161 Bernie
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/161
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 161, Bernie. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today I'm honored to introduce you to Bernie, a late discovery adoptee who's been working the past two years to learn about birth trauma and adoption trauma. Bernie and I talk about how he confirmed he was adopted, what patterns and challenges he had through his life that now he attributes to birth trauma, and what happens when the validators of our memories are lost. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased [00:01:00] to welcome to Adoptees On, Bernie. Welcome, Bernie.
Bernie Thank you. It's good to be here.
Haley Radke I would love it if you would start and share your story with us.
Bernie My story is that I am what is called an LDA, a late discovery adoptee. I only discovered conclusively that I was adopted in my early sixties. I was born in 1955 in Los Angeles and formally adopted no more than 23 days after that. My family did not mention anything about my adoption at any time, while I was growing up, or after I had become an adult. In fact, one time I can remember finding my birth certificate, which listed the place of birth as Los Angeles. And I thought that was pretty [00:02:00] cool given the fact that I was living in and growing up in Iowa. And I went to my mom and I said, “Hey mom, I didn't know that I was born in Los Angeles.” And I'll never forget this, she became very angry and she said, “Don't tell people you were born in Los Angeles. You were born in Des Moines.” And that was startling. And I just left it at that but I kept it in the back of my mind for future reference. But from that point on, if anybody asked me where I was born or if I had to fill out any forms for school or anything like that, I always listed Los Angeles.
As I say, I didn't discover the truth until many years later. I have an adoptive cousin whom I've always felt very close to, and one evening I called her because I guess the best way to put it was I was going through a period of existential angst. You know, typical [00:03:00] questions: Who am I? What am I doing? What is my purpose? And so forth. And I collected little bits and pieces of anecdotal information over the years and I thought this is interesting. One day I'm gonna figure it out. And I decided now was the time to find some things out 'cause I knew that my cousin had been adopted because she had told me. And so I came to her and I said, “My birth certificate says Los Angeles. My mom claims that her and dad flew to Los Angeles on business and she had me there and that I was a few weeks premature.” And in retrospect it didn't make any sense because why would a woman eight months pregnant in the mid fifties be flying out to the coast well over a thousand miles away from home? My mom also had rheumatic fever, which can cause damage to the heart muscle. And [00:04:00] I don't think any self-respecting OB-GYN would encourage a woman who had that to say, “Sure, go ahead. Start a family. We'll get you set up with appointments,” and so on and so forth. So that didn't make any sense either. And the whole idea about a business trip? My dad was working in a mom-and-pop grocery store and had some experience as a carnival worker in midways. What about those businesses would take 'em out to California? It just didn't fit. So I said to her, “If I'm wrong, I apologize. I'm not trying to offend or insult anybody,” but I said, “Is it possible that I was adopted?” And she paused for about a second and took a deep breath and said, “Oh, thank God you asked me.” Apparently she had learned from her adoptive father's sister, her adoptive [00:05:00] aunt, who told her that she was pregnant, and as an aside told her, “And by the way, I think Bernie's probably adopted too,” but she held onto that for all those years because she didn't want to upset me or startle me or shake up what I knew about the reality of my life. And I don't blame her. I think it was the right decision to make. And that conversation occurred in early 2018 and in the subsequent months that have gone by since then, I've tried to reconcile that with what I know and the experiences that I've had growing up and in my adult life and I've done a lot of reading and a lot of research, and after some time for the first time, everything that ever happened to me made sense. It wasn't a case of being ill, it wasn't a case of being sick, like some [00:06:00] people whom I had grown up with were more than anxious to convince me was the case. It was having been taken from my mother immediately after birth and then placed for adoption immediately thereafter. And that's been the journey I've been on ever since then.
Haley Radke Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. Oh my goodness. Okay. So your cousin confirmed this, your adoptive cousin? Your mom and dad, had they passed away at this point? Am I getting that part of the story right?
