65 [Healing Series] Finding Meaning
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/65
Haley Radke: This show is listener supported.
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're talking about finding meaning in our lives, even when we think of ourselves as a mistake and perhaps without a purpose. I also want to give you a heads up. We do discuss suicide in this episode. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Pamela Cordano. Welcome back, Pam.
Pam Cordano: Thank you.
Haley Radke: Pamela is a fellow adoptee and psychotherapist who specializes in helping you to discover meaning in your life. So that is the bio I have had for you for quite a while. But I am curious, what does it mean to you? Meaning in your life?
Pam Cordano: Yes. Meaning is my favorite subject and to me it's almost like the background music that's playing in my heart all the time. And this wasn't always the case. I can tell you how this happened, like why meaning became so important to me. But I can't do it justice unless we talk for three hours, but I can tell you the story.
I had a terrible infancy. I didn't connect with my adoptive parents. I was an only child. I was just holding my breath my whole childhood. I enjoyed college. I met my husband in the freshman dorm and I had some good experiences, but basically all the way until I was in my mid-forties, I think that I was really in conservation or self-preservation mode, and I didn't even know it because I think that I was just hurt and traumatized from my history and from things feeling hard that I really didn't know another way of being.
And so something really huge happened in 2010 and what that was, and you're gonna have to put your seatbelts on cuz this is a crazy thing I'm gonna say, but I had a therapist who was really dear to me. He was like the therapist for therapists and my friends, my colleagues and I all saw him and he looked like Robert Redford and he just seemed like a guru almost.
And he committed suicide. He jumped off a bridge, and this was mid-November of 2010, and it was so shocking to me that he did that. I didn't see it coming and there had always been a part of me, I think about our adoptee community and how prevalent suicide is. And I've met a lot of adoptees who have had suicidal feelings, even if they've never acted on them.
And I would say I've had that my whole life, where staying alive and investing in life felt difficult and hard and the thing I would do on my better days, and on my harder days or when I was really triggered or when I'd have a fight with my husband or something awful, I would feel like, what is the point? And I would feel like my life force would go out of me really quickly and I think that's an adoptee thing. At least I've heard that a lot of people say that kind of a thing.
So there were times when staying alive was difficult. I never really got to the point of actually in any way contemplating suicide, but I've always had a feeling that living is difficult and it's just, for me, it's just hard to live without having that support of generations and generations of my own biology and being split at the root, like the book title says.
So anyway, my therapist kills himself. And then, let's see, four days later I went to Esalen in Big Sur, which is like a place therapists go to get continuing education units and we take cool classes there. So I was in this group and there was a man in the group who was an AIDS doctor from New York, and I told the group, we all had a chance to introduce ourselves, and I said that I was in a really traumatized, not good place because my therapist had just killed himself and that my goal for the weekend was really just to breathe. Yeah, I didn't really have any other goals to learn anything or anything like that.
So we had to partner up with somebody, and I partnered up with this AIDS doctor, and he told me that his father had killed himself when he was one, and that no one had talked about it, and it was just called an accident.
And so there was this similarity in how he grew up not really knowing what had happened. And then he found himself going to medical school and being an AIDS doctor, and he started putting it together that here he was as an adult, trying to save the lives of mostly young men and it had everything to do with his father and trying to save his father who he couldn't save.
So we connected and I thought to myself, well, here's my therapist who takes the path of suicide. And then here's this doctor who lost his father and has this brilliant career and worked so hard at saving people's lives, and he's so invested in life himself. So I was just comparing the two as two kinds of directions. One's going into life, and one was going out of life. And I recognize both of them inside of me.
The doctor emailed me a link to the California AIDS Ride where people ride their bikes from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for people with AIDS and for research and things like that. And so I felt like I had to do it, and I'm not an athlete and I trained for about seven months riding my bike up to a hundred miles a day.
And that the ride itself was 545 miles, and we rode seven days in a row with an average of 80 miles per day. Some days longer, some days shorter. And I've never done anything like this in my life, and it was brutal. It was grueling to be on my bike training and doing the ride. It was grueling, but for me, it was about two things.
