65 [Healing Series] Finding Meaning

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/65

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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.

63 [Healing Series] Triggered Triage Kit

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/63

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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 tackle something so many of us deal with: What do you do when you get triggered? Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Pamela Cordano. Welcome, Pam.

Pamela Cordano: Thanks, Haley.

Haley Radke: Pamela is a fellow adoptee and a psychotherapist who specializes in helping you to discover meaning in your life. And today you're going to help us with: we get triggered all the time, so you're going to help us with a triggered triage kit. I love that.

Pam Cordano: A triggered triage kit, what every adoptee needs.

Haley Radke: Yeah, how much do you charge for that? Because I would pay a lot of money–

Pam Cordano: A lot of money!

Haley Radke: –to carry that around with me.

Pam Cordano: We need special purses with bling or whatever. Man-purses with bling. Everybody can have a purse, A trigger triage kit.

Haley Radke: So before we talk about the kit, which is awesome, can you just tell us what does it even mean to get triggered? We see and hear that word all the time. It's like a buzzword now, “getting triggered”.

Pam Cordano: The thing is, we all know what it is, right? Because we experience it. It's really just overwhelm. It could even be trauma. Our system just gets lit up like a Christmas tree with too many lights on it, and it's more than we can handle. And so we get overwhelmed or unable to really tolerate what we're feeling. And we often have our pattern ways that we deal with being triggered. Some of us get panicky and anxious, and some of us go toward addictions, and some of us get kind-of sleepy and disengaged, or disassociated, and we all have our ways that we deal with being triggered that we probably all know, to some degree.

Haley Radke: Okay, I think I've had all of those. Plus stomach issues. Lots of stomach issues for me.

Pam Cordano: Yeah. Sometimes I think that we don't even quite catch the moment it happens until we're fully into it, and then we're like, ‘oh my gosh,’ and we're overwhelmed, and we're triggered. It takes practice, and it takes maybe living more and more years to really get good at identifying when it happens, so that we can catch it sooner.

Haley Radke: Okay. I'm just like, ‘Okay, I need to figure this out. How do I catch it sooner?’ Okay. So last night I was reading a book and my favorite genre is psychological thrillers, pretty much. I almost am always reading one, and I don't know if you read much of those, but I'd say about 10% of them have some form of an adopted person showing up to exact revenge on their birth family–

Pam Cordano: Oh my gosh.

Haley Radke: And you don't find that out till a little later on. Yeah. Nice. What a nice picture.

Pam Cordano: You read this out of choice? Before you go to bed?

Haley Radke: Well, it's only about 10%, I would say, so, you know, most of the time it's okay. But last night I was about halfway through the book and I started feeling a little suspicious, so I went to the end, because I don't like surprises anyway. It takes a lot to surprise me, I would say. I don't know why I enjoy thrillers so much, it doesn't make sense, I know. But I went to the end and I find this out, this is an adopted person who is coming to obliterate her family. And I just got so mad. Yeah. And so I was trying to sleep and I couldn't, of course, because all the things: my heart was racing, and my stomach was in knots, and I wanted to break my Kobo, and it's like this heightened response to something that shouldn't make me, I don't know, I feel like it shouldn't make me that angry–

Pam Cordano: Wait, wait. But who's that saying that it shouldn't make you that angry? That voice is quite suspicious. Who is that?

Haley Radke: It’s me, my inside voice! I don't know.

Pam Cordano: Okay, so can I interrupt this, bring up something about what you just said? How we talk to ourselves when we get triggered is really important. And you and I have talked about this before on your show about having that internal adult that talks to us. So when we're triggered, if we have a voice that comes in and starts to criticize us, that says, “Oh you shouldn't be this upset,” or “You shouldn't be this triggered,” or “What's wrong with you?” Then we're just adding insult to injury when our system is hyper-aroused, and it's super uncomfortable on a physical and emotional level. So how we talk to ourselves with our triggers is something we can learn to do differently. With help. I learned it in therapy.

Haley Radke: Okay. I need to learn how to do that, because I often do have that inner talk, like, ‘Why is this thing that no one else seems to be affected by pushing me over the edge?’ And the other thing that's happened quite frequently, I haven't talked too much about this, but I'm in a little bit of a situation with my church. I would say they probably feel everything is resolved on their side, and I am doing my best to get to that point, but every time we go, in the service now, I really pick up on any time the word “orphan” is mentioned, or the word “adoption” or anything about blood or family, there's these key words, right? And even though in context what's being presented in the service doesn't necessarily have anything to do with my situation, or even with adoptees in general, it's those things plus this conflict I'm having, then the whole rest of the service I'm just like, ‘Yep, this is what happens.’

Pam Cordano: Okay, so I know you're not my client and we're not doing therapy right now at all, but if you were my client, I would ask you to just pause. Because both examples, from reading a story about an adoptee killing their birth family, and then this example with the church, and these words, and the way that we adoptees have an experienced understanding of these words which is different from how they might be talked about at church. These are two huge examples of triggers. I don't know if listeners even listening to this might be like, ‘Whoa!’ and overwhelmed already, you know what I mean?

So actually the first tool in the triage kit is pausing. When we start to notice that something's going wrong in our systems, like we've read a story that's really triggering or upsetting to us, or we're hearing something that we're not expecting to hear, but we hear it and it triggers us. As soon as we start to notice that physiological hyperarousal –like that's what I was feeling when you were sharing the examples– the first thing to do is to try to learn how to pause. Some people call it “the sacred pause”. It's a pause to try to take a good look at what's actually happening in the moment, and to get one's bearings so that they can even know how to start breaking it up into little, more bite-sized pieces, to even figure out what to do.

Haley Radke: So what does that look like when I am, say, sitting in a service and this is happening? What does the pause look like? Does that mean I exit?

Pam Cordano: The more we can start to slow our awareness down –this is mindfulness– and pay attention to what's happening inside of us in the moment. If you were to really break it into a slow motion kind of thing, even if you're already triggered, you might notice your heart's speeding faster, or that your body's gotten kind-of firm, or that your muscles are tensing in resistance to what's being said. Or you might feel a fight-or-flight feeling like you want to get out of there.

And all of this, with practice, can be observed before a decision is made about what to do with anything. So if you were really, really overwhelmed, it might be the best thing for you to quietly get up and exit, because it's just too much. As we learn to bear sensations in our bodies, either with the help of a therapist, or with a meditation practice, or a yoga practice, we become more and more comfortable handling more and more reactions that are physiological and stem from trauma and overwhelm. And that's where we become more able to make choices about what to do next. Because if we're not used to this intensity, these feelings in our body, we might just be used to cutting off our awareness of our bodies, and not even really know what's going on until we're really overwhelmed to the point we have to maybe just go in our rooms and shut the door. Or for other people it might be, like, engaging in some vindictive behavior or whatever. We go into some other action. So ideally, like if I was that little angel on your shoulder and you're in church, and on the other shoulder is the one saying, “Guy, why is this upsetting you? It's not upsetting anybody else. What's wrong with you?” So if I'm the nice little person on your shoulder, I might say, “Okay, hold on, hold on, we don't have to listen right now. Let's just take a breath and pause. What's happening right now?” And the question, “What's happening right now?” is really: “What's happening inside of you right now?”

And the answer is really about sensations, like, “My chest is tight. I'm sweating. My shoulders are super tight, my jaw is tight. I have this urge in my body to just get up and get out of here.” Answers like that would be available with enough loving asking of the self, “What's happening right now?”

And then you might say, “This, that, and this is happening.” And I might say, “Okay, let's just take a couple of breaths.” Because breathing is always good for being triggered. A couple of big breaths. And that changes things in the body and the nervous system. The shoulders can drop sometimes and you can see a bit of breathing, and even just being talked to by somebody inside yourself is helping. And we have to go bit by bit with being triggered of, ‘Can we hang in there or do we have to make a change?’ Like, a behavioral change. Like, get out of the room, or something else, depending on the situation. Put the book down, throw the book away! Put the book in the backyard until tomorrow morning and tell your husband to get rid of it.

Haley Radke: That's pretty good.

Pam Cordano: What do you think?

Haley Radke: Well, I've already calmed down, because I was breathing when you were talking me through that, and I was like, ‘Oh, I've already calmed down.’ That's good.

Okay, pausing–

Pam Cordano: What do you think it was that calmed you down? Was there a moment that you noticed something started to shift into calmer?

Haley Radke: I was doing deep breaths. So sorry for the sound on that, I'll mute it. But I was doing deep breaths and when you said, “And then your shoulders could drop,” that literally happened, my shoulders dropped back and I just felt like my whole posture was more relaxed.

Pam Cordano: Yeah. So, if we say that the first thing in the trigger triage kit is to pause, then the second thing could be to take a couple of big breaths and just oxygenate yourself. And then to ask the question, with a really kind voice, of, “What's happening right now?” and trying to notice what's happening, even in a sensation way, because the sensations are the most honest answer. Our brains could start saying, ‘Oh my God, that woman is such a jerk. I can't stand her! She always does this, blah, blah, blah!’ but that's not gonna get us anywhere.

But if we say to ourselves, ‘What's happening right now?’ and we check inside, ‘Okay, I feel like I'm gonna throw up,’ or ‘I feel like I'm gonna pass out,’ or whatever things might be happening inside of us, if we have a kind voice asking, then our response has a chance to be listened to. And then now we're relating to ourselves in a way that a mother or father might relate to a child in a loving way.

Haley Radke: That feels peaceful.

Pam Cordano: That's good. Problem solved!

Haley Radke: Yeah, I'm good! But this is my recounting of the triggering moment, it's not necessarily the moment.

Pam Cordano: Right. So there's more, so we could go on and say more things about the trigger triage kit.

Haley Radke: What would you do next?

Pam Cordano: Well, something we talked about a lot at the adoptee retreat with Anne and with the participants, was we talked about how there's two different networks in the brain. One network is called the default network, and it's just the same stuff we already think and know, that's based in fear and based in our previous experiences in the world. It kind-of goes around and around in circles. It's just recycling what we already know, it's not open to new information. And so our default network is really that voice that says to you like, ‘Why are you reacting to this story? Nobody else is.’ That's the default network talking and it's just this patterned way we talk to ourselves, that often isn't very nice, because it's fear-based, and it wants us to get in line and pull it together or whatever.

And the other network that's completely unrelated, it's an entirely different network, is the direct experience network, which takes place in the present moment. So that's the place where something new can happen and where we can actually change what's happening with us. And so in the example of being in church where you're hearing stuff and you're triggered, with the example of pausing and taking a couple of breaths, already taking a couple of breaths is in the present moment, it's a direct experience in the present moment.

And then talking to yourself and saying, “What's happening?” The question really is “What's happening right now?” So the answer is going to be what's happening right now, and now we have a chance for something new to happen and for there to be something that can heal in the trigger. Because we're in the direct experience network, where new things can happen.

So to me, therapy is about helping clients get into the present moment and into their direct experience so that they can have a new experience. I never want to sit with a client and have them just tell the same stories with the same emotions over and over again, because they're going to leave the session in exactly the same shape as when they walked in.

Haley Radke: I love what you say about that's a healing thing to go into that, like you're reprogramming.

Pam Cordano: Yeah, you're literally changing your brain.

Haley Radke: And I think what our default is when we're triggered is to run, right? And if we can build these couple steps in, this is giving us the opportunity for healing instead of avoiding it and then always getting triggered by the exact same thing. Because you can't always avoid it.

Pam Cordano: Yeah. And it takes sometimes more than what we do with ourselves, but even if we're in therapy, we still have the six days in between the sessions where we have to deal with life and our own triggers ourselves. It's really the awareness of what's happening in our traumatized systems, and then the kind voice that understands we've got a reason to feel that frightened or angry or overwhelmed.

