180 [Healing Series] Estrangement Through an IFS Lens

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/180

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Haley Radke: You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 180, Estrangement Through an IFS Lens with Marta Isabella Sierra. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Before we get started, I want to let you know how much it means to me that you're showing up here to listen to adoptee voices. I remember when I was first in reunion with my dad, and we hit the inevitable rocky patch after the honeymoon period faded, I felt so alone. I believed that I was absolutely unlovable because my first mother had ghosted me after a few months into our reunion just a decade prior. For me, creating this podcast has been a tremendous labor of love so that other adoptees like me who were feeling alone, struggling in reunion, or coming out of the fog would have connection, so we wouldn't feel like we were crazy. The wildest part of all of this is that it succeeded. Adoptees On [00:01:00] has become our show to connect and share what the adoptee experience is really like and I'm asking you today to support the podcast and make it sustainable for me to continue doing this work. I'm Haley, the host and creator of the show–our community's show–and I'm also a wife and mom of two little boys, who are trying their very best to stay quiet as I record this.

Haley Radke’s little boys: Hi, Mommy.

Haley Radke: They're trying their almost best to stay quiet. When you sign up for Patreon or donate via PayPal, you are helping me, Haley, contribute to my family's needs. What I didn't expect when I started podcasting was that this would become my full-time job. I'm showing up for you and saying yes to adoptees, and I would love for you to show up for me and commit to a year of support for Adoptees On. I have big plans, and I want to do [00:02:00] huge things for adult adoptees, but I can't do it without the support of you, my listeners. For the month of April only, I have a sale on for a yearly membership to Adoptees On Patreon with one month free. After that, it'll be back to regular price. I'm honored by the support I have already gotten from the community and, truthfully, pretty scared to make this ask again, but if I'm going to continue making the show, I really need your help to make it sustainable and to have the ability to meaningfully contribute to my little family over here and to hire other adoptees to help build the show. Click the link in the show notes or go to adopteeson.com/partner to sign up right now. Okay, let's get to the show.

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 through the Internal Family Systems model. And if you're not even sure what [00:03:00] that is, don't worry. It's literally my first question. Let's listen in.

I’m so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Marta Sierra. Welcome, Marta.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Hi, Haley.

Haley Radke: I was just telling you how you are a favorite guest on the Healing Series, so I'm so glad you're back. And you bring the Internal Family Systems model lens to our Series. I know lots of people are not necessarily familiar with that, so can you just give us a Cliff's Notes of what IFS is before we get into our main conversation?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes, absolutely. So IFS is, most simply stated, the honoring of the fact that we have multiplicities. We have many different parts of ourselves that can have a lot of conflicting feelings, beliefs, [00:04:00] intentions, and that all of our parts are working really hard to keep us safe and to try to keep everything together and yet often really failing at that when our system is out of balance. So the goal of IFS therapy is to strengthen the relationship between ourselves and our parts so that we can feel more internally connected, internally balanced, and so that we can cope differently than maybe we were before.

Haley Radke: Thank you for explaining that. And we have a really great episode in which Marta talks us through this, Episode 69. That's way back. You've been on a number of times, so way back if you want to hear more about IFS and how it can specifically help adopted people. Okay. So we are here to talk about estrangement, which is just super fun. Everybody loves it. There's no feelings, nope, no nothing. It's not hard, right?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Super easy. [00:05:00]

Haley Radke: Super easy. Yeah, super easy stuff. But we've been talking through this Estrangement Series. I've had many adoptees on sharing really hard stories and about why they've decided to become estranged from their adoptive families or they're considering it. And I would love to hear your perspective of that from the IFS lens when we're deciding if this is a safe relationship to stay in?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes, absolutely. I just want to start with a little disclaimer, Haley, which is actually a comment on parts that give disclaimers. So there's this pattern when adoptees speak where we feel inclined or even maybe mandated internally or externally to give disclaimers like “not all adopters” or making sure that we [00:06:00] mention, I love my adoptive parents, before we go into something a little more complicated or something a little heavier. And that's an example of what I'll be talking about later on which is prioritizing other people's comfort before speaking our truth, before speaking our narrative and stepping into that. So I won't be doing that today, and that might be uncomfortable for some listeners or some people. And I'm doing that to really model not taking care of other people's parts, which is something that we talk about in IFS, which is not being responsible for other people's parts, not taking care of other people's parts. So I'm speaking today, as I always am, from both my personal experience and my professional experience, and these are things that I believe to be true. And people are welcome, of course, to have all of their own feelings about that, but I won't be giving any [00:07:00] disclaimers during this episode.

Haley Radke: Okay. While you were saying that, my jaw was on the floor because so many people give the disclaimer and I'm always like, Oh, come on. Please don't do that. Please don't do it. I just want to know what you think. You don't need to protect everybody. I love that you said that. That's fascinating. That's a whole ‘nother rabbit trail. Okay.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes. So, that out of the way, the big question here, I think, is when do we hold boundaries versus when do we cut contact? And in IFS we talk a lot about polarities, which just very simply means two parts that are pulling in really opposite directions. My go-to example is someone in a relationship conflict that's "part of me wants to leave, part of me wants to stay." With bigger conflicts it's more than one part pulling in one direction and one part pulling in the other. It's almost like there's two whole camps that have really different [00:08:00] views. And so when we're talking about estrangement, that means that there's a whole group of us inside of us that feel unsafe leaving the relationship, and then there's another camp that feels unsafe staying in the relationship, and that can really rip us up from the inside out because it feels like an impossible position, right? How can I take care of all of my parts? In IFS we talk about our role as leaders of our system is to do our best to take care of all of our parts. And so how do we do that with this big conflict? And so the idea is that we really have to honor both sides. We have to honor all of it and the complexity of it, and, no matter what decision we might make in a given moment, that we're taking care of all of the parts the best we can, despite who gets the decision [00:09:00] made for them maybe in a given moment. For example, if you have two children, two external children, and they have different wants and needs. We're not going to be able to go to the circus and the zoo on the same day, right? So somebody's not going to get their needs met, and they still need love and care and support around that. So if you're in the place where the majority of your parts feel unsafe leaving a relationship, and you're going to stay in that, it's okay to honor that the majority of me feels unsafe leaving this relationship, I'm going to stay in it. There still needs to be a lot of attention to the other side, the parts that feel unsafe in the relationship. How am I going to still protect those parts of me? And so that's where the boundaries come in, right? Okay, what do these parts need to feel as safe as possible? And so, of course, that looks a lot of different ways, right? Email only, or taking breaks, or no texting at night, or [00:10:00] again, that's totally individual. And then to the other end of the spectrum, once 51% of your parts or more feel unsafe staying in the relationship, and maybe you start to take some of those steps towards cutting ties or you do cut ties, there's still a lot of love and care that needs to go to the sides that still feel loyal to the side that is really afraid. What happens without this relationship? I equate letting go of these relationships that are not functioning anymore to trying to move through the space and time continuum. Like you just start to shake. I'm shaky right now talking about it, right? Like it feels, I think, of what it takes for someone to saw off their own arm in an extreme emergency, right? It's that counterintuitive to us. And so there's just a lot of care that has to go into what we're going through in these experiences, in these relationships. [00:11:00]

Haley Radke: I feel like every time I go see my psychologist and we address something of this nature in my own personal life, it's like she has to tell me the same thing every time. And I even said that to her today. I was like, Do you feel like you're just on repeat with me? But sometimes it is taking care of that section of you that is like, Oh my gosh, am I doing the right thing here? I don't know. It does bring up all those things.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yeah. It's really hard to try to take care of these two sides of us that are really in such huge conflict. Sometimes I'll do an exercise when someone again, estrangement aside, is having a conflict and sometimes the thought is, Oh, whichever side has more parts is the winner, right? Or the one that maybe should get the priority or get the decision [00:12:00] made in their name. But when we're talking about trauma, sometimes there's more because the fear is really big, not because that's the thing that we're supposed to do. And so really listening to our parts, to both of these sides, both of these camps, what are their fears and concerns and what do they need from us to help them feel more safe? And listening to our parts means paying attention to what's happening in our bodies, what our thought streams are, what our thought patterns are, noticing our behaviors and emotions. All of those things are ways that our parts are communicating with us. And the less we listen, the louder they will communicate. And so part of my own journey towards severing ties, a big part of that is that the last four times that I saw my adopters in person, there [00:13:00] was a lot of vomiting before, during, and after those encounters.

Haley Radke: Wait, do you mean actual vomiting?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: I mean actual vomiting.

Haley Radke: You felt so sick you threw up. Oh, my word.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: And, our dear Pam Cordano, who I'm blessed to be working with, her view on vomiting is that it's the body's way of saying no, right? And so my body was saying, No. No, I can't do this. No, this isn't safe for me. And I had some trouble listening, given that it had to happen four times before I realized I can't do this. I can't keep going like this. My parts are being very clear with me that this is not a safe situation for me, and I had to decide, right? Am I going to listen to them? Am I going to protect them? Am I going to put them first or not?

Haley Radke: So putting [00:14:00] them first, choosing our own safety, I think, is a way that you phrased that to me before we started recording, it feels like that's the scariest part because we’ve spent our whole lives being adopted and into someone else's family, into someone else's dreams and hopes, and we're trying to live up to that. And then now, as an adult, deciding, Okay, can I even choose myself? Can I choose that? It’s terrifying.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: It's terrifying

Haley Radke: Can you talk to someone that is maybe feeling that way? Like the vomiting, that's a pretty big signal. I don't think that all of us get to that point. Maybe we do, I don't know.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: It can look so many different ways. Again, Haley, everyone's system is individual, so how it [00:15:00] communicates with you is going to be different. But I know that I'm not alone in that reaction. Because we are so afraid of being rejected by a second family, we adopt so many beliefs and so many mandates internally and this idea of perfection, right? That we have to be perfect. If I don't want to lose this second family, then I have to be perfect, and some of that perfection plays out in parts of us that feel responsible to fix our adoptive family system. And when we center any adoptive family members, that could even be siblings, over ourselves, that's such a barrier to self-love and self-care, like you're saying, because then it feels impossible. It feels impossible to choose us when it feels like we're choosing us [00:16:00] to keep going with the pattern the way that it's been going, because that's created for safety, right? I have to be perfect if I want to receive care and love in this new family. And so that's safety based. So again, I'm going to say “safety” a million times because this is all safety based, except the method of keeping us safe is in direct conflict with the other. But both of these camps of parts are trying to keep us safe. They're just not succeeding. Unfortunately, protective parts most often invite in the very thing they're trying to protect us from.

Haley Radke: Okay, that's interesting. Say more about that. We are doing something to prevent something from happening, and the opposite is going to happen. It's just going to happen.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes. So I'll reference when we talked about romantic relationships some time ago. I have a part that wants to protect me from [00:17:00] feeling abandoned, and so will run away first, but eventually that person's going to leave if I keep doing that, right? And so I have not avoided being hurt. If anything, I will leave that situation feeling more certain than ever that I'm incapable of this or I always pick the wrong people or whatever the narrative is that gets reinforced.

Haley Radke: Wow, we really have all the things going on there. Whew, okay, so you mentioned that you've chosen to be out of relationship with your adopters. Are you okay with sharing a little bit about that?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes, absolutely, and I will keep sharing about it as I keep talking about our parts because, I'm talking about that as an IFS therapist, but I'm talking about it as like, how did I get here? How did I finally do this? Which has been a very long process. [00:18:00] I listened to all my old episodes in preparation to talk to you today, Haley, and I was so surprised that in that first episode about IFS, I shared about the session I had had and how the therapist wasn't adopted, but that I felt safe because when I was talking about my female adopter, he reflected back to me: "It sounds like she's really dangerous to you." And I couldn't believe that was right there because that was 2017, maybe. I don't know. It was a while ago, at least three years, and it was right there, right? That I was in danger, that I really was unsafe in these relationships, and it was still so hard for me to see even then, even though it was coming right out of my mouth, right? There's other parts of me that were still so terrified about the how and the fear of judgment externally and all of these layers that [00:19:00] we're going to be talking about and the burdens that we carry as adoptees, which I keep learning more and more about. But at this point I have my big three that I feel like are the result of what happened to us.

So the first is the neurological and physical damage to our beings when we were separated that is mostly irreversible, right? That's first for me. It has to be because it's so concrete; this happened to our bodies. And the second is something I've talked to a bunch with you as well, Haley, which is that broken sense of innate trust in the world, in ourselves, in relationships. And then this third one that's really gotten so carved out for me through my own process and professionally is that we are loyal to others before we are loyal to ourselves. It becomes an internal mandate to put others before ourselves and I see this doing such pervasive damage to adoptees on every level. It touches every aspect of our lives. [00:20:00]

Haley Radke: Ugh. I don't want to talk about that because it's too personal. Okay. Here we are. Talking about this is so hard, and you're sharing really personal stuff, too. I identify with that so much, and I think I might have mentioned this in another Estrangement Episode, but I'll just say it again, but everyone I've talked to, it really feels like choosing estrangement means choosing to finally be myself.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes.

Haley Radke: Who else would we say this to, what other friend would we say something like, Oh my gosh. You just have to go along with that stuff. Don't worry about being yourself. You would never [00:21:00] ask someone else to cover up all the things that make you you and just try and fit in and– oh my word. Ugh. We would never do that. So what is it in us? It's all of those three things, probably, but I'll let you go ahead and explain.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: And fear. Again fear. We are so wired for fear, and I think it's unfortunately sometimes our baseline. And I think it looks different, of course, in different people but, whether that's really anxious or really angry or really shut down, these are all fear-based responses. And I think that our systems, unfortunately, run on fear or love. And I think when the love has been blocked by the fear, this is the result, that we're often not in the present moment and therefore this need to fit into [00:22:00] our adoptive family systems, right? If our protectors are prioritizing our adopters' needs, and if they're doing that to ensure our safety, but they're not. That's not happening anymore if we're talking about adults. So our parts get stuck in space and time and some of our parts don't realize that I don't need those people for literal life support anymore. For housing and for food and for maybe some of the needs that were being met. I'm not there in space and time and yet our protectors, to a fault, will continue to prioritize others, thinking that it's keeping us safe when it's actually maybe putting us in harm's way

Haley Radke: That's so profound. I hope that thought can be really helpful for people to just unpack. Like how would you make the space to think about that and, I don't know, sit down and process with your parts to just think about that? [00:23:00]

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yeah. So I think a strength of IFS here is the qualities of self-energy, as we say in IFS, but really your heart, like opening your heart to yourself. Three of those eight Cs are courage, clarity, and confidence. And I think when we're talking about estrangement, these are so essential because they're all linked to truth and the truth about our worth which is that we deserve to be fully alive, to be fully here, to be fully ourselves. And that it's okay to take steps towards that which maybe nobody outside of us even understands. And how do we tap into that support internally? In order to tap into that support internally, we may need external support first. So I can't emphasize enough, as you often do, [00:24:00] Haley, the importance of support and the importance of adoption-competent therapy. I knew where I needed to go. I was really clear on it. The vomiting was the clarity for me that I had made the decision. This is over for me. I can't do this anymore. And there was still this huge how. How? How? How? How am I ever going to do this? And so I needed support around that, and that's when I started working with Pam. And in our first session I was already working on the email that would eventually be sent. And it took months of working with my fear, really, and supporting the parts of me that were terrified that I would die, all the things, all the irrational, trauma-based fears about what happens if I choose myself.[00:25:00]

Haley Radke: I'm glad you said that though because I think we can just say, Oh, we cut off contact, or whatever, and that just sounds like just this simple thing. Whatever. I blocked them everywhere, and I actually moved. But that's beside the point. It's not just one tear-off-the Band-Aid kind of thing. It's not that. You're talking about months of, oh my gosh, processing. It's never just this one little thing. Maybe there's a trigger. Maybe there's one little thing that's the trigger, but there's been months, years leading up to this point.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes. There's a lead-up maybe to a moment or an action that's taken, but that's just a point in time. I think of it also as like a reunion, as this one moment, and there's so much work after. And estrangement is the same. If you do decide to cut ties, there's more work after. There's a lot [00:26:00] more work after, which is what I'm working through now myself. It keeps going,

Haley Radke: It keeps going, I'm sorry to tell you.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: It keeps going. Yes.

