184 [Healing Series] Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/184
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke, and 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 going to meet a new to Adoptees On psychologist and do a hybrid episode. So we'll hear some of her story and throughout we'll be talking attachment challenges and how adoption trauma can display throughout our lives. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Dr. Sharon Stein McNamara. Welcome, Sharon.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Hi. Good to be here.
Haley Radke: I would love it if you would share a little bit of your story with us.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Sure. So I was adopted in 1959. I was adopted through Children's Home Society of Minnesota, and my birth mother at the time was 19. [00:01:00] One thing I have just recently found out that I'm so excited about is that there's a Minnesota History Museum, that there's a book that's come out about the Booth Memorial Hospital of the Salvation Army, and I was born in that hospital. That's where the unwed mothers went to give birth. Anyway, so I was adopted by two people who couldn't have children on their own. They were infertile. My mom and dad are Betty and Bill Stein. They're both dead now. But it was a difficult adoption, I think, in that they waited seven years. They never told me exactly why, but that they kept on getting turned down by Children's Home Society. I later found out that it was probably due to my father having been a World War II veteran and that [00:02:00] he had some PTSD, but that wasn't until I got the papers later. I actually did get all my records. I petitioned the court.
Haley Radke: So even then, they knew to kind of watch for PTSD symptoms. That's interesting in a home study.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yeah, a little bit. They didn't really. They just mentioned that he seemed to be more anxious.
Haley Radke: But after seven years, they got the go-ahead stamp anyway.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Well see, the story is that my dad called and said, Hey, we've been waiting all this time. What's going on? We're gonna go to Lutheran Social Services if you don't give us a baby. And so then they gave me to them. So it’s sort of interesting to think about the decision. Of course, back then they did the matching of eyes. I had both parents have blue eyes and I have blue eyes and brown hair. So they, actually more than intellectual matching, they did eye color and hair color. That kind of thing. [00:03:00]
Haley Radke: So that was so you could blend in, so people wouldn't know.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Right. But yeah, my parents basically were told that we were blank slates, that they were to tabula rasa. And so I have a younger brother and a younger sister. My brother's two years younger, and my sister's five years younger. But yeah, that was the family, and it wasn't really ever discussed why my parents couldn't have children. I later found out that my father had mumps in the service that caused infertility. But it was a secret growing up, what was wrong that they couldn't have their own bio children.
Haley Radke: Okay, so your other siblings were adopted then as well?
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yes. I found my birth mother when I was 22. So gosh, when was that? It was in the [00:04:00] '80s, right after graduation from college. And she was willing to see me, to meet me. She said she had been thinking about it every day or every year at least on my birthday. And so she had wanted to have a connection. In the long run, when I look back over my family history, the person that I have the most anger or confusion or upset with is her father, my birth mother's father, because he was the one who said, We can't deal with a baby. You can't keep her. And so I know all that retrospectively, but...
Haley Radke: And so you found her just a couple years after for you in age that she was when she relinquished you.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Right. She was 19, and I was 21 or 22. I think it was 22. Yeah, so I learned all about therapy because I went to therapy from [00:05:00] college age on, and then being interested in psychology, I ended up wanting to go on and study more. But I knew nothing about trauma or developmental trauma or anything until I went to The Girls Who Went Away, the woman who wrote that book, Anne Fessler. And I remember being in the audience listening, and she kind of looked at me because I asked a question and she said, Well yeah, this is trauma. You having been pulled away from your birth mother, that's a traumatic incident. Animals don't do that to their young. She was the first one that I remember hearing about comparing things, like how a shepherd, if a shepherd knows that the baby lamb has lost its mother, they have to do all [00:06:00] kinds of elaborate stuff to get the mother sheep to take the baby lamb. They have to put the smell of the dead baby on the new baby to make the mother accept it. And I was like, Oh my gosh, we do all that for animals? And then, they just hand over a newborn baby? So in my case, I know–and I've done a lot of therapy, a lot of work on myself–I believe that because I was in a foster home for the first six weeks, so I know I was a breach birth, 48 hours in labor, and this is from the Booth Brown house where, my birth mother has told me the story, and she said I was breach and probably had possibly even a dislocated hip as an infant being born. So they put me with a foster parent to watch and see if everything was going to be okay. [00:07:00] And she said she remembered visiting me. She wasn't sure about relinquishing and she went back and forth, but in the end, her father basically said, Look, we're not gonna help you. And my birth father, first father, whatever, was not wanting to marry her. So it was back in the day when a woman alone couldn't be an unwed mother. It was just not allowed.
