176 Miguel Caballero
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/176
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 176, Miguel. I'm your host, Haley Radke. I get to interview some incredibly special people on this show, and today is a perfect example. I am thrilled to introduce you to Miguel Caballero. Miguel shares some of his story with us, including how he got sober eight years ago. There are so many adopted people who struggle with addiction, and Miguel describes feeling that he had a birthmother-shaped hole to fill. He's gone on to fill a great need in our community by starting the peer-led support group Adoptees in Addiction. 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. [00:01:00]
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Miguel Caballero. Welcome, Miguel.
Miguel Caballero: Hi, Haley. I'm so happy to be here.
Haley Radke: I have eagerly anticipated our conversation, so I would love it if you would share some of your story with us.
Miguel Caballero: Well, I'm used to introducing myself and saying, "Hi, I'm Miguel. I'm an alcoholic," because I do that probably three to four times a week at what my friend likes to call “the beverage program,” a 12-step program focused around alcohol. So I'm an alcoholic. I'm eight years sober. I'm in my 40s and I'm an adoptee, and as my friend David Boll says, I'm also a relinquishee. I think that's important language to understand some of the stuff about addiction and alcoholism and all that good stuff.
Haley Radke: Thank you. I like that language. I'm also a relinquishee. Eight years, that's really significant.
Miguel Caballero: Yeah, it's really good. What's funny is that it seems like a lot of people notice. They’re like, Congratulations. That's awesome. [00:02:00] And before I got sober, my response to somebody else being sober was, Why would you live life without alcohol?
Why would you do that to yourself if you didn't have to? Because I was a pretty heavy binge drinker. I liked to get blackout drunk. I liked to do lots of crazy things. I liked to run naked at parties. That was a big thing, to go streaking. I liked attention. I really liked attention. I think that was something that was a little bit of some hole-filling for me. It was a need to feel seen and liked and to escape this pain that I was in. And so alcohol really numbed a lot of pain for me, and I wasn't actively aware of that, but looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the depression, a lot of the abandonment issues, a lot of the sorrow, a lot of that was being numbed by alcohol. So for a [00:03:00] long time, you could say that alcohol helped me deal with life. But then you can also add up all the things that were less glamorous than running naked through a party: smashing cars up, losing jobs, having to call in sick. So many things like that happened again and again, losing relationships.
So alcohol was fun for a while, and then it became fun with problems, and then it just became problems. So in 2012, I was freelancing up in Seattle, Washington, and it was getting cold and dark and awful. And there were the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, the horrible Sandy Hook shootings of all these little kids. And there's something about my pain and my adoption that whenever I would see a mother protecting a child in a movie, it would just totally wreck me. I would just cry forever. And to see these teachers protecting these kids or trying to, [00:04:00] it just broke something inside of me. And it really just ruptured something. I felt that really deep primal wound. It was right on the surface, and I couldn't numb it with alcohol. And a few things happened. And then my girlfriend was all ready to do an intervention with me. And she said, You need to get help. And I, instead of fighting her and she didn't have to call my friends, I just said, I know. And I was done. I was done drinking. I was 40 years old, and I needed to stop. I knew that for me to live life in a way that could make me happy, I had to stop drinking alcohol. So yeah, just talking about it brings up a little bit of something. And stopping drinking is really great. I highly recommend it to anybody with a problem or drugs or shopping or gambling or any of [00:05:00] those things, sex and love. But when you stop doing that, those things that you've been numbing really come to the forefront.
