288 Bruce Porth Part 1

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/288

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288 Bruce Porth

Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I often share on this show that a great way to build your adoptee community is to join my Patreon group. And today's guest is someone that I have gotten to know over the past few years exactly because of that.

We are so fortunate to hear from Bruce Porth today. He is one of those people that only speaks when he's got something thoughtful and insightful to share. And today's conversation is no exception. Bruce shares about his childhood, some difficult relationship circumstances, his path to uncovering the impact adoption and [00:01:00] family separation had on his life, and what reunion has looked like.

This is part one of two, and don't worry, next week we'll release part two, where Bruce shares more about the healing modalities he's used, including breathwork and psychedelics. I want to give you a trigger warning, we have brief mentions of suicide and sexual assault in this episode. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson. com and next week we will share our recommended resources. Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On. Bruce Porth. Welcome, Bruce.

Bruce Porth: Thank you, Haley. It's really good to be here.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad we finally get the [00:02:00] chance to have a one on one convo. I feel like I've seen you in lots of my Patreon events and gotten to know you through those, but let's deep dive. What, do you want to share some of your story with us?

Bruce Porth: Sure. Yeah. And this is, yeah, this is great. Just me and you, Haley, and the millions of your followers. I can start with a little bit of my story. It's interesting. I just picked up Peter Levine's most recent book called an Autobiography of Trauma. He's really an amazing guy, but he's got a quote in there that I just came across the other night that really resonates with me.

And I think it comes from a Jewish proverb, but the quote is "what is truer than truth", the story. And the meaning of it is that our stories are really important and they can reveal more about us than any specific facts, or evidence based information about us. And people's stories are what I really love [00:03:00] listening to.

They can be extremely healing, and they have been for me. And there's a different take on telling our stories too, Anne Heffron's take on it is, it's like pooping a watermelon. And more specifically around writing our story, I think but I can relate to that as well. So a little bit of background for me, I was adopted at 10 days old in Chicago, Illinois, through a Booth Memorial Salvation Army Hospital.

And my mom was 16 years old and didn't have any resources. This is at the tail end of the the baby scoop era. The decision was made for her, like a lot of women in her situation. And so she went off to Booth Memorial hospital in January or February of 1967. I was born in April and I was adopted at 10 days into a family [00:04:00] that was a young couple, infertile couple, as is often the case, and I came into that family when my adoptive mom was, struggling a little bit with depression. She had just, suffered a few losses in her own life. She was struggling and I found out much later that was the answer to her dilemma at the time, and that I cured her of her feelings at the time of sadness and depression. And that was the way that I started out in that family. My, my adoptive father was pretty emotionally unavailable. He was prone to some volatility growing up for me, and he was a hollow dictator.

And not what I really needed, not what any adoptee or any child needed to grow in a healthy way. My dad grew up in a family that was, there was a great deal of pain there. And, his mother had, [00:05:00] attempted suicide a number of times. Her sister actually died by suicide. Unfortunately, there was a real, legacy of pain that my dad never had the ability to deal with.

And in the absence of any kind of intervention, a lot of that pain just slid right into the next generation, which was me. The family was really shame based and, that was the environment that I grew up in. When I was 10 months old, they, ended up getting pregnant and this is often the case, in some families when there's infertility as I've come to understand from listening to a lot of other people's stories.

And that was the situation with them as well. Not only did I cure my mom of her depression at the time, but I also apparently cured them of their infertility. And I've been thinking a little bit about [00:06:00] that. And being a proponent of family preservation, I was thinking of ways that we could support more family preservation.

And I don't think anybody's ever studied this, but I had the idea that perhaps what we could do for a mother who is under resourced and pregnant and not in a position to care for and raise her baby. Maybe we could match them with some prospective adoptive parents who are struggling with infertility and these prospective adoptive parents would provide financial emotional support through the whole, pre and perinatal period and, get to know the mom really well, go to doctor's visits, things like that and build some kind of, intimate relationship and then see if, any of that would [00:07:00] modulate their fertility, just, being around somebody who is able to get pregnant and being around a young child and having a part in the process of nurturing that, that child, and the mother through the pregnancy, but then the child, in the early stages of infancy, perhaps, I don't think anybody's ever studied that.

But I would be really curious to see if anything would become of that and see what the data would say. I know in my case, my parents had 10 months with me and that was enough to change their biology so that they could become fertile.

Haley Radke: Did you ever experience like feeling different than their biological child?

Bruce Porth: Oh, completely. Yeah. I always felt different.

Haley Radke: And treated differently?

Bruce Porth: No, I wasn't treated differently that I'm aware of. Although I was keenly tuned into whether or not I was going to be treated differently. I know at Christmas time, I would studiously, [00:08:00] count the number of presents, that me and my sister would get, I don't think that was entirely something I did.

I think my sister did it as well. And I think there's some aspect of just normal, sibling rivalry associated with that. But I never felt a sense of attunement in my family, but I also wasn't really, there wasn't much conversation around adoption with me. What my adoptive mom has told me was that she told me that I was adopted, but I think it was when I was around the age of three or four.

And the way that it was, told to me was in a very positive, tone and so I, that's pretty abstract thinking. I would not be able to understand what it meant. It's one thing to know that I was wanted, but, it requires abstract thinking to be able to figure out that the other side of that is that somewhere else I wasn't wanted and wasn't [00:09:00] kept and I wasn't capable of doing that during the period that she was telling me that and then I think she told me a couple of times and then she thought that her job was done. And so the way that I, I did find out that I was adopted was at least in a way that meant something to me was when I was about six or seven years old playing in a sandbox and a neighbor kid was making fun of me for being adopted and so I came home.

I was in tears. I was really in a state of despair and I asked if this was true. I asked my mom if it was true and she confirmed it. And then I don't remember much after that. I think it was, there's a lot there that I probably blocked out, but I do remember asking questions about my, quote unquote, real mom and she had no answers and the question seemed to be difficult for her to answer and it was [00:10:00] clear to me that it was bringing up pain for her.

And so I learned how to not ask questions about it and be quiet. And so we never really talked about adoption since that time, not in any really meaningful way. In fact, my mom passed away in 2020, ironically on my birthday, and in the couple years leading up to her passing, I really wanted to still have a real conversation about adoption with her.

And I'm a full grown adult trying to ask just a basic question, and it took so much effort on my part to even, raise the topic. And what I got back from her was these trite, cliche answers that she loved me as if I was her own and really what it told me is that she's extremely uncomfortable about discussing the topic still after all these years.[00:11:00]

And so unfortunately, I was never really able to in her lifetime have that conversation because it. I really wanted to connect with her around that issue, and I recall reading or hearing something that Anne Heffron once mentioned that really meant a lot to me, where she said that all she wanted from her adoptive mom was to grieve together the loss of her birth mother.

And when I read that or heard that, it really hit me like, yes, that's exactly what I wanted from my mom as well. So in my dad's case, there really was no emotional availability to have any kind of conversation like that about adoption or about, really anything else. That had any depth to it.

So I did grow up without a father, at least the emotional [00:12:00] presence of a father.

Haley Radke: You're a super unique individual in that every conversation I've ever had with you, you seem to lead with your heart and you're so emotionally vulnerable and I know these are skills that you've worked on over the years. Is it because you're like I'm not going to do that. Did you make a decision at some point about how your adoptive father was and like pivot? Or is this more innately you, which I know is a hard question for an adoptee to answer.

Bruce Porth: That's a really good question. There were times I do remember that I would be really frustrated with my dad, and I remember telling my mom on a few occasions I don't want to be like him.

And so there was, some consciousness around that. That I clearly didn't want to follow [00:13:00] in those footsteps to some extent I think it's unavoidable. That's the environment I was steeped in. I'm going to pick up on some of that children map to the state of their parents, regardless of what they say.

And so to some extent, I was, I think I was doing that. But I do have the benefit of having started a healing process pretty early. It was not too long after I left the house that I was forced into starting down some sort of healing path. And so I've been at it intermittently for quite some time.

What really got me into it was when I was a freshman in college, I knew that there was that I was struggling a lot and I had successfully gotten up in my head in the year prior to leaving the home to go to college and I did that with, literature and the type of friends I would hang around with and [00:14:00] it seemed like it was probably some kind of survival mechanism that I knew that I would be out on my own and I needed some kind of foundation to stand on and I knew there was a lot of pain inside me, I think on some level, but I didn't know how to deal with it or what to do with it.

But one thing that I could do was get up in my head and that did carry me through part of my 1st year of college and then it became unsustainable anymore. And a lot of that raw pain, that was lodged in my body going all the way back to relinquishment. I no longer had internal defenses against it.

I think partly just because it was so much. And over the course of a few weeks or so, I started losing my grip on who I thought I was and who I had made myself out to be. This part of me had taken over in an effort to survive. I don't like the term false self because I, it's a very legitimate part of myself that [00:15:00] was engaged in that process of saving my life, but that part can only do it for so long.

And then the authenticity in my body, that real visceral pain just came to the surface and I was literally overwhelmed and had no language for it either. And really had no idea that it had to do with adoption and relinquishment.

Haley Radke: How would you describe your pain? Were you depressed? Were you like having an existential crisis? It's if you don't have oh my gosh I wish I knew who my parents were or like if you're you know, if that's not in your gaze what's the I don't know. Could you describe to people what was happening for you? I remember feeling like I was going crazy at one point. Actually crazy.

Bruce Porth: There was definitely a feeling of that. That feeling of losing my grip [00:16:00] on what I thought was reality. And the orientation points that I think I had established for myself weren't really deeply rooted in who I was authentically. And so without those orientation points, it felt like I was starting to drift out to sea.

But on a physical level, I was. I was feeling nauseous and sick. There was throbbing in my head. On an emotional level, I was feeling, yes, depression. Mostly, at the time, I was feeling a great deal of rage. And it was rage that presented itself in a way that felt way too big to contain. I also didn't know really where it was coming from, and it felt extremely primitive.

And I just didn't know what to do with it. I was completely flooded, to use an IFS term. I did struggle for a couple of days. I found myself in the library of my school, [00:17:00] in the psychology section, trying to heal myself as perhaps any good adoptee would do, feeling like I'm alone in this world and I have to fix things, including myself, on my own.

It was an engineering school, so they didn't have a very big psychology section in the library, so I really didn't get that much in the way of resources there. Plus, it wasn't really what I needed. And unfortunately, at the time, I didn't know what I needed, but I did eventually find my way to a school counselor and really sweet, gentle guy.

And we started out doing sessions once a week, and we got to a point where I just. I had no words anymore. There was no language. Somehow I must have let him know. And I think it was an unconscious form of expression that I was adopted. So he knew that, but I didn't know that's what I was struggling with and [00:18:00] so he asked me at one point, do you think this has anything to do with being adopted? And I just remember, just almost violently saying, absolutely not. And so those defenses were extremely strong and I, I think in an effort to justify those defenses. I was perceiving a hostile reality to that was what I was experiencing.

So I would often just sit there in silence and not say anything. And at one point, he asked me if maybe we shouldn't continue and I was just shocked by the question. And I said, no, we need to be doing this. And looking back on that, I, what I was finding there was just a, a sense of safety, whether I was saying anything or not.

And I wasn't fully aware of how much I needed that safety. Because it literally felt like the world was hostile.

Haley Radke: So when did you come to really unpack for yourself? That adoption was like [00:19:00] even impacted your life in some way.

Bruce Porth: It was actually many years later. I did continue to struggle through my college years I knew I wasn't ready to go out into the world when I graduated and I did really well in school I think because all of my self esteem depended on doing and not being, which I think perhaps has its roots in, the commodification of adoption, that there's value in doing and not necessarily in being.

So I, I did really well, but I knew I wasn't ready to be out in the world. And so I went to graduate school and found a group of friends there that I really seem to resonate with, but I was also starting to drink quite a bit as a way to just put the pain somewhere else because I hadn't kept up with the counseling that I was [00:20:00] doing after that freshman year, I went back home and tried to get through that summer without showing how much pain I was in my family, and even before that's the first school year ended. The therapist was going into private practice and he asked me at that time just let your parents know and we can, I can get the insurance information and we can continue to work together.

And I couldn't bring that to my parents. It didn't feel like an option. It didn't feel safe enough to do that. And the option was to just try to struggle through on my own in isolation. And so that's what I did. But I, I couldn't mask it entirely through that, that first summer home. And I did just break down at one point and ended up, my mom did find me a therapist.

But this was. A while back, and there really wasn't that much [00:21:00] awareness of adoption as an issue, and certainly not, the depth of grief and anger that can come with that maternal separation. And it was around the time, I think that Nancy Verrier was probably thinking about her master's thesis and, starting to put that together and eventually turning that into the primal wound book, but none of these therapists had discovered that yet.

And actually, at one point, again, because I didn't have words, there was no language. I was just acting in. All the feelings that I was having the therapist asked me to just draw what I was feeling. And so I started to draw this picture of the view that someone would have if they were falling headfirst from a really tall building towards the pavement and I didn't totally appreciate, the significance of that until more recently, [00:22:00] but that was illustrating the nothing place that Pam Cordano and other people in the flourish experience have talked about. And for me, the nothing place is not a neutral place. It's a, feels like a really scary place where there's a lot of anger and a lot of terror and a lot of just no orientation whatsoever and just drifting out in space or falling head first towards the pavement, but I wasn't really in a position to continue with the work that I was doing, and instead I started drinking quite a bit. I did get through grad school and then I wasn't really willing to go through and do a Ph. D. I knew I wasn't Ph. D. material and I had seen some friends of mine, fail the qualifying exam to get into the program.

And I knew I couldn't survive a loss like that. So I did set out at that point in time and got a job and stepped out into the world. Totally ill equipped to be out in the world. [00:23:00] It took about, 2 years or so before I did find a recovery path. And I was drinking quite a bit, and I would typically drink about a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at a time, and that would happen a few times a week.

Sometimes what I, I would just, I would be drinking at home, and I would be watching movies, and one of the movies that I would watch was a movie that I had seen back when I was in grad school. And this was probably the first time that I was emerging from the fog, because we had a ritual of every Tuesday night a small group of us would go out to the movies And I was never in charge of picking the movie.

So it was always a surprise to me and this one week we happened to go see this movie called Immediate Family with Glenn Close and James Woods and we got about 20 minutes into that movie before I realized what it was about and then I was just flooded with grief, [00:24:00] but couldn't express it. And so I was biting the insides of my cheeks, just to hold it together.

And it was probably a few weeks after that, when we were out at the bar and I, it was closing time and we were leaving. And I left with a friend of mine walking back to our cars, but we stopped, short of our cars and just started talking. And I had been carrying so much of this pain and never really had a place to express it or find an empathic witness to validate it and as the conversation proceeded something about it must have felt safe enough for me to, disclose that I was adopted, but it wasn't just a conversation about it. There was all of this pent up grief that just flowed right out of me.

And my friend was right there for me. In a really amazing way, and it was the first time that I really felt held in a deep way by anybody. And the next morning I walk into my [00:25:00] office and there's a single rose in a vase that she had left me, as additional validation. And to me, what I was learning through that process was that love exists because there was a part of me that did not believe that love existed at all.

And it wasn't a small enough part of me that I could just set aside and move on. It was a significant part of me. And I, up until that point, had to keep it contained. Because I was never able to find a safe harbor to express it.

Haley Radke: So that was in your early 20s or mid 20s by that point?

Bruce Porth: That was my, yeah, my, my early 20s at that point.

So I was, I was coming out of the fog as early as that period of time. But then I, I did end up finding a 12 step recovery and I actually did an outpatient treatment and [00:26:00] this was another moment of coming out of the fog where part of that process was doing a family tree. I remember when the facilitator that day was drawing my family tree.

And put this dotted line from my family to me, and it was like, oh my gosh, like I don't belong there. I only belong there by a dotted line, not a continuous line, and it just validated that for all of my life it felt like I was connected by just this tenuous thread that could easily have been broken. If I didn't behave, if I didn't get good enough grades, it felt to me like it would jeopardize that connection there.

I think that's probably a common experience for a lot of adoptees. And the, just the amount of emotional labor that we have to do, to get through childhood is just astonishing to me. [00:27:00]

Haley Radke: We were talking before we started recording and mentioning oh, my kids probably get this vibe from the situation that is happening here. And I was like, yeah our adoptive parents don't have to say. We're not talking about adoption. We get the vibe. They don't have to say, I'm emotionally unavailable for you. We just get it. And kids are so perceptive. And we're uniquely so because we're literally looking for life or death resources as soon as we're separated from our mothers. Yeah.

Bruce Porth: Exactly. Infants don't really have any other way to communicate except through the energy that they experience with the parent. And I think it was Einstein who said that the sole governing agency of matter is energy. Everything comes down to energy, I think, including in, relationships.

And, of course, I'm [00:28:00] trying to, energetically bond with, somebody that I can attune to. And I did not have that.

Haley Radke: So going through recovery, also starting to examine this, like starting to come out of the fog is what you were saying, like, when did you first really dive into adoption stuff. I've heard you say some internet things from the 90s, late 90s. Is that right?

Bruce Porth: Yeah, it was interesting that I actually found my mom, but I, I still feel like I was pretty deep in the fog for many years.

Haley Radke: Did you search on purpose?

Bruce Porth: I did. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Bruce Porth: And.

Haley Radke: What made you want to do that?

Bruce Porth: It was the end of a relationship and so this was the kind of relationship that burned really hot, but not necessarily for a very long time. [00:29:00] And so I got more vulnerable in a relationship than I had ever done, up to that point. And when we both had significant issues, it really needed to end, but I wasn't ready for it to end.

And when it did, it threw me into a, a level of pain that I really didn't know what to do with. And even though I had support, I was doing some 12 step Al Anon work and had a pretty tight and close community. But this was territory that they couldn't relate to. And I didn't even know this territory or what to do with it either and how to navigate within it.

So it was at that point when it just became really clear to me that I have to find my mom and I had never really thought about it up until that point. But then it was just like neon flashing lights that it was time. And so I went about doing that. I did [00:30:00] get on the Internet. This is the very early days of the Internet.

And so there was no Facebook, no Instagram or anything like that, but there was. And I don't even remember how I found this, but I found this internet mailing list called AIML Adoptee Internet Mailing List and people would post things and it would go through a moderator and then they would eventually get, get posted.

And so every night I was coming up from work and I was reading through it. And occasionally I was taking the risk to post something and through that I. I'd already started to, I had sought out my non identifying information, which was basically worthless. But through that mailing list, I did find and get connected with an investigator.

And so after thinking about it for a little while I went ahead and decided to pay him his fee, which was 375 dollars. And then in a really short amount of time, literally like three days, he had an enormous amount of information about [00:31:00] me and about my birth family. Including birth certificate numbers, not only of my mom, but her sister and her other children, current and previous addresses.

It's still astonishing to me that other people have all this information that is denied us. And so I, I got that information and I sat on it for 6 months. Because it felt like I had, I found this nugget of gold. And I just wanted to hold it for a little while, and I was preparing for the next step.

And I'm always impressed by people who just, they get the information and they get on the phone like right away. And I needed to move slowly, through this whole process. But I did eventually, I wrote her a letter that coincided with my 30th birthday. And then waited and then two weeks later, she did write back and she was very receptive.

And a year later, I went out and met her face to face along with my 3 siblings, 3 half [00:32:00] siblings. And and we started a relationship and it was really good. She really. She did not want to let me go and hearing that was so validating because I was, I had been telling myself a story that I wasn't wanted.

And so there was the revelation that I got just from the reunion was it, it wasn't that I wasn't wanted. It was that I couldn't have been kept and that lifted a burden off my shoulders that I really did not know I was carrying. And it was just, it was really significant. And so we started a relationship and I was really impressed.

She was, the gifts that she bought me were like, exactly what I wanted. She just she knew me, like, energetically, we were just really on similar wavelengths. By that time, my, my first daughter had come along and she loved being a grandmother and we're slowly getting to know each other.

And unfortunately, just, 4 years or [00:33:00] so after we had met I got a call from my aunt. One morning that there had been a house fire and she was not able to get out and I remember getting that phone call and not feeling a thing almost as if she was a stranger. And I think, at that time, she still was a stranger to me because I still had a lot of work to do with thawing out, from that original wound of the relinquishment before I could actually feel her, her, the second loss of her.

