If you want to comfort someone who's had a DNA surprise, avoid making these 10 comments.
By B.K. Jackson
Until recently, most people likely haven’t encountered someone who’s been knocked off balance by a DNA test result, so it’s understandable they might not appreciate the magnitude of the impact. But it’s just a matter of time. Mind-blowing DNA revelations are becoming so common that some DNA testing companies have trained their customer service staff representatives to respond empathetically. While those employees may know the right thing to say, here in the real world the people around us often haven’t got a clue how it feels — like a punch to the gut.
If you’ve become untethered from your genetic family, you might get a second surprise: some of your friends and loved ones may be remarkably unsympathetic, often infuriatingly judgmental, and sometimes even hostile. It’s clear that although DNA surprises have become ubiquitous, social attitudes haven’t kept pace, and a stigma remains.
When you’re in a free fall and looking for something to grab hold of, negative reactions can set you spinning off your axis.
It shouldn’t be surprising that people may not know what to say to someone who’s received shocking DNA results. After all, few know how to comfort someone who’s experienced the death of a loved one, even though grief is a universal experience.
If your world has been rocked by a DNA surprise, let those around you know what helps and what doesn’t. And if you haven’t been so affected but want to help and support someone who has, it’s worth trying to put yourself in their place and imagine what the experience has been like. Or better yet, simply ask. But think twice before adding to their distress with one of these unhelpful yet commonly heard responses.
1. Your father will always be your father.
This well-meant platitude isn’t comforting to those who didn’t feel loved and nurtured by the dads who raised them. It’s like pressing a bruise. They wonder whether their biological fathers would have given them the love their dads didn’t or if the dads who raised them loved them less because they weren’t true progeny. And those of us lucky enough to have had precious relationships with our dads don’t need that reassurance. It’s like telling the bereaved their loved ones are in a better place. It’s what people say when they don’t know what to say. It doesn’t soothe our roiling emotions or patch the holes in our origin stories.
2. Your father was just a sperm donor.
A more cynical take on the same idea, this attempts to make light of those roiling emotions. If we were lucky, we know our dads are the men who loved us, bandaged our knees, held us, worried about us, sacrificed for us. Our love for them and theirs for us is ineffable, immutable, inseverable. But it doesn’t make us any less curious about the men whose not insignificant sperm gave us life and gifted us with half our genetic makeup.
3. Blood doesn't make family.
This tries to mollify us and discount our feelings at the same time. Blood is exactly what makes family, consanguinity being the first definition of kinship. Certainly there are also families of affinity, but the familial love we feel for them doesn’t alter the fact that our blood relatives exist and they matter to us.
4. It doesn't change anything. You're still the same person.
Of course we’re the same people! And yet we’re not. We may feel diminished, less of who we thought we were, or, if we always knew deep down something was amiss, more at ease, more authentically ourselves. All the cells in our bodies are different than we thought they were. Each contains the DNA of someone unexpected that encoded the traits that are the foundation of who we are.
5. You can't miss something you never had.
No, we can’t. But missing is akin to longing. We can wonder what we missed and long for what never was. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” — the flip side of this comment — is equally untrue. It’s precisely what we don’t know that does hurt us. We don’t know where we came from, what genetic landmines could detonate our health, or the biological relatives who may be out there, somewhere, not even realizing we exist.
6. Don't air your dirty laundry.
Letting loose the family skeletons tends to be frowned upon. But just as grief is too heavy to be carried alone, keeping secrets is a lingering burden that feeds isolation and loneliness. It’s a comment that whispers, “You’re a dirty little secret.” It’s not our shame, but it is our truth to tell. As Anne Lamott famously wrote in “Bird by Bird,” “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
7. Don't open a Pandora's box
Wonder and longing often fuel a desire for reunion with biological relatives, which may be perceived as an affront by our families or as a threat by biological relatives who fear the shame exposure of their long-kept secrets would arouse. Discouraging a search for biological family sends the message that our need to know fundamental truths is insignificant compared to others’ needs to protect their secrets.
8. What difference does it make? Who cares?
That millions take DNA tests to see where they come from and millions more trace their lineage seems evidence enough that knowing about one’s pedigree matters. But tracing a family tree isn’t an option for NPEs (non-parental events or not parent expected) who can’t establish filiation, nor is protecting themselves against collateral damage — invisible health risks. For example, I worried my whole life about birth defects, cancers, and other genetic diseases that were the legacy of my Russian ancestors. Fortunately, I discovered I descend from robust Sicilians who lived long, healthy lives. Not so lucky is the ticking time bomb of a 40-year old NPE who doesn’t know he has a father and four half-brothers who all died of heart disease before 45. We simply want the same knowledge everyone else has.