So for me, there are a lot of issues around being an adoptee, being a relinquishee. There's the seven core issues of adoption. And it all comes up. It all comes forward. And all those feelings that you've pushed down, almost like a floating toy in a pool. You push it down, you push it down. And when you let it go, it just comes splooshing up and splashes everywhere. And I think that's what happens for a lot of people who've been using some form of numbing out. When they stop the numbing, here come all the feelings. [00:06:00] And so for that reason, and a lot of other reasons, I started going to AA and I started finding a community and people who understood me, people who listened to the things that I was going through and nodding along with me. I felt very seen and very heard in the 12-step rooms. And one thing that I think is very magical about AA and NA and all those things is that it's a program of one sufferer relating to another sufferer. So the original two people of AA were Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob and they talked to each other as horrible alcoholics, not as a spouse telling the other spouse what to do and how terrible they were, or a boss telling them they're going to get fired. They just said, This is how bad I am. This is what I feel like. And the other person said, I hear you. I've been like that and I've felt like that too. And somehow in that shared vulnerability and those shared admissions, there's something very healing that comes in and there's a chance [00:07:00] to get better in a very meaningful way. And I had always wanted that. I had always wanted to be seen and heard and I wasn't always aware of how to do that in a positive and constructive way. So coming in and finding that I could talk about my feelings and people would listen and they would come up afterwards and say, I felt that way too. Or, Yeah, I know totally what that is. Or, I don't know what that's like but, I know this other person who has gone through that. And those feelings, that community, the shared vulnerability, all that really was very, very healing and it felt really good. I won't say that it was easy to give up alcohol, but it wasn't a terrible thing. It was definitely an easier transition than I thought it would be, and I found new friends and I connected with old friends in new ways. Life was feeling a whole lot better [00:08:00] after I got sober. All I wanted to do was stop drinking and stop being in pain. And I found community and a sense of belonging. I don't know if this is an adoptee characteristic but I'm an extremely sensitive guy and compassionate and there are a lot of really good qualities about me. I also got to display those qualities and help other people when they were suffering and to go up to somebody who said that they got fired or they had a bad day or their child was sick. Whatever it was, I got to sit down with another person and just be there for them. And that shared vulnerability, the ability to listen with an open heart and to be kind and good to somebody else was also something that I'd always wanted in my life. I didn't realize that stopping drinking would afford me that opportunity to do that, but it did, and that was also wonderfully [00:09:00] healing and good.
So that was a quick rumble through a year's worth of recovery and learning and discovery and so a lot of pain, too and a lot of growth. It wasn't as easy as it sounds in a two-minute encapsulation. There are ups and downs and setbacks and those things. But for the most part, it was an upward trajectory.
Haley Radke: When you were in the meetings and you were finding this community and people that felt like you, and those kinds of things, did you ever come across anyone else that was adopted? Did that topic ever come up in those first months, first year?
Miguel Caballero: Yes, absolutely. I will say that when I was in rehab–I'm very open about my adoptee issues and my alcohol issues. I'm very open out there in the world. I talk about it, whatever's going on with me, and I've been lucky enough where those issues haven't been difficult or there haven't [00:10:00] been penalties. Like, I have friends that are nurses and they can't go out and say that they've been drug addicts. That just doesn't fly, so you have to be anonymous. That's the second part of the NA and AA and all those things. But for me I've been able to be open about my adoptee issues, about my alcohol issues, and all those things without feeling any sort of sanctions or frowns or what have you. So yes, I talked about my adoptee issues. In rehab, there was a very young woman who had given up a baby two or three years before, and I got to talk with her. That was really... It was very emotional and very sad, but it was also very healing just to hear her and hear her opinions on what it was like and what her giving away her child had felt like and how she kept thinking about him. So it was out there front and center. As I got more sober and more fluent in the ways of talking in rooms, I would start to be asked to [00:11:00] be a speaker at AA meetings. So you talk for 10 minutes or 20 minutes, and I always share. I usually lead with: "Hey, I was adopted, and what I took from being adopted was that my birth mother took one look at me and decided there was something about me that was unlovable and worthless and not worth keeping.” I would lead my shares with that and talk about the ways adoption had affected me and intertwined with my alcoholism. After the meetings when I was speaker, there'd be two different types of people that would come up to me. One person would come up to me and they would say, You know what? I hated my family so much, I always wished that I was adopted because I wished I wasn't like them. So there's that person. And then somebody else would come up behind them and they'd say, You know what? I'm an adoptee also, and I related so, so much to what you were talking about and I share that suffering in the same way that I share the suffering around alcoholism. [00:12:00] And so as I was going to meetings, I collected phone numbers and formed friendships with a bunch of these people. It was always in the back of my mind that we should have our own little meeting, adoptees that are alcoholics. And I was just scared to start it and scared to get rejected and scared for it to fail, so I didn't do it for quite a while.
