By Lisa Coppola

In kindergarten, this adoptee ran around distracted, compulsively blew kisses at other kids, and then asked those same kids if they were mad at me—far too many times. In some distorted attempt to sooth my worries, I tied the tassels on my blanket into a million knots and licked my hands raw while other kids took their naps. Other times, I would just shut my brain off, and appear blank, absent, as if I was staring off into a daydream. One week, as the big test for numbers and colors approached, I couldn’t remember what color was what, so I broke a barrel of crayons apart in frustration trying to sort it all out. I didn’t understand at the time, but I was living with a constant fear of rejection and subsequent loss. Even my dreams were infected. I was a groggy kid in the early mornings, after having recurring nightmares in which President Ronald Reagan was giving me the color and number test, and that I kept failing over and over again, disappointing him, and in turn, the rest of the country.

This was the age that marked the beginning of being referred to as space cadet, clueless, and flighty. It’s when I became used to disappointed and stern looks from adults, when I grew accustomed to hearing sharp requests to pay attention! from—it seemed like—everyone. I was frustrated that I couldn’t learn like the other kids and grew to be ashamed of myself. In my little brain, I was distracted by a roaring sea of chronic worry: thoughts of my family members dying, my parents getting divorced, my brother getting sent away, my cat getting run over, or of me being abandoned or rejected in some other way—somehow. Instead of learning in class or at home, I was focused on how to make my mother laugh, or how I could help my dad quit smoking or how to fix my brother’s lying problem.

By the end of that year, in 1986, I took the first of many tests for learning disabilities. I was given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder (ADD–inattentive type) and eventually placed in a special program in elementary school where I was given guidance on how to improve my executive functioning skills. I was allowed a quiet place to take tests, a teacher’s aide to read the test questions to me, and tips and tricks for time management and memorization. I was also put on stimulant medications that changed in dose and variety until my senior year of high school. I cannot remember the medication doing much of anything for me, and my grades did not improve. My attachment issues, chronic worry and hypervigilance, ruminating thoughts, and subsequent compulsive behavior was not touched upon by professionals and in turn was left to flourish. Throughout this article I will refer to this combination of symptoms as relational trauma, which is often referred to as CPTSD or complex post-traumatic stress disorder Today, as a seasoned attachment therapist, it’s clear to me that without attachment- and trauma-informed treatment, those executive functioning interventions didn’t stand a chance.

                                    ***

In his book, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, Gabor Maté, MD, explores the idea that years of varied brain and attachment research have pointed to: that ADD originates in early childhood stresses during the first years of crucial brain and personality development. He describes a wide amount of research illustrating the connections associated between early life stress and brain changes. (Maté, 2019 p. 80) Maté also stresses, in his writings and on his website, the importance for those of us diagnosed with ADD or ADHD to acknowledge and unravel our early childhood stresses.

I was born heavily marinated in stress and fear, and these experiences continued through much of my childhood. For a long time into adulthood, I didn’t understand how that chronic stress from my birthmother loss and family chaos had truly impacted me. As an adoptee, my early life story was, well, not the best. My birthmother experienced my conception as a terrifying act of violence inside an inpatient psychiatric institution where she had resided for much of her adult life. She remained in that institution throughout her entire pregnancy and during that time had to be taken off her psychiatric medications. Once I was born, she was only able to hold me for five days before I was put into a foster home and then a month later removed again, from what I had come to know as home, and put into another situation with new people, my adoptive parents. My new parents had also adopted another child. The boy joined their family several years earlier when he was three years old. He had years of neglect and abuse behind him when he first arrived and, in turn, reasonably could not trust anyone. Occasionally our family also served as an emergency foster home for the state, and my brother and I witnessed some kids coming in and leaving. One time the kids had to leave suddenly. Something bad had happened in our home, I don’t remember what, but I can imagine that my brother and I must have felt on some level that we also, someday, might have to go.

My older brother’s oppositional behavior, my father’s very short fuse, and my mother’s panic disorder, did not blend well together. Nightly arguments, which most of the time turned into screaming and threats, ensued, and I listened, kneeling at the top of the stairs with my body tensed up in hypervigilance. I was so alert to the energy of my family that I grew to understand the sort of mood my parents or brother were in by the sound of their footsteps. While our father tried hard at times to cultivate moments of patience, he truly struggled to regulate his emotions, as did our mother, who was hospitalized with bouts of panic and depression for a few months when we were still very young. With all of these cards our family was dealt, there had never been a time in which I felt free of my own chronic social scanning in order to prepare for some kind of eruption, rejection, or loss. I also coped by becoming a very creative child, conjuring up whole worlds—worlds where I held more power and felt more protected than I did in my real one. My imagination gave me much-needed relief from the stress in my mind and body.

Despite how explosive things often were at home, I do believe that my parents did the best they could with their own histories behind them, and they often expressed their love to us. My mother was persistent and fought hard to get me services at school to help with my learning. She pushed for me to have a counselor in the learning center in our high school. Miss. S. was warmhearted and let me take tests in her office. The break from the pressure of a classroom helped, but my ruminative racing thoughts dogged on, even with that escape.

I believe that in my parents’ minds I really just needed to learn ways to pay attention better. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t seem to pay attention for very long no matter how hard I tried—even with those stimulant medications. I was both scared of and obsessed with my father. Besides being hot-tempered, he was hilarious, affectionate, and my favorite person. He would sit down with me after dinner sometimes, have me lay out my math homework on our Italian pizza parlor-esque tablecloth, and try to help me, and I would try to listen, but I would end up pretending to understand the information in order to please him and avoid his temper. At some point in middle school, I stopped what seemed to be an uphill battle of trying to get my brain to work the way it seemed everyone wanted it to. The pressure of letting people down and the fear of rejection (abandonment) had me worn out.

After high school, which I narrowly escaped as a graduate, I spent my time in a pattern of working jobs that meant nothing to me and then getting fired from them. I stopped taking the stimulant medications and I found that alcohol soothed my chronic worry, so I drank as often as I could. After a good friend encouraged me to get into classes at a community college, something amazing happened. When sitting down to study with a rocks glass full of vodka or rum, I found that instead of feeling that old dread around homework, I found ease and comfort and in turn, I was able to focus and gain more organized access to my brain space and creativity. The problem was, when I started, I rarely could stop. But despite the daily hangovers, weekly blackouts, and morning heart palpitations, I excelled in college. My parents were shocked—and proud. Now, this is by no means an advertisement for using alcohol as an aid for focus, but it is an illustration of how it was the dis-ease in my body, not just a problem with my attention span, that had been the foremost barrier to my learning and concentrating.

In time, drinking gave me far more negative consequences than benefits. After more than a decade of trying to live with active alcoholism and bottoming out in various ways while somehow simultaneously earning several degrees, I took action to get myself sober and engaged in the recovery world. I also started to work with a trauma-informed therapist. The hypervigilance and racing brain came back with a vengeance when I put down alcohol, and I had to sit with it, and with other people in my recovery meetings, to better understand its origins. I learned in recovery about how the chaos and insecurity in my childhood had created early ongoing patterns in my thinking and stress response system. One of the most important skills I acquired during that time through trauma informed therapy was the ability to reframe my thoughts so that they, in time, have come to lean more naturally toward self-compassion rather than self-shaming and self-abandonment. Instead of hearing that inner voice that used to say, Why can’t you just pay attention? I now hear one that says, What do you need right now to ground yourself? 

I learned to listen to my wise intuitive inner voice and to question my fearful frantic one. Developing long-term friendships with others who were going through their own recovery processes also helped me with relational fears in more ways than I have space to discuss in this one article. In the world of addiction recovery, you are told that you will always be invited to come back no matter what, and that notion helped me feel deeply connected to the rooms and people I found there, even though I found those rooms intimidating at first. Finding the right medication was also a game changer, and for me, that was not the stimulant medication that I was prescribed as a kid, but instead, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication that was given to me to combat my anxiety. After I was able to get internally balanced, I was able to understand and use those executive functioning skills that had been presented to me so many years prior: skills like organizing my schedule into smaller segments, planning projects and study time for those projects far in advance, and pausing to go outside or do breathing exercises when I was feeling overwhelmed.

Our earliest experiences greatly impact our brain formation. About seven years into my sobriety journey, and after getting licensed as a mental health counselor in my thirties, I started to study early childhood trauma more extensively. I learned in depth about the complex family systems with adopted or fostered children like mine and about what happened to our little brains in the beginning of our lives. Construction of the brain starts while we are in utero and our early experiences influence and affect the architecture of our brains by forming “either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all of the learning, health and behavior that follow.” (Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, 2007) When loss happens as a first experience, the brain and body may always remain on guard for more relational trauma and loss. All relinquished and adopted children start off early with a kind of extraordinary fear and loss. The process is explained in more detail in Nancy Newton Verrier’s book The Primal Wound and in more depth through many of the early childhood stress studies that have been conducted over the past 20 years. (Hambrick et al., 2019) Additionally, research shows that in fact early life stress exposure results in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-like behavioral symptoms (Bock et al., 2017), and that children may respond to traumatic experiences with behaviors that mimic the symptoms of ADHD or, alternatively, trauma may exacerbate pre-existing ADHD in children. (Biederman et al., 2013)

With this knowledge under my belt, I found myself able to reflect on and understand why it was so difficult for me to concentrate in school. As a kid and teen who was consistently anticipating a new loss or disaster, I had been living half the time in a state of hypervigilance and hyperarousal, and the other half tuned out and stuck in my drained brain.

Never was relational stress or adoption loss discussed with me or my parents in regard to my problems with learning. This lack of discussion was problematic, of course, as I internalized my struggle with focus, impulsivity, and my ruminating mind as my own personal failing rather than the result of trauma. My teachers, testers, and my parents had been focused solely on an ADD diagnosis and behavioral modifications. I had no idea that my brain had formed and adjusted to the toxic stress I had been enduring from infancy onward. I didn’t know my brain was trying to protect me in some well-meaning (but malfunctional) way by keeping me on high alert and letting me rest and reset by shutting me down (dissociation).

Too many times to count in my work as a clinician I encounter professionals who have not yet learned or developed enough of an understanding to discuss symptoms of relational stress when they meet with their young client’s parents who are focused on an ADD diagnosis. This is a major disservice to our kids who eventually become adults with untreated trauma symptoms. For example, several years ago I was working at what one would consider a very progressive group therapy practice with about twelve other therapists, many in their first year or two of getting their clinical licenses. The practice held a training on ADD. An expert from an outside specialty group came in to educate our staff and share her knowledge about diagnosing ADD. She shared some good info on how to teach executive functioning skills as well as on key symptoms of ADD—trouble focusing and inattention, impulsivity, and at times hyperactivity. As many of these symptoms are also signs of  relational trauma, I asked her if and how therapists might discuss this trauma alternative in place of or in addition to an ADD diagnosis with clients or clients’ parents. I suppose that could be true, that it might be both, she said, but did not elaborate further. I thought that perhaps we would have more of a discussion on this possibility during the training, particularly after I broached that subject, but she just quickly moved on to discussing interventions. I was disappointed—but not surprised. While research is limited on the prevalence of trauma informed assessments, a 2017 Children’s Health Care study of 200 charts in the offices of developmental-behavioral pediatricians revealed that less than half—just 44%—had documented any anxiety or trauma history screenings. What needs to happen for trauma screenings to find their way to being prioritized in any setting where kids are being diagnosed for learning disorders?

Fortunately, there are some professionals who recognize the need for a conversation highlighting relational trauma and its impact on brain formation and focus. Some of them, including myself, work at Boston Post Adoption Resources (BPAR), a nonprofit that works specifically with relinquished children and adults. BPAR’s intake director, Erica Kramer shares, “A disproportionate amount of the kids who are referred to us have an ADHD or ADD diagnosis. The question is: Is this ADHD, or is it actually a relational trauma response?” Kramer says it’s essential that more clinical programs, like adoption and foster care agencies and counseling programs, educate all professionals to be trauma-informed. “If the professionals had known that this was a response to trauma,” she says, “that could have been life-changing. If foster and adoptive parents were told about how to parent a kid with a history of trauma, they would not have been blindsided. So many adoptive parents have told me, Nobody told me to expect this. I didn’t know.” 

I wanted to learn more about how specialists who are practicing trauma-informed care with kids who have been diagnosed with ADD are working with these kids and their parents. So, I met with Ken Barringer, a licensed mental health counselor and director of the Academy of Physical and Social Development in Newton, Massachusetts, to discuss his perceptions of ADHD diagnoses, traumatized children, and subsequent treatment. He’s worked at the academy since 1981. Barringer describes what typically happens when kids who have experienced trauma get an ADHD diagnosis without any attention to the impact of the trauma: “With younger kids if it’s trauma and it’s not treated as trauma, so we think they have a [strictly] behavioral problem and we don’t address it from a trauma standpoint, we’ll try behavioral techniques. These work—if anything—minimally effectively. Then medication is often the next step. So, for example, you might have a kid who is very anxious to begin with, and their anxiety has them acting out and now they are being given stimulant medication, so now things are going to be worse. Then people [professionals] often say, ‘Okay. It’s not enough intensive behavioral therapy’—which often becomes punishment—and ‘It’s not enough medication. We have got to start trying other [stimulant] medications or adding a new medication.’ Next thing you know, it’s years down the line and this kid has lost years of learning time because no one is understanding him. A lot of kids end up in behavioral-based programs that they shouldn’t be in this way. Now, if the acting-out behavior had been thought of as a trauma response and trauma-informed therapy had been instituted, then maybe that whole situation didn’t have to happen. Down the road, they end up possibly becoming addicted or having other adverse responses.”

During this part of the conversation with Barringer, I flashed back to my first counseling internship. I worked at a program for people who had nowhere else to go at that point in their lives for one reason or another and who were trying to stay sober inside of a very chaotic homeless shelter. It was quite a feat for those folks to attempt to achieve and maintain sobriety while staying in a place that could be considered an equivalent to hell unless one was numbed out. Those in the program had childhoods full of neglect, stress, and fear. It was more common for them to inform me about an ADD diagnosis given by a past provider during the intake session than it was for them to tell me about a trauma or anxiety diagnosis, and many of them had been prescribed stimulant medications in their childhoods, again, without attention paid to their symptoms of trauma. So many of them learned, as I had, to curb their anxiety and stress responses through alcohol as adults. It’s no wonder anxiety and alcohol use disorders have been linked (Smith, 2012), and no wonder alcohol acts as a (temporary) solution for so many—until consequences inevitably outweigh the benefits.

So, what is trauma-informed care? I ask Barringer. He describes the three Ss: “Structure, Support, and Safety, and snacks if you work with kids,” he jokes, then clarifies, “Keeping kids in highly Structured environments that will Support them leads to Safety.” Regarding the details of what a supportive environment looks like, Barringer suggests this: Instead of yelling “Pay attention!” to kids at a distance, move close to them and show compassion. “Parents, teachers, coaches have to buy into this [trauma-informed care] too,” he adds. “It’s hard to give valuable feedback from a distance, because it sounds just like noise. If it is a trauma response we’re dealing with, a raised voice can trigger the kid; we’ve got to move closer. I like the phrase, He is doing as well as he can. I tell parents, as much as you don’t like being in this interaction with them, they don’t either. It’s not as much up to them to change as it is up to you to change because you are the grown-up.”

Darci Nelsen, PhD, LMHC, BC-DMT, is a colleague of mine at Boston Post Adoption Resources who works extensively with relinquished children and adoptive parents. “When we focus strictly on behavior modification in order to decrease these behaviors,” she says, “we end up focusing too much on the ‘what’s happening’ versus the ‘why it’s happening.’” She echoes Barringer, remarking that if professionals neglect to rule out the presence of trauma, the child will be treated for behavioral symptoms and not actually resolve the real underlying issue that might be driving the behavior.

Nelsen then shared what she sees happen to the child’s narrative of themselves when there’s more focus on the what that is happening with their behavior versus the why. “There tends to be this message that gets internalized as I am incapable, or, I am bad because these things are happening to me. In early elementary years, children start to develop a sense of who they are as learners or peers, and when they are spoken to about their behaviors it becomes internalized as an internal narrative about who they are, and that becomes who they believe themselves to be.”

She goes on to describe first meetings with parents of adopted children who are diagnosed with ADHD or ADD. “They fully believe this is happening for their child. My first mode of intervention may not be challenging that parent initially or telling them that a differential diagnosis such as trauma may be important to explore—but instead, first having them consider that what is going on for the child might be a dysregulation of attention rather than a deficit. The child may be attending to something else, especially for children with histories of trauma or complex trauma. We can explain all those complex symptoms with things that show up with trauma: symptoms like inattention, hypervigilance, hyperarousal, and impulsivity. For someone who has experienced relational trauma, the stress-response system is on high alert and might present similarly to ADD or ADHD.”

For a child with trauma, she says what might look like My child is not able to pay attention to the teacher, might actually be them shifting their focus to signs of threats or danger. Nelsen adds, “I don’t want to minimize how hard it is to talk to children about these types of things. It is hard to talk to kids about relational trauma, about complex or chronic stress. For some children, it will be hard for them to acknowledge and understand that what they have experienced may have been harmful in some way. It might be hard for them to differentiate what trauma is from normal life. It’s important to talk about this in a non-shaming way, saying something like, What happened to you is not your fault, and the things you are doing in response are a normal response for what has happened to you. This allows children to start thinking, ‘This thing happened to me, and I do have a choice on how to respond and to feel my feelings.’ Parents can model this for kids—feeling their feelings and then self regulating—and providers can as well.”

So, do I think I meet the criteria for ADD today? Perhaps. Probably. I still misplace my keys on a regular basis, struggle to pay attention when I am not interested in the subject matter,  and I remain an impulsive personality type. But, with my relational trauma symptoms treated properly, and lessened, I have the brain space more available to plan, organize, execute, and accomplish my goals in a timely manner and, often, with gusto. Do I think some kids have strictly relational trauma and are being misdiagnosed with ADD? I’m really not sure. I want to be clear that I am not an attention deficit disorder expert and I am not writing this to reject the existence of the symptoms that create an ADD diagnosis. I am here to ask that we also pay attention to the impacts of relational trauma,  that we look at the root of a problem and start there.

I am not a person who believes in time spent wallowing in regrets. I believe in learning from all of our experiences, and that all problems, including our losses—no matter how awful—can teach us the most valuable life lessons. But I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have had someone like Barringer or Nelsen on my side when I was a kid. We still have so much to learn about focus and early relational trauma; and fortunately, experts are doing the work more now than ever, researching and investigating this. It’s the trickle down that takes too long, from psychological study to the average behavioral clinician toolbox. Can you imagine the learning and growth possibilities if we started treatment for ADD by talking about the impact of trauma? If professionals and parents helped acknowledge the relational trauma and encouraged kids to shake off that shame from their internalization of their attention problems? Perhaps one day kids can start to say to their own fearful and traumatized parts: I get it, I know why you are here and why you are spinning, I see you, I care about you, I get what you are trying to do . . .  but you need to step down.

Look at the fears. Start at the why. Cultivate compassion and security.  I’ll end with a Gabor Maté Quote: “Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.”

Lisa Coppola is a writer and licensed mental health counselor (LMHC) as well as the creator and program director of the Voices Unheard Storytelling Program for Adult Adoptees through Boston Post Adoption Resources (BPAR). An expert in the field of relinquishment trauma, she’s been a guest speaker on The Right Mind Media Podcast, On Mic with Jordan Rich, The Center for Adoption Support and Education, and on Grief in Brief. Coppola has been published in Severance Magazine, The Fix, and in Adoptees Voices. In 2022 she authored the workbook Voices Unheard: a Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees. Find her on Instagram. Learn more about Boston Post Adoption Resources here.

/*! elementor - v3.19.0 - 29-01-2024 */
.elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=".svg"]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}

By Sara Easterly

As an adoptee who writes and speaks in adoption spaces, I’ve encountered many adoptive parents with adult-aged adoptees who are struggling because their children have created necessary boundaries, asked for distance, or cut off ties altogether. Most of these parents entered into adoption without access to adoptee-centered information in a time that lacked much, if any, post-adoption support. They may have made it through what seemed like normal years raising their children into adulthood and have been looking forward to blissful years of parenting “retirement,” only to realize that adoption has presented new hurdles to a rewarding relationship with their adult children.

If you’re faced with a similar parenting challenge right now, there may be a way through. Insight into what could be going on underneath the situation points the way.

Three things adoptees’ boundaries or distancing might be telling you:

1. Adoptees may be experiencing an adolescence.

Adolescence is described by child developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld, PhD, as the bridge between childhood and adulthood. For adoptees, adolescence is often delayed or we undergo a second adolescence in adulthood designed to complete any unfinished business from the first. There could be a couple of reasons for this:

• Important identity tasks of adolescence can be complicated for adoptees. On a physical level and on a day to day basis, we’re without genetic mirrors that would help normalize our physical or behavioral traits and proclivities or understand our changing bodies. If we’re in a closed adoption, it can be hard to imagine ourselves 15, 30, or more years down the road when our first parents’ faces aren’t accessible to offer glimpses of our future selves. These are just some of the things that can impact the identity tasks of adolescence, when we’re meant to confidently grow into ourselves.
• The emotional impact of adoption’s inherent separation trauma can slow our adaptation and maturation. Adoption cannot take place without separation from our first attachments, and we are faced with additional separation in many forms throughout our lives, such as when others comment about how we do or don’t match our families, or when we wonder about our birth parents and whether they’re thinking of us. When we’re faced with overwhelming separation, our natural instincts move in to protect us. These serve a purpose in helping us survive and function day-to-day. But the cost is that our defenses can make it challenging to access vulnerable emotions like sadness and grief—crucial to our healing and growth. Many adoptees can take decades to start feeling the losses related to relinquishment and adoption—in the meantime living numb, or running from the pain, until we’re ready to take steps toward grieving all that we cannot change, which is how humans adapt and build resilience.

2. Adoptees may need room for their own perspectives to grow.

If we keep in mind that an adoptee who’s pulling away may be undergoing an adolescence, we can also remember that adolescence is a time when adults-in-the-making are developing their own ideas and tend to push back on those of their parents. This is often misunderstood as being contrary for contrary’s sake, but it comes from a place of discovery and growth. When novel and tender beliefs are just beginning to bud, we feel a fierce need to protect them. Perspectives that differ from ours—such as whether adoption is purely a beautiful thing, as adoptive parents often believe and express throughout our lives—can threaten the formation of our own thoughts and understanding of adoption, which may be completely different once we’re looking up-close at the losses of adoption. If our parents focus only on the positive, happy side of adoption and have a hard time accepting the sadness and loss that also exists, it can make it challenging for us to be in their presence.

3. Adoptees may need some heartfelt apologies.

In interviewing nearly two dozen adoptees for my forthcoming book, Adoption Unfiltered, and listening to thousands of adoptee stories through the Adoptee Voices writing groups that I lead, I’ve come to see that many of us have been deeply hurt by our parents—even if we’re unable to recognize the wounding until years later. As we reach the “Dissonance” stage in the Adoption Consciousness Model articulated by Susan F. Branco, et al, we may feel a sense of pain over authoritarian discipline practices employed in our childhoods that added separation to our already separation-saturated souls. We may feel hurt by ways our adoption stories had been oversimplified or overshared. Interracial adoptees may feel anger toward their parents for the cultural and racial isolation they experienced that wasn’t necessary or could have been better supported, or for racism encountered in their families. Many of us come to find out that the circumstances around our adoptions involved coercion or other questionable ethical practices. Even if our parents didn’t directly play a role in this or know better at the time, it can be hard to reconcile that these painful realities happened due to or under the watch of adults we trusted to look out for us. Additionally, there may be less obvious wounds. Due to our early experiences of relinquishment, adoptees can be especially sensitive to signs of rejection, and we can be hurt in ways that may not affect nonadoptees as deeply.

