322 Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/322
AO E322 Monique Pangari
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'm so excited to introduce you to today's guest, Australian Adoptee and somatic psychotherapist, Monique Pangari. Monique shares about her experiences as a teen mom. What led her to search for her origins and how she discovered the man she believed was her father was actually not biologically related to her.
She also reflects on how her lived experience shapes her work, supporting adoptees, including the concept of personal sovereignty. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to [00:01:00] sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.
Let's listen in.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Monique Pangari. Hello, Monique.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Hello, Haley. Such a gift. Such a pleasure to be here talking with you today.
Haley Radke: I am so excited to talk with you. It's a long time in the making. You've had some big life altering things happen. We've had rescheduling happen and we live on the opposite side of the world, but we're here now.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: That's right.
Haley Radke: And I spent the last couple days having your voice in my ears. From other shows that you've been on, and I was like, I'm so delighted to get to meet [00:02:00] you. So I'm excited for everyone to, to hear your story. Do you mind sharing that with us for a start?
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Okay, sure. As you just mentioned, on opposite sides of the world, so I live in Australia and I was adopted. I was born in 1972 here in Queensland and was adopted. Actually I was relinquished at birth and adopted six weeks later. So for those first six weeks I was in the hospital. And the rule at the time, is that babies that were to be adopted were to stay in the hospital for six weeks, whether there was a family available straight away or not for paperwork reasons.
So that's interesting information. It's good to know, you know what, what was happening at that time. And because. I guess we can trace so much back to those first weeks and what happened. That's such an important time. Yeah. So I was adopted into a [00:03:00] family with two older siblings. They were also adopted, so I had two brothers and I was the youngest and in fact I was adopted where in the same place that I live right now. So the hospital I was adopted in is literally a few kilometers away from where I currently live, but I was adopted into a family that moved about six hours north of here. Grew up in central Queensland in my family, and probably at about 18, oh, first off I had my first son at 17, which was probably the instigator.
I can't quite remember how much that was instigating things, but certainly by about 18, 19, 20. I started to get very curious and wanting to know where I came from and so I did reach out and gained some information. I think it was through Jigsaw back then, and [00:04:00] was able to get my original birth certificate, which had my birth mother's name on it.
And then through that process I was able to track down my birth mother. So I was 21 at that time. And I phoned her and she was living in Perth. So for people who don't know, Australia, Perth is on the other side of the country. It's a long way away. And we had a phone conversation that lasted over an hour. She was pleased to hear from me.
And then within about a week, I think she jumped on a plane and flew over to Queensland to meet me. And that was the beginning of the reunion and a whole lot of other things that played out from there. So
Haley Radke: I know your story has a lot of twists and turns.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: It does.
Haley Radke: Can we just pause on having your son at a young age?
How were you able to parent at [00:05:00] 17. A lot of us our story is, we're relinquished because of a teen pregnancy. That's my story. And I'm curious about that.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Interestingly, I did find out that my mother, my biological mother had me at 18 and I had my son at 17. Yeah, I was in a relationship with a man that was four years older than me. I was still at school. He was a police officer. So for my father, it's interesting 'cause I grew up was very strict parents. They were very strict and didn't really allow me to do much as the girl in the family. But I became interested in a guy when I was 16 and he was aboriginal. And he was my first kind of crush, I would say.
And when my father found out about that, obviously he was racist and I didn't know that. This is all [00:06:00] hindsight, going back and looking back and going, oh my God, I didn't know I was living in a family that was racist, but he behaved very horrendously and forbid me to see him again. So then, a month or so later, I, through a friend, I met this guy.
He was a police officer and he I wasn't overly interested in him, but my father gave full permission for me to go wherever I wanted with this guy. And so I did. And so we started hanging out a lot. I was rarely at home. It gave me the sense of freedom that I was wanting at such a young age, and then I eventually fell pregnant and that was a lot of shame for my adoptive parents and yeah I quit school. No, I had already left school actually before I found out I was pregnant and I got a job and I stayed in that job until my, until I was [00:07:00] probably about six, seven months. Yeah. And then I spent some time with the father, a couple of months before the birth.
I returned home to be at home and had my son. That was a traumatic experience in itself in some ways because of the way that I was treated by the hospital nurses who still had that leftover attitude of unmarried, an unmarried teenager having a child. So I've had to work through, yeah some of that.
So I was told a lot at that time. You've ruined your life. What have you done? And yet the decision for me as soon as I found out I was pregnant was I'm keeping this baby. So it just, it wasn't even a question for me. And of course at 17 you don't know what that means, but I was very determined, so I did and my parents became very supportive of helping me look after my son.
