307 [Healing Series] The Nothing Place with Pam Cordano, MFT
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/307
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. I am so glad to be back with you after our summer break. Today's episode is a special episode in our healing series that, truthfully, I've been scared to do and I've intentionally been waiting to do because of this fear.
This concept has been on my show topic list for several years, ever since I heard the words The Nothing Place for the first time. I believe that naming and describing this idea to you could be so deeply helpful for adoptees that [00:01:00] we just have to go there today. This could potentially break open a block we've had in describing the true complexities and impact adoption separation has had on us.
Pam Cordano, one of our favorite adoptee therapists, is here to tell us about The Nothing Place, the glaring gaps in attachment theory that don't address adoptees very real separation trauma, and how examining this part of us can unlock a new sense of grounding and belonging that we haven't been able to access before. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome [00:02:00] back to Adoptees On Pam Cordano. Hi Pam.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Hi Haley. Hi everybody.
Haley Radke: Okay behind the curtain. It is my birthday today. We are recording. This is gonna be the first episode back from summer break. I'm feeling a little rusty. You've been on the show so many times and the last time you were on you, this is back on episode 285 okay. It was transformational. Many people have listened to this episode multiple times. It's one of our top listened episodes. It's called The Seven Insights into Adoptee Attachment, and we talked about this thing called The Nothing Place. And I told you, I said, Pam, I've had this written on my whiteboard for a long time, like we should do a show about it. But it's so bleak and depressing. How would anybody wanna listen to this? And yet, here we are, [00:03:00] me feeling rusty and it's my birthday. So many feelings and we're gonna talk about The Nothing Place today.
Pam Cordano, MFT: We're crazy.
Haley Radke: Yeah. You know what? I love it. It's good. It's good. It's good for us to talk about hard things. We're gonna have trouble putting language to this, but I think it's been really transformational for a lot of adoptees to hear about this, to wrap their minds around this idea and give language to it. So that's what we're gonna help you do today. So let's start here. Pam, what is The Nothing Place?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Oh gosh. The nothing place is what happens when attachment is severed. Before a baby can differentiate self from other. Remember, babies are in symbiosis for the first six months of their lives. They don't know that they're a separate self, so the nothing place is what happens when attachment is severed before a baby can [00:04:00] differentiate self from other, it feels like non-existence.
For adoptees, it's often described as floating blankness and sometimes sheer terror.
Haley Radke: A nice slight topic.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. On your birthday?
Haley Radke: Sheer terror.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Sheer terror.
Haley Radke: Oh, do you wanna talk about my birthday? About August 22nd. What's special about today besides the fact that I came into this world?
Pam Cordano, MFT: That's the most special thing. You're 42 today. Is that okay to say out loud?
Haley Radke: It's okay. Yes.
Pam Cordano, MFT: And you're crushing it. And we all love you and we're so grateful for you. And so it's your birthday. That's the big thing. You could ask me to talk about any topic on your birthday, and I would likely say yes 'cause you're so special to me. The other thing that's interesting about today is it's a new moon and it's called a black moon because a black moon is the second new moon of a given month. And so today's a black moon. And I was just thinking about how the black moon, the new [00:05:00] moon represents darkness and hiddenness and beginnings that come out of the void.
And there was a point where you are a beginning that came out of the void and now you're here. And for those of us who are lucky enough or tenacious enough or have enough support, that we keep trying so hard to heal and to feel comfortable in our skin and in our lives, there's a way we can keep especially together coming out of this void of the nothing place.
Haley Radke: Do you wanna tell us about the origins of this named thing?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. Yeah. I think I was there when it started. I was in a joint, very deep psychotherapy session. By joint there was me and then there was a non adopted attachment therapist, and the two of us were working with an adoptee.
And the adoptee went into this [00:06:00] really, I don't even know how to describe it. This is where words fail, but like a horrific looking place where I could see, and his eyes and in his whole being like, like a dorsal vagal, like a collapsed state where. He was just not with us, but it didn't look quite like dissociation.