Often adoptive parents aren’t sure how to grapple with the guilt they feel over their children’s wounding. Or they may be stunned by what feels like a 180-degree shift when the children they thought they knew, who easily donned their ideas, become adults with their own interpretations around adoption. There can be a temptation to react defensively or blame the adoptees for being ungrateful or for harboring resentments. But such responses don’t lead to the closeness and connection parents likely desire—and that your child probably does, too. After all, more separation isn’t always what’s best for those of us already brimming with it.

Unless lines have been crossed making it unsafe or unreasonable to engage with our families, forgiveness and forging a new relationship together eventually may be possible. Our parents’ empathy and heartfelt apologies can first call us back toward relationship.

Rebuilding relationships takes time.

At the end of the day, adoptees are seeking safety in relationships. For a healthy parent-child relationship to work—no matter our age—we need to feel safe depending on our parents. Adoption has already complicated this, so winning our hearts requires effort and may be ongoing throughout our lives.

As our perspectives on adoption evolve over the course of our lives, we need room to express our complete range of emotions. Just as adolescents need room to express their emotions, so, too, do adult adoptees undergoing an adoption adolescence. Once we’re more solid and confident in our beliefs around adoption, apart from the influence of our parents and our wider culture, engaging with people we disagree with doesn’t feel so threatening—so long as we are fully respected and honored in the process.

Perfect parenting isn’t possible, nor expected. And even though we’re adults, we’d like to see you still trying. You likely didn’t receive stellar parenting guidance and post-adoption support in the past, but it’s never too late to seek it out. You’re in luck, because it’s a different time now and solid, adoptee-led information abounds. Making an effort goes a long way in showing that you’re committed to us, aiming to do better, and welcoming our full selves.

Parenting requires strong leadership—and adoptive parenting is no different. Good leaders don’t shirk from challenges. They rise to meet them. As you rise to meet the needs of the adoptee in your life, may they feel your caring and commitment that grows from your open mind, soft heart, and willingness to evolve with them.

Sara Easterly is an award-winning author of essays and books that include her spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom (Heart Voices, 2019), and her forthcoming book, Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies (Rowman & Littlefield, December 1, 2023). She is the founder of Adoptee Voices and is a trained course facilitator with the Neufeld Institute with a heart for helping others understand the often-misunderstood hearts of adoptees.

/*! elementor - v3.17.0 - 08-11-2023 */
.elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=".svg"]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}

By Michèle Dawson Haber

I’m a step adoptee. I was raised by my mother and a stepfather who legally adopted me. For a long time, I didn’t identify as a step adoptee, but now I talk about it a lot. Why? It’s probably easiest to explain by telling my full story. After all, stories are the connective tissue that bind so much of our fragmentary experience in the world. In my experience, there were things I didn’t understand or accept about myself until I reached my fifties, when I started to explore how my step adoption impacted my identity. I was so blown away by what I discovered that I wanted to share it with others so that they too would understand how important it is to have a complete story of one’s origins.¹

My father died when I was a baby, and my mother subsequently remarried. Two years after they married, my stepfather legally adopted me. An adoption decree ordered that my last name be changed, my birth certificate be altered, and that I henceforth be considered “born as the issue of the marriage between” my mother and my adoptive stepfather. I was five, about to start school, and had a new half-brother. I never asked my parents why I needed to be adopted, but I can guess now at some of their motivations: my stepfather had known me my whole life, we had as secure a connection as anyone could hope for, they wanted to be a complete family unit that wasn’t divided along last names and past history, and they wanted to spare me the awkwardness of answering questions about my different last name once I started school. All reasonable motivations. But when they decided not to give me anything more than the most rudimentary information about the father I was genetically tied to, when they urged me to forget about the past and be grateful that my stepfather loved me enough to adopt me, when curiosity about my father was met with tears, tension, and refusal—they created an environment that encouraged me to deny the existence of any longing I might have.

Would anything have been different for me if my stepfather had not adopted me? Is my mid-life search for details about my father simply a delayed mourning for the loss of a parent that I never knew? Yes and no. There are lots of similarities between my experience and those who have lost a parent very young. But what step adoption does is legally switch one parent for another, thereby facilitating the erasure from history of that former parent through name change and document amendments. I can’t know for sure, and I can’t ask them now, but it seems that this was my parents’ objective, and it was buttressed by their refusal to provide me with any narrative history of my father. I learned not to ask; I got the message that it didn’t matter.

Yet despite their efforts and hopes, my origins could not be erased, especially because I looked like no one else in my family. I was the only dark haired, olive-complexioned child in my family of six, and, for most of my growing up years, I felt like an alien amongst them. I knew there was a past that I was connected to that no one was willing to talk about. While home life was mostly harmonious and I did my best to look toward the future, my parents’ withholding of information about my own history had an impact. Their silence created a narrative hole that left me feeling like a floater, and I didn’t consider myself as belonging wholly anywhere—not in my family, not in my social circles, and not even with myself (whoever that was). I adapted by trying to please everyone and doing what I thought was expected of me.

I didn’t understand any of this until recently. My “coming out of the fog”² event occurred when I heard the sound of my father’s voice decades after his death from an old tape reel recorded in 1963. Until that moment, I believed I wasn’t affected by my step adoption, and I didn’t think my pre-step adoption history was relevant. But hearing my father’s voice when I was fifty-three years old changed everything. I thought I understood about how my life had unfolded and how I became the person I am today. I suddenly realized I knew nothing about my early history and wanted to know more about this enigma of a man who made up half of my DNA. I embarked on a quest to uncover the details of his life and write the first chapter of mine.

My quest took three years. I was fortunate that the information I sought was discoverable. When I first filled in the gaps of my personal history, I experienced feelings of anger and loss—finally understanding the full import of what had happened and all that could have been that had not. But after a while, something more powerful overtook the negative emotions: a feeling of calm contentment. I finally had my origin story and, with it, a feeling of wholeness and self-acceptance that until that moment had eluded me. Although the loss will never go away, I now have a sense of continuity and belonging. The story I can tell of myself has some coherence where before it was disjointed and incomplete.

After this experience of searching and filling in my personal history, I started to wonder if there were other step adoptees out there like me who don’t know anything about one of their parents or who don’t even think that knowing might be important. I went looking for data on step adoptees and found very little information.

In the U.S., government reports do not track step adoption as a separate category,³ so whatever is known about step adoptees comes primarily from the few national surveys that identify step adoptees.⁴ According to these studies, it’s estimated that 23% to 25% of all adopted children are step adoptees. (One study conducted by the National Council for Adoption put the number as high as 50% based on data from nine states and the District of Columbia where the number of step adoptions is tracked.)⁵

Researchers who have studied step adoption posit that step adoptees are most likely to be a result of a birth outside of marriage rather than a divorce. In other words, a single mother gets married, and her new spouse adopts her child.⁶ Researchers further suggest that when the child is a product of a previous marriage, adoption by stepfathers of their stepchildren is most likely to occur when the first father is out of the picture for some reason, for example because of death, desertion, or having stopped visiting and paying child support.⁷ This makes intuitive sense since the process of getting the agreement or terminating the parental rights of a non-resident parent who is still in the child’s life after a divorce is viewed as neither easy nor desirable. The statistics within stepfamilies back this up: only 5% to 8% of all stepchildren are adopted by a stepparent.⁸

So, with these statistics and assumptions in hand, what can we say about the likelihood that these step adoptees are in the same position as I am of not having met and/or knowing very little about one of their natural parents? How many of these step adoptees grew up in families where the first father was a secret or never spoken about? How many of these step adoptees grew up with big gaps in their origin stories? I sure wish I knew—no such research exists.

While I may not know how many, I do know there are step adoptees out there who can answer “yes” to these questions. It is for them that I write about my experience. As it was for me, they may not even know they are called step adoptees. They may have never explored their feelings of disconnectedness and may have repressed their desire to learn anything about their absent fathers or personal histories. My hope is that my writing and these conversations will reach step adoptees who are, unknowingly, still in the fog. I want them to know that uncovering their origin stories, if possible, can be transformational. Even just acknowledging that each of us has a pre-step adoption history that rightfully belongs to us and is part of our personal narrative can subtly change a person’s perspective of themselves and how they carve out a space in the world.

I also hope to reach those who have been impacted by other types of severance from their genetic identities. Although each of our experiences are different in important ways, there is also overlap. Step adoptees who have never known one of their first parents and/or have little or no information about them can understand how it feels to have an identity formed by a deficient life narrative. I believe step adoptees can make meaningful contributions to conversations happening in the MPE community. More importantly, step adoptees, by virtue of their overlapping experience, are natural allies in the fight for legislative and societal reform. We need more voices to join the movement against secrecy, obstruction, and the denial of everyone’s right to know their genealogical origins.

And so, with these objectives in mind, I will continue to write about my experience and hope more research will be done on step adoption. If you’re a step adoptee or know a step adoptee, send me an email, I’d love to hear from you!

Notes

1. I am indebted to Michael Grand for first introducing me to the ideas of narrative theory (The Adoption Constellation: New Ways of Thinking About and Practicing Adoption). In addition to Dr. Grand’s writing, there is a solid amount of scholarship devoted to using narrative theory to examine the adoptee experience. I have written about this elsewhere in a little bit more detail—click here to read more.

2. “Coming out of the FOG” is both an expression and an acronym formed by the words fear, obligation and guilt. Amanda Medina of This Adoptee Life website and podcast provides a great definition: “…the process by which adoptees who have considered themselves unaffected by adoption, start looking to their past, their background, their origin and as a result start shifting their view on adoption, their own and in general, as well as the effects it may have had on their life.” The AdopteesOn episode with Lesli A. Johnson also has a great discussion of this expression.

3. Adoption researchers have mostly ignored step adoptees because of this lack of data. Step adoptees, if they are not tracked separately by states, are included in the category of “relative or kin adoption.” Step adoption is thought to comprise the largest group within this category. (From Susan D. Stewart, “The Characteristics and Well-Being of Adopted Stepchildren,” Family Relations 59 (December 2010): 558-571.)

4. In the three published academic papers that I could find on step adoptees (unfortunately all dated), the following survey instrument were used: The 2002 National Survey of America’s Families (NSAF), The 2007 National Survey of Adoptive Parents (NSAP) in combination with the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH).

5. National Council for Adoption, “Adoption by the Numbers, 2019-2020,” 2022.

6. Although step adoptions by stepmothers do exist, they are vastly outnumbered by stepfather adoptions. This is a function of mothers being 83% more likely (2004 data) to be awarded custody of children after a divorce. (Matthew D. Bramlett, (2010). “When Stepparents Adopt: Demographic, Health and Health Care Characteristics of Adopted Children, Stepchildren, and Adopted Stepchildren,” Adoption Quarterly, 13:305, 248-267.)

7. Susan D. Stewart, “Stepchildren Adopted by their Stepparents: Where do they fit?” Iowa State University, 2007. Susan D. Stewart, “The Characteristics and Well-Being of Adopted Stepchildren,” Family Relations 59 (December 2010): 558-571. It should also be noted that in the U.S., a child is not allowed to have more than two legal parents.

8. Stewart, 2007; Stewart, 2010, Bramlett, 2010.Michèle Dawson Haber is a Canadian writer, potter, and union advocate. She lives in Toronto and is working on a memoir about family secrets, identity, and step adoption. She interviews memoirists for Hippocampus Magazine, and her writing has appeared Salon.com, Oldster Magazine, The Brevity Blog, and the Modern Love column of The New York Times.

Nancy Verrier, LMFT, became so deeply intrigued by her adoptive daughter’s response to having been relinquished that she earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology and wrote her thesis about what she called the primal wound—the trauma of separating a child from its mother. Her book, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, published in 1993, is in its 15^th printing and has been translated into seven languages. Its message resonated with filmmaker and adoptee Rebecca Autumn Sansom who, along with her biological mother, Jill Hawkins, PhD, have produced a powerful documentary starring its author and exploring the theory that the trauma of relinquishment must be acknowledged before healing can occur and examining the cultural shift the book kickstarted. Reckoning with the Primal Wound is the first feature-length documentary about relinquishment trauma that explores the perspective of both adoptee and biological mother and features, in addition to Verrier, psychologists David Brodzinsky, PhD, and Amanda Baden, PhD.  In September 2022, the film premiered at The Catalina Film Festival in Long Beach, California. It’s since been seen in dozens of screenings to enthusiastic audiences of adoptees and others, has been accepted into 20 film festivals. Here, we talk with the filmmaker about the genesis of the film, it’s creation, and its reception.

How and why did you become a filmmaker? 

I got really frustrated with my parents when they didn’t have any footage of me from early childhood. My history, however brief, was always oddly important, and I wanted to dissect it. It was due to this frustration that I got a camera and learned how to edit in high school and have been doing that ever since. I can’t seem to stop.

Do you recall your first reading of The Primal Wound, by Nancy Newton Verrier, and what your initial reaction was? 

Yes, of course. It was after years of being told by random adoptees I met (even in different countries) that I should read it. It went in one ear and out the other until I was finally ready to absorb the information. That happened to be when I was 29 years old. The outcome was immediately trying to find my biological mother. So it changed my life—for the better.

Tell us about the journey of this film. What inspired it and how widely has it been seen?

I began filming in my third trimester back in 2017 and it came out officially in October 2022. It was inspired by adoptees in my family who were struggling with addiction and I always wondered if unpacking their adoption issues would help alleviate some of their pain. They weren’t receptive to reading anything or joining support groups that I recommended, so I Googled around to see if there was another medium for the information in the book. I couldn’t find anything. I was so surprised, because at that point, the book was over 25 years old. I think I looked down at my huge belly and wondered if being a pregnant person would be an asset for such a film…then I realized Nancy Verrier lived 45 minutes away, so I emailed her, and while waiting for her to respond, I just started filming. My boss at the time told me about her childhood friend’s harrowing experience finding her birthmom that she was documenting on Facebook. She lived a couple of hours away and agreed to an interview. (That’s Doris if you’ve seen the film.) So, it just started happening, and then my mom didn’t want to come to the birth (which was fine and understandable), but Jill, my biological mother, did really want to be there. I had no idea I would be induced and have so much downtime in a labor and delivery room with my birthmother, but again, it just kind of happened. That interview ended up being so compelling. I tell people now that it must’ve been my destiny to create this documentary, because, honestly, so many things kept falling into place, and getting the input from the community over the past 18 months made it something that is beyond me and any scope I could’ve done alone. It definitely has its own life and I’m just going with it.

You noted that Nancy Verrier was initially reluctant to participate. What persuaded her?

Yes. She got misquoted in print and it scared her from doing much press and she was never going to agree to a big production or anything. But once we built up a rapport, our relationship was easy. In the interviews, it’s just me and my friend, author Sara Davis, behind the cameras. And it was my idea to let the cat, Solare, out of the back bedroom…so pretty much all of the unprofessional decisions were mine. I did add as many animals into the film as I could because they are so important to us, to relinquished people. If anyone wonders if that was intentional or not, it was.

How about your family? Were any of your family members reluctant about participating, and if so, why, and how did they come around? And at one point in the film, for example, your adoptive mother doesn’t want to appear on camera, yet she’s seen throughout the film. Did her reluctance have to do with privacy and how was she moved to be fully present?

My parents are the opposite of how I feel about being on stage or on camera. They did not want to participate. But they would drop gems all the time. I had to surreptitiously film my mom a few times. And then I couldn’t help editing the footage into my final cut. I ended up falling in love with that footage. I actually got pretty depressed upon completing the edit and knowing I had to get their permission. I was 99% sure they would veto it. But, they didn’t. I still have the text my mom sent after watching the film. “We realize it’s not about us.” That’s when I knew this project was meant to be. They still won’t come to Q&As or anything, but I will always appreciate their decision to let me use the footage. I think their roles and their story/perspectives are extremely important.

What role did filmmaker Nico Opper play in getting this film made?

Nico is an award-winning filmmaker and provided some post-production notes, but their main role here was as a participant. And of course they graciously let me use the footage from Off and Running, which I recommend everyone watch to further understand the perspective of inter-racially adopted people.

What other documentarians have influenced your work generally, and for this film specifically?

As controversial as he might be, Michael Moore’s catalog made an impact on me. I’ve seen all of his films and respect his approach to making a lasting point through documentary film. Chris Paine’s Who Killed the Electric Car? was formative as well. And of course, Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers. Then for more expressive elements, I’ve been influenced by filmmaker and performance artist Maya Deren. One of my favorite quotes I’ve gotten from a viewer is that the film is ‘poetic and raw.’ That’s a huge compliment to me. I really like organizing films into parts, so for this one the four parts come from the sections of the book: “The Preface,” “The Wound,” “The Manifestations,” and “The Healing.”

What was your goal when you began—what did you want the viewer to walk away feeling/thinking—and how, if at all, did that change as you progressed?

I simply wanted my adopted relatives to go to rehab. But then as it became kind of a thing, where 1,000+ people signed up to be in the Adoptee Army section of the credits—which means they agree that more should be done to change the current narrative of adoption—I started thinking bigger picture. Which always means policy change, right? I would absolutely love for the film to be used as a tool to alleviate pain and suffering for anyone experiencing any form of genealogical bewilderment. I say that because it’s not just adoptees, it’s donor-conceived people, people dealing with misattributed parentage because of the prevalence of DNA kits, surrogacy-born people, and of course foster and former foster youth. Let’s really think about family separation and its long-term effects. And consider if we’re doing the best we can by these invisibly marginalized groups. I say invisibly because we’re not recognized as marginalized by the majority of society. But I believe we are.

How long did the whole process take from inspiration and conception to distribution and what challenges, if any, did you encounter as you moved forward?

This April it will be six years since I first had the idea. I’ve had the normal challenges of being an independent filmmaker. So trying to cover operation costs has been nonstop work, but I can’t complain because it’s really hard for a film that didn’t get picked up to make anything. If it does turn a profit I’d love to create a mutual aid fund for adoptees who are on the struggle bus. I do give 10% of the proceeds each month to an adoptee for their personal self-care fund. And then I like to say that my lobby is to get the Department of Human Services to give us all at least $5K a year for self-care and therapy.

Another unexpected challenge has been community members who do not like the book. And I understand the criticism, but I wish people would give the film a chance before writing it off just because it’s associated with the book. That’s been kind of stressful actually.

One of the things I found fascinating, and most personally resonant, was when you said “You are not the person you were going to be…which may not be a bad thing.” In an article about my own experience, I once wrote, “I can’t help but imagine, for good or for bad, who I might have been if I’d only known who I was.” These are thoughts I don’t see articulated or acknowledged often. I imagine they may be difficult for non-adoptees to understand. Can you say more about that and what you meant?

Oh, I love the way you put it. Much more poetic. But, yes, it’s a paradox of sorts. We are, but we aren’t. I feel like the Buddha said something similar, right? Like, this is because that is, and that is not because that is not. I always think, if I were Autumn, would Jill’s children born after me—Christopher, Clare and Candace—be? They are, because I went.

Someone recently sent me a passage from a book about reincarnation that made them think of their experience as an adoptee. It was about how some souls are removed from their soul family in order to evolve for the benefit of the soul family. I think that’s a positive way to look at it. But I always welcome any attempt to make it make sense. Some people have a really hard time calling me Autumn, but for me (in certain spaces) it helps bring my two timelines together. I think this is why filmmaking and being in control of the actual timeline is cathartic for me. (In editing software, where you cut the film is called the timeline).

In the film I go on to say that “I’m trying to figure it out”—knowing that I can’t really figure it out. But maybe we’ve been given the gift of examining our lives being non-negotiable?

At one point in the film, Amanda Baden, MEd, PhD, says, “One of the challenges for adoptees is that they may be seeking people to validate their experiences all the time, and it’s hard to do that when people don’t always understand or empathize with their experiences.” Is this film an effort to validate their experiences? Or your experiences?

Did you know the film had more Baden than Verrier at one point? Talk about dropping gems! And yes, this film is validating our experiences. I hear from adoptees that their main takeaway is seeing other adoptees voice feelings they’ve had and feeling like they aren’t alone anymore. That’s the best outcome I could hope for.

There’s discussion in the film about microaggressions and at one point specifically referencing comments people make when they find out one is adopted, such as, “Have you searched for your birthparents?” Having never known my mother, people asked me all my life if I searched for her. It never struck me as negative or offensive, just a natural curiosity, a way of showing interest. It’s impossible, I think, to expect others to understand how their responses may be offensive or considered microaggressions. And saying nothing seems to show a lack of interest. What are appropriate responses when one discloses that they’re adopted? 

That’s a good point, and I totally hear you. I also never took it as offensive growing up, but looking back I think the question led me to try to find Jill before I was ready. I did attempt to get my records from the State of Tennessee when I was 21 years old, and it was unsuccessful. I think the main reason I wanted answers was to please other people. Which is not why anyone should do anything. But people can be aware that it’s unintentionally detrimental to adoptees’ psyche to call into question the realness of their nurturing or natural parents, to dismiss how personal and loaded the question is, and maybe just respond with a little more empathy.

I think Jill’s answer when I ask her how she would’ve felt if she’d been adopted and she says she would’ve been in constant turmoil is pretty astute.

But yes, I agree, being intentionally relinquished by your mother and being abandoned by her are different, but also not different at all. That’s a quandary. I just wonder if my relationships with my friends and you with your friends would’ve been deeper and more psychically beneficial if they were framed more sympathetically.

Now I think the best response to learning someone is adopted or dealing with maternal/gestational parent separation is to say something like, “I’ve heard that can be a difficult life experience. If you ever want to talk about it or need support I’m here to listen.”

What would you say to others about using their voices, their art, to express the experience of being an adoptee?

The nice thing about content creation is that there’s always something new to be gained from individual stories. I love learning about people through their own personal experiences, through words, songs, performances, films, memoirs, etc. I would personally love to amplify trans-racial adoptees’ stories in future projects. The added loss of culture seems extraordinarily unfair.

Tell me about the two songs that play over the end credits and their songwriters—”March 11, 1962,” by Liz Rose and Mary Gauthier, and “Wanna Be,” by Celeste Krishna. Why did you choose those?

My mentor, Demetria Kalodimos (true crime podcast producer of Carol’s Last Christmas), told me I needed to meet her friend who was adopted and a musician in Nashville. It was Mary Gauthier. When we finally met, she graciously offered me any track off of her exemplary album The Foundling, which chronicles her adoption journey, to use in the film. I could hardly pick one, but kept coming back to the lyrics in “March 11, 1962.” It seems to be the right choice considering the feedback. So many people can relate to making that call and the emotions surrounding reunion. Like one viewer says, “Seeing Mary Gauthier’s lyrics and hearing her voice while watching the names scroll through, I feel like I’m standing naked in a field and finally seen!”

I have a small record label and my artist, Celeste Krishna, wrote a song about trauma and depression for her album My Blue House. It’s called Wanna Be. She let me use it. Last week someone told me it’s the song they blast on the way to therapy. I got Celeste to send a voice note explaining the meaning and why she wrote it and that voice note was sent to another community member who was teaching a high school writing class and she used the 90-second voice note as a prompt that same day! I love that the songs are getting more exposure through the film. The line, “Analysis, paralysis, my own mind, tied knots that I cannot untie”—I couldn’t NOT use it!

At one point in the film your adoptive mother says of the book, “The author had a point of view…and I don’t know if that can be scientifically corroborated.” I’m not adopted, but as someone who was abandoned by her mother as an infant, I find that Verrier’s book, although not scientifically verified, and everything said in your film, rings true. Yet I know not everyone sees it that way. Your adoptive mother’s comment echoes some criticism of the Primal Wound—the suggestion that it’s merely a theory and that there’s no evidence to support the ideas it presents. Do you have any thoughts about that criticism? To your knowledge, is it something that Verrier has ever addressed?

I think Nancy and I agree that anecdotal evidence can be profound. That’s why I put out the call for the Adoptee Army. You can argue all day that the data isn’t there. But if thousands of people with similar experiences are saying “YES! That’s how I feel!” Can you really dismiss them all?

