323 Lisa Olivera, MFT
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/323
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. I am so honored to welcome back Lisa Olivera to explore her new book When the Ache Remains. Lisa shares how becoming a mother has brought up new layers of both loss and connection, and we both open up about recent painful relationship ruptures.
Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the [00:01:00] website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On Lisa Olivera.
Hi Lisa.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Hi Haley. I'm so glad to be back. I can barely believe it's been four years since the last time. I don't know how that's possible.
Haley Radke: I know I was looking back 'cause I was like, oh, I gotta give folks the episode number. It's episode 203 and I was like 203. I'm well over past a hundred episodes and I thought this was, I thought it was two years ago.
Truly, and no, it's been four years. Four years. You have a daughter that's a whole four years old. You shared your story on that episode. I'm gonna point people to go back and listen if they're unfamiliar with your story. But for folks who might be new to you, do you mind just sharing a little bit of your adoptee story before we talk about your new work and adoptee things together?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah, I'd be happy to. And yeah, [00:02:00] I shared a lot more in the last episode I was on, but I'll share that I was a foundling. I was found just outside of Muir Woods when I was a few hours old and adopted a few days later, and I had been with that family ever since. There was not a lot of talk about adoption growing up.
There was not a lot of conversation or capacity to hold my depth of grief and loss and feelings of not belonging and because that wasn't mirrored to me anywhere. I of course internalized it all as something being wrong with me, which I know is very common for adoptees. I had bouts of very severe depression and suicidality.
I was in and out of hospitals as a teenager. I struggled with that into my early twenties really, and I found my biological [00:03:00] family through ancestry.com in 2015, when I was 27, that gave me contact with my biological sister, brother, my first mother, my biological father. I discovered half siblings who still don't know I exist.
I'm still a secret to my biological father's family, and he lives about 25 minutes away from me. So that continues to be a tender place of my story. I've also had some severance after reunion with some family members, and my experience as a, an adoptee continues to be deeply complex, beautiful, painful, and one of the parts of me that I feel I'm in an ongoing relationship with that continues to deepen and widen and get harder and easier in all of the ways. [00:04:00] I guess that's the quickest, most general overview.
Haley Radke: I remember when I was trying to pick my major and I chose psychology 'cause I was like, I just, I need to understand humans, which LOL I'm trying to understand myself.
What drew you to becoming a therapist?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Goodness. So many things. One of which was that I didn't realize until later was this sense of wanting to feel useful as a way of feeling like I'm worthy. That took a lot of humble recognition to realize and to unwind from, but there was a sense of. Being of service and being helpful and supporting other people will make me a worthy person.
So there was that thread. Then there was also a thread of really deeply caring [00:05:00] about people feeling the felt sense of being held and seen in my own experiences, having a sense of un-aloneness and accompaniment in pain and from what I've experienced, what has felt like a pretty wide capacity to meet people in the depths of who they are in ways that I felt could make me of service in this particular profession.
I've always been so curious about people. I've always loved connecting with people on a deep layer. I've always held a real sense of importance around wanting to support people in feeling seen and understood and known. Partially because I know the fracture of not having that in all of the places in our life that some people do, and I think my experiences as an adoptee was also a big [00:06:00] part of wanting to go into this work.
When I first started this work, I worked a lot with adoptees and their families. I worked with youth in foster care. I worked in a group home for female foster youth. So I feel like my foundations in this work started from a place of really sitting with the deep pain of feeling a lack of belonging, feeling a lack of safety in what it means to be a family and really wanting to make something of my own pain. I think that was part of what led me to this work.
Haley Radke: Make something of my own pain. That's sounds a lot like what I've been doing. I identify with that so much.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Oh yeah. And how many of us are like working to support others in some kind of way, just to feel like useful, and worthy. I think those are the words you used. [00:07:00] I totally identify with that.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. Yeah.