It looked like something else. And so the attachment therapist said something like, hey, we're right here. Haven't you done this enough? Can't you come out? We're right here. Can you come out and find us here? And he just, the client just looked he looked like he was actually somewhere not nowhere, he was somewhere but somewhere awful.
And then as I kept looking at him, I said, no, we can't ask him to come to where we are. We have to go where he is. And the client said really calmly, this is a place where there is nothing. Nothing at all. And in that moment, I recognize, I feel like I started [00:07:00] crying. It was really a big moment, but I recognized it.
I could see him and he was, he described it where there's nothing at all. My whole body remembered somehow that place more consciously than I ever had before. And then we started calling it the nothing place. And what was super interesting is that once that happened and we, I went to him, I felt it, I think I started crying in that moment.
The other therapist, the attachment therapist suddenly realized that attachment theory does not account for what was happening. That attachment theory explains bonds that are insecure or disrupted, but they're still present in a continuous way for a human. But attachment theory does not explain what happens when attachment is completely severed before a baby has a sense of self, and other.
And that gap, the nothing place gap is where we adoptees, live in some deep part of ourselves and that we've [00:08:00] built a life on top of.
Haley Radke: So can we go to, like most people call it the fourth trimester, right? Baby is born and what's supposed to happen is. You as a baby, you learn from your mother. The mother is your nervous system. The mother is your source for life, food, all the things, emotional regulation, all of those things come from the mother. And you said that happens up to six months?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. Yeah. I'll lay it out. So from zero to six months, the infant lives in symbiosis with a mother or the primary caregiver.
The infant has no clear sense of self or other, and the only way they regulate is inside of a shared system. So funny that I'm crying. This is so sad, but I'm usually not the crier, but
Haley Radke: [00:09:00] Oh, I a hundred percent am.
Pam Cordano, MFT: This is you were the one dreading this conversation and I'm the one who it is like it's hitting me. It's crazy. Anyway, so regulation comes, the baby's actual nervous system regulation comes from inside of a shared nervous system, not from their own nervous system. And then from six months to 18 months, there's this gradual differentiation where the baby starts realizing I'm separate, but I'm also connected.
This is built through thousands of micro moments where the mother leaves, the mother, comes back. The frustration inside the baby's system is soothed. The baby's hunger is met, and so these thousands of micro moments build from six months to 18 months. This gradual differentiation of I'm a separate self in relation to my caregiver mother.
Haley Radke: Is this what you've called call response before.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yes.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. And call and response starts from the moment a baby's born, but for the first six months, [00:10:00] even with call and response, the baby does not know that it's a separate self. But then starting around six months, they start to learn that gradually for the next up until they're 18 months old.
And then from 18 months to 36 months, the emergence of stable object constancy develops where my mom's not here. But I still know she exists. And this anchors a sense of the baby's self as continuous and not an annihilated.
Haley Radke: Wait, remember playing peekaboo?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: And like it's only funny and nice to do when the baby knows you're gonna come back.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: There's a point where we don't have object permanence and so peekaboo was just like, oh my God, where did she go?
Pam Cordano, MFT: It's like a torture chamber,
Haley Radke: right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I didn't like playing that with children.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Like nothing places like a peekaboo that never had a second partner to come [00:11:00] back and show back up again. I'm serious.
Haley Radke: Yeah, I know. It's so bleak. You have to laugh or we will cry.
Pam Cordano, MFT: I know. Traditional classical attachment theory presumes some form of continuous caregiving. It does not build into it attachment rupture that adoptees go through, and this therapist was just shocked realizing that everything he had come to understand about attachment was missing a really core piece for some people in the population.
Haley Radke: Devil's advocate. It's okay, most of us were placed pretty soon to where we were born. If you were adopted as an infant, and so there was another adult doing those things. So what's the difference?
Pam Cordano, MFT: It's not about interchangeable adults for anybody. It's about [00:12:00] the one the baby is bonded to, and we get bonded in utero for nine months. And so whether a baby is relinquished at birth or a week later, or six months later or two years later, the mother is for the baby, is not an interchangeable figure. I think we adoptees know this, those of us who are outta the fog, we know this. I don't knowthat t he wider culture doesn't know this. And that's part of the illusion.