And how do you ethically collect data on gestational parental separation? And why don’t animal studies count? The fact that you can’t legally separate domesticated animals from their mothers before they are weened and ready—well we too are mammals. People know it’s true, but admitting it would be detrimental to too many structural belief systems. Until the majority of society thinks we are also a marginalized group, we won’t get any more civil rights. I do, however, believe the tension is building toward a tipping point. I would be honored to be a small part of the reckoning.

Has there been any criticism of the film, and if so, what is the nature of it? 

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The critics are people who haven’t seen the film, so do they count as critics? And like I said before, it’s been that I’m hyping the book and an adopter instead of an adoptee. Which is a fair criticism, but I’ll say that knowing Nancy has been so meaningful and she’s provided a lot of value to my life and I’ve heard from so many people that she’s added value to their lives and taken time to hear them. Unfortunately, that’s exceptional for an adoptive parent to do, to listen to adult adoptees. I wanted to pay tribute to that in some small way, and my art is film. This film does pay tribute to Verrier’s contribution while reckoning with her role as an adoptive parent. I welcome any concerns anyone has. I’m very approachable.

I’m wondering, specifically, if your empathetic view toward, and inclusion of, birthmothers’ voices has been well-accepted? 

Funny you should ask this at this particular moment, because a birthmother influencer, Ashley Mitchell @bigtoughgirl just did two stellar reaction videos of the film this week! They are amazing and no, I didn’t ask her to do them, it’s totally organic. I embedded them on the website and you can find them on her Instagram page. So far, birthmothers have appreciated the film and are recommending it. I was hoping they would. It was actually screened at the CUB (Concerned United Birthparents) retreat last year if that tells you anything!

Is the film being used in educational and therapeutic settings? 

I am really pushing for more of this to happen. I’ve been told it needs to be, but as an independent filmmaker, my network isn’t big in these spaces, so any help with recommendations to child welfare organizations, colleges and universities, or to therapists would be greatly appreciated.

According to a press release, the film is the first-ever customizable documentary. What does that mean and how does it work? 

Thank you for noticing that. Yes! One of the benefits of being independent and owning the rights is that I can change the film whenever I want. So it dawned on me that for specific screenings I could put an organization’s thought leader in the film for 30-60 seconds for the price of the licensing fee ($400) and then it would be even more inclusive and help elevate even more people in this space who want to prevent pain and suffering within the adoption constellation. There are so many people doing important work in this space and if the film can amplify that in some way, I am happy to edit until the cows come home. Ha!

Finally, featured in the film is Moses Farrow, LMFT, an adoptee and adoption trauma educator. He says, “The adoption industry has evolved over the last 400 years or so because of careful and consistent crafting of the initial statements ‘best interest of the child’ and ‘second chance at a better life.’ Once these took hold, it was very easy to stigmatize women, to stigmatize out of wedlock pregnancies. As we become more aware and more and more in touch with this level of truth, I wonder how in the world we can reconcile that we are adopted into such a legacy? How are people so desperate to ignore such truths and realities. We have to move this narrative forward.” Can you comment on your point of view about what it would mean to move the narrative forward? What needs to happen to change the narrative?

I love how Moses puts it. And I think about this a lot. I’ve watched every season available of The Handmaid’s Tale and it’s multi-million-dollar budget, fantastic writing, and acting, AND laying out why all of this is messed up hasn’t really moved the needle as far as societal thinking about adoption goes. So, what can an indie film or grassroots adoptee centric movement do if Hollywood can’t?

I just posted on Instagram about a sketch NBC’s SNL did last month where adoptees are the punchline. It seems like we haven’t made any progress sometimes, doesn’t it? But, I’ve also had a number of friends see the film and then apologize to me, unprompted. I’m like, I wasn’t fishing for an apology, but thanks? They’re like, yeah, I know I said some wrong things to you about being adopted and I’m sorry. That, to me, is how we’re going to do it, and if the film is the thing that makes something click for people who haven’t considered our point of view before, then that’s all I could hope for as a filmmaker and as an adoptee rights activist. I appreciate all of the work Severance Magazine has done in this space and hope we can collaborate in the near future, too. Thanks for helping me spread the word about the film.

If you had to narrow the film’s message to one sentence, what would it be?

Everything you think you know about adoption is dead wrong.

How can readers see the film?

They can now buy/rent/and gift the film digitally via Vimeo which is linked at the film’s website or they can buy a DVD that I will hand make and sign from the merch tab on the website. There are also screenings(with surprise guests sometimes shhh!) and we’re cooking up some in-person screenings for this year, so if readers sign up for the newsletter, they’ll be in the know.

Rebecca Autumn Sansom is guided by the promise of a consciously evolving humanity. As a filmmaker, she was invited by Oregon’s Congressman Blumenauer to screen her feature documentary about high speed rail, Trainsforming America, at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC. She won a 2015 Midsouth regional Emmy for her work on Tout Your Town, a travel series produced by Genuine Human Productions, Nashville TN. As a native Nashvillian, Sansom’s life has been steeped in the sounds of Music City. For three years running, she’s been disrupting the entertainment industry through a safe space for marginalized talent with The Wavy Awards presented by The (NYC) Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

Lisa “LC” Coppola, a domestic adoptee through the department of children and family, is a mental health counselor who has years of expertise counseling adult adoptees and others touched in any way by adoption. A heartfelt advocate for those relinquished, she’s also a therapist and, in collaboration with Boston Post Adoption Resources, is the creator of the Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories speaker and writing workshop series. A writer from the Boston area, she often explores themes concerning relinquishment and addiction. Now, she’s created a resource to guide therapists and peers who work with adoptees. Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees is a 52-week journal with prompts based on core themes that emerge in therapy and a script to help group facilitators. The journal can be used by adult adoptees on their own or under the care of a therapist, by therapists as a tool in their practice, and by peer-led support group moderators.

How would you describe this journal and what makes it unique?

The book is a guided journal, yes, but it is so much more than this. It offers 52 guided writing prompts based on common themes in adoption that we see clinically at Boston Post Adoption Resources, a nonprofit mental health agency. But the prompts are framed with resources including a post adoption vocabulary section and suggested reading, so the individual writer has access to knowledge if they want to do a deeper dive of study. The combination of prompts and resources also assists mental health professionals who might not be well versed in adoption-related challenges or therapies. Most graduate-level programs only spend eight minutes on the topic of adoption, believe it or not. So therapists can use this journal to become more informed about adoption loss and then as an aid to guide adoptees out of the fog—meaning out of the denial of the complex trauma of their adoptee experience.

Probably the part I am most excited about is where I include detailed instructions for adoptee volunteers—peers who might want to coordinate peer-led support groups. The instructions cover how to establish a group and how to organize weekly meetings using the journal prompts as themes and assignments, and even include a script to make the idea of running a meeting less daunting and more do-able.

How did you come up with this idea?

As a mental health counselor, I’ve had more than a decade of experience in running writing support groups and workshops on the themes of identity, recovery, relationships, and other issues that both adoptees and people in recovery from addictions struggle with. As an adoptee and person in long-term recovery from addictions, I’ve been a participant and beneficiary of these types of groups and therapeutic activities myself, so I’ve seen the value from both sides. When people come together to acknowledge a similar struggle, there’s a sort of belongingness that develops that I have seen to be the most powerful kind of healing. You see this all the time in the addiction recovery world. As adoptees are going through this kind of mysterious buried pain and grief, and one that is hardly discussed in public, I knew that they really could benefit from this kind of peer-to-peer recovery. So I wanted to combine my dual experiences to offer something bigger and more impactful than a traditional prompted writing journal, something with legs and utility to empower adoptees with a tool and to enlarge the professional and volunteer post adoption support system.

How is writing for adoptees valuable and therapeutic?

As a mental health counselor, I find that journaling on one’s story, trying to sort out the truth through telling the story, sifting through fears and hopes on paper, is incredibly powerful. It’s a way to help clients work their way through disparate and confusing emotions and memories, to identify common threads throughout their lives, and ultimately to connect to the truth of their uniquely personal stories. In individual and group sessions, I guide the journaling process with carefully planned prompts that guide the writer through a revelatory and healing process over time.

How did you come to discover writing as helpful in your own experience?

I’m an adoptee who has spent a lifetime confronting a history of trauma—quite common in adoption—as well as addiction, and who ultimately has found a path to healing. I share part of my past openly in the early pages of the Voices Unheard Journal. Writing and support groups have been my lifeline. I’m working on a memoir myself, and through this process I’ve been able to really get in touch with who I am at my core. Of course, as an adopted person, who I am has always been a confusing, kind of clouded thing, and with writing a memoir I had to really get to know myself on a new level to write my character. I had to look at the pain I came up against in my life and how I got through it. I feel stronger now than ever in who I am and in my own strength and resilience. The journaling process really helped me understand my story to the extent needed in order to write the more structured linear story.

Why the focus specifically on adopted adults?

So often in our practice we meet adoptees who are not aware until adulthood of the depth or the impact of their traumas. For example, I worked in addiction recovery programs for many years and during that time found that adoptees made-up a  disproportionate number of my clients. As I worked with them, sometimes for years, and as they gained some good time in sobriety, they often discovered that a root cause of their need to self-medicate was coming from a place of unprocessed grief around their relinquishment experience. In childhood, the adoptee trauma can look like a learning disability, or anxiety, or depression, or issues with love addiction or love avoidance. But once you peel back those layers of the onion, as they say, it’s all linked to that original wound manifesting. And many counselors, adoptive parents, and teachers have never been educated that adoption trauma even exists, so kids rarely ever get to address it while they’re young. Boston Post Adoption Resources and other adoption trauma-informed organizations are starting to change this now. Also another reason I designed this book for adult adoptees is that many are beginning  to search for biological families. This is a hard, confusing, process that needs support.

Tell us more about the cover art.

The design was created by our own clinical director, Kelly Dibennedetto, and her husband, Albie. It was based on that notion of “coming out of the fog.” The fog at the bottom represents the concept of denial around the adoption trauma experience that many adult adoptees face. The ladder provides hope for progress—a path to discovery and insight—as it connects adoptees to their own stories on a journey to healing.

What kind of feedback have you had so far on the journal?

We are very excited that some highly renowned adoptee writers and adoption professionals have really embraced the journal and generously provided written endorsements. In fact, Sharon Kaplan Roszia, co-author of one of the most important pieces of literature used by therapists trained in adoption competency, validates the approach of this journal and says it’s “long overdue” in the field.

What other projects/ books are happening at Boston Post Adoption Resources?

BPAR already has an acclaimed illustrated book called Adoption Is a Lifelong Journey, written from the perspective of a child adoptee and offering tools and tips to parents. It was released five years ago. We also published a free eBook for parents/caregivers called Voices in Transracial Adoption to share the lived experiences of transracial adoptees through interviews. We’re seeking funding to build an online post adoption resources learning center to educate on a deeper level on specific topics.

Learn more on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

By Laura L. Engel

In 2016, I was living a great life, newly retired after a 35-year career in the corporate world and enjoying the extra time to indulge in travel with my beloved husband. That spring, on a whim, we decided to submit DNA tests to Ancestry.com.

Privately I hoped for a miracle. I had a secret.

In 1967, I’d given birth to my first-born child in an unwed mothers maternity home in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had been a typical 17-year-old high school senior with plans for the future that evaporated overnight.

In the sixties, it was considered close to criminal for a girl to become pregnant with no ring on her finger. The father of my child had joined the Army, preferring Vietnam to fatherhood. After my parents discovered my shameful secret, I was covertly hurried away and placed in an institution for five months. There, I was expected to relinquish my baby immediately after giving birth to closed adoption and I was repeatedly assured my child would have a better life without me.

After his birth, I was allowed to hold my son three times. My heart was permanently damaged when I handed him over the final time. The home allowed one concession—I could give my baby a crib name. I named him Jamie.

***

For decades I privately grieved my son but never spoke of him. Many times, I furtively searched for Jamie but always hit a brick wall. Adoption records were still sealed in Louisiana, continuing the archaic shadow of secrecy.

In October 2016, while out walking my dogs one evening, a  ‘Parent/Child Match’ message popped up on my iPhone, causing me to stop me in my tracks as my knees gave out from under me.

After 49 long years, Jamie had found me. Who was he? Where was he? Would he hate me? How would this affect my life? My family? His family?

I had always dreamed of finding Jamie but never thought past that point.

My hands shaking, I gathered courage and wrote back to this man who now called himself Richard. Within minutes he answered. At first, we tiptoed around each other, answering basic questions, but soon we were pouring our hearts out. My son was back in my life, and I learned I had three new grandchildren. All the while shame and fear bit at me as tears streamed from my eyes, but simultaneously overwhelming joy and hope flooded through me.

That night I heard my son’s voice for the first time. The wonder I felt when he said, “I know your voice” transformed me. In minutes, the secret of my son changed from fear of anyone knowing about him to wanting to shout out to the world, “My son has found me!”

Between tears and laughter, our first conversation lasted four hours. It was torture. It was euphoric. I cried. He cried. A tremendous relief replaced fear.

All the reunion experts warn, ‘take your time—do not rush into your first meeting.’ Neither one of us cared what experts said. Within four days, Richard flew from Louisiana to California to meet me. That first meeting was magical. My son was back in my life, and suddenly I was whole.

We discovered we delighted in each other’s company, and nature trumped nurture in many aspects of our lives. Richard resembled me in appearance and personality, and to my delight his oldest daughter was my tiny clone. I was smitten and immediately fell deeply in love with him and his children.

My husband, children, and stepchildren welcomed Richard and his family with open arms, and I pinched myself. My life took on a whole new dimension as Richard and I tried to make up for lost time. Two thousand miles did not keep us apart.

For three years, we made multiple trips to see each other, spending holidays and time together. His family welcomed me with open arms, too. Both of his adoptive parents had passed away, and I sorely regretted not being able to thank them for loving my son and giving him a good life.

2020—COVID happened—suspending all trips back and forth. We called, we texted, and all the while I watched as this son of mine started to break down before my eyes. A messy divorce, loss of job, and unhealthy isolation began to destroy him. Depression had colored my mother’s life, and I watched with hands tied as it was destroying his. Desperately, I advised him as a mother, counselor, cheerleader—but this was beyond my mothering skills. He seemed unable to pull himself out of a dark hole and I worried daily.

In February 2021, we had what would be our last conversation. Before hanging up Richard said, “I love you, Mom. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

I cherish that phone call. Two days later, the son I had mourned for 50 years, the son who had found me, left me again. He took his own life. Now I had lost him twice and this time was forever.

A year later and I have torn myself up over the “what ifs” the “could I have done more?”  My grief has been crippling, but slowly I have come to realize that as painful as his loss is, I am forever grateful for our fleeting time together and I would not trade it for anything. Without our magical and much too short reunion, I would never have known about his childhood, the good man he was, or felt the love he imparted to me. I would never have forgiven myself for leaving him, and I would never have known my beloved grandchildren. Through them, I still have Richard.

I wish I could speak to all the birth mothers out there, who continue to carry the shame and guilt that society placed on us. For those who refuse to allow their relinquished child back into their lives. I want to say I know your fear. I know your uncertainty. I lived it and still live it. It is deep-seated in us, regardless of the circumstances that resulted in us leaving our children. Please know if you are brave enough to welcome that lost child into your life again, you may create a peace and a bond worth all the fear and guilt. There is nothing quite like reuniting a mother and her child, and you may be giving a gift of connection to that child and yourself, as it should have been all along.

One thing I know for sure—the memories of those short years with Richard will uplift me the rest of my life.Laura L. Engel, author of You’ll Forget This Ever Happened: Secrets, Shame, and Adoption in the 1960s, was born and raised on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and was transplanted to San Diego more than 50 years ago. Retired from a corporate career, she’s married to the love of her life, Gene, and is the mother of five beloved grown children and an adored Golden Retriever, Layla Louise. She’s the president of San Diego Memoir Writers Association and an active member of the International Women Writers Guild. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Louise Browne and Sarah Reinhardt created The Making of Me as a platform for conversations about all aspects of adoption. But it’s a podcast with a twist. In each episode, the hosts and their guests discuss a book about adoption. In the first season they tackled Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound, and now just a few episodes into their second season, they’re exploring another classic, Journey of the Adopted Self, by Betty Jean Lifton.

Meet the adoptee friends who pivoted from operating an ice cream truck to hosting a popular podcast.Can you each summarize your adoption journeys?

Sarah: My bio parents met in their first year of college but went their separate ways after the second semester ended; he went back to New Hampshire, and soon after, he was drafted in Vietnam. I’m not sure if he dropped out of college or what the circumstances were that he was drafted, but he never learned of the pregnancy. My bio mom kept it from her parents—weirdly, she was also adopted!—and on a plane from JFK (she was from Queens) to St. Louis where she was to go to nursing school, her water broke. There was no hiding that from her mother. She was not allowed to even hold me. I was immediately taken from her. I was placed with a foster mother for about six weeks and then adopted into my family. A few years later, they adopted a boy, and when he was five months old, they discovered they were pregnant with twins. They divorced when I was seven, and my brothers and I stayed with my dad (who remarried about five years later). My bio mom had four kids after me (and another she carried almost to term but lost after a terrible car accident)—all of whom were kept. My bio father, who died before I was able to meet him, had three kids, one from a second marriage. So I’m the oldest of seven biologically, and three from adoption. I also have three step-siblings. I met my bio mom and siblings in 1998 and stayed in touch with her until she died in 2009. I’m still in reunion with my sisters.

Louise: My biological mom chose to put me up for adoption in September 1968 after leaving college when she became pregnant with me. She was 18 years old. She’d known my biological father in high school in Colorado, where they dated. From what I’ve gathered, they met up again during the holidays and I was the result of that encounter. My biological father was already engaged to his girlfriend at the time who was also pregnant previous to their encounter. My bio mom took on the journey of having me on her own. My bio dad did know about me and signed off on my adoption. I believe that the decision to relinquish me was made by my bio mother “in her right mind” because I have letters from her to family members who had asked her to consider letting them raise me. She was very insistent that I have a father figure who was strong because of her missing some of that in her childhood and she did not want to see me being raised and not be my mother. She had strong convictions on having me be with an intact family. I do think it critically changed her path. From what I know from relatives, she may have regretted it later in life. She passed away at a young age in a drowning incident so I’ve never been able to ask her. I know who my bio dad is and who many of my family members are from knowing his name and having it confirmed on Ancestry. I have not had a reunion with them. I do stay in contact with my bio mom’s sister and cousins. My parents adopted me through an agency several days after I was born in Denver. They had one biological son and had lost a baby girl a few years prior to me in delivery. My mom could not have more children of her own. I then grew up in Littleton, Colorado

How did you meet?

Louise: Our sons were in elementary school together and we met through a mutual friend.

Sarah: Once we discovered we were both adopted, we became instant friends. Ultimately we opened a business together—a gourmet ice-cream truck in Los Angeles.

How did you decide to do a podcast about adoption together and what was your goal at the start?

Sarah: Adoption was what we initially connected over, and we had talked about starting a podcast. We were tossing around ideas and finally we were, “Uh, duh! We should talk about what we both know.”

Louise: Honestly, we didn’t really have a goal except to hear adoption stories and connect with other adoptees.

How did you find and build your audience? Were you already connected with a number of adoptees or with the adoptee community?

Sarah: We were not connected with the adoptee community. In fact, we didn’t even know there was such a thing until a few months in and we found Adoptee Twitter. Our initial audience came from word-of-mouth and friends listening and sharing, and then we started to build a following because people related to the stories and our connection with each other.

Louise: And then it took on a life of its own. People started reaching out to us to thank us, asking to be on the podcast and share their stories.

There are a number of adoptee podcasts – how do you describe The Making of Me?

Louise: I’d describe The Making of Me as more of a conversation around adoption. First we discuss a chapter of an adoption book. in Season One it was The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier, and Season Two is Journey of The Adopted Self by Betty Jean Lifton. After we discuss the book, we bring on a guest to tell their story.

Sarah: I think what draws people to the podcast is that even though it’s a deep topic, we bring levity and honest back-and-forth with our guests.

How and why did you conceive of the idea of linking chapters of books to adoptees’ stories?

Sarah: The chapter discussions are not necessarily linked to the stories. It’s kind of its own thing that we do together before we bring a guest on. But every chapter, every adoptee can relate to.

Do you plan to continue basing the podcast on books about adoption, and if so, do you already have thoughts about books you want to highlight in the future?

Louise: We plan on continuing to base it on books about adoption, at least at this moment. We’ve got a list we’re going through. We’re thinking possibly about a memoir by an adoptee for our next book.

Louise, on your website bio, you write about learning that your birth mother had been killed in an accident, saying “This piece of information proved to be a touchstone between the guiding and protective voice in her head and the events of the past.” Can you say more about that and what you mean by that?

Louise:  My bio mom’s family found me when I was 32 years old due to my bio grandmother being terminally ill. I learned the night that I got the call about them finding me that my bio mom had been killed in an accident when I was in the 2nd grade. This just made sense to me. I was overwhelmed, saddened but not that surprised, strangely. My entire life from around the fourth grade until my late 20s, I felt that I had a voice that protected me. Not my own internal voice, but a voice that would set me on the straight and narrow or give me warning signs when I was going off track too far. I always felt that it was ‘otherworldly’ and I have had many experiences since childhood with sensing people from beyond. When I found out that she was no longer on this earth I wasn’t shocked. I sort of knew this internally. It’s hard to explain. When I found out that she had passed away, I stopped having this sixth sense or voice in my head.

Louise, you’ve said that hosting the podcast has been life changing? In what way?

Louise: The way it has changed my life is that I never really had the experience of community with other adoptees. I have had adopted friends (many in fact), but when we touched on deeper issues about adoption that we all felt, I almost feel like we were scared to broach the topic. We would bond immediately over certain shared experiences that I couldn’t relate to others about, but would be a bit guarded about anything after that. I now have a sense that I can be more open to explore parts of myself that I have kept to myself and haven’t been able to describe or flush out. It is freeing and a bit scary.

Can you both describe your understanding of what is meant by being in the fog or coming out of the fog?

Sarah: How I see it, it’s waking up from the narrative I was told my entire life; I was “lucky,” I was “chosen”—and that was the end of the story. It’s having my eyes opened and understanding that was only the beginning of the story— seeing the deep trauma, how that first relinquishment (and subsequently second from my adopted mom and emotional abandonment from my adopted father) altered the course of my life, affecting almost every decision I’ve made, how I felt about myself, how I relate to people and the world around me. It’s been enlightening and also a grieving process. I’m getting to know myself in a different way. Even though there’s been some grief, it’s also been liberating because I now know I’m not alone, I’m not a freak, and I can begin to heal in a new way.

Louise: The concept of the fog perplexes me somewhat. I do feel I have crossed a line that I hadn’t crossed before in exploration and understanding of what some of my deeper issues are and what caused these issues (where they may have stemmed from). I’m not sure I had the understanding of the deeper core reasons as to why they were there before this. That feels amazing. So, yes, that does feel like coming out of a fog. I understand the fog and how important it is in describing these feelings. I feel I may always be moving through this fog and not just stepping out of it. Or stepping out and then maybe going back in. Maybe it’s a place I may always be in or out of? The way I can best describe it for me is like I am living in it and some days it is sunny and clear and other days it is so thick it may rain. I now feel that I am on a journey that has shifted, and wherever it takes me, I’m excited to have a deep understanding of myself. I feel calmer with this new insight and have developed some grace (for lack of a better word) in looking at the situation from many angles. I am not sure how else to describe it. I hope that makes sense.

What has most surprised you in the course of doing the podcast? What story most affected you?

Sarah: What has been most surprising for me is how far and wide the reach has been, and how many people want to connect, tell their stories, and just tell us how much they relate. And again—the community that I never knew existed!

All the stories have affected me in one way or another, but there are a couple that stand out. Sam, who was an LDA and didn’t find out he was adopted until he was in his early 50s with a life-threatening kidney disease. He had humor in dealing with it. Rachel, whose birth was the result of a violent act, and the grace in which she lives her life. And John, who was part of Operation Baby Lift out of Vietnam! Everyone’s story is so unique and yet the same. I love that.