Haley Radke: So you went to a screening of Anne Fessler's documentary and that's where you first learned about attachment trauma. Can you tell me where were you in your training to become a psychologist? Had you already become a psychologist?
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yes, I was already a psychologist. They never talked about it. I went to a developmental psychology program, Harvard, the Graduate School of Education in Developmental Psychology. And I don't know if you've heard [00:08:00] of Joyce Maguire Pavao. She was ahead of me in that same program, and so she was the first person that I had ever spoken to who really studied adoption. And she was older than I was, but I went to some of her trainings and I got to learn, you know, I've been to her retreats in Provincetown. Provincetown is where she had them, and I think she's retired now. But anyway, I learned a lot from her just later reading her books. But yeah, they did not talk about anything about babies and developmental trauma. It was much later that the brain stuff started to come out about like, yeah, the baby is actually searching for the heartbeat and the smell and the sound of the mother's voice. All that is wired into a baby, an infant that's born is looking for that sound, that connection. [00:09:00] And then, I don't know if you've seen the new documentary. I saw the trailer, but I'm really excited about the Primal Wound documentary that's coming out because it shows just some of the photos of those infants just crying and crying and crying. And then we knew some stuff about Bowlby. He was the psychologist that studied both animal development and human development, and he talked about this terrible depression that babies would go through when they were separated from their mothers. And so I remember my adoptive mother said to me, Yeah, all three of our adopted children cried all the way home from the Children's Home Society. And, see, later I found out that I had sleep and eating issues; those have been constant issues with me. While a lot of it has to do with the fact that you didn't get sleep training because [00:10:00] the adoptive parents didn't know that it's not normal for a baby to just cry herself to sleep. They told me they didn't know how to put me to sleep. They would just leave me to cry and just leave me in the room until I would probably just disassociate or pass out as an infant. And that's what they thought was normal, I think.
Haley Radke: My parents said that I had colic, right? And colic is sort of this diagnosis they give anything. They're like, Oh, they cry a lot. It's probably colic. It's this, what do you call it? It's not a specific diagnosis. And there's so many of us that that's what our parents would have said about us: Oh, they're just colicky. They're colicky.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yeah. And I remember even as a three-year-old, my little brother coming along and they said he was a colicky baby. And so yep, that was the diagnosis.
Haley Radke: Okay. So I gotta ask you, Sharon, [00:11:00] looking back, you've been a practicing psychologist for years, and to know that so many of your colleagues had the same training as you, and you're an adopted person, so you looked into this, and something drew you to go to Anne Fessler's documentary screening. And so then you learned and you figured that out. But that means, and I think it's pretty obvious, it's been demonstrated by a lot of my guests whose therapists don't get it, that there's so many people who were trained in the era you were trained, and later, that had no idea about this.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: That's right. And even now, I'm on a listserv of psychologists. We know now that there are adoption-competent psychologists or therapists, in that they do special training. But overall in mental health, it's not considered that you have to [00:12:00] have a specialty in this in order to do the good work. But every once in a while, I'll see a posting by somebody saying, Oh, I have this adopted person, and no matter what I try, they have this negative view of themselves, and they can't seem to get out of it. And I keep trying to do cognitive restructuring and…. Yeah, it doesn't work because it's so deep. It's a primal, primal wound. What I have found is that the most healing thing is EMDR that has a focus on pre-verbal early development. There's a book called When There Are No Words that I use a lot. It's an EMDR book about rewiring the emotional system. When There Are No Words: Repairing Early Trauma and Neglect From the Attachment Period with EMDR Therapy by Sandra Paulsen. That's a book that has helped me a great deal and I've done this protocol [00:13:00] myself in my own recovery. And it's really gotten at some of the core trauma response. I don't know about you, but I have, still now, a high startle response; I easily jump, and this is trauma. It's kind of hardwired.
Haley Radke: Yeah. And for those of you who are asking what's EMDR? There is an episode on EMDR in the back catalog so you can go and listen to a little bit more on that. Yeah, that's fascinating. I've done EMDR myself, and I've heard of a lot of adoptees that have used it to their great benefit. I noticed that you also use dialectical behavior therapy.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yes.
Haley Radke: That's a mouthful. What's that?