And so that was, it was a really difficult time, getting through that because I really hadn't gotten to know her yet. And what I'm still grieving over is the fact that, what that relationship would have become because she was, so invested in it, in us getting closer. I do feel a sense of gratitude in that she has a twin sister and I have a very good relationship with my aunt.

[00:34:00] And through that relationship, I was able to get a lot of information about my mom that she would, that my mom would have told me, but didn't have the opportunity to do and that information was so incredibly healing for me. And just even little bits and pieces, like discovering that she and my aunt, shortly after I was born, that they were plotting to come find me.

And kidnap me or unkidnap me. And when I heard that it was so validating and I'm still integrating that now with what I, the new material that I'm learning and specifically around attachment and how it's important for the child as I've been learning, just recently for the mother to, to look for and find the child over and over again.

The child needs to know that they're findable and then they can go about the business of finding themselves. And [00:35:00] so knowing that she wanted to find me and take me back. Was really incredibly validating to me.

Haley Radke: I'm really sorry for your loss. That's devastating. I'm so glad you have your aunt. Are you still connected with your siblings?

Bruce Porth: I met all of my siblings when I went out to the Midwest to meet them and somehow we never really connected in a way that led to a sustainable relationship. I'm totally open to it and maybe it's just up to me to reach out and I just haven't done that. So I, I don't know what the future holds there.

I certainly would like to nurture those relationships a little bit more and make stronger connections.

Haley Radke: Did you ever think about looking for paternal side?

I hope I, I [00:36:00] don't gush too much, you just have favorite people or people you're drawn to. And I think. A lot of the friends I've made over the years are folks that are thoughtful, empathetic, kind, and have this thirst for knowledge and have a curious spirit. And I'm just so drawn to folks like that.

I think that's one of the reasons I so enjoy any conversation I ever get to have with Bruce. So I hope you'll come back next week to listen to part two of our conversation. And in the meantime, come join us on Patreon. That is one of the ways the show keeps living, keeps existing and helping adoptees around the world.

adopteeson.com/community. And I'd love to have you. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next [00:37:00] Friday.

287 Ande Stanley

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/287

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. On today's show, we are welcoming Ande Stanley, creator and host of the podcast, the Adoption Files. Ande is a late Discovery Adoptee only finding out accidentally when they were already in their thirties.

We talk about how that happened and the reactions of adoptive family members to Ande finally being in on the secret everyone knew, but them. We also discuss how Ande found their way to the adoptee community and how some initial bad interactions, instead of deterring them, [00:01:00] led the way to Ande becoming a community builder.

I do want to give a trigger warning for today's episode. We mention suicidal ideation at multiple points during this conversation, and there are also mentions of sexual violence. Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adoptee on.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adoptee on.com. Let's listen in. I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Fellow podcaster, Ande Stanley. Welcome, Ande!

Ande Stanley: Hi, it's a pleasure to be here, thank you for inviting me.

Haley Radke: I'd love it if you would share a little bit of your story with us.

Ande Stanley: Okay I am a late discovery, baby scoop [00:02:00] era, intercountry, same race, adopted person. And I can remember when I first started interacting with adoptees and seeing things like LDA and BSE and ICA and realizing I had absolutely no idea what people were talking about. Thankfully, over the last four and a half years or so, I have met a lot of really wonderful people who have been willing to help me become more educated, which has been really nice.

Haley Radke: Four and a half years ago, what made you start looking around for adoptee info?

Ande Stanley: I found out by accident in 1999 when I was 33, but unfortunately, at that time, and for a very long time afterward, I lacked the resources that would have allowed me to feel safe, asking questions [00:03:00] about what I believed about adoption and to begin processing my feelings around the betrayal trauma and the adoption trauma and the rejection trauma and all of the feelings.

And my role in my adoptive family and in my married into family and in my church was a very narrow, very well prescribed role. And when I began receiving messages that my very reasonable questions and feelings were making people uncomfortable and upset, I did what, the little good little Christian soldier that I was at the time.

I basically shut down and did my job, which was to be selfless and to make myself available for the needs of other people and to make them happy. And then in [00:04:00] the early 2000, I became disabled and in 2013, they told me it was permanent. So I began seeing a therapist, not for anything to do with all of the adoption stuff, but to manage how I was feeling about my mobility issues and my chronic issues that I was experiencing and as I began to talk more with him about boundaries and about trauma, some of the adoption stuff started to creep into the conversations and around that same time, I was leaving the evangelical church that I had been a part of for 30 years. And I was also spending a lot of time flying back and forth to Indiana to take care of my adoptive [00:05:00] mother, whose health was failing, and I was realizing that I had a very limited amount of time left to ask her all the questions that I wanted answers to and a lot of things came out during that period between about 2015 and 2019 that were extremely painful for me to navigate. I did not have a support system. And I had attempted for about two years post discovery to really reach out to receive the support that I needed without success.

I'd had some very unpleasant experiences in a purported adoption support group that consisted of primarily adoptive parents who jumped all over me. And so it just left me really leery [00:06:00] and I got to a point where I was in a very dark place and I was actually considering ending my life. And my therapist had been encouraging me to end the isolation that I had put myself into because I just didn't trust people and I was desperate.

So I just went online one day and started typing in, Adoption and kept getting all this pro adoption stuff. And then I thought, okay, adoptee and I just fell into an adoptee space, but I didn't know how to behave in that space. And I had become incredibly good at what I call the three C's, being calm, capable, and just composed, and those are pretty deadly.

They allowed me to survive [00:07:00] in the context that I grew up in, but they were not a good coping mechanism for being able to interact in a support space. And I behaved badly and I got kicked out. And I deserved it. I actually

Haley Radke: Would you say what behaved badly means? Because to become capable and composed would, yeah, say more.

Ande Stanley: I have a background, my degree is in psychology and I have a drug and alcohol counseling certificate and someone in the group who I did not know was also very fragile had asked a question and I had responded from this position of kind of authority. Because my role in my family was also to be the smart one who had all the answers and I [00:08:00] was used to as a, female presenting person having my credentials challenged all the time, we have a credibility problem as adopted people and as female presenting people in our culture.

And so I felt I have to tell people why I know these things. And I was, they reached out to me and said, you need to stop this. And I said I don't understand. They asked a question. I'm just trying to answer it. And they said, if you don't stop, we're going to have to remove you. And I said, but I just, I don't understand.

And I said, I'm sorry. I upset him, but I still don't understand why I'm in trouble because, and they just finally said, you know what, you're gone. It was actually a really good thing. Cuz i had to choose how i was going to respond to that and i had to think about why did I default to that when [00:09:00] I was also

just incredibly fragile at that point but nobody knew that because i was so good at putting on this front. And I decided that instead of talking, I would sit back, and I would listen, and I would read, and I would talk to people, and I would begin to interrogate all of those beliefs that I had about adoption because I had been immersed in this pro adoption narrative and because of a background with family members in medicine and in law enforcement and my own work with at risk kids, I knew that there are circumstances where children do need alternate child care.

I [00:10:00] didn't understand the laws. I really didn't know what I was talking about. And I needed to either withdraw and isolate myself again, or begin to engage in a more thoughtful, considerate way. And I knew that if I withdrew and isolated again, I wasn't likely to survive. And I don't think the people who are listening who know me will have ever heard this and I am forever thankful to the people who listen to my story of having behaved badly and listened to and believed my commitment to change and to learn how to interact respectfully and from a more trauma informed [00:11:00] perspective.

Another member of another support group that allowed me into their space read some of the things that I had been writing and recommended me to a women's adoptee writing group and they welcomed me and were patient with me and kind. And I've become friends with some of them and they know who they are.

And I really want to encourage people to make connections because those connections are what allowed me to still be present. I think so many of us are going through things that nobody knows about.

And if we can come to conversations, With people with the understAndeng that there may be a lot more going on under the surface that we don't know about,[00:12:00]

then perhaps we can come from a kinder place.

Haley Radke: Thank you for being so candid about that. I know you're not the only person who's experienced that. I was just talking with a friend of mine, and she was like, the first time I went into adoptee spaces, I said some things that were from the, naive perspective.

She hadn't unpacked everything yet. And she was like, I got so scared to engage because of all the vitriol that I received. And she was like, I don't even want to be in those spaces anymore, because it can be push someone fully out and who knows what their mental state is at the time, like I, I've seen that damaging stuff too.

It's really tough. So thank you for sharing. And I'm so glad you had those folks come alongside you. It's so interesting to me to hear you share that journey. And now, like I've heard a lot [00:13:00] of episodes of your show and I'm sure your perspective has really changed. Sometimes we talk about becoming radicalized adoptees here and it sounds like you may identify with that as well.

But can you take us back a little bit? Because you said you found out that you were adopted when you were 33 and there's a gap in there before you're like really processing some of that. Can you, do you, are you comfortable sharing how you found out? And I know you had to put it away for a while, but since then, how have you unpacked that?

I'm sorry, I don't have a late discovery experience, but when I hear people that have had that, it makes me so angry.

Ande Stanley: Yes, I agree with you. I'm of the opinion that anything past day one is late. And the amount of damage that causes exists on a spectrum. So the longer you go without that information, [00:14:00] I believe the greater the harm.

I found out by accident, my adoptive mother was downsizing and had decided to send each of her children a box of photographs. She accidentally sent me the box that she intended for her daughter. And in the box was a photograph, dated a month before I was born, and she was clearly not pregnant. And I had been questioning my identity for years.

I felt very wrong in the space that I was raised in because I was so different from the rest of the family. And whenever I would ask questions, I was treated as if I was making things up. I was fantasizing. I was trying to cause problems. And [00:15:00] I learned to be silent and just carry that around with me. So I had finally decided to embrace the identity that I had been told for decades belonged to me.

And then I see this picture and I could not, I couldn't deal with it. So I put the picture back in the box and I put it on a shelf. And then my adoptive mom came out to visit and she wanted to go through the pictures with me and my kids. And I thought, oh, this is going to be interesting. So I brought the box out and she's sitting next to me and our, my two kids are sitting on the couch with us.

And I opened the box and I hand her the picture. And she said, where did you get this? I told her you sent it to me and she got up, got her purse and left. And then she called me later that [00:16:00] day and invited me to lunch at a very popular lunch spot. I arrived, she had chosen a table in the very center of the room, surrounded by people with their families.

It's the middle of the day. And I sit down and she looks at me and she said, you're adopted. And I locked myself in the restaurant bathroom for 30 minutes and just sobbed to the point where I could hear other people in the bathroom, like little kids going, mommy, what's wrong with that lady? And that was how I found out, and there was a tremendous amount of pressure to accept the idea that I had been lied to for a reason, they were protecting me, it was better for me, they were keeping me from the pain of what came before, and eventually over time I realized that [00:17:00] these were just stories that my adoptive mother told herself to make herself feel better.

About deceiving and manipulating me for years for her own ends.

Haley Radke: Didn't you have a younger adoptive brother? I know he passed, but did he know he was adopted? Did you know he was adopted?

Ande Stanley: No, he never learned that because he passed away when he was 12. Our adoptive father died when I was 12 and he was 11, and then he died, my brother died.

And the thing that I find really interesting that out of the four children in the home, two were biological, two were adopted, the two adopted children, we had a very strong bond. The two biological children had a very strong bond with one another, but out of the four of us, the only two children in the home who had night terrors were [00:18:00] myself and my adopted brother.

We both had recurring nightmares. I would patrol the house at night looking for intruders. My younger brother would sleepwalk. So I, in retrospect, looking back, I can see that there were clearly these signs. And when I began going to therapy for my disability, my therapist was talking about PTSD and CPTSD.

And I had always attributed my insomnia and my nightmares and my flashbacks and a lot of these things to the trauma of having lost my adoptive father and my adoptive brother at a very crucial point in my life. I was in puberty. I was entering middle [00:19:00] school, sexual attraction was beginning to be a thing, I found myself attracted to both girls and boys, I was raised in a Catholic space, so this was absolutely not okay, and I knew that if I talked to my adoptive mother about this, she would send me away.

And she subsequently became an alcoholic following the death of her husband. So I'm being parentified from the age of 12. I'm the one calling the ambulance when she's falling down drunk and breaking her face. And I'm still having to go to school and be a good student and present as being calm, composed and capable.

So when I was speaking with my therapist. He asked me, how old were you when you were patrolling the house? Nine. And he said, [00:20:00] that's before these things happen to you. And that's when we began to talk about my being adopted. That is actually the point at which. I began to think, oh, maybe this has affected me more than I realized.

So we began to explore that. And he was the first therapist I had been to who actually described what had happened to me as a loss. He was also the first therapist to acknowledge the religious trauma that I had experienced in the Catholic Church. And then as a member of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches.

He was the first person who really gave me permission to begin talking about the fact that I had always been discouraged from associating with other adopted people. My adoptive mother, when I [00:21:00] was growing up, she always described adoptees as weird and that there was something wrong with them. Yes, she had a brother who he and his wife had adopted two children and they grew up knowing.

And they knew I was adopted. Everyone knew I was adopted. My in laws knew I was adopted. Everyone knew, but nobody told me.

Haley Radke: Your in laws knew you were adopted?

Ande Stanley: oh, everyone. My, my adoptive brother and sister, Adoptive parents, biological children, their spouses knew, everybody knew, neighbors knew, and

Haley Radke: Wait, so your in laws, brother in laws, sister in law, whatever, it's like they knew, did they think you knew?

Ande Stanley: No, they knew that I did not know. They had been told that they couldn't tell [00:22:00] me. And my sister in law actually told my adopted brother, you need to tell her. And he would not. In fact, to this day, he will not talk to me about the fact that he participated in lying to me for years and years and we no longer have a relationship.

Haley Radke: Sure.

Ande Stanley: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Shocker.

Ande Stanley: I know they think I'm a horrible person because if

Haley Radke: I guess they kept secrets from you.

Ande Stanley: Yeah I was told that I need to apologize for becoming upset With people lying to me. I know. That's not at all messed up.

Haley Radke: I'm still stuck on the photo. What about the photo? How did you know? Like I could see myself looking through a box of pictures and like you said it was a month before you were [00:23:00] born. Was there something written on it or like how did you know the date?

Ande Stanley: My adoptive mom was the most organized person I have ever met in my entire life.

She was a bank manager and on the back of all of the photos that she took, she wrote the date that the photo was taken. And, I am, I used to say I'm the elephant in the family, because they are all teeny tiny people. So I'm looking at a photograph of her and her daughter, and she is wearing your typical 60s Jackie Kennedy sheath dress.

With a swing coat and she weighs all of maybe 95 pounds. There's absolutely no way that this person is pregnant. The baby would have had to weigh like a pound and a half and I've seen pictures of myself starting when they, I was in the hospital for 2 weeks after I was [00:24:00] born and then I was taken home with them.

They were my foster parents initially and so I've seen pictures of me starting when I'm about two or three months old. And I was not a little baby. I was a chunk.

Haley Radke: Same. Same. You're a young mom at this time. And my kids are 10 and 12 now. And I'm thinking, you're getting this life shattering information.

It's impacting all of these relationships, and of course you got to put it away. You got, you have a hat to wear you've got roles to, you, you said this earlier you're like, I, this is too much, I have to put it away. I get that now, I really get that, you have to, there's no way to dig into that until you're safe to do so.

Ande Stanley: Yeah, the, I had an 8 and 11 year old. [00:25:00] My husband was working 60 to 100 hours a week. I, I was in a leadership position in my church. The church was very, oh, it's wonderful. You're adopted. Who cared that they lied to you? This was God's plan for your life. It was just reinforcement. And my family was also used to me being very calm in most situations.

The problem when you've been taught to sublimate your emotions is that when you do let your emotions out, they often tend to be too big and too much. So I would swing between numb and just a mess. So they were used to me most of the time being very outwardly having it together. When I fell [00:26:00] apart after discovery, it scared the crap out of my spouse and my kids.

And at that point, I just didn't think there was any reason to really begin. I had never even dealt with the grief from my earlier losses. So this was just another trauma to stick in my, I have this imaginary airplane hanger, and in my hanger are all these containers stacked up full of all of the things that I have shoved into them over the years.

And occasionally I will visit my hangar and some of the containers will wobble around and make strange noises. And for the longest time I was absolutely terrified of opening any of [00:27:00] those containers because I honestly believed it would annihilate me.

Haley Radke: I love that language because we've, I'm sure guests have said before oh, have a little box.

I'm going to tuck away in my closet, but the enormity of scale of these things, like that feels right. There's a train storage yard really near here with those giant sea cans. I'm picturing those, I'm picturing those stacked up in your hangar. It's

Ande Stanley: Yes, in fact, one of the effects of therapy and beginning to deconstruct is this goal I have one day of finding an animator who's willing to work with me to take that imagery and portray myself [00:28:00] because I always wanted to fly. I took flying lessons and I wanted to be a pilot and then I became disabled. And the medication I have to take, I'm not allowed to have a pilot certificate. So I have this picture of kind of being dressed in this sort of steam punky kind of pilot's outfit with the hat and the goggles and my tool belt and dragging these containers out into the light and eventually repurposing them into this plane that I can fly away in.

And to take those things and create something that allows me to soar. And I just haven't found that person who's willing to work with me, dirt cheap.

But that's something that kind of illustrates for me that process of deconstructing of [00:29:00] critically beginning to analyze. What the adoption narrative is and how it has impacted me and how the intersection of all of these different kinds of traumas have added layers to. What I need to navigate in order to have the coping strategies, because I know that the triggers and things will be lifelong, because every stage that we enter into adoption impacts us in an additional or a different way.

So to think that we can just be done with it is, in my opinion, unrealistic, but I think that the process of healing. Is that we learn how to better integrate the things that happen to us and to create new neural pathways so that when we're confronted with those triggers, [00:30:00] we don't default to the ones that worked for us to help us survive when we were younger.

And that's why, when people talk about the fog, I actually prefer the language of safety. That it's not that we were in some kind of walking through some kind of mist or fog, it's that we did not have the safety to begin looking at our beliefs and our feelings. And as we acquired that support system and the feelings of safety, that's when we can begin to look at those things.

And that there's nothing shameful or bad about being in the fog, because I do see people criticized for it, and I've probably done it myself on occasion, [00:31:00] but they're just not in a place where they have the safety to be able to consider things. And maybe they never will. And that's their journey.

Haley Radke: I know you've been a moderator in creating some adoptee safe spaces online.

And I really appreciate that because it serves the community and hopefully does make that space for people to start exploring some of these things, and as they unpack all the different things we go through, whether it's trying to access records, or if we do get access to a reunion, navigating that, and all those kinds of things.

I'm, I feel really thankful for all the people that are willing to do that kind of work, because it's so emotionally taxing. And I'm curious about that for you. How I guess I'm seeing it now oh, you're experiencing [00:32:00] community and then stepping back and listening, I think all of those things probably added to your skills in that area to be gentle with people now when they're wanting to unpack those things. Is that any of that ring true for you?

Ande Stanley: I really do think so. The first person who allowed me back into a support space was incredibly gentle and kind, and also very willing to provide me with pointers, tips, information I had also, as I said, I had a degree in psychology and I had a drug and alcohol rehabilitation certificate.

I had facilitated groups for people struggling with substance disorders and as a survivor myself of sexual assault, I had facilitated groups [00:33:00] for people who had experienced sexual violence in their lives. I didn't know how to translate that to the adoptee spaces, because I didn't really know much about how other adopted people were impacted by adoption.

I really, I tell people I may be 58, but in adopted person years, I'm barely 25. So I really had to listen and learn and I do think that those things have helped me along with the skills that I already had for working in human services. I used to do intake and get to ask people endless questions, which I loved and so I brought those things and then I had [00:34:00] to learn the language and the impacts of adoption, because unfortunately, when you get a degree in psychology and in human services the only time we visited the topic of adoption was when we talked about the heinous twin studies that were carried out. We discussed that, which was horrifying, and we discussed the plight of the Romanian orphans because they were talking about nature versus nurture. It had very little to do with how these children themselves were impacted lifelong.

Being adopted was seen as the solution to their problem, rather than just another trauma and another step that they had to go through that may or may not end up being beneficial [00:35:00] to that child, so it was very disconcerting to realize that I was so ignorant. And, but that's okay. None of us are capable of knowing everything.

