And they had a brochure about the Texas reunion registry and I had been like counting the days for as many years as I can remember to register. So I registered immediately once I turned 18 and I reunited with my birth mom really quickly, and that's the phrase that she preferred was birth mother. As a therapist I always use the term that my clients prefer. We had to go through the ridiculous processes that Texas puts forward, like an hour of mandated counseling. What are you gonna get done in an hour to prepare for reunion? I get the idea behind it now as a professional, but I just [00:03:00] don't like the idea of mandated anything for anyone who hasn't committed an actual crime. So there's that. That's a conversation for another day. But yeah, so I was reunited when I was about 18 or 19, and so it's been a really long time with both sides of my birth family. And I would say originally my parents didn't really, they would have said they were supportive of me having my information and meeting my family, and they did.

But if you had a longer sit down about the policies and closed adoptions and versus sharing information, they really weren't in agreement with that at the time, that was my gosh, how many years ago now? So I have dragged them into the modern times with me. My whole family's very supportive.

I'd say in the last 15 years or so, they've really, they've stepped up a lot more, like my parents have gone to the Texas [00:04:00] capitol with me to lobby legislators to restore access to original birth certificates for adoptees. My birth mom is deceased now, but she wrote letters to legislators with me.

I would take dictation basically from her. So my family's come a long way from how things used to be that it was just truly a lack of education. They truly didn't know any better because that was not what was presented to them when they were adopting. In fact someone, I don't know. I hesitate to say the agency, 'cause I don't really know where the request came from, but someone affiliated with some kind of update to closed records, had contacted them and asked them to reach out to their legislators in the, I think mid eighties.

I've been doing this for longer than I look, and I think my dad had written a letter to support closed records at that time. But now if you asked him, he would be like, oh, I don't, I don't believe any of that anymore. That was [00:05:00] then, this is now. And they've all really come around. So I got involved with some nonprofits really quickly, like text care and American Adoption Congress.

And Adoption Knowledge Affiliates or AKA. And so I was doing that a really long time before I ever became a social worker. I started my master's in social work in two, I graduated in 2006 and I, so I knew before I even started all of that I. At least a significant portion of my work would be with adoptees.

At that time I was specializing in community and administrative practice, so I did a lot of projects that, that I would affiliate with the volunteer work I was already doing, like I got a student group together to lobby for OBC access in I think 2005 and there were a lot of things like that, and most of my papers were about adoption.

There was also the fact that I could drum up something I'd already written [00:06:00] and expand upon it 'cause I'd already done the work earlier. So I knew at that time I would've told you, I don't wanna do therapy. I never wanna be a therapist. That sounds boring. That doesn't sound like me. I wanna do activism. I wanna be a lobbyist. I want to do management and nonprofit leadership, and I was really focused on that at that time. And I ended up going into work in rape crisis centers for a number of years doing primary prevention of sexual violence, which isn't just outreach, it's more like we're trying to prevent attitudes that contribute to sexual violence in the community.

So it's, it was more about social justice and anti-oppression work and equality and equity. I worked a lot with high school students and did a ton of education and outreach and public speaking and training around that, and I started to make connections. So I was still volunteering in adoption advocacy at that time, but I was really starting to make connections [00:07:00] between that work and the sexual violence prevention work.

And after some years I saw that there really wasn't much room for advancement in the work that I was doing. Even though I loved my work. It was really hard. I also provided response in the emergency room when there was a survivor presenting for a rape kit. So we all did a little bit of everything really hard, but I loved it.

I was very passionate about it. But then I started to realize in that area that was probably gonna be it for me for some years, and I couldn't financially and family wise continue that work. So I went more into the medical side of things. I worked in a hospital and then a number of years in hospice where I got my clinical licensure and I thought, I in, I'm in a, a medical setting. I may as well get that license. And actually, Dr. Melanie Chung Sherman hired me to see just a couple of people in her [00:08:00] practice and Krista Woods did as well. So I had three or four clients. So I just dabbled to see can I do this? Do I dislike it as much as I thought I would? Because if I like it, I can do it forever. It's job security. There's always gonna be people that need help. And it turned out I really liked it and I was, not to toot my own horn to so much, but I was pretty good at it. So I stuck with it, and initially adoptees were my primary focus for a long time. Really, I specialize in some other issues now, including eating disorders, sexual and domestic violence, recovery, oppression and discrimination, sociopolitical stress. I do have some DNA discoveries clients, people that found out, for example, their dad was not their biological father, so to speak. Lots of family secrets and also high control groups.

