By Brad EwellIn Facebook groups for people with not parent expected (NPEs) or misattributed parentage experiences (MPEs), there’s a consistent large difference in the ratio of men to women. If you were a man looking to meet women, this would be a place to be. There are typically a handful of men and thousands of women. Where are all the guys? Percentage-wise there couldn’t be that many more women than men having DNA surprises. So what’s going on here?

Looking at the bigger picture, this is a fairly common phenomenon among individuals with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health concerns. Several studies indicate that men are typically much less likely than women to seek professional help when facing psychological distress. The study authors suggest a number of factors for the disparity, such as the fear many men have of being judged as emotionally vulnerable or weak. Researchers also point to the fact that because men are trained from an early age to compete with other men, it makes them less likely to trust each other and reveal what they may perceive as weakness.

I posed the question to several individuals who not only are behavioral health practitioners but who also have personal experience with misattributed parentage. Their thoughts generally mirror the finding of the studies, but they offered additional insights.

According to Jodi Klugman-Rabb,* a licensed marriage and family therapist and licensed professional counselor, “Sometimes it’s as simple as the gender role conditioning specific to cultural norms that men are not manly if emotional. So expressing emotions is then seen as weak, making group process emasculating. On a more micro level, emotional process can have a lot to do with the family of origin dynamics and whether kids were allowed or encouraged to explore emotions safely, how cultural gender norms influenced that, and, to take it back out on a macro level, how these expectations were transmitted intergenerationally.”

Eve Sturges,* also a licensed marriage and family therapist, agrees. “Men,” she adds, “generally are taught to look for solutions; without a direct path, they often don’t understand the benefit.” Men view support groups as a place to talk about things, but they fail to see the benefit of the emotional burden that’s released when feelings are verbally expressed.

Men also fear that a vulnerable disclosure might disrupt the peace in their relationships, whether with their mates or family members or at work, according to Cotey Bowman,* a licensed professional counselor associate.

In order to make support groups more appealing to men, these professionals say, the stigma that prevents men from seeking support and expressing emotions must be addressed at a cultural level. Until this cultural change, the best option is to allow and encourage men to see other men model vulnerability and acceptance of emotions.

After reading the studies and talking to professionals, I can see myself and the culture I was raised in fairly accurately reflected in their comments. At 50 years old, I’ve been a police officer for half of my life. Police and other first respondors are notoriously emotionally restricted at work because the job demands it, explains Jodi Klugman-Rabb. It’s very difficult, she adds, “to ask first responders to compartmentalize at work but share at home. Most cannot walk both lines because our brains are not wired for that level of compartmentalization.” It’s an apt assessment of the people I work with daily.

I was raised in an environment where the expression of emotions was an indicator of weakness. As a result, I’ve grown into a person who is self-reliant to a fault. I try to avoid having people to do things for me because I don’t want to bother them or draw attention to myself. My dad taught me the importance of being self-sufficient and tough. When you get hurt, he said, you just “rub some dirt on it” and move on.

I vividly remember several instances in my childhood when my father imparted these lessons. Once, while building a fence, he accidentally nailed the palm of his hand to a picket fence with a nail gun. My job was to go to the other side of the fence, pull his hand off the nail, and get some duct tape so he could tape his hand up and finished the fence. Another time, he lost his balance while using a chain saw on a ladder and sawed through part of his thigh. Again, I was assigned to get the duct tape so he could tape himself back up and finish the job. (I think he got some stitches, but only after we finished the job). Finally, and most memorable, was the day he broke his leg. We were riding horses in a pasture when another horse came up alongside him. The horse tried to kick my dad’s horse, but instead kicked my dad in the shin. My dad grimaced. “We need to go back,” he said. “I think my leg is broke.” We rode back a couple of miles without him making a sound; he just wore that same grimace on his face. Once we got to the stalls, we tied up the horses, got in the truck, and started to the hospital. I was in middle school and had driven a few times around where we kept our horses but never out on the street. When we got to the road, my dad stopped and said, “If I feel like I’m going to pass out, I’ll just pull over to the side of the road and switch seats so you can drive me to the hospital.” He managed the 10-mile drive to the hospital, where he allowed me to grab a wheelchair to get him into the emergency room. Inside, I watched blood pour out when the nurses pulled his boot off. It turned out he had a compound fracture.

Clearly, reaching out to others for help is not something I was taught to do.

You may be wondering, then, how have I come to be writing an article about being emotionally vulnerable in groups? Given the way I was raised and the culture I grew up and work in, this is the last place in the world I’d want or expect to find myself. I don’t consider myself particularly weak or vulnerable. My job requires the opposite of me; I have to show courage and be strong for others. I had been in therapy once several years ago for help with some anxiety and stress issues, but my therapist had moved away and I felt better, so I didn’t take the time to find another one. I addressed it more as a strategy session than as therapy. I believe this is because, as Eve Sturges explains, I was looking for that step-by-step strategy to fix my problem and I didn’t view talking about my feelings as a useful part of the steps. I also told only a handful of people in my life that I had gone to therapy. This was intentional—a decision based on the fear of being emotionally vulnerable. I simply didn’t want to be viewed as weak and I believed that would happen if people knew I was struggling with my emotions.

