173 [Healing Series] Estrangement Part 2

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/173

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke, and this is a special episode in our Healing Series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee. Today we are continuing last week's conversation about estrangement. Let's listen in.

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

Pam Cordano, MFT: Thank you. Hi to you and hi to everybody.

Haley Radke: So I gave you a hard time last time. We're probably still going to talk about hard things.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Probably since the subject is hard.

Haley Radke: Yeah. So we are talking about estrangement, and last time we talked about some of the deeper-rooted causes for estrangement and why we would choose that. [00:01:00] Why sometimes it's our adoptive parents that choose that on our behalf. I want to continue that conversation. One of the things you mentioned was that you had a two-year estrangement from your adoptive parents. What made you decide to go back and reconnect? How did that happen for you?

Pam Cordano, MFT: I had really good reasons for choosing the estrangement, and my reasons were good enough that they could have lasted for the rest of my parents' lives. I had enough reason to have a permanent estrangement with my adoptive parents but, oh, the truth is, it cost me a lot. For me personally. Being in a state of estrangement with them cost me a lot. It wasn't so hard with my dad. He wasn't much of a parent to me and I hated him, but my mom was a mixed bag [00:02:00]. She required a lot. It was hard to be her daughter in a lot of ways. It was exhausting in a lot of ways. But there was also a kind of generosity she gave me. Like I mentioned in our last session, I was bonded to her in a certain way. I came to them when I was six months old and she kept me alive, so there was something there in me connected to, attached to her. I remember being estranged for those two years and I hated that I was so uncomfortable being apart, being that far apart from them. I was like two people at once, and I think that's often how adoptees feel. Like there's two or more parts of us that are in a terrible kind of competition. So the older, principal part of me was like, I have every right to not be in a relationship with these people. And with my mom, it was because she was still in a relationship with my dad, like what he had done wasn't so [00:03:00] bad for her that she would leave him. So she, in my mind, was betraying me. So there's that part of me that felt older and more in my head, like more principled, more in my mind. But at this very deep, young core part of me, it was unbearable to have made a break like that with them. It's like in that place where there isn't language–the younger than language place–that part of me didn't have the language even for arguments, but just felt lost and alone and frightened and untethered. I already was aware I was untethered from my biological family, but then untethered from the only people that I had any kind of family relationship with. I had my adoptive parents and me, the only child, and my mom and dad were both only children also, so I didn't have aunts or uncles or cousins or anybody. So I was on this planet alone with no family. [00:04:00] They were my only family. So there was something I felt inside of me that felt like it was really hard to be estranged.

So I did a lot of therapy in those two years and I worked really hard and I grew, but I also at some point realized: Okay, fine. I want my mom back in some limited capacity and he comes with the package. So I got more grounded in what I can really expect from either of them. My dad, nothing. My mom, not much. So that's where I was more prepared to go back into a limited kind of relationship. Because it was when I had expected things to be right, that it didn't work out. And they weren't going to be right. So I made a decision to go back in where things were not right and they were not going to be right but I still wanted a limited kind of relationship with them. And I don't regret it, which is good to know. [00:05:00]

Haley Radke: So you had a period of two years where you were fully estranged. And then did you stay in relationship with them for the rest of their lives?

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yes, in a limited way.

Haley Radke: Limited way, yeah. So here's a comment, I mentioned before in our last episode that I had asked listeners to give me some comments on if they had ever considered estrangement from their adoptive families. And so here's another note from a listener: “I have a superficial relationship with my adoptive parents. We have long periods of silence, sometimes years. I've grown to accept it for what it is now, and I'm okay with “playing along” for their egos’ sake.” [00:06:00] So when you're talking about your relationship and seeing other adoptees who do stay in relationship, what's your experience with something like this? Saying that you have a superficial relationship? It sounds like this person is doing that to protect themselves in some fashion.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Right. And so I think. with everybody in our lives, getting clear on what's actually a reality and what's actually possible and what isn't, is fundamental. Because if we're confused about what's possible, like for me to try to get my dad to take some responsibility in the breakdown of our relationship from my infancy, for which he held me responsible, I'm just going to be exhausting myself, frustrating myself. I'm going to be out of touch with reality. He's not going to do that. He's not going to get it. And then trying to get my mom to get it in her role in the whole thing, she's not going to get it. Before I could reunite with them, I had to really get clear on what was not possible so that then I could only relate where things were possible. And I think a lot of times that's what we call superficial. Superficial relationships are where only a limited amount is [00:07:00] really possible in the relationship. And so that's where we stay because the cost of a full estrangement sometimes is too hard. Other times it's the only thing that's going to work.

Haley Radke: You expressed this to me before, and I don't think we were on record then, but that something needed to change. If it isn't going to be the adoptive parents' perspective, actions, behavior, all that, then it has to be us. We have to change. And so what does that mean?

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. That really is about getting clear on what really is and isn't possible. Like if our parents or families, if anybody in our lives lacks capacity in some way, it really helps us to get clear that that's just the case, and then we can make new decisions about that. [00:08:00]

Haley Radke: Yeah. So I have this quote on the superficial relationship. I have someone else that said, which I thought was really profound actually: “I'm in contact with my adoptive parents but I'm emotionally estranged.” I thought, Man, that's a good line–emotionally estranged. And the buzzword we always say is the “boundaries.” So if you're still choosing to be in relationship but it's only going to be safe for you and look a certain way–like I only allow them access to my external life and not my internal feelings, etc. I have lots of experience and notes here. Here's what I'll share about my personal experience: my psychologists have coached me for many years in relationships with all kinds of people, saying which people are in which circle of your life, [00:09:00] right? And like the outside, you're only sharing what the weather is like with these people in the big circle. And then your smallest circle, your inner safe people, they can know that inner life for us, our feelings and thoughts and like the true Haley, right? So looking at those circles, is that what you're getting at? That knowledge of which level of circle can you safely be in with your adoptive parents?

Pam Cordano, MFT: Right, and I think the process of figuring that out can be complicated. I know a lot of adoptees who just keep hitting their head against the same wall, just trying to get their adoptive parents to change and get it. So I wanted my mom to protect me from my dad, from his rage and from his rejection and from his meanness. From the time I was four, I can remember arguing and arguing with my adoptive mom to protect me from my dad. [00:10:00] I was just angry with her all the time and telling her what she should have said, what she should have done, what she's not doing right, all the time. To keep doing that was awful. But as I got to be an adult, it was better at some level than just stopping the madness and feeling the truth. And the truth is, I grew up with a scary, enraged man who didn't protect me and with a woman who chose him over me in these situations. And what did that feel like? That felt terrifying and all these terrible things. That's the feeling that's going to get me out of the repetitive pattern of trying to get her to do this thing that she's never done.

So when you talked about the circles of who can you have close in and who can you have kind of in, and more further out? When we have confusion about that we have the wrong people too close in and the right people too far out to get clear on where people really belong [00:11:00] relative to us. If we keep repeating a pattern over and over again, probably we could stop and maybe with the help of a therapist go in and feel what the problem actually feels like. And by feeling that problem–this goes back to the end of our last conversation–by really feeling the place that we're suffering and that we've been suffering and that we don't know what to do about it and the helplessness of all of that, and the grief and everything else, that is like a doorway into the power of a new decision. Then we could have different boundaries that we could actually uphold or maintain because we're not avoiding this awful feeling. We've discovered that we can feel it and we can come through it in some other way.

Haley Radke: I think, gosh, it's so easy for me to be the adoptee and to be pointing at the other people to [00:12:00] change, and coming back to, well, most people don't change. That's just the reality. Just in general. In life most people stay stagnant. And I wouldn't say that's true of my listeners because a lot of you, I know, are in therapy and are working on things and you are constantly moving forward. And so then, when we're in relationship with people who aren't doing that and are staying stagnant, coming back to Okay well, I guess my next thing is strengthening my own person and being in a place where it does feel safe that I can hold those boundaries. I think what I've heard from adoptees is like, I'm so busy working on who I really am. I don't have the capacity to be holding those boundaries to protect myself. So that's when relationship is just off the table. It's not a safe thing.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah, I loved how [00:13:00] you said “strengthening my person” because the cool thing about when we strengthen our person, then we can better support estrangement that feels right to us and we can better support not-estrangement if that feels right to us. If we can really direct traffic more clearly from that hard work of strengthening our person.

Haley Radke: Here's a couple more notes from people. “I'm not estranged, but I have limited contact”, so that felt good to them. And another said: “I'm completely estranged. It was my choice and I've never felt more free.” And then a third: “I haven't considered estrangement. They're not perfect but they're trainable.” I tell you, I cackled when I first read that one. I was like, they're “trainable!” And then the last one I'm going to share is: “I am distanced from both my adoptive parents and bio family [00:14:00] because I need space to grow my own family and to be myself.” Aren't those all expressions of the same sort of thing, like all of them?

Pam Cordano, MFT: Right. What makes me so excited is when I see adoptees filling out the space of who they are, whatever that means. Whether they're full of passion about something or whether they're full of rage about something, or hope or grief. When I see adoptees filling out their own space and being more fully who they are, then I just feel like they're on the right track. That's when they're on the right track, and we can feel it when we're around people where we want to shrivel in, we want to go into hiding and put on a false face, and speak with a false voice and say false things, and say “yes” when we mean “no.” Say “no” when we mean “yes.” And we feel what [00:15:00] that feels like; it's like this shrinking in. Anne Heffron and I are teaching these Flourish classes twice a week. We have got over 50 adoptees altogether in these classes. And that is such a theme: adoptees taking up space and risking saying things and verbalizing things, finding their own voices, and that's going to be supported and not offensive or hurtful or wrong and bad, somehow.

Haley Radke: So I know we are all in very different spots, but can you teach us a little bit about when would we know–if we are already estranged–that we could reconnect? If that should even be on the table? And then what are some things that we could see that this is a no-go zone? Like this is never going to work. [00:16:00] Can you speak to that a little bit? I don't want it to be prescriptive. Because we're all in so many very unique situations, I know this will be high level, but maybe some questions we could ask ourselves to assess, to figure that out.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Well, let's see. The people I know who are estranged felt so sick from their interactions. It was like drinking poison. So sick, like more sick than they could tolerate and bear, so sick that when they would get off the phone or get away from an in-person meeting, they would have to recover and it would be hard to do the daily functioning of their lives. Like really sick. And different things make us feel sick differently. So I think that if you–meaning listeners– are feeling [00:17:00] that the cost of a phone conversation or of an in-person time together is just so terrible to your systems. And if you find yourself just wanting to cancel every time you get together with or talk to anybody or making up excuses saying you're sick when you're not, or whatever. And it just may be something to think about. Either more boundaries need to be put into place. Maybe you need a therapist to help you do that and figure that out and how to verbalize it. And, how to work with your particular parents so that you can verbalize it in a way that's actually effective and gets through and maybe minimizes drama.

But also, sometimes people just know that the only way to save myself is to get completely out. I think there's a knowing there, and it isn't necessarily an objective situation like, well, if this and that and this and that, then definitely get out. It's not external. It's internal. We know that point where it's: Okay, either we're gonna die in this situation, [00:18:00] we're gonna get sick, we're gonna whatever, or we have to get out to save ourselves. And then you asked about getting back and how do we know when to get back? Sometimes if we're doing our own work during an estranged period and we start to feel a shift in us to like, You know what? I think if she does that again, I think I could handle it. If he does this or doesn't do that, I think I could handle it differently. Maybe it's worth checking out. If there starts to be an openness inside of us, that's a sign. Or if they're also doing their work, they're writing letters and saying, Look, we're thinking about this differently. We're seeing a therapist. We're thinking about what you've said. We're understanding you differently. We're not all the way there yet, but we'd really like to open up some communication even if it's the form of letter writing or some kind of compromise. Then, you know you've got people who are willing to go through some pain to grow and change and open to reunite with you. So that's something, maybe. It depends on the [00:19:00] family, of course. But that's something. So externally, there might be some signs that some work is being done and that there's a devotion in place that might be worth revisiting. Maybe only in a therapist's office, or with a third party, or something. Or maybe very slowly. Slow is good. Slow is really good.

Haley Radke: On purpose, I chose, based on requests from listeners, like many multiple requests to talk about estrangement from adoptive parents. On purpose, this series is about that. And we've covered so many times about reunions breaking down with first families. Like so many times. And so, it's like I have a handle on that. Like, guys, do it slow. It can be a rollercoaster. It's all like ups and downs. So to hear you flip it with adoptive parents, the reconnection, it's just like we know a [00:20:00] lot of these things, and yet it just feels like such a different angle. I don't know. That's what's going through my head.

Pam Cordano, MFT: That’s true. It is a different angle. It's so similar but so different at the same time. In some ways easier, in some ways harder, it seems. Meaning we can easily make this case that we're not even related to you anyway, so who cares? It's like this is all a lie. I've heard people say that. That may make it easier, but the harder part is that there was some measure of bonding when we were too little to even have a choice about it because we had needs and they met our needs enough that we're still alive. So that's in place inside of our bodies as a thing. We don't have that with our biological families the same way.

Haley Radke: And for so many of us that did grow up in the average, safe-ish, “normal” kind of home, those people are the [00:21:00] keepers of our memories as well, right? They have the pictures and the family home videos and all those kinds of things from our childhood. So sometimes estrangement can bring out a feeling of loss of all those things, even like physical artifacts. Especially when you're searching for identity, you want to cling. Cling onto that.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah, I'll take anything. Anything.

Haley Radke: Gosh, yeah, so many layers to this. I appreciate it so much. You've given us so many good insights. Is there anything that I didn't ask you about? Anything you really think we need to hear? Anything else? And again, I don't want to say estrangement is the right thing to do, or it's wrong and you really should try and be reconnecting. It's not meant to be that. We're really just talking about this so you know you're not alone, so we're making wise choices, so we're not [00:22:00] stuffing the feelings down, even though I really like to do that. Anything else?

Pam Cordano, MFT: The last thought I have is that it's terribly uncomfortable, but also possibly real and true that when we are estranged or partially estranged or emotionally estranged, neither side feels comfortable. It isn't that estrangement feels good per se, it's just that it feels less bad than being in a relationship or fuller relationship. That's part of the cost of coming out of the fog, right? It's like this feeling, for maybe a long time sometimes, that nothing really feels comfortable. When I was in my twenties or thirties, who I was at that time, I might have wanted to feel good in estrangement. I tried to feel good during my two-year estrangement. Like I had to have it be black and white in that way. But [00:23:00] the truth is, it didn't feel good. But it was for those two years until it wasn't better than being in a relationship. So I think we have to be prepared to have both sides be uncomfortable, in and out. Again, it's the same theme, Haley. Because the thing is, if we think we're going to feel good when we're finally estranged, then we could be surprised by sudden terrible feelings and then feel really sorry.

Haley Radke: I just think you're in for a rude awakening. [00:24:00]

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. You're in for a rude awakening. Yeah. And sometimes, I guess, the boat has to rock a while, right? Like, Phew, I'm so glad I'm outta that mess. Finally, I'm gonna have a party. I'm gonna get a cake, and make it my anti-adoption cake, or something. And then it's like the boat rocks the other way: Oh my God, it's Tuesday, 8:00 a.m., and I'm drunk and I've called in sick. And it's like, What happened!? And then, the boat rocks again. I'm just saying it's been hard for me. That neither side feels good. Even with my parents dying and the relief I felt, it still doesn't feel good because I still went through it all. So it's hard. I like feeling good, Haley, I do. I'm just saying, but I also don't like the sneak attack of I thought I had this, I thought it was solid, and then, oh my gosh, here I am not solid again.

Haley Radke: Oh, well, now, you all know Pam loves to talk about how you feel in your body. Okay. And when I say my stomach has been churning. It's true. It's always coming back. If you don't deal with it, it's always coming back. So thank you for challenging us.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Next time you have me on the show, why don't we do a light topic? Let's do a light one next time.

Haley Radke: Well, I can give you some [00:25:00] behind-the-scenes secrets. I can do that. I have been considering how to have a show that's all jokes. Now, we don't like people making adoption jokes, but adoptees, let's tell our own jokes. I don't know. That’s been on the whiteboard for a long time because I don't know how to do that.

Pam Cordano, MFT: That's a great one. I love it.

Haley Radke: So there you go. Next time Pam will be back and telling us some jokes. So Good. Where can we connect with you online so we can learn more from you? And please also tell us about your book.

Pam Cordano, MFT: You can find me at my website, pamcordano(dot)com, and my book is called 10 Foundations for a Meaningful Life (No Matter What's Happened). I published it last January, so it's been a year and a month ago, and that's been a fun journey, for sure.

Haley Radke: Thank you for walking us through this, even though it's hard.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Thanks for having me. I've been able to see your face [00:26:00] during this conversation in the cringes and the, yeah, I know.

Haley Radke: Hey! Don't sell me out.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Poker face.

Haley Radke: It's okay. Listen, it's the whole thing. There's all the feelings. So you're listening to this and having hard feelings? I'm with you.