Haley Radke: Okay. That was so helpful. Thank you. Hard, but helpful, and I think it's given us a lot to process, and I'm really glad that you're going to come back, and we're going to talk a little bit more about this from a different perspective. So thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us again. And, like I said before, Marta has been on a number of times, so you can find all her episodes. I'll link them in the show notes. But where can we connect with you online?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: I am almost finished with my final legal name change, so I'm going to give you my new email even though there's no matching website yet. But that is martasierralmhc(at)gmail(dot)com. [00:27:00]

Haley Radke: Perfect, and we'll link that in the show notes, too. Thanks so much for your wisdom, Marta.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: You're welcome, Haley.

Haley Radke: I would love to have you as a monthly supporter of the podcast. Without my supporters, there would not be a show. So if you want Adoptees On to keep going, I would encourage you to go to adopteeson.com/partner to find out all the ways you can sign up and help the show. And I'm so grateful for those of you who have signed up. It makes a huge difference for me and my family and the plans for the podcast, which are top secret, but there's great things coming, I promise.

Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday when Marta will be back, and we're talking a little more about estrangement through the IFS lens. [00:28:00]

179 Shannon Gibney

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/179

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 179, Shannon. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Before we get started, I want to let you know how much it means to me that you're showing up here to listen to adoptee voices. I remember when I was first in reunion with my dad, and we hit the inevitable rocky patch after the honeymoon period faded, I felt so alone. I believed that I was absolutely unlovable because my first mother had ghosted me after a few months into our reunion just a decade prior. For me, creating this podcast has been a tremendous labor of love so that other adoptees like me who were feeling alone, struggling in reunion, or coming out of the fog would have connection, so we wouldn't feel like we were crazy. The wildest part [00:01:00] of all of this is that it succeeded. Adoptees On has become our show to connect and share what the adoptee experience is really like and I'm asking you today to support the podcast and make it sustainable for me to continue doing this work. I'm Haley, the host and creator of the show–our community's show–and I'm also a wife and mom of two little boys, who are trying their very best to stay quiet as I record this.

Haley Radke’s little boys: Hi, Mommy.

Haley Radke: They're trying their almost best to stay quiet. When you sign up for Patreon or donate via PayPal, you are helping me, Haley, contribute to my family's needs. What I didn't expect when I started podcasting was that this would become my full-time job. I'm showing up for you and saying yes to adoptees, and I would love for you to show up for me and commit to a year of support for Adoptees On. I have big plans, and I want to do [00:02:00] huge things for adult adoptees, but I can't do it without the support of you, my listeners. For the month of April only, I have a sale on for a yearly membership to Adoptees On Patreon with one month free. After that, it'll be back to regular price. I'm honored by the support I have already gotten from the community and, truthfully, pretty scared to make this ask again, but if I'm going to continue making the show, I really need your help to make it sustainable and to have the ability to meaningfully contribute to my little family over here and to hire other adoptees to help build the show. Click the link in the show notes or go to adopteeson.com/partner to sign up right now. Okay, let's get to the show.

I'm thrilled. Shannon Gibney, writer and activist, is here. Shannon shares some of her personal story and how she's observed adoptee voices reaching critical mass over the last 15 years. Since her first novel, See No Color, was released six years [00:03:00] ago, she's heard from many younger adoptees who felt seen and validated by reading her words. Shannon recounts how her experience of grief and motherhood and the adoptee experience intertwined and how she's modeled truth-telling, even the difficult things, to her children. 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. I just want to give you a content warning. We will be discussing child loss in this episode. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Shannon Gibney. Welcome, Shannon.

Shannon Gibney: Thank you so much for having me, Haley.

Haley Radke: Thrilled. Thrilled to talk with you today. I would love it if you would share some of your story with us.

Shannon Gibney: I identify as a mixed Black, transracial adoptee. My birth father was Black and my birth mother was Irish American, and I was adopted by a white family in 1975. [00:04:00] I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have two brothers who are biological to my parents, so they're white. I have an older brother who is two years older than me, but it's three years because he skipped a grade, which those things matter when you're a kid and not so much when you’re–

Haley Radke: Every grade counts.

Shannon Gibney: It does. It does, and then all of a sudden you're 21, and it's like, who cares. And then I have a younger brother who is a year younger than me. And I did a birth search when I was 19. And as a domestic adoptee, of course, that was a much easier experience than a lot of my friends who are Korean adoptees, for instance, and internationally adopted. A lot of those folks, unfortunately, have a very hard time, of course, finding family members or birth parents. But I was "lucky." And I put that in quotes because I've also talked with some of my friends and colleagues who [00:05:00] are adoptees and critical adoption scholars who have also made contacts and had relationships with their birth parents and birth families. And the discourse on reunion is, well, 1) it's very lean, and 2) it's just not very complicated at all. And so I think what I've come to find in my own experience, and also connecting with other adoptees who are in reunion or have been in reunion is that it's just a very layered set of relationships. A very layered set of relationships. And we don't really have good frameworks or language in the dominant culture to really talk about that and acknowledge that. And even in our adoptee communities I would argue that we don't either because there's a lot of trauma and a lot of other things that get triggered with that. [00:06:00] That's just all to say that I discovered through my birth search that my birth father had unfortunately passed away when I was six. And then I did find my birth mother, and I had a complicated on-and-off relationship with her from then on until her death about seven years ago. And that's just not uncommon. Again, we don't talk about these things and the focus of reunion is all like, Oh, search and reunion. But it's like not 10 years out or 20 years out, what's going on then?

So, I'm active in a lot of adoptee communities, particularly transracial adoption, adoptee communities, POC. And I'm a writer. I write novels. That's probably my first genre. I also write children's books. Got three children's picture books that I'm working on right now. [00:07:00] I edited an anthology called What God Is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color. I co-edited that with my dear friend, writer Kao Kalia Yang. I'm working on a new anthology right now with Nicole Chung, a Korean adoptee, and that is a collection of young adult stories about adoptees by adoptee writers. So that'll be coming out in 2023. And then of course, my first novel, See No Color, is about a mixed Black girl adopted into a white family, and it's got themes of baseball. So it's a very loosely autobiographical first novel. My current novel that I'm working on now called Botched, I call it a speculative memoir, and that has all kinds of themes of transracial adoption going through that. So writing is and continues to be the primary or a primary way that I process [00:08:00] my experience and build community.

Haley Radke: So much there. I read somewhere where you talked about how writing will last for years and years, and I'll admit this, I haven't said this before, but it was only a couple years ago where I was like, Wow, books are, like, just ideas we write down, hey? Which really makes them small and yet so huge. And I wonder, for you, having your writing last for years and years in these stories. Who knows who will pick them up 200 years from now and read what you've written, and it will be preserved. What, for you as an adopted person having some of your history erased–and you say you had the privilege to search and have an answer where many don't–what about writing tied to being an adoptee? What does that mean for you, having your stories preserved? [00:09:00]

Shannon Gibney: My first piece in a book was Outsiders Within, which was an anthology that was published 15 years ago, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka and Sun Yung Shin, both of whom are Korean adoptees, and Julia Chinyere Oparah, who is a Black transracial adoptee. Everybody in that group is transracial adoptees. And that book was a watershed for so many of us because it was really the first book by transracial adoptees for transracial adoptees. The literature on transracial adoption has been dominated historically by white adoptive parents who don't identify as such. So people who are like, Well, I'm a psychologist, I'm a scholar, and I'm studying attachment with children and I'm looking specifically at transracial adoptees. But I'm not disclosing that [00:10:00] I have a daughter who was adopted from China. So I have a very particular viewpoint, right? But that's also not getting disclosed. And so that's still happening now in 2021, but adoptee writers, scholars, artists, activists, and cultural workers have really shifted the conversation. And in the past 20, I would say really 15 years. I'm 46, and I've seen a huge change, right? But coming up as a transracial adoptee, first of all, you don't see hardly any stories. You feel like a freak. You really don't see hardly any stories of people like you. And then the ones that you do see are very flat because they're produced by non-adoptees, either white folks or now I'm seeing more people of color writing stories actually with transracial adoptees in them. But I still find, not all of them, but many of them to be problematic. [00:11:00]

Haley Radke: I saw your series of tweets about own voices. And hello, adopted people, we're not this trope, right?

Shannon Gibney: Exactly, you can't just say, Oh, own voices. Oh, I'm a Black writer, and I'm going to have a Black transracial adoptee in my book. And therefore I get that experience because I'm Black. No, that's a very particular experience. Let me be clear, I'm not saying that in order to write about something you have to have experienced it, right? If you're going to write, for instance, a scene of sexual violence you have to have experienced sexual violence in order to get it right. But I think all of us, anybody reasonable, would understand that you have to do your research, you can't just say, Oh, whatever, I think it's like this. No.

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh, we reviewed a book last year on the Off Script podcast. Carrie and I read this. And I was [00:12:00] looking up interviews with the author and this was not an adoptee and it had an adoptee protagonist. And she said, "Oh my gosh, I've done so much research," and she listed off all the people she had talked to. You know what it is, right? Yes. Adoption-competent therapists, adoption, adoptive parents, birth parents. Nowhere did she talk to an adopted person. Nowhere.

Shannon Gibney: Right! Adoptees are always left out, and if we're let in, they talk to the children, right? We're infantilized always. But they're not going to talk to the people like you and me who are in our 40s. You're probably in your 30s. I'm in my 40s. But we're grown is my point, right? We have our own lives, our own families, perhaps our own children, all these things, and you can't just objectify us. So that's really what I'm getting at, I guess, is this movement of a critical mass of [00:13:00] transracial adoptees. I think we talked about in our prep before that it’s not that I actively try not to connect with white adoptees. It's just that's the way that whiteness functions. It separates out white folks from people of color. So I don't actually know that much about some of the cultural production or activism of white adoptees. I don't see that much of it. Most of the stuff that I interact with is, again, transracial-adoptee-produced, and that's going to be POC. But I've really seen, definitely in the past 15 years, a sea change of books, of plays, of organizations, of study groups and direct actions. And so that's not to say that the dominant narratives of adoption aren't alive and well and thriving in mainstream American culture because they are. And that makes me tired. Every time I [00:14:00] see a New York Times article about this white couple who went through so much to try and adopt a child from Somalia or something like that, I want to vomit. But there's just a lot of stuff out there. So I just want to say, in answer to your question and I know this is a roundabout way: That first piece that I wrote in Outsiders Within, I don't think it's a coincidence that the first piece that I had published was about my experience as a transracial adoptee because it's such a seminal experience in my life. It has overdetermined every other aspect of my identity, for sure. And that also, I think living in the Twin Cities, which we call the Land of 10,000 Adoptees because there are more Korean adoptees here than any other place than Scandinavia. Of course, for folks who are not from Minnesota, the state motto is the Land of 10,000 Lakes, not Land of [00:15:00] 10,000 Adoptees. And so connecting in my mid to late 20s with other transracial adoptees, other folks like me, mostly Korean adoptees, it really changed me. It changed my understanding of my personal experience, my personal history, and helped me understand how the experience was structural in many ways. So in other words, it politicized me is what I'm trying to get at. And I remain quite thankful for that. I say my first novel, of course, See No Color, published in 2015, again about a mixed Black girl adopted into a white family. I've said on many occasions that I wrote that for the girl that I was as a tween or teen who was longing for this very rich narrative of a sense of racial and cultural [00:16:00] isolation. A sense of questioning about racial identity and identities, right? Because Black is related to mixed, but it's not the same thing. And what do you do when you don't have access to this one culture that is mostly maligned in the dominant culture, Black culture in this case, right? But you, your body inhabits that racial reality, right? What do you do? So I wrote that book for the girl that I was so that girl and other girls like her, other adoptees like her, could reach for a different book. And since the book's been out now for five to six years, that has really been the sweetest thing about it being out, is other adoptees, especially younger adoptees, encountering it and [00:17:00] telling me, Wow, I never realized that I was a transracial adoptee. I didn't even know that there was language for this experience, and I never knew that, for instance, this feeling of shame, this deep feeling of shame that I have, and fear when I get around Black people, that's something that is part of the adoptee experience. Other adoptees feel that too. It's not my fault. This is what happens when you take Black children, Black people out of Black communities and put them, raise them with loving, hopefully, white families in a racist culture. This is what happens.

Haley Radke: How validating it is it for a young adoptee to feel so seen through your words. I think that's beautiful, and when I read it too, I thought of my little, 12-year-old self kind of feeling, I don't know, and that's not my experience, but there's so much adoptee [00:18:00] truth throughout that even myself, I was a domestic infant adoptee, same race adoption, I learned so much from your book as well. And what I found really fascinating was I listened to this podcast where a couple of young men read your book, and they don't have a connection with adoption, and they learned so much from it as well. So I think as big of a gift and validating it is for young adoptees to read your words, you're also having this impact on changing the societal narrative.

Shannon Gibney: Yeah, I hope that's what all good literature and art can do, you go into the specific, right? You have to inhabit this specific experience or set of experiences in order to get to the general. Everybody knows what it feels like to not belong, we've all had that experience at some point. Everybody [00:19:00] knows, particularly around adolescence, all these questions about who am I and where do I fit in my family, who do I wanna be? Your sexuality starts getting more prevalent and more important in your daily interactions and how does that intersect with your racial identity, how you see yourself, how other people see you? These are things that look different in situation to situation, but we all have to deal with them at some point. So yeah, I hope that's part of what my work can do.

Haley Radke: I wanted to ask you something that is really deeply personal. You co-edited another book that you mentioned, What God Is Honored Here? with Kao Kalia Yang, and you share about losing your first daughter, so your second child, a stillbirth. And I [00:20:00] heard you on multiple different podcasts sharing part of that story, and all I kept thinking throughout, because of course I'm here interviewing you as an adopted person, adoptee to adoptee, was what was that like for you as an adoptee? We talk so much on this show about grief and understanding this great loss we had, connection to our first mother, and then you have this great loss, personal loss of your daughter. Did you link that at all? Did you process it through the adoptee frame at all? I wonder if you wouldn't mind talking about that a little bit.

Shannon Gibney: I have an 11-year-old son, and I have a six-year-old daughter, and then I have another daughter, Sianneh, who would be seven if she were still here, and she was a stillbirth at [00:21:00] 41 and a half weeks. So she was 10 days late. So as you can imagine, that was utterly and completely devastating, and that was also part of the reason why Kalia and I wanted to put the collection together, because she had a loss at 21 weeks the year before me. And we both, after our losses, we always say we, we were doing what writers do, which is search out stories and meaning in literature, and we just could not find anything that really got to the raw reality of what it's like to lose a child, both physically, psychologically, emotionally, all of it. And I think it's hard for me to really... I think it's a really great question, and I don't know that I have been asked it in that exact way before. [00:22:00] I think having a language and a framework for loss, for deep loss, in a culture that–my mom was a therapist for many years, she always says we're a grief-averse culture. In a culture that's grief-averse it was very useful for me. And an understanding of, for example, ambiguous loss and how does that show up in one's body. And these things, I think that in our dominant culture we are not to talk about or we cannot talk about or we can't name or we can't linger in, such as my baby is dead, such as I don't know why I feel empty, but I think it has something to do with the fact of losing my first mother. There are certain [00:23:00] experiences that imprint on your consciousness and continue to have an outsized effect on everything that happens to you after that and how you process it, maybe even more importantly. And so I think that having this early experience of loss and not being able culturally to really articulate it or have a framework to understand it or a community to understand it helped me paradoxically because I had to go build those communities. I had to find those other adoptees. I had to find those people in a very similar way that Kalia and I had to go and find these other women of color and Native women who had [00:24:00] lost their babies, but nobody wanted to talk about, nobody wanted to hear those stories. Much in the same way that up until very recently the dominant culture doesn't want to hear anything but happy stories of adoption. They don't want to hear that there's loss inherent in taking a child from their first family and grafting them into another. Sorry, it's not just tiptoeing through the tulips and yes, Mom, I love you. Yeah, that's there, but there's a lot of other stuff there, too. So I think that the experience of being a transracial adoptee helped me develop these skills that I would need in order to process and work through the experience of losing my daughter in a healthy way as a writer.

Haley Radke: [00:25:00] I wonder, we've talked on the show before about the hard things and the crappy reunions that fall apart and the searches that find graves. We talk about the hard stuff all the time so I appreciate you so much sharing that with us. And what I found so fascinating and beautiful, to be frank, is how your son still talks about Sianneh and her memory is alive and included, and how you talk about that. And in adoption, as well, there's the intergenerational trauma of loss, and my children are fortunate that I'm in reunion with my father. So he's always been in their lives and they call him Poppy, and he's around. And so they haven't had that loss. It's very confusing to them when I explain how I grew up. And my kids are still pretty little; they're six and eight. But [00:26:00] I'm curious about how you speak to your children, then, about adoption and the impact because it sounds like you claim activism and all those things, right? So I know you're talking about it. They must see that as well in you, and how do you keep that in your language with them, I guess.