It has been difficult at times because people in these spaces, we're all coming into them with our trauma. And many of us are in highly activated states, which if you spend a lot of time studying the nervous system, you'll learn that when a person is in an activated state, they're not operating with their prefrontal cortex.

They're operating from this hind brain that's saying, do whatever you need to do to survive. And they're not really capable of taking in a lot of what might be shared with them or said to them. And they may not realize that the things that [00:36:00] they're saying and doing are they're valid, but those of us who are moderating or who are admin, we also have the potential to become very activated by the things that we're hearing in this space.

One of the best things that one of my professors told us in class was know the things you cannot manage and ask for help when that happens. So we had to spend time identifying our biases and the things that we absolutely could not tolerate interacting with. So for me, for example, I could not deal with, I'm trying to find the most politic way to say this I attended Catholic camp during the summers growing up, and some people familiar with the Catholic church might know where this story [00:37:00] is going.

The founder of our camp, who was there, who knew me, who I have letters from him, he visited our home when I was growing up, was one of the first pedophile priests tried and convicted in the Catholic church in the United States. I have difficulty dealing with clergy members and pedophiles, so that was something that I had to know, that if somebody came into my practice and said, I'm here because I did such and such to these people, I needed to be able to say, I need to step away.

I need to find somebody else to deal with you. So in working in these spaces with adoptees, I've had the tremendous advantage of being able [00:38:00] to say to the other moderators admin, I can't take this one and that has kept me, I think, from completely just burning out at times.

Haley Radke: That's so wise and helpful for other people who are working in the same kind of spaces, because, yeah, it's a lot in and now I see where you're some of your interviewing skills come from and all that you're using all your tools from your life to do the work. I identify with that. I do. You're also a caregiver and you have a lot on your plate, but I've seen, so that's an understatement.

That's an understatement. How about that? I've seen you do things to like, take care of yourself in other ways. I saw you post about your embroidery on Facebook and what other things are you doing to like, take good care of yourself? [00:39:00]

Ande Stanley: Oh, gosh. So this will sound familiar to a lot of people with small children.

Sometimes I just sit in my car.

I've been working on this manuscript for years and I keep joking that I'll dedicate it to the Starbucks drive thru when the time comes. Because I'll sit in the Starbucks drive thru and write. I garden. And I also, because of my disability, I have to stay physically active. I can't sit for very long, so I walk.

A minimum of, several miles a day, and I've done some marathons and some other activities. I write. I do the podcast. It's a struggle actually to find time to care for myself. So ongoing therapy has [00:40:00] been a huge part of that as well, but I realize I'm privileged too, because not everybody has access to therapy.

Haley Radke: Yes, or the, I heard you reference this when you were talking about going to a recent conference and it's not everybody has the money to travel somewhere or like the time to take a weekend off and do those kinds of things, and I'm in that same space, like a privileged space to, yeah, to do this work, even all of those things.

And so hopefully some of the things that we're making will support people in those ways and fill in some of those gaps. I think my understanding of Adoption and critiquing the system, so much of it has come from listening to, hundreds of adoptees share their stories and experiences with me and I'll say with us because you've [00:41:00] had the same opportunity to chat with so many fellow adoptees and hear their stories. And we're, I will just go to recommended resources cause I absolutely want people to listen to your show, The Adoption Files. And I love how you talk about access to our records and you share. We didn't really, we didn't really even touch on this today.

So hopefully people will go and listen to your story about trying to access your records in the UK and the hoops they make you jump through and therapists and just like all this nonsense. It's really outrageous. And so you share a lot of that in your show. But you also talk to other impacted members of the constellation and one of my favorite conversations you had was with my friend, Katie Nelson Burns, who runs the Family Preservation Project and is a part of the Board of Saving Our Sisters.

And that was just like, so good. I just [00:42:00] love that conversation. And thank you for bringing all those things into the world. I just love more adoptee voices, more people talking about the complexities of adoption and the problems in adoption. And the other thing I want to link to in the show notes for people is you wrote this really amazing piece for Severance and I think it will be really helpful and relatable for especially late discovery adoptees.

So I'll make sure to link to that. Is there anything you want to tell us about your show? What led you to create it? And, maybe talk about the name a little bit because I loved X Files.

Ande Stanley: This is funny. People think that I named it after the X Files, but I've never actually watched that show.

Haley Radke: No! You said it somewhere and I was like, oh, it is like the X Files.

Ande Stanley: Somebody else called me like, oh, you mean like the X Files? And I was just, no. What happened is, I was on my own figuring all of these things out, it was 1999, computers, [00:43:00] it wasn't a thing, and I learned that I could apply for my, not just a copy of my original birth certificate, but my adoption file.

Because the UK allows adoptees at the age of 18 to apply for and receive their certificate and a copy of their actual files, and so I was pursuing my adoption files. When I was welcomed into this women's writers group, I listened to other adopted people talking about how they had been denied access to everything.

And I had naively assumed that of course everyone has access when they, at least when they turn 18. Why wouldn't they? It's their information. And I began to hear the emotional and financial and physical consequences [00:44:00] of being denied this most basic human right, knowing who we are and where we come from.

And I was absolutely appalled at the rhetoric that was being used to deny people their documents because I'm thinking. Adopted people in the UK are receiving their documents all the time and I'm not familiar with any riots or any problems that have been caused. By us having access. This is. This is crap, and one of the reasons why I left the Evangelical Church, it's not the only reason, but one reason was in the 90s, I began to hear this very pro adoption rhetoric being used in the churches, and because I had read the Bible many times, and eventually went to school to be a pastor, I knew that the scriptures they were using to justify this were being used completely out of context.

And [00:45:00] they were not promoting plenary adoption and I had been doing some writing anonymously because I still wasn't ready to talk publicly about things and one of the women in the group said you should write a blog. So I started a blog and then she said, I listened to podcasts all the time and I don't hear anyone talking to adopted people about the actual laws in the state where they were adopted or in the country where they were adopted and all of the things they've had to go through to try and get their information. She said, why don't you do a podcast? And I said, I hate computers. And she said, you can just do it. Just try it. So I did. And I constantly blame her for this whole thing. I'm like, crap. She's the adopted genealogist. It's her fault this whole [00:46:00] thing happened. I know she's fantastic. And she's one of those people that I have to thank for still breathing.

But I thought this is ridiculous. So I began interviewing people with the intention of talking about their adoption files. I had received mine. The fact that most people are not allowed to do that. It's just so heartbreaking and then as I began to speak with more and more adoptees about the laws in their state and how those laws have impacted them and how they cope with that, I began to understand that this is not something that ends with the adoptive person because I'm looking at my own children and my grandchildren and how this has impacted them.

And Jamie Weiss, who's fantastic, she's been a part of the Georgia Alliance for Adoptee Rights. She said one day to me, those documents that have been falsified follow you your whole life. [00:47:00] Your marriage certificate, your death certificate, all of this contains information that's not actually real.

And so when your descendants are trying to find information, if they don't know that you're adopted, Then, to them, they're using documents that contain untrue information. So I began to see how family members are also impacted by this. And so I started talking to family members. And then I had a couple of first mothers introduced to me.

Renee Gellin was the first one. She and I spoke. And it began to change the way that I perceived what my own mother had gone through and what other, pregnant people in crisis are experiencing. And that began to make me think if we want to change the laws, if we want to shift the narrative, [00:48:00] we can't just address obtaining unrestricted access for adult adoptees. We have to go back to the root of the problem, which is the cultural beliefs around family, around entitlement, around race, around nationality and ethnocentrism about sexism and misogyny. We have to look at the religious ideologies that are shaming people and coercing people.

It has to be, for me, a more holistic approach. And I absolutely respect the people who are addressing narrow aspects of this topic, because it's so huge. It's impossible for one person to take on all of it. But in talking with different people, I hope to just [00:49:00] jumpstart maybe some conversations among some people who may never have considered that if we ultimately want to change this.

We have to go all the way back to before a child is born and we have to interrogate our beliefs around who should be a parent. And how parenting should occur and how the actual people who experienced the family severance are going to be impacted lifelong.

That's and it's evolving, it's funny because my most popular episodes have actually been the ones where we talked about how adoption is a little bit culty.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Ande Stanley: And that really seems to resonate with people. And the more I've talked with people, the more I've realized there's that intersection between religious trauma and adoption trauma, because so many of us are adopted into [00:50:00] religious spaces.

Haley Radke: Right.

Ande Stanley: And there are so many messages that we receive in those spaces. There's, there are a number of people who are beginning to work in the fields of religious trauma, religious abuse. This is not cult abuse, though there are adopted people who have been adopted into or who have joined cults and they do need that assistance.

This is trauma that occurs in what we would consider mainstream religious institutions. And there's a lot of harm. Some of the people who are addressing that, one of them just read her book, it's When Religion Hurts You, by Laura E. Anderson, PhD. And in reading this book, I would encourage people, even if they, haven't experienced religious trauma to read this book because a lot of what she talks about [00:51:00] embodiment about the neural pathways, we form coping strategies, how we're impacted by the living legacy of trauma, which is a theory put forth originally by Janina Fisher.

About how trauma we received in the past continues to be something we live with throughout our lives, how we manage that, how we set boundaries how we become more in touch with our own bodies so that we can recognize when we're activated and understand how that works. She touches on all of these things.

In her book. So there's a lot there.

Haley Radke: Sarah Edmondson endorsed it. That's perfect because she's the podcast, as A Little Bit Culty.

Ande Stanley: Yes, and that's where Lynn was like, let's call it that. We're both we [00:52:00] both listen to their show all the time. And I think I had to. I think I had to put a disclaimer in there.

We're sorry. We're not trying to rip you off. It's just and we've had the privilege of being invited to participate in a network of professionals and others who are working in the field of coercive control. Some people who are listening may be familiar with Janja Lalich, who is a very well known sociologist who works in the field of cults and cult recovery.

You'll see her on a lot of different Netflix specials, The Program and some others speaking about cults, she is the kind of the founder of this group that I'm a part of. And it's been really great to be able to begin introducing the concept of how adoption involves coercive control [00:53:00] from beginning to end.

And the other members of the group had not considered that, and now we're starting to receive feedback like, oh, yeah, I can absolutely see that because of how many adoptees are in the troubled teen industry. I can absolutely see that because I'm watching how when we do assessments for family placements, how the default is to just take the child away and give them to someone else.

And it just feels like a tremendous privilege to be able to participate in that space and hopefully, again, shift the narrative so that people understand that this is a failed experiment.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. I look forward to seeing what comes out of that. It sounds like that's, talking about [00:54:00] shifting the narrative.

That's a big piece of it. Thank you so much, Ande, for coming on and sharing some of your story with us. And thank you for your work and how you're supporting the adoptee community. Where can people find your show and connect with you online?

Ande Stanley: As I said, I'm not a huge fan of computers. They intimidate me.

So I can be found at the Adoption Files podcast. It's hosted on Spotify, Apple, Amazon. I was so excited when Audible accepted it because I'm a huge Audible Books fan. And then I have a Facebook page called the Adoption Files. oh, WordPress. I have my old blog posts and my podcast are also on WordPress under the adoption files.

Haley Radke: Perfect. We will link to all of those things in the show notes so people can find you [00:55:00] and listen to your show. Thank you.

Ande Stanley: Thank you so much for having me and thank you for everything that you do and for everything that you continue to do.

Haley Radke: I just feel such a sense of gratitude whenever I talk to someone who has made a great effort to give back and to serve the adoptee community in some way.

And, there is always a time when it's our time to come and receive things from community, especially when you're new in community and you're exploring this and you're the one asking the questions and taking advice from people and taking. So to be the receiver, and I know that I have been a receiver of wisdom for many years from folks.

And I feel so thankful that [00:56:00] they're willing to share that. And then to see the receivers become the givers and leaders in community is so amazing. Because what would we have done if there wasn't anyone who went before us to give that info? And the more adoptees that come of age and are finding out like, oh my gosh, there's more adoptees out there and they're finding our podcasts or community from whatever, Instagram or Tik Tok, the more of us they need giving back in this way, the more blogs we need, the more social accounts we need, sharing about our experiences. So thank you for all of you who are willing to do that and be givers of information and sharing sharers. I was going to say, as we as your time in the adoptee community evolves, right? It's pretty [00:57:00] special if you can give back in that way.

So thank you so much, Ande, for what you're doing. I really appreciate it. And I know you're representative of many who have been moderating Facebook groups and starting their own podcasts or blogs or TikTok accounts or whatever it may be. Thank you so much for listening. We are going to have two more episodes in August.

We're going to have a two parter with one of my favorite people coming up in a couple weeks here. So let's talk again very soon.

286 Grace Newton, MSW

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/286

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Grace Newton, a Chinese adoptee, author of the prolific blog, Red Thread Broken, and one of the co authors of the Adoptee Consciousness Model. We discuss the reasons for the rise and fall of international adoption from China and how the critical adoption scholarship of Chinese adoptees is on the rise, including Grace's own contributions.

Grace also gets more personal sharing about her relationship with her Chinese American fiance and how their love story and family have helped her on her racial reclamation journey. Before we get started, I want to personally invite you [00:01:00] to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Grace Newton. Welcome, Grace.

Grace Newton, MSW: Hi, thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad that we finally get a chance to chat. I'd love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.

Grace Newton, MSW: Sure. My name is Grace Newton and I am a Chinese transracial transnational adoptee.

I was adopted from Nanjing in Jiangsu province, China in 1997 when I was three years old. And I was adopted to Madison, Wisconsin. My parents are both white, and I have no siblings, [00:02:00] so I grew up as an only child, and I guess I actually grew up a little bit outside of Madison, in a suburb that's predominantly middle upper class, white, I oftentimes talk about, I think my while I always was really proud to be Chinese American, my early childhood understanding of my ethnic racial identity, I think, was honestly more of a pan Asian one.

As I saw what Asian friends of mine did at home, I would pick up little things, like leaving the shoes outside the door, eating whatever spicy foods, or just little things I would notice and I'd be like, oh, this must be an Asian thing. And I would tuck it away. And so I really was able to explore my identities, both as a Chinese American person and as an adoptee when I was in college, which I think is a pretty common experience for a lot of adoptees because we're finally [00:03:00] on our own for the first time.

And I think that for me, I really realized, that people were seeing me as this Asian woman independent of my family because they didn't know my parents or my upbringing. And so I really had to grapple with, I think, this internal way that I saw myself and the external ways I noticed the world was seeing me.

And I also, when I was in college, I took a class on transracial and transnational adoption that was taught by a Korean adoptee professor. And this class really opened my eyes to a lot of the complex history and, lesser told stories within adoption. And so that was really the catalyst for me to create my blog, which is called Red Thread Broken, where I really used that as a tool to continue processing things that I had learned from that class, [00:04:00] and I've continued writing and thinking about adoption and I'm currently in a PhD program in social work. And my area of research is adoption.

Haley Radke: What led you to pursue your master's and then go into studying adoption?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, I think for me, a lot of it really comes back to the class that I took in undergrad. And my blog during college, I took a class that was called like the psychology of, or maybe it was Asian American psychology and then this adoption class.

And I think those experiences were the first time that I really saw my identities as an Asian American woman and as an adoptee reflected in the research. And I think that. That was a really empowering experience for me. And so in undergrad, I had toyed with the idea of going into academia, but I think I wasn't really [00:05:00] sure if I really liked the idea of academia or if it was just somewhat comfortable because all I'd ever known was being a student.

And so after college, I worked at an insurance company for a little bit. I did an AmeriCorps position with United Way as I was thinking about what I wanted to do. And during this whole time, I had continued writing on my blog. And I think in the back of my mind, I'd always thought still about this idea of academia, but I think simultaneously I had avoided social work for a while because my mom was a social worker and I didn't want to be mini her.

But I realized that I think with my interests and passions and the ways that I wanted to be involved at social work really fit. A lot of those well, and I really like that the field of social work is a values based profession that's [00:06:00] rooted in social justice. And so I decided to pursue my MSW and I knew I wanted to work near in adoption in some capacity. And I'd also been told. Just pragmatically for the academic path, it's recommended to have at least two years of social work, field experience, post masters before starting a Ph. D. And so I went to Washington University in St. Louis for my MSW, and after that, I worked in public adoptions in the state of Wisconsin for a couple of years.

So I worked primarily with foster youth who were being adopted by their current foster parents, as well as some hopeful adoptive parents who were interested in adopting specifically from the public foster care system. And so a lot of [00:07:00] my just like personal engagements have been with international adoptees and a lot of the my own experience as a Chinese adoptee, of course, is an international one.

And so I think that my experience working in Wisconsin in public adoptions was in a part to also complement my other knowledge and just see where are all of these similarities and the differences and in all of these adoption stories. And so after, yeah, about two years working in public adoptions, I started my PhD program to continue looking at these questions from like the research lens.

Haley Radke: If you're comfortable sharing. How was that personally for you to work in adoption for two years. Did that take a toll because we'll get into this within a little bit you were a part of working on the adoptee consciousness [00:08:00] model and it sounds like that to me that you had already come into some consciousness about adoption and saw some of the difficult things in it. And of course, now you've gone on to study it even further. So personally, as an adoptee, with some of those formed opinions and I'll let you say what they are. How was that? I'm like, Oh my gosh, how did you do that?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, it was definitely challenging at times, and I think while I had worked informally in adoption spaces as, like a facilitator for small groups or teen support groups, in those circumstances, the adoptee themselves were, like, who I was primarily working with. But in my role, public adoption social worker. My clients were both the adoptive parents or prospective adoptive parents and the soon to be adoptee. And I think that it was really [00:09:00] challenging holding this kind of dual identity as both an adoptee and adoption professional. And there were certainly some situations that, that I felt less certain about than others.

I think I always tried to just really reflect a lot of care for the children that I was working with and answer their soon to be adoptive parents questions. With all of my background information, I did not disclose to I don't think any of the adoptive families actually that I was an adoptee based on my Anglo name. Some people may have been able to guess. And there were definitely comments made by some of the adoptive parents regarding birth family that were really difficult to deal with. And I would try to interject or again, intervene in ways that were really beneficial to the child because at the [00:10:00] end of the day even the adoptive parents who I would say, maybe didn't have a complete understanding of all of these complexities of the system they were entering.

I could genuinely see that they wanted the best for the child and their care. And I think trying to work together to create that as the outcome is the goal. And I think that, in terms of, my own knowledge too, I think at times it's been really easy to see all of the corruption and cases, particularly in international adoption, where I feel like international adoption as an intervention was completely unnecessary.

And I think, working with some of the kids that I did really learning their stories too. And I think. It did become quite apparent to me that some of these situations the children would never and should never go back to the circumstances that they were in originally. [00:11:00] And so I think it did also force me to think in a more, more holistic and more complex way to of adoptions will always exist in some capacity.

It may not be international forever, but kinship care, informal adoptions, even formal adoptions. And yeah how do we make this experience the least harmful as possible. Because I think it is unrealistic to say end adoptions altogether.

Haley Radke: I think from someone like me who comes from a family preservation standpoint, and it sounds like that's your perspective as well, it is so helpful to see there are the asterisk cases where, and I think the public sees all of them as these asterisk cases these ones really are necessary.

But truly, there may be some that are necessary. And we are looking to the whole and [00:12:00] seeing the problems in the system and trying to fix the upstream things and I know it's like it probably is always going to be around maybe not how do I say this? I think there's a lot of people that talk about the things you mentioned like kinship care informal adoptions, legal guardianship, and making sure we're not changing the child's identity and having access to their medical history and all those kinds of pieces as well.

So there's there's a huge thing to look at. And it's not just like family preservation is the only way and that that just is excluding such a grand part of the problem. I mentioned that you helped work on the Adoptee Consciousness Model. And so I love when I see adoptees working in the research, because we've talked about this before so many times on the show what's talking about us? Who's researching us? And we need to make sure we have [00:13:00] evidence for the things that we're talking about anecdotally. So can you talk a little bit about how that was to work on that? And also thank you for your work on that. And my second part of that is how have you seen it now in use in adoptees vernacular? Have you heard people say that to you?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, it's been a really exciting project for me to work on. And so I guess I've been working primarily with Dr. Susan Branco and JaeRan Kim, who approached me after I published my first peer reviewed article called The Trauma and Healing of Consciousness, which was an autoethnography that looked at, or I guess it used my experiences as an adoptee in academic settings to propose this trauma and healing of consciousness framework.

