139 Alison Malee

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/139

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 139, Alison. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Well friend, I hope you're doing well. It can feel like a whole new world sometimes, doesn't it? I will admit, I'm finding it challenging day by day with my little boys at home 24/7, but I also acknowledge my privilege that I'm able to stay home and be relatively unimpacted. I'm really feeling for those of you who have lost jobs or are serving in areas that are causing you fear or anxiety. I see you and I hope that our time together today will help you focus on someone else's story for a bit and bring some insight and light into [00:01:00] your day.

Today's guest, Alison Malee, is the perfect person to do that for us. Alison shares her story of being adopted in the nineties and how she has been processing her recent discoveries via DNA testing. These have brought about great shifts in identity and also allowed her to connect with members of her first family. We wrap up with some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are over on adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Alison Malee. Welcome Alison.

Alison Malee: Hi Haley. Thank you so much for having me.

Haley Radke: I, oh my gosh, I say this every time. I'm just so excited. And you were so kind. You sent me your book last year. It's so beautiful and I'm gonna sneak preview for you, but I am showing Alison, I have all these little tabs of things I marked up in her book and it's so beautiful 'cause her book is really beautiful, but we'll get to that in a little while. [00:02:00] First though, why don't you share some of your story with us?

Alison Malee: Sure, so I was adopted in the nineties and as you can imagine, it was a closed adoption because they mostly were at that time. I am a biracial adoptee, which I know now, but didn't for most of my life. So I am black and white and I actually didn't know that until about two years ago now. And I was in foster care for about a year before my adoption went through when I was about 11 months old. And I was adopted into a very white family and while they are amazing and I am very grateful for them, I struggled a lot with identity and culture and race as super missing keys in my childhood because they were just things that I did not have. So I grew up in a really small town in PA and went to a predominantly white school, or was in a predominantly white school system all throughout my years in school.

Haley Radke: [00:03:00] You said you were adopted into a white family. Did you have any siblings in that family?

Alison Malee: My parents got divorced and remarried when I was 10, so I was an only child for all of that time with them.

Haley Radke: Okay, okay. So you were just saying that you were, it was like a very small town and what was that like as you're sort of searching for your identity and you're an only child and you don't necessarily have your genetic mirrors there in place? What was that like?

Alison Malee: It was really difficult. I think, for me personally, I have always known that I was adopted and adoption has always been a part of my story. There was never a point in time that I didn't know. Knowing didn't make that easier for me because I felt so outside of my family even though they loved me and showed their love for me and that was never an issue. I always felt very outside [00:04:00] because I look different and because I am different. We have very different interests, very different opinions on things. I mean even down to politics, we view everything very, very differently. I am very creative and artistic and my parents, almost everyone in my family is either a lawyer or in the medical field. And I am a poet so we really had different views and things. And it was hard. It was definitely hard.

Haley Radke: And you said that you only found out a couple of years ago that you're biracial. What was that like growing up? Did you wonder what's different about me? Or was it more just like well, I'm adopted, so that's sort of the disconnect? That seems really like a challenging thing to me. I can't really wrap my head around it.

Alison Malee: It is one of the wilder parts of my story, I think. Growing up, I asked a lot of questions and maybe not the right questions, but I didn't quite understand why I looked [00:05:00] so differently and why my questions always kind of got shot down or my complaints always got shut down. Because I was often made to seem very dramatic or very emotional when complaining or crying about my hair and why my hair was so curly and my mom had such pretty straight hair and why my lips looked like this and my features were this way and her features were different and I wanted to be like her so much. And I wanted to be like my classmates so much. And I didn't quite fit in with the people that were in my classes and that was really difficult. I think, not even really until I moved out of my small town and I moved to New York, did I fully get to see a wide variety of people and cultures and body types and all of those things that sort of mirrored my [00:06:00] own, without actually being a mirror. But just the kind of melting pot that is New York, I got to be able to see so much more than I was able to see in my small town.

Haley Radke: Okay. I sort of interrupted you, but you were kinda sharing your story. What sort of happened next for you? So growing up, teen years, what was kind of happening then?

Alison Malee: So, I guess backing up a little bit, I sort of wanted to touch on just like childhood.

**Haley Radke:**Sure. Yeah.

**Alison Malee:**Not necessarily, piece by piece my childhood, but the parts for me about adoption that I really remember from those years before I fully understood what that meant. And, I think, I remember elementary school and middle school, it not being something that super bothered me, but it made me different. And I do remember parents coming to pick me up at school and friends saying, “That's not what I thought your parents would look like.”

**Haley Radke:**Oh.

**Alison Malee:**And so that was always interesting. And I also [00:07:00] remember feeling like for the longest time my Hogwarts letter was going to come, or I was gonna be whisked away in the night to a magical realm. When I turned 16, when I turned 18, those were the years that I always thought that was going to happen. And I remember when we first got a computer in our house. My parents were already divorced and my mom wouldn't come home from work until after I'd been home from school for a couple of hours and I would spend all of that time Google searching my birth mom's name, because it was literally the only key I had to her and to that world was just her name. And I would Google it and Google it. And I started, I think when I was like 12 or 13, emailing those people. So I would find people on LinkedIn or MySpace at that time and I would send them emails and most people didn't write me back, but some people would be very kind and say, [00:08:00] “No, I'm not who you're looking for.” But I remember for such a long period of time, that was something that I did.

Anyway, it was hard not knowing roots, and I think so many of us and so many adoptees and people who are in this situation realize that it's hard to not have a sense of culture and identity. Even if you know those things starting out and you've known that your whole life and you've walked through things knowing, okay, this is where I come from, if it's not within your home and it's not within your walls every day, it's really hard to feel connected to that. So that was always difficult.

Gosh, I think I touched on all of these things already. We talked a little bit about struggling with identity and struggling with my features being different from the features of the people around me and the people that I was seeing every day. And I know I said before that I was always made [00:09:00] to seem very dramatic and very emotional for questioning things. But now as an adult and now understanding those things were all so valid, and that's really important for me to say and acknowledge because all of those feelings of not fitting in and not feeling worthy, almost, because I felt so different and so outside. That's all so valid because I didn't look like the people around me and I understood on some sort of level that I wasn't like the people around me even though I didn't quite understand where I fit. And the way I look is very ethnically ambiguous and I've sort of always been able to blend in everywhere. I've been all over the world and I've always managed to blend in wherever I am and people think that I am from wherever we are. And there is also the key point in being [00:10:00] biracial, that you're always too much or not enough for each half of you. That now has been difficult, re-reworking my mindset around that.

So I think, not the main points, but the other half of this story, which is like the last couple of years and sort of the entirety of my reunion story, which just started recently. I feel like all of this has come to the surface now that that has begun.

Haley Radke: Because you really, you started your search when you were pretty young just putting in your mom's name, Googling, like the information that you had and reaching out to people. But I'm assuming that never came to fruition.

Alison Malee: Oh, no, no, no.

Haley Radke: Okay. So your 12-year-old searches didn't come to fruition. So what did you do as an [00:11:00] adult to search?

Alison Malee: So I now know the name that I was searching was not even her name. She had given her first name and my father's, my birth father's, last name when she had signed my paperwork. And so the name that I had been searching for ten plus years on Google and Facebook and all of those things was not actually even her name which I think is so interesting now.

But anyway, so a couple of years ago I decided I was going to do a DNA test. Solely, basically because I wanted to know what my genetic and ethnic roots were. And I thought it would be interesting and I didn't even think anything like, oh, I'll find some DNA connections. I really just wanted to know what am I made up of? Where did I come from? I've always wanted to have cultural traditions and things that were [00:12:00] uniquely tied to my culture and my race in that way and I never did. So I really thought, through the DNA test, I would be able to find those things out.

I received my results and I think I was both very excited to know and also disappointed that I wasn't like a wizard or werewolf or something like that, but was actually super human and tied to real people and that they were somewhere out in the universe and it took me a really long time to acknowledge those results because I think it made me really sad. It was a sad kind of grounding thing because it cemented for me that I was adopted and that this was like a real thing that had happened and I don't know how to explain that properly. [00:13:00] I think when it's not real, like when you don't have any information, it feels very, this thing happened, but it's very outside of me. And that was before I had any kind of ties to anybody else that was adopted, to any of the proper education. We never discussed adoption in my household. That was not something we talked about. We never spoke about it. It was never brought up, we never mentioned it. If I said something that was about adoption, it was like quickly shut down and I knew it made my parents equally uncomfortable and equally sad, so we just didn't discuss it.

So it took me a long time to acknowledge the results. So I left them for a couple of months, almost half of a year. I saw them. I read them. I read through them but I just let them be for like half of the year. And then one day I was watching [00:14:00] Coco, I don't know if you've seen this movie, with my toddlers and the movie is so much about family and how important family is and your ties to your family and, it's like about the day of the dead.

Haley Radke: It's even about the generational, like your ancestor, like having this legacy of sorts, right?

Alison Malee: Yeah. By the end of the movie, of course I'm sobbing and I decided I was going to send an email to my top two results on my DNA test, my top two DNA matches. So I sent them both an email, a very vague email, and within the hour a woman had responded saying that she was almost positive I was her niece. She just needed a little bit more information. And I was her niece. She was right. And the woman that had emailed, just randomly, she was one of the top people that came up, was my birth mom's half [00:15:00] sister. So she and I emailed back and forth for weeks and she was able to get some information from my birth mom. Then through that information, was able to track down one of my half brothers on Facebook, and she was able to connect us. She actually put us in a chat room on Facebook. Her, him and myself, and said, “You guys are siblings. Kind of chat it out.”

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh. Wow.

Alison Malee: She was amazing. She did so much digging and she was like such an integral part of this whole story. But she connected us and then from there, him and I were able to discuss things.

Haley Radke: And was he older or younger than you?

Alison Malee: He's younger than me. Yeah, he's much younger than me. He is a teenager still and so discussing all of this with a teenage boy. You know, he's a teenage boy.

**Haley Radke:**Surprise

**Alison Malee:**Yeah, it was interesting. So all of my siblings on my father's side all knew about me and he [00:16:00] had discussed me openly with them. So it wasn't a surprise to him at all. He actually told me in one of our first conversations that he had spent a couple of years googling my name. Because my birth father had given all of them the name that him and my birth mom had given me and had told them about me. And so he had actually spent time searching for me.

Haley Radke: So this brother, the teen brother that you're talking about, was on your paternal side?

**Alison Malee:**Yes

**Haley Radke:**Okay, but the aunt that you found was on the maternal side.

**Alison Malee:**Right

**Haley Radke:**Okay. So they're still interconnected, live in the same community, or is that sort of how they know each other?

Alison Malee: So they don't know each other at all.

Haley Radke: Oh.

**Alison Malee:**My birth mother was able to give her enough information.

Haley Radke: Oh. Okay. Okay.

Alison Malee: That she was able to start searching online.

Haley Radke: She was doing the searching. Okay. Okay.

Alison Malee: Oh yeah, that's what I mean. She dug and dug to find information.

Haley Radke: Wow.

Alison Malee: And she was able to find his profile online.

Haley Radke: Whew. [00:17:00] That's a lot, finding out you have siblings.

Alison Malee: Yeah, so I grew up an only child, like I said, for many years of my life. And then I found I have two half brothers, a full brother, and three half sisters. And I found that out within like a manner of days. So that was wild for me and it was super overwhelming and I was very excited. I always wanted siblings. I always really wanted siblings growing up. But it was a lot to take in because it all happened very suddenly. I started speaking to my aunt online. Within a couple of weeks she had introduced me to my half brother and then the night that we started talking, he was able to help me find an old Facebook profile of my birth dad. So that was the first time that I ever saw him. I didn't know what his name was before then, so that was like [00:18:00] my first ever introduction to him as a person because throughout my childhood, the only thing I ever had was her name and I was always led to believe that he was not present, that there was no information on him. They didn't know anything about him. He had never gone to any meetings or anything like that, and that he was just not in the picture at all. And that she was the only one that was there. So I think just even realizing that he was a solid, real person and that he was there and that he did know about me and did speak to all of these other people about me and it wasn't like a secret that they kept, it was something that was openly discussed, was a really positive thing for me in the midst of all of this chaos.

Haley Radke: And how about learning that you have a full sibling? So a full brother. Was the full brother younger or older than you? [00:19:00]

Alison Malee: So we are actually Irish twins. He is 11 months younger than me.

Haley Radke: So they stayed together after you were

Alison Malee: Yes, I think they were only together during that time period where he was conceived. And I don't know exactly what happened afterwards, but when he was born, she gave him to my paternal grandma. And then she, my paternal grandma, is amazing and she raised him 'cause I don't think either of my birth parents were capable of raising him.

Haley Radke: Okay. Yeah, 'cause you had said early on that you were in foster care for a long time. So was it by choice that your parents lost custody of you? Did they relinquish or was it not consensual? Do you know?

Alison Malee: They had been in, where I grew up in my hometown, they had been there in a sober living facility. And they had [00:20:00] me and where they were staying in that sober living facility was a one bedroom, two person max apartment or studio situation. And so somebody had reported them, that there were more than the allotted people in there and that they were pretty certain they were still using. So, child services came and took me.

**Haley Radke:**Okay. Wow.

**Alison Malee:**And I would have been six weeks old when that happened.

Haley Radke: I'm sorry. So as you are getting to know all of these siblings and, I can't imagine, like that's a lot of relationships to be building over such a quick time. Are you in touch with your bio mom or your bio dad? Is that something you even want? Do you know the story? Like, I'm sure you've got all these things racing through your head at that time.

Alison Malee: So after I was able to connect with my half brother, I feel like I need to say half [00:21:00] to differentiate because there are so many siblings in this story. I don't consider them any less my siblings.

Haley Radke: I'm with you. I also grew up an only child and I have three half siblings, but I never call them that either, so I get it. I get it.

Alison Malee: Oh no, never. But I just feel like for the story, I can differentiate.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. That's right.

Alison Malee: Yes. So anyway, after we were able to get in contact and connect, he had added me and I was able to see his friends list and he had connected me to a couple of other people, but I had found my paternal grandma, her profile on Facebook. And I went back and forth for a couple of days, but I ended up sending her a message and after that we exchanged phone numbers. And actually, that first day we exchanged phone numbers, we spoke on the phone for a number of hours and at the end of that conversation she asked if I would be okay if she gave my phone number to my birth father.[00:22:00] To which I think I just panicked because that is such a big step. And that is not how I had anticipated having a conversation with him for the first time. But I said yes, I think out of, I don't even know, just shock.

And within a couple of hours he had called me. And I didn't answer. And then he called again and I didn't answer. I sent all of the calls to voicemail until my husband could come home because I just couldn't imagine having the conversation by myself. So I waited until my kids were in bed and when my husband was home, and then I called him back and he was just sobbing and I was sweating, and I just couldn't even process the fact that this was him on the phone. And he was just sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and trying really hard to get words out. And I couldn't say anything. I just, I think I said hello. And then that was pretty much all I was able to get out because it just was like such a panicky moment. [00:23:00] So I don't even remember exactly what happened.

I literally think I blacked it out because he had hung up and then called back. I think he was crying too much. So he said, “Give me a minute.” And he called me back and at that point we were able to exchange a couple of sentences like, “Hi, my name is Ali,” and he was calling me by the name that they had given me, which I obviously don't go by anymore. My adopted parents had changed my name, but he just kept saying that over and over again. And it was a short conversation. But when I look back on my life, I will think about that moment and speaking to him on the phone because it was one of the most surreal moments in this whole adoption story for me, hearing his voice for the first time and somehow deeply knowing that we were connected, even though at that moment I was incapable of getting any words out. [00:24:00] Hearing his voice and how moved he was speaking with me, I just knew: This is my father, and what a wild thing that is.

So after that first conversation, we spoke on the phone a couple of times after that, and then we had agreed to meet in person. And so my husband and I drove, gosh, like over two hours to go meet him. We met him on his territory. I wanted to do it in a public location. So we drove there and we met him. We went to a local street fair they were having there and it was again, like he was crying and so upset, but also grateful to be there. And I just couldn't, I was just in shock. And I felt that way all of the whole day of being there. When we were driving, I was [00:25:00] anxious and asking all of these crazy questions. What if he doesn't like my hair? What if he thinks being a poet is a weird job? And my husband just kept saying it's gonna be great no matter what. It's just a beautiful thing that you're able to do this no matter how late it is in your life. No matter all of the things that have been missed, just focus on this day and the fact that you get to be there and that he's gonna be there and you have to take it moment by moment. You can't think that far ahead.