Haley Radke: That we're interchange, that the parents are interchangeable.
Pam Cordano, MFT: That parents are interchangeable.
Haley Radke: Yeah. With no consequence. So the attachment therapist is like, what the heck? I had no clue this was missing from attachment theory.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. He saw it like once, once he realized that he, that what was happening was outside of his framework, and it became really evident in the room and with the clients where the client went, and then how I responded with this recognition. Like it was very overwhelming [00:13:00] for this attachment therapist.
Haley Radke: Did they get emotional too?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Oh yeah.
Haley Radke: Oh.
Pam Cordano, MFT: They had to take a break. They realized they had that a huge thing had been missing around a whole segment of the population, meaning us, that it's not the same. And that therapists and people try to prematurely pull, let's say the adoptee or the relinquished person out of where the ground is that they're trying to, to heal from if they can get there and again asking the adoptee, I'll say to, to adapt rather than people knowing how to go and be where somebody is in the nothing place with them.
Haley Radke: I'm trying to picture studying this, because babies are nonverbal. There's no, there's nothing that's been. There's nobody, no words put to this before. It's not even an attachment [00:14:00] theory. And then so how do you even come to describe something like, it's just, yeah, this is what's really hard to put words to.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. The cool thing is that how this client could get here was, in my opinion, like extremely rare. He was able, even able to do this to go in there and then that there was this perfect configuration of an adoptee therapist and a non adoptee attachment specialist all in this at the same time.
It was this perfect moment where I feel like the value, one of the values is that moment started something that is, I think, and has been adding value to adoptees with trying to understand what makes this all so hard in healing and getting comfortable and grounded because it is preverbal and there's no cultural mirror.
So without having models, it's just, we're just, it is just this kind of chaos of confusion and trauma. But this is starting to put [00:15:00] order in like order and structure to what's underneath in this deepest place.
Haley Radke: Do you consider the nothing place the there's the act of obliteration, of connection between baby and mom, and then there's also the time period gap of when you should have this connection and be able to realize, come to a realization that you are an independent creature aside from a, the person you came from, is it all of that? Is it the one thing like, I'm trying to wrap my head around, what do you think about that?
Pam Cordano, MFT: I think it's a combination of the baby being in that symbiotic for most of us who are adopted under, at, under six months or at least had some kind of trauma or inconsistency, foster homes, whatever in the first six [00:16:00] months that, that before the baby, when the baby is still in symbiosis with a specific person who's their birth mother, even, from the moment they're born, it's the birth mother. That's who they've been with as a co-regulator, as one system the baby knows when that gets severed it's the breaking of that relationship during the time of symbiosis. That, that it, that's what we're talking about.
Haley Radke: Think about a NICU baby who
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yep.
Haley Radke: Can't come out for six weeks. And then can, would they have some version of this?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yes. And that's when Nancy Verrier, in The Primal Wound included NICU babies. And like my adoptive mother was a preemie in, I think two months in the NICU back in the thirties, 1930s. And she had a lot of similar kinds of issues in her nervous system as I did. Who knows, maybe that's even something that I don't know, made adoption [00:17:00] amenable somehow or appealing to her somehow. I don't know, but that's a weird thing to say. But yeah.
Haley Radke: Okay. And this is, sorry, another slight rabbit trail. Thinking of children born by surrogate. So it's, that is something I'm so curious about when they start studying that because you can go to your genetic parents, but your tie is severed from the person who carried you to gestationally.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Very confusing.
Pam Cordano, MFT: I think a lot of adoptees think about that. The surrogacy. The other thing I wanna say about the NICU babies, and maybe this goes with surrogacy, depending on the situation and the organization of the structure of the families, but. With a NICU situation, if the parents are intact the lineage is intact. Even if the baby can't be held, particularly in the past, it's better now. There, there's more holding and more awareness of bonding and what the baby's actually need, [00:18:00] but there's still like a psychological, I could even say spiritual holding of that baby in an intact lineage. If that baby's being kept while they're in the NICU, it's a different kind. There's a holding kind of. I can only imagine that the baby would have similar kinds of biological trauma and this nothing place kind of experience, but there is some kind of a holding that is still intact. In that situation.