Haley Radke: So you, in addition to being a therapist, you're also a writer. We talked about your first book already enough, the last time you visited us here. And in an interview you did I heard you talk about writing as a child and that the only place you felt you had, to be honest was in your journaling time. Can you share more about that?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. I've always been a writer. I've always had a journal or a diary or a place that holds what I didn't know how to contain in myself.
What I didn't know how to say to another person what I wasn't sure a relationship could actually hold because relationship felt so fragile and scary in some ways for me as a child. And even though I had a sense of stability in my [00:08:00] family, I also had this constant churning of questioning around whether or not that was ever gonna get ripped away from me.
And whether or not that was actually something rooted and solid, I don't know if my nervous system ever knew that. And so writing became this relationship that I felt was rooted and solid for me. It became this holding place, this like nest I could land in with all of my stuff that I wasn't sure anyone else knew how to be with.
And. It also became a place where I could explore and imagine and tell stories and name things that I weren't sure were okay to name out loud. And so this, it became this refuge and this mirror and this place where I could put the stuff that I didn't know how to put anywhere else, that at times felt like it was just gonna seep out and overflow out of me like a [00:09:00] volcano erupting and writing continues to be that for me and a long part of my life was spent keeping my writing private. But I remember being in high school and having a live journal and like sharing my feelings and thoughts on live journal and connecting with people through my writing there. I remember having a blog and sharing in my journalism class I wrote a paper about being adopted and it was in the school newspaper.
And so writing has always been this thread of trying to connect to myself, to the world, to my story, to what it means to be a person. And it just has leaked out of me in these different ways, but it's always been the first place that I feel like I can go to say what I need to say without editing it for anyone else's comfort.
Haley Radke: When you [00:10:00] released your first book into the world, a portion of it is memoir and you share about the adoptee experience and in some of those things that we talked about in our last episode, and it does talk about the complexity of being an adoptee and the grief of that and those kinds of things. Did you get responses from fellow adoptees in feeling seen by those words?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: I've had so many adoptees reach out and share about my writing in that book that was specifically about my experience as an adoptee. I've also had adoptees reach out and share that my writing reaches something in them, even if it's not naming adoption or the experience of being adopted explicitly, because I think a lot of the writing that I do and share is about [00:11:00] themes of trying to belong, trying to feel connected, trying to unwind from deeply held narratives and ideas and felt sense, experiences of who we are and what it means to be here. And I also write a lot about holding the pain and the grief of being human as something that might not ever necessarily go away. And that is certainly deeply rooted to my experience as an adoptee and to I think it was Pam Cordano who explained it as like this Nothing Place.
Like I feel really connected to that and feel that there is this place inside that may not ever get penetrated fully by life that is so deeply protected. And I'm not sure anything will ever actually get past all of those layers of [00:12:00] protection because it's so strong. And yet it feels like my life's work to meet that grief and that fear and to find beauty and connection and aliveness where it is and to practice not hiding in that place as often as I used to.
So I think that even when I'm not writing specifically about my experience of being an adoptee, a lot of the themes that I write and share about are really drawn from that experience. And so I think adoptees can see and sniff that out and feel resonance with it, even if it's not named explicitly. Yeah, that's the felt sense that I get when I connect with other adoptees who have read my writing.
Haley Radke: And what about the general population? To your adoptee [00:13:00] specific writings, did you have feedback around that? What was the tone or do you remember any instances about that?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: There was an experience, which I think is a lifelong experience of people wanting to take my story and take what I've shared and again, turn it into this like before and after story.
Even when I try really hard to not write it that way, I think people are just programmed to want to see it as this simple arc of transformation or this simple storyline where there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and oh, reunion happened, so it's happily ever after, or you've found acceptance in some ways, so it must mean that there's no more pain.