So we get there and instead of being overly emotional, I just remember feeling out of body and just shocked and frozen. And I went through the whole day like that, and then we said goodbye and he starts crying again. And I just couldn't even, I just I don't know, I couldn't process any of it. And we get in the car and I just sobbed the whole way home. And I [00:26:00] don't know what it was that I couldn't do it in front of him or do it with him. Like I couldn't partake in it with him because I didn't feel, I think, maybe sorry for him in the way that I think he maybe thought I would, or I didn't feel empathetic in the way that I wanted to. And then when I was by myself, I was able to say holy cow, what a day, what an overwhelming experience, but not in the way that when two people cry together, you're crying with each other. I needed to be able to do that separately by myself. Yeah, so I was able to meet him and I have met him since one more time but mostly our communication is via text messages or emails. Occasionally we talk on Facebook video messages occasionally, but most of our conversation is now via text and all of those [00:27:00] things.

Haley Radke: You have a poem in your book, This is the Journey, “What Happens When You Meet Your Father at 24?”

Alison Malee: Yeah, I do. There's a whole poem dedicated to this one day because, like I said, it was one of the most surreal moments for me.

Haley Radke: You say, okay, where's the line here? “A father who is at best still a stranger. A man who is wearing your face.”

Alison Malee: Yeah. My birth father and I look just alike and it is me. You know what, even just going back a little bit, seeing a picture of him for the first time, even though they were old and blurry on his old Facebook profile, seeing his features and recognizing so much of that in myself was a very eye-opening thing for me. And then meeting him and recognizing even more in person, like we have the same eyes, the [00:28:00] same nose, our faces are shaped the same way. I look just like him. And that is still, even in this moment, as I'm telling you, that is such a crazy thing for me because I grew up not seeing any of myself reflected in anybody, which is how I think most adoptees feel. You don't have any of those mirrors growing up. So to see him and to recognize, oh my goodness, this person is such a reflection of me and I am such a reflection of them, at least on the outside, was really a really cool thing.

Haley Radke: So what point are you at in reunion with all of these people? Did you reach out to your bio mom? Are you still in contact with the siblings? There's so many people in different, I'm assuming, different life stages. There's teenagers and younger, like it's a huge mix of people to be in touch with one-on-one with all of them.

Alison Malee: Yeah, I am in contact with [00:29:00] almost everyone, at least on my paternal side. I have two, again for differentiation, two half brothers and a full brother and I also have a half-sister who is much younger than me. She's actually around the same age as my children.

**Haley Radke:**Really. Wow, that's interesting.

Alison Malee: So a big age gap and I have not had the opportunity to meet her yet, but I have met both of my half brothers and my full brother. And actually over the summer I was able to go to a family reunion on that side, and I met most of that side of the family, my grandma, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. I was able to meet all of them that day. And I had met my aunt and my grandma previously. Being able to get together and all of that was really, gosh almighty, I feel like I am telling this story backwards, a hundred times over. Anyway, I was able to meet them and to meet most of my paternal family, [00:30:00] which has been really lovely and they, most of them, come to my children's birthday parties now. My aunt and my uncle always try and make it and my grandma usually comes, and on my daughter's last birthday, my half brothers were able to come. One of my half brothers has children, so he brought his children and they were able to play with my children and it was a very beautiful day for me.

Haley Radke: I love that. I love that. We hear about so many reunions that fail or they never make it past the honeymoon stage and what does that really look like? And all of those things.

Alison Malee: Yeah, I don't sugarcoat anything because it's not all rainbows and butterflies and it has been really hard in a lot of ways. I try to look at the situation now knowing that all of this is very difficult for everybody involved. And [00:31:00] while I know that, and I now know and understand that while I feel like the person that got the short end of the stick, a lot of people involved got short ends. So I don't wanna make it seem like my end was somehow shorter because in a lot of ways it was not. In a lot of ways I missed out on so many things but the flip side of that is that my siblings did, too. And while I said before, I didn't feel a ton of empathy for my birth father when meeting him and when communicating with him, I feel so much of that for my siblings and I know that they have struggled so much of their lives with a lot of the same kind of things and the same kind of concepts and losing people in that way. So I try to tell the story as [00:32:00] honestly as I can, but also acknowledging as I'm talking about it, but also to myself, that all of us, everyone involved, has struggled in some way and

Haley Radke: Well it's a lot of work to make any new relationship work, right? You're having to remember to call or text them or invite them to your child's birthday party when it's not just been this natural thing, right? Like the way you were talking, like you're integrating families in a really beautiful way and of course that comes with challenges. So thank you for acknowledging that. This is not all sunshine and rainbows.

Alison Malee: Oh gosh. I don't have a relationship with my birth mom and my birth dad and I have a lot of boundaries. I have put a lot of boundaries up, which is why most of our communication is done via text message, over the phone. There are a lot of [00:33:00] boundaries in place and they're necessary for me and my mental health. But also for my children and everyone involved, there are boundaries. And there are boundaries with a lot of my family, but I don't think that they are a hindrance. Should anyone want to take the necessary steps to deepen a relationship, if that makes sense, I would be more than willing to connect with biological family members in a deeper and more, have them play more necessary roles in my life if they wanted to. So I always wanna have the boundaries. The boundaries are very important, but I also know that not everyone understands the trauma that adoption causes and brings and may not understand where I'm coming from all of the time.

Haley Radke: There's one line in your book that [00:34:00] I think really reflects that, and when I read it, I was like, oh my word, I feel like I should put this out on my wall. “I tuck away the grief, but you must understand, It still lives, it still consumes.” And I think that's so beautiful. And I don't know what you wrote it about, when that came to you, but so many of us talk about these complexities in adoption, right? You can think of the gains that you had with your adoptive family and the losses that you had not being with bio family, and same for your siblings, the loss they had not being with you and perhaps their life circumstances were different from yours growing up. And there is always that underlying threat of grief, even in those joyful reunions and having the birthday party where there's family there. It is complex and I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding anything but the, [00:35:00] “Oh, look, Allie had such a good life and she was just such a cute little girl with her curly hair and look at her little family,” and all of those kinds of things without acknowledging the hard experiences that you had maybe not fitting into your town. And it's so multifaceted, right? And it's hard to explain that to people when they just see that glimpse of, “Oh, you must have had it so good.”

Alison Malee: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's so difficult even within my biological family and my adopted family, nobody quite understands the actual aftermath and the actual reality that has been with me, that I've carried with me throughout all of my experiences. When I had my first daughter, I remember being in the hospital and holding her and just crying and crying and I couldn't [00:36:00] stop crying. And the nurse came in and said, “Is everything okay? Are you in pain?” And I just couldn't even answer her because I was just so trapped in this feeling of I just can't imagine anyone ever looking at me like this and not wanting to keep me and looking at my little baby face and looking at me so fresh and innocent, coming into the world and thinking I can't or won't be her mom. And I just couldn't, I couldn't wrap my head around that. My adopted mom was there with me. I don't remember where she had gone, but she came back into the room and saw me crying and I tried to explain it to her and I just couldn't come up with the words 'cause it's such a hard feeling to explain such a lonely feeling. And I, I just couldn't even get the words out or think of what they were, the proper way to explain [00:37:00] that specific feeling.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I am noticing our time is quickly ticking away. Is there anything else that you want to share with us or say to adoptees before we do recommended resources, and then we'll talk a little bit about your book then.

Alison Malee: I wanted to talk with you today because I really think it's so important for adoptees to have a platform, and I'm so grateful for this podcast and the voice you have given to so many adoptees who are struggling and don't really have the resources and the places to turn to where people are amplifying their experiences and their thoughts and their feelings. And giving them a space that is safe, that is genuine, and that doesn't sugarcoat the hard parts about adoption. Because, we all have heard a thousand [00:38:00] times adoption is so beautiful and it is, but it is also so hard and so full of pain and grief and so many complicated feelings that we all have to struggle through and fight through and acknowledge and accept and learn to understand. And I hope that by sharing even little pieces of my story, told in non chronological order today, that it's helpful for somebody. So seriously, thank you so much, Haley, for having me, but also for doing this. For all of the adoptees who need people to voice their stories so that they feel comfortable voicing their own.

Haley Radke: Thank you Alison. I appreciate that. Yeah, I agree. It's so important and of course that is one of the reasons that I started the show and I feel like there's [00:39:00] momentum, adoptees sharing their voices. And in fact, I didn't even know who you were as a poet and I think it was a couple of years ago, you just tagged my show on your Instagram and you were sharing it as a resource for adoptees and I was like, wow, that's amazing. And then you reached out when you had published This is the Journey. And so this came out last year, I think. I was rereading it again today and it's just so beautiful and you share so many things about your story, in Reunion, in little snippets here and there. And reading with adoptee lenses on, I think I picked up on a lot of that. I'm struggling 'cause I'm like, how do I describe a book in front of someone who has this magical ability with words? So I'm feeling intimidated. Because your poetry, your writing, it's thought provoking and you can tell it's so carefully crafted and you're [00:40:00] able to capture really incredibly profound understandings in such a few short phrases. That is shown through on your Instagram account and I really appreciate it. I think that a lot of adoptees will read your poetry and just feel understood and like they get it and give them some words for things they've experienced that they might not have had words for before. So I absolutely recommend your book. It's just wonderful. And I know you have a couple of other poetry collections out as well, but the one that I'm really enjoying is This is the Journey.

Alison Malee: Thank you so much, Haley.

Haley Radke: Oh, you're welcome. It's true. Like I said, it's all marked up, but only with these beautiful book pins because I really struggle writing in books.

Alison Malee: Oh, me too.

Haley Radke: But my book darts are like my favorite thing. So do you have anything you wanna share with us about This is the Journey before you recommend your [00:41:00] resource to us?

Alison Malee: So I wrote This is the Journey in the midst of all of this reunion happening, in the midst of discovering family and figuring out about my own race and identity and my ethnicity, and figuring out all of that. I figured all of that out while writing this book. So the book really is sort of a roadmap through all of that for me, but also a really thought out collection of all of the feelings and the immensity of everything that has and is continuously happening throughout the last couple of years. So the book is like my heart and soul. I have written other poetry collections, but this is the most personal because so much of it is [00:42:00] surrounding my adoption story and surrounding my reunion with my father and speaking about my birth mom and my lack of a relationship with her and meeting my siblings. There's a whole poem; it's multiple pages long about my brother and all of those things. So it's a very personal collection and it's very near and dear to my heart. And I wanted to, like I said before, give voice to my adoption story, but specifically for adoptees to have and be able to read through and, like you said, with adoptee lenses on, be able to read through and see my story and hopefully connect to it and see little pieces of their story within mine.

Haley Radke: For sure they'll be able to. Absolutely. The other thing I really liked is you write about your husband and your daughters, and it's like I'm a whole person and I'm experiencing my real life, and then I also have Reunion going on around me, and so it's very well rounded. I don't know, [00:43:00] what am I trying to say? It's very well rounded.

Alison Malee: Thank you so much.

Haley Radke: Okay, if you guys pick up This is the Journey, I want you to make sure you read the poem, “The Back of a Living Thing,” and it's about being in a therapist's office and, oh, my word. The analogy in there is so good. Don't spoil it. Don't tell us what it is. People have to read it. I don't usually do that, but it's so good. I'm like, wow. I'm gonna read that again, for sure.

Alison Malee: Oh gosh. You are so kind.

Haley Radke: What did you want to recommend to us today?

Alison Malee: I found the YouTube channel, “Yes I'm Adopted… Don't Make It Weird”.

**Haley Radke:**Oh yes, yes.

**Alison Malee:**A couple of years ago, and gosh, I love the way that they speak so candidly about adoption and nothing is sugarcoated. They don't try to make it very professional or incredibly stuffy in the way, I hate to say that about [00:44:00] other adoption resources because all adoption resources are wonderful and I'm grateful for all of them, but some of them can feel very stuffy and like it's not real and coming from real people who have experienced adoption firsthand, who are adoptees firsthand. So I am grateful for their candid and unapologetic conversations about what they have experienced.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Brett and Davo, they're pretty funny. They do a lot of good joking around together for sure.

Alison Malee: They do. They do. And for so many of us that talk about adoption, and I love that we're able to have these conversations together, but not to make light of anything, but I think it's important that we have dialogue that isn't necessarily like “I'm drowning in my emotions and I need help.” We have to also have the dialogue that is, “Hey, you know what? I've been there. Let's talk about it. Let's figure it out together.” [00:45:00] Let’s have more of an open conversation that doesn't necessarily need to be as weighed down as I think it tends to be.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that. All right.

Alison Malee: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Did you wanna share something else or should we wrap up?

Alison Malee: I'm like, yeah. So the other resource that I wanted to talk to you about is called @adoptwell. So where I found them was on Instagram but it's really just a community for everyone that has been touched by adoption. So they discuss from adoptee point of views, from all different perspectives, from adoptive parents, and I've seen from biological parents. I've seen all of the above and they share stories and just give little glimpses of real people experiencing adoption. [00:46:00] And I love being able to see and to learn more about all sides of adoption because, for many years, I didn't see anything about adoption. The only adoption stories I knew were in books and movies and were often very unrealistic. So it is so good to see people having these conversations where everything is real and the people are real, and the experiences are real, and you can learn from the ways that they have maybe fallen short or the things that they have learned that allow everyone in the triad to feel seen and heard.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Okay, so I found their Instagram is @adoptwell. Is that right?

Alison Malee: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay, perfect. Thank you so much Alison. It was just a real pleasure hearing your story and hearing from your heart. And I just, I really loved our time together today. I'd love it if you would share where we can connect with you online.[00:47:00]

Alison Malee: Lovely. So like I said, Haley, thank you so much for having me today. I am such a fan of your podcast and all that you are doing and have done for the community. You can find me online. My Instagram is just @alison.malee and on Facebook it is just Alison Malee, on Twitter it is just Alison Malee and if you Google search Alison Malee, my website will pop up.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you so much. And you gotta follow Alison on Instagram. It is a highlight in my feed for sure.

Alison Malee: Thank you so much.

Haley Radke: I just want to, again, reiterate how much I appreciate that you listen to the show, that you share it with your adoptee friends, and that is one of the best ways you can help the show by just telling one person about this episode. If there was something that you learned or you [00:48:00] just had a real connection to Alison's story, I would love it if you would share this episode with an adoptee friend who you know would be encouraged or inspired by hearing from Alison.

Another way to support the show and to help keep it going and say that you want Adoptees On to exist in this world to support other adoptees, is to go to adopteeson.com/partner and there you can find all the ways you can connect with adoptees who are supporting the show. And there is a secret Facebook group. There's another weekly podcast for supporters. There's a few different levels of support to choose from and we actually did a Zoom call in our Adoptees On Facebook group this week, and it was so good to connect with people, via social, no, not via social distancing, via physical distancing, but bringing in social intimacy and just talking about what's going on for us right now. [00:49:00] And so that's been really special. So we're trying to find different ways of connecting.

Another fun thing we're doing right now is an adoptee reading challenge, and we talk about the books that we read over on the other podcast: Adoptees Off Script, which is for monthly supporters. So if you have lots of time and you wanna join up with the Adoptee Reading Challenge, you can sign up to support the show adopteeson.com/partner or just pick up a book that is written by a fellow adoptee and share about it on social media. I would love to connect with you there, and I'm so grateful for all of those of you that already support the show. Thank you so much. I couldn't do this without you. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

137 [Healing Series] Hiddgen Dignity Part 2

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/137

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Haley Radke: This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

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 Part Two of my conversation with Pam Cordano on Hidden Dignity. Let's listen in.

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

Pam Cordano: Hi, Haley.

Haley Radke: Oh my word, I'm just so excited to talk to you again. And last week you were talking to us all about grievances and some really foundational principles I think a lot of adoptees need to hear.

And we're talking about things that are found in your book, 10 Foundations for a Meaningful Life (No Matter What's Happened), to Viktor Frankl with love, and I want to continue that conversation. I think it's so important and I don't know how many times I can say valuable in the same breath, but truly, you're sharing some things with us that I think everybody needs to hear, adopted or not, but specifically adoptees.

Thank you. Thanks for writing this book. It's so good. I gushed last time, so I'll try and hold back today.

Pam Cordano: And thank you for reading the book. It means a lot to me, really.

Haley Radke: I don't know if you saw, I'm going to show her. I have these beautiful book darts that my friend Carrie gave me. So there's like all these places I've marked up because I don't like to write in books, but these precious book darts I did use on your book, so that is like priceless.