And so I was able to stay at home, but over time. It became [00:08:00] obsessive about my child and I felt I was, I felt like my mother was taking over the parenting role and I wanted to get out and to get away, and I knew even I hadn't finished year 12, I knew I needed to get an education so that I could leave.
And so I did a year at TAFE and I ended up getting an OP score of one, which is. Back then they had OP scores at the end of year 12, and this gave me an OP score of one, which was the top that you could get, which meant that I got straight into university to get into the course that I wanted to do, which was a joint degree in education and psychology.
And I picked that because it was 12 hours away from my parents. So I got into uni and off I went. I was 21 at that point. And I had already met my birth mother. My son was four, and I'd done that extra year at tafe. I was starting to get my head wrapped [00:09:00] around university studies and I decided I was gonna do it all by myself.
So off I went as a single mom and I started studying a joint degree by myself because I wanted him to be raised by me. It was, I still look back on that. I feel a bit teary thinking about that woman that made that choice, who was still a child really, in a lot of ways, it's probably the most deadly thing I've ever done in my life, really.
I feel really proud that I had the courage to say, this is my child and I will do this, and I was very grateful for the support that I had been given and I didn't see at the time the legacy of intergenerational trauma and the legacy of adoptive parents who had saviorism as their operational status quo.
And so when I had my son, they almost went into I [00:10:00] became less important to them and my son became very important to them. He was, they just revolved their life around him for many years, and it created a bit of a triangle where I had to really fight for him to see me as his mother.
And that dynamic plays out today. It just played out at Christmas time. Yeah, it's a really tricky triangulation that happened because I had him so young and I really needed their support and help, which I got and I was grateful for, but it came at a great cost. One of the best things about that is that I found out who I am under pressure and I did raise him and I raised him by myself and I got myself through uni and he had a great schooling and yeah, he's a school teacher now and living independently and doing well in his life.
Haley Radke: You did it. Good job, mama.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: I did it.
Haley Radke: You did it.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Thank you. Nobody's asked me that question before. Oh, that was a trip down memory lane.
Haley Radke: [00:11:00] It's one of those things where I have so much respect because I know like it's a crisis situation. And it was temporary.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes.
Haley Radke: And you did that.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: And it was temporary.
Haley Radke: Oh
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: yeah.
Haley Radke: Good for you.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah. It took me 17 to 21 at 20, I guess I went back to school. So yeah, those first couple of years I just needed support and, 'cause I was so young to get things together, but then I did do it and that's it. It's a temporary situation that needs support.
Haley Radke: So another turn in the story is you also had a NPE experience finding out who you thought was your father was not your father, and that led you to have a, I'm gonna say a reunion, quote unquote, experience with a sister, and you had a lengthy relationship with them all to find out [00:12:00] actually we're not related. Can you talk about that?
Because I know you're not the only one that's had that experience and that, when I heard that part of your story, I was like, this is very upsetting. This is one of these. I don't know. I don't even know what to call it. I was gonna say traps in adoption when we don't have all the facts in front of us and this is something that can happen.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah, just gonna take a deep breath. I can feel myself shaking a little bit. It doesn't matter how many times you go over these, this history, in your own head or share it with somebody else, it still brings up emotion, and I'm just noticing I'm sitting with that right now. So just wanting to name that.
Yeah. So I met my birth mother, as I said, at 21, and she, before she flew over to meet me, she didn't tell me she was doing this, but she reached out to who she said was my father. And at the [00:13:00] time he had just gone through a divorce. That he'd been in a long-term relationship and it was one year out of his divorce and he had two children.
So unbeknownst to me, he drove up from where I currently lived, Sunshine Coast to where I was living at the time. She flew over and was like, surprise, this is your father. And what was interesting to me is that when I was a teenager. We had, my brothers and I had found the paperwork hiding in mom's closet.
That was the paperwork from the government to say, we have a child available to be adopted. And my paperwork being a bit newer than my brother's paperwork had more details in it. And in my paperwork it said the mother has brown hair and brown eyes, and she works as a stenographer and the father has blonde hair, blue eyes, and works as a carpenter.[00:14:00]
So when I met this man that my mother said was my father in my early twenties, he did not have blonde hair and blue eyes, and he wasn't a carpenter. And so I met him and got to know him. I got to know his children and his daughter ended up moving close to me. And so we became very close and we would see each other regularly, and I did ask my mother at some point, why is this in the paperwork and this is not who he is. And she just really fobbed it off and didn't really answer that. So in getting to know my sister, she had a 21st birthday. I was then pregnant with my second son, so I was 29. So we had a long time of knowing each other and becoming really close, and she came out one day and said, look, I don't know if you know this, but your mum was dating another man at the time.