Shannon Gibney: It was interesting when my son was smaller. He would say, “I was adopted,” and of course I was like, "Don't tell–"

Haley Radke: Shannon, my kid came home from school and told me that he had told his friends he was adopted, and I was like, "I beg your pardon?"

Shannon Gibney: But it just shows you, right? Because your kids reflect yourself back to you, right? So it just shows you how central this part of your identity is and that they have absorbed that. And of course they want to be close to it because they want to be close to you. And so this is the way that they start processing it. And this is something that I've talked about with many people. I think the group Adoption Mosaic just had a session on this, too, [00:27:00] the intergenerational effects of adoption. Who is studying this? Who is talking about this? Who is writing about this? Because, for instance, it's very interesting. I have encountered a few families who, like mine, my grandmother was an orphan, and this is not uncommon that adoption runs in the family. And how does that happen, and what does that mean culturally? And how do our children process this information? My son's name is Boise, and in my new book all of this is explored and dealt with. But he's named after my birth father. My birth father, I found out that his name was Boise Colin. It's actually a family name. And so my grandfather's name is Boise. And I met my grandfather. I had the privilege of talking to him on the phone a few times when I was about 20 [00:28:00] before he passed a few years after that. So his name was Boise. And then, it's interesting, family history is just very complicated, as I was saying before. And so he, my grandfather Boise Colin Sr., his second wife had a child that he adopted when he married her. Okay? So my birth father, who was named after him, has already passed. So my grandfather marries this woman who has a child. His name was Christopher, and he was eight or nine, or 10 maybe, when my grandfather adopted him. He changed his name to my grandfather's name in the adoption process because he said that this is the man that he admired most in the world. So his name is Boise. So my son is now the fourth Boise [00:29:00] in this broken and yet amended line. It's very rich. It's very complicated. And we had the opportunity to meet my aunt, so my birth father's sister. He has two or three living siblings now, and we reached out to my uncle, so Boise Collins, who's my age. He's my uncle, but he's two years older than me, right? So the child of the child that my grandfather adopted. And so my children got to meet my aunt–my birth father's sister–and they've met her on several occasions, and we've been to her house in Detroit, and we met the other Boise. And it's just very interesting for my son, to watch him integrate a lot of stuff. And of course it's like, Okay, there's my side of the family and we've got Grandma and [00:30:00] Grandpa who are white, and aunts and uncles on that side of the family who are also white. And then their dad is Liberian, and so we've got that side of the family, also, that is partly here in Minnesota and partly in Liberia, and those grandparents over there. So it's a lot of stuff for them to parse through and figure out where it all goes. And they didn't have a chance to meet my birth mother because she passed before they were born. Yeah, it's very layered. It's very layered.

Haley Radke: Very layered. Yes. What else can you say, right? It's such a, I don't know. I think in asking the question, I'm always hoping I'll get some advice from a more experienced mother than I on how to navigate and explain this. But I think often we're just [00:31:00] muddling through, right?

Shannon Gibney: My whole thing as a mother, as an artist, as a person is, just tell the truth. That's hard enough. In the most skillful way that you can. Sometimes, obviously, it's not the time to tell the truth, right? But most of the time it's like the best thing you can do is not try to fix anything, not try to manage it and whatever. It's just, Look, this is the way it is. I'm doing the best I can, and this is what I came out of. This is the conditions under which you came into the story, but it was already going for all these years in this way before you came in. Now, what you do with it, that's a whole other thing that we can talk about and hopefully navigate together, and I can help you get the skills so that you feel like you can do it in a way that is going to feel okay for you. That's a different conversation, [00:32:00] but I've done the best I can with this mess. I'm doing the best I can with this mess. and I involve my kids. This whole thing of adoption before where it's, Oh, we're just gonna pretend that what's going on is not going on, right? Oh, we're all the same. We're all part of this family, and nobody's different. Adopted? Nobody was adopted. Whatever. That clearly did not work. That doesn't work. That never works. So that's what I've always done with my kids both in adoption and with the death of their sister. My son was three and a half when Sianneh died. He was so excited about being a big brother, so excited, and he was utterly devastated in his own three-and-a-half-year-old way, just like I was and his dad was. And I didn't try to put my utter and complete devastation on him because that would not be appropriate, but I wasn't going to try and hide it from him either. [00:33:00] And so yeah, she is part of our family story. She is alive in how we move through the world from the banal to the sort of very transformative and enlightened. They'll say, Oh, if Sianneh were here, we'd have to have a bigger car because there's no way we could fit three car seats in here. We'd probably have to get a van. And sometimes it hurts for me, but also it's very healing, and my son will tell people, No, I have two sisters. It's just that one is dead. And people will be like [demonstrative inhale], but to him that's just, This is my life. It's just a fact.

Haley Radke: Thank you for modeling that for us. Okay. Is there anything you want to tell us before we do our recommended resources? Anything I didn't ask you about, anything you want to make sure adopted people hear from you?

Shannon Gibney: Just that you're not alone. [00:34:00] There's many of us out here. Sometimes it can be really hard to find other people and to find other stories, but it's worth it to do that work. And in the end, when you find various communities, what you find is that 1) you're not as much of a freak as you always thought, but 2) you're also not as special as you thought. Because those two things are intertwined. And that's a relief. That's a relief. So I feel all these Western countries have this crisis of loneliness. I think in the UK, they have a minister of loneliness because it's such a problem. And with the pandemic, it's only been exacerbated, of course. But I feel like these really small micro-communities, like Korean adoptees or Black adoptees, whatever, it's like we can model what's possible to these [00:35:00] larger, more dominant groups that have really, for the most part, lost those kinds of communal connections which are of course forged through vulnerability and sharing. That's a really important skill that I think adoptee communities can model for others. And so yeah, if you're not yet part of an adoptee community, search them out. Get involved. Start listening to some podcasts. Join in a conversation through Adoption Mosaic or Network of Politicized Adoptees. There's so many really good groups out there. Read a book by an adoptee. You can find a lot of us on social media. I always try to respond to reader comments or people who reach out to me. I think that would be my main message.

Haley Radke: Perfect. I love building adoptee community. It's [00:36:00] not going to be a surprise to anyone but, of course, I'm going to recommend Shannon's books. So powerful. You're a phenomenal writer, and I'm not just saying that just because I'm looking at you right now. I said it behind your back too last year. Shannon mentioned this, but See No Color is the novel that's specifically adoption-related. Would you say it's middle grade or YA?

Shannon Gibney: It's YA.

Haley Radke: YA. So it's got some really interesting themes with the baseball and family. I found it really fascinating how you have the sister, the character Kit, pushing Alex, the adoptee, into finding out more information. I found that really interesting. I'm not going to spoil anything because I want you guys to go pick that up and read it. It's so beautiful. And I haven't gotten a chance to read it, but it's in my cart right now: What God Is Honored Here?, which we've mentioned, so you know what [00:37:00] theme that's on as well. I think that will be an incredible book, so I'll just recommend it too. But Dream Country. Oh my word, Shannon. Talk about this sweeping masterpiece, you've got all of these different protagonists and you're going back and forward in time, and I learned so much about Liberia. I had no idea. You talk about being in Minnesota. Listen, I'm in Canada, in Alberta. It is like this frigid white province. I learned so much. It was just stunning. I just loved it. It's just amazing. Dream Country, you guys, you have to read this book. You just have to. Love it. Okay.

Shannon Gibney: Thank you. And one thing I'll just say about Dream Country is even though there's not themes of adoption in it, there's themes of intergenerational family loss, and a central [00:38:00] question in it is what do you do when you don't know your story and you don't know your family story? How do you heal?

Haley Radke: What I found so fascinating was that you lived in Ghana for a while. This is researched. The- It

Shannon Gibney: It took over my life.

Haley Radke: That's an understatement.

Shannon Gibney: Yeah. It totally took over my life on and off for 20 years. I always say I spent 10 years trying not to write it and I spent 10 years writing it.

Haley Radke: Well, it shows that you spent that long. And so, anyway, we are so excited about what's coming out for you in the future. And whenever you talk about Botched, I'm so fascinated. Do you know Disappear Doppelganger, Disappear?

Shannon Gibney: Oh, yes. Matthew's book.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Matthew [Salesses]. Oh my gosh, so good. And so when you were talking about the alternative timelines and, yes, adoptees are so skilled at that, I think. Yeah, at thinking about our other [00:39:00] identities. So I'm very excited about that. Okay, I'm going to stop gushing. What do you want to recommend for us?

Shannon Gibney: So I recently did a talk with Adoption Mosaic, and they're a group run by a transracial adoptee, Astrid Castro, and it is just a great group. So just check them out. I would definitely check them out. There's a group here in Minnesota that I'm quite fond of called Network of Politicized Adoptees, NPA for short. And they just do all kinds of really interesting community and cultural work. They have book clubs about books written by adoptees. I've gone in and talked to them about my book and about other people's books. I think two years ago when Nicole Chung's book came out, All You Can Ever Know, they read it and I came in. [00:40:00] I think Dr. Kim Park Nelson had a class on the history and origins of Korean adoption, so it’s community education but on steroids, taken to the next level. I just appreciate their presence. I appreciate the depth and the sort of carefulness and commitment that they have to having these discussions and doing this work in as equitable a way as they can.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. I'm so excited we get to share them, and I will have links to all of those things that we mentioned in the show notes so you can find their website. I saw their Facebook page, so I'll link to all of those places so that you can find the Network of Politicized Adoptees and also Astrid's Adoption Mosaic. Astrid was a guest a little while ago, so we got to hear a bit of her story. Did you know she used to be a professional snowboarder?

Shannon Gibney: No, but that somehow doesn't surprise me. Yeah. She has those natural instincts [00:41:00] of being able to adapt to things coming at her very quickly, so that actually doesn't surprise me at all. No. Yeah.

Haley Radke: When you started sharing some of your story and about how we always see reunions as the happy whatever, I was like, Oh, man, this podcast is a resource of all the other sides of adoption that people don't talk about, but we do. So yes, Astrid has got her story in there too, and now you do, so thank you so much, Shannon. Where can we connect with you online?

Shannon Gibney: So my website is always the best place. It's just shannongibney(dot)com, and there is a Contact Me page and that just goes directly to my email. So yeah, if you want to find out more about me and my work, events, all that stuff, my website is always the best place. I'm also on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. If you go to any of those platforms and you type in my name, I'll come up.

Haley Radke: And I'll also link those places in the show [00:42:00] notes for you, too. All right. This was such a good conversation. Thank you so much.

Shannon Gibney: Thank you, Haley. Thanks for having me, and thanks for the work you do to build communities of adoptees. Appreciate it. Really do.

Haley Radke: I just want to double down and also encourage you to find adoptee community. If you already have some adoptee friends, ask them where they like to hang out online and, hopefully, you'll find a safe spot to connect in. There are very specific adoptee groups on Facebook, Clubhouse, all kinds of different spots on Twitter. I know there's other online forums that you can kind of get connected into that are really specific for transracial adoptees. There's some groups that will be country-specific. There's some that are religion-specific. There's all kinds of different groups that you can hopefully get [00:43:00] connected in with.

I have my Adoptees On Patreon group, but there's lots of free groups that you can hopefully get involved with. And if you're not sure where to start, another great thing to do is to go ahead and find some of those events that Shannon was talking about. There's online events happening all the time where you can connect with other adoptees and make adoptee friends, which is one of the biggest gifts.

So another gift to me is I'm so grateful for my monthly supporters. You heard at the beginning I have a sale on right now. If you join for a year of membership, you get one month free, and that is the only way I can keep producing the show and paying my editor and paying all the bills. So if you are able to, I would love to have you as a supporter. Go to adopteeson.com/partner to join and get the other Adoptees Off Script weekly podcast and there's another level for the [00:44:00] Facebook Group. I would love to have you join. And if that's not on the table, no problem. One free way you can help support the show is just tell one person about this episode that you think would love to hear from Shannon and her experiences as a writer and activist and that would be hugely beneficial. I would love that.

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

178 Ferera Swan

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/178

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 178, Ferera. I'm your host, Haley Radke.

Before we get started, I want to let you know how much it means to me that you're showing up here to listen to adoptee voices. I remember when I was first in reunion with my dad, and we hit the inevitable rocky patch after the honeymoon period faded. I felt so alone. I believed that I was absolutely unlovable because my first mother had ghosted me after a few months into our reunion just a decade prior. For me, creating this podcast has been a tremendous labor of love so that other adoptees like me, who were feeling alone, struggling in reunion, or coming out of the fog, would have connection, so we wouldn't feel like we were crazy. The wildest part [00:01:00] of all of this is that it's succeeded. Adoptees On has become our show to connect and share what the adoptee experience is really like. And I'm asking you today to support the podcast and make it sustainable for me to continue doing this work. I'm Haley, the host and creator of the show–our community's show–and I'm also a wife and mom of two little boys, who are trying their very best to stay quiet as I record this.

Haley Radke’s little boys: Hi, Mommy.

Haley Radke: They're trying their almost best to stay quiet. When you sign up for Patreon or donate via PayPal, you are helping me, Haley, contribute to my family's needs. What I didn't expect when I started podcasting was that this would become my full-time job. I'm showing up for you and saying yes to adoptees, and I would love for you to show up for me and commit to a year of support for Adoptees On. I have big plans, and I want to do [00:02:00] huge things for adult adoptees, but I can't do it without the support of you, my listeners. For the month of April only, I have a sale on for a yearly membership to Adoptees On Patreon with one month free. After that, it'll be back to regular price. I'm honored by the support I have already gotten from the community, and, truthfully, pretty scared to make this ask again. But if I'm going to continue making the show, I really need your help to make it sustainable and to have the ability to meaningfully contribute to my little family over here and to hire other adoptees to help build the show. Click the link in the show notes or go to adopteeson.com/partner to sign up right now. Okay. Let's get to the show.

Ferera Swan is here to share her experiences of reunion and secondary rejection with us. We talk about the impact other members of the extended family can have on our reunions. And Ferera tells us about the meaning behind her name and what her producer encouraged [00:03:00] her to include in her song “Second Time.” 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, Ferera Swan. Welcome, Ferera.

Ferera Swan: Hi. How are you, Haley? It's so great to be here.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad to have you. I'd love it if you would share some of your story with us.

Ferera Swan: I'm a domestic adoptee, and I was born in Texas. I'm from Texas, in Houston originally, and I actually wasn't ever told that I was adopted directly from my parents. So I had asked my parents if I was born from my mother. Those were the words that I had used when I was about six, and then again when I was about eight, and I think both times I didn't get a direct answer. But then finally when I was 10, we were on a [00:04:00] vacation in China, and that's when I ultimately asked, and they told me. My mom told me that, yes, I was adopted. So I guess I'm diving into how I found out I was adopted. And then from there I was able to go to the adoption agency when I was 15. My adoptive mother actually took me, and I was able to retrieve some documents. I guess my file, and it had a poem, a letter, and two black-and-white photos of my birth parents. They were photocopies, so I couldn't really see them very well, and then a bunch of, I guess, social work home visits and things like that, information on my biological families. So I was able to get that when I was 15. I've been in reunion since 2008. In 2008 I decided to search, and I found [00:05:00] them on my own, actually, through ancestry.com. Not AncestryDNA, but ancestry.com. I found my birth parents' marriage license. And so that was a crazy thing to find because I didn't actually know that they were married.

Haley Radke: Were they married before you or after you? Does she remember with the date?

Ferera Swan: I believe they got married after they relinquished me. So yeah, they were in high school. I don't know if you would call them high school sweethearts, but they were young and in love. She was very young, and he was young as well. So yeah, that's basically a nutshell. I just gave you an outline. And then I ultimately met them in 2008, the same year, and that was quite an experience. I reconnected with my paternal family first, [00:06:00] and then I ultimately found my birth mother's twin sister.

Haley Radke: So they weren't together anymore?

Ferera Swan: Oh, no. They got divorced. So she moved back to Chicago and he went back to the Philippines, and that was that. But I learned a lot about their story and their relationship and just everything they had gone through at the time. Where my birth father's family wanted to keep me, but ultimately my bio mother's family decided to relinquish for her because she was, I believe, 16 by the time she actually had me because she was 15 when she got pregnant.

Haley Radke: So you found her sister and how did you get in contact?