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: That's a therapy that was originally created by Marsha Linehan. She's a psychologist and adapted cognitive behavioral therapy to [00:14:00] include this thing called dialectical behavior therapy. It's basically looking at black-and-white thinking or extreme polarities and trying to find a middle ground between. So that's why it's called dialectic. The two sides are either doing complete acceptance. And as adoptees, the first thing we have to kind of do is accept that there's no control over the fact that you aren't being raised by the people who are genetically related to you. So all you can do is a form of acceptance: Okay, I accept that these are the people that I have to be raised by right now. Later you can decide to end that relationship if you choose, but as a child you really can’t. So it's the two sides of the dialectic, the big teeter-totter, basically is can [00:15:00] you change the situation or do you need to accept the situation? So there's change strategies and acceptance strategies. This is an interesting piece and I'm curious. I know that this is for anybody who might be listening who has an interest in adoption, whether they're adoptive parents or birth parents or adoptees or bio sibs or whatever. But the piece that is most difficult for me as an adoptee is not so much having that relinquishment piece, it's that my adopted parents hadn't done their grieving about their own loss of not having bio children, and they also were fairly self-absorbed people. I was there for them. They wanted a child and they got a child. It wasn't so much, Oh, this child needs us and we're gonna try to figure out what she needs. [00:16:00] It was more, we need her. So you know, I was a good adoptee. I adapted. I figured out what they wanted and figured out how to pretty much please my adoptive parents. That was my upbringing. My sister was more "Fine, I can't do what they want, so I'll rebel.” And so it was a somewhat difficult childhood in terms of having two girls that were quite different from each other. And of course you're going to create the family that you have with the siblings that you have. My brother was in the middle, so he just figured out how to try to make everybody happy. But yeah, we had these two things, two sides that my sister and I acted out.
Haley Radke: What can it do to someone to be the good adoptee and to just kind of give in [00:17:00] and be molded into what's expected instead of being allowed to be your own self?
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yeah. And I think that if you know that survival is to be what they want, what your adopters or your adoptive parents want from you, you're going to figure that out and just do what they want, and I do think you give up pieces of yourself. It was clear. I figured out that they wanted someone who was good in school, so I was a straight-A student. I was going to figure out how to be the very best student I could be. It also gave me some freedom from home, so that was a win-win thing. And so that I raced through college and went on to get a PhD or in my case, an Ed.D. in psychology because it was a safe place to feel like I could fulfill my parental wishes. [00:18:00]
Haley Radke: Oh, my goodness. Yeah. There's so much weight put on the expectations. It's just so weighty, I feel like, for so many.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yeah. And then not even knowing what is it you inherited from these other people that you have a genetic makeup from. Like, is there a musical ability? I don't know if you got yours, but when I was a child, they did give me that piece of paper that's called the social history from Children's Home Society, and I would read that over and over and over again. And in my case, it said-
Haley Radke: So a lot of people would call that non-identifying information, right?
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Right. The non-identifying information. Yes, the social history piece. I remember reading that my birth mother and her sisters had musical ability, and I like to sing. So that was [00:19:00] maybe a little clue to who I am genetically.
Haley Radke: So now with your training and you're looking back on all these things, what do you think is one of the critical pieces of information for adopted people to know about the impact being separated from their first mother has had on them?
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: So the biggest piece–and I lived this and I learned it out of trial and error–is you're very vulnerable. Most adoptees, at least my experience has been that during adolescence it's a very vulnerable time because you don't have these pieces of information about who am I? Where did I come from? Having missing pieces makes adolescence really difficult. So one of the things that I'm actually working on is a memoir, a healing [00:20:00] memoir about my personal history and what I've learned as far as healing as an adoptee. So one of the most painful times for me was I had trauma all throughout my childhood but I didn't know it. I still remember going to kindergarten at a new school. I was sent on the school bus by my mother and she didn't think there was a problem. Well, I missed the school bus. I got lost and I completely freaked out so badly that I was just sobbing and I literally dissociated. I remember blacking out and then coming to with my mom there and the teacher saying, What's the problem? Your mom is here. She came to pick you up. But I thought that I was gonna be left forever at school. I think adoptive parents and adoptees don't realize, Oh, you mean [00:21:00] other people don't have that kind of abandonment fear? It doesn't go all the way to where you think you're gonna die? And see, that's what adoptees have because we were traumatized to feeling like we were gonna die when we had that original loss. You're listening for the voice, you're smelling for the smell, you're listening, your brain is thinking you're gonna die because you're with strangers now. The people that are supposed to take care of you are gone. So then that repeated throughout. I mean, I had episodes where my parents left me with a babysitter and didn't come home, and, again, I would have a panic attack, anxiety. I know people that watch This Is Us, the adoptee in that television show will sometimes have high anxiety, and yeah, I was exactly like that. And then when I had [00:22:00] my first breakup, I was 17, fell in love, was completely boundarylessly in love, just merging with this boyfriend. And then when he broke it off, I became suicidal. I said things in my head like, if I am going to be alone and not have him, I don't want to live. And it took several months, but I almost got hospitalized. I didn't, but I did have chronic thoughts of suicide after that breakup.
