187 Dr. Liz DeBetta

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/187

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Haley: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 187, Dr. Liz DeBetta. I'm your host Haley Radkey. We are coming to our summer break. What better note to end on than this encouraging episode with Dr. Liz DeBetta. Liz has been on the podcast before and shared her story of coming to her late thirties before examining the impact adoption had on her life.

Today, though, we are strictly diving into one of her areas of expertise, which is using writing as a tool for healing. Writing is accessible. It has physical, emotional, and mental health benefits. Writing can help us create a new narrative for ourselves. Liz recently led a group of adoptees through a transformative writing group, and she shares with us some tools we can use to start our own writing practice.

We wrap up with some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, www.adopteeson.com. Let's listen in. I am so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On Dr. Liz DeBetta. Welcome Liz.

Liz DeBetta: Hi Haley. So good to be here.

Haley: I'm so excited to talk to you. The last time we talked was episode 118, so you can scroll back. You were still working on your dissertation, so I was so, like, pumped when you put “Dr.” on your paperwork because you're done. Woo!

Liz DeBetta: Yes, it's true. I got done in, you know, in the midst of the pandemic.

Haley: So you're still planning the party then?

Liz DeBetta: Yeah, we had a Zoom party with a bottle of champagne and some takeout sushi and a few friends on Zoom and that was pretty much it. So yeah, there hasn't been a big in-person celebration yet, but a good excuse to have one.

Haley: That's right. Absolutely. I'm going to point people back to that episode to hear some of your story and the background on how you got to doing some of the things we're going to be talking about today. But I would love it if you just give us a little intro into who you are, and how you got to the point where we are now for adoptees to be writing as a method of healing.

Liz DeBetta: I have been writing since about the age of 14. I had a really smart, insightful teacher and coach who knew that I was going through some stuff. I can't, I don't recall if at the time he knew that I was adopted.

I'm pretty sure that he did. But either way, he knew that I was dealing with some really big feelings, and so he suggested I start writing poetry, which at 14 years old, I really thought was the dumbest thing in the world. Because poetry, like, who writes poetry? Come on. And then one day, we were sitting in his office and he read me this poem that he had written for his college girlfriend and the poem was called “Blue Fire.”

I'll never forget it. It was a poem that he wrote while he was on a date with his girlfriend. He had taken her to see the ballet, which was her favorite thing. And he spent more time watching her watch the ballet than watching the ballet himself. And he wrote this poem about it. And I was profoundly moved by this experience of this man sharing this poem with me.

And then from that moment I was like, oh, maybe this isn't so dumb. So I got a little colorful journal notebook and I started writing. And at the time I didn't know why I felt the way I felt. I didn't know why. I was depressed, I was sad, I was angry, I was confused, I was scared.

All these things. And I just wrote, and it was for me. I never shared any of that with anyone. And so I did that for a lot of the years. Any time the world got too much for me, or my own feelings got too much for me, I would just go to my notebooks and I would write. And stuff just sort of came out.

It wasn't anything that I was ever really super conscious of. Yeah, I mean, it is a conscious process, but I also feel like there's something really unconscious about a lot of the writing that I was doing, especially early on. And I have a theory about that, which I'm still playing with just from an academic, theoretical, scholarly standpoint.

But anyway, I did all this writing and, in retrospect, it really helped keep me balanced. It helped me organize the really intense feelings that I had. And gave them some place to live other than inside me.

And so, fast forward, all of these years later, when I got into my PhD program, I didn't really know where that journey was going to take me, but I did know that I was really interested in continuing to pursue creative writing as one part of it.

And one of the courses that I got to take in my program was Poetry for Healing. And it's a whole field. There's a whole field of poetry and writing for healing that I didn't even know was a thing. And I was like, this is the thing I've been doing my whole life. I've been using poems to help myself manage the difficult stuff.

And so then, when I learned about all of that and I learned that there are actually physical and emotional and mental health benefits to writing through grief, writing through pain, writing through trauma. Writing about it and making sense of it. I was like, oh, this is so exciting. And again this is the thing I've been doing.

And so then, as I moved toward thinking about my dissertation, which was a creative dissertation, I decided that I wanted to do an exploration of some of my early writing. And as I looked back through some of my first poems,

Haley: Because you kept all your journals and things, right?

Liz DeBetta: Yes, of course I did. And I will tell you something. Not one of them is finished. They are all from different parts of my life and I have never completely filled one of them. And I think there's something really telling about that, because I think we're always on a journey and we're always unfinished, right? So it's a metaphor for that, I think, in those notebooks.

But yeah, so I started going through these early poems and I could very clearly see all of my pain and my grief and my trauma and my loss and my confusion. It was all there, right? I started looking at the language and the images that I was constantly using and the mood. And the tone of so many of those poems was really dark and just a lot like a feeling of being lost and having all these questions.

So there was an implication of all these questions, but never finding any answers. So it was really interesting to start to look at that and then to look at how to take those early poems and create a new narrative. So a big part of my dissertation project was a one-woman show where I incorporated some of my early poems and then some newer poems where I was rewriting parts of my story that were still unknown to me.

So like questions about the circumstances of my birth, for example. I didn't have any answers about that. I didn't have any information about that, right? So many of us don’t. And so some of the more recent poems were about just me reimagining what the night I was born was like.

And so I created this whole narrative that was punctuated by all of these poems to tell a story about what it's like to live with the trauma of being adopted in a patriarchal society that's disadvantageous to women and children, right? That says that two parents are better than one, and that a young single woman is irresponsible and shouldn't be able to keep her baby, right? And of course, lots of these things are generational, but they're still happening. So it was really important to use art and the creative process to tell a story publicly that people need to hear. So I guess that's it in a large nutshell.

Haley: I've heard you speak about writing as a public testimony and it's interesting that your project was this one-woman show where it's literally giving a public testimony. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I don't think, of course, not all of our writing will be performed and you are an actor. You have got a theater background as well. So there's that piece for you.

Liz DeBetta: So in some of the research about creativity, using creativity to heal trauma, Dr. Sophia Richmond writes about creative transformations of trauma, and one of the things that comes up in her work is this idea that the art, whatever it is, whether it's a poem or a piece of personal narrative writing or a painting or a drawing or a piece of music that is composed. Whatever form the art takes becomes a container for the artist to put the trauma into and to reshape it and to fashion it into something.

And then that's one part of the way that we start to heal, when we can put our feelings into something outside of ourselves. So the poem, the one-woman show, the whatever. And then the other piece of healing, at least according to her, is having that art witnessed and sharing it publicly.

And that also comes up a lot, there's a lot of connections to that in lots of the other research. It is this idea of not only writing or creating, but then giving it to someone else and saying, here, witness this. Because I'm heard and I'm seen, and also the act of public performance is, I don't want to get too theoretical, but it is another way of creating empathy, right?

Because when you are a performer or a speaker, when your body is in physical space with an audience, the audience members are part of that experience with you for the time that it's happening, and they can't turn away, right? Like they've chosen to be there. They've chosen to sit there in this live experience, to take in what is happening, right?

And to engage with my body as it tells the story. And what happens is then that space, that theatrical space becomes a container for empathy and for critical thinking. And so part of the process for me then was also a couple of audience talkbacks where people got to ask questions.

Not only about the writing and the performance process, but like my own experience, and why I chose to tell this story. And what it ended up doing for a lot of people was shifting their perspectives and having many people say, I had no idea. I never thought about adoption this way.

I had one woman who grew up with adopted siblings and she said, I have this much better understanding now of what was going on, like why my family dynamic was the way that it was. It's probably because my siblings were going through some of the things you described in this performance and none of us knew.

Haley: How does that feel for you personally to know that you got to shift someone's narrative.

Liz DeBetta: That's exactly why I do this work. That's the thing that became really important to me. The more that I worked on my PhD and my dissertation study was like, okay, I can take all of these parts of myself, right?

I can take my background as a theater artist and my background as a writer and a teacher, and a thinker, and I can smash them together in a really unique way to do something positive in the culture of adoption. Because the more that I studied all of the literature, the scholarly literature, I was like, nobody's telling these stories.

And we know in the adoptee community, we know how often we're silenced. We know how often, “but what about…”; and people speaking for us and about us. And so it was part of my own healing process to do this important work, but also I look at it as an act of cultural mediation and cultural healing, right?

If we don't start to tell these stories and make people listen, then nothing's going to change. So it's really affirming to have people, multiple people, after they've watched my show say, Wow, I have totally changed my perspective. So that's why this work is so important, and that's why every opportunity that we have to get adoptees’ voices centered and telling our stories, we should. Because I think the time is well past when we should be paying attention. It's 2021 and, like, we gotta get comfortable talking about trauma. Like we can't. Sorry, but sorry, not sorry.

Haley: It's time.

Liz DeBetta: Yep. Yeah,

Haley: I have this Adoptees On Healing Series where I'm always talking with therapists about various things related to trauma and healing and things.

And, you've used the word healing and I'm curious what that means for you. What things have shifted for you or changed for you as you've written poetry and literally studied this and performed and all of those things. Do you feel like healing happening? What is “healing,” what does that mean for you?

Liz DeBetta: I think, healing, one of the things that I wrote and I say in the show is that healing is not a linear process. For me it's been concentric and twisting and turning in on itself. And because it's a journey, right? And it takes different paths at different times.

But for me, what I've come to realize, especially over the last couple of years, is that healing is about finding wholeness. About finding ways to feel whole and to feel real and to feel grounded. To not feel like I'm gonna fly off in a million parts, which is another thing that I wrote. This constant feeling of I'm gonna fly away into a million parts. If I don't keep control, right?

And yeah, a lot of the healing comes through owning these parts of my story and really sitting with the feelings, I, and I think a lot of adoptees, can relate to dissociating and not feeling, and not wanting to feel, and being afraid to feel or being taught our feelings aren't valid. And so we just shove them down and pretend everything's okay, and then we don't know. We don't know what's okay and not okay. It just becomes a mess. And I have that experience of really not feeling and sort of existing in a numb but overactive space for a long time.

In terms of my experience of my body. So a big part of healing, too, for me has come in having a new experience of my body. And learning to stay in my body, to be present, to feel safe, to not want to escape all the time. And that was a big part of why the performance aspect of my dissertation project was important because the performing and the living through the words that I had written and through the story I was telling and really experiencing all that in my body through the rehearsal process and through the performance process helped start to move trauma too.

I started to feel different, like I would finish rehearsals and things would hurt. And yes, it was a very physically active show. I did a lot of movement and breath work and stuff, but, like, things hurt. My hips hurt. And that's a place where we know that trauma gets stored. And I started to notice the places, the sort of what I call holding patterns, right? Like my default holding patterns where I was like, oh, I have held my hips and my gut and this whole center of my body really tightly for my whole life.