And my mom thinks that he [00:15:00] might be the father and or that it's worth, investigating. And I said, do you have a photo of him? And she showed me, and he was blonde hair and blue eyed, and he was a carpenter. And I went, oh, okay, there's more to this story. So I reached out to my birth mother and asked her some DNA evidence if she would, back then we didn't have all the DNA opportunities that we have now.
And it was gonna cost $2,000 to get a DNA test. So I asked her if she would go halves in that. Yeah. So I had a child, I was married, I had a mortgage, and I had a child on the way. It was not $2000 it was not something that we easily had. Anyway, that created a great deal of drama. She was not interested in doing that. It was very unhappy. Anyway, over a period of time, maybe about six months, she finally agreed to do that. And though I went to the doctors. I did the DNA test, waited several weeks. Finally it came back [00:16:00] and the lady at the doctor's surgery, the receptionist just read it out, just handed it to me.
She didn't make an appointment with the doctor. She just handed the results to me. I hopped in my car. I was driving home because doctor surgery was about five minutes from home. Opened it up while I was driving and read it. And freaked out. I got home, I can remember hitting probably the most depressive state.
I dunno if that's the most depressive state, knowing where my life has gone since then, but it was my first incredibly major depressive state. I felt wow, I've just spent 10 years thinking these people are my family. I had met not just my sister and my brother, but a grandmother who I thought was my grandmother and an aunt.
So I'd spent a lot of time getting to know these people and to find out that after 10 years, these people were not actually my family. It just created a huge feeling of who am I and who can I [00:17:00] trust? So it felt like a major betrayal, but I didn't have language for any of that back then. I just had no, no words for it.
And I do remember feeling suicidal and not that I made any attempts at that, but. I remember fantasizing about what I could do or would do, and of course, having a child on the way and having another child, I was never gonna act on that. But I do remember thinking about it and that led to me finding Jigsaw in Brisbane.
And I started going along to a meeting once a month. And I guess I started hearing other people's stories at that time and listening to other adoptees, starting to sharing their stories. I was hearing how they had support many of them, and I felt dreadfully alone. I felt like my husband was well ill-equipped to understand what the hell was going on with me.
My adoptive parents were not interested in any way, shape or form, and I was in my late twenties. I didn't have [00:18:00] friends that had any capacity to understand any of this, and I didn't have any capacity to word what was going on. I didn't have the language, but I know I went into a very dark place for a long time.
And then eventually I decided that I would look for my birth father 'cause I now had his name. And so I did what I did when I went looking for my birth mother, which is I went to the phone books and I looked for his name and I ended up finding my grandmother who was living in Sydney. And I found a couple of people I think, and then I got onto her and we had an hour long conversation over the phone where she filled me in on a lot more things that I, my birth mother had never told me that basically my father was around through the whole pregnancy. He financially supported her. He thought he was the father. She told him he was. That's why I was on, his details, were on my birth, identifying information.
And then when I contacted her at 21, she contacted this man who [00:19:00] she thought was father. And once they. Missed information in there. They got married 12 months after she reached out to him and they reached out to me. They married, and then they contacted him somewhere in there. Didn't tell me any of this.
Somewhere in those 10 years, they contacted him, met up with him, and told him, you are not the father. This other man is the father. So he had also had 10 years of thinking maybe he wasn't the father yet. He, his life was based on 21 years of thinking he was the father for this child he'd never met. So he opened me.
He agreed immediately to a DNA test, welcomed me with open arms and was probably the closest I'd ever felt to feeling a sense of just love and acceptance in my life. I'd never felt that before, and that was the first time I think I felt it and it was. It wasn't even big. He would just do things like introduce me to other [00:20:00] people as his daughter. And it was almost like the simplest thing, but to me it was the hugest thing in the world.
Haley Radke: I remember when my dad, my, for the first time, did that. It is, it's huge.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah. And that got me into relationship with my two sisters. I had a sister living 15 minutes from where I lived that I didn't know about.
Because he also had two daughters and another sister that lived down in Northern New South Wales who I later became really close to and we shared a lot of time together.
Haley Radke: Do you maintain any connection to the first family that you thought was your family?
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: No. I, it's, it was very sad and I don't know if other adoptees who've been through this might relate. I have, I think I've read other people's experiences and thought, oh, that's what I did. But they kept trying to reach out to me, which was lovely of them, and I couldn't respond. I just look back now and think, [00:21:00] oh, that was so rude of me. And I kept feeling at the time I should respond. I should respond like they're good people, but I just couldn't.