Like I think people really want to simplify what is complicated and to reduce what is complex. [00:14:00] And I think being an adoptee is a deeply complicated, complex experience that most people do not know how to hold. And so we are often tasked as adoptees to hold other people's simplifications of our story and our experience instead of other people being willing to sit with the nuance, the difficulty, the not so simple before and after experiences that we have, and I find that sometimes I get so used to people not being willing to understand the complexity that I can just like not want to do that labor and just let them hold their perception of what it means to me to be adopted or what it means to me to have found some healing, but also not found some healing.
And I try to find this balance between [00:15:00] sharing my experience openly and also not objectifying myself and sharing more than I think people can actually mirror to me, because that can really amplify a sense of aloneness when I share something. And people are only willing to receive a part of that. And I think adoptees are often tasked with leaving our wholeness to make other people feel comfortable and so I, I really try to find this balance of sharing openly and honestly, and also knowing that sharing too openly might actually feel really painful for me because it will be yet another experience of not being met in the truth of how I hold myself and my experience as an adoptee.
I think that's why connecting with other adoptees is so deeply healing because you don't have to hold that tension with them. They can just it's just there [00:16:00] and you can drop this sense of protection and permissing other people's unwillingness to sit in discomfort and these ways that we can be inadvertently tasked with managing.
Our story so that we don't share more than other people can hold, and then inadvertently reiterate this narrative that our experience is too complex for people.
Haley Radke: I love that you use that word objectifying because that is so it, and especially for yourself, like I can see as a foundling story, the redemption arc, and look at you now, like it's so easy for folks to pick up on that and reduce you to this trope really.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. And [00:17:00] also it can cause people to assume that my story ended at some point or that my experience as adoptee ended instead of recognizing that actually like my experience as adoptee is going to, it's going to be with me the whole entire through line of my life. Like we don't stop being adoptees that's not something that happens.
And people want that to be what happens because they want to not have to sit with the difficulty of it, because that would cause them to reckon with their own inability to really see the humanity of us, which includes things that our collective doesn't quite know how to hold yet.
Haley Radke: Totally. That it's you're, that's totally accurate I think I love how you said that even for folks who are in [00:18:00] a place where they can annul their adoption or make it like it wasn't even for folks who have the happy fairytale reunion and get completely integrated back into a family of origin. Like even for those case, like you're still adopted, you still got separated as an infant or in childhood. There was still a severance. There's a still an overcoming that we gotta work through. I, it's just. This is forever.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: So can we pivot and talk a little bit about what motherhood has looked like for you as an adopted person? And we touched on this last time, and you were so new I thought why is this lady having to try and sell her book right now? She should be home with her baby and not having to work. Now you're a few [00:19:00] years out. Motherhood as an adoptee for me, it changed me so much. I know it changes humans anyway, but specifically as an adoptee, do you have thoughts on that now that your little girl is sorry she's getting older.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: I know she's basically an old lady as a 4-year-old compared to what feels like forever ago as a newborn.
But yeah, I'm feeling, I feel like I'm still really living into the answers to that question and I think becoming a mother really uprooted so much of my locked away grief around separation, around not being able to look into the face of someone who looked like me around [00:20:00] just what I imagined my infant self going through as she was handed from stranger to stranger, and not understanding why she wasn't with her mother.
Like I think the wave of intense somatic grief that has been brought to the forefront since becoming a mother continues to unfold for me. And it's so interesting because I feel like when I look at my daughter, it's like our relationship is this place that holds both the grief and the healing that is available.
It's like in this one relationship, I can feel this depth of grief around my own separation and my own loss, and then at the same time, I can feel this gift of closeness, connection and mirroring that I get to have with her [00:21:00] like in the same two bodies. We together are holding what feels like the myriad of experiences of what it looks like to form healthy connection as an adoptee.
And I feel that with her so deeply. And I also have felt in very tangible ways, like some of my own fears of being deeply seen and known, actually coming up with her. And there were points where I remember like being really afraid to look into her eyes because I could just, I even get emotional thinking about it because I could feel like how much love was there and that was really scary to me.