Gosh, I'm so thankful. So thankful for the therapists that come and show up for us and give us so many interesting things to talk about, think about. Even if they're hard, even if they're asking us to do hard things, I think it's so important. So thank you so much, Pam and the other therapists who have been on the healing series, I really appreciate it deeply. They've taught me so much and sometimes when I'm re-listening to make notes to give to my editor, I'm just like, Man, was I there? Because I feel like I'm learning this all over again. So [00:27:00] I understand why some of you download these episodes a few times to re-listen. I get it. Me too.

I just want to ask a favor of you today. If you know of an adoptee who has been experiencing some challenges in relationship with their adoptive parents, I wonder if you would share these two Healing Series episodes on estrangement with them. And again, it's not a comment on, you should break up with your parents. It's not that. It's like looking at what is healthy for us and what can we do to heal a relationship, or when do we need to know when it's not the time? So if you know someone that's been struggling with that, I think this would be really helpful to share with someone like that. So if you think of that person in your head, maybe as I was talking, and you're like, Oh my gosh, I know exactly who I should share this with! Then you can [00:28:00] teach them how to download a podcast. Not everybody knows how and you know how. So if you are able to show them where they can listen, the podcast is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, any podcast app people like to use. You should be able to find it there searching Adoptees On. It's also on YouTube and there's no video. But sometimes just sending a link to a YouTube video is easy if someone is not used to downloading a podcast in an app. So you can find it there as well.

I'm so thankful for those of you who share the show on social media or however you do it, one-on-one, with a friend or in your adoptee support groups. I hear a lot of you talk about these episodes with your support group and kind of unpack things together, which I think is so smart, so brilliant. I love to unpack some of the things I'm trying to learn when I'm doing these interviews, so thank you for sharing in that way. And [00:29:00] you're helping build the community when you do that. So I really appreciate it.

That's it. If you want to join Patreon and support the show financially, adopteeson.com/partner has all the details. And thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

172 [Healing Series] Estrangement Part 1

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/172

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke. This is a special episode in our Healing Series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee. Today we are talking about estrangement. Let's listen in.

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

Pam Cordano, MFT: Thank you. Hi.

Haley Radke: One of our all -time favorite therapists, and I love bringing you on to talk about cheery subjects. We talk about anger and all kinds of hard things and today we're going to talk about estrangement. Hey, don't you love being that cheery person to come and tell us about estrangement?

Pam Cordano, MFT: Oh gosh. It's a big topic.

Haley Radke: It is a big topic. It is. [00:01:00]

Pam Cordano, MFT: No way to make it simple.

Haley Radke: No, it's so true. It's so painful and I'm joking about it and I'll probably joke about it later and laugh about it because it's awkward, it's painful. We both have experiences with this and so it's personal. There's lots of feelings and we're just going to do our best.

Pam Cordano, MFT: So all we can do is do our best with a messy, complicated topic.

Haley Radke: I have heard from lots of us, lots of adoptees, that they are estranged. And today we're specifically focusing on estrangement from our adoptive families. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know you're in the community. I know you've heard from tons of us, myself included. You've been on the other end of that phone call.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah, it's a big topic and I think that when adoptees come out of the fog and they start to become disillusioned with what's happened to them and what their own adoptions have cost them as far as [00:02:00] losing their lineage, losing their birth family, losing a culture, a country, the terms of the adoption, things they might not have been told, lies, coverups, whatever. And just to learn more about the adoption industry itself and corruption and things like that. I think that's a place where the relationship with their adoptive family can feel more unsolid and in danger than it's ever felt before. At least, it can be very stressful for their relationship with their adoptive family. But often what I hear about is much more than the word stressful. It's feeling disgusted or betrayed. These are strong words, I shouldn’t even say them, but feelings of disgust with their adoptive families or feeling betrayed by them, enraged with them. Just really needing to embark on their own journey of finding out who their first family is and possibly visiting a country that they might have been born in or been from but they've never been to before. Or just really going out and [00:03:00] embarking on this self-discovery journey to find the truth and to get grounded for the first time in a new way in who they really are and always have been, at some level. And that can just really throw a lot of chaos into their relationship with their adoptive family. So that's a point. And then of course there's a reunion where we find our birth parents and the stress and strain that can put into the relationship with our adoptive families. And it just seems like it can get very complicated and dangerous for the relationship.

Haley Radke: I've heard those things too. Those are big pain points for people and the first one you expressed, so coming out of the fog and we're learning to look at our adoption, like the real impact it's had on us and looking at it from a point of grief and loss and trauma and all those things.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Anger.

Haley Radke: Anger, yes. And then imagine expressing that to the people [00:04:00] that adopted you and thought they were doing the right thing and probably had no idea of all these external factors. We're talking to adult adoptees here from a broad range of ages. You know adoption's history. People would say things have improved. I don't know if I agree with that or not, but years and years ago adoptive parents had no idea. Maybe adoptive parents today have maybe a little bit of a better idea of ethical issues in adoption. Maybe they don't. That's a debate for another day. But imagine expressing those feelings to the people who participated in this industry.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Right. And in some ways, it can be easier to focus on the factual pieces like “What made you want to do it this way?” or “Why didn't you ask these questions?” These pieces of the story that we might talk with our adoptive parents about. But I think that the really hard thing is the underneath stuff that we don't even have [00:05:00] language for about what it has been like for us to lose our lineage and to not be with them. Most of us, all of us have a profound feeling in ourselves of being unwanted and there being something wrong with us and trying to say that to people who did everything that they could to make us feel the opposite. This rude awakening that's so deep in our own systems, and I'm sure in a way in the systems of our adopted parents too. How do we even navigate the feelings? We come out of the fog and things start to get shaky. Like how do we even navigate that with people who aren't adopted? Who could possibly understand what it's like? And so even when everyone has the best of intentions, it just puts this barrier in place. I think trying to work this out with our–I'm gonna say this: “parents.” This is part of the estrangement, right? That [00:06:00] there's a point where we can put quotes around parents. Well, which parents? And suddenly what was just a given is now a question. Are these my parents? Are these my “parents”? Are these people that I can disentangle myself from? Do I have a real parent somewhere else? Am I going to get better care and love from them? Are they going to get it more than my adoption parents do because they went through a loss with me? And wouldn't that be amazing if we could join there and my whole being could be understood and received and I could finally settle down and relax a bit and feel safe. That's like the wish, the dream. But how are we supposed to find that when everything's gone into upheaval?

Haley Radke: And then addressing that with the context of search and reunion. Adding that layer. From what I've seen, people wrote in to me and said, “Actually, I searched and reunited, but my adoptive parents were so mad. They're the ones that cut off contact.” And so I know that's not true for everyone, but [00:07:00] those feelings are so big. I think of that feeling of, “Well, now I'm really being replaced by my adopted child's first family.”

Pam Cordano, MFT: Right. And for us, we're like, “Boohoo, our whole life has been this.” Is this comparable pain? For adoptees it's often we feel like: Grow up and be parents. Be steady for us. Don't be children, be parents so we can finally get down to the truth of the pain we're in and find a way to try to start addressing it differently.

Haley Radke: In your experience, do you think we are actually having these conversations with our adoptive parents and it's leading to a strain and perhaps eventually to estrangement? Or are often these things, the unsaid things, that lead us to the path of estrangement? Because I tell you, I have had many conversations about this and I ask what was the breaking point? What was the thing? What was the [00:08:00] last thing? A few people have been like, “Oh, we had this big fight about such and such, but really it was all this buildup.” Or some people will just be like, “There was no big fight. That was it for me.” I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?

Pam Cordano, MFT: I think the same for me. I hear about big conflicts where finally there's a point in time where the heat comes out about everybody's upset about this or that, or “you never–” and “you always–.” And finally the stress and strain really just come out and shows itself in a way that feels irreparable. But normally, I think that there's just so much that isn't said or that's said in a twisted-up kind of way or in a partial kind of way. In a way that's how adoptees often grow up, not really saying the whole truth. And we're trying to stay safe and be loved. Even the adoptees I know who were the “angry adoptees” like I was and were rebellious and troublemakers. [00:09:00] We were also still making sure we had a place to sleep and food on the table. Maybe some of us get sent away to boarding school or something, but I didn't. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that so much is unsaid in the adoptee, in almost all cases that I know of, so that when things get so stressed and strained, whether it's because of reunion or whether it's because of some other event–like who knows? It could be anything–that often there isn't a practice inside of us adoptees or in our families of talking through things in a really thorough, grounded kind of way. So the explosions are much more like partial communications about things that are really important, but really charged. It’s just totally messy.

Haley Radke: So I asked on Instagram a few weeks ago when I started releasing episodes about the estrangement series. I asked listeners if they had ever considered estrangement from their adoptive parents. [00:10:00] And some of the answers were really heartbreaking to me and fascinating. I think we can learn a lot from them. One person said: “I've seriously considered it but I can't do it. Must be grateful. Face palm emoji.” Seriously considered it. So what would make people seriously consider it? We've talked about these relationship dynamics that are very hard and very painful, especially when we're finally exposing our true identity, I think.

Pam Cordano, MFT: What I hear from adoptees is that adoption feels like too much you, not enough me. Like the experience of being adopted itself: it's too much you and not enough me in the relationship. And even when adoptees are rebellious and angry, they're still organizing to this you. Their life is about rebelling from this you, or when they're being compliant and [00:11:00] grateful, they're very attentive to the you. And so when we grow up and we start getting healthier or the cost of being you-centered starts to weigh on us in different ways–we get sick or we have other kinds of problems that show up from being too you-centered in our lives– then pretty much we either get worse or we start to heal because there's a crisis there with however it's showing up. And so when people get a little healthier and they get more filled in with what's me? What do I need? There's an I in here that needs to feel seen and understood and respected and loved and cared for. When we try to bring more of our own true selves into the relationship with our adoptive parents and if it doesn't go well in various ways that's where we can feel like, “I can't do this. This is toxic for me. These people are toxic for me. I can't be comfortable in my skin when I'm around these people.” And that's what I [00:12:00] hear about a lot from adoptees with how they feel when they start to bring the range of their true selves into the relationship and where it's not received or the parents feel threatened or they're judging them in some way and not getting what's trying to be expressed. And then the adoptee can just feel like, “I'm better off without this.” Although that's just part of the picture because then there's a tremendous cost for us, also. This is opening up another related subject, but even when we leave painful or unhealthy relationships, especially with family members, it costs us a lot as adoptees. The leaving, the breaking, the ending has got its own whole host of problems that come from reliving that experience of a broken relationship. The cost of that is tremendous on us.

Haley Radke: Estrangement can seem from the outside, maybe, like an easy “quick fix.” [00:13:00] Right? Fine, that's it. I'm just ending it. But there is an intense cost, is what you're saying.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Totally. And it often comes after the adrenaline and the mobilization of “I'm outta here. I'm just drawing the line.” And calling your friends to say I drew the line. I'm done. I'm out. Yay. Good for you. I'm changing my name. Good for you. And by the way, I'm a fan of changing the name right now. I'm all about that. I'm very excited about that. I'm not knocking that at all. I'm just saying that there can be this mobilization of energy to save ourselves from this toxic situation where we don't exist enough in the relationship, but then that gets followed by a cost because–and that's not a reason not to do it–it's just to try to be thorough about the whole picture. I think that it takes a big toll on us. How could it not? Like we have the most profound experience of a broken set of relationships you could possibly have as a human being: to lose your lineage, to get separated away, [00:14:00] cut off from your lineage. So every cutoff from that point on, whether we're in first grade and we break up with a friendship or romantic breakups or whatever, they take a lot out of us adoptees because those breaks reverberate back to the beginning. And it's just like with grief, like when non-adoptees lose somebody, every grief after that brings back the first grief. That's just how we are as humans. They're all linked. They all link together.

Haley Radke: So I'm going to read another note that I got from an adoptee about this, and this is going to feel really strong. This is strong language. This is what people are really thinking on the inside and probably wouldn't say out loud. Okay.

“I wish I could leave them behind and never look back. I feel obligation only. I'm biding my time until they die, and that makes me feel overwhelming guilt. But I might be able to live my own life when they pass away.”

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah, [00:15:00] I hear that. I hear that from so many adoptees. And this is so taboo. We're not supposed to say these things.

Haley Radke: Can I tell you, reading that out loud made me feel guilty. I'm tearing up. I know adoptive parents listen to this podcast and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings.”

Pam Cordano, MFT: Well, the thing about guilt like what you're saying now and what that person said in what you read–what's hard is that the adoptees who I hear say this are good people. They're good people, and they're just trying to find a way to be able to breathe in their skin and in their life. They're trying to find a way they can feel like they are more comfortable in their life and in their skin. Two things are in conflict. One thing is: I need to feel comfortable in my skin. I need to feel like I belong somehow to the life I'm [00:16:00] living in a way that is not so compromised that it's just choking me and suffocating me. But the point isn't to be mean to the adoptive parents and to kill them off or to not even care when they die. That's not the point. The point is the existence as an adoptee, with so much being underground and misunderstood or un-understood, the pain of that is so hard that to imagine a time when we don't have to suck ourselves into ourselves so tight that we're not even really there to interact with people. We're just longing for that relief. So it's these two things. We feel guilty for what we're saying, but we also know that there's like a liberation that comes from–. I hate talking about this publicly. I have and I will and I hate it just because of what you just said about how you felt reading that statement. But I had such relief when my adoptive parents died. It was eight years ago that they both died close together. I'm an only child and I felt like the [00:17:00] charade is over. I am now free. I don't have any adoptive parents. Like I could say, in a way, I'm not an adoptee, I'm a person. I still am because it still affected me and it's informed my life in every way. But I was free of it and I had this feeling as if I'd been swimming across this giant ocean for 40 something years and finally I got to shore. That's how I felt when they died. Because finally I felt like a real person, like the real me. Like I was a person that wasn't eclipsed by this adoption thing that I didn't even choose for myself or want. It was liberating. But that's more about me and my own internal suffering than, “Oh, my adoptive mom was so bad.” “My adoptive dad was so bad.” It is just less them. And so the problem is if we say something like this in a mixed crowd, we can look like we're just hating on our adoptive parents. And maybe we kind of are. But I [00:18:00] really think that the point is we need to feel comfortable inside and sometimes requires a full being away from through death or through estrangement to find, “Oh, this is just me here and this is what it feels like to be just me. Like I can breathe for a second. Wow.” And then we can learn from that freedom.

Haley Radke: I appreciate what you said just there, because I think now I'm seeing a much bigger spectrum of estrangement. It's like there's some people that choose it just so they can be themselves. And there's people that choose it because of obvious abuse and horrible behavior. And then in the middle, there's the people–I don't think I've released this interview yet but someone expressed to me that it's like his adoptive parents were really good people and really good about certain things. And then they were also really horrible about certain things. Like the “both.” And so it's okay to [00:19:00] see them as both, and it just wasn't safe to be in relationship with them anymore. So this is a huge spectrum.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. My adoptive parents were not bad people. If I had been their biological child, I'm sure it would've been fine. But to not be their biological child, and then with all the complexity, my trauma, their unawareness. It was a kind of a disaster, a disaster inside of me.

Haley Radke: Let's go towards the middle of that spectrum. So yeah, your parents are good people, pretty fine, whatever, but there's things that they do that are just like eating away, I would say. So boundary crossing, things that looking back on it, you're like, “That's not great.” There's some things that are just eating away at you. How does somebody come to the point where they're like, “You know what, [00:20:00] I'm kind of done with this.” How do you come to that point? I think I've said this a couple times in this series too: I don't want to just advise everybody that they break up with their families. I'm not advocating for that either. I just want adoptees to feel like they're free to be themselves and they feel like they're in healthy relationships. Is that so much to ask?

Pam Cordano, MFT: Right. You and I want ourselves and all adoptees to feel like we have a say, that we have power in our choices, in our lives, and that we're people first, and we're adoptees second, meaning our duties–if we perceive we have duties as adoptees–those are second, or those are maybe 3,000 in the list. That we, ultimately, are people. We are humans, and we get to make choices like everybody else does. We're not servants, we're not second-class citizens. We may feel that way, but we're not. So how [00:21:00] far do we have to go? What does it take to free ourselves of feeling that other people are more important than we are? And I think that the pattern that tends to explode an adoptive family into estrangement has something to do with, well, from the adoptees I know, of them feeling like they just cannot make enough space for themselves, their authentic selves in the relationship somehow. Their needs, the depth of their feelings, their pain, the things they haven't liked, anger, all those things. If it's hard to make room for that in the adoptive families, there's jeopardy there.

Haley Radke: So another adoptee shared: “I chose estrangement because they would not respect my boundaries.” And I wonder if that's expressing what you just said there.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yeah. Because when we don't respect someone's boundaries, we're saying that my needs are more important than your needs. I'm more important than you. That's what we're saying. So it's healthy then [00:22:00] to say that this is not working for me. So either we change something or I’ve got to step back even further. And then we have another chance to change something or I step back even further, maybe to no contact if it comes to that, if it proves to be too impossible to be heard and respected.

Haley Radke: How do I know when it comes to that point? How do I know to choose me because we're not familiar with choosing me first.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Exactly. It can really help to have a therapist involved when getting to that point of trying to discern how much distance do I need? Is this relationship threatening? Might I need to get out of this entirely? Or am I not communicating as clearly as I could be? Or am I not honoring my own boundaries as well as I could be? Or am I not speaking my own needs as clearly as I could be? How much of it is that we haven't built those skills because maybe our families [00:23:00] weren't a place where we were building those skills? Or we weren't people who were building those skills for whatever reasons? And how much of that is that this is an unworkable situation here? It's impossible for me with these people to be respected or understood or seen or cared for the way I need to be. And it's too painful.

