By Dr. Liz DeBetta Healing is a non-linear and subjective journey. What feels and looks like healing to me is going to be very different for someone else. There’s a certain amount of grace in the process of learning to hold space for ourselves while we determine what our individual healing looks like and how we approach it. It’s never a one-size-fits-all, nor is it finite. There is no point A to point B. This is what I know to be true because of my own healing journey that began about a decade ago when I was lost and found myself by finding my voice and the path to healing by returning to the creativity that has always been a lifeline for me. I’m an adoptee and I have spent most of my life searching for the missing pieces, searching for answers to questions I didn’t always have the words to articulate. In the absence of answers and the absence of being able to ask questions I found other ways to cope. I was a good student, I won awards, I was the star of the school play, I was the president of the student government, I was an all-around overachiever. I stayed safe by staying busy. I knew that something felt wrong but, in my tweens, teens, and twenties I didn’t have access to what it was or why I constantly felt sad, confused, and out of place. There’s a term for this in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—it’s called monachopsis: the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place or maladapted to one’s surroundings. I wish I had known this word back then so that I could begin to describe the internal confusion I felt but couldn’t name. Instead, I stayed busy and made myself fit in by being the leader, taking charge of projects and activities, being on teams, and developing my aptitude as a shape shifter. I was good at reading the room, blending in when I needed to and standing out when it was to my advantage. I was good at taking care of people, at seeing the big picture, while always paying attention to the details. I was also an emotional volcano ready to erupt at any moment. I felt out of control all the time, so I controlled my external environment by controlling my schedule. If I kept my schedule jampacked I could avoid feeling the intense emotions that were always bubbling beneath the surface. I know now that this level of control was, and is, a trauma response, a survival strategy meant to keep me safe. It was one of the ways I began to “control the controllables.” It’s a tool I still use when my nervous system gets activated and the scared little girl I still carry with me shows up. Alone and confused, shy and scared Hoping for tomorrows that will never come Dreaming impossible dreams Big sad eyes looking out at the world Looking and searching, wondering what’s to be That’s the Little Girl inside of me That little girl showed up in the first poem I ever wrote when I was 14 years old and full of overwhelming feelings that I didn’t understand were connected to the unacknowledged grief, loss, and trauma that I carried because of being separated from my mother at birth and spending nine months in interim foster care before going home with my adoptive parents. I started writing because I needed an outlet for all of the feelings that were constantly spilling over; staying busy wasn’t enough. At this same time I also began to do community theatre, which became another outlet for me, one that helped me use my emotions in a constructive way. Writing and theatre became the creative outlets I needed to stay alive. The poems I wrote were a safe place to express what I was unable to say any other way, and theatre gave me the chance to step into someone else’s life and use my excessive emotions to feel and see the world through the character’s eyes, which was easier than doing it through mine. Creativity was a lifeline for me then, and became a lifeline again when, in my late thirties, I hit a wall. I was stuck and I knew that I needed to do something differently, I needed to understand why I felt like a hamster running on a wheel all the time and why I wasn’t moving forward in my life. In his discussion of the creative personality, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that “creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.” I will add to this that adoptees are also remarkable for our ability to adapt to any situation, but it can be challenging to reach goals without a clear sense of self or a clear story about our beginnings. I realized, finally, that I needed to begin to look inward because all of the external strategies that I had been using to feel in control were starting to fray at the seams. I could no longer hold myself together when I didn’t actually know who that self was. As adoptees, we want to know who we look like, where we come from, and if there is any truth to the cliché that blood is thicker than water so we search for clues wherever we can. Given past life transitions, adoptees tend to be open to and aware of changes in their environments. This was certainly true for me and was precisely why acting came so naturally to me—I was highly attuned and aware. I was also curious. Living in a constant state of curiosity, coupled with my hypersensitivity to myself and my environment, helped me as an adoptee to survive highly unusual circumstances. Click image to read more.