All right. You have this really interesting story about a horse moment. Should we start there?

Pam Cordano: Yeah. I love that story. My friend Cynthia and I went to a silent meditation retreat north of San Francisco at a place called Spirit Rock. And I don't really meditate and I'm not Buddhist, but I went on this thing.

I thought what would happen if I were just silent for an entire week? I didn't know what would happen. I thought it might really be nice for me or it might be Hell. So I was curious, a little frightened. But anyway, we get there and I was excited also because my job involves so much listening, mostly listening, but some talking. And I was excited to just be quiet and not have to listen to anything except nature, birds and quietness.

So we get there and I was really, really upset to find out that this was not a silent meditation retreat the way I expected. It was a meta retreat, which means we had to say a meta practice, which is if I said it to you, Haley, I would say (there are different versions):

May you be happy. May you be healthy and strong in your body. May you be safe and protected. May you have ease.

And for the course of an entire week, we were going to be doing that for hours and hours, dawn to dusk, or actually till 9:00 PM, with easy people all the way to difficult people. And I was just really annoyed I was going to have to work. I was going to have to work and not to just sit there and relax.

Haley Radke: Did you have an instinct to fake it? My first thought is they're not gonna know. They're not gonna know what I'm thinking about that.

Pam Cordano: I could have done that. I'm sure I did some of the time. Yeah, yeah.

But so, day two, we were supposed to do a walking meditation, which is just going back and forth across 10 feet and then various things very slowly and I didn't want to do that. So I did break the rule and I walked way down to the edge of the property where I found a horse. It was a whole day that I'd been eating really healthy food and been silent.

So I thought the horse would be really drawn to me, like equine therapy or you can tell how you're doing by what the horse is doing. And so I kind of called to get the horse over and he came right over and I was really happy and I felt, oh, it was sort of a spiritual moment and clearly that had something to do with how clear I was getting in my heart and all this.

Well, I went back the next day and called him over and he didn't come and he was just in the middle of his pen eating his food. And I was mad at him. I was offended, I was hurt, I was emotional. I was probably going through sugar detox because all the food was really healthy. But I took it personally that he wouldn't come to me and I felt rejected by the horse.

And so part of me was really triggered by the horse and part of me was just rolling my eyes at myself and how ridiculous I was being and just watching myself react and knowing that it was whatever, just my own BS.

So, because I had nothing else to do, I gave a lot of thought to how I was feeling about this horse's “rejection” of me, and I started realizing over the next two or three days where he kept rejecting me again, that I wasn't really being loving toward the horse. I wanted what I wanted: his attention. I wanted his compliance, his obedience to me. I wanted it to be the center of his life. I wanted it to be more important than his food.

And I think, in some ways, silent meditation retreats are like this, like we don't think in our normal ways. Things get very exaggerated because we're in our own heads and, well, there's just nothing else to do. I mean, people react about crazy things. I mean I am probably not as crazy as I might sound right now in the story, but yeah, so I go in and sit on the cushion and I'm imagining this horse and I'm doing the meditation with the horse.

So I'm thinking, may you be happy. And I felt like, I guess so. May you be healthy and strong in your body. Yes, of course. May you be safe and protected. Yes, of course. May you have ease. I guess so. And I was just watching myself struggle with it. And as I went, as I practiced that over and over, eventually I did start to feel those things.

I did want the horse to be happy. I did want the horse to have ease. It kind of cleared it up. So as the week went on, I made going to see this horse twice a day a part of my practice. And it was a symbol of what I do with other people in my life and with grievances from my life.

And so I started trying, from that place of getting more clear about loving the horse and wanting the horse, truly wanting the horse happy and to have at ease and all the other things, I started walking toward the horse wanting to just be present for whatever the horse was doing without any attachment to what the horse did or didn't do with me.

And so I became horse-centered instead of Pam-centered, and it felt really good. It felt like suddenly I was really truly loving the horse and not just wanting from the horse in a self-centered kind of way. And then that led to me thinking about my kids and my husband and friends.

And with these meditation retreats it gets very subtle but clear that it takes a lot to just love a person and to be willing to see them and what they're doing or not doing as valid in its own right and not about me. So this goes back to our discussion last week, or last recording, where we talked about the idea that grievances require us to put ourselves in the center of a situation.

So here was me taking myself out of the center and really putting the horse back in the center because the horse's life is the horse's life. And I felt better. So, I mean, that's not to say the whole week was like that because I was on the cushion doing this meta with my biological family who I'm estranged from. I was doing it with my adoptive parents who died and we didn't have a good relationship. And I was doing it with hard people, too. Political figures, all kinds of people.

Haley Radke: Well, even when you start talking about it in the book, you talk about doing it with your daughter's dog.

Pam Cordano: He was my first one.

Haley Radke: This was the easy one and I thought, wow, okay. I mean, it's so true though. It's easier to put an animal in that place at first because no matter what person you're interacting with, there's always like a little something.

Pam Cordano: That's right.

Haley Radke: How did you feel at the end of that week? Five days feels like such a long time to be doing that.

Pam Cordano: It was seven. Seven full days.

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh!

Pam Cordano: Yeah, seven full days.

Haley Radke: Okay. Seven full days of doing this over and over and over with all kinds of different people.

Pam Cordano: I felt really good because the thing was, there wasn't a lot of input. There wasn't a lot of input. I mean, I would see birds, I would see people out of the corner of my eye but we weren't really supposed to pay attention to each other.

So because I wasn't having interactions that might have typically set off my own grievances or triggers, it was like I had a break from all of that and, really, the worst problem I had of things that were there was me with this horse.

That was the hardest, my hardest relationship that week was with the horse. And it was hard. I mean, it was hard for a couple days in a very exaggerated kind of way.

Haley Radke: But even as you're just going through this world, right? You're always interacting with people and there's always little things that come up here and there that you're like, oh, really? That's what you're choosing to say? Like, there's all these little things, little tiny grievances we collect along the way.

Pam Cordano: Yeah, but luckily there we're all kind of our own worlds.

Haley Radke: The horse is the only one to give you…

Pam Cordano: Grief.

Haley Radke: Oh, I was gonna say it. And then I was like, oh, this is that. I'm glad you said it.

Last time we talked, you mentioned to me that you don't really like the word “forgiveness.” Can you talk more about that?

Pam Cordano: Yeah. I grew up in a non-religious family, so I didn't understand forgiveness from a religious or spiritual point of view. And every time I heard it, it just sounded like the cherry on top, as if we're supposed to know how to do that.

It felt like bypassing, spiritual bypassing. Grievances are full body experiences. So we can think we want to “forgive” somebody, but first of all, why? We would need a reason why to forgive somebody. And our bodies sometimes take longer to come along for the ride.

Like, I could think to myself, oh, I just wanna let that go. But yet my body could still react in a patterned way of threat and of anger and grievance. So I just don't understand the word forgive as a verb because it feels like it's just the top, like the head but it's not the whole system.

I think of forgiveness sometimes as more of a consequence. Like meaning: Okay, if I reconnect with my own sense of my dignity, if I get the things I need from other places, if I maybe unwrap some of my grievance stories, then eventually forgiveness might happen.

But it's just more of a consequence to these other efforts. I don't know if that's true, but that's sort of how I think of it.

Haley Radke: So when you are saying this meta prayer or mantra, you're kind of releasing things, right, over time about someone. How does that contrast for you with forgiveness? Is that linked in some way?

I do come from a religious background and so a lot of times people will talk about, oh, you're forgiving someone, you're taking them off your hook and you're putting them on God’s, and there's a real sense of there's going to be justice at some point, but I'm not going to be the one to give it to them.

Pam Cordano: And that's why I can let go of it because someone's gonna do it, right?

Haley Radke: Someone's gonna get 'em in the end. Which doesn't necessarily have a nice connotation to it either. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, though.

Pam Cordano: I think the value for me wasn't in feeling everything I was saying. Like, when I would put my biological family in my mind, I really didn't want them to have any kind of danger or illness.

Those were the easier ones for me. I could pretty much across the board not want people to be sick or in danger or unsafe, but it was more the happy and ease. The first one and the fourth one. May you be happy. May you have ease. That I would struggle with because what does it mean if my biological family is happy and has ease with me not in the picture?

What does that mean? And my old way of thinking would be what does that mean about me? And I could even start doing that right now. It's not that I'm over that. It’s like if they're happy and they have ease, maybe I'm just so inconsequential and it hurts, you know. So it wasn't that I was saying these things to pretend I felt that way.

It was more like I would wish it, and then I would see what happened. And you're right, it was a process. Like, I would have body tension. I would say “F that” in my head afterwards. I would have these phrases I would say after in my own mind.

But with the repetitive aspect of all this, it just started to ease a little bit. And the weird thing was I started to feel more free rather than like I was in an even more unfair situation. Because that had always been my thought before. If I give up my grievances, I'm really ripping myself off.

So the opposite happened.

Haley Radke: Did you keep up this practice after your seven-day retreat? If you had somebody that you were like, I'm collecting some things against this person. Maybe I need to do this a little bit.

Pam Cordano: I probably did it more for maybe the next two or three weeks. But then I stopped.

But now when I would do it would be if I were really suffering in a grievance. If it was the kind of thing where it was keeping me up at night, like being so mad at somebody or feeling so hateful towards somebody, I would do it to save myself. That's why I would do it. I would do it to remind myself, I was going to say, of who I am and I feel that way because who I am is I want to be better to myself than that. I don't want my night eaten up by an experience of hatred that's alive in my brain and in my body, and I don't want to go through that. I don't want it.

Haley Radke: What's that saying? There's this saying it's about unforgiveness, right? It's about, like, you're drinking poison and hoping the other guy dies.

Pam Cordano: Right, right. Yeah.

Haley Radke: It's not that exactly, but it's along those lines. So I kind of feel like that's what you're saying there, it's for you.

Pam Cordano: Yeah, because, like we talked about last conversation, the link for me and it was a link I had to try on, observe, play with over time that the grievances were hurting me more than they could possibly be hurting anybody else on the planet, and I didn't want it anymore.

Haley Radke: Well, I don't know, this might feel broad because there's so many things you talk about in the book, different practices that you've done, different things you've learned and it's great. There's so many valuable practices and examples in here.

Can you talk about that in maybe a more broad way of how you have taken this concrete base of grievances about adoption that we talked about last week, and added these practices in over time and in order to find that sense of freedom and actually enjoy your life and not have this cement block on you.

Pam Cordano: Well, what comes to mind when you ask that question is just, it is almost like I want to keep saying this because I don't imagine that anybody would believe me, although I know who I'm talking to and I'm talking to you and people who are adopted or care about adoption and the impact of adoption.

So probably the people listening to this care more than almost anybody. But the thing that really comes to mind is I really did not want to be alive. I never attempted suicide, but not attempting suicide doesn't mean you want to be here. So as soon as things would go wrong, I was on such a slippery slope of falling into a very overwhelming, tight trap that I couldn't easily get out of.

And also, I've had a lot of addiction and I had such a desperation to find a way to stay here. If I was going to stay here, I had to find a way. So I had this therapist in college, I write about that in one of the chapters, and I saw her for 11 years and she came to my 40th birthday party and she wrote me a card and she said, I’m going to start to cry if I say this.

She said: Has anybody worked so hard? She said, has anybody worked so hard? And I felt so seen by that because I've worked really hard. But the point is it's less about, like, my life feels so much better now. It does. And I believe in the things I'm teaching in the book. I believe in them. I believe they work.

But the thing that I was really dreading and avoiding by doing such hard work in so many different ways was I didn't really want to die, I guess, and not just die by suicide, but die by just never finding a way to be here comfortably. And kind of the agony of that, like the purgatory, the agony of that.

So that's what's behind all this effort and still is. I mean, I still have grievances. I could probably name five off the top of my head.

Haley Radke: Do you need to find a pasture somewhere and hang out with the horse for a bit?

Pam Cordano: I feel like it's a relief to name that because I think so many of us live with that underneath somewhere, and clearly the statistics tell the truth about how hard it is for us. And I do think it's a miracle for so many of us with our histories and with bonding trouble that we're here at all. Really, it's a miracle and we all should have the superhero logos on us.

Haley Radke: Well, I think it comes back to something that we talked about last week again and saying that expressing these feelings and, you know, there's that deeper meaning below: Okay, we actually are valuable even though we feel like we're just thrown away, rejected, unworthy, all the words, we know all that language. So discovering that you're meaningful and what does a life look like then?

Pam Cordano: That's right. That's right. Something I also realized, like sort of an Aha! moment for me was, well, no wonder we're mad because we actually deep down believe we're worth something and that we didn't deserve this. That's the basis of it all. It's this hidden dignity that we have. The other thing I realized is that a meaningful life is available to all of us.

Like a meaningful life isn't just for the people who had intact lives and minimal trauma. It's for us too. So how do we get there and how do we tap into that so that we're not just feeding our minds and our hearts with the grievances, but we're also, again, subversively and powerfully taking what's our birthright, which is life. If I'm going to be here, I want as much as I can have.

Haley Radke: Can I read a short paragraph from your book? Okay. So here's a paragraph from one of your chapters. I think this is chapter nine. And you've already shared with us before that your adoptive parents have passed away but you didn't have a very good relationship with them, and you were estranged from your biological family.

Okay, so here's the paragraph:

“I don't think about my adoptive parents or my biological families much anymore. When I do tension and heat don't accompany the thoughts. I don't need my past to be different. I don't need my family members to be different. What happened is I've become far more interested in something else. How can I serve the most people in my life now that I'm finally invested in being here? This is my new primary question.”

I read that and I thought, wow, isn't that exceedingly powerful? And I'm not like, oh, so everybody should be estranged. It's not about that, right? It's about what is your purpose? Can you talk about that?

Pam Cordano: Yeah. I thought that my biological family was going to be the golden ticket. I thought I got a bum deal and I was going to suffer until I was about 18 years old. And then I was going to go on the hunt and find them all, and it was going to be a beautiful reunion.

And to meet them again and connect with them was going to be like going back through the birth canal and being born as a real person. And I needed them to do that. And with that, they were everything to me in my mind. So when that didn't go well over a period of 10 to 15 years on both sides, I was disillusioned and I was full of despair.

So again, what am I going to do? Am I going to say, well then, I've lost my access point, forget it, or am I going to find another access point? And so part of the hard work has been how do I find another access point?

And when things really failed, I think I said this to you before, when things really failed with the last connection I had with my father's family, and when things failed there, I started doing pushups every day to counteract the weakness I felt inside. I felt so weak from the failure I felt weakened in my whole system, and part of me just wanted to lay down and give up. So I started doing push-ups to counteract it and to just fight.

To fight. Staying in the ring, staying with the push-ups and staying, fighting for myself, which is what dignity does, that's where the heat and attention calm down. And it's kinda like with the horse, like it does feel better to me now to give than to take. And when I'm in a bad mood, one of the first questions I try to get back to is, what's something nice I could do for somebody?

Because I know that's not how I grew up. I grew up thinking about number one, and self-preservation was everything to me. Self-protection, self-preservation, and the world was dangerous. So for me to think that way it's almost like I'm this angry adoptee that's become, God, I don't want to say the G word, but that's become, ah, connected. Connected.

Haley Radke: I'm like, wait, what G word? I know it. I know it.

Pam Cordano: Okay, but there's another G word, which is generosity. I'm interested in generosity because it feels good and it feels better than grievances. We've got two new G words. One is grievance and one is generosity.

And also, I know Victor Frankl, who I've talked about before, he did it and his story helped me. And so I think I'm out of the woods. I know I'm out of the woods and I hope my story can help other people.

Haley Radke: I love that you said that.

Pam Cordano: I’m not trying to compare myself to him, by the way. He's a hero to me. I'm just saying we all need each other. We all need each other's stories.

Haley Radke: Yeah. I haven't shared too much, but I went through extremely challenging year last year, and I don't talk about it publicly, and I don't know if that'll happen or not yet, but on my worst days, I would go out of my way to write a note to someone just telling them how much they meant to me and how important their work is.

And yeah, there's nothing like that, right? Because it's not out of a selfish place like I genuinely want to give them this gift of my words and encouragement, but man, I probably feel the best out of anybody.

Like I just feel so good. After it's hit send and hopefully they'll feel good receiving it. But that was something that I just had to do because I just feel like nothing. And that was the best thing I could do for myself in those really horrible moments.