Haley Radke: What did you say to the people who said, Oh, I hated my family. I wish I had been adopted?
Miguel Caballero: I would just smile and say, I'm sorry that it was hard for you and your family. I think on some level when someone comes up to you and they want to tell you a little bit of their story, they want to be seen and heard. And even though their experience wasn't my experience, I could be there for them in a positive way and just give them a place to talk about something about their childhood. [00:13:00] Just coming up and saying that to a complete stranger is pretty difficult. And so, for me, when people are trying to be vulnerable in the rooms and outside the rooms, I do my best to listen and to be there for them because that's what I want for myself. And I'm pretty good at that. Sometimes I get scared or freaked out and I don't want to talk to some random person, but for the most part, I know I'm doing something good and I don't have to be scared of not being good at it or worry about the consequences of failing or what may happen. I can get by those feelings to be there for somebody else. If it's something I'm doing on my own and I could fail at, that I'm going out to do, I hate that. I'm scared of it. I'm scared of failing. I would rather not do something than to do something and fail. I think that's probably an adoptee-style issue. [00:14:00] Possibly just my issue, maybe a little bit of both.
Haley Radke: Michael, can I remind you just even a little bit further? Because you were describing earlier some of the pain and depression and I saw you write about this birthmother-shaped hole and refer to those kinds of things. And sometimes when I'm talking to people who are in recovery, they're looking at their past and they have all the hindsight. And you were even talking about adoptee issues, it sounds like, in your first year. When in your life did you discover that adoption had had an impact and that you were a relinquishee? Because, often when I talk to other adoptees, I've heard, Oh, I'm coming out of the fog, and that only happened when I was starting recovery. That kind of thing. It sounds like this happened earlier for you.
Miguel Caballero: For good and bad. When I was in middle school I was a [00:15:00] very difficult kid with my parents. A lot of picking fights and screaming, “You're not my real parent” at them. And they, my parents, did their best. They're very lovely people. I don't know that they were really equipped to deal with somebody like me. I don't think there was enough literature, enough training out there. But they did their very best. I joke with people that they did enough wrong where I need therapy, but not so much wrong that there'd be a good memoir. It's just some pretty typical parent and child issues for the most part. They did their best. But when I was 13 or so, I was just yelling at them constantly and they took me to therapy, and the therapist asked me, Do you want to talk about your adoption? I was like, Why? I hate my parents. My parents are terrible and I hate school. I wasn't the most emotionally mature kid. So it was brought up, but it was never front and center.
When I got older, I was in college and I started to open up a little bit more. I thought about it and I wrote to the adoption agency to see [00:16:00] if I could get in touch with my birth mother. And it took them a long time to find her through the State of Illinois, and apparently she was in the Philippines. But she eventually said that she didn't want to be contacted, and that was very, very hard. So that came up. I found The Primal Wound on my own somewhere and brought it into my therapist when I was, like, 25 and had underlined whole chapters essentially. It's "Look at this. This explains so much. I feel lost." And all of those things. Reading it was such an eye-opener, it explained so much, but it also explained very hard things. To explain that you have a feeling of loss and that's normal, that's comforting. But also, Hey, you have this weird feeling of loss all the time, and that's not fun. No one's saying, Hey, could you give me a feeling of loss at all times that I don't understand? No one would choose that as their prize at the bingo game.
Haley Radke: Oh my God. That [00:17:00] was so good. I'm going to be thinking about that for a long time.