Louise: I am going to echo Sarah here. I’m blown away daily by those who want to share their stories bravely and connect with us via many means. I feel so honored to have others reach out to us and tell us about their struggles and why they are ready to share their stories. It makes me care greatly about what we are doing and wanting to make sure we let others tell the truth as it is for them. Adoptees and our guests are so resilient, have great humor, and also have such deep souls. I’m grateful I’ve had this time to share with them and to grow in this along with my friend Sarah. Each story is my favorite when it comes out and after our interviews.

From your experience after so many episodes, what do you think is most misunderstood about adoptees by people who are not adopted?

Sarah: People who aren’t adopted don’t understand that it’s a trauma from the start—the “primal wound.” They assume the narrative that we were told—we’re “lucky,” we’re “chosen,” we were “spared a terrible existence.”

Louise: I think they don’t understand that babies carry that trauma on a cellular level. It seems that the mainstream general public hasn’t dug into hearing what adoptees have to say and focuses more on the adopters.

How much were you aware of the adoptee community when you began doing the podcast?

Sarah: How about this—ZERO awareness of the adoptee community! Isn’t that crazy?

Louise: For me, it’s been eye-opening and so informative. We’re really grateful for the community.

As with most communities, the adoptee community isn’t always unified in its beliefs or in its approach to advocacy. Has that ever been an issue for you as you’ve been working on the podcast?

Louise: We had a couple of bumps, mainly to do with being new in the community but because we were open to listening we’ve been welcomed by mostly everyone.

What do you love, if anything, about adoptee Twitter, and what, if anything, do you not love about adoptee Twitter?

Sarah: We love the community, that there are others who have gone through and feel the same as we do—mirrors that we never had, really. We love hearing about issues that we’d never heard in a public forum.

Louise: What can be difficult is that sometimes it feels black and white – not much nuance. If you don’t agree, then you are wrong – no middle-ground. Sometimes legitimate feelings feel dismissed if they’re not the exact same as others.

Why is it important for adoptees to share their stories?

Louise: It’s important to share stories so we can connect as a community, have a safe space to tell your story to people who understand you. We’ve talked to people who have never told their stories and listened to our podcast and found the courage to finally want to talk.

Sarah: It’s liberating to tell your story and be heard with love and compassion.

As advocates for adoptee rights, what do you think is the most significant issue that needs to be addressed?

Sarah: For starters, taking a look at why there are so many infant adoptions. If it’s really about wanting to be a parent, why must it be a baby? Someone else’s baby? Prospective adoptive parents might want to examine—is this about parenting or is this about wanting a baby for our own needs?

Louise: Take profit out of adoption. Resources to birth mothers and families—making keeping that family together the priority. Putting that first, not the needs (or wants!) of the prospective adopters.

Sarah: Legal guardianship rather than adoption (in most cases) is a better option. And NOT changing the child’s name. Why? Just, why is that even a thing anymore?

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to pose abortion as a problem and adoption as its solution. The adoption argument has become a pillar of the anti-abortion movement’s platform. Each time the words abortion and adoption appear together in headlines, there’s a rapid and robust response from adoptees and others to counter the fallacious proposition. This time, however, Barrett’s comments have roused ire not only for their essential, objectionable content with respect to adoption, but also for the cavalier language she used to dismiss the impact giving birth has upon a woman’s health, her career, and her life.

During the recent Supreme Court oral arguments concerning Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, Barrett, an adoptive mother, not only posed adoption as a substitute for abortion, she further suggested that if the consequences and obligations of motherhood are deleterious to some women, they can simply sidestep the “problem” by taking advantage of safe-haven laws, as if dropping off a baby to a police or fire station has no repercussions to a mother or her baby. As if there were no career reverberations and no health risks. As if the wellbeing of the child were of no concern. As if it doesn’t matter that adoptees may be weary, enraged, or traumatized by having again and again to field a question that should never be posed: Would you rather have been aborted?

Unfortunately, the burden of dismantling these destructive narrative falls upon adoptees and allies. Following is a sampling of their efforts. Please join the conversation by adding your comments.—BKJ“I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict,” by Elizabeth Spiers, The New York Times

“What We Get Wrong About Adoption,” by Gretchen Sisson and Jessica M. Harrison, The Nation

“Adoption is Not the Answer to Abortion,” by Lora K. Joy, My Adoptee Truth

“Barrett is Wrong: Adoption Doesn’t ‘Take Care of’ the Burden of Motherhood,” by Gretchen Sisson, The Washington Post

“Why Adoption isn’t a Replacement for Abortion Rights,” by Anna North, Vox

“I’m Adopted and Pro-Choice. Stop Using My Story for the Anti-Abortion Agenda,” by Stephanie Drenka, HuffPost

“Amy Coney Barrett’s Adoption Myths. ‘They’re Co-opting Our Lives and Our Stories,’” by Irin Carmon, New York magazine.

“A Choice in Name Only,” by Nicole Chung, in “I Have Notes,” a newsletter from The Atlantic.

“Is Pro-Life Evangelicalism Killing Adoptees,” by Sara Easterly, Red Letter Christians

“Adoption is Not a Simple Solution to An Unwanted Pregnancy,” by Lucia Blackwell, The Seattle Times

“Adoption doesn’t mean abortion isn’t needed, even if some Supreme Court justices think so,” by Aimee Christian, NBC THINK

Sonia Derory spent the first six months of her life in a hospital in a Parisian suburb while her parents reflected on whether they could raise a child with what they perceived as a disability. She was born in 1983 with dwarfism, a medical or genetic condition characterized by short stature. Ultimately, her parents concluded it would be too great a challenge to raise her and placed her for adoption. After spending another six months in a nursery, Derory was adopted by a couple from a small town in the St. Etienne region in center of France into a family with other children, some also adopted.

Derory had always known she’d been adopted—a fact that otherwise would have been evident because her Algerian heritage set her apart in appearance from her French Caucasian adoptive parents. But she always wanted to know who she looked like and where she came from. Early on, she was afraid to discuss with her adoptive parents her desire to know about her origins. “They weren’t particularly open-minded about my search,” she says, and she felt guilty and conflicted. But in 2006, when she was 23, she searched for her birthmother—not a challenge since her birth parents’ names and identities were listed on her birth certificate.

After several months, she located her birthmother, who at first seemed pleased by her appearance in her life. They were in contact for more than a year and a half, and Derory welcomed her mother into her home. She even wore an identity bracelet engraved on one side with her original birth name and on the other with her adoption name, to demonstrate the depth of her connection. “I did everything—in fact too much—in order to be acknowledged as her daughter because I had this deep-down need to build a relationship with this mother who could help me discover my cultural origins.” After those months, she says, her mother decided to cut ties and all contact, but by that time, Derory had already become very attached to her, so it was deeply difficult to accept—another devastating rupture.

“In her mind she had given me away as a baby many years ago and so felt nothing for me emotionally as an adult woman.” She didn’t want to have any type of relationship, and and they never met again. A few years later, Derory met her birthfather, who told her he’d searched for her when she was very small but was unsuccessful because her name had been changed. He, however, was also unwilling to engage in a relationship with his daughter.

Derory had grown up near her birthplace in Saint-Etienne in east-central France, where she went to high school and developed a love of theater. She took acting and circus classes and workshops but, daunted by the difficulty of earning a living as an actress, she turned to another career. For ten years she worked as a communications and media officer in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in Massif Central, a highland region in Southern France. But in 2014, drawn back to her love of theater, she boarded a train to Paris, intent on becoming an actress. She studied in a theater school and won some small roles in a few classical plays, a television show, and many short movies. She also nurtured an interest in directing and taught herself the necessary skills, learning from trial from trial and error and by being inquisitive on set. Soon she’d use those skills to tell her own story.

Derory had seen stories about people searching for their birth parents but thought they seemed unreal, like fairy tales. “I needed to give testimony about my own life and story that was realistic and true to what had actually occurred.” She particularly needed to address an entirely overlooked topic—adoption and disability. In her short film, “Encounters” [Recontre(s)], she tells the story of what happened during her reunion with her birthmother. Not a documentary, it relies on the participation of an actor who plays the role of her birthmother, and names and documents have been changed. The truth of the story, however, she says, is communicated in the voiceover. “I was faithful to the actual words of the protagonists through the voices—a choice, like the length, partly dictated by financial limitations. Bearing the costs of the film herself, she was restricted technically and materially, which is why the film is done in voiceover rather than with the actors speaking. She also made two shorter versions. One for the Nikon Film Festival, “Almost her Mother” (Je Suis Presque Sa Mere), with a running time of a little more than two minutes, tells the story from her mother’s perspective. And the 45-second “A Tear in the Heart” (La Larme Au Coeur), is from the perspective of a psychologist who mediates the reunion of mother and daughter. The longer story, “Encounters,” is from Durory’s perspective.

Her work is evidence of the importance of storytelling, both for personal healing and to raise awareness of the lived experience of adoptees. “I think everyone can testify on their own level to show their perspective on adoption and help advance the cause of adoptees.” It’s important, she believes, to counter stereotypes that paint adoptees as spoiled, special, or difficult children. “They’re like all other children who just need to be loved and to belong to a family. Sadly, they live all their lives with this wound of abandonment that is difficult to deal with in their social, personal, and emotional lives.”

“Today,” Derory says, “I’m at peace with my story. I can relate and talk openly about my life without feeling emotional, and I think I can say that it’s made me resilient and stronger. I’ve managed to reach many people all over the world who don’t know me and who in turn have been really touched and moved by my story.”

To learn more, look for Derory on Instagram here and here.

To view the films, visit https://www.carminos-production.com; https://www.facebook.com/Je.suis.presque.sa.mere/; https://www.facebook.com/La.larme.au.coeur/; and https://vimeo.com/carminosproduction.—BKJ

By Sara EasterlyAdoptees are used to others telling our adoption stories—to us and for us. This makes sense to some degree, considering many of our adoptions took place at a preverbal time in our lives. And it takes time, developmentally, to grasp the concept of adoption—let alone make sense of relinquishment’s effects on us.

But at a certain point in our growth process, it becomes essential that we, as adoptees, take the lead with our stories. We’re the survivors of relinquishment. We know adoption from the inside. We alone have experienced the complicated mix of emotions swirling inside—many of which we’ve hidden or pressed down upon out of overwhelm, denial, peacekeeping, shame, fear, or because we prioritize our feelings last. Our voices matter—for our emotional health and for that of the adoption narrative.

Sometimes we don’t fully understand our emotions, or their depth, until we put pen to paper and our unconscious feels free to flow. But organizing our thoughts into story form—through journaling, memoir, essay, fiction, or poetry—can help us make sense of the past with an eye toward future growth.

What’s more, others in the adoption constellation need our perspectives. Fellow adoptees need to know they’re not alone. Each time we write and share our stories, we’re helping normalize dynamics that others may be struggling with in isolation. Historically, adoptive parents’ voices have taken center stage. But without adoptee voices, adoption-related literature falls flat (and very often gets it wrong). Our words can and do make a difference.

Supporting Adoptee Voices

It’s for these reasons that Adoptee Voices came to be—offering writing groups for adult adoptees and creating another space for publishing adoptee essays, poetry, and articles. Through the groups, Adoptee Voices offers:

• Dedicated writing time
• Adoption-specific writing prompts
• Writing accountability
• Community with other adoptee writers
• Publishing and writing advice

With Fall on the horizon, Adoptee Voices is preparing to launch its next writing groups for adoptees:

Craft & Publication-Oriented Writing Group: Eight Wednesdays Starting September 8th

This writing group meets and writes together online, with a focus on the craft of storytelling, writing with publication in mind, and marketing to agents, publishers, and readers. Adoptees can write from weekly prompts or bring their current works-in-progress. After writing together in community, we break into small groups for sharing our writing and giving/receiving feedback. Led by Sara Easterly (Searching for Mom), Ridghaus (Six Word Adoption Memoirs), and Alice Stephens (Famous Adopted People).

Writing as an Emotional Playground: Eight Mondays Starting September 13th

Meeting and writing together online, this group is focused on writing as an emotional playground. Adoptees can write from adoption-specific prompts designed to help explore the unconscious and play with emotions through words. Small groups help to create a supportive environment and build community. Led by Sara Easterly (Searching for Mom), Jennifer Dyan Ghoston (The Truth So Far and Once Upon a Time…in Adopteeland), and Kate Murphy, LCSW (The Couchblog).

For a taste of the writing that other adoptee-writers have shared from the writing groups, visit adoptee-voices.com/e-zine.

Registration for both Fall groups is currently open, but spaces are limited. Adult adoptees can find information and register by visiting adoptee-voices.com.Sara Easterly is an adoptee and award-winning author of books and essays. Her memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the Illumination Book Awards, among many other honors. Her essays and articles have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Red Letter Christians, Feminine Collective, Her View From Home, Godspace, and others. Find her online at saraeasterly.com, on Facebook, on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor, and on Twitter @saraeasterly.

Read her essay on Severance here.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

If you’re willing, could you summarize your own adoption experience?

I was adopted as an infant in a closed domestic adoption. I searched in my early twenties for my first mother and had a brief reunion before she chose secondary rejection. I reunited with my biological father when I was 27, and we are in a decade-long reunion, including my three siblings who are now young adults.

On your website you describe yourself as an introvert, which probably would come as a surprise to anyone listening to you for the first time. You seem remarkably at ease conversing with everyone and did from the start. Is that a great challenge for you or does it come as easily as it appears to?

I have always loved having deep, in-depth conversations about meaningful topics with one person at a time. If you put me with a group, even with ten of my closest and dearest people, I will be awkward, uncomfortable, and questioning my life’s choices. One-on-one feels natural, and being in the role of interviewer gives a permission that I would love to have in everyday life: ask any questions that pop into my head, even if they’re invasive.

I find you describing yourself as an introvert also surprising because you stood on a stage and did stand-up comedy. That’s not something many introverts can do. Tell us about stand-up comedy—what was your experience and what has it done for you? How if at all does it relate to the experience of adoption?

My brief foray into stand-up comedy came from a desire to add to my interviewing toolkit (and reduce my public speaking nerves). The Adoptees On podcast covers challenging topics, often with a heaviness that can feel unbearable. I need to occasionally add levity into our conversations. I took a stand-up class with maybe a half a dozen others for six weeks. I loved my teacher. He asked us to lead with our story and personal experiences vs. “telling jokes,” which was much more in line with what I wanted to do. The class finished with a public performance of our comedy sets. It was fully one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done. Generously, the audience did indeed laugh at my set. I’ll always be proudest of my first joke, “The best part about being adopted is never having to think about your parents having sex.” For the adopted people that listen to my podcast, finding good things to think about our adoption experience can sometimes be hard to come by.

I would say relating to the experience of adoption, for many of us, the loss of connection to our biological mothers was the worst thing that ever happened to us in our lives. The relinquishment trauma is real. To do a terrifying thing by choice felt incredibly stupid and like the worst thing in the moment, but afterwards the euphoria carried me for several days.

Did you anticipate Adoptees On becoming quite the phenomenon it’s become and that so many people would be listening?

I never expected Adoptees On to become what it has. My show gets between 20,000 and 25,000 downloads a month and has had 650,000+ downloads all time. Podcasts are a very slow build unless you have some sort of celebrity name associated with them or already have a massive following. There’s this draw to podcasting because it seems easy to do, and people wrongly think that with podcasting comes instant fame. It’s safe to say that Adoptees On is in the top 15% of all podcasts.

You’ve created an extraordinary space for adoptee voices. Why did you start Adoptees On? What purpose did you hope it would fulfill?

I started the podcast because I felt alone. I struggled and lost my first reunion with my biological mother to secondary rejection. I struggled in my second reunion with my biological father and was convinced I was the broken common denominator. I was able to find adoptee blogs to help me feel connected and was building friendships with several other adult adoptees on Twitter. They were the only ones that “got it,” and I had the deep desire to be able to hear all of their experiences so I wouldn’t feel so alone. I have loved podcasts for years. To give the hipster answer, I loved podcasts before they were cool. I listened to podcasts walking to and from university all the way back when I had to download them on iTunes on my desktop computer and transfer them over to my Sony mp3 player and then later my video iPod in 2005. In 2015, I happened to be listening to two different indie podcasts that both had episodes about “how to” podcast. They weren’t shows about that. They both independently had gotten a lot of questions from listeners and shared what they were doing. I had that lightbulb moment—I could do that! Lonely adopted me had found the secret way in. Podcasting meant I could interview adoptees to feel connection. It seems selfish as I look back on that motivation, but I’m thankful it hasn’t stayed that way. It has instead become a way to build connection for many adult adopted people that feel/felt like I did.

Can you tell readers who may not be aware of it about your other podcast?

I do indeed have a second podcast. It’s behind a paywall so a lot of people don’t know about it. I wanted to have something to give as a thank you when listeners signed up to support Adoptees On monthly on Patreon. It’s called Adoptees Off Script, and my main co-host is Carrie Cahill Mulligan (she was my first guest on the main feed, and one of my first adoptee Twitter friends!). We chat about adoptee/adoption news articles, upcoming events of note, personal things that I never talk about on the main show (like what I’m talking about in therapy), and we also have this amazing book club where we read adoptee-authored books once a month. It’s a whole other wealth of resources, but more fun with a mix of serious and silly. I try hard to leave it almost all unedited, so you hear my mistakes and all. It’s one of my favorite things I do. It’s also one of those things where I’m sure I put my foot in my mouth at least a few times a month. It feels safe to talk with Carrie and so I probably dish a little more than I should. We wrap every Adoptees Off Script episode with things we’re loving right now, none of which can be adoption-related. Think book recommendations, movies, podcasts, recipes, products, and one of my latest loves was this gigantic disco ball I bought used from FB marketplace. It’s a rich tapestry.

How important is it for adoptees to feel heard and be seen?

I don’t know if there is anything more important. Having validation of our experiences has been the number one healing tool for many of us.

I believe that storytelling is healing and gives people agency—that it’s healing for the teller and the listener. Can you talk about why you think it’s important—the role you think storytelling plays in healing or in coping? What do you believe both the storyteller and the listener get out of the conversations you have?

I remember once talking with an adopted person in their fifties and they were sobbing as they finished telling me some of their story, “No one has ever heard this before.” Imagine going five decades and hiding the most intrinsic part of your story from both yourself and everyone around you.

Sharing our story is undeniably scary, especially when expressing any amount of discontent or pain with the thing that all of society has always told you is the best thing that could have happened to you. It’s a huge risk sharing a story that includes a narrative that’s contrary to the dominant one—the risk being that of denial or rejection by the listener.

My intent is that when a guest is sharing their story with me, I give them my full attention. Questions come up organically that I’m curious about or that the future listeners will be wondering, and as we dive deeper I almost always empathize and identify with many of the things they reveal. I know my listeners empathize and feel seen even while listening because there is almost always a part of the guest’s story that is relatable. My highest hope is that listeners know they aren’t alone.

Adopted people, former foster youth, foundlings, late discovery adoptees (LDAs), not parent expected (NPEs), stepparent adoptees, donor-conceived people, so many of the communities you serve, BK, can identify with my guests’ stories. The pain in being disconnected from some part of your genetic heritage is real and manifests in many relatable ways.

You’ve talked to a number of guests about how creative pursuits bring healing. Can you comment about some of the ways people have explored or helped cope with their feelings through creative means?

I’ve talked with musicians, actors, painters, jewelry makers, writers (memoir, fiction, poetry), playwrights, costumers, photographers, graphic designers, singers and songwriters, both fine artists and hobbyists, filmmakers, chefs, fiber and textile artists… and I’m sure I’ve missed some. When I say there’s something for everyone to express themselves creatively, that’s no exaggeration. My creative hobby that helps me practice mindfulness is probably a little tacky, but I’m obsessed with 5D diamond painting (think paint-by-number with tiny glittery beads). It’s extraordinarily satisfying.

Have you found that many of your guests find the experiencing of doing the podcast something of an unburdening—that the sharing of their experience with you relieves them in some way just through the conversation?

That is definitely one of the surprises for me of doing this show. I’ve had many guests tell me that their interview was a powerful step in their journey and felt healing to them. To be clear, I’m not a therapist by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s the power of adopted people being heard by another adoptee: fully feeling seen and having their pain acknowledged.

You once wrote in a newsletter that it’s necessary for adoptees to be writing the books, becoming social workers, organizing events, etc. Do you see that happening at the level it needs to happen? If not, what is standing in the way?

I still believe that it’s necessary and want to support as much as possible adopted people leading the way in these areas. I am one 100% biased toward the adoptee voice and family preservation and I have no qualms about saying that. And no, I don’t see it happening at the level it needs to happen. It’s still woefully lacking.

We’ve seen the success of authors telling our stories without truly knowing what it’s like to be adopted. In the “#ownvoices movement” there’s a drive to ensure those who have lived it get the opportunities and I hope that will extend to adopted people getting the bestsellers instead of just our allies. We’ve wrestled with this conversation a bit on the Adoptees Off Script podcast and in my private Facebook group, and some of the thoughtful responses mostly boil down to the fact that adoption and relinquishment trauma is still not accepted or believed by the general public, and often when it’s adoptee voices sharing their truth they are seen as playing the victim.

What prompted me to write that newsletter, if it’s the one I’m thinking of, was sitting at a table of self-identified allies of adopted people who were mocking a painful situation for a pair of adoptees. They recounted a story that took place in my province years ago: a couple fell in love and got married and once the adoption records opened they discovered they were full siblings and had to separate and come to terms with a difficult circumstance. I never want to call someone an ally that would openly mock the adoptees they say they’re serving.

I’ve watched several adoption-related organizations dissolve (or implode) over the past few years, and one thing I’ve noted as an outside observer, is the commonality of what is merely lip service to centering adoptees. I asked an organizer at one conference who had requested me to come and speak, “how many of your other speakers are adopted people” and the response of incredulity on her face was my answer. The thought literally hadn’t even occurred to them that ensuring adequate adoptee representation should be at the forefront at an adoption conference. Some of it is a desire to cater to everyone and so we become an afterthought. I also see the adoptee-led organizations that are thriving, and applaud the challenging work they’re obviously putting in to secure safety and full representation.

In what other ways can adoptees ensure their voices are heard?

I’m prefacing this with a reminder that I recommend doing all advocacy work out of a place of wholeness (serving with the scars vs. an open wound to borrow a common expression). As unfair as it is to have this responsibility, I believe it is our job to tell the whole truth about adoption. If the only people willing to share are the adoptive parents and the folks who only share the brief glimpses of happiness (the reunion porn, as some of us call it), these false societal narratives are going to continue to be dominant.

To ensure being heard? What doesn’t work is the rage-y call-out culture. That gets people blocked and silenced. Instead I think it’s the quiet one-on-one moments when we share candidly with safe friends and family how adoption has truly impacted us. When we’re not under pressure of the quick come-back on a Facebook post; when we’re sharing a full, nuanced picture of our experiences; when we can back up what we’re saying with facts and articles, these are ways we’ll be taken seriously and be heard.

How often do your guests make you cry?

It used to be every single episode, now it’s probably half of the time.

Is there an emotional cost, or burden, of receiving all the stories you hear? How do you carry that and what sort of self-care do you do in response?

First, I want to acknowledge there is a huge cost to my guests sharing their stories. Risk of backlash from their friends and loved ones. Potentially painful recounting of past inner work. Their emotional labor is real.

For me personally, I get wiped out after recording. I often nap afterwards. Sadly I’ve gotten somewhat numb to the hard things people share with me. I have to compartmentalize because otherwise the things I hear haunt me. I have an excellent psychologist who helps me process when things get too challenging. I’ve been known to take a bath in the middle of the day to try and wash away the feelings.

I believe you’ve said that the podcast has literally been lifesaving for some people. Can you explain?