So we have kindness and we have awareness, and those two things are really going to help us. And that's really what therapists do is they're kind and they're aware and they're investing themselves in us.

Haley Radke: So will you fit in my bag that I'm gonna carry around everywhere? In my kit? Nice, sparkly–

Pam Cordano: Yeah! And then when you– this is what's happening with me is then when you get really good at this you're just gonna kick me out, because you're going to want to put something else in your bag. I'll be in the way at some point. And that's when we know we can handle it ourselves.

Haley Radke: Oh, this is so helpful. Thank you.

Pam Cordano: Another thing to think about with when we get triggered– and of course there are variations. There's mildly triggered, moderately triggered, severely triggered. When I'm severely triggered, which happened to me a couple weeks ago, I can have a feeling of kind-of paralysis. Not physical paralysis, but I don't know what to do, and I feel terrible and I don't know how to get myself out of it, and I have to wait a bit for something, whether it's some rest, or whether it's the right conversation with the right person, or some part of me to show up to help myself. Sometimes I can't do this on the spot, like we're talking about with the church example.

But when we're not that severely triggered, when we're more mildly to moderately triggered, and we pause and we ask, “What's going on?”, a lot of times if we're not used to this yet we have an impulse to do something. For me, if I'm triggered and I just can't cope with it, Ben and Jerry’s sounds really good to me.

And so part of my brain knows that if I eat a whole pint of Ben and Jerry's, I'm not going to sleep very well. I'm going to feel bad in the morning. Like, I'm going feel like too much sugar in the morning. But what we can do with ourselves or some people, they have other things they do. They maybe they do online shopping, or they're playing phone games, or whatever to try to soothe themselves. And there's nothing wrong with soothing ourselves, but when the soothing behaviors aren't really our goal in the long run –like, I don't wanna play Candy Crush for too long, like half an hour's okay, but I don't want to play for hours– then we can work with ourselves. I can say, “Okay, Pam, I know you want to go play Candy Crush right now. That's fine. You're welcome to do that, but let's just give it five more minutes. Let's see if we can bear this feeling for five more minutes before we go to that.” And that's a way of titrating our tolerance for how we feel. And again, this is not when we're extremely triggered. This is just when we're mildly, we're moderately triggered. So we build in space to experience what we're feeling, even journal about it before we go to the trusted behavior that's going to soothe it or change it.

And then there's always other things, too, I'll just throw these out. Like it's always good to do, if we are up for it, when we feel triggered and we're inclined to be either like, we want to do flight, fight, or freeze. If we can manage it, it's good to do a few gentle yoga poses and be with our breath. It's good to call a friend or somebody that we trust and talk it through with them and go toward a person who's safe. It's good to journal. It can be good to turn on music that is soothing or happy or comfortable music. There's a lot of things we can do. It could be good to go read poetry or some kind of inspirational text that reminds us about another way of feeling in the world. So, we can make a connection to things that make us feel better. That's always a good thing to do, too, if we can manage it. When I'm really triggered, sometimes I just can't. I just isolate and, you know, go down the rabbit hole for a while, and then I've come out and apologize later.

Haley Radke: Yeah, if I didn't have two young kids, I'm sure I would be spending more time in my bedroom with the door closed some days.

Pam Cordano: Yeah. As long as you're nice to yourself in there, it's fine with me. We can’t go in the bedroom and be mean to ourselves, that's just terrible.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. I won't give you any more examples of the things that I've said to myself because it's been worse. So anyway, this was really helpful. Thank you. You mentioned the retreat, you and Anne Heffron run adoptee healing retreats, and there's some coming up. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Pam Cordano: Yeah. We had our first one in February in Berkeley, California. And it was just incredible. I knew we had a good program lined up for everybody, we had 10 people that flew out to see us, but I didn't know how it was going to feel to be in a room with 12 people, all of us adopted. Something about the resonance of adopted people where we don't have to explain anything and we just get to work, really, at what's in our way of becoming more comfortable in our skin and more joyful in having more access to what we want in life. So it was a wonderful experience. I feel changed by it.

So we have one coming up in July, again in Berkeley, and one in November in Berkeley. And then Anne and I, in January of 2019, are going to go out to New York and then we're going to go to London and have a weekend each place. So we're really excited. And then we're going to have a Part Two adoptee retreat for people who have already taken Part One who want to come to Part Two, and we're just going to reinforce and build some new aspects of healing.

Haley Radke: Amazing. Amazing. So if people are interested in attending that, where can they get in touch with you?

Pam Cordano: They can find Anne Heffron or me on Facebook and message us, or they can also email me at pcordano@comcast.net.

Haley Radke: Awesome. And I have links to all of your social media and your websites up on Adopteeson.com so people can find you there too. Great. So in addition to the adoptee retreat, you have something else that's really exciting. Please tell us about it.

Pam Cordano: Yeah. This is not adoptee-specific, but a friend who's a Jungian psychologist and I are leading a group of 10 women on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and we're considering it, like, a non-religious pilgrimage. It can be religious depending on the person, but it's just a pilgrimage of growth and transformation. So we'll be walking for eight days in a row, and then we're gonna meet up with an artist in Santiago and we're going to do an integrating project. And the trip filled up really quickly, so we're really excited about that. And we're gonna have another one in April of 2019, and we're going to do the same thing. We're just going to walk for eight days and spend two additional days on the Camino, an ancient pilgrimage pathway in Spain.

Haley Radke: That sounds incredible.

Pam Cordano: Yeah, it's like one of my dreams to put healing together with traveling. Even though we're not going to be acting as therapists on the trip, I just think traveling in an intentional way is therapeutic in and of itself. So I'm really excited about it, yeah.

Haley Radke: Beautiful. People can get in touch with you for more details if they would like to come along.

Pam Cordano: Thanks, yes.

Haley Radke: So good to talk to you. Thank you for the very, very helpful triggered triage kit. I think that people are gonna find it really valuable. I already do.

I hope you had some good takeaways from Pam like I did, and some of those things seem so simplistic, but honestly, when you are in the moment and you're having this experience that is so emotional, that's what it takes is those tiny little steps to bring us down back into awareness of what's really going on for us.

So I want to challenge you to try it. I'm going to be trying it out, too. Lots of deep breathing in my future, friends. If you would like to come and meet Pam in person, and myself, and our friend Anne Heffron, who Pam does these wonderful adoptee retreats with, come to San Francisco, come and meet us in May! Sunday, May 20th, Anne is gonna be teaching her Write or Die class, which I'm very excited to take from her, and then later on in the evening, we're going to just have a hangout meetup. Just hanging out, that's it. Excited to spend time with listeners and some former guests of the show and you can come, I would love it. If you check out Adopteeson.com/events, has the details, or you can go to our Facebook page and click on the events tab there. All the details are available for you and I'd love to meet you in real life.

This show is listener-supported, and what that means is there are so many of you standing with me, actually donating to the show monthly as a financial partner, which helps keep the show going. You are helping to cover all the production costs and all the behind-the-scenes things that it takes to run a podcast like this. So I just want to say thank you so much to my generous donors. And if you feel that this podcast is a valuable resource, if you have learned something from it or if you know another adoptee that would find value from it, I would really love it if you would consider partnering with me. Adopteeson.com/partner has details of how you can join up monthly, or there's a one-time donation link right on the homepage of Adopteeson.com. Thank you. Thank you so much.

And another way that you can help support the show is by telling just one person about this episode. Maybe you know of an adoptee that struggles with triggers just like me, and they would find some of these tips really, really valuable. So I'd love it if you would just text them right now and say, “Hey, have you heard the latest Adoptees On episode?” Or send them a message on Facebook. I think it would be really helpful for them to learn these techniques that Pam has taught us today. Thank you for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

57 [Healing Series] Support Groups

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/57

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Haley Radke: 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 talk about support groups and how to start your own, but if that idea kind of freaks you out, don't press stop yet. My guest shares a really great alternative idea to help build supports into your life, and it's free. Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Jeanette Yoffe. Jeanette is a child therapist with a special focus on adoption and foster care issues. Welcome back to Adoptees On, Jeanette.

Jeanette Yoffe: Thank you, Haley. Great to be here.

Haley Radke: So you are the executive director of the Celia Center, and I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about that, where it got its name (especially), and what it is.

Jeanette Yoffe: Okay. So, Celia Center came about because… Let's see, it's 2018 now. Nine years ago, I started a support group. I'm a psychotherapist and here I was working with children of families in adoption, and I wanted to know who was out there like me. Are there–where are the other adult adoptees? Cuz I wasn't meeting many in Los Angeles.

And so as a therapist, I took it upon myself to start a support group, which I called Adopt Salon. I started gathering names and having people come to this group. And what came about from that was the support group became–we became a community. And people would come up to me and say, “Can you do a training on this?” Or, “Can you talk about this?” And I said, “Well, um, I don't have a place or a space to do that, but I'll try.” And so then I thought, You know what? What if I started a nonprofit organization that is devoted to educating the community about foster care and adoption experiences because I…? There was such a need.

So then I started the nonprofit called Celia Center and for me to give it meaning, I chose my first mother's name, which is Celia. And so for me, doing this work, just always, I'm channeling her. Because I had wished that she had a place like Celia Center to go to, to get the support she needed when I had separated from her, the education, the support of being around other mothers, other adoptees. It came from a place of: we need to do more in our community.

And I took it upon myself as an adult now. I get to do these things and I'm gonna do this because it's important. And we are leaders now and we are the ones that need to educate society about our experience. We are the experts. So, and my goal was also to bring the constellation of adoption together, because I had read Michael Phillip Grand's book, The Adoption Constellation, which also inspired me to create this center.

And the constellation is the new term in best practice today. It's the politically correct term, which identifies anyone involved in an adoption. So that's the birth parent, the first mother, the first father, the adoptee, the adoptive family, and I also include the foster constellation. So, the foster family, the foster youth, and it also includes social workers, nurses, spouses, siblings, anyone connected to anyone who's experienced this life experience is part of the constellation.

Haley Radke: So this is sort of replacing the triad, which has had its three points and sort of gives equal to each point.

Jeanette Yoffe: Correct. Exactly.

Haley Radke: Okay, that makes sense.

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes, the equilateral triangle–which they are not equal parts. So yeah, years ago I wrote something on Facebook and I had written, “triad,” and I literally had 150 posts. “How dare you use that word? That's not the word anymore.” And I'm like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. I work with anyone involved in an adoption. I have compassion for all members. I agree, there's no equal part, but give me the new language.” And that's when I found this book and I said, “Yes, that's the term. It's the constellation and we're all here to support each other.” So I wanted to bring the constellation together through Celia Center.

Haley Radke: So, yes. Very good. So can you talk a little bit more about what Adopt Salon is? And also let's just sort of frame our conversation with… So you're in the Los Angeles area. I'm in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I'm actually trying to start an adoptee support group, and I know there's a movement to start more and more across the U.S., North America, the world.

So can you sort of frame it with also, what are some things that we could be doing to do that? Peer support or as you say it, constellation group, all of those kinds of things.

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. Okay. So, and there's different types of groups. So, I run the Adopt Salon Constellation Support Group, so that involves first mothers and first fathers, adult adoptees, and adoptive parents.

So we're all in the room together. And I also include the foster care constellation, so foster youth alum, foster parents, and their birth families as well, and/or foster families. So we're all in there together. Now, I run this group. I'm a therapist, you know, that's a lot to handle for one person to… because you're navigating all these different parts of the constellation.