So I do see a number of other issues, but I really feel like adoptees are still my people [00:09:00] and it's really my life's work.

Haley Radke: I've seen you and followed you as an expert in this space for years now, and I've been to some of the presentations that you've done, and I view you as an expert in what we're gonna talk about today, which is narcissism in adoptive parents and the impact that can have on adopted people.

And you've told me some things behind the scenes on air, on Patreon.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Nothing identifying of course.

Haley Radke: No. And in your presentations that I find so fascinating, and I know listeners are gonna be like glued to the earbuds. So let's get into it. And one of the first things I wanna say is. In culture right now. I think there's this accusation thrown where people are like, oh yeah, a narcissist and that we're just like armchair diagnosing narcissism [00:10:00] everywhere, and we're not necessarily clinically diagnosing our adoptive parents with narcissism. We're working around that.

So what are your thoughts on this? Let's give a little intro here.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: So I think it's important to understand some of the context of that. I totally agree. We toss that word around a lot, narcissism, narcissist, et cetera. And you can have a bundle of narcissistic traits without actually having a clinically diagnosable personality disorder of narcissism.

And so in that regard, it doesn't necessarily matter if it's diagnosable or not. It could be that. You just lean on the narcissistic side. We all carry some traits, some narcissistic traits. It's a totally normal thing, and so we don't have to be that afraid of it. We all have those traits, is what I'm saying.

But it's, it's like a spectrum, as with a number of other diagnoses, a spectrum of severity. So there's [00:11:00] people that really struggle with it. There's people who might be more in the area of what we would say, malignant narcissism. That's getting more into the area of like psychopathy, psychopaths.

And so not everyone is at that level of narcissism, but that doesn't mean it's any less damaging to people and you can, it can be treated, narcissism is treatable. There are people who specialize in that treatment out there. I am not one of them, but the person really has to want it. They've really gotta wanna change.

There's frequently also some medication involved, so therapy and medication, not always, of course, but frequently and the problem with that is that people that are more strongly narcissistic don't usually feel like they're the ones who need to change. Or they, they think that people around them need to change because they're the ones who are right.

But I can say from professional experience, I've definitely [00:12:00] worked with a couple of people whose loved ones had told them like, this is not good. You're, this is how it's affecting us. It's very narcissistic the way you're behaving. I don't know what all that means, but if you, for example, wanna stay with the family, you've gotta work on this some.

And there are some measurement tools out there, and I have worked with at least a couple of people who were like, I don't really I don't necessarily think I need to change, but I trust my family and this is what they're telling me. So obviously it's hurting people whether I understand why or not, and I'd like to change that.

And you just need that kernel to start with. But like I said, a lot of folks don't have that kernel but that's why there's specialists.

Haley Radke: Can we pause there and just talk about

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yeah.

Haley Radke: What does it look like to grow up with parents, one or both who are narcissists or have narcissistic tendencies?

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: It can show up in a whole lot of different ways and often when you're [00:13:00] talking about a personality disorder, it shows up in all the domains of life. So you would see it at home, at work in different ways, of course, with friends or other areas. To the kid though, if you're growing up in that kind of a setting, so there's a go-to phrase that I use that if a narcissist tells you to set yourself on fire you do it, they're gonna tell you it's not warm enough and kids can't live up to any of that. So if you're dealing with a person who's more narcissistic in nature and they have expectations, certain expectations that kids will, for example, behave a certain way, talk to them a certain way, the family will run in a particular way.

We all, not just the kids, ultimately can't live up to all of those standards and it can really ingrain, we're not even throwing in the adoption element quite yet, but if you are, it can really ingrain these notions of I'm not [00:14:00] good enough or nothing I ever do is good enough or I can't be good enough.