So I was, now that I know about nervous systems and what happens, I was in collapse. I was in complete collapse. I couldn't bring myself to talk to them, to converse about any of it. I didn't have the words. I didn't have the language. I didn't know how to navigate any of it, and I had really no support. I really didn't have any support.
I don't know if Jigsaw had a counseling service back then, and I don't know why. If they did, why I didn't access it. I do remember trying to see a counselor at some point. It didn't last very long. It didn't. I didn't get into any kind of adoption stuff.
Haley Radke: Classic. Classic.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Are you able to like pinpoint I'm so glad you got connected into Jigsaw.
So this is a Australian organization that helps. Is it [00:22:00] all members of the constellation? Like I know they serve adoptees and first birth parents.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Oh, that's a good question. I know that they're funded specifically for forced adoption.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: That we have another organization here in Queensland called PASQ, which stands for Post-Adoption Support Queensland, and I worked with them for a period of time and they are funded for all areas of the triangle, but Jigsaw I know is specifically just funded for forced adoption.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: And definitely work with relinquishing parents, biological parents, and adoptees. Not, I don't dunno. That's a good question.
Haley Radke: Okay. Okay.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: It's one I need to find out.
Haley Radke: So you connected in with other adoptees at that time when you got connected into Jigsaw, and then when did you start like connecting all the dots for adoptee stuff.
And now, like [00:23:00] for the last several years, you've worked with adoptees as a psychotherapist and so a somatic psychotherapist. And so I know you, you come a long way from those days where you didn't even know anybody to. Can you talk about that path a little bit?
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah. Let's just get a timeline. It really helps me to have a timeline.
I'm 54 now. I was in my early thirties when all that DNA stuff was happening, and my youngest son was born at 29. So trying to do the timeline here. So over the last 20 years, yeah, so my thirties then became I was parenting again. I did two master's degrees. At uni, we built a home, we built a life together my husband and I. And I was busy, like really busy. And so this adoption stuff was happening in the background of my life in a way. It wasn't something I talked about, it wasn't something anyone else really knew was going on. [00:24:00] What I did know I would do is if I went to parties or were with friends, I would drink too much and often end up crying, which would alert me.
It alerted me eventually to there's something. There's something here, which I knew all along. There's something here I really need to delve further, even after having all of the reunions and having the information out. I hadn't really been on any kind of healing journey at that point, but through my studies, I guess I started studying and training in, even though I'd done all my academic studies at uni, my master's degrees.
It wasn't really till I started doing my post grad training in expressive therapies, which was over five years, and it was a very deep dive into my own personal world using the modalities that we were learning. And I would say that was the beginning of me starting to wake up to the relationship with my adoptive family, starting to really see what [00:25:00] was happening.
I was also, working, I ended up leaving Education Queensland where I was working for a long time as a behavior management teacher. And went into work outside of the education department in agency work and started working in child protection, and it was when I was working in child protection, I started really looking at my own childhood and recognizing that I had lived through child sexual abuse.
I didn't have a name for it. I didn't know that's what it was until I started working in that field. So I did start to gather that. I had a lot to work on. Had a lot of personal stuff to sort through. And as I came out and shared this with the, with my adoptive family, because I was abused by a cousin in my adoptive family, specifically because I was adopted as he told me, that led to, a lot of family members being very upset.
People didn't believe me. And then my brother came out and said he was also abused by the same cousin. [00:26:00] He basically was drinking himself to death because it was so unacknowledged, unsupported through the family. So not only was adoption, it wasn't okay to go and find family members. It also wasn't okay to start to talk about what actually went on behind closed doors in our family.
And I also started to see that I grew up in a family where there was domestic violence, though. It was not uncommon for mom to turn up at the breakfast table with sunglasses on, for instance. So there was a lot for me to start to process, and I was becoming aware of these things in my thirties.
I would have periods where I would distance myself from my adoptive family, but I never felt that I could ever not have contact with my adoptive family. That felt like too terrifying, but I started to see how unhealthy it was. And then in my late thirties I decided [00:27:00] not decided, but I came out basically to my husband and that relationship ended and I moved away and moved down to Northern Rivers and yeah, started to live quite a different life.
So my forties were very much about finding myself coming out. Recovering from a divorce, which was devastating, like the levels of devastation at the end of that marriage was huge. I lost my best friend and at the same time I was starting to discover like an unlived life, like more of who I was. I was away from my adoptive family now. I was away from a life that I was really conditioned to lead and I was on my own two feet in a way, and I was single parenting my youngest son, my oldest son was old enough now that. He'd gone off to uni and so my forties was again starting to do more self work. I was very, my [00:28:00] forties, I spent a lot of time looking at attachment and adoption on attachment.