And the responses I got from people were always, oh my goodness, this is so nice. Like very kind things. And people were often surprised that I had written to them. But, I mean, truly I felt so good after, and I don't know I see a little piece of that in what you're seeing, like those acts of generosity.

Pam Cordano: And I think that when you did that, it's a part of you that is still intact, that isn't damaged or obliterated by the other stuff going on. It's a part of you that's still whole. And so to work at those parts of us that are whole is powerful.

Haley Radke: All right. Thank you, Pam. Your book is just so beautiful. There is so much we can learn from it, and I especially love the structure. Can you just tell us a little bit about what you have at the end of each chapter?

Pam Cordano: Yeah, so the book has my 10, my literally 10 favorite foundations for living a meaningful life, which is also a way of saying my 10 favorite ways I learned how to save myself from death. And I think it's a hopeful book, even though it's an honest book. And at the end of the chapters I have four questions for each chapter to just think about the material and try to integrate it and apply it to your own life.

And then I have two immediate actions to increase your life force, like right now. Because I'm a practical person and I like the idea of what can I do right now to get this or to try it on or to see how this might work for me? So I tried to come up with two of those for each chapter.

Haley Radke: They’re so good, there's so many good things in there. You guys, you have to grab this book. Let's end on that practical note. Can you tell us the meta mantra again, because I think that would be a nice call to action for people to maybe practice that today, maybe for your dog, for a start. Or the most neutral person or your pet. A pet of some sort that you have neutral or good feelings toward.

Pam Cordano: Yeah. So you just sit somewhere comfortably. You don't have to sit on a meditation cushion. You can just sit on a couch or anywhere you're comfortable. You can even do this in bed before you go to sleep or when you wake up in the morning and you just quietly say to yourself, you think of a person or an animal, like Haley said, and you just say:

May you be happy. May you be safe and protected. May you be strong and healthy in your body. May you have ease.

And you don't have to fake it or pretend you feel it more than you do. You just try saying those words and try on that intention, and then you just see what comes up. And if you do it with something that's easier, like my daughter Sarah's dog Joey, he's so easy for me.

I want all of those things for him forever. And so it was really easy, and we did that. We did the easy thing for two whole days before we even got to somebody mildly complicated. So, and it feels good. And you can even do it for yourself and I do it for myself. Sometimes you could put your hand on your heart and you can close your eyes and just say it to yourself.

May I be happy. May I be safe and protected from danger. May I be healthy and safe in my body. May I have ease. Something like that. And you wish that for yourself. And then that helps. Now we're coming full circle. That helps reconnect with our lost dignity.

Haley Radke: Thank you so, so much. I want you to share where people can connect with you online.

Pam Cordano: You can find me online, I'm on Facebook. My website is yourmeaningful.life, or pamcordano.com. Same thing, same website, or my email is pcordano@comcast.net.

Haley Radke: And where can people find your book? 10 Foundations for Meaningful Life, (No Matter What's Happened)

Pam Cordano: You can find my book on Amazon or through Balboa Press.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much. And I hope you'll remember us all after you’re rich and famous and it was so fun to see my name in your book that was like, oh my gosh. Insane.

Pam Cordano: Oh yeah, you're in chapter 10, right?

Haley Radke: Yes.

Pam Cordano: We didn't even talk about that in this, but yeah. How was that for you?

Haley Radke: Well, I don't know if Anne told you. So Anne Heffron and Pam do healing retreats together. They're very good friends and she writes about their friendship in the book. And I had Anne on an episode for my Patreon podcast. So if you're a monthly supporter of the show, I have a weekly podcast called Adoptees Off Script.

So Anne was a guest, she's a frequent guest on there. And I had ordered your book and it came and while I was recording with Anne, cause you guys are like besties, I grabbed my package and I was like, Anne, I wonder if you can guess what's in this. And so we opened it together while we were recording, which was so fun.

And I flipped through and then I was talking to her like, oh, you're in the acknowledgements and everything. And so that was really special. And then once we had hung up, I mean officially like the Patreon recording was all done and we were still kind of chit-chatting. I was just kind of flipping through and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm in here! Which is so funny.

Pam Cordano: Of course, you're in here. Yeah. I mean, the last chapter's on spectacular community and really defining what that is and why I think that's important and without the work you do and what you give us, I just wouldn't know chapter 10. It would be nine foundations for meaningful life, seriously.

Like, you were the link to put all of this together and also for the adoptee retreat, people who are still in touch and rely on each other and travel together, and it's just amazing what's come out of all of this.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

I feel like Pam has this magical combo of wisdom and experience, and especially because of all the clients she's served over the years who've had a myriad of life experiences, right? She's worked with people who are dying, who've been diagnosed with very challenging illnesses, and adoptees, and her experience with grief and meaning, and is just so valuable.

So I'm so grateful she shared with us, and I hope that you take something really great away from this conversation. Maybe your next action step is you pick up Pam's book and you find more insights in it. I think there's something really valuable for you to take away from today's conversation and I hope that you come back and let us know what that is.

Maybe you send Pam a note on social media. Maybe you comment on the Adoptees On Instagram post of this episode and just share what you've learned, what your takeaways are. I'd love to see what you're learning from Pam and maybe something you'll share will trigger something else for someone who's thinking, oh yeah, I needed to remember that, too.

Another thank you I need to make is to my monthly supporters. Thank you so much. Without you guys, there would just not be a podcast. It just would disappear. And so if you think Adoptees On is important, if you want to keep hearing from other adoptee therapists on a Healing Series, if you want to hear from adoptees sharing their stories, if you want to reach other adoptees around the world to know they're not alone and feeling this way about adoption and the impact it's had on their life.

Consider going to adopteeson.com/partner and joining us. There's so many fun bonuses. I have a whole other podcast every week that we talk about some really interesting things that we might not talk about on the main feed here. And I have a Facebook group for adoptees only. And there's just so many wonderful things that are happening in the community, and I'm so grateful to be a part of it, and I wouldn't be able to do this without your support.

So thank you. I'm so grateful for you if you're supporting the show in that way. And if that's just not on your radar, what about sharing this episode with another adoptee? Maybe there's an adoptee that you know that could use a little encouragement, a little bit of wisdom, and this would be a great episode to introduce them to the show and to Pam.

Yeah, I would encourage you to do that, and sometimes people just would love to listen to a podcast, but they don't know how. So just grab their phone, subscribe to the podcast for them, show them how to play it in their app and download it so they can have it with them on their walk with their dog or driving in the car.

That's the best way to introduce someone to a podcast, so thank you for doing that. I appreciate that. It also means a lot to me when you share the show. Okay. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

136 [Healing Series] Hidden Dignity Part 1

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/136

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Haley Radke: This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

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 part one of my conversation with Pam Cordano on Hidden Dignity. Let's listen in.

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

Pam Cordano: Hi, Haley.

Haley Radke: I am gonna start crying. Oh my gosh. Okay. We got on the call and I was like, I'm not talking about your book. We're not talking about it until we start recording because I didn't— I wanted to save every second of this.

Oh my gosh. Your book is just, it's so beautiful. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna cry. Oh my gosh. Okay.

Pam Cordano: No, I'm gonna start crying.

Haley Radke: Get it together. Okay. So, Pam has been on the show so many times. You guys know her and love her just like I do. And she has this gorgeous offering for us in the world, and it's called Ten Foundations for Meaningful Life (No Matter What's Happened): to Viktor Frankl, with love.

And I was reading through it and just crying, and having all these light bulb moments. And just being like, Okay, what if you just read us the whole book on the show? That would be, that would just be so delightful. It's such a gift to read your words and just to know the heart you have for adopted people, and the freedom you want them to have. And the things you've learned in your lifetime, many of which you've shared with us on the show before.

And I don't know what to say. Just thank you and I'm so proud of you and I just… Oh my gosh. I'm hugging your book because you're far away. But…

Pam Cordano: Thank you, Haley. It means a lot to me. I mean, yeah, it's a big deal for any of us to put our hearts on the line, and our stories on the line, and our opinions on the line. It's hard and vulnerable. It's a big deal.

Haley Radke: And you share some very personal parts of your story that are like, I wonder if people know that about you. You have really some painful snippets of your life that have impacted you so deeply. And yeah, talk about vulnerable. I mean, incredible. Okay. I'm gonna stop gushing. Yikes. Okay.

One thing you and I have talked about sort of off-air in between our conversations over the years is how many adoptees we see kind of get stuck. And we look back at our circumstances, and we've emerged from the fog, and we're like, Man, adoption sucks. It really screwed up my life. And then we kind of get stuck there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Pam Cordano: I’ve lived…I'm 55 (almost). I'm 54 and a little bit, and or I'm almost 55 and I know what that's like, because I lived there most of my entire life, in that place of being really angry and being full of grievance. And so aware of the injustice of it all, and I know that place really, really well. In fact, I mean, I know the place and I know what it's like to believe that's the only place, and to not see an exit door. And to not think that an exit door makes any sense at all. And to even think that–to not think, to believe that to leave my grievance would be to leave my soul.

That it's the truest thing about me. That if someone doesn't understand what happened to me, and how unfair it was, and no matter what things look like on the surface, what a bad deal I got... Not just with my early life, and then not just with my adoptive family, but also with my whole reunion with both parents and their families, then they don't know me.

And so to know me is to know my grievance. And without that, I'm not known. That's how I used to feel. I–

Haley Radke: The line in the book that you have is, you say, “Until later in life, I didn't want to abandon my grievances. I thought they were my deepest truths.”

Pam Cordano: Totally. Period. They were the truths that had been with me from the very beginning and even in conception, all the way until the present. And they felt like the ground floor of my life, the foundation of my life.

Haley Radke: And I'm assuming that you have seen other adoptees act like that.

Pam Cordano: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And when they do, I completely understand. I feel a kinship with them. I understand. I could jump right in and join the party of how awful it's been, and what a miracle it is that we've even stayed alive.

Haley Radke: Right. So what's the next thing? When did you realize Oh, I might be stuck in thinking this? and Is there more than this?

Pam Cordano: I think it has been a really gradual process. I've always been a person that's been going to therapy and things like that, that I've talked about before on the show. One part was (and it was through writing the book that I really got clear about this), that the only reason I could work with cancer patients even before I had cancer.

And the only reason that cancer patients were really the only people I wanted to work with was because they were living in a life that was half-alive and half-dead. And they had their own grievance. Why me? Why my body, why this disease? My kids are toddlers. I don't wanna leave them. I haven't had my fair shake. I haven't had kids yet, and now my uterus is gone. And they had their own version of grievance.

And of course, I– My bias is that adoption is the hardest thing because it happened from the beginning, so we… Our brains were so not ready to deal with all that we had to deal with. So I, in my heart, feel like that was worse.

I'd rather have ordered a whole different family situation and not have been adopted than even if I got Stage IV cancer when I was 30. And maybe that's not fair for me to say. It gets complicated comparing pain; it gets really complicated. And it feels a little bit dangerous to even say that.

But my point is just how hard it is when you're adopted and also when you don't connect with your adoptive family. And when reunion doesn't go well, and all those things that we talk about together (all of us). But to work with people with cancer, the thing that surprised me was how much they loved life (the people I was working with).

They were (many of them were) dying; most of them back when I was an intern, were dying. And they didn't want to go. They didn't want to leave behind life. And it wasn't just their family and their kids and their dreams, but it was also the little mundane things. Like in the book, I talk about this guy Mike, with a squirrel. And there were lots of stories. A woman, the day before she died in a hailstorm, who was in love with the hail–and I use the word rapture. She felt rapture from this hailstorm. And so I was seeing how much people that were not me loved life, and it was just a bit of a– I could see it through their eyes a bit, because death was on the table.

So because death was on the table, and suffering and injustice, then I could hear them when they talked about life. But the happy people that just want to talk about the happy things, I couldn't hear them. All that came up for me was the grievance and thought, Yeah, try being in my shoes and then talk about how nice your Thanksgiving was, or whatever I might think to myself.

Haley Radke: It seems like such a big shift, though, to go from the victimhood mentality, (which I think is what it is) to being like, Okay, so then what? What's the next thing?

Pam Cordano: Another thing is then (this is all throughout spiritual and religious literature), is the idea that a grievance hurts us more than it hurts the people we have a grievance against.

And on an intellectual level, I found that really interesting. It's like Okay, am I doing something that hurts me more than that person and those people? That's even more unfair if that's the case. But to think that, and to try that on intellectually is completely different than being able to feel it.

So I spent years not wanting to have grievances, and wanting to get the grievances out of my body and out of my mind. My mind would just go around and around and around with the same old grievances, and the triggers, and the storylines. And the intrusive thoughts of people in my birth family that I didn't want to be thinking about, or imagining what they were doing without me, or this and that and the other thing. It was like intrusive thoughts of the grievances. Does that make sense?

Haley Radke: Yeah. Absolutely.

Pam Cordano: So I would say that it took a really long time, because I wanted to be done with my grievances, because they were hurting me so much. I mean, my mind was tense, my brow was furrowed, my shoulders were tight…

I woke up angry, I was angry during the day—much more angry than I acted in the world. I would put on sort of a nice act (I'm a therapist after all), angry at night… I was just angry.

And like we talked before with my kids, and my kids would act entitled, or spoiled (or something), and I would just feel enraged. Like they have no idea how much they have compared to what I had, and they want this, or they want that. It's ridiculous, you know. So I hope you can see, I know this land of grievance. I know “Grievance Land.”

Haley Radke: And how does it feel to be the therapist and you're guiding someone through a challenging time? And you're giving them these tools, and you're listening to them. And yet on the inside (I don't know), what's your self-talk like? Really? Really? This is what we're talking about.

Pam Cordano: I tend to see people with really big problems. And that's who I really like to see. I see people who are suicidal. I see people who are paralyzed. I see people with very serious cancer and other illnesses. I see people who have had traumatic loss. And I see people who are adopted now more than I used to. And so usually who I have worked with–I don't have that thought, much.

And even if I did, I would kind of feel sorry for them. If somebody had a wonderfully sort of easy life, and they were complaining, I would kind of—I'd be curious, like on the human level. What's this? How strange! It’s like an alien to me.

Haley Radke: And like Is this really what we're talking about? Or is there something below that?

Pam Cordano: Exactly right. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm trying to get the therapist dirt, you know.

Pam Cordano: Yeah, we can do that!

Haley Radke: No, I'm joking. But yeah, so wow, you're seeing really challenging things happening. And also an understanding that you yourself have had this challenging thing happen.

And so moving from grievance to what? Forgiveness? Is that the next thing? Or is it– is there something in between there?

Pam Cordano: Okay. Step one was: I started to recognize the amount of pain the grievances were causing me physically, emotionally, mentally (in relationships). So I was–often they say the first step is awareness. I became aware of the cost to me of all my grievances. And so then I didn't know what to do about them.

And I used to hate the word forgiveness. I still kind of do, because it's not easy to forgive. And so actually I've studied grievances to try to understand What's the anatomy of a grievance? How do we create a g–? How do we literally create a grievance so that then I could uncreate my grievances?

So there's this guy, his name is Fred Luskin, and he has this project at Stanford called the–I think it's called the Stanford Forgiveness Projects (with an -s at the end).

And he has a book called Forgive for Good. And my favorite part of his work that I read was that (Oh my gosh. This is gonna be interesting to put out into words.). This is actually in my book. But there's a recipe for a grievance, and here's what we have to do. And I'll use myself as an example.

I had an intern who warned me she did not get along with women. So that's the most normal thing in the world. She's just warning… Here, we're gonna work together. And she's warning a woman that she doesn't get along with women. Okay. That's–nothing's happened yet that's out of the ordinary.

That's what–that's how she feels. That's what she does. So the second thing is we worked together for about two weeks and then she fired me. And I was so offended. But the second thing we have to do, then, is make ourselves the center of the story. Somehow, she was doing this thing to me.

I had generously opened my practice to her. I had done my best to take good care of her, and help her become a therapist, and she has the nerve to somehow decide that I wasn't good for her, and fire me. And I was just so offended. So I put myself now in the center of the story as if this is entirely about me. And then the third thing we have to do is just tell ourselves. Go over it, and over it in our minds again and again—like bazillions of times.

And I did that for probably three years. I just went over it, and over it. I was so offended. And I would see her in town and I would hear her name come up, and I would see her at events. And I was just full of grievance and just so mad at her. And then the next thing we have to do is we have to remove all other possibilities that this story means something different than we think it does.

My story is: She screwed me over. I opened my heart to her and she screwed me over. (And you can probably hear the adoptee in here, right?). There's a woman rejecting me. What does that feel like? It's–of course I'm super, super triggered by it. But nothing else is now possible.