And now I can start to release that. I can let it go. So it's also feeling those physical changes that tells me that I'm healing. And then I guess another big thing that's happened is I've been doing EMDR, too, for the last couple of years, so that's been a really good companion to all of this other work.

But the way that I don't have my recurring nightmares anymore, and I know that a lot of adopted people have these sort of very similar recurring nightmares around searching for something that we never find. And that's certainly been my big recurring dream of looking for someone or something and spending the whole dream panicking and not being able to find whatever it is or whoever it is I'm looking for.

Or starting out the dream with my partner and then getting separated and then never being able to find him again. And now when I have this dream, it resolves itself and by the end of the dream, we're back together. And to me that's huge.

Haley: That is huge. Wow. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing all those things.

I am doing EMDR again, like I'm really in depth right now, but I feel often scared of writing. Even privately because I am worried about the things that are gonna come out, it's like admitting things to yourself. But that’s just my personal note. I know that you ran a group for seven weeks with other adult adoptees and were leading them through all of these different writing prompts and different exercises, and I would love it if you would talk a little bit about that because I think it's such an amazing thing to talk about, writing on your own. But then you've brought in this other aspect of writing in community and what that could do for people.

Liz DeBetta: Yes, I think it's really important for people to write and writing is scary, right? You're not the first person. You know, yes. You have to confront things, right? But it's also a way of getting it out. And so for the group that I just worked with for seven weeks, I was really interested in creating a space, an adoptee-only space, and creating an opportunity, as you say, to write in community. And what we, I called the group migrating toward wholeness.

Because, like I said, that's healing. I think, for me as an adoptee and for a lot of other adoptees, especially as adults, is to try to move toward a sense of wholeness. And so the group was comprised of 11 other adoptees. Aged from their mid-twenties up through their sixties. So we had multiple generations represented.

I specifically chose domestic closed adoption adoptees for this first group because I was interested in seeing what the commonalities in our experiences might be despite the age differences. Just from a researcher’s standpoint.

Haley: And that's your personal experience as well.

Liz DeBetta: Yeah, exactly, that's my personal experience. And I am a creative person and a facilitator, a sort of guide. And this aspect of social justice, like this is real social justice work when we can create spaces for adoptees to come together and find ways to tell their stories and to heal in community.

Whether the writing that gets done gets shared publicly or not is a side bonus. But there was the act of writing and sharing in the small group, because we were witnessing one another for those seven weeks. We got together every Saturday for seven weeks for two hours. The first week, people just shared their stories and we just listened to each other.

And from that first session everything was really emergent. I didn't really pre-plan a lot because I wanted to work with who was in the room with me. Who was there and what was I hearing and what did I think people needed to start to think about and write about.

And so the prompts came out of things that people were saying, the questions that I posed to them. Each week we had two sets of questions. There was a set of writing questions and then a set of writing prompts. So those were just some direct quotes followed by ellipses that they could just finish the sentence and keep going.

Or, several questions that came up related to things people said, related to the experiences that were shared. And then I also offered them each week four questions for reflection, because one of the important things to do is not only to write about the experiences and start to discover what you need to say, but also to reflect on it. Like what's happening as I write, as I'm working through this process, like, what's going on in my body, right?

Am I sleeping better? Does my breathing shift? Things like that. And also there were some things that were really hard for people to write about. Because for some people this was the first time they were giving themselves permission to write about being adopted and their feelings and, like, go there, right?

So to your point, Haley, like some of them were like, I saw this and I was like, this is scary, but I'm gonna do it. They jumped in and what happened was incredible. It was an incredible process and we wished it didn't have to end. We ended up adding an additional session because by the time we got to six weeks, we were like, okay, we need more time.

We need a little bit more time together. And for some people, this was the beginning of creating space to feel what they need to feel. What they've been told has not been okay to feel. And many of us know that something really special happens when adoptees come together in adoptee-only spaces. It's automatically a safe space.

So, I think I talked a little bit about this in the presentation that we did after the seven weeks with the group, but it is this idea of reflective resonance, which we as adoptees do automatically. When we listen to one another's stories we're not listening to respond.

We're listening to hear. And to be supportive and to be empathetic and say, yeah. What I'm hearing you say is, this is really hard for you. Or, this has been a really challenging way to go through life. What happens, usually, because we're socially conditioned to listen, to respond, which is not reflective resonance.

And so this happened so much as adoptees, when we try to speak in other spaces that are not exclusively adoptees, we get spoken to, we get spoken over. People are not listening to us and reflectively resonating with us. They're not going, “Oh wow, that sounds so hard.” They're going, “Oh, but not all adoptees.”

Or, “but what about the adoptive parents?” And this is something that comes up a lot, like in conversations I have with my own parents, which is incredibly frustrating at times. But I give my parents a lot of credit because they've also been on this journey with me for the last couple of years, and they're trying. They're really listening and they want to know, and they want to understand, and they feel bad that they didn't know 40 plus years ago what they know now.

And I know that it's incredibly difficult for them to listen and to hear. Anyway, back to my point about this idea of reflective resonance. I think we do this instinctively as adoptees where we just listen. We're here and we can be mirrors for one another.

And so I think a lot of this work, part of the healing comes in the more that we can create adoptee-centric spaces, I hope that there will be a shift in this to more widespread reflective resonance where people can start to receive the stories. But the first step is creating spaces where we feel safe together, and that creates that community of braveness.

Right? And the ability to explore the feelings. Knowing I'm sitting here with 11 other adult adoptees whose experiences very closely mirror my own, despite the fact that we're in different parts of the United States, grew up in very different circumstances, in different decades. But here we are saying so many of the same things.

That gives me permission, or anyone who participated in the group, the permission to really go there and to have the opportunity to not be afraid to dive in. And that's really powerful.

Haley: I was just asked about this and the person challenged me, or adoptees, asking what is this adoptee activism thing? Are we just in an echo chamber? And my response was I feel like we're practicing on each other and building up the muscles. And I love that you said bravery because it takes courage to share our story wholly. That is against the traditional narrative. Knowing that the responses we've gotten in the past may continue, the “but what about” and “I don't believe you” and all those kinds of things.

So building the muscles in order to share outside starts out with having the safe space. I love this reflective resonance, I love that term. It's so perfect. And could you speak a little more on having an intergenerational group? Because when we share stories on this show and there are younger adoptees or older adoptees and some of them will say I was in the Baby Scoop. Or you identify yourself by that sort of generation. But what was it like to have people from different decades participating and speaking to each other in that way?

Liz DeBetta: I think it was really important. I think what it did was it showed us that we are not the problem. Right? It showed us that we are not the problem. That the culture of adoption and the system of adoption as it has existed since the mid-1940s is the problem. Because we had adoptees who were in their mid-twenties who were still products of closed adoption.

And adoptees in their sixties who were definitely part of the Baby Scoop who had been really effectively silenced by their generational guilt and the shame. But all of us talked about this guilt and this shame and this needing to fit into a mold. And someone else's idea of who we should be, right?

There was so much crossover in what people said and shared and parts of stories and just the internal experiences. I guess that’s really what I'm talking about is having this multi-generational group of adoptees talking about internal experiences that were very similar.

Haley: And you had only closed domestic adoptions represented in your group. And even when I think of some of the younger adoptees that I've spoken to who were products of an open adoption, that thread continues. So I love that you said that. It's not us. It's not me, it's you, system.

Liz DeBetta: Yeah, exactly.

Haley: Yeah.

Liz DeBetta: And I think it was really empowering and affirming for us to come together and for the younger adoptees to connect with the older adoptees. And again, I think the most profound thing was that for several of the group members, this was the first time they were doing this kind of thing.

And so there was a tremendous amount of trust that they placed in me and in each other that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't adoptees only. And hearing each other share different parts of their stories or pieces of the writing that they were doing from week to week gave other people permission to keep writing and to keep sharing.

Haley: So we've both talked about doing EMDR and various therapy at other points in our lives. And you mentioned your social justice activism, and I'm curious if you have thoughts on the accessibility of writing. And if you think it's accessible and if that makes it just another reason why it's such an important tool. Because of course we can, I've said this on the show before: therapy is inaccessible to a lot of people. It's just very expensive and it's inaccessible sometimes. So can you talk about writing and what your thoughts are on that piece?

Liz DeBetta: Yeah, I love that. And it's so (beep) that therapy is inaccessible for so many people. When so many of us need it, not just adoptees, but so many people in the world. It's a part of our physical health, right? Taking care of our mental health. So we need to do better about that.

But yeah, I do think that writing is accessible to anyone regardless of circumstance or situation or ability because you can get a notebook and a pen or if you have a computer, you can open a Word doc or a Google Doc and type if that's accessible.

If you have some physical limitations, you can speak to text, right? Like you can speak and the technology will type for you. And so I think that recognizing that writing can also be a very private act, right? It doesn't have to be something that you choose to share, but it can be something that you do for yourself because it is therapeutic. Because it helps you give shape to things that feel chaotic. That's in some of the literature about why writing is a therapeutic thing. It’s that when we create a narrative for ourselves, we're giving order to something that formerly felt chaotic.

When we use something specific like poetry, we're getting right to the heart of the emotions, right? We're taking out all the unnecessary language and we're using images to connect to the really deep, intense emotions. That can then help us make sense of them.

An image that I work with a lot has to do with ghosts and tombs and bones and things, and I think that it's really important to not just write the things but then go back and like what? Why did I write this, right? What are the ghosts? And for me, like I know the ghosts come up because we know there are ghosts in the adopted family, right?

Most people hopefully know about Betty Jean Lifton and her work specifically on ghosts in the adopted family. But that actually came up in the group. One of the group members was like, I just learned about this and I was like, yeah, here's the article. But it's true.

We live with these ghosts and so I, as a writer, have to pay attention to what's coming up and what that tells me about my internal experiences and things that maybe I still need to process. But the writing is a process and an act of processing too.

Haley: You've taught us a lot during this whole conversation, but I just want to double down on it, and I think you'll talk to this when we're doing our recommended resources as well, right away, but it's a process. It can be a tool for healing. There's research and it's proven. And even as you were listing off the things that “healing” meant to you and the impact doing this work has had on you, you were mentioning physical, emotional, and mental things that have come about. So it's not “Oh, I'm just gonna scribble in my notebook.” There's meaning behind it and there's things that come out that are really beneficial.

Liz DeBetta: Yeah, I think one of the important things about using writing as a tool for healing is that we're not just word vomit.