Where I and so [00:14:00] that paper came about because I had been looking at a lot of literature about trauma in my MSW program. And there's a lot on historical trauma and collective trauma, intergenerational trauma, but I was thinking about the ways in which just coming into this knowledge about the history, complexity, different child removal projects was traumatic.

And I didn't need to be intergenerationally, like connected to these other groups of adoptees by a shared lineage to all of that trauma that's embedded in this community and in these adoption practices and so yeah, Drs. Branco and Dr. JaeRan Kim reached out to me after reading that because they had already been working on the first paper or like the Adoptee Consciousness Model.

And so I was able to join in that [00:15:00] project. And I think that I really have seen an uptick in the use of just consciousness language around the adoptee community. And I feel so fortunate that this work is really resonating with people. We draw upon some other models of adoptee awareness. And then of course, the kind of ubiquitous language of coming out of the fog and our, the adoptee consciousness model, instead of just, like a pre and post state proposes these five different touch points that adoptees work through in different stages of coming into consciousness around this identity.

We view this as a kind of a in a spiral, but not necessarily a linear way that you have to go through all these steps in order, just that you can bounce around the spiral and different events, like overturning Roe v. Wade or having a child [00:16:00] or any other like large major events might send you through that spiral once again.

And that it's just, it's not really this pre and post thing, it's the never ending process. And so I'm really excited that this has been received so well by adoptees and we did a study with a number of focus groups and I felt really privileged to hear all of those stories of our participants and just to see how these different touchstones are reflected in each of their experiences of coming into consciousness around their adoptee identity.

Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for your work on that. I had a whole episode on the adoptee consciousness model. So we'll link to that in the show notes if people want to hear a little bit more about it. And we'll link to the paper as well, because it's very accessible for folks to read. And I love how earlier you were like, I went to [00:17:00] this university class and that probably brought you right to one of those touch points, right?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, definitely.

Haley Radke: So I think it's neat that your autoethnography led into working with Susan and JaeRan. That's awesome. I'm curious about some of the things I saw you present about at a recent conference as well. So I got up very early one Saturday morning when you and a group of your peers were presenting.

And I don't know, maybe I was the only one on Mountain Time. You guys were on Eastern at least, but it was called Carving Out Space Chinese Adoption Studies. And one of the very first things that your group was talking about was how, because there's so many Korean adoptees, and that program started earlier, that those folks have been doing research and working in the field for longer [00:18:00] and have, dominated some of the space in terms of adoptee research and of course, as they should because they've been doing this long and there's a lot of work on it.

And so in talking about Chinese adoptees, starting in the early nineties, that's when the Chinese adoption program internationally started up as 91. Is that right?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, the Chinese adoption law was, it was signed like December 29th of 91. So functionally it started around 1992.

Haley Radke: Okay. Okay. So 92. And so one of you mentioned that it's we're all now coming of age and to having our masters and PhDs and coming into the adoptee research space. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I never thought of that. So can you share a little bit more about that? And what was it like to present with your peers at the [00:19:00] ASAC conference? Cause I was like, I wish I could be in that room. Cause it felt like really something special.

Grace Newton, MSW: Thank you for getting up early and joining us virtually since you couldn't be there. I think, yeah, it was, it's, it was really wonderful being at ASAC. It was my first time there. And I think that in several years, I just have seen a lot more leadership and involvement from Chinese adoptees, which is really exciting to me as a Chinese adoptee. I have been on the advisory council of the KAAN Conference, the Korean American Adoptee and Family Network.

So I've been on the advisory council there for about six years as a Chinese adoptee. And I remember my first time attending. I was like, oh, I don't know if this is like a space for me because like it's so Korean and I have felt so welcomed there. And I think in the last couple of years, [00:20:00] the Chinese adoptee attendance has really increased at KAAN specifically, as well as Chinese adoptees leading workshops and presenting there.

And I think that part of this, is because there aren't really big established conferences for Chinese adoptees yet. And so I, I think that this is a way for us to get involved in what is already existing, but I have seen changes too, in terms of the families with children from China, New York.

Group is the first FCC group, I think, to turn over leadership to Chinese adoptees, and it's rebranded in the last couple of years as the Chinese Adoptee Alliance, and they're hosting events. And so I think that we are going to see a big increase in Chinese adoptees in these spaces. And I know of at least a couple of, I know there's LiLi Johnson, [00:21:00] who's a Chinese adoptee professor.

She was at UW Madison for a while, and I think she's somewhere in Canada now. So there are a few Chinese adoptees who are on the older side of the, Chinese adoptee cohort who are in these academic spaces. And I think part of the rationale for the conference round table that we shared at ASAC was just, yeah, I think that because the Korean adoptees are so large in number and have been so active, that in some way, they've served as this blueprint of who Chinese adoptees might be, because we are also a huge cohort, East Asian, who've been primarily adopted to the U. S., but I think, there are really specific and unique factors involved with Chinese adoptions that will make us and our group inevitably different from the Korean adoptees.

Haley Radke: One of the things you spoke about, [00:22:00] sorry, I'm using the collective you. My notes, I don't have indicated who said what every time.

I have a couple points where I know it was you, but one of the points someone made was that as Korea was winding down, then Chinese adoptions picked up. It was like the right quote unquote right timing and so there's several hundred thousand Korean adoptees and then the Chinese adoption program.

Could you speak to this a little bit like how it has it's not fully closed but how it has wound down over the last few years because of some policy decisions and then what would your estimate be of how many chinese adoptees there are.

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, I think the current estimates are about 160, 000 Chinese adoptees globally and about 83, 000 of [00:23:00] those Chinese adoptees have been adopted to the United States.

China allowed foreigners of Chinese ethnicity to adopt and some foreigners to adopt on kind of an ad hoc basis before 1991. But really, the Chinese adoption law in 1991 was what formally opened China to international adoption. And yeah, I think that when we talk about all of these international adoption systems, we have to remember how interconnected they are and, the 1988 Olympics was really what kind of started the end or major decline of Korean adoption and the just like shame around the article that came out during that time about how Korea was like exporting undesirable children. And 90, 1991 when China really opens to international adoption is not very far away from 1988 when Korea starts winding down. [00:24:00] And I think, yeah, there's a lot of factors. So Korea, which had been a major, source of adoptable children no longer is a source.

I think we'd already seen a number of adoption and trafficking scandals in Latin America, but China at this time was considered a clean country for adoption because all of these, predominantly at the time, infant girls who had been abandoned on the streets were viewed as genuinely orphaned, and I think that the fact that so many of the girls from China were abandoned anonymously due to China's policies were also attractive to adoptive parents who, a lot of parents had some concerns or hesitations about potential birth parent involvement from that would be involved with domestic adoption, but because these girls in China [00:25:00] were abandoned anonymously on the street, there's really no possibility of birth parent involvement there. So there are a lot of factors that kind of created this really desirable group in China. And so throughout the 90s and early 2000s, Chinese adoptions were on the rise. I think the peak of Chinese adoptions is about 2004 or 2005. Around that time is also when the Hunan scandal is made public to the world where there were, it was discovered there were a number of children, girls from Hunan province all trafficked among and circulated among several orphanages in that province when one orphanage's supply ran low.

So I think that particular scandal was really what turned this view that China was this entirely like legitimate [00:26:00] adoption program from all these voluntarily relinquished girls and of course under the one child policy where families, were punished through loss of income jobs, second children, unregistered children not having access to citizenship or schooling.

It's really hard to legitimately claim that any of these relinquishments of children were voluntary. And I think another turning point for Chinese adoption is around 2009, at which point China becomes basically entirely a special needs program. And so in the 1990s, when China opened adoption, the population of adoptees was 98 percent girls.

And then, yeah, by 2009 it's pretty much entirely special needs, I think in 2010, the US [00:27:00] State Department stopped keeping track of which children adopted from China had disabilities, because it was pretty much understood that they all did. And yeah, so China, yeah, post 2005, adoption from China overall has been on the decline, but the percentage of children who are being adopted, the special needs has increased, and then I think another particularly important demographic shift in this is also the number of boys who are being adopted.

As the number of special needs adoptions from China increased, the gender skew of who was being adopted really evened out too. And so around 2016, that was the first year that actually more boys from China were adopted than girls at 51 percent of the children were adopted. And so I think because a lot of the early research on Chinese adoption really involved the girls of 1990s, there's a just In some ways, a kind of flattening of [00:28:00] Chinese adoptees of that's who Chinese adoptees are.

But after the 2000s, there really is this kind of like second wave of special needs kids. And then also that about maybe like 13, 000 boys adopted from China who I think are just erased from Chinese adoption research because there's been, probably first huge group of Chinese adoptees was nearly all girls.

Haley Radke: I don't know if this is in your wheelhouse or not so I'm gonna ask you like I don't know if this is your area of expertise I know, you know a ton about this, obviously. I'm curious about the attitude in China about adopting children and so one thing that was mentioned in the presentation is that if you were to seek for your biological family, a lot of parents [00:29:00] would not want to be found because of the shame of abandoning a child, and that would be not a good situation to come into.

But, in my estimation, it's like this, the one child policy and then the two child policy and three and now that's been abolished, but that was the impetus right for abandoning children. And so I don't know how many children are available for adoption in China now, and culturally, is that something that's accepted?

I, was just at this screening of a film about Indian adoption and there's, some talk about culturally, if Indian people want to adopt and those kinds of things. So can you speak to that at all?

Grace Newton, MSW: I think Kay Ann Johnson's book, China's Hidden Children does a really wonderful job complicating the one child policy and notions [00:30:00] of like cultural preference for sons in China.

And I think what her book really shows is that there has been a longstanding pattern of domestic adoptions within China, some of them formal and some of them informal, but the 1991 Adoption Law of the People's Republic of China. The goal of that really was, in part, to crack down on domestic adoptions and promote international adoptions. And so part of the requirements of that original law was that adoptive parents had to be over the age of 35 and also had to comply essentially with one child policy by not having any children in their home. And so culturally it would be pretty uncommon for Chinese families to be 35 years of age and not have started a family and so I think that the adoption policy [00:31:00] essentially did what it was meant to do.

And in shaping who was able to adopt and a lot of western adoptive parents who participate in international adoption, a lot of them do happen to be older and do happen to have had infertility issues, which may be delayed their, family creation strategies. And so I think. That and then we see again, and I think around a 2007 reform, which is around, I think, the time that China's beginning to realize there's going to be some population issues from the one child policy, there's like a relaxing of domestic adoption laws. And so I think that one of the common issues that we hear about in terms of Chinese adoptions is around not telling the adoptee that they are adopted, which is something that, is much more possible when it's like a same race [00:32:00] adoption versus in my case, which was like a transracial international adoption, and I think that personally, in my experiences when I've gone back to China, I've come across a lot of people who, perhaps weren't necessarily aware of the extent of international adoption.

And then also, I think an interesting response is just in line with like dominant narratives of adoption. Just oh these are my family now and my parents here in the US and that's my family. And to be grateful to them that they've raised me which I am. And that, but also, there's this family in China that exists, and so I find that kind of interesting given Chinese cultural beliefs around filial piety and importance of ancestors and paying homage to that.

But I think the kind of sense that this is my family now. And yeah, I guess I wonder, one of the things that I wonder though is, we talked about [00:33:00] how all these Chinese adoptees are coming into age now. What that also means is that the siblings, of adoptees who were kept are coming into age.

And I wonder if things that were too hard or too shameful for parents to talk about are going to be exposed in terms of the siblings who want to know who and where their siblings are. And I have seen in some Chinese adoptee, or searching groups that, yeah, there are some siblings of adoptees who are searching for this missing sister..

Haley Radke: Wow, that's so interesting. I'd never thought of that, in zooming out to like the 30, 000 foot view. And one of the comments made in the presentation was that the Chinese government was using international adoption of their children to build [00:34:00] relationships with other countries. And all the powers that be in Korea or China or any of the other countries that have been exporting their children, there's no thought of the impact it has on the child in their personal well being and, all of those things. Before we do recommended resources am I right that you're getting married very soon?

Grace Newton, MSW: I am August 31st of this year less than three months away.

Haley Radke: So when we're recording, you have just a few months to go. Congratulations. So excited for you.

Grace Newton, MSW: Thank you.

Haley Radke: You wrote about your fiance on your blog. Would you just mind sharing a little bit about your relationship and how that's maybe helped you reclaim a little bit more of your ethnicity?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, sure. The starting point of that is that I experienced a breakup [00:35:00] before I started dating him. And I think in my early twenties, I was fairly open to just, meeting new people. And I think I didn't really think about what I wanted in a family life or home life. I was just like focused on my schoolwork and, Figuring out like that process and enjoying friends and, and yeah, just exploring meeting, meeting new people.

And then I think when I had a breakup and it was a relationship that, I had talked about future oriented things with and the possibility of a marriage and family and those things what would that really look like? I think I was in my late 20s, 27, I just finished my master's program, and I had started to think about those things differently.

And I think what became apparent to me was [00:36:00] that it was important for me to have this identity, like collective identity as Asian Americans. I think I was prioritizing like Chinese American. But Asian American identity, and I think that in my relationships with white men, I had also, when envisioning a family, I realized, that the burden of passing down Chinese culture, or holidays, or language, all of that would be on me, and related to, this culture that sometimes I feel like very inadequate in and the idea of having a partner who could share that responsibility, but also the joys that come with that became more important.

And so I really did prioritize at that point, dating Asian men, which was harder in Wisconsin and I was like, oh, I'm going to have to move to New [00:37:00] York or California or somewhere if I really want to prioritize this, but I met my now fiance right in, in Wisconsin. And of course, we connected about it, like a lot of.

Just like silly things and food and interests, but I think a lot of the ways that we connected initially were cultural too, in terms of being able to talk about trips back to China and for me, how I'd say, like, when I was in China, I was like the most American and simultaneously the most Chinese I ever felt, and to have someone like look back at me and totally understand that feeling was really chill and I think for me in I yeah, you mentioned I had written about this and I think being with a Chinese American person, I think there was a lot of internalized racism that I had to undo within myself in order to really think about the why I would want to [00:38:00] prioritize that in a relationship.

And I think that also there was a lot of internalized racism that came undone just being in this relationship. I think about my eyes or moles on my face and things that were like different and that made me different. And loving my fiance who has, similar features, like loving that on him I think it's made it easier to really like wash away some of those things like about myself. No, I love this on him. Why wouldn't I love this on me too? And so that's been a really remarkable part of this. And I think also being embraced by his parents here has been really special. And so I think you know, so much of adoption, we talk about this like loss of family, loss of culture, loss, so many losses.

And I think more than just my fiance himself, gaining like a family, a Chinese [00:39:00] family that, that has been really a profound thing for me too. And I think that. I recognize given the structure of the Chinese street abandonments and the complexities of and language barriers and the time that has elapsed since I left China that it may not be possible for me to find birth family.

But having this like intimate relationship with a Chinese family that has embraced me has been a huge gain for me. And I think, yeah, it's allowed me, I think also to just see so many different ways of being Chinese and Chinese American and I think watching my fiance's interactions with them and thinking about okay maybe there are some things that I wouldn't have known about Chinese culture or whatever even if I had stayed in a Chinese family, I'm like, oh, okay. I don't need to burden myself with that worry so I think yeah [00:40:00] it's all been a healing process.

Haley Radke: That's so lovely. I'm so happy for you. Congratulations. I would love for folks to check out your blog, Red Thread Broken. Congratulations on 11 years of keeping a blog going. That is impressive, Grace. Oh my goodness.

I love seeing the progression. You write about all kinds of things, like personal things, academic things, media critiques, or things that are happening right now and social critiques, I guess I could say. And there's even a post from your mother who we didn't talk about this, but you alluded to that they're supportive and.

Grace Newton, MSW: Why I as an adoptive parent.

Haley Radke: Why I an adoptive parent yes, I'm not pro adoption. I'm from 2014, and that got picked up in several places and had a huge audience. That's really a neat one to read for folks. And in 2014, you were talking about China's one [00:41:00] child policy and writing academically as a university student. So it's really neat. You have this whole history of things there.

I was like, I'm going to read your whole blog. I couldn't cause there's so many things. So I'd love for folks to check it out if they haven't already. And is there a good spot? What do you send people to when you're like, I have this really impressive blog that thousands and thousands of people read. Do you like, where do you send them?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, I don't have a specific spot and I probably should make a, here's a good starting point. Read these 10 pieces. So maybe I'll do that this summer.

Haley Radke: Okay, perfect. I have to do that too for Adoptees On. Once you have a couple hundred posts, it's it can be overwhelming for new people.

So I know they'll come in and check that out. And we'll link to a couple of the highlight pieces in the show notes for folks. What did you want to recommend to us, Grace?

Grace Newton, MSW: A book that's just been really sitting with me this year is China's Hidden [00:42:00] Children, which I talked about a little bit earlier. And I think that It's a little bit older, I think it came out in 2016, and unfortunately, Kay Ann Johnson, the author of this book, has since passed away, but I think this book is really a remarkable piece of her legacy that she's left to the Chinese adoptee community specifically. It's a difficult, I, okay, I would say it's an easy read in terms of the book, and then the content, I would say, is very difficult, and for Chinese Adoptees, especially, who do decide to read it, I would say, take care have good people around you, but it's, I think, a remarkable book that really complicates the notion of Chinese adoptions and the one child policies role in that and this overarching, I think, myth that surrounded early adoptions from China that, there's this kind of disdain towards girls within Chinese culture or [00:43:00] and what Kay Ann Johnson really shows in this book is how wanted girls from China really were within China, and how many people sacrificed and went to great lengths to hide girls who they had given birth to, and even girls who they had adopted within China who were quote unquote, over quota children.

And I think that while it can be difficult, really the resounding message to adoptees from the book is that whatever people say on this side of things we really were wanted by people in China.

Haley Radke: Thank you, that sounds wonderful to read and illuminating. I was trying to think of the name that someone else recommended this documentary about the one child policy and we also gave trigger warnings for that because it is there's just so much hurt and trauma and [00:44:00] I think it's just good to be well informed frankly, it's easier to put our head in the sand, but we shouldn't be doing that. So.

Grace Newton, MSW: Was the documentary One Child Nation?

Haley Radke: Thank you. Yes, it was. And that is yeah, so hard to watch. Thank you so much for sharing some of your expertise with us today and your personal story and for your work on Red Thread Broken and The Adoptee Consciousness model and other things I know you have coming out soon.

I'm so excited to follow your academic career as we go on through these years. I'm sure I'll be reading lots of things you've put out. Where can folks connect with you online?

Grace Newton, MSW: Yeah, so as you mentioned, I have a blog called Red Thread Broken, so you can find that at redthreadbroken.com and then on Facebook and Instagram, you can also find me, my Handles Red Thread Broken.

And I guess on Twitter, I'm @GracePingHua. So G R A C E P [00:45:00] I N G H U A. That's where I am.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thanks so much, Grace.

Grace Newton, MSW: Thank you.

Haley Radke: We send you our congratulations, Grace, as you get married this summer. So excited for you. And Grace is continuing on in her PhD program and I'm just cheering everyone on who is working on critical adoption scholarship. It is so important. It is so important based on some of the recent trash research that I've seen coming out from supposed organizations that purport to support adoptees, and it's no, you're actively fundraising to support more families to be separated.

So let's be listening to adoptees who are doing this work. Some of the [00:46:00] questions that people come up with who do not have lived adoption experience personally are just outrageous. Honestly, I don't even know how they pass through some of the legal hoops and things that, that academic scholarship needs for them to go through, right?

Questions are supposed to be unbiased, impartial, not leading in some way when you're doing academic surveys. So when you see things come out that are very skewed or slanted one way, make sure you put your reading glasses on and you dive in personally to make sure you understand what's happening.

So anyway. As I was saying, I'm cheering on the adoptees who are looking at these issues and are able to give a perspective that is often unheard. And speaking of unheard, thank you for those of you who are supporting the [00:47:00] show, either by just sharing the episode with one fellow adoptee, maybe, a Chinese adoptee and they want to get hooked into adoptee community.