And I studied a lot around parent child attachment. I did years of study in that and then I, I did years of study in adult attachment and relationships. I became an adult relationship counselor and trained in emotion-focused therapy for couples and like I started creating my own training programs around attachment.
And yeah, it was a good solid decade of really starting to try to understand adoption. Attachment through an adoption lens. And what I found through all of those years is that nobody was talking about adoption, and I had to pull together the pieces. So I touched into healing portals over those 20 years different ways, mostly through my career.
A lot of understanding was developed, but I wouldn't say I really touched into a deeper healing. Until more recent years and probably what really kicked [00:29:00] that off was joining Flourish, which as you some of your listeners would know, we talked about probably on the show, was a year of coming together with 25 other adoptees online during COVID every week for two hours, and sharing writing prompts really.
It was probably hands down one of the most healing things I've done as an adopted person was finding adoptee community and having a whole year to unravel and to hear other people say, me too. Oh my God, that's my experience was so affirming and mind blowing really, and yeah, and that led to us maintaining a lot of good friendships that we still continue to have.
And has led to me then finding a voice around advocating for adopted people, because up until that point, I [00:30:00] still hadn't found a voice. I still found, every time I spoke about it, I will get into trouble. There's this sense, and even today, if I talk about adoption, I still feel like I'm gonna get into trouble for this, or I need to limit what I say.
It's gonna upset somebody. But I do it anyway because I don't believe in secrecy and wounds fester in the realm of secrecy. And I see other adoptee people, particularly in our Flourish group, that were like 20 years younger than me doing all this deep work. And I'm like, oh, I wish that was available to me 20 years ago.
I'd be further on in my journey, but I feel like I've come a long way just in the last five years, probably since Flourish. But yeah, it's a lifelong journey. And it's not over yet.
Haley Radke: No, not over yet. Can you tell me about the importance of sovereignty [00:31:00] to you? You've got it. Somatic sovereignty is your, one of your websites.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Right. Yes. I have a few websites and yeah, somatic sovereignty, the word came to me. I was playing around with words and it's almost like I've lived into, that word was just like, yes that's what I want. That, for my, for what I'm, for, what my work offers. But I feel like since I claimed that name for my website I've deepened more and more into what does this mean? What does it mean? And I just keep getting the layers just keep shedding for me around, around sovereignty and particularly, I think sovereignty for all women is incredibly important, but particularly for adopted people, because adoption itself is coveted in, or that's not the right word, but is shrouded is, it came out of a sense of saviorism and paternalism [00:32:00] and, saviorism being an act of often goodwill, wanting to support somebody but also get recognition for that. And I think many of us as adoptees could probably not have to look very far to see whether we had, whether we grew up in a family that wanted to save us, particularly in intercountry adoption, there's that can be shrouded in saviorism.
And then paternalism is slightly different, similar but slightly different. Paternalism is that sense of, again, wanting to support, but wanting to support somebody without them having a say. And so adoption is paternalism because as a baby you don't get a say, you don't get a say about whether your name is kept.
You have your whole identity is earased by giving you a new birth certificate. Yeah, the deeper I dive into paternalism and the way [00:33:00] that adoption is structured and created, it's about a whole heap of people saying, we know better and we are going to enact laws, for your benefit without you having a say.
And this has happened in indigenous communities across the world, and it certainly happens in adoption. I guess I've been deep diving into how does that play out then in somebody's life, if that's what you came into, how does that play out? And it certainly played out in my life in terms of the ways that my adoptive parents tried to take over, in a way, parenting my child 'cause they didn't see me as fit and thought they could do a better job in a lot of ways. But then, these outer complexes can turn into inner complexes. And so yeah, I continue today to look at how does paternalism impact me? What, where are the places where sometimes I look to [00:34:00] be, to have somebody guide me and as opposed to listening to my internal world.
And sovereignty to me is the opposite of paternalism. It is the capacity to turn inward. To listen deeply to the body, to your intuition, to your instincts, and to learn to trust them. And adoptees above so many others have been taught not to trust our instincts have been taught not to follow that deep, that inner voice.
And I guess I've always been someone that did do that, at 17 saying, I'm gonna have my child, I don't care what you say. 21 going, I'm moving as far away from this support as I possibly can so I can learn to stand on my own two feet. Those are the sovereign decisions that I don't know where they came from, but I'm so glad I had them.
