77 [Healing Series] Group Therapy

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/77

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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 are learning all about group therapy. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Pam Greenstone. Welcome, Pam. Pam is a licensed professional counselor in private practice in Austin, Texas, and has been leading psychotherapy groups since 2002. So Pam, you approached me about doing a couple of episodes on our healing series about group therapy, and I was like, Okay, that sounds really cool. I don't really know what that is. So, why don't you first tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into being a group therapist?

Pam Greenstone: Sure. I am an adoptee myself, and was born in 1970 in Dallas, Texas, in foster care for two weeks, and then adopted by my family. And see…I think I'm in reunion right now since 2014, with both my birth mother and her family, and my birth father and his family.

I just returned, actually, from a family reunion with my birth father's family, which was incredible and wonderful. So yeah, I'm in full on in reunion. And I wanted to start by talking about the history of group therapy, and I think that'll lead into how I got involved in group, as well. So, in 1906 (it's been around for a long time), Joseph Pratt did what is considered kinda the first group therapy experience. And he brought together 15 tuberculosis patients, and thought it might be helpful to do education with them and have them talk about their experience. And then he also had them agree to certain things upon joining the group.

So those two factors–the fact that he was getting a group of people together to talk about their experience and then that they had this certain set of agreements, that made it the first group therapy, and it went well and the outcomes were really good. And so he (I think) kept doing it and kept spreading the word.

So a lot of doctors, and also psychiatrists would do this kind of work with schizophrenics, alcoholics, people that were struggling with socialization, and they were doing this until about the 1940s, just in their medical practices. But in the 1940s, it became a bigger deal, because there were all these World War II soldiers coming back with what they were calling “shell-shocked,” or “fatigue from battle,” and what we would now know as PTSD. And so just because they had to (there were so many patients), they started seeing them in groups. And from there, they started to see how good the outcomes were, how well these people did–even better than individual therapy in some ways.

And so that's when psychiatrists, psychologists started doing research, and writing books, and it became more of a mode of its own (a therapy mode of its own). And so since the 1940s, it's been what it is today, which is small groups of people getting together to talk about their thoughts, feelings, and reactions in the moment as they're having them, getting to know themselves, and getting to know the way they do their own relationships, finding ways to get along better with lots of different kinds of people, and what it is today, what you see today. In the year 2000, I was in graduate school and also coming out of the fog and also in my group therapy class. And when I saw the list of therapeutic factors in group–which I could go over them right now, if you think that'd be a good idea.

Haley Radke: Yes.

Pam Greenstone: It's Yalom. Irvin Yalom is a theorist. He's written books on existential group psychotherapy, and he listed out these therapeutic factors that we still have today and he's worked with them. So it's–these are things that happen in group that are helpful or therapeutic:
-installation of hope -universality–just knowing that what we're going through, everybody is going through -imparting of information (just like psychoeducation kind of stuff) -altruism–because in group, we're not only getting help the whole time, we're giving help the whole time. So helping others is really therapeutic. -recapitulation of the family of origin, or the family group (and that's when you're sitting in a room with a group leader who's a trained therapist who can sometimes feel like a parent, right? Or maybe there are two of them in the room, and then other members, which can feel sibling-like.)

All of a sudden we can start having feelings like we did in our family in different times in our development. And so that's–we can heal those wounds in the moment, if we're in a therapy group where we have room to express all of those kinds of feelings, or we can do things differently and learn to grow and change that way–have room to react and respond and say things in a different way than we usually would.

Then the other factors are: -developing socializing techniques -imitative behavior (just seeing how other people interact and using that and practicing with that and seeing if it works for you) -other kinds of interpersonal learning -group cohesiveness–which is just a sense of belonging (which is huge) -catharsis–which is like having strong feelings and talking through them at the same time -existential factors–just this sense that, in a way, we're all alone in the world, and that it's important to find ways of relating and connecting with one another in a deep way

So, listen to that list! So I was sitting in my group therapy class and I'm like, Why aren't we all in group therapy? Why isn't everyone in group therapy? I just thought, This is incredible. The fact that I was also going through coming out of the fog, I thought, Oh my gosh. For me, as someone with the wounds, and the trauma, and the loss that I've experienced in my life without a way of talking about it– I didn't know how to talk about that. I could see how group would provide me not only therapy and psychological help that I needed at the time, but also just a constant sense of belonging.

Once you become part of a group, you benefit from that group cohesiveness and that feeling of belonging the whole time. And I thought, Oh my gosh, that would hold me, and then also give me the therapy that I needed. And so I felt really lucky to be in that place where I was looking all at all of that stuff, all at the same time.

Haley Radke: So you were already doing training for therapy when you've discovered this, and then you just got really passionate about it.

Pam Greenstone: Oh my gosh. I had so much passion. I talked to everyone about it. I got in my own group, I started talking to my clients (once I started seeing clients) about it. And yeah, I'm a real advocate for it. I just can't believe how helpful it is in so many different ways.

Haley Radke: Well, I was just gonna ask, can you tell us what's the difference between having a therapist lead a group? So, group therapy versus peer-led support groups (which we've talked about before on the show as well).

Pam Greenstone: Yes, and I want to say that I… Of all the different kinds of groups, there are support groups, there are self-help groups, there are sometimes like book groups that follow along with a certain kind of self-help book, there are AA groups, or different kinds of 12-step program groups.

I refer to all of them. I think group is helpful in all kinds of ways, and if someone doesn't feel ready to join a therapy group, a support group might be a good fit for them. You know, so I just want to say that outright. And I think one difference is (because there are a lot of differences) is that in therapy groups, we really always try to bring it back to the here and now–bring it back to the moment. So when a member might be talking about something that's going on in their outside life, right? Say they're talking about… “Talking to my spouse and I feel so misunderstood.”

So they might tell that story. And then another member or the leader might say, “Is there a way that happens in here?” Or they might say, “I think that happened between us, and this was my experience of you in that time.” So there's this opportunity to bring, keep bringing everything back to the moment and to the relationships in the room, right?

And with that guidance of a therapist, you can grow your capacity to start observing yourself, right? In your relationships in the room, and then also in your relationships outside of this group therapy room. So that's one big difference. That doesn't really happen in support groups, and it shouldn't, because I think it's a therapy– It's a psychological kind of tool that a therapist is skilled in using, whereas a lay-led group, it's not gonna be as effective in helping us change, right? Change our interpersonal style, or make characterological change, which is very possible in a group setting with a therapist who's trained in a certain kind of group therapy.

Let me think of other ways it's different. Oh my gosh, there's so much structure in a therapy group. When you join, you adhere to a certain set of agreements, right? And the agreements are there to create a very holding and containing environment, so that people feel safe enough or brave enough to do the vulnerable and difficult work of sharing their thoughts and feelings and fears in the moment, right?

And so, it's usually a group that's going to be together for a long period of time. So that's holding, right? Knowing that it'll keep being there every single week. You attend weekly, and you try to be on time, and if you're not there (or if you're not on time), we tend to talk about that. What might be getting in the way of having all of the time in group? If there's a new member added, that's something that the group is told a few weeks in advance about, so that they could talk about their feelings and thoughts about that and prepare, right? And then the new member has gone through at least three intake sessions, and they know what the agreements are upon joining. And so they're brought in a way that's very structured and very predictable, right?

Because what happens in the room is completely unpredictable. Everybody's gonna be sharing their thoughts, feelings, and reactions in the moment, but we don't know what's going to happen. So I think there has to be a lot of structure available and in place, so that the more in the moment stuff can happen without feeling scared about that or like it might go off course. Those are some things I can think of right away. Does that…?

Haley Radke: Yeah! So you listed off this amazing–this big, amazing list. I tried to copy some of them down, the therapeutic factors. Do any of these happen in other groups? Like you were listing off the support and all those different, like in AA, da, da, da... Did any of those happen…?

Pam Greenstone: Yeah. So yes. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah, especially in AA, right? Installation of hope, universality, imparting information. There is so much that's happening between the people, right? In the room. I think in AA groups there, there's no crosstalk, right? You share what you wanna share (from my understanding of it), and you don't–people don't respond to that. And that's a way they create a holding environment, which is a little bit different.
In self-help groups, oh my gosh, so much of this happens. Yeah, absolutely.

I think you get any group of people together, and if you're open to it, there is so much wisdom, and beauty, and ability to connect there, if we let everybody just be themselves. And if they can allow themselves to be who they are, right? Those are the difficulties. Can we allow ourselves to be exactly who we are, instead of maybe trying to fit into what we think people want, or, Oh, I'm trying to avoid conflict, or…

These are the big things we work on in group therapy. “Wow, I noticed that I'm not really being myself. I'm just saying the things I think will keep things smooth in here.” Or “I want to make sure you like me, right?” Just all of those kinds of things come up, but we have– In group, we have room to observe that out loud, and then keep talking about it, and other people can relate as well, and okay, then what do we start doing about that? Or practicing in here that'll help create a change?

And in a self-help group, that doesn't tend to happen and we don't–we wouldn't necessarily want it to right? We want it to be about support, about learning things, about seeing how we all relate to one another in our shared experience, feeling less alone. I think that's more about self-help. That's more of what you get from self-help groups.

But they're all good, in my opinion, especially if they're– If you go to a self-help group or a therapy group and you don't feel pretty good most of the time, something's wrong. Not all groups are helpful and therapeutic. It's okay to listen to your instinct, and exit a group if you don't feel like it's a safe enough place for you.

Haley Radke: So, how would someone come to the realization that this kind of group therapy (for an adoptee, specifically), would be helpful to them? Versus going to see their therapist kind of week-by-week? What would spur someone on to say, Actually, I think I am gonna look into this?

Pam Greenstone: It can look a lot of different ways, but I think if they start to notice in their individual therapy certain patterns that happen in their relationships, right? But they can't quite make progress. They keep with their therapist, noticing these patterns, but not really feeling– feeling kind of stuck around it, right? So, maybe for an adoptee, they have more of an insecure feeling in certain kinds of relationships, and they notice that over and over and over again, but it doesn't seem to help them shift or make a change. That might spur somebody to go, Maybe if I do group work, it'll happen in the group in a way it wouldn't happen with an individual therapist and I'll be able to address it in the moment. And really start practicing in a contained way, new ways of doing it.

Haley Radke: Could you pause there and just tell us what that would look like? Give us an example of…so, they're sharing something in group, or maybe someone else is sharing something in group, and it rubs them the wrong way, and they have a negative reaction. Is there, I don't know, can you give us an example of how that would actually play out?