Miguel Caballero: So my therapist really didn't know what to do with that. She wasn’t adoption competent. It was like 1998, so there was barely any internet. I didn't have any support for reading The Primal Wound on my own and that was very hard. So I knew it was a thing, and I had seen the way I reacted to mothers and protecting kids in movies and that kind of thing. And I knew there was just this feeling somewhere in me that was a little bit wrecked. So my coming out of the fog was over a bunch of years of therapy. It was reading The Primal Wound and a couple other books, but there wasn't any community around that. It wasn't there yet on the internet, and we didn't have social media. It was the early days of the internet. So I was on my own, and that continued for quite a while. I'd find other adoptees here and there, or [00:18:00] I would see a talk, or one night at 5:00 in the morning I was up and I saw the Run DMC, the DMC special that was on, and related to that so much, but I didn't have anywhere to go with that. And that was hard. When I did find places to bring it up, it wasn't always fully understood, which I think continues to be an issue. I don't think the general public quite knows what to do with us adoptees/relinquishees. It's a complicated thing to understand, and your adoptive parents have love for you, and they heal it. That's the simpler story to tell, and to learn about it and to understand more is a more difficult thing. You have to, I think, really care about somebody very close to you to want to understand that stuff and to open yourself up to it.
Haley Radke: Do you think that having all of that knowledge earlier on and then coming to a place [00:19:00] deciding that you're going to be in recovery–is that the language that you identify with, saying that you're in recovery?
Miguel Caballero: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Okay. I don't want to put something on you that's not yours. But then knowing–so you're, like, in your car thinking, Okay, I've maybe have been stuffing this down. Do you think that helped you in your healing journey? Having done that work earlier and it came back to you?
Miguel Caballero: Absolutely. I spent a large amount of money on therapy and a large amount of money on drugs and alcohol in my 30s. I don't know which was the bigger amount, but they were very large amounts. So I talked a lot and I was sensitive. I am sensitive. So I explored a lot of feelings. So I think that very much helped. If I had tried to get sober at 25, I don't know what that would have looked like, and I don't know that I would have had the maturity. I see 21-year-olds come into the rooms and trying to get sober. I'm just like, Wow that's [00:20:00] amazing. I had to get my butt kicked for a good 25 years to finally be like, Okay, I need to stop drinking. So if it had happened much younger, I would have fought it. For whatever reason, I didn't fight it when I started to get sober in my 40s.
Haley Radke: Let's go to what you've created.
Miguel Caballero: Sure.
Haley Radke: So you said you were a little bit scared to start something. You had this idea. You wanted to connect with other adoptees. Do you know the official stats? We could talk about numbers all the time. But adoptees, I know they're overrepresented in addiction, in seeking out residential treatment programs. It's crazy. The numbers are wild. But I don't know exact figures. Can you talk about that a little bit and why you decided to finally go for it?
Miguel Caballero: Sure. I've seen all sorts of stats that I can't trace them down to their root. I've tried.
Haley Radke: Yeah, me too. It's like, Where is the number from? [00:21:00]
Miguel Caballero: It's like a Barbados shell company. You're like, "It references this other book, and that book references another book. But I will tell you that, generally, in a room of more than 15 people in recovery, there's at least one other adoptee. I don't know if the math works out for that. So seeing all these people and becoming friends with some, there was one young man who came in once and we went out to coffee afterwards with another adoptee. And he was so raw and just so full of pain that was on the surface. He was having a hard time seeing how he could live life without alcohol and live life with this pain. It was so tough on him. And I haven't seen him since then. I wanted to be there for that guy, for that woman who came in just raw and coming out of the fog and the primal wound right at the surface, and they're trying to get sober. I really wanted to be there for that person as much as I wanted [00:22:00] to create a community of more recovered, well-balanced adoptees who had been through a little bit more.