By Kathleen Kirstein I thought the writing prompt “There Was A Secret” sounded good when I first heard it. I could easily imagine writing about it. However, I’ve changed my mind as I sit here around 4 pm, finally drinking my morning coffee.     When I first woke up this morning, I started writing this piece in my head, as that’s my process. The more I wrote, the angrier I got. The anger may have been smoldering in the deep abyss of every brain cell since last night. I think I was triggered by something in the adoption community, reminding me I don’t fit in.     Sometimes it’s tough being the late discovery in a sea of people who’ve always known they were adopted. I can’t relate to the life experience of always knowing. I can barely relate to being adopted because my brain still wants to toss that little fact aside. No, that never happened because if it did, my inner critic would tell me, “Your first 49 years were wrong.”  The years before a free trip to Mexico and the need for a passport outed my adoption. This led me to search for the answer to why my birth certificate was filed 14 months after my birth. The answer was I was adopted at 43 days old from a maternity home in Vermont to a family in New Hampshire.    I want to throw up because I didn’t even know my kids were the first biological family to me, the first people I met with my DNA. Somehow, that makes me feel unworthy and not to be trusted with anything because I couldn’t be trusted with my own true story. I was simply not someone important enough to know the secret.    I realized in my late teens that my body type and problem-solving skills differed significantly from those of the family who raised me. I know now I was invalidated when I asked all the adults in my family the dreaded question, “Was I adopted?” I took on the “you’re crazy” response and made it my truth, as no other truth from the adults in my world was forthcoming to change the narrative. Again, I am not worthy of honest and truthful information. A secret must remain a secret at all costs.     I pay the costs daily in various ways. It might be a trauma response here and there. It might be in the form of a non-adoptive friend at Mahjong talking about how great adoption is and how it’s a great gift. I stay silent as I have learned the price I pay when I try to educate these individuals on another point of view. My words of education only lead to my getting a backlash of all the ways I am wrong. “You didn’t have to grow up in an orphanage.” They have no clue that my first 43 days of life were spent in that orphanage they speak about. If I push the issue, I will leave the game feeling inadequate and unimportant, and my feelings of worthlessness reinforced once again because they can’t hear the truth of this adoptee’s life experience.   Click on image to read more.

Gina Cameron was always aware that something in her family wasn’t quite right. Her relationship with her father was volatile—strained and lacking in warmth and closeness. Her mother was critical, controlling, and went to great lengths to point out the ways in which the mother and daughter were different. But Cameron had no idea that for 63 years her mother had been keeping a profoundly disturbing secret. It wasn’t until Cameron was in her sixties and her mother had died that the secret tumbled out. At a family reunion, her cousin Dan inadvertently dropped a truth bomb in a casual conversation, commenting that Cameron and her sister had different fathers. Her family had always been aware, he said, and had been told not to tell her, but he was certain that by that time she’d have known. She was blindsided by this revelation that, in turn, triggered a childhood memory: an aunt saying, “Louie isn’t Genie’s father.” When she later confronted her mother about what she’d overheard, her mother not only insisted it wasn’t true, she also accused her of being ungrateful, shameful, impertinent. She was ignored for days by her parents and stuffed this experience deep down, only to have it resurface five decades later. Rattled by her conversation with Dan, Cameron arranged a meeting with her father’s niece Ellen, and got a lead for another piece of the puzzle of her origins while strolling together on the High Line in New York. Ellen called her sister Karen, who in turn phoned Cameron and recalled that they two had met when Cameron was three years old—when Louie had met her mother. And again, a memory arose from deep within her—from the time her father, in a letter, disowned her when she was 42 years old. “You’ve been a thorn in my side since you were three years old,” he wrote. She was sick, he’d said, selfish, hurtful. Looking back after all those years, it all began to make sense. “Scenes from my past crowded my waking hours,” she writes. “The revelation about my paternity was a new frame for the puzzling, troubled undercurrents I’d always felt in my childhood home. For that, I was grateful.” Grateful for a reason why she’d been seen as the family’s problem, why she’d been branded bad, a compulsive liar, a stubborn and willful child, why she’d been locked in a closet as a punishment as a child, locked in her room when her parents went out, and locked in a hotel room during a family vacation. That gratitude found expression when, at a family visit, her cousin, Carol, asked if Cameron had felt that she’d been treated differently as a child—something she and other relatives had clearly observed. When Cameron acknowledged those feelings, Carol took her hand and said, “Now you know you weren’t crazy to feel that.” “I bathed in her words and gesture—a simple acknowledgement of my perceptions, believed as fact, no judgment. Seen, and accepted, I felt more and more at home.” The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to take shape, but there was no one involved who was still alive and could confirm all the details of what had happened or answer a burning question: Who was her father? Click on image to read more.

For many of us, DNA test results have delivered news that’s made nothing in our world seem normal. Our families may not be our families. The truths we’ve known may not be truths at all. We’ve been upside-down, turned around, and left looking for some kind of foothold—a way to ground ourselves in this new unreality. Then came a virus and a quarantine that have made everyone’s lives anything but normal. On top of that, an unprecedented political climate along with civil unrest have been both globally and personally destabilizing. If that weren’t enough, bring on the holidays, which for some in the best of times are difficult, stressful, and grief-inducing. But this year, even those who typically find the season joyful may experience sadness, disappointment, and grief. If you experience anxiety, it’s likely been magnified in (or by) 2020. If you’ve experienced trauma, the fear and isolation caused by the pandemic may be retraumatizing. If you’ve been alone in quarantine or can’t spend the holidays with the people you love, your loneliness may seem overwhelming. Even if you’ve been holding your own, the common sorrow—the empathy and compassion fatigue for all who are struggling—may be depleting you. This state of life as we know it now may be getting on your last nerve.