So that can be overwhelming for someone starting a new support group. If you're starting a new support group (like I had originally), which was, I wanted to do with just an adoptee support group. And that, anyone can do. And so how I did this was, I put an ad on an online newspaper: “Starting an Adoption Support Group.”

And I started receiving a lot of emails. And so, I kept hold of those emails and I said, “Okay, now that I have an interest…” (because you just don't know who's out there). I said, “Okay, great. And now I can go find a place. Let me see, where can I do this group?” So I called around to churches, local adoption agencies, and I said, “Hey, you know, I'm interested in starting a support group in town. Do you, would you be willing to provide us with some free space? This will be a free support group.”

And so I found an agency that provided a space for us, and then I gave it a name; give your support group a name. And you also will need some sort of mail server, or Mailchimp, or Constant Contact so that you can–as you're accumulating names, you can also keep them notified of when the group is.

I like to keep the group on the first Wednesday of the month from 7 to 9:00 PM, so it's consistent. It's the same time on that month, on each month, so people know what to expect. So you wanna keep that consistency. It's an open group, but only for members specified of the group that you're starting.

So if it's just an adult adoptee group, it's just for adult adoptees. If it's just a foster youth alum group, it's just foster youth alums. If it's a co-group of first mothers, and first fathers, and adoptees, fabulous. But only they are allowed to attend. You set that limit on who will be attending your group. And then the other thing is this (and I feel very strongly about this): you need to set some very firm and safe ground rules, because if you don't, things can get out of hand and it can cause feelings of not feeling safe. And it can cause what I call–what is called “secondary trauma.” We do not want to do that.

So here are a few rules that I have for all my support groups, and that is, we support each other here. We do not fix each other, meaning we do not give unsolicited advice. If you, when you share and you go around the circle, I would just say, “Give me your name, what part of the constellation you represent, and tell us what you're here for. Or do you have a question? Are you, do you have a pressing issue? We'll get to you first. And you can share briefly about your story.” So, going around to the group, again, as rules, we don't fix each other. We don't give unsolicited advice. You do need to tell us what you need. You know, “I do need advice. Please fix me.”

Or after you share–because typically what happens in a support group is, you share and you feel this sense of “Whew!” relief. Because you see everybody nodding their heads. Everybody gets you. We need to be seen, heard, and received. That's the beauty of a support group and, you know, everything's online today.

Support groups are important. We need to be with each other, together in the physical realm, not the Internet. We need to see each other and feel each other, because that's how we grow. We cannot do this in a bubble. So I also say, “You can also be here and not share.” And I call it you can be an owl–you can observe, watch, and listen.

That's okay, because I know the first time I went to a support group, I was scared $%!#-less. It was very overwhelming. I didn't know what to do or how to handle, and I wish someone said, “You can just be an owl. You can observe, watch, and listen, and just take it in.” So those are important pieces.

And when I do a constellation group, I do say this a lot. The reason why I bring the constellation together is because… Think about this: If you look at a tree from one angle, all you're gonna see is that angle. This group is about looking at that tree from multiple angles so that we can bridge the compassion between each other, see that we're actually more alike than different, and this is a shared experience. And how do we support each other within this experience, within this constellation?

So it's extremely powerful. I mean, support groups are amazing. I wish they could all be recorded. And actually, speaking of recording, Celia Center– we were asked to film one of our support groups (the single adoptive parent support group, because I've had multiple groups) for the OWN (Oprah Winfrey channel), Raising Whitley.

We supported Kym Whitley when she adopted her foster child, and she hadn't told him that he was adopted. So she came to our support group and we helped her make sense of why it's important (even though he's three), that he needs to know what happened! He needs to know his story. So that was filmed. We did that, and then only last year we filmed one of our constellation support groups on Long Lost Family for (I don't know if you watched that show), Joanna, who meets her birth father. She has a lot of questions, so she comes to our support group, and gets advice, and support, and help. So it's been amazing.

Haley Radke: That’s so cool. Yeah. That's so cool. And can you tell me where does the name Adopt Salon comes from? What does “salon” mean to you?

Jeanette Yoffe: Because of my background being an artist. And I didn't say this, but Celia came to the United States on a work visa to be a dancer in New York City and the salon, the term “salon…” I don't know how long ago it was, but they used to have artist salons where artists would come together, and they would just share ideas and connect with one another, inspire, be each other's muse… And I thought, Oh, that's a nice feel. You know, because I didn't wanna scare anyone. This is, you know, the constellation. There's gonna be a first mother there, and an adoptive parent, or a foster parent meeting a birth mother for the first time. I wanted to take the charge out of it and go, “It's a salon, come to the Salon.”

And I actually used to light candles, lower the lights. I mean, I was very aware of, you know, that sensory overstimulation. I didn't want it. I wanted it to feel safe. So it's nice to do these added touches, you know, lighting candles, creating an environment of comfort and safety is key. So, that's why rules are important.

Yeah, I think that I went over everything you need to do to start a support group. And we usually sit in a circle. You know, cuz it's, you know–we're all coming full circle. And have tissues. Oh, oh, and have tissues.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Don't we! Tissues. Okay.

Jeanette Yoffe: If you don't feel comfortable starting a support group (because you said that earlier), I tell foster youth alum and adult adoptees–find a listening partner. And that is someone that you can call and you both identify and know how it works.

And it could be a call that's every Saturday, or someone that you get to call every week who will be your listening partner–will just listen. Because that, in and of itself, is supportive. And it would be nice to find someone (if you're both not comfortable going to a support group), “Well, we'll be each other's listening partners.”

Again, you don't give unsolicited advice. You just listen, and you receive, and you acknowledge, because that is really important. Because we do need to share our stories. We can't keep it all inside. We need to externalize it, we need to hear it, we need to reorganize it, we need to rethink it. Because it's always, it's always evolving, it's always changing.

It's always feeling a little different, or we're feeling more vulnerable about it. We need a place to discharge, literally, from our minds and get it out of our bodies. So, as you can see, I talk. I can talk a lot; I can talk all day. But it's important. We can, and we have a voice and…

Haley Radke: Well, maybe I should have started with this question, Jeanette, what is the purpose of a support group? So if there's a… Like we are just talking, like if it's peer-run and you go around this circle and you sort of share your stories. Is it just being heard? And is there a difference between that and a therapist-led? Like, is there more of a healing to–I don't know, do you wanna unpack that a little bit?

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. And there's different variables. Like I said, if, you know–I would not advise someone new going into this, starting an adoption constellation support group. You have to have done, number one, your own work. You have to not be biased towards any member of the constellation. So, that, I highly recommend, needs to be a psychotherapist (that's dealing with all members of the constellation).

You have to be adoption and foster care-competent and be able to answer some tough questions. Now, I've also run my groups where I have guests come, and share their stories, and tell us what they've learned, or what–it could be a birth mother, an adoptee, a foster youth… So, there can be a teaching component in your group.

You can have a guest come, and there's a...,or there could be– You could have someone running the group who's not a psychotherapist, have a psychotherapist come in for 15 minutes and teach some mindfulness meditation or educate about trauma. So you could have that piece. It's how you establish the group.

We are here to listen and share and support each other in our experience. Again, we don't fix each other. You, you know, as the facilitator–you wanna be honest. You know, “I'm not a licensed psychotherapist. There are some questions I can't answer. I can only answer from my experience.”

As a psychotherapist, when I run groups as (if you're a therapist), you are there to provide the expertise, and knowledge, and education. But anyone can start a support group. However, you do need to be aware that you may be triggered. You have to be honoring and doing your self-care.

There's another group (it's an AA and adoption group that I just went to), that Celia Center is gonna be starting to send out notices about. And that's for adoptees who also have alcohol, and dependence, and maybe alcoholics, struggling with drug addiction. And so that group, all they do is they literally structure it like an AA group, and you have five minutes to share your story. And every time you share, you have a five-minute share. And then they do a meditation, and it's done.

It can be, you know, anyone can ask questions in this group, or we can have someone come in and talk about a specific topic. You can have a suggestion box. "If we bring in a guest, what kind of guest would you like us to bring in?" So you do need to establish, as a facilitator, specifically what type of group this is.

We support each other; we’re here to listen and share our stories. And if you need advice, we will give you advice. Otherwise, we're just here to listen and support one another. And you can remain in contact outside of the group, which is really important. And I do say, and that can also serve as your listening partner person that you can turn to in the weeks when there isn't the support group.

Because a lot will come up. So we do want to create a community–exchange phone numbers, see each other outside of the group, but keep what's said in the group at the group. We don't disclose/share any personal or identifying information with those outside of the group. This is to keep this group emotionally safe, and keep this confidential.

So, I hope I answered your question.

Haley Radke: Yeah, yeah. No, that's really helpful. And in fact, at a conference I was at, I was in a support group for like an hour, and it did have all the members of the constellation. And there was not, you know, a specific facilitator and it devolved very, very quickly. Very quickly.

Jeanette Yoffe: Ooh, yes. You need firm rules. Set the tone. Yes.

Haley Radke: Yeah, so, really adoptee, adult adoptee support group is where I would love to start. And I think that's such good advice, that you really need an expert present to be able to direct the conversation, and do all the things that you've been trained to do, (that a layperson like myself, we don't necessarily have).

Plus, I would have that layer of being triggered and, you know, it's not good! It's not a good situation. So yes, that's very, very wise. Is there anything else you wanna tell us before we wrap up? About the Celia Center, or starting a support group?

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes, I actually do. Celia Center–we did our first Arts Festival last year, and we are going to be doing another one. And it's called Giving Voice to Adopting Resilience: Fostering the Spirit of Creativity, and we'll be doing another one in November. And also, I will be doing my one-woman play, which I did 15 years ago. I'm gonna be doing it again.

So I'm super excited to have Celia Center provide this for our community. We're gonna have artists, transracially adopted adult adoptees sharing their stories. We have spoken word artists, we have visual artists, we have singers. We have a dance troupe from San Francisco that's gonna come down and do their piece about adoption.

So, it's a great event that we're very excited about and it really helps transform what we're trying to educate to the community about having lived through foster care and adoption. Now we get to show it through our creativity. It's so much fun. It's empowering; it empowers you. And you actually feel stronger because of the experience, and it makes you stronger within yourself.

And to share it with another–when you share something with another, what's shareable becomes more bearable. So that's why we need to speak up, share our stories in whatever format you choose, because it's very empowering.

Haley Radke: Well, I love that you touched on this. All of my season three was this theme of healing through creativity and so I talked to a number of different artists in various capacities. I don't wanna list them all, cause there's too many, but specifically, Brian Stanton was on the show and also Nicole Rademacher. And we talked about last year's event, and how amazing it was. I think especially, Nicole and I talked in depth about it.

So if people are interested, they can go over and check out that episode. And then, of course, I'll link to all the information about that upcoming event, in November, so that people can come check it out. That's so exciting. I love that you're doing that.

Jeanette Yoffe: Thank you. Yes, there is a video on our Celia Center YouTube channel about the Arts Festival last year. And it's a beautiful video, just showing all the art displayed, and the performers, and it was an amazing event. It brought a lot of people together.

Haley Radke: Yeah. So, great. Thank you. Okay. Where can we connect with you online?

Jeanette Yoffe: Well, Celia Center is C-E-L-I-A center.org. And there's a lot of information on our website there, about our upcoming events, special events. Sometimes you go to Wolf Connection, here in Los Angeles. And again, our support groups are on there. The festival information is celiacenterartsfestival.org. That's a beautiful website for our Arts Festival that you can connect to, and you can always look on our YouTube channel, Celia Center.

Haley Radke: And your website is yoffetherapy.com?