It's not that she might have trauma from her past (with her mother), and she may just legitimately have trouble with women. And it may not be personal about me at all. And she might have wanted it to work, but it just didn't. And she might have felt awkward about changing supervisors, so she might have just done it awkwardly, or suddenly.

And maybe since then she's done more work on her relationship with women and her mother, and she's free of it now. And maybe it wouldn't turn out this way. It's just not so personal. So then we remove all other possibilities, and then that's how we have a grievance. So I started to try to imagine with some of my grievances (once I started learning this formula), how to back it all up.

And I used to laugh to myself about the part about making it self-centered. And it was a relief. It was like, Okay, if this story is so much about me, I–Then that feels better, because adoption felt so much like me. Like adoption. The fact that I was adopted felt entirely about my inherent lack of worthiness.

It was the proof that I wasn't worthy to be here in the world. So I might have said on the show to you before, but I felt full of humiliation and shame about being adopted. And I felt humiliated that this intern would fire me publicly. It was like everybody was gonna know. It's part of the story, the grievance story. Is this too convoluted or is it okay?

Haley Radke: No! It's so interesting, because you're giving this example of–I mean, I don't want to negate it in any way. It's this small example of something that happened to you, but it's had a big impact, right? You said you thought about it for years and it was this big thing, and then taking that back to the example of, “I'm adopted.” It's like your whole life structure revolves around that. It's not this two week interaction you had with this person.

Pam Cordano: No. Right. And I think what worried me about myself–it doesn't worry me now because I've gone I've… Something has shifted inside, which is why we're even talking about this. And you're asking about, “How did that shift happen?”

But before something shifted (I'm not sure if this is accurate), but what I felt like was my grievances were more intense, and more extreme, and upsetting, and agonizing than anybody else's I knew. My friends–none of my friends were adopted at that point. Now I have adopted friends, too, because of your show. But I just–when I compared my reactions to things compared to theirs, I felt like I was just really effed up.

Haley Radke: Is there something about that, though? This'll be like in generalized terms, but for someone that is kind of stuck in My story just sucks and there's nothing I can do about it, that we're just collecting evidence.

Pam Cordano: Totally right. We have a worldview, and then we collect evidence. And one of the things I wrote about in my book in Chapter two about dignity is I believe that we all (deep down) know that it's not true. That we're not worth nothing, that we're not worth giving away, that we're not worth being adopted, that we're not worth family-lessness, or all that we've been through. And so that is really the basis, in my opinion, the basis of our anger. We know it's not right, because we're worth more than that.

And the reason people have problems with the way adoption laws are and practices are, is that we know we're worth more than the way it's done. And we're worth more than being adopted at all. So getting mad is actually–we wouldn't even be if we… If I really believed I was worth being given away, I wouldn't have anything to be mad about.

I would just—I don't know. I'd just take my place in the corner or something. I mean, read a book. I wouldn't be all mad, but I was infu…I was furious. I was furious since I was four.

Haley Radke: Okay. So I'm having a major light bulb moment, right? Because that is so insightful, that just the very reason we’re mad, or upset, or that something is like— there's disconnect, something wrong happened… It means something.

Pam Cordano: It means something important. It means something about what we know. We know our value. We know it.

Haley Radke: And so it's like, Why can't anybody else see that? I don't…

Pam Cordano: Yeah. Why can't anybody else see that? And why is everybody being complicit in this? And why is no one talking about this horrific thing that was done to me? And don’t I ma—

I mean, I do matter. That's the thing, that it's not, Don't I matter? It's actually, I'm mad and I'm saying don't I matter? But deep down, at some level, I know I do matter and this is just wrong and I need more overt love and acknowledgement of what this has been.

Haley Radke: I'm thinking about all the people that write to me once they've heard a few episodes of the show, and usually when they do, the words that come are very much, Oh my gosh, I finally get it. I finally feel seen, or I finally feel understood.

There's the validation and I mean–holy smokes! How to have a moment that you're like, Oh my gosh, someone else gets it. Someone else sees that I am worthy. And why did this happen to me? What is that moment? Oh, me. Wow.

Pam Cordano: Yeah I think that and I did this (and I see this at the adoptee retreats that Anne and I have, too), that people are angry. And they're disconnected, and sometimes they're addicted, and they’re all kinds of things, railing against their experiences. But they don't yet have it put together that they–some part of them does think that they're worth something, or else they wouldn't even be… They wouldn't have a basis for being mad if they, you know what I mean?

The runt of the litter. When you think about Charlotte's Web–I don't know if, remember if there was a runt in that movie? But they're not off like setting the farm on fire. They're just like, they take their place. They're not arguing, but we who have a problem with it are… We're trying to value ourselves and we do value ourselves at some level.

It just may not be connected up. So I'm trying to flip–I'm trying to flip the script here. You know what I'm trying to do here?

Haley Radke: I have nothing to say, because I'm just like, Whoa. Whoa. And I read your book, and I read it very thoroughly. And I super did not understand that in Chapter two. It's just because I'm like, Oh, I guess. Right? You skim over things that you're like, Oh, she's not talking about me for that. I don't think I have worth, you know? There's something to that. Ewww, that feels yucky.

Pam Cordano: But maybe the yucky isn't 100% yucky.

Haley Radke: But I have–I've literally sat with people around a table who tell me that same thing, right? “I've always felt worthless. I've always, I've like…” That whole thing. And to know that you're only expressing that because deep down you actually think you're valuable?

Pam Cordano: Right. And you know what the most important reason I want to…? But I have so much passion about this piece of the conversation…is that what I care about is helping people save their lives. And not just their life from suicide, but their quality of life and their dreams for their futures that can become more about who they are, at some point. And less about what the dream is in terms of the grievance–a grievance-based dream. But just dreams that are free of, that are possibly different and possibly even coming from outside the wound (if that's even possible). I didn't used to think that was possible.

The point of my book was I had to find a way to save my life. This book to me is about saving my life. And so then when I share that thing about dignity, or some belief that we do know we have value underneath it all, I'm not saying that to be positive or make people think it's not as bad as it is. I'm saying that to help people see– Like if they can connect to that, then they've got the basis to start turning something around a little bit. Do you know what I mean? Like dignity is power. And we have it.

Haley Radke: But even just that thought of saving your life, it's so profound. And as I said before, so many of us get stuck in the black hole of, Adoption sucks, and, Why did this happen to me?

And you see the anger, you see the anger in what they write online. You see the anger in person, the impact it's had, constantly pushing people away... We all know people that are like that, or you recognize in yourself, probably. If I'm talking about that, am I talking about you?

Pam Cordano: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, hating the world, hating people, hating me... Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah! But a call to, “What could life be if you can process some of that? And find this meaning?”

Pam Cordano: Okay, so having a grievance is an active thing. It requires our minds, our emotions, and our whole bodies. It's a very–it's a full-on experience, having a grievance. And so, if we start to notice how uncomfortable it is when we're in a grievance (which I did).

I mean, like I said, I had muscle tension. I got headaches a lot. I had jaw tension. I had stomach aches from holding everything so tightly, had rage at people. I had a feeling of overwhelm, like I could barely take one more thing. And I started to not want my body–I guess, because I started to care about myself. I wanted–I didn't want my body to feel so bad, so often. So I started to try to practice having a softer body (even though that was counterintuitive), because when you're trying to save your life and protect yourself from humiliation and bad things, it's hard to let that defense structure down.

Haley Radke: So what does that mean, “having a softer body”?

Pam Cordano: I actually started with my kids. I was raising my kids and I would feel mad at them a lot. And I mean, I'm soft-pedaling this. I felt mad all the time, honestly. At them and everything else. So I remember hearing somewhere, maybe it was at a retreat or something... I heard something about trying to parent with a soft body, and that was really like a revolutionary idea to me. So I remember, I would walk in the front door from work or somewhere and I would try to soften my belly.

I would just try to soften my sh–drop my shoulder, soften my belly, and try to walk in the house. And my intention was: whatever they were doing, whatever they said, whatever they did or didn't do, I was going to try to communicate with them while keeping my belly soft at the same time. To not get into the pattern of reactivity and anger that was beyond what they were responsible for, obviously. You know?

And so I think my kids were important enough to me to be worth practicing, that I had a dial on my body. I wasn't just trapped in grievances. I had a say about what I did with my softening it, or not softening it. Or trying to soften it, and then failing (or whatever).

Haley Radke: It's so interesting that you say that, right? Because it's–Of course, tension is like this tight thing, but I don't know that the opposite of that would be like, Oh, soft. But telling that to your body…Oh, that's interesting! That's a good one.

So how does that go to unwrapping this grievance? Of that fact that I'm adopted?

Pam Cordano: So then I started going into public, practicing having a soft body. And I thought, Okay, if I'm in a meeting or with a client and somebody does or says something that triggers me or threatens me or anything, I'm gonna see what happens if I keep my body soft.

I even went on rollercoaster rides at Disneyland, trying to–the entire ride, keep my body soft. Just start just…I wanted to master, like I get to decide. I get to decide when my body's soft. And the weird thing is, it's not weird at all, actually! When our shoulders are dropped, and our bodies are more soft, we don't feel as triggered.

And so we can start with our brains and try to think our way out of a problem, or we can start with our bodies and try to let our bodies unwind. And it goes much faster with the body involved, I promise.

Haley Radke: I'm just thinking about the story you told in your book about your body deciding not to vomit anymore?

Pam Cordano: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Which you don't have to share! People will have to read the book to get that one, but wow! I cannot picture being soft on a rollercoaster. That's amazing. That's amazing.

Pam Cordano: Yeah. And actually, after my father (this is not in the book), after my father died… My dad scared me, so I stopped vomiting when I was four. And after he died seven years ago, I got norovirus and I vomited. I'm not kidding. I vomited 88 times and I was terrified, because I have a terror of vomiting. And I've met a lot of other adoptees who do, also. Something about losing control? And so what I did was, I actually went to the ER, because it was really extreme.

But as I was vomiting I imagined my dad putting his hand on my back (which in real life, I would never want his hand anywhere near me)-- But he had his hand on my back and just saying, “I'm sorry. Just go; just let it out.” And I tried relaxing my body, even then. Because I felt like, That's my power. So much about being adopted is not having power, but what we do with our bodies is something that is in our power.

Haley Radke: I don't know how you make me cry every time. I don't understand.

Pam Cordano: What are you crying about? What is it?

Haley Radke: Wow. I'm just picturing you in that moment, and picturing your dad having his hand on your back. And I just–that's so moving. Being able to recapture something that you should have had: you should have had a compassionate parent that could take care of you when you were sick.

Pam Cordano: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, and imagery is really powerful, because our bodies really don't know the difference between what we imagine and what actually happens. So that's why (we've talked about this on your show before)... But if we imagine eating a lemon, our mouth will water anticipating the sour lemon juice.

And in the same way, sometimes there are ways to imagine pieces of the world that we didn't get. And again, that goes together with dignity, because we do deserve those things. And so even though they may not be “true” in our lived experience (and that does matter), it's also true that we deserve them.

So if me giving myself my father's support, when he was the source of my terror, was kind to myself. And I felt like it was honoring myself, somehow.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. Okay. We are gonna start wrapping up this part one of our two-part conversation with Pam. Do you have any final thoughts on grievances before we say goodbye for today?

Pam Cordano: The final thought is: there's something really radical and subversive about questioning our grievances. And we can have a death grip on them and think that we'd rather die than give up a single grievance or give up an important grievance. But it's smart for us to look at the possibility that some of our grievances, or the magnitude of our grievances, or how much space they take up in our lives could actually be imprisoning us more than they're helping us stay intact.

Haley Radke: That's a big thought to end on. Okay, thank you. So we want to make sure everybody is able to grab a copy of your book. It's called 10 Foundations for a Meaningful Life, (No Matter What's Happened). So why don't you let us know where we can grab it, where we can connect with you online and…yeah!

Pam Cordano: Yeah, okay. So you can get the book on Amazon or with Balboa Press (if you don't want to go through Amazon). And just, my name is under Pam Cordano, MFT. And my website is Your Meaningful Life. Your Meaningful (dot) Life, or pamcordano.com (Same website). And my email is pcordano@comcast.net.

Haley Radke: And one thing that we didn't mention, but your book is (obviously) 10 Foundations, so you're talking about all these different foundations. And at the end of every chapter, you have all of these questions for us to answer and actual exercises. So I love that. I love that. So good.

Pam Cordano: Thanks. Thanks.

Haley Radke: Alright. Thank you so much for sharing with us.

Pam Cordano: Thank you, Haley.

Haley Radke: I hope you took away as much as I did from that conversation. I can't wait to share next week's with you. It's so good. Please make sure you're subscribed in whatever podcast app you like to listen to. My favorite is Overcast; I love Overcast. It's so easy to use. I have curated playlists for myself. If I'm going to be listening to adoptee shows, or if I'm going to listen to true crime–I have different playlists for different moods. There's more than just those two, but those are two examples I can think of.

Anyway, I love listening in Overcast. If you want to make sure you get notified every single week, that's a great way to do it. Subscribe in your podcast app, and then it'll just pop up as soon as there's a new episode.

Friday morning is when I release and it will just download automatically and it's just such a dream. So easy to use the Overcast app. If you're on Android, there's lots of free podcast apps you can download, and if you have an iPhone, you have a built-in podcast player. So, go ahead and hit subscribe and you will be notified next week when the part two of our two-part series with Pam Cordano on Hidden Dignity is ready for download.

I am just so grateful for Pam for coming on the show. I'm also grateful for my monthly supporters who faithfully just want the show to continue, and they actually do that by going to adopteeson.com/partner and signing up for Patreon (which is a monthly subscription service). So you get access to some bonuses, like a totally separate Adoptees Off Script podcast that is up every Monday, and there is an adoptees-only Facebook group. And there's some new things coming very soon, so you can watch for that.

I'm just–Ooh. Lots of cool things in the works. Anyway, I'm so thankful for my monthly supporters. If you want Adoptees On to continue to exist in this world, if you think healing episodes are important, if you wanna hear more adoptee stories and this is the place for it, then please consider joining my other monthly partners. Adopteeson.com/partner has those details for you. Thank you, my friend, for listening. Let's talk again, next Friday.

135 [Healing Series] How Trauma Affects Reunion

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/135

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Haley Radke: This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

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.

Last week, we addressed cross-cultural intergenerational trauma, and we are continuing that theme today with Marta Sierra Drachenberg. She is back and, oh my goodness, this is so good. I can't wait to get to it. I just wanna mention before we get started, though, that we do mention sexual assault. So please keep that in mind when you're deciding whether or not now is the best time for you to listen. And if you do have little ones around, please do put your earbuds in, because this is an adult conversation.

Okay, let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Marta Sierra Drachenberg. Hi, Marta!

Marta Isabella Sierra: Hi, Haley.

Haley Radke: I can't wait to talk to you, again, today. I am so excited and I just, I forgot to do this last time, but you are a therapist, but you specialize in internal family systems. And can you just give us a quick snippet of what that means?

Because it's a little different from some of the therapists that we've had on the show before and I think it's so valuable. It's such a valuable way, especially of looking at adoptee things. So please tell us a little bit about what IFS is before we get into what we're gonna talk about today?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Sure. So, IFS is an experiential therapy, which means that it's an experience; it's not just talking. And it's a way to access all the different parts of yourself, meaning that we all are really multiple—we have lots of different parts of ourselves that feel lots of different ways, and have lots of different beliefs, and lots of different reactions to things. And then when you add trauma in the mix, that have been affected in different ways, and then parts that are protecting the parts of us that have been traumatized…And it's just a whole world in there. And the goal of IFS therapy is to get yourself (your authentic self, or your heart–however you wanna think about that) in a really solid relationship with all of your parts, so that you can facilitate healing. And feel more connected, and less dysregulated, and ideally move through triggers in a different way. Experiential therapy can also help build new neural pathways in the brain, which is really what's so hard about healing preverbal trauma in the first place.

Haley Radke: When you were first on the podcast and you taught us about it, it was so, so interesting. So, if any of what Marta just talked about is interesting to you, go back and listen to her episodes 69 and 71. And she really gives us a deep dive into IFS there. Thank you.

Okay, so we left off and we were talking about how different reunion can be when it's international and really cross-culturally… We talked about a lot of different things last time and I wanna continue that conversation.