Haley Radke: Even if mom dies in labor and dad is waiting and ready to take care of baby.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Right, because if mom dies in labor and dad's ready, then dad's gonna be grieving and in the same soup in a way as the baby around that loss. And there's gonna be a kind of mirror or orientation point in that shared grief versus just cut ties cut and baby's now in a totally foreign environment.
Haley Radke: I just don't understand why Muggles, this is the term that Pam uses for non [00:19:00] adopted people for kept people. Why Muggles don't get that parents are not interchangeable.
Pam Cordano, MFT: It's like issues of privilege. It's like anything that is so normal to a person that it's not questioned. It's usually pain. Pain becomes the questioner, and then the people who are invisible or harmed by that invisibility start speaking up. And in a way that's what we're doing in this conversation is making space for something that is invisible.
Haley Radke: Right.
Pam Cordano, MFT: On a cultural level, which is super painful.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Pam Cordano, MFT: So if in that state of symbiosis, relinquishment happens, the baby has no way to hold inside their system. I exist. You exist because that hasn't been formed yet before the rupture. And so what then happens is the nervous system encodes [00:20:00] this experience of void and terror because that rupture creates that in the baby's body.
And that's the place of the nothing place, no self, no other, no continuity, no me, annihilation that, all that stuff. And then later on as we get older with our adoptive families, let's say our development overlays the ability to function. We go to school, we do what we do, we learn how to be a person that's functioning, but there's still this split consciousness inside of us where there's this more adult kind of competence or child kind of competence. Adult and there's still the body memory of non-existence deep inside of us. So we live with that split.
Haley Radke: I'm trying to take it in. I think just literally trying to understand that a baby doesn't know it [00:21:00] exists, right? That's a hard thing to get, but literally they can't know that yet. Because the, because of the developmental state, lack of development, yet it's very hard to understand that a baby wouldn't know they exist. And I know you said developmentally.
Pam Cordano, MFT: And that, that, that feels like death. That's a fear of annihilation. If I, am I dying? I'm dying. And not even am I dying, like it's like a, not the thought I'm dying, but the experience for the organism of I'm dying 'cause I just got chopped apart.
Haley Radke: And there's not the ability yet to say, oh, they went somewhere, they're coming back. It's just gone.
Pam Cordano, MFT: That doesn't even start being a biological possibility until they're at least six months old, the [00:22:00] beginning of being able to do that. So we just have to develop on top of this experience of being chopped apart and it feeling like death, and then we build coping on top of that to survive.
And then we become the people we become on top of all of that, and then we don't know why we're so anxious, or we have so much trouble in relationships, or we're terrified of being alone in the dark or throwing up or we get sick from all this stress in our bodies. We don't know what is going on that we are so screwed up and we think that it's like our, it's our fault or something's wrong with us and feel shame about it.
But this talking about the nothing place and describing the rupture during the time of symbiosis and what that does, which I could have known intellectually, but to see it on this client's face and then, and to experience it in my own system, all at once it landed and now we can talk about it. I, those of us who it's landing for, we can talk about it.
Haley Radke: Isn't this the [00:23:00] same as so many friends I've had, or even interviews we've mentioned like I feel like I fell outta the sky. Like feeling like you come from nowhere.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Like that terrible idea, that storks bring the babies to the new parents. It's no, like adoptees literally, a lot of us literally feel like that, like some random thing just dropped us outta the sky with the receipt.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. It's like we're, it's like we're a tree that we have to grow. We have to grow into a big tree with no roots. Like somehow there's no root system and then we don't know why we keep getting blown over or we don't like when kids are hanging on us and climbing us 'cause we're about to fall over anyway.
But yeah, it's that disoriented. There's no continuity in the nervous system literally. So the infant nervous system depends on co-regulation 'cause they're in symbiosis. Without it neural circuits for safety and orientation do not get laid down. The nothing place feels like non-existence because in brain [00:24:00] terms, there was never a scaffold for I exist in relationship to you.