There's a thing called the Survivors Program. It's at The Meadows in Arizona. It helps you deal with childhood trauma, and I went out to that. After that I felt very freed of a lot of the fears that hold me back. And so I was like, Okay, it's time. And I started a version of the group that was specifically AA-focused. It was physically in Los Angeles, and we had between four and eight people for maybe a year, once a month. And then not everybody that goes into recovery is of the best social or mental abilities, and there was a guy who caused problems, and the group fell apart. And that was sad, but eventually I kept finding more adoptees. And there was a friend of mine, her name is Lilly, and she said, I want to do that group again. So having her support and [00:23:00] her co-authorship–I don't know what the right word is. Anyways, meeting Lilly and her pushing for the group, we decided to do it again physically. We sent out flyers. We passed out flyers at meetings. And we had it physically once in January of 2020. You may see where this is going. And then we had it again in February of 2020, and then this weird thing happened and we weren't allowed to meet in person again. Which actually has turned out to be one of the few pure blessings of this whole past year. We were forced to go onto Zoom. And what was wonderful about that was that you didn't have to be in Los Angeles to come to our meeting. And being an adoptee is not that rare of a thing, being an addict is not that rare of a thing, but putting the two together is pretty rare. And so going online, we were able to find people through Facebook adoptee groups. [00:24:00] I know a few of the therapists here in LA that are adoption competent, and they put us in their newsletter. So Jeannette Yoffe, and Lesli Johnson, and Angela Gee, all those people. And I actually went onto Psychology Today and searched through their therapist recommendations for anybody that said that they were an adoptee therapist and then talked about it in their bio. I emailed them. And so by ones and twos, people started finding us. So we were able to create a community. We started at 10 people, and I'd say by four months, so August, it was around 15, and then by the end of the year it was around 20 to 25 people every week. And people from all across the country, and even we have a couple women from England. There's a woman from New Zealand. There's a guy from Australia who I haven't seen for a while, but for him it's tomorrow first thing in the morning when we're starting our meeting, so that's okay. But we've found [00:25:00] people from all across the country, and the general reaction when somebody comes to the meeting is just this feeling of awe that there are this many other people with the same set of problems.
And you just hear it again and again, that I've never been in a room with this many other adoptees that are also addicts. And that feels really good. It feels really good to be able to help foster that community and to give us a space to be seen and heard in ways that just adoptee rooms can't really provide, and more specifically, that just the recovery rooms can't provide. There are issues, incompatibility issues in some ways. I was listening to one of your past podcasts, the one with Harris, and I think [00:26:00] he talked a little bit about this, that in the recovery rooms, the 12 steps, you do all these things to try to deal with your feelings and the things that have happened to you, and you work on these issues. And generally speaking, AA, NA, all those, are really good at helping you deal with a lot of those things, a lot of the anger you have over childhood things or the sadness you might feel at adult things, like losing a job or a marriage falling apart. So they're very good at that if you're working the steps, as they like to say. And so when you bring something like adoption into the rooms of AA, people don't quite know what to do. They are like, We have this solution. You just do the steps. You write about it, you talk about it, and then you'll feel fine. And so I think it's baffling to a lot of alcoholics and addicts when we bring in our adoptee issues. They just [00:27:00] don't know how to react to us not feeling much better. That can be pretty disheartening for a lot of people. Personally, I'll just keep talking, even if people don't understand. I just want someone in the room to be hearing my words. But I know that very specifically, a few of the people in our meeting have shared about their adoptee issues and gotten some negative or not super positive feedback from people, and that has really turned them off of recovery rooms. Which is not great because those rooms help us stay sober.
Haley Radke: And I think that sort of comment to someone, when you invalidate the adoptee experience because it's taken so much courage to share anything, sharing pain about adoption. It's so antithetical to the world's [00:28:00] view of adoption that adoption's just this gift and it's magical. And so to come to the place where you're like, Okay, I'm sharing this pain, and have it completely invalidated by a community that has helped you, that must be excruciating for someone to experience.
Miguel Caballero: I think it is. I think it's devastating, and it could make you not want to be a part of those rooms despite the positive feelings and positive things that are there. And I totally understand that.