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. So that's my private practice for therapy. Psychotherapy.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much, Jeanette, for sharing your wisdom with us today. And I hope that this maybe will inspire someone to start their own support group.

Jeanette Yoffe: Excellent. Yes, go for it. Go for it. We need each other and we need to be with each other. It's important.

Haley Radke: Yes, for sure. Thank you.

Jeanette Yoffe:Okay. Thank you, Haley. Thanks so much.

Haley Radke: This show is brought to you by my incredible Patreon partners. Patreon is a website that collects monthly pledges that help sustain the cost of producing this show for you every single week.

As a thank you, I have a secret Facebook group for adoptees only, that you're welcome to join. And we have some really great in-depth conversations there about search/reunion issues that have been popping up from our childhood. And I wish I could tell you who's in the group, but I won't, because it's secret, right? But there are some really, really amazing people who have gathered to build this community, and I would love to include you in that if you would like to support the show.

If that's not something that you're financially able to do, please message me anyway. I have a list of several Facebook groups, and one forum that I like to send people, that are all safe spaces that I can recommend as alternatives. And don't let money be the factor that keeps you from getting support. You know, Jeanette had that great idea of finding a listening partner, and that's free. I just thought that was such a fantastic idea.

I just wanted to let you know about the ways you can connect with me online– so we have the Adoptees On Facebook page, and I'm on Twitter and Instagram @ Adoptees On, and you can also find my personal Twitter and Instagram @ Haley Radke. Or you can find me on Facebook;

I'd love to be friends with you. And if you would like to get our monthly newsletter, you can sign up for that adopteeson.com/newsletter, where I will give you just brief snapshots of things I'm thinking about or learning, and updates about the show. Very last thing. Would you share this episode with just one person today, as soon as we wrap the show?

What if you send an adoptee in your city a message saying, “Why don't you listen to this episode? What do you think? Should we start a support group here?” Or, if someone that Jeanette was describing– the listening partner and you think, You know what? I know exactly who would be a great fit for that.

Maybe you can send them this episode, and then chat about what that would look like for you guys. And if you're in the Edmonton, Alberta area, send me a note. I'd love to have you at our next monthly adoptee support group, here in Edmonton (which is actually taking place right here at my house). So, if you ever wanted to see where I record, you can come to my house and join in our adoptee support group meeting.

Thanks for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

56 [Healing Series] Foster Care and Complex Trauma

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/56

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Haley Radke: 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 tackle, what are the psychological and emotional impacts of growing up in foster care, as well as multiple practical tools for working on different pieces of adoption trauma? This is another one you're gonna wanna listen to more than one time because there's so many great takeaways.

Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Jeanette Yoffe. Jeanette is a child therapist with a special focus on adoption and foster care issues. Welcome to the show, Jeanette.

Jeanette Yoffe: Thank you, Haley, for having me. It's great to be here.

Haley Radke: So it's your first time on the show and I'd love it if you would start the way I always ask my guests too, if you would just share a little bit of your story with us and how you came to your career path.

Jeanette Yoffe: Well, I was born in New York City and I lived with my birth family for the first 15 months of my life. I then went into foster care. My mother had some mental illness at that time and needed to be hospitalized.

And then I was in foster care for a duration of six and a half years. And what happened was I was supposed to go back and live with my aunt, maternal aunt in Argentina because my first mother is Argentinian. And it fell through the cracks. So I remained in foster care for a while. The New York City foster care system took some time to figure out what to do, and then I left that foster home and went to another foster home, another home to be adopted.

And so I was adopted at the age of eight years old. And I have two siblings who were also adopted. And I had reunion with my biological brother who was also adopted, but in a separate family and we didn't even know he was in the Bronx and I'm in New York. We didn't know each other growing up, so we got to know each other as adults.

And I've also had reunion, I did find my birth mother 10 years ago and I had reunion with her, which was amazing. And then I only recently had reunion with my birth father, and that was last year. And that's a whole 'nother story and a whole 'nother episode that we can talk about.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. Yes.

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes.

Haley Radke: So you are in two separate foster homes, is that right? So like one foster home for a long period of time and then adopted in the second placement?

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. Correct.

Haley Radke: And so now you are a child therapist and this is your specialty, is working with children that have been in foster care. And can you tell me a little bit about how you came to do that?

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. I actually came from New York to Los Angeles to be an actress. Because I was very confused. I had an identity crisis. I didn't know who I was. So being an actress, oh, it always gave me a script of what to do and what to say. But coming here, I started volunteering with an adoption support center in Los Angeles.

And so I moved here, started volunteering at a group, and this little girl had come up to me and she was so surprised to know that I was adopted too. And I just looked at her and I thought, well, this is odd. And I got down on my knee and I said to her, yes, I am adopted. And it was a extremely profound experience for me because I thought in that moment, Wow, I need to do more about this.

I need to be more involved in helping kids today recognize that, yeah, you're gonna grow up and you're going to be okay. So that was what inspired me to go into psychology and study and have a focus on children, and especially in foster care and adoption. And I just became, I was compelled to do the work, and it also allowed me to do my own healing work and really focus on this piece so that I could be a resource and support to others who have also lived the experience.

So it's been amazing. It's been an amazing journey and I'm just so grateful and I feel so blessed that I can do this work and. It's amazing to be a healer and help people. And also be aware of my own process. Because this is a lifelong process. But I think as an adoptee you're so much more informed. You understand. And parents, when they hear from an adoptee, the reality of their experience, they're more likely to understand and have greater compassion for their children. So when I see that happening, that's the work.

Haley Radke: So many of the guests I've talked to prior have been adopted as infants and we sort of go from, you know, hospital to the adoptive family and we talk about all the issues that come up with that.

There's a huge emotional impact even when you were adopted right as an infant. And then foster care adds another layer onto that, because as you said, there was two different placements. You were with your original family for 15 months, and so there's different pieces of transition there in your formative years. Can you teach us a little bit about that? The psychological and emotional impact of growing up in foster care versus, and or including the infant adoption. What is, what's sort of the differences for you?

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. So what I've discovered is as an adoptee who's separated at birth, that is considered a trauma. It's a traumatic incident for that baby. Okay.

When a child has gone through that early separation and then experienced multiple placements, or have lived in their original families for some time, and then were adopted and separated and gone into foster care at a later time, what happens is it becomes more than just a single incident trauma.

It becomes complex trauma. So that is the key term when we're talking about children in foster care to adoption. There is still that primal wound, however, it's much more complex because of the multiple placements, the multiple layers, the memories, the implicit early memories that are stored in the body.

And then there's the explicit memories. What I remember about living with my family and what may have happened when I was there. So children in foster care are carrying so much in their bodies and in their memories. So complex trauma is the biggest piece to understand.

Another piece for foster adoptees, is we tend to self blame and blame ourselves that it was our fault that these things happened. And that's because a child's brain is egotistic. They believe everything happens because it's within their power.

Haley Radke: Yes.

Jeanette Yoffe: Totally normal. However, what I've found working with foster adoptees is they wear it like it's a condition. Like, I'm adopted or I'm in foster care and there's something wrong about them. And what's hard is they cannot separate themselves from their experience. So they have difficulty with this condition that there's something wrong about them, that they were responsible and they should have fixed it. So what can happen is shame can develop, which is very difficult for a child to understand. So there's a technique that I'm gonna teach you later on if you feel that you have experienced pervasive shame. Because you'll find that you're very hard on yourself. You can't, when you make a mistake, you feel like the mistake. When there's a problem, you're the problem. You take things very personally.

So that's a piece for foster youth. So we need to learn how to let go. Separate. And see our experience with objectivity so we can make sense of it, learn from it, and walk, work through it.

There's another piece that is important to understand is that because foster youth have had multiple transitions, they've had multiple relationships, so they have difficulty with attachments, and especially if there's been abuse, neglect, there's been trust that has been broken. There's attachment trauma. So it's so difficult to be able to have a new relationship, feel safe in a relationship, trust that relationship because the blueprint. What's been stored in that memory in the mind and the body will become the blueprint of relationships for the rest of their lives, unless deemed otherwise.

And a lot of the work that I do is attachment focused family therapy. I'm very much working on the attachment, repairing the attachment, and allowing children to feel safe in a relationship again.

We do have a heightened sense of perception of any sense of rejection in others. We're always scanning the environment. There's this hypervigilance going on. Is this safe, is this not safe? And there are the seven non-verbal cues which are very important to recognize and they are eyesight, the way someone looks at you, the facial characteristics, what they're showing in their face. Are they squinting at you? Are they questioning you? Tone of voice, posture, gestures. Timing and intensity of response.

And we're always looking and relying on these seven nonverbal cues for what's safe and what's not safe. And if you think about this, 90% of communication is nonverbal. So when trauma is experienced, the first sense to go offline is sound. So I have to teach parents and workers working in this field to be very aware of their seven non-verbal cues because if you are not aware, you could be causing more distress, more trauma for that child. And we need to create a place of safety and comfort because of what they've been through.

There can also be a learned helplessness that develops for foster adoptees because especially if they remember and have memories of their families. That they could have done something and they feel helpless inside this powerlessness. So they go through life thinking that if I couldn't even help my family, how can I even help myself? So they'll learn helplessness that can occur.

Now these characteristics, some are more heightened for some foster adoptees, some are less. It's all based on temperament, personality, their ability to be resilient, to work through experiences. The amount of support they've received. Therapy is very important.

So these are variables. A big piece, also, is they have experienced a lot of ambiguous loss. And ambiguity for any child is very difficult to contain because there's a lot of questions. Especially if they've had the early implicit memories of trauma where they don't know what happened, but something happened to them.

And then there's the explicit memories of what happened to my family? Or why did I leave this placement to go to this placement? Was it my fault. Did I do something wrong? Did they not love me? So it can be very complicated to work through this ambiguous loss and have even greater questions, especially if someone's not there to help you make sense.

And one of my interventions that I do with kids is we create a question box. Just to hold and acknowledge all of these questions. So they're externalized, released from the mind, placed in a container, providing a sense of, okay, somebody's looking out for these questions, someone's acknowledging, someone's hearing me, and someone's helping me make sense of my story.

So it can feel extremely overwhelming for a foster adoptee to experience all of these pieces. I do six hour trainings on trauma informed best practices in trauma informed care for children and adults, and I have had adults, foster youth alumni and adult adoptees come to me after the training and go, I wish I had this training when I was a kid.

So we also need psychoeducation. We need somebody to teach us these pieces and then teach us how to help us work through and heal and comfort and support these pieces. So there you have it in a nutshell.

Haley Radke: Well, and I mean of course you explain like there, we all have different levels of intensity for each of these pieces. And you know what I'm thinking about the typical older child, in foster care, like teenager. I mean, how many placements have they had? And so those layers, when you get to the teenage years and you're supposed to be forming your identity, I mean, it's complex for adoptees as it is. And then compounded with all of these different relationships and attachments, as you said, it's big stuff. Really big stuff.

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes, it is. Big stuff. So the psychoeducational piece is we need to understand that we are having a normal response to an abnormal event. So that we don't judge ourselves. Like of course our body is trying to work through these memories and that's why they keep coming up over and over.

So we need to learn to accept that piece.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Is there anything else that you wanna teach on this? We could. Talk about how some of these express themselves as we reach adulthood and beyond, if they're not dealt with?

Jeanette Yoffe: Well, we'll have difficulty trusting in relationships, in feeling confident, and building our self-esteem and feeling confident enough that we can go out and take a risk.

Because if we're not feeling secure and safe within our bodies, we're not gonna be able to take risks. We're going to feel held back, unsure of ourselves. And we really need to be a part of a community that understands us, that we don't have to explain ourselves over and over about our vulnerabilities. We, we need to be around other people that have also experienced similar experiences.