To feel like how much love was possible in that specific biological way and how the amount of love that was possible with her [00:22:00] again, like really amplified what I actually lost. And so it's this sort of dichotomy of I feel like through getting to be her mom, I'm becoming more of myself and connecting to a sense of lineage and rootedness in a way that I didn't even know I didn't have in some sense. And then I'm also having to face and reckon with the things that I didn't know how to feel until this became possible right in front of my eyes, in my arms. And there's such a tenderness and such a beauty in getting to have this sort of opportunity to really meet these relational dynamics with presence and attunement and care, and to let them infuse my own healing so that I can then support her in being who she is in the world without needing her to be someone for my own sense of [00:23:00] okayness, which is often what I felt like I had to be as a child for my parents.
And so there's this, what feels like just this circular spiral of healing and grief and healing and grief and healing and grief. That is interwoven in my experience of being her mom. And I'll also just name that she's the most incredible kid and I feel so deeply lucky to get to love her. And that loving her so much is the greatest gift. And also it mirrors like this wound. It's gonna need lifelong tending.
Haley Radke: I identify with so much of what you shared. I remember the first time that I felt scared of the closeness with my son and I thought, oh my gosh, I gotta go make an appointment with my therapist [00:24:00] because my nature is to push away. Because reject first before you can be rejected.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Classic. And of course you can't do that to your baby. So I hear that. I also hear I didn't feel seen growing up. I felt very alone. I really did. I felt very alone growing up and I was just reminiscent. Talking about this with a friend and feeling this idea of like where people are like, oh, I really want my mom never felt that in my life.
And so when my kids need me, I'm like, great. I'm so glad I can be there for you. And I don't relate to that. 'cause I, who I needed was me. And that's who showed up for me was me. And so as a mom to make sure that I'm paying attention to them and showing up for them in a way that I didn't have certainly, and I'm on the next [00:25:00] age level up, Lisa, where I see the launch and I have to work and study myself to be prepared to, with joy, send them off into adulthood. And again, that feeling of le Yeah, your big size. That feeling of leaving me, it's whew. So on the edge I told Lisa off air, but my oldest son just passed me in height. And so even though he is 13, the, it's, the university looks closer than it did when he was four.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Oh my goodness. Yeah. I really feel the tenderness of slowly trying to re-pattern what's happening with my own child from what happened to me, and slowly letting my nervous system actually try to see and hold it as separate and as different and as actually [00:26:00] happening in a safe container with the person it's supposed to be happening with.
And I have to remind myself of that often. When I feel myself getting triggered or activated by her needs, or by her not having needs, even though I can see she needs something or by her expression or whatever it may be, I have to remind myself so often, like I'm an adult, she's a child. It's 2026, I'm her mother. She has me. I have to literally remind myself the facts of my relationship with her. So that my nervous system can settle into what's actually happening rather than responding from this core wound that I have, because that can get activated so easily and there can be a lot of shame around that getting activated as a parent when I don't want my stuff to leak into how I'm showing up for her.
[00:27:00] But of course it's going to 'cause I'm not a robot and I can't just shut myself off and detach from how my own history and attachment and connection is going to impact her because it will. And so I've been trying to allow that to just be what it is so that I can be with it rather than hide from it, which is sometimes what I want to do.
Haley Radke: It's such a good reminder too. I see Lisa with her therapist hat on here that, no, like genuinely, sometimes all I need to say to myself is I'm an adult and that's enough to be like, just chill me out in the moment. I need to be their nervous system. They can borrow my calm energy, like to regulate, for whatever high need situation is at hand.
But truly just that little pause like I'm an adult. Like that for me is what really helps me.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: So helpful [00:28:00] and creates like just enough room to be able to see what's actually happening in the room.
Haley Radke: Okay. I have so many different things I wanna talk to you about. So you have a brand new book out called When the Ache Remains.
It's a beautiful cover of these like ferns, unfurling. And I'll tell people a little bit more about your book during recommended resources, but you have this beautiful way of holding the both and, looking for joy even when things are hard and holding grief and accepting it in, and not trying to push past it.