We're not just writing that all these terrible things happened. We're describing them, right? Specifically, we're using really deep, detailed descriptions of experiences, and that can come out in, like I said, in the images, in the details that you used to talk about who was there, when was it, what did it feel like?

But then we're also thinking about not only what happened, but how did it make me feel? How did it make me feel then, and how do I feel about it now? And so always like having that sort of conscious process of checking in with ourselves and saying, okay, I am writing, and I need to write about this.

And often that's what happens, right? Is like the feeling, or at least for me anyway, the feeling gets too much and I have to do something with it. I can't keep holding it inside me or it's going to eat me up. I don't want to hold that. I don't want to sit there for a week feeling (beep) inside.

I want to do something. And it comes out as a poem usually. I did this yesterday. I was having a really complicated set of emotions surrounding Memorial Day. My brother, who's also adopted, is a vet. Severe, complex trauma from both being adopted and his time on active duty.

And there's a lot of really complicated stuff going on with him and my family. And we watched Da 5 Bloods on the night before. And that story is about a group of Vietnam vets and one of them said things that were so close to some things that my brother has said, and it hit me really hard.

And I woke up yesterday and I was feeling all of this stuff and I was like, I gotta do something with it. So I wrote a poem to help move some of that stuff, and so that's an active agency too, right? That I can do. That I have control over the things that are going on. I can choose to do something about it.

So I chose to sit down and feel what I was feeling and write it. And that's another reason why writing is both powerful and accessible for everyone. Louise DeSalvo in her book Writing as a Way of Healing says that writing is an act of freedom we often felt we didn't have. She also says that through writing we change our relationship to trauma because we gain confidence in ourselves and our ability to handle life's difficulties.

Through writing and changing our relationship to trauma, we come to a feeling that our lives are more coherent rather than chaotic and that we can solve problems. And she says also that because our writing, our work of art, is a concrete object, it becomes a memorial and a testimony to the resolution of the mourning process.

And so that sort of connects back to what we were talking about earlier with the container, right? Like the poem is the container. And so I'm going through a mourning process of not having a relationship with my brother anymore because he's really damaged and it's really sad.

And he's really angry. And so that poem became the concrete object where I could memorialize and create a testimony to my own grief and that sense of loss around that relationship, but also where it's coming from.

Haley: Thank you for sharing those things. So powerful. Before we do our recommended resources, I'm wondering if you would give the folks listening, a writing prompt or two if they're new to this, if it feels scary to me. One or two things that we could start doing. What's beginner level?

Liz DeBetta: The thing that's popping up right now is two things. I often like to find inspiration in other things. So sometimes like a word or a phrase or part of a sentence from something else that I've read will inspire me, and I'll start with that. So if you have a particular line or quote that speaks to you for some reason, that could be a good way in. Another thing I like are letters. You can write letters to yourself, and this was actually one of the really hard activities. So maybe this is not great, but I'm gonna suggest it anyway.

Like we can write a letter to our younger self. For some of us as adopted people, that's really hard because we still haven't really fully embraced that little person. But it can be really helpful to do that as an exercise, over a week or two weeks or a month. Take 10 minutes every day and engage with that part of yourself and say the things that you needed to hear. Things that maybe never were told to you that you, as your adult self in your full power now, have the ability to say, “Hey, I see you, I'm sitting with you and we're okay.” Or just letters to people that you need to say things to. And you don't ever have to send them. And if it's hard to write in the first person, shift that and write in the third person.

Because then it puts you outside. When you shift.

Haley: You're the observer.

Liz DeBetta: You become the observer instead of in the story, right? And then as it gets easier, then you can shift back. And you can rewrite it in that first person narrative when it feels more comfortable and when it feels less intense.

Haley: I love it. All right, so we got the beginner level and intermediate level.

Liz DeBetta: There you go.

Haley: Oh, that's so good. Okay, what do you want to recommend to us today?

Liz DeBetta: Okay, so there's so many really good books, but what I chose today to share with everyone is a book called Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo, who's a writing teacher.

And the book is based on 20 years of research that she accumulated in teaching writing and also connected to some of the stuff I talked about earlier. She pulls in a lot of the research, but also her own experience. And what I like about the book is that it's both about the way that writing can help us and it's backed up by the research.

But also she makes sure to continually discuss the idea that we need to have balance when we write. If we're just writing about negative experiences, that's not going to be good for us, right? We need to write both about the negative and the positive and create what she calls balanced narratives.

Each chapter is followed by some writing activities and exercises, so for people that want to start writing and aren't sure how to do it, this is a really nice kind of overview of all the things that we've talked about today, like this idea of using writing for healing and how we do it and why we do it.

Haley: I like that. I like that balanced approach. Because I could see how, if you're just constantly writing all the horrible things, that's what gets stuck, right? You're not shifting anything.

Liz DeBetta: Exactly. Yeah. And that can actually create negative health outcomes. But it's because you get stuck in a negative feedback loop when you’re just focusing on the bad. But actually there's good too, right? There's always good.

Haley: Yes. Thank you. That's great. Fabulous recommendation. You mentioned earlier that you had presented on your seven week group and the outcomes, and I think I've mentioned before on the show this year that the Rudd Adoption Conference was virtual, and so their focus was adopted adults. Connections across generations. And so your presentation was the last one to wrap up this year for 2021. And so I'll make sure to link to that. So you talk more about the group and what's really special, and Rudd actually linked both videos you have. There's two participant videos.

There's a shorter one and a longer one where people in your group are reading some of the work they did with you and some of the writing. It's very powerful. And then they're also a part of your presentation and talking about some of the things you shared today about the impacts and I was there live, on Zoom. I think I was making dinner, but I was listening and it was just wonderful and accessible and really interesting.

And I highly recommend you go and check that out. And the other presentations that Rudd offered are also on their YouTube channel, so I'll link to those things. Then the other thing that you and I have in common, is we're both Adoptees Connect facilitators. And now that, I was just gonna say, now that Covid is wrapping up, I don't know, it's not really everywhere, but a lot of the Adoptees Connect groups are meeting in person again, we're still doing online here in Alberta because, yeah, that's just how it is.

But the founder of Adoptees Connect, Pamela Karanova just announced that they are now planting more groups. So if connecting with other adult adoptees has felt important to you, and if anything, what Liz was sharing about the power of community today felt important to you.

I would encourage you to go to the Adoptees Connect website and see if there's a group near you that you can join. And if not, you're the person. Tag you're it. You can start it. You don't have to be a therapist. You don't have to have any credentials. You have to be an adult adoptee who's willing to connect with other adult adoptees.

And that's been one of great gifts in serving the community and I've felt very blessed by doing it. Meeting new members and we have new people coming all the time to our group. We're still really small, but it's really cool to connect with other adult adoptees, especially people that haven't been in the community before and have no idea about the impact adoption has had on them.

And they're reaching out for resources and you could be the person that starts a group in your area. So I'd recommend you go and check out Adoptees Connect. Do you have any thoughts on Adoptees Connect, Liz?

Liz DeBetta: Yeah, I think that, again, we talk about the importance of adoptee-only spaces and adoptee-centric spaces and Adoptees Connect is one of the really important opportunities that we have to come together in community. It's about building a community where we can just come together and share ourselves and our stories in a non-judgmental, social way.

And we, my group in Salt Lake City, just got together a couple weekends ago for the first time in person after hosting on Zoom off and on throughout the pandemic. And we had two new members. It's been a slow grow for us here over the last couple of years, but people are finding each other and people are coming. I think the more opportunities we have to create community together, I think it's another tool for healing.

And why it's been important for me is that I can bring more people together.

Haley: Absolutely, yes. Thank you. So speaking of that, where can we connect with you online and where can we sign up if we're interested in doing this writing experience with you?

Liz DeBetta: Yeah, so I have a waiting list is the best way to put it. So lots of folks are interested and in order to keep myself sane and organized I will send you the link to the original Google form that folks can add their info to. They'll just have to skip through the part that says, are you available for all sessions? And just say no. Because it's from the Rudd, the original Rudd writing group that is already over. But for everyone that is including their information on that Google form, I will have your contact info and then as things develop, I will be able to keep in touch and let you know what's coming next. Things are still a work-in-progress, but I hope to do much more of this, as much as I can.

Haley: Love it. Wonderful. And what's your website? And I'll make sure to link to that form and your other contact info in the show notes. But where can we find you?

Liz DeBetta: So my website is currently not live. It's a work-in-progress, but it is my name: LizDeBetta.com. So easy. In the interim folks can look for me on Facebook.

Haley: Sounds good.

Liz DeBetta: And if it's okay, I would love to leave you all with a poem.

Haley: Yes. I can't wait.

Liz DeBetta: I also think about poems as gifts. And so this is for you and for all of us who might need to hear this right now.

“I am here, finally, fully, frightfully aware of me, myself, and I. I who has been afraid to be here, afraid to be me, afraid to present myself, my flaws and my imperfectly perfect self. I am here now knowing nothing is impossible because I am possible. I am me moving through grief, moving through pain, moving through fear to find peace in myself, with you, and in my circumstances. I am here unapologetically. For the first time the fog has lifted. I am free. Free from shame, free from guilt, free from my own self-doubt. I am free to be me, myself, and I.”

Haley: Thank you for that wonderful gift.

Liz DeBetta: You're welcome.

Haley: Oh my goodness, I cannot believe this is the last episode until the fall. It's our summer break and normally I would go to the end of June, but just because of COVID and having the kids at home, I know I've told you about this in the last couple episodes. This is just how it worked out. So I am taking the break.

I'll be ready and refreshed to come to you with new episodes in September. And there's a huge back catalog, so I am sure you couldn’t have possibly listened to all 187 episodes, have you? Scroll back if there are things you haven't checked out yet. There's so many good episodes. I'm sure you can find a gem or two to listen to during the break.

And there's still going to be new episodes for my monthly Patreon supporters. So if you go to AdopteesOn.com/partner. You can find out details of how to join us there. We are still hosting our monthly book club. This month we are talking about The Guild of the Infant Savior with Megan Culhane Galbraith, which is a fabulous book. So excited to be reading that with her this month.

We have Barbara Sumner in July. We are going to have a round table in August. So many good things coming up, even during the summer break. So if you can't get enough and going through the back catalog is not gonna do it for you, come join us on AdopteesOn.com/partner for the Patreon bonuses.

There's a weekly podcast there called Adoptees Off Script, and they're all ready to go for you. There's over a hundred episodes there. So if you really want to go back and binge listen, there is more. I am so grateful for each one of you for listening. I am truly honored that I get to do this for you, to be in your earbuds and on your hikes and walks and commutes and when you're doing the dishes.