Bernie My dad passed away in 1982. He had suffered a massive stroke brought on by a cerebral hemorrhage in 1964. I was only about nine at the time, so that was another impact growing up [00:07:00] without an active father present in the house. My mom passed away in 2011,so by the time I learned the truth about my adoption it had been about six years and change after my mom passed away. And then in 2013, the last of my adoptive aunts and uncles and their spouses also passed away. My mom's parents had passed away sometime before that. My dad's parents had passed away long before I even came on the scene so there was no one left of their generation or the generations before who were firsthand witnesses to what had happened.
Haley Radke Oh my goodness. Thankful for your cousin to confirm that for you. I just read this memoir by another late discovery [00:08:00] adoptee and I won't name it 'cause I wasn't a big fan and I think one of the things that when he was writing about his story, I was like, huh. He didn't have any hints? He never knew? I thought he was gonna share all these little clues all along that he had added up. And I don't know if I'm probably projecting this onto his story because I thought of course you must have known something. It sounds like you were collecting some things here and there. Do you have thoughts about that? Have you heard from a lot of people like what I was expecting, like that you would know clues?
Bernie I had been collecting bits and pieces of anecdotal information, and none of it really screamed at me that it was urgent to get to the bottom of all this. It was more like that's interesting and this is interesting, and one of these [00:09:00] days I'm gonna take some time and try to piece it all together and find out what it means. But as I say, it wasn't until that evening in 2018 that things were finally coming up enough to the surface that made me wanna ask,
Haley Radke Do you wanna talk about the existential crisis? What does that mean for you? Where were you in that moment of just needing to put pieces together? Did you suspect you were adopted? Like when did that first come into your head?
Bernie The first time I considered the possibility was just a few years before then and again, it hadn't risen to the level of absolutely needing to know. But I was in my early sixties, I was in a job that I didn't find too terribly satisfying. As I say, my [00:10:00] adoptive family, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles were all gone. So there really wasn't anybody of those generations to connect with anymore. My family, the people that I really felt close to, was my wife. My friends were few and far between. Not that I don't consider myself to be a likable person, it's just that I'm just one of those people who has a very small number of people that I consider myself to be emotionally intimate with, and the combination of all of those things, I felt the need to know more about myself, to understand myself better. Again, who am I? What is my purpose? What am I really meant to do? What are [00:11:00] some things I can find out that might fill in the gaps? As I say, my mom didn't know how to deal with the emotional side of me. I was never a bad kid. I was never a disciplinary problem. I never got in trouble with anybody, but I was very emotional. I suspect that was a result of being separated from my mother at birth and the subsequent adoption and she didn't necessarily know how to deal with all the crying. I give her credit for doing the best she can. Nobody knows how to be a parent right out of the box. But instead of it being a case of, alright, you're upset, you go to your room, you relax for a little while, calm down and then come downstairs and we'll talk. It was never like that. It was more like, stop crying right now, or I'm calling the police. Or stop crying right now, or I'm gonna have you put in an insane asylum. And she would [00:12:00] sometimes pick up the phone. She wouldn't even dial. She would just pick it up and immediately start talking, “Hello? Yes. Listen, I can't take it anymore. You're gonna have to come and get 'em right now. Okay. Thank you. Goodbye. Okay, they’re coming.” And I would immediately and intellectually know there was no conversation. There's nothing to worry about. But emotionally it scared me to death.
Haley Radke Oh, that's upsetting. That's, yeah. Okay, so you're having this existential crisis and all of these things are coming to a head for you, and your cousin tells you the truth, but I don't feel like that would firmly plant your feet on the ground. Now you're like, oh my gosh. What was that like? Getting this information confirmed?