You just have a way about you even as a person. It's this just feels like you, this feels all very you. Can you talk to us specifically as adoptees about allowing grief to be okay and present with us? Because I [00:29:00] think it's a big piece of our healing journey is just to allow it to just come alongside.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. I think cultivating a relationship with grief has been the biggest ally for my own sense of healing and like accessing a sense of wholeness, even with this fracture that I think I'll always have, and especially as adoptees, I feel like allowing and really feeling and being with our grief is so subversive.
In a culture that tells us being adopted doesn't matter, and in a culture that tells us that it's beautiful and that it shouldn't feel painful, and that like we got the family we needed, and all these ways that every message around us tells us that grief isn't appropriate to feel because there wasn't a loss.[00:30:00]
And I think being willing to meet the grief that we experience is an acknowledgement of the loss and the loss that stays with us. The loss that changes shape over time. The loss that gets amplified during certain seasons and that gets quiet during others, but there's this loss that we carry that doesn't necessarily go away, and that specifically is what I was writing from when I wrote the title, When The Ache Remains.
Was this place in me that I know is always going to be here. I think I wrote something in the book that says like the only way to get rid of the wound of being an adoptee is to not be adopted. And that's not possible. Like it would have to change, like my whole story would have to be different for that wound to go away completely.
To get rid of it would be to get rid of my wholeness, which includes that important part of my experience of being alive [00:31:00] and learning to meet the grief of that with my own presence has been a way of reminding myself in my body that like what you experienced was and is real. Whether or not anyone else knows how to mirror or hold that for you, like your experience is real.
It's happened. It's happening. And allowing yourself to meet that grief with openness and with a sense of seeing it as compassion can offer just this anchor in what can feel like this, like dark sea of trying to navigate how to be with our experiences as adoptees in a world that doesn't always know how to throw us those anchors and the grieving process as an ongoing relationship rather than something to complete has been a real sense of like medicine [00:32:00] for me and is let me make my experiences become real when often I was told that they weren't real.
Haley Radke: Can you speak to the power of acknowledging those things to ourselves, like just giving something awareness, like even like naming a feeling or, and how that can impact the rest of our life versus what can seem easier, which is shoving everything down and not thinking about it. And I'm not even talking about oh, let's look through the things. Just like it's there. Just it's right there. And just acknowledging.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. And I wanna name that. I think shoving it down and not wanting to look at it makes a lot of sense sometimes.
And there are plenty of times where my adoptee stuff is in a corner in the [00:33:00] closet underneath a pile of clothes, in a place where nobody is gonna get to it, including me. Like sometimes that's where it is because sometimes it feels like too much if I were to take it out. And so I think that's actually like a really wise strategy at times.
And I think, and I can speak for myself, that I've had the experience of everyone else shoving my experience as adoptee into the corner and saying it doesn't matter. And not wanting to look at it and not wanting it to be real, because to look at it would force them to confront their own feelings around it, their own grief around it, their own anger or sadness. And since they can't do that, they instead want me to pretend like it doesn't exist. And
Haley Radke: Their complicity. Complicity in the system.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yes, exactly. And so in that way, I think even the act of acknowledging, it's like saying, no [00:34:00] thank you to the system that continues to do so much harm. Saying no thank you to the people who try to gaslight us out of our experiences being real and deserving of being felt and held and witnessed.
And in that way, I think acknowledging whatever we're feeling is a way of reclaiming our power. It's a way of rooting into our sense of agency, which as an adoptee feels really important because there were so many ways that our voice and choice was not part of what happened to us. And so in that way too, I think it's not only about acknowledging so that we can feel what we're feeling, but also acknowledging as a way of reclaiming that we actually get a say in how we hold our own experiences, which to me is so important in a world that often doesn't want to hear our voices. It's can I hear my [00:35:00] own voice? Can I want to hear my own experience? Can I want to name my own experience? As a way of reclaiming that actually, this is my experience. It doesn't get to be yours just because you want to narrate it differently. I feel a lot of fire around this actually, which I don't often let myself access, so it actually feels good to name that with you.