Let me rewind. So a couple years ago, the State of Illinois opened up their birth records, and so I wrote and I got my birth mother's name. It turns out she is part Filipino, and it was a very odd name, and it took me all of five minutes on Facebook and Google to find her. And I was trying to reach her. She lives in the Philippines. She's 68 years old, and I don't know if she can't see that I'm reaching out to her [00:29:00] because she's 68 and doesn't know the internet well or if she's ignoring me. And I kept trying to reach out to her and, finally, she blocked me on Facebook. It was actually on Mother's Day. Without ever having any contact. That was devastating. That was very hard. I went into a very deep depression over it. But one thing about me is, I still shared about it. I shared about it in recovery rooms. I also shared about it on Facebook and with my broader friends. And my friends wanted to help, but they had no vocabulary for what was going on. And so they would bring these very random things to the table because that was all they knew. They see that their friend is hurting, and so they just want to draw from any knowledge about anything. Like I had a friend whose brother is a cop, and he said, My brother's a cop, so I don't know if you should continue to be reaching out to her. What does that have [00:30:00] to do with this? Or somebody had problems with their real parents growing up, and they formed their own family of friend contacts. And I could see that everybody had meant well, and I'm mature enough to say, All right, they're trying to show me love, they just don't know how. Some of the time the response would be telling me not to feel what I was feeling. Like, Hey, you should just move on. She's not even part of your life. Just acknowledge it and move on. So I came up with the word “adoptsplaining.” That is when a non-adoptee tells you what you're supposed to feel, much like mansplaining. And that would happen. So I think that happens also in the rooms of recovery where you bring up an adoption issue, and then they tell you how you're supposed to feel in a way that doesn't feel good and, as you said, could even be devastating. [00:31:00] And I'd like to think that in our rooms, whenever somebody brings an issue up, there's nods and there's understanding and there's care. There's all sorts of different flavors of adoptee and relinquishee, some that were foster kids, and some transracial. I'm losing track of all the different labels but there's all of that in our rooms. And you can be there for somebody in very profound ways.
To change tack just a little bit, I want to talk about all the different addictions and how that plays out, and how you're also able to find us. As I was saying, the first meeting was specifically AA. It was about alcohol and in some AA meetings, you can't talk about drugs, you can't talk about other addictions. You can only talk about alcohol because only alcoholics can relate to alcoholism. They can't understand any sort of other addiction.[00:32:00] And I get that. Especially when you're first getting sober, you want to know that somebody who was a worse alcoholic or a worse sex addict or a worse gambler, you want to know whatever your thing was, they were able to solve it. So you're like, Oh, then I can solve it, too. But I think for adoptees, we're filling a hole inside of us. And like I was saying, I think that hole is a birthmother-shaped hole. I think that relinquishment leaves this damage, and it could be the primal wound. It could be just that lack, that initial lack in our lives, and we're trying to fill that up so that we don't feel it. We're filling it up with shopping or filling it up with gambling or filling it up with sex or filling it with love or, I don't know. I play Candy Crush all the time. I could be trying to numb my feelings with Candy Crush. Whatever it is, the addiction part of it is very focused in a lot of ways on helping us not feel this pain around adoption. And so I think our room is a little bit of a balance between [00:33:00] those two things. There'll be times when people will share and all they'll talk about will be their recent adoptee/relinquishee reunion, whatever stories. And there'll be times where somebody would talk and not mention adoption for five minutes. They'll just talk about how they just really want to go do this bad behavior right now. And they don't bring up the adoption thing. But both subtexts are ever-present in some way, shape, or form. And for me, I don't care at this point in my sobriety, if you're an addict of some kind, I can relate to you. Even if it's not my addiction, I can still understand that compulsion to feel better: Please find me some dopamine that can cover up these negative feelings. And whatever will supply that dopamine, you can get addicted to.
Haley Radke: What's it meant to you to start this community?