It was about deciding I wasn't going to do what my therapist did. I was going to actually do what this doctor did. I was going to move more and more deeply into life itself. And then the other thing that was just crazy that I didn't expect was it was my first time really putting myself out there to raise money and to do something that was going to benefit all these people that I didn't even know.
It was really for others and that was really, as an adoptee who was angry and self-preservational and conserving my own energy, it was really new to open my heart to people I didn't even know and give to them. So that ride down the coast changed everything. It's like it broke something open in me, and this is going to be too long to even explain.
But it was after that I discovered Viktor Frankl who wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning about his three years imprisoned in the Holocaust, and how he studied his own relationship with life itself when he lost everything. He lost his pregnant wife, he lost his parents. He lost all but one sibling. He lost his dignity, his freedom, his possessions, his future as far as he knew, and he still found so many ways that life was meaningful. Even though he lost everything.
And somehow that really resonated with me after the AIDS ride, I started to think about myself and all of us, everybody, because I work with people with cancer and I work with people who have had terrible tragedies change their lives completely. Deaths of children and just terrible things.
So I started to realize what Viktor Frankl said was that, even when we've lost everything, we still have access to the attitude we take toward life's limitations. And I thought about the AIDS doctor. He put his pain into service; and my therapist, he put his pain into himself, really, in ending his life and freeing himself that way, I guess.
There was something about service and moving beyond my own self into something outside of myself and serving something outside of myself. And to me that's what meaning is. And I feel like on a psychological level, on a spiritual level, I think that's what makes us feel better.
So I've studied Viktor Frankl a lot, and I started a group 10 years ago for adults who had terrible problems, like stage IV cancer and MS and paralysis and bereavement. We would meet once a week and we would cultivate, Viktor Frankl style, the things that were still meaningful to them and that they still had access to and ways they could transcend their own selves in service of the world despite whatever they had gone through that had obliterated the life that they once knew.
And I didn't charge them anything for the group. We were just trying this. And then we kept meeting and now it's been 10 years and the same group is still meeting every Monday and we're still working at this. And it's the happiest group of people I know.
It's incredible. So we've had a couple people die who were part of the original group, and then we've added more people in. So now we have eight people and three of the original five in the group. We do service projects and we read really cool books together and we look at opportunities to address things happening in their lives in ways that are more open-hearted and more expansive and less conservational and self-protective.
And I feel, as an adoptee, my relationship with meaning has opened a portal to a whole different perspective of what's possible. It's the thing I rely on more than anything really.
Haley Radke: I'm so moved by that whole story. You've talked to us about Viktor Frankl before and I love hearing what has inspired you to move forward into life. The impact it's had, like that ripple has started so many good things for other people as well.
Pam Cordano: Yeah. And then they have started these other new things for other people. It's crazy really. The ripple effect is just amazing. Like when we start to really think beyond ourselves, which I couldn't have done before.
I didn't have access to it. I just was too frightened and too angry, I think, to even believe that there could be another way of living.
Haley Radke: If you had to make a generalized observation, broad-sweeping strokes, I know, about adopted people, what do you think keeps us most stuck in this area and not able to see the bigger picture of meaning in life?
Pam Cordano: For me, it was just feeling really hurt and even disoriented in the life I was in. There's so many adaptations we have to make to our new families and to the world at large when we don't have that foundation behind us that's intact. It just takes so much energy. And then the trauma, and for me, there was a lot of pain of feeling like I didn't get along with my adoptive parents, so I was just consumed with my own, I don't want to say drama in a demeaning way, but my life felt dramatic, like, from fighting with my parents and huge battles and I had addictions, and everything just feeling really difficult and chaotic, like an inner chaos. So to me it was like I couldn't afford to really think about other people.
And I did that enough with just being adaptive and trying not to get rejected again. So it was like a defense, it wasn't authentic necessarily. It wasn't grounded. It was authentic. I was authentically a nice person, but it wasn't grounded because I didn't have my bearings yet.