Thank you for allowing me into your ears and I know it's so annoying that I say thank you a lot. I'm sorry. It's a Canadian thing. It's an adoptee thing. It's a people-pleasing thing. It's just my quirk, I guess. Anyway, thank you so much for listening and I look forward to talking to you again very soon.

In September, we'll be back with brand new episodes of Adoptees On so make sure you're subscribed or following wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's talk again soon.

182 Gregory Luce

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/182

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Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 182 Gregory Luce. I'm your host, Haley Radke. I am so excited to introduce you to Gregory Luce today, the attorney behind adoptee rights law. We get to hear some of Greg's personal story today, including the five-year court battle it took for him to receive his records.

We talk about some of the typical arguments adoptee activists hear from legislators against original birth certificate access and what impact DNA testing access has had on OBC legislation. Greg also challenges us to make sure we're listening to all adoptee voices.

Greg is a lawyer, but he's not giving us legal advice during this episode. 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: Gregory Luce. Welcome, Gregory.

Gregory Luce: Hi, Haley. It’s good to be here.

Haley Radke: Okay, first of all, I'm so thrilled to talk with you, because I've followed you for years on Twitter, have learned so much from you, but I'm really excited to get to hear some of your personal story. So, would you mind sharing some of that with us today?

Gregory Luce: I am a D.C. born and adopted person. I was born in 1965 in the District of Columbia and seven days later, I ended up in Silver Spring, Maryland with my adoptive parents and I have an adoptive brother as well. My story’s probably pretty typical for most domestic adoptees, maybe most white domestic adoptees, but I grew up always knowing I was adopted.

I did wonder quite a bit as I got into my adolescence and then wondered quite a bit more, and sort of had a breakdown when (as I think a lot of adoptees do) when they are about to become parents or have just become parents. And that was my sort of breaking point in trying to figure out who I am, where I came from, and to get information about that.

And that was in–let’s see, it goes way back to 1999/2000, as I didn't really know anything about getting records. In fact, I think back in 2000, I was surprised to learn that I have two birth certificates. I didn't know that there was an original, and once I found out there was an original, I was going, “Whoa, they’re hiding that from me. It's in a court somewhere and I can get it.”

So I researched it a little bit. And I'm an attorney, and I was an attorney at that point, too. So I knew what I was doing for the courts in the District of Columbia. It just said, “Fill out this form, submit $80.00 and you'll be heard by the court.” And so I did that and I got an order back saying, “Yes, we are unsealing your records.”

And so I'm like, “Woo hoo, that was easy.” It didn't mean what it said it meant, though. It meant that they were going to unseal my file and then kick it over to the adoption agency. And then I got a letter shortly after from the adoption agency saying, “Well, if you pay us $500, we'll search for your parents and see if we can get your parents’ consent.”

And I was not interested in that. I wasn't prepared for a reunion. I wasn't prepared to meet my parents. So I said, “No, thanks.” So then, shortly after that, maybe six months? I had forgotten that I'd done one of these (they used to be private) these private registries. I think they still exist.

This private registry was related to the D.C. area. So Maryland, Virginia, D.C., maybe parts of West Virginia. And, lo and behold, there's a match. And in the fall of 2000, I met my birth mother through that. And we met towards the end of 2000, and then I think, if I’m still remembering correctly, she died 169 days later.

So, we did get to know each other. It was a wonderful reunion. She had been battling cancer for quite some time. And it’s my belief she held on for this amount of time to know that I was still alive and doing well. I ended up inheriting all of her records. I was an only child. She later married my birth father and they later got divorced as well, but I had thousands of documents from her.

And so I rebuilt her life and rebuilt her life, so I would understand it. I became essentially her biographer, or her historian. Then, about in 2015…and these things always take so much time. You sit on it, you think through it, you're not quite sure what you want to do. Life gets in the way. But in 2015, I said, “You know, I'm going to give it another chance and this time I'm going to go whole hog and I'm going to throw the book at the court to try to get my records.” And so I wrote a 35-page petition and memorandum and filed it with the court.

It took five years and two denials from the court, as well as the Court of Appeals case in D.C. when they finally said, “Yes, you can have your original birth record and your father's name will be unredacted.” Because their final decision at the trial court was, “Yes, you can have your records. We need to figure out the privacy interests of your deceased mother and even though you know the name of your father, we're not going to give you his name. We're going to redact that.” And I got a redacted original birth record. That was what I appealed and won on that part. It's changed D.C. law a little bit in that respect.

It means that consent of the birth parents is not the linchpin there. It has to take into account the paramount interest of the adopted person, but they do still attempt to contact the birth parents in D.C. to determine if they would release or what their preference is for releasing records.

I'm in a long snail mail relationship with my birth father. We write letters, plunk them in the mail, and open them, and read them, and reply maybe a few months later. So, that is ongoing and very slow, and I think eventually we'll meet at some point. But through all that, I mean, after coming away from 2015…for the two years it took me just to navigate the courts in D.C., I said, “You know, this is nuts. This is crazy. I'm a lawyer and it takes me this much effort to challenge the court and to try to get my records. What's it like in the rest of the states?” And that's when I began my sort of a new turn of my legal career and I became (what I call myself) an adoptee rights lawyer. I think I'm the only one in the country, because there's not many attorneys that do this full time. And I began the Adoptee Rights Law Center as a law firm that represents adult adopted people.

That grew into not only birth records and identity documents, but also representing inter-country adoptees who either are having trouble proving citizenship or need to secure citizenship because they did not get it done when they were young. So, that's where I am today. It's been a crazy four years now? So when you say we haven't spoken for years, I still think I started this last month. It just feels that way to me, but it's been four years of doing this and there's so much that has happened in those four years. So I'm glad it feels new to me still.

Haley Radke: What kind of law did you practice before starting this?

Gregory Luce: All kinds! I clerked for a judge for a couple of years. I did employment law for a few years. I was a technology person at the State Bar Association. I ran a nonprofit that organized low-income and tenants in their buildings to fix their buildings up.

I don't stay in positions very long. I just hop around because I get bored, but this is the one that's kept me (I think the longest of any), is this work here. Because it's so meaningful and so personal and it's actually really, really gratifying. So yeah, I did it all. I did litigation, family law, you name it. The only thing I haven't done–I have not done criminal law. Although, I think I did get thrown into court one time for a client and had no idea what I was doing.

Haley Radke: I remember when you started your Twitter account and just thinking, “Oh, this is really cool. This is fascinating to me.” I'm Canadian, so, but of course, most of my guests are American, and so I follow very closely what's happening down there in terms of legislation and things. So, it's amazing to me. You kind of glossed over this, but you changed D.C. law. That's amazing to have the interest of the adoptee as paramount. I mean, that's a big deal.

Gregory Luce: It is. It's not unrestricted right (which you get through legislation), which is the next step, but that's why I got into this. It was to figure out a way to change the law and figure out a way to make it so you do have an unrestricted right to request and obtain your original birth record if you're a domestic adoptee. But obviously, what happens with the court, is it takes such a long time and you have to have someone like me, that's willing to stick in there for four or five years in litigation. And there's not many people who really want to do that.

Haley Radke: Also, frankly, most of us wouldn't have the resources to pay for your services for that long,

Gregory Luce: Right. Yeah. If I were to have paid myself for what I did, it would be $40-$50,000. That's what my legal fees probably would have been in the end if I had hired an attorney. Some people will say, “Why didn’t you hire an attorney?” Well, that's the reason.

That was the other part of forming the Adoptee Rights Law Center. I'm in a part of my life where I call myself a stay-at-home lawyer, where I've been taking care of the kids while my wife works and doing sort of part-time work. We didn’t need–I'm privileged not to need to work to earn money in that sense. I mean, it's something we still need to worry about, but not in the sense that many other people have to worry about. And so I started out with almost entirely pro bono cases, because I knew that adoptees did not have the resources to pay $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 to file a court case.

And I've continued to do that, because there's so much demand, though. I have been fairly careful now about what cases I take pro bono, and then those cases where a client can afford, I'll have a low flat fee that would cover petitioning a court and getting records…the whole case, as opposed to an hourly fee.

So that would range. It's cheaper than hiring, at least in Minnesota. It's cheaper than paying $1,000, which is what it takes for the major adoption agency here to launch a search. And those searches depend upon consent to get any information back. So, I'm cheaper than the adoption agencies on purpose, and still try to keep my services pro bono. And most of my inter-country adoptive cases are pro bono. Not all, but most. So, that's sort of my way of giving to the community, but also keeping busy in an area that I really love.

Haley Radke: Yeah. I didn't know your story before you shared it and I usually make notes, and I do research before my interviews. I had a note to ask you about what your thoughts on mutual consent registries were. And then it turns out that that's actually how you found your birth mother!

Gregory Luce: Right. They never work. They are notoriously ineffective. And lo and behold…

Haley Radke: Sorry, I should just make a little note there. The reason I wanted to ask you that was because that's given as a reason. “Well, mutual consent registries are available, so that's what you should use to search.” From some legislators, I've heard that argument.

Gregory Luce: Right. No, they're just so terribly ineffective. No one knows about them. You have to sort of get lucky to find out about them. There has to be a match. They often don't work anyways, even if there is a match there, because something's messed up in the search algorithm or the search database. I just read a story in New York, where they currently have an unrestricted right now; they changed the law. We've changed the law. We helped change the law there. These were two siblings. They both registered for the registry there 27 years ago and they just found out from the registry–27 years later. So, the registry did not work in that case, and that's typical, I think, for many of these registries and they're just completely ineffective. Of course, that's what’s so interesting about my story, is that it worked. And it worked six months before my mother died.

So, just quite amazing that that's what happened. It worked six months before she died and six months after I first petitioned the court. And the court had nothing to do with her registering. She just happened to register, I think, in October, 2000. And I had registered, I think, back in 1987, or something. So that was 13 years there.

Haley Radke: I remember filling out those things as a teenager. We had the Internet, I had an old computer. Well, it wasn't old–it was new!

Gregory Luce: An Amiga or something?

Haley Radke: Yeah, I don't know! We'd get an Apple for a while, and then, I don't know when we switched to PC, but I remember just randomly filling out these online database things and nothing ever came of that for me. But that was in the olden days.

Gregory Luce: Obviously, I had forgotten completely that I had registered. Up pops an email from the administrator of this registry and everything's changed from there.

Haley Radke: I find this really interesting, because you have worked on changing statewide legislation, but also, it's just one off, going to unseal one person at a time kind of a deal.

So, can you talk about the differences of those things? It's fairly obvious to me, but for a lot of people, they don't understand closed records, etcetera. You've got this hole nailed down. Can you tell us about that, please?