So sensitivity within ourselves, and we also will have difficulties in attachments and trusting others. It's really learning how to manage all of these pieces and have a daily practice. You must honor what you've experienced and see it for what it is.

It's there. We can't just make it go away. We get to, is what I always say. We don't have to. It's how we look at it. We get to do this healing for ourselves. We get to repair what happened to us because it's not what's wrong with us. It's what happened to us. We get to learn how to be more compassionate.

We get to re-parent, re mother ourselves. It's an opportunity for growth because we're either in two modes of functioning. We're either in protective mode or growth mode. And we get to decide which one we wanna go move towards, but we also do need to have a community that understands us and supports us in our growth.

We do need to be with an adoption or foster care competent therapist. Because they may say they understand the experience, but they do not. Okay. So I teach County Social Workers, department of Mental Health therapists here in Los Angeles to be adoption and foster care competent because it is, you're dealing with complex trauma.

I also suggest to adult, foster youth alumni and adult adoptees to go to trainings, read books on adoption, read, Coming Home To Self by Nancy Verrier. Really get to know these pieces and parts of you. It's not all of you. There's pieces and parts of you that need to be explored and examined.

And when you find that person that you feel that you can open up to, that you feel safe with, the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to tap into that primal wound. And I remember the day that I did it . I was probably about 21 and I was in therapy . I could feel this abyss like coming up from inside of me, and I allowed myself, because I felt safe enough with my therapist, to go there and I just cried and I cried and it was like a well of tears.

I tell kids that I work with, we're gonna cry buckets. And you know what? When we do that, we're gonna feel better. It's not gonna completely go away. I'm, I am real with kids and adults. It's not gonna go away. However, the way you can see if you're working through your primal wound is it will decrease the in intensity, frequency, and duration. It won't be as intense.

So really see it as an investment in yourself, because the more you go in there, the less it actually will become, and you'll be able to tolerate it more and manage it more because that is the condition. Not having been adopted or having been in foster care. The condition is learning how to manage these psychological and emotional impacts, effects of having lived this experience.

That's the condition. I'm all about helping us see things differently. Because when we can see things differently, change our perception, we can start to trust and go down the road of healing.

Haley Radke: Yeah. That's so powerful. Shifting our mindset to one of healing and what are we gonna do about it, right?

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes.

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh, yes. That's so important. Okay, so you had mentioned that you were gonna share a couple of tools with us. You mentioned a shame technique. Can you go into that? What do you mean by that? And maybe before you do, just, one more, just addressing the difference between guilt and shame, cuz a lot of people say they feel guilty, but if you could explain that would be helpful. I think.

Jeanette Yoffe: Yes. This is something I have to explain a lot. Okay. So shame, it's like, and this is how I explain it, shame is like a bubble that surrounds you and in the bubble you see a mirror. And all you see is your bad self. You feel, you see your deficiencies. You see you are not worthy. You see, you're unlovable.

There's something wrong about you. Okay? So because it's a bubble, you cannot see past the bubble. Okay? People who experience pervasive shame who live with this feeling that when someone points out to them a mistake, they can't separate themselves from the mistake. It's all in meshed in one. When you point out my mistake, I feel in that bubble, I'm the mistake.

Okay? Shame will impede the development of guilt because guilt is feeling sorry and acknowledging the other person. You're not only looking at yourself. So that's why it's very difficult for people who experience shame. It's very difficult for them to apologize and take responsibility, and this is a common red flag that you are living in shame because you cannot go to that person and say, I'm sorry, because what you're saying I'm sorry for is, I'm sorry I'm so bad. I'm sorry I'm so wrong.

And I know this because I lived it, and my mother would, oh, I'm gonna teach you responsibility. And she would sit me on the stairs and you're gonna go and apologize to your friend. And she would tell me to do this, and I would fight her to a T because she didn't understand what was going on with me.

It wasn't that I couldn't take responsibility. You're asking me to go to that person and reaffirm how bad I feel about myself. And a lot of kids and adults who've experienced foster care have this pieace. And so how we do this is... and the research shows people with pervasive shame have low levels of the ability to show remorse, take self responsibility. People with high levels of guilt have more empathy for others, are able to show more empathy.

So what we wanna do is help the person separate themselves from their behavior. And so there's a metaphor called the sandwich metaphor. And so the bread on the bottom is the stroking. Okay? So if I'm talking to an adopt foster youth out there, when you have recognized that you've done something wrong, okay, you made a mistake, you showed up late or you blew the stop sign, whatever it is, okay?

The first thing you need to do, the bread on the bottom is say to yourself, you are a good person, okay? You matter. Like you would talk to a good friend. You are a good person, and you put the emphasis on the behavior. And I made a mistake about this.

And that's the burger and the sandwich, that's the lettuce, the tomato. I made a mistake about this and I can learn from this mistake. I'm not the mistake. The mistake is the mistake and I'm gonna learn from this.

And then the piece of bread on the top is the, I love you. You are a good person. You matter. You're gonna get through this. So again, stroking because, and we need people around us.

If you are married or have a spouse or a partner or boyfriend, that this is a vulnerability for you. If you're gonna point something out to me that I've done wrong, can you just tell me first that I'm lovable? I love you and honey, can you not leave the plates hanging off the shelf because they broke today our new plates?

I and I love you, honey. So the emphasis goes on the behavior. And most of the families that I've worked with, I worked with, I had one family who said, Jeanette, that was a single most important piece you helped me understand. It shifted everything in my relationship with my child. So we get to do this work now for ourselves.

When I make a mistake, I do this for myself. I go, okay, you are a good person. The mistake is a mistake, and you are learning. This is how we learn by making mistakes, and I'm gonna learn from this, and I love you. I do the ho'oponopono, the Hawaiian Prayer.

Haley Radke: Oh yes.

The, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. You do that for yourself. That's the difference between shame and guilt. So guilt is the ability to go to that person and say, you know what? I'm sorry that I left the plates on the shelf. I'm gonna learn from that. I won't do it again. I'm sorry that I did that, and I'm sorry that it affected you and the glass broke all over the floor and you got hurt. I'm sorry about that.

So guilt is expressing concern and empathy for the other person, and also having a regard for yourself. We're human, we are imperfect, and the gift of imperfection. Brene Brown's book is a beautiful book to read to help honor and grow that part of yourself so that you can have that empathy for yourself.

I think what happens with kids and adults with shame is they haven't had someone be empathetic towards them. I cried a lot as a kid and my mother would say, stop crying. What are you crying about? And I have approached her as an adult and I said, mom, that wasn't helpful.

What I really needed you to say is, Honey, I'm so sorry. You're feeling so sorry about yourself. I know a lot happened to you and I'm gonna be here and you're sorry and in your sorrow. And the parents get confused. They don't know how to read, and as adults, we don't know how to read our behaviors. We misinterpret our behaviors and we get stuck in our behaviors.

So, and I'm sure the listeners or some are gonna identify and go, yes, that's me. So the tool is really doing that sandwich metaphor with yourself. You are a good person, we're all good people. All good people make mistakes. You're not the mistake and you can learn from it and that's how you grow. But be kind to yourself.

That re mothering. Reparenting because children who've been in foster care and adoption have a lot of unmet needs. So we get to meet these needs and reparent ourselves today.

That's a very helpful exercise. Thank you. Is there anything else that you wanna touch on before we wrap up, jeanette?

Jeanette Yoffe: Yeah, I think there was one piece that is important and that is I use an acronym called pace. It's called PACE Yourself, and it actually comes from attachment theory, P a c E. So you apply these attitudes towards yourself.

P stands for Be Playful. Okay? Be playful so we can lessen the harshness we have on ourselves. Do something fun. Go try something new. Go out of your comfort zone, be playful, laugh at yourself. Laughter releases stress.

A is be accepting of yourself. You may not be accepting of the action you took or the mistake you made, but accept yourself; that you are doing the best that you can. We are all doing the best that we can at any given moment. I hope I'm doing the best that I can in this moment.

Be Curious, C. Be curious. Okay. Be curious about what you're feeling in your body. Trauma gets stored in the mind and the body. So it's through the body that we get to be what's called a sensory detective because trauma gets stored through the five senses. And trauma also can get soothed through the five senses. So the five senses are a sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. So a sensory detect, detective use, look, and explore. Okay. Which sense is heightened for me because that's my vulnerability and I need to learn how to soothe that sense. So be curious. You ask yourself, where am my body? Am I feeling this? What does it look like? How can I help soothe this part of myself? What do I need to do with my hands? Do I need to just squeeze some Play-Doh? Sand? What do I need to do? Do I need to drink some nice warm tea to sooth myself? I use lavender all the time in my practice. I use it before I see a client. I use it with a client. Breathing, teaching myself to breathe and slow down. Okay. And listening to calm, soothing sounds, providing yourself with sensory comfort is very important if you've experienced trauma.

And then E is have empathy. So PACE yourself. Treat yourself with kindness. You're doing the best that you can and do that sandwich metaphor. Whenever you make a mistake or do something wrong, you're learning from it. You'll explore it and go deeper and you can make a difference. And make changes, small changes. Cuz the way we change is in small doses. We can't just jump in the pool and expect everything to just change.

The last piece about healing. I say healing is like being in a whirlpool. Okay. Because you're being asked to change and shift and transform what you're experiencing into something different. Well, if you think about a whirlpool, everybody's going in one direction for a long time, and then you're asked to turn around and go in the other direction. Well, that's what change is gonna feel like.

It's gonna be very difficult at first to put these pieces of practice in your daily routine. And the more you do it, the more you stick to it and just push through and put in that effort. You can have a new rewiring in your brain, a new felt sense of relief, cuz that is the goal for treating and healing trauma.

It's feeling a sense of ahhhh. So the more you can find that relief in your life and it's through the senses using these, some of these tools, you'll be able to feel better and then you will do better. Trust me. And I've done a lot of work on myself and I do practices every day. So it's important.

You matter. You are worth it. I say that to all my clients, over and over. You are worth the effort. We're all worth. We're all worthy. We're all deserving of worth and value. We're here. We get to be here. You have a seat at the table too, so it's reclaiming, naming what you're feeling so you can tame it and work through it.

So I'm pretty serious and very direct with the clients that I work with, that how important it is to put in these daily practices because you matter and we're never going to fully heal. You know, this is a lifelong process. So right at that actually gives me a sense of, oh, okay, great. I mean then this is a process.

You don't have to put all that pressure on yourself. It actually gives you a sense of, you know what, okay. I am going to accept that I get to do this re mothering, reparenting rewiring for myself, and I'm gonna do it, and I'm gonna do it the best I can and that's good enough. And give myself permission to do this work.

And you know, a lot of adoptees, they come usually when there's a life, big life stressor, there's a loss they experience and it just opens up that primal wound. And everybody's in their own, on their own journey. Let's not judge each other. Some people are more advanced than others. Cuz like me, I went into therapy when I was 13 years old and I'm still in therapy and I'm a therapist.

It's okay. It's important. We need to take care of ourselves. It's self care. Because of what happened to us and take responsibility and we get to then go into the world and utilize our many strengths, because I also say we also have many strengths. You know, there's all these issues and core issues and well, where are our strengths?

We're very strong-willed. We're very determined. We are deeper thinkers. We feel the world on a much more profound level. That's what makes us amazing creators, visual and performing artists, writers, painters. We can see things that other people don't see because we are very observant. And once we can tap into that strength we actually can do things that we never thought or imagined we could.