So isn't it like Maslow's pyramid? People who don't have enough food to eat aren't going to be thinking about self-development or, what would you call it, healing the wounds. It's no, we need some food. So it's like that. Maybe this had to come later for me.
Haley Radke: I think about that sometimes, working in this space, and about how sometimes it does feel a little bit like why can't we just suck it up?
Because we do have food and we have warm houses, or cool air-conditioned ones if you live somewhere that's not Canada. And, as adults, a lot of us have gone on and gotten married or had children of our own and started new families.
Like, why isn't that enough and is it selfish to think about all of these things that are all of our baggage and stuff? I don't know if I'm taking us down a rabbit trail.
Pam Cordano: No, I think that's what I was saying at the beginning. I don't think it was self-indulgence that made my life feel hard to me, like I was a dramatic person or a self-indulgent person, or even a selfish person.
I think that I was just traumatized and overwhelmed by things that didn't seem as overwhelming to other people as they were to me. So I think it was honest, but this is where the culture doesn't see us as being traumatized, they see us as being lucky and fine. It's really hard internally to make sense of the ways we're not fine.
And to have a place to put it. We don't get that cultural support to help us become more fine. It just gets walled off and we have to deal with it on our own. So I think it's really legit, it's just that the culture doesn't, so it's easier for us not to.
Haley Radke: Fair enough, fair enough. You had a really huge event happen with the loss of your therapist in this very shocking way that's like this wake-up call kind of thing. But what about those of us who haven't had this big experience but yet are still feeling these things you've been describing, like not really knowing what the point is or just feeling, I don’t know, as you're talking about this, I just feel like this sense of being lethargic, right? Like you're just kind of existing, right? Just kind of existing, but there's no zest. I dunno.
Pam Cordano: There's no organizing push forward or something like that. Is that what you mean? I think growing and healing takes a ton of courage, and I'm a huge fan of going out of one's comfort zone.
Like the people who flew to Berkeley to do our healing retreat, I think of them as being so brave because they didn't know us. They didn't know what to expect. They didn't know each other and they got so much out of their own willingness to be brave and to try something that was an unknown.
And even calling a therapist can be scary. Because it hurts so much when we're not attuned to, when we're misattuned to by people. But I think there's lots of ways to heal and grow and experience oneself in new ways. It's not always therapy for some people. For some people it's surfing or it's riding a bike or playing an instrument.
I guess we're all different. For me, I have felt lonely and isolated, and I have yearned for a sense of belonging. And so I have tried really hard to have experiences where I can work at that. Other adoptees might have different focuses.
For me, it was about feeling like a misfit. I don't belong. A ton of shame. How do I feel like I belong on this planet? That my life makes sense? That I deserve to be here? That I have something to offer the world? That I'm not just a mistake that shouldn't have been here in the first place? Like, how do I move into being behind my life?
And not very long ago I found out that Viktor Frankl's original book was titled Say Yes To Life, but his editors made him change it to Man’s Search for Meaning because it was more, I don't know, academic sounding or something, but he was just writing about how to say yes to life. And I think that what I wanted to find was a “yes,” so that my “no” could just be quiet.
Haley Radke: You know what the other thing I find really inspiring about this whole deal is that you were in your forties, and I think that so many people that I have talked to who are just realizing that adoption has had an impact on their life are in their fifties, some in their sixties, and I feel like I'm on the young spectrum.
I'm just about 35 when we're recording this. That to be exploring this healing and all these kinds of topics that we're speaking about, but there's something so freeing and hearing that you were already in your forties when you woke up to this and it's there's still so much ahead.
Pam Cordano: Yes, there's so much ahead. I would never want to go back in time to my youth because I was so unhappy and I was so confused. And I'm almost 53, and I have this idea that my life is just going to keep getting better and better because I feel more and more of a yes to my life.
To life itself. Not just my life, but to life. And so that makes me feel like I feel free in a way that I didn't use to.
Haley Radke: What would you say to someone who's hearing us talk about this and it just feels too big, too overwhelming? This is a huge mindset shift.