You mentioned that just even the nation of Colombia has trauma that has been going on for generations and that there's not really access in a regular…What am I just trying to say? There's not really access to mental healthcare as a regular practice and that shows. So can you talk a little bit about that in your reunion, and especially with your mother?

Marta Isabella Sierra: So, yeah. The first thing I'll say is that I had talked in the last episode about a second language barrier being a cultural language barrier. And I had said there were three. So the third one that we're gonna talk more about today is this mental health language as its own language.

So, even as my language skills got stronger, I really found myself without the words for all of this mental health speak, right? Like this “therapist talk” that I use so casually in English, I was really struggling to even—What words should I use? And then more importantly than that, Does that still even make sense? Does it register? Do you know what I mean?

Like you had said, “boundaries” in our last episode, and I didn't stop you because I knew I wanted to talk about it today. But that's nothing. That means nothing that may as well be Chinese, right? No one knows what a healthy boundary is. No one's ever experienced a healthy boundary. It's this totally foreign concept that I'm introducing. So, that's really hard.

I have worked my whole life, not only on teaching other people how to implement healthy boundaries, but trying to walk the walk, implement what I'm asking my clients to implement. And I found myself really without the ability to do that, because it's just not even understood. I couldn't even explain it if I wanted to.

Haley Radke: That's blowing my mind. I'm just like—my mouth is wide open because I'm like, Wow, that's not even translatable. So, what do you do then? How do you explain a choice that you might define as Okay, I've got a boundary with this specific thing. How do you explain that choice, then? They're–they don't understand that.

Marta Isabella Sierra: I think sometimes you just don't (similar to in English). If someone's not respecting your boundary, you don't keep explaining to them, right? You just say, “I'm not gonna do that.” So a lot of times it would end up just being like that: “I'm not gonna do that.” And not even bothering, really, to go into the “why.”

There's already so much miscommunication that can happen in these relationships. And certainly there were a lot of assumptions about why I was doing what I was doing all the time, which of course I was making, too. We're all just trying to figure each other out. I just learned that they're gonna make their assumptions about my behavior anyways, whether or not I try to explain it. So ultimately, in those high moments of stress, I'm gonna just have to do what's best for me and I'm gonna have to release control over what everybody thinks about that.

Haley Radke: That's so great. You sound like you have it together. I'm like, Oh, how do I do that?

Marta Isabella Sierra: And, so, the other thing is just that, we need each other. I know we talk about this all the time in your podcast. We talk about community all the time, but I just–I can't emphasize that enough–that what got me through the hardest parts of that year was the people in my life that have gone before me.

I have an amazing friend from Oregon who is older than me, has been in reunion longer, is from Colombia, and knows the culture. And I would have—I had maybe four video calls with her over the course of a year, but they were so essential. And she's a clinician. She's not a therapist, but she's been working in adoption for years and years and years. So she speaks that language with me, as well. And we would get into these really interesting discussions about, “Is it even ethical? To hold our Colombian families to American mental health standards, when they haven't had access to the education that we've had? When they haven't had access to the resources that we have?”

Can I even say, “You know, you're not respecting my boundaries. You're—it’s disrespectful and hurtful to me. I'm out.” Is that really ethical? And I don't have a concrete answer. All I can say is that having those discussions with her definitely allowed me a lot more compassion. I do, still ultimately, I do what I need to do for me, including the painful decision I made about my relationship with my brother. But it does help me in moments to remember that there's just so much history in my family, and in my country that I'm never gonna ever understand. And I have to remember that I don't have all the puzzle pieces, that there's so much going on that I can't see. And I need to honor that the same way I want it honored for me. When I do something that's not understood, I don't want it to—the assumption to be negative or for someone to assume they understand completely why I'm doing that. I want them to be curious. So if I'm wanting curiosity on their end, then I have to be willing to also be curious.

Haley Radke: Well, that's a huge question. That is really intriguing, and I'm not gonna go too far off track here, but just a rabbit trail from that statement, the ethics of holding my Colombian family to the same standards as Americans, because they don't have access to mental health supports or even the same “therapy language” (in quotation marks). And I'm thinking about how so many of our reunions have broken down and we talk about, “Oh, well you have to work on your own stuff first.” And lots of adoptees, and lots of first parents both haven't had any sort of therapy to deal with those things. And so I'm just, Hmm…this is an interesting question to ponder. Thank you for bringing that up.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. And given that, I wouldn't— I'm so glad for all the work that I've done. It still was a really difficult situation a lot of the time. It was still hard to navigate things, but I was so grateful for all of the work I had already done and having the language of IFS (especially in really difficult situations) saved me.

So I guess that's an easy place to jump into what happened with my mom. So, I'm really, really close with my mom. I always have been; I feel really, really lucky. We're very connected. I think we always have been, even before I knew about her, even before I found her. We're very similar in a lot of ways.

We have a couple really different parts of our personality. One of the big ones is that she's very religious. Again, it's a really Catholic country. I sort of felt, like, really scared in the beginning. I remember telling her that I wasn't religious. I remember shaking and being nervous. We were just texting over WhatsApp, but I didn't know how she was gonna take it.

Overall, she's pretty good with it, but it comes up in these ways, because my mom's concept around her personal trauma is that she didn't have any trauma. And anything that happened to her, she's given up to God. And so, that's her defense mechanism around it, right? She's wrapped this thing around it and she won't touch it. She's very receptive to me talking about my trauma, and how our separation, and lots of things have affected me. She's fine with that, but there's just this block around what she's experienced.

And I'm not just talking about the trauma of my birth (which I'm a product of rape, so there’s a lot of trauma around me coming into the world). But she's experienced just so much more than that; I'm not gonna list it. It's—I try to walk that line of telling my story, versus telling her story. I feel fine disclosing the rape, because it's my origin story. She's experienced a lot of other trauma in her life, and this is how she survives it. And it's also how she's so loving and full of light anyways, despite it.

And so it's allowed us to be close and build this relationship that's very close. But I suppose, at some point, that was going to boil over. So, that happened in April on this big trip that I talked about in the last episode. It was a lot that I already talked about—two huge things. And so this is the last one, which is… So we had been staying in my aunt's house. I met a bunch of new family while we're there. So, as far as stressors on my mom's system, she's back where she grew up. She's back where she raised my brothers and sister. She's staying in the house of an ex-boyfriend who was (bleep) to her (and was kind of still being [bleep]). That's where some of my family was staying.

She's introducing me to a bunch of new family, which I can't imagine how vulnerable that was for her. And I think, more than she articulated out loud, she really wanted that to go a certain way. Of course, right? So obvious now, but I wasn't thinking about it then. Of course, I was in my own overwhelm of, I'm going to where my brothers and sister grew up. I'm going to meet all this new family. I was in my story while she was in her story.

And my relationship with my sister has always been very tense. She has a lot of stuff around me. I don't even want to talk about it a ton, honestly, but we have a very difficult relationship. And that was sort of moving towards a blowing point as well. And so because they were staying in a separate house together, they would often show up together and leave together. And so, my mom wasn't actually seeing how I was interacting with my new family, because when she would come around, my sister was with her.

And I would go away or I would shut down, or I would go hang out with the kids, or…there were a lot of animals there, too (I would go play with the animals). Because I was trying not to flip out. So, I was taking—this is like an example, right? I was doing my mental health self-care: taking space, using my skills, using connection. All of these things that I think are taking care of myself, that are viewed externally, culturally, as me being disconnected and antisocial.

I'm over here, like, I'm doing such a great job, right? And the perception of me is that I'm being disconnected and weird because the assumption is I'll spend every second with everyone all in the big group. And even just surface level, like every 10 people speaking Spanish at once for three hours–I can only take it for so long before I have to go lay down. It's just too much for me; I need a break. And so, that was like one light element that was going on, but it's like tension’s building throughout the week. Everyone's talking about everything we're doing, and everything that's happening.

It's just like that's very “Latin family,” like phone tree. I say something, and then I get a text from this cousin way over there that already heard about it, because it goes “tick, tick, tick,” down the line of whatever. It's nuts. Everyone tells everyone everything. There's a lot of that stuff going on.

So meanwhile, everyone's been talking about us all week. There's been so many things that could have been fixed with direct communication, early on… “Put your stuff in your suitcase every day” was an expectation that I didn't know was happening (that I would never do on my own), but would have adjusted easily.

So it's all festering, right? All week. Including my sister seeing that an opportunity has opened to really hurt me. So on the eighth day, we do this big family shoot (family photo shoot), which in Colombia is like, forever. It lasts forever. First, all the women, then all the men, then just the kids, then this family, then this family, then everybody, then now with the grandparents–it's crazy and it goes on forever. So that ends, and my sister calls me and my cousin and my little, my youngest brother over and starts just screaming at us.

It was the craziest thing I've ever experienced. About something that I'm not gonna even indulge the content, because honestly it didn't matter. She was upset about something that we did that had zero negative consequences. It was just the little snack that she needed to have her opportunity to flip out. This is also not out of the norm for her. And it's also not out of the norm culturally, bringing back in the cultural piece. You don't deal with your feelings, you don't deal with your feelings, you don't deal with your feelings; you explode, and then everything's–and then you just move forward. And then everyone just goes, “That was annoying.” And just carries on. It's just, it's so foreign to me.

So, first thing I do is physically back up, and then I'm texting one of my closest adoptee friends. And she's with me in the moment and I'm like, “My sister's screaming. Like, this is crazy.” And she's like, “Just take some space.” She's coaching me through it. (Thank you, Summer! I love you.). And so I'm sitting down now, but it's still going on. And it goes on forever, and it goes into this whole attack that is specifically–would be designed to make an adoptee go insane. Nobody wants me in this family, and if I'm not gonna be like the family, then I should get out. And just craziness, right?

And she's also screaming at me in Spanish, so I'm not even getting everything. I'm getting enough. All the kids are here. This is like a show, right? And she wants me to respond, and I'm not gonna take the bait. And I'm also choking back tears. I'm like, She will NOT see me cry. Right? I'm locked down. But I also froze, which is pretty rare, right? But we know trauma response is fight, flight or freeze. And that's not my usual go-to, but I was so overwhelmed that I froze. And I have a lot of regret about that, but I also have compassion that that's just what my amygdala decided I was gonna do in that moment.

So this goes on forever. My mom gets involved. It's like she whipped everyone up, right? It was just like this weird, crazy frenzy. So, eventually, it ended; things transpired over the night… It was just a really rough night. Of course, I broke down. I was crying all night. I’m talking to my friend. My partner's there. My partner was sleeping through this. He was upstairs, so then he wakes up to me sobbing and shaking in bed, and (poor thing) has to deal with me. And we don't feel welcome.

We wanted to leave, but it's the middle of the night, so we waited till morning. We go get breakfast; we go find a hotel to go to. We just had one more night there. It didn't make sense to move our flights or anything, so we just went to a hotel in town (which my brother helped us find). And so, meanwhile, my mom has been—my sister has still been stirring up my mom, which… It's an important moment to pause and say that my mom was 16 when she had my sister. My sister's older than me. They have an interesting kind of inverted relationship, which can often happen right when teenagers have babies. That there's a parentified child role with the child. So, my sister's kind of the matriarch of my family. She has a lot of…she takes care of everyone, like financially.

Most of my family (in the beginning of the year) lived in her house, which changed by the end of the year, which is interesting. But she's kind of the leader of the family, so she has this influence over my mom that's kind of maternal and interesting. So in certain cases, I think when my mom is a certain level of vulnerable, she can get under her skin and kind of whip her up a little bit. So she's whipped my mom up that like I've done something terrible and that I'm also acting terrible in response to it. So she's email—She's texting me, texting me, texting me. And I'm saying, “I don't want to talk. I'm too overwhelmed. I'm really, really, really, REALLY upset. Can you please just let me calm down?”

She shows up when we're taking our bags to go to the hotel, asked to talk to me. I said, “Fine. You have five minutes.” She just starts screaming, which (again) has never happened before. I've never seen this side of her, and she's just screaming at me and I'm like, “Nope, not today.” Right? I'm a little bit more with my faculties then I'm like, “Not today.”

I scream at my partner and I'm like, “Let's go.” We've got our bags and we leave. And she's yelling at me the whole time. So that was me really breaking a cultural norm. You stay and you take your verbal whipping. That's what you do as a child. “You take your punishment” is sort of how it's viewed. Like, “You be a good kid and take your punishment and sit here and deal with the shaming and the yelling.” And so by leaving–which I was doing to take care of myself, right? There's my healthy boundary, right? There's my self-regulation. It's seen as very rebellious. So she is now–if she was at an 11, she's now at a 19 and she is rapid texting me, just venom.

I never saw this side of her before. The cruelest things anyone's ever said to me in my entire life. She used so many things against me, attacked just everything about me. I'm not gonna even say the exact things, because I just… I still, now, even in the aftermath, I do feel protective of this side of her. That was just..it's a really cruel part of her. But I know it's a reaction to trauma, right? But she just went at me in a way that I couldn't deal with. I was laying on the ground in our hotel room, tremoring, sobbing, just trying to calm down my baby part. That was my only goal. I just kept saying, “You're okay. We're okay. You're okay. We're okay.” Just so dysregulated.

And I just couldn't believe it, and in those moments…I was really trying to just stay with what was happening for me and calm myself down. But of course there's other parts of me that are thinking and, I'm really feeling like I’ve lost her. I don't have my mom anymore. It really felt like, I don't know how I could ever trust her again, that she would say these things to me. Who even are you? It felt, Okay, if this is really you, then everything else was a lie. And then and I can't… okay.

And I have like my “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” parts that are like, We lived without a mom for 30 and a half years. We can do it again. We'll survive. We're not gonna give…, right? Like I'm already rallying the troops, right? I'm like, I will get through this. Which I know I could have, but I think that just goes to speak to how, and we're re-wounded or re-traumatized. How strong that impulse is to just shut the door.

Haley Radke: So your mom is texting you these horrible things?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Uh-huh. Eventually, she stopped. I never wrote back that day. I never responded at all. It just felt like she was out of her mind, which she was. She was completely out of her mind.

Haley Radke: So you're getting texts from your sister and from your mom?

Marta Isabella Sierra: No, my sister had given up at that point. The damage had been done that she wanted to inflict on me, which was to humiliate me in front of my whole family. And so I'm just…I'm, like, dying. It's really rough. And then we have this huge long journey back to Cali. We get back. At this point, I'm already having my usual things that I have when I have an extreme trauma response, which is like my digestive system is insane, wreaking havoc on my body.

Soon after that, I got really sick again, which was my fourth time in the hospital in Colombia. This time, it was different than the other times, though. And then ultimately we decided it was probably dengue fever, which is from the mosquitoes in Llanos. Which, if you grow up there, there's two strains of dengue fever. You get them each as a child and then you never get them again. But the emotional crisis, I think, perfectly set my body up to come down with something like this. So it's a days-long fever with a rash all over your body, and vomiting, and just all of it…It's super fun. I’m dealing with that as I'm dealing with all this emotional stuff and not talking to my mom, really, not being ready and really wondering, Is this it? Is this over?

And we still had three months left. What am I even doing here anymore? It just–it was really, really crushing. The interesting piece of aftermath was also that my little brother (my youngest brother), as a result of all of this, decided he didn't want to live with my sister anymore. So he had asked if he could stay with us for a couple weeks while he looked for a place (when we got back from that trip), and so of course we said yes. And so two weeks was actually three-and-a-half months. He moved out a week before we left in July. But that was a whole other element.

Haley Radke: This must feel like choosing sides, then. Like he's choosing your side?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. Yeah. So, I was worried about that—and so just the whole system reconfigures, right? And I have my great uncle, who’s my abuelo's brother, was one of the few people that I reached out to. He's this really grounded voice of wisdom in my family. I know that my mom will listen to him. And we talked and even he, though… He's not wrong. I love him so much, but he (I wasn't ready for any of it, either)... His view was, “You know better, Marta, more about all of this. You understand trauma better. You have to be the one to forgive. You have to be the one to open your hand up.”

And I just wasn't ready at that point. So I did. I took care of myself the way that I know how to, in the face of no one really understanding that. I did it anyways. I took a lot of space. I told her I needed time, that I did not know when I was gonna be able to talk, that I felt really unsafe around her. I did articulate a lot about how violated I felt, and how dysregulated my… I talked to her about parts anyways. Even though she doesn't understand IFS, I told her, “My traumatized baby is feeling really unsafe. I can't be around you right now. I don't know when I'll be ready.”