9. You have a good life. Focus on that.
Having a good life doesn’t make us immune to despair, confusion, or grief. Ask anyone who’s lost a parent. Comments such as these disregard the sense of dislocation we feel after having been unceremoniously severed from our family trees. And lack of ceremony is key, because when something is lost, even if it’s something we didn’t know we had, there’s grieving to be done, whether the unknown father is dead or yet living. But there are no ceremonies, rituals, or social supports for this particular bereavement.
10. Get over it!
We likely won’t get over it unless we’re able to grieve our losses and gain answers to the questions that others never have to ask about the things they take for granted — knowledge that is their birthright, but, they believe, not ours.
What can you do?
Understand it’s complicated. The issues and feelings a DNA surprise give rise to are numerous and diverse. The most meaningful thing you can do is listen and acknowledge the feelings, but withhold judgment. Sometimes a willing ear and kind silence is the best response. Consider how you might feel if you learned you’ve been a secret for decades and what it’s like to see your family tree pruned by half. Erase everything you know about your father: his name, appearance, forebears, and medical history. Erase everything you share with him: his surname, religion, ethnicity. If you didn’t know all this, would you still be who you are? Would you not feel stripped bare and dispossessed? As Michael Crichton wrote in “Timeline,” “If you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.”
Return to our home page to see more articles about NPEs. And if you’re an NPE, adoptee, donor-conceived individual, helping professional or genetic genealogist, join Severance’s private facebook group.
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23 comments
Thank you so much for this piece! <3
I'm donor conceived and I've received so many indifferent or judgmental reactions from people that don't understand the magnitude of this discovery.
Thanks Leslie! I hope it helps people understand. Feel free to send us your own version on unhelpful comments and we’ll add it to the magazine.
At 60 yrs , I found out I was Dna NPE…1 yr later I am still absorbing the news…My father , the only one I knew …loved me and I him…my mother was just the best…they are both gone and I will never know what happened, but I am sue my father had no idea and my mothers chose so to say anything to protect me…
Heidi,I just found out my father that raised me wasn’t my biological father,I’m 59.Nobody told me anything.
I’m the same just found out my dad. Isn’t my real dad, I’m 51 and my dad 79 but I’m not going to tell him he means the world to me it hurt so much
It’s a shock because it’s unnatural.
You can add, “Don’t say, ‘You can’t change the past.’”
Thanks for writing this!
Thank you for these words.
I read SO many of these especially in groups on fb. and they are very annoying.
I am an NPE…Yes, I had a dad that raised me and loved me and i loved him very much, however i don’t need the reassurance that he is still my dad, i know that., I needed to find my bio father, and I did, His ashes were abandoned in a funeral home, by one of his nieces (whom i hope i never meet!!) for 28 years, I found him and I also found a beautiful half sister who didn’t know him either., Both of us buried him in a National Cemetery with full Military honors since he was a veteran. We did this because we are his daughters…..Yes i have a dad, but I also have a father. I now have 2 and love them both in different ways.
I am an NPE and all these points are valid. It’s been 3.5 years since my DNA bombshell and I have come to realize the only people who will ever truly understand are other NPE’s. Everyone else either doesn’t care, pretends to care or just changes the subject to something they want to talk about.
Guilty of many of these responses on the list. Trying to be nice and understanding, call me ignorant but I didn’t want to hurt my new half sister. We have become wonderful friends, and she has helped me to understand her mother, my step mother, and I’ve learned to forgive her/them.
It’s a new situation for most people, and these comments more often than not are said out of kindness and a natural urge to ease someone’s distress. None of us could know until we’re in the situation that they, in fact, don’t help and cause distress. Happy to know you’ve found a wonderful new sibling!
I love several of the points in this article and will share it in a moment.
I have a couple of choice platitudes to add to the list where adoptees are concerned.
“Your mother loved you so much that she wanted you to have a better life.” Translation: love equals abandonment. There are no guarantees when you are handed off to total strangers.
The second is really appalling, yet clueless people drop this one surprisingly often: “Aren’t you glad your mother didn’t abort you?” Um, what? I put it right back on them. Who says that!?!
Thanks for the great insights. All we can do is educate, educate, educate.
Interesting comments, however, I needed to hear some of these. My biological family is a mess, and I was not born from any sort of love. In fact, my mother was molested by either her father/brother, and here I am.