Bernie Again, because I had my suspicions, it wasn't that I was thrown into a state of shock. It was more like I just paused internally long enough to move it from a possibility to a fact. It's okay, I was [00:13:00] right. I was adopted, and at the beginning my thoughts were okay, but I know who my parents are. I know who loved me. I know who raised me. I know who took care of me. But as I learned more, as the months went by, I began to see, this is why I've always been so emotional. This is why I've always had difficulty in new surroundings. If anything, learning in the beginning and as the months went on began to give me comfort because I was trying to take two aspects of myself and piece 'em together, like jigsaw pieces into a single picture, and it never fit perfectly. Now, I had the realization that my life was actually contained in two boxes of jigsaw pieces. One picture for the reality [00:14:00] of being separated at birth and adoption, and the other being life with my adoptive parents. I was, as I say, I was never sick, I was never ill. I was just experiencing the after effects of birth trauma. And despite mom being unable to deal with the emotions, I learned that I could finally start letting go of the stigma of being considered wrong or out of place or misfit. It was never true. It's not true now, although there are certainly things about birth trauma that have stayed with me all these years, and those are things I'm currently working on now. But it's been a lengthy process. I went from, okay, now I know the truth, big deal [00:15:00] to, okay, now I know what the truth is, and now I know why I am the way I am, and now I have the possibility to work on this and set things right as much as I can within myself. And part of that is being able to take ownership of the truth now, take ownership of my story instead of being ashamed. Oh my God, there must be something wrong with me. And I used to get threatened every time that I cried. And thinking that crying is a sign of some terrible kind of mental illness when it really isn't. And it's been a process, letting go of those falsehoods and adopting something that's, pardon the expression, adopting, taking possession of something that's healthier.
Haley Radke So how did you [00:16:00] get to that point of I noticed you're saying, adoption, trauma, birth trauma, the impact of being separated from your mother, you sound like you've done a lot of research on this and you understand that impact it can have now. How did you figure those things out? Are you like a researcher? Did you seek out other late discovery adoptees? What were some of your first things that you did once you thought, ooh, maybe adoption had an impact on me. Not just this secret keeping, but also did it have an impact on my mental and emotional wellbeing?
Bernie One of the first things that I did was I jumped on the internet and started looking for articles about adoptees and the first article that I came to that sounded like it would have some promise was “10 Things Adoptees Want You to Know” by Lesli Johnson [00:17:00] and so many of the bullet points there rang true with me. So I took the initiative and I wrote to her, if for no other reason, to say thank you. And she wrote back and we've been in communication with each other ever since. She's been open to hearing about my experiences. I almost feel as if I have to send her a check every time I send her an email, even though she's not formally a therapist of mine, because she's been so helpful.
Haley Radke Wow.
Bernie Also, although I was reluctant to do DNA testing because I had privacy concerns, I've always been something of a reticent private person. In fact, this interview is the most I have put myself out there ever. So this is a big leap for me. But I finally did the DNA testing and it confirmed 75% Italian, [00:18:00] 25% Irish. My adoptive family is Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. So that was confirmation right there. But as these different pieces came together, reading and connecting with people like Lesli and learning about things like EMDR, which had been used successfully for all kinds of trauma. I just started going deeper and deeper into this, and I finally got to the point where I realized, yes, they were my parents. Yes, they took care of me. But yes, there was also a lot of damage done and I've gotta find ways to fix it. One never knows how much time one has left, and it was important for me to get resolution to a lot [00:19:00] of things now. So one of the other things I did was I found a therapist locally who is trained in EMDR and that had a profound effect on me as well. After the first session, I came home and my wife said, “Your face looks so much more relaxed,” and neither of us realized that there had been any tension in it. And after several of them, the relaxation, from attention level, it went from way up here to way down here. And we never knew it was there before. So that was one way that I was able to process at least some of the trauma. Another thing I did was I learned about the book, The Primal Wound by Verrier and read it cover to cover, [00:20:00] and it was one of those books where I had to stop every few pages and just take a deep breath because everything that she described was absolutely right. It explained the separation anxiety that I experienced all those years. And again, it was validation. No, you weren't sick, you were ripped away from your birth mother, which under ideal circumstances should never happen to a child. And it explained the loss of the self. People would ask me, “Tell me, who are you?” And as funny as it sounds, I could never answer that question. I'm so and so many years old, I work in this profession. I list facts, but who am I? For years, I could never give an answer that I felt completely resonated with me because as I learned from Verrier, the self was never something that fully developed. I never had the chance to be comfortable and trusting with someone in the first two, three years of life where I could do all this [00:21:00] exploring. So one piece at a time, one resource at a time, one person at a time. And it's brought me to the point where I am today. And the point that I'm at today is I own this story. I wanna share this story very much. I'm writing right now. I hope to have it in a published form in the near future. And, whereas before, I only would speak about it with a handful of close confidants, and there's still some people I will not share the story with because I don't think it would be well received, I'm sharing it with more and more people. If I didn't feel confident about that I wouldn't be participating in this interview.