The people pleasing is very strong with folks who grew up in a setting like this really feeling. I see a high degree of enmeshment in these families adoptees who feel afraid to make their own decisions that go against what their parents might want. And I can go into more detail about what it, what I see in therapy, but one of the points about that is, when I have a new client and they say my parents were narcissists, I do usually start off by asking, do you know if they were ever diagnosed by a professional? Because it ends up being relevant later because sometimes they'll use the fact that they weren't diagnosed to dismiss their own concerns or their own pain.

So we can open a door to a conversation that like, it actually doesn't matter what the diagnosis is, it's not okay for someone to treat you that way. And it has the impact it has even if the person, quote unquote, can't help it. [00:15:00] Just like we say that the motivation behind the adoption doesn't change the effects that it has, it affects people the way it affects people.

Regardless, it doesn't in this context always matter if there's a diagnosis. The behaviors have the impact they have. It makes people doubt themselves, think less of themselves. It's abuse, it's abusive behavior. Abusive behavior isn't always reportable, but it is abusive.

Haley Radke: When someone with narcissistic tendencies adopts and doesn't have that underlying understanding that we are not blank slates and has this picture of what they want their family to be like, appear to be like, those kinds of things. What would the impact on the adopted person be like? What would you see there in that kind of a situation? Or what have you seen?

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yeah. And I [00:16:00] really started to specialize more in adoptees who came from narcissistic family systems through my work with adopted youth.

And I did that for, it was at least a few years, but I ended up having to stop because in my practice at the time I was living in Texas, in North Texas, and some of these things change regionally, but I always got a lot of contacts from families that were pretty narcissistic in nature, wanting me to quote unquote fix their kid.

So they would say things like, I want you to fix their adoption trauma, or, they're not connecting with us. They're not attaching to me, and they really need to do that. So it became very parent focused like a finger wag. This is what I want you to do for my kid. And subtly I started using different methods to deal with that, I have a number of youth guidelines that say, we treat youth in a youth focused, adoptee centric [00:17:00] manner. We will be working with your child on the issues that they, and we feel are the biggest issues happening in their lives, which might not match. We will definitely mix in some of the things that you're worried about, but they may not be the primary focus.

Some things that I noticed were parents who were worried about the wrong thing. So they'd be putting emphasis on say, my child hasn't cleaned their room in three months, and they're not being polite to the neighbors. We're trying to work on their politeness, and they're not getting a's anymore, they're getting C's, and that's unacceptable.

Whereas from my perspective, I'm trying to keep your kid alive. Your child is suicidal. You believed they had no history of self-harm or suicidality. They're telling me they've had that for years. You don't know that because they don't feel safe going to you to talk about it because you tell them to focus on their grades.

It's not helpful to the [00:18:00] parents to be feeling down and I know I hate to, not always or not all, and we shouldn't have to, but not all adoptive parents are like this. These are the families who would come to find me and that part would happen a lot where the kids had a lot more going on than the parents believed, and they would express great surprise about what was going on with their youth and just shock and I can't believe it.

I would see a lot of situations where the parents and I would have a really good parent check-in. I'd give them a lot of guidance. A lot of this is what your kid's gonna need soon. And so a red flag would be like a pretty systematic disregard for the instructions or the advice, and you don't have to take the instructions or advice of your mental health provider.

But if it's a systematic, frequently occurring thing, we might not be the right fit. Maybe you need someone else that can help you with these issues, and that's [00:19:00] fine. Sometimes we're just not the right fit, but it would be chronic. I would hear things like the food was locked up. After dinner the kitchen would be locked up. There's no more food. The kitchen is closed. You can't have anything, which is problematic when I'm working with youth who are struggling with the beginnings of eating disorders or disordered eating behaviors. And sometimes the adopted youth would have to eat separately from the non-ad adopted kids, or they would get different food.

Their adoption status was often weaponized against them. So if they're upset about something and having an argument with their parents, they might hear things like, that's just your adoption trauma talking. I've had a number of clients whose adoptive parents would call them expletives, like an adopted piece of expletive.

And this is all verbal abuse. Adoptive families are just as likely to abuse their kids as anybody else's, and [00:20:00] children can also similarly be removed for if there's, severe enough abuse in the home. But they're less likely to be removed because of there are a lot of myths and internalized beliefs we have about adoptive parents.