*TW – Suicide

I have had multiple adopted people write to me and share they were experiencing suicidal ideation, a couple of whom had already made suicide plans. Each one found the podcast and for the first time in their lives felt seen and heard by hearing other adoptees share. All of them chose to stay in this world and got supports in place that were adoptee-specific. What a miracle that hearing another adoptee’s story could be lifesaving. Talk about validation being important!

The other surprising note I’ve gotten a few times is that the show has saved a couple of marriages. All of these messages expressed a similar circumstance: relationship problems stemming from search/reunion where the partner didn’t get it. The adopted person shared some episodes from the relationship series with their partners (including an episode my husband did with me) and it led to each of the couples going to therapy with adoption- competent therapists to repair their connections.

Adoptee voices are so important and yet often I get the impression that those voices are in an echo chamber—that adoptees are largely speaking to an audience of adoptees. Do you agree, and if so, doesn’t this limit the ability to truly spread awareness? What do you think needs to happen to make change in this regard?

It takes incredibly strong people with a support system in place to safely challenge the narrative publicly. A lot of us are still working on figuring out our identity, confidence building, and truly learning to love ourselves. Talking with other adopted people and sharing our work with them may feel like a safe first step.

I understand not wanting to put yourself out there—even talking to other members of the adoption constellation isn’t innocuous. Some listeners may remember the disgusting personal attack Caitríona Palmer and I experienced at an adoption conference by a biological mother in 2019. We were presenting a session on our mutual experience of secondary rejection from our mothers. We were describing our personal stories, what we did, what we regretted and wished we had done differently. Truly it was a recounting of our personal stories and memories, when a fellow presenter, who was also a biological mother, ran up to the mic that was for Q&A at the end of the session and yelled at us. Her primary message was that everything we had done as adoptees was wrong and “of course” our mothers left us because of our actions. It was one of the most egregious outbursts I have ever seen in a professional setting and one of the most painful experiences of my life. Both abusive to us as presenters and for the adopted people in the session to witness. I’ve never named her publicly, but I’ve seen her booked at other events and it’s always a shock to see her name on the agenda. Sharing adoptee thoughts and experiences is not always welcome.

When I see adopted people building their muscles in adoptee-land, I hope they will grow into service and sharing in the greater community when they’re ready. I sort of answered part of this earlier, that talking one-on-one to our safe friends and family about what we’ve experienced is the way I believe will spread awareness and change the narrative.

What aspects of the adoptee experience do you feel remain least understood and most require awareness?

Because of the depth of loss, identity confusion, and the loyalty trauma response, many adopted people may not have been able to tell you adoption was a problem until later in life. I have friends that deeply regret their complicity in being the “poster child for adoption” in their teens and early adulthood. Promoting adoption can sometimes be the only way to push down the cognitive dissonance some of us experience.

If you could say any one thing to someone who is not adopted about adoptees what  would it be?

The privilege of the kept is the innate knowledge of identity. They have a naïveté of the importance of access to original birth certificates, medical information, and a full racial, cultural, and genealogical history. When you have always known who you are and where you came from, it’s not obvious that everyone needs and deserves access to that same information. It’s almost impossible to understand what the lack of that knowledge does to us because you can’t remove your intrinsic knowledge of identity to put yourself in our shoes.

What are your plans for Adoptees On going forward?

You’ll see more interviews with academics, more therapists, and more deep dives into topics that I find fascinating. I hope to add some new voices to the community and have been slowly working away at that behind-the-scenes.

What might readers be surprised to know about you?

One of my gifts of reunion is being diagnosed with celiac disease. My biological father passed that down to me, and now that I’ve been tested and am completely gluten-free I feel a million times better. I’ve mastered GF cooking, but GF baking feels impossible to adapt to. The perfect GF cookie remains elusive.

You’ve talked to virtually everyone in the adoptee world. Is there anyone you haven’t talked to that you’re dying to have as a guest?

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface! I’ve only publicly interviewed 100+ people in the adoptee world. My hopefully-one-day list is extremely long and the limitation is the capacity for the number of episodes I produce each year. I have a lot of people request celebrities like Sarah McLachlan or Keegan-Michael Key. Maybe one day! Truthfully some of my favorite interviews are with adopted people who aren’t necessarily well-known. I love being able to share someone’s story who might not otherwise be heard. If you twisted my arm to name names, my current top two are Jeanette Winterson and A.M. Homes. We’ve been reading some of their work in our Adoptees Off Script book club and I want to be friends with them and thank them for their bravery in telling adoptee stories in mainstream publishing.

What haven’t I asked you that you wish I had?

Absolutely nothing! Thank you for the honor to share with your readers. I appreciate your service to the genetically severed community. What a brilliant magazine name, Severance. Perfection.

What do you do when you’re not researching guests and recording your podcast?

I enjoy interior design and I’m desperately trying to love gardening (mostly failing). I’m always in search of my next favorite podcast. When I read for pleasure, they’re mostly psychological thrillers and I cross my fingers the plot twist isn’t adoptee or adoption- related. I’m being a mama to my two little boys (7 and 9) and I’ve been married for 16 years to my amazing husband who was my first long-suffering listener to me constantly talking about adoption.Haley Radke is the creator and host of the Adoptees On podcast. She’s an adult adoptee advocate, co-facilitator of the Edmonton Adoptees Connect group, and has a BA in psychology. Radke is passionate about elevating adoptee voices to help challenge and change the traditional adoption narrative. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

In 1961, a New York couple sent their seventeen-year-old daughter Margaret to Lakeview Maternity Home on Staten Island, where she gave birth to a boy she named Stephen. In love with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, George, she was determined to keep the child, but was pressured by her parents as well as social workers at the home and the personnel of the Manhattan adoption agency—Louise Wise Services—to relinquish the baby for adoption. Margaret and George planned to marry, and during the many months when she was separated from Stephen, Margaret held out hope that she and George would prevail against a system that was cruelly stacked against them and regain custody of the child. Ultimately, she was coerced into giving up her parental rights. The boy was adopted and his name changed to David.

Margaret had been advised to move on, to forget about her baby. She never did. She went on to marry George and have a family, and all the while her son was never far from her thoughts. Through the years, as health problems emerged in her family, she contacted the Louise Wise agency to provide medical updates for the boy’s parents. The response was always curt. In the early 1980s, inspired by the rise of adoptee activism, Margaret began to search for her son, both for reassurance that he was well and also so he could know she’d never forgotten him and had always loved him. At one point, after her son’s 20th birthday, she gathered her courage, made elaborate preparations to make herself appear undeniably respectable, and knocked at the door of Louise Wise Services, hoping at most for information about her son, and at least for the opportunity to leave her contact information so that he could find her if he wanted to. Four times she rang the bell and tried to plead her case, and three times she was ignored. When she rang for the fourth time, the receptionist advised her that she’d call the police if Margaret didn’t leave. Devastated, Margaret collapsed to the floor and sobbed.

Meanwhile, David had been adopted by a loving couple, grew up, moved to Toronto and later Israel, finally settling in Portland, marrying and having children. By 2007, his health had deteriorated and he was undergoing dialysis, scheduled to receive a kidney donation from a friend. At the dialysis center in 2007, he met an investigative reporter, Gabrielle Glaser, who planned to write the feel-good story of the kidney donation. But it didn’t end there. In 2014, after having taken a DNA test, David reunited with Margaret shortly before he died. Glaser went on not only to tell their story, but also to exhaustively report on the rise of the adoption system in America, painting a sorrowful picture of an industry based on coercion, cruelty, and deception.

In this extraordinary, rigorously researched book, American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, Margaret and David become the faces of the Baby Scoop Era, the period between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, when countless women were pressured to surrender their newborns, never to see them again. While Margaret and David’s fascinating story is the through line of the book, Glaser rips away the veil that hid decades of abuse and secrecy, detailing chillingly unethical practices that led to heartache for countless birth parents and adoptees.

Some of the practices and policies to which adoptees were subjected, which are nothing short of barbaric, exceed imagination. Glaser tells of babies subjected to “intelligence” tests conducted by Samuel Karelitz, a pediatrician who snapped newborns’ feet with rubber bands and declared crying to be the hallmark of a smart baby—a strategy he believed would help best match a baby to adoptive parents and which was carried out on babies for the first few months of their lives. She writes about a forensic anthropologist, Harry Shapiro, a one-time president of the American Eugenics Society, who was called upon to determine the race of babies, tasked with ensuring that dark-skinned babies were not placed with white families; about Viola Bernard, a Columbia University psychiatrist whose devious studies separated twins in an ethically dubious effort to study nature vs. nurture for the purposes of better matching babies to adoptive parents—an experiment that was the subject of the shocking documentary Three Identical Strangers; and the university-run “practice homes” where surrendered infants were housed and tended by a rotating group of home economic students so they could practice their mothering skills.

American Baby is an extraordinary achievement that destroys the notion of adoption as a win-win proposition for all members of the adoption triad. It’s an essential text for anyone wanting to learn the true history of adoption in America and understand the often-devastating consequences.

What was it about the Philomena Lee story, told in the book and biopic Philomena, that got under your skin? 

I saw the movie first and read the book later. I’d covered adoption as a beat, so I was aware that adoption begins with loss. That was my fundamental underlying understanding from the beginning, and it’s how I wound up interviewing David in the first place, because he was adopted. His story landed on my desk when was getting the kidney from his friend, because he didn’t have any family members who could give him one. He talked about hoping his birthmother would see the story, so he could learn more about his medical history for his three kids. A few years later, I thought about him a lot when I saw Philomena. I was really struck by the cold, moralistic Irish Catholic church—I’d seen the 2002 movie the Magdalene Sisters, and those stories ricocheted in my brain. Philomena’s portrayal by Judy Dench—the shame she had to endure at the hands of family, at the hands of the community, at hands of the church, but also the loss that she never recovered from—as a mother myself, it just dawned on me that this movie, with one of my favorite actresses, is about a woman’s life as a mother that was ruptured. And of course she didn’t forget her child. Of course she thought of her child every single day of her life. So that really drove it home for me what David’s birthmother’s experience may have been like.

What took you from that point to the point at which you realized you had to tell this story and why? 

David called to tell me he’d located Margaret and that, as he put it, she hadn’t wanted to give him up, that she loved him all of his life, that she married his birthfather, had gone on to have three more kids, and had done everything she could to maintain custody of him as a powerless teen in NYC in the early 60s. That revelation was such a profound reversal of this narrative that he’d been told, that he’d accepted. It was a narrative of many people from the Baby Scoop Era—the narrative adoption agencies wanted them to believe. What I heard in his voice about all those things was that they were so healing for him, and I imagine that it had to have been healing for Margaret to imagine that her son had had a good life with people who loved him very much. Of course, it was devasting that he had a terminal cancer and was very near death. But there was the power of learning that he’d been wanted, and the healing aspect for her to learn that he’d been loved. Then there was also the deceit that had been perpetrated on him, on adoptees, on birthmothers, and on adoptive families. The fictitious narratives that had abounded for everyone and had been allowed to continue for decades—that was just a shock. As someone who’s not adopted, I was intrigued and saddened and also outraged.

I thought I knew a lot about adoption before I read your book and I was shocked by so much, by the practice babies, and those passages where Margaret went and knocked on the door of Louise Wise Services—it was absolutely shattering.

It was shattering to get to learn about. I love her dearly. She’s an incredibly heroic and courageous woman. It’s astonishing how much she endured and is still standing. And that scene—we went to all those places together, she and I. Someone asked me if I’d fictionalized some details. I did not. She has a crystalline memory of the events that transpired, especially after we visited the sites. As we know, traumatic memories imprint in our brains in a very different way than ordinary stuff. You don’t remember what you bought at the grocery store six weeks ago. But you do remember a baby being taken away. You do remember trying desperately to fight for the right to keep the baby you bore and had been sent away to bear in secret. You remember walking up the steps of Louise Wise Services. You do remember what you wore and how you put on your eyeliner so you could be presentable to this elegant agency. And she was still trusting it up until that moment—she trusted it until she learned that David had never received any of the messages about his health conditions.

I’m amazed by the breadth and depth of the information you present. It’s remarkable that you were able to get access to some of it. What were the biggest obstacles or challenges in your research? Did anyone not want to share because some of the information reflected negatively on them?

The biggest disappointment was with the experiments about the rubber band babies [the Karelitz studies]. I did everything I could—and you may have seen this in the notes—to try to uncover what the motivation was for those studies, what the grant proposals looked like. I wondered if I would be able to uncover documents that had any of the names of the babies, surrendered for adoption and in agency custody, who were part of those experiments. But after 20 years, the federal government destroys grant proposals or studies that do not further scientific inquiry or lead to cures. I went to the National Archives. I think there were nine or ten studies the government paid for, those “induced crying” studies. I contacted all of those journals and asked if it was possible to obtain documentation surrounding those experiments. I got either non-responses or brush-offs from each and every one. And I don’t believe that all [research materials] were “destroyed.” I also flew to Florida to meet face to face with the surviving research psychologist who participated in those studies. On the phone, she’d been forthcoming. I got to her office in a strip mall but she’d clearly lawyered up by the time I got there. I’m an experienced reporter, and I know how to help guide people who want to speak their conscience. I thought that was what would happen. But in person she just absolutely shut down. Interestingly, she had a big rubber band ball on her desk and was tossing it back and forth between one hand and the other. My editor and I weighed whether to put her in the book, but there were so many villains already and she’d been a young 24-year old PhD. She claimed she just crunched the numbers. Induced crying! Really? She had no idea what the research was all about? She clearly had been coached to say that, so that was a little disappointing….

Most of the people who would have wanted to stand in my way are dead. Louise Wise is bankrupt. Karelitz is long dead, Viola Bernard and Harry Shapiro were long dead. What surprised me was the lionization of these people in real time. Nobody was looking behind the curtain about what was happening at that time. Nobody. I was shocked by that—even up until now, even Karelitz’s research on crying is still cited—without so much an asterisk about the brutality of it.

And you mentioned Dr. Joyce Brothers—someone so many in this country at a certain time looked up to, and it seemed as if she hadn’t done any due diligence.

She also parroted the Karelitz studies and promoted them as a useful tool for worried mothers who wrote in to her and said “I’ve got baby who’s a crier.” And she said, “Don’t worry, your baby is going to be smart. According to Dr. Karelitz, who does these rubber band studies, your baby will be smart.” Nobody even raised an eyebrow as far as I can tell.

You weren’t a newcomer to the topic. You had already covered a beat of related issues. Still, did you have an inkling of the full scope of abuse, hypocrisy, and deceit before you’d delved deeply into research?

I had no idea. I didn’t really know the breadth and the depth of the treachery and the deceit. As much as I understood from the very beginning—and I’ll get to this—from the very beginning of the first story I ever did about adoption, I just had no idea of the massive transactional history of it. I had no idea of the fact that it was an industry. It was an industry—one that took babies for a fee and placed them with families who weren’t their own. Like in all long projects, you don’t automatically start out knowing everything. It’s a layering process of understanding, and only when you finished and step back and say wow, okay, this is not just a story or a book about adoption, it’s really about our society. It’s about sexuality. It’s about policing women’s bodies. It’s about the paternalism of medicine. It’s about the conservative postwar mores that allowed this to flourish.

Is there any one thing more than any other that surprised or shocked you during your investigation? 

The experiments on ten-minute old babies, the prolonged time in foster care decades after it had been well established that infants needed to be able to rely for their own safety and development in the world on a steady caregiver who was going to be there for them. And the institutionalized cruelty of it.

A recent New York Times piece on your book was titled “Adoption Used to Be Hush-Hush.” Is it fair to say it still is in some ways? A lot has changed, but it still is legalized deception, isn’t it? I believe four-fifths of people don’t have access to their records and it’s still transactional.

No, you’re 1000% correct. And as much as I may have thought things were improved, since the publication of this book, I’ve been deluged with stories of fraud; deceit; current transactional, flat-out sale of babies; and I’m going to need to find a home for some of this stuff I’m uncovering. It’s ongoing. Yet adoption is still celebrated. We see these celebrity adoptions, and people say “Look how wonderful it is, Hoda may adopt a third child!” Remember that viral video of a little boy who’d been adopted and he’d invited the whole kindergarten class to come to his finalization celebration? And everyone said, “Oh, what a heartwarming story!” But whoa, wait a minute! What about what that little boy lost? Okay, great that he has a family now that’s going to care for him and love him and cherish him in the manner all children deserve, but we just run right over that initial foundational truth, which is he lost something. He lost his kin. That’s the title of your magazine. It’s a rupture.

And I wanted to throw a zucchini at the screen of Three Identical Strangers. I hated it. The other day I watched a talk about the movie by Harvard psychologists and psychiatrists and I was so dismayed that they didn’t raise any of the questions that any sentient person would raise after watching that film. They didn’t even broach the meaning of the original trauma. Greg Luce, founder of Adoptee Rights Law Center, was also observing the talk. He texted me halfway through and said, “I can’t watch this. They’re talking about adoptees as if we’re just subjects.” He and the adoptee community have opened my eyes to the ongoing infantilization of adoptees and the prurient interest in them as subjects. It’s outrageous.

Does the adoption industry remain predatory in any way? Is it still an industry? Does coercion remain a factor at all or is that a thing of the past?

Oh, absolutely. I’ve got several stories I’m trying to pursue and even some lawsuits that are being filed on trying to stop these predatory, coercive fraudulent promises made to families in the name of open domestic adoption. Such arrangements are rarely legally enforceable, and promises are made that are not kept. It all depends on the good will and intention of the adoptive parent, and in some cases, birthparents, too. I’ve heard from birth families who are told by adoptive parents, “Sure, of course we’re going to be able to get together.” But then they move to another state, or even another country, and the birth families never see their children again.

Adoption is widely described in our culture as a selfless act of love and generosity. Do you believe most Americans at this time have a realistic view of past or present-day adoption practices?

I do believe the narrative we have is the one we’ve always had, that this is the best solution for everyone involved and everyone ends up happy, happier. It’s very difficult to present a counter narrative. The first story I ever wrote about adoption was the early 2000s, and I had seen in my coffee shop in Portland, where I lived at the time, a flier of what appeared to be a racist depiction—stick figures filled in with yellow highlighter with Asian features and straight black hair, and I thought “What’s this? How can this be in socially conscious Portland?” Then I looked up and saw the words,  “Are you an angry Korean American adoptee? So are we!” I called the number on the tear-off sheet, and became aware of the history of HOLT International, which was founded in Oregon and was the first adoption agency to facilitate international transracial adoptions on a big level. I spent some time learning about the agency’s roots in Cold War politics, and interviewed four women who’d been adopted through Holt. My editor at the time was a really smart intuitive guy who had his own history in this realm—his Black serviceman father had married his Japanese mother in Japan after the war—and so he’d lived through a lot of similar experiences growing up in rural Oregon after coming from Japan at an early age, being orphaned and then raised by white foster parents. So we just had the voices of these adoptees, and I didn’t get in the way—the story was in their own words, like what you and I are doing, with moving portraits of them. And it was before social media, so no one posted it, but my email was at the bottom of every story, and the next morning I was deluged with responses from transracial international adoptees and from adoptive parents. The response from adoptees was, “This is my experience, appreciate this.” But the adoptive parents were furious. “How dare they! How dare you? We rescued these kids. These ingrates!”

That piece is what really changed my entire view of adoption. It was David’s experience, of course, that prompted me to write this book. But my background came from that original story. It’s been almost 20 years, and I don’t think that much has changed. Do you?

I don’t see the change. I’m neither adopted nor the scholar you are, but I don’t see any evidence of it. I just still see a lot of pain. I’m not even sure—I guess it remains to be seen—how well open adoption works.

There’s no regulation. And there’s still resistance to the idea that it’s traumatic. An academic with personal experience with adoption once told me he didn’t believe there was evidence that birthmothers suffer. “Where’s the evidence/ Show me the evidence?” Which I presented.

This was recent?

Yes, four years ago. My internal response was, well, show me the evidence that people in Middle Passage suffered. We can’t interview them, but of course they suffered. I didn’t say that, but it was my knee jerk reaction. I did present the evidence.

There was a Cyprus-born British researcher, Sir John Triseliotis, who studied adoption for decades, and his research shows that among women who had reunited with their children there was an enormous sense of relief and decreased feelings of guilt, and for adoptees there was an enormous reduction in anxiety and depression.

Many readers are likely to be shocked by much of what they read in American Baby. And many will think much of what shocked them either no longer exists or, if it in fact no longer exists, could never happen again. How would you respond to them? 

We’re still battling this ongoing rubric with which we see this social engineering experiment.

In what way do the lessons of American Baby pertain to, or serve as a cautionary tale to, the artificial reproduction industry, which remains almost entirely unregulated?

This is just another realm of the unregulated creation of new families, and, if you want my honest opinion, maybe one of the reasons people don’t want to look too deeply at adoption is because they may be consumers or future consumers of artificial reproductive technology, so they’ve got their heads down, they’re not interested.

So much of your subject matter is heartbreaking, traumatic, and rage-inducing. I imagine it could be overwhelming and deeply disturbing. Can you tell us about your own emotional journey in writing this?

Thank you for asking that question. I had a lot of anger. On one hand, I could channel it onto the page, but the weight of it was great. Sometimes after a day with Margaret, I’d sob in the car on the way home.

You began this project as a reporter. Do you now consider yourself an advocate or do you see that as a conflict?

No, once I became aware of the duplicity, the lying, the experimentation—it’s an impossibility as far as I’m concerned to look at this and remain unmoved or objective. It’s wrong, and yes, I’m a journalist, but in this case, I have a duty and a moral right to speak out and draw attention. Someone referred to me as an activist, which I’m not, but I am an advocate. One of my first jobs was as a reporter at the Associated Press in Baltimore, and if you reported on something you had to get a critic from the other side—and I didn’t really find critics—how could you be supportive of experiments on ten-minute old babies? How could you be supportive of adult men and women not having access to their original documents? Their own history? How could you be supportive of that?

What would you most hope could come out of having told this story? 

I would hope the larger public recognizes this hidden chapter in social history is still happening, still in plain sight. The legacy of secret or closed adoptions persists today for so many people and their families, and not just the adopted men and women—also their birth and adoptive parents; their spouses; their children; their siblings. At the end of the day—not even at the end of the day—family matters, who you are matters, your kin matters. That’s why we have DNA testing, why genealogy is the second most trafficked realm of the Internet, after porn. There’s a natural curiosity to know where you come from, what your origin story is, what your first days were like.Gabrielle Glaser is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist whose work on mental health, medicine, and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and many other publications. BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

By Megan Culhane GalbraithOnce upon a time a little girl was born in a charity hospital in Hell’s Kitchen to an unwed mother.

Her name was Gabriella Herman and she was adopted about six months later. Her name was changed and her identity was erased. Her birth certificate was dated two years after she was born.

By the time she was six months old she’d had three mothers: a birth mother, a foster mother, and an adoptive mother.

_____

My reunification with my birth mother began via a letter from Catholic Charities followed by another by Air Mail from my birth mother. To me it felt like a new beginning. Perhaps then it is fitting that our relationship would end with a letter. This time it was sent 25 years later and by certified mail.

_____

The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book is my attempt at unwinding the story of my birth and identity through the lens of stories told to me by my birth mother. The book was accepted for publication on Mother’s Day 2020. The synchronicity was not lost on me. My debut! My first-born! My book baby! My mother—dead for decades—wasn’t here to celebrate my happy news, so I called my birth mother to tell her my book was about to be born.

She was excited for me on the phone. She mailed me a congratulatory card. Inside she wrote; “You did it! Congratulations on getting your book in print in 2021. How wonderful! XOX.”

She was fond of using the USPS and had a habit of sending me envelopes stuffed with news clippings, Harper’s articles she’d torn out of the magazine, and typed letters that contained sternly worded directives even though I hadn’t asked for her advice. I called these her “lectures.” I shrugged them off in the interest of maintaining a relationship with her. After all, she was the only mother I had left.

_____

I use dolls as a window into my story by recreating photos from my baby book in my dollhouse. Doing this allowed me some distance from my fears. By playing with dolls I could examine those fears through a different lens. Dolls are used to understand trauma in myriad ways—“show me where he touched you,” or “point to where it hurts” or “can you show me where she hit you?”