But that doesn't mean that's continued throughout my life. Like I, I self-sabotage all the time. [00:35:00] Alcohol has been an issue in my life and for many years in my life. And what alcohol has done for me is it keeps me quiet. It keeps me not thinking. When I go through periods of not drinking, it's like I wake up and then I start to see what's really happening.
So there are ways, I know alcohol consumption is a big one for adoptees, but there are other ways that we keep ourselves quiet and silent and not listening to ourselves is one of them. So I guess personally, I'm on a big journey around sovereignty. I'm in my fifties now, so I'm also in my perimenopausal years, which is a time when a woman, my midlife years, it's a time when a woman really comes into her power.
And for the first few years, I think I just really fought this. I didn't want to change. I didn't want my body to change. I didn't wanna put on weight, I didn't wanna have brain fog. I didn't wanna have achy joints and exhaustion. And so I started listening to the medical model and I gave up my [00:36:00] sovereignty in many ways.
And then last year, because of the medical model, I ended up under the knife of the surgeon fighting for my life because a doctor had made a mistake and during a routine test and my lung collapsed. So I came out of that experience. That was the end of June last year, and I really started to go, okay.
It's time to start trusting yourself now. Start trusting your body and to start healing from within. So yeah, I'm living the path of sovereignty, going back in throughout my life and appreciating the places where it's showed up, acknowledging the places where I didn't listen to myself. And there's been many, and moving towards like really true, authentic sense of self.
Which I think is what one of the books that I found in my thirties was Journey of the Adopted Self [00:37:00] by Betty Jean Lifton, and it's old now, but I really love that book and it really started to shape that sense of what that book is on about is really a sense of self and how adoptees really struggled to know a sense of self.
Because of our lack of biological mirror mirroring. Because of our lack of lineage. Something I've, I haven't talked about today is in my, another reunion I had in my thirties was late thirties and again more recently was finding out about my Aboriginal heritage. And so there's a whole cultural lineage that I haven't had growing up that I'm still starting to find.
And because I, the people who, if my family generation that have the stories, many of them have died. So again, I have to come back to sovereignty. I have to come back to those places and trusting those things that happen that tell me my ancestors are close, that tell me that I have Aboriginal lineage because I feel it.
You [00:38:00] certainly feel it. I always have. It's always been with me. But as an adopted person, I question it over and over again because I didn't grow up with it. And it's very easy to hear the voices of people that say you're not black enough, or you didn't grow up with it, so therefore you're not.
And those are the places where I'm not being sovereign, where I'm listening to others' voices. They cloud things. And for adoptees, I think this is our struggle a lot of the time, is to get those other voices out of the way and to really listen and to really trust and really believe the experiences that we have, the truth that we know in our bones.
It doesn't need somebody else to validate it and to start to know it, speak it, and live it. I think, as I go further in my fifties I hope to embody more of who I truly, really am as a sovereign aboriginal woman.
Haley Radke: That's powerful stuff. And I know that you help guide [00:39:00] other people to finding that. And if folks are like vibing with you, they can check that out. I know you've got lots of stuff, lots of opportunities, even if we're far away to learn from you. So let's switch to do our recommended resources if that's okay.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Okay, sure.
Haley Radke: We're recording this just a little bit out from when it's airing, but hot off the press is this new article by Lynn Zubov.
I don't know if you've seen this. Lynn is a first mother and she's been conducting research on adoptees, first mothers and first fathers, and she's just published her results. In the Journal of Social Sciences, the article is called Long-Term Mental Health Effects of Mother [00:40:00] Child Separation Due to Adoption, and I'm gonna link to it. It's open source, so anyone can read this and read the data. And there's some caveats on her study, which let me just flip to the back here. There's some caveats based on how she found her sample and those kind of things. So I'll just flag that for folks. But it's very illuminating, especially about our risks, both adoptees and relinquishing parents, our suicide risks. And yeah. Have you seen this article, Monique?
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah, I saw it last week. I think I, I came across it on Facebook and immediately we posted it for people to start to become aware of. But yeah, the statistics are very sobering.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah. So [00:41:00] this is important work and we have to support the people in our community that are doing these kinds of things for us. Like we've talked so many times on the show about who's doing the research on us and we need proof of these things. And so thank you Lynn for that. And of course I will link to the Flourish book that you, you mentioned gathering with the Flourish community for a year and there's a whole book about your experiences and the group that put that together was so kind to donate the proceeds to Adoptees On.
Amazingly and I'm sure we have a, I'm sure we have an episode about it too, that I'll
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes.
Haley Radke: I'll link for folks.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: I do you remember that.