Like they're wonderful people, they've saved this child, I'm sure they're doing a great job. It's probably no big deal. So when the youth is growing up in that environment, and those are the attitudes they encounter from the world around them, they start to believe, no one's gonna believe me, rightfully and in order for them to force your, in order for you to force your brain into a mold for you to survive something that is messed up abusive, but you've gotta get through it every day. You've gotta find a way to make it make sense. And so usually they will start telling themselves, I'm probably making a big deal out of it anyway.

No one believes me, so it must be me. I'm making a big deal about this. It's not that big of a deal. Maybe I don't [00:21:00] understand what's happening. Maybe they didn't mean it. And then systematically that gets rebutted because the parents continue to minimize, dismiss, things like that now, and I could go on and on about that, but if you grow up in that kind of a setting, and now you are, let's say you're, in college or on your own for the first time, and I see a shift that happens.

I've also had a number of young adult adoptees who were like at the beginning of their college years, or they just moved out and they've got a job. Things can really go crazy inside because it's the first time they haven't been around their family 24 hours a day and sometimes they don't know what to do with themselves.

And that's when I start hearing the questions of what's my purpose? I don't have a purpose. Who am I? And a lot of once you're out of the daily control of the narcissistic people, sometimes they will do things like blowing up your phone. I've had clients whose parents would wait to call them until they [00:22:00] knew they were in therapy and they would call over and over.

So we've had to do things like hide the phone so they can't hear it, put it in a box. Lots of work around boundary setting in that phase of life also, a lot of people, their parents are still paying for some things because they. This is their first time on their own. They can't cover all of their costs quite yet, and those purse strings can be fraught, really fraught.

So that's another red flag I look for. A lot of adoptees will reach out and in the first conversation when we start talking about like insurance or private pay, what are you gonna be comfortable with? I can hear their voice change when they start talking about the fact that say they're mom's gonna pay for it, or their adoptive parents are gonna pay for it because then they know when you've had a session, they know the practice name when they get billed for it.

I've had parents say to their kids, or I mean their adult children, [00:23:00] oh, what are you talking about with your therapist? I've noticed that things seem different between us. Maybe I can meet with her and just, give her my take on things. And I usually tell my clients that's, I'm not gonna be doing that.

That's not safe for you. And I'm specifically here to help create a safe environment where you can really be yourself. And that is not what happens, from what you've shared with me. That's just not what happens when you're with your parents, and I don't need other stories. That's not how therapy works.

I have unconditional positive regard for my client. You're my number one priority, not how everybody else in your family thinks you should be living. Now they have their opinions and you and I can work together on. How do you field their questions? How do you deal with it if your mom says, I want to come to your session and you don't want her there, do we need to role play setting those boundaries?

Yeah there's more about that. Another thing that I, that's a big red flag [00:24:00] is when adoptive parents call to try to make appointments for their adult children.

Haley Radke: No. Okay.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yes. And I will tell you, it doesn't happen with any other issue, at least in my practice. They never do that with any other issue. People don't call me and say, my son is suicidal and I think that he should see you for depression. That never happens unless they're calling about an adoptee and they'll usually say, my son or my daughter, I really think they need to see you because of their adoption trauma. And it's funny, I look back on like when I first started this work and I wouldn't have known that was a red flag, but I would've known that the practice, the policy is to say, that I'd be happy to see them, but they need to call me directly.

I would do that with any issue, but all these years later, that's all I need to know almost. So it also tells me like what's coming. If the adoptee does contact me, that, okay, we're gonna need to talk [00:25:00] about the fact that this happened. And so usually I will tell the person, the best thing you can do for your son or your daughter is to get some support for yourself. And I don't do therapy with adoptive parents, but if you would like to make a consult appointment, which is, one to three sessions, it's usually around problem solving or giving you direction. We can do that. I'd be happy to meet with you about that.

But they'll have to contact me directly if they decide that they're ready to make an appointment. Now, of course, we're talking about people who are not in a guardianship situation or declared incompetent or anything like that. I'm talking about fully independent adults who can make their own decisions and phone calls and have to consent to these kinds of things.