I am lucky in that my adoptive family has never made me feel less than for this. Other adoptees? Not so much. In fact. if I were doing a list like this, I would add “isn’t it exciting- you have a whole other family”
I don’t view my biological relatives as family. They are strangers. I represent a terrible time in my bio mother’s life, and somewhere, I have a father who’s also a molester.
What do you do with that? I’ve joined facebook groups, started a blog, joined forums, but none of that will change the fundamentals.
I recently discovered a paternal half-sister. I suspect there are 2 – 4 other siblings from 3 different mothers. My “new” sis and I would like to find the others but, don’t know where to begin. We do not have any information other than possible counties where two may have been born and they would be younger than us. Any suggestions?
Have you done a DNA test yet_
I found out late January when I woke up and found out that I was roughly a third Norwegian. Identifying my entire life as half German and half Italian, it was instantly an “ah ha” moment. My Dad,
was not my Dad, I now refer to him as Not-Dad. All of the guilty parties are gone to question. When I told a good friend that morning about my DNA results she said, “oh, so your illegitimate!”, her attempt at being funny, could not have missed the mark more. My husband wanted to focus on my mother’s affair and also wanted to be humorous and crass. I think I have a couple of half sisters out there and I am trying to get the courage to ask one to do a DNA test. I am still struggling with all the complexity of my family dynamics. My step father turned out to be my real father, if I am right, and thru lines on Ancestry suggest I am, and he later killed himself. It is just a lot to process.
It’s been almost 4 years since I found out I was an NPE. It’s shattering on all levels. Your advice on what not to say is excellent. I’ve found few people really give a damn and will just gloss over it and return to talking about themselves. I have found a Facebook group which helps me a lot but nobody who isn’t NPE can possibly understand the shock and the visceral pain of discovering though a DNA test that your father was not your father.
I’m in year 2 into finding my father and his side of the family. My other half, the people who look like me (I never looked like anyone in my family growing up), that behave like me ( at this point nature is winning over nurture), they’ve dubbed me, ‘the missing link’. I’ve met 3/4 of my new siblings and my family has expanded tremendously. They love me and by most estimations it’s the best situation to have landed in when finding a new family at 40. However, my mental health is in pieces. All the feelings I had suppressed are coming up all at once. I’m not the same person. I wonder often who I would have been if we had grown together. As I expand my territory to include my new family, my ‘old family’ doesn’t seem to be joining me in the adventure. I thought it would be easier.
Thanks for this piece. It’s a relief to read, because the few people I’ve told about my DNA discovery just can’t relate. My parents separated when I was eleven, and my mom didn’t handle it well. She’d get drunk and tell me my dad wasn’t really my dad, having me ruined her life, etc. (Only 3-4 times, but man, you just don’t forget that stuff!) So I’ve been rolling those thoughts around for over three decades now, and I finally decided to do a DNA test. Turns out mom wasn’t lying – the first thing I saw on my list of matches was my “father.” Quite a shock, when all I expected to see was ethnicity without paying for a membership (surprise, I’m not Italian either). I have no idea if he was a donor, a fling, or what. My parents are both dead, and not knowing, there’s no way I’ll reach out to this man. If he chooses to reach out to me fine – maybe? – but if not I’ll live with the mystery.
Anyhow thanks again. Its good to know I’m not alone.
I found out 4 days ago that the man I called dad was not my bio dad. I’m crushed. There is a lot of family tree information dating to the mid 1600’s and I always believed it was my ancestry – and now it’s not mine at all!! And my mom? I was raised in a family with 3 older sisters and a mom and a dad. Now at 63 I find out they are my half siblings and I am the result of my mom’s dalliance. All of the parents are deceased so I can’t ask questions! I’m full of emotions – and have already heard many of these comments from my well meaning half sisters and even a daughter who has said “it’s not a big deal – just don’t think about it.” They have said, “you’re not going to dwell on this are you?” 🙄🙄🙄 This is life changing!
Linda, we have almost identical stories. I’m 63 yrs old and I just found out 6 days ago that the dad who raised me isn’t my biological father. I’m crushed. I have 3 older brothers who all share our father’s DNA. My parents and bio dad are all gone, as is that whole generation, so no one left to ask. I did reach out to a first cousin, who was very gracious and helpful with figuring out who my bio dad is. Unfortunately he never married or had kids, so no half siblings out there, but my 3 older brothers and my husband are being very supportive.
I love this! I’ve never know who my father is and still do not know at 48 years old. I have had those thoughts & felt ways described multiple times. The NOT KNOWING WHY for me is the worst part…..a question I’ve always wanted answered. Certain things longed for never go away .