There's that expression with alcoholism. Like when do people stop drinking? It's when the worst day sober is better than the best day drinking. There's some way that the scale tilts; there's a tipping of the scale. So it's like using coffee for this math equation, but the best day being in relationship is worse than the worst day of being out of relationship. That's when the scale has tipped and then an adoptee is just going to say I cannot handle this anymore. I need out, forget it. Done.

When I was in grad school for Psychology, I had this really amazing family therapy professor and I [00:24:00] just idealized him and I thought if anybody could help me and my adoptive parents it is him. And I convinced them to go with me to a family session, and we got in the room and my adoptive dad told this guy that the trouble in our relationship was a hundred percent my fault because as a baby I had rejected him. And the therapist spent three sessions trying to get through to my dad, just baby step by baby step. And it went nowhere, and the therapist fired us. That was when I knew I had to fire my parents. So I fired them for two years. I was a hundred percent out for two years. And then I had to change; I had to get grounded in: “Wow. That's him. It's not gonna change. That's the best he could give. And with all that help, that's the best he could give. Whoa, this is my life. This is real, right? I gotta get grounded there and cultivate some other ways of feeling connected in the world.” And then two years [00:25:00] later, I decided to go back in. I was picturing myself having a snorkeling suit and a helmet: Go back in!

Haley Radke: Okay. I want to put a pin in that because we are going to talk about that next time.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Okay.

Haley Radke: As we wrap this Part 1 up, we've talked about this overwhelming guilt. Oh my gosh, can we do this? Can we do this? I hope you can speak to this. I feel like if we are on purpose choosing and thinking through this, like we've expressed over our time together today. And we're really choosing it with an intent and purpose of taking care of ourselves. Can we alleviate some of that guilt? Because it's like: “Okay. I am putting myself first.” Because you've expressed this a couple [00:26:00] times: “Okay, that's it. Done.” And maybe for some of us, the decision is made in a split second like, “That's the last straw.” But I don't think it's that way for everyone. What are your thoughts on that as we wrap up this Part 1?

Pam Cordano, MFT: That's a really good question, Haley. Even with the adoptees I work with who are the most confident and grounded in their decision to permanently leave their relationship with the adoptive parents, families, that guilt does still linger. And they might get a call from an extended family member who tells them “Oh, your mother's in the hospital. She would really this, or she would really that.” There's still that cord connecting to this sense of it's complicated–and it's not, I don't think, just a sense of that adoptee obligation like we were saved so we have to then be grateful and devoted to the people who saved us. You know, that narrative. But also, there was some bonding. We were babies [00:27:00] and we were fed and cared for enough that we stayed alive. I talk in my book about call and response, like we called, they responded enough that we're still here. And so that in and of itself is a kind of bonding. We may say, “Oh no, I'm not bonded.” But no, there is a kind of bonding that happens when we're so young and little and we're asking for care. Even if our parents have mental health issues or are not good for us to be in relationship with, there's still enough that happened that we're alive. So it's in us in some way that it’s really hard to feel clean, to feel free and clean, really. So even the clearest people are still struggling with that.

Haley Radke: Okay. I had a big sigh because I was hoping you would give us a nice tidy answer, but fine.

Pam Cordano, MFT: No, but wait, I'll give a tiny, I do have a tiny answer. It's a hard answer, though, and I think that's going to make sense. If we do make that decision in a careful way over time and we feel like it's the right decision and we [00:28:00] still have those feelings of guilt, what we tend to want to do is like, “Ugh” and change the channel really fast, drop the guilt like a hot potato because it's so painful to feel that kind of guilt. But what we actually need to do is to lean into it because that guilt holds a lot of information for us about who we are, that we're loving people, we're caring people. We care even though we are making a decision to separate. We have hearts; we're loving people. And also that there may be a pattern that's been in place forever about being so over-responsible for the other person, for the you. But that pattern dominated us for so long. And the guilt, in a way, is also part of that too. Like it's so hard for me to put down the worry about you, to put down the anxiety I feel about what you’re feeling about my decision because I'm so you-focused. And the way to become not you-focused in part [00:29:00] is to get aware by leaning into it of how much that's dominated us and how yucky it feels. It's like going through the fire rather than trying to avoid the fire. Does that make sense? Do you get me?

Haley Radke: It makes sense, but I'm a little bit irritated with you. Not going to lie. Because putting feelings away is a little bit nicer feeling than leaning into learning what the deeper feelings mean.

Pam Cordano, MFT: I know. You know what? I was an expert at putting feelings away and thinking I could get away with it and, well, I don't believe that anymore. With my most beloved clients, I'm really working hard with them to lean into those hard places. Not to be trapped there, imprisoned there, but to get free that way. To me it's like the quickest way out of it rather than unnecessary torture.

Haley Radke: Okay, well, I guess I appreciate the challenge you're [00:30:00] giving. I'll get to a place of appreciating the challenge. Thank you for your wisdom on this. It's not easy to hear. I'll tell you the truth, it's not easy to hear.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Did you ever hear the phrase: What you resist persists?

Haley Radke: Oh, geez, yes. I'm just going to double-down like that. Okay.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Oh gosh.

Haley Radke: How does it feel to be the bearer of bad news all the time, Pam?

Pam Cordano, MFT: Very familiar. Very familiar.

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh. Well, if we want to hear more wisdom from you and maybe some hard things that we need to hear…

Pam Cordano, MFT: It'll be a year before I'm on here again. Sorry. (Laughter)

Haley Radke: No. We'll hear from you next week and then we'll see. Where can we connect with you online? And please also tell us about your fabulous book. If I had more than two thumbs, I would give, like, however many stars to your book as well.

Pam Cordano, MFT: My website is pamcardano(dot)com [00:31:00]. You can email me at pcordano(at)comcast.net. Yeah, I published my book a little over a year and a month ago, and that's been fun. Yeah. So that's how you can connect me.

Haley Radke: And what's your book called?

Pam Cordano, MFT: Oh, it's called 10 Foundations for a Meaningful Life, No Matter What's Happened. And it's a lot about being adopted and trying to find ways of healing, but it's not just about adoption. But adoption is in there from page one.

Haley Radke: It's fantastic. And we got to do a Book Club with you over on the Adoptees On Patreon, which was also top-notch. But that's behind a paywall. This is free. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it even if I give you a hard time.

Pam Cordano, MFT: Yes. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here, thank you.

Haley Radke: I am so thankful for all of the therapists who have been willing to share their time with us on the show and their wisdom and expertise. I just [00:32:00] think it's a really huge gift to the adoptee community, and I am excited that I can provide these episodes to you. You can listen again and again. There's a whole library of podcasts. This is Episode 172. So there's hours and hours of Healing Series episodes that I hope will help you feel supported in some way.

I know therapy is just not accessible for everyone, and so this is just a part of the way that I hope to provide resources to the community that are accessible in as much as a podcast could be. Even that, I know, is a stretch there. I was just talking to someone the other day about this and it's like it's a free resource and yet not everybody has access to the internet or some digital device to listen on. So I understand that even that has limitations. I digress.

Thank you so much for being here. I want to say [00:33:00] thank you to my Patreon supporters, this collective of 200 people that support the show monthly and that pay for so many of the behind-the-scenes costs of running the show and producing this resource for you. And so I'm so thankful for you guys. You know who you are. I try not to name names because some people really want to keep their privacy. And I've had quite a few of them on the podcast and that's been really special to hear more of their stories in depth.

So if you want to keep Adoptees On going and growing and reaching more adoptees around the world, I would encourage you to go to adopteeson.com/partner. You can find out more details. There are some fun behind-the-scenes things that you can have access to, like a weekly podcast where me and a co-host talk about adoption and lots of other personal things that I probably wouldn't share on the show. That's available to every single Patreon supporter. And then there's different levels. [00:34:00] There's a private Facebook Group. There's other little things here and there that you can have access to, including our Book Club that's available to every Patreon supporter. The audio recording is up for our last two episodes already, and they were really fantastic and insightful. So I try really hard to make the main feed show awesome and also for the Patreon stuff. You can support the show out of your generous heart and also get some rewards, so it's like both/and.

Anyway, I couldn't make the show without you. Thank you so much for showing up for me in that way, and I will continue to show up for you. Next week we will have Part 2 with Pam Cordano on estrangement. Thank you for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

171 Dr. Susan Branco

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/171

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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 171, Dr. Susan Branco. I'm your host, Haley Radke.

Dr. Susan Branco is with us today, and she is a force for good in our community. She shares an overview of her story, and we get a chance to deeply focus on topics that she's done an incredible amount of work and research on. These include how counselors of color deal with client microaggressions and ensuring adoption themes make their way into the core curriculum for future social workers and therapists. Dr. Branco shares more with us about her case study of the Colombian Adoption House, which includes firsthand experiences of Colombian adoptees and what happens [00:01:00] when they find out their adoption was illicit or black market. Her passion for family preservation is evident when we go down the list of systemic problems in the adoption industry. 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 to welcome to Adoptees On, Dr. Susan Branco. Welcome Susan.

Dr. Susan Branco: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Haley Radke: I would love it if you would start by sharing a bit of your story with us.

Dr. Susan Branco: I was born in 1972 in Bogota, Columbia, and I was then adopted by North American, US parents, and I grew up outside of Philly in Pennsylvania. And I relocated to the Washington DC area for college, and I've been in this area ever since. I am recently in [00:02:00] reunion. And I dedicated most of my life to being a licensed professional counselor. I'm still a licensed professional counselor. For a long time, I had an independent practice working mostly with adopted people, families, of which. I would say, the majority ended up being transracially adopted people. Around 2012 or so, I decided to return back to school for my doctorate in counselor education and supervision. And then from there I gradually stopped clinical practice and entered the world of academia. So right now I'm a full-time Clinical Assistant Professor with the Family Institute at Northwestern University. It's an online clinical mental health counseling program. And I still practice, however, right now I'm practicing exclusively with persons who identify as immigrant populations and who speak Spanish.

Haley Radke: That's amazing. So we talk [00:03:00] a lot on this show about the need for therapists who are, we used to call them, adoption competent. Most of my community started talking about adoptee-competent therapists, and it sounds like you're the person who can train therapists in how to do that.

Dr. Susan Branco: I try. I'm an affiliate instructor with Rutgers University. They have a post-adoption certificate program, so particularly during the tele-mental health boom when everything became an online situation, I've been able to do virtual training. Prior to that, I was doing it old-school, traveling to New Jersey from DC to do the in-person workshops. So that is quite important to me. I have worked with other adoptee and transracially adoptee counselors, and we frequently talk about competency and sensitivity, as well as having our voice be heard, while also being very clear about our credentials because our stories are [00:04:00] important. But we do still need to have the skills and the credentials and the training to be able to provide quality mental health services. And there's many things that go into that.

Haley Radke: I have seen an uptick in “coaches.” So I think it's really important that when you're looking for a therapist, you are making sure you are getting someone who is qualified. I'm sure you would agree with that.

Dr. Susan Branco: I do.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Dr. Susan Branco: I've seen the coaching progression and there can be a place for coaching. What concerns me about coaching is the lack of across-the-board regulations sometimes that helps people to provide a certain standard of care with coaching. And I also think it's confusing for clients to understand what the difference is between coaching versus counseling and psychotherapy. [00:05:00] So sometimes that could be problematic and hopefully quality coaches are able to discern the difference and refer people to counseling as needed.

Haley Radke: So if it's like a partnership, you could have a coach and a therapist, and there's different reasons for both.

Dr. Susan Branco: Correct.

Haley Radke: I was listening to another interview you were giving earlier today, and I found it so fascinating. So I know you've done some research on this topic and, as I said before, we're always looking for trained adoptee-competent therapists. And you mentioned you've worked with lots of transracial adoptees, and I find that a lot of the therapists that I know and that are in our community are white. So I thought it was really fascinating how you explained that there is–I'm going to have to ask you to explain it, I think, because I'm not going to be [00:06:00] able to get it right–but just pairing a person of color, likely we're looking at a transnational, transracial adoptee going to a therapist who is a white person, already there's a dynamic, a power dynamic there. It’s possible they're not going to get the help that they're looking for. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then where can an adoptee find a therapist that can provide them the help that they need?

Dr. Susan Branco: Sure. When we're talking about cross-cultural counseling or therapy, I use those terms interchangeably. I'm thinking about how do we look at our positionality. So we're always as the counselor or therapist in a privileged position, really, because the hierarchy in that relationship, no matter how much we try to flatten it, the counselor's always in a role with more power. So this is why we have to pay great attention to ethics and things of that nature to ensure [00:07:00] that we are being as fair as possible to our clients. But add on top of that different racial and ethnic identities and even socioeconomic statuses, and you're looking at even more layers of power differentials. So in addition, when we are thinking about cultural and cross-cultural counseling, we also have to be mindful of understanding that in order to really fully think about an experience of someone of color, perhaps, and I'll only speak of the population I'm most connected to, which is a transracial adoption and myself identify as a Latinx transracially adopted person with an indigenous background. And I'm thinking about my experience and how I've experienced white adjacentness, how I've experienced racism or microaggressions, and I'm using that experience to then be able to widen my perception to how [00:08:00] people of color may have also experienced those things with the awareness that there are some experiences that will be entirely new to me because I didn't walk that same walk.

And so all of what I'm describing is a phenomenon or a term that we call “cultural humility.” And this is a term where we're talking about going into a relationship with complete humbleness, an openness. In other words, we're not going into a relationship with a predisposition that any one way, in this incident culture, is superior to another. And that sounds easy. It sounds like what most of us strive to be, right? Because none of us want to say that we have any superiority over anyone else. But what makes that really hard is that we all come to everything with years and years of experience and bias that takes careful examination, challenging ourselves, maybe others challenging us to de-tangle [00:09:00] and de-layer. And that's especially important to do as a counselor. So sometimes that can be something that might happen more organically between a counselor of color and a client of color because they may have, not the same of course, but they may have some level of shared understanding and experience of what it means to be a person of color in whatever environment they're living in. It is not impossible at all for a non counselor of color or a white counselor or therapist to also develop cultural humility. In fact, I know many that have and work quite hard. Same with counselors of color. It doesn't mean that because you're a person of color, you don't have to do this work also. So I do think that there may be a propensity, though, for particularly transracially adopted people to be pulled towards [00:10:00] counselors of color because, as we know, many transracially adopted people are raised by white parents, so they may feel inherently, perhaps, safer with a counselor of color. They may feel less burden to not share certain things out of risk of offending, perhaps, a white counselor. And that burden may be from feeling that way with their adoptive family. It's not impossible, however, because I've certainly heard of and have seen white counselors working quite well with transracial adoptees. However, I think it does ultimately benefit clients to have more options, particularly clients of color, to see counselors of color. There's still not enough of us in the field. It's growing, but we still need so many more. It's still a white-dominated profession across all of the helping professions. We're still trying to [00:11:00] build that number in the field. I hope that answered your question about what you heard me say before in the interview.

Haley Radke: It totally did. Thank you. Do you have any advice for people who are looking for a therapist and they want to find someone that has similar experiences as them?

Dr. Susan Branco: In the United States we do have a list of counselors of color who are also transracially adopted. It's not a huge list, but there is such a list with certified and licensed counselors throughout the country who can see transracially adopted people. However, knowing that those people are few and far between, some suggestions I've always offered to people is, when you are searching for a counselor, certainly you can do a web search, like Psychology Today, just check and see if they are talking about what their background is in their profile. They should be. [00:12:00] Check to see if they've worked with other clients of color. If they indicate that they do multicultural counseling. I think it's always appropriate to have an initial screening where you can ask about that as well as their experience with adoption. So finding those two mixed is hard, but it's good to ask because it gives counselors a chance to say, “You know what, I don't have those two things, but I do have ample experience working with clients of color. I'd be willing to learn more.” And that's what you want to hear because what we don't want is to have a person who's adopted having to be the sole instructor of all things adoption. Similar to we don't want a person of color to have to be the sole information conveyor of all things about persons of color to their therapist or counselor.

Haley Radke: I think a lot of us can identify with needing to seek out some mental health [00:13:00] supports and having to educate our therapist and bringing them books like, “Hey, have you ever read The Primal Wound?” Or “Have you ever heard of –?” And it can be really frustrating. So I like that reminder that you can ask your therapist questions, you can interview them, you can interview a couple, you can go a couple times. And if you don't fit, you can pick someone else. I think, not all adoptees, but a lot of us are people-pleasers and we want to just go through and do what the next thing we think we should do. But I really want people to feel empowered. You have a choice, and especially you're paying someone, and you said there's this power dynamic in the relationship, but you still, as a client, have a choice when you're looking for a good fit for a therapist.