Pam Greenstone: Sure. Let me try to give you an example from my own experience in group. So for me, goodbyes in group were always very hard. So if someone started talking about leaving the group, I would have strong emotional reactions. I'd feel a lot of grief and I'd feel like I'd want to withdraw. It's almost like they–then they'd just be gone already, as a self-protective. So, I noticed that, right? In group, because a lot of people talk about leaving group, even when they don't leave. Because they're like, “Get me outta here! This is too hard.”

So when they would talk about it, I started noticing that kind of over time, that those same feelings and those same thoughts would come up for me. Well, I guess they don't need me, or I can't have a say in their decision. That was a common one for me. I would think, Well, they're gonna do what they're gonna do. I have–there's nothing I could do about it. I have no say.

So I would just shut down or not give my opinion, or not engage with them about my own feelings about that loss. So I started to notice that, and over time I found that if I could say a little bit of that (that was going on in my mind), it actually had an impact on the other member. And they used it to influence their decision, right? I was a part of their treatment team ( in their mind), and so they would use that, and it became part of their decision making process.

Haley Radke: And is there–do you have another example of, I don't know, someone feeling like they have this negative pattern? And so they can't get out of it with their own therapist, so they go to group, and then what kind of situation would happen in the group that could break that pattern for them?

Or is it something like, “This happens over time, this happens over time.” Or another member, or the therapist will reflect this back to them: “You've said this thing like 10 times before, what are you doing about it?”

Pam Greenstone: One example I can think of is, say a member has noticed jealousy, right? In their relationships with others, either friends or their spouse. So they notice that pattern; they can't quite seem to get a hold of it. So they go into group, and at first, when you're in group, you're really just–I mean, if you're talking, you're doing a good job. You're just letting the group get to know you, you're sharing about your life, you're observing, seeing how the group culture is, getting adjusted–but eventually, you're going to start to have that feeling, right?

That jealous feeling in a relationship, and it'll happen in a similar way to, say it does in maybe in your marriage or in a friendship, right? Where a friend starts talking about a vacation they're taking and you get jealous and shut down and distance yourself from them for a while. So when that jealous feeling happens in group, you have a lot of people watching you, and it's likely that someone's going to notice a change, or a withdraw, right? If that's unusual.

And so someone might check in, right? Or the leader might check in and say, “You haven't said anything since, you know, so-and-so talked about their vacation. What's going on?” So then you (the member) has an opportunity to talk about the feelings, and maybe that'll happen three times before they're able to actually say out loud, “I got so angry when you start talking about your vacation. I have no idea why.” Okay, so that might be what it looks like at first. Then maybe the next time it comes up, “That thing is happening again. I'm feeling angry and jealous, and I don't get why.” So then there just–there becomes more room, more space to describe the feelings and to have it go pretty well, it brings you closer to these people.

It brings you closer to yourself. You start to understand all the layers of that emotional experience, and then you start to get interested in it, instead of afraid of it, or instead of feeling like, Oh, this is gonna go wrong. So over time, you just get better and better at that particular emotional experience and using words in those moments, rather than behaviors.

And so then that's a mastering of a certain special, emotional, difficult, emotional experience for you. So then you have more room in all your relationships outside of group when it comes to that particular part of your, either personality, or your own history, your own psychology. So it's like water over a stone.

This is not–it doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in one group session. It's like you slowly just keep growing your capacity to accept your own feelings and know that if you dive in there and start talking about them, it's probably gonna go pretty well. And you're probably going to end up feeling closer to the other person, and yourself.

Haley Radke: And I love just that you are actually– You have a chance to practice. Essentially, it's like practice relationships in a safe space. And you can just say whatever you want and then you can see the other person's reaction. And then you can have a do-over or have a back and forth until you can figure out, Okay. What should I have said here?

Pam Greenstone: Right. With all that room, where the culture is valuing of that kind of work. And in our families, that's usually not the case. We get criticized or we–people's defenses come up and there's not usually a chance to keep talking about it.

But what a therapist loves is when we talk about that. So that's going to be encouraged. You're going to get positive reinforcement, you're going to get positive messages like, “Wow, that was brave to say that.” You're probably not gonna get that out in the world as much–like maybe, in some of your friendships.

But that's not our culture as it is right now. So, until that day, I think groups can be really helpful. The other thing that I think of when you say that is that– I went to a training group one time and the leader suggested that… So all the members in this training group were group therapists (so there was a high level of kind of awareness and knowledge about group therapy).

But there was a member who was having trouble just asking for help at certain times from the leader. And so the leader just suggested, “Just yell out, ‘help.’” And the member was like, “What? I can't just scream out, ‘help! That's gonna be hard. I'm gonna feel embarrassed.” And the leader was like, “What's wrong with feeling embarrassed?” And then, “Well, people might have a bad, an angry reaction toward me if I just do that, if I interrupt them and do that.” “What's wrong with people having angry reactions to being interrupted?”

So it's just this constant—just making room for, yeah, that practicing and then that acceptance of whatever it is that people experience in the room, and a willingness to listen. So just because someone might not like being interrupted doesn't mean you can't interrupt them, and then keep talking about that, and then they can talk about that experience of being interrupted as well.

And there's room for that at–there's room for that, too. So over time, we just develop more, and more, and more room for lots of different kinds of people, experiences, and emotional communication.

Haley Radke: And one of the… Okay. So you said one of Yalom's factors was having that sense of family and what did you call it? Recapitulation?

Pam Greenstone: Corrective recapitulation of the primary family group or groups.

Haley Radke: Okay. So let's talk about adoptee-specific. Why is this so helpful for adoptees?

Pam Greenstone: So, as I was reading and thinking about our time today, I was reminded of a couple of quotes and one is I think by Harry Stack Sullivan and he said, “We are harmed in groups and therefore we must heal in groups.”

And then I also read about Winnicott. And Winnicott was a physician who was a child psychiatrist, and also a pediatrician. So he really knew and noticed a lot about babies and their relationship with their mothers. And he said, “There is no such thing as a baby. A baby can exist only in relation to a mother.”

And that really–when I read that, it struck me. It was like reading The Primal Wound, right? There is a way that our loss as adoptees who were relinquished is so–it's non-verbal. It's something our body remembers. And so, now let's bring in Yalom's idea of recapitulation of the primary family group or groups. And how adoptees or people that were raised within the foster care system can't necessarily put words to the loss or the grief that they experience when they sit down in a group of people, especially when one is a parent figure.

And so we have–I think we have times of remembering, or body sensations, or just senses, or feeling that we need to say. And we didn't have a lot of room to say any of that stuff in our adoptive families most of the time, especially for my generation or your generation (even though it was very palpable for me and what I've heard described by a lot of adoptees). And so for adoptees, it might come in the form of that–either a longing, or a sense that something's missing, or an insecurity about how long this might be able to last for us, or that at some point, we're gonna leave anyway (so why bother?).

So it might–it'll come up in lots of different ways. At first, maybe as sensations or feelings. And then over time, we'll be able to put that into words. And so I think it's incredible to be able to have that experience, and then also say it out loud, and then to have that welcomed, right? By the group and by the leader–not maybe 100% welcomed, because I'm not saying other members won't have their own reactions to it. But that the culture is of “I'm interested, I'm listening,” and that will be enough to allow an adoptee over time to value those insights when they have them. And then start saying them in safe enough groups of people, so they can feel understood, and heard, and get to know that part of themselves much, much better than we tend to know that part. Does that fit with what you're asking?

Haley Radke: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so you said that when people join a group, they have a couple of intake sessions with a therapist, and they go over exactly what the expectations are for the group. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Pam Greenstone: Yes. I'll give you a set of agreements that are pretty basic and most groups would adhere to something like this.

So when I introduce the agreements, I say, “Now these are not rules that are to be followed. They’re agreements that you make, and we imagine that you won't be able to adhere to them all the time, and that the work is to talk about it and why it's hard to follow the agreements.” So the first one is:
-Agreeing to be present each week to be on time and remain throughout the meeting. -You agree to work actively on the problems that brought you to the group and talk about the important parts of your life.
-Agreeing to put feelings into words and not actions. -Agreeing to use the relationships made in the group therapeutically, and not socially. -Agree to remain in the group until the problems that brought you to group have been resolved. -Agree to be responsible for your bill. -Agree to protect the names and identities of your fellow group members -Agree to terminate appropriately.

So there are–it's protective that everybody makes these agreements because It's like saying, “We're gonna talk about these things when they don't happen.” For instance, like the one that's about paying your bill. What we're saying with that is, “We're gonna talk about money in this group.” And that's a good topic to talk about consistently. People struggle in their financial lives, and so when someone overpays, we talk about it like, “What was that about? What was going on? Is this something that happens? In your life, is it expressing or saying something? Do you feel like you're getting a lot out of group?” If they don't pay on time, maybe it's important for them to be talking about that part of their life, because it's happening in their outside life as well.

They're not paying their bills, or their lights have been turned off, or they're struggling financially. And people have a hard time saying that out loud in a group of people; a lot of shame comes up around that. So that's an example of a way that can work, and that creates this holding environment where everybody feels like they'll be able to bring these things up if they affect them.

So for one member, if a group member comes in late consistently, it might remind them of a member of their family, or somebody they grew up with? So every time that person comes in late, they're like, having all these feelings and all these thoughts. It's reminding them of their parent that was late picking them up from school all the time, or things like that.

And so it's almost like it gives permission to everybody. Like it's okay to talk about it and say, “I don't like it ever when you're late and I'd like you to never be late again.” And the other person has room to talk about what they're struggling with, why it's hard to be there. They don't wanna be there at all. So being late's much better than not coming.

Haley Radke: Oh, that's good. There's so many little insights, just from that. Just from having someone be late. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing about group therapy. And it's just so intriguing to me, the lessons you can learn from being in a group of people versus just one-on-one. So that was really, really interesting. Pam, where can we connect with you online?

Pam Greenstone: I think the best place to reach me would be my website, and it's pgreenstonetherapy.com.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you so much. And we are gonna have you back to talk about–we just talked about how awesome group was, so we have to talk about, “How do you find a group?” So we will do that next time you're on the show. Thank you.

Wasn't that so interesting? I loved how Pam gave us all of these lists of benefits from being in a group setting, whether it's group therapy, or being in a peer-led support group (which might be the more manageable thing for some of us right now). And it also was just so validating for me to hear, because we've been working very hard to start a peer-led support group here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. And there's many popping up around the U.S., as well through Adoptees Connect, and around the world.

So, if group therapy sounds like something that you're interested in checking out, we are going to have another episode very soon where Pam talks us through finding a therapy group in our area. And the steps to go about doing that, and also alternatives if that's not really something that you're able to do at this point.