Haley Radke I'm curious, as you've shared your story, my bet is that you've been asked this question too many times, which is why I wasn't even gonna ask it. But I am. I'm going to, 'cause probably people are wondering too, you found out you were [00:22:00] adopted after both of your mom and dad had passed away. And so has there been, you mentioned a little bit, you hinted at this, but I'm wondering if there's been some processing that you've done. Have you thought about why they kept it a secret from you? Have you written them a letter perhaps, or, like all of those tips therapists give us to process things with someone that we're not able to actually have a conversation with. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Bernie I haven't sat down and wrote out my feelings to my adoptive parents. I think about what the whys and the wherefores might have been, why they might have kept it from me. And all I can do is speculate. Any reason I give is just conjecture. Maybe they were afraid that they would lose me if I knew the truth. [00:23:00] I would find a way to escape the situation somehow. I don't know how I might have done it, but maybe that's what they were afraid of. I wish I could somehow communicate to them. I have to believe that wherever they are now they certainly know that I know the truth, and the best that I can do is find people who have been in similar circumstances as mine and talk about our experiences together. There's a small group of people that I meet with on a regular basis, not a formal support group, but just people who have become good friends of mine. And we share our experiences with each other. And we talk about things like birth trauma and hyper vigilance and all of these other things that are [00:24:00] hallmarks of adoptees and and we're there for each other. And as I say, I have a therapist locally who is, though not necessarily an expert on adoption issues, is an expert on trauma and that's helped me tremendously and the writing that I'm doing also helps. I seem to have discovered, I studied mathematics when I was in college. I've spent 40 years in the IT industry, but I never realized until recently that I seem to have a knack for being able to write well and communicate ideas well, and that's helped. That's helped a lot. I guess my way of processing is putting things down on paper in a form that hopefully I can get polished enough that I can share with other people.
Haley Radke That just makes me excited to have more resources in the world from adoptees who really have worked [00:25:00] on things and processed things, and it sounds like you're really doing that. Okay. Let's shift, 'cause another thing I'm really curious about, you said you did DNA testing. Did you have thoughts of searching for your biological family?