Dr. Susan Branco: I agree entirely. And keeping in mind that I train counselors-in-training, people who are trained in a master's degree program get a really good, [00:14:00] solid foundation on how to be a helpful counselor. But they don't know, and nor do I, every single potential issue that comes our way that people bring to us. So what you're really looking for is someone that's welcoming what you're bringing, and that's going to demonstrate cultural humility by saying, “I may not know all that. I'm going to find out. It's not going to be your entire responsibility.” And they are willing to do extra work. I have students in my program who are working with supervisors who have demonstrated this many times over by saying, “This is new for me. I'm going to take a CEU on this so I at least get some basic understanding of what this client is bringing. I'm going to look up what are some good, peer-reviewed articles that talk about this particular issue, so that way I'm not going in not knowing anything.” Certainly everybody's experience is unique, and you want to always be open to those nuances. But it's incumbent on your counselor or [00:15:00] therapist to do the bulk of the heavy lifting with that. So you can always ask, “How open are you to learning more about this on your own?” And that will be some out-of-session time. Many of us do out-of-session research to find out how we can best serve our clients. So that's another great question to ask.

Haley Radke: That's a good tip because how many people have I heard say, “Oh my gosh, I had to tell her 30 minutes about all this adoption stuff and I only had 20 minutes left to talk about what I was here for.” Oh, that's good. Okay. I didn't know you could do that. That's great.

Dr. Susan Branco: You can.

Haley Radke: That was a great tip. Wow. Okay. I'm curious, what are you seeing right now as some of the most important things when we're talking about training counselors and things especially related to adoption? Are therapists interested in learning more about that? Are they [00:16:00] becoming more competent? Are there more offerings? You were saying you give some courses on that. I’m curious about that.

Dr. Susan Branco: I often will say that it is my mission to infiltrate every course I possibly can infiltrate to talk about adoption. So part of that mission was about two or three years ago I wrote something about our core curriculum in counseling. There's a core curriculum we have to follow to meet our accreditation standards so that every counselor-in-training who graduates with a counseling degree of some sort will have the same basic training. So I looked at what those core classes were and I used research from some of my colleagues in the field who've done some great work and I developed how we can incorporate in every single class at least some mention of adoption and transracial adoption. And I find that students are becoming more [00:17:00] interested because when they get into their fieldwork, almost universally, they end up working with someone who's either adopted or connected to adoption in some way. And they will come back and say, “I have no idea where to even begin because we did not learn this in any of our core courses.”

So part of my mission, particularly at the program where I am now, is to do online lectures that are prerecorded that then become asynchronous material where I'm doing a lecture on something related to adoption. For example, I did a lecture on the adult attachment interview, the circle of security protocol and how that relates to adoption to give people an overview of how they can maybe do assessments if they're working with someone connected to adoption. Recently, myself and some graduate assistants did a CEU training for all of our students [00:18:00] and supervisors who were interested in Adoption 101, the basics of working with adopted populations and the adoption constellation. And we reviewed the updated seven core issues from the 2019 updated book. Many people were thrilled to have that information because they see a lot of these clients and they had no idea. So my mission is to somehow get in every course, to be able to have people finish the course knowing at least one thing that they may not have known before. Because I know, and we know, that we have a higher rate of mental health seeking behaviors, for very good reasons. But for this reason, we need to have more training in grad programs. So I see it more in counseling in general. I know it is part of social work training programs. I believe it's starting to [00:19:00] make a rise in marriage and family therapist programs, but programs like the Rutgers program, and there's some other adoption postmasters training programs, seem to be flourishing, so that gives me great hopefulness. There's still not enough, of course. We have a long way to go, but I do see more interest also because people are hearing about it more in the media. So certainly there's popular shows that have adoption themes, for better or for worse. Some are better than others. As adoption is always a hot topic in a movie or in fairytales, in TV shows. So I think people are thinking about it a little differently than maybe they were before because of some of the better programming that's out there. And I think, especially for at least the students in our program, they're seeing it more in their field placements.

Haley Radke: That's fascinating and I love that you're talking about weaving it in [00:20:00] throughout because we, my show, and most of my listeners, look at adoption as a trauma: you're separated from your family of origin. And, of course, when you're training mental health professionals, you're talking about trauma and how do you deal with that? It's like teaching, adding that if you've had an experience with being separated from your family of origin, that is a traumatic event. Those kinds of things. It's like stating the obvious, but it's not obvious to everyone.

Dr. Susan Branco: That's correct. Even today, one of my course topics was assessing for suicidality. And last week we were talking about multicultural competencies. So we had a chance to talk about transracial, multicultural adoption competencies that have been endorsed by our professional body. And then this week I was able to make the segue to risk factors in suicidality and we talked about many populations, but I was able to bring up that adoption is a risk factor based on the [00:21:00] research we know about that. So there is a way to include it in most course content if you have an awareness, just like everything else.

Haley Radke: Good. You're good. I like that. Now, I know you have done a lot of writing; your publications list on your website is extensive. And I was just reading in Adoption Quarterly, “The Columbian Adoption House: A Case Study,” which you published in 2020. As I was reading, I thought, oh my gosh, we just need more of this. It's proof of so many of the things that we talk about: the problematic elements of adoption, especially international adoption and the corruption, and all of these wild and crazy things that happen that are so shocking that lots of people wouldn't believe it. And we tell personal stories [00:22:00] sometimes and are told, that's a one-off. But how did you come to decide to write this and focus in on your country of origin, as well? Why did you think it was important to have a case study on something like this? I think it's really important for us to learn from. But I'd love to hear your motivations for writing that.

Dr. Susan Branco: A lot of it had to do with the literature search that I did. I found that there really wasn't a lot specifically about Columbian adoptees. We know that Columbia's adoption program is one of the older international adoption programs. It's often cited as a model program for other Latin American countries. And when I did my lit review search, I did not see much outside of something else I did about Columbian adoptees back in, I want to say, 2007. That was a book chapter and it was a very small [00:23:00] study at that time. I also co-wrote something with a colleague about conceptualizations of different types of adoptees from Latin America, so not just country specific. And I felt like I was hearing more and more conversation within our community on various social media sites where people were consistently presenting evidence that indicated there was something not right about their adoption facilitation. In 2016 Vice News in an exposé on some people whose adoption information was found to be fraudulent from Columbia. So I decided that it was really important that our voices be heard in a research way because, like you were mentioning, it is important to hear everyone's story, but oftentimes, particularly in the adoption professional community or the academic community, [00:24:00] if you don't have a legitimate research study, you are often told that you're not credible and whether that is right or wrong that seems to be my experience with those realms. So I felt it was important to have something that was peer-reviewed, that had institutional board review or review board approval, that methodologically had a set of steps and rigor. So I took all these pieces of news I had heard over the years from the New York Times back in the eighties, from El Tiempo, a popular newspaper in Bogota, that talked about legitimate child trafficking that happened in Bogota. I found some other literature, particularly a case study that was quite well done from the [00:25:00] 1990s, and I put together all these pieces while interviewing some brave people that were courageous enough to tell me their story on the record about their experiences with figuring out that what they've been told has been a lie, and their attempt to reclaim their right to identity is completely thwarted because they don't have accurate information. So I put all those pieces together to develop a story that I hope is readable to people who may be completely new to this topic. And I paired it with ethics and codes of ethics that were clearly violated in this process with the hopes that we will never return to that. We all know that that clearly was not the case because we've had many instances, I think of Guatemala, I think of Ethiopia, Vietnam, the list can go on where countries were found to be corrupt in their [00:26:00] practices and eventually shut down. So the timing of when the article came out coincided with somewhat of a movement in Columbia to change adoption practices and be more accountable, not, of course, to the degree that we're hoping eventually, but being more accountable to prior practices.

Haley Radke: It's Haley from the future popping in: I wanted to let you know that right after I recorded this episode with Susan, she sent me the government report from the Netherlands, which cited her academic article as one of their sources for halting all international adoptions at this time. We are recording this in February of 2021, so remember how we talked about how important it is to have these kinds of academic articles. There is your proof. Okay, let's get back [00:27:00] to the show.

Haley Radke: So some of the people that you interviewed were reporting back to you things like: “These files don't make sense.” “There's obvious lies.” “Someone said, my mother died, but when I asked for the death certificate, they can't give it to me.” So you've worked with a lot of adoptees in your career, I can imagine. Can you talk about what the impact is on someone who finds that out about themselves? I'm a closed adoption, born in the eighties, adopted provincially. I have access to my records because my province is open. I remember getting some identifying information that wasn't exactly accurate, but it wasn't this grand scheme to prevent me from ever finding out any truth. And while there are some challenges to my identity just being an adoptee, but for an adoptee whose literal [00:28:00] file is a big old lie and finding that out? What does that do to someone?

Dr. Susan Branco: It's incredibly painful. It breeds a sense of complete betrayal by your, in some cases, adoptive family members, by your country of origin, by members who hold power positions in your country of origin. And it can be devastating to learn that the narrative you created based on what we call micro-fiction in adoption, this false narrative that was often given to adoptive parents because it sounded good and it filled in a need at the time of giving a story, finding out that what you thought was true is in no way true, and that you may never have an answer can really [00:29:00] cause you to question what is true in general. Who can you trust? How can you know that you can trust someone? It can really create a lot of turmoil. So it's not surprising that many members of the community do struggle with things like anxiety or depression or maybe feeling challenges to trusting people because their entire beginning was created through a lie or false information. However, I always want to pair that with, our community is incredibly resilient. Because even despite all that, despite knowing I might never know, I have seen members of our community and other communities thrive, survive that, do other things to reclaim their culture and their narratives, move beyond. Not to dismiss or to demean anyone who's [00:30:00] struggling in that place of despair but I've seen people move beyond that through a lot of hard work. It's not one day you wake up and you can move forward, but I've seen people reclaim what's theirs and that looks different for every different person. So I do think we are incredible survivors that we've been able to take these circumstances and use them to make meaning of our narratives now. It doesn't mean that we're not angry sometimes, that we don't fall into that hole sometimes, or that we don't, on occasion or on many occasions, struggle with trust in systems, in others. But I have seen it happen for the majority of our community.

Haley Radke: What struck me was the perseverance of truth and [00:31:00] hiring private investigators and DNA testing and all of these things, even though knowing this may not give you an answer at the end. I think I see that in a lot of people who are doing their search: that perseverance, like there's something in you that says, “I just have to know.” And especially when you're living a country away, a world away or maybe you don't speak the language or so many barriers. God, the resilience really does stand out to me. You've got this proud, smiling expression on your face. I love that. I loved how you talked about your community and there's just like this beaming pride when you were speaking about them.

This is a little bit of a stretch, so maybe a thought experiment: Of course, Columbia is not the only country that has had these terrible, corrupt practices. And in recent years we've heard [00:32:00] lots of other things. Marshall Islands had this big thing blow up in the last year and all these things have been uncovered. So we're talking about adoptions where there's still young children. What are your thoughts on that? If an adoption has been uncovered to be gray or black market, some sort of child-trafficking situation, what I see is, “Oh my gosh, we gotta punish the powers that be that let this happen.” But I never see talk about how to reunite this child with their family of origin? How to reconnect them with their community? I'm curious about that because that's the first thing I think of. In all my years of doing this–which is not that long, it's five years–I've only heard of one adoptive family that [00:33:00] found out that their adoption was truly an illegal situation and they returned the child. I've only heard of one. Do you have thoughts on that?

Dr. Susan Branco: What of course comes to mind first, for me, is what we've seen transpire shamefully recently in our country in terms of the brutal practices of parental separation. And in something like that case that was so broadly seen, there is a spotlight on that situation, and yet we're still trying to figure out how we're going to reunite those children with their families. So with adoption and transnational, transracial adoption, I'm always thinking about those [00:34:00] situations. I agree with you. Those children should be reunited with their first families when it was an illegally trafficked adoption because that's who they belong with. But we know the system that's created that circumstance does not have similar viewpoints about who children belong to. Children are often commodified, and we're still operating under false assumptions about what is better for a child, particularly based on the idea that European white, Westernized culture is a better culture to raise a child. So for those reasons, I think we only see that one example of a child who was returned to their community because people in power, for the most part, still believe that children are better off [00:35:00] not in their original communities. And that thinking is completely born out of colonialism, racism, and terrible bias about what is best for a child. I don't agree with it. I agree with you that those children should be immediately returned to their families, and, I know I'm not alone in this and nor is this a unique idea to me, but we should be looking more at ways of having children stay with their first families, rather than having poverty be the number one reason why a child can't stay with their first family.

Haley Radke: Family preservation is so important to me, and when you're describing the adults in the situation, the adult adoptees who, that's their story, 30, 40 years ago and all the problems that have come out of it and the mental health issues that we [00:36:00] struggle with, as you said before, higher suicidality, all of those things. Gosh, it feels so big. This is systemic, all those things that you said. It just feels so big. It's heavy. It's heavy to feel like you're up against this huge system and I thank you for explaining that so succinctly and very powerfully. I think it's important for people to hear that those are the reasons this still is happening.

Okay. I've asked you so many different things. You're an expert in so many different things. Is there anything I didn't get to yet that you want to talk to adult adoptees about? Anything that you think is really important for us to know? Things that you're passionate about that you really want to share with us?

Dr. Susan Branco: Sure. Currently I'm doing research on adult Columbian adoptee first family reunions because that's another area in the [00:37:00] literature where I have actually seen some literature from transnationally adopted adults reuniting with their first families. But I did not see anything specific to Columbian adoptees. And this was another area where I was seeing a lot of anecdotal information about it on social media and just through groups. So I thought we need to have a study about this so that we can offer our community some guidance as to what this may look like on the other side of this, as well as give practitioners, counselors information about how to better support someone who's going through this process. So I'm doing that research now. I'm doing interviews with some amazing people who were willing to be participants and one thing that has really struck is that the participants range in age. So I have some participants who are around my age–I'm in my late [00:38:00] forties–and then I've had some participants who are in their early twenties. And I know in this field I've been doing this kind of work since the early 2000’s, and I have some colleagues who’ve been doing this way before I was, and one of the things we tend to circle back to is we've done so much work trying to educate adoptive parents, adoption agencies about how important it is to be able to offer cultural socialization to your children. So that means not living in an environment where they are the only ones of color, integrating your whole family, not just the child, but your whole family into a community with people that reflect your child. Not just doing culture campuses, wonderful as those can be, but really having your entire family be considered a multiculturally [00:39:00] humble family. And we–the collective we of so many of my amazing colleagues and practitioners and people in academia–have been doing this for years. So when I'm interviewing people and they're in their early twenties and they're sharing with me that they did not get any exposure to their culture growing up. That they remain the only person of color in their community, I can't help but feel demoralized that it's still happening. I still saw it happening even when I was in practice with younger children. And I'm not entirely sure the complete answer as to how we prevent that and how we really get serious about the importance of cultural socialization and raising your children in the community that reflects them so they're not [00:40:00] isolated and carrying that burden by themselves. But it does strike me–it has improved, don't get me wrong–but that there's still so many of us out there that are struggling in isolation. And that really gives me pause. And at the same time, it invigorates me to keep going. And I think that invigorates a lot of our community members to just, we're going to keep doing this so we can reach more people so that people know you are not the only one. Even though it feels that way right now. You are not. You're not alone.

Haley Radke: Have you seen the impact of not having that cultural socialization on the reunion process with their Columbian family of origin?

Dr. Susan Branco: The impact that is starting to emerge based on some of the interviews I've [00:41:00] completed suggest that not having that was one among many other very valid reasons that people wanted to search and reconnect with their first families. And that reconnection, people are describing it as allowing them to discover who their true self might be, allowing them to reclaim some of the culture they have lost. And allowing them to alter their narratives so that it's not this narrative exclusively focused on loss and grief. Not dismissing that, of course, but also being filled with an alternative ending that they've been empowered to reclaim.

Haley Radke: Again, there's that resilience, right? There's something so powerful about that. That's really fascinating. I am wondering, [00:42:00] I'm not sure exactly how to ask this. I know an adoptee who would identify as Latinx and also say they are white-passing and has gone through a journey of trying to do cultural reclamation. Do you have thoughts on that? I think, for me, watching their journey, it was beautiful to me and fascinating and it looked to me like it was empowering for them. I wonder if you've seen that or if you can talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Susan Branco: Throughout our talk, I've been thinking about one of my favorite models for transracial and transnationally adopted persons’ identity development. And one of my favorite models–and I maintain it's one of the best models–is called the reculturation model. And that was a model developed by Dr. Amanda Baden and [00:43:00] colleagues back in 2012. She is a huge name in the adoption field, wonderful academic and practitioner. And this was a model looking at how we reclaim our identity, how we reculturate, because we're not acculturating, that's different to what our unique circumstances are. And we are not enculturating, because that's also a bit different. We are reculturating; we're reclaiming our past. So the process that you described with your friend is a very common process that many people will start to engage in maybe late adolescence through emergent adulthood all the way throughout adulthood to reclaim what was lost for them and to work through determining what is my identity.