I want to recommend a couple of things for you to go back through while we're on summer break, and we're going biweekly. I have so many episodes in the Healing Series. It's mind boggling to me. If you go to adopteeson.com/healing, you'll see a list of all the therapists who have joined me. And underneath their bios, there's little icons for each podcast episode that they have been on, and you can see all the topics there. One of them in particular is “How to Start a Peer-Led Support Group,” and Jeanette Yoffe was on, and she talked us through that and gave some really good advice. And I found out that some of the support groups that are already happening have been listening to that episode and tweaking the way they're running the groups a little bit.

So that was very, very cool to hear. So, thank you for those of you who've shared that with me. And in other news–that's it! I am so glad to be back with you for this week, and I'm excited to share Pam's next episode with you very, very soon. And this fall, we'll be back every single Friday with a new Adoptees On podcast episode for you.

And there's going to be some other kind of exciting announcements coming up. So, if you want to make sure you're informed about all those things, you can go to adopteeson.com/newsletter and sign up for the (mostly) monthly newsletter. I keep saying monthly newsletter, but guys, my life is just so bonkers, that sometimes it's a little bit in between monthly. If that's something you're interested in, adopteeson.com/newsletter. Thank you for listening. Let's talk again, very soon.

75 [Healing Series] Brainspotting

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/75

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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 are talking about brainspotting. First of all, what is it? And why is it so helpful for adoptees in particular? Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Dr. Julie Lopez. Julie's a trauma-informed practitioner whose primary clinical specialty is working with trauma and PTSD. Welcome back to Adoptees On.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Thanks so much for having me.

Haley Radke: I am so excited to talk with you today because we are going to touch on brainspotting. I've seen it all over Facebook, all the adoptee groups are talking about brainspotting. I know it's not brand new this year or anything, but it seems to be getting really popular, especially in the adoptee community. So do you want to just give us a brief overview, like, what is brainspotting? It sounds like such a funny word, like, what is that?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Yeah, so brainspotting was developed by David Grant up in New York, a psychologist, who had long been doing EMDR and was an EMDR practitioner. And he noticed, especially, I think the story that he tells when he first started researching what was going on with eye positioning, was when he was working with a professional level figure skater. And she was having trouble mastering this one particular move. I'm not sure I'm gonna get it right, it was like the triple toe loop or something very challenging. And every time she went to do it, she wasn't landing it. And so she came to him to do the traditional EMDR, and he realized when she was doing some of the eye movements, that her eye position, when they were going over the move, was always in the same area.

So he started to get curious about what that relationship was, and by having her stay in that one area where it seemed more activated or there was some area of distress, he realized, and they realized together, that there was another experience stored in there, and it was mapped into the way she was focusing for that move. And when they resolved that, she was able to land the move. So, does that sound–

Haley Radke: You didn't see me shake my head and be like, ‘Wow!’

Dr. Julie Lopez: Yeah! But I can see you!

Haley Radke: You can see me, that's why you're laughing.

Dr. Julie Lopez: But yes, so it's really fascinating. The premise behind brainspotting is that our eye position actually maps to spots in the brain where some of this material is stored, that's in our unconscious. It would seem nonsensical that this distressing experience she had prior would have anything to do with her physical mastery of a move in ice skating. But it was from there that he started to research the way that you could actually work with a brain spot and change someone's here-and-now present day experience.

Haley Radke: It’s pretty amazing to just think about this spot in your visual field being connected to some kind of memory or experience or something. Like, that sounds a little bit woo-woo, but I know this is all scientifically–

Dr. Julie Lopez: It totally does.

Haley Radke: Yes, okay. Go on.

Dr. Julie Lopez: It would be even more woo-woo if we were doing video for this podcast, because I would bring out some of the materials that go with it. Like, there's a wand that you use that has a ridge– it looks like, I don't think you're old enough to know about this, but an antenna off the back of a TV, that you can stretch. So it's a stretchable wand.

Haley Radke: I have seen an antenna before!

Dr. Julie Lopez: Well, it was a major part of everyday life when I was growing up. Anyway, there's this red wand, and you actually use it to hold the spot when you find a spot in someone's range of vision. And theoretically the spot is then correlating back through our brains and accessing a neural network where material's been stored. And so by using the gaze, you're actually accessing some of that material and the processing goes faster.

It's very similar to EMDR in that you're looking to access where some of this emotional and psychological mapping may be stored, and it's particularly effective for reducing physically held symptoms.

Haley Radke: Can you walk us through, so you're working with a client and you found the spot– how do you find the spot, I guess? How do you find the spot? And then what are you doing when you've got their gaze in that one section?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Every question you just asked has multiple answers to it, so I'll give you all those answers. I don't want to confuse people, but I'm just going to start out with this disclaimer that in this interview, I'm basically giving you a commercial– I'm giving the Cliff Notes of a commercial about a show that's for a whole series. So I'm going to really just give you the high level overview. Basically, I'm sitting with you and you say, “Every time I hear my first mother say, ‘I didn't have a choice,’ or ‘I couldn't help it about giving you away,’--” and I'm sharing that because this used to drive me bananas every time. Every time my first mother would say something like “powerless” or wasn't taking responsibility, I would become enraged. And I knew all the logic behind it. I knew about the time period, she was part of, the Baby Scoop Era. I knew about the dynamics with her parents. I knew about the dynamics of the conception. I knew everything intellectually, but my body would just go bananas, and I was so pissed. And there was a time period I just wouldn't see her because I knew I would get triggered every time to that feeling, and I knew I wasn't going to be kind. I wouldn't take it head on –sometimes I did– but it just was very unpleasant for me. And it would really upset me, it would affect my sleep, things like that.

So let's just say, pretending you're me, you've come in and you've said, “Oh, I just can't take it, and it's really affecting my wellbeing, and it's affecting my relationships, and I really wish I didn't have this big reaction. And I know all the intellect behind it, but I'm still having it. My throat closes up, like, my face gets red, my adrenaline starts running.”

I would have already explained brainspotting and you would've already said, “That sounds really woo-woo to me and crazy.” And we would've agreed we're going to try this different kind of approach, and we could find a spot by using an “outside window”, is what it's called. So I would take the wand and I would have you think about that feeling and pull it up, and I would take it across the x-axis of your vision. So I'd have your eyes watching –and actually you just did it right now– I'd be looking for areas of response. So like right here, you had a little response to that. Look, this isn't even real because we're talking about my issue, not yours, but you had a little response.

And I would say, “Oh, okay,” so outside window, I'm looking for where you have a response, where there's some area of agitation. And I would stop there on the x-axis and I'd say, “Okay, now I want you to follow my little wand up and down,” so we'd be looking at the y-axis. And I would be deciding where you had– I would say, “Okay, it looked like right here. Does that feel about right?” I'd be getting your input. And then actually, once you've done the brainspotting level two, there's also a z-axis, so closer, further. So we've done x, y, z, I'd be identifying it: outside window.

Another way is inside window. That's your own experience. So I would say, “Okay, pull up that feeling,” and we'd do it again. But it doesn't matter what I'm seeing in your physical response. You would say, “Oh, right about there. It feels most active,” y, z, right? And we'd be looking at that. So that's how we identify it.

And then I would just hold it there. You'd already be active into that neural network, so I would just let you be in that heightened space with that experience.

I think what's hard when I'm training people –students, or I'm training supervisees– is a lot of healing professionals want to be helpful and they want to be “value-add”. And the challenge with some of these more brain-based therapies is actually the best posture is to get out of the way as much as possible. Because our bodies want to heal. So you're basically opening a window, like a direct hit, into a felt experience and without all the intellectualization or the cultural norms. We're really trying to get into the space where the body's going to do what it wants to do anyway.

So, believe it or not, I don't do anything. I hold the space where we've already accessed an activated spot for you and let you have your process. And people will naturally start to process the visceral experience.

Haley Radke: Like, will they talk about it? Will they say what's going on for them? Or are you just sitting there feeling sick, or what?

Dr. Julie Lopez: It depends on the person. So for some people, they are talking about it or they're even moving. They're like, “Oh my gosh, my neck is killing me.” I basically encourage people to listen to their bodies. So while I'm holding the spot, they might move around. Their processing might be non-verbal. And if you think about the power of being able to process something, and especially for an adoptee that's pre-conscious or pre-verbal, it's not even stored in our system with language. So how in the world are you going to use language to process out an experience that wasn't stored that way? So you’re right, they might not be talking at all. They might be saying –or not saying but just feeling– ‘I'm gonna be sick,’ and I'm watching how they process. And when it looks like they're through a segment of processing, which could be 100% non-verbal, it could be just their eyes are going, or they're crying– and I've told them already, “Once you feel like you want to share something, then share it,” and if it's a very verbal thing that they're processing, they may be just telling me, “Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm remembering this thing,” or that type of thing. People process very differently.

Keep in mind, I'm just giving you a demo, but when you're doing it, you're actually looking for the most activated space. So you're already in that place, and then we let the body do what it wants to do anyway. My job as a practitioner is to help the process keep going, to make sure the person doesn't get flooded in case they need resourcing. Because our ideal on the healing path is that we're stretching, but not torturing ourselves. There is an ideal space to manage healing. We don't want someone to get so overwhelmed or flooded, and I firmly believe the body brings up what it can handle. So a part of it is just helping to provide the container for the person to do their work, and to intervene if it starts looping or not moving through like we would want to.

Haley Radke: How long would that sort-of take? What's the range? I mean, I get it, it's different for everyone, but is this like a–

Dr. Julie Lopez: It is so different!

Haley Radke: Like, a five minute moment, or is it like–?

Dr. Julie Lopez: No, it's not. And I'm a little bit biased on this one because I do work with a lot of adults who've had developmental trauma, and especially with my special connection and interest in working with adoptees. When you have the earlier experience that's hard for your system to take in, or that hasn't been fully metabolized or digested, whether it's having an impact today, the longer it might be to process. And it's complicated because the way that you could have a twin sister that went through everything quote-unquote “the same as you”, but there are so many factors that play a part in how it's stored in your system.

Sometimes people think I have a crystal ball, which I absolutely do not. It's just as mysterious for me, how you as an individual are going to have these experiences stored in your body. So it could be within a normal session kind of timeframe. A little bit of time to set up, and then we're looking to work with each spot. So you process a whole spot and then you might move on to another spot, depending on what's evolving.