Memory born from trauma is full of dead ends. Shame is spring-loaded. My birth mother’s stories circled back on themselves: they were versions of a truth.

When I brought up the shame and the trauma I felt as an adoptee, she said they were useless emotions.

_____

As I dove into editing my book I sought permissions from my father, my siblings, and my birth mother to use various photos from my baby book or, in my birth mother’s case, from the album she’d given me titled “Our Family Album.” These were photos of her as a teenager, in her early 20s, and of our reunion in New York City, at a hotel just blocks away from The Guild of the Infant Saviour, the Catholic unwed mother’s home where she’d been sent to have me.

Dad gave his immediate approval: “No one can tell your story but you, honey,” he said. One of my siblings supported me; the other did not.

After weeks of unusual silence from my birth mother I became concerned. My follow-up emails were met with what felt like chilly silences. When she finally wrote back her tone was cold.

“I sent you a letter about permissions,” she said. “You need to go to your local post office to investigate.”

“Need” and “investigate.” Those words sent me into a spiral of anxiety.

In the early stages of my search for her I’d used the number on my birth certificate to compare with the numbers in the genealogical listings at the New York Public Library. It was an exhaustive and fruitless effort. Now, she was asking me to search again, but without a USPS tracking number I was at a loss. It was like I was setting out on another search but this time without even a number as a clue.

_____

I began thinking about silences. I re-read Silences, by Tillie Olsen.

THE BABY; THE GIRL-CHILD; THE GIRL; THE YOUNG WRITER-WOMAN

“We cannot speak of women writers in our century (we cannot speak of some in an area of recognized human
achievement) without speaking also of the invisible, the as-innately-capable: the born to the wrong circumstances—diminished, excluded, foundered, silenced,” writes Olsen.

“We who write are survivors . . .”

_____

Many emails later, my birth mother forwarded the USPS details to me. As I clicked through the tracking system I realized she’d sent me a certified letter. I was stunned. It had been undeliverable for nearly a month and was now on its way back to her marked, “Return to Sender.”

_____

re.turn  |  \ ri-ˈtərn
intransitive verb
1.     to go back or come back again //return home

transitive verb
2.     give, put, or send (something) back to a place or person

sent\ ‘sent\; sending
transitive verb
1.     to cause to go: such as
        a. to propel or throw in a particular direction
        b. DELIVER //sent a blow to the chin
2.     to cause to happen //whatever fate may send
3a:   to force to go: drive way
         b. to cause to assume a specified state //sent them into a rage

_____

A wise friend of mine told me her experience with book publishing was 90 percent wonderful and 10 percent “a blow to the head you never saw coming.” Here was my 10 percent. I felt physically sick for days. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I felt nauseated and deeply lonely. The two people most opposed to me using my voice were the two most closely connected to me by adoption.

Why a certified letter? Why such an abrupt change in tone? Why the long silence and sudden secrecy? What had changed in the days between our upbeat phone call, my birth mother’s congratulatory card, and this letter? Why couldn’t she have returned my phone calls?

“Can you please email me the contents of the letter?” I wrote.

“After two failed attempts by the U.S. Postal Service to deliver this May 22, 2020, certified letter to you, I have no choice but to send it by e-mail,” she wrote, copying my editor and the series editor.

Before she’d grant me permission to use the three photos she’d need to read, revise, and edit my entire manuscript, she said. She suggested there were inaccuracies. She requested her privacy.

“I hope that you will have the honesty and integrity to grant this request,” she wrote.

Was she trying to keep my book from being published? Why was she making this about her? I felt like she was trying to silence me just at the time I was finding my voice.

_____

The search for my birth mother began nearly 25 years ago via a letter from Catholic Charities that contained her “non-identifying information.” From those spare details, plus a search by my caseworker, I found her. She’d been willing to be found. We began a long-term relationship. She’d promised to be my open book. She’d said I could ask her anything. I listened to her stories and wrote a book about piecing together my identity via her memory, among other things.

She’d surrendered me when she was 19 years old. We’d done the hard work of knitting each other into our families. Now she was demanding I erase her from my narrative.

How could I choose a name for her that would signify this second erasure, this silencing?

_____

erased; erasing; erasure
transitive verb
1a.   to rub or scrape out //erase an error
b.     to remove written or drawn marks from //erase a blackboard
c.      to remove (recorded matter) from a magnetic medium //erase a videotape
d.      to delete from a computer storage //erase a file
2a.    to remove from existence or memory as if by erasing
          b. to nullify the effect or force of

_____

Fairy tales fascinate and annoy me because of the lack of agency of the female characters. The women are acted upon, locked away, shut up, and shut down (many times this involves a wicked stepmother.) They wait for permission to speak, or for a prince to rescue them.

In deciding on a pseudonym for my birth mother I was firm that I would not erase my birth name, or our shared last name. I’d had enough of the shame, secrets, and half-truths that burden us adoptees. The shame wasn’t mine to carry anymore. If she wanted to live in the shadows, so be it.

I’ll rename her in my book I told my editors, but I won’t erase myself in the process.

I chose the name Ursula. It reminds me of another tale; that of Ursula the Sea Witch in Hans Christian Anderson’s 1836 version of The Little Mermaid. Ursula demands the little mermaid’s voice in exchange for fulfilling her desires.

“But if you take away my voice,” said the little mermaid, “what is left for me?” goes the tale. … “Put out your little tongue that I may cut it off as my payment …” says Ursula.

_____

In his column for Catapult called “Love and Silence,” my friend and fellow adoptee Matt Salesses writes about how hard it is to tell a story the narrator is not supposed to tell.

He teaches Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. He writes:
“. . . begins with a story the narrator is not supposed to tell. It is the story of her drowned aunt, who was erased by her family because her story is unacceptable: She became pregnant out of wedlock. In punishment, the townspeople burned the family’s crops and killed their livestock, and the next day, the aunt was found with her baby in a well. The narrator, Maxine, is told this story by her mother, on the day she gets her first period.

“Beware, the story implies, of desire. The narrator’s retelling of her mother’s story doesn’t censor desire, but explores it, wondering whether the baby was a result of rape or love, why the aunt did not abort it, why she jumped into the well with it—a kind of mercy? The retelling is an act of love. Maxine frees her aunt from erasure, by making the story-that-should-not-be-told (which is always only one story) into many stories, reinstating her aunt in the realm of imaginative possibility.”

The retelling is an act of love … in the realm of imaginative possibility.

_____

One of Ursula’s favorite books was Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale. I have the copy she gave me here in my lap. I’ve read the novel many times. It was Setterfield’s first published book.

The narrator is Margaret Lea—whose name is near perfectly similar to my birth mother’s. In the novel, Lea admits to feeling like half a person who is compelled to unwind the narrative threads and the secrets of a reclusive writer named Vida Winter. Winter tells her dark family story through Lea, who is not allowed to ask questions.

The epigraph of the novel reads:

“All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind, and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t is the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”
—Vida Winter, Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation

The Thirteenth Tale is a story about endings as much as beginnings. It is structured to begin where it ends because, in the end, both characters confront the weight of family secrets, their pasts, and their intersecting stories. Its themes are identity, loss, reconciliation, and death.

I’m unsure what compelled me to pick up the book again except the vague memory that it was a book about a book about memory, and that it was significant to my birth mother. When I first read it years ago, I’d wondered if she was trying to tell me something. It felt like a harbinger. Just like the main character, Ursula had been telling me stories about my birth and her life for years. Many times she bristled at my questions and shut me down.

“The past is the past, just leave it there.”

“Whose memoir are you writing, mine or yours?”

The end always justifies the beginning.

_____

I have a poem by Lucille Clifton secured to my refrigerator titled, “why some people be mad at me sometimes” …
“they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering
mine.”

_____

Most fairy tales have a “happy ending,” but that rarely happens with adoption. Have we come to the end of our story? Is this what is meant by “coming full circle?”

I was born. I was surrendered. I was adopted.

We were reunited: lost and found and lost.

It’s been nearly a year of silence from her. My book will be born on almost the same day one year after she sent me that certified letter.

I must now be the one to surrender.

THE ENDMegan Culhane Galbraith is a writer and visual artist. Her work was a Notable Mention in Best American Essays 2017, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Redivider, Catapult, Hobart, Longreads, and Hotel America, among others. She is associate director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute. Look for her on Twitter, on Instagram here and here, and on Facebook here and here. Go here to buy signed copies of The Guild of the Infant Saviour and for information about events and interviews.

By Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and Lori HoldenIf you’ve ever spent time in what is known as “Adoption Land”—various communities that exist to support people with emotions and struggles particular to adoptees, first/birth parents, and adoptive parents—you’ve likely noticed an array of fiercely held perspectives on adoption.

While Adoption Land helps normalize and heal, there can be a danger in looking at adoption dogmatically or in an echo chamber.

Adoptive parents who sing the praises of adoption tend to lead the narrative that’s most familiar in mainstream culture: adoption is a beautiful thing, children are gifts, adoptive parents are selfless, orphans and unwanted children abound, and the best way to help them is through adoption.

This perspective, which elevates adoptive parents to saint-like status, misses the profound nuances of adoption and excludes important perspectives from other key players—adoptees and first/birth families (for simplicity, from here on referenced as birth families)—whose voices are critical to serving the adoption community.

Adult adoptees who speak out often focus on the trauma of adoption. Losing a mother is one of the greatest separations imaginable, and yet adoptee mother loss is often diminished, ignored, or equated with other kinds of losses. Adoptee pain is not the happy “positive” story of adoption that mainstream culture usually takes interest in, but it is scientifically proven: from the moment of relinquishment, adoptee brains are wired to protect from further loss. This can manifest as people-pleasing, perfectionism, anxiety, aggression, depression, addiction, suicidal ideation, or other self-harm. These are critical, life-saving dynamics to shed light upon, and it’s important that adoptees continue to speak up about the effects of attachment loss.

But while unpacking the emotional turmoil that goes hand-in-hand with adoption, adoptees can get stuck in darkness and hopelessness. It’s easy to lose the “forest for the trees,” straying into the “Trauma Olympics,” or forgetting about the plasticity of the human brain and our enormous capacity for resilience. What’s more, over time adoptees may disengage with, or even block, adoptive parents, together with a large swath of society, after becoming fatigued or retraumatized by constant microaggressions, gaslighting, and flawed information. But engage they must—especially if they feel a calling to support other generations of adoptees and work toward industry reform.

Birth parents’ voices are still desperately needed in Adoption Land. When birth parents remain silent, adoptees miss out on their perspectives, which can serve as a balm for the scars of relinquishment. Also, when birth parents remain quiet, adoptive parents may be prone to carry on as if first bonds don’t matter (out of sight/out of mind), when those first roots are deeply significant to most, if not all, adoptees and must be honored for everyone’s emotional health.

That said, it’s no secret that there’s a power dynamic that contributes to shaming and silencing birth parents. Adoptive parents, because they, unlike the birth parents, are actually parenting the children, naturally are in a superior position. Birth parents, observing from the shadows, are typically waiting for the moment they can join in. Some birth parents, so engulfed by the shame of their placement, are nowhere to be found. Entombed by the layers of their trauma and feelings of unworthiness, speaking out could be the last thing on their minds. Additionally, speaking out means talking about the present time as well as the past. An open adoption arrangement can be greatly affected by what birth parents choose to say. The consequences for speaking out could be dramatic: the difference between seeing your child or not, in visits or even just pictures.

This is why it’s important for birth parents to feel an invitation to enter Adoption Land—both from its participants and generally from adoptive parents—and why that invitation must be shame-free and punishment-free.

Working Together for True Change

Change happens when people work together. Although progress has been made, a greater evolution is still needed for the betterment of the 100 million families affected by adoption. We all benefit when we empathize with others and are willing to look within for what we can do.

Toward that goal, three women living in adoption share three different perspectives on working with others from within the adoption constellation. We’ll start with the adopted person for two reasons: first, this is the person in the “triad” who had no voice or choice in their relinquishment and adoption, and second, adoption practices are supposed to be about the “best interests of child”—a child who may at first seem readily adaptable, but grows to have her own independent views and voice.

Sara Easterly, Adult Adoptee

I recently met another mom, and as we talked, she learned that I was an author and adoptee. She asked about my memoir (Searching for Mom), and within minutes the conversation turned to her friends who were adoptive parents and might want to read my book. I nodded, momentarily basking in flattery … though it was rather short-lived. In the same breath, this mom started telling me about how awful these adopted children of her friends were: out-of-control, acting up, wreaking havoc on their families, and destroying their adoptive parents’ marriages.

I confess that I made an immediate, judgmental assessment of the adoptive parents without knowing them or understanding the situations further. Inside, I felt pretty irked by the double-standard: how culture loves to pretend adoption is about saving needy, powerless children, but when adoption gets hard or doesn’t add up to beautiful, it becomes about blaming the kids—no longer seen as needy and powerless. Instead, it’s their parents who are victims, overlooking the fact that they chose adoption and have benefitted from it too.

Thankfully, this mom was a long-winded talker, which gave me time for a lot of deep breaths that stopped me from speaking out of my anger. As she continued, I remembered the cultural lack of awareness when it comes to human attachment dynamics and how losses manifest, particularly for adoptees. Most people don’t even consider that adoption is rooted in loss.

I also thought about how hard parenting is when our children don’t behave as we’ve hoped and when we feel like we are failing them. As a mom, I’m aware that parenting has its pain points. I reflected on how difficult it is to admit that what we’re doing as parents isn’t working, and how much easier it is to blame our children and circumstances, rather than face ourselves or a situation we’ve had a hand in—a defense mechanism employed to protect us from pain. As an adoptee, too, I know about defense mechanisms. Noticing all of these commonalities was my path toward empathy for these adoptive parents and out of the “othering” line of thinking that could have propelled me to defend, attack, or shut down. I thought of my adoptive mom and what she might have said to her closest friends. I know I wasn’t always easy to parent either.

My adoption took place before there was much awareness or sharing of the effects of relinquishment. My parents, like so many others, were instructed to take me home and pretend as if my adoption made no difference in my life. With this as an unspoken rule, I grew up playing the same pretending game … but the long-term result was that I became an enigma to my parents. From most outward appearances, I seemed to be thriving. But my parents had no idea of the incredible grief, secret mother-fantasies, and flight from vulnerable feelings that boiled inside of me. My growth, as well as a deep attachment to my adoptive parents, was hindered by a lack of unity and information-sharing between all parties. How I wish my parents had had access to adult adoptees when I was a child and had been open to hearing perspectives from birth parents too! It may not have made parenting me a cakewalk, but I’m certain more awareness would have gone a long way for us all.

I don’t want to see other adoptees and families (both adoptive and birth families) getting unnecessarily stuck too. That’s why I continue to write and speak about my experiences now. It’s also why I listen—even when it’s hard, like it was when this mom shared about her friends’ adopted children. It can take effort, but it helps to see their perspectives as a gift. For one thing, their sharing helps me, as an adoptee advocate, see where more progress is needed. There’s a personal benefit too: an opportunity to continue my healing journey, with a less-personal window into parents’ struggles and needs. Similarly, by being in community with adoptive and birth parents, I know I am offering a gift: helping them understand the often-misunderstood hearts of adoptees.

Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Birth Mom

Birth parents who speak about their adoption experiences are more often birth mothers than birth fathers. From this perspective, birth moms who speak out typically fall into one of two groups.

First are those who speak from the traumatizing circumstances surrounding their placement that has left an open wound. The circumstances that have deeply affected them could have been any number of events, but most often they have either been forced or coerced to place their children or they have heavy regret about their decisions. In more recent times, many birth moms are speaking out because promises that were made to uphold an open adoption were broken.

Second are the birth mothers who are relatively fresh out of their placements and aim to testify about their experience for inspirational purposes. They typically tell their stories while parroting the extremely positive rhetoric taught to them from whomever facilitated their adoption. Most often, these are women whose adoptions were open to some degree. Perhaps they are looking for some sort of redeeming value in what was an almost unbearably painful chapter in their lives. This may explain why some become adoption cheerleaders early in their post-placement journeys.

Each group of birth moms is aware of the other; they often find themselves in stark opposition one another, clinging to their rigid perspectives of how adoption has affected their lives. Both groups have more in common than they know, even in their different experiences, levels of openness, and trauma sources. It’s highly likely that both groups were told a sugar-sweet tale of how the adoption process would be. Some adoption professionals stash away critical information that would be useful to educate birth mothers on the after-effects of placing their children for adoption. This decision by adoption professionals—to conceal from birth mothers the inevitable mental and emotional outcomes of adoption—is likely made from fear of “negatively” influencing their adoption decisions, thus causing the professionals to lose thousands of dollars, damage their reputations, and erode the trust of their client: the prospective adoptive parents.

It’s no surprise that when a baby leaves the arms of one of these birth moms, all of the rah-rah rhetoric that has set the birth mom upon a high heroic pedestal vanishes and leaves her to fall a long way back down to earth. The fall from adoption glory is a hard one. I, myself, have experienced the terror of the plunge. It was as though I walked out of the hospital and into a sea of “tell us your inspiring story of redemption!” Redemption? What do I need to be redeemed of? The pressure of turning our stories of relinquishment into a flowery fairy tale is an extension of the shame placed upon single pregnant women. It took me some time to confront my faulty ideals of adoption, but with each milestone of understanding, I chipped away at the conflict within myself and parted ways with the shame surrounding my adoption and pregnancy. More important, this prepares me to one day have real and honest answers to the questions my child will ask. My imperfections and those in my story are not to be hidden away or crafted into a phony fable; facing the ugly head-on is healing in the long run.

I speak up to demystify the less familiar and often unavailable birth mom perspective. To keep our voices clear and audible, we must continuously protect our paper from presumptive pens. Every time we disappoint society’s craving for a fairy-tale ending, we dismantle the shame and free other birth mothers from the captivity of a dishonest narrative. Through listening to each other and speaking in truth, we can remove the barricades to deeper relationships with our children.

Lori Holden, Adoptive Mom

Many (not all) adoptive parents come to domestic infant adoption after enduring the indignities and grief of infertility. Like fertility treatments, the process to adopt can be invasive, uncertain, and fraught with emotion. By the time new parents finally bring home a baby, it’s no wonder they might end up thinking the whole process was “worth it,” “meant to be,” and that all their troubles are behind them. That neither they, nor their beloved babies, will ever need to worry about anything adoption-related again.

It’s a short leap to “adoption is wonderful. Just look at us as proof!”

I’m not just speaking about others. That was me. I joined the ranks of insufferable new adoptive parents back in my early days of adopting my daughter and my son. In the time before social media, when parents gathered in online bulletin boards and forums, I went in proclaiming my amazing! experience! as the truth of everyone in adoption. After all, I felt it so fully it must be The Truth!

It didn’t take long to find out just how wrong I was.

I got called out on a forum for my exuberance and audacity—rightly so. Though it hurt, I began to listen—especially to adult adoptees and birth moms who explained to me situations similar to those Sara and Kelsey have shared here. I began to understand the complexities and nuances of adoption. I began to gain a wider array of perspectives that helped me become a more attuned and empathetic mom to my children. I am grateful for the adoptees, birth parents, and other adoptive parents who have helped me to see beyond the “adoption is wonderful” narrative.

Listening to, much less engaging with, people who are less-than-positive about adoption can seem scary. You’re positive, they’re negative. What could a Negative Nancy possibly have to say worth listening to? Turns out, a lot, if we listen from a place of openness. When we can actually understand practices that have harmed the Saras and the Kelseys (and even the Loris) of Adoption Land, we can then make different and better decisions. For example, once I began hearing the common lament from adoptees that splitting their loyalty between their adoptive parents and birth parents was painful for them, I began embracing a Both/And heart set, which replaced the prevailing Either/Or mindset. My daughter and son are better off for that.

What a fortunate time to be in, to have access to varied voices through the Internet. Instead of shying away from possible conflict, we should be taking advantage of these spaces that enable us to grow beyond our comfort zones.

Yet I also want to caution that there can be too much of a good thing. You can collect all of the insight from all of the voices and still not know what to do with it—much of it may even be conflicting. In addition to listening outside you, I also encourage you to listen within, to discern what is true for you and your situation. Find a balance between letting in other voices and tuning in to your own. In this way, you can cultivate confidence in how you approach adoption both in your own life and with others online. But not just confidence; confidence with compassion.

Leaps and Strides

It’s almost funny to consider how we, as a culture, took a leap to the “adoption is beautiful” fairytale when in reality it’s built on a foundation of loss, pain, and heartache. Perhaps this is a reflection of society as a whole, showing its fear of the dark and our existential human longing for an easy, breezy, happy ending.

Ironically, we can only make strides toward a satisfying ending when we embrace the full, real, messy aspects of adoption too. When we make proper room for all that is hard, there’s more space for the light. There can certainly be a lot of light in adoption—of course! But Adoption Land has historically spent decades tucking away the darker, harder parts, and it’s time to acknowledge that it’s complicated and look beyond our perspectives.

Perhaps this is the challenge for each group in Adoption Land: to recognize that each of us is carrying pain. The adoptee has the pain of separation. Birth parents have the pain of relinquishment and shame. Adoptive parents have the pain of insecurity and sometimes grief from previous losses. Seeing each other’s pain is what gives us empathy for one another.

With empathy as the baseline, the second challenge is to listen to each other. Listening to others’ perspectives can be hard and may sometimes seem like a tall order. Until we feel solid in our own beliefs, we might find others’ views threatening or stifling. But once we find our confidence, listening is where significant growth can unfold. If we listen only to voices that come from our perspectives in the triad, or to people with whom we already agree, we won’t discover information that may help us become better versions of ourselves. We can get stuck. Being open to others’ perspectives not only can help us make better decisions at the personal level, but can also improve Adoption Land by advocating for practices and policies that more effectively serve us all.Sara Easterly is an award-winning author of books and essays. Her spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the 2020 Illumination Book Awards, among many other awards and honors. Easterly’s adoption-focused articles and essays have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Feminine Collective, Godspace, Her View From Home, and Severance Magazine, to name a few. Follow her on Facebook, on Twitter @saraeasterly, and on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor.Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard is the director of advocacy and policy at AdoptMatch. She’s a birth mother who is passionate about greatly raising the standards in adoption to better serve the children, mothers, and families affected by family separation. Ranyard has worked at various agencies and law firms in the adoption field and can often be found fervently and frequently begging the question, “How do we fix this?” She is also a co-host of the birth mom podcast,Twisted Sisterhood. Follow her on Instagram @fromanothamotha.Lori Holden writes at LavenderLuz.com and hosts the podcast Adoption: The Long View. She’s the author of The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole, written with her daughter’s birth mom and acclaimed by people in all parts of the adoption constellation. She has keynoted and presented at adoption conferences around the US, and her work has appeared in magazines such as Parenting and Adoptive Families. Follow her on Facebook, on Instagram @Lavluz, and Twitter @Lavluz.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

Recognizing the challenges facing individuals who experience DNA surprises, Adoption Network Cleveland (ANC) has launched the DNA Discoveries Peer Support Group, a virtual peer support program focused on the emotional impacts of the journey. It kicks off with a special panel on February 2 facilitated by ANC’s search specialist, Traci Onders, that will feature an individual who’s discovered misattributed parentage, a donor-conceived person, and adoptees who have found birth family. Onders spoke with us about the program and the personal journey that led her to working with ANC.

How did you come to Adoption Network Cleveland and how did you become interested in this work?

I started as program coordinator for adult adoptees and birthparents in 2016. I’d begun volunteering at Adoption Network Cleveland (ANC) prior to that because its mission was personally important to me. Adoption Network Cleveland advocated for adoptee access to records in Ohio for more than 25 years, and finally in 2013 Ohio passed legislation that opened up original birth certificates to adult adoptees. It’s hard to imagine this would have happened without the steadfast determination of ANC, and as an adoptee, I wanted to give back to the organization that made it possible for me to request and receive my original birth certificate. ANC is a nonprofit organization and has a reputation for advocacy rooted in understanding, support, and education—a meaningful mission to me.