Now, speaking about Columbia, I can tell you that that identity is something that I don't believe is unique to [00:44:00] adoptees. From my visits to Columbia and from my reading about the country as a whole, we certainly are a colonized country ourselves, and there is a sense of lighter skin being held at higher value from the Spanish colonizers. However, most people, many people in Columbia, are considered mestizo: we are indigenous as well as European. So it presents a whole host of wonderful diversity. We also have a large Afro-Caribbean influence in Columbia; we have a Middle Eastern presence. So it's really a biodiverse country and diverse in its people. But that process of determining where do I fall? And particularly in a country like the United States where there's not a lot of room to have anything that falls outside the [00:45:00] census boxes that we often have to fill. And I have seen many people in our community having, out of survival, quite frankly, and out of this piece about not being culturally socialized, being able to pass as white sometimes. It doesn't work all the time, but sometimes. And really that's out of survivorship if that's going to be something that helps you to get through life because that's how you're being accepted, then it makes complete sense to me that people might go in that direction. Often, it’s some sort of pivotal moment when people start discovering I am not just that. I may be part European but I do have this other part of me. DNA testing has certainly opened a lot of people's eyes about, “Wow, I do have these different parts of me, and what does that mean? What does that say about who my ancestors are? How do I connect with my [00:46:00] ancestral heritage? How do I explore that? Part of me that I didn't even fully know existed because no one had shared that with me. No one had exposed me to that possibility.” So as adults, I see a lot of people really digging into that and leaning into that part of who they are and reclaiming it.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for explaining that. I wrote down a lot of new phrases from you that I'm going to have to read more about and I love the concept of cultural reculturation from Dr. Baden. She's a superstar in our community, for sure. This was so amazing. I'm so glad we got the chance to talk.

I would love it if we could do some recommended resources now. I usually start, and it's not going to be any surprise that I'm going to recommend to everyone that they make sure to check out some of your writing, Susan, because it's so important. And I've [00:47:00] talked about this a little bit lately, but you guys can read academic publications. You can do it. So I know sometimes it's really hard to get your hands on some of these articles, but what I found out is lots of the authors of the studies, even though they might only be accessible if you're part of a university or something and you go to your library and you can get access. But sometimes the authors of the studies will email you a copy of the article. So would that be okay, Susan, what do you think?

Dr. Susan Branco: Definitely. I'm more than happy to provide copies of articles, and people email me all the time to ask. I'm always honored.

Haley Radke: Beautiful. I love that. And I especially want you guys to check out “The Columbian Adoption House: A Case Study” from Adoption Quarterly, which is what we were talking about earlier. I thought it was really interesting and, of course, I thought it was cool that you did in-depth interviews with adoptees, because I feel like I do a little tiny piece of that every week. [00:48:00] But it was really fascinating to read pieces of their stories, and there's direct quotes from fellow adoptees in there. So I think you guys will really find that fascinating. And again, just like Susan told us, this is real research that you can show to someone and they will take it more seriously because it's peer-reviewed in a journal for all the academics that it is important to. It's legit. And it's very well written. I learned a lot from it. So thank you so much for that. That's what I'm going to recommend. What about you? What would you like to recommend to us?

Dr. Susan Branco: I am a huge fan of the Rudd Adoption Center at Amherst University. They host in-person, and this year virtual, conferences that always address something new and unique to our community. This year the topic happened to be the journey of adult adoptees, I believe. I might be getting that name slightly wrong, [00:49:00] but they are offering free YouTube videos with conversations with different panelists from the conference. And they also offer accessible white papers that talk about certain issues in adoption so you don't need to go through the peer-reviewed journal process or you are able to access that from their website. So I find that a wonderful resource because it's all things adoption and very good research.

Haley Radke: I have been watching some of those on YouTube and they're really well done. Lots of people that you guys probably already know. So I definitely second that. I didn't know that they had some white papers. That's fantastic. I'm going to have to check that out. Thank you so much for recommending that. I think the more we support what we want to see more of, it's just that circle, I think. So yes, I love that. That's so good. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed hearing from you and about your [00:50:00] expertise. Just so generous. Thank you.

Dr. Susan Branco: Thank you for inviting me. I'm just honored to be here.

Haley Radke: You can find Dr. Branco's website at drsusanbranco(dot)com, where there's a contact form if you'd like to request access to her Columbia House article. She's also on LinkedIn and on Twitter at drsusan (underscore) branco. I have links for you in the show notes to all of those spots. I am so grateful that I get to share these amazing conversations with you, thrilled to be reading academic papers to find the gems of humans to bring to you so we can learn more from experts. Thank you again, Susan. I'm so thankful that you shared with us.

And, guys, this podcast is not possible without listener support, and it [00:51:00] continues. My listeners are paying the bills and it's amazing. Thank you so much to all of my supporters. I have almost 200 on Patreon. We're just about there. So exciting. Adopteeson.com/partner has details of how you can support the show, help keep it sustainable, help keep paying all the costs for my editor and all the extra things it takes to have this podcast out into the world.

So if you love Adoptees On, if you want it to continue, if you want us to reach more adoptees who maybe are feeling alone and not connected into community, I would encourage you to go to adopteeson.com/partner if that's something that you're able to do. If not, another amazing way you can support the show is, literally, just tell one person about this episode. Maybe you have a friend who loves reading academic journals and they just really want to learn more [00:52:00] about adoption, and they would probably find this conversation fascinating. So share the show with just one person. That's a huge gift.

We are coming back to the Estrangement Series. Don't worry, we'll be back with more episodes focusing on estrangement and, of course, our regular episodes and more Healing Series episodes. Lots in the works for you for 2021. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

170 Alice Stephens

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/170

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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 170, Alice. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Alice Stephens, author of Famous Adopted People, joins us today. I was honored to hear her describe her childhood, which included years in Botswana.

Of course, we talk about writing in her book reviews. If you ever need a book recommendation for an adoptee-focused look at adoption, Alice is an expert. She even shares a piece of her story I didn't know about her search in Korea for biological family. 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. [00:01:00]

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Alice Stephens. Welcome, Alice.

Alice Stephens: Thank you, Haley. I'm so pleased to be here.

Haley Radke:* I can't wait. Would you mind sharing a bit of your story with us?

Alice Stephens: Sure. So I was born in 1967 in South Korea. My mother was Korean and my father was an American soldier in Korea. I feel like I was adopted at a very crucial point in adoption history because it was the sixties, late sixties, and it was in the era where adoption was coming out of the closet, so to speak. People were becoming more and more aware that adoption is not something that happens in every family. And in the sixties, the Korean adoption movement that began in the fifties, right after the Korean War, was growing. And we were the first big group of transnational adoptees into the United States. [00:02:00] And when you have a transracial adoptee–somebody who does not look like her family–then everybody in the world knows you're adopted. And again, it cannot be hidden. So a lot of people were becoming more aware of adoption. They were seeing these Korean adoptees or other transracial adoptees and gears were going off in their heads. And so the narrative of adoption was slowly changing. I actually had a newspaper article written about me, and I know I'm not the only one, the only Korean adoptee, who had newspaper articles written about them. The whole emphasis is on how do-gooder it is to adopt these children. How it is a benevolent thing, a self-sacrificing thing even, that they say about my parents. They were [00:03:00] healthy, young, and successful. They had their own children but they selflessly decided to adopt another child. And if you just look at the language in this article that was written in 1969, it is just a fascinating document about the language that surrounded adoption at that time and the way that they were changing the whole concept of adoption. Okay, so I'm getting off track here.

So I was adopted into my family in 1968. I arrived at nine months old. My adoptive family is white. I have three siblings who are the biological children of my parents. I am the youngest. We were this family of three blonde-headed children and me, and we attracted interest pretty much everywhere we went. We lived in Philadelphia for four years. And then after that we moved to Gaborone, Botswana, which is in Southern Africa. And that was a [00:04:00] wonderful experience for me because childhood: it was a land without any TV, without any stoplights. We lived in one of the only two-storey houses in the city. It was a city, it's the capital of Botswana, but at the time it was actually 15,000 people. So it was a small town. I had a really golden childhood just running free. But, in Botswana there were probably about five East Asians, five people who looked like me in the whole town. And so I never saw people who looked like me. And the natives, the people who lived in Botswana, they hadn't seen people who looked like me either. So there would be people who pointed at me and talked about me, pulled their eyes, all that sort of thing. So even though I belonged, I always also knew that I didn't belong and that there was something about me that was really different.

Then we moved back to America when I was in fifth grade. [00:05:00] We moved to the suburbs of Washington, DC, which is actually where I live now. I went to public school, fifth grade. Again, I was the only Asian kid in my class. Another thing about the time that I was adopted was in 1965 immigration laws had changed. Before that basically black and brown people were kept out of America, and it was only the “desirable” European immigrants that were allowed in. They changed that in 1965 and so up until then there were Asians in America but most of them had come before the laws, which for the Chinese were established in, like, 1880 and for the rest of the Asians it was, like, 1925. So for that long period of time, there were no Asian immigrants into America. So when I came to the suburb, [00:06:00] there was hardly any sign of Asian cultural life even though I lived in the nation's capital, which has all sorts of cultures that come there as part of the seat of government. So I grew up really divorced from my genetic cultural background.

My parents are very progressive, very liberal. Of course, they always told me that I was adopted. I always knew my story. I always had access to my adoption file. They had some books about Asian people for young children. One was called The Chinese Next Door, written by Pearl S. Buck. And the way that they depicted Asian people was really as a very different other. And so that kind of affected me, too, as I was growing up, but, like many adoptees, I just didn't realize it. That conflict in my mind was something that I [00:07:00] ignored, but it also affected me terribly. I hated to be singled out as an Asian. I hated the prejudice that I got. It made me really angry. The older I got, the less self-confidence I would have because people would pull their eyes at me, make fun of me. And I grew up in a white world and I thought I was white. And when you get this sort of pushback, “No, you're not white,” it's called cognitive dissonance. And it is a pretty big problem for a lot of transracial adoptees, and it manifests itself, I think, most in adolescence when you're exploring your place in the world, other people are exploring their places in the world, and people like to tell you don't belong in your place. So my teenage years were pretty rough. I had very low self-confidence and I just [00:08:00] basically became a juvenile delinquent and defied everything. Defied the stereotypes about Asian people, defied the stereotypes about adopted people. I was just a bad kid, but I had a very strong family structure around me and I had all that love and I had a lot of information about the world, education, reading, all those things. They gave me all those tools to build my own identity. The only thing they didn't give me was the understanding that it was okay to feel different things about being adopted.

We never talked about adoption as like, how do you feel about it? What do you know? How does it affect you? What's it like for you to be the only Asian person ever in a room? We never talked about it, and even my mother says today, “I don't think of you as Asian.” [00:09:00] And this is very common for transracial adoptees. Your parents tell you, “We don't see your race.” Which is a beautiful sentiment, but it doesn't work in the real world because everybody else does see a race and everybody else tells you about it. And in America, in the Western world, race is one of the biggest defining characteristics, right or wrong. And the more tools that you have to deal with that, the better. And as an adoptee, I didn't have any of those tools.

I did have tools from my parents about getting in touch with my Asian side. My mother majored in Chinese in college. She had a big interest in China. And so in high school I started to study Chinese and I started to get more interested in Asian culture. At the time, there was really [00:10:00] no evidence of Korean culture, and I'm talking about the late eighties now. So the dominant cultures were Chinese and Japanese, and those are the ones that I started to explore. I went to study in China when I was in college. I lived in Japan. But I didn't really think very much about how I was Korean. I thought about how I was Asian because that's what Americans told me: I was Asian or Chinese or Japanese. But I didn't really think about the Korean part. I got married, had kids, still thinking about adoption, but really more like thinking about it in order to ignore it than thinking about it in order to think about it.

And my mom said, “Why don't you look for your Korean mother?”, when I was in my mid-twenties. And I said, “Oh, okay.” And more for her, I wrote a letter off to the agency and they said, “Oh, we can maybe help you for $500.” [00:11:00] And I said, “No. I'm not gonna do that.” And then I moved on. Also, in those years, I really had to find out who I was and I had to be comfortable with the person that I was. I had to break the bad habit of the person that I was when I was younger and become a better person. I had to look at myself and ask why was I not kind of a good person when I was younger, and I just had to figure my shit out, and so I did. It took me a long time. I think a lot of adoptees are slow bloomers. I think a lot of us come to things late. So it took me a long time. I had my own kids, first time I ever saw my flesh and blood was with my son, and that was like wow. And so I was just concentrating on my kids, myself, my family, my career, just life. And then [00:12:00] when my kids were in high school, I had a lovely job and then the 2008 recession came and I was fired. I picked up some other work around that, but I thought to myself, what I really want to do is be a writer and now is the time to start doing it. And so I started to get serious about writing. I'd always been serious about writing, but serious about being a published writer and growing that persona of a writer, being a writer, living as a writer, which means writing. A lot of people don't realize that writing is you actually have to sit down eight hours a day, or whatever, and write.

Haley Radke: Yes. I'm sorry, I'm laughing because there's so many of us that are like, “Oh my gosh, wouldn't it be great to have a book? But we don't really wanna sit down and write.”

Alice Stephens: Yeah, it's like any, anything. You have to practice, practice, practice. You can't just [00:13:00] sit down and write this magnum opus. It takes a lot of time. So I was really fortunate and I had that time, I had that support, and so I started writing. I started with book reviews and I got a column about writing.

Actually, I have to go back. I did start a novel when I was living in Japan, and I wrote this novel. It's a really good novel. When I got fired, I was like halfway through it, so I finished it. After that, I got an agent. I got another agent. It never got picked up. And then I said, “Why don't you write what you know?” That's what they tell you to do. Write what you know. And I said, “Okay. I know adoption.” There are no adoption books–fiction books–out there that I could find. There were very, very few authentic adoption fiction books. There are a lot of novels written about adoption that are not written by adoptees and that mishandled the whole subject of adoption. [00:14:00] So I said, “This is what I'm gonna do.” I wrote the book very quickly. Like nine months, which is very quick for a book. And then I tried to sell it and nobody would pick it up. So it took five years to sell the book. Five years. And I got more than 60 rejections

Haley Radke: For Famous Adopted People?

Alice Stephens: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Wow.

Alice Stephens: Yeah, so it was a really big wake-up call and a really big eye-opener about how the publishing business works.

Haley Radke: Can I ask you a personal question about that?

Alice Stephens: Yes.

Haley Radke: When you said 60 rejections, my stomach flipped. For me, and I know lots of adoptees, rejection–our beginnings start with a rejection. So how was it getting those? Were you taking it very personally because this is the thing you know, you're writing about adoption. What was that like? [00:15:00]

Alice Stephens: Yeah, well, rejection is a huge part of writing, which yes, as adoptees, we hate rejection. And the biggest irony is that I'm in one of those businesses where you have got to have a really tough, thick skin because rejection is the norm. Acceptance is not the norm. Rejection, rejection, rejection. How did I deal with the rejection from the publishers? Actually, they made it easy because the things that they said were so ridiculous. They'd say, “Oh, this is a good story.” Or, it was, “Yeah, I read it. I read it in one night.” But then they'd say things like, “Americans don't like to read about foreign countries.” “Americans don't like characters with foreign names.” “Americans don't like dialogue.” It was all about the foreign and all about how people [00:16:00] couldn't connect and, to me, it spoke of them being afraid, like of them. Nobody said, “This is a pile of crap. You can't write. Give it up. Go home.” They were–not all–but most of them were what we call “good” rejections. There was encouragement in there. There was “This is a good book, but it's not for me.”

The thing about being an editor is you have to totally fall in love with a book. You have to know it. You have to understand it in order to champion it. Who are the people who work in publishing? They're not generally people who are going to look at adoption from a critical point of view. My idea is that the people in adoption are the type of people who adopt children, or the type of people who know people who have adopted children or have adopted transracial children. And that makes them like, “Well, she's trying to tell a different kind of a story. And we can't tell a different kind of story. [00:17:00] America knows one story and why are we gonna try and change the subject? People aren't gonna buy it. There's no market.” So that's what they told me. So I didn't take the rejection personally, and I kept on going. My agent left. My agent, she actually did a great job. She has an adopted, Chinese-born child. She actually did a really good job in representing me. She went over and above, but eventually she said, “Nobody's touching it. I've done everything I can.” So then I went out on my own, and I was sending out cold, and a miracle happened. It's really a miracle that I sent my cold slush file without an agent to The Unnamed Press, which is this amazing indie press in LA, and they picked it up and it was just like, wow.

So anyway, while writing the book [00:18:00] and then in preparing to publish it, I began to get more aware of the adoption community out there. Up until then, I had no idea that there were all these people like you who have been going on for years and years making this community, these communities, and actually organizing on the ground and getting adoptees together. And it's really been so wonderful for me to find out that there are all of these adoptee organizations out there.

Haley Radke: I'm curious because you were saying that you had written part of your novel and then after you got laid off you finished the rest of it and you had this thread of “Oh, maybe I'll look for my mother because my mother said I should.” Where's coming out of the fog in that process for you? Because there's lots of things in the book. When the Adoptees On Patreon group read it as a Book Club book [00:19:00], we found so many themes in it. We were like, “Oh, this is like that.” We were picking all these things out that I would identify as being metaphors for being out of the fog, understanding the adoptee experience at a deeper level. So how about that? Can you talk a little bit about that, like your mindset and things about adoption, while writing?