Ferera Swan: It was actually the craziest story. The way [00:07:00] I found the marriage license was that I... So on the poem that she wrote titled “Never Forgotten,” which was for Marilyn, which is what she named me. I'm going to omit her name for her privacy. But whoever was in charge of whiting out the identifying information–the last names–forgot to white out the first three letters of my bio mother's last name. And so those three letters, I had seen them all this time since I was 15. But I didn't think anything about it because I was like, I can't do anything with three letters, her first name and three letters. And that's when the guy that I was dating at the time suggested that I could maybe Google a Filipino last names database to see what I could find. And I had said, I'm probably gonna find thousands of names. But actually there were only three that I [00:08:00] found on the website. And I just happened to guess the right one. And so I typed her name in on ancestry.com, and their marriage license was the very first thing that popped up on the screen. I was just like, Oh my gosh. So that was really surreal. I saw my last name for the very first time in my life. I couldn't even...I didn't even really... I wasn't even sure how to say it. So I took the last name, and I was able to find, with the internet these days–and at that time it was MySpace and I think Facebook was around–but I found my birth aunt because her first name was in the documents. So now I had a first name and a last name, and she hadn't married or anything, so I was able to locate her, and I called her, I think the next day or the same day. I don't even know when.

Haley Radke: What did you say to her? [00:09:00]

Ferera Swan: I think I called her at work, and it was a New York phone number. I said, "This is going to sound really weird, but do you have a sister who gave up a child for adoption?” And it got really quiet. And then, she gave me her phone number and then we talked later. And when we talked, one of the first questions she had asked was what my intentions were. Not in a mean “what do you want?” kind of way. I think she was genuinely curious why I was reaching out. But, I don't know, we chatted for I think it was four hours straight. It was really... I felt an instant connection, and I'll just say that I developed a relationship with this aunt over the next however many months. We would talk sometimes on the [00:10:00] phone for seven hours at a time. Yeah, sometimes I was like, Doesn't she have to work? I don't know. There was never any pauses. It was just constant. So we grew to be very close, but it was very tragic ultimately because I'm no longer in a relationship with my bio mother or my aunt. So that's... I mean there's so many different things. I'm just thinking out loud and replaying all that happened. But it's really unfortunate because I think, looking back now, I really wish I would have found my biological mother first, instead of my aunt.

Haley Radke: I'm curious about that. You gotta say more about that. So how did it go from a four-hour phone call with your aunt to meeting your biological mother? And then how did it play out?

Ferera Swan: We developed a relationship. And then [00:11:00] the three of us got on the phone one day, and I got to meet my biological mother over the phone first. But my aunt was also on that call. It was such an amazing, surreal experience just to see, just to hear my mother's voice for the first time ever. And I've written about this before, but I was talking and then she paused, and I was like, Hello? Are you there?" to see if she was still there. And she said, "Yeah, I'm still here. I'm just listening to the inflections of your voice." And I remember that. How it impacted me to hear that. And I always say that for the very first time, the woman who gave birth to me was telling me, I hear you, and I [00:12:00] felt alive for the very first time. It's really what it felt like, the experience. But it's a blur because I want to say I think I'm not sure if I believe my aunt was on that call, but I do feel like she was very much a big part of this experience. So one thing I'll say is that she is the twin of my first mother. She's her twin, and they are very close. They have a very, very, very close relationship and friendship, and it's a very special bond. I'm not a twin, but I can imagine twins have that bond, and I think that her daughter coming back into her life after all these years caused some tension. I'm describing it from my perspective, it seemed like it caused a lot of tension between them.

Haley Radke: So you said that your aunt hadn't married. Had she had any children? [00:13:00]

Ferera Swan: No, and she does not.

Haley Radke: Okay. And then your first mother, did she have any other children?

Ferera Swan: Yeah. So I have a half-brother that I've met. I guess I should say we had reunion in Houston first. I met them; my grandmother flew down, my first mother flew down, my aunt, my other aunt, and then me and my then boyfriend all met. We had a weekend together. I'm a musician so that night I brought my keyboard, and we actually played piano. We played keyboard for each other for the first time ever, which was super, super cool and weird at the same time. Because, yeah, she just writes music off the top of her head. I don't know. And that's where I get that from. I've always been able to do that since I was a kid, and she's always been able to do that as a kid. And my [00:14:00] half-brother is also a musician. I got to meet him later that year when I flew to Chicago and met him when he was about six years old.

Haley Radke: So were you an adult when you were united?

Ferera Swan: Yeah, I was just 25 and my bio mother was 41. Which is crazy because my husband's 43 now, and it's crazy to think that he's older than she was at the time. So many years have gone by but it doesn't feel like it's been that long.

Haley Radke: I have that same kind of little bit of a feeling because next year I'm going to turn the same age as when I first met my first mother. Yeah. And so it's a bit of a mind-eff, let's just say it as [00:15:00] politely as I can. Because you're like, Oh my gosh, what would I do if I had this long-lost at this age? So it's interesting that you've got that little dynamic there. Okay. So you had this meeting and stuff, but you said that your relationship felt a little bit like it messed up or was, I'm not sure exactly the language you said, but about your bio mother and her twin sister, because they had a really close relationship. Can you talk more about that? What makes you think that?

Ferera Swan: I think it would be helpful to share what happened the first time we ever met. So we were in a restaurant. We were in the foyer and they walked in as a group and my aunt approached me first and hugged me. And then I hugged my bio mother and, of course, we both cried like right there in the middle of the restaurant. And then, [00:16:00] I later found out that that was an issue for my bio mother. I don't think she liked that her sister hugged me first.

Haley Radke: She got to talk to you first and she got the first hug.

Ferera Swan: Right. And I later learned that an argument ensued over that which was a very, for an adoptee, I think, at least for me I'll speak for myself, I've never really felt, I've always struggled with feeling really desired, wanted. Special's not the right word, just wanted. I've never really felt wanted in that way, and so to learn that there was an argument over who hugged me first... And I've gone over some old emails, which I cringe when I read them, like how I talked back then. But anyway, it was just, it was like, I don't know. There really aren't any words for how it made me feel, but I was like, Wow, she wanted [00:17:00] to hug me first. But it was also very unfortunate. I didn't feel guilty for it but I felt sad for them, that this happened between them. That they had a conflict over it. I was unaware of how that played out as the relationship continued, as the reunion continued, but I always feel like that was a thing.

When all these feelings of grief surfaced for me and I was navigating all these emotions of anger that came up, and I really didn't even know why, what I was processing because there's no handbook for reunion. I think we like ran at each other full speed and just missed each other. That is how it felt because we were so close and I think we were both navigating–I think she was navigating her grief and I was navigating mine–and we just [00:18:00] didn't see the other person's pain. I don't think she could make room for my pain at that time, at that age where she was at, and with the information that neither of us had. So tragically we stopped speaking. I asked if we could talk on the phone to discuss it. I wanted to talk about it and I never heard from her again.

Haley Radke: How long was that? How long were you in relationship with her before you had stopped speaking?

Ferera Swan: Six months or so, I think. But what was interesting is that my aunt reached out to me later and we had a relationship. I don't know why I feel like I want to say “on the side.” That sounds really bad, but it really did feel like it was. I always wondered if my bio mother even… She made it seem like she was aware that we were in a [00:19:00] relationship. But then. So the thing that I've never actually talked about on a podcast before, and I thought about whether or not to bring it up, but I think it's important because it's caused so much grief and pain and just the things that I've been trying to navigate on my healing journey. This was a huge event that happened. So I was continuing this relationship with my aunt, who I really was coming to admire and respect and really trust. And then I was supposed to fly to New York to see her and she ghosted me. There was an event or two that happened on her end that made her unavailable, but then whenever I tried to follow up and reschedule–I really don't know what happened but she just stopped talking to me. And I was [00:20:00] incredibly hurt and I was so confused. I had no idea what happened. I really don't know what happened. To this day I still don't know what happened and this is where we are. But I've got to say, what is the most hurtful things I ever learned years later is–a mutual friend told me–that my aunt had made a comment, and that comment was, "I just don't want her to think that she's gonna get everything handed to her on a silver platter." And I was so confused by that. I was so hurt by that. I think that there's a lot of biological families that have this kind of idea that adoptees are coming into their life because they want this or they're just trying to get that, or whatever. And I'm like, No, we want to connect with our [00:21:00] families. I just find it so heartbreaking that they would suggest that or that they would perceive that we have some kind of intention, some kind of any other intention, aside from just wanting to connect.

Haley Radke: You said that in your first call with your aunt, she was trying to press you to see if you had some sort of ulterior motive.

Ferera Swan: Right, and I think, as a 25-year-old, I was just heartbroken. I didn't know what I did wrong. Adoptees are constantly asking, What did I do wrong? Anyway, so there's where we are. And I don't know what happened, what could've happened.

Haley Radke: So we have talked about this before a few times on the show, and the language that we usually use is “secondary rejection.” So it's like you got it twice. Let's see, your biological mother and then your aunt. And [00:22:00] I, too, got the ghost experience, and the reason I say we've talked about it before is because I've talked about this with several guests and lots of adoptees off-air. It's: God, couldn't we have just had a huge fight so I know the reason? Couldn't you have written me a really scathing email and just say these are all the reasons I never wanna talk to you again? Something. Just give me something.

Ferera Swan: I think that echoed the “why was I given up?” layer of trauma and rejection that I think a lot of adoptees do experience. But one thing was like what you said: Couldn't you just write me an email? Actually, my bio mother and I did have an exchange that kind of preceded the end of our–I say “the end”–why we stopped talking. But in her email she did say that I was making it all about [00:23:00] me and have I ever thought about how she felt. I really want to highlight the fact that I'm not bringing this up to shame her feelings or shame the fact that she said these things at 41 when she didn't have any information about what she was dealing with. It doesn't erase how hurtful it was to me because in adoption, it is always about the child, I believe, no matter what if we're truly talking about the best interest of the child. But I think she was hurt because I was where I was at with what I was processing and we were just not–there was a lot of telling me that I was being inconsistent. I would say one thing and then I wouldn't do it. But I think as adoptees, we know that navigating reunion is not a linear process and we don't know what the heck we're feeling half the time. [00:24:00] It was the craziest experience of my life. I felt like I was living two lives. I was dealing with the guilt that I felt towards my adoptive family, like I was doing something bad. I had to make sure I was talking to them just as much. It was just insanity. So yeah, I just think that's what's so heartbreaking about reunion is that we're up against something that's not normal, that nature didn't design. We're trying to navigate this thing where we come back together and it's like, how do we build relationships that are authentic and that can sustain? Because I think, I feel, like adoption took that from us. I'll never know, probably. I have heard from my bio mother since. I reached out to her in 2000–I think it was '18, and I haven't heard back from her–explaining some of the things I'm [00:25:00] sharing with you and my thoughts on what happened during our reunion. Why it might have unfolded that way, how I'm sorry that she's been sitting in her grief, too, or having to live with her grief, and that she's not alone in it, because I carry that grief every day with her. And just letting her know she's not alone in that pain. But I do think that she also grew up in a different time. She's not that much older than me, but she's from a different generation. And I don't even know if she's read it yet. The last time we had an exchange on Instagram, she told me she had not read it yet, that she would read it when she was ready. But here's the thing. I've gotta say this because I shared a collage of my biological parents and me on Instagram, and one of the photos I used was a photo that I had of her that did not belong to me. I found [00:26:00] it, and I used it on the collage. And now, in retrospect, I should not have done that. I should have used one of my photos that I had of her. So that was an issue. I got a message from her, and my heart skipped a beat and I was like, Oh my gosh, she messaged me! But the language was threatening. In a nutshell, it was like, If you don't take this down, I'm going to have to report you to Instagram. I chose to respond with kindness and compassion. But I was angry, and I think justifiably so. Again, it's that whole you think that I'm posting this because I'm trying to–the word used was “exploit.” Which is interesting because adoptees are exploited in adoption. And you know what? A lot of people, I'll just be really honest, are like, Why do you even waste your time? Just forget her. Move on. [00:27:00] And I'm just like, I wish I could, but she's my mother. Let's use honest language. Adoption relinquishment doesn't erase biology. It doesn't erase our need, our primal need, for that maternal connection. But she did respond, and she was nice. She did say she wasn't trying to be mean. But still….

Haley Radke: So recently, as of this recording, I saw something happen to you on Instagram. You shared that you accidentally followed her on a social media platform and you tried to undo it right away. There's always this thing, even when you said, Oh, I reached out to her 10 years later, literally a whole decade later. I'm connecting with this because, like I said, I share this experience of secondary rejection and I've reached out a few times.

Ferera Swan: Oh, wow.

Haley Radke: [00:28:00] And heard nothing, like zippo. Like from the outside looking in, do people think we're, like, stalking them? It's not. Just once a decade. Does that count as stalking? Does accidentally following and, oh my God, quickly unfollowing as fast as possible and just praying that their notifications are not set count as stalking?

Ferera Swan: It's so weird because, like you said, does that count as stalking? But these are the things that go through our brains. We don't want them to think that, but then again, why is it the adoptee's responsibility to remain a secret or remain out of sight? Or don't even accidentally follow me. There's so much there that I feel is, and I'm going to use this word: unjust. I think it's not just unfair, it's unjust. The level... Yeah. [00:29:00] It looks like you wanted to say something,

Haley Radke: I do. I want to ask you a question.

Ferera Swan: Okay.

Haley Radke: So for the last few years, you have become a meme machine. And you have so many, really, it's the gamut. There's inspiring adoptee posts, there's adoption truth, is what I would call it. Sharing statistics about different things that the community needs to know, talking about family preservation, talking about the challenges in just being an adoptee in adoption land, all of those things. How is that for you, being public about these struggles and calling out truths about the adoptee experience and knowing that your biological family can be viewing these things and seeing these? Do you ever have a thought like, Oh my gosh, if I hadn't have said that, maybe I would still have a chance.

Ferera Swan: I'm so glad that you [00:30:00] brought that up, Haley, because I think about that a lot. So I would say that one of the most empowering, healing things for me is writing these things that I put on these memes and knowing that they're public and knowing that other people know that I know that it's public. I don't know. It's like….

Haley Radke: And that they know that I know that they know that I know.

Ferera Swan: Because, like I said earlier, adoptees never asked for this. We didn't choose this path. And it has nothing to do with gratitude. It has everything to do with, you can't even fit it in one sentence, the loss and the grief. And so writing these things and posting them over the past few years have been incredibly healing and empowering. And yes, I've thought many times about it because you go through a range of emotions when you write these things. You [00:31:00] relive that emotion that you felt at the time of whatever event you're writing about. So if I'm writing about something that has to do with secondary rejection, I start feeling angry and I start thinking, How could they, blah, blah, blah, And so I feel that. And then I'll think, I'm gonna write this and I don't care, I'm gonna write it and I'm gonna put it out there. And then I've backpedaled, I guess you could say, thinking that maybe I shouldn't, I was in a bad place, I shouldn't have written that. Because I've written about my experience with what I learned about from this mutual person about my aunt, the thing that she had said that was very hurtful. She had shared several things with me, this mutual person, and so I had written about that as well, and then thought, Oh, no if they see this, there goes my chance, like you said.

That, there goes my hope. But I was just telling my husband this today and I thought, and if that's their choice, if I'm going to be rejected [00:32:00] again for speaking my truth and sharing my story and being honest, then that is on them. I've done nothing wrong by sharing my story from my perspective as an adopted person who was involuntarily separated from her mother and her family. It's my absolute human right to share my story. And I do it by way of memes. And I do it more and more now through music because I think that integrating creativity and art with social justice and change is important. That is what this is about. Because of adoptees just like recently, like right now actually, fighting for unrestricted access to our birth certificates and just all these things. And I think, fighting for our right to exist basically. I don't know. I think [00:33:00] everyone's experience is definitely different. I've heard happy reunion stories, but honestly, I hear a lot about secondary rejection.

Haley Radke: That's very common.

Ferera Swan: I actually didn't know how common it was until I started opening up about it. Until I discovered the adoption community and I learned I'm not the only one that this happens to.

Haley Radke: Back in the day, when I was attending university and working on my BA in psych, I worked at the library and I spent a lot of time there and I did a lot of research while I was reuniting with my first mother about adoption reunion. And one of the stats at that time– God, that was a long time ago–was, like, over half of reunions fail. And I was like, That's BS. It's not gonna happen to me. Right? Because you're in the honeymoon stage so it's like everything's happy. It just didn't even occur to me that things [00:34:00] could go so far south. Okay, that's a rabbit trail for another time. I want to hear you tell us about your name.