But when I get adoptees whose parents are like that. They will tell me things like they've had a lot of diagnoses. They don't know what they all are, and no one's ever really explained them to them. Since they were a kid. Their parents had them in therapy [00:26:00] with all these different therapies, but the therapists were talking to the parents all the time.

The kid didn't have, when I was a kid, I didn't have input on which therapist I would see, and they would say these things to me, which weren't helpful or good. There's all, now I know there's all these things going on in the background that I know are coming when I meet with folks like this.

So I guess one point to make here would be a lot of people will say oh, that's just how I grew up. Or, oh, that's just how my parents are, and nine times out of 10, that's not what it is. What's happening is the person telling themselves that so they're, like I said earlier, you've gotta find a way in your brain to make it make sense so you can live through it.

That's one of the things you say to yourself is that's just how my family is. That's just how my parents are, when in reality it's abusive. And that's usually a big initial conversation [00:27:00] of you've told me all these things have happened in your family and all these ways that you were treated.

Have you ever thought of that as abusive? Have you ever put the a word to it? How does it feel to try that on? And that initially can be a really big shift for people like. People will say they were hit, they were spanked, like far past the point where it was appropriate, or they were forced to sleep outside sometimes or different things, and they knew it wasn't okay they knew it was wrong. They knew their parents weren't supposed to do that. But once you put the a word on it, it can really shift the dynamics. You were forced to live that way and there wasn't anyone advocating for you and you don't have to hold those feelings for them anymore. If you can't do that right now, or you are allowed to be angry about it, it doesn't mean you'll be angry forever, but you are [00:28:00] allowed to let yourself feel that because in families like that, frequently you're not really allowed to get angry.

If you get angry, that could be risky to you, whether emotionally, psychologically, physically, so anger is usually a high risk feeling. And so just learning to feel the anger is important because a lot of times you can't get to the healing, the true more healing phases until you allow yourself to just feel what you feel.

And separately from adoption and attachment trauma, that's for all therapy. We're here to try to help you feel all of your feelings, not just the ones that seem quote unquote productive. When somebody says to me that's not a productive feeling. There's a lot of stuff to dig out there. It happens more than you might think.

Okay, so is the point of feelings to be productive, what's the point of feelings? Are feelings voluntary? What happens if you feel that feeling? What if to be productive is just to feel it, because it's a part of being a human [00:29:00] and you're allowed to feel freely and think freely, which a side note working with those families or those youth and then later adults was how I got more into working with people who have left high control groups or, really high demand religious groups 'cause a lot of times the families that would contact me were. In those kinds of groups, or the adoptee grew up that way, they're not anymore. And so there's a multiple layered issue of trauma going on where you're subservient to your parents, you're subservient to God. God will punish you if you go against your parents.

We could go on and on about that, but anything that restricts your thought you're right to think freely. Your freedom to think whatever you want and feel what you feel is generally not a great thing. To put it super broadly.

Haley Radke: Well [00:30:00] said. Yes. So another thing that I've heard in our community, I'm gonna say it's anecdotal 'cause I haven't, seen the study, but it is that narcissistic people are drawn to adopt, and that's why we have this higher prevalence.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Of adoptive parents. What Say you about that?

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Okay, so in full disclosure, I'm not aware of any research that says that. So I'm basing this only on my own experience in the field and the many colleagues I keep in contact with who work around the same issues and people and i'll start by saying, there is research that shows us that believe it or not, that there is a higher prevalence of people in positions of leadership in like America's largest corporations who have, who are more narcissistic or maybe even psychopaths. So we already know that's a thing. [00:31:00] I did dig up the research once.

I don't have it handy in my brain at the moment, but it does exist. They did go look for it. So my belief is that adoption is very similar in that those, so those kinds of leadership positions appeal to certain personality types. So you have to be comfortable with certain things that a lot of people aren't comfortable with, like being the front, facing the face of something, a brand, a company, a team, what have you.

Being interviewed, people saying yes to you all the time. People telling you how smart you are and what a wonderful person you are. You're doing such a great job getting paid lots of money. Having to make huge decisions where you might not have to or really can't think about how it's gonna affect certain people in order to get the really macro level work done.