This episode is a great way to start and following Grace's blog and the ways she's sharing to connect with fellow adoptees. Another way to support the show is to share it on social media, to comment on our Instagram or share our posts when they go out or folks that are sending donations through PayPal or supporting on Patreon.

You're keeping the show alive. So it just, thank you so much for that. Thank you for listening to adoptee voices and let's talk again very soon.

285 [Healing Series] The Seven Insights into Adoptee Attachment with Pam Cordano, MFT

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/285

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Haley Radke [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's episode 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.

We are joined by Pam Cordano talking about the seven challenges of adoptee attachment, which include profound ongoing chronic misattunement, disconnection from our instincts and commodification. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to our [00:01:00] Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We'll link to everything we'll be talking about today on the website, adopteeson. com. Let's listen in. I am so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Pam Cordano. Welcome, Pam.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Thank you. It's so fun to be here with you again after a while.

Haley Radke

I know we get to talk regularly and you come to a lot of Patreon events, but you're not always on the main feed. We got to have you back on the main feed more. Yes. I know that your insights for adoptees have been so tremendously helpful and one of the things that we've relied on for years as adoptees looking at adoption with a critical lens and how it's impacted us has been the Primal Wound, which is a little bit [00:02:00] controversial sometimes, because it was written by an adoptive parent.

And so when I heard you. Do this talk on seven challenges in adoptee attachment. I was like, oh, finally, like an adoptee is breaking these things down for us. And you put into words a bunch of things for me personally, and I know others who've heard you share this. So do you want to share a little bit more about this and I don't know, do you think it relates to primal wound at all?

Pam Cordano, MFT

I do. Actually, that book was really important to me when I read it and the Primal Wound, it gave a structure and started to outline something that really resonated with ways I had been feeling inside that I didn't have language or concepts for.

And [00:03:00] so I was really grateful for that book actually when it came out. That was such a long time ago, but as I've lived more into my own healing as an adoptee and having been a therapist for a long time I've been really, grappling with our leading ideas about attachment theory and specific ways that I think that leading attachment theory is inadequate for us adoptees.

I just started to think about trying to name some specific things that are actually, that have substance to them that are in the way of us feeling comfortable attaching. Not just to other people, but to the world at large and to our own selves. Just attachment as a whole thing. Maybe how this relates to the primal wound is maybe some of what I'm trying to figure out has to do with looking under the hood of us.

And it's not just more external and conceptual, but it's looking under the hood.

Haley Radke

Every [00:04:00] time I get one of those new books, like What Happened to You or, all the the leading Gabor Mate book or Bessel van der Kolk or something like that. I literally always flip to the index first and see if they have adoption in it or adoptee and I keep looking for them to talk about us we're good case study. And they don't.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. I think that I think it's very hard for somebody not adopted to understand what it's like being us under the hood, they're just describing cars, but we're like in the engine of, we live in the engine of us and it's complicated in here.

Haley Radke

Okay. So even Nancy Verrier with a Primal Wound, right? She's looking from the outside. It's not her personal experience. Yeah. Okay. You're under the hood.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Under the hood. And I'll just say psychedelics have been huge in helping me get under the hood and [00:05:00] helping other people get under the hood who are trying to understand these huge defense structures that have been keeping us alive from the beginning. It's very complicated in here.

Haley Radke

Before we get into the seven, can you just set up why attachment is so important? And I know you talk about the limbic system and the brain and that, can you set that up for us?

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Trauma attachment 101. This is what I guess, what I would think is important to say right now is that we have our amygdalas.

The amygdala is the fear center of the brain and the amygdala is telling us that something dangerous is going to happen or something dangerous is happening. So it's looking for danger and the amygdala is part of the larger system called the limbic system. The limbic system is a larger system.

The amygdala is part of the limbic system and the limbic system stores highly charged memories and manages all of our sleep and appetite cycles and our moods [00:06:00] and our ability to bond. So the limbic system is where we bond from and the limbic system is where we need to connect with other people. With them and their limbic systems connecting with us. So that's where the party is of attachment, the limbic system. Okay.

Haley Radke

Okay. We're in the attachment party. Got it.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And that's one reason that when adoptees get together, we don't even have to make a decision. We, people can just feel the difference that the safety being with another adoptee, even if our stories are very different because there's a certain kind of mutual understanding that helps our systems relax and then bonding can happen more comfortably and easily among adoptees. That's why adoptees are so important to each other.

Haley Radke

That's cool.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. So there's this therapist up in Seattle who is not adopted. He's an attachment [00:07:00] specialist. And I just said to him straight up like I'm an alien. I was like okay, explain attachment to me from your point of view. And he said, so I wrote down what he said.

He said this, he said, the baby needs the mom's limbic brain to attune to the baby's limbic brain. When attunement happens, we feel safe. The baby learns she can be found by the mother. She is findable and worthy of being found. If someone finds her, she's not alone. If she is found, someone worked to find her.

If this happens consistently, she does not need to doubt her value. She can be found in the deep, young places. As she is found, she also learns to find more of herself. This paragraph has become very important to me because it just names the magnitude of what didn't happen for [00:08:00] me and I think what doesn't happen for most or any adoptee, because how can pause, pause right there.

Haley Radke

How can a stranger fill in for that?

Pam Cordano, MFT

How can a stranger with a, with an entirely different agenda, the agenda maybe is becoming a mother, becoming a father, starting a family, adding to a family, conquering infertility. I don't know what the agenda is, but it often isn't the agenda of simply opening one's system to a horror of pain in a baby.

Like when I think, I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but when I think about the day I arrived, to my adoptive parents, I probably needed the Red Cross to show up, like with the helicopter and that silver wrap stuff that they wrap people in to keep them warm. I was a wreck looking back and hearing stories from my grandparents, like I'd stopped crying, I was, I'd been through six months of [00:09:00] hell and had shut down natural systems like crying just to stay alive.

That was the day that was so exciting to my parents. They, they had the neighbors come over and it was like a celebration, like a brand new, gotcha day kind of situation. So it was just It's not just like the limbic resonance wasn't there, but there was this massive misattunement, actually, and I don't know how that couldn't be the normal story. Do you?

Haley Radke

I'm just, I'm trying to put this together for myself, because we have all kinds of different adoptee experiences, and I was like born in a hospital left in the hospital for, say, 10 days before I went to my home with my adoptive parents. And you have this interruption, right? You're with your birth mother, but she was neglectful and you were [00:10:00] removed. That's your personal story that you've shared here a little bit before. And there's other adoptees who are, with. Their families for longer, and then they get removed, right? So at any point, there's always this gap in care.

And we're with new people who are supposed to help us regulate in some fashion. But whether it's kinship or a full stranger. It's not the same.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And first of all, it's hard enough for us. I'm almost 60 years old and I'm just starting to understand and feel into the magnitude of the trauma from my infancy. And in a really bodily way, as hard as I've been working on this I've just started to make more progress in the last couple of years. What adoptive parent younger than me, A, can understand something about losing one's whole lineage and the primal [00:11:00] wound, and then Secondly, do enough work on themselves to be at a place where they can resonate with a baby in a limbic kind of way, open up to that kind of trauma. It just doesn't really make sense that would be something available.

Haley Radke

Is that even possible? That's maybe just like a hypothetical we can't even, say, but say an adoptive parent is so prepared and they know what they're getting into and they've done all the work and things. In my mind then they don't adopt, because then they know. So I don't know if those things can even coexist. Having a human so ready for a baby that suffered this catastrophic loss.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And I've talked about Cambodia before when I went to Cambodia and I met some orphans there that, that were teenagers, but had been orphaned when they were babies and in [00:12:00] Cambodia following the genocide.

The baby's names and stories were kept intact and were known by the families that took them in. Nothing was put on the babies to like, to now I'm your mom and this is your dad. It was like, we're here, we're a family taking care of you and you can call us what you want. You can call us, auntie or first name or mother, father, if you want to, but that's up to you like it's your life. This is yours. It's it was very baby child centered and I think that and then the families had known what the and had felt with the children what they've gone through because I guess they had all gone through the genocide.

So they all knew, but I think that was better for them than what happens here with such a it's a one two punch. It's like a loss and now this fiction.

Haley Radke

We've had this talk before, right? There's this, yeah, there's the relinquishment and trauma. And then there's also a trauma of, okay, now you have to fit where you've been put. [00:13:00] Right. And I think, should we go through the seven? Cause I think some of that is like absolutely addresses that.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Seven areas of challenge specific to adoptees and attaching. So the first challenge is the adoptee body. The adoptee body is where the story lives. A theme in our community is all these ways that adoptees bodies are not well, like digestive problems, sleep problems, autoimmune disorders, headaches.

I've had cancer. It's just the body is my body has been fraught with stress and it seems like almost all of the adoptees I meet have a lot of this kind of stuff. For an adopted child, there are two stories going on. There's how well they're masking the trauma and trying to fit in and doing whatever, however they're doing that.

And then there's what the body is doing. The adoptee body is really where the story lives. And the adoptee body is talking to us and to our families the entire time. [00:14:00] So I know for me, I didn't sleep well at all as a kid. I still don't. And I also didn't eat that well either. I was just eating was tough. Everything was tough. Eating was tough and sleeping was tough. My parents wanted to be good parents and they saw these problems as reflect reflections that they were not doing something right. So it became centered on them. And so they weren't curious why? Why is Pam having such a hard time sleeping and eating? What's going on? Let's try to get underneath this. I'm sure there are some adoptive parents that would, that care about the body and are paying attention to the body. But for my parents, it was really about a reflection of them that they were doing something wrong or they weren't, they wanted me to show them that they were doing a good job, basically.

The body is where the story lives. What story is the body telling and who wants to listen to it? And that really matters. Even for us now that those of us who are adults, adoptees who are adults, like we, we want to really start to care about what the story our body [00:15:00] is telling. And we want partners and friends and family to care about our bodies and the stories that are, because the body tells symbolic stories.

If I can't be conscious of something that's going on and express it in words, that's one way that it shows up as a symbolic body thing. You know what I mean?

Haley Radke

Because we've talked before about pre verbal trauma, so we might not have words for it, but it's like living somewhere.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And it does show up. It does, there's the body doesn't, the body doesn't lie or the body keeps the score. It's. The body tells the truth. I think that a lot of adoptees are under so much stress to deal with the trauma that they may not even be aware of, but it's there. And then be fitting in and masking and functioning as best they can as children and as adults.

I don't think listening to the body is necessarily a high priority when we're trying to survive. So it goes, it gets deprioritized. But I think that [00:16:00] when we're really talking about attachment, we have to include the body. The body is a really wonderful truth teller. And it can be a nightmare to enter, but it's the place that we need to attach from.

So we have to start to value the stories our own bodies are telling and then be close to people who also value the stories our bodies are telling so that we can at least be in reality. There's the quote by John Bowlby, British psychologists and psychiatrists that I think was like the father of attachment who said, "what cannot be said to the mother cannot be said to the self."

And so if we adoptees have nobody, we can tell the truth to about this implicit trauma and it's running rampant in our systems. We can't tell ourselves either. And that's where it has to go into symbolism has to go into body problems, addictions. Things like that, more indirect, but real signs of what we wish and needed to be able to tell to maybe both mothers, but can't, so that [00:17:00] we can't tell it to ourselves.

Haley Radke

That sounds to me like so much of this is subconscious. Mhm. And even for those adoptees that don't acknowledge that adoption is problematic or has had challenges or comes from a challenging system in place, like all of those things, like there's still something happening underneath the surface that just isn't safe to surface.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And it comes out eventually because it gets very hard over decades and decades to, to hold these defenses in place to keep us alive and things start to break down. As we get older and often that's a nightmare, but it's a gift because then we have a different, a new chance to have some access to it and to work some things through that could never be worked through before.

Haley Radke

Okay, what's number two?

Pam Cordano, MFT

Okay, the second one is the enormity [00:18:00] and value of belonging to lineage. When we lose our lineages, it's a massive loss. And I used to think of lineage as being a line, like there's me, there's my birth mother, there's her mother, there's her mother, like it went down a line. But now I think of lineage as a giant spider web with many points of connection and orientation for us.

So to be removed from that entire spider web is a massive loss. And our culture doesn't treat that as a massive loss. There's a devaluing of remaining in one's lineage, the value of that. And so the loss of that, which happens in one minute or one hour or one day is huge. We used to, I used to call it separation trauma or attachment destruction.

I thought attachment destruction was a really bold way of saying something about this primal wound. But even that is it's a moment attachment destruction. But when we think about the loss of a spiderweb lineage, [00:19:00] we're like with, we're like in a free fall out in the world without that net that holds everybody into place.

Haley Radke

So even you and I have talked about this before and picturing the web, it's if we're gone, the impact of our absence also impacts the family of origin, right? Their web is changed. Yeah, and then I was thinking about say transnational adoptees. And so our web is in a certain place and so if you're from a different country and your web is in a different country and that's You know, that's also a place of comfort and safety and those kinds of things right?

We remember where we were and where our family has been. And so there's also that loss that's just compounding on

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's huge.

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's huge. The smells. It's yeah, [00:20:00] if it's a place, it's not just all of the people, the points of, and the stories and the qualities of the lineage. But it's, yeah it's the place.

That's a whole big part of the web too, is the place. Or, trans, transracial adoption. Same thing.

Haley Radke

Yeah. I was just going to say, yeah, race, ethnicity, culture, all of those things are pieced together as a part of the web, maybe.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yep.

Haley Radke

Okay. Okay.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Totally. Number three. When we are plucked from the, or kicked out of, whichever, however we leave that massive lineage web, we're in a freefall, in a sense.

There's, we're not being held by all of the points that hold us. More and more, it's gotten out this new phrase called the nothing place. And the nothing place is a phrase we're using to mean no orientation points, free fall, [00:21:00] terror. And a friend of mine shared this nothing place thing with me.

He'd done psychedelics and he'd found himself in the nothing place. And when he described it, I totally recognized it. And so at the time it was in 2021 Anne Heffron and I were doing a year of Flourish 50 people, two days a week, weekly meetings with adoptees. And I brought this nothing place concept. Concept ha. It's it's not a concept, it's real. To all of them and ask them to try it on and I was shocked because everybody resonated with it. And knew in some way that they were avoiding something about this terrifying free fall into nothingness without the web, but we haven't had language for this that's been adequate. And so it's just like this monster that we're avoiding something. I think that's the monster is a free fall.

Haley Radke

I [00:22:00] was thinking that I've been watching this like travel show lately. And I was thinking like, if you were as an adult transported to a fully a different country and you had nothing with you, so you had the clothes on your back and you had no money, no passport, and you didn't speak the language and you didn't even know where you were and like how disorienting that would be.

But yet, you still have your brains and experience with you, and you can figure out okay, I need to, I need to get help from somebody I need to figure out where I am. You can figure out how to communicate and whatever. So you have some of those skills. And I was thinking about how a baby or a young child is just like just alone.

And when you describe it as the nothing place, like I think of myself, like alone as a baby and it's too scary to go there, right? It's just too scary to like, even think about that.

Pam Cordano, MFT

[00:23:00] Totally. And what you just said about the show I may not have this totally accurate, but I think with the highest level military people, Navy SEALs , they do an exercise where they drop somebody off in a foreign town and they have to survive for four days.

And there are some enemies. I think there are quote enemies that are looking for them. So it's like this four day trial of survival. And I don't know, I think about us as babies and well, there's a primal wound, right? We're already like reeling from this loss of lineage and then we don't recognize anything. And we, yeah, we can't talk, nothing.

Haley Radke

Because babies are, and really small children, right? We're fully at the mercy of anyone, anything around us. There's no competence whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah. I was just trying to think of other ways to [00:24:00] explain this to someone who's not adopted. Huh. And I just, there's nothing like it, right? There's nothing like

Pam Cordano, MFT

What's the movie where somebody gets lost out in space just spinning around out in the middle of nowhere, like an astronaut?

Haley Radke

Interstellar is that the right one? I don't know, there was a couple space movies?

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's funny because just, I think that for non adopted people, they might say you have loving people that want you, that want to make a home for you, that have paid a lot of money for you that, that, have decorated a room for you, like you're not out in space, there's people here, but that's from adult humans that don't understand loss of lineage.

I think the value of talking about the nothing place is getting back inside the adoptee and being adoptee centric and not non adoptee centric.

Haley Radke

It's interesting. I have a whiteboard full of ideas and everything for shows and things next to me that you can't see, but it's here. It's always there. And I've had The Nothing Place written on the board for several years, actually. [00:25:00] And I could never bring myself to ask you to do a full episode about it because it is so depressing to just think about that and I was like, God, I don't think I can talk about that for half an hour. That just is it's too much.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And you know what, trauma, the definition of trauma is too much, too muchness. It is too much. And it was too much. And that's what we're trying to say to the world. It was too much. It is too much. And it was too much for us.

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

You might have been fine. We weren't. And aren't. Yeah.

Haley Radke

Yes. I was just thinking, we're talking about, different adoptee experiences and even open adoption has been seen as this like panacea like but you still know who your birth parents are like you still get meetings with [00:26:00] them sometimes or whatever. However open adoption agreements have been structured if they remain open by the way but it's interesting because I was thinking like nothing place that still exists for open adoption.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Oh totally Because the death in place happens when we get separated from lineage, and then if, when the birth family comes back in, whether it's a six months, one year, every five years, not till the child's 13, whatever they just, whatever the decision is, all of this trauma has already happened.

And so then, what part of the child is meeting their birth family? I don't think it's an open limbic system. It's, I imagine it, from the adoptee's point of view, I imagine it being pretty scary to meet the people that let you go.

[00:27:00] Haley Radke

Even if it's regular? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All the way along. Yeah. Okay, we got to move on from that.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Okay. The next one falls right into place, which is adaptation becomes the primary survival mechanism. So we're in the nothing place. We got to survive. Every living organism wants to survive. The replacement for orientation is adaptation. And we are doing everything we can to adapt to what's in front of us to survive. And we're really good at it. Adoptees are super adapters. That's why Paul Sunderland, in his video about addiction, said that adoptees really surprised him when they would seem so put together and intact, and then the littlest thing would happen and they would, lose it. Because we can adapt, but that doesn't mean that we [00:28:00] feel okay and filled in inside.

Haley Radke

I'm stuck on this sentence. The replacement for orientation is adaptation. This just feels so profound to me just because it's going back to the lack of orientation we have. It's frankly

Pam Cordano, MFT

And it could be very confusing then what's the real me versus what's just adaptation? It gets so Confusing. It takes so long to figure that out.

Haley Radke

Can you just say some examples of things that are adaptations? Literally just being the child of these new parents just having that identity is an adaptation, right?

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Being very perceptive. What do they want? What makes them smile? What makes them what makes them love me more? Which would make me safe? I, okay I'm less worried about saying something really offensive compared to how I used to be when I first met you. I was really worried about [00:29:00] upsetting people, but I'm less worried about that now. Several years ago, I saw an article in the Huffington Post, and I forget which adoptee, I wish I knew which adoptee wrote it.

She said something like, I feel like I've said this on your show before, that when a baby is kidnapped, they are expected to remember their parents and reject the kidnappers. And then when a child's adopted, they're expected to forget their birth family and bond with the adopters. And so if I were kidnapped, I would be paying.

I would be using all my energy to survive. I would be trying to figure out the kidnappers. What makes them mad? What makes them happy? What makes them calm down? What keeps them from harming me, I'd be looking for everything I could do to maximize my survival. I think we do that from the get go. We just start getting very perceptive to survive because we've already had this huge threat to our life by this relinquishment. [00:30:00] We're under, it's quote attachment, which is an attachment under duress.

Haley Radke

You already said it. That's the literal survival mechanism.

Pam Cordano, MFT

I guess it goes without saying everything we're naming is a challenge in our ability to attach. So trying to unwind these crisscrossed patterns and confusions to figure out like, let's say, I don't know, since we're such good adapters, because we had to be, how do we attach when we get into a romantic relationship where we have to watch where am I adapting or what's real and can the person I'm with tolerate the real me and how about now and how about now like it's a process to start, to become real with people so we can attach.

Haley Radke

What's coming to mind and I don't know if this is the right place to comment on it, but I still see people sharing about reactive attachment disorder, which from the therapist that I know and respect, that's [00:31:00] not a real thing.