Haley Radke: I feel like I live around a burning fire where I'm setting things on fire. On purpose. On purpose only for good.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: No, I appreciate you saying those things and also acknowledging that like it is safe sometimes to put those things away. Of course. I think that's really helpful.
And because I didn't mean it as a shaming way of for folks who shovel their stuff in their closet, never look at it because it's not always safe for us to do and I think we've, I've [00:36:00] talked about this in other episodes. I don't know how scientific this is, but I feel like when we have the capacity and when we are psychologically safe to do is the time when we see things in a different way and only when those things are true. And so our brain is doing a good job of protecting us and keeping us alive, and that's when we can come into further adoptee consciousness, in my opinion.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah.
Haley Radke: If you're comfortable about talking about this, you mentioned that there's been a rupture in your reunion, and I understand it's from different political stances, I'll say to shortcut. Are you comfortable talking about that?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah I'll share what I'm comfortable sharing, which is that for a long time I thought that reunion was going to be this like solution or [00:37:00] answer to some of my grief and some of my sense of self and belonging as an adoptee. I thought that it was going to be this and it, I narrated it in a way as this like place where everything got fixed and healed.
And when I had a rupture from my sister who became deeply close to me through our experience of reunion. She was the first person I had ever connected with in my biological family. She was who I got matched with on ancestry.com. We were deeply close. We spent a lot of time together. We talked every day.
So it was a very close relationship and this rupture happened really suddenly and really quickly and without much say or sense of control in what was happening. And I have experienced it over the last two years as [00:38:00] a profound layer of grief that has gotten activated around even the people that we think see and know us, like sometimes they don't.
And sometimes when we think people are able to witness our full humanity, sometimes they can't. And there's such a deep pain in recognizing that sometimes we can put this sort of magical lens on when we talk about reunion, because that's what we want it to be. We want so deeply for it to be this experience of feeling fully seen and met and known for the first time.
And I know that I had this narrative, and so to have someone that I assumed really knew and saw me have this perception of me that felt so deeply off, really brought into question not only what it means to [00:39:00] be close to people, but also it's also caused me to explore like where do I still have walls up that I actually didn't know I had up.
And I think in this rupture with her that I won't go too deep into detail around I've been trying to explore my side and my experience of yeah, like what it has meant to be in connection with her and to have that go away when our connection had become this real anchor in my sense of security as an adoptee, and it has brought to light the need for me to really deepen into my sense of self outside of any relationship and my need to really hold the tenderness of what it means to let people in and what it means to practice trusting people even when we do it imperfectly and what it means [00:40:00] to be really open and honest about some of the hard parts of cultivating a deep relationship with someone and to also practice separating other people choosing to leave.
From this root story that I have of I'm not lovable and everyone's going to leave because that certainly got activated when this happened. This sense of I can't trust people. No one wants me around. I'm not good enough for people to stay. If I make any mistakes, someone's going to leave, which is a real story that I've had to work on for a long time.
This sense of I have to get it right all the time, or they're going to leave. And in my own therapy, that's something I've really been working through is like sometimes people leave, not because you're imperfect, but because they didn't know how to stay with what you were bringing. And sometimes it's not rooted to your sense of self and the story [00:41:00] that you carry about what it means to be attached or what it means for people to leave and.
Yeah, a lot of that has gotten tangled up and then unthreaded over the last two years and continues to be just a really tender place of acknowledging the messiness of reunion and then rupture and then severance and losing contact with people I thought I would have contact with my whole life, and really deeply trying to not let that further this old story of being alone in the world.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I really, I identify with some of that having a friendship disillusion because of someone's assumptions about me and my character after having years and years of deep connection. [00:42:00] And so this feeling of feel like of being so unseen.