And so it's exciting. I always want to inspire adoptees, fellow adoptees and foster youth alumni to, to go... and I created this training... be the archeology of you and go in your primal wound. That is actually an exercise we did. Okay? Walking in the desert, there's a hole cuz it's a desert out there. And you, before you go to the hole as an archeologist does make sure you have your backpack, your flashlight, some boots, and extra set of clothes. Whatever you need, because you're gonna go in your primal wound right now and put the flashlight on.

We're gonna look in this big hole and we're gonna talk about what's in there, and we're gonna redecorate it. We get to go in and explore this part of us, examine it, and redecorate it.

So I've literally done this exercise with many adult adoptees, and we climb in our primal wound holes with our headset on, with our hammer. We're all ready. We climb in there and we create a space of comfort because we need to get to know this part of us. The more we avoid it, the more it's gonna be enacted out and reenacted out in the real world. So going in there and listening, feeling, befriending this part, putting a picture on the wall.

Putting a floor on the bottom and learning how to feel the bottom of it, because we can plant ourselves in there and examine it and be with it and know we're going to be okay.

Haley Radke: And that, and just having the bottom, like as you're saying that I'm like, if we don't go there, we picture it as like the never-ending abyss. Right.

Jeanette Yoffe: Exactly. It gives it some footing. It gives us a, just a grounding because, and that's another exercise that I do, is the grounding tool where you imagine from your belly button to the center of this planet, there is a cord and that cord cannot be broken. And it is extremely powerful. And when you feel that pull. And you have to be standing. You just stand arms at your side. Just go in your mind's eye, in your imagination, and imagine there's a cord from your belly button to the center of this planet. You feel that connection, and then you ask somebody to give you a little push. Your body feels this newfound strength and you feel this connection that you've never felt before.

And for me when I first did this, and I teach this to everybody, is it helped me feel a sense of belonging and connection. And that's that footing, feeling a sense of being grounded.

Because when you're uprooted-- I don't know if you've ever seen the sign language for adoption, but it's literally, oh gosh, it was a little scary to see it. But literally it's like, they're holding their hands together, they're pull something up, they put it to the right and they put it down. That's sign language for adoption. And when I saw that, it just reminded me of this image of a plant being just pulled out by its root, pulled out and put in another, just smashed in another pot.

And there's no sense of this. You know, you're uprooted, literally. So we need to ground ourselves, put that lining in our primal wound so we can get a footing. So we can see it for what it is, and befriend it. And get to know it and live there. Not live there literally every day, but go in there and not be afraid of it. And honor it.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Those are some real, some really good tools. I really appreciate that. I love having really practical things that we can do and your wisdom at on just this needs to be a daily practice and it's a journey. And it's a lifetime of moving forward with that. So thank you. Thanks so much for speaking to those things.

Jeanette Yoffe: You're welcome.

Haley Radke: I'd love it if you would share with us how we can connect with you online.

Jeanette Yoffe: I wrote a book about all the interventions that I do with children and teens and families in adoption, so that you can find that on Amazon. It's called Groundbreaking Interventions, Working with Traumatized Children, Teen and Families in Foster Care and Adoption.

My website is Yoffe therapy.com. I also have a YouTube channel, Yoffe Therapy, and there's a lot of videos on that. And that's how you can find me.

Haley Radke: Thank you. That's so great. I was just on your YouTube channel this morning and watching a bunch of the different videos. You've explained these exercises in depth. It's, they're so good. So good. It's a great resource for people to check out. Thank you so much for sharing with us today, Jeanette. It was just an honor to speak with you.

Jeanette Yoffe: Well, thank you. You too. Thanks so much. It's been an honor.

Haley Radke: I've been on a bit of a break from the show prepping and recording for season four, so I wanna give you a quick update on that.

And I sent out my monthly newsletter last week where I revealed the theme of season four as chosen by my monthly supporters. Thank you guys.

So if you're curious about what the theme is, you can go back and find the back catalog of my newsletters. There's three, so it's not like a ton of things to go through.

Adopteeson.com/about is my bio page, and I have a couple of links there to articles I've written, and there's also a link for the newsletter. And so if you click through on that one's got the back issues. So you can check back on the latest one to see what the theme is for season four. But before I start releasing season four episodes, I'm gonna have a few more healing episodes for you, including the one next week where I invited Jeanette back and we talk about support groups and how to start your own support group, which is perfect timing for me because we have started one here in my city in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

So if you're a listener and you live in the Edmonton area, please get in touch with me so you can come to our next meetup and I'll send you the address. It's at my house, so if you're ever curious about where I record, you can come to my house and see.

Anyway. Tune in next week because you really wanna hear what Jeanette has to say about starting your own support group. This show is literally brought to you by the support from my Patreon partners, and I couldn't do it without them. Truly, Patreon is a website that allows. Creators like me to raise monthly support to help me keep producing this podcast for you.

And as a special thank you for a monthly pledge, I have a secret Facebook group for adoptees only, where we support each other through search and reunion issues, and we get really real about all the things we're struggling with. So come and join us. AdopteesOn.com/partner has all the details. I'm so grateful to be able to do this for you, and I couldn't do it without that financial support. Thank you. Thank you so much.

So if you wanna come and support the show, monthly, adopteeson.com/partner has the details. I also have a one-time donation link on my adopteeson.com page for PayPal, if that's something that you. You're not really interested in joining the group, but maybe you would like to give a one-time donation that is so appreciated and helpful also.

Thank you. Okay. I have a special message from a fellow adoptee to share with you. Let's listen.

(Voice Recording of Christie) Hi, my name is Christie. I discovered that I was adopted at the age of 18 in a fight. And for many years I wasn't allowed to have any feelings about that. In fact, growing up I wasn't really allowed to have many feelings at all.

So I internalized a lot of my emotions and now I was ready to let those emotions out. Through writing and let my story be known. So the past year I've been working on my book, and yesterday it officially became available. Right now it's only available on lulu.com, but in six to eight weeks it will be available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and that's l u l u.com. The name of the book is, Why Aren't You Like Me? The brochure said you would be. I hope you read it and I hope you enjoy.

(Haley Speaking) Thanks, Christie. If you are an adoptee and would like to tell us about your book or blog or whatever you're working on, head over to adopteeson.com/connect and click on the microphone at the bottom of the page.

Don't email it to me. I wanna hear your voices. This is a podcast, right? Thank you for listening, and thank you for being so kind during my break. Let's talk again next Friday.

53 Holly NG - Pouring Out Our Feelings

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/53

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season Three, Episode 13, Holly NG, which stands for Nerdy Gal. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today I talked with Holly, aka Nerdy Gal, about her reunion with her first mother and some of the instigating factors that led her out of the fog.

Holly also tells us how a technique called dirty pouring has helped her process her feelings. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and links to all of the things we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.

The other thing you can find on the Adoptees On website is a signup for the new monthly newsletter. I just sent out an email about losing my actual voice and I shared some thoughts about what happens when adoptees stay silent. I’d love to be able to include you when I send my [00:01:00] next note in January. The signup link is in the show notes and it's also found at adopteeson.com/newsletter.

Before we get started, if you're a new listener, I just wanna give you a definition of “coming out of the fog” in case you haven't heard that terminology before, because we reference it a few times in this episode. Coming out of the fog is the process of discovering that adoption had a deep and profound impact on our lives.

Now it's a little more complex and nuanced than that, and if you're interested in hearing more about the process, check back in the podcast feed just a few shows back for a Healing Series episode called Coming Out of the Fog. Okay, let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to the show, Holly. Welcome, Holly.

Holly: Hello. Thank you so much for having me, Haley. I'm so excited.

Haley Radke: Awesome. Me too. So why don't you start out and just share your story with us. [00:02:00]

Holly: So, I was born in 1978 in December, and the story has it that I was placed in foster care until February. Nobody is sure why. I've asked questions, talked to extended family members of my first mother, and my adoptive parents have remembered almost everything up till that day and the day they got me, except for why I was in foster care for three months. So that's kind of something that I struggle with, but I'm hopeful I'll find the answer to that someday.

My first mother was 19, I believe, and my bio father, or I don't know if you call them first dad, first father was, I was told, 21 at the time. It's weird because I do have my footprints, like my family [00:03:00] history. And then I have something that my mom, my adoptive mother, had written down as far as traits go for both mother's side and father's side.

I also have a copy of my birth certificate that was whited out with my names and my first mother's name. When my parents told me that I was adopted, I was probably five, well, probably seven or eight actually. And just like others that I've heard, I already knew. There was a part of me growing up, or there was all of me growing up that knew that I did not belong to my family.

So I remember this was my first trigger, I believe, in life. When they told me that I was adopted, they handed me these documents that were whited out. And I remember them telling me that if you ever want to look for your biological family, you know [00:04:00] you have to go through us. We are the ones that have to help you with this because it's a big process, you know, very difficult. And we have to help you.

So I remember standing there and thinking, I was starting to get enraged, and I was thinking, why do they have to help me do this? Like, why can't I do this on my own? And I can't even, and it was right there in front of me. Like my name was whited out. My first mother's name was whited out and it was just like everything inside of me started to boil.

And I looked at them and I looked down at the birth certificate, if that's what it is, and I held it up to the light and I could see right through it. You could see through the white out. It was so old. And so you could see my name right there and you could see my birth mother's name, my first mother, and that was it.

And then I remember handing them [00:05:00] back the documents and they were just standing there staring at me, like dumbfounded, like, oh my gosh, we'd never even thought of doing that. And so I handed them back to them or handed the paperwork back to them, and I remember going upstairs and going outside to play and I had written her name down and kept that with me until I was 19 years old.

Haley Radke: So they handed you those papers when they were telling you you were adopted?

Holly: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Wow. So you found out you were adopted and your name at birth and your first mother's name all in one shot?

Holly: Yes. When somebody tells me I can't do something in life, that has always been my motivation to do something. That was presented to me along throughout my life from them, and I always did it. I always did whatever [00:06:00] they told me I couldn't do. So that was kind of like my motivation, telling me I can't do something.

Well, my first mother, she had named me Holly Anne because I was born December 23. And growing up I was Holly Jean. And so I had asked my adoptive mother, you know, did you guys name me this or did you keep the name or how did this all happen? Because I'm still unclear as to the circumstances and why I was in foster care, like I said, for three months. And they said, yes, we named you that.

And my first mother swears she named me that first, but they said they didn't name after what she did. And it's just, yeah, it turned out to be kind of not a fight amongst family, but a little bit of an animosity, I guess I would say. So [00:07:00] I was named Holly twice apparently. So yeah, I wrote down her name and always kept that on a piece of paper, you know, next to my bed or wherever it was.

When growing up, I would always call. Well, so the phone books back in South Dakota were about an inch thick, right? So you could look up any city, any name, and that was the first thing I did. I went through the phone book and I found the last name of my birth mother. I found that there was another man there, and then there was her name, and that was it.

So I would call, when I was younger, I would call who is my uncle now, and I have spoken to him just recently actually. And I would call and hang up or I would call and say like, Oh, was George there? You know, just to hear his voice. Then I would hang up. Well, one time I called and he answered the phone.[00:08:00]

And I said like, Whoa, is Dwayne there? You know, just trying to disguise my voice, my first mother and I sound identical. I was going to hang up the phone. And he goes, Hey. And I was like, oh my gosh. And I had a friend there with me and they were like, oh. And he goes, Great talking to you. And then I hung up, but I was like, oh my gosh, they're onto me. They know. They know like I'm calling them. Oh my gosh. You know?

Well, at 18 years old I left home and a bunch of my friends and I moved to Arizona. It was the night of being out and much too late and many drinks into it. I decided I was gonna contact my first mother and introduce myself and say, Hey, did you have a child earlier in life?