Ferera Swan: Ferera is a combination of both of my biological last names. So I've stuck an A behind. It's a mixture of the two. And then Swan is from the story The Ugly Duckling. I had a therapy session some time ago, like a handful of years back, and my therapist and I were processing adoption and these really intense, deep feelings that I have always grown up having and experiencing. And then she brought up the story of the ugly duckling and said, Oh, yeah, it's like when the swan discovers that…. I forget if it's a he or she, but the swan discovers she or he is a swan and not a duck. [00:35:00] I guess I had a breakthrough moment in that session. I just broke down and I was like, Oh my gosh. I didn't say, “Oh my gosh," but I was just quietly crying. I just had this moment of clarity and it was so empowering and beautiful. And my husband was there. And so I decided to, I guess you could say, rebrand as an artist. At the end of that year everything became Ferera Swan. And all of a sudden I was able to write about my adoption with no hesitation. I don't know, there was something about changing my name that really empowered me to use my voice. I think when I was under the name that my adoptive parents gave me, there was always a filter on how much I could say, how I said it, what I could say, because I'm this other person. It's kind of weird, but yeah, that's how.

Haley Radke: Thank you [00:36:00] for sharing that. I really wanted to get a chance to hear about your name because I knew you had chosen that. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you really want to share before we do our recommended resources?

Ferera Swan: I think that reunion should be treated with a lot of care and a lot of empathy, as much as possible that one can provide for the other. And compassion. I just think that's unfortunately not the default place that we're in when we're navigating reunion. I know it wasn't for me, even for myself. That's all I wanted to add to that.

Haley Radke: All right. Thank you so much. Okay, so let's do recommended resources, and I have a whole bundle here because you're prolific. So first, I mentioned earlier that you love making adoptee memes and so I [00:37:00] love your Instagram. I feel like it's educational and sometimes poignant. It's a really nice mix. And, you mentioned you're a musician. I wish we had gotten a little more time to talk about that. You released a single called “Second Time,” which is about your story so I really want to encourage people to listen to that. It's on Spotify, and I'll link to all the places you can find that in the show notes. It's really powerful. I think people can really get a sense of your passion and emotion through hearing your voice in that song. I'm wondering if you can tell us just a little bit about your choice to speak the last 20-25 seconds of the song?

Ferera Swan: Oh my gosh. Thank you.

Haley Radke: If you would share that.

Ferera Swan: I said, "Oh my gosh," because I didn't realize that you've heard it. But first, thank you [00:38:00] for listening to that song. The last 20 to 25 seconds, I'll just share really quick, is the last line of the last email I wrote to my biological mother at the end of our–I don't know what you would call it–but at the end when we stopped talking, at the end of reunion. It was at the end of the email, and during the recording process I was working with Ramy Antoun. He's just amazing all around, but he used to drum for Seal. Anyhow, he had this crazy idea for me first to put a picture of my bio mother in the vocal booth and then to read the email that I last wrote to her.

Haley Radke: He just wanted to make you cry. Sorry. Carry on. I bet it worked.

Ferera Swan: Before I did the final vocals. So I'm actually singing quite differently, like when I listen to that song [00:39:00] it's different than how I normally would sing. But I was super in the moment, so I'm almost just sing-talking it. I'm not sure if that makes sense. But anyway, so I didn't know he was recording me when I was reading the email, and he kept the last snippet of it, stuck it on the back of the song and left it there. Which every time I listen to it now, I cry every time.

Haley Radke: Can you say it to us?

Ferera Swan: It was something about always wondering about, always talking of wanting answers. I was talking about the adoptee experience and then– Oh, no, you're gonna make me cry now. I can't. I think all I ever wanted to know was that I was never forgotten. And that was the name of her poem. So I used the [00:40:00] name of her poem to finish–I don't know, is that called a tag end? I don't even know.

Haley Radke: You're the musician. I wrote down: "I was truly never forgotten." Those are the last five words. Say it. Say it.

Ferera Swan: I was truly never forgotten. Yeah.

Haley Radke: What does that feel like?

Ferera Swan: I now know that I was truly never forgotten. I just think that it's heartbreaking. I can't imagine how painful it is for her to remember me this way though now, and for me to remember her this way. Remember in the sense of what we experienced in reunion and the relationship we could have had, and all the could haves. And it's not ever about regret. I just wanted to add quickly that from what I remember her saying there was a lot of not looking back: Don't [00:41:00] look back. Move forward in life. Don't look backwards. Basically, leave your mistakes in the past and move forward. And I think yes and no, though, because we all know that whatever we don't delve into trauma-wise, grief-wise, loss in ourselves, that is very much in our present.

Haley Radke: And no matter how much you just try to shove it down, it's going to come back. You know what? I've had a lot of therapists tell me that, you know. Yeah, in the last few episodes, so yeah.

Ferera Swan: Exactly, yeah.

Haley Radke: I'm being sarcastic, but yeah. That's true. Okay.

Ferera Swan: No, I know you get it,

Haley Radke: I do get it.

Ferera Swan: That's why I mentioned it.

Haley Radke: And if this is the first episode people are listening to, they're like, Wow, Haley's being harsh. But no, I get it. Stop shoving your feelings down, Haley. Okay.

Ferera Swan: It's hard though. [00:42:00] but I have empathy because it's painful. I don't think everyone is willing to go there. I think it's so that's why I think it's so tragic.

Haley Radke: Yes. The other cool thing, I don't know if you guys know, is Ferera has an Etsy store called Indigo+Swan. And you've got lots of really cool stuff. There's too many things to talk about but I wanted to highlight the adoptee mantra that you have. And I've talked about how a couple of different adoptees have some version of a similar expression that's really meaningful for them. It doesn't resonate with everybody, so I love that there's another one. Here's another one you can check out: Ferera's. I'll link to that in the show notes as well. But it's very empowering and, yeah, I really appreciate your words there. So I won't read it out. You gotta go check in the show notes for that. What do you want to recommend to us now that I've talked you [00:43:00] up?

Ferera Swan: I really would recommend J.S. Lee's book, Keurium. Actually, she has two books. I would really recommend Keurium and Everyone Was Falling, which is her latest release. And I would really recommend them because, one, I think for several different reasons but I do think Everyone Was Falling is definitely a necessary, a much-needed read, especially during the times that we're living in right now. It's just been so difficult, for so many different reasons, but I won't spoil the book for you, but I think that's definitely a must-read. And then Keurium is more adoption-focused, as well as on narcissistic abuse, which I have also been a victim of as well. And so I really connected to that book, and that book really changed…I mean [00:44:00] I was, like, bawling in bed at 2:00 AM over Christmas break when I read it. I was like, Oh my gosh. The last line just got me. So anyway, I would really recommend those two books. She's just a phenomenal writer, and she just really speaks to the hearts of all readers, I think.

Haley Radke: For sure, Jessica's amazing. I had her on the show, Episode 151, so if you want to go back, you can listen to her story and a little bit more about her writing. We talk about both of those novels. And I love adoptee fiction. We hear so many memoirs, which is awesome, we love adoptee stories. But to have an adoptee writing fiction that also sometimes has parts of themselves woven throughout, of course, it's really awesome.

Ferera Swan: Yeah. It's super cool.

Haley Radke: Yeah. She's amazing. Oh, my goodness.

Ferera Swan: And she's multi-talented. She doesn't just write. She's a painter. She does everything, so she does it all.

Haley Radke: I haven't said this anywhere, but I commissioned some artwork from her, [00:45:00] and we'll see that at some point, probably soon.

Ferera Swan: Ooh, how exciting.

Haley Radke: Yes. Yes. She's very talented. Okay. The last thing I wanted to drop just be- before we say where we can connect with you is I wish we had talked a little bit more about music and your work with that. Again, we'll send everyone to listen to “Second Time,” but also, I wanted to just mention that there's a playlist called “You Don't Look Adopted” that Anne Heffron curated, and it's all songs that adoptees recommend, that the recommending adoptee thinks these songs bring up feelings for them about the adoptee experience. It's a huge variety of songs. It's oh, my gosh, just hundreds and hundreds of songs on there. So I think it's so cool to go through and pick out things that do resonate for you. I, myself, have a bit of an adoptee-feelings playlist. And Alice Merton’s “No Roots” is on there. There's a lot of people who recommended Sarah McLachlan’s songs [00:46:00] because she is also an adoptee.

Ferera Swan: Of course.

Haley Radke: “In the Blood,” John Mayer. All those, you know the songs, but anyway.

Ferera Swan: Yes.

Haley Radke: I just thought that would be a cool resource to share as well.

Ferera Swan: That is cool. I actually didn't know that. Thanks for telling me about that. I had no idea. Is this on Spotify?

Haley Radke: It's on Spotify. “You Don't Look Adopted” which is also the name of her book and it's adoptee-curated, which we love. Okay. Ferera, where can we connect with you online?

Ferera Swan: So on Instagram, I'm Ferera Swan, and then you can also connect with me on my website, which is fereraswan(dot)com, and if you go to that site, you can find a bunch of different things like Instagram, iTunes and Spotify, YouTube may be on there, SoundCloud, some other things, but my blog is on there. So that's where you can find me.

Haley Radke: All the places. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing some of your story with us.

Ferera Swan: Thank you. Thanks [00:47:00] for having me, Haley.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much to all of the new Patreon supporters. If you are able to and if you want to say Adoptees On has had an impact, this is a really great way for you to support the show and to say that with your finances. Adopteeson.com/partner has details of how you can sign up and get the extra podcast every week, Adoptees Off Script, and I'd love to have you as a supporter. I can't do the show without you, truly.

And thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

177 [Healing Series] Internalized Oppression

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/177

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You're 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.

Before we get started, I want to let you know how much it means to me that you're showing up here to listen to adoptee voices. I remember when I was first in reunion with my dad, and we hit the inevitable rocky patch after the honeymoon period faded. I felt so alone. I believed that I was absolutely unlovable because my first mother had ghosted me after a few months into our reunion just a decade prior. For me, creating this podcast has been a tremendous labor of love so that other adoptees like me, who were feeling alone, struggling in reunion, or [00:01:00] coming out of the fog, would have connection, so we wouldn't feel like we were crazy. The wildest part of all of this is that it succeeded. Adoptees On has become our show. Our show to connect and share what the adoptee experience is really like. And I'm asking you today to support the podcast and make it sustainable for me to continue doing this work. I'm Haley, the host and creator of the show–our community's show–and I'm also a wife and mom of two little boys, who are trying their very, very best to stay quiet as I record this.

Haley Radke’s little boys: Hi, Mommy.

Haley Radke: They're trying their almost best to stay quiet. When you sign up for Patreon or donate via PayPal, you are helping me, Haley, contribute to my family's needs. What I didn't expect when I started podcasting was that this would become my full-time job. I'm showing up for you and saying yes to adoptees, and I would [00:02:00] love for you to show up for me and commit to a year of support for Adoptees On. I have big plans, and I want to do huge things for adult adoptees, but I can't do it without the support of you, my listeners. For the month of April only, I have a sale on for a yearly membership to Adoptees On Patreon with one month free. After that, it'll be back to regular price. I'm honored by the support I have already gotten from the community, and, truthfully, pretty scared to make this ask again. But if I'm going to continue making the show, I really need your help to make it sustainable and to have the ability to meaningfully contribute to my little family over here and to hire other adoptees to help build the show. Click the link in the show notes or go to adopteeson.com/partner to sign up right now. Okay, let's get to the show.

Today, we are talking about internalized oppression with psychologist Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker. Let's listen in. [00:03:00]

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker. Welcome, Chaitra. I'm so excited to talk with you.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Thank you, Haley. So appreciative of you having me on today.

Haley Radke: It's embarrassing that it's your first time on the show. That's on me. But because it is, I usually ask our experts to share just a little bit of their story so we can kind of get to know you a little bit and know that you know what it's like to be an adoptee. So would you mind just sharing a little bit of your story with us?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Sure. I was adopted from India as an infant back in the days when you were escorted to the United States. Parents didn't travel to pick you up. So I actually flew over here in a basket with three other babies. And, so I joke with my husband, that's why I like my space when I sleep now because we were so squished in that basket. So I grew up in Minnesota: predominantly white [00:04:00] communities, two white parents. I have a brother who was adopted from India also, who's non-biological to me. And growing up, I always knew that I was adopted. Obviously, I was going to figure it out at some point because of the racial differences. But we didn't really talk much about adoption. We never talked about race, even though as an adult, I can tell that my parents were aware of it because they would do things like buying me brown dolls or we would go to culture camp sometimes. But they weren't great communicators, and so it wasn't really in their wheelhouse to talk about all of those things. So a lot of it I just tried to assimilate throughout my life and ignore things that felt hard about being adopted or being a person of color. And for me, psychology just always felt like a good fit. From the time I took my first psychology class in high school, I knew that was what I wanted to do. And so I got my degree, and then it was always a lot of [00:05:00] attachment and trauma work. I didn't really make that connection at the time. I worked with a lot of kids who were in foster care who had been removed from their homes. But then it was actually when we went through the process to adopt our son that I really made the connection and realized what a need there is for these services and that there were names and labels and concepts to describe all of the lived experiences I had. So that was really powerful for me just in the last decade, really, to understand so much of this on a clinical level and a human level, and to connect with other adoptees in more powerful ways. So now I'm a private practice psychologist in Denver and specialize in working with adoptees.

Haley Radke: That's amazing. I love hearing why people were drawn to the helping professions, like so many of us adopted people are. So thank you so much for sharing your story. [00:06:00] I'm curious because you really do specialize in helping adoptees and adult adoptees, what are some of the things that people are really coming to you for?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: A big part of it is what I would call internalized oppression, and I don't think a lot of adoptees have learned to label it that way. What ends up happening is that we get all of these messages from society about what we're supposed to be, right? “Supposed to be." That we're supposed to be grateful, or we're supposed to feel like we were saved. We're not supposed to talk about adoption, not supposed to talk about race or differences. So many of these messages we get become internalized, and it starts to create shame within us as adoptees that there's something inherently wrong with us for wanting to talk about these things or wanting to feel a different way or wanting to address them.[00:07:00] So a lot of that comes down to this place of us having to essentially kind of retrain ourselves to think outside of those messages we get from a lot of non-adoptees or adoptive parents and professionals who don't really get it, so that we feel pride and we feel empowered and we feel a sense of identity that doesn't have to be incorporated with shame.

Haley Radke: Okay. So internalized oppression is leading to lots of really nasty things, it sounds like. Okay, internalized oppression. I've heard that before, but I've never connected it to the adoptee experience. Can you talk more about just that term? I've seen it in research papers and with a lot to do with race.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah, absolutely. And it's absolutely present in race. It's present in [00:08:00] any type of marginalized group where there's privilege with one group and then others are at a disadvantage. And so often I don't think that most people think of adoptees as being marginalized. And we forget that we're not what people assume as the default and we are at a disadvantage in that way so that simple things like filling out medical forms where you might say, I don't have my family history. Right there, having family history is a form of privilege, and that sense that we don't, instead of a lot of times saying, Oh it's messed up that this form doesn't include I'm adopted and I don't have that history. That it's not a box you can check, it automatically turns into this sense of what's wrong with me that I don't know, or should I search, or why haven't I searched, or why don't I have that information? And it spirals into this place of wondering what's wrong with us, as opposed to saying, Wait a minute, what's wrong with the system [00:09:00] that's in place? So instead of seeing those systemic barriers as external, we tend to feel like it's something wrong with us instead. Those messages just become so ingrained.

Haley Radke: Okay. The external versus internal. Okay, that makes sense. That totally makes sense. Oh, wow. I wonder if that's a light bulb moment for anybody else because that's huge. That's really huge. Okay. So you notice that a client is experiencing that. That’s a big world-shifting view. What do you think about that?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: First, I think there are two really big parts to that. First, we have to identify that it's not something within this adopted person that's inherently flawed or wrong or limited. That it's oftentimes about the systemic barriers around them. So instead of only [00:10:00] looking at it in terms of I've tried this and I've done this, and why can't I do better and why am I not enough? That thought of not being enough is so common. And instead of going to that place, being able to say, Okay, so you've done all these things and they're not working. Have we looked outward to consider what some of the barriers might be in your environment to you being able to succeed or feeling better about yourself or these things in your life? So really expanding that tunnel vision that tends to happen. And again, because we get so many messages from other people: You should be well-adjusted and you should be grateful and you have nothing to complain about, and you shouldn't be worried about things you've lost because you've gained so much. When we get all of those messages, it's so hard not to feel like there's something wrong with us for not believing those things. And what I see with a lot of clients is, we start to talk about this disconnect that, [00:11:00] intellectually in our thoughts, we can say, Oh yeah, all these things they're saying make sense, I guess. And it then becomes distorted: I guess there's something wrong with me.