I was born to a woman who had been sent to a home for unwed mothers to hide the shame of pregnancy from the small town in which her family lived. There was no counseling available for the grief of relinquishing a child, and she was told to go on with her life and forget about it. These homes no longer exist; we know now how awful and hurtful this practice, rooted in shame, is.

My birthfather died a year later in a tragic accident. He was also an adoptee, raised as a son by his maternal grandparents. I will never know if he knew who his father was, but thanks to DNA, I do.

I first searched for my birthmother more than 20 years ago after my children were born. Pregnancy and childbirth made me want to know more about the woman who carried me and gave me a deep understanding that she made decisions that had to be extremely difficult and painful in a way that I had not previously appreciated. I had complicated pregnancies and no medical history for myself or my children. As a mother, I felt compelled to know and understand more about both my history and my beginning. At that time, I discovered that the agency that handled my adoption, Ohio Children’s Society, had destroyed its records. I had no information at all to work with, and my search hit a brick wall. It was important to me that I connect with my birthmother in a way that was respectful. I didn’t know if she had told anyone she’d relinquished me, and I was concerned that if I hired a private investigator, the PI might use tactics that I wasn’t comfortable with or make a possible secret known to others, and that this somehow might hurt my birthmother or her family. Until I could request my original birth certificate in 2015, I didn’t have many options. In 2015, adoptees were finally able to access their original birth certificates in Ohio, and when I did this, it named my birthmother. I also discovered that I have a maternal half-sister. My birthmother and I reunited very shortly after that. I was finally able to learn her story and to gain a more complete and ongoing medical history. Knowing these things and my relationship with her have been blessings in my life that for many years I did not imagine would be possible. A few months later I met the extended family, and their warm welcome touched my heart.

My search for my birthfather led me to test my DNA at Ancestry and 23andMe. I‘d been told who he was, but since he died very young, I did not have the opportunity to connect with him or understand his story. Using DNA, I was able to confirm what I’d been told, which allowed resolution that I might not have been able to find in such ambiguous circumstances. He was a kinship adoptee, and I was able to determine his parentage.

I learned that although he died when he was twenty-three years old, he’d had three children with 3 different women—that I have two paternal half-brothers, both born to different woman. The first died as an infant. The second brother took a DNA test to learn his ethnicity. He discovered misattributed parentage—that the man who raised him and is on his birth certificate is not his biological father and that I am his paternal half-sister. We don’t know if his father knows, or even if his mother knows for sure. He doesn’t want to discuss this with them, and that’s his decision.

At ANC, we use DNA to help adoptees solve for unknown parentage, and my own search made me acutely aware of how much in recent years DNA was tearing down brick walls and helping connect people who might otherwise never find each other. It also made me particularly sensitive to the fact that some of these discoveries can be quite earth-shifting for people.

As my work in this area grew, I was promoted to search specialist to greater focus on assisting those in search, utilizing both traditional methods and DNA. ANC provides support and guidance throughout the journey of search—before, during and after—and has for more than 30 years. I came to appreciate how many people outside the adoption community were also  touched by DNA discoveries.

My own personal history of search and reunion give me an important connection with the people I work with because I can truly understand how these questions can consume one’s thoughts and time. I can relate to the frustrations, the joys, the sadness, the loss, the quest for knowledge when one doesn’t know their “chapter one,” the feeling of having to write “medical history unknown—adopted” every time one fills out medical forms or sees a new healthcare provider. Having reunited with my birthmother, I know the roller coaster of emotions that reunions can bring. I have a deep respect and understanding of the birthparent’s experience because of my work with many birth families and also my connections to my birth family.

Through my own journey, I have come to realize many things about adoption. It’s a lifelong journey, and not a one-time transaction. My work helping others separated by adoption to find each other—whether it is adoptees searching for birth family, birth family searching for adoptees, or more recently people that have DNA surprise discoveries—has revealed many complexities and similarities. When we shine a light on these discoveries, we find the impacts of secrets, shame, infertility, racism, money, power, privilege, mental health, abuse, neglect, domestic violence, trauma, addiction, grief, loss, religion, social class—to name a few. For me, it’s important to advocate for progressive practices and reform in adoption and child welfare.

The DNA Discovery Peer Support February 2 panel discussion is a joint endeavor by Adoption Network Cleveland and Adoption Knowledge Affiliates. Can you describe the nature of the collaboration?

Adoption Network Cleveland founded in 1988 and Adoption Knowledge Affiliates founded in 1991 have a lot in common. Both organizations were founded by adoptees with a vision to bring together adoptees, birthparents, adoptive parents, and professionals in an effort to increase knowledge, service, and understanding. Both have been impactful organizations over the years. With the pandemic and our world going virtual, ANC and AKA partnered to host a joint virtual conference in October 2020, combining conferences each organization had planned and been forced to cancel in the spring.

At ANC, we had been discussing how to better meet the needs of people who were coming to us with DNA discoveries—not only adoptees but those with misattributed parentage, individuals who are donor conceived, and others. Adoption Knowledge Affiliates started its DNA Discovery Peer Support Group in Sept. 2020, and ANC planned to start one in 2021. Adoption Network Cleveland and AKA are collaborating for the panel discussion on Feb. 2, and from there each will individually hold its own DNA Discovery Peer Support groups. People who might find more than one meeting a month helpful might like to have options.

How was ANC’s DNA Discoveries Peer Support group developed and conceived and why it was felt to be necessary?

At this point the majority of searches we assist with have a DNA component. In addition, we’d like to increase engagement of people with DNA discoveries beyond adoption-based situations. We have expertise in this area and would like to be a resource in a broad variety of situations. People are finding biological family or are being found; and they’re finding new information about their core identity, such as ethnicity, birth order, unexpected relatives, and more. There can be a wide range of reactions by those being found and those searching.

Many of the issues that folks are working through with a DNA discovery are the very same core issues experienced by the adoption community, such as loss, rejection, guilt and shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and control.

We felt uniquely positioned to offer support and guidance in a manner similar to what we have been doing through our General Discussion Meetings, which are open to anyone touched by adoption and/or foster care. Adoption Network Cleveland started holding these meetings more than 30 years ago, so we bring deep knowledge and the meetings evolve to meet current needs. More information about those meetings can be found here.

Adoptees who are using DNA to make these discoveries are excited to find new information and new relatives. It can be important to remember that we don’t know what this discovery might mean for the person on the other side, such as in the case of misattributed parentage for example, where someone might be learning that the man that raised them isn’t their biological father.

We wanted to create a safe place for people to speak about the emotional impact of these discoveries, in a confidential environment with people who have walked a similar journey and truly understand.

Are the groups being held via Zoom? Are they virtual as a consequence of COVID-19 or will they remain open to people from any location when virus restrictions lift?

We will be using Google Meet, which is a lot like Zoom. The DNA Discovery Peer Support Group and our General Discussion Meetings are free, but advance registration is required so that one can receive the link for the meeting. The meetings are the second Tuesday each month, 8-10 PM Eastern Time. Registration can be found on our calendar. We plan to assess and see once it’s off the ground if the meetings will remain structured virtually. Personally, I see this continuing as a virtual group if there is a demand.

How do you envision how these groups will go? Will each group meeting be facilitated? By you? What’s the goal and desired outcome?

Our group will be focusing on the emotional impact of DNA discoveries. This is something that all discoveries have in common, and this will be a place where people can really connect and provide understanding, another perspective, and support. Our DNA Discovery Peer Support Group and our General Discussion Meetings are facilitated by experienced volunteers who are supported and overseen by our staff. I will be assisting with the DNA Discovery Peer Support Group as needed, and, as a search specialist, I am available for individualized guidance, one-on-one search assistance, and support. The experienced volunteer facilitation team members chosen for the DNA Discovery group are both adoptees with their own personal DNA discoveries. The group they lead is shifting from being one of ANC’s six monthly General Discussion Meetings to meet this specific need.

Our goal with the DNA Discovery Peer Support Group is to provide a safe and supportive environment where people feel open to discuss a major life event—finding out new information about themselves and their identities. One does not need a connection to adoption to attend these meetings. We will be focused on supporting people throughout their journey and helping them to connect with others who truly understand how earth-shifting this can feel, how others have worked through their own discoveries, and the accompanying emotions. We understand these types of discoveries are not a one-time event, they are lifelong journeys. Connecting with others who have walked a similar path can help to normalize what can be an overwhelming experience.

What do you believe are the most significant issues, the most pressing concerns, for which people need support after a DNA Discovery?

Every situation is individual and unique, so it’s hard to generalize. However, the core issues that arise are very much the same that we know from adoption and permanency: loss, rejection, guilt and shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and control.

DNA testing has the power to unravel decades old secrets and can make individuals question their ideas of family, or religion, or even morality. I am a firm believer that everyone has a right to know their genetic heritage, but that does not mean anyone has a right to a relationship, as that is something for both parties to determine. Many people who take a DNA test do not think they will receive a result that might include a surprise such as a different ethnicity, or a new sibling, a different parent, an unknown child, a niece or cousin. Discoveries can also include learning one is adopted (late-discovery adoptees) or donor conceived. These can be a very powerful experiences and can upend long held beliefs.

In what ways do you believe peer support makes a difference? How does it help?

Connecting with others who have been there and understand can be normalizing and healing.

We have followed a peer support model for our General Discussion Meetings for more than 30 years with great success. We’ve welcomed those with DNA discoveries to these meetings as technology has evolved. It can be extremely valuable to hear the perspectives of other individuals who have walked a similar journey and truly understand. I’ve seen people make wonderful connections with each other and learn insights that might not have happened anywhere else. Peer support offers a place to work through some of the core issues such as loss, rejection, grief, identity, shame and guilt. Hearing how other’s work through their journeys provides a variety of options as we consider connecting with relatives and offers a chance to see how people have gained a sense of control over the experience of discovery, and not have it control them. Peer support also offers an opportunity for people who are farther along in their journey to give back.

What limitations are there, if any, to peer support? 

Peer support is not meant to take the place of therapy, and individual therapy can be a very powerful and healing experience. Accessibility can be a limitation for some.

In addition to the peer support group, ANC also offers a Monday evening speakers group. Can you tell us more about that?

Adoption Network Cleveland is a leader in bringing the adoption community together to create a network of support and advocacy. In this critical and uncertain time for all of us, we are pleased to offer a Monday Evening Speaker Series full of topics that are of interest to a broad audience impacted by adoption, kinship, and foster care. More information and recordings of past presentations can be found here.

Learn more about the DNA Discovery Peer Support special February 2 panel and the ongoing group here. And for information about other programs and events, click here.

Look for Adoption Network Cleveland on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter @adoptionnetcle. Look for Adoption Knowledge Affiliates on Facebook and onInstagram @aadoptionknowledgeaffiliates.Traci Onders is a search specialist at Adoption Network Cleveland (ANC). An adoptee herself, she’s facilitating ANC’s new DNA Discovery Peer Support Group special panel on February 2. 

By Chris WodickaIn a few weeks, it will be the 30th anniversary of my becoming a U.S. citizen. Even now, I can’t begin to tell you exactly what was required or how long it took. My adoptive parents successfully navigated that process for me when I was just a child, several years after my adoption from South Korea. We celebrated as a family afterward, but I didn’t understand what it all meant at the time. Today, I see more clearly how that piece of paper has shaped my life and what I have been allowed to take for granted. As a citizen, I have been able to vote in elections year after year my entire adult life. I have been able to work, get a U.S. passport, and receive federal financial aid. I have not lived in fear of deportation.

Other transnational adoptees have not been as fortunate. In many cases, the steps required for naturalization were not clearly communicated by the government or adoption agencies to adoptive parents. Today, it is estimated that thousands of adults who were adopted as children lack U.S. citizenship. These adoptees fall into a loophole from the Child Citizenship Act (CCA) that was signed into law in 2001. The CCA granted citizenship to many adoptees who were still minors at the time of enactment but excluded others, including adult adoptees born before 1983. The bipartisan Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2019, which would close much of the loophole, has been sponsored by Congressman Adam Smith of Washington and introduced in Congress, where it awaits committee action and a floor vote in the House. This legislation would grant citizenship to more than 50 deported adoptees and other adoptees without citizenship who are still in the U.S. It would also provide the citizenship that all intercountry adoptees are entitled to as the children of U.S. citizens, end the unequal treatment between adopted and biological children of U.S. citizens, and allow deported adoptees to come home, reunite with their families, and rebuild their lives.

Due to the widespread erasure of adoptee voices, many people’s understanding of adoption comes largely from the perspective of adoption agencies and adoptive parents. This mainstream, mostly positive narrative frames adoption around “families” and “love.” In contrast, for many adoptees, the experience is more complicated and often traumatic. These feelings can be acute and front of mind. In other cases, these traumas linger in the background, shaping how we perceive our place in the world: in our families, friendships, and sense of belonging. They can resurface without warning.

Even though I have been struggling with my own Korean American identity and adoptee experience, I was largely ignorant of the issue of adoptee citizenship. While I have supported other immigration measures in the past, I did not learn of the Adoptee Citizenship Act until earlier this year. Finally, I read and heard more stories of deported adoptees who’ve been forced to confront this other form of separation. As I’ve tried to learn more, I’ve come to better appreciate how U.S. policy falls far short. After all, many of our fellow Americans—both adoptees and other immigrants—cannot fully participate in U.S. life, even though this may be the only country they have known.

I believe issues of families and belonging are always paramount, and our current crises have only magnified this urgency. During this pandemic, we all probably know families who are struggling with forced time apart. Holidays, birthdays, and major life milestones are conducted via Zoom or FaceTime. For adoptees who have been deported, the uncertainty of not knowing when they will next see their loved ones has been the reality since even before COVID-19. Without the Adoptee Citizenship Act, deported adoptees will remain in unfamiliar countries, separated from their families and friends, and uprooted from their homes. For those who lack access to economic relief from their country of origin or from the U.S., where can they turn? When it comes to addressing policy failures that span years, we cannot completely atone for the injustices of the past. All we can do is act. With the bill expiring on December 10, it’s up to all of us to come together and demand our elected representatives in Congress pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act and finally provide internationally adopted Americans with the citizenship we were promised.Chris Wodicka is a transnational transracial Korean American adoptee. He is a member of Adoptees for Justice and lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Adoptees for Justice is an intercountry adoptee-led organization whose mission is to educate, empower, and organize transracial and transnational adoptee communities to achieve just and humane adoption, immigration, and restorative justice systems. Learn more about adoptee citizenship at adopteesforjustice.org. BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about adoptees, NPEs/MPEs, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

By Sara EasterlyA common mistake adoptive parents make when hearing adult adoptees speak about adoption trauma is discounting their experiences because “times have changed” or their adoptee hasn’t voiced similar feelings. Some parents will straight-up ask their adopted children if they feel the same way and then rest easy when their children deny having similar feelings. Differing details of adoption stories can be used as evidence of irrelevance. Adoptee voices that land as “angry” are often quickly written off as “examples of a bad adoption.”

“Not my adoptee,” is a knee-jerk, defensive response that blinds parents to adoption-related dynamics that may be uncomfortable or painful to consider—especially when everything seems to be going swimmingly in early childhood. This posture, though, discounts the real and proven trauma inherent in adoption, missing an opportunity to fully support adopted children and ultimately benefit from closer, more authentic relationships.

That trauma looks good on you.

One reason it’s so easy to miss signs of adoption trauma is because it can present so well.

Adoptees are unintentionally groomed to be people-pleasers. Once we’ve lost our first mothers to adoption, we can work incredibly hard to win the love of our next mothers. We strive to measure up—doing and saying whatever is needed to keep our adoptive mothers close. This is all unconscious and certainly not meant to be fraudulent. To our brains, running the show, it’s simply a matter of survival. Children need parents, after all, and attachment is our greatest human need, taking priority even over such basics as shelter and food, as explained by child developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld.

Of course, “good,” compliant behavior is welcomed and adored in our culture. What parent wouldn’t find a well-behaving child absolutely lovely? As a mother, I confess that my job feels so much easier when my kids behave. Unfortunately, though, the more adoptees are praised for our good behavior, the more our unhealthy patterns are reinforced and extend outside of our family relationships. We’ll ditch our true feelings in a heartbeat if it means feeling treasured and keeping loved ones close.

Other manifestations of adoption trauma are valued by mainstream culture: perfectionism churns out hard-working, dedicated students and employees who’ll always go the extra mile—nobody spotting the adoptee’s frantic need to prove his or her worth. Adoptees often make natural leaders—nobody knowing that we can harbor a desperate need to be in charge that started upon relinquishment when our brains decided nobody was looking out for us, so we’re best served when we’re at the helm. People-pleasers can also be charismatic, supportive, empathetic, and generous … others unaware of the self-sabotage that can be at play behind the scenes. We can seem unfazed in the face of stressful situations, many not understanding that’s because we’ve spent a lifetime diminishing our feelings and disregarding deep pain in order to become masters of compartmentalization.

These are traits we value in society. They serve. These traits aren’t all bad, of course. But they can be inwardly destructive—especially if adoptees aren’t aware of them, and most certainly if the cost is the adoptee’s true sense of self.

Adoption blinds.

Another reason it’s harder to spot adoption trauma is because it hides itself from adoptees themselves. The grief of losing a first family member through adoption is so significant it’s not easily looked at by the adoptee. Like looking at the sun too directly, it will burn. What’s more, our experiences of such great loss are often preverbal, before we learned words like loneliness, isolation, abandonment, and hopelessness to help us understand our overwhelming emotions—so overwhelming, sometimes, they aren’t felt. Our brains protect us in that way, because to feel them just might do us in.

Developmentally, most children won’t even have the capacity to reflect upon adoption loss until much later in life. This is what’s known as “living in the fog”—a state of denial or numbness in which adoptees are unable to closely examine the effects of adoption. When directly asked, in-the-fog adoptees often won’t have the consciousness, or the words, to talk about adoption trauma. We spend years, and possibly decades, feeling more comfortable parroting society’s or a family’s lighthearted interpretation of adoption than trying to articulate our underground, confusing, complex emotions.

When we sense a disconnect between our nuanced feelings and culture’s saccharine-sweet story of adoption, we blame ourselves. When we fail at being “perfect,” we are prone toward additional self-attack. When we’re more three-dimensional than simply “good” adoptees, we can resort to secrecy in order to keep the darker parts of ourselves hidden from those closest to us. In any of these ways, we can end up living a double life, censoring large swaths of ourselves—making it harder to feel fully known and rest in a sense of deep love by those closest to us.

This is why it’s critically important to listen to out-of-the-fog adult adoptees. Adoptees who share their stories aren’t usually doing so for fame, glory, or money, but out of a genuine desire to support other adoptees. We share on the other side of healing—or in the midst of our healing—in hopes of opening adoptive parents’ eyes to our innermost secrets that we wish our parents had had access to in our younger years.

Are some of us angry? Absolutely. Society hasn’t made room for our voices in the story of adoption, despite the fact that we’re its central players. Some of us have been let down by the people closest to us—again and again. Some of us haven’t felt seen or known. Some of us have been mistreated. Some of us have sought to take our own lives to stop the pain without having to shed light on adoption’s darkest manifestations.

“Not my adoptee” could easily be your adoptee—whether you or your child recognize so right now. Like all children, adoptees eventually grow older; hopefully, in the name of their mental health and wholeness as individuals, their feelings around adoption will evolve over time. As your child matures, you’ll want your child to look back and know that you did your best to understand them, to see them, to know them, and to guide them. While all adoptees are different, and each story is unique, listening to #adopteevoices—an array of them—is of utmost importance when raising adopted children toward their full developmental potential.Sara Easterly is an adoptee and award-winning author of books and essays. Her memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the Illumination Book Awards, among many other honors. Her essays and articles have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Red Letter Christians, Feminine Collective, Her View From Home, Godspace, and others. Find her online at saraeasterly.com, on Facebook, on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor, and on Twitter @saraeasterly.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about adoptees, NPEs, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

Don’ t miss the latest in a series of webinars from Right to Know (RTK), a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of MPEs (misattributed parentage experiences)—including adoptees and those conceived through assisted reproduction—and NPEs (not parent expected).

On Sunday, October 18, from 4pm-5:30pm EST, the webinar will address mental health issues experienced by MPEs. Moderated by DrPh candidate Sebastiana Gianci, the panel will include Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFT, therapist, cohost of the podcast Sex, Lies & The Truth, and creator of the innovative training program Parental Identity Discovery; Cotey Bowman, LPC associate, creator of the NPE Counseling Collective; and Lynne Weiner Spencer, RN, MA, LP, a therapist specializing in donor conception, adoption, and the experiences of NPEs and MPEs.

Among the topics to be explored are trauma, identity, grief, ambiguous loss, anxiety, and rejection.

In November, the series’ presenter will be Libby Copeland, award-winning author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are. (Look for our Q & A with the author here.)

And in December, RTK’s webinar features the DNA Geek Leah Larkin, an adoptee and genetic genealogist. If you’d like to attend the upcoming webinar, request the Zoom link at RSVP2RightToKnow.us and check out RTK’s event page to stay in the loop about upcoming presentations.

If you missed the last webinar, “Understanding the Medical Ramifications in Your DNA Test,” you can watch the recording.

Right to Know, created by Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, Gregory Loy, and Alesia Cohen Weiss, aims to educate the public and professionals about “the complex intersection of genetic information, identity, and family dynamics.” It works, as well, to change laws with respect to related issues, including fertility fraud. Find it on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram @righttoknowus.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy. And check out our articles on the topics that will be discussed in RTK’s webinar: disenfranchised grief, stages of grief, ambiguous loss, rejection, and trauma.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines here.
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

In only a year, Blake Gibbins’ YouTube channel “Not Your Orphan” has garnered an enthusiast base of subscribers who tune in for the host’s thoughtful, engaging, and provocative videos about a range of adoption issues from adoptee infantilization to genetic sexual attraction. Gibbins, a queer domestic adoptee and adoptee rights advocate, lives in Colorado and is deep into a self-designed graduate program in child welfare history and contemporary adoptee rights from Vermont’s Goddard College.

“Not Your Orphan,” Gibbins explains, is for “adoptees and allies and all who wish to understand.” And unlike so many conversations about adoption in which adoptee voices are nowhere to be found, “Not Your Orphan” is a place, they say, “where we talk everything adoption from the perspective of those who actually live it.”

Whether focused on how to be a better ally, cognitive dissonance and its place in the discourse on adoption, the gross inequities in the adoption system, or the trauma of family separation, the videos are informative, illuminating, and even—despite the seriousness of the subject matter—amusing. With an easy conversational style and a guileless gaze that connects with the viewer, Gibbins add a surprising intimacy and even the illusion of interactivity to these videos. This disarming presence, combined with deft editing and creative effects, glides viewers through what Gibbins acknowledges are sometimes uncomfortable conversations.

As host, Gibbins is both entertainer and the best kind of teacher, sharing deep knowledge of the history, workings, and abuses of the foster and adoption industry along with welcome dashes of humor and irony and a heap of social justice perspective. These videos, however, are informed not only by historical perspective but, and equally important, also by lived experience. They’re clear and direct, and variously raw, vulnerable, angry, whimsical, and passionate.