So I did. I went into a quiet room and I remember my friends at the time were like, Holly, just do it. Just do it, Holly. I was [00:09:00] like, don't be nervous. What's the worst that can happen? So I called her. Immediately when she picked up the phone, I could hear myself and she was like, Hello? And I just said, Hi, um, this is Holly.

And she's like, I'm so happy that you contacted me, Holly. I've been waiting for this for a very long time. So that started our relationship and as awkward as it was, we basically, we were great friends for many, many years. Yeah. We were like sisters. Two peas in a pod in a lot of ways. In some ways, no, but.

I found out I had a half sister. She had her about eight years after she had me and she kept her. She always felt very bad. I could tell, and I always told her, it is not your fault. I never, ever, ever have [00:10:00] blamed her for anything. You know, she told me she ran away from home during her pregnancy because her mother, my grandmother, wanted her to have an abortion.

Her father, my grandfather, said, no, if you wanna keep the baby, then you stay and we will handle this. Okay. So she did end up hitchhiking to Oregon and told me they partied. They had lots of fun, you know, all that good stuff. So I didn't make the connection until just a couple years ago that it was actually relatives of mine that she went to stay with in order to get away from her mother.

Haley Radke: So you said that you were really good friends like sisters for a period of time, and what does that relationship with her look like now?

Holly: Two years ago, and this is when I believe I was coming out of the fog. I still have, you know, some questions about what that looks like, but [00:11:00] I know that I went through something that was like the most major transformation or awareness of my life that I've ever gone through, and everything became so clear to me.

I can describe it somewhat, but I was working a very, very stressful job. I had two best friends die who I worked with. One of them had cancer and I watched him pass for two years. And when he finally was able to go and be at peace, I became super angry at my adoptive parents. Reading up on adoption and the presenting problem and what, you know, a major life incident can bring you to coming out of the fog.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was slowly coming out of the fog. So it takes me a little while to do things, I guess, [00:12:00] looking back in my life than it does other people. And I don't know why, but I was really angry. I wanted my parents, my adoptive parents, to read The Primal Wound. I started The Primal Wound. I could not finish it because it was so painful.

Everything was spot on, and I was still in denial a bit, I think, and I didn't want to hurt my adoptive parents. That's always been my biggest concern is hurting my adoptive parents. So I was going through that and one of the nights of my very deepest, darkest moments, I was so mad I google the agency where I guess I was in foster care.

And there was a little comment section, you know, leave your name, leave your email, we'll get back to you. And here's a little comment you can make. Well, the comment ended up being like a novel. And I was like, I don't think they're gonna get back to me, but it feels so much better to get it [00:13:00] off my shoulders.

And basically what I was telling them or asking them at the end was, what do you do or what kind of resources are you giving adoptive parents before they adopt a child? Because I would love to know what sort of counseling, what do you make them go through? What kind of questions do you ask them?

Do you prepare them? Like do you really sit down and prepare them for what they are going to deal with, you know, with their kids? So they got back to me the next day and they sent me this beautiful email. And they were like, some of the things that you said in your comment section to us, Holly, were spot on and there's something like nobody would ever know.

I was describing like a yellow room that I was in and all I could hear was screaming. [00:14:00] And there was another thing. I had a caseworker, her name was Ruby and I described her, they were like, there's no way that anybody could have known. Like you could not have known this. And I remember starting to remember things that I know that were way back in the subconscious or in the subconscious mind, I guess is what you would say.

And it was really strange. I mean, I was like a head case. We got laid off from the job. My two friends had passed and then here I was thinking, you know what? There is something that you need to do, Holly. I don't know what it is yet, but you need to find your authentic self.

It was just an internal voice speaking to me and I cut my friends out and they were like, what's going on? And I'm like, I just need time. I just need time [00:15:00] or I'm going to lose it. You know? I know that there's something that is calling me right now. Gradually, over the last two years, I've found a lot of answers and everything makes sense now.

Haley Radke: What does that mean that you found a lot of answers?

Holly: Well, I did a DNA test through Ancestry.com, and I found out from my first mother's daughter, my half sister. I had always asked about my biological father and she said, Oh, yeah, I know who he is. It might be one of three, however, we're pretty sure that it's this guy.

So she said he was still alive. Well, over a couple years of hearing that, my half-sister was like, Holly, I have to tell you, your dad passed away in 2009 and I can't bear to watch, [00:16:00] the interaction between you and mom go on like this anymore. So I do wanna tell you that he passed away.

When I heard that, I just, it was like a punch in my stomach. I couldn't believe that she had kept it from me. And so I googled his obituary and then I found through Facebook some of my siblings from his side. So there's one girl and one boy. The boy I look identical to. The girl, I mean, people say we look nothing alike. I could see it, maybe.

So I reached out. He was very forthcoming. He was shocked. He didn't know that I existed. And it's weird because he was best friends with some of my guy friends in high school growing up. So I was thinking, you know, if I would've stayed in South Dakota, I could've married my brother. [00:17:00]

Um, but I didn't. He said that he would do a DNA test and I waited the nine weeks or whatever it was to get it back from Ancestry, and he said that he was doing the same because I wanted to make sure that this was, in fact, my biological father. When I got my test back, he said, well, let me see your test. Let's share results.

And I said, Well, did you get yours back? And he just said, No, I thought I could use yours. I said, Okay, so do you plan on doing a test, taking a test, spitting in the jar and then submitting it or not? And he never did. That was kind of a let down. So I kind of pieced together my family tree and that took a while and then I got sick of it.

But there was one connection, I think, that I made. There was one first cousin, I don't know whose side it was on, that reached out to me and said, I don't know how you got my information, but I don't want anything to do [00:18:00] with you. And I responded back and I said, Well, you submitted a DNA test through Ancestry and we came up as a match. You're like the closest match to me. So didn't mean to disrupt your life. Have a good one.

That's it. I haven't gone back to readdress that. I kind of stopped with that because it just seemed like there were so many close ends, but dead ends sort of, I guess, if that makes sense. And I was just kind of sick of all of it or it was just too much. And so I kind of moved on from that.

Haley Radke: Have you confirmed that like, you know, that's your brother and you know who your dad was and he's passed away?

Holly: It has not been confirmed via DNA. So, no, it's not a hundred percent.

Haley Radke: And so I had asked you before what your relationship was like now with your birth mother. Can you [00:19:00] take us back to that conversation where your half-sister says, oh, by the way, your dad is actually dead. Can you take us back there?

Holly: Well, I confronted my mom and I just asked, did you know that he passed away? And yeah, I didn't wanna hurt your feelings. And so we kind of moved on from that.

Haley Radke: I didn't wanna hurt your feelings?

Holly: Yeah. I didn't wanna hurt your feelings. I didn't wanna hurt you. That's the common theme it seems.

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh. But like, what about the truth?

Holly: The truth has been, I mean, unless these two families were so close, which I doubt, I highly doubt that they were, it was a closed adoption. The truth for both sides, or both sets of first moms, first dads, adoptive parents. The truth is so far away from reality for any of these [00:20:00] people that it's just. To me, I was always brought up, tell the truth. Tell the truth. I've always been so forward and almost to a fault I'm honest.

My first mother, she, we just kind of left it as is. She came out to Arizona about five times to visit over the past 20 years. Every single time she was here, it was like I was taking care of a child. The first couple times I was like, wow, that's different. But the last couple times it was truly amazing to me at how maybe stuck in whatever depths of despair she's been her entire life.

But also that we need to remember life does move on, not from, it's never gonna change, you know? So you have to at some point [00:21:00] accept responsibility and make the best of everything. And the last time that we have spoken was two years ago during Christmas. It was my birthday. I had gotten both sides of the family together to do pictures, which I thought would be a fun thing to kind of bring the family together.

Needless to say, the day did not turn out the best. And once again, I felt horrible. That night my first mother, my son, and I came back to my place and we're sitting there and something had triggered her. I don't know what it was, but we were all watching a movie and she told me, get up and get me a glass of water now.

And so I was like, this is strange. So I got her a glass of water and set it down and then she said, That's not the glass of water I wanted. I want a bottle of water. [00:22:00] Go get me one. And I just said, We didn't get any bottled water, mom. We got a jug of water, okay? So she flies out of the chair, goes into my son's room where she was staying and slams the door, starts throwing around all the gifts that we'd given her.

Glass is shattering all over the room. I take my son, I put him in my room, I lock the door. I say, Stay in here, son. He is scared to death. And I come back out and I'm like, What are you doing? And she is just in a rage. She grabs her stuff, she packs her suitcase and she walks out the door and she never has called.

She has never tried to reach out except for on Instagram. One day not too long ago where she was making comments on photos that I had and stuff like that. And other than that, nothing. So it was like seeing her walk out the door. [00:23:00] You know, I had my son to take care of, make sure he was okay. So I didn't really think of it at the time, but that was pure devastation.

I mean, it just, it's affected me like no other. But I think when that happened, it triggered me. Everything else happened after that. It was, you know, I lost my job, we got laid off. I'd been working corporate America for 20 years, you know, just working to the grind and then everything just unraveled over the course of up until now.

It was about a year and a half ago now that I found myself in Walmart and I picked up a canvas. I don't even know what I was doing there. It was like midnight. I'm like walking up and down the aisles, aimlessly just like, you know, I wanna say my beard wasn't trimmed, my [00:24:00] hair was awry.

I'm just walking up and down at night. I just see a canvas. I look at a paintbrush, get a couple paints, and I'm like, All right, I don't know what we have here, but we're gonna go with it, okay. I get home and I just kind of squirted paint on that canvas and I'm just going back and forth and it just fell into what it is now.

And I think it was the escape from reality. And I was able to do something where I would do it by myself. I would do it alone. And so when I did it, I would turn on music and I got more comfortable with the idea that I was the one in charge, I was the one that was in charge of making something.

I was in charge of the outcome. It was all me. It was up to me for this piece to turn out, and it was scary at first. After a while, it just became so [00:25:00] exhilarating. [00:25:00] I can't even tell you. It was like freeing to me. That's when I started to look into the dirty pouring and I literally found, I just mixed different things together and I just came up with my own way. But it was the whole process that basically allowed me to heal through being creative.

I played piano my entire life. I was a concert pianist starting from five. I took lessons from my godmother who was very strict. She made me learn to write music and the theory behind it. And I was in Guild. It was like a national honors society, I guess, for young pianists. When I moved out of the home at 18, I traveled 2,000 miles down to Arizona and I've lived in Arizona ever since, I didn't have a piano.

I've had [00:26:00] keyboards, but I didn't have my piano to sit down and just really jam out. And you literally lose yourself in the moment. And you don't have to be creative. Trust me, you don't have to be an artist. When I started painting, I can't even draw a stick figure. I'm not even joking. Like I've never taken an art class. You just have to go with it.

What I tell people is that you have to do it. You have to do it alone. You have to do it scared. You just have to do it. You can't overthink it. In fact, don't even think at all while you're doing it because your subconscious mind will be doing enough of that for you. Your other side takes over with everyday life, you know, with our jobs, our kids, our things we have to get done, the creative is pushed aside and it's screaming to get out.

Haley Radke: Okay, so you said dirty pour and what is that? [00:27:00]

Holly: Dirty pour. I did not come up with that name. But dirty pour is where you take acrylic paint and you add different mediums to it. Mediums are like Floetrol, which is like a paint thinner, or you add like different mediums that artists use.

You can add water, you can add silicone, anything, and you mix it up and then you dump them all together. And then you take your canvas and you dump it on top of the canvas, and as it spreads out, it makes these cells, these different cell-looking things. And that's what I was trying to get to. Just the whole process of it, like mixing the paint and then dumping it together and then spreading it out on the canvas.