But then there's this disconnect to what we actually believe and what we know. And most of the time, on a really somatic and visceral level, we know it's not us. There's something within us that's telling us this isn't our fault and this isn't something wrong with us. And so when we can dig into that piece and really understand the messages around us and how they're influencing us, then comes the second part of not feeling angry or ashamed about the ways that we've coped with those messages. And the best example I can give is, so many people talk about adoptees engaging in self-sabotaging behaviors like substance abuse or even when it comes to attachment, like they're rejecting before they can be rejected. And that's, again, we get those messages like [00:12:00] it's something wrong with the adopted person. But the truth is, most of the time it's self-protective. It's not self-sabotage. And so if we can start to identify the parts of ourselves that have tried to protect us or tried to self-preserve instead of viewing those as negatives because outsider people might think that they are, it gives us an opportunity to start to really feel empowered and proud of the ways that we have managed to survive for so long

Haley Radke: Okay. As you're describing these things, I had to quickly scribble down “coming out of the fog.” So what are your thoughts on that term? Because the more you talked about the internalized oppression and realizing that was happening, it sounded to me like that's what happens when people come out of the fog. They realize that. [00:13:00] And so is this like a technical term for that? Or do you not like that term? What are your thoughts on that?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah. I have a hard time with that term because I feel like every adoptee is on their own journey and there's nothing wrong with them for being at whatever point they're at in that journey. It's one more way that I feel we put adoptees down or shame them, and we even do that within our own community. And so we really need to be able to say the reason someone believes what they believe is probably due to self-protection and self-preservation. There's something about their family or community or workplace, or whatever it is, that they are not safe to explore these other aspects of adoption yet.

Haley Radke: So the thing that we've been labeling, do you think that labeling “coming out of the fog,” is linked to [00:14:00] it? I get that. I've heard so many people don't like that term, and it can be dismissive and it can be really... I don't know. It's not a continuum, right? Just like grief is not like, Oh, you hit this stage, then hit this stage. It implies that someone who is fogged is not with the rest of us yet. And even saying that there is a “yet,” there's still all of those things that you pointed out as well. But the thing we've been labeling that, is that just instead the internalized oppression or is that totally unrelated?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: I think they're absolutely connected, that the internalized oppression is in some ways about survival. The things that are around us, we have to do what we can to adapt and live within them. And so if we take in all of these messages we're getting that some people will label as the things that put us in the fog in the first place, all of those kinds [00:15:00] of happy-unicorn-rainbows messages around adoption, then there's probably a reason that someone is choosing to believe them. Even if they may not fully be aware that it's a choice, there's a reason, and that reason almost always comes down to self-protection. When we talk about “coming out of the fog,” it's one of those terms that I think can be appropriate at times. Like if we're labeling ourselves that way, that we felt like we were in a fog and we've come out of it, that feels okay to me if it's empowering to that person. But when we're labeling other people that way, that's where it feels like it's shaming.

Haley Radke: Oh, like the fogged adoptees, or they're defogging or something.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay. Chaitra, I am sorry for just going back to that, but the thing is, I've never had another word for it and it's like an easy [00:16:00] phrase to say. So I love that you're teaching us a different way to say that, and it's so all-encompassing. My goodness, that is amazing.

Okay. I have a quote from you I want to read to you from your Facebook page, and I'd love for you to say a little more about this. So this is a quote from you: "Heartwarming stories are a band-aid meant to distract us from the systemic problems that caused the underlying wound. To create change, we have to be willing to look beyond superficial healing to what caused the injury."

Mic drop. You can't see the mic drop.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: I have to admit, I'm glad that's the one you chose. I was a little like, Oh boy, which quote? I've said a lot of things.

Haley Radke: You've said a lot of things. You tell me a lot of things. You don't know, but you are teaching me all the time. [00:17:00]

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah. My eyes have really been open, like I say, really just in the last, maybe, 15 years or so. It wasn't until my first class in graduate school that I truly understood white privilege, that it was something that just clicked for me. And it was something as small as a band-aid. So this idea of band-aids is that they come in this color that's supposed to be flesh-colored, but they never matched me. And suddenly it all clicked. Like, all these ways that I had felt different or there was something wrong with me; it clicked. There are all these small messages every day that are telling me I don't belong and I'm different. And so from that point on, it's been this journey of really understanding systemic forms of oppression. And, in that way, I felt like that quote really harkened back to where that first started for me and understanding that on a deeper level. But at the [00:18:00] same time, there is this constant sense of if somebody's stuck or they're struggling, what's wrong with them? Why can't they fix it? And it's this sort of individual-in-a-vacuum view. And instead, any time we're feeling stuck, what I encourage clients to do is really think about the environment around you. And funnily enough, I just posted a quote about that today. So this idea of what do we do when we're feeling stuck and we feel like we've done all the things we can to move out of it, we need to look at the external world around us and what is it that is putting systemic barriers in place? Or what are the messages we're constantly having to fight against? Or what ways are we constantly having to prove the validity of what we feel and what we need? And when we're having to fight our environment in that way, of course it's going to be hard to succeed and to feel whole.

Haley Radke: You [00:19:00] talked about the self-sabotage can be self-protective, but what are some of the ways that we can be protective of ourselves when we're unraveling this internalized oppression? What are the healthy ways to do that?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: So much of it is about, I think, how we frame it. That when we view the things we're doing, like when we buy into that narrative of things being self-sabotaging, as soon as we can reframe those as self-protective and embrace those parts of ourselves, it can be incredibly healing in itself. So if we realize we're in a pattern of pushing others away and we're afraid to get too close because what if they leave or what if I'm not enough, right? That's a common fear, and it absolutely makes sense that it's there because we have had someone leave us. And once we know something is a possibility because we've been through it, it's always [00:20:00] a possibility. It's always something that could happen again. We can't unknow what we know. And so if we acknowledge there's that part of ourselves that feels that, instead of getting angry or resentful and going, God, why do I do this? Why do I push people away? What's wrong with me? If we can talk to that part of ourselves the way that we would talk to a child or an infant to comfort that part and say, Oh my gosh, I see you trying to protect me right now. You're trying to keep me from getting too close because you're worried someone will leave, and I can completely understand why we're scared of someone leaving. And guess what? Right now, things are different because right now we've got this person who does this and this to show us that they're sticking around. And we are older and braver and wiser and stronger now, and there's more that we can do to handle this situation and to navigate it.

So if we can talk about how we take the time to navigate that and how we give ourselves space to say, [00:21:00] Thank you to this part of me for trying to keep me safe and protect me. And you know what? I've got it now. I'm okay. You can rest. I might need you again, but right now it's okay for you to rest.

Haley Radke: That sounds like Internal Family Systems work.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: To some extent it is, and I feel like there's a different level of that with adoptees sometimes too. We already have all these parts that are similar to other people, but then these parts we carry with us of who we could have been, this ghost life. And so in that way too, I think, we have a lot more parts to have to navigate.

Haley Radke: Oh boy. Yeah, I feel like that's a whole ‘nother conversation. Yeah. Wow. The ghost life, that's Betty Jean Lifton, right?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Ghost Kingdom language. Yes. [00:22:00] Okay. So you're talking to mostly adoptees here and adults–adopted people who are now all grown up. And I know it's not necessarily our job to be teaching our adoptive parents about the things that we're now learning and unraveling, but it just falls to us often. So can you give us some ideas or conversation starters or things if we're wanting to open up some conversations about this with our adoptive families in particular, especially as it relates to the things that you're seeing your clients talking about right now? And, if we're wanting support in these areas, if we don't want to be unraveling alone and then going to that unsafe place and having to defend ourselves or …you know exactly what happens.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah. [00:23:00] So in general, I think the first part of trying to normalize some of those things and feel like we can talk about them is to be around other adoptees. We really need that unspoken bond. I mean, we're a culture within ourselves. And so I think if we can be around one another, that helps because the isolation of feeling all these things is a big part of what I think is dangerous about it. And then beyond that, trying to explain it to others and trying to help them understand, I really feel like that's something that we have to be aware of as far as our own self-preservation, again. That, when things happen, I see this a lot with transracial adoptees of color, they'll feel like they should be at the forefront of these battles for racial equity and equality. And to some extent, I can understand why that feels empowering to be battling in that. [00:24:00] And at times it's exhausting and it's harmful, and we have to be able to understand when we need to step back for our own self-protection and self-preservation too, and there's no shame in that. So I think with anything, when we're trying to educate others about adoption or race or any type of marginalization, we have to be accepting of the times when we need to rest, too, and to know that doesn't mean we're not enough or that we're not doing what we need to do. It just means we're weighing the costs and benefits of how it's affecting us. So these people might say, Oh, you shouldn't cut people out of your life. You shouldn't cut your adoptive family out. It's fine to see this therapist just because they're not an adoption specialist. Those are things that are really dismissive of that experience and being able to say, I can do this to an extent, and when it starts to become more work for me than it is for the other person, it's [00:25:00] okay for me to step back from that and choose a different way.

Haley Radke: Okay, I like that. The self-preservation can mean choosing not to have those conversations. And, at the time we're recording, we've been doing this whole series on estrangement and it's been very eye-opening as to what things have caused these breaks in relationship. And so much of it is just can I just be me? Can I just be me? Isn't that wild? Like, yeah ... I don't know. Do you see that?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Again, those external messages of what we're supposed to be within a family instead of letting us be who we are and not labeling that as the problem.

Haley Radke: I have another quote written down from you. I promise this is the last one because I see your face. You get a little bit nervous when I say that.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah.

Haley Radke: "Multiracial [00:26:00] families often have to make difficult decisions about who to keep in their lives and who to cut out for the emotional and psychological wellbeing of their partners and children of color."

You just said that very recently, and that's exactly what you're sharing again with us now.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah, absolutely. That is one of the things that, unfortunately, agencies don't talk about and don't train prospective adoptive parents. I know a lot of people like to blame adoptive parents, and I definitely do to some extent, because in the age of the internet they can look up so many things to learn all of this. And, as we all know, the general public is not adoption informed. And if somebody is choosing to adopt, it should be up to the agencies to educate them appropriately about all aspects of adoption. And so part of that, I feel, needs to be, especially with transracial adoptees of color being [00:27:00] adopted into white families, there needs to be a huge component in educating about the importance of racial mirroring and cultural mirroring and giving those kids an opportunity to develop a healthy racial identity. And if so many of the families I work with didn't receive that training, they're in this position now of essentially having to decide whether they keep people they've cared about for a long time in their lives or not for the sake of their children. Even if their children love these family members, but they're showing either overt or covert forms of racism that are going to harm this adoptee of color, how to cut someone out of your life in a way that shows your kids that you value them and you protect them? And as an adoptee, so that you feel like your parents are on your side and that you're the priority. Such a tough place to be in. And I would never say it's easy to cut people out. I've certainly had to cut people out: with some people it is [00:28:00] easier and some people it is tougher. But at the same time, it really has to come down to the adoptee is the one who needs to be protected first and foremost.

Haley Radke: What do you say to an adoptee who comes in and says, Oh, my word. I'm realizing all of these things now. I need to unpack. I need to figure out my identity? I know you work with a lot of transracial adoptees and issues of race, and that's so complex. I don't have that experience. I'm a white domestic adoptee. But I've heard from many adoptees of color that grew up in white families, and they're like, Sometimes I feel white. Now that I'm an adult, I don't get treated with the white protection of my parents anymore. What's that called?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: I call it the umbrella of white privilege.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Umbrella. I don't [00:29:00] have my umbrella anymore. What are some of the things that you do to help someone that's struggling with that?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: It sounds really simple, but one of the main things that people need is just to feel fully seen and heard in all of the things that they're unpacking. To not feel judged or to feel like there's a certain agenda to it, or a certain way they're supposed to be. Just that in itself, I think, is one of the most healing and empowering things about adoption-informed therapy spaces. That adoptees can come in and talk about all these things in a completely unfiltered way, and that's just so powerful to see. It's amazing to see the shift, the sighs of relief and the entire body relaxation just at being able to talk about these things without having to be careful about how they say it.

Haley Radke: Okay, this feels like a perfect time. I really wanted to get to this because I know that you [00:30:00] are part of this really neat thing that's happening: the Society of Adoptee Professionals of Color in Adoption. Can you tell us what that is and tell us more about it?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Absolutely. So we are a group of adoptee professionals of color, and we all are connected to the adoption field in some way. So there are a lot of us with doctorates but that's not a requirement for being in the group. There are some without and some who are students. It was initially started by three adoptees, one of whom was Dr. Amanda Baden, a very well-known researcher and professor in adoption. And the goal was really to bring a space together where we can support one another, we can network, and we can figure out ways to support the community as a whole. We just had an event recently, because we're really just starting to go public as we've [00:31:00] been kind of behind the scenes, working on mission and vision and values. We just recently had an event, a public forum, where we're wanting to hear from adoptees of color about what we can do for them and what the needs are. So at this point, we're really trying to learn from the community about how we can support everyone. And so we have committees that are writing op-ed pieces, and we have committees that are working on how to create a very solid sort of pre-adoption psychological evaluation for prospective parents, something that's used across the board and requires training to be adoption-informed. So things like that where we're really trying to make sure that we're creating a space where our voices will be not only heard, but will dominate the conversation.

Haley Radke: Yes, we need that. [00:32:00] Absolutely need that. Okay. Well, I'm cheering you on. I think that's fabulous, and I'll make sure to link that in the show notes so people can go over and sign up for the newsletter from the Society of Adoptee Professionals of Color in Adoption so you can make sure you're supporting what they're doing.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Great. Thank you.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Okay. I feel like we covered a lot of things, but is there anything I didn't ask you about that you want to make sure to mention or tell us or encourage us as we think about this internalized oppression and all the different facets and ways it could be impacting our lives?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Oh my gosh, yeah. We've talked about a lot, for sure. I know I've shared a lot and it's so hard, too, because I feel like it's so unique to each person. Even though this is a common theme, I think the words everyone needs to hear specifically may not always be the same. And so I think, overall, I just want to encourage [00:33:00] adoptees to, like you say, to consider in those times when they're feeling stuck, that it may not be something that's limited in them. It might be a limitation in their environment and oftentimes even just a limited capacity in the people around you. That if they're not able to attune and meet your needs or communicate effectively with you, it's not always something you're doing wrong. A lot of times it's about their own hurts and their own struggles, and their capacity might be limited to give you what you need. So it's not that you're asking for too much.

Haley Radke: Well, I appreciated you reframing my question even, because I had asked you for some conversation starters we can use. And you're like, Hold on a second, let's go back. Adoptee first, yourself first. Make sure you've got what you need and that you're safe. So yeah, I really appreciated that.

Chaitra, I'm so glad we got to talk today, and I just wanted to say a huge thank you. [00:34:00] I hope most of you know this, but Chaitra is the amazing adoptee psychologist who created that fabulous list of adoptee therapists. So a directory that is–what did you call it? It's like you self-registered.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah. So people self-submit their information, but they all have to confirm that they identify as an adoptee in some way. So whether that's international or domestic or kinship or foster, they all identify as adoptees.

Haley Radke: And so there's therapists, there's psychologists and it says which state they're able to practice in or otherwise. I'm in Canada, so you know. But because of licensing requirements, some therapists are only licensed to practice in a certain state. Or I know you're a psychologist, and so you have a few different states that you can do virtually now. I've seen that. So it's [00:35:00] amazing. I'm so grateful for your work on that, and it has really opened up a resource for people that maybe they didn't know. I've tried so hard with the Healing Series to highlight adoptee therapists, and so you can go see someone who gets it. You could go. Come on, it's pretty awesome! So I just think that's such a fabulous curated resource for us, so thank you. Thank you for making that.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah, of course. I think that's one of the best things we can have out there for adoptees. And for adoptee therapists who are not on the list, I hope that they'll hear this and sign up and submit their information too. The more of us, the better.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Yes, please do that. Okay, I'll link that in the show notes as well, but it's been on the show a lot of times, so no excuses. Where can we connect with you online?

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: So my website is growbeyondwords(dot)com and you can find information about all of my services and upcoming [00:36:00] groups and webinars and books and trainings and soon, really excited, in 2022 I'm writing a series of children's books for adoptees. I'm very excited about that, so stay tuned for that piece.

Haley Radke: That's very exciting. All right. You'll have to come back when they're coming out so you can tell us about them.

Dr Chaitra Wirta-Leiker: Yeah, I'd love that.