I do take some notes while I'm doing the work because things are not linear in our system. They're stacked, in usually a more complex way. So you may be– I gave you that example about working on the anger, and the kind of beliefs held with it might be that ‘I don't matter,’ right? Or that ‘I'm being diminished.’ And in that process, other themes may come up like ‘I'm all alone’ or ‘I'm gonna die,’ or something like that. It might not seem logical, but there's schema that can all be attached to one root target, so it can get complicated. And you would just desensitize each spot as you go.

Haley Radke: That sounds magical.

Dr. Julie Lopez: The other thing is having a center like this where we do a lot of advanced brain-based therapies, we've actually found that a picture's worth a thousand words, and even more so the experience. So sometimes we'll do empowerment-based free workshops in the community, just so people could see, touch the equipment, ask the questions, hear the history, understand the theory. Especially like with something like neurofeedback, which has the big computer system and you're hooking electrodes up to your brain, it seems crazy that you can change your brainwaves by playing a video game where there's no words, and the reward system is helping encourage your brainwaves to operate at a different level. It's very hard to conceptualize without sitting down, having it attached to you and seeing what happens. But it's pretty amazing. So I know you say it sounds magical, and it does, if you saw the equipment. And even us, like, I've been doing EMDR for 25 years, and brainspotting, it's only been a couple years now, two or three? And when I first got the equipment I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ Because I've got these goggles that are half black on the right eye and on the left eye, because you can do single eye training. They encourage bilateral sound, so there are special CDs that do that. I could go on and on. Like I said, this is the Cliff Notes of the commercial about the show that's a series. It's a very short, condensed version. But it does seem pretty incredible. Our brains are amazing..

Haley Radke: Wow, you've definitely inspired me to seek out a practitioner in our area here, so thank you. That was a great explanation. I'm excited to hear from listeners if they try it out and what it's done for them.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Great. And I would just say, too, if I can, there are many different ways to change the way that your brain is mapping information in some of those automatic responses to inputs that we get in our everyday, whether it's relational, or just inputs from the outside environment. And if it works for you, great. If it doesn't, it's not the only way to do nonverbal work on your system. We are exploding with information about different ways to access the nonverbal part of our lived experience.

Haley Radke: That's so important to note, right. There is something that's gonna work for everyone, and we've talked before about how adoptees have stored that trauma non-verbally, and it's important to address it in that same way. So, thank you. Thanks so much. That was so helpful. How can we connect with you online?

Dr. Julie Lopez: My center's website is www.vivapartnership.com, and from the site you can connect. We have a lot of great information that goes out in our newsletter, really empowerment-based. We have a Facebook page and Twitter.

Haley Radke: We'll link to them all in the show notes.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Perfect. Actually. But I will say, I would like to get the word out there about the Resilient Brain Project, which is a free online resource for folks. So another way to start feeling empowered around how to make change as an adoptee is to go to that site. It's www.resilientbrainproject.com.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much for your expertise in this area.

Links to everything we talked about today are over on Adopteeson.com, where you can find all the past episodes of the Adoptees On podcast, links to all of our social media accounts, you can sign up for our newsletter, and you can also support the show at Adopteeson.com/partner. I want to say a big thank you to my monthly supporters. You are literally making it possible for me to continue producing this show for you every single week. Thank you, and thanks for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

73 [Healing Series] The Resilient Brain Project

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/73

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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 are talking about a new free online resource that is going to wow you. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Dr. Julie Lopez. Julie is a trauma-informed practitioner whose primary clinical specialty is working with trauma and PTSD. Welcome to the show, Julie.

Julie Lopez: Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Haley Radke: I'm so excited to finally connect with you. I first heard about you because I saw a poster on Facebook that you and Kathy were doing a really special event for adoptees, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness. Here is another expert who is adopted and who knows all about trauma and is working on healing.’ And then when I went a little further, I saw this amazing thing that you're building, the Resilient Brain Project, and I messaged you right away. I was like, “I have to hear about this.” So that's what I invited you on the show to talk about today. But because it's your first time, I would love it if you would share a little bit of your story with us.

Julie Lopez: Sure, I will definitely share a little bit of my story, but I just wanted to note, because I know you were looking a little deeper, did you happen to notice that Adoptees On is referred to in the Resilient Brain Project?

Haley Radke: I did and I was so happy.

Julie Lopez: Yeah. And I'll get more into that, but I thought that was great that you reached out. Thank you. So I'll give you the backstory. Before the relinquishment, my first mother was 15 years old when she was dating a cool older guy from a different school. They had a little summer romance and she experienced statutory rape.

She never talked to him again, and then found out a couple months later that she was pregnant with me. So she dropped out of school. She was one of the “mothers who went away” and told family and friends that she was going to study on the West Coast of the US. She lived on the East Coast, but she was about 20 minutes away at a home for unwed mothers, had me, and I stayed in an orphanage type of setting for about two months, and then was adopted by my family in Washington, DC.

I have been in reunion for 24 years with my first mother and I'm mostly in reunion with my first father's family, but not him so much, although I've met him. At the time I met him, he didn't know who I was, and that's a much more complicated story. So that's a little bit more recent. And I would say I've just been on a journey for more than half my life. At the time when I first even thought it was something that I needed to look into, I wasn't really awake yet. And I was actually working as an engineer. I have my first degree in systems engineering and sometime in that journey I went back to school, got my master's, and then my PhD focused on clinical social work. And in that whole time period of therapy and personal discovery, I came to just understand how profound my own personal experience had been on my sense of self and my place in the world. So that might not be the version of my adoption story you wanted to hear, but I think it's relevant to my personal passion for working in the healing field and the types of things that I commit my time to and what I've been studying for the last couple-decades-plus.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. That's exactly what I was hoping to hear as your story, and it's so interesting to me what drives adoptees to go into the healing fields like this. And you mentioned this word “awake”. Can you talk a little bit more about that? I hear everyone saying “coming out of the fog”, but I think maybe that's what you're referring to there.

Julie Lopez: Absolutely. When people talk about “the great sleep” or “coming out of the fog”, they're talking specifically about the adoptee’s journey, and I was referring to it on a bigger scale because a big part of how I coped with what I now know was my own relinquishment trauma, was through performing. I got straight A's. I was the captain of the swim team. I did everything perfectly, and it was incredibly stressful and very unhealthy. And it was all based on the fear of being relinquished again, which was not a conscious thought in my mind. It was a little conscious, but not very, and it definitely was not as clear as what I'm saying right now. And through that posture that I was carrying in my life, I went to engineering school, and because I was competitive, I graduated and I got a fantastic quote-unquote “fantastic job” out of school, but it was not my path and it was not my passion. It was teachers and parents that pushed me in that direction, and I was very willing to comply out of that compulsion to perform.

So when I say awake, it's awake on every level. ‘Who am I? What's important to me? How do I feel?’ And that's really important, I think, to negotiating life and to negotiating relationships. And I think it's bigger than coming out of the fog of the dominant narrative around adoption in our country and all of those messages. So that's what I meant when I meant coming more awake. And it's a journey and it's a multifaceted journey. I think that is bigger than just being the identity of being an adoptee and the experience of growing up adopted.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. There's a lot there. We know all about that. We do. We really do.

But I really want to devote our time to the Resilient Brain Project. Can you tell us how did you come up with this idea? I really want to give listeners this resource. I really want to share this with them because it's free. It's amazing. Okay, I'm gonna let you talk about it.

Julie Lopez: Okay, so I do have a center here in Washington, DC called the Viva Center, and I have an amazing group of people who are part of our operations team who make things run. We have a vision, we have a mission, and in one of our annual retreats –which was not last year, but the year before– we were talking about ‘How can we really live our vision?’, which is to create a world that is ready to heal. And we looked at the different aspects of what it means to be ready to heal. And so a part of it is people that are fully empowered to understand about how our human systems work, and that healing is possible; about reducing barriers to access around some of this information and hope and de-stigmatizing mental health.

So it was out of discussions with these key players that are part of my center that we envisioned capitalizing on the accessibility of the internet and creating basically a pretty extensive and action-oriented resource library that's free as long as people have the website address, which I'm happy to share.

Yes, it's www.resilientbrainproject.com and that's where it came from. And the person that we're really hoping to reach is the one who has tried everything that they think is available to them and that they're feeling broken or feeling hopeless or feeling like there's no way to change what's going on in their body or the lens through which they're seeing their life, and that person gets access to something that begins to empower them to recognizing that there's a whole big world out there around opportunities to heal.

Haley Radke: One of the things that I joke about often on the show is just how expensive therapy can be and it's this ongoing joke and yet it's really not funny because it can be really a barrier for people to enter into the healing space if they think, ‘I just can't even afford that. It's just not– I don't have coverage–’ whatever it is. This is like a stepping stone towards that.

Julie Lopez: Exactly. And our hope is that also some of the resources that people are directed to or some of the action tasks that they might see would help them to be able to mitigate some of the symptoms that they're feeling in the moment.

There are definitely some very proactive resources around dealing with stress or anxiety that are here and now. Resources that you can literally look at, go through a checklist and see does this impact the way my nervous system, you might not think of it that way– ‘What's going on? Can I exhale? Can I shift down so that my body is more relaxed?’ Our bodies are complicated, so every person does not experience change in the same ways. Someone who might be very oriented towards, trauma-sensitive yoga, someone else may feel that another type of approach could be better for them. So I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all when you think about the journey of healing, something that's stored in the body.

Haley Radke: So you just mentioned one of those sections is like action. So you've got five different categories throughout your whole site, which has multiple categories for people who are looking for help. And this isn't necessarily all adoptee-specific that we're talking about today.

And yet you do have. That as a I saw it in multiple places. Yes. Things that adoptees could access that are adoptee specific? Yes. Or other people that are a part of the constellation. Going back to that, those five categories: “Actions For Now”, “For Allies”, “You're Not Alone”, “Master the Subject”, and “Advocate.” Can you talk about those five and why you felt those were so important to include?

Julie Lopez: This was such a complicated process because we wanted the end product to be simple. So every single section –and there are 12 different areas of mental health that we look at– has those five subcategories that you just mentioned. And the reason we picked those is because we were looking at the whole person in community and looking at what are the elements that would help get someone that much closer to feeling hopeful around their own experience. So actions for now is here at now. Tips, connections, apps, active, things that people can do to shift their felt state, and they've already been pre-created, so it's just a matter of following steps or downloading an app. They're all accessible. And the thought was, if someone feels a change or notices, ‘Wow, I didn't realize my body worked that way,’ or ‘I didn't know this was something that I could do’, it might inspire them more to think, ‘Wow, there might be a lot of other things that could help me shift and change’.