Gregory Luce: Yeah, and it's a great question, because it's something I think about all the time. There are two approaches you can take when you believe you have a right to obtain your original birth record. One is to change the legislation so that they recognize that right, or in many cases restore it in the state that used to have it. And the other is to find a legal argument that would make the courts recognize that right as a right.

The legislation is actually probably easier to do (as hard as it is). It's probably easier to change a law than to establish a right through the courts. And so you have to have these dual tracks going, though, in which you're trying to pursue this right through legislation, but you're also trying to convince legislators that it is a right. And they recognize it as a right, because part of creating a right is advocating for the belief that it is a right. And that's really important to realize that you don't so much… It’s the pressure that you put on society through legislators that will lead to them saying, “Yeah, you're right. If you put it that way, it really is a right.”

And then how you define that is going to be the big question, both for legislation and for the courts. If you're narrowly looking at it and you're narrowly saying, “We have an absolute right to the original birth record,” that's going to be much harder to prove than, “We have a right to identity.”

And this is where I'm sort of moving and how I'm analyzing these things legally, is that there's a much broader right to identity, to heritage, to citizenship, that relates to birth. That is the right that's really an issue. That's why I'm so excited in some ways to be connecting with the donor conceived community who have the same identity rights that come up. They call them genetic identity rights, or any number of different rights. And it's a very complicated area, but it is. It encompasses this broad right to your own identity. I think that's where we're going to find a lot of support moving into the future.

The right to the birth record is a right that arises out of a right to a full identity. And so I'm seeing organizations arising and there's one in Switzerland now called child-identity.org. I think there's a hyphen between child and identity. It looks at identity from the point of view that birth certificates…everyone in the entire world does not get a birth certificate.

There are many countries that have pretty lax systems to even record a birth. And so that in itself is a right–to have a birth certificate or a birth record. I've had clients who haven't had them. And that creates all sorts of problems in moving through the world, but this organization in Switzerland (and there are many others, probably like it) takes a really broad look at identity.

And within that is a right to a birth certificate and a right to know who's on your birth certificate, to know your parents, and who they are. There's no general right to relationship unless that relationship is through the birth parent before they relinquish or surrender a child. But even then, there are going to be some rights that attach to that relationship.

But any adult doesn't have a right to a relationship with another adult. We're not talking about relationship rights. We're talking about identity rights.

Haley Radke: Right. Okay, I have never heard it put that way and that's really fascinating, because I was just looking it up and I wanted to ask you this, too, because I was watching some of the videos that you've made and I wondered if you could tell us what happened in California in 1935?

Gregory Luce: So, my theory with California…I don't think anyone really knows, but my theory with California is caught up a little bit with the Georgia Tan scandal. Georgia Tan was definitely involved with a lot of Hollywood adoptions and you had celebrity adoptions as well in California.

What was happening there was that you can request the birth record of anyone in California. You still can, actually, but in the 1930s, people who knew this and knew possibly there was an adoption would request the birth record of that child and would try to blackmail the adoptive parents to say, “We're going to tell.” Which is what's so odd to me. “We're going to tell the kid that the kid's adopted.” That was the blackmail. Not that they adopted a child, but we're going to tell the kid who’s adopted. So, it's wrapped up in that whole fiction that if you were born to the parent and blackmail was possible, because it was so secret that you actually adopted a person.

In 1935, California became the first state in the country to seal the birth records to everybody, including the adopted person. But the genesis of that was around potential blackmail that existed at the time. So, my theory is there's Georgia Tan, there's celebrities, there's actual blackmail going on, but it had nothing to do with protecting the birth parent, which is what eventually became the narrative in the U.S.

Haley Radke: I love that you said that, because what I was reading was talking about hiding from the adopted person the fact that they're illegitimate and covering that? So, that's a really interesting twist.

Gregory Luce: Right. Yeah. It would have been very different in Idaho. You don't have a whole lot of celebrity birth adoptions in Idaho or Oklahoma or wherever, but yeah, illegitimacy was a huge factor. Hide the child's illegitimate status by essentially legitimizing them through adoption. That was the other main, major impetus to do that. But in most cases, as you probably know, the records were not sealed to the adult later. That started to really come into play in the 40s and 50s, into the 60s, even into the 70s. In fact, I think Pennsylvania became the last state in ‘84 to seal their records.

Haley Radke: Because, in that video that I mentioned, Greg has this green map and then California goes red and then the states just go “blink, blink, blink…”

And so now what are your feelings on–Ok, first of all, I can't believe you said you think this is easier through legislation. That kind of blew my mind.

Gregory Luce: Let me say this, though. I think I would probably quit or threaten to quit every day doing legislation, because it's so exhausting, but I do think it's the route that's easiest, if you're looking at time. That's the easiest one to change, but it is very frustrating,

Haley Radke: So, easier, but not easy.

Gregory Luce: No, not at all. In fact, the divisive…I think the divisiveness is actually overplayed within the adoptee community, but I would say just the opinions within adoption itself are very exhausting. And a lot of those actually are coming from legislators and how they view adopted people and all the stereotypes they bring to the equation of determining whether this adopted person deserves a birth record. We saw that played out in Maryland this past session. That was pretty painful to watch.

Haley Radke: Can you talk a little bit about that and what you mean by how they see adoptees? I know I was in a session with you at a conference where Claire McGettrick was talking about some of these things and about how to approach legislators. And from us coming with this person–we come with all the adoptee…I'm an adoptee. We come with all our baggage, and feelings, and whatever–that there's not really a place for that, necessarily.

So, do you have some comments on that?

Gregory Luce: Oh, you mean coming with the difficulties of being adopted?

Haley Radke: I would say coming with the feelings arguments versus what you said, “It's a right to identity.”

Gregory Luce: Yeah, the feelings... It's a hard balance, because you have to be human when you advocate. You have to convince legislators that, yes, we are human and yes, we have feelings, but you don't want to overplay those. You have to balance that with the right that you're asserting. And so that can be difficult sometimes. Some people come into legislation believing this may solve their issues–that getting the birth record will solve other emotional issues that they may have associated with the adoption. And it doesn't, necessarily. It may contribute to solving issues, but the right to your record and your identity is the first step. That's the basic right: your record.

And so that's where you have to concentrate: on that record. Maybe its potential for use, but not what it can simply do by possessing it. It's very meaningful to possess it. I almost cried when I–I just got my original birth record unredacted in November of 2020 (so less than a year ago), after 20 years of trying to find it, and it was very meaningful to get that.

That's the fruit. That's always the first step to whatever you do with it, once you do have it. So, I think it is a real balance to figure out how you approach legislators and convince them that it is a right. You don't back down on that. If you back down on, “This is a right,” then they know how to split you off from others who don't believe it's a right, or think that you're overplaying what it is. And so you have to be really firm that it is a right. You're not going to back down on that, because you're trying to convince them that it is.

I think that’s very hard for some people, especially adopted people, to be firm in this right, because you're taught for most of your life that you don't deserve it. It's not yours. It said you don't deserve it. You're going to mess things up if you get it. You weren't supposed to know. All these myths that go along with that make it hard for some adopted people to say, “No, no. I don't care what you think of me. Think about what I need as an adopted person and the right that I have to have my own birth record. It’s not your birth record, it's mine.”

I think that's the hard part, to deal with legislators. It may often come to this with all of the myths of what an adoptee is. And often we're perpetual children. That's really at the heart of it, is we're not treated as full adults. We’re treated att the time we’re born as children. And that's the hardest thing to listen to and see underneath it all is that we're not treated as fully human. And that's what we saw in Maryland. I think we saw there the myth that we're going to destroy families. We're going to “out” birth parents. We're going to show up at the door and they would have to hide these birth parents from the shame that they had. But it was shame that was produced by the state. And so it's shame that's perpetuated by the state today. That's what I think they don't recognize, either. That it's perpetual shame and it's perpetuated by the laws that we currently have.

Haley Radke: And what are you hearing from legislators or other people that you're in contact with doing similar work in other OBC rights access organizations with the argument about DNA? What's less shameful? Getting connected to the third cousin who then digs up who your birth mother is, versus having your paperwork?

Gregory Luce: Right. That's a great question, and I take it by making sure we don't put all our eggs into the DNA basket, so to speak? Meaning, part of it and an argument is always, “Well, it's become irrelevant in many ways to not provide this record.” A lot of legislators still don't get that. They're so protective of the myth that existed when a child was relinquished in the 40s, 50s, and 60s–that it doesn't matter to them. So, what I often say, too, is that these methods of trying to find out just the names of your parents are so deeply embedded in who we are as adopted people (not all adopted people, but many), that we've been using different methods for decades to do that.

We've been using private investigators. We've been using searchers where you pay $2,500 in cash in an envelope through an intermediary. We have Search Angels. The methods have just changed. And DNA has become inexpensive and easy to use, and that's just the method we use now, but it does not substitute for a request for the birth record and you're provided with that birth record upon request.

But you're right, it does…And I've used this in court. If you have DNA and you get these matches to third cousins, second cousins, more increasingly first cousins, and you then get–I usually use Search Angels with my clients, because I don't do the investigation to try to find people. That Search Angel will take that list of matches and then start going down that list. What I've done in many of my court cases where we don't know who the birth parent is, we narrow it down. And then I get an affidavit from the Search Angel explaining exactly what she (usually she) is going to do over the next two months to try to locate and identify that birth parent. That means calling 200 people, contacting people on social media, and using existing databases to find them.

And so I put all of that in an affidavit and I say to the court, who, to be honest, is the fact finder…They're the ones that are looking at all these facts and making their decision, like legislators really should be doing in the sense of creating legislation. The judges in almost every case say, “Well, I'm just going to release you to the record–the birth record.” Because that's way better than this route you're outlining here, of contacting 40 people and asking the question, “Do you know if a cousin or an aunt or someone gave up a child or surrendered a child to adoption in 1975?” That question then reverberates across generations. As opposed to requesting the record, and receiving it, and doing what you want with it.

So judges understand that and they respond to it. They're the fact finders, neutral fact finders, hopefully. Legislators have not yet fully understood that, and some don't really want to understand it. I tell people that this issue is bipartisan. It really is. You get staunch Republicans who are fully in favor of the right to your own birth record.

You get Democrats who are very similar. It skews a little bit Democratic, depending upon what abortion politics are in play in that state. But the biggest factor, and Annette O’Connell in New York really brought this home to me, is age or generation. It's a generational difference. The younger the legislator is, in general, the more they're not going to care. They’re not going to see the big deal. I mean, they're going to care, but they're not going to see the big deal of releasing an identity record. Whereas, the older legislators are locked into the myth that developed around adoption in the 40s, 50s, 60s, into the 70s, and are unwilling to let go of that myth. So it's really skewed by age, more than anything else.