Pam Cordano: Right. So what I say to people who I meet in my office who have stage IV cancer, or who are dying, or who are paralyzed, or who lost their child and none of that can ever change is that we can start by finding little things that we connect with that give us a sense of vitality inside of us.
Let's go back to Viktor Frankl. From the prison camps he appreciated sunsets. That's incredible and we can do that too. Appreciating something that's beautiful and doing things we enjoy that make us feel more alive and more connected, and telling stories that mean something to us.
Like the story I told you about the AIDS ride or working with attitudes that we believe in when we're having a hard time. Like for me, the attitude of curiosity. Curiosity is an attitude. So when I'm working and if I start to feel tired or disinterested or disengaged with a client, I know the first thing I need to do is get curious.
And I get curious by getting into my eyes and looking at them with fresh eyes and seeing them. They're here. It's a present moment, being in the direct experience, and then my curiosity keeps me really interested and then I'm more there and then magic starts to happen.
There's all kinds of things that are available to all of us all the time. And one thing that Viktor Frankl says that I love is that meaning is everywhere for all of us. And it isn't that meaning goes away, that we don't have meaningful lives, it's that we become disconnected ourselves from meaning.
And that's a really hopeful thought to me. And I believe it because then it's like it's accessible to all of us, and all we need to do is really tap into it, which is what I love to teach my clients to do, and myself.
Haley Radke: That's a light bulb moment for me, Pam, because as I'm telling you, oh, what do you want to say to these sad people who are in their fifties and sixties who think they haven't done anything and they're stuck and blah, blah, blah.
There's meaning already. We have to wake up to it.
Pam Cordano: Right. It's right there and it's everywhere. It's where you are right now all over the place. Are you in your house right now? So you have two little boys sleeping, is that right?
Haley Radke: Yes. We're recording this in the evening. They are asleep, yes.
Pam Cordano: And your husband's there?
Haley Radke: Yes.
Pam Cordano: Do you have any animals?
Haley Radke: I do. I have a little dog, Lucy.
Pam Cordano: Oh, you have a dog named Lucy. That's so cute. Yeah. And you have friends all over the world?
Haley Radke: I do.
Pam Cordano: And you have a trip ahead that's special and meaningful to you to San Francisco?
Haley Radke: Yes, I do. And I'm gonna get to meet you.
Pam Cordano: Yep. We're gonna meet, and there's stars, and there's the moon and the clouds and rain. And there's just stuff everywhere.
Haley Radke: I think you meant snow.
Pam Cordano: Oh, snow. Okay. Life is seriously like a buffet. It's just there's stuff everywhere. We just have to train ourselves to see it and know it and tap into it and connect with it.
Little bits of meaning lead to bigger chunks of meaning and bigger access to meaning. We don't have to feel all excited about life right now, we can just move into it bit by bit.
Haley Radke: Oh, I love that. And you've given us just our little beginner steps to explore this a little more. I think that's just perfect.
If you were gonna recommend, wait, let me guess. Would you recommend that we read Viktor Frankl's book Man’s Search for Meaning?
Pam Cordano: I would, and when you read it, here's the thing, here's the adoptee's take on Viktor Frankl's book. It's a short book. It's in two parts. Part one is his experience and part two is his theories.
And it's written for laypeople. It's totally readable. And he wrote the book in 11 days, right after he got out of the camps. And what's so cool as an adoptee is, people say, oh my gosh, the first part of his book is so depressing, it's so brutal. Yes, it is. But if you the adoptee like me the adoptee, if we read it looking for these little treasures we're going to find in the first part, that's what the whole thing is about.
He's not writing the first part to say boo-hoo, look what happened to me. He's writing it to say, look what I discovered in one of the worst aspects of being human. Look what I found. And then he teaches us how to find it too. So I find his whole book just miraculous. A lot of people say that his book is one of the 10 most influential books ever written.
It's incredible. So yeah, it's five bucks at the paper paperback store. It's easy.