Haley Radke: All right. Thank you so much. This was wonderful.

Can you tell we were both having a light bulb moment when Dr. Wirta-Leiker was talking about internalized oppression and realizing it and we were contrasting that with coming out of the fog? Holy moly, you guys, I think that was a breakthrough for all of us. I look forward to following Chaitra for more. She has so many interesting thoughts she shares on her Facebook page for Grow Beyond Words. [00:37:00] I hope that you go ahead and follow that. And like I said, we'll have links to those in the show notes.

So for the month of April, as I said, we're having a month-long Patreon sale. So that means if you pay for the whole year, you're going to get a month for free and there's different levels, which is all explained on Patreon, but the first level is you get the weekly Adoptees Off Script podcast, which is me and my usual co-host Carrie Cahill Mulligan. Sometimes I'll have guest co-hosts. We are doing a 2021 year-long Book Club right now, so you'll have access to the past recordings of Book Club and access to all the future tapings that you can come to live, some with authors, some with a round table discussion. And then at another level, you can join a private Facebook group just for adoptees where we are talking through all kinds of things. All kinds of things happy, sad, in [00:38:00] between. The community support there is remarkable. I've been in lots of groups that are not fun to be in, but my group has been pretty phenomenal, if I do say so myself. The community there is really beautiful, so thank you. So you can sign up at adopteeson.com/partner.

Thank you so much to those of you who already show up for me and support me in various ways, including sharing the show with just one person or giving me a review or writing me notes. I know so many of you write me these really heartfelt emails, and I just don't have the capacity to reply to them all, but I read them. I see them. Thank you, and you guys are the reason I show up and make the show for you. So thank you for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

176 Miguel Caballero

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/176

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 176, Miguel. I'm your host, Haley Radke. I get to interview some incredibly special people on this show, and today is a perfect example. I am thrilled to introduce you to Miguel Caballero. Miguel shares some of his story with us, including how he got sober eight years ago. There are so many adopted people who struggle with addiction, and Miguel describes feeling that he had a birthmother-shaped hole to fill. He's gone on to fill a great need in our community by starting the peer-led support group Adoptees in Addiction. 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, Miguel Caballero. Welcome, Miguel.

Miguel Caballero: Hi, Haley. I'm so happy to be here.

Haley Radke: I have eagerly anticipated our conversation, so I would love it if you would share some of your story with us.

Miguel Caballero: Well, I'm used to introducing myself and saying, "Hi, I'm Miguel. I'm an alcoholic," because I do that probably three to four times a week at what my friend likes to call “the beverage program,” a 12-step program focused around alcohol. So I'm an alcoholic. I'm eight years sober. I'm in my 40s and I'm an adoptee, and as my friend David Boll says, I'm also a relinquishee. I think that's important language to understand some of the stuff about addiction and alcoholism and all that good stuff.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I like that language. I'm also a relinquishee. Eight years, that's really significant.

Miguel Caballero: Yeah, it's really good. What's funny is that it seems like a lot of people notice. They’re like, Congratulations. That's awesome. [00:02:00] And before I got sober, my response to somebody else being sober was, Why would you live life without alcohol?

Why would you do that to yourself if you didn't have to? Because I was a pretty heavy binge drinker. I liked to get blackout drunk. I liked to do lots of crazy things. I liked to run naked at parties. That was a big thing, to go streaking. I liked attention. I really liked attention. I think that was something that was a little bit of some hole-filling for me. It was a need to feel seen and liked and to escape this pain that I was in. And so alcohol really numbed a lot of pain for me, and I wasn't actively aware of that, but looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the depression, a lot of the abandonment issues, a lot of the sorrow, a lot of that was being numbed by alcohol. So for a [00:03:00] long time, you could say that alcohol helped me deal with life. But then you can also add up all the things that were less glamorous than running naked through a party: smashing cars up, losing jobs, having to call in sick. So many things like that happened again and again, losing relationships.

So alcohol was fun for a while, and then it became fun with problems, and then it just became problems. So in 2012, I was freelancing up in Seattle, Washington, and it was getting cold and dark and awful. And there were the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, the horrible Sandy Hook shootings of all these little kids. And there's something about my pain and my adoption that whenever I would see a mother protecting a child in a movie, it would just totally wreck me. I would just cry forever. And to see these teachers protecting these kids or trying to, [00:04:00] it just broke something inside of me. And it really just ruptured something. I felt that really deep primal wound. It was right on the surface, and I couldn't numb it with alcohol. And a few things happened. And then my girlfriend was all ready to do an intervention with me. And she said, You need to get help. And I, instead of fighting her and she didn't have to call my friends, I just said, I know. And I was done. I was done drinking. I was 40 years old, and I needed to stop. I knew that for me to live life in a way that could make me happy, I had to stop drinking alcohol. So yeah, just talking about it brings up a little bit of something. And stopping drinking is really great. I highly recommend it to anybody with a problem or drugs or shopping or gambling or any of [00:05:00] those things, sex and love. But when you stop doing that, those things that you've been numbing really come to the forefront.

So for me, there are a lot of issues around being an adoptee, being a relinquishee. There's the seven core issues of adoption. And it all comes up. It all comes forward. And all those feelings that you've pushed down, almost like a floating toy in a pool. You push it down, you push it down. And when you let it go, it just comes splooshing up and splashes everywhere. And I think that's what happens for a lot of people who've been using some form of numbing out. When they stop the numbing, here come all the feelings. [00:06:00] And so for that reason, and a lot of other reasons, I started going to AA and I started finding a community and people who understood me, people who listened to the things that I was going through and nodding along with me. I felt very seen and very heard in the 12-step rooms. And one thing that I think is very magical about AA and NA and all those things is that it's a program of one sufferer relating to another sufferer. So the original two people of AA were Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob and they talked to each other as horrible alcoholics, not as a spouse telling the other spouse what to do and how terrible they were, or a boss telling them they're going to get fired. They just said, This is how bad I am. This is what I feel like. And the other person said, I hear you. I've been like that and I've felt like that too. And somehow in that shared vulnerability and those shared admissions, there's something very healing that comes in and there's a chance [00:07:00] to get better in a very meaningful way. And I had always wanted that. I had always wanted to be seen and heard and I wasn't always aware of how to do that in a positive and constructive way. So coming in and finding that I could talk about my feelings and people would listen and they would come up afterwards and say, I felt that way too. Or, Yeah, I know totally what that is. Or, I don't know what that's like but, I know this other person who has gone through that. And those feelings, that community, the shared vulnerability, all that really was very, very healing and it felt really good. I won't say that it was easy to give up alcohol, but it wasn't a terrible thing. It was definitely an easier transition than I thought it would be, and I found new friends and I connected with old friends in new ways. Life was feeling a whole lot better [00:08:00] after I got sober. All I wanted to do was stop drinking and stop being in pain. And I found community and a sense of belonging. I don't know if this is an adoptee characteristic but I'm an extremely sensitive guy and compassionate and there are a lot of really good qualities about me. I also got to display those qualities and help other people when they were suffering and to go up to somebody who said that they got fired or they had a bad day or their child was sick. Whatever it was, I got to sit down with another person and just be there for them. And that shared vulnerability, the ability to listen with an open heart and to be kind and good to somebody else was also something that I'd always wanted in my life. I didn't realize that stopping drinking would afford me that opportunity to do that, but it did, and that was also wonderfully [00:09:00] healing and good.

So that was a quick rumble through a year's worth of recovery and learning and discovery and so a lot of pain, too and a lot of growth. It wasn't as easy as it sounds in a two-minute encapsulation. There are ups and downs and setbacks and those things. But for the most part, it was an upward trajectory.

Haley Radke: When you were in the meetings and you were finding this community and people that felt like you, and those kinds of things, did you ever come across anyone else that was adopted? Did that topic ever come up in those first months, first year?

Miguel Caballero: Yes, absolutely. I will say that when I was in rehab–I'm very open about my adoptee issues and my alcohol issues. I'm very open out there in the world. I talk about it, whatever's going on with me, and I've been lucky enough where those issues haven't been difficult or there haven't [00:10:00] been penalties. Like, I have friends that are nurses and they can't go out and say that they've been drug addicts. That just doesn't fly, so you have to be anonymous. That's the second part of the NA and AA and all those things. But for me I've been able to be open about my adoptee issues, about my alcohol issues, and all those things without feeling any sort of sanctions or frowns or what have you. So yes, I talked about my adoptee issues. In rehab, there was a very young woman who had given up a baby two or three years before, and I got to talk with her. That was really... It was very emotional and very sad, but it was also very healing just to hear her and hear her opinions on what it was like and what her giving away her child had felt like and how she kept thinking about him. So it was out there front and center. As I got more sober and more fluent in the ways of talking in rooms, I would start to be asked to [00:11:00] be a speaker at AA meetings. So you talk for 10 minutes or 20 minutes, and I always share. I usually lead with: "Hey, I was adopted, and what I took from being adopted was that my birth mother took one look at me and decided there was something about me that was unlovable and worthless and not worth keeping.” I would lead my shares with that and talk about the ways adoption had affected me and intertwined with my alcoholism. After the meetings when I was speaker, there'd be two different types of people that would come up to me. One person would come up to me and they would say, You know what? I hated my family so much, I always wished that I was adopted because I wished I wasn't like them. So there's that person. And then somebody else would come up behind them and they'd say, You know what? I'm an adoptee also, and I related so, so much to what you were talking about and I share that suffering in the same way that I share the suffering around alcoholism. [00:12:00] And so as I was going to meetings, I collected phone numbers and formed friendships with a bunch of these people. It was always in the back of my mind that we should have our own little meeting, adoptees that are alcoholics. And I was just scared to start it and scared to get rejected and scared for it to fail, so I didn't do it for quite a while.

Haley Radke: What did you say to the people who said, Oh, I hated my family. I wish I had been adopted?

Miguel Caballero: I would just smile and say, I'm sorry that it was hard for you and your family. I think on some level when someone comes up to you and they want to tell you a little bit of their story, they want to be seen and heard. And even though their experience wasn't my experience, I could be there for them in a positive way and just give them a place to talk about something about their childhood. [00:13:00] Just coming up and saying that to a complete stranger is pretty difficult. And so, for me, when people are trying to be vulnerable in the rooms and outside the rooms, I do my best to listen and to be there for them because that's what I want for myself. And I'm pretty good at that. Sometimes I get scared or freaked out and I don't want to talk to some random person, but for the most part, I know I'm doing something good and I don't have to be scared of not being good at it or worry about the consequences of failing or what may happen. I can get by those feelings to be there for somebody else. If it's something I'm doing on my own and I could fail at, that I'm going out to do, I hate that. I'm scared of it. I'm scared of failing. I would rather not do something than to do something and fail. I think that's probably an adoptee-style issue. [00:14:00] Possibly just my issue, maybe a little bit of both.

Haley Radke: Michael, can I remind you just even a little bit further? Because you were describing earlier some of the pain and depression and I saw you write about this birthmother-shaped hole and refer to those kinds of things. And sometimes when I'm talking to people who are in recovery, they're looking at their past and they have all the hindsight. And you were even talking about adoptee issues, it sounds like, in your first year. When in your life did you discover that adoption had had an impact and that you were a relinquishee? Because, often when I talk to other adoptees, I've heard, Oh, I'm coming out of the fog, and that only happened when I was starting recovery. That kind of thing. It sounds like this happened earlier for you.

Miguel Caballero: For good and bad. When I was in middle school I was a [00:15:00] very difficult kid with my parents. A lot of picking fights and screaming, “You're not my real parent” at them. And they, my parents, did their best. They're very lovely people. I don't know that they were really equipped to deal with somebody like me. I don't think there was enough literature, enough training out there. But they did their very best. I joke with people that they did enough wrong where I need therapy, but not so much wrong that there'd be a good memoir. It's just some pretty typical parent and child issues for the most part. They did their best. But when I was 13 or so, I was just yelling at them constantly and they took me to therapy, and the therapist asked me, Do you want to talk about your adoption? I was like, Why? I hate my parents. My parents are terrible and I hate school. I wasn't the most emotionally mature kid. So it was brought up, but it was never front and center.

When I got older, I was in college and I started to open up a little bit more. I thought about it and I wrote to the adoption agency to see [00:16:00] if I could get in touch with my birth mother. And it took them a long time to find her through the State of Illinois, and apparently she was in the Philippines. But she eventually said that she didn't want to be contacted, and that was very, very hard. So that came up. I found The Primal Wound on my own somewhere and brought it into my therapist when I was, like, 25 and had underlined whole chapters essentially. It's "Look at this. This explains so much. I feel lost." And all of those things. Reading it was such an eye-opener, it explained so much, but it also explained very hard things. To explain that you have a feeling of loss and that's normal, that's comforting. But also, Hey, you have this weird feeling of loss all the time, and that's not fun. No one's saying, Hey, could you give me a feeling of loss at all times that I don't understand? No one would choose that as their prize at the bingo game.

Haley Radke: Oh my God. That [00:17:00] was so good. I'm going to be thinking about that for a long time.

Miguel Caballero: So my therapist really didn't know what to do with that. She wasn’t adoption competent. It was like 1998, so there was barely any internet. I didn't have any support for reading The Primal Wound on my own and that was very hard. So I knew it was a thing, and I had seen the way I reacted to mothers and protecting kids in movies and that kind of thing. And I knew there was just this feeling somewhere in me that was a little bit wrecked. So my coming out of the fog was over a bunch of years of therapy. It was reading The Primal Wound and a couple other books, but there wasn't any community around that. It wasn't there yet on the internet, and we didn't have social media. It was the early days of the internet. So I was on my own, and that continued for quite a while. I'd find other adoptees here and there, or [00:18:00] I would see a talk, or one night at 5:00 in the morning I was up and I saw the Run DMC, the DMC special that was on, and related to that so much, but I didn't have anywhere to go with that. And that was hard. When I did find places to bring it up, it wasn't always fully understood, which I think continues to be an issue. I don't think the general public quite knows what to do with us adoptees/relinquishees. It's a complicated thing to understand, and your adoptive parents have love for you, and they heal it. That's the simpler story to tell, and to learn about it and to understand more is a more difficult thing. You have to, I think, really care about somebody very close to you to want to understand that stuff and to open yourself up to it.

Haley Radke: Do you think that having all of that knowledge earlier on and then coming to a place [00:19:00] deciding that you're going to be in recovery–is that the language that you identify with, saying that you're in recovery?

Miguel Caballero: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay. I don't want to put something on you that's not yours. But then knowing–so you're, like, in your car thinking, Okay, I've maybe have been stuffing this down. Do you think that helped you in your healing journey? Having done that work earlier and it came back to you?

Miguel Caballero: Absolutely. I spent a large amount of money on therapy and a large amount of money on drugs and alcohol in my 30s. I don't know which was the bigger amount, but they were very large amounts. So I talked a lot and I was sensitive. I am sensitive. So I explored a lot of feelings. So I think that very much helped. If I had tried to get sober at 25, I don't know what that would have looked like, and I don't know that I would have had the maturity. I see 21-year-olds come into the rooms and trying to get sober. I'm just like, Wow that's [00:20:00] amazing. I had to get my butt kicked for a good 25 years to finally be like, Okay, I need to stop drinking. So if it had happened much younger, I would have fought it. For whatever reason, I didn't fight it when I started to get sober in my 40s.

Haley Radke: Let's go to what you've created.

Miguel Caballero: Sure.

Haley Radke: So you said you were a little bit scared to start something. You had this idea. You wanted to connect with other adoptees. Do you know the official stats? We could talk about numbers all the time. But adoptees, I know they're overrepresented in addiction, in seeking out residential treatment programs. It's crazy. The numbers are wild. But I don't know exact figures. Can you talk about that a little bit and why you decided to finally go for it?

Miguel Caballero: Sure. I've seen all sorts of stats that I can't trace them down to their root. I've tried.

Haley Radke: Yeah, me too. It's like, Where is the number from? [00:21:00]

Miguel Caballero: It's like a Barbados shell company. You're like, "It references this other book, and that book references another book. But I will tell you that, generally, in a room of more than 15 people in recovery, there's at least one other adoptee. I don't know if the math works out for that. So seeing all these people and becoming friends with some, there was one young man who came in once and we went out to coffee afterwards with another adoptee. And he was so raw and just so full of pain that was on the surface. He was having a hard time seeing how he could live life without alcohol and live life with this pain. It was so tough on him. And I haven't seen him since then. I wanted to be there for that guy, for that woman who came in just raw and coming out of the fog and the primal wound right at the surface, and they're trying to get sober. I really wanted to be there for that person as much as I wanted [00:22:00] to create a community of more recovered, well-balanced adoptees who had been through a little bit more.