And so it appeals to folks like that. I think adoption is similar where, like I said earlier, it's not all adoptive parents who are very narcissistic, but those who are naturally attracted to it because of a [00:32:00] number of factors. There's the savioristic aspect. People are telling you what a wonderful person you are. You've rescued this child. People tell the adoptees like, oh, you're so lucky, and your parents did so good by you and they gave you everything. Gosh, you would've been so much worse off. If parents hear that's gonna appeal to them too. Being able to use others' experiences as a platform for your own experience.

I see a lot of folks like that blogging, doing YouTube series about that's their only really experience with the issue that they're speaking from, and there's nothing wrong with personal experience. I don't mean to imply that, but if you're gonna be speaking to such a large audience, I think we have a bigger responsibility to about what we're talking about.

So it, it appeals to people because they want their ego stroked. They are able to have, in terms of a power dynamic, there's a one up one down between them and the child. You should think highly [00:33:00] of me. You should basically worship me. You should be grateful. So I think it's very attractive to people like that, even when there are some folks that aren't like that in that position.

Haley Radke: I'm curious about this idea of having your child comply for the sake of appearances, and when you were listing off that list of they don't clean their room, they haven't cleaned their room for three months, their grades are low, like these are observable things from the outside. And so can you speak to that a little bit about, for an adult adoptee who might have had that sort of situation? What we might, if we're still telling ourselves it's me in adulthood?

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yeah.

Haley Radke: What might we be seeing behavior wise in ourselves that we could maybe attribute?

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: All of that is performative in [00:34:00] nature. And I'll also back up, something I forgot to say earlier was that in these family systems we often see where essentially the family needs the adoptee to be the person with the problem for the family to continue functioning around this issue.

So it's very similar to addiction in that there's a person with a problem and we rotate around it. But in, in that dynamic, the parents are getting attention. And something that would happen a lot with my youth clients is I would get parents who would I often say, I'll do anything for my kid except for the thing you want me to do. Except for the one thing you told me would be the most helpful. That's the thing I won't do. So whether that's a higher level of care, having shelf stable snacks available anywhere the kid might be so they can eat if they're hungry, not locking down the kitchen, speaking to the kid in a different way, or reading a book or what have you.

They will have these conversations where they say they're gonna do the [00:35:00] thing and then it wouldn't happen and the kid just keeps coming back and then we get attached and when the kid starts to get better. Sometimes they would pull them out because this isn't working. We need to try something else. We were expecting this to be different or be different faster.

And now there's another disrupted attachment for the youth. And really it's the system seeking equilibrium. And I'm gonna link that to the performance. But

Haley Radke: is this connected to Munchausen Sometimes.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: It's all it's a Venn diagram, right? There's definitely people in that overlapping spot. I haven't worked with someone yet that I felt like that was what was going on, but I can see how it could be connected for folks who were doing that.

But every system seeks equilibrium, so I made that connection to addiction in an addictive family system, when one person changes everybody's roles get all wacky.

So that's why in treatment, they will often tell all [00:36:00] families. Now your loved one's in treatment and theoretically they're gonna get a lot better, but once they get better, not, it's not that everything's fixed, because now you might not know how to interact with this person anymore. You know how to deal with them when they were using.

When they're sober, they're a completely different person and your whole family's gotta reorganize itself to work with that. And it's not easy. It can be really hard. So just like with any family system. When the adoptee starts to get better, that would mean the parents have to start doing things differently.

So one of the things that I started doing to screen families was to say, before I will consider taking your child on, I need, I had a laundry list of things. Any recent discharge documentation and instructions for aftercare, if they've been in a higher level of care. Any records you might have your hands on from previous therapists, any diagnoses that they've been given, if they have an IEP, I need to see a [00:37:00] copy of it.

I need you to fill out a form that's your version of what's going on with your child, and I need your kid to fill out a form of what they feel is going on with them. I need to do a face-to-face consult and there's a booking fee because I had a lot of people who would book and then not show, I need all these things, and by the way, you have to be willing to do therapy for both, the parent or parents.

And I need to know, I have to have an ROI in place for that therapist. And I need to know you have a, an appointment scheduled so you don't have to get in to see them before you see me, but I need to know you've got something on the calendar. So they're gonna have to confirm that with me. And every once in a while.