It's so gratifying to me. I don't know what it is. It's just so gratifying. I've posted [00:28:00] some on my YouTube. And yeah, they call it dirty pour. And then I just call it my art therapy because it really has, I didn't know at the time what it was doing for me, but it was freeing me. It was freeing me.

I wasn't doing it for somebody else. I wasn't doing it to make anybody else happy. Which is what I know growing up, being pressured to do the piano and to to be perfect all the time. That was for somebody else. It wasn't for me. And so this was the first time at, you know, almost 38 years of age, 37 at the time.

It was the first time that I was doing something for myself, like not getting a master's because of somebody else. Not getting a job because of somebody else, or they wanted me to do it. It was me, this was all me. It is more freeing. I can't even describe it. Because people kind of look at me and go, okay, that’s fun.

Haley Radke: Is there anything else that you've done in the last while? You know, you've done your painting and you said it's been really healing for you. What other types of things have you been doing?

Holly: I started blogging and I didn't know at the time, I think it was 20 years ago when I moved out here with or out here to Arizona with my best friends. We were sitting in a bar, and I remember the music stopped and you could just overhear somebody talking about the other person. And I was always just like, man, do I have to talk about everybody all the time? Like, this is just not who I am.

And then I thought, you know what? If I ever write a book, it's gonna be called When the Music Stops, because that seems to be the story of my life, you know, and I didn't know the significance of it. When creativity comes to an end, I start [00:30:00] to panic because I'm like, how am I gonna let out my frustrations? How am I gonna let out my authentic self? You know?

And so when the music stops has a kind of meaning for always keep the creativity going. It doesn't have to be piano or music. It can be anything, you know, it can be art, it can be underwater basket weaving. Who knows? Like that might be next for me.

Haley Radke: In Arizona?

Holly: Right. Sand weaving, in the heat.

Haley Radke: And how about other adoptees? Have you connected with other adoptees?

Holly: I have. And actually through your show is really how I've connected immensely through social media. Twitter is a big one. I've gotten to see who have been some of the past guests on [00:31:00] the show, and that has been so healing in itself. It’s just reaching out and hearing other people's stories, that we actually are going through the same thing.

I think that's the biggest thing. Like two years ago, I had no clue that anybody was actually feeling the same things as I was. It was mind-boggling. Like I found your podcast. I was listening to Joe Rogan, right? And then I typed in something about adoption. I was like, maybe there's something on adoption.

And yours came up. And I started listening to it and immediately, I remember my son and I had just gotten home, I was in my room and I just dropped to my knees and I was just sobbing. Sobbing, sobbing. Like there is a lifeline. There is somebody that feels the same way. This is insane.

How can this be? You know, like how come it took this long? That's been [00:32:00] amazing. Amazingly helpful. That's been my therapy.

Haley Radke: Wow. I'm so pleased that I can provide you with some therapy from afar through your earbuds. I know you've told me that story before, but I did not remember until you started saying, and I'm so glad that there's been a small piece from our show in your healing.

I love that. It's so good

Holly: And you don't give yourself enough credit, I'm telling you. I'm telling you, girl, like it has been my everything. Because through your show I was able to find people on Twitter or Facebook, you know, those sorts of things. So, yeah.

Haley Radke: Well, adoptees are just really incredible people and so we have like the whole gamut. You know, you're talking about your sister is the good adoptee and you're the angry one or whatever. But overall, we are incredibly resilient and have an immense [00:33:00] amount of empathy for people in a variety of different situations. And even the ones that are maybe in a hard, angry place right now are really incredible people.

So I've had almost all good interactions with adoptees. Almost all. It's pretty good because, you know, we talk about this saying, “hurt people hurt people.” You know, occasionally there'll be that situation, especially online when you can't read tone or whatever, and there's been a couple of misunderstandings.

But yeah, adoptees are pretty amazing. So I'm just honored and humbled at the same time to be able to do this.

Holly: And I say for people that don't believe that we're going through this or that the suffering [00:34:00] is in fact; I describe it as when you're underwater and you are swimming towards the surface and like right before you get to the surface, you start to run outta air quicker and you get that really tight feeling in your chest and it's right before you get to the surface.

And then that feeling right there is like what it feels like. I think when you're out of the fog as an adoptee. On a daily basis or however for which way you go through it. If it's a couple days and then you take a couple days off, or if it's a week at a time. I think, to me, that's the same feeling. And I can say that the day that I was born, I was still free.

The day they removed me from my biological mother was really, to me, the last day of my life where I was the person that I was meant to be. And you can try and find that your entire life, [00:35:00] but you only get so close. I don't think that you can actually ever get back to that place where you were meant to be.

But the other thing that I do truly believe in is that we can choose to live in sunrise or in a dark place, and both are perfectly fine. You know, to other adoptees that are out there feeling this dark-like place, that is fine. Because when people choose to live in that darkness to survive, I can remind those that say, always be on the positive, always think in the positive, that in those dark moments is when you have the most intellectual healing that takes place, in my mind.

That is what has happened with me. In those darkest of times I have learned the most about myself. [00:36:00] So never ever give up. Don't ever give in. But those places of darkness are where you're learning the most from yourself.

Haley Radke: I don't think I've ever thought about that before. But it's so true because when you're the most desperate, then you are reaching for, like what? Like something, something.

Holly: When you've been there, when you've been to those places, it's almost like you have to make that your friend and go like somebody that almost welcomes it. It's really strange because then when I'm in it, I'm like, Oh, why would you welcome this, Holly? But then I'm like, Okay, take a step back and know that you are learning the most when you are in the deepest depths of despair.

You're learning the most about yourself because those feelings and those experiences that have happened to you are coming to surface and they're taking you with them, and now's your time to learn. And when you get [00:37:00] back to the highs again, you know, like, Wow, this is great and this is what I took from that.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much. Let's go to our recommended resources, and I would recommend everyone goes and checks out your pictures of your dirty pour, I don't know what to call it, dirty pour artwork?

Holly: Dirty pour art therapy is what I call it.

Haley Radke: Okay. It's so unique and interesting, and I love how you describe the process for us. And you can actually watch Holly, this is very cool, on Periscope. You do a lot of scopes where you show how you do it. So that's been really cool to follow along with as well. It's kind of mesmerizing, right? Seeing the liquid go and move and you're not exactly sure how it's gonna turn out.

Holly: Exactly. There's no recipe. There's no recipe for creativity, you guys. [00:38:00] That's what I want everybody to know. Don't even think about it, just do it. And of course, you're gonna make a mistake. But that's how we learn, right? So there's no recipe when I give the classes on Meetup. And we were the first dirty pour art therapy meetup in the world and in the history of meetups.

So they featured us. And everybody there went in with the mindset of, okay, how much paint do I put in? How much? You know, the people that are really wound tight, they were just dying. They were like, Oh my gosh. And I'm like, Okay, put it aside, don't look at your neighbor because yours is gonna look nothing like your neighbors, whatever.

And I told them, just go with the flow. This is literally a flow. Like you flow, you're gonna dump this, it's gonna flow on the canvas. And they left there so happy. [00:39:00] I was so happy just to see the looks on their faces. Like they really took something in that they'd never experienced.

Yeah. It made me cry because I was so happy for them.

Haley Radke: It was so beautiful to see you plan that and how it all turned out and everything. So neat. And so you're describing that, and I've only been to one paint night. The last few years, this has been a huge trend, right? It's a paint night and they have the canvas at the front and it's like, this is the picture that you're gonna paint.

And the teacher of the class is like, Okay, everybody paint this color on top and then this. And yeah, it was amazingly tense because you legitimately didn't want to make a mistake because you're trying to get your painting to look like theirs. And your style is so different than that. It's so different.

Holly: I don't wanna be like [00:40:00] anybody else. I never have been. If I see somebody with something that I've got from like Goodwill or whatever, I'm like, Nope, nope, can't wear it. Can't do it. 'Cause I like to be different. And that way you're not pressured to follow a pattern.

Like there was a man in the class, literally, he was probably like 75, and his wife at first was like, Oh no, he is gonna get paint everywhere. And I was like, Let him go. And she was a psychiatrist too, and I said, Let him go. And he was running around with paint all over and he was laughing and she was laughing, and she said, I'm gonna try this with my group.

And she works with adults in a mental hospital and she's like, I just don't know how it's gonna work. I said, The same way it worked here, just do it. You might wanna use a little less paint, but just let 'em have fun. Let them be free. So [00:41:00] that's just what it's about.

Haley Radke: So good. Okay. What do you want to recommend to us?

Holly: I would recommend two things. There is a recipe for the dirty pour, and I don't know if you want me to say the recipe here or if you just want to have people go to my YouTube channel and watch it. Because I made two videos tonight and it shows the process.

Haley Radke: Oh, cool. Well, why don't you give us the light version and then send me those links and I'll put them in the show notes.

Holly: I want everybody to actually try a dirty pour. Okay, so the recipe for the dirty pour is you go out and you buy acrylic paints. Doesn't matter what brand. Doesn't matter how expensive. A pouring medium. You can get Floetrol, usually from a Home Depot or Ace Hardware, something like that.

Stir sticks, dollar store, like the Popsicle kind. Plastic cups, a [00:42:00] canvas, gloves, and then just be yourself. You mix the acrylics with the pouring medium. You can put in silicone. You can do whatever you want. And then you pour it all together and you toss it. You do a flip cup thing on your canvas and then let it go and watch the cells appear.

Haley Radke: Cool. Okay. And so you have a video of doing this on YouTube that we could watch for the instructions as well?

Holly: Yes, and I would be willing to do something online for anybody that wants to do it. Who is uncomfortable with still doing it themselves. I would be more than happy to teach people how to do it.

Haley Radke: That's awesome. Okay. Wait, did you say you had two things?

Holly: I did. And I have a book, too. I have a book. It really helped me through some of the darkest times, the last couple years, and it's called Dark Nights of the Soul, and it's a guide to finding your way through life's ordeals, [00:43:00] and it's by Thomas Moore.

He talks about our lives are filled with emotional tunnels everywhere, whether it's losing the loved one, illnesses, disappointment, relationship woes, things like that. Like I was saying before, in those dark nights you can overcome those and he kind of shows you how, when you're in those fragile moments of your life, that restoration is coming and you just have to be able to get through it.

And he kind of helps you see in different ways how to get through those. Even though they're pretty bad. I found that very, very, very helpful.

Haley Radke: Great. Thank you so much, Holly. Tell us where can we connect with you online?

Holly: You can connect with me at www.nerdygal.onuniverse.com.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. And I'm gonna put the link to that and your blog [00:44:00] and also your Meetup link so that if people are in Arizona and they wanna come out and do a paint night with you, they can do that.

Go paint with Holly and um, if you are far away then you can watch her YouTube video about how to do this. And send us pictures if you do it. Tag us on Instagram. Wouldn't you love to see that? That would be awesome.

Holly: For sure. Thank you so much, Haley. I can't even thank you enough. I, and you and the guests. On the show are like the most dear people to me in the world, and I haven't even met you guys, but I seriously love you guys.

Haley Radke: Aw, you're so sweet, thank you.

This episode is brought to you by my generous supporters. I literally couldn't do the show every week without their support. Thank you. If you're looking for a place to find further adoptee support, have you considered signing up to partner with me?

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We've got two weeks left of Season Three. Next week I've got our last artist interview to share with you, and then I'll have the Season Finale with two familiar voices coming up right after that. And my Patreon supporters have voted and overwhelmingly chosen the theme for Season Four, and it's so good.

I cannot wait to start recording and to share Season Four with you. Thank you for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.