And there are people out there that know this stuff because they created it. So it's a bigger sense of hope for allies. Unfortunately, all too often a helpful family member or friend or partner can say and do things, or even out of their own fear insist on something and not understand the bigger picture. A great case example, because I do a lot of trauma work, is often when people self injure, cut their arms, do something, it's not at all about suicide yet. People get hospitalized, totally misdiagnosed with very pathologizing diagnoses that have nothing to do with the very normal and correlated act of self-injury, which comes in many different forms. Suicide's another very good example when someone's suicidal, oftentimes, or an eating disorder. Actually, I could go on and on. There are so many times where a loved one means well and wants to help and says 100% the wrong thing. And since we're on Adoptees On, I'll say, when someone says something like, “But your life was so perfect, why would you feel bad?” They don't want you to feel bad, and they care about you and love you, but when they do that, they're totally negating and not validating. A very normal experience. So the For Allies section was really about trying to help prevent those type of ruptures by giving a bigger context and resources for the allies that truly have good intentions but are missing the boat and that they can get support.

Because it's hard to be in that position where you don't have direct power.

You're Not Alone. Also, very important around normalizing an experience when people actually feel like, ‘wow, I'm not the only one,’ or ‘so-and-so's talking about something and it's my story, but I didn't tell them the story, so maybe my experience of it doesn't mean I'm broken or crazy or really out there’. And we find that all the time in our adoptee communities where we hear someone else's story and they feel really alone, like no one's gonna get it. And then someone– I'm a member of a number of closed Facebook groups that are just for adoptees, and there are so many times where someone says exactly the right thing, and I feel that it's because there's a shared experience and that alone is so incredibly powerful.

Master the Subject. All about science, all about how our bodies work, all about statistics, all about information, and all about being empowered to advocate for yourself, which leads to the fifth one, which is about advocacy.

Because on the journey to healing anything, oftentimes when people get to the other side or they really feel more at peace, they want to advocate, they want to bring others along because they see themselves and the struggle they had and they feel compelled as the final step in really integrating experience to improve the lives of others. So these are bigger organizations that are usually poised to do that or to facilitate that and allow people a vehicle to get involved. So those are the five areas, and it's all free and it's all there.

Haley Radke: Okay, so you said 12 areas of mental health. So you've got all of these different ones. And can you, oh look, you have a list ready to go.

It's just our little postcard so you can, do you wanna just give us a couple of those and then talk to adoptees specifically? Yes. What are the things that we can be going there and looking and finding for resources for ourselves in any of those five categories that you were talking about?

Julie Lopez: So specifically for adoptees, I'm going to start there. You would look in the section under “Trauma and PTSD”. And it's listed as relinquishment trauma. And there's a subsection under each of those five categories. So you'll see very specific resources there.

And this is just a little bit about my journey as a clinician and as I was an adjunct professor for 10 years in a master's program for social work, and I always integrated my own knowledge and understanding and identity as an adoptee and as a trauma practitioner. So because the course I taught was a fall to spring sequence, I just wrapped it in because I think that's a part of normalizing and experience. And so I love that personally about I. This particular resource is that it's just wrapped in as one of many different types of things that people can experience instead of it being a big taboo subject or very threatening to the popular narrative.

And so that's where you would find the resources that are adoptee-centric and adoptee-specific. I'm going to be honest with you, because we're people and we have these complex lives, every section could be a benefit to an adoptee. But that's where you're going to find the language that really speaks to the adoptee experience, and I think importantly validates the concept of relinquishment trauma and some of what it means to grow up adopted, which are two separate things that people can, depending on the way that it metabolizes in their day-to-day life, experience a lot of symptoms around.

Haley Radke: Definitely. What are some of the other 12 areas?

Julie Lopez: Stress; Relationships and Sexuality; Confidence; Grief and Loss; Life Changes; Depression; Anxiety; Addictions; the Trauma and PTSD section, which I already mentioned; and then Identity and Discrimination.

Haley Radke: Yeah, so I think we check a few of those

Julie Lopez: Yeah. And especially now it's very accepted and normalized that eating healthy and exercising is good for your system. Our system also has emotional and psychological mapping and the way that our bodies work and our minds work, and how we relate to ourselves and others. Is what we're going after when we're talking about being mentally healthy.

So like I said, a big part of the Resilient Brain Project is giving it a title that has some biological connections to it, because we really do know how to rewire our brains in different types of ways and how to improve brain function, not just through psychotropic medication, but through other brain-based interventions.

And kind-of saying, “Hey, this is a part of our body and this is a part of our human system and it's resilient and we can make changes, and this is how we integrate experiences that can be traumatic, disempowering, that impact our sense of selves.” Our identity was really important to the mission of putting together this resource.

Haley Radke: And what does being resilient mean to you?

Julie Lopez: Resilience to me is about having the tools and the ability to get through something that's difficult. Getting through a difficult time, getting through a difficult experience, and being able to find your way to not just survive it, but pull the pieces back together to be able to thrive. Not as if something never happened, but in spite of, and because of finding ways to really thrive in your current day life.

Haley Radke: I love that. I love that. And so many of us just feel like we're always just treading water and trying to get by, and so this whole idea that we can heal our brains and heal our systems, taking these small steps towards that, I just get this big sense of freedom when I think about that.

Julie Lopez: That's awesome. I love it. And I will say, because you said something and you said it was part of what compelled you to reach out about the Resilient Brain Project. It is free and it's completely accessible, but I will say some of the more advanced therapeutic approaches that we have now are expensive.

They're expensive to be trained in. Some of the equipment is very expensive and it's an investment. One of the pieces of equipment we have here, which is a neurofeedback system, was over $20,000 for us to purchase, and then each person who got trained, which is beyond a master's or PhD, spent another couple thousand dollars and it's best practice to do ongoing supervision.

So it's all expensive. I worked at the DC RIP Crisis Center back in the nineties, and it’s a nonprofit. All the services are free. We got grants and foundation money to cover what we were doing, and that was actually how I got my first level of EMDR training, because there was a humanitarian assistance program that was part of the EMDR International Association that sponsored the training because they wanted to make it more accessible to the frontline where people had experienced trauma.

And these tools can make profound shifts and they're shorter. I just wanted to say that because I know money can feel like a big barrier, but most people would get heart surgery if they knew they needed it or they would get pretty radical about losing weight or about exercising if they had a heart attack and they're recovering, when it's really a serious thing.

And I unfortunately have seen people who've their lives cuz they're in a lot of pain or they're having really extensive symptoms that put them in the hospital. And I would just like to add one other thing is that some of these very effective treatments can be short. They're not long. They're not, like, a five-year investment in insight-oriented type of therapy, relationally based. They can be shorter. I've had clients for two months, three months, depending on the presentation, so I don't want to oversimplify it but it's been pretty radical, the changes that can be made in a shorter amount of time.

Haley Radke: That's fantastic. It's there's different levels for all of these.

I'm just like this huge range, right? You can go on the website. If you're just feeling really stressed out, you can find an action right now that's going to take you back to a more mindful state. Exactly. And then we can also think, ‘Okay, I really just wanna really address this head on and I'm going to go and get neurofeedback or EMDR, brain spotting, something like that and like really address the problem.

This is just a huge range. And I think you mentioned earlier, we just want to have accessibility and also normalize that mental health care is just one other facet of being a human.

Julie Lopez: Totally. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And one of the things that was fun was when we were first developing and selecting some of the materials for the Resilient Brain Project is I would just try it out with my family and close friends, I'd say, “What do you think of this resource?” Or I would say, “Hey, if you're stressed out, can you try this out?” And so we got real live feedback and it was great because part of what we're also trying to do is share information so that people might be able to use what we have there. Which is more cookie cutter than a custom tailored individual kind of therapy treatment, but it might do the trick and it might be enough, and then it goes in the toolbox and it can be used. We were really trying to add in the types of things that we also share in the more expensive individual therapy sessions where someone could just apply it to themselves. I will say this about adoptees and about relinquishment trauma is, it's much of it, especially if someone was relinquished as a baby or if some of the pieces around being with different primary care providers, maybe a number of them, foster care.

And then is that the mapping in our brains around how the world works is not stored in our explicit memory system, it's in our implicit memory. So the sensations and the feelings and the behaviors are coming out of a space that we don't have any conscious memory of. And so although the cookie cutter approach, which is what the Resilient Brain Project is, it's like a plug and chug. There's no one looking at you and saying, “Hey, this is gonna be helpful for you.” You're saying, ‘Oh, I need this and let me pull this out.’ If you have a workout tape and you put again, and it's just one size fits all, is that one of the challenges of having trauma that's stored as implicit memory is that while we might see the symptoms, it's very hard to see what the mapping is without professional help.

So I think of this as like a great tool that can be used and hopefully avoid a bunch of expensive therapy experience. But if you really want to get into the custom tailored piece, and you think that some of what you're storing is from your implicit memory, then you're going to need or probably be inspired to do a little more custom tailored work for a little time. But our goal is to try to cut down the amount that you have to do that.

Haley Radke: Thank you, Julie. That was a really great overview of your site and a lot of little insights here and there in our conversation. How can we connect with you online and how can we find the Resilient Brain Project? Do you want to give us that website address again?

Julie Lopez: Yes. So the Resilient Brain Project is www.resilientbrainproject.com. If you want to see some of the work that we're doing in DC, the center’s address is www.vivapartnership.com.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

You can find show notes for this episode and every episode of the Adoptees On podcast on our website, Adopteeson.com. In there you can also find links to our social media profiles. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find a spot to subscribe to the monthly newsletter and also there is a spot there where you can support the show. I want to say a big thank you to all of the people who have generously partnered with me on a monthly basis so that I can keep providing content like this for you for free as well. So thank you so much to my generous Patreon supporters. I couldn't do this without you. Thank you for listening, let's talk again next Friday.

71 [Healing Series] Romantic Relationships

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/71

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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 are going to tackle intimate partner relationships. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Marta [formerly Drachenberg]. Welcome, Marta.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Hi, Haley.

Haley Radke: Marta is a fellow adoptee and licensed mental health counselor, who is trained in internal family systems, a model she believes to be especially powerful in helping adoptees learn to love and welcome all their internal parts.

So Marta has taught us before about internal family systems, but today I asked her back, because we're gonna talk about just the challenges of being adopted. And being in a romantic relationship with someone and all the fun things our partners get to deal with with us. Is that right, Marta?

Marta Isabella Sierra: That's correct. It is a rollercoaster ride to sign up to be with one of us, for sure.

Haley Radke: Yes, yes. It is no secret that my husband deals with a lot, but, I mean, why is that? Why is it so tough to be with someone who's adopted? What is it about adoptees that can make it a challenge, for just being in relationship?