Haley Radke: Yes.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Yes. What do you wanna recommend to us?
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Those are two fabulous resources. I have a list of things. Can I give three? [00:42:00]
Haley Radke: I guess. Only ' cause I like you so much.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Oh, that feeling's very mutual. Thank you. I would say the book, if you are looking for a book to get started, Adoption Unfiltered is, before we used to have The Primal Wound as the recommended book which is still great, but somewhat outdated a little bit now. And I think Adoption Unfiltered is the new version of the Primal Wound.
And it, and what I love about it so much is that it covers the stories of the triangle, so adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents. And it just, it's a great all rounder for everybody to read. So that would be a reading recommendation. I also have had great feedback around I have a, an ebook that I created that you can download off my website. It's free, it doesn't cost anything. And it was, I [00:43:00] created this during that time where I was trying to bring together the research on attachment and nervous system work together with adoption. Because I just felt like there's a big missing gap out there that nobody's talking about. And so I created this handbook and it's, you can download that for free off my website, healingadoptiontrauma.com.
And my third recommendation, and this is my big one, is I think the best resource we have is nature. I would say for adoptees spending time in nature for me has been one of the most healing things I can do. Just watching the seasons, interacting with trees, moss leaves, getting a sense that we are actually held by this mother earth and that, whilst I had two mothers, I didn't really receive [00:44:00] any of the nurturing mothering that I would've liked to have received.
When I really am in need in that of that, I'll go to nature and just lie on her. Feel her talk to her. Listen to her. Yeah. That's probably my biggest recommendation.
Haley Radke: We, we never talked about this, but I heard you share about sand trays in another episode.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes.
Haley Radke: And you have lots of photos of them on your Instagram account. Which we'll also link to in the show notes, but when you were talking in another interview about people putting their hands in the sand. And sometimes they might start to get weepy right away. I, it just, as you were describing it, I was like, oh, I would just love to put my [00:45:00] hands on some sand right now.
And for me I'm like, that's nature connected and anyway. If we had more time, we could talk more about
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes. That's a whole nother episode.
Haley Radke: You, yes. You got, you have to go to Monique's websites because she's an expert in all kinds of different modalities, and we've talked about so many different styles of therapy on this show over the years, and I love that you're a somatic psychotherapist. So these, all these embodied, healing activities. And I think that really helps us connect because we've had this severance from our mothers.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes.
Haley Radke: Which I think disconnects our like mind from our body and it's taken me years to build any sort of connection back and so
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Exactly.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes. Yeah. I would say the two [00:46:00] most profound modalities that I've studied, and I've studied a lot of different modalities, would be somatic experiencing trauma training. Is a three year trauma training and sand play therapy, which is, there is no three year training, it's just year after year after year after year training in sand play.
It's a depth modality and it's interesting. These two don't get talked about a whole lot in the world of adoption and I'm not overly sure why, but as you just said, healing, the disconnect between mind and body is probably the biggest wound that I feel like I'm still constantly learning to be with, like learning to be with my body, learning to be with the what's happening internally.
It just continues to keep unraveling how deep that can go and there's lots of ways to do that. We can do that through touch and in turn, introspection, turning [00:47:00] in and following and noticing what's happening inside. And we can do that through movement and all sorts of ways. So yeah, the mind body split is particularly for those in adoption wound, and the other one is sand play therapy, and the reason I've been drawn for over 20 years to sand play therapy is that it profoundly reaches into the preverbal trauma. And I don't know, another modality that reaches so deeply into preverbal trauma than sand play therapy. It's. primarily a nonverbal modality, so you don't need to find words.
And as I feel like I've said numerous times, as I look back over my journey in my twenties and my thirties, I didn't have words to say what was going on. And I only found that in my late forties when I came into relationship with other adoptees. And so I have been doing sand play over those years.
It profoundly gives you a picture of what's happening on the [00:48:00] inside. On the outside, it's like having a dream that we have at nighttime in 3D, but it's showing us what our internal world looks like, so it takes our mind out of the way. Access is our limbic system where trauma is held and images appear that are very unexpected, that we don't expect to come.
In the protected space of the sand tray and the sand play therapeutic relationship. And over a series of those images and trays being created, we see a pattern, and I've been through this myself. We see a pattern of healing start to emerge. And I would say for me, that's where my sovereignty really started to kick in. That's where the word sovereignty came. I'm continuously going back to those trays and looking at them and more wisdom just keeps coming through and I continue to do my own trays every week as much as I can to allow my unconscious to speak to me. [00:49:00] Yeah, so that's a little bit about those, but you can read more and find out more on my socials and my website.