I think about so for people who don't know, it's sort of like if there's a child in your care and they're so to speak acting out and you're, they're troublesome in some way to you as the adoptive parent, they'll often get diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder. And now I'm, as you're talking, I'm thinking like. These kids are the ones saying the truth out loud. I don't belong here. What am I doing here? Get me out of here. How do I get out of here? Do you have comments on reactive attachment disorder? Do you think that's a real thing?

Pam Cordano, MFT

Look at this. I'm just looking up symptoms, right? Avoidance of physical touch or comfort when distressed.

What I have heard a lot of adoptees say is it was the wrong hands. It was the wrong bodies. I didn't want those hands. I didn't want those bodies. I wanted someone who felt right. I remember my mom would always say to me, oh, I can't do anything right. I can't do anything right. It was [00:32:00] like, Yeah, I didn't want you. I wanted her, I didn't even know who her was at that point, but I knew I wanted her.

Unaffected when left alone. I found it a relief to be left alone because then I had less adapting to do. I could call, I could just relax.

Emotional detachment. Yeah. Why emotionally attach when our deepest truth is absolutely unknown. It's very hard to attach when we have to keep most of us and ourselves in the closet.

Rocking or self comforting excessively, inability to show guilt, remorse, or regret. Some kids are mad for good reasons. So they don't feel guilty for being mad. Tantrums, anger, sadness.

Haley Radke

Yeah, so the cure, quote unquote, for reactive attachment disorder, or like your, what you want to have happen, is that they adapt better, and fit in better, and behave.

Pam Cordano, MFT

[00:33:00] Yeah.

Haley Radke

That's the fix.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Victor Frankl said, an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal. I think that sums it up. We can put a DSM diagnosis on it or we can just say normal.

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And then the child has to carry, The adopted child has to carry the abnormal instead of the situation, the institution carrying the abnormal.

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

That's what's abnormal.

Haley Radke

So medicating the child, sending them off to whatever home

Pam Cordano, MFT

Bootcamp.

Haley Radke

Yeah. Yeah. All of those things. It's never the fix on the situation. And not that every situation can be fixed, but adoptive parents anyway, that's a full aside, but I thought that kind of went, okay, what's our next one? Number five.

Pam Cordano, MFT

This bridge is right to the next one, which is [00:34:00] profound chronic misattunement. So adoptees are swimming in a fish tank of water that is profoundly chronically misattuned. And this is from inside the family and outside the family and inside their own selves with themselves. There's just this misattunement.

It is everywhere because we can't be understood in the steepest place and we can't understand ourselves in the deepest place easily. It takes, I think it takes decades. And then adoptive families don't know how to, we're barely learning how to understand our own selves, how our adoptive parents and families gonna understand what we're trying to understand about under the hood.

And then the culture at large is, has got, sparkles and rainbows on top of this. So I think I shared with you, Haley, that there's this public figure that I like, and she and her partner adopted a baby. And before they even got the baby, [00:35:00] they were calling the baby, their soulmate. And I felt so turned off and upset just that a baby is getting burdened with that story, that label without participating in an agreement of soulmates, or in an agreement of the narrative about soulmates. It sounds nice on the surface. But it isn't nice for the adoptee. What? Say it.

Haley Radke

I can't even.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Say it.

Haley Radke

You've said that to me before. It just makes me want to barf. And I'm just going back to adoption is this problematic thing that once you see it, once we pull up and show you under the hood, like how could you unsee that?

Ugh. Yeah. Yeah, I have all of these like things going on the back of my [00:36:00] head always. How can I show non adoptees, you like to call them muggles, the truth behind what our experiences is, what works most effectively to tell people to show people so that we can stop the madness. And I'm always looking for those things.

One of the things that just boggles my mind is, The like videos on Instagram or TikTok where it's like, oh, here's your new baby and everybody's oh my gosh, I can't believe you're adopting. This is wonderful. So amazing. And then the same people are like, oh my gosh, you're reuniting with your birth parents. Oh, it's wonderful. It's so amazing. Like, How can, how do you not see the disconnect? So you're talking about swimming in the chronic misattunement of society. Like it's like, who's pushing the rock up the hill? Who's that? That's what we're doing. The boulder up the, or whatever, it's [00:37:00] never gonna get there.

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's gonna run over us.

Haley Radke

Yeah, exactly.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Smash us.

Haley Radke

It has. It has run me over. For sure. I am smushed at the bottom of the mountain.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Yeah.

Haley Radke

Yeah. Even these Gatcha Day celebrations I had recently Cam Lee Small on the show and in his new book, he talks about the gotcha day misses "lost-ya" day it's very, it's incredible to me that people can see that and not see where did this baby or child come from they came from somewhere. How are you celebrating what could be the worst day of their life?

Pam Cordano, MFT

And you think the baby doesn't know this it hasn't isn't the one experience. We're bodies We're in a body like you think that we don't experience the entire things and it's [00:38:00] registered and it's the core of our nervous systems developing like we're not even there like we're a cartoon or something it's like cartoon life

Haley Radke

I'm picturing someone sort of new ish to this listening to us. We've become, so radicalized. We have our eyes wide open. It's just like this whole conversation might just come across as like wild. But it's like facts are facts, yo. I don't know what to tell you.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Like I'm, it is, I don't have the energy to twist myself inside out anymore and pretend it's something else.

Haley Radke

Yeah, exactly.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Okay. So the sixth thing, then the result of swimming in this profound chronic water of misattunement is we get profoundly disconnected from our own instincts and we start to say yes, where when we have a no or [00:39:00] no, when we have a yes, and we think things that are not dangerous are dangerous.

And we think things that are dangerous are not dangerous. We get really screwed up in our own instincts, maybe not entirely like the quote, angry adoptees that grow up. Like I was more of, I had both. I had compliance and I had anger. The anger was at least a remnant of connection still to some of my instincts.

Like I remember, being 14 or something and yelling at my mom in the kitchen where my dad could hear and saying, You're not my real parents. You're just my guardians and you bought me and and that was true, but it was blasphemy. I knew that I was going to get grounded and I was breaking their hearts and just saying the truth. But I got pushed to a point where I could connect back in to something I knew that was true.

Haley Radke

I'm going back to thinking about adoptees who have done their all to fit [00:40:00] in and to absorb the adoption is beautiful narrative. And even in fact, maybe like I did, I felt like I owed it and to adopt myself to pay it forward, those kinds of things.

And what a profound disconnection that was, to not see.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah.

Haley Radke

There's like mega shame there. For me, I know I've said that out loud before. I know that's not the first time people might hear me say that, but it's it feels so shameful now to think oh my gosh, I almost was complicit in this system. And that sucks. And then for folks who have gone ahead and done that, you can't admit it because it's not safe.

Pam Cordano, MFT

And there, that's where there's a lot, so much shame too.

Haley Radke

[00:41:00] Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

To be in your case, what you said about shame, about almost being complicit, I think that's evidence of how hard you had to survive, how hard you had to adapt.

Like we, we can just think it's a, it's an us thing, but it's the whole system that, that leads to that kind of a decision of or should I adopt? Or whatever. I know I've, I think I said this before somewhere, but when I was like seven years old, my mom's friend wrote me this really pretty card and mailed it to me with little bunnies on it and said, as I was going to sleep tonight, I was thinking about how lucky you are as such a young person that you've been blessed twice so early in life.

First, by a mother that loved you enough to give you away, and then by a mother that loved you enough to take you in. I just remember the, huh? Feeling what? And I knew I [00:42:00] was supposed to really cherish this card, but it didn't, my body was like, it had nowhere to go. Cause it just didn't fit.

Love is not giving people away. That is not love. Love does not give people away. And also my parents didn't love me enough to take me in. I was the next baby to come up on the five year wait list. That was a healthy white female, so that's why I ended up with them. It was all sequential, had nothing to do with me.

Haley Radke

This is back to misattunement soup.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. Disconnection from instincts comes from that. Yeah. Okay, and the last thing, this number seven is, okay, commodification. We babies and children who get adopted are turned into a commodity. We're reduced to a commodity. A price tag is put on us based on what the context is for the adoption and money is paid and we're purchased.

[00:43:00] And without that purchasing, the parents wouldn't have the babies. That's a requirement. So even though a lot of adoptive parents might say, oh, I don't believe in commodifying humans. I don't believe in buying and selling humans. I don't believe in human trafficking. That's just how the system is. So that's just how it works.

That is commodification. That is purchasing humans. And the thing that's important about this for us under the hood is that commodification is a lived experience for us. It's not just a fact of a system. It's a lived experience and our body's experience being reduced to a commodity. And to pile on to this problem with disconnecting from our instincts is we don't even know who does this body belong to.

Is it me or is it them? Or is it society? Or who does this country belong to? Who does this planet belong to? Who does this cosmos belong to? If people are religious, who does God belong to? [00:44:00] Because there's such a disconnection from owning one's own body and self and life. Our life gets usurped.

And then we have to wake up, come out of the fog, and get the right help and enough of it to start. returning to a state of belonging to our own selves again. And other people don't have to think about this the same way. Might have had a strict religious or abusive family, but it's not nearly to the magnitude that we're talking about here.

Haley Radke

This continues into adulthood where adoptees who are looking for original birth certificates or adoption records, those kinds of things, they're like filed in, in the same place in the court. From what I understand, it's like items in the legal system we're commodified there too. [00:45:00] I'm not saying that very well, but I just even in adoptions that are public like mine was, there's costs being paid, even if it's by the government or any of those things. There's still financial transactions happening, whether or not adoptive parents actually are the ones to write the check. Just to, I'm just going to say that in case people are like nobody paid any money for me. Somebody did.

Pam Cordano, MFT

I was a county, I was a county adoption in California and my parents paid $5,000 for me. And then when I was 25 years old and I went to the court, to get access to my birth certificate. Um, I was told my dad, my adoptive dad came with me and I, we were told I had to leave the room [00:46:00] for him to be able to see the file of the case where he was the plaintiff. By adopting me. So I had to leave the room for him to see that my birth certificate and you probably know that in California, we still don't have access to our birth certificates. It's bizarre. And I think that, I could get hung up on that. But I think that for me the deeper place about all of that is in my own body and alienation from my right to my own life and my own self and living in a world where this has all been allowed and still is still allowed.

Haley Radke

So if you were to go on to a website today from most adoption agencies that are looking for mothers in a crisis situation and you were to chat or fill out a form for seeking help, they will ask your ethnicity to [00:47:00] determine the potential value of your baby. There's still a price put on or a value put on what your skin color is or if you're biracial or that's still actively happening.

So there's an added weight as well for our fellow adoptees who are people of color and are seen from the world's perspective as valued less than. I'm just saying it out loud because that's what's happening. And so, yeah. It's really

Pam Cordano, MFT

additional burden

Haley Radke

Yeah.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Layers of burdens.

Haley Radke

I don't know what to say. Cause this is it's I love having the words and language to describe all of the different issues that wrap up [00:48:00] into this ball of oh, this is why I might have some issues. It's hard though. It's really hard to think about it.

It's hard to look at it because it feels that's too big. That's too big. I don't want to address that. I want to hide from that. That's scary. It's easier to put that to the side. I want to blend it in society. I want to I can't be looking at this right now.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah.

Haley Radke

Do you want to just talk to adoptees that might feel that way? Or give us I don't know, one next step because this is like overwhelming.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah. It's interesting, like, When Haley, when you and I hang out, we usually have a lot of fun. We, this isn't like what we talk about. We have fun.

Haley Radke

Yeah, we do. I know. I was like, this is depressing.

Pam Cordano, MFT

We have online parties. Yeah, this is depressing. But I think that I don't think we necessarily have to dwell in all of these things. I think it's just good for us to start of, some of this could be helpful in just clicking [00:49:00] our awareness. Maybe clicking some confusions in ourselves back into the right spot so that we just feel more lined up in a way that makes sense and maybe more ground underneath our feet.

But first of all, we adoptees need limbic resonance. And that's it's hard to even I didn't even 7 years before I was in a go 7 years ago before I was in adoptee land. I did not understand the value of hanging out with adoptees. I did not want to be part of this club and I didn't want to talk about adoption and be with, I just wanted that to go away.

But actually adoptees need each other so much. And that's why this show and adoptee events are so powerful because our nervous systems can relax and we can feel much more limbic resonance that we're used to feeling with each other in places that are very important and also maybe heavy and difficult.

But once we can connect on the difficult stuff. Or even knowing that the difficult stuff is a place of connection, we can relax and [00:50:00] having fun it's also a whole part of the picture. When Anne Heffron and I did adoptee retreats, we started a little heavy, but then quickly it lightened up and we laughed harder than I usually laugh anywhere because there's a lot to laugh about, too, and enjoy. It's fun to enjoy just feeling connected, in a new way without the stress of that barrier between people who get it and people who don't. So limbic resonance is huge. Also if you're seeing a therapist, make sure your therapist can feel you and you're feeling felt because without that, it's, there's no point really in therapy.

Haley Radke

Interesting. I think our intuition is very good on that. And so I hope people can have permission to like, like trust that.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah, I agree with you. And then the next thing is [00:51:00] just that, uh, I just said two things at once limbic resonance and adoptee community. Those two things are, I think, essential for us for our healing.

I just, I don't know a better, faster way to heal and feel more comfortable in our skin than that, than those two things. And then psychedelic assisted therapy is huge. I think that the walls that keep us outside of the hard places are so thick and they're built to keep us out and going to see a therapist once a week and talking about it. We can talk about things, but it's hard to get underneath through the wall into the hard places. And especially where the body is where the body has taken over the pain and the trauma, and we're not even aware of it anymore. And so I encourage people to research psychedelic assisted therapy. MDMA, psilocybin, and others too, ketamine for some help to get under the hood.

Haley Radke

Okay. Thank you.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Yeah.

Haley Radke

Pam, you [00:52:00] have you and I have been friends for, seven years since the first time you came on the show and you've said so many amazing things to us that have opened up opportunities for connection and healing. So thank you. I feel like this is like a culmination of all of these conversations we've had and all the work you've done in the adoptee community. I'm so appreciative. Thank you.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Thank you Haley. Thank you.

Haley Radke

Where can people connect with you online?

Pam Cordano, MFT

The best way, I'm off social media five years now. My kids taught me some things and I got off social media. So I'm

Haley Radke

lucky.

Pam Cordano, MFT

It's nice. So my email is the best way, pcordano@comcast.net.

Haley Radke

Okay, perfect.

And we'll have that in the show notes for you. Also, if you don't have a pen handy right now, you can click back through later. Thank you [00:53:00] so much, Pam.

Pam Cordano, MFT

Thank you. It's a pleasure being here and hello to everybody out there. I'm happy to be here talking about this with you.

Haley Radke

It is always such an honor to have Pam on the show. If you want to hear the other episodes she's been featured on, we will link to those in the show notes for you along with her email address and she regularly is a guest on our Ask an Adoptee Therapist events and our Off Script Parties, which is an opportunity for you to meet fellow adoptees who want to talk about these things and build that community that she was talking about today. That is so important. And I'm so truly, deeply grateful for her wisdom and the way she shows up for us in those spaces. So my big [00:54:00] thanks to Pam, and I hope that you'll consider joining us, adopteeson.com/community. And if you want to see any of the upcoming live events we have on for these things, we'll have more things going on in the fall, but you can go to adopteeson.com/calendar and see a link of all the past things we've done and then all the upcoming Off Script Parties, Ask an Adoptee Therapist events, book club, documentary club, all those good things great opportunities to meet fellow adoptees. Okay, friends, thanks so much for listening and let's talk again soon.

284 Dr. Alice Diver

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/284

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is the remarkable Dr. Alice Diver, law professor and outspoken adoptee advocate. Alice has written multiple journal articles and books on the topic of adoptee rights, including her latest, Genetic Stigma in Law and Literature, Orphanhood, Adoption, and the Right to Reunion.

Alice shared some of her personal story with us, and then we dive into her work, including Language in Adoption, where you'll hear such gems as surplus people and substitute families. We also get to talk about how adoptees are viewed by the law in comparison with adoptive parents. We wrap up with some recommended [00:01:00] resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Before we get started, I have a little update for you. If you're a regular listener, you'll know I've taken the last few summers off. But since dropping to two episodes a month, we're going to be going through the summer. So please keep subscribed or following wherever you listen to podcasts, as you'll have several opportunities to hear from fellow adoptees this summer.

Of course, we have lots of content going for Patreon supporters as well. And info for that is always available on the website, adopteeson.com. Okay, let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to the podcast, Dr. Alice Diver. Welcome, Alice.

Dr. Alice Diver: Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

Haley Radke: You don't know this, but I've admired your work for years and years. So this is like a career highlight for me truly. So I'm very excited to get to talk to you. And I'd [00:02:00] love it if you would share a little of your story with us.

Dr. Alice Diver: Wow, thank you so much for the, for that. That's amazing to me. Thank you. I guess my, I'm an adoptee. Obviously, I think anyone that knows me knows that because I tend to tell them quite early on.

So I was one of the 1960s vintage babies and I was adopted in Montreal. I was seven months, so I went through the, I would say, mother baby home institutions rather than homes. So in through a mother baby orphanage, the Catholic Welfare Bureau. And my folks, their story was quite sad. They'd been married for 20 years. And had a baby but he passed away after only a few days, so they got me very shortly after that and they said they wanted a girl, so as not to be reminded that they'd had a wee boy, and they were mid 40s, so they were, lucky to have a child at that age because we were coming into the era of, older persons, maybe not being ideal adopters.

They were [00:03:00] very good and they did their best. They took us to, we moved to, it was just me only child as well. Or as I'd say, rescue dog. From time to time, I would describe myself, hard. I don't think they knew what hit them. They'd had cats before, but they'd never had, this deranged creature who yelled a lot that came into their lives.

And because my mom had, because she was Irish. She was always very homesick. So in 1979 when I was 12, we went from Montreal to a small town in Northern Ireland where there was no McDonald's, no Pop Tarts. I thought I'd died and gone to hell. Very upsetting experience to me. And had lots of lots of fair haired, very Irish looking cousins.

And then I was I stood out as being different, but adoption was never really discussed. I think they hadn't told some people, that because it was, they'd been having a baby and then they got me. So some of the family didn't know, but yeah, it soon became apparent. It was in the days of matching characteristics.

So they were very fair. And they were given this blue eyed blonde baby, [00:04:00] then at the age of about, I think about 18 months, the blue eyes, blonde hair disappeared, unfortunately, and yeah, and they ended up with this very brown eyed, swarthy, round baby that bore no resemblance, but I guess what has shaped me in terms of the search, the way Quebec works, it's closed records, as I think is the same for a lot of U. S. states. So when I was 18, I applied for the non identifying information. So they send you very helpful non identifying things like you had big eyes and a nice shaped head and you like to sit outside in the sun. And I thought all of those things still apply. Thank you. Didn't narrow it down. I did discover, though, the thing that really that made it was.

I discovered Indigenous heritage. So I didn't know where I heard Newfoundland, and then I was able to do some research of my own, but that was amazing. So no one had any clue about that. I guess it ties in with not exactly baby scoop, but with maybe stigma [00:05:00] or the need to deny people's ancestry. No medical records.

So I didn't know that most of my family were birth family were deaf or going deaf with otosclerosis. That would have been useful to know. Hearing aids are great. Switch them off at night. It's all good. I'll tell you a little bit just about the reunion, because that's that a lot of people like, they seem to like this bit of the story.

So I, the way it works in Quebec, you write through social services, intermediary person. It's all confidential. I wrote a very lovely letter saying that I was a great person and at that stage I was married had my daughter and sent a photograph of her and I thought this will just be the hallmark reunion, and I'll be welcomed with open arms because what's not to love but after about a year birth mother came I don't know the terms not great, but she's okay with it I'll say mother came back and all confidential anonymous and she said, no, sorry, I'm not telling anyone about you.

I have teenagers at this point. She said, [00:06:00] So no, there will be no contact. Fine. I thought there's not much I can do about that. I just have to accept it. Yeah. And then she wrote a second letter after that, which was more of the same. And I thought she's clearly struggling.

And I guess it was a burden to carry. Yeah, so you try to put that aside for as long as you can, and you get all my things. Then I had four children of my own and I worked. Then DNA came into the public realm. So at 2012, I thought I might just get the DNA done and see who pops up.