Marta Isabella Sierra: So, I think one of the most damaging pieces of adoption trauma and that initial severing of that relationship with our first mothers, is that it steals from us any innate sense of trust. If you are with your biological mom and you create that secure attachment in early childhood, you have an innate sense of trust in yourself, in other people, in the world. You have a sense of safety.

And that's something that was taken from us, that was broken very, very early. And so to the point where we sometimes don't even have a concept of what trust is, and almost don't believe that it's a real thing. And this most pervasively affects relationships.

But before I say more about that, I wanted to give a brief example of the difference between an adopted and a non-adopted person, regarding this sense of innate trust. I have a close friend, a dear friend, who went through a pretty brutal divorce this past year, and she was so, so crushed. And part of it was that she had never even thought about the idea that they wouldn't be together forever. It had never occurred to her.

She took all of it at face value and trusted in it so deeply, and it was such a loss for her and such a grieving of, "Oh, sometimes things fall apart, right?" Or sometimes, you trust someone and maybe they weren't worthy of your trust, and that's painful. And there were points in my loving and supporting of her that were challenging for me, because I can't even conceive of that level of innate trust.

My whole life I am bracing for things to fall apart, for things to go badly, for people to die, for people to leave. And so the idea that she was just walking around the world, living her marriage with this level of trust, and for her… To watch her lose that, was so interesting to me and kept bringing me back to, Wow, I have no idea what that would be like to trust something so innately.

So personally and professionally, I feel like I see adoptees struggle so much with all of their relationships (family and friendship included), but intimate relationships are different, because intimacy/romantic relationships are our most vulnerable space. It's the most vulnerable space that we exist in as humans.

It's the closest we let people get, and in that it's the most vulnerable. It's where we work out our family of origin issues, which as an adoptee is so, so complicated, and there's also… Because of all the fear that we're carrying in our systems, there can often be this really strong desire, deeply rooted desire, even, for control.

And I'm gonna quote C.S. Lewis really quickly, who said, "To love at all is to be vulnerable." And we're asked in romantic relationships to be the most vulnerable that we are in our lives, and when vulnerability as an adopted person is linked to feeling unsafe, that gets really sticky and really complicated.

Haley Radke: I definitely have often struggled in relationship. And yet, I've been married for, oh dear, Nick does listen to the show. So he's gonna–12 years. No, it's more than that. No, it's more than that. It's going to be 14 years this year. But I've said before, he's this really stable force in my life. And I'm the one that's up and down, and up and down. And I feel like I bring the challenges to the relationship.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. And that can be a really hard feeling. Feeling… You know, the clinical term for that in a couple's therapy way would say that one person in the couple feels like the "identified patient," like the one that's got all the problems. But it's also of high value, actually, as an adopted person to find someone who is securely attached, to partner up with, which leads me right into talking about attachment styles a little bit.

So, I wanted to recommend a book called Attached, that explores specifically how attachment styles affect adult romantic relationships. And it's really a great book. You can do a self-assessment, you can do an assessment of your partner (if you have a partner currently), and really learn about the different attachment styles.

And the most important thing that the book is bringing forward, from the research that they did, is the idea that our attachment styles are fluid (which isn't how we always thought about attachment styles in the psychology world). At one point, we thought of them as really defined in infancy and childhood, and then that's your attachment style.

But what we're learning is they're actually much more fluid than that. So, the good news of that is that if you aren't partnered yet (as an adopted person) and you seek out someone who's “securely attached,” they can pull you into “securely attached.” You can develop that together. The con of it is, if you're an adopted person and you're super dysregulated and you find a secure person, you can also pull them out of secure attachment and bring them into your world.

Haley Radke: Don't tell them that. I'm looking around…Nick's upstairs. It's fine.

Marta Isabella Sierra: So, I appreciate your vulnerability in speaking to that, Haley, that you feel like the one that has all the ups and downs. But the upside of that is, it's like slinging pudding at a wall and it just falls down, instead of someone catching it and throwing it back to you. Because securely attached people, when we're having our dysregulation are just like, “Hey, there's no fire. What's going on? Everything's fine.”

Like you said, he's this stable force in your life, and so they can reflect that back and it helps us see the places where, Oh, what I'm feeling isn't actually happening in this moment. Or, Something else is coming up from me. I'm not present moment right now.

And there are those of us (myself included), who read this book and learned these things when they already have fallen in love with someone who has the opposite attachment style for them. And they talk about that in the book as well, which is really helpful. I happen to already have fallen deeply in love with someone with an opposite attachment style and someone with their own trauma history as well (that is very different from my trauma history), which provides a whole other myriad of challenges that we get to navigate. Which sometimes is really helpful, and sometimes we really speak the same language, and sometimes we just trigger each other in all of these really terrible ways, and have to work through that.

But that's also not impossible. And so even two people with opposite attachment styles, even if they're not secure, can move towards “secure” together. And it's a lot of work, but I think it's worth it.

Haley Radke: So you mentioned this book Attached, and you're talking about different attachment styles. Can you just give us Cliff’s notes of what that means?

Marta Isabella Sierra: It means how we are in relationship; that's the simplest way that I can put it. A general way of what comes out of us, what parts of us show up when we're in relationship, and again, especially in this intimate, romantic space that can be so vulnerable.

Haley Radke: And can you give an example of a couple different attachment styles?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I do not have the book in front of me, but I believe it's “anxious,” “avoidant.” There's a mixture of those that's a very small percentage of people that are “anxious-avoidant,” and then “secure.” There's some really beautiful examples of how this plays out in attachment styles in this new show that's on HBO–I don't know if anyone's been watching.

It's called Here and Now, so (spoiler alert), I'm gonna talk about a couple of different scenes with one of the characters. It features a family structure of two white adoptive parents, three adult adopted children (one from Liberia, one from Vietnam, one from Colombia), and they also have a biological child as well (a teenage girl).

So, I'm gonna be talking a little bit about Ramon's character, who is the adult child that's adopted from Colombia. And we watch his relationship in the first season with Henry. And there's these two specific moments that I think they did such a beautiful job of really showing what can come up for us: a) that he gets so close, so fast. And that's really common, I think with adoptees. We have really strong feelings, and we're craving that love so deeply that we can run really fiercely towards someone. And you see that side, and then you also see the other side, which is this urge to run, and this urge to end things really quickly, really unilaterally.

So, the first kind of trigger is: he wakes up in the middle of the night one night, and Henry's not there. You really see how he comes undone. Like, Where did he go? And you can see how hard that is for him, and his impulse is to end the relationship. And they work through it with a conversation, but you could see that it could have ended there, had Henry not fought a little bit and said, “No, I want you to know what really happened, and why I did that, and why I'm sorry.” And they move through it. But there's already one point, right? Where they could have gone a different way.

And then there's a later piece where Henry had potentially been unfaithful. And without getting the actual story, without asking any questions, Ramon goes to the worst-case scenario (like we often do, like we're hardwired to sometimes), and just assumes the worst and ends the relationship, unilaterally. And I think there was a lot lost there. And that's getting into my opinion of what I saw these two characters sharing, but I think they did have a shared history of trauma. I think there was a lot of love there, and it was lost in a really fear-based way. So, both of those examples are examples of Ramon being incapable of trusting, of innately trusting. He goes to the worst-case scenario; he goes to the fear response.

And so that's again, that piece where, if we're unable to trust, is going to constantly come up in our relationships, and potentially do a lot of damage to our partners and to us. And so that needs a lot of attention from us, and us doing our work so that our partners aren't being hurt, and also so we can build–even to build something.

And so, you asked me in the last episode, “How did IFS change my life?” I waited for this episode to speak to it, but I wouldn't have the partner that I have today if I hadn't found IFS. I started my training right when we were just starting up, and the dysregulation in the beginning of something new, I think, is really intense for us.

That first year was very intense for me, navigating my feelings and not blowing it up. I have this part that gets so afraid of the realness of it and would blow it up. And when I was younger, certainly, blew up many a connection out of fear. And there was a lot of work to do with my parts in that first year about: it's okay, a lot of comforting, a lot of overwhelm, and that work continues now. Four-and-a-half years later, I'm still doing a lot of work to make, to try to make sure (and I fail epically all the time), that this doesn't affect our relationship.

And so, in the beginning, we used to get in this conflict, that I would say, “I trust you,” and he would say, “You don't trust me.” And we would go round and round with this, really often. And as I was starting to do my first adoption readings about adoption trauma, was right around that same time that we had been starting to date. And so I started learning about this, and really learning about this broken sense of trust, especially from primal wound.

And I was able to sit with him–I still remember sitting on the porch with him. And I was able to say one day, “You know, I think that you're right. I think that I don't trust you. I think that what I mean when I say that is, ‘I want to trust you, and I trust you more than any man I've ever been with.’ But you're right. A lot of me, a lot of parts of me don't trust you at all.”

And that was so validating for him to hear. I just remember his relief and him thanking me for speaking to what his parts already knew was true, which was that I did not trust him. And that's okay; it was a little too soon. And so, the other piece is that trust is a big spectrum. It's not black and white. We don't trust or we don't trust. It's a big spectrum, and I continue to try to move towards that trust. But again, four-and-a-half years in, I still struggle with it today and up through a week ago, moving through a conflict, and him saying, “When have I not been here for you? Since we've been together? When have I not been here?” And I have to ask all of my parts to step back and calm down and acknowledge: Never. I don't have any reason that's real. I just have my traumatized parts that are reacting out of fear.

Haley Radke: One thing I remember I did when I was dating my husband (many years ago), was I would really push him away, big time. And what part of that has to do with trust? Like, I can't really–I don't have the words for it. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. So a polarity that exists inside of everybody, when it comes to relationship, is: we have parts that want to run towards the other person, and we have parts that want to run away from the other person. I believe, in adopted people, those parts get very extreme. So again, we have those behaviors of running towards someone, making up a whole kind of story, and making it more intense, and rushing it and all of that, right? Like, I have to get so close to you that you're my skin. That impulse is so deep.

And then we also have, Oh, but now we are this close, and now I feel really unsafe, and I need to get the F out of here immediately! And there's the running. And so there's these opposing energies that I think (again) get really extreme with us: the parts that want to run towards, and the parts that want to run away, which can feel… Again, that rollercoaster can feel very upsetting to the other person, if they don't understand what's happening.