Haley Radke: I know you're an attorney and I know you have this view of the courts and the judges and most of us would not understand, but when you are talking about fighting for your own record and literally saying, “I already have my birth parents' names and I already have this information.”

What are you feeling inside? It just sounds so ludicrous. “How can you not give me this paper? Because I already know what’s on it.” Are you not like, “Is this all a farce? Am I being punked? What is happening right now?”

Gregory Luce: Those are good ways to explain it–being punked or the absurdity of it was often really brought home by that whole process. They're hiding things for the sake of hiding things. At some point, they're just, “We were so locked into hiding this birth record, that that's the reason we're hiding it. Because we're hiding it.” And that circular absurdity was really what was brought home to me.

I've written about this on my personal blog, and the one question that I got from a social worker…So in D.C., again, when you unseal the record, they then refer it over to an agency to look at whether there's consent already and then look at whether they should contact the birth parent. My mom was deceased at that point and I had had a relationship with her for the time we knew each other. I had inherited all of her records, so I was part of her extended family. But the question I got from the social worker was, “Do you have proof of the relationship with your mother?”

And it was such an absurd question to me, for a number of reasons. One is, well, the proof is the birth record that I'm trying to ask for! There's the proof right there–her name's right there and I'm there on that record as well. But what I wrote about was all the records that I have. The absurdity of what I was–I was almost using satire, in some ways, in what I sent back to the social worker.

And that satire was–I gave her Christmas cards that we sent to each other. I gave her other cards that we sent to each other. I gave her–I have a recording of her on New Year's Eve saying, “New Year's Eve.” It's on my– back in the days where you had actual machines that recorded voicemail. I have a video of being at her home in Florida for Christmas. So, do I send all of those things in to the social worker just to prove that I had a relationship with her? It was just so absurd. And I think that may be where a lot of people would give up, and I would not blame them, either. A lot of adoptees probably give up as part of this process. Sometimes, it's so hard, especially the court process, but I knew I was right.

I knew that I had a legal point here to make, as well, and I stuck with it. Over the years, I've learned how to deal with the absurdity as well. And I think that's what I like about being a lawyer, is I can deal with that absurdity in a constructive way, but I do feel for my clients who have to deal with it on a very personal level.

I have a client in the last three weeks who has really gone through the wringer of–We've got a birth record, but she wanted a baptismal certificate. She wanted the original baptismal certificate. I don't know if many people know, but in the Catholic church, they issue amended first baptismal certificates that make it appear as if your adoptive parents were at the baptism, which physically, this was impossible. She wanted her original baptismal certificate and then we got a court order for the agency to supply it. The agency said, “Well, you need to pay our fees to do that.” The fees approached around $400, just to open the file and to release an original baptismal certificate. $400! And it was just so absurd.

There's not much you can do on that, because you're dealing with (usually) a private adoption agency. So, they really have a lot of power there. And so she paid. I think we negotiated the fee down, but, again, the absurdity of hiding things for the sake of hiding them is really what comes home to me and to my clients as well.

Haley Radke: Well, when you were describing–I got emotional when you were describing what you were sending over as satire, you said, to the social worker. I was thinking, “Who has the right to privacy here?” Sorry to say this, to use this wording, Greg, but it’s just what has come to my mind–prostitute my precious memories when I only had 164 days with my birth mother. And now I have to show you all these precious things to me. That is…I don't have the words for it.

Gregory Luce: It was, no, it was stunning. It really was. That's why I tended to write about it. That was one way of therapy for me is that won out–I would say is writing. Yeah. It's stunning what you have to give up of your own personal self to get your records. And this was to get my original birth record. It ended up the courts–well, not the courts. They kind of made a mistake in my case. I mean, I asked for three sets of records… And this is what I always tell people–there are usually three main records that you're seeking. One is the birth record. It's generally very hard to get, but generally of those three, it's the easiest to get. The next are court records, which are a little harder to get, depending upon the state. Some states will give them to you as part of the birth record.

And then, third, are the agency records. It could be the public agency, or often, it's a private agency. Those are the hardest of any to get–usually it's in a private agency. The courts don't really want to order a private agency to relinquish records. And in my case, they gave me 77 pages of agency records.

They redacted my father's birth name, but I already knew who that was, so I just would fill it in every time that redaction came along. And they just did a poor job redacting it anyways. Sometimes his name was Aaron, sometimes it wasn't. But I got the hardest records ever to get, but then they're also the most revealing. They are probably–If you were to think about three sets of records, they are the most valuable, because they have the most information of who you were at that age and what went into the machinery of your relinquishment and adoption to a new family. And so, I learned quite a bit from those agency records.

There was a Georgia adoptee that was at an event recently. And she also got a scad of OBC records and they were incredibly helpful. But then what they couldn't answer for her, was she was in foster care for five months, and there are no records related to that. That's often the hole that people have. I had a seven-day hole, where it was probably in between the hospital and the maternity home. It's not that hard to fill in those seven days, but for people who have five months to fill (where foster care records aren't typically provided anywhere)--that's much harder.

But you're right. It's this whole issue of…you could call it prostituting yourself to prove that you're entitled to your own information. It’s just bizarre and absurd, and I don't wish it on anyone and I'm not going to insist on clients to follow through if they don't want to. I don't have that power, but I certainly leave it up to them as to whether they want to, how hard they want to fight for that, and what they have to give up to get it.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. We're going to do our recommended resources, but before we do that, is there anything else that you want to say to adopted people, or share further about your story, or anything that you really want adopted people to know?

Gregory Luce: I guess, I usually don't have New Year's resolutions at all, or they just have never been important to me. I did have one this year, and it's been really important to me. I think it's something that resonates with adoptees and that is: listen. It’s to listen. And not saying you listen to those voices that you hear all the time, especially in adoption. It's often the adoptee is not centered when there's discussion about adoption. But I'm talking about, “What are the voices we're not hearing right now in adoptee rights work?” And a lot of those are transracial adoptees, inter-country adoptees, and in-race adoptees. So these are the voices I think that, one, are the future of adoptee rights work. And it's the voices that I think we need to not only listen to, but follow. And I'm seeing a lot of that, but I think we still have a lot of work to do to get there.

I think we're going to start talking about the resources, and Adoptees United is one of those. We're making a very conscious effort to build our board so it's diverse and inclusive. And we'll have more information about that board, probably pretty soon now.

Haley Radke: I went to your Adoptee Rights Town Hall for Adoptees United, which is one I want to recommend and I wrote down a quote from you.

Gregory Luce: Oh no, oh no. Sometimes I cringe that I'm recording and oh no.

Haley Radke: Oh, come on. You are entirely staying intact here. You said, “Domestic adoptees need to be better allies to inter-country adoptees.” You said that before you made your New Year's resolution. So, there you go, you’re staying intact.

Gregory Luce: All right. Well, good. It is work that we have to do, and I truly believe that. The other voice that I think we need to listen to, too, especially, is our young adoptees, I have no idea, really, what issues they’re having. We are about to add a young, 25-year-old, transracial adoptee to our board. What he listens to and thinks about is very different from what I listen to and think about as an older, white, domestic adoptee–in a very good way.

If you listen, and you truly listen, I think that we're going to make some progress. But we also have to act, and acting means that you act positively, and what you learn and listen from those who will be and should have more power today. That’s how I do it.

Haley Radke: Well, thank you. I really appreciate you sharing your story and so much wisdom about adoptee rights. I love that your name is Adoptee Rights Law Center. It’s very.--That’s it. That is it.

Gregory Luce: No, it sounds like I’ve got a staff of 30! I’m a center, you know.

Haley Radke: Someday!! Come on. You’ve got to live into it now. That's awesome.

I want people to go and make sure they're checking out your writing there, because I learned a lot from you about integrated birth certificates from a post that's there. Recently, you wrote about (this is a good title, too) “The Five, Most Pernicious Myths about Adult Adopted People.”

Gregory Luce:Yeah, it’s true! We've talked about some of those today.

Haley Radke: Yeah, we did. But Adoptees United, especially–can you tell us more about what that organization is meant to do, and what your plans are for Adoptees United?

Gregory Luce: We're going state-by-state, legislatively. And that was, for me, Minnesota court cases and also inter-country adoption and also inter-country adoptee work. But we were really limited and having to reinvent in every state or every issue, the infrastructure, the logistics, the messaging, all of that. So we wanted to form a national non-profit organization that could, one, raise money, and two, educate people on these issues and become a national voice on adoptee rights issues in a very specifically oriented towards adoptees/adoptee rights.

It wouldn't be an umbrella organization (nothing against umbrella organizations), but we're very specific on limiting it to adoptees, but also building coalitions. The coalition was largely responsible for what happened recently in New York. Coalitions work because they bring different organizations together that may not want to work together without having some structure behind it, or some bottom line commitment to what we're all after.

And so Adoptees United helps form those coalitions that help with the logistics of websites. It helps with the logistics of emails and it helps the local advocates, which make all the difference. Those people who are in the state trying to make change, to focus in on their advocacy work that is actually physically going to the legislature, and lobbying for the legislation that we need. So it's a national organization that could raise money, provide education, and also provide logistics behind legislative efforts across the country. And also, hopefully, as we very consciously build our board, become a very diverse and inclusive voice as well.

I see myself–I'm the president of Adoptees United, but I see myself more as an administrator to get it to where it needs to go. I'd like not to be the head of it for two years from now. I think it needs to have leadership that changes to reflect where we're going with adoptee rights. So that's why we have Adoptees United now. It's going really well. And I think part of that is, to be honest, the ability to draw in people on Zoom and on our Zoom events, like the town hall meeting that you went to,

Haley Radke: Can adoptees (and if not), what's the best way–Can adoptees that are interested in changing legislation in their state, but they don't know where to go? Can they connect with Adoptees United? Or where's the best place for people that are itching to do the work go?

Gregory Luce: That's what I would recommend, is contact us at Adoptees United. There's a form there to fill out, or they can certainly just contact me directly at Adoptee Rights Law Center, because I'll just hook them in.

But that's how it happens. It's a combination of the events that we do and what grows out of those. Because they're now actively trying to build coalitions in California. There's a real interest in a Southeastern United States Coalition. It's not just Florida, or Georgia, or Louisiana, specifically, but these regional lines I think are a really good model for the future.

And partially that because we're such fun, and let's say, we’re such fungible creatures, adoptees. We may have been born in one state, but we likely live in another state at this point. And therefore we're not a constituent in the state that holds our birth records or any records. And so you're disenfranchised in that way, but regionally, we'd be more powerful than that.