People would go through the whole thing. If they would go through the whole thing. They lasted a decent amount of time. They were making decent efforts for their kids, but mostly they, or they would make it through all of that, do the face-to-face, and then say they don't need it anymore because they're reaching out during a [00:38:00] crisis.

And when the crisis moment has passed, everything's back to normal. We don't need any help. And that's the perfect time to do the deeper work when there's not a crisis. So I've digressed.

Haley Radke: I think my last thing before we wrap up is, as you were talking about that I was like, oh, this is the estrangement situation.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yes. Yeah.

Haley Radke: We're working on ourselves, we're, figuring out how this impacted us and how to build our boundaries and all these things, and they can't hack that.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yeah I've had a lot of clients who were estranged to some degree with their adopted family. I've seen a lot of articles circulating recently with professionals and family members talking about how estrangement happens too fast. They're doing it willy-nilly. Why won't they let me back into their life? And I just, I have to take that with a grain of salt. I am sure [00:39:00] there's people out there who maybe cut off contact earlier, or they could have gotten some more help and they might have been able to work something out, a communication system that works for them.

But as far as the people that I've worked with, the estrangement was a really long time coming. They've tried literally everything and it's the same thing over and over, and they just can't take it anymore. And who can blame them. Now some people don't have to estrange completely. Some people just need help working on their boundaries.

Like sometimes it can save a relationship to not see each other so much. So if your family is like insisting, you come over every weekend. We spend seven days with overnights together at Christmas. We, we always have these traditions and we need to talk every day on the phone. And you're just at your wit's end.

You don't have to do it that way. Now coming to that conclusion is a whole psychological project, but you're allowed to make changes to [00:40:00] protect yourself. And clients once said to me, it feels like punishment. It feels like I'm punishing my family, they did so much for me. And that kind of logic path in your head.

It's not punishment. It might feel that way because you're not used to being protected and taking care of yourself and advocating for yourself and having the space and the boundaries you need, but it's self-protection and self-defense. It's not punishment, and you are allowed to take steps to protect yourself if you're experiencing routine manipulation, abuse, what have you. Or maybe you just need to take a break. There's no rules. So it's not like you decide I'm gonna talk to them, or I'm never gonna talk to them again. And I think a lot of adoptees get caught up in that black and white thinking, pick a side, whose family are you in? It all goes together, but it doesn't have to be that way. It could just be that if your parents wanna talk to you every [00:41:00] week, maybe you are only available to talk to them once a month. If they want you to visit every weekend or every month, maybe you're just not available to do that this month, and you don't have to always explain all of the details.

So your time and your space is important, and you are allowed to manage this relationship for the sake of your own wellness and safety rather than for the sake of the relationship itself. So you are just as worthy of taking care of yourself as anybody else. Your needs are just as important.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

Any last things you wanna tell us about narcissism in the adoptive family before we do our wrap up.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Sure. I just, I think it's more common than people realize and you just don't have to play along for the rest of your [00:42:00] life. You are your own person, and it is a lot of work to recover from narcissistic abuse or emotional neglect.

It is a lot of work just like it is for someone who's leaving a relationship that was experiencing narcissistic abuse. The adoption adds more complicating factors, but you don't have to live like that forever. I like to think of myself as a realist. I don't ever wanna oversell what I can bring to the table, or, therapy's gonna solve everything.

You're gonna feel better, I promise. That's just not me. I can't promise you're gonna feel that much better. I think it's more realistic to say that you can feel better, you might not be a million bucks. I don't know. I don't know what the future holds. I don't think there's an end point for healing where now I'm done.

This is a lifelong experience, so it continues to come up at different points during our lives. I [00:43:00] think it's more realistic to say, these episodes or whatever you wanna call it, the times when you're really overwhelmed and it feels really strong can get fewer and further apart and less severe, and you can get better at taking care of yourself when you're struggling with these things.

You can have better boundaries with the folks that I don't know you're being subjected to, because for some people it's really important to stay connected even when it's difficult. So then the question becomes what can we do to try to manage this in a way that you can live with?