Haley Radke: Yeah, yeah, for sure. We can see all of these things, I think, hearing you explain this. Probably a lot of us are like, Oh my gosh, listen, I've been sitting here thinking you have cameras in my house. So we're all kinda feeling that way. But then, what are our next steps? If we see it, then how do we work on building that trust, and how do we work on saying to our partner, “Okay, I am working on this. Can you work on this with me?” And those kind of things? How do we navigate that?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yeah. So, again, what comes up in our intimate relationships is a lot of family of origin stuff, which we have two families of origin (really), that we're working with. Two loads of crap that we're trying to get…

Haley Radke: Twice the fun.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Twice the fun. So, there's–it's honoring that, right? That a lot of what's coming up for us is maybe about our adoptive parents, maybe about our birth parents, but that (generally) it's not about that.

When I do couples work, the first thing I say is, “90% of what's coming up between the two of you isn't about the other person. You're hitting wounds, and they're coming up, but they're not–you didn't create them together. They were already there, and you're hitting upon them.” So, I would say step one as an adopted person, is a huge amount of curiosity about what's happening for you and what your feelings are and what's going on in your body, in your heart, in your mind. And really attuning to that so that you can recognize when you're having a really intense emotion and start to be able to recognize when it might be disproportionate to what just happened.

And that's my first signal, personally, is Oh, I'm having a really big reaction to this. I need to slow down. I need to see what's happening. I need to listen. One way that I do that, especially if I'm super escalated, I generally journal on my phone and not in my journal. And it's interesting to go back and read and I can see, “What's about my adoptive parents?” “What's about my birth mom?” And in the journaling, I think I'm writing to my partner, but I read it later and I'm like, Oh, I see who that was about.

It's almost never about him. And so, it's starting to recognize that narrative: “How does that show up for you?” And these are a few triggers, abandonment kind of narratives that I've noticed in myself that maybe your listeners will relate to and hear for themselves.

But if I hear any of these statements inside of myself, I know that it's adoption trauma stuff that's coming up for me. Why aren't you here? Where are you? How could you leave? So short and simple, right? But all of those link directly to my traumatized infant part, and I'm not in the present moment if I'm thinking those things.

If I'm feeling those things, I'm not in the present moment, and I have to ground myself before I can move forward. And so the practical piece of that is, when I notice that coming up and I notice where that lives in my body. I know that a lot for me is right under my rib cage, right in my diaphragm, that a lot of my fear lives there.

So I might place my hand there, and just take a really deep breath and just say, “We're okay. Everything's okay. I'm right here.” And depending on how much I know about what part of me is showing up, I might reassure it in different ways. “We're safe now,” or I might remind that part that my partner is a safe person. “You know that Tyson loves you. Everything's okay. You're in a safe space.”

I might remind that part that my birth mom loves her (which is a gift of my reunion), which I didn't have before to say to her. But now I can say, “She loves you, and you'll see her again. It's gonna be okay.” So that part's really specific, individually, how you calm down the parts of you that got stirred up in the moment. But recognizing is definitely the first step, so that I'm not running out and saying out loud, “How dare you leave? How could you do this to me? Again?” And then we're in a whole thing, right? And now I'm in a one to seven day fight that I don't know what's gonna be said, and what I can't take back.

Haley Radke: So that's if we're already in a relationship.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes.

Haley Radke: And I know several adoptees personally, who kinda go in and out of different relationships and you just sorta see them bouncing from one person to the next. And to me, I look at that from the outside and I think, This is a little bit dysfunctional. How does someone like that, you know, look at themselves and say, “Okay, what am I gonna do next? Do I want a partnership that's gonna last for a while?” I mean, what do you say to someone who's experienced that?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Well, you know, part of me wants to say, partnership isn't for everybody. It's okay if you don't want a partner, too.

Haley Radke: Fair enough. Yes, yes.

Marta Isabella Sierra: But yes, if you want to build a healthy partnership, it's essential that you're doing your own work (ideally with a therapist). I strongly recommend that any adopted person–once you're in a relationship, that you think this might really be something (even if you think, Maybe just for a year, but this might be something); get yourself in couples therapy as soon as possible. People use couples therapy as a Hail Mary at the end, and typically, couples seek help six to seven years past when they needed it.

So part of it is honoring that this is hard for us. This is an area that is difficult for us and we need a little help. And finding a partner that's okay doing that work with us, that's also interested in growth and building healthier relationship and just really honoring.... Again, it's not a place that we're broken, it's not something we can't have, that's just for the other people, but it's a place where that's very challenging for us, and we need a lot of help.

You know, I know for my partner and myself, we didn't have healthy examples growing up. And so we're trying to build something that we haven't even seen, and so we need help with that, and that's understandable. And then to the way other side, I would say for anyone that's single and just dating around, and wants to live that casual life and isn't really ready for something serious: if that doesn't feel safe, don't do it. Definitely don't do it if it doesn't feel safe.

But even in casual encounters, as adopted people, we can get very deeply wounded. And so, it's being careful about our hearts, and our safety, and making sure that anyone we spend time with (even if that's somebody for two hours, that we're gonna be intimate with), that it's safe and that we're clear with our parts about what's happening.

If we're just seeking physical comfort, again, that's totally fine, and we have deep needs for that (generally, as adoptees). But are we being clear with our parts that this isn't our forever person, and we might be leaving them really soon? Are we being clear about our own intention with ourselves, going into it? Or are we gonna let ourselves run wild after, and really get hurt all the time?

Haley Radke: Thank you. Thank you. I think those are all really great things to think about and it's a lot of self-reflection. This whole time, I'm like, Man, you're hitting a little close to home for me, here. Thank you. Thanks for that. It's good. It's good.

Marta Isabella Sierra: It's a very difficult thing to talk about. You asked me to think about examples to share, and it's vulnerable. I have shaming parts about how much I'm still doing my work in this most vulnerable area. I'm very much still doing my work, and it's very much still affecting my partner, and I wish that it wasn't. I have parts that are really angry that it still affects him day-to-day, and that's what's happening.

So, what do we do? We ask for help. And we try to do our work, and it goes as fast as it goes. But if we can say to our partners, “Part of me felt this…,” or even in the repair. Sometimes we can't resolve it in the moment, right? We have to come back later and say, “I think that part of me that got really angry that you left and went to go hang out with your friends, really was feeling that separation with my birth mom. I think that's why I was sobbing. I'm sorry that I put that on you.” That's so different than anything else than any other way we might deal with that.

Haley Radke: But that really goes back to just what you said, a moment ago, about going to couple’s therapy, and how we leave it till this is like seven or eight years late. You know, doing those repairs as you go is so important.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. And I can't tell you how many people (even therapist friends that I have) have had reactions. I casually talk about our couple’s therapy often, and people say, “What's wrong?” “Nothing. Things are good. That's–I want them to stay good, and we're building a foundation, so it's important that we have help.”

Haley Radke: Yeah, I am a big believer in therapy (obviously). I mean, I think it's so amazing to be able to go into a session with Nick and my psychologist (that's who I see). She is just able to help us hear each other, you know? And sorta uncover some stuff, and really have a good conversation about what it's really about. And sometimes in, whatever–in the heat of the moment, you just aren't able to do that. So I love that you just said, coming back later to just do that repair is so good.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Marta. Is there anything that we didn't cover yet that you really want to get to?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I don't think so. That's it. I didn't think I'd get through everything that I wanted to say, but I did.

Haley Radke: Oh, and this was really good. And I did; I felt so uncomfortable talking about this. I don't know why. I had that–Season four, we're talking all about relationships (as we're recording this). And I did this bonus preview episode with my husband Nick, and he relayed all of these things to me about how my reunion with my dad affected him.

And that whole time he was talking, I was like, Oh my gosh. I was so selfish. And I just, I didn't see it till later, and then just reliving that, it brought so much stuff up. And this conversation too, I'm like, Whew! So, you know what? We need to go there. We can't hide these things. This is really what's happening for me, for you, for people that are listening. It's really important to talk about. Thank you.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yeah, you're welcome.

Haley Radke: Marta, where can we connect with you online?

Marta Isabella Sierra: There will be links in the show notes to my personal email. If you just wanna talk to me, that's totally fine, I'm open to that. And also my professional website as well, where my practice information is. And yeah, feel free.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

I am so thankful for each one of you that tells me how much the show has changed your life, and I can't believe it. I still get these emails daily, or messages on Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook. And it means so much to me that you are finding the show so helpful in your own life. So, one of the ways that you can help support the show is by just telling one or two people about the impact it's made on your life, and to encourage them to listen.

So, I know that some of you have been sharing in your adoptee support groups, which is awesome. What a great idea. And also, I've heard from some of you that you're actually bringing the show to share with your therapist, and they are getting more insights from listening to the Adoptees On show. And think about it, if they are able to help more adoptees through their struggles, I mean, it’s like full circle.

It's just so exciting to see this change shifting in the world. So, thank you so much for sharing the show in that way. And one other way you can help me to continue making this show for you is with your financial partnership. So adopteeson.com/partner has details of how you can support the show monthly, with a small gift.

And I have some thank you gifts as well for you for supporting the show in that way. So, I have a secret adoptees-only Facebook group, which is filled with past guests, and other supporters of the show, and they're all really amazing people. Let me tell you, we've had some really great conversations in there.

And also, I have another level of support with some unedited episodes of the podcast. And often I have a guest (Carrie Cahill Mulligan) come on, and we talk about what's happening behind the scenes of the show, and also what's going on in our own lives. Carrie's fantastic. She was a guest in…She was my very first guest, actually, season one, episode one, and then she came back to interview me all about my story (which is the season one finale), episode 13 of that series.

So, if you're all caught up, and you're looking for a few more shows, that's another great way to support the show. And fill your podcast queue. You can sign up for that, adopteeson.com/partner. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again, next Friday.

28 [Healing Series] Is Adoption Trauma?

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/28

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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 is a heavy topic. I know I say that every single time it's a Healing episode. We tackle: Is adoption really trauma? Let's listen in.

This is Lesli Johnson, a fellow adoptee and licensed therapist who works to help other adoptees connect the dots of their story and live authentically. Welcome to Adoptees On, Lesli.

Lesli A. Johnson: Thanks, Haley. How are you today?

Haley Radke: Great. I'm so excited to talk to you again. You have really made an impact on our listeners so far, so I'm really excited to tackle this topic with you today.

I've had some adoptees contact me and they've been surprised by some of the stories on the podcast. We sometimes mention adoption as being a traumatic thing, that there's this thing about “adoption trauma”, and I was hoping that you could address that today. Do you think being adopted means that there's some kind of traumatic wound? What are your thoughts on that?

Lesli A. Johnson: I certainly also get contacted a lot with questions related to adoption and trauma. I think trauma is sometimes a hard word to hear, but I do think the process of separating an infant or a baby or a child from their biology, it is traumatic.