Talking to my supports at this point was huge, of course, but ultimately it was about me having IFS in my life. About me having this language. Because what I had to sit with (what I'm still sitting with), is that part of my mom hates me. Part of my mom maybe even wishes that I didn't exist. I'm a physical reminder of her rape.

Even though I look way more like my mom than–I mean (I haven't even seen a photo), but I look… People call us twins. I mean, it's—there's not a lot of pictures of her when she was younger, but people that knew her when she was younger say that we're identical. So, I don't have that piece that some children who are products of rape have of looking like that person.

But that doesn't change the fact that I'm the physical evidence of what happened to her. And some of the cruelest things she said to me that day were specifically about how I came into this world and this piece that I've been secretly feeling so vulnerable about, right? That we had never processed, to weaponize it against me in a moment of vulnerability, I just—it feels so heartless. But then if I back up and put my clinical hat on, I know she was really triggered being there, right?

All of those stressors that I said before. Being in that environment, I know she felt really exposed, too. And it was just the perfect storm of triggers. And she lashed out, because there's so much pain inside of her that she hasn't healed, that she hasn't let out, and it— she unleashed on me. And while I don't think that that's okay, obviously I do understand why it happened.

And there came a point–I just missed her. Even though she hurt me so much worse than anyone's ever hurt me, I just—day after day, I was starting to miss her. And I was starting to wonder, Is this really how I wanna leave here? Am I not gonna–am I really not gonna make this repair? Am I really gonna give up on this? Am I really ready?

I do have those parts. I know I could survive it, but the same way that my lens on her parts and her trauma helps me with compassion, I also still strongly feel like my responsibility is to my parts. And my job is to take care of my traumatized little girl.

And the question is, “Do…?” (Many. I say one, like my baby, but really like I feel very fond towards my five-year-old and my adolescent part, too). So all these little girls that I'm responsible for. What's gonna serve their healing? Is it to lose her again or is it my job to make sure that they have their mom so that they can heal and they can feel safe?

So we met with my translator (my friend, that’s my translator) and called and after some, a lot of texting, and we met in person and we just, we talked a lot about some of the things that— There was a lot said in the aftermath that I was really upset about, too. And so just healing up some of those wounds. And really, I think ultimately what it was, I saw her fear, too. And I don't know if she could have survived losing me, again. I don't know if I could have survived losing her again. At some point, somehow that all became clear to me: that it wasn't necessarily about what happened that day, but it was about moving forward together, because to lose each other again, I think would've just been so detrimental to both of us.

And actually, my mom has a lot of heart problems, and (unsurprisingly) she had a lot of symptoms after this trip. Her heart was literally breaking. So I'm really protective, obviously, of her health and ultimately we moved through it. And by the time I left, a couple months later, we were pretty much back where we had started and now we're–I mean, we talk every day.

She texted me, “Good luck!” before I signed on with you. And yeah, I can't imagine my life without her. And I know that so many reunions break because there's unhealed trauma and things that happen that just feel too painful to survive. And we feel like we have to walk away. And I'm absolutely not saying, “Whatever, just deal with whatever happens to you in these relationships.” Take care of yourself.

Again, I'm telling this story in 10 minutes, but it really evolved over two entire months and there's a lot that I'm not speaking to, of course. And it was complicated, but I still (at the end of the day) I'm so grateful. And without IFS, I don't know how I could hold that truth: that this woman that loves me, would move heaven and earth for me, is so loving, also has a part of her that hates me.

But that's just true. That's just being a human that's experienced trauma. It's not black and white. It's not like she loves me or she doesn't. I know that she loves me, and there's a part of her that hates me because I'm the reminder. I'm the proof. And I have to do my own work around that, around accepting that.

Haley Radke: Can you say how long, thinking about things and processing, before you guys all met with the translator–how much space did you give yourself?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I think probably six weeks at least, maybe more? I can't remember exactly, but…

Haley Radke: That's the thing. I don't want to gloss over that. Because, it wasn't like, “Oh!,” and then the next day, “Okay, we met up.” No, this is a big process.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes. And I worked part-time when I was down there, but I really didn't have a lot going on. I said it–I mean, everything shifted. If I gave you what a week looked like before that trip and a week after–I also was grieving the loss of my brother that I talked about in the last episode.

So suddenly, I wasn't hanging out with him most of the time. Suddenly, my youngest (my baby brother) is living with us and I'm all messed up, right? And I don't really want him to see me like that. So I'm hiding in my room. But then he's like, “Where are you?” ” He's worried; he's so worried about me. I mean, he's never seen anyone... It's funny when I step back. He's never seen someone feel something and move through it, like in the moment, the way that I sob when I'm moving through something, I think it really jostles him like, “Are you gonna die?” And I'm like, “No, I'm just feeling my feelings. This is so normal.”

And Tyson (my partner), Tyson's just like sitting there, right? While I'm like (emotional crying), because he's just used to me. And my brother’s like, “Oh my God, are you okay?” And I'm like, “Yeah! I’m, you know, feeling all my feels.” So I didn't have a lot going on. I just–this was what I was dealing with. This was what I was talking about. This was what I was writing about. This was what I was feeling. And in and out of it, like we are in our process, I was also doing numbing stuff, and staring at Netflix. You can't be with it all the time, every second. But yeah, it was a while.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. And I think it's really helpful for us to see, really, a point where reunion could have just broken down for good. And then what you did–what you chose to do, instead of walking away. I think, so many of us, it's easier to just be like, “Hey, that’s it!” And just shut that box, because it's so painful to look at and… Yeah. Thank you for your wisdom in there. Is there anything else you wanna say to us about that processing? Anything else in this area before we wrap up?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I think, just that–and of course (I can't speak for everybody), I only know my mom. But I would say, trust the things that you do know, if you have done some of your work. I know that people can't hear things in an activated state, right? So it was weeks later before I even started having more conversations about it with her, and ultimately she did open up to my point of view. She did want to hear things. And even if her beliefs don't change, she was willing to listen. We still had difficult, important conversations. And so I think, and again–that's with that language barrier I was talking about, that's with the cultural barrier and the mental health barrier.

It's complicated. And you have to be tenacious about it. I think that to know that we may have to have the same conversation five times in five different ways, because there's so much that could be possibly getting lost in translation here. And I think, when we're raw, that's so hard, right? She sends me something and I don't know those words. And I put it through Google Translate and it hits me in the gut, right? I have to be willing to take a breath in that moment and say, “Can you say that another way? Is that really what you meant?” Instead of flipping out, which is so hard to do. I'm not, all of this is so effing hard. It's so hard, but I think it's ultimately worth it.

Haley Radke: I think one of the most insightful things that you shared with us today was just that line, that (we glossed over it), but you said, “I was in my story and she was in her story.”

And just how powerful that is to think about that, we’re sort of looking at everyone else thinking, “Oh, well, they know what’s going on for me.” But they don’t. People are in their own story.

I think that’s so valuable to pin that away in the back of your head so that you can come back and be like, Oh, they’re in their story and I’m in my story.

Thank you so much, Marta. I mean, truly, for inviting us into some very intimate and vulnerable moments in your story and going back to painful things—that comes at a cost. And so I'm very grateful that you're willing to share that with us, and I know it's gonna be so helpful to so many of us.

So, thank you. And where can we connect with you online?

Marta Isabella Sierra: My website for my practice is (old website link removed) and you can find an email for me on there (martasierralmhc [at] gmail [dot] com).

I did also want to say, since we were talking about IFS at the beginning, I wasn't thinking of doing any recommended resources. But I will put in a tiny plug for Jonathan Van Ness’ book Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love. His memoir came out (for anyone who watches “Queer Eye,” he is the hairstylist on “Queer Eye”). He has survived a tremendous amount of trauma. He has been in IFS therapy for years, and his memoir hugely integrates IFS and it's awesome. I listened to it on audiobook.

Haley Radke: Wow. That is so interesting. I had no idea. I think he has a podcast, too.

Marta Isabella Sierra: He has a podcast called Getting Curious. There's also an episode with Rick (Richard) Schwartz, the creator of IFS. It's so amazing to watch Dick interact with Jonathan's parts.

Haley Radke: Okay. Thank you for those recommendations. That is excellent. And I think– I love hearing you talk about IFS, because it's so unique. I mean, in my perspective it's so unique and I don't know. I haven't told you this I don't think, but I've heard from several listeners that they have started IFS since hearing your episodes.

Marta Isabella Sierra:Oh, that's so great.

Haley Radke:And not just that. I know of one who is a mental health professional and she started training in IFS, cuz she found it so interesting and helpful.

So you're making–Look at that! Marta: the Adoptees On IFS influencer.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Oh my God. I love it. I also have started working in adoption for the first time, since the last time I saw you. So since I've been back in Boston, I've been working at Boston Post-Adoption Resources, which is in Brookline, and we're doing really awesome work.

So if you're in the area, or in Massachusetts and you need resources, call us.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Don't you just feel so thankful when someone opens up and shares like that on the show? I truly am so grateful and I wouldn't be able to do the show without people being vulnerable, and teaching through their experiences. And also therapists who have this wealth of knowledge, and then actually applying it in real life.

This is a pretty valuable show. I'm just–I'm really grateful. Thank you so much again, Marta, for sharing with us. I truly—It's hard to know the impact of the podcast sometimes, because I only hear from a very small percentage of listeners (but I know there's thousands of you listening). But it's episodes like this and last week's that you just know, this will have an impact on someone else's reunion and helping them navigate. So, such an impact.

And if you want the show to continue and keep having an impact like this and hopefully helping save some reunions through understanding Marta's experience, and how you can learn from it, and you can look at, Ergh, what's wrong with mine? And how can we heal it? And work together to a new understanding of each other?

I mean, if you want that kind of value in the world, please consider partnering with my podcast and go to adopteeson.com/partner to support the show. It is so meaningful to me when you sign up. You're saying, “I want this show to exist in the world. I want other adoptees to have access to this information. Other family members, members of the constellation to be able to hear about the adoptee experience and hopefully get us on the same page.”

I just—I can't do the show without your help. If you have had that experience and have learned something from the podcast, please go to adopteeson.com/partner and check out all the ways you can support the show.

And right now, as I have been telling you for the last few weeks, we are doing an Adoptees On(ly) Reading Challenge. It's been so, so fun, and you can access that when you go to adopteeson.com/partner. Okay, thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again, next Friday.

134 [Healing Series] Cross-Cultural Intergenerational Trauma

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/134

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Haley Radke: This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

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 have a returning guest, [Marta Isabella Sierra]. Marta uses the Internal Family Systems model, which you may hear us refer to as IFS during the episode, and she taught us about IFS in episodes 69 and 71 of the podcast. If you want to go back and check those out, it's very interesting.

Today, Marta gives us an insider's view of her year-long trip to Colombia and what barriers there can be to a cross-cultural reunion. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, [Marta Isabella Sierra]. Hi, Marta.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Hi, Haley.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. A lot of time has passed since you were on the podcast and a lot of things have transpired. So can you give us a little snippet of your story? it's been like well over a year since you were on just to orient us to your story, and I'd love to hear what's been happening for you.

Marta Isabella Sierra: So I was born in Bogota, Colombia, and adopted by white parents from the States, grew up in Connecticut. That's some of what I had shared before. I started searching for my mom probably in 2015, 2016.

And found her in March of 2017. We're coming up on our three-year anniversary this March. And so that had pretty recently happened, I think, the last time that I recorded. But I think I had already gone down. I was about to leave, I think. When we last spoke.

Haley Radke: I think you were prepping for your trip. And you had shared that you had done DNA testing, but actually how you found her was through a private investigator, so that was pretty interesting.

Okay. So preparing to do a trip down there. How was that? What does a trip mean? Because it's a little different than what I pictured in my head.

Marta Isabella Sierra: I just want to back up and say the reason that we decided to go live down there, which is “we” as me and my partner and our two animals as well, we took our dog and our cat, really was because I unraveled after my first trip back after my reunion trip. I had a really, really hard time.

I just want to say that in case any of your listeners relate to that and just normalize that the first connection can be super dysregulating. I had a really hard time being away from my mom.

Haley Radke: So just to clarify, you mean, you went down to meet her and then as soon as you came back you were out of sorts.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes.

Haley Radke: Okay. Wow.

Marta Isabella Sierra: I was just crying every day. It felt so excruciating to be away from her. My IFS lens on it, right, is that my little baby part was in a panic, right?

Last time I left her it was 30 and a half years, and it's really hard to explain to the preverbal traumatized baby that lives inside of you that it's not the same thing that's happening. So I was having a pretty hard time. Yeah. So eventually my partner offered that maybe we need to just go spend some time down there.

Maybe that's what I needed. So we started looking into it, started planning, and yeah, the plan was, so a year, a little over a year, we figured it would be, not exactly a year, but yeah, we left May of, gosh, what would it be? 18? Yeah. Through July of 19.

Haley Radke: Wow. And what did you think when you were planning that trip?

I mean, that's sort of like a huge, that's not sort of, it's a huge life change. For a whole year. What were your expectations? Did you have any?

Marta Isabella Sierra: I don't think I had any. Actually, I don't think at that point I would've said I had any concrete expectations. I came to learn over the course of my time there that my secret wish was to be cut and pasted back into my family, right? What we all wish. I just want to be reacclimated and put back in. And it's just so impossible that that's how that's going to go. So I think it was many months, though, before I realized that.

I would say the first big adjustment was, compared to your reunion trip where everything's about you, right? It's almost like you're a baby again, right? Everyone's like, welcome to your new family, and you meet all the people and there's parties for you, and everything's “what do you want? Oh, you like fish, we'll make fish.” And you're so celebrated. Of course, living down there, everyone has their lives, they're doing stuff.

And just even navigating how much time are we spending together? Who's initiating that? Who's not? What does that look like? Feeling really uncertain about that all the time. Kind of some of my earlier memories of just navigating what is it to just be here and what do these relationships look like right now?

Haley Radke: So broad picture first, you are raised in the States. White family. And then you go to Colombia. What is that like for you, just culturally being in a different culture?

Marta Isabella Sierra: It was amazing. Mostly, I mean, it's different, of course, and I have lived other places. I have experienced culture shock before. There was certainly some of that.

But for me being a Colombian woman and being surrounded by Colombian people, being in the majority for the first time in my life is still something that's so comforting to me and so great. And then you have the layers of that though, right? That I'm easily still identified as “other” in an interesting way.

Even though I look like I belong there, it's like people can smell it on you. It's interesting. I had to tell my story multiple times a day. If I leave the house, I have to tell my story. People are always asking questions and I have a very American and bougie-looking dog that draws a lot of attention to herself.

So everyone's always asking about the dog, which sort of outed us as American pretty quickly. And people don't understand adoption there at all. So the questions would always be kind of interesting. I learned over time how to set boundaries and not tell every single cab driver my entire life story if I wasn't in the mood.

But I also tried to use it, when I was able, to educate a little bit about the process. But, yeah, it was really amazing to be immersed in my culture and also, of course, really hard. Not everything about it is amazing, of course.

Haley Radke: So where did you live when you were there?

Marta Isabella Sierra: We lived in Cali. My family lives in Cali, which is the third biggest city in Colombia, and we lived in a pretty downtown area in a neighborhood called San Fernando in Parque del Perro, which is a really nice little park. It's kind of touristy, really. There's lots of restaurants and things, but it was a nice area to live in.

We had a two bedroom apartment. We had a lot of space for not a lot of money. And yeah, that was its own decision, right? Whether to live with family or not. For people that have done this before, that's a big decision piece. And I think if I went down as a single person, I would've probably lived with my family, which would've been a whole completely different experience for sure.

I'm glad that that's how I did it. And that's what my experience was, even though I know in some ways that it meant a trade-off. We spoke English at home and so my Spanish didn't get as strong as I would've liked it to get if I were completely immersed in it.

And with technology, like, I was still watching Netflix in English on my computer. So I wasn't as immersed as I might have been in a different situation. But aside from that, the support of having my fur babies and my person with me was just incalculable in how much that helped me navigate a lot of grief, really.

It was just another layer of grief work because it's all around me every day right? What I lost.

Haley Radke: So here's what I'm picturing in my head. You go and you're with your family for a meal or something, and then you go home to your apartment with your partner and your animals, and then you're like on your own again.

What is that feeling like? Even knowing you can go back again and see them tomorrow? But just even that little separation?

Marta Isabella Sierra: That piece felt okay and felt kind of needed. Even on a short little trip, my first trip, it was like, okay, I have to go back to my Airbnb, right? I need a moment.