And when I say there never was, even if the baby was kept by the birth mother for two weeks, they were still in symbiosis when the relinquishment happened. So they didn't, we have to keep thinking of the baby as being in symbiosis when they're under six months. And then, and what that, it doesn't matter in some way, if they got. A day or a, or two a month it's still happening in that time.
And polyvagal theory is really interesting in a super nutshell our dorsal vagal system, that's our collapse place. That's where the nothing place lives. It's in this dorsal collapse place. It's not even equipped to do fight or flight 'cause babies can't do fight or flight. They're, they can't even move and they don't even know that they're separate. They're stuck having to just go into collapse. This is where the nothing place lives. It's in the dorsal, vagal collapse place in our nervous systems. And then a stronger part that we can develop later is fight or flight so we can [00:25:00] actually make decisions about what, when do I fight, when do I do flight, but the happy place for all of us is in the ventral vagal system that's higher up and that's where we feel safe enough. We feel socially connected. We have our curiosity and creativity online. That's the good life times is in ventral vagal.
So with this rupture in our dorsal that lands in our dorsal vagal system as freeze and collapse, it's harder for us to get to a steady state of ventral vagal. It takes a lot of work and probably a lot of good fortune around, kind and tuned in people being with us later after we've come through all of this. Does that make sense?
Haley Radke: Just to be able to function.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. And to feel and to be comfortable functioning. Not shut down and then not in not dominated by fight or flight. More times rather than less times. That doesn't make sense. But to be less involved with fight or flight and shut down. And to have more of us available for ventral vagal, where [00:26:00] we actually feel good.
Haley Radke: So this is an upsetting thing that many people have said. They either report my case was, oh, she's colic, right? I cried nonstop all the time for no apparent reason, quote unquote. And then others report, oh, I was such a good baby because I never cried. So there's like always crying, never crying.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: That's either one. This collapse.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah, the never crying is really collapse and the always crying. There's still some energy to me. I think of the always crying is still trying to stay alive and not go because collapse the, like the freeze state. The freeze state if we stay there too long it's like a preparation for death kind of place.
Like freeze is a place that wants to figure out what do I do I fight or do I flee from danger? Freeze is danger. So if we can't [00:27:00] find a way to, to fight or flight, we're just sinking into this free state where it's like preparation for death. We can't, the parts of us to say frozen too long are parts of us that kind of just seem to go dead or get buried or turned off. They just stop being online. The crying part, I feel good about thinking of you crying like that in, in the sense that you're fighting for something. Like what can a baby do if they're trying to engage, trying to be known stay in the ring. Crying is maybe better than, crying is better than no crying.
It's not great. It's not good, but it's, it at least it's, there's an action involved with it. And who knows, maybe, I don't know. You're such an action person. You put things out in the world, you, you do that kind of thing. And I don't know, I don't know what I'm saying by saying that, but I'd rather see a baby crying than a baby who gave up crying.
Haley Radke: I just feel so like this. This is so difficult because I know all my adoptee friends, like this is what we [00:28:00] experienced. This is no one, nobody who would subject a human to this.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Torture. This is torture. Okay. Should we go to iFS?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Sure. So in, in IFS theory, the exiles most exiles hold feelings that are not fully acceptable or acceptable at all in the family. So it can be things like, shame or rage or pain, grief. Sometimes exiles hold positive feelings too. Let's say there's a mother that's jealous of the child might wanna shut down their joy or their how they can shine in the world so the mother doesn't get jealous. So that's, there's examples of exiles can hold good things too, like quote good things too that are just not allowed in the family to maximize love. The nothing place is a deeper exile than those kinds of exiles. The nothing place is an exile that holds an experience of non-existence itself. [00:29:00] So it's not just a part with feelings, it's the body memory of no self. No other 'cause it broke apart. And then what happens is protectors our protective systems, I'll say in adoptees work over time to cover up this abyss. And they do thing, over functioning, people pleasing, addiction, anger problems, reactive attachment disorder issues. Like whatever it takes to try to stay alive, stay afloat, and cope.