We're trying to build these regional coalitions. We have one that's the Capitol Coalition for Adoptee Rights. And that was the one that was involved in Maryland and we'll probably see D.C. happening next when Maryland got defeated. It’ll probably going to be a couple of years before we go back to Maryland, but D.C., may be the next one as well.

Yeah, so it's building those regional coalitions and in the bigger states like California, maybe a state, only a state-level coalition, because it's so big.

Haley Radke: It is big. I've had a lot of California listeners, so hopefully we'll find some people for you here.

Gregory Luce: Oh my God, it is. It is by far the most requests I get from adoptees is how to get your birth records from California. And it's such a restricted state.

Haley Radke: Wow, I'm so excited. Glad we have it. I think it's great. I think it's really great. So I hope that you guys are able to follow Adoptees United, watch out for their events that are coming up, and if you're itching to do some work. If you’re ready, they're ready for you.

What do you want to recommend for us today, Greg?

Gregory Luce: Boy, there's so many books that I have. American Baby is one, the book by Gabrielle Glaser.

Haley Radke: Look at all my book tabs.

Gregory Luce: Yep. I happen to have one of the few paperbacks because I have the galley version.

Haley Radke: Oh, you so fancy! You got referenced in this book.

Gregory Luce: I know, I saw that! That was so generous of her to do that, but I've been in touch with Gabrielle for awhile now. She's been doing such a terrific job of getting the issue of secrecy and adoption out there and discussed. And I think it may have even led to that Steve Inskeep piece that we saw more recently, but that's a book that I'd recommend. Cleave is a book of poetry. I have it around here…Tiana Nobile?

Haley Radke: Oh, I just went to her poetry–the lunch. It was wonderful.

Gregory Luce: Oh, cool! So another one is done by Megan Galbraith and it's The Guild of the Infant Saviour. I'm looking forward to that one. I think that's out in mid-May/end of May.

Haley Radke: Yes. It's coming out soon and she's going to be on the show. So, we're very excited. You can look forward to that.

Gregory Luce: Good! I have a whole pile. And then I still came across all sorts of books from the past that were written several years ago, Invisible Asians is one by a professor in Minnesota. One that's out right now is Surviving the White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll. That's a memoir. She's a Black adoptee, grew up in a white family in New England and is a cultural critic for…well, has been a cultural critic for many prominent publications in the past.

So, I always recommend books. You know, I often don’t have time to read them. So, I just listed a bunch of books that I have, and I haven't even read yet, but they look so good.

Haley Radke: They look so good! I have read them. They are good! I haven't read all of the ones you mentioned, but I’ve read most of them. Oh my gosh. Oh, that's hilarious. If you would like more dry humor from Greg and wisdom about adoptee rights issues, where can we connect with you online?

Gregory Luce: The best way is probably Adoptee Rights Law Center and that's at adopteerightslaw.com, or I'm more active on Twitter than any other social media and that's @adopteelaw on Twitter.

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

I hope Greg will come back, because I had so many more questions for him and I just want to know more about the people who are doing such great work on our behalf and what passions propel them. And I just want to get all their wisdom so that I can help you advocate and me advocate for other adult adoptees.

So, what a gem. Love Greg. He is such a gift to the community and has done such great things. He's too modest. He's very modest and he probably wouldn't have told us half of those things without a little pressing. So I'm so thrilled that Adoptees United exists and is going to hopefully connect more advocates nationwide.

So, I do encourage you–If that's something that's been on your heart, get after it. We need more people speaking up for OBC. And I know there's lots of people already doing it, so join in with them and see how many more states you can get opened up down there. Anyway, I am so grateful for Greg's voice and so many of the other guests we've had recently really sharing such powerful things with us.

And I'm also very thankful to my Patreon supporters. You know I couldn't do the show without you, so thank you so much. You know who you are. You know, some people list off names of Patreon supporters, but I've never done that, because I know some of you are very private and you don't necessarily want people to know, but I see you.

I know you, and I'm really grateful. I wouldn't be able to do this without you. So, if you want to join my friends that are supporting the show every month, you can go to adopteeson.com/partner to find out details of how you can support the show and keep it going.

And also how you can access my other weekly podcast. I do two podcasts a week–I feel like that’s too much. Anyway, it's Adoptees Off Script and we have a monthly book club over there, we have lots of silly news reports (it's not silly, but sometimes I get a little bit silly over there), news reporting on adoptee things that are happening. We break down news articles that are– you'll find out the real Haley and how much I want to hear adoptee voices over anybody else’s.

I'll just leave it at that. Sometimes to my detriment. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

181 [Healing Series] Is Loyalty a Trauma Response?

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/181

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke. 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 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, Part 2. [00:03:00]

So if you haven't listened to last week's episode, Episode 180, I would encourage you to go back and download that before listening to this. We're diving in a little further into the idea that loyalty is a trauma response. I want to give you a content warning: We do mention and discuss suicide in this episode. 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: Okay, we had a really challenging conversation about estrangement last week, and we're going to keep on going. One of the things you mentioned that I wrote down as soon as you said it because I thought, Oh my goodness, this is so profound: “We are loyal to others before ourselves.” I've also heard you say that loyalty can actually be a trauma response. So I really need help unpacking that. [00:04:00]

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yeah. That's my perception of loyalty at this point because the level at which we can be loyal to abusive caregivers–and that's outside of adoption as well. I've worked with estrangement with many clients over the years, and not all of them were adoptees. So this can be applied to any relationship with an abusive caregiver. But really, we're talking about the fawn response, which is a newer thing that we're talking about when we're talking about fight, flight, or freeze, or fawn is the fourth response. And so I just pulled up a little Psychology Today article to give a little simple encapsulation of what that is. So the fawn response involves immediately moving to try to please a person to avoid any conflict. This is often a response developed in childhood trauma where a parent or a significant authority figure is the abuser. [00:05:00] Children go into fawn-like response to attempt to avoid the abuse, which may be verbal, physical, or sexual, by being a pleaser. In other words, they preemptively attempt to appease the abuser by agreeing, answering what they know the parent wants to hear or by ignoring their personal feelings and desires, and do anything and everything to prevent the abuse. So some key signs that the fawn response is in use are: When you look to others for how you feel in a relationship or situation. It is difficult to identify your feelings even when you are alone. You often feel like you have no identity. You are constantly trying to please the people in your life. At the first sign of conflict, your first instinct is to appease the angry person. You ignore your own beliefs, thoughts, and truths and accept those of the people around you. You may [00:06:00] experience unusual emotional responses when issues do not involve people of importance in your life. This could include emotional outbursts at strangers or sudden sadness throughout the day. You feel self-anger and guilt some or most of the time. Saying no to those around you is a challenge. You are overwhelmed at times but take on more if asked. You lack boundaries and are often taken advantage of in relationships, and you are uncomfortable or threatened when asked to give an opinion

Haley Radke: What do I say? Hashtag relatable?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Hashtag Are you adopted?

Haley Radke: Okay. So fawning, I haven't heard that term before. That is really wild. I can't believe you just read that list.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yeah.

Haley Radke: No kidding. Hashtag adopted. Whoa.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: So this is really complicated because [00:07:00] society views… Well, we know, right? We know the narrative about adoption in society, which is that we are blessed and we should be grateful, right? And so part of that narrative is that our obedience and loyalty to our adopters is viewed as noble, and it's comforting really. It's comforting to the other people because it confirms that narrative that we are fine and that no trauma occurred. Look, they're fine, right? They're doing all of these things. They're taking care of their family. Who would do that if it wasn't a good situation? Well, someone having a trauma response would do a lot of things that externally look like those have to come from a loving place versus… Yeah, it's fear-based, really. And sometimes things can be really “good” and really “moral” [00:08:00] and yet can still cause us a tremendous amount of internal damage. And unfortunately, adoptees get really good at hiding that damage, even from ourselves. So that's conscious or unconscious. That can look like someone that's overextending for an abusive adopter that's aware and knows that it's hurting them but can't really get out of the pattern, and that also might be someone that swears up and down that they're totally happy to have that person move into their home and take care of them 24 hours a day. And maybe three years in, that person has a heart attack or something. It will show up. There is damage being done when we are centering other people in front of us.

Haley Radke: I just had Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker on the podcast, and she was talking about internalized oppression and coming out of the fog [00:09:00] and how she doesn't really like that term. But we were comparing the two, and I think that's also linked to what you're saying right now, how, for lack of a better term, for people who are in the fog it can be unsafe for them, like for their very selves, to admit there's something going on or to even observe that there's something going on that is in conflict with this dominant narrative.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes. And trauma responses often unfortunately create additional trauma or additional re-wounding, right? Which looks like this piece that I know on the Estrangement Series people have been talking about, right? Which is going back for more, going back for more, just this pattern that repeats. And the more triggering it is, the more we want it to be different. And so our system is just trying harder and harder, and [00:10:00] we feel like there must be a way, right? If we're in the story of "I'm broken, that's why this feels bad," then we can't see that we're just repeating this pattern and the wound is getting more and more infected. I can't speak enough to the level of suffering that can result when we're in this internal conflict about estrangement. Again, that is whether you are in the very beginning of putting up your very first boundaries up through to you have made this decision and you have tried to cut ties. The distress is very similar. It's really hard to have this big push/pull inside of us. But my opinion from my experience personally and professionally is that being in our adoptive families can be its own traumatic experience, and that's in addition to the separation [00:11:00] trauma. Separation trauma is the result of being separated from our first mothers. That is traumatic. We know this. When a baby is taken from its mother, there's a trauma that happens. I'm saying that this is on top of that because it's not, thankfully, it's not all situations, right? But this is a reality. This is a reality of many adoptees' experience, that the experience of being a member of their adoptive family was traumatic. And then you add racial trauma on top of that for transracial adoptees. And I do believe that being raised in racial isolation is abuse. That's another belief that some may find radical. That's my truth. I know it to be others' truth. The impact of being raised in whiteness as a person of color, the impact on identity, the impact on self-worth, the literal [00:12:00] impact on our safety, physical, emotional, psychological and very real safety is so deep. It's so heavy. It's so… I just... I can't... There aren't enough words for me to talk about the gravity of this. Intention becomes irrelevant when we're talking about these layers of trauma. I know some people say, Oh, people didn't know. There are so many parts of us that want to remedy this somehow and make excuses for the perpetrating parties. And my example of that is that you can still go to jail for involuntary manslaughter because a life was lost and somebody needs to be held accountable. And so irrelevant of intention, if you feel personally traumatized by something [00:13:00] and you need to hold people accountable for that and make decisions to protect yourself, then that is your right as a person. That's your right as a human being to do that. And nobody else outside of you needs to agree that that is what occurred. And I would be remiss to not mention the also layers of sexualization and victimization of BIPOC bodies, especially in light of recent violent events. I think protectors that can get activated when we're talking about this level of trauma, this level of labeling abuse in adoptive family systems can want to qualify. Was it really that bad? Did you really need to do that? Really? What happened to you? Did they put their hands on you? Like, all of this comparison about the severity of trauma. It's not necessarily even just about the two [00:14:00] adopters that raised you. It's about these family systems. And again, for transracial adoptees this means being put in a very unsafe situation. And people in BIPOC bodies have a higher likelihood of being victimized, not just within the family system, but within these communities where we're vulnerable and predators know that we're vulnerable. They know that, and there can be a preying on this innate loyalty to others over self. There's an innate sense that we will follow the rules, that we will be obedient, that we will put ourselves second, and in that we can put ourselves in some really dangerous situations