So it was actually really grounding. I came to really love my apartment and feel safe there and need to go there sometimes to just bring it back down a level because everything's so intense.

Haley Radke: I guess I don't yet have the same experience. I'm not transracially adopted, transculturally, transnationally. I don't have any of that. And so reunion for me as a domestic adoptee looks so very different.

Like you literally moved countries to build this relationship. Can you teach us a little bit about the challenges and the things that maybe someone like me wouldn't even have considered or known about?

Marta Isabella Sierra: It's all this little stuff. And what I came to learn really is that Spanish is one of three language barriers, I would say. And the second one out of those two is definitely culture and misunderstandings about that. And even if we understood exactly what the other person was saying, like literally saying, it was still confusing.

And I'm really lucky to have had some great supports down there, including some bilingual friends and a translator that I worked with who also helped me with some documents and legal kinds of things, but she would come around and help with translating, and I found that ultimately more what she was translating than Spanish was cultural stuff that I didn't understand.

A really easy small example is that Colombians put themselves together pretty specifically. Colombian women, especially, like no matter the socioeconomic status, you can see the difference, right? But even a woman with not a lot of money probably, her sneakers match, her shirt matches her earrings, and her hair's done and her makeup's done. It might not be done the same way as someone that's higher class, but that's what you do. And that's not who I am.

Haley Radke: Are you a little bit of a casual girl, Marta? Sorry, I should say casual woman.

Marta Isabella Sierra: I lived in Seattle. I came from Seattle. So even the transition from Boston to Seattle, the American listeners will think this funny, was a downshift for me and a letting go of what's appropriate in public.

And I just don't care. And certainly if I'm emotionally dysregulated, right? Like, I don't care at all. And so some early conflicts with my mom would be about her asking me questions I didn't understand why she was asking me, or criticizing how I showed up, or my hair?

And, but her assumption sometimes, like I'd wear a lot of messy buns. I have really long hair and I mostly wear it up in a messy bun on the top of my head. And her assumption if I showed up like that was that I didn't shower that day and, like, why aren't you taking care of yourself? And it was like, what? I showered like before I left. I don't understand.

So we just had to navigate that one piece. But it was, of course, being criticized by your mom. It’s a trigger. So it was difficult. At first I didn't understand. And finally we had to come to this piece of her belief is you put yourself together and you look nice because it's nice for the other people.

And my view is I don't care about the other people. I'm not going to do something for other people that's not authentic to me, right? And that's specific to me, but it's pretty American, too, I think in some ways. And that's an easy in-way into that. Colombia is a very Catholic, patriarchal country and that's difficult for me.

I strongly identify as a feminist and there's a lot of things that are norms there that were difficult for me, and I would say this was one layer of it, right? That as a woman, I owe it to the world to be like nicely packaged every day and be something that's nice to look at. And I just was never gonna tow that line.

But we had those conversations and she came to accept that about me. But you know, still, the preference is still under there that I would make more of an effort.

Haley Radke: Okay. Okay. That's a really great example. I'm kind of getting a picture here. Do you have another example of something that was just really lost in translation?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Well, everything's in its own little compartmentalized box. Colombia has been through a lot of war, a lot of really terrible times. I was born in the middle of that. There's a lot of us that were born and adopted out during the time in which there was so much violence and other things happening in our country.

And so anyone around my generation, when we're coming back, our families that were left there experienced all of that. It deeply affected them. Besides other legacies of intergenerational trauma around single moms and not being able to move up in socioeconomic status sometimes, no matter how hard you work. The caste system there is pretty set.

It's hard to advance. The economy is difficult. So there's lots of complex political and socioeconomic stuff going on. And then there's this history of war and trauma that's so normalized. People that visit Colombia are like, Colombians are so amazing, they're so happy. They always have a smile on their face.

That's a survival mechanism. There's a lot underneath that. That's how we survived. That's how my people were strong and kept moving forward. But in that, there's this denial of the trauma and of things that have happened, and things just kind of get put in neat little boxes and left there.

So, one example is my mother's father, my grandfather passed six or so years before I found her, my abuelo, and the story that I got about him at first. I had a lot of grief because he was presented by my mom as this great man and he was a professional musician his whole life. And I always sang and danced and did theater and so I saw this photo of him and I just grieved for that, that I had this amazing abuelo that I would never get to meet.

It was a solid many months in to being down there that I started to hear other stories, that he was pretty abusive, that he was unfaithful, that my mom's older sibling actually is not from my grandmother. And that there's more, and that who knows how many more there are, right? And all of these different things that I didn't hear at first because it's just not normal.

It's not normal to share all the things, you just share the things that are more comfortable and everything else goes in little boxes. So I rarely got all of the information upfront, which for me, and I think for a lot of adopted people, it's: Tell me the truth! Like we wanna know the truth.

Haley Radke: Yes.

Marta Isabella Sierra: So what is truth? What's a cultural definition of truth? It's just all so layered and so more than anything, this affected my relationship with my brother, my oldest brother who's younger than me. If you had asked me six months in to my time down there who I was closest to in my family, I would've said him.

We were really close for a lot of reasons. He's a little separate from my family for the reasons that I'll tell you in a moment, but also he just lives separate from them. He has a partner of 11 or so years who has a daughter, so he kind of has a stepdaughter. They have two dogs. The only other person in my family that had dogs. Once or twice a week we would go down to where he lives, just 20 minutes, half hour in a cab, and take the dogs to the park.

And I just spent the most time with him, I would say, week to week. And we're close in age. There's lots of things that we have in common. He was just really, really special to me. And there has always been this lingering story about if he had a daughter or not, and the story that he had always told me was that he didn't believe that it was his daughter. This happened when he was 16.

And so in April of last year, it was time for us to take this big trip to Llanos. That's where my family is from. It's out in the eastern plains. It's a pretty big journey and it's a very different part of Colombia. And I was going to meet her.

I was going to meet my niece, and I just needed to know the truth from him before I went and before this stopped being a concept and started being a real person. I had also kind of gone to battle about it for him, and I felt protective of him because this specific topic had caused so many rifts in my family.

And it all came spilling out when I saw him before the trip, that this is his daughter, that he refuses to look at any of it. He won't take a test, he won't be in her life. He sort of blames her for the sins of her mother. They were 16 when they were together. I think she was maybe not good to him and possibly cheated on him. And he blames her for it.

And so she's not being raised by her mother either. My niece is raised by her maternal grandmother, so she's essentially an in-family adoptee, right? So I go there and I meet this girl and I fall head over heels in love with her. She's 14, she's super smart. She doesn't understand why this is happening to her. She has a lot of questions and there's so much vulnerability there.

But she's tough and I see a lot of myself in her. And I just felt bonded to her really quickly and we had a lot of talks about it. And, she's a teenager, so she didn't spill her guts or anything, but I made sure that she knew that I'm here for her for always and for whatever she needs.

And so even since coming back, I've just taken a little bit more of an active role in her life and she's really important to me. So after that trip, my relationship with my brother really split. I couldn't accept it. It just was so painful for me that he could turn her away when he had been so loving and accepting to me.

I mean, it's still, I mean, obviously I'm getting choked up talking about it. It still doesn't make sense to me. Emotionally and logically in my clinician brain it makes total sense. Whatever happened with my niece's mother was traumatic to him. He's put it in a box and he won't touch it and that's really normal there.

That's how you survive, right? You just keep moving forward. And, but it cost him so much. I think it cost him a lot and it cost him our relationship, which in his eyes, I've abandoned him. But I just had to do what was best for me. But that's a moment where I do have compassion about why he's doing it.

And I still ultimately decided to draw a boundary. Because it felt, for me personally, it feels disloyal to her to not hold him accountable for his actions. And it breaks my heart. I still miss him every day. So yeah, that's a big piece of my experience down there with trauma and with the denial of it.

And one of the last things he said to me when we were communicating over text was, let me know, let me know when you've resolved your traumas. It all got put on that I have a problem with this because of my trauma, instead of any ownership.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I'm so sorry. That sounds really challenging and I think this is so fascinating how you describe that in Colombia they just don't really get the concept of adoption when you're talking to strangers and whatnot.

And yet, you go down there, you are this professionally trained person and you can see trauma all over. How is that for you? And in general, or more specifically if you want to talk about your family, but even just in broad strokes, just looking at the culture?

You talked about how they've had all of these challenges in war and things, and I know that, especially, I mean I'm living in Canada, it feels like such a privileged nation, that I can just go to therapy and it's so different. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Again, it's just, there's so much going on underneath this surface. There's this image, that now I'm wishing I had pulled it up before we started talking, but about cultural awareness. It's like the image of an iceberg and I just really liked it because it talked about the top things, right? Like foods and the flag and the different pieces of it.

And then under the water were all of these other pieces that make up any given culture, right? Which is like histories of trauma and roles in the family. What do those roles look like? What are the responsibilities? And just all of this under-stuff, right?

I would say that there's just a lot of pain and people in pain that don't even understand. I'm super empathic and so I would feel everything. So like me saying my apartment was my safe space, like sometimes I would just get way too overloaded being around people and I had to go home and reground because I always feel what people are feeling even if they're not aware of it, which was a lot. It's a lot of information to get when no one wants to hear the feedback really.

And another example would be my baby brother who's my world. He has struggled his whole life with depression and anxiety, but has no words for it, right? And so we would have really deep conversations about that and about him starting to understand what it is. Why shame is a very, very common language there. A way of communicating, a way of controlling. It's a lot of shame that goes on and certainly in my family as well.

And so we've been naming that for him. There's a reason that you feel this way. This is when you're spoken to in this manner, over time this is what it creates inside of you. This might be part of what you're feeling. And I think he found that extremely helpful and has made a lot of changes in his life to take care of himself in a different way because of the conversations that we had. I'm really proud of him.

Haley Radke: I love that part. Like the influence you could bring down there and to your family and just your wisdom and sharing that with them.

Marta Isabella Sierra: But it is new information, like you were saying, like it's new information to them. It's something they don't have access to. They don't get any education around it.

And nobody goes to a therapist down there unless you have a serious psychiatric condition. Like your medical doctor has told you that you need to go. It's a completely different mental health culture and it's just not talked about.

So you had said what a great thing that you could teach that I think is so complicated. Not just that role, but specifically add on the layer of being an adoptee, right? Because I already have parts of me that feel responsible for other people.

And so you add that piece in, right? That I'm coming back into my family system, that I'm viewed as having more access to a lot of things, right? Financially, but also education, all of these things. And so there is a view that I'm to make an impact. So there's an overt feeling of that.

And then there's my own internal stuff of I'm supposed to make everyone's lives better. That gets so sticky, I think, and I have a lot of feelings of failure with my other brother. I feel like I failed.

And because I used my own story. I used research, I used all of this is what's going on for her. Is this really what you want to do? And I couldn't break the wall of his protective system that will not go near this trauma of his, right?

And so I do have parts of me that feel like I failed. That feel like I'm supposed to heal my family and like I failed in that manner. And so it has pluses and negatives, I think. But there's definitely a lot of my family that I have made an impact on and that does feel good, but I just want to name that has two sides to it and that I think when we go back into these family systems that have been dealing with so much for so long and that we can have that wish, that's a great wish, and we can certainly do some good.

But I had to ask at what cost at a point.

Haley Radke: Well, I thank you for sharing that because I've gotten questions from multiple adoptees who have higher access, they're more wealthy and then they will reunite. And then there's this expectation from the original family: oh great, you're gonna help us out of this.

And so I imagine that boundaries would be so challenging in that situation. And then even my question to you was, well, you're this therapist and you can come. But then I'm trying to be like, oh wait, you put yourself in Marta's shoes. That's not your role in the family.

You're not there to go and fix everybody. And even as a therapist, you're not counseling your friends and family here either, right? That's not a thing. So yeah, you got some layers there. Holy smokes.

Marta Isabella Sierra: So I have a little cousin that is being raised by my sister. They took her out of a bad situation and my sister is raising her. She's seven now. My little che, she's my little sweetie pie. She has experienced a lot of trauma in her young life. We're not exactly sure what, but that's part of why my sister took custody of her.

And I would be called in to kind of weigh in on things around that occasionally, which was always interesting. And I don't work with children. I don't specialize in working with children. I barely know how to talk to children in a casual setting, if we're being honest. So I didn't really have anything to offer clinically other than she needs to see a therapist.

But there's resistance around that and it's not the easiest thing to find, even if you are open to it. But her suspected abuser is her father and he is in Llanos. That's where I was talking about. So part of that trip was also that she was going to be around him. And I had a real problem with this, of course, being who I am and being a therapist and I had many conversations about it.

Ultimately, I had to let it go because I'm not her guardian. I don't get to make these decisions for her, and it's very complicated. But the view is she's never alone with him. So there's like this protective element, right? We're watching her. Don't worry, nothing will happen.

Nothing new will happen. And she's asking about him. She wants to see him, which I'm not around for that. I'm sure that's true, of course. Why wouldn't she want to see her father? We know that children in the face of tremendous abuse will still want their parents, of course.

And so their view is, yeah, well, that was a long time ago. He's changed a lot. And also a little tinge of that's just how men are. There's this acceptance of abuse from men in my country that upsets me deeply. And so, yeah, I had to let go. It's not my decision. I've said my piece, they listened to me and they ultimately decided what they're going to decide.

And so that's, again, a piece of yeah, a man did something horrible. It doesn't register. It's just so normalized. Similar with the stories about my grandfather and there's just so much around infidelity, around physical violence, around sexual violence. It's just what else is news today?

Haley Radke: Well, I thank you for walking us through a ton of different insights that you had through your over a year there. Year and a half, almost 14 months?

*Marta Isabella Sierra:** 14 months.

Haley Radke: Okay. Okay, man I'm struggling today. My goodness. Okay. Thank you for walking us through those insights. You've had well over a year you spent with your family and in Colombia, and I think this will really help a lot of adoptees that are considering searching and reunion, especially when it's in a different country and not sure what to expect. And I think we don't hear about these things in depth enough, so I really appreciate your thoughts on that.

Marta Isabella Sierra: I think that the other thing that I realized through going and being down there is that I think the whole periods of honeymoon and transition into regular reunion, when you're talking about international adoption, are so skewed because there's not a lot of physical time together.

And so I think the honeymoon could go on, I don't know how long, but I think that mine cracked open around April of last year. This big thing happened and then in the aftermath of it, I was like, oh, I think my honeymoon just ended. Like I hadn't thought I was out of it. I had more identified it with that kind of first three weeks, intense infatuation, can't-breathe-without- you kind of phase.

But actually I think it's like that first part of a relationship until you learn these are full human beings, which for me even was many months in to living there.

Haley Radke: I can't imagine. I mean, even as you were talking about staying down there and not knowing if you're going to get invited to this or are you going to see them then, like all that kind of real life.

Wow. It's just, I don't know. You had a huge life change in that time period. And I can't wait to hear more about what you learned. I'm so glad that you're coming back and you're going to talk to us a little bit more on the next Healing episode, a little bit more about your experience, and I can't wait.

Okay. In the meantime, let's press pause till we get to that episode next week. And where can we connect with you online?

Marta Isabella Sierra: My practice is (old link removed) and that's pretty much the best way to get in touch with me. There's an email on there. (email martasierralmhc [at] gmail [dot] com)

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing with us today.

Next week Marta is going to be back on the podcast with us, as I said, and make sure you're subscribed because you don't want to miss that episode. She shares some very intimate and vulnerable things she experienced while in Colombia, and whether you're in reunion or not, there are some giant takeaways that we can learn from her experience and apply to whatever we have going on.

So I really appreciate her sharing and her willingness to open up that way. You don't always get that from therapists especially, there's so much of a “you're the client, I'm the therapist” kind of barrier with a lot of professionals in that capacity. So I really appreciate Marta opening up in that way.

And, I mean, wow, how much more valuable info can you get than someone who is literally living out how to do this, how to do this in a healthy way. I'm so appreciative. The other thing I want to say is, thank you so much to my monthly supporters. You guys know I say this every week, but it's honestly the truth.

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It is so easy. I love Overcast. But if you have an iPhone, there's a podcast app built right into your phone and if you have an Android, you can listen on Spotify. It's very easy. Just search Adoptees On and if you're sharing the show with someone, you can show them.

You can be the podcast evangelist and show them exactly how you like to listen. I appreciate that so much because sometimes that's a bit of a barrier for people. So thank you for doing that, and so much talking. Why is Haley talking so much today? Okay. I'm gonna stop, but I just want to say thank you so much for listening and let's talk again next Friday.