All of that's on top of this deep exile. And healing. Healing this, helping, this exile heal is not about fixing it at all. It's not asking it to come out and meet the land of the living in muggle terms. It's really us, and this is really a hard thing I'm gonna say, but it's us learning how to be just little bit by little bit with the terror and the overwhelm of the nothing place itself as a deep experience in our systems.
That's what [00:30:00] that's where we were before the stork suddenly brought us in, or we suddenly got, we arrived on spaceship from another planet. We were in this nothing place. So it's in there and the best thing we can do is start slowly to get to know it and we can talk about that, but, and also to be around either therapists or friends who have some capacity to also hang out with that.
We don't want a therapist asking us to be somewhere else when. That's really the ground of where we need to bear in our own systems to start to feel rooted.
Haley Radke: Using that word rooted. How many of us have gone to therapists or psychologists and you wanna deal with this, whatever issue that's going on for you, and they're always looking for the root. And when you deal with that, then that issue resolves. And so I get it. I see why that would be so critical to look at, but also because the terror is so deep, you really would have to be safe in order to look [00:31:00] at that. And I've, I know I've said this before, I don't know how accurate this is, but I really think our brains only show us like things that we're ready to look at.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Just to keep us safe.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. And I've said before on your show that this is one reason I'm a fan of psychedelic therapy because it does allow for getting access to places that our protective structures will not allow us to go into. And that's why talk therapy can take so long and be so frustrating because it's just we can't, our system is saying, no way are we going in that place. And that's why I'm a fan of psychedelic therapy and I hope that it gets legalized soon.
Haley Radke: There was so many episodes. I remember like from the, I think from the first season even, we were talking about how we have these boxes we store away in our closet and we just can't even open them because it's just too much.
Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. The terror. That's the word. But yet people knowing about this, I know you've had [00:32:00] a group of adoptees talk about this together when you were leading the flourish groups and just even knowing that there was something to name, it can reduce that.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Totally.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Pam Cordano, MFT: There's an upside. We're gonna talk about the upside of us even talking about this topic. Yes. Before this ends for sure. But yeah.
Haley Radke: Don't worry.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Don't worry. Hang in there. The nothing place exile doesn't just sit there quietly. It exerts a gravitational pull on the whole system.
And that's why that when there's stress or even intimacy in relationships, there's this gravitational pull that's freaking out. And this nothing place thing is a dynamic living part of us. It's not just, it's not a concept. It's not, symbolic. It's really a real thing that we have inside of us.
And I wouldn't have known that until I saw this client get there and then I felt like I got there. So when we feel fatigued or we have a conflict or we're in an [00:33:00] intimate situation this nothing place exile pulls forward and the system feels like I'm dissolving, I'm not here I'm gonna die. Like this whole I'm gonna die thing comes from this place. 'cause we did have that experience and that is the experience in nothing place. I'm gonna die. I'm getting annihilated right now.
Haley Radke: Is that equivalent to many of us, myself included having suicidal ideation.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. Totally.
Haley Radke: Great.
Pam Cordano, MFT: It's also babies that are in orphanages who die even though they're, their physical needs are being met. They're, they are. They are. They go further. Those of us who have survived this, we didn't go as far into death as they, but I think it's a continuum of death. This nothing place place.
Haley Radke: So people who have this need met their whole life and identity is built on this strong structure and we just have this [00:34:00] gaping hole where the foundation should be.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. And sure there's, of course there's people that have all kinds of, they have drug addicted parents or they have violence in the home from the time they're born or they're getting really severely abused. Of course those things are like horrific for any human system, but there is a continuity of attachment even if it's really poor attachment and scary attachment or eventually disrupted attachment, there's a continuity with versus an entire break of the organism of symbiosis. It's different.
Haley Radke: So the gravitational pull to come back to the abyss is there. And if we're shaking or pushing some way. That can get triggered. Is that what I'm hearing?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. It does get and I think it does get triggered.
Haley Radke: It just does get triggered and whether we're aware of it or not,
Pam Cordano, MFT: yeah,
Haley Radke: okay,
Pam Cordano, MFT: We get triggered. We get triggered [00:35:00] and I can't imagine any trigger that doesn't somehow harken back to this nothing place for us in some way. It feels like we're talking about the ground floor of the adoptee system.