Bernie Yes. Once I got the results back, I did a few initial forays through ancestry messaging on ancestry.com, but never got any responses back. One of the people who reached out to me on Ancestry turned out to be, and I apologize if she's listening, either a third cousin or a fourth cousin who actually lives in the same area that I live. And she said, can you help me on researching this and this? And I wrote back, I said, I'd love to help, but I'm adopted. So I need help finding out who these people are. So we got together one day for coffee and, [00:26:00] turns out she is a very serious amateur genealogist and based on the information I was able to provide plus what she already knew about her family, we traced back our common roots and ultimately she came up with, “On your mother's side, this is probably your birth mother, based on age and just some common sense criteria. This woman is too old and is too established, and she probably wouldn't be the person,” and did the same thing on the birth father's side. Unfortunately, my birth mother passed away in 2006, so contacting her directly was not an option. The gentleman whom I believe to be my birth father, who we're 100% certain about the birth mother, we're over [00:27:00] 90% certain about the birth father. I don't wanna say a hundred percent because I've tried to reach out to this person and he has refused contact. So on the very remote chance that we are wrong I wanna respect that and not say it's this person. But I've tried reaching out two or three times, both to him directly and to his son, and each time it's been met with silence. So I have to consider that to be a dead end. At one point, one of the friends who I meet with regularly, who is also an adoptee, said you might wanna try to reach out to the siblings, because a lot of times siblings are more receptive to being contacted. So I reached out to the siblings on my mother's side, five of them, four boys and a girl and I wrote letters because I didn't have any email addresses or any other contact information available to me. Within 48 hours, I got emails back from one of the brothers [00:28:00] and the wife of one of the other brothers, and they were able to help fill in a lot of the gaps based on the information they knew about their mother and the information I was able to provide about my history. We realized that each of us had correctly found the other person. So they knew that there was somebody out there that my mother had had before she got married. And from what I was able to tell them in my letters, they now knew that I was that person. Since then, I've had some communications with them. They've been very nice. They've been willing to share information. How much further the relationship goes beyond that? I don't know. It's not something I feel that I can push. I don't wanna put them into a corner where I'm demanding something of them that they don't feel that they're ready to give. But I'm grateful [00:29:00] for having found them. My sister-in-law is considered the historian of the family, and she was able to provide a lot of information and, when she asked certain questions about health related matters, and I was able to say yes I experienced this and yes, I experienced that. Oh, your brother was always, or your mother was always, there was a little bit more of a connection in that way as well. In fact, she even shared, and this is the first time I'd ever seen this, she shared a picture of my mother within two years after I was born. Apparently, my mother had shared with this sister-in-law and with her only daughter, the truth. Shortly after I was born, she met the man that ultimately became her husband for the rest of her life and shared that information with him, and it was not a deal breaker because they got married and went on to have five kids. Whether or not the other siblings knew about this [00:30:00] at the time that I sent the letters, I don't know. They most certainly know now, but I don't know what their feelings are about my being just this theoretical, without a name, without a face person that exists out there somewhere, to actually being a person with a name and with a face and with a shared history.
Haley Radke Older brother.
Bernie Yeah, I'm the older brother now and maybe they're not sure how they feel about that now. I don’t know-
Haley Radke Well I'm the secret older sister on my father's side, not anymore, but, my bio dad had to sit his kids down and say, oh, there was something when I was in high school. Yeah, that's a huge change. How much younger is your next step down sibling?
Bernie He is no more than about two years younger than me.
Haley Radke Okay. So they're [00:31:00] all, like your peers in age-
Bernie Oh yes.
Haley Radke Wow. So you talked about you don't wanna push and would like a relationship with them? Are you hoping for more details of things? I don't know. Just when you talked about this photo that you received of your mother, you lit up, like your face lit up and I, I don't know. Like I think for a lot of us, we get so little information that those things are so precious. So is there something that you hope for?
Bernie I do hope that as time goes on, they will be more open to more than just swapping emails. Right now, they certainly respond to every email that I send out, but I'm hoping that we can move beyond that [00:32:00] to maybe a phone conversation, maybe a Zoom meeting. I'd love to be able to meet with them in person if they're open to that. But right now as we are recording this, we are in the middle of a severe pandemic. That's out at least for the time being. Hopefully if somebody is listening to this, a year or two down the road, that will no longer be an issue. And we'll see.
Haley Radke From your lips to God’s ears.
Bernie Yeah, exactly.
Haley Radke Yeah. Yeah. I think that's interesting that this is another whole wrench in a lot of people's reunions right now. I was talking with a listener just a couple weeks ago, a Patreon supporter, and they mentioned I just found my family and we wanna get together, but they're in different countries, so they can't cross the border right now. And I think it's impacted a lot of people. Thank you for sharing your hopes. I think sometimes some of us are a little too scared to say those [00:33:00] things out loud, but we might be feeling them deep down, so I appreciate that. I mentioned right at the beginning some stereotypes that I have about late discovery adoptees. Is there anything that you've learned in the last couple years now about late discovery adoptees? I don't wanna group you all together, but if there's something that you would wanna share with other adoptees, like what are the best ways we could support you when you first find out and you're looking for community or any stereotypes you wanna break for us, any kind of things along those lines?