The word trauma, I mean, there is a negative connotation about it, but I'm advocating more for just truth and transparency, so that's why I use words like trauma. I don't think that that means that a person has to have a lifelong trauma, but if we're addressing the event as a traumatic event and then saying, “Okay, so now what do we need to do to help this person be calmer, work with their nervous system, work with integrating adoption into their story, to alleviate the symptoms of trauma?” I think a lot of times when people hear the word trauma, they're like, “Oh, that's so negative.” No, it's a word. It's a word. It's a word describing some symptoms that happen to most people when they're separated from their mother.

For a lot of adoptees, there are multiple traumas if they are placed in foster care, or if there are multiple placements. And I think that sometimes when an adoptee has had more than one placement or more than one foster home, that it's sometimes easier to use the word trauma in that situation. And maybe it’s deeper trauma, but I don't think so, I think it's okay to use the word trauma to describe the separation between a baby and their birth mother.

I always use the analogy, most of the time if you're going to get a puppy, you're not really supposed to take a puppy away from its mother until it's six or eight weeks old. But it's somehow okay to have a baby separated from– Not “okay”, I'm not using the word okay lightly, just supporting that idea that there is a traumatic response.

What we know about the brain and the nervous system today –that maybe wasn't evident, you know, 20 or 30 years ago– was that the process of separating a baby or an infant from his or her biological mother, is coded in the nervous system and in the mother's nervous system as traumatic. The only part of the brain that's fully developed at birth is the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight, flight, or freeze. And when the familiar mother isn't there to soothe the baby, the baby's levels of cortisol shoot up. And if this event of separation happens before the language receptors of the brain are developed, which is between 0-3, the event is just encoded in the nervous system. So we call that an ‘implicit only’ memory, meaning it happened before there was language, so there are no words to describe it.

What I've found in working with adult adoptees, and even teenagers and kids, is that they often –adults who maybe have a little bit more access to their experience and relating it– say things like, “I have this sense of just feeling lost or unrooted or like I don't know where I am, but I don't know what that's from.” And we might be able to relate that back to the separation before there were words to describe what happened. You know, the sense of rootlessness or the sense of where they say, “I don't remember exactly what happened, but I just have this felt sense.” That implicit memory.

Haley Radke: So what's the difference between a biological mother relinquishing right in the delivery room versus a biological mom taking her baby home? So there's that feeling like, ‘Where's my mother?’ What part of that is the traumatic?

Lesli A. Johnson: What we know now in 2017 –that you know, when I certainly was adopted, oh my gosh, almost 50 years ago– is that there's so much that the baby hears and smells even in utero. So, the baby knows the mother's voice. The baby knows the mother's gait, you know, the way she walks. The baby knows the mother's smells. So when that separation happens, everything that was once familiar to the baby is gone. It activates the sympathetic nervous system –the baby's– in fight, flight, or freeze. ‘What do I do?’, you know, not that they're thinking this logically, but their nervous system gets activated.

Whereas if the mother is able to be with the baby and act as the parasympathetic nervous system, the soothing agent, the familiar mother's able to calm the baby and soothe the baby. I mean, there are studies where crying babies are given a piece of clothing that the biological mother– you know, has her scent on it, and the baby is soothed by just even that familiarity.

Haley Radke:There's a connection that's been built, all over the time that the biological mother was carrying the baby–

Lesli A. Johnson: Essentially for the baby's entire life, yeah.

Haley Radke: Right, so then that's what's been severed. Can you talk a little bit about what does that mean? So it's traumatic, and so what does that mean for our brains? What's different between my brain as an adoptee who is relinquished as an infant versus someone who was parented right away?

Lesli A. Johnson: To clarify, a baby taken home from the hospital by their adoptive parents is parented from this start. But there still was that separation. So speaking in general terms, because I don't know if it's a hundred percent, but speaking in general terms, what I see in my practice is a common theme of separation anxiety. Separations and transitions are difficult. There is activation sometimes of just the nervous system so that there's hypervigilance. Sometimes adoptees talk about feeling anxious around separations and transitions. But just a heightened vigilance in the nervous system.

Sometimes people may not even relate that to adoption or the separation. But I certainly would say that most adoptees that I work with in my practice have a significant amount of anxiety and activation of their nervous system. Difficulty self-soothing would be another thing, too.

Haley Radke: So you say some adoptees, they don't even realize that this is connected. So how do we connect those dots?

Lesli A. Johnson: Well, I think you just named it: connecting the dots. I really believe good mental health is the ability to connect the dots of your story and have a coherent narrative.

So for smaller children, it would be helping the adoptive parents view adoption as trauma. I think one of the first books written on this would be Nancy Verrier's The Primal Wound. I remember reading that book in graduate school and kind of putting it away and I didn't wanna have that wound, you know, ‘that wasn't me’. And then realizing, ‘Oh wait, this completely explains it. This really is–’. I think she kind of was a pioneer in that respect, of calling adoption what it is, it's a trauma. So working with that is working with the trauma. Every person might display different symptoms, but talking about it for what it actually is, I mean, the truth is your friend.

Haley Radke: Okay. It is so interesting that you say that thing about The Primal Wound. Because I remember when I was reading it, too, I was like, ‘Nope, nope! This is not me.’ I've had a few adoptees contact me, one in particular I'm thinking of emailed me and he said, “Just so you know, I love your podcast and I listen all the time, but I'm an in-the-fog adoptee,” is what he said. “I'm good with adoption. Like, you know, it's interesting to hear these stories but it hasn't really affected me.” So is that true? Like, some of us are just super affected and some of us are fine?

Lesli A. Johnson: I think that certainly there are people that are: a) maybe more resilient, b) maybe are better able to use coping mechanisms like denial –and I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all– but work at a different level where maybe they're not either making the connections to adoption or they truly don't feel that adoption has had any impact on their lives.

I wouldn't challenge that person. I might challenge them if they were my client and I really saw themes that I've seen with clients. But yeah, I think maybe to each their own. But I've definitely seen it in clients that I've worked with where adults come in and don't think things are related to adoption, and then really start to connect their dots and have a real eye-opening, a lot of ‘aha’ moments, and are able to integrate how adoption has shaped them and add that piece to their story because it is a part of their story.

Haley Radke: It's true, I would never want to “lead someone out of the fog” –so to speak, that lingo– to realize maybe there is a traumatic aspect, because one of the discussions we've been having in one of my Facebook groups is like, “This is too hard. Let's go back in the fog. We don't wanna deal with these things.”

Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, denial and repression are super powerful. They're super powerful coping mechanisms.

Haley Radke: So what else can we use to not just cope, but heal from this trauma?

Lesli A. Johnson: Acknowledging it as such, and then working with it like you might other traumatic events or events that are perceived by the individual as traumatic. So, working with establishing a coherent narrative; support groups; therapy; you mentioned Facebook groups. I think when you're able to have a supportive group of people to run ideas by, run thoughts by, have your feelings and thoughts and experiences validated, that can be really healing. And as you know, we've talked before, I'm a huge proponent of EMDR therapy, which is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. It's an integrative therapy that I use in my practice. That's been really helpful.

Haley Radke: Yeah, and we did a whole episode on that, so you can go back and check that out for a deeper dive.

Lesli A. Johnson: Other tools and things that I've seen work with my clients: having a mindfulness program, working with the body in mind again. When traumas happen, the event is stored in the brain in a maladaptive way, so we really wanna work on connecting the mind in the body and integrating. So things like yoga, mindfulness, anything that helps connect the mind and the body.

Haley Radke: That’s really good. Trying to put it out of our head is not necessarily– if it's all repressed, that's fine, but if it's like coming out in different ways, we should probably deal with it.

Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, I think so. I think it's good to acknowledge it, because I think for most people there are parts of their adoption story and adoption experience that do kind of leak out as they go through life and move through life.

Haley Radke: Like having your first baby. For some people, the midlife kind-of crisis-y stage. Those are two separate things I've heard from multiple adoptees, when they have kind-of “woken up”-- I don't know how to say that.

Lesli A. Johnson: I think adolescence is another time, too. I mean, adolescence for all people, adopted or not, is a time of finding out who you are. And for adopted teens, that can be difficult if they don't have the pieces of their story. And part of finding out who you are is knowing where you came from. I think that's another life transition that's sometimes difficult for adoptees.

Haley Radke: Can you direct us to any particular books or research that we could kind of dive into a little further if we're interested in deeper study? You already talked about The Primal Wound, but is there anything else that would be helpful, to learn a little bit more about maybe the effect that it has on the brain, anything like that?

Lesli A. Johnson: One of my favorite books on trauma in general, that I think addresses what happens in the brain and the nervous system, is The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk, that's an excellent book.

Another of my favorite books related to adoption and the not-so-wonderful parts is called Adoption Therapy, and it's an anthology of essays by written by adoptees, many of them who are also therapists. That book was edited by Laura Dennis, it's called Adoption Therapy. Have you read it?

Haley Radke: I just got it. I had saved up a bunch of money and I ordered, like, 10 different books. So it's literally upstairs on my nightstand right now.

Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, it’s another one of those –in my opinion, similar to The Primal Wound– where it's not exactly what I would call a pleasant read, but every bit of it is so informative and it's a wonderful book.

Haley Radke: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your insight on this topic, which is very hard. Where can we connect with you online?

Lesli A. Johnson: You can connect with me, probably the easiest way is through my website, which is www.yourmindfulbrain.com, and then there are links to my email, Facebook page, Twitter account, and Instagram.

Haley Radke: Oh, perfect. Thank you so much, Lesli.

Lesli A. Johnson: Sure, my pleasure.

Haley Radke: If you have other topics that you'd like to see addressed in an upcoming Healing episode, please come find me on Twitter or Instagram, @adopteeson, and let me know.

I keep telling you about my secret Facebook group, but this week I want to let you know how you could have access to that and some unedited episodes of the podcast. If you are dying for more content, my second-level Patreon reward is a private RSS feed. That's techno-lingo for your very own personal podcast feed.

The latest unedited show I just released yesterday, is me chatting with Carrie about what I learned at the Indiana Adoptee Network Conference, and I tell her a humiliating story of something totally inappropriate I said to a complete stranger. So, if you would like to revel in my misery, that is the only way you can hear that story.

My link for Patreon is Adopteeson.com/partner. If you're ever looking for a supportive Facebook group and Patreon's just not something you can swing right now, come and find me on Twitter or Instagram and send me a message, because I have some places I can recommend for you.

Next week's episode is with Marriette Williams. She's an international adoptee who searched and found her biological mother, only to find out that her adoption was non-consensual. Make sure you're subscribed in Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts, so you don't miss it.

Let's talk again next Friday.