Alice Stephens: As I said before, I wanted to write a book that refuted the other books that had come out about adoption that were written by non-adoptees, and there are a lot of them out there. I've reviewed some of them. So I wanted to turn those tropes upside down. And I think when I was writing Famous Adopted People, I was writing out all the things that I'd been thinking about for all these years but that I just didn't have an opportunity to articulate because I wasn't sitting down to write a formal book or essay or anything about adoption. [00:20:00] Previous to that, the book that I wrote when I was fired was actually a historical fiction novel. So it didn't really occur to me to write an adoption novel until it did, and then I just sat down and everything that came out of me was things that had been churning around in my mind. And by getting it down on paper, I was able to figure out all those different threads. Writing is about revision, revision, revision. So it wasn't like I just put it all down there and then it all made sense. I put it down there, it was a big ugly mess, and then slowly started unbraiding it and then re-braiding it and making it into a coherent hole. I was also very lucky with my editor, Chris Heiser, at Unnamed Press. The manuscript that I submitted to him was different. He gave me a lot of good pointers about how to make the story more exciting. Like [00:21:00] he said, “You have to have Lisa, the protagonist, at least try to get out.” In my first manuscript, she didn't try to get out of her imprisonment. So anyway, he just helped me make a better manuscript. And then while I was revising and revising, ideas are congealing in my mind. Like I'm being able to see things more clearly.

I think that a lot of adoptees are creative and that by using their creative whatever, whatever that impulse is inside them, they are working out all those emotional and mental things that are within them. By using that creative expression, they're able to articulate their feelings in a way that they might not be able to just sitting down with their friends, or whatever. And by doing it through their art form, that then helps them to be able to articulate with their friends and their family those more basic expressions. [00:22:00]

Haley Radke: There's so much processing that we do throughout our lifetimes. So I love how you're talking about getting this all out and, really, you're probably discovering some more things about yourself and your true opinions by writing. I love that. That's so fascinating.

So you do book reviews for the Washington Independent. I was reading through multiple of your reviews in preparation for our conversation today, and this line stuck out to me and I would love for you to talk about this in your work–you've already addressed it–but now talking about it from a reviewer point of view. You say, “As an adoptee and book reviewer, I greet each new book about adoption with trepidation and hope.” That is gold. What a good line, Alice.

Alice Stephens: Thank you. Well, if [00:23:00] it's an adoptee-written book, then I'm all open. All for it. But if it's a book that is not written by an adoptee, chances are good that they are taking this subject in a predatory manner because it's a subject that can be milked for lots of human drama and it goes down to the very basics of our civilization: the family union and genetic tribes and that sort of thing. I think for maybe, I don't know, the last 30 years, the adoption narrative has been dominated by non-adopted people. You see that in a lot of the books that are offered. And so, as a book reviewer, I started to review whatever books that I found that were about adoption. One of them is The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See, or [00:24:00] Good People by J.D.? I don't remember her last name. But they were both using adoption as a vehicle instead of as the theme. They were riding the vehicle rather than trying to be the vehicle. I don't know if that makes sense. They were just not invested in adoption as a real story. They were using it for their own purposes and making a narrative that, for one, follows a pattern that is the same in many of the same books which is the adoptee gets rescued, and does not rescue herself, and the adoptee is just lost and waiting for somebody to come. Whether it's the adoptive parent to come and take them to their forever home, or whether it's their birth mother or father coming to show them who they really are. [00:25:00] The adoptee, I say, is the object of the story rather than the subject. And what the adoption story should be about is the adoptee and her journey and not about somebody else, the savior who comes to save the adoptee. So many books are the adoptee is the object and not the subject of the story. And whenever I see a book by a non-adopted person, I say it is most likely that person is using the adoptee as the object and not the subject. The object to be acted upon, not the subject who saves herself.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I think it's really only in the last few years I've been hearing that term “own voices” and to apply it to adoptee authors as an own voice, I think is important. And you're sharing mostly with adoptee listeners right now. [00:26:00] What would you say to us about our reading habits or the ways we consume or give reviews or any of those kinds of things? How can we influence publishing to hear more from adoptee authors like yourself and read the kind of stories that we do want told to be mainstream?

Alice Stephens: Yeah, I think it's just by raising your voices and being heard. I mean, by writing book reviews yourself. It is so important that adoptees write book reviews about adoption books. But again, it's like there's this big sort of barrier to it. I've tried to get into the New York Times or the Washington Post to review books about adoption, but it's hard. They don't answer my call and they don't seem to feel like there's a need to have [00:27:00] adoptees review books about adoption. Whereas there is now a movement to have people who write black books be reviewed by black writers and that sort of thing. But the adoptee thing, and I think it's because maybe, I don't know. My mission is to have more adoptees write. I try to encourage adoptees to become writers because I think that's really the way. Adoptees are writing; adoptees are speaking up. And it's got to grow. The movement has to coalesce and grow and become a little more unified maybe. But definitely, adoption is becoming a lot more of a topic of concern, a lot more of a fashionable topic, and not just from the adoptive parents’ (view), but they're starting to listen to adoptees more. [00:28:00] It is slow. But anyway, what can you do? I think that adoptees can write reviews like on Good Reads, Amazon and that sort of thing. Saying: I'm an adoptee and this is adoptee-approved and articulating why this is a good book or this is a bad book. Especially, bad reviews, I think, are pretty important too: I'm an adoptee. This book is harmful to adoptees. This book is [censored] and don't read it. So I think that just being more vocal and letting people know what we think.

Haley Radke: [00:29:00] Okay. I have always encouraged people to make sure they're doing the reviews for adoptee authors, but I love that idea, too, of making sure we're giving critical feedback to the books that are making us into tropes. And I wanted to just circle back just to talk about your reviews and how you've pitched to some bigger publications and they don't want to hear from adoptee voices. I was just talking with one of my friends and comparing and contrasting your review of American Baby by Gabriel Glaser from an adoptee perspective versus the New York Times review. And we were like, “We need to hear Alice's. That's what people need to hear.” And so I'm cheering you on. We are going to hear more from you. More from you about adoption-related books in future, I'm sure.

Alice Stephens: Thank you.

Haley Radke: Another thing I wanted to ask you about is from another one of your articles. You were writing about the original cancel culture. I've heard you express before that publishing is so white and it's very hard for people of color to really break in. And one of the lines where you were talking about this [00:30:00] is “White gatekeepers favoring white voices that cater to a white audience.” Can you speak to that, please? I think it's very important for us to understand that.

Alice Stephens: So, as we said before, most of the people who are in high places in publishing are white, and there's been a lot written about it. Just recently, some changes have been made, I'm talking about just the last few months, and some people of color have been put in charge of a few publishing houses or have been made into editors with power. But it's a very slow process and there is incredible resistance to it in the publishing industry because culture has always been white in America. That's always been the way that culture has been defined, and the people who tell you what culture is have always been white. [00:31:00] That's the way it's always been and it's very resistant to change. I work at a bookstore and I work in outside events where we do events that are outside the bookstore. And I am one of maybe 18 people who work on that staff. We all work there because we love books. I'm the only one who's a person of color and there are only two men. So they're basically older, white women. And I see the way that they read, what they read, what they're told to read. They read what the book reviews tell them to read. “Oh, did you see that Ron Charles loved this book? I'm gonna read it.” And they put it on their list. “Oh, the New York Times said this book's lovely.” And so they're going to read it. All those people, they read what the publishing industry tells them is the biggest, latest book. And while there are a lot of writers of color out there who are making it onto those lists, they're basically, I think, still [00:32:00] dominated by what I would call a lot of mediocre white writing. And it's just a group-think of what you're going to read next, which is dictated to you by the book reviewer who gets it dictated to them by the publishing company.

So I think we've heard about American Dirt, which was a novel that was published, I think, by Grand Central. It was given like a million-dollar publicity budget and the cultural purveyor said, this book is a great immigration novel. And it turned out to be written by a white woman who has a grandmother who's Puerto Rican. But there was a lot of controversy about it because she totally wrote it from a white person's point of view even though it was supposed to be about a Mexican woman and her son. In [00:33:00] reaction to the pushback that people of color gave to this author, you see white cultural critics come out and defend, they get very defensive about it. And people literally said, “I'm just gonna go out and buy this book because people tell me not to.” And I see that as tribalism. I see that as people getting very scared that the white viewpoint is no longer the dominant viewpoint. When they're told that maybe a book that they loved as a child, like Little House on the Prairie, has lots of racist things in it, they get defensive. They don't want to hear that. It just seems to me like there's such a white mindset that, even when it is liberal and open, is actually very closed and very defensive and very self-centered, very privileged. I don't know how to break that. But I [00:34:00] think the best way, really, is to stop having people who write reviews be white people talking to white people, and just be people talking to readers.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I keep bringing out some of my old childhood books to read to my kids at bedtime, and I'm really shocked by some of the things. I've had to skip entire chapters because I don't reread it before I start reading to them. And I think, “Oh my gosh, this is what was filling my head as a child.” And I'm in my late thirties so it wasn't all that long ago. And so yeah, we haven't come very far. But I appreciate that the challenges for us is we need to be reading with our eyes open, as well, and choosing and not just having the [00:35:00] so-called gatekeepers being the ones to tell us what to read. And I think you very much challenged us as well, not necessarily just in this interview, but with your work as a book reviewer. Reading so many great reviews you've done, I'm like, “Oh, I think that book would really stretch me.” So I really appreciate that. I think it's really important.

Alice Stephens: Oh, thank you. If I could just add one thing about book reviews. I make it my mission to review the lesser-known books. When I first started out, I wanted to review all the big books, but now I don't have much interest. There are many people who are going to review those books. Those books are going to get all the publicity they want. I want to bring attention to the smaller books, maybe the more challenging books, or the off-kilter books, to let people know that they're out there too.

Haley Radke: That's perfect. I think some people have [00:36:00] looked at who I interview on the podcast and been like, “Oh, we really wanna hear from this famous person or this famous person.” And I'm like, “Well, they're already famous, I wanna highlight adoptees with all different stories. We wanna hear all the real stories.” And I don't know about you, but sometimes I think, what if I did land a big interview, Alice with some big name, who knows? Are they really going to come on and tell us their real feelings about adoption? I don't know. Probably not. Anyway, that's just my aside if you're ever wondering why I haven't tried to get some super famous person on–just because the name of your book keeps staring at me, Famous Adopted People.

Before we recommend resources, is there anything else you want to share with us about your story or about your work? I just really want adoptees to hear from your heart so is there anything I missed asking you about that you want to get to? [00:37:00]

Alice Stephens: You didn't miss asking about it. I just didn't get to it. I just want to say that I am looking for my Korean mother. I went back to Korea with a group called Me & Korea and I went back on the Hapa tour. So we were all mixed-race Korean adoptees. And the woman who runs it, a lovely woman–Minyoung Kim– has nothing to do with adoption, but she's made it her life mission to get Korean adoptees reacquainted with Korea and she runs these tours. She took me and my husband one day just to search the neighborhood where I was born. We had a picture of my birth mother, my birth father, and we went to this neighborhood where older Korean women who used to live around the army camps lived. We knocked on their doors. We showed them the photo. None of them knew, but pretty soon we were like a [00:38:00] little parade of people going door to door, and all of them hoping for me. That just really, really touched me. We did find where I was born, which, for me, that's like my only connection to that time in my life. So it was very, very moving.

Also, I have found my half-brother through DNA. I found my birth father’s family through Ancestry. I got the results back that said: this person's your first cousin. It took me about six months to decide to contact her because I was very nervous about it, and once you open that box, you can't close it back up. But I did, and she right away knew who my birth father was. He is now deceased. But I have a half-brother. I have two half-siblings, and the half-brother and I are in close contact. He's a nice guy and we text a lot. And so that's been [00:39:00] great. And someday I hope to go to California where his family is from. And, it turns out that I'm a total mutt besides my half-Korean part. My birth father was Mexican-American. So I am like 15% Native American, 25% Spanish, Portuguese. I have some Northern European, I have 2% Ashkenazi Jew, 2% Congolese African blood. Oh, and I have 2% Neanderthal genes! So I'm just like all over the place.

Haley Radke: Who are they matching up with the Neanderthal genes? Sorry. We just did an episode about DNA testing a couple months ago. It's all very fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. I wish I could ask you more about it, but we have to do our resources now. Maybe next time. [00:40:00]

No one will be surprised that I will recommend your novel, Famous Adopted People. What a page-turner. It was a wild ride. There are some very uncomfortable things that happen. And when we, as a book club, dug in and were looking at all the symbolism and things, it was just very mind-opening. And I have this note to myself to remind me to mention this: There are some really stirring passages about adoptee rights and advocacy topics. I just felt it very comforting when I came across those because I'm always like, “Okay, if a normal (I don't know why I call 'em that) someone who's not connected to adoption, so not an adoptee, reads some of those things, I'm like, “Okay, hopefully they'll get it.” [00:41:00] So anyway, I really appreciated that and it is, like I said, a wild ride. I really enjoyed it. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it because, as you said, there's not too much adoptee fiction and so I literally had no idea going in what it was going to be like. And it was really great. I loved it. There was one part–I don't want to spoil anything. I'm not going to spoil it, but we did do a Book Club on it and if you're on the Adoptees On Patreon, you can go and hear that. It's so good. Loved it. And, I said I spent all this time reading your book reviews on the Washington Independent. I think people should go check those out too, because their reading list is just going to get filled right up. So thanks for that.

Alice Stephens: Thank you.

Haley Radke: Is there anything you want to tell us about your book? Or you can just go ahead and recommend your resource?

Alice Stephens: Okay, I thank you very much for that lovely talk-up of my book. I think you said everything that I'd want to say. I'm so glad that you liked it and I was so glad to be part of that Book Club. I've done a lot of book clubs before but I've never done an Adoptee Book Club, and it was just amazing to be able to [00:42:00] talk to people and not have to explain everything and not have to be the spokesperson for adoption. And I think one problem with my book is that people, adoptees and non-adoptees, approach it like this is going to be The fiction book about adoption. It's just one book. There's so much more to be said and it's such a huge topic, so complex. I just hope that a lot more adoptee writers can get published. I know there are a lot of them out there. One thing I want to quickly mention: this is very preliminary, but I'm hoping to start an adoption literary festival with Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. We are in the preliminary stages of trying to organize an adoption literary festival for adoptee authors only. So hopefully we're going to do that and you'll be the first to know if we do.

Haley Radke: You let us know because we'll tell [00:43:00] everyone all about it. Alright, watch for that. Okay, what did you want to share with us today?

Alice Stephens: My resource is called Side by Side. You can find it at sidebysideproject (dot) com. And it is the project of Glenn and Julie Morey. Glenn Morey is a Korean adoptee and a filmmaker. He has this project where he interviewed a hundred Korean adoptees. It just so perfectly showcases how we are all so different and all the same. It's just a subsection of adoptees, Korean adoptees. Even within that subsection there is this huge array of stories. He interviews Korean orphans who never got adopted, and so everybody from Korean orphans to [00:44:00] people who got adopted, and just the stories are amazing. It's just the interview and the person speaking; it goes from maybe 10 minutes to an hour. And I am fascinated by every single minute. I'm going through it slowly because I can't just sit down and watch a hundred at a time. And I also like to have time in between to think about the stories and to also differentiate the people. But there is every adoption story there from the most horrific to the most fairytale. And there's every emotion, but every single person has that pain, that adoption knot that they had to either work through or that's still sitting there really tight in their chest. And so it's just amazing to see. And the validation that it's okay to [00:45:00] feel that way. It's okay that I felt this way my whole life. They did too. It is really great.

Haley Radke: That power of not feeling alone. Holy-moly, that's huge. It's so huge for us. The other thing I just wanted to mention, because most of us love listening to podcasts, Side by Side is also available on Audible, if you want to hear the stories. I think they announced that towards the end of last year. And it's now an Audible Original.

Alice Stephens: Oh, that's great.

Haley Radke: Yes. Very cool.

Alice Stephens: One thing about watching it, though, is that a lot of the adoptees are from other countries so another great thing is that you don't just get the American adoption story. The adoptees are from Denmark and France and so you get all of these adoption stories and different cultural approaches to the adoption. Though, they're all pretty much the same [00:46:00]. All the approaches to adoption are pretty much like: “You're adopted into this family, and that's it.” But yeah, it's just a fascinating document and I'm so glad that they did it.

Haley Radke: Awesome. I'm sure lots of people will be heading over there to check that out, and we will link it in the show notes. Speaking of, where can we connect with you online, Alice?

Alice Stephens: I have a website which is very convenient and easy to remember. It's famousadoptedpeople (dot) com.

Haley Radke: Perfect. And all of Alice's links will be in our show notes so you can follow her and all the places and the links to that are on her website as well. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I so enjoyed our conversation.

Alice Stephens: Thank you, Haley. Thank you so much for everything that you do for the adoptee community. I'm just so impressed by people like you who've been out there, and you getting your voice out there and gathering up all the other adoptees and giving us a place to come and feel like [00:47:00] a part of a community and feel like we're not weird and strange and unlovable and all those things. I really appreciate it and really admire you guys for doing this.

Haley Radke: My honor. Thanks so much.

Alice sent me one more link she wants you to know about. It's her piece recommending four novels that get adoption right. I've got it linked in the show notes for you. It'll help you find your next read after you finish Famous Adopted People.