There's a thing called the Survivors Program. It's at The Meadows in Arizona. It helps you deal with childhood trauma, and I went out to that. After that I felt very freed of a lot of the fears that hold me back. And so I was like, Okay, it's time. And I started a version of the group that was specifically AA-focused. It was physically in Los Angeles, and we had between four and eight people for maybe a year, once a month. And then not everybody that goes into recovery is of the best social or mental abilities, and there was a guy who caused problems, and the group fell apart. And that was sad, but eventually I kept finding more adoptees. And there was a friend of mine, her name is Lilly, and she said, I want to do that group again. So having her support and [00:23:00] her co-authorship–I don't know what the right word is. Anyways, meeting Lilly and her pushing for the group, we decided to do it again physically. We sent out flyers. We passed out flyers at meetings. And we had it physically once in January of 2020. You may see where this is going. And then we had it again in February of 2020, and then this weird thing happened and we weren't allowed to meet in person again. Which actually has turned out to be one of the few pure blessings of this whole past year. We were forced to go onto Zoom. And what was wonderful about that was that you didn't have to be in Los Angeles to come to our meeting. And being an adoptee is not that rare of a thing, being an addict is not that rare of a thing, but putting the two together is pretty rare. And so going online, we were able to find people through Facebook adoptee groups. [00:24:00] I know a few of the therapists here in LA that are adoption competent, and they put us in their newsletter. So Jeannette Yoffe, and Lesli Johnson, and Angela Gee, all those people. And I actually went onto Psychology Today and searched through their therapist recommendations for anybody that said that they were an adoptee therapist and then talked about it in their bio. I emailed them. And so by ones and twos, people started finding us. So we were able to create a community. We started at 10 people, and I'd say by four months, so August, it was around 15, and then by the end of the year it was around 20 to 25 people every week. And people from all across the country, and even we have a couple women from England. There's a woman from New Zealand. There's a guy from Australia who I haven't seen for a while, but for him it's tomorrow first thing in the morning when we're starting our meeting, so that's okay. But we've found [00:25:00] people from all across the country, and the general reaction when somebody comes to the meeting is just this feeling of awe that there are this many other people with the same set of problems.

And you just hear it again and again, that I've never been in a room with this many other adoptees that are also addicts. And that feels really good. It feels really good to be able to help foster that community and to give us a space to be seen and heard in ways that just adoptee rooms can't really provide, and more specifically, that just the recovery rooms can't provide. There are issues, incompatibility issues in some ways. I was listening to one of your past podcasts, the one with Harris, and I think [00:26:00] he talked a little bit about this, that in the recovery rooms, the 12 steps, you do all these things to try to deal with your feelings and the things that have happened to you, and you work on these issues. And generally speaking, AA, NA, all those, are really good at helping you deal with a lot of those things, a lot of the anger you have over childhood things or the sadness you might feel at adult things, like losing a job or a marriage falling apart. So they're very good at that if you're working the steps, as they like to say. And so when you bring something like adoption into the rooms of AA, people don't quite know what to do. They are like, We have this solution. You just do the steps. You write about it, you talk about it, and then you'll feel fine. And so I think it's baffling to a lot of alcoholics and addicts when we bring in our adoptee issues. They just [00:27:00] don't know how to react to us not feeling much better. That can be pretty disheartening for a lot of people. Personally, I'll just keep talking, even if people don't understand. I just want someone in the room to be hearing my words. But I know that very specifically, a few of the people in our meeting have shared about their adoptee issues and gotten some negative or not super positive feedback from people, and that has really turned them off of recovery rooms. Which is not great because those rooms help us stay sober.

Haley Radke: And I think that sort of comment to someone, when you invalidate the adoptee experience because it's taken so much courage to share anything, sharing pain about adoption. It's so antithetical to the world's [00:28:00] view of adoption that adoption's just this gift and it's magical. And so to come to the place where you're like, Okay, I'm sharing this pain, and have it completely invalidated by a community that has helped you, that must be excruciating for someone to experience.

Miguel Caballero: I think it is. I think it's devastating, and it could make you not want to be a part of those rooms despite the positive feelings and positive things that are there. And I totally understand that.

Let me rewind. So a couple years ago, the State of Illinois opened up their birth records, and so I wrote and I got my birth mother's name. It turns out she is part Filipino, and it was a very odd name, and it took me all of five minutes on Facebook and Google to find her. And I was trying to reach her. She lives in the Philippines. She's 68 years old, and I don't know if she can't see that I'm reaching out to her [00:29:00] because she's 68 and doesn't know the internet well or if she's ignoring me. And I kept trying to reach out to her and, finally, she blocked me on Facebook. It was actually on Mother's Day. Without ever having any contact. That was devastating. That was very hard. I went into a very deep depression over it. But one thing about me is, I still shared about it. I shared about it in recovery rooms. I also shared about it on Facebook and with my broader friends. And my friends wanted to help, but they had no vocabulary for what was going on. And so they would bring these very random things to the table because that was all they knew. They see that their friend is hurting, and so they just want to draw from any knowledge about anything. Like I had a friend whose brother is a cop, and he said, My brother's a cop, so I don't know if you should continue to be reaching out to her. What does that have [00:30:00] to do with this? Or somebody had problems with their real parents growing up, and they formed their own family of friend contacts. And I could see that everybody had meant well, and I'm mature enough to say, All right, they're trying to show me love, they just don't know how. Some of the time the response would be telling me not to feel what I was feeling. Like, Hey, you should just move on. She's not even part of your life. Just acknowledge it and move on. So I came up with the word “adoptsplaining.” That is when a non-adoptee tells you what you're supposed to feel, much like mansplaining. And that would happen. So I think that happens also in the rooms of recovery where you bring up an adoption issue, and then they tell you how you're supposed to feel in a way that doesn't feel good and, as you said, could even be devastating. [00:31:00] And I'd like to think that in our rooms, whenever somebody brings an issue up, there's nods and there's understanding and there's care. There's all sorts of different flavors of adoptee and relinquishee, some that were foster kids, and some transracial. I'm losing track of all the different labels but there's all of that in our rooms. And you can be there for somebody in very profound ways.

To change tack just a little bit, I want to talk about all the different addictions and how that plays out, and how you're also able to find us. As I was saying, the first meeting was specifically AA. It was about alcohol and in some AA meetings, you can't talk about drugs, you can't talk about other addictions. You can only talk about alcohol because only alcoholics can relate to alcoholism. They can't understand any sort of other addiction.[00:32:00] And I get that. Especially when you're first getting sober, you want to know that somebody who was a worse alcoholic or a worse sex addict or a worse gambler, you want to know whatever your thing was, they were able to solve it. So you're like, Oh, then I can solve it, too. But I think for adoptees, we're filling a hole inside of us. And like I was saying, I think that hole is a birthmother-shaped hole. I think that relinquishment leaves this damage, and it could be the primal wound. It could be just that lack, that initial lack in our lives, and we're trying to fill that up so that we don't feel it. We're filling it up with shopping or filling it up with gambling or filling it up with sex or filling it with love or, I don't know. I play Candy Crush all the time. I could be trying to numb my feelings with Candy Crush. Whatever it is, the addiction part of it is very focused in a lot of ways on helping us not feel this pain around adoption. And so I think our room is a little bit of a balance between [00:33:00] those two things. There'll be times when people will share and all they'll talk about will be their recent adoptee/relinquishee reunion, whatever stories. And there'll be times where somebody would talk and not mention adoption for five minutes. They'll just talk about how they just really want to go do this bad behavior right now. And they don't bring up the adoption thing. But both subtexts are ever-present in some way, shape, or form. And for me, I don't care at this point in my sobriety, if you're an addict of some kind, I can relate to you. Even if it's not my addiction, I can still understand that compulsion to feel better: Please find me some dopamine that can cover up these negative feelings. And whatever will supply that dopamine, you can get addicted to.

Haley Radke: What's it meant to you to start this community?

Miguel Caballero: I think I mentioned that, [00:34:00] as a child, what I felt about my being an adoptee was that there's something worthless and unlovable about me. And I still feel that in a lot of ways, and I have a very, very judgmental, punishing mind for myself. I think I have a lot of compassion for other people, but I don't have a lot of compassion for myself. And when my brain is in a particularly bad mood, I can make anything that I do not good enough. Any effort, any call, any task, anything, I'm not doing it good enough, and I should feel awful about myself because of it. And for this meeting, I don't feel that. There are times when I know I let somebody down that's been joining our group. They were expecting something more of me, or they were disappointed I didn't email them or [00:35:00] whatever it is, but I don't kill myself over it. And I know that there's something in this meeting and in our community that is unabashedly good. And my brain, for whatever reason, can't cut me down over anything in regards to the meeting. Like I had mentioned about emailing therapists from Psychology Today, that is so much rejection available. I'd say probably one out of 10 replied. And if I got a one out-of-10 success rate at anything else in my life, I would have stopped by number 11. There's no way that I would keep doing something like that. But for this meeting I'm okay with that. I'm okay with people coming and going or not liking something about what we're doing. I'm okay with it because it's a good thing. It's a good thing that we're doing for each other, and I don't feel worthless and unlovable on Saturday afternoons when we're doing this call. And [00:36:00] I know that it's helping a lot of people, so that feels very good. I don't know, it feels like a building block to help me feel better about myself in this world. And on top of that, just as an individual, it feels great to be in a call and be understood and to provide that understanding that was so freely given to me throughout my eight years of sobriety. People have been there for me, and I feel like I am better at being there for people in this room than I am necessarily in the regular, normal people, 12-step recovery rooms. There's just something that feels right.

Haley Radke: That was beautiful. Thank you. Is there anything that we didn't get to touch on yet that you want to make sure adoptees hear from you before we do our recommended resources? [00:37:00]

Miguel Caballero: Yeah. I want to make it 100% clear that I am not diminishing the power of 12-step groups in those rooms. I think if you're an adoptee and you have an addiction problem, you can get help and stop that behavior, and the best way is through those rooms. And once you stop that behavior, then you can work a bit better on the adoptee issues. And I think that's the way it should go for most people: stop that terrible behavior. If you want to heal, stop cutting yourself. Just stop. Stop with that behavior and then go search for the adoptee piece of it. Stop the addiction first because that's the thing that's going to kill you. If you want to talk about triage, stop the thing that's going to kill you and then move to the next thing. And I think the addiction is the killer. I've lost too many friends and too many people that I know to addiction. So please, get [00:38:00] help if you need it. And if you aren't sure and you need help and you have questions, my email will be on this podcast, and the group's email is in there. And we're here for you; we're here to provide help, and you don't have to do this alone.

Haley Radke: Well, I wanted to recommend your meetings. And I don't have personal experience with it, but I have a trusted friend who, in fact, said, "Haley, you have to interview Miguel,” because she thinks so highly of you. So your website is adopteesandaddiction(dot)com, and your email is adopteesandaddiction(at)gmail(dot)com. So tell me a little bit more. You're a weekly group; you meet every week. What happens? How do people find it? Tell us all the things.

Miguel Caballero: People find us all over the place. In the internet age, there are 70 different ways you can find anything. But generally it's through other adoptee groups that people find us. We [00:39:00] don't publicly post the Zoom info because we don't want the crazy Zoom bombers and all that good stuff to happen.

Haley Radke: That happened to me last year. Oh my gosh, yes.

Miguel Caballero: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Keep it private. Thumbs up to that.

Miguel Caballero: Yes. But if you email us, we'll get you the Zoom info. It's an hour long. If you're used to 12-step meetings–in most 12-step meetings there's a reading from whatever text is important to that group. In our group, we pretty much just launch into: "Hi, everybody is welcome. Now listen to our speaker." And we'll have a speaker for a few minutes tell a little bit of their story, and then we just go around and share for a few minutes each. It is an extremely welcoming group. There are constantly new people, so it's not like we're this tough old clique that's hard to break into. There are always new people. And then we usually stick around after for, it could be 10 minutes or a couple hours, and just talk on a more informal basis. If you're just [00:40:00] figuring things out, that's totally fine. We don't force anybody to say that they're an addict or alcoholic or whatever. If you feel that you have some sort of addiction issue and you are an adoptee, then you're welcome to join our call. We don't have adoptive parents or birth parents so that we can speak a little more freely about being an adoptee. And yeah, once a week. It's a good group. There's smiles, there's laughter, there's probably a few tears.

Haley Radke: So you meet every Saturday, and right now, at the time of this recording, the time is 2:00 Pacific.

Miguel Caballero: Correct.

Haley Radke: And on Zoom. And so you can get the link by emailing adopteesinaddiction(at)gmail(dot)com and I will have links to that in the show notes. And I also just want to say, you mentioned his name earlier, I've had David Bohl on the show before. He also has a meeting that we can send you guys to. We'll have a link to that in the show notes, too. So there are [00:41:00] resources for you if you are struggling with addiction and you're adopted. I'll link to anything that I have for that in show notes. And I'd love to connect you with Miguel. I'm sure he'd be happy to find you resources as well. What did you want to share with us today? What's your recommended resource?

Miguel Caballero: So there's a wonderful YouTube talk by a therapist named Paul Sunderland, and I believe he works at a recovery place in England. I've not talked to him specifically, but he has a 45-minute, YouTube talk about the sources of addiction in adoptees and how both those issues intertwine, and it's a really good introduction. I think if you're still kind of figuring out what your place is in the world with regard to you're an addict and you're not sure about the adoptee part, or you're an adoptee and you're not sure about the addict part, I think you'll find that that talk will help eliminate a few areas in your own psyche and in your own life. [00:42:00]

Haley Radke: Yes. We've talked about that video so many times. I think there's so many things that adoptees identify with when he describes it, and not just addiction issues either. It's very illuminating. And when he talks about developmental PTSD, you're mind-blown. There are so many really good things to take away from that. Good things. Good information. It's not necessarily nice information, but it's good to know. So thank you. Yes, we will link to that in the show notes as well. How can we connect with you online, Miguel?

Miguel Caballero: I'll put my email in the chat. Do we put Facebook profiles? I'll put that too. I don't care.

Haley Radke: Sure. I can share all the places we can find you.

Miguel Caballero: Yeah. I'm not on Clubhouse or Parler or any of those. TikTok. As far as I know, we don't have adoptee TikTok yet. I'm sure there's some. Oh. [00:43:00] Oh, is there?

Haley Radke: Ooh, there is adopteeTikTok, there is.

Miguel Caballero: I'm so sorry, adoptee TikTok. Please don't come at me. Please, I am your friend. Please don't humiliate me with a dance. So, I'll have my email address in there. I'll put my Facebook as well because a lot of people are on that. And yeah, however you reach out, I will try to reach back out to you and we can get in touch and have a conversation, and hopefully we'll both feel better afterwards.

Haley Radke: I just want to extend my gratitude to you for building such an amazing community. And when you were talking about what it's like to be in that room with people that just get it and, I just saw your eyes change. And people don't get the benefit because they're listening, but I'm sure they could hear the passion in your voice for being able to feel seen and [00:44:00] known and have your story validated, so thank you so much for creating that for people. I know, too, what it means to create a community, and it's life-changing for people.

Miguel Caballero: Yes, you do.

Haley Radke: So thank you. I appreciate your service to the community, and thank you for sharing some of your story with us, Miguel. I really appreciate it.

Miguel Caballero: Haley, I'm smiling ear to ear. Thank you so much for bringing me on, and you are doing incredible service for the adoptee world. So here we are.

Haley Radke: Teammates. Thank you.

I really hope that if addiction in any of those areas that Miguel mentioned has touched your life, that you do reach out for support as he encouraged you to do. So as we said, the show notes are going to be available for this episode. If you click on the podcast app you're listening to, you should find the list there or if you go to the [00:45:00] Adoptees On website and you type in “Miguel” or “176” into the search bar, it should come right up for you.

I am so grateful for Miguel and I've had a number of adoptees share their struggles on the show before talking about addiction. Did I mention? I don't know. We'll see if it makes the cut. But anyway, I did a short series on adoptees and addiction a couple of years ago. It's Episodes 91 to 97, so there's more resources in there, as well, that we touch on. So if you scroll way back in your podcast app, you can find those stories.

And I want to say a big thank you to all of my monthly supporters. There have been so many new people joining Patreon. Thank you so much. If you have been wanting to join, just wait. Just wait a little bit. Next month, for the month of April, we're going to have a sale, [00:46:00] and so if you just wait till April, I'll tell you about that next week.

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