And it found some sort of fourth cousins. They were very nice, very welcoming, but I couldn't connect any dots until about six years ago, I found an aunt who was younger than me, and with, and had been doing her DNA to see about tracing more of the Indigenous ancestry. So within half an hour, the way it works, we both got an email.

Within half an hour, armed with a surname, I found an [00:07:00] obituary, I went on Facebook, and I was able to see pictures of my half siblings, who all, her husband, this was about 3 a. m., elbowed him and said, you gotta wake up. And I said, look at these people. Do they look like me?

And he was just, I can't really say the expletives that he said, but he was instantly correct response. Wide awake going, and I was 50 at that stage. He said, yeah, he says, I think we found your people. He said, because your people look like our kids. He said, it's just, look at them. He said, yeah.

He says that, that. That has to be your mother, but just, you're the same person. So my poor aunt, she then tried to make contact. Cause I said, listen this lady's does not want contact. So don't frighten her, please. Cause I don't want to be responsible for someone having a heart attack. I said, tread softly.

I said, I've made my peace. If you can convince her, that's fine. And of course it was Christmas. It was my birthday. I hate my birthday. The first week of January, worst week of the year. So it just yeah, I sat and it was about, probably [00:08:00] took about six weeks of my aunt and some of her sisters convincing her that I was not, an axe murderer and that it was okay and that I didn't want anything apart from maybe to say hello and maybe the odd email.

And ironically, the thing that convinced her that I meant no harm was she was so scared of being discovered because she hadn't said to her kids. I said, if it's the DNA thing that's scaring you in case, people start to see matches. I said, I'll just, I'll take it down. I'll set it to private so you don't have to be panicking. And that seemed to flip the switch. And she said that's a nice thing to do. And then I will never forget it. I was for work. I was down in Cardiff and Wales. And as you do, there's this sort of abandoned castle. It's hard to beat a good castle. So I thought I will walk a rare sunny day.

I thought, I'm just going to go for a walk. And the tour guide was busy telling us about, and I won't even try a Welsh accent, but was busy telling us about, who was hung and who died and what ghosts there were. [00:09:00] When a message pops up on Facebook going, Hey, it's your mother. It's been whatever it is, 50 years.

I think it's time I said hello. And we can chat. I have to now hold it together and walk around a castle. I have to have it. How do I manage this? And I can remember texted after texted my two youngest daughters were out for dinner in a restaurant, having pizza, they live the high life.

I don't, I texted them the message and one daughter burst into tears, loud tears in the middle of the restaurant while the other girl was like, could you stop that? It looks like we're breaking up, pull yourself together. And then she said a week later, she was telling her friends and they all started to cry and she says, I can't handle this. Could people stop crying? What is wrong with everyone? But no, she, it was nice. And after that, and in her defense now, she's never, my mom has not missed a day since then, both morning and night, I get a little Facebook message. Saying, what the weather is, what the, what the menu for the day is.

Lovely, [00:10:00] normal, everyday things.

Haley Radke: For six years?

Dr. Alice Diver: Uh-huh. She's not missed, she's not missed a day and night she hasn't missed. If I miss a day, I'll get a message saying, where are you living? And I'm like, yes! Which is nice to get that bit of maternal, concern or whatever. And initially she said she was going to take a few months to very slowly tell her children about me, because it is quite a bombshell.

But within a week she had told them. And a couple of days later then my eldest brother was messaging me and we talked for about two hours about Doctor Who. So I let, it's little funny things that, yeah, and I've been sent recipes. I've been over to visit, I've gone to Montreal, they came to Ireland.

Went to Newfoundland and saw moose and all the, I have to say it's just been, it's been very good. It's been very good. It can't be easy for people to have this random stranger turns up, I didn't turn up on a doorstep as such, but yeah, so it was, never thought that would have happened and yeah, it's been going pretty good.

Haley Radke: Amazing. [00:11:00]

Dr. Alice Diver: That's my story. Longer than I meant it to be.

Haley Radke: No, I love it. I love it. You're a law professor. From what I understand, you mostly teach family law. And what drew you to become an attorney? And you've been researching adoption for many years prior to your reunion.

Dr. Alice Diver: Yeah, I think I suppose even about as an undergraduate student, we had the chance to do a research paper in final year.

I used mine as a rant against the system, really, to just look at adoption orders, how they close records, freeing orders. Even now, I would look sometimes at cases where contact is denied between older siblings and sometimes for very good reasons, it might, may have to be.

But it's just interesting that the language is still of the 1970s. Sometimes I just, I find it. It's interesting some of the reasons that they cite. Yeah, it's just always been a, it's always been an [00:12:00] interest. When I was a lawyer, I was only practicing for about five years before I went into academia.

So I probably did more property law, some child protection cases, trying to defend a care order or trying to have contact between parents and children, but sometimes that can cut a bit close. There's times you think this is one that's going to follow me home. Academia is much better.

You get paid for having coffee and talking to people and annoying, annoying my poor students. It's much more satisfactory in terms of a career choice. No disrespect to my, former fellow, lawyers. But yeah, and family laws, I say it's a nice one to teach, although we do, a segment on domestic abuse, which is harrowing.

I always say to people now, there's a trigger warning. I find increasingly more over the last 30 years, more care experienced people coming through. What would have been known as care leavers here, but now care experienced. And I know when I'm addressing a room, I'll say, I know there's adopted people out there.

I won't make you put your hands up. [00:13:00] If you wish to talk, because you can kill a conversation stone dead by going, anybody adopted? That's not yet acceptable to do that, maybe someday. But generally somebody, one or two people will come up maybe after a week or so and say, I was adopted or the thing about the UK records are open so you can get your birth certificate at 18.

Don't necessarily get maybe all the supports to go with that. It's getting better. But there's still some issues. There's still the belief, that, I'm thinking of Ireland, where records were recently opened and maybe not going that well, and their redress scheme. But there's a sort of a thought that you get that piece of paper, now you've got a name, or, now you can identify your people.

Away you go. And they assume it'll be the hallmark happy ending. And it isn't always. They forget that people can be rejected, that there's stigma, that regions can break down. But they can just wither quietly sometimes where people go, yay, and then it's okay, novelty wears off. So I would love to see more research being done into that, [00:14:00] if possible.

I don't know. It's a funny one.

Haley Radke: Do you think if you hadn't had your original rejection from your birth mother, that you would have dove so deeply into critical adoption scholarship?

Dr. Alice Diver: Wow, that's a really good question, which I've never really thought about. Possibly yes, because I'm quite bad tempered and grumpy.

So I possibly would have, I'm very good at seeing the negative in any situation. Would I have, I probably might not have been just as angry about the system and about everything. But yeah, I definitely, I would have seen, because I would have seen others struggling with the brick wall and the closed records.

So I think it probably would have, because suppose the thing about reunion is if you manage to get one and even if it goes well, you can be happy, but there's still the voice at the back saying I really get along with these people. They're lovely. And I can see I'm going to be fond of them. [00:15:00] But I lost 50 years.

So for example, like my sister, we unbeknownst to ourselves we have a daughter only a week apart back in the 90s. So if we had been, in touch, then that would how amazing would that have been that we would have been pregnant at the same time and just all the little things that you missed.

And I've often I think I've said to my brothers, it would have been just so not about an only child. I know you're maybe going to be a bit odd. But I've frequently told them, I says, if I'd had you guys growing up, even, they're younger than me, but they're a lot bigger and it just would have been nice.

You wanted someone to fight your corner. I just would love to going back to have been able to say, I'll get my brothers. Feel like Daenerys Targaryen. Here's my dragons. That's what it would have been like, cause they're quite, you know, they're big fellas. And I think they would, I like to think they would have protected their short, grumpy sister, maybe.

Haley Radke: Have quite a bit in common. I'm also Canadian. I don't know if you knew that. And my, I had a rejection from my birth mother, but we've never been in contact [00:16:00] since our brief reunion. And I started the show a couple years into reunion with my father. And I don't know, had all the things gone if this is where I would be, I'm not sure.

I'm thinking about that too. And I also was raised an only and have siblings now. So it's a real shift, isn't it? From being an only, solo focused to being a sister?

Dr. Alice Diver: It's nice. I like it. I do like it. Although I have to, cause I'm they would be the oldest. I have to rein in the urge, to dispense advice or to try and, maybe be bossy and stuff. I have to, it's unusual to have, it's lovely, but unusual to have siblings. I never know if it's said to be marked.

Haley Radke: How do you rein in that urge? Maybe that's a conversation for another time, but I could use some advice on that.

Dr. Alice Diver: Oh, badly. I've managed to do it very badly, as my kids could probably could probably advise as well. They could say, yep. [00:17:00] Mother has started again. She's off again with the advice that we don't want.

Haley Radke: I'm curious if you let's shift to more sort of work focus. Have you done much looking into adoption annulment, or rescission or any of those kinds of things? I saw your presentation at ASAC. And another lawyer was presenting, Greg Luce, and I don't know if you saw his presentation.

Yes, you did. And when you were initially sharing your story, and I've heard you share it a few other places, you said your coloring changed, so you went from fair to a little darker. And you also found out later that you're deaf. And I thought, oh, your adoptive parents actually had recourse to return you if they had cared to do, I don't know if folks know much about that, but I'm [00:18:00] wondering your thoughts on that and flipping it over to the adoptee rights side of things. We have no such recourse really.

Dr. Alice Diver: Exactly. But I do I found out after my mother had passed away, my dad let slip one day that apparently when I was about two, he said, yeah, I think she wanted to send you back at that stage.

But I said, no. And it's okay, that's an interesting thing to, yes, but then I thought maybe that just came out of somewhere or, I think he meant well to say it. And, again, I was handful and she was grieving and. Yeah, so that's, I know it's a threat too that sometimes, adoptive parents will say in jest to their children.

I know so many people that was said to, and even if they weren't serious, that's not the thing. Do not say that.

Haley Radke: Never.

Dr. Alice Diver: To an adoptee, because we're always yourself, I think we're always looking for any potential signs of rejection, so someone, maybe stops speaking or is angry at you, you immediately assume that [00:19:00] I'm gone, I've, they've written me out of their life, so it's a funny one.

Oh yeah, I think this was, whenever the deafness was discovered, funny enough, I was about 27, and I remember telling them, oh, I'm going to get, adoptive mom. I said, I'm going to get hearing aids. This is great. And she said, we were told there was nothing wrong with you. And she was quite cross.

And I was all there's loads wrong. Behold, there's, there are many flaws. Again, I think she meant it well, but it didn't come out that way, and yet it just reminds you that you're a bit of a commodity sometimes you're filling a role, which is a dark way to see things. I know.

But that's how we see it sometimes, because that's.

Haley Radke: Facts are facts, frankly,

Dr. Alice Diver: 100%. Yeah, they absolutely are. Yeah, it's funny. The thing about rescinding one's adoption, the UK doesn't allow you to do that. And I had funny enough, a symposium last year, and I think it was I had Scottish and English adoptees coming in by Zoom.

And we had a really great heated discussion, a [00:20:00] Northern Ireland judge was in for that one. So they, I went out and got coffee and left them to it. It was very lively. I should try and find the recording. They were saying, why do we not have the right to appeal our adoption, to take back our original name.

If an adoptive place, but especially if it's abusive, why is the, why are, why can't we reclaim our identities like this? And I remember that the judge, this lovely man, and he said, no, I agree. He said, the law is flawed. That's something that really needs to be looked at. And even with, I suppose the notion of redress, and recompense is really what's all about at the moment.

We're hoping that the UK will apologize to adoptees. They haven't yet. We're still waiting. How they, how it wasn't their fault, the ill treatment, I'll never know. But yeah.

Haley Radke: Nor has Canada. There was a the Senate hearings and those things, but there, nothing really came of that to this point.

Dr. Alice Diver: But even when you do get the apology, is it a piece of paper? Is it a word? Does it open the door to you maybe getting compensation? I know Northern Ireland at the minute is the ongoing [00:21:00] investigations. How do you compensate someone for a life that wasn't lived, or the relationships that you didn't have, or a placement that wasn't ideal?

There's just some things that are that little bit too horrific or beyond the pale that they're a tough one. And yeah, law is, I guess I'm back on my soapbox, but law is quite inadequate at trying to, unless I had a time machine, maybe that's why I'm thinking, maybe that's why we talked to the Doctor Who, me and the brother, maybe because, a TARDIS would have been good, because I think we would have, we've had, we had some discussions about, in childhood, would we have gotten along and, things that we could have, they were appalled to hear that as an only child, if you're playing a game of, let's say chess. I wasn't great at chess, but checkers, battleship, Clue, Ludo, games that you normally would have one other person, you would nearly, you'd have to go away and come back to forget your last move to work out a way to play a board game by yourself.

You'd see what my parents wanted to return me. Actually, I was a creepy kid. [00:22:00] Creepy kid with many personalities. But yeah, no, it's a strange with the law, I think is gradually waking up as adoptees get older and as countries start to ban international adoption and surrogacy has come into the mix as well with people saying, we're complex.

Lenny's issues are tricky and difficult and there isn't a fix for them. Yeah, so at least there's a bit of growing awareness not as much as there should be I would like society to take better notice of us not use this as punchlines that's the bit that really you know, it gets my goat.

I don't, I, you don't have to go more than a few days before you'll, something on social media, someone will be making a joke where the punchline is, and you're adopted. And it just makes me rather cross.

Haley Radke: I, I've heard you say this before, that the law is flawed and is not in any place to fix these wrongs right now for us.

And [00:23:00] in your new book, you talk so much about adoption and literature in, in various forms. And I've also heard you express this idea that fiction helps move culture forward. So can you talk a little bit about that, because I don't want to speak for you, so can you expand on that? And then what kinds of books and representation we're seeing more and more adoptee authored work in the world, which is wonderful, that's getting accolades and hitting bestseller lists and stuff, which is amazing, and we're celebrating those adoptees.

What more things do you want to see in the world that you think could shift the law?

Dr. Alice Diver: That's it. The memoirs are doing great work. I think it's so important that people are, that they're like testimony, they're like evidence, a long form of it where people are saying, okay, I know the narrative is that adoption is a thing of wonder and it's very beautiful and it can be a [00:24:00] good thing.

However, there needs to be a light shone, talk to the adult adoptee and get them to talk about their childhood. Because people, unless you, you've been there or walked in the shoes, you don't really get it, I don't want to say the kept because it sounds mean, but it's not a bad term either. It does. It does sum up.

Haley Radke: That's what I say.

Dr. Alice Diver: I'm sorry. There is kept privilege. There is. They just don't all get it.

Haley Radke: Another adoptee therapist of ours, Pam Cordano, calls them muggles.

Dr. Alice Diver: Yeah. Perfect. That is civilians. Yeah. Muggles is good. Because they, their world was very different to ours, from, you could say from birth, from pre birth, they didn't have to track people down.

Things that they take for granted, knowing who you look like, having someone that you look like and not having that. I think we do the eggshell walk quite a lot. I think we're often so scared about saying things to not drive people away, or maybe sometimes we drive them away first. I don't know.

There's just a lot of little differences there. It's just, [00:25:00] it's funny when you know when you're in a, if you're in a support group, if you're in a room of adoptees, even if you're not the same age. You could tell a story and the heads will start nodding and people will be like, yeah, I get that. Let me tell you this sort of one of mine.

And it's just, it's been in a warm bath. You wouldn't be in a warm bath with people. You know what I mean? Emotionally, it's not literally, but yeah, it's just you're among kindred spirits. I like that the muggles, I do like that. Yeah. They don't have our magic powers to read people in an instant or to cope with things that other people would find.

Sometimes you'll say something about your childhood. And you watch people's jaws drop and you think, oh, so I forgot you were in a little different universe and that wouldn't have been a thing for you. It's quite nice to appal them though. I do the, cause then we lose our filter and it's, I just think it's an appropriate response for them to say that was wrong.

Yeah, do you think? Yes it was. And then the conversation can move on, I think we just need to keep them educated. But fight the good fight. That's what I think we're doing. You were saying about, yeah, law just [00:26:00] doesn't quite do it. Even in other areas, it doesn't always promote justice as well, as we know.

Literature, I think the memoirs, definitely they're fantastic. Sometimes pop culture can do a thing, can reach the parts, that law doesn't. I probably said it at the ASAC talk. The movie Philomena, not without its problems, but it brought quite the message. It definitely brought it home to people, here's a thing that happened, a thing that was very wrong.

It's a pity the adoptee had passed away because it would have been good to have had his story and a bit more about that. The book, I suppose as well, I've gone through various eras to see how adoptees are treated. They're not always adoptees, sometimes they're foundlings, sometimes they've been rejected.

So there's a lot of folklore in there, and I was amazed to see how some of the odd little things in folklore that have survived. So burial, where were the unbaptised babies buried in Ireland? Was it [00:27:00] on consecrated ground? Was it a septic tank? What traditions went with that? Did you even get a burial?

A proper, dignified, humanising ceremony to happen. Why is there this fear of us? Because there is the fear of the unknown stranger turns up and goes, I'm your sister. Brace yourself. Some people are okay with that. Others are like, what do you want? Do you want money? That, please don't hurt me.

And quite often if there's a, a psychopath in a I don't know a Netflix tale. I just know I think that they're either adopted or they've got some missing thing. They're not identifying a parent. It's a little bit, it's a little bit tired. I'll still watch it. I'll still watch it.

And then I'll complain loudly to whoever's in the room with me, even if it's only myself. Because we're we got so used to that. What else does the book have? The books, I was told recently that it was quirky and a bit of a mashup. And I said maybe that's what I was aiming for. It has a bit of everything.

Where else would you get? You've got, we've got Heathcliff, we've got the Dickens orphans, getting along together. [00:28:00] Jane Eyre, because she had her witchcraft. That's the hill I will die on. And then I suppose going into The happy 20th century where you've got your Anne of Green Gables, which so many people love.

And I feel so bad for raining on their parade by saying, yeah, okay, she was an orphan, but she was the poster girl for a very bad system of transportation and the farm children. But even in the book, they're like, yeah, we're fresh out of boys, you'll have to take a girl, just lots of little little things that are there.

But it's good for us to read about it because on the second reading you start to see the little bits that don't add up and the gratitude, her main thing is gratitude. So that's in there.

Haley Radke: Can we talk about The Giver?

Dr. Alice Diver: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Haley Radke: Because. So that's by Lois Lowry. I looked it up today. It was published in 93 and it won the Newbery in 94 and that's when I read it and I was 11 and I recently gave it to my son to read and he's 11 when we're recording this [00:29:00] and he's oh, it was depressing.

And I was like, huh. Anyway, I loved that book. I loved Anne of Green Gables. I had many books that deeply permeated my childhood. And you said you were playing games by yourself and turning the chessboard. I was reading by myself in my room the same books over and over, including The Giver.

And when you talked about The Giver in your presentation, I was like, oh, my son had just read that, so I got a, my literal childhood copy. And I was like, I gotta reread that, because some of the points you made, I was like, what? I don't remember that. So reading it with my adult eyes, I was like, oh my word.

The whole all of society is adoptees. Birth mother is a job you get assigned. And it's this low level no glory, servitude sort of situation. And I was like, oh my [00:30:00] goodness, all the bombshells I had from that. Thank you for reawakening that for me.

Dr. Alice Diver: That's, that's, it's a great book. I suppose we home in, if there's an adoption, not even a subplot, but just the elements of it.

So they had to, so yeah, everyone was adopted because obviously they took tablets that they wouldn't have the stirrings and the feelings and there was no romance. There was no yeah, no music, no color, none of these things. And yeah, and the term birth mother, it was built up to be, this is an honorable profession, but then you very quickly see that they're just discarded three births, that's it. We see an older lady later on who, had been one, but she never got a family of her own. And it's just very, they're very derided and so on. I don't know if you've read the sequel. There's three sequels. Son is the final book. That's the one maybe to go to for a little bit of closure. I don't want to give spoilers.

But it is takes you back and gives you more of an insight into what was happening to the [00:31:00] girls that were producing the product is what, how they refer to the babies. I think if I could, in some senses, it's perfect. It's bleak, but it shows you the dark side. What would happen if family life was totally changed and there were no laws protecting it?