Haley Radke: Listen, I almost ordered a bag sand after listening to that. To one of those conversations about that. Perfect. Okay. We will let folks do their own digging into hearing more about that from you and where can we do that?
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: As you said, I have a couple of websites and then they're all under slight reconstruction at all times, so just know if there's things missing on there that's because it's under reconstruction. So I have one called healingadoptiontrauma.com. I haven't touched that one for a little while. And then I have another one I created a couple years ago called Somatic Sovereignty. So it's somatic-sovereignty.com. And the one that I've been working on since about December after my operation and coming into recovery, I've taken a sabbatical, had a [00:50:00] year off or it'll be a year coming up in June.
And the last three months of that year has been diving into a new iteration, which is more focusing on sand play somatics. And so my new website is called moniquepangari.com, which is my name.
Haley Radke: Perfect.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah. So you'll see different iterations of me across those three different websites, but that's moniquepangari.com is my latest one.
Haley Radke: Okay. We will link to all of those things and your Instagram in the show notes so folks can find you. Thank you so much, Monique. What a delight to get to talk to you today.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Thank you so much. I can't tell you what a privilege it's to be on your show, on this podcast that literally saved my life. I would say it was this podcast. That slowly started entering into my consciousness. I couldn't listen to one every day. I couldn't listen to one every week, but I would always keep coming back throughout my thirties and [00:51:00] forties listening to this podcast. I dunno, how long have you been going? Maybe not my thirties, but certainly my forties. Yeah.
Haley Radke: It's 10 years.
Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yes.
Haley Radke: Thank you.
I might repeat myself a little bit, but I'm feeling big feelings during every interview so far this year, and a huge piece of that is looking at my calendar and thinking, oh my goodness, it is coming up on a full 10 years of this podcast, and when I'm recording this, it is the 10th anniversary of coming up with the idea for Adoptees On, and it was March, 2016, I started brainstorming, [00:52:00] what podcasts do I like? What don't I like? How do I make sure I make a really good show that I would wanna listen to? And really, I wanted to hear from fellow adoptees their real true, unvarnished, no sugar coating stories, and that's how it started out. And when I had the idea for the healing series and to talk to therapists who were also adoptees, I don't even know where that idea came from, but I just think, thank goodness that I thought of that, or someone prompted me to start in on that. I don't even know, but I have learned so much from [00:53:00] every therapist that has been on the show. And what's so cool about having Monique on is to think that there are so many adoptee therapists in this world all over the globe, and even if we're just looking at our own little bubble, wherever we are.
There are other people doing the same work We are in all the countries. What a, I don't know. I don't know if I'm getting my point across, but I just felt grateful to know that it's not just, I'm not a therapist, it's not just me out here, podcasting, there's so many adoptee podcasts you can listen to now.
It's not just Monique out there therapizing. There's so many adoptee therapists. We could always use more. We could always [00:54:00] use more, but there's so many more folks who are really knowledgeable in this space. If you think about just. How far we've come in the last 10 years. Oh. I'm so proud of us. Good job adoptee community.
And I know it just keeps expanding. It just will keep expanding. Our voices will continue to get louder and to be heard. Perhaps we will gain that sovereignty that Monique was talking about with us today. Yeah, I'm just feeling super grateful today. I don't know if you know this, but I don't think I've shown this, but in my office where Spencer's snoring right now, I don't know if you can hear him, but I have a whole wall in front of me.
Part of it's covered with audio foam 'cause audio nerd forever. And the top half is full of [00:55:00] cards and photos from listeners who've sent their, good thoughts and kind words to my PO Box and I maxed out last year. And so I started on the wall, oops. To the left of me by my glasses collection.
And anyway, I'm feeling the gratitude, I'm feeling the love. I stayed up late to record this. And so I have, I don't know, those late night feelings and whenever I'm really tired, I just look up and think, oh yeah, that's who I'm doing it for. So if you ever sent me a note, you know it's up on my wall here and I can see it.
I thank you for listening. I, am feeling so grateful. And if you're curious about my other project On Adoption that the wheels are [00:56:00] still going, I'm still working on that. And you can always look for information about that on the On Adoption Instagram, if you sign up for my newsletter adopteeson.com/newsletter.
We have updates coming out there and i'm so proud of all that work that's happening over there. Okay. That's enough rambling. That's enough. Late night rambling. It's probably not late night when you're listening to this. You're probably out doing something productive, like walking your dog or going for a run or doing your dishes.
Good job. You. Thank you so much for listening to adoptee voices. Truly. I feel so grateful that you're here. Let's talk again soon.