Haley Radke: So good. Is there anything else that you would recommend as we explore this topic of meaning? Any other books or resources or anything?
Pam Cordano: Yeah, I write about this on my website and I spell it out maybe more articulately. My website has a section on meaning where I break it down and talk about a really cool clinical trial they did with advanced cancer patients, connecting them to Viktor Frankl's work with meaning.
And it was an incredible clinical trial where people who really were done because they were dying, they got a new lease on their life and they became less anxious, less depressed, less despairing, more connected, and really into their life, even though they were dying.
And so it's a wonderful clinical trial that I describe on my website that is really special to me. It's so special to me. I flew to New York to meet the guy who spearheaded this clinical trial. I was like, I have to meet this guy and work with him because I loved his work so much and I felt if these people dying of cancer can do it, then we adoptees can do it too.
That's how I felt.
Haley Radke: Okay, I'm gonna link to that for sure in the show notes. Oh, that sounds so interesting. Speaking of meaning and experiences and all of those good things, you have two different events coming up that I want you to tell everybody about.
Pam Cordano: Yeah. The first one is that Anne Heffron and I are doing adoptee retreats in Berkeley, California. We have one coming up in July, one in November.
The first one that we had in February this year was just a wild success. It was off the hook. I couldn't have predicted how amazing the experience would be. We have 10 adoptees, the two of us, and we just work like mad for four days to have breakthroughs in our healing process and to really utilize the power of a group to magnify a healing experience.
We're taking that to New York and London in January.
And then in October of this year, and in April of next year, a colleague of mine named Patty, who's a Jungian analyst, she and I are leading a group of 10 women on the Camino de Santiago in Spain for a healing pilgrimage to go and experience little ancient towns and walk for eight days in a row, and then meet up with an artist and integrate our experiences.
And the first one got booked immediately and now we're booking for April of 2019. So that's not adoptee-specific, but it's for women between the ages of 40 and 90.
Haley Radke: Wow, that sounds incredible and I bet it's gonna fill up fast. So if we would like to get in touch with you about either of those, where's the best place?
Pam Cordano: My email, pcordano@comcast.net.
Haley Radke: Perfect. I will link to that, as well, in the show notes on adopteeson.com. Thank you so much, Pam, for talking us through meaning. I can tell it's just so dear to you.
Pam Cordano: Thank you. It is. It's my thing.
Haley Radke: So good. Thank you.
If you are finding the Adoptees On podcast valuable, I want to invite you today to partner with me. I have monthly partners from all over the world who stand with me and help support the production costs of bringing you this show every single week. Adopteeson.com/partner has the details for that. Thank you so much for your generosity.
Also, I want to let you know that my trip to San Francisco is coming up. As Pam and I mentioned briefly in the show today, we get to meet in real life. I'm so excited. And so that's Sunday, May 20th. Anne Heffron is going to be teaching a Write or Die class, and we are going to have a meet-up later on in the evening for podcast listeners.
So I'm gonna be there. Pam is also gonna be there. I would love to invite you to come and meet up with us, hang out just a couple hours of getting to know each other in real life. If you're going to come meet me in San Francisco, adopteeson.com/events, as well as our Facebook page on the events tab, has all the details for you there.
I would love it if you would come. Please come. I'm coming all the way from Canada, so it's only fair, right? That you drive a little ways. It's fine. It's fine. It's good. I have goosebumps. I'm so excited. When Pam texted me to tell me she had booked a hotel room and she was coming to meet me, I cried. I literally started crying. I was so happy. So please come. You can be in on that big hug. Big group hug.
And lastly, I just want to ask if you would share the show with someone. Adopteeson.com has all the links to all of our show notes, all of our episodes, all the places that you can download and find the show.
And what if you share it with just one person that you think might be struggling a little bit with finding purpose in their life? I think that listening to Pam talk about meaning and just the simple little things that we can look around for in our life and say, wow, this is so valuable. My life does have meaning.
I think it would be an encouragement to them. So share the show with just one friend that you think might like to listen to this today. Thank you. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