When not studying, advocating, or working for the local school district, Gibbins says, “I enjoy such activities as breathing, sleeping, and sometimes eating food.” Despite the crushing schedule, they took time to talk with Severance about a range of issues pertinent to adoptees because, they say, “I love being able to connect with other thought leaders and game-changers in the adoptee community, but also anyone having experienced child separation.” Here, they tell us about their path as an advocate and share their views on the importance of adoptee voices and the forces that tend to silence those voices.Gosh, no problem! Let’s see…I was a pre-arranged adoption from Houston, Texas, meaning my adoptive parents met my first mother some months before I was born and agreed to an adoption at birth. Growing up we didn’t really talk about it. I found out when I was about 6. Mom says I went really quiet and then asked if everyone I loved was going to die. I knew I was having struggles from separation trauma way before that though. Like, I can remember nightmares from age 3 about people kidnapping me, plus the social anxiety, obsessive perfectionism, depression, incessant crying, ya know. But I think having the verifying information started to connect more dots for me. I was also lucky enough to have found my papers when I was 8 or so; that gave me two names I could carry with me. But yeah, we didn’t discuss it. When I was 16 my first mother sent me a manila envelope with two letters and some photos (the first photos I’d ever seen of someone genetically related to me). I also found out that I had an older half-sibling who was two when I was born. No one had ever told me that before. I was elated at the time, but later that part really hurt me. And the way my adoptive mother reacted to the letter—oof. I swore to never talk about it again with her. But that’s changed in adulthood, now that I study what I study. Ha, I don’t really give her the option not to talk about it. I guess I’m “reclaiming my time,” so to speak. As far as reunion, I haven’t met my first mother’s family. And my first father and I didn’t really hit it off when we met. But anyone who goes to my channel can find out why.It’s really because of my own “coming out of the fog” experience [see more below about the meaning of coming out of the fog] and just not wanting to be silent about what I was learning. When I was finishing my undergraduate degree in peace studies at Naropa University, I attended a symposium on trauma by Dr. Gabor Maté. I was there to better understand the PTSD of the veterans I was working for. But I ended up learning far more about myself that day than anything and even became the focus of the event’s conversation at one point. Before that day, I hadn’t ever thought of adoption as trauma (though I had a crap-ton of symptoms of trauma), but I certainly left that event with some huge questions. So when we were having to come up with topics for our undergrad theses, that was what I chose—adoption. I wanted to know why I cried so much during that event and why I’d never considered my own pain as worthy of being connected to that piece of my story before. When I started doing research about adoption and child welfare history, that’s really when light bulbs started to go off. Why the heck had nobody heard of any of these shady figures or corrupt events in history? Why is nobody talking about the trauma or the ties to eugenics? I carried that line of study into my graduate work and in my first semester started the channel as a companion to what I was learning. I didn’t want to hold in all that information. I felt like the world should know. Although it’s safe to say being in grad school meant I wasn’t making enough videos to keep up with all I was learning. That’s changing now that I’m entering my final semester.Yeah…I’m not sure if it’s really about controlling the narrative so much as trying to bring justice to it. What would truly be just, in my opinion, and I think in the opinion of many others, would be to center the most impacted. You wouldn’t, for example, ask the cis-gendered boss of a trans person to speak as an expert on the trans experience in America. But the hardest question with centering adoptees is, “How do we get people to care about our perspective?” Because many really don’t understand that there’s anything worth discussing. Sometimes, just to make a bold point about bodily violation, consent, and toxic conditioning, I draw comparisons between infant adoption and assault, or kidnapping. But that’s never gone over well with others. Oh gosh, I’m remembering now…so I’m actually a survivor of a very complicated sexual assault experience (that’s not what I’m remembering), and am also an adoptee. My memory is over being so upset when I was workshopping with this group of speakers on my five-minute script about adoption—to be presented in front of 900 people at a storyteller event—and this leader stopped me when I made a statement about how, as a survivor of sexual assault, I think it’s important to believe survivors first and so was asking that we believe adoptees when they say adoption has harmed them, instead of leading with scrutiny. This person was gobsmacked that I’d drawn any kind of comparison, ignored that I mentioned I’d been a survivor, and asked that if I wasn’t going to elaborate further I probably shouldn’t include anything about assault because “it can be a very triggering subject for some.” I just stared. People hear what they want to hear. They consider trauma, assault, and violation of rights to be what they’ve been taught it is. It doesn’t matter how many facts you’re bringing to someone, they just aren’t as powerful as beliefs.Sure. I mean, to piggyback on your previous question, sometimes the narrative doesn’t progress because there are also adoptees who support our child welfare and fertility industries and actually help in the silencing of dissenters. But I’m hesitant to call them “in the fog” because I think there can be this risk of elitism inherent to all that. I think there’s just coming out, and you are where you are, and you find what you find, or you stay put. That said, I’m not cool with the shaming by those who choose to support the system toward those who don’t. Anyway, “coming out of the fog” has become a part of the phraseology of the adoptee rights community. And I actually think it’s a great description of what happens. The way I describe it is as “an organic and non-linear process by which an adult adoptee begins to unlearn and deconstruct the mythologies taught to them about adoption by the adoptive family and mainstream society at large. It is a process of personal reclamation and authority of one’s own story.” That process can be catalyzed by any manner of things, at any age, or not at all. And that makes it really difficult when we say “listen to adoptees.” To every marginalized community there is nuance, and not one voice will speak for all. But consistently I hear others say, and agree from personal experience, that there are adoptees who defend adoption in ways that many of us used to before whatever happened that catalyzed our own “awakening” process. But because these institutions favor supportive voices, any objectors are often scrapped, and even abused. And there might be adoptees who protect adoption till their dying day, and I support their right to their own stories. But this is why so much of my work tries to get people out of their heads about who had a “good” or “bad” experience and instead focuses on justice, truth, and history. Because adoptees can evolve and change in regard to how they relate to their own adoption and to the industry as a whole, but some facts don’tchange, like that these institutions didn’t begin with pure intent, are not creating pathways to prevention, and that separation of a young human from their genetic mother hurts them.I’m not shy about comparing young adoptee psyches with symptoms of Stockholm syndrome. You have to love thy captor to survive and adapt. Like I can remember having very early dreams that my [adoptive] mother was trying to kill me or possess me, and they just slowly faded because I began to see her as not a threat as I got older. For those adopted as older children, their position regarding consent and receptivity toward the process becomes trickier. I’d say it still has Stockholm-like qualities, because you need to make yourself believe that you’re going to have some permanency with these people, some security. And because removal often comes with this sense that you’ve been wronged or abandoned for something that you did, or just for existing, then you really try your hardest to keep favor with those who take you in. That or you fight like heck to resist them; there have been many young children out of home, or in this or that placement, who have been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. We’re already navigating so many things just to attach and feel secure as young survivors of separation, and so to even fathom also bringing up the trauma of separation itself with our caregivers—while we’re actively trying to attach—would be frightening. It risks the whole operation. Because you don’t want the people who took you in to feel like the monsters in the room, because it feels like, “Well then what cause do we have to keep you [safe] if you’re just going to be ungrateful?” And so when you’ve been conditioned this way as a young person, it’s just a pattern that can stay with you: protect the parents/don’t talk about adoption = don’t risk being abandoned again. The power structure of adoption, too, just inherently makes adoptive parents out to be the biggest voice with the most power and praise. In one of my “Medium” articles I added how one Texas Democratic congressman recently encouraged that anyone adopting an older child in foster care deserves a holiday and saintly status.Umm…that’s a hard one. I think what helped me the most was finding other adoptees who felt similarly—reading their voices or watching their talks. But there can also be a lot of anger and high intensity in our advocacy community, and while it does encourage validation, I don’t know that there’s a clear handbook on the care of self while in the work. I think radical honesty and self-reflection has helped me a lot. Like, I try to name aloud my trauma patterns and triggers when they’re happening so I can recognize them and not let my system go haywire. Like I might humorously say to my roommate, “I feel like if I don’t do X, or because I did X, you’ll abandon me or kick me out.” And therapy, oh my gosh therapy—if your insurance or state helps you have access to it. And if your therapist isn’t safe or healthy when discussing this, then shop around. I’m not trying to convert anyone either, but for traumatized bodies, it’s super important that you’re really careful about what you put in them (especially substances that affect control and because the damaged chemical reward system can be really hungry for quick fixes), also that you get active, however is possible for you, and get intimate with nature as often as you can to help reset the nervous system.Hmm…I might recommend people read my article “Becoming Ungrateful” on “Medium.” I go into how dangerous single stories can be when it comes to systems or institutions of oppression. It’s a lot to go into here. One of the biggest sources of silencing adoptee voices I also talk about in the infantilization video—the intersection of trauma and privilege in an individual’s life. Many Irish (and others) did this in the 19th century after coming to this country. First, they were maliciously, violently harmed in their own countries and then here in the U.S. After a while though, whiteness was offered as a protection, and so as long as they too became offenders of violence toward newcomers, there was a relief from trauma. Some of the greatest adversaries, I think, of dissenters in this conversation tend to be those who’ve struggled with infertility, white and affluent lesbians and gays, and the evangelical Christian community, because each of these communities has been promised something to alleviate their own suffering by possession of a child in separation. Like, I’ve been called worse things by my fellow queer community about critiquing child separation than I have by just the average non-adopted person. And that hurts. Because I’ve always struggled to feel belonging in a community that’s being led to believe that access to a child is an equal right. We’re being promised that relief, resources, happiness, and security will come from the nuclear family model, and it’s just not true. Ha, all of my future dates are going to have to end with, “No I don’t want a child, and here’s why.” And then it’s like, good luck seeing that person again. It gets exhausting.Oh, I think it’s so many things working together. Adoption is a trauma-identity, and so what binds us isn’t a culture, or sexual preference, or a faith system—it’s trauma. That can be really exhausting to continue to engage all of the time. Believe me, making a degree out of it is no party. And I think all the reasons you listed do happen and are valid.I think you have to feel safe that you won’t crumble into a pile of dust. And that you won’t lose everyone you ever cared about. I actually don’t know why the queer community isn’t a better ally toward dissenting adoptees. Because it’s a similar fear when you’re coming out of the closet that you could lose your loved ones (except there’s often been a developmental privilege). But there are a couple differences in that comparison. Like, the way the queer community is right now, visibility is more accepted in society as a whole (though not in every singular place), and there are national and local organizations that help people with their identity and access to resources. And unlike coming out, where you’re saying to your loved ones, “This is who I am,” with opening up about the pain and struggles of separation there’s an unspoken inflection of “You hurt me.” And that can be more difficult to talk about. Especially when one is trying to safeguard the caregiver. I hope we [the adults] continue to make spaces where adoptees can come and just experience others owning their truth, justice, and resilience.I’m still trying this out. I really don’t have a solid answer yet, and I’m not sure we ever will. Movements are so organic, really. You just accumulate more and more voices agitating more and more of the toxic singular story, and suddenly people start paying attention. But we won’t be made privy as to when that day of critical mass will be. In regard to the quote, I do think it helps if we make sure we are building adoptee-centric community spaces first.Anonymity is the biggest thing, I think. That offer of anonymity with platforms like Dear Adoption, or with many influencers who take commentary that others have privately asked them to offer, and do so by posting with the tag “anonymous,” is so important. Because if you’re terrified to speak your truth publicly, then you need that safety and protection. Also there are just not a lot of physical, in-person spaces one can visit and hang out, read books, access resources, or form groups and meetings with other adoptees which also afford privacy from the gaze of their families. The online community has been a lifesaver. Plus with that piece about how getting together to advocate with a trauma community can be tiring, it’s important that people have the option to tune in and tune out as much as they need from the privacy and safety of their homes. That’s just a mental wellness thing. But I do hope for more in-person spaces focused on healing and justice. All of that being said, online does also come with trolls and pretty harsh pushback sometimes. So take care of you first. Don’t give it all to the cause.Well, when early separation has occurred, there’s no consent from the newborn, infant, or young child in that trauma. And they most certainly have no clue what the heck is going on, or that it means they’ll never see (or maybe even know) their caregiver again. So the more I speak my own truth, the more I’m gathering all these stolen parts of me back and becoming a sovereign body once again. Then I get to play gatekeeper, get to say, “No you may not [cross this or that boundary].” Adoption taught my limbic brain that I was nothing more than a commodity to be given away. So I became really good at giving all of me away. But yeah, not anymore. Reclaiming your story is rough, but so worth it in the end; for those moments you get to say “no” and nobody is going to violate that no. I mean, that last sentence alone is why I’m not ashamed about drawing connections between adoption and assault. I would wish the same freedom felt in the moment of a respected “no” to any survivor.That’s an easy one. There are not only so many kinds of adoptees, but also many kinds of adoptions. It’s definitely not a monolith, and so nuance and context (in juxtaposition with consistent fact) will always be required. I watch myself struggle with it sometimes on my channel. Like I might say “adoptees…X,” or something universal, and I try not to. That’s why I’ll add words like several, or many, or even clarify with infant, or newborn. Part of why I’m fundraising right now for the channel is so that I can go and meet those whose voices and experiences can fill those gaps I can’t speak to. But even with the most well-constructed article or video, you still get people who say, “I’m sorry you had a bad experience, but I didn’t. Don’t speak for me.” And you just want to shake them and say, “Did you listen to any of what I just said?” Haha, because I do really try and press the issue that there are different situations. But, like I said, there’s also biological or historical fact, and this isn’t about who had a good or bad experience. It’s about justice.I would say that the framework developed at Barnard College by Dr. Lee Anne Bell around storytelling for social justice really helped me think about stories of oppression as multiple stories, and then to begin hunting for what those “other” stories were. People can Google and read more about The Storytelling Project, which they use exclusively to talk about racism, but I think it helps to use that breaking down of story structure with any movement or issue. As far as liberating oneself? I mean if your life experience does not feel like “adoption is beautiful and painless or faultless,” then you’re already living the work. It’s just about beginning to talk about it.Oh no…I feel too seen, haha! It’s a great question, and one I try not to be scared about. The truth is, I really don’t know. There have been times where I sort of depressingly stare into space and ask, “Is social work really the only path for someone who made an entire degree out of studying child welfare history and child rights issues?” I can’t bring myself to ever even consider working within the agencies and institutions that exist in order to slowly reform them. I don’t have the patience. And I can’t place a child; I won’t do it. I’d probably be awake and haunted for days. My best friend wants me to get a PhD so I can work in higher education, and for the credibility, but I’m not sure. Truth is, I wish there was some wonderful position that someone would seek me out for. Someone who sees me as a passionate, creative teacher and advocate who wants to spark national conversations about reforming child welfare through storytelling, journalism, and research. And then they hire me because they love what I do and believe I’ll be a great contribution. Sadly, there just aren’t a lot of jobs out there for “those who want to build a future to end adoption, foster care, and big fertility.” But I hold hope that I’ll either be sought by “the right fit” that I just didn’t know existed or that I can be funded to do more of what I do. If not, there’s always working at a bookstore by day and acting as rogue adoption educator by night while I work on my novel—so long as I can pay my loans.I love this question. So, when I was in my undergraduate degree program, one of the most important books I read was Barbara Bisantz Raymond’s “The Baby Thief.” I had already been gathering a lot of information about these different parts of history and making my own connection, and then I found her book and it was like the perfect 101 synthesis of everything I’d begun studying for my thesis. It’s primarily about the life and work of Georgia Tann, but touches on a lot of other historical points that interlace with our current system of child welfare. Let’s see. The documentary “The Eugenics Crusade,” the books “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race,” and “White Trash” are all really important foundational reads for how eugenics philosophies set up what would become western child welfare as we know it. For those who can stomach old fashioned writing (I struggle), it’s worth looking into written works by Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Orphan Train Movement. To a critical reader, he’s not shy about exposing his own beliefs toward immigrants in support of why he wanted to remove their children. Understanding poverty law in 19th-century America in general really gives you a framework for the case of adoption today. “Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City” was also a well-researched piece with a lot more detailed information on the development of welfare at the time. Great for anyone who needs a clear, step by step unfolding with bits of storyline to back up research. I would also say “Dawnland” or “Blood Memory,” which speak well about the Native scoop era and those ramifications. There’s just a ton. And once you start, more resources always open up.That’s actually so difficult to answer, haha! There are so many excellent resources, and they all serve different functions. I’d feel badly for leaving anyone out! There are podcasts like AdopteesOn, multi-perspective platforms like Dear Adoption, and resources from orgs like Family Preservation 365, InterCountry Adoptee Voices, Adoptees Connect, and Saving our Sisters. People who want to stay up to date with more domestic OBC (original birth certificate) legislation can follow Adoptees United  (which then connects to many other domestic orgs working on the legal front). And I would highly encourage people to stay abreast of the work Adoptees for Justice is doing with the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2019. There are way too many adoptees facing deportation in the US, and way too many who have been [deported] already—by that I mean that any is too many. There are also a ton of social influencers, and that number is growing. Ha, I don’t want to stop and list them all or this will be so long. Oh, and I presented at KAAN (Korean Adoptee and Adoptive Families Network) this year and was really pleased with the way they run their conference—lots of engaging dialogue and emphasis on centering adoptee voices.I think I answered a lot of this in a previous question, so maybe I’ll just end with a “words of wisdom” sort of thing if that’s okay. I would want those reading to know that if separation is a part of your early life story, then you’ve earned your suffering. You don’t need to work hard to prove it to anyone who doesn’t understand. We believe you. I believe you. There is an international community of us who believe you and will not judge your story when you choose to talk about it. Trauma is a bitch, but also an amazing educator if you let it be. So, write it out of you; talk it out of you; whirl, spin, and kick it out of you. But let it move. Don’t hold it in. That’s not good for you, or for anyone, in the end. What I’ve come to learn is that I had no idea how impactful sharing my own story could be toward giving someone else permission to share theirs. We all tend to wait for permission from time to time. So I gift that to you and hope that when you’re ready you’ll come find us. Because we are a growing movement. You are not alone.Look for Gibbins and “Not Your Orphan” on Facebook, on Twitter@notyourorphan, on Instagram and, of course, on YouTube. And learn more about their fundraiser to support their videos and broaden their advocacy work and find out how you can help. 

And check out one of Gibbins’ videos on in the sidebar on our homepage.

Facebook groups and virtual support groups can be lifesavers, but nothing beats face-to-face time with people who know how you feel and have been where you’ve been. That’s why Erin Cosentino and Cindy McQuay have begun organizing retreats for adoptees, late discovery adoptees, donor conceived (DC) people, and NPEs (not parent expected) at which participants can get to know each other and share their experiences in a relaxed setting while learning from experts about the issues that challenge them. It’s not therapy, but it may be equally healing, and undoubtedly more fun.

Since the day that Cosentino, 44, discovered at 42 that her father was not the man who raised her, her mantra has been “Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed.” McQuay, 56, has known her entire life she had been adopted. Both married with children and busy schedules, each devotes considerable time to advocating for people with concerns related to genetic identity and helping searchers look for biological family. And each runs a private Facebook group, Cosentino’s NPE Only: After the Discovery, and McQuay’s Adoptees Only: Found/Reunion The Next Chapter.

Among her advocacy efforts, McQuay, who describes herself as a jack of all trades, helps adoptees locate the forms necessary to obtain original birth certificates (OBCs). A strong voice for adoptee rights, she strives to enlighten non-adoptees about the often unrecognized harsh realities of adoption, helping them understand that “not all adoptions are rainbows and unicorns.” Countering the dominant narrative, she’s quick to point out that adoptees “were not chosen, we were just next in line.”

Cosentino and McQuay first encountered each other when they were among 30 participants at an afternoon meet-up in Philadelphia last March. “It was an awesome experience to be able to see and hug these people with whom we’d formed deep bonds over the Internet,” says Cosentino. “We loved that we were able to meet up with others, but felt that there simply wasn’t enough time to share with each other.” Further, she says, McQuay felt slightly out of place because she was the only adoptee in attendance and the agenda was geared more toward NPEs.

After the meeting, a group of attendees went out to dinner and Cosentino and McQuay began to talk about the possibility of creating a retreat. As a special educator, Cosentino says her go-to is always to teach, so planning a retreat where people affected by separation from biological family could gather and “learn and grow while healing” seemed like a great idea. Over the course of the dinner conversation, they’d decided to plan something longer and more inclusive, and, thus, says Cosentino, “the idea for the New Jersey Shore Round Table Retreat was born.”

They designed a program that would include all people facing identity loss and address their issues. It was important to McQuay, for example, to “make sure NPEs, LDAs, and DC people knew what adoptees have been living their entire lives”—how they’ve spent their lifetimes searching for familiarity in strangers’ faces, about the frustrations associated with the laws pertaining to OBCs, and the trauma and loss they’ve experienced.

Their inaugural retreat was held in Brigantine, New Jersey in October 2019 and was attended by 18 women and one man. “We initially and quite simply wanted more time together. We felt we wanted to provide a space where we could all—NPEs, DCs, adoptees, and LDAs—be together and share our experiences,” says Cosentino. The lone man attending felt fortunate to take part but wishes more men would take the opportunity to attend. According to McQuay, “Men may be hesitant to open up, but would be surprised to learn that the retreats are not women-specific. They contain activities that benefit everyone.

At the same time, they wanted to delve deeper into the trauma often experienced in the wake of the revelation of family secrets and so invited Susannah Spanton—a Reiki master and Bio-Energy practitioner as well as a trauma trainer at Lakeside Global Institute, which provides trauma-informed training—to speak about how the body responds and adapts to trauma. According to Cosentino, “Trauma changes a person, but we all respond differently to trauma. It’s a very individual experience. So we focused on asking thought-provoking questions and sharing meals, lots of laughs, and some tears as well. We just wanted to be around people who get it.” In addition, they broke up into smaller groups where they explored hard questions and also enjoyed time for meditation and reflection.Now they’re branching out and planning additional retreats—for starters, a spring 2020 gathering in Brigantine (with half the 30 spots already booked by previous attendees) and an autumn 2020 retreat, tentatively scheduled to take place in Pennsylvania’s Poconos, where participants can enjoy the mountains and the fall foliage. “We can’t help but think of the quote (from an unknown source)—‘Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go,’—and it really is the perfect backdrop to heal, grow, and maybe not let go, but move forward,” says Cosentino. She and McQuay are open to the possibility of hosting retreats virtually anywhere if there’s a desire from people in other areas. Because Cosentino sits on the board of a cancer nonprofit organization for which she plans events in states remotely, it’s a seamless task for her.

The first gathering, says Cosentino, was their ‘guinea pig.’ “We learned from that first retreat what people liked and didn’t like, what they need, and even what they are not ready to experience. The second retreat will take a more therapeutic approach. “Our trauma specialist is returning, but we’ve enlisted the expertise of art and writing therapists as well—Elissa Arbeitman, MA ATR-BC and Chelsea Palermo, MFA—and a licensed social worker, Gina Daniel, DSW, LCSW, will be there as well to educate us on therapies that work for NPEs, adoptees, LDAs, and DC individuals.The most significant benefit to attendees, say McQuay and Cosentino, is togetherness. “We heal simply by being together in a safe place where we already know what the others are experiencing. But of equal importance and value is the opportunity to have trained professionals guide us through different therapies and approaches and provide strategies and opportunities to feel whole,” says Cosentino.

“The best thing was knowing you are not alone and being able to share and talk about your own personal story without judgment or someone saying ‘don’t worry, nothing has changed,’” says one attendee, Da Rhonda Roberts, a 56-year NPE and a human resources coordinator from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “For me it changed a whole hell of a lot.” The trauma lecture was also informative and helpful for her not only for its relevance to genetic identity, but also because she’s a survivor of domestic violence. Many people with genetic identity loss have experienced other types of trauma, which may be amplified by the distress they experience after making difficult family discoveries, so strategies for addressing trauma are essential.

Not feeling alone was also a key takeaway for Heather Resto. A 39-year-old NPE from Connecticut whose older brother is also an NPE, she also credits the retreat with reassuring her that “it’s okay to feel everything I feel as a result of this discovery—anger, grief, shock, sadness, and joy connecting with new family.” The lecture on trauma, she says, validated her emotions. “There was something cathartic about sitting in a room with 17 other people going through the same thing. While our stories are all different and we’re all at different points in our journey to discovery, we are all connected as NPEs. We all get ‘it,’ while many people in our daily lives just don’t see how a discovery like this is traumatic and life changing,” Resto says.Learn more about the retreats at Hiraeth Hope & Healing, and join pertinent communities on Facebook: Cosentino’s group for NPEs, McQuay’s group for adoptees, and Severance’s group for anyone experiencing genetic identity issues.

Check back soon for more on how to start a retreat or symposium in your area.