Bernie I don't know necessarily what some of the stereotypes are. I can tell you this. A friend of mine recently wrote an article for his community where he talked about validators and he defined a validator as someone who, [00:34:00] as the term implies, can validate your experience, can be with you and say, “Boy, remember when we were in high school, you and I went to whatever”, or “Remember that long night we had back when you and I were working for __ and we snuck out for a little while,” and when you get to a certain point in your life, you find that there are fewer and fewer validators. And that's true for people whether they were adopted or not, but having no adoptive family of that particular generation or previously to go to anymore, not really having too much of a birth family at this point in time, at least until they decide where they land in this whole thing, it gets lonely and I [00:35:00] think that that's the one thing that I would wanna get across to people is that it can be lonely sometimes. We who were separated from our biology are always looking for family. And I'll say “family" in quotation marks because I've searched for those kinds of deep, meaningful relationships in all kinds of venues. I've searched for them as a student. I've searched for them on the job. You don't necessarily find success in finding them, but you look for them wherever you can because your family of origin just isn't there for you. And that's something that stays with you even if you grew up in a good, quote, unquote, good home, there's still that existential [00:36:00] loneliness. There is still the separation anxiety, there is still the loss of the self and without having people with whom you started your first few moments of life there to validate you, to support you, to be there when you've been out in the wide world, sometimes wild world, and sought to make your your fortune, they're supposed to be the people that you can come home to who. Who take you in, who love you, who care about you. And it doesn't exist. And as you get older, that becomes more and more acute. And I hope people will take that message to heart. In my faith community, I put out a message that talked about how it's important for [00:37:00] people to be in touch with each other, especially in the time of pandemic and that it doesn't matter what you see their outside circumstances to be, unless you're really intimately familiar with the other person, you'll never know what their story is. Doesn't matter if they've got a lot of money, doesn't matter if they have a nice house, doesn't matter if they're working. Doesn't matter if they've got a big family. It doesn't matter if they're healthy. It doesn't matter if they look happy all the time. There might be things going on the inside that you don't know about. So when people are isolated it's all more important to reach out to them. And admittedly I wrote that from a place different from having to shelter in place and isolate from much of society because of present day circumstances. A lot of people don't know the story and sometimes it gets lonely out there. I guess that's the message and loneliness doesn't necessarily get any [00:38:00] better as the years go on.
Haley Radke That's really profound. I just finished reading My Name is Why by Lemn Sissay. I don't know if you've heard of him. He is a foster alum in the UK and he's a poet and he's written quite a bit and in My Name is Why he shares his documents from all of his social workers and things, all of his foster care information, and when he talks about this paperwork, that's the only connection he has to his memories. Those are the places he finds the validation, as you were mentioning, the people that were there and that families are the keepers of our memories. And so when Lemn was talking about this, these papers being his memory keepers, and they're written by [00:39:00] some social worker who’s just quickly writing up their paperwork for the day just to get home, it's very yikes. I don't know how that makes you feel when you hear me say that. It's definitely sobering. And so I thank you for sharing that perspective with us. I think it's really important to think about. Bernie, is there anything else that you really wanna tell us before we do our recommended resources?
Bernie The only thing I can add is birth trauma is real. It's a real thing. It has real world consequences. And I do not criticize people who go the adoption route. I know a number of people who have adopted wonderful people, wonderful kids, and I don't [00:40:00] come out as either being pro adoption or anti adoption. Those people who are considering it should look very carefully at the ramifications. I think it's important to understand that where we were back in the 1950s when I was adopted, we know so much more than we do today and we do a disservice to parents, to adoptive parents to birth parents and to the children if we don't fully understand before we make these life-changing decisions. I think that's my bottom line message. Get educated and understand fully, and if you can successfully navigate those waters, you will have a much better chance that all three sides of this triangle [00:41:00] will come out the better for it. It may not necessarily be perfect, but it will be better.