As I mentioned briefly in my chat with Alice, she joined me and some of my Patreon supporters for a Book Club conversation about Famous Adopted People, which was stunningly insightful. I enjoyed it so much. If you'd like to access that or any of the other bonuses, I have for Patreon supporters, head to adopteeson.com/partner for more details. Without supporters like you, I can't sustainably make the show. I'm so grateful for those of you that are able to help keep it going. [00:48:00] One free way to help the show is to share this episode with just one person. Perhaps you have a friend that's a voracious reader and they may like to get a few suggestions from Alice.

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

169 [Estrangement Seires] Leigh Bailey

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/169

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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 169, Leigh. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today I get to introduce you to Leigh Bailey. This is another episode of our Estrangement Series. Leigh shares about her reunion and how it started to be about her adoptive family's experience instead of her own.

We talk about how trying to put up safe boundaries can be exhausting and how you decide if estrangement is called for in the situation. Spoiler alert: we can't tell you what's right for you. 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. [00:01:00]

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Leigh Bailey.

Leigh Bailey: Hi. Hey Haley. Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: Okay. Your accent, I just have to say it, it's just, it's delicious to listen to. I've told you that before and I'm really excited to hear even hard things from your lovely accent.

Leigh Bailey: Thank you. You're so sweet.

Haley Radke: Well, would you start in by sharing a bit of your story with us?

Leigh Bailey: Yes, I would love to. Thank you. So I was born in January of 1975 in a small town in southwest Georgia. And I was given up for adoption at birth, and three days later I was placed with my adoptive family. My birth mother actually lived in the area where I lived and grew up in. It was a private adoption. Four years after I was born, my parents who had struggled to have their own children ended up getting [00:02:00] pregnant with my sister. And so I have a sister who is biological to them who's four years younger than me. She and my mother are twins. She and my adoptive mother are twins. And I think that was always hard for me growing up because I just felt this disconnect. I was just different. I was just a different person than they were. And my daddy was so sweet. We were outside folks, my daddy and me. And my sister and my mom, they were like shoppers. And I would rather take a beating than be shopping. But growing up I spent a lot of time outside with my dad, and I think he recognized how much alike they were. And just kind of tried to keep me with him.

And so anyways, we never really discussed my adoption. I remember two times where it was discussed: once my mother told me that the doctor who had delivered me told her my birth mother had moved away from our area. I just really [00:03:00] always thought that I came from folks that were lesser than my adopted family. Just having that in the back of my head affected my confidence. I just really always felt like I wasn't up to the same level. I wasn't at par with my adoptive family. I was in the fog until probably about five or six years ago. My youngest daughter is so sweet and she was curious about my adoption. Every now and then she would mention things about my adoption. And then one day I was sitting on the sofa in our den and she came and sat next to me and she said, “Mama, I bet your parents are really sweet, your real parents.” And I said, “That's sweet of you to say.” And I said, “What makes you say that? I'm curious.” And she said, “Because you're sweet.” And I said, “Thank you.” And she goes, “And it's okay if your real daddy's in jail.” And [00:04:00] I thought to myself, “I had that same thought myself; you know, good people don't give kids away. He probably is in jail.” But then I said, “That's really sweet of you to say. I appreciate that.” But then it occurred to me my being adopted and not knowing my biology is about more than just me. It's about my girls, as well, because my biology is their biology.

So I got my husband to do the dirty work. I got him to call the person who would know my biological mother's name, and he made that call and he came back to report what he had learned, and it was not at all the narrative I had had in my head my whole life. My birth mother was actually married and in her early twenties when I was born, and I just could not wrap my mind around a [00:05:00] married couple in their early twenties giving their kid away. I thought maybe she had to have been like 16 or 17. And the parents didn't want her stuck being a parent at that young of an age. That scenario was in my head. And I really just couldn't get my mind around that. So I searched and searched for her, and I finally figured out who she was and realized that she lived, at the current time, real close to where I grew up. She had apparently moved back.

So I took the Ancestry DNA test to see what I could learn about my genealogy and my biology, and I was blown away at what I found. It actually paired me from the very beginning with my birth father, but I couldn't figure out who he was, though. His name is pretty generic. There's a ton of names. It's not like John Smith, but once you Google it, there's like a bazillion of them. So a really good friend [00:06:00] of mine, who's an adoptee as well, her name's Ann Rickert, and she's a friend of the show. She listens to your show and she doesn't mind me saying her name. She helped me figure out who he was, and the reason I couldn't figure him out is because he goes by a nickname. So I had to stalk him on Facebook and Instagram and get a feeling like I felt like these were good people and I wasn't entering into a psychoville type situation. And I reached out to him and it took a while for him to respond. In my mind, since he'd already done the test, I thought maybe he was looking for me. He had no idea I was in this world. He had no prior knowledge of me. So he had lots of processing to do. He was in shock. Fast forward, we speak on the phone for the first time and he asks if he can meet me? And I was elated. I thought, probably, he was going to talk to me on the phone and realized it was too much. He couldn't handle this. Nobody knew about me. How was he going to tell everybody? So he came to visit, [00:07:00] and, Haley, when I tell you, it was like somebody unfogged the mirror for the first time. It was literally like looking at a one-foot-taller-than-me, male version of myself. It was like looking in my own eyes and at my own hands. Our mannerisms were the same and our sense of humor was the same. And for him to have not had any handle in raising me and for us to have such similarities. So my husband asked him during his visit, he said, “I need to know that you're not gonna hurt her. I need to know that you're not gonna go away.” And he said, I remember exactly how he said it, he said, “My wife doesn't know about this and my kids don't know about this, and I can't tell you how they're gonna respond, but I am my own man and I will have a relationship with Leigh.”

Anyways, the last person we ended up telling [00:08:00] about this birth father situation was my adoptive mother. I had shared this whole situation with my adoptive sister the whole time. And she and I, both, just knew that my mother wouldn't handle it very well. My adoptive father was in a memory loss unit with Alzheimer's, and she had a lot going on with his situation, but we really knew, Haley, that there would never be a good time for me to tell her I'd found my birth father.

Haley Radke: How old was she at the time? Because you said your dad was in a memory loss unit.

Leigh Bailey: Yes, my adoptive mom would have been 73 at the time. So I tell her, and she seems to be okay with it. I told her that my birth father was coming for a visit and she said, “Okay, so I would like to have a little get-together at my house for my friends to meet him.” [00:09:00] And I said, “Okay.” That felt like acceptance so I was excited about that. And so he spent the weekend with us and then we all drove down to my mother's house. And it felt like a sip and see, like when you get married and you have all your wedding gifts on display and everybody comes and looks at them, eats some hors d'oeuvres and has some drinks. I remember standing in her place: the men are in one group, the ladies are in another group. My birth father is talking to all the men, and I'm kind of on the periphery of them, and I'm looking over in the den at my mother and her friends and, Haley, it was almost reminiscent of the after the funeral gathering, like when everybody comes back to your house and they're supporting and surrounding you with love. And I thought to myself, “I don't really know how much of this is about me right now. I don't need this. I don't need this stare-at-my-dad party. [00:10:00] This is for her. And that's when I think I started losing control of the reunion, and it started being about how it affected others and not me.

Then about a month or so later, he invited my family and I to come down to his house down in Florida where he lived and meet his family: my birth father, sister, and brother. We had a lovely time. It was a lovely weekend, and he had a little gathering at his house, too. He had some friends over and he had some family over. And I remember one of his siblings walking in with a balloon that said, “It’s a girl!” I really wasn't sure how I felt about that. I think she was trying to be funny and light. [00:11:00] I don't think there was any malintent, but I just remember not knowing. I just was very ambivalent about how that felt for me. The one thing I do remember that struck me is that I'd spent 43 years knowing I was adopted and I thought, I have thought of everything about how adoption feels. There's no way there's anything else left for me to feel or think about, until I started looking around their house and seeing pictures of the four of them together. On trips, holidays, just family gatherings, the beach. And I just remember this huge sadness coming over me, thinking I missed this. I never thought about feeling like this. These people just went on with their life and I was given away and he went on to.

I need to tell this part about it. When I talked to my birth father for the first time, he explained to me that he had been married before I was born. His wife died six months to the date of their marriage, their wedding, very unexpectedly. [00:12:00] And the next three or so years after that he just lived life like that day was his last day. He just had a really wild time. And so I was a product of a one-night stand during that time period. And then he went on after. And then, in this meantime, I'm born. He knows nothing about it. He meets his second wife, marries her, and has two kids. And I'm just looking around at all these pictures and thinking, how did this happen? It just felt tragic and I never ever anticipated that. So we left and went home and as we drove home, it was almost like my adoptive sister, who has a seizure disorder, and there's the progression of a seizure. There's this [00:13:00] buildup at the beginning before the seizure. Then there's the actual seizure, and then there's this postictal state afterwards where you're catatonic and your body's kind of gearing down. I felt like I was in a postictal state on the way home. I was just gearing down from what had just happened that weekend, trying to process it all, take it all in.

After that, I felt like the most popular family member around. All of a sudden, my adoptive sister wants me to be at everything she's got going on, and she lives almost four hours away from me. And then of course, I'm getting invited to do things with my birth family, and I'm trying so hard to keep the playing field level and give everybody their appropriate time. The last thing I wanted was for anybody to say, “Okay, great, here he's in the picture and now we're getting slighted.” So I'm spreading myself thin and running myself ragged, trying to keep everybody happy. [00:14:00] And I'm at my sister's–I can't remember what the occasion was, but I went for something–and somehow my birth family came up and one of her friends said to me, “Just make sure that you don't forget about your family that raised you.” And when I tell you I thought I was going to scream, that's putting it mildly. I thought to myself, “You have no idea what it's like to be adopted. You have no idea what it's like to finally get this chance to know your birth family, and you're gonna throw that in my face?” It's like telling somebody with cancer how they should feel when you've never had cancer. You just don't do that.

So then, I decided I would invite my birth father and his wife to Grandparents' Day for my daughter's Grandparents' Day celebration at her school. And of course my adoptive mother was coming. I'd invited them all to stay at my house. I had it all planned; it was going to be great.

Everybody was going to get to spend some low-key, casual time together in a very relaxed setting at my house. And my adoptive mother said, “I'm not staying in the house with them. They're gonna have to get a hotel.” And in an effort to accommodate her and keep her happy, I had to uninvite them to my house and ask them to pay for a hotel. [00:15:00]

And I remember another time being at the beach, and my husband and I were in the parking lot with my sister discussing my birth family and my sister said, “But you're my sister.” It was like that Steel Magnolias moment where they're just having that meltdown after the funeral. She was having the Steel Magnolias meltdown in the parking lot at the beach. And my husband tried to explain to her, as did I: “Look, you have always known your biology. You have never not had a mirror to look into when you look at your parents. Leigh has never had that. And she has been everything y'all want her to be all these years, and this is her chance to know her biology. This is her time.” And she just responded with, “But she's my sister.” [00:16:00] And I knew right then and there, they weren't going to ever hear it. They were never going to hear it. It was always going to be about how it affected them. They could never pause and have empathy for the situation or to just stop and say, “You know, it must have really been difficult going through life not looking like us and playing along with the narrative that we are her people, going to family reunions, holidays, and aunt so-and-so’s.” There was none of that. There was just no way. And I thought to myself, “I just think there are some people that can't do this. They just can't hear these things.” Maybe it's a predisposition. Maybe they're narcissistic. I don't know what it is.

So I entered into therapy not long after–there were multiple [00:17:00] blowups of that same type–and it just was very clear to me that this was about how it made them feel. Nobody wanted to hear my side. So I entered into therapy, and my therapist immediately identified that I bore guilt for everything. She said, “You just feel guilty for all this stuff that you have nothing to do with, Leigh.” But it was all I knew. And I didn't even realize that it stemmed from originally feeling guilty for wanting to know who I was my entire life. You know, ever since I've been in reunion with my birth father, my mother loves to tell people, “I always told Leigh that we would help her find her real parents if she wanted to.” However, I have not one memory of her saying that to me. And my husband says that in the 22 years he's known me, in the 21 years we've been married, he has never heard her say that, never heard me say that. I think sometimes–and we are all guilty of it–we tend to rewrite history in a way that makes us be able to sleep at night. [00:18:00]

So I entered into therapy and I began discussing do I want to figure out how to set healthy boundaries with them? Or do I want to talk about becoming estranged from them? And I'm all about family preservation. I am, even in my adoptive family’s situation. But when in every encounter I have in person with them or on the phone with them, I have to remember my keywords and I have to remember to set the boundaries, respond with a question. It is exhausting. This is as exhausting as it was for me to go around as a child: every time I enter into public, I look around to see who looks like me. And so I thought to myself, “I just don't know that I can keep this up.” And then I found myself celebrating when my biological father and my adoptive mother would be around each other at the same time. [00:19:00] And she would leave and we would celebrate that she didn't act too bad. It's like, what a thing to celebrate, you know? And you make all these concessions. You don't talk about this, and you try to keep it light and casual, and nobody discusses adoption. There's never been one time when my adoptive mother has thanked my birth father for having me, or my birth father has thanked my adopted mother for raising me. We've never had that conversation. I don't think we ever will. So then, I just felt like she really just wanted the whole thing to fall apart and she was just waiting on the reunion to go south.

So then fast forward to about a year and a half ago, my birth father and his wife decided to divorce. I felt like somebody was divorcing me. I wanted them to stay together so badly. [00:20:00] I don't think I slept the entire summer during that time. He gave me all these reasons why they were divorcing, and I knew that there had been issues when I first met him, but I couldn't help but think, had I not entered the picture, this wouldn't happen. And I thought, “God, why couldn't y'all have just gotten this outta the way before I met you?” But I remember where I was standing when my mother and I were on the phone one night, I was in my driveway and she said to me–and she got this really sweet tone in her voice and I knew something was coming–”Let me just ask you this one question and then I'll leave you alone. Does his wife blame you for the divorce?” I thought my head was going to blow off my shoulders into the stratosphere. I thought to myself, “There is no way under the sun I would want either of my two girls that I love so much to assume that level of guilt.” [00:21:00] And a couple of days later, I called my sister and I told her about it and she said, “I know, she told me she said that to you.” And I said, “Why would she do that? Why?” And she said, “I don't know. I said the same thing to her. I said, ‘I would've never said that to her. I can't believe you said that to Leigh’” and she said “Maybe I shouldn't have.” But she didn't feel sorry enough about it to apologize and she never has. And since then, for some reason, whenever I'm around her in person, she has this line of questioning that feels like it's designed to lead me down a road of this is why you should have never pursued a relationship with your biological family. If you'd have just stayed ours; this wouldn't have happened. [00:22:00] I've just never understood why it's so hard for them to understand my wanting to know my biology, that it seems like the only thing that they can feel or think is that I'm supposed to be grateful that I was pulled from the fire of those who are unfit to care for me. No matter how I say things, no matter how I write things. I've tried writing. I've tried catching everybody at a good time. It just falls on deaf ears.

So my adoptive father passed away of Alzheimer's. He actually ended up with COVID and had to be in the hospital in restraints for 25 days, which you can only imagine caused a tremendous amount of atrophy to his body. And about three weeks after he was released from the hospital, he passed away. A couple weeks after his funeral, I was down at my mother's helping her sort through some stuff and my oldest daughter calls me and says, “Mama, so-and-so just told me that her mother just told her out of the blue that she was adopted.” [00:23:00] And I was like, “What? Who tells a 15-year-old! What?” And she said, “Mama, she wanted to FaceTime us and tell us that on FaceTime.” And I thought, “Thank you, Lord, that that didn't happen.” Because I know my jaw dropped and my face would not have been the face to be looking at. And so I hang up the phone and I tell my mama that. And I'm like, “Can you believe that?” I said, “Y'all did it so right. I always knew I was adopted.” There was never that sit down. You're not who you think you are. There was never that moment. And she said to me–this is the first time she's ever asked me this–she said, “Did being adopted bother you?” [00:24:00]

Just a little bit.

Haley Radke: Sorry, I can't get over that. What is that? Is it really not understanding whatsoever? Is it just completely ignoring any of those little mentions you made here and there? What is that?

Leigh Bailey: Yes, that's exactly how it felt. It felt like, “Have you been so disconnected from me my entire life?” And so I said, “Yes.” I said, “Mama, it embarrassed me that I was adopted. I wanted to be yours. I wanted to be the same thing my sister was. I didn't wanna be adopted. I didn't wanna know I was given away and not wanted.” I went on and on to talk about how I had joined these Facebook groups and I had a community now, and that I was in therapy and I was trying to repair a lot of the damage that had been done as a child. [00:25:00] And I thought she was really hearing me, right up until she wasn't. And she said, “Was there anything positive about being adopted?” I wanna just grab my person and leave. And I said, “That's not the point. That's not what I'm telling you.” It's like they could only love and accept me in the form of the person they wanted me to be. It's like buying something you have expectations of working a certain way. And you're all happy with it when it does, and then one day it stops working that way and you're not happy with it anymore. It's, “Wait a minute, I don't really want that anymore. We need to go back to when it was working this way.” [00:26:00] And I thought to myself, adoption trauma is such an easy concept. It really makes more sense that it would affect us and affect our brains than for it not to affect us. It's just not rocket science. It's really that simple. And if you are in my life and you love me and you're empathetic towards my feelings, how can you not ever just take a minute and say, “You know, we didn't make her, someone else did, and so maybe we should celebrate that her dark hair came from her birth family and not try to pretend that it came from one of us, and maybe we should celebrate her talents and interests that differentiate from ours, and say, golly, it'd be really neat to know who that came from. [00:27:00] And I think it's great that you are who you are.” But, you know, I was just theirs.