That maintains a connection you want and I mean my clients, I think there has usually been some kind of a way to do that. But if that's not for you and you've already tried all of that, and I do think continuing to go back to that at some point can be seen as a kind of self-harm. If you, if we keep putting ourselves in this situation where we know by now that we're gonna [00:44:00] be hurt and we're doing it for the benefit of the other person, then that's my view is that it can become a form of self-harm.

And so if that's what's happening, it's time to talk about how you can care for yourself better. Because sometimes no one else is gonna do it and you've gotta have a reason to go on other than your parents in this regard.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Okay. So I know you're booked and busy, but you do have a wait list.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: I do.

Haley Radke: Where can folks find you and connect with you if they wanna learn more from you or have the possibility to work with you?

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: You can get me in a number of ways. You can go through the website, the clinic website, which is findselfcounseling.com. You can call or text the office number, which is also on the website. That's 9 7 2 8 9 5 8 3 7 6. Or you can email admin [00:45:00] or director@findselfcounseling.com. I would say right now the wait list is such that I probably could take new clients in another month and a half I think, but it always depends, if somebody kind of graduates or they decide they wanna work on a different issue and they're working with someone else, openings happen all the time.

I do also have an adoptee processing group, and it's a virtual group that's open to folks in I'm licensed in nine states, so it's a little bit all over the place and we usually meet on a Monday evening once or twice a month, except for the summertime. So if you're interested in that instead of doing therapy or as an adjunct, that's usually an option. I just have to meet with people in advance to make sure the group is the right place for them.

Haley Radke: Amazing. And you had a recommended resource that you wanted to share too?

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: I do. I recommend Adoption Mosaic, and they've been around for quite a while now. They have a whole lot of great resources [00:46:00] on their website.

They also have I wanna say their monthly virtual meetups or meetings and trainings where they have adoptees or allies talk about different issues. And I really think that they have a really well-rounded number of topics. And they also have I think a book list. And they do consults, especially for adoptive parents if you wanna get some support.

They do have someone that does consults specifically for that, and they also have a support group for adoptees who are in any kind of estrangement family situation, or even if you're just considering it. So that is another really good option that they have.

Haley Radke: Totally love what Astrid is doing over there at Adoption Mosaic, so co-sign for me.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much, Katy, for sharing with us today. I really appreciate it.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: You're so welcome.

Haley Radke: I know it's gonna be helpful to a lot of people.

Katy Perkins, LCSW-S: Yeah, hopefully.

Haley Radke: I can't remember now how [00:47:00] many people have told me. I think one or both of my adoptive parents was a narcissist. And when that started coming out I was like, alright, are we just all falling into this trap of, labeling everyone and, but the deeper I investigated, the more I learned from Katy and several other adoptee therapists, I was like, huh, maybe there is something to this. And when I tell you I was locked in when Katy was telling me these things in our recording and I was scribbling notes for myself and I had several insights.

I was like, so I trust that this will have been helpful for you. I am so grateful for all the [00:48:00] experts that share their wisdom here, we have had so many healing series episodes over the past 10 years, and I know that other therapists will go and listen to Healing Series episodes to also help them in their own practice, and I feel like this one might be one of those.

It's just really cool to have this as a resource for people. I remember when I started the Healing Series. I really wanted more adoptees to be able to access therapy, but like I didn't have the money to give them, the resources to pay for therapy. And I was trying so hard to build up a list of therapists that you guys could access if you had the means and if you didn't I always wanted them to share helpful tips of some kind so you could [00:49:00] implement and, try and give you something that would be helpful if you didn't have supports going in your own life. And I hope that for folks who've listened for any length of time that hearing folks' stories, hearing from adoptee therapists who get it, that you just realize I'm not alone.

I have a community out there, and maybe there's someone that has a very aligned experience with my own that I can connect with to like process through these things. I don't know, I just think it's really cool the community that we've all been building through all these years of podcasting. So I'm so thrilled to get this out in my 10th year with Katy. I, like I said, when I was introducing her, I've learned from her for many years and she is one of those like [00:50:00] pillar scholars in our community and our clinicians, and. It's just an honor to be able to bring her to you here. She has done a couple of Ask and Adoptee Therapists with us on Patreon, which are so good. So if you're not over there, it's a good spot to be to listen to those episodes. Okay, friends, thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.