Haley Radke Well said. Thank you. Yeah, I, I don't know if you know this, but I still have adoptive parents send me emails and say, oh, when's the best time to tell your kid you're adopted? And one of them I think her daughter was like nine years old. I thought, yeah, it's probably a few years ago. Don't keep secrets. That's my tip for anyone who's listening. Okay. Let's go do our recommended resources, and I'm gonna let you go first. What did you wanna recommend to us today, Bernie?
Bernie I can't speak highly enough about Lesli Johnson. People who listen to this podcast are already familiar with her of course. If they are not, Lesli is a marriage and family therapist in Pasadena, [00:42:00] California. She is the first person I reached out to to get information about what I should do on this journey. I consider her an ally. I consider her a good friend. The Huff Post article “10 Things Adoptees Want You to Know” is a great starting point. And if you want to know more about her, you can go to her website, which is yourmindfulbrain.com.
Haley Radke I love Lesli. I'll co-sign that. She was the very first therapist that I had on the podcast and she's been so generous with her wisdom on the show. She's been on a lot of times, and I'll make sure to link to Lesli's info in the show notes as well as that article that you're mentioning the “10 Things Adoptees Want You to Know”. I have those both and I will drop those in the show notes. [00:43:00] So I've had a couple other late discovery adoptees on the show, but not too many and in that time, I found one other resource that I want to recommend, and this is actually Canadian. I'm Canadian. Did you know that? Not everybody knows. I have to keep mentioning it every once in a while. A Canadian named Megan, she's a registered therapeutic counselor and she does a lot of art therapy and I actually have one of the mugs that she made. I'll show it to you here. It's beautiful. It says, “The roots are there even if you can't see them,” and at the very bottom of the mug, it shows this huge root ball underneath this fur tree that's on the side of the mug. And it's one of my most prized adoptee-made possessions. I ordered it from her, but I wanted to mention her because she's started a website called latediscoveryadoptees.com, and [00:44:00] she has a couple of different programs. Now I think that she found out later in life that her father was actually her adoptive father so that's her connection with adoption. But the programs she's doing are for late discovery adoptees, and they're very art centered. She calls it expressive arts. And so if that's something that you're interested in, I think she's a cool connection to find. And she's got some free things on her website that you can check out. And of course, as Bernie was mentioning, he's done EMDR and those kinds of therapies, and Lesli is so good at those and Lesli does brain spotting. She'll even do brain spotting online, like through video, which is really cool. So I love that there's the scientifically proven things and then also for the creatives, there's other ways of finding connection and therapy. [00:45:00] Anyway, so that's what I wanted to bring to you, and I will link to that website and Megan's Instagram account which has some other photos of her other art and a couple other mugs that you can check out as well.
So that's my recommendation this week. Thank you so much, Bernie. It was such an honor chatting with you and thanks for sharing your story with us.
As Bernie shared with us, he's very private online, but he's open to connecting with you via email. And his email address is adopteebernie@comcast.net, and I will put that in the show notes for you.
It is National Adoption Awareness Month as this episode releases, and good grief, I hope I'm not the first person to share that with you so far, but I would ask that you consider supporting adoptee voices with your social media shares this month, with your blog posts, with your friends and [00:46:00] family. And another way to make sure adoptee voices are heard loudly above the fray is to support adoptee creators with a financial gift. If you've benefited from listening to adoptee voices on this podcast, I welcome your monthly support over on adopteeson.com/partner, where I think the benefits are fun and helpful. If you're not adopted, but have learned from me and my guests, consider a one-time gift via PayPal, and the link is in the show notes and on the front page of adopteeson.com. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