Now I look back and I'm like, Oh yeah, that was because your early infant trauma got triggered and the feeling is I'm gonna die, so I might as well make myself die, because I can't deal with this pain. I did get good therapy and was at that time able to work through that. But I [00:23:00] remember seeing the movie Ordinary People when his brother had died in that film, and he had the same kind of thing, like this feeling of, oh my gosh, I can't live. In his case, I think it was more survivor's guilt, but it was definitely a trauma reaction.
Haley Radke: Yeah. That's really hard. I'm sorry little Sharon was going through that.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Thank you, Haley. Yeah. I do think that I am a good therapist because I'm not afraid of…. Other therapists have never experienced the level of pain of abandonment that most adoptees have gone through. So another thing is that you want a therapist who's not afraid of that level of pain and is able to be there with you with that deep, I mean, when people regress to [00:24:00] that infant-like state, they're wailing as if, oh my gosh, I'm gonna die right now. And some therapists really have never experienced somebody being in that much pain psychologically.
Haley Radke: I mean, you've said it several times. The book called it the primal wound. That's, yeah, very aptly named. I want to make sure we have space for the other side. So when adoptees are discovering that they have all these things happening in life, and maybe there's a root cause somewhere. Lots of people discover my show and they're like, Whoa, I never thought adoption could have been…. Talk to us about the hopeful side. Once you see the primal wound and talking about developmental trauma and all of the buzzwords that we use all the time, once we know that, what's on the other side of that for [00:25:00] us? Talk about the hope. Let's not get stuck.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Oh, absolutely. So I think of multiple layers of recovery. So the first recovery for me was after having suicidal thoughts. And the other thing is I had a negative belief that I didn't know I held onto, which was I'm just a random accident. I have no purpose to be here. I was just born by accident. In fact, I felt almost like a burden sometimes, and this is partly because my adoptive parents sometimes complained. They would say things like, oh, you kids are so expensive or I can't believe how much you cost us. And I'm like, Okay. Other kids probably wouldn't have picked up on that and felt bad, but adoptees do. They internalize all that with, oh, I guess I'm a big burden on them. Wow, I had better be perfect or [00:26:00] I better be good enough so I don't get thrown out. So those unconscious beliefs were in my mind and it was actually a spiritual piece that helped me. One of the therapists that I had talked about said, Just because your first mother and father couldn't keep you doesn't mean that you weren't meant to be here. Maybe you have a bigger purpose than you understand. Maybe there's a spiritual purpose. Maybe there's something that you don't fully comprehend that is your purpose here. And this may sound a little, I don't know, woo-woo or out there, but this literally happened to me. I had a spiritual experience. There was a time when I was thinking about killing myself. And I had an experience of, now I think maybe it was [00:27:00] like some kind of ancestor medicine or something. But a woman came to me and just kind of spoke to me. This was just thoughts. It wasn't like I had a vision or a hallucination. But I remember feeling that it was a presence, and she just said, You have more to do in this life. You have more to give here, and you will know later. You won't know, but you will help a lot of people. And so that actually settled me right down. I had this emotional relaxing, Oh, okay, yep, so it wasn't a big mistake. I am meant to be here. Even though it wasn't my parents' plan, it was somebody's plan. And then that helped me. I haven't had the same level of suicidal thoughts since then.