And I think that's exactly what does happen for some adoptees. Goodbye family life and we'll just get on with it. I would warn mothers reading it if they'd gone through a system like that. It made me think of a lot of the Irish testimony, the English testimony. the brutality the ill treatment as the product was taken away and given to another family.

Again, lots of drugs, either to dry up the milk or to suppress the emotions and so on. And then you remember, this is a book for kids. It's for teenagers. But then I think you know what? Maybe it's, it's good that they read of such things and then they'll think this is fiction.

And then we can do a Margaret Atwood and say, oh no, it is not. It's happening somewhere sometime. Yeah. [00:32:00] And it's sometimes you need to shine a light on things that aren't right. Cause how else are you going to change them? Even if it upsets people, if no one ever got upset, nothing would ever change.

And we'd be like the little happy people in The Giver that don't know that apples are red and that never have music. They don't even have grandparents, don't have Christmas lights, don't have, any of these things. So it's yeah, I think it's a good, it's a good work.

Haley Radke: One of the terms you use in your book repeatedly is surplus child.

Dr. Alice Diver: Yes.

Haley Radke: Can you talk about that? Because that lit something in me. I was like, Oh my God, I'm a surplus.

Dr. Alice Diver: I'm sorry. I apologize. I never like people on fire. I apologize for that. No, it was a term used in I'm fairly certain it was used in one of the novels might have been Handmaid's Tale. Somebody used the phrase, of course, I jumped on it and thought, oh, that's bleak.

I'll use that. Why not? It's a bit of darkness. [00:33:00] I will appropriate it and use it. I suppose that, yes, they were, that was, they kept population levels in the giver. They kept them low to prevent future famines. So a twin was automatically going to be sent elsewhere, euthanized, whatever, to how they chose.

The child that didn't fit in, so Gabriel that sparks the first book and we later find out why he didn't fit in. But yeah, he's not, he's going against the system because he's, you're not sleeping, you're not eating, you're crying, you're want, you're not being sedated the way the others are. So he's a little, but he's not, again, surplus to requirements.

Handmaid's Tale, you saw the children, I think horrifically they referred to them as, shredders. So they were somehow flawed and were not kept. And again, she slips that in very quickly near the end, that one of the babies that we thought was being very embraced and celebrated and appropriated didn't quite conform, so there's a rumor that maybe it was chosen to be rejected. I think the first chapter with [00:34:00] the illegitimacy, the cheerful first chapter that talked about illegitimacy and children being exposed and abandoned. Or seen as changelings left out, they're fairies. Again, in a way, I suppose surplus to requirements or not fitting with, if the product was not acceptable, we didn't quite fit with what was wanted of us.

So you could have been imperfect because you were born out of wedlock. Or maybe through some disability or something. So yeah, it does put it up a bit to the adoptees will get it. I think I was like, who am I writing for? As I'm writing this couple of people said, who's your audience? I said, I would imagine it'll be angry adoptees.

That's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping it'll be. That, or people that have to live with us that want to try and understand us. But I'm thinking you nearly need to be blunt for the muggles or the kept person to go, okay, I get it now that you are facing that stigma and it has roots that go back a long way.

And it can sometimes be just a little bit subtle where you're maybe left out of something either by your [00:35:00] birth family, your adopted family, or maybe by friends. If you don't get you, maybe you don't get the invite to go to the pub that evening. Most people won't mind. An adoptee might go, what have I done? What's wrong with me? Abandonment again, and it just could be that you got left off the email. You'll maybe get a call later, but you do the little things that sort of are always there, always haunting us.

Haley Radke: Yeah,

Dr. Alice Diver: To be surplus , yeah, it's a loaded, it's a loaded word, isn't it?

We're bonus people, that's a better way of putting it. It's

Haley Radke: extra.

Dr. Alice Diver: I'm a bonus person.

Haley Radke: It is, but I was thinking and this is something you addressed too, right? We've got orphans, adoptee, foundling, and, sometimes we're labeled with an incorrect word, right? I'm not an orphan. I had living parents. I'm not a foundling, like I was born at a hospital and relinquished, I have friends who are literal foundlings found in a field, by a mentally ill mother who didn't have supports she needed. Yikes, [00:36:00] the terminology is so, problematic and you do point that out throughout the book.

I love having this extra word, surplus. And substitute family.

Dr. Alice Diver: Yes.

Haley Radke: Because I, I love it when people say,. I love I do, I truly love this when people say I was adopted by strangers.

Dr. Alice Diver: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Cause that's, that's not everybody's circumstances. Sometimes we have kinship adoption, but like that is what happened to me and to you, strangers, stranger adoption. So can you talk about substitute family?

Dr. Alice Diver: I think we're probably, yeah, when we're always scared of being seen as ungrateful because we're meant to be grateful because we, probably get reminded quite often. Oh, but you had good, I've had that said to me a few times, but you had good parents and I'm thinking I wasn't complaining.

I maybe just made some comment like I've been to Canada to see, why did you go there? You had good parents here. I think they're no longer living. It's hard to visit them. So I will maybe go and visit the living [00:37:00] in Canada instead, but yeah, that's the terminology substitute. It does sometimes sound very blunt and a little bit shocking.

Stranger adoption. It sounds like you're rejecting strangers that brought you in and you might not be doing that, but you're stating a fact in that, and I will always say we're mammals. We have other ways of sensing if we're in the right place, and that might not be, it may be a bit unfair, because I'm sure quite often the substitute family, the stranger, can be very welcoming.

Stranger's just a friend you haven't met yet, but when it comes to, baby and family, yes, it's a dark term. And if it upsets someone, I'm not gonna, I can't apologize to the kept person who says, oh you're critiquing the whole system. Yeah, I'm afraid I am because there needs to be something.

What does it say about a society if mothers can't keep their babies? That lack of support. It is an indictment of society and backin, up, up the church that thought this [00:38:00] was a good idea to create this industry. I know we're living in changed times and different times, but I think it's one of, that's one of the worst and darkest things that can happen to a human being, that can happen to a baby, that can happen to a relinquishing mother.

So yeah, I'm sorry that I can't have, the flowers and rainbows. My daughter told me, the youngest girl told me, the one that, keeps marching me off to hairdressers and telling me I'm awful. Because she means well, tough love from her. She had there was an office party a few months back and she said that she saw a cake and she thought, oh I wonder what they're celebrating.

And one of the ladies in the office had been cleared to be an adoptive parent, didn't know what kind of baby she was getting, didn't know the age, was told it would be an older child, was told there would be problems, but wasn't told which types of problems and so on. But anyway, so they had, Prosecco and champagne and there was balloons.

Everybody was really festive and cheerful. And my daughter says she says, I just, I couldn't do it. She says, because I thought this is lovely. This is nice. But also there's a child out there somewhere being abused. [00:39:00] There's a mother about to lose her child. There's something horrendous happening, especially for a two year old.

And there's issues, but we're not, we can't tell you the issues because it might prejudice you. But I feel quite sorry for the lady. I thought you might want to you know the issues, if you went to get a rescue dog, they'd warn you. He bites, or he's gassy, or he's smelly, or any of the things that you might want that information on.

But they thought, I thought, that's mad that's still happening. And I thought, yeah, that I wondered, were there any adoptees in the room that were maybe going to go and share in the cake? Maybe. But she's, I didn't eat, I didn't eat any cake. I said okay, but you're always on a diet anyway, cause you're terribly thin.

So I knew you wouldn't have eaten cake. But she says, no, she's just, I did just I did you say to anyone? Oh God, no, she said, I didn't want to be the bad fairy. I didn't want to ruin the vibe. She says, but I had to come home and tell you that I felt a bit so that maybe as a sums up society.

There's still that thing of, you can't speak out and you have to be like, yay, this is great. Somebody somewhere [00:40:00] eating the cake must in the back of their mind have thought, is there not a bit of darkness under here and are celebrations appropriate? And she was celebrating the idea that she was getting a child.

And I do feel for the lady that was, just infertile and I can see why she was overjoyed. But equally, I'm thinking she might have needed to have a bit of warning that, especially an older child, that's not a baby, you're getting an older child that's been through a lot of abuse.

Yeah, it's very complex. And how does law fix that? It can't. How does society fix it? I don't know. Grumpy people like me yelling at them might be the thing.

Haley Radke: Me too. I'm in, I'm yelling to Alice. I am. I'm doing my best. I'm, I still have this. I cannot reconcile how people celebrate the initial adoption, and we also get full coverage for every adoption reunion that people want to make [00:41:00] public.

And it's this happy, amazing story that people cry tears over. Do not know how the public reconciles that in their brain. Like why are you celebrating? You were celebrating when they were separated. Why are you celebrating that they're back together? I don't understand.

Dr. Alice Diver: That is a brilliant, there's an article in that somewhere, that's a brilliant point.

Yeah, it's make up your mind. Why do they have to be, yeah it's all so beautiful. Let's just go live with, let's do what the giver does. So everybody gets to be adopted, everyone gets to have all that joy and then we're all, yeah there's an answer, it's a strange one.

I think most human beings, we try to make the best of things, but I think sometimes ignoring underpinning realities, they're going to bubble out later on.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Dr. Alice Diver: We're very good at masking and saying everything is awesome, everything's wonderful. But yeah, sometimes then they said, oh, I wonder why was she angry today? Don't know. Something has maybe, the [00:42:00] little triggers are everywhere. If they could stop with the triggers, if they could stop with, stop triggering us, does it, do you have to have it as a, oh, if I got one more subplot or one more twist, the big reveal is, guess what?

I'm not your father, or I am your father, or it might be, or whatever the, whatever that reveal is yeah, they need to find something else to, yeah to entertain people with that's very cynical, but yeah, it just, it's becoming a, it's a little bit tired. It's doing us a disservice because it ties in with the whole thing of but you're fine now and you should be grateful and why are you not great? Like Twitter is a scary place to go to. Some people will get really violently angry at any adoptee who dares to not even criticize, but to just say, yeah, your system could be better. Whoa, you will open, the portal to hell and people will start abusing you. I wonder why. I don't know. I don't know what their, what the issue is, but yeah.

Haley Radke: They have a secret child somewhere that they're afraid is going to show up on their doorstep [00:43:00]

Dr. Alice Diver: Something like that, yeah.

Haley Radke: There's something. I don't know. I have one more last topic I want to talk about before we do recommended resources. And when you presented at the ASAC conference, your topic was forced adoption as a war crime.

Dr. Alice Diver: A cheerful one. I do like a cheerful, a happy little topic.

Haley Radke: I loved it.

Dr. Alice Diver: Totally. I spread joy.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. I did. I totally loved it. I feel like there's some tie ins from the book, some examples that are similar, but can you talk a little bit about that? Because I really do think it, it's on theme with the rest of our conversation.

Dr. Alice Diver: Yeah, I could, I can do that. So casting my mind back to the paper, I think I was looking at Ukraine and what is happening there the occupied regions where the Russian Federation has come in. Now they have, they decided that this is a war crime, [00:44:00] the forcible displacement.

So children are being, and older children as well, are being fast tracked and sent off to being adopted by Russian families, in some cases going up into far away places. It was the fast tracking of the passport that got me. So they're changing their nationality very quickly. They're saying that these children are in some cases they say they're abandoned, so they were in care. Again, we see the falsifying and that a lot of them weren't abandoned. Their families tried to get them back. So that they're orphanizing them. They're saying, oh yeah, no parents that we could find. We know that's not true. They're using international law as a bit of a double edged thing.

So they're saying we're not war criminals. We had to do this to stop them being stateless. Because to be stateless is in breach of international law. It's a terrible thing. They're using child protection principles with saying it's in their best interests. You don't want 'em to stay in an institution, so we're gonna send them off to this loving family.[00:45:00]

But how do you square all of that? And I know it's a very different situation to ourselves because we were peace time adoptees. We weren't fighting a war. But you can connect the dots. How many similar issues were there? There's, Reuters did, and Amnesty, I think, did reports of these adoptees.

They weren't allowed to wear the colors of Ukraine, so they weren't allowed to wear the blue and yellow. And they were taught certain songs, so there was propaganda. And some of them, as they got a little bit older, were saying, oh yeah, that was our former country was bad. Do we see a similar thing like that happening with us, as in, how many of us didn't talk about birth family in front of adoptive family?

How many of us, I never said that I got my non identifying information. I never would have said that I was going to search. I waited till, really till the folks were I didn't wait till they were dead. I did it and didn't tell them. But in some ways I was glad reunion happened after they passed away because they would have lost their minds, Oh my God, it was the taboo subject of don't mention it.

My mom once, she said, I think I was a [00:46:00] teenager, and she said one time, I want you to know you're free to search anytime you want, but wait till I'm dead. She had a very pragmatic way of looking at things. So I just, yeah, I just think there's, maybe, I don't know if the war crime will ever be prosecuted, we'll wait and see if that's ever a, if that's ever a thing, but it will be interesting to draw maybe some lessons from wartime adoption across to the peacetime adoptees, because we're fighting our own little battle, it's just a small personal wars. Against society and against, anyone that annoyed. I'm ready to overturn cars now. I will start the revolution.

Haley Radke: Some of the notes I took were you say, you said, are there some war crimes that are acceptable? And it feels like this is one of them.

Dr. Alice Diver: Yes.

Haley Radke: Yeah. See, look at you. You're like, yeah, past Alice. Good job.

Dr. Alice Diver: We're really listening to this talk. That's a bit

Haley Radke: Come on.

Dr. Alice Diver: Oh, I'm not used to people listening. My students tend to doze off. They [00:47:00] get very bored by me, so that's great. That's lovely that you took it.

Haley Radke: I took plenty of notes.

Dr. Alice Diver: That's a note.

Haley Radke: I, it was really evocative for me. And so was your book. And I really hope that folks follow more of your work. I know you've published many articles around this topic and your new book, The Genetic Stigma in Law and Literature, Orphanhood, Adoption, and the Right to Reunion. It, I think a lot of adoptees who, like me, have read so many adoptee stories will really find it engaging and I love how you bring the law into it, even for someone like me that is not really trained in it or anything like that.

I found so many things, I was like, oh. I want to learn more about this. I want to talk more about this. And so I know folks will really connect to a lot of those points that you're bringing forward. I think it's wonderful. I [00:48:00] know you've written so many things on the topic. And so for folks that are new to you, I think they'll be excited to deep dive more of your work.

For podcast listeners though, I do want to say you have three episodes on The Law Pod podcast, which is that part of your university?

Dr. Alice Diver: It is. Yeah. The law school do that. They put out weekly on just on various different topics, very good explainers, law, politics. This one was slightly different to suppose that because it was I had Korean adoptees over, I had Canadians. So it just got us in a round table to to talk about everything.

Haley Radke: I love this. Avoiding origin deprivation. So we'll link to those and your conversation with Emily Hipchen as well. Who also oversees ASAC.

Dr. Alice Diver: She's very good. She's very patient with me. She puts up with my bad writing. She's a great editor and she's very good.

Haley Radke: Anyway, we'll link to those things. I hope that folks check out [00:49:00] all of those things and other work that you've written. Is Forced Adoptions as War Crimes, is that going to come out in ASAC?

Dr. Alice Diver: Oh, yes. I think so. It's being, it's gone.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Dr. Alice Diver: I think at the peer review stage.

So I think it's probably come back to be revised a little bit, but I'm hoping it might be winter or maybe spring. So yeah, I think it, it ties in, you've reminded me, I think it ties in with The Giver and the Handmaid's Tale with the lack of reunion at all. So again, it's those novels, they shy away from really exploring too much of adoption.

So maybe that's where the, are some things like even for the dystopian novel, yeah, reunion, they don't go there. It's yay, happy ending reunion. End of book . I'm like, that was they, God. How did they get on? You've given us this A one.

Haley Radke: Did they get a message every day with a recipe and the weather? I don't think so.

Dr. Alice Diver: Absolutely. , that's absolutely that's the reunion handbook. You know, I not very bad.

Haley Radke: I keep saying ASAC , I should say it's the [00:50:00] Alliance for the Study of Adoption Culture. And it's a journal that comes out twice a year and there's a conference that's biennial. So maybe you'll present in a future conference, people could see.

What do you want to recommend to us today?

Dr. Alice Diver: I'll give my favorite novel, which I only really touched, I touched on it briefly in the book. Again, I think a book I read when I was about 10, An Episode of Sparrows. Now it's not, strictly to do with adoption. But I like it because it follows the experience. To me, it's, it marks a sea change. So it's set in the 1950s, just after the war. And it follows the experiences of a little girl who is very slowly and gradually abandoned by her mother. And she's focused on wanting to, to dig out, to plant a little garden among bomb ruins, like these ruined streets in London, but it actually has moments of humor.

She builds up her own substitute family. She builds up kinships with people and it's not a very long story. [00:51:00] And it's got, I will tell you nothing of the ending. Cause it would just be a, it would be a spoiler. The gardeners will like it because she's she gathers. She's quite a cheeky wee girl.

Like she'll, so she'll occasionally, she'll occasionally shoplift to get things that she needs. And she'll, it's, I just, I can't recommend it enough. And there's just a tiny bit of law near the end. But again, I couldn't tell you too much about it because it would spoil the ending, but it's just great.

And I see, I've read it a few times over the years because you know yourself, you read something as a child, you read it as an adult. And we get a glimpse, very briefly, inside of, a convent, a home of mercy, or whatever. She's so defiant the whole way through, her defiance. It's very funny and it's for once it's actually, I know it really sounds really bleak, by the end of it, you're edified, you'll be doing messy crying, you'll be doing hot mess crying, but the tears won't all be sad tears.

It'll be okay. But it'll ring you out on the way. So yeah, it's just if you're bored of life or if you want to upset yourself, for the week, you can [00:52:00] probably read it in a day.

Haley Radke: And there's no plot twist that there's an adoptee that's a murderer. We're good.

Dr. Alice Diver: Thankfully, no. That's what it means. Thankfully, there's none of that carry on because, yes, I'm one Elf away from losing it. It's.

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh. Yes. Yes. You and Emily talk about Elf in your episode, so people can hear your Christmas movie thoughts there. This has been just a privilege. Thank you so much.

Where can folks connect with you online and find more of your work?

Dr. Alice Diver: Thank you so much for starters. And I'll have to say thank you for having me. This has been brilliant. I was very scared, but you were nice to me. So okay, let me think. I'm on. Yeah, I think I'm on Twitter. I don't post much on Instagram.

I just, I will have a look on it. Obviously, through the university's website, I have a page. Facebook from time to time I will go on as well. I probably just mainly post pictures of the cat because he's a bit of a lunatic and he [00:53:00] merits currently fighting with a magpie. He's having war with magpies at the minute in England.

So yeah, like I'm on Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn. Yeah, I'm open to all, open to anybody, or anybody wants to email, you can give out, the email as well. I'm happy for conversations. If anybody wants a chat or to complain at me I'm good for that too. Or to ask about the book, granted, anything, it's all really nice. Everyone, all welcome.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Dr. Alice Diver: Thank you as well. And it was really good to have to meet you properly and to have a chat. It was lovely.

Haley Radke: Isn't she remarkable? Just so impressive. And to add to that, if the high cost of an academically published book is a barrier for you, please note that Dr. Diver has offered to make a PDF of her book accessible if you like to email her. And all that info will be in the show notes [00:54:00] for this episode, which will be on adopteeson.com. Or if you're listening in a podcast app, you should be able to just click on the picture and click through the show notes should appear and there'll be links there for you. Thank you so much for your ongoing support of the show. I would love it if you would share this episode with just one friend, perhaps there's a fellow adoptee that you know that would really benefit from hearing from Alice's work.

I am so thankful for my monthly supporters. And another way you can support the show is from, with just like a one time donation through PayPal. And there's a link on the front page of adopteeson.com if you'd like to support Adoptees On or our new project. We would love to have you, um, back the work we're doing and help us keep the lights on and paying all of our fellow adoptees for their work here.

Thank you [00:55:00] so much for listening. And as promised, we are going to talk again very soon. This summer. Oh, you can hear my dog. Spencer cannot be chill today while I'm trying to record this for you. Sorry. He's digging on my carpet. We are going to have shows throughout the summer and there'll be two episodes in July and two in August.

And our first July episode will be coming up for you on July 12th, 2024. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again very [00:56:00] soon.