And, my friend that I referenced earlier, she's been so amazing during my journey. She had a totally different situation. She had an adoptive mother that actually saved a little piece of paper that had her birth mother's name on it and held it for her until she knew the time would come when she would ask who she was. And she showed it to her and she shared the journey with her and helped her find her biological mother. So while we're both adoptees, we feel very differently about adoption because of that very difference, those different scenarios.

One of the hardest things for me in reunion–other than like constantly having to battle [00:28:00] everybody that really wanted it to fall apart–is that the only way, at 43, I can have a relationship with my biological father is as an adult. I will never know what it's like to be held in his arms as a baby or put in time-out as a 3-year-old. He will never see me graduate high school. He will never walk me down the aisle to get married, and he didn't know me during the times of my two daughters’ births. And the only relationship I can have with him is that an of an adult. And I think that threatens all the preexisting folks, all the people that exist. And I have had to learn to try to separate myself from that guilt-ridden pleaser. To say unto myself, “You know what? This is a [00:29:00] gift from God, and I'm sorry if it bothers all these people and they feel uncomfortable and they feel threatened, but I'm not because he's my dad and I'm not going to not know him and not have whatever relationship that's healthiest for us to have just because all these other people don't want it or don't like it or it doesn't make them feel a certain way.” I heard Lesli Johnson say on your show one time, we have to learn to sit with the discomfort of those who disagree with us. I don't need you to agree or like my decisions. This is not open to a vote from you.

But I think as adoptees, so many of us have a hard time managing reunion because of those that we have to sort of battle. And I hate to say “battle,” but those who can't hold space for us. [00:30:00] My oldest daughter is 16, she was 13 or 14 at the time I met my birth father, and she said, “Mama, I don't know why everybody's acting so ugly. You'll never have 43 years with him. He's 69 years old. You'll never have 43 years with him. Think about what they've had with you and they need to step back and let you have your time. You've been their time.” It was a very profound thing for someone that age to say. I thought, “Golly that's a movie line, but you'll never have 43 years of him.

I have contemplated estrangement many a time, and it ain't ever yet. It ain't over yet.

Haley Radke: Okay. Wow. I need to get myself together. [00:31:00] I've been crying quietly here as you've shared the last few minutes. I identify so much with your story. Even your daughter, it is so profound, missing 43 years. And it's like I'm not going to get the next 43, so give me what I can have now. And I don't know about you, but I have certainly felt this need to make up for lost time. And it's really mind-boggling to me that other people can't understand that when we've said yes to them for so long and then, now, you're choosing to say yes to yourself and that's so painful for them. And yeah, wow.

Leigh Bailey: Yeah, it feels very selfish.

Haley Radke: It does. So you talked about going to therapy to suss [00:32:00] this out, like do I just need stronger boundaries? Do I need estrangement? Can you talk about that? What makes you choose to stay in relationship? What makes you think, okay, is this it? What's that like for you navigating?

Leigh Bailey: So for me, during the thick of it, my father was still alive and every day was a different problem with him and his memory loss unit. And I was constantly helping my mother with that. And I felt like I can't leave her now. I can't do this to her now with him and I can't do it to him either. So then when he passes away, she's older now. She's 76, I think, and she's not in the best of health. And when I see her, Haley, it's so hard because when I go down there and I visit her and I see her feeble-looking, I just feel sorry for her. [00:33:00] And I have empathy for her situation and that she's alone now. But then I drive away and that 3% of the time that I actually feel that way about her goes away. And that 97% of the time that I feel the total opposite for her comes back. And, literally, I feel like I talk about the same things over and over in therapy. I rehash things over and I make progress, and then I digress and we have to go back to where we were. And then I make some progress, and then something else happens and I digress. My problem is that I just don't live very far away; I live about an hour and a half from her. And I'm very much still a part of the community and her friends, and I feel like if I become estranged from them that I'll become estranged from all these other people. And I don't know if I'm okay with all of that yet. [00:34:00]

I listened to a podcast–and I can't recall the podcast–and they talked about narcissistic parents and estrangement, and the lady was a doctor so-and-so on the podcast, and she said, “The question you have to ask yourself is: If I walk away from these people today and never see, never hear from them again, never interact with them ever again, how does that make me feel?” How do I feel about that? And there are times when I'm so disappointed in them that I just want to do that. But then I just feel sorry for her because, I guess, that's how my daddy raised me to be, to have empathy. He used to preach “the least of these” to us all the time. That which you have done to the least of these. And when I see her in her home, falling and [00:35:00] having health issues I just think, “Gosh, if she's the least of these and I'm not getting over myself to just ride it out, then maybe that's shame on me. I don't know.

Haley Radke: And what about your relationship with your sister?

Leigh Bailey: It's definitely been strained. She's been a lot better about my reunion with my birth father than my mother was. But we've had some very strained moments over the last six months. We text and send pictures of the kids but I'm just very guarded. I'm very guarded. And I know that they know the Leigh from before I did all my work, all my therapy. Like my therapist said to me one day, she said, “Leigh, here's the deal. You're doing all this work. You're here. You're toughing it out every week. So now you're in this circle over here, and all [00:36:00] these people who aren't doing their work, they're over here in this circle. And your supporters, your husband, your birth father, your kids–everybody that supports you–they're in this circle over here with you.” And it made a lot of sense. That's who I need to focus on. So right now where I am is: I'm focusing on the supporters, dealing with the non-supporters, and I'm trying to keep my boundaries set in a manner that makes things healthy for me.

You have to set boundaries with those who aren't on board with you. This would be my advice. Only discuss things as you wish. Even when you enter into reunion, you get excited. You've learned all this stuff, and you do, Haley, you said it right when you find your birth father and he's 69 years old, you're like, “Oh my God, he's old. I gotta pack this in.” And you jump the clutch on the reunion. You're just like full-steam ahead 'cause, Lord, his family is going to be like, “Okay, I don't think we like her so much anymore. We're gonna have to cut this off.” Or somebody may die. You don't know. [00:37:00] And it's just, “We gotta get this weekend planned and this weekend planned.” You get excited and you start sharing it with everybody. And then, all of a sudden, they're like, “Wait, I don't know how this makes me feel.” So then it becomes about how they feel. So you have to hang on to your reins. Don't lose your reins. You let go of your reigns and everybody starts slowly but surely making it about how they feel. You have to go back to the nucleus of the story. And in the middle of the story, it's the baby that was given away and the birth father that made her. And that's the basis of reunion. Reunion doesn't occur because of all these side people. And you can't let the jealousy of others alter how you enjoy your reunion. It would be awfully easy for you to find yourself making concessions because so-and-so's not real comfortable with this, and “We didn't realize you were going to know him this well. We just thought you were going to talk to him every so often. I don't know how we feel about that.” Here's the deal: It doesn't matter [00:38:00] because it's not your dad. It's mine.

Haley Radke: One of the last things that put me over the edge–I don't know if I've shared this before–but I got asked: “When is this gonna go back to normal?”

Leigh Bailey: Yeah. This is the new norm.

Haley Radke: Exactly. This is it.

Leigh Bailey: So you're going to need to get on board. This is the new car. This is the new ride around.

Haley Radke: I'm curious how you feel choosing yourself.

Leigh Bailey: I struggled with it at first. I just kept digressing in my choice of myself. I would choose myself and I'd feel all high and mighty. I'd use my words, I'd set my boundaries, and then I would start feeling guilty, but, “Gosh, how does it make them feel?” And then you just really have to stop and say, “How did I feel 43 years separated from my [00:39:00] biology? How did that make me feel?” I have spent my whole life being theirs. It's like there were all those boxes that they needed checking. I had boxes that needed checking; they had boxes that needed checking. They needed a child. I needed a home. Check. Check. Wipe the slate clean and move forward. I think that's how they think it works. The fact that there's a lifetime of residual trauma and pain, it's lost on them, completely lost on them.

Haley Radke: Oh, I keep going back to that. You are having this huge conversation with your adoptive mom, you're explaining all the impacts that adoption has had on you. And then at the end it's: “Wasn't there anything good about it?” It's like talking to a wall. Nothing's getting through. There's a tiny window and the only thing that fits through it are the nice things. “Tell me the nice things I did for you.” [00:40:00] Yeah, that's tough.

**Leigh Bailey:**Yeah.

Haley Radke: Wow. I thank you so much for sharing the hard stuff with us. I think a lot of us can relate to reunion putting a great deal of pressure on our current relationships. And, as you said, there's pressure on your biological father's relationships. Like reunion exposes the cracks everywhere, I think. In my experience that's what it's been. I am so impressed when people persevere and really look for help and support and choose themselves. That is so impressive to me because a lot of adoptees–I won't say all–but we've just bent to the will of others our whole life. That was like our purpose, yeah? [00:41:00] And so to be like, “No, I'm choosing me, choosing my family.” I found so much of your story interesting because I've experienced similar things and my psychologist sounds very much like your therapist. So I feel okay. I think we're getting good advice. I think we're learning good things. Choosing yourself.

Is there anything else you want to say before we do recommended resources? Say to someone else who's like you. Do I keep this up? Can I manage just being the boundary enforcer? Or do I need to take a break and say that to someone who is in your same imposition?

Leigh Bailey: When I would dread calling my adoptive mother just to check in with her and I would get this right below in the middle of my stomach. I would get this feeling in my stomach [00:42:00] like, “Oh, please, just don't even mention my birth father. Please just don't bring anything up. Please, let's just talk about something benign.” That's when this isn't healthy. This isn't good for me. And if I'm not healthy, I'm not good for my husband and I'm not good for my kids. And I have the most supportive husband in the world when I tell you he is a rockstar about reunion and adoption and all the mess I've been through in the last few years. He is a rockstar. If you can set those boundaries in a way where you can pick that phone up and answer the phone or have that visit in person. Not have your stomach in knots and it be so painful and you're just dreading the conversation and like looking at your notes before you walk in the door: “Remember, say this.” You know, when it doesn't consume you like that, I think you can carry on as long as it feels healthy to you. But when it affects you, it affects those around you. And that's no good. [00:43:00] That's no good.

Haley Radke: Well said. Okay, my recommended resource is along those lines, so I'm going to go first. I had a friend recommend this book to me very recently. I'm not even finished reading it. And it's so good that I wanted to bring it to you all because she and I both have had some extremely challenging relationships going on, and when she told me the title of the book, I immediately ordered it. It's called Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries and Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy and it's by Lindsay C. Gibson. And she is a psychologist. It's so good, and you mentioned the word narcissism in our conversation, and I think lots of adoptees will be like, “Oh yeah, there's a narcissistic parent ….. [00:44:00] And, we're technically not supposed to go around diagnosing people with a personality disorder. But this is so interesting because it's not necessarily talking about narcissism, but emotional immaturity. Dr. Gibson's little abbreviation for that is “EI.” So want to read that? That's Emotionally Immature. Okay. I'm going to read from the back: “This guide offers powerful tools to help you heal and break free from the coercive control of EI parents and other EI people. You'll learn practical ways to set boundaries, validate your feelings and gain emotional autonomy in all your relationships.” And I was like, “Yes, please.” So far, I haven't seen anything necessarily about adoption, but when she describes case studies of how parents are interacting with their adult children and just the really unhealthy things, I'm like, “Oh boy, have I seen that?” And I'm not necessarily just talking about my own situation, but, you know, how many adoptees I've talked to. [00:45:00] And the really neat thing in this book that I really like is she gives lots of tips on setting boundaries and things and you can find that all over the place. But at the back, she has a bill of rights for adult children of emotionally immature parents. I feel like for adoptees, I think this is a really helpful thing. The right to set limits. And she goes through more specifically what that means. The right to choose relationships. The right to put my own health and wellbeing first. And there's a whole list. There's 10 of them. And I'm like, yeah, we don't have to put up with these things, just as you were saying, Leigh.

And the other thing I was on her website, it's drlindsaygibson(dot)com. I was just checking it right before we hopped on, and she has a Q&A from readers. And the very last question–when we're recording this anyway-was: “Dear Dr. Gibson, How do I know if it's best to cut off contact with emotionally immature parents?” [00:46:00] And her short answer is: “It's best to cut contact when you feel like you've had all you can take. No. It's “all you want to take,” not “all you can take.” All you want to take and that's very different. So anyway, I recommend reading that little article on her website. I'll link to it. If you're where Leigh is, you might want to talk to a therapist about that and guide you through making that decision or whatever. And this book is so good. It's Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents. And also, thank you to my friend for sharing that with me. She knows who she is.

What do you want to recommend to us today, Leigh?

Leigh Bailey: Okay, so I know everybody mentions Anne Heffron, but Anne is my writing coach, and I'm in the process of writing my book. Just writing my story, even if it's only for me to read. Getting it out of my head and into print. [00:47:00] Sometimes I'll write a ton of stuff and I'll go back and reread it, and I'll say, “Okay, so I got it out. I said it. I don't have to have that on there anymore, and I'll keep this part.” But just reading Anne's book and seeing that this is our truth. Feeling like you identify with people. Sarah Easterly, I know, I'm not going to go through a litany of all the adoptee books. There are so many good ones out there. Sarah Easterly’s Searching for Mom was a great read, too. It was really nice to connect with people like that and to know they've been there, they've walked in your shoes. Because really, that’s the rub we have with those that don't get us. They've never walked in our shoes.

Haley Radke: Well, when you talk about your story and when we're on this journey of what does it look like when we're interacting with the other people in our lives who maybe have not behaved–what's the line about writing a memoir? [00:48:00] About if they didn't want me to write about them in this way, they should have behaved better. I'm butchering that phrase, but it's like if you're feeling guilty, if you have cut off contact or whatever, you can go back to what you've written and also remind yourself, “Oh yeah, remember they did this really challenging thing. I don't really wanna revisit that.” So you also have a little bit of proof for yourself.

Leigh Bailey: You hate to think about taking your kids away from their grandparents. But you just have to look at the situation as a whole. And right now, I'm fine with them, I'm handling it well. But there's been a time when, like I said, I thought, “I can't do this anymore. Cannot do this anymore. It's no good.”

Haley Radke: Sorry I cut you off there. Did you have a last thought on your writing?

Leigh Bailey: No. Just how cathartic it is and it is for me. And I think it could be for everybody too. Anne always says we cannot die with our stories inside of [00:49:00] us. That's my approach.

Haley Radke: That's a pretty good job. Anne's getting a real workout on this show the last couple weeks!

Leigh Bailey: I know. I know.

Haley Radke: No shame. I think when you read another adoptee's memoir, just like you and I just had this conversation, it's very real. We're not trying to sugarcoat anything for anybody. It's freeing. You're like, “Whoa. She could say that? Maybe I could too.” And like you said, if it's just for you and maybe no one else will see it. Or maybe it'll be a best-seller. You don't know.

Leigh Bailey: And I was literally listening to your podcast the first time I ever heard of her book, Haley. And I remember when, I think it may have been Lesli Johnson, said the name of her book. I think it was that episode. And she said, “You don't look adopted.” I erupted in laughter. I laughed so hard out loud. I thought, “Oh my gosh. Who does?”

Haley Radke: Yes. It was a good title. Thank you so much. [00:50:00] I would love for you to share where we can connect with you online.

Leigh Bailey: I'm on Facebook. I have my whole name on there: Leigh Willis Bailey. I am on Instagram (at)LeighB75, and then I have a blog: alwayslooking(dot)blog. I named it that because I've always been looking. I've always been looking for familiar faces in the last five, six years I've been searching for biological family. I get a high from looking for my family. I don't ever want the search to end. I never want not to search. I always want there to be some more folks to be looking for.

Haley Radke: That's a good title too. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing with us, Leigh. I really appreciate it and I know that there'll be lots of people listening that feel very connected to your story and will be like, “Oh, I'm so glad someone else said it out loud, so maybe I can too.”

Leigh Bailey: Thank you so much for having me, Haley. I've so enjoyed this. [00:55:00]

Haley Radke: Guys, this stuff is so hard. I thank you for listening and honoring Leigh's story and my other guests’ stories. I just want to encourage you if you are feeling lonely or confused or trying to navigate some of these really, really challenging relationships to seek out support. I know therapy is not always accessible but if it is, I would encourage you to find an adoptee-competent therapist. And there's lots of lists online where you can find those. There's advice for interviewing your therapist. I have a Healing Series episode way back on that. And I just encourage you to seek out support and community. And, I want to thank my community for supporting the show and keeping it going. There's been some ups and downs lately, if you know what I'm talking about. But if you don't, that's fine. I really [00:52:00] appreciate your financial support. It pays for editing and hosting and all kinds of things.

And, if you want extra bonuses, there's Patreon. I have an Adoptees Off Script podcast that's weekly. We're doing a Book Club right now with adoptee-authored books, which is really wonderful, and we'd love to have you join us. So adopteeson.com/partner has details. And a free way to help support the show is just to share this episode with one friend who you think would either relate or another episode that you think they would benefit from.

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