Haley Radke: That's beautiful. I was at an event fairly recently where Zara Phillips and Gabor Maté were talking about the [00:28:00] trauma of relinquishment. And Gabor Maté expressed that because some people are uncomfortable with talking about the spiritual kind of side of things, or whatever, and he expressed it so beautifully. I want to share it again here in case you missed that. He said: "Life wants life, and life wanted you." And I just thought that was such a beautifully expressed sentiment, and it was very powerful. And yeah, for so many of us who just literally feel unwanted. Life wanted you. Oh, powerful.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yes, he is an incredible healer. I have listened to several of his films; he does continuing education. So yeah, I like his work. But I will go listen to that podcast. So thank you for that.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Okay, so that's one layer. That's a big deal. What else? [00:29:00]
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Well, the other thing is relationships. I know a lot of adoptees struggle with relationships. So in my case, I had a repetitive pattern of getting attracted to men who were not able to commit. And guess what? I was doing that replay of probably my birth father's drama with my birth mother. Here you get into this intense relationship and then can't stay. And so what oddly happened for me is the way to break that pattern was first I found my birth mother, but it wasn't until I think I was 35, and I kept having these relationships that didn't work. Finally, when I found him and I met him, everything shifted for me, and I was able to have a long-term relationship [00:30:00] that I'm still married to my husband now. The key to it is, and I wouldn't have known, that in psychodynamics they talk about how we keep replaying these early wounds. Or that which is repressed is destined to be repeated. That's a Freudian phrase. So when I brought it out into the open, I was able to... My birth father he's gone now. Anyway, he was not really very capable of talking much with me. He felt incredibly guilty with the wife that he married after he left my mother. She knew about me but they were quite conflicted about what to do about me, so there was a lot of drama about that. So he would call me when he was alone, but he [00:31:00] didn't want me to come to his home. He didn't want me to meet her. He didn't want me to meet my half-siblings. Not until as an adult was I finally able to meet my half-siblings. But these relationships are incredibly complex. You've got four sets of parents. Not sets, but four parents, birth mother, birth father, adoptive mother, adoptive father, and then how do you manage all these parents and siblings and half? It's complicated to be able to finesse it. So anyway, long story short, what happened to me was seeing him and grieving for that and understanding that he couldn't have been able to be in my life freed me up to break that pattern of having these men who couldn't commit. And so then I was able to marry my husband and we're still together. But [00:32:00] also, I married a man who is incredibly patient and capable. I'll occasionally still, even now, he'll be down in the basement working, and I'll think he's left the house, and I'll be like, Where are you? Where are you? I've lost you. I've lost you. Are you here? And, I’ll walk around the house yelling his name because there's still the baby part of me that's going, This person that I'm supposed to be attached to isn't really gonna stay. They're gonna leave.
Haley Radke: I appreciate you saying that so much, Sharon, because that connected a dot for me like big time. Because we moved recently. We used to live in a very tiny house, and now we have a bigger, a bit of a bigger house, so it could be that we don't know where each other is. It's not imagined. It's just a normal house. But if I don't know where Nick is, yeah, I have a little voice asking, Where is he? And if one of my kids asks me where he is, I get really irritated [00:33:00] because I'm like, First of all, look yourself. Second of all, now I don't know where he is. Thanks for pointing that out to me. Wow. Yeah. That's interesting.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yup, it's your little inner abandoned kid that's still getting triggered.
Haley Radke: Why not? Why not just add one more thing to the list of things to talk to my therapist about. Perfect. Okay, great.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yeah. I also know Betty Jean Lifton was a wounded healer in this area and, certainly, there's several adoptees who are also therapists. I do think it adds a dimension when you have lived it yourself plus you are in the healing profession. There just is a plus to it, if you've worked through your stuff, to be able to offer it to others.
Haley Radke: And there are so many adoptees that [00:34:00] choose various healing professions. I've seen that a lot. And I didn't realize this at the time, but my degree is in psychology. I'm not a psychologist, but it's interesting, right? When you're in your teen years, late teens, and going into university and picking psychology, it's like how do I get to know myself, right? How do I figure out human behavior and all that? I think it was a cry to find myself.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yes. Very much for me too, but it's interesting because I couldn't really own it until later. I went through my whole graduate school program and I studied compulsive gambling because that was okay because my adopted grandfather had a gambling problem. So that was allowable. But to study abandonment [00:35:00] trauma or developmental trauma, it wasn't until later that I really realized that. And also addictions. I certainly know many adoptees have them because we're trying to block out such emotional pain, and it's attractive to use drugs or alcohol to numb that until you can do your full grieving and acceptance of the pain.
Haley Radke: Totally. Wow. Okay. I know that you brought a recommended resource, but before we get to that, is there anything else that you want to share with us or thoughts you want to leave us with?