Haley Radke: This, maybe we should talk about this at the end, but what it's bringing to mind is how you've talked about adoptees as superheroes, right? And it just makes me so this is what gets me emotional. It just makes me so much more impressed with all of us who've made it and have, in any fashion we've made it and those that are working on trying to improve our lives and change things for our children and legacy and all of those things, like it just makes it all the more impressive.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. Yeah. I think that for us, just living daily life requires a kind of strength and capacity. Even when life looks like a show, am I allowed to say show on your show?
Haley Radke: We are. [00:36:00] We will beep bad, but yes, you can say it, huh? Yeah. Okay. So the value of naming this is that we can work on it?
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. Okay. So here's what I see the value is it's validating. Like when I brought this to the flourish groups and there were, I don't know. 40 something people in the flourish groups. I think it was everyone, if not nearly everyone, really related to this in some way or another.
And to have something named for us when the culture doesn't name it and how could they is it can feel very validating. So it's, and it's also a way of saying you're not broken. Like whatever you think you look like compared to other people in life. If we have a way of understanding what we actually went through and we start all of us, carving out like language and understand shared understandings about it.
It just gives us another [00:37:00] way to look at our lives and what you just, when you got tearful about the superpower thing, it's, it is like that. It gives a perspective so that we can perhaps see ourselves with more and each other with more compassion and awe really, and horror awe. And also, it's so cool to find language for things that happened before language was built. It's almost as if in the culture, if we can't language it, it's not, it doesn't it, it isn't there. It's not real. But yet our nervous systems tell a story and for us to find ways to language it and find shared languaging it, it gives form to the formless.
And it also creates a sense of belonging. There's a paradox because this nothing place is literally a place where there's nothing. There's no you. There's no me. There's no up, there's no down, there's nothing. And yet, once we can find each other in the nothing place, even just start to find each other in the nothing place [00:38:00] paradoxically, it's grounding. We find, oh, there's some ground this the nothing place is a place. It's not, it isn't really a no place, it's a place, it's just a horrific place. But to be there together is different. So when this client got there and then I feel like I fell in, on accident, but I'm grateful I did.
It was comforting to him. It was comforting to me that we like, oh my gosh, we both, if we're both here, it's not the same as if I'm just alone there and hiding it from myself and reacting to try and to stay out of the, out of this deeper place. And then instead of being pathologized oh, you're avoidant, you're angry, you're resistant, you're ungrateful you're, you dissociate a lot, like all these labels that, that we can be thought of or called, or it's no we can witness.
In ourselves and in each other, the deeper truth of what, what's actually happening that isn't pathological at all and it has a chance to be actually reparative in that way. It's another story besides [00:39:00] that we're screw ups, defective. No wonder they gave me away. I'm such a, I'm an inherently defective person.
And then finally, I'll say this again, that the goal is not to erase this place. The goal is to learn to be with it without the panic or annihilation terror. To start chipping away at that so that we can actually just land here and feel that root system that's actually there, but I don't know that we can do it alone. I think we need each other to, that's why this shared language, I think that's why we're doing this episode is like we're trying to give language so we can all do this together.
Haley Radke: I don't know if you remember, if you've heard about this, we've talked about this maybe before, but you even said reactive attachment disorder before, which I'm just like, it's bs.
It's like a, it's like this stupid diagnosis for normal reactions to abnormal situations and this is what I'm thinking of. I'm like, oh, this having a nothing place [00:40:00] as a part of our origins. This is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. This is normal for adoptees to feel this way because there is a gaping void in what should have been this be begin nice symbiosis, nice beginning with our mother and it's not available to us.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: I know you know this, but I'm going to link in the show notes. We have many adoptees, including people from Flourish who wrote about the Nothing Place, and there's some poetry and just moments people have captured even about when you brought this idea to them and they write about it in The Flourish Experience we'll link to that and some other folks have blogged about it. So I'll have links to a few different folks in the show notes talking about this. Is there anything more you wanna tell us? If someone wants to start looking at this to possibly look in the scary place to acknowledge it, [00:41:00] what are first steps to do that in a safe way ?