This might be a, a theme in my life, but so unseen and unknown and misunderstood after so what I thought was so much deep a connection was so profoundly confusing. And you and I know each other a little bit and I think for readers of your work, folks that are connected to human stuff on a regular basis, reading your thing for work and hearing your interviews and reading your books, and seeing how you show up on Instagram, like certainly that's public facing for people who hear me talk on Adoptees On or on Adoptees Off Script or wherever. All my different podcasts, Adoption Pop, like you get a sense of me and it's do all these strangers know me better than you? [00:43:00] What? I don't know.
It was it was world shifting to me to feel so misunderstood by a close person. I don't know like I like that you talked about coming back to trying to know yourself better and not relying on other people. That's not easy. That's not easy at all.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: No, it's it's like a real, real rooted pain. This sense of feeling misunderstood, especially when it's someone that you thought like really deeply knew you. And if you asked my husband, he would tell you. I have gone back and forth countless times over the last two years, like trying to understand, trying to figure it out, trying to understand how this happened.
Looking at it from every which way, looking at it from every perspective, like just trying to understand. And yeah, there is this reminder that sometimes you can't [00:44:00] understand because it just doesn't really make sense to you. And I have to trust that it makes sense to her for whatever reason that it doesn't make sense to me.
And holding that confusion and that shock in that like it has been life rattling and I feel a little timid talking about it publicly, and I think that's why I am like trying to share about it in a way that feels comfortable and rooted. But there has been a lot of uprooted confusion around the rupture and all of that has adapt, has touched on my adoptee stuff in a big way, in a really big way and has amplified this sense of what I think sometimes as an adoptee, there can be a felt sense of am I real? Do other people see me as real? Do other people see me as like a whole human? I think the fracture, I often refer to it as like this [00:45:00] fracture that I hold, that fracture can sometimes make me feel like I'm not even real in the world. And so when confusion happens, when something happens that disrupts what I thought I knew, it can make me go back to this place of am I missing something? Do I not have something people have? Am I like not fully? Like it's almost like it can sometimes feel like, have I like never come fully alive in my human form because some of these things can activate that sense of what I know about myself and what I know about relationship. And I feel like I'm going on a little bit of a tangent here, but there is this sense of, yeah, not always knowing how to be with the confusion and the feeling misunderstood.
Haley Radke: And when it comes from like a relationship where all you have is love and good intentions for the other person. And I feel like that's a piece of it too. [00:46:00] So it's I just want I love you and I want the best for both of us and together. And I'm from the other side of it, and so the like. I guess my birth mother will choose not to have contact with me, and so I have no power over that.
I have chosen to estrange for my adoptive parents, and so they have no power. So it's like there's always like one party that holds this power that, and so you're on the, it feels like powerless side of this particular situation. So I feel for you, Lisa, I really do.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that.
Haley Radke: Your new book is just so lovely. It's like another like balm for the soul. Are you gonna read the audio book?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah, i'm recording it next month. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Amazing. Okay. Okay, so we peeling behind the [00:47:00] curtain. We are recording this before your book is out into the world, but folks will be able to grab this and hear your words from your voice then. That sounds awesome. When they're hearing this. I love these, all these different parts. We talked before, like just, I mentioned the unfurling of these like fern leaves. Your words are so hopeful and gentle and the books really, it's helpful in this way of you talk about this, I don't know, I'll call it synthesizing healing as like a, it's a practice, it can be an action, but also this holding compassion for when we're just becoming aware and then having the bravery to look inward and I think you just do that in such a masterful way, just like you did with Already Enough and it's.
To prep for the interview. I had to read it fairly quickly. I tried my very best to [00:48:00] slow down. But it's another one of those books where you can go back and revisit. You have all these very practical exercises for folks to slow down and I just, I let, do you wanna tell us anything more about the book?