Miguel Caballero: I think I mentioned that, [00:34:00] as a child, what I felt about my being an adoptee was that there's something worthless and unlovable about me. And I still feel that in a lot of ways, and I have a very, very judgmental, punishing mind for myself. I think I have a lot of compassion for other people, but I don't have a lot of compassion for myself. And when my brain is in a particularly bad mood, I can make anything that I do not good enough. Any effort, any call, any task, anything, I'm not doing it good enough, and I should feel awful about myself because of it. And for this meeting, I don't feel that. There are times when I know I let somebody down that's been joining our group. They were expecting something more of me, or they were disappointed I didn't email them or [00:35:00] whatever it is, but I don't kill myself over it. And I know that there's something in this meeting and in our community that is unabashedly good. And my brain, for whatever reason, can't cut me down over anything in regards to the meeting. Like I had mentioned about emailing therapists from Psychology Today, that is so much rejection available. I'd say probably one out of 10 replied. And if I got a one out-of-10 success rate at anything else in my life, I would have stopped by number 11. There's no way that I would keep doing something like that. But for this meeting I'm okay with that. I'm okay with people coming and going or not liking something about what we're doing. I'm okay with it because it's a good thing. It's a good thing that we're doing for each other, and I don't feel worthless and unlovable on Saturday afternoons when we're doing this call. And [00:36:00] I know that it's helping a lot of people, so that feels very good. I don't know, it feels like a building block to help me feel better about myself in this world. And on top of that, just as an individual, it feels great to be in a call and be understood and to provide that understanding that was so freely given to me throughout my eight years of sobriety. People have been there for me, and I feel like I am better at being there for people in this room than I am necessarily in the regular, normal people, 12-step recovery rooms. There's just something that feels right.
Haley Radke: That was beautiful. Thank you. Is there anything that we didn't get to touch on yet that you want to make sure adoptees hear from you before we do our recommended resources? [00:37:00]
Miguel Caballero: Yeah. I want to make it 100% clear that I am not diminishing the power of 12-step groups in those rooms. I think if you're an adoptee and you have an addiction problem, you can get help and stop that behavior, and the best way is through those rooms. And once you stop that behavior, then you can work a bit better on the adoptee issues. And I think that's the way it should go for most people: stop that terrible behavior. If you want to heal, stop cutting yourself. Just stop. Stop with that behavior and then go search for the adoptee piece of it. Stop the addiction first because that's the thing that's going to kill you. If you want to talk about triage, stop the thing that's going to kill you and then move to the next thing. And I think the addiction is the killer. I've lost too many friends and too many people that I know to addiction. So please, get [00:38:00] help if you need it. And if you aren't sure and you need help and you have questions, my email will be on this podcast, and the group's email is in there. And we're here for you; we're here to provide help, and you don't have to do this alone.
Haley Radke: Well, I wanted to recommend your meetings. And I don't have personal experience with it, but I have a trusted friend who, in fact, said, "Haley, you have to interview Miguel,” because she thinks so highly of you. So your website is adopteesandaddiction(dot)com, and your email is adopteesandaddiction(at)gmail(dot)com. So tell me a little bit more. You're a weekly group; you meet every week. What happens? How do people find it? Tell us all the things.
Miguel Caballero: People find us all over the place. In the internet age, there are 70 different ways you can find anything. But generally it's through other adoptee groups that people find us. We [00:39:00] don't publicly post the Zoom info because we don't want the crazy Zoom bombers and all that good stuff to happen.
Haley Radke: That happened to me last year. Oh my gosh, yes.
Miguel Caballero: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Keep it private. Thumbs up to that.
Miguel Caballero: Yes. But if you email us, we'll get you the Zoom info. It's an hour long. If you're used to 12-step meetings–in most 12-step meetings there's a reading from whatever text is important to that group. In our group, we pretty much just launch into: "Hi, everybody is welcome. Now listen to our speaker." And we'll have a speaker for a few minutes tell a little bit of their story, and then we just go around and share for a few minutes each. It is an extremely welcoming group. There are constantly new people, so it's not like we're this tough old clique that's hard to break into. There are always new people. And then we usually stick around after for, it could be 10 minutes or a couple hours, and just talk on a more informal basis. If you're just [00:40:00] figuring things out, that's totally fine. We don't force anybody to say that they're an addict or alcoholic or whatever. If you feel that you have some sort of addiction issue and you are an adoptee, then you're welcome to join our call. We don't have adoptive parents or birth parents so that we can speak a little more freely about being an adoptee. And yeah, once a week. It's a good group. There's smiles, there's laughter, there's probably a few tears.
Haley Radke: So you meet every Saturday, and right now, at the time of this recording, the time is 2:00 Pacific.
Miguel Caballero: Correct.