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I know that especially in the last couple years where the racial tensions in the US… I'm in Canada, but I have eyes really raised high and that's been happening up here as [00:15:00] well. And I feel like there's been a responsibility put on people of color to educate everyone around them. And so then, looking at an adoptee who's a transracial adoptee adopted into a white family and they have this innate sense of "I have to be loyal." But then, you're also a person of color and maybe it's my job also to educate my family and try and un-racist them or whatever, I don't know. I don't even know how you could possibly navigate that. That feels impossible.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yeah, I see adoptees put so much emotional labor into this and I think the cost can be really high. And, I can't emphasize enough, Haley, our protectors are going to do their best to protect us all the time. You may find yourself putting a lot of energy into this, [00:16:00] and I don't want there to be judgment about that. There's no moral meaning to being blended with a protective part of you or what your system is doing to help you survive every day, day to day. This is a both/and situation, and we can only do so much healing when the trauma is still happening. So if for you, personally, the relationship feels like the trauma, then we have to move out of it in order to really get the space to do the healing that we need to. An example would be working with someone experiencing domestic violence. You can't do deep trauma therapy work with someone that's still in a literal unsafe situation. So if we put that lens on it, if your personal experience of your adoptive family system has been traumatic, then there's only one path to your healing. [00:17:00] Again, whether that's boundaries or cutting ties, but it is to put yourself first, probably for the first time, really, in this radical way to really put yourself first. And that we are not owned by anyone but ourselves. We're not property. The door unlocks from the inside. That's what I wish to disseminate to all the adoptees. You are not locked in. If you are unsafe, you can go. It's okay to choose you.

Haley Radke: I think I wrote this question to you when we were preparing, and it was something to the effect of choosing safety of our identity over keeping relationships. And I think you really eloquently said that. I'm sure people will be rewinding–that sounds old-fashioned–to write down what [00:18:00] you just said to remind themselves that they have the power to do that. And we talked about this last time, that there's this great fear as well, and that, if you're thinking of leaving your adoptive family and becoming estranged, professional support is highly recommended because it is so challenging. And then, you're adding on this piece–this is not my experience because I'm white and I was adopted into a white family–but for transracial adoptees and their racial identity, that is a whole 'nother part of your person. And I've heard people use this language, and I think I agree with it. It's violent to not be able to live out your full identity as a person of color. Is that the right lingo to use?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes, I would agree with that, Haley, and that brings me to [00:19:00] another piece of my story that feels so essential to share, which, again, is how do our parts communicate with us? So there's two big pieces to why I knew, for me, it was the right decision to sever ties. One piece was the vomiting that I mentioned in the last episode and the way that my body was communicating with me. The other was my suicidal part, and I know I talked about suicidal parts way back in my IFS episode, but just to remind people, suicidal parts are not parts that hate us or that want us dead. They are parts that cannot see any other way around the level of pain in our system. I like to use the image of a glass with a waterline, like a red line maybe towards the top, and once the water surges too high, it triggers an alarm bell. I think of suicidality [00:20:00] as an alarm bell. It's not, again, that our parts want us dead. It's that they're ringing the alarm bell. They're saying, The pain is too high. We're underwater. We can't keep going like this. And so after I came back from Colombia, from living down there, I entered this really hard phase, and I found myself more consciously suicidal than I had ever been in my life. And I say consciously because what I learned as I got to know this suicidal part of me is that she has been with me the whole time. I have a lot of other really strong, beautiful, amazing protectors that have hidden her from me for most of my life. They were so scared of her. She has so much power inside of me that she was kind of [00:21:00] hidden from my view, and so I wouldn't have necessarily identified that way earlier in my life. But coming back to the US, being separated from my mom yet again, reintegrating into this majority white culture after living surrounded by my blood, by my culture, and then having to still try to keep up this relationship that was demanding that I abandon myself in order to exist, I just couldn't see a way to keep going. And it really came down to me or them. It came down to am I going to choose myself? Am I going to choose to live? Am I going to die for them or am I going to live for me? Because being a clinician, being skilled at [00:22:00] this work, having skills, having a beautiful life in my present moment, lots of support, the most amazing partner I could ever wish for in my life, all of these things, none of that was going to protect me from this pain, from this trauma. It was that big. And it got to a point where it shook me that I'm not safe from this. The very statistic of how many adoptees we lose, that part of me and my life mission is to watch that number go down over my lifetime, that I'm not immune. I'm not too good to become one of those numbers. This could happen to me, and I had to choose life, which meant choosing me. And for a transracial adoptee, white supremacy culture centers whiteness, which also means it centers white lives. So I have to believe, as a BIPOC [00:23:00] person, that my life does have enough value, that I can choose me over the other people, that that's a right as a person.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for being willing to share that with us. I think it will be so validating for so many people to hear you say those words, and I don't want to say admit but share the thing that so many of us have kept down in secret. That's very powerful for you to share that with us.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Thanks, Haley. Yeah. I really just don't want any adoptees to feel alone with all of this. If I can name something that someone's feeling, that's everything.

Haley Radke: Is there anything else that you want to share with us as we talk about this piece of loyalty and identity and choosing yourself, all of those [00:24:00] themes that we've covered

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: An extension of that can be there's so much liberation in choosing us and in this freedom, again, to be fully ourselves, to be fully our authentic selves. I feel like I was living someone else's life. I don't feel like I was... There's all these pieces of it, right? Like reunion brought me back to life a little bit. My partnership brought me back to life a little bit. But this piece, severing the ties of these two relationships, it really allowed me to feel like I'm finally here. I feel like I'm fully alive, right? And a lot of adoptees talk about being half here or feeling like a ghost, or am I an alien? Or am I really here? And I think all of that is if we don't have internal permission to be here, to be alive, to give and receive love, that our experience [00:25:00] of life is going to be pretty painful, and it doesn't have to be.

Haley Radke: And when you said to give and receive love, I just thought as ourselves.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes.

Haley Radke: As ourselves. Yeah.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Yes. I know that you've talked about how a lot of adoptive parents can fear that reunion will be the cause of estrangement, of severing ties, and so I did want to speak to that a little bit, even if just from my own experience that I don't believe that it can ever just be one thing, right? That's just such an oversimplification of what's happened, which is really lifelong for us, right? That these decisions aren't made lightly, and also that, yeah, it's not the fault of that. There were so many things I had to accept and I had to release control over to do this, including releasing the narrative entirely that other people are going to perceive this decision, how they're going to perceive this decision. And I don't have control over that and the [00:26:00] narrative or how it looks, right? Which might be, Oh, she found her biological mother and that relationship is strong, and so now she's ending this other thing. That's not my truth. So if people are going to assume that, I can't control that. And what I want to say here is that, yeah, there's a correlation, not causation, meaning that did having a strong relationship with my mother give me strength to love myself, to put myself first? Yes, absolutely. But it's not the cause of it. It's not the why. And if anything, there was a bunch of fear there too, because my experience of a parent is fear-based and shame-based and terrifying. So I actually was really scared to tell her that I had done it because I was afraid of her reaction because I fear caregivers. [00:27:00] So that was its own piece and, actually, Pam was like, You need your mom through this process, so encouraged me to tell her, and of course, I had this really healing, beautiful, corrective experience of what a mom is, what a real mom is.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad you got to have that.

**Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC:**Thanks.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for sharing, Marta.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: I have a part, I have a mama bear part that wants to make sure that the adoptees, because that's who I'm speaking to, don't hear: The only way to do this is to sever ties.. This is about individual safety and, again, what's safe for one person is not safe for the next person. So not everybody can do that for a million reasons. And so that's not the mandate, and that's not the only way to [00:28:00] reclaim parts of yourself and have a more healthy, balanced, fulfilled life. You have to do what's best for your system, and that's individual. But if you feel like you can't hear your parts, if you're listening to me thinking, I have no idea what my parts are saying. In that fawn response, one of the things was: I have trouble identifying feelings even when I'm alone. That's how pervasive the loyalty is. So if you feel like, I have no idea if I'm safe in this relationship or not, or what I think about anything you just said, that's when we need support. And so your role as leader of your system at that point is to advocate for yourself, which means getting help so you can hear your parts. And advocating like that is also a radical act of self-love.

Haley Radke: Beautiful. I love it. I know people are going to want to talk with you more and learn more about IFS. [00:29:00] How can they connect with you online?

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: My new email address is martasierralmhc (at) gmail (dot) com.

Haley Radke: Perfect. We'll have links to that and all your other episodes in the show notes. Thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself with us and your wisdom. I really appreciate it, Marta.

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC: Thanks, Haley. My pleasure.

Haley Radke: We are wrapping up the Patreon membership sale. I know today is the last day. I will leave it up just a few extra days till May 6th in case you aren't catching this the day it released. But I'm so thankful for all of you who've joined this month. It's a huge gift to me and my family and to the plans, future plans, for the show and hiring [00:30:00] adoptees and lots of exciting things in the works. Hopefully, you will see that in the months to come. I am so thankful for every single person that listens to this show and values the adoptee voice. Thank you. And if signing up for Patreon is just super not on your radar, no worries. If you would share this episode with just one person, one adopted person that you know who would really benefit from hearing Marta's perspective, I know that would be a huge gift to them. So thank you so much for those of you that already do that, that you already post about the show and you tag me, and I can't always respond to all of them but I promise I read so many of your kind emails and where you share the show on Instagram and Facebook. I just really, really appreciate it. So thank you. Thank you so much. I'm so honored to be able to do this work for you. So the link for Patreon, again: adopteeson.com/partner.

Thank you so much for [00:31:00] listening. Let's talk again next Friday

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