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yeah. It's a difficult thing to talk about. I have done a lot of work on forgiveness because I couldn't really move through the pain without getting to the other side and getting to where [00:36:00] I don't think of forgiveness as acting like it didn't matter. Forgiveness is not saying, Oh, I never had pain because I'm just gonna act like it didn't happen. No. Forgiveness is the acceptance that people did things to us, adoptees, and that we have to reduce our expectations that they could have acted differently. So I have forgiven all four of my parents and done a real piece of work on how much I got hurt by their choices and the pain that I went through and releasing the expectations that they could have done things differently. And this I was taught through a person who is actually a first mother. Mary Hayes Grieco, and she wrote the book that I mentioned, the audiobook called Ambushed by Babies. And one of the [00:37:00] stories is about the relinquishment she went through. And she also has other children so she talks about being a mom and all the pieces of being a mother. But she's also a forgiveness trainer and has helped me a great deal with that because at the end of the day, we can't ever go back and no one can make up for the loss that happened. It is what it is. So radical acceptance and releasing my expectations. And I've even gone so far as to do ancestral healing because the grandparents played a role for both my birth father and birth mother. This was back in the late '50s when it was unacceptable to have a child who was pregnant out of wedlock. And [00:38:00] so my prayer is that the earth, the world, the whole world becomes more accepting of the fact there are complicated ways to have a family.
Haley Radke: I was just talking to someone about family preservation because I'm really passionate about it, and we were lamenting the current state of foster care and how, this is a long story. Anyway, there was a Twitter thread and someone was advocating for more foster families: “We gotta find families for these kids.” And someone just so succinctly and impactfully, I think, replied: "They already have families." And I don't know why that was such a light bulb moment for me, like, they already have families. We already had families, and to negate that and just gloss over it. [00:39:00] I don't think blank slate theory has really cleared out the way many people might have thought it had. Yeah, that's really impactful how you said that. I really appreciate that. So yeah, it's true. It's true. Thank you so much, Sharon, for sharing some of your story with us and some of the ways that you've found to help adopted people. Where can we connect with you online?
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: My website is sharonsteinmcnamara (dot) com, so that would be the best place, and I also have email. I can give you my email: sharonsteinmcnamara (at) gmail (dot) com.
Haley Radke: That's perfect. I will share both of those in the show notes, and I'm really thankful to have more adoptees who are therapists, psychologists in the world to serve our community. Thank you.
Sharon Stein McNamara, Ed.D.: Yeah, thank you. [00:40:00]
Haley Radke: Friend, I'm so glad you stuck around and hung out with me and Sharon today. I want to give you a couple of real-time updates, so if you are listening in real time when this episode is released, I'm Canadian, and I happen to live in Alberta, which is the province that, at the time of the recording, hopefully this has changed, but we are number one for COVID in North America, which isn't great. It's not great to be number one in that. But that means my kiddos have come home for online learning, and I'm sure you can understand that means it has a significant impact on the Adoptees On production capabilities. So I'm coming to let you know just a couple things. I have always [00:41:00] planned to have a break for the summer, and this year Adoptees On will be on pause for the summer and will be back in September with new episodes. I'm not going to be doing any replays. I've done that in the past, but there's a huge catalog, you guys. So many fricking episodes. I calculated out the hours the other day, and you can listen to six full days, night and day, of back catalog episodes. So I was like, Yeah, we're not gonna do replays. I had planned to take July and August off anyway, but now it's likely that we're going to wrap up earlier in June. So I'm going to finish all my episodes that I have recorded already, and we'll be bringing those for the next couple weeks. But just anticipate. See, I'm letting you know ahead of time because I know how hard it is to get surprised. You can just anticipate that Adoptees On will be on a break during the summer, and it's [00:42:00] just a little longer than I had intended because my kiddos are going to be home full days, every day, and Haley is switching to “mama teacher sorta” mode supervising the online schooling. I'm sorry about that. Literally out of my control.
But I want you to know if you are a Patreon member, if you're in the Patreon Facebook Group, I'll still be around. It's easier for me to do that than it is to record. I'm sure you can understand that. So yeah, I still have Patreon episodes going up every single week throughout the whole summer. A lot of those are already done, thankfully, and we're still doing Book Club. So if you feel a little nervous about Adoptees On not being there for you on Fridays, I'm on Patreon Adoptees Off Script every single Monday and once a month with Book Club. So if you want to support [00:43:00] the show and you want to make sure you hear a little bit of Haley every week…oh my gosh, that sounds so stupid, it is what it is.
It's true. Adopteeson.com/partner has the details of how you can access that and support the show and keep it sustainable. And don't worry, I will be back next Friday, the next couple Fridays, but just so you know, the break is coming. Adopteeson.com/partner for the Patreon bonuses. Thank you so much for those of you who support the show monthly or have given a yearly gift. It is huge to keep the show going. Thank you.
Thank you for listening, and let's talk again next Friday.