I just loved it. I love you, so of course I would. But the subtitle Lessons on Tending to the Unfixable and Finding Beauty Anyway, like how perfectly you is that?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Thank you. I feel like I wrote this book for myself. I feel like I wrote it trying to imagine. People who needed it sitting next to me when I wrote it and imagining my hand, like reaching out to people who need a hand and offering them things that I have needed in my own experience of tending to my own wounds and my own aches and my own pains that continue to resurface and then get easier and then resurface and get easier.
I feel like this book is almost like a deepening [00:49:00] into Already Enough, like it feels like I wrote Already Enough. And then I like went deep into my own grief and was like, oh, there's a lot more here that I actually have to say about what it means to meet our humanity and what it means to allow our grief and to allow ourselves to accompany our own aches instead of push them away relentlessly.
And I really wanted this book to be something that was accessible and something people could flip to read a page or something people could read all the way through. I really just wanted it to feel like someone being accompanied as they meet the things that they hold in themselves. I feel like I could have dedicated it to adoptees because I think I wrote it a lot of it for my adoptee self, for the part of me that needs to hear that it's okay that some of these things are still really hard and that they might need my own care for a lifetime. [00:50:00] And yeah, it felt really relieving to write it and to let my, to let it be known that I'm not finished and we don't need to be finished with our stuff.
Haley Radke: Yes. That's so it, I know when I talk about we have the healing series and those things, like it feels and then, so then you should be healed. There should be this end point. And I love how you talk about it. It's just for a lifetime here are the things. Sometimes we're curling inward, sometimes we are doing more active things to, work through it's just such a beautiful visualization of what that can look like for through our lives as human. And you're, and I hope folks know about your newsletter too, because you write so much. There's so many things that you can take in of Lisa's perspective on the world and keeping us mindful and grounded and thoughtful.
I think I just, you have so many [00:51:00] lovely things for us to connect with, so thank you. What do you wanna recommend to us today?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: I think I picked The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. Which is a book about grief, and it's a book that actually helped me a lot in understanding my own grief as an adoptee.
It's a book that frames grief, not just as something that happens in death, but as something that happens in a lot of stages of our life, and it talks a lot about grief as something that needs to be held with other people, which I think is something you do so beautifully with this podcast in a way, and with your community and yeah, his work around being with grief has been a real teacher for me. Yeah. So I'll recommend that.
Haley Radke: Thank you. We will link to that in the show notes and you mentioned Adoptees On in your book and I'm so grateful for that. Thank you.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Thank you.
Haley Radke: Where can folks connect with you and find your [00:52:00] work online?
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah, my website is lisaolivera.com and that has links to my newsletter and to my Instagram, and those are the main places that I share, so that's a good hub for everything.
Haley Radke: Perfect. Thanks for letting us into your world for a little bit.
Lisa Olivera, MFT: Thank you. It's always such a gift to get to connect with you. Thank you.
Haley Radke: I feel the same.
Oh my goodness. Do you ever just find people that. I don't know Lisa that well, but every time I speak with her I'm just like, oh, I just love you. You're just like a kindred spirit to talk about Anne of Green Gables lingo. I just really learn a lot from her every time she speaks. If you're not following her on Instagram, it's just such a peaceful, I dunno if you can hear [00:53:00] Spencer snoring in the background, but she's so chill and relaxing and she just has this way of speaking so kindly, and I don't know about you, but my internal dialogue is often not kind. And so to have that voice like speak into my life in just like this really kind nourishing way is such a gift. And I think you'll find if you follow her on Instagram you read her books, you listen to her on other shows, you read her newsletter.
Like you will just get this influx of oh, it's just like these nice, warm, fuzzy feelings. And not in a superficial way either. Like in, I keep saying this word, nourishing like a, in a really nourishing way. And [00:54:00] strengthening yeah. Anyway, I'm a big fan of hers. Thank you so much for listening to adoptee voices and I also thank you to guests who are willing to come back and talk with me again.
What a gift to get to share these conversations with you. Thanks for listening, and we will talk again very soon.