Pam Cordano, MFT: That if people are comfortable being in their own company enough, they can just start trying it on. They could go for a walk and just give it a little thought like, what do I think or feel about this nothing place thing in flourish people recognized it immediately and some people were more sad or scared about it, and other people were really relieved, like viscerally relieved about it.
So there might be a whole bunch of different types of inter of reactions to it. But also I think that if people are in therapy, bringing it to their therapist or if they have friends who they trust or friends that are adopted that they trust, they could also start talking about it a little bit there.
I think it's it's almost like it's like soil and we can just start digging a little bit in the soil, but the goal is not to overwhelm 'cause it's a tender place. It's just to, it's just to start exploring whoever wants to.
Haley Radke: And do you have anything to say [00:42:00] to someone who might listen to this and just be like, oh my gosh, this is just made up. You guys are just feeling sorry for yourself. Not that we get those emails ever.
Pam Cordano, MFT: I don't really care about those people that much. I don't even feel ruffle. I feel like now that I know this place so much more it doesn't even. If someone wants to negate it, I like whatever. I just don't have any business with them.
Haley Radke: That's such a healthy way to look at it. And I think, truly, anytime I've talked to someone about this that's adopted, there's like an instant knowing. And for people who are adopted, but perhaps haven't started really deep diving it critically, this might not resonate and that's okay. Like
Pam Cordano, MFT: totally
Haley Radke: live your best life. Don't dig if you don't want to dig.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Absolutely.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing this with us, Pam.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. Haley, thanks so much for [00:43:00] being born actually, and keeping yourself alive, however you did that.
Haley Radke: I did it. I did. We both did it. And you are listening. You did it too. Way to go us. Way to go us.
Pam Cordano, MFT: That's right. It's a big deal.
Haley Radke: It is. And I hope this naming is more an encouragement to feel like, oh, I'm not crazy. There's nothing wrong with me. This is a normal reaction to a very abnormal situation.
Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah, if we go back to the black the black moon that's happening today and we go back to the deep exile name, what deep exiles or any exiles need is love and presence and so we can start building presence and love in for ourselves in this place and with each other, and that's what it needs. It doesn't need to do to get. To get moving and be different. It just needs love and presence to gently, slowly start coming to it [00:44:00] and that's when the light comes back.
Haley Radke: Beautiful. Thank you so much. You've been on the show so many times sharing your wisdom with us. We so deeply appreciate it. Truly, where can folks connect with you online?
Pam Cordano, MFT: By email pcordano@comcast.net.
Haley Radke: Lovely. Thank you. Thanks for celebrating my birthday with me.
Pam Cordano, MFT: I'm so excited. You asked me what an honor.
Haley Radke: I know I've said this before. I love Pam so much. She has helped me personally and so many of us by bringing language to the ethereal, the intangible of it all when we are trying to help ourselves understand what happened to us in the context of adoption separation. And our loved ones and [00:45:00] trying to explain to them like how it feels to be an adopted person existing in this world.
So I'm so deeply grateful to Pam. I'm also so grateful for all of my patrons. If you have felt value from Adoptees On, you can join our Patreon. You can search Patreon and quote Adoptees On, or go to adopteeson.com/community and folks can pledge monthly amounts or you can pay for a year and you get so many so many episodes of me and my friends talking about adoptee things. We also have the Ask an Adoptee Therapist events, which Pam is a part of occasionally. We also have Adoptees Off Script parties with Pam, and this fall we're starting a series of Adoptees Off Script parties where we are focusing in on the fight flight, fawn or freeze themes, and [00:46:00] so I know we're gonna be learning a ton more from her about those. So thank you so much for all of you who have supported the show in the past and those who will continue to do so and keep Adoptees On alive in this world. The other thing I know folks have been asking me about, and you will hear this fall more about my brand new podcast that I've been working on and you will. We'll be sharing more, I promise. So stay tuned for that. Thank you so much for listening, and let's talk again very soon.