Haley Radke: And on Zoom. And so you can get the link by emailing adopteesinaddiction(at)gmail(dot)com and I will have links to that in the show notes. And I also just want to say, you mentioned his name earlier, I've had David Bohl on the show before. He also has a meeting that we can send you guys to. We'll have a link to that in the show notes, too. So there are [00:41:00] resources for you if you are struggling with addiction and you're adopted. I'll link to anything that I have for that in show notes. And I'd love to connect you with Miguel. I'm sure he'd be happy to find you resources as well. What did you want to share with us today? What's your recommended resource?
Miguel Caballero: So there's a wonderful YouTube talk by a therapist named Paul Sunderland, and I believe he works at a recovery place in England. I've not talked to him specifically, but he has a 45-minute, YouTube talk about the sources of addiction in adoptees and how both those issues intertwine, and it's a really good introduction. I think if you're still kind of figuring out what your place is in the world with regard to you're an addict and you're not sure about the adoptee part, or you're an adoptee and you're not sure about the addict part, I think you'll find that that talk will help eliminate a few areas in your own psyche and in your own life. [00:42:00]
Haley Radke: Yes. We've talked about that video so many times. I think there's so many things that adoptees identify with when he describes it, and not just addiction issues either. It's very illuminating. And when he talks about developmental PTSD, you're mind-blown. There are so many really good things to take away from that. Good things. Good information. It's not necessarily nice information, but it's good to know. So thank you. Yes, we will link to that in the show notes as well. How can we connect with you online, Miguel?
Miguel Caballero: I'll put my email in the chat. Do we put Facebook profiles? I'll put that too. I don't care.
Haley Radke: Sure. I can share all the places we can find you.
Miguel Caballero: Yeah. I'm not on Clubhouse or Parler or any of those. TikTok. As far as I know, we don't have adoptee TikTok yet. I'm sure there's some. Oh. [00:43:00] Oh, is there?
Haley Radke: Ooh, there is adopteeTikTok, there is.
Miguel Caballero: I'm so sorry, adoptee TikTok. Please don't come at me. Please, I am your friend. Please don't humiliate me with a dance. So, I'll have my email address in there. I'll put my Facebook as well because a lot of people are on that. And yeah, however you reach out, I will try to reach back out to you and we can get in touch and have a conversation, and hopefully we'll both feel better afterwards.
Haley Radke: I just want to extend my gratitude to you for building such an amazing community. And when you were talking about what it's like to be in that room with people that just get it and, I just saw your eyes change. And people don't get the benefit because they're listening, but I'm sure they could hear the passion in your voice for being able to feel seen and [00:44:00] known and have your story validated, so thank you so much for creating that for people. I know, too, what it means to create a community, and it's life-changing for people.
Miguel Caballero: Yes, you do.
Haley Radke: So thank you. I appreciate your service to the community, and thank you for sharing some of your story with us, Miguel. I really appreciate it.
Miguel Caballero: Haley, I'm smiling ear to ear. Thank you so much for bringing me on, and you are doing incredible service for the adoptee world. So here we are.
Haley Radke: Teammates. Thank you.
I really hope that if addiction in any of those areas that Miguel mentioned has touched your life, that you do reach out for support as he encouraged you to do. So as we said, the show notes are going to be available for this episode. If you click on the podcast app you're listening to, you should find the list there or if you go to the [00:45:00] Adoptees On website and you type in “Miguel” or “176” into the search bar, it should come right up for you.
I am so grateful for Miguel and I've had a number of adoptees share their struggles on the show before talking about addiction. Did I mention? I don't know. We'll see if it makes the cut. But anyway, I did a short series on adoptees and addiction a couple of years ago. It's Episodes 91 to 97, so there's more resources in there, as well, that we touch on. So if you scroll way back in your podcast app, you can find those stories.
And I want to say a big thank you to all of my monthly supporters. There have been so many new people joining Patreon. Thank you so much. If you have been wanting to join, just wait. Just wait a little bit. Next month, for the month of April, we're going to have a sale, [00:46:00] and so if you just wait till April, I'll tell you about that next week.
Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