So what went so wrong (or right) to bring me to the point that I’m sharing personal struggles and fears out in the world for other people to see? The answer is nothing. I finally realized no matter how much I wanted to believe I could deal with everything on my own, that’s not realistic. When I discovered that I’d been adopted, I was absolutely lost and felt totally alone. My wife was supportive, but there was no one who could really relate to the depth of loss that comes with such a discovery. My wife suggested I look on Facebook and see if there were groups formed by people who had experienced something similar. It sounded like a good idea, but I thought there would only be a handful of people at best who’ve gone through this. Instead, I found a community of thousands who have all experienced the same thing. So I lurked, devouring everyone else’s stories but not sharing my own. Over time, I observed more people sharing and receiving helpful and empathetic responses, which made me start feeling safe. And that feeling of safety finally led to me being comfortable enough to participate in the groups. I told my story to strangers who shared my experience and in return they gave me good advice and empathized. And I’ve taken it farther. Now I write about my experiences to a wider audience beyond the safety of private Facebook groups. In doing so, I’ve learned that sharing my stories has been deeply cathartic and healing. Every story I tell feels like a weight lifted off my shoulders.

As I talked to other men who have joined and participate in groups, I noticed their stories were similar to mine. They grew up learning to be self-sufficient and kept their emotions under wraps. I also noticed a common theme—a duty to keep family secrets private. I know there are many other men just like me trying to navigate their way through this NPE/MPE journey, many of them trying to go it alone. While there are likely a handful of people who can make this journey alone, I believe everyone can benefit from finding a community and experiencing its benefits.

My hope is that sharing this article and my other stories will let men know there’s a direct benefit from participating in Facebook and other support groups and sharing their stories. Cotey Bowman explains that when he works in group settings with men and is vulnerable himself, this modeled behavior is then reflected back as men in the group learn it’s safe to display emotions and vulnerability as sessions continue.Brad Ewell lives in Texas with his wife and three children. In 2019, he became a late discovery adoptee after taking a home DNA test. He feels he’s still very much in the middle of this journey and enjoys writing to help organize his thoughts and better understand his own story. Brad volunteers with Right to Know, a non-profit group dedicated to supporting people’s right to know their genetic identity. He’s told his story on two podcasts, NPE Stories and Sex, Lies, and the Truth. You can connect with him on Instagram @Brad1407, on Facebook, or email him at mpebrad@gmail.com.

Read more of his articles and essays: An Unexpected Abandonment, Dear Mom and Dad, and Watching and Waiting. *Eve Sturges is the host of a podcast, Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges. Jodi Klugman-Rabb is the developer of Parental Identity Discovery and the co-host of the podcast Sex, Lies & the Truth. Cotey Bowman is the creator of the MPE Counseling Collective.BEFORE YOU GO…

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

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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.

By B.K. JacksonWhen Julie Lopez was born, she was removed from her first mother and taken to an orphanage, where she lived without a primary caregiver for two months until she was adopted. She had a good upbringing in a loving home, yet for much of her life was troubled by puzzling symptoms. At one point, for example, she experienced dizzy spells and disorientation that made her feel “as if time moved out of space.” She went to a neurologist who prescribed medication for what he believed to be extra electrical activity in her brain. “My life was pretty great, so some of the symptoms I had were inexplicable to me.”

It’s a phenomenon she believes is common among people who believe their early lives were essentially carefree. After working with a therapist skilled in brain-based therapies, she came to know that some of her symptoms were triggered by behavior-influencing codes stored in her implicit memory — the memory that can’t be consciously accessed. As a result of that therapy, the symptoms dissipated. Lopez attributes much of her own personal therapeutic success to those early experiences with brain-based work.

Cracking those codes is the subject of her new book, “Live Empowered!: Rewire Your Brain’s Implicit Memory to Thrive in Business, Love and Life.” There, she explores how these memories, which normally help people function efficiently, can become tripwires, setting off cascades of negative emotions and destructive symptoms.How can you be affected by experiences about which you have no memory or that happened before you were able to understand and express them through language?

It all begins in the hippocampus, a part of the limbic system, which controls the autonomic nervous system. It’s the part of the brain “responsible for coding and putting date and time stamps on our explicit memory — the memory we can consciously recall,” says Lopez. There are four circumstances during which information is stored in implicit memory.

1. When an individual is in the first three years of life, before the hippocampus is fully developed
2. Following a physical brain injury that damages the hippocampus
3. When stress levels are high, cortisol levels rise, and the hippocampus shuts off
4. When bodies dissociate from the experience of extreme trauma and the hippocampus similarly shutters.

Implicit memory, says Lopez — founder of the Viva Center, a Washington, DC community of therapists specializing in brain- and body-based therapies and a trauma-informed approach to healing — is a concept developed in the early 1900s by a number of scientists in different disciplines to explain how our systems hold data that we don’t consciously remember.

Every human, says Lopez, has implicit memory, which she describes as a hidden control panel in the brain — not one you can consciously direct, yet which holds all the data that informs how we live. “Everything stored in implicit memory is there to help us in our most primary function, which is to survive and to excel.” Although we can’t directly tap into this vast reservoir of experiential data, it nonetheless influences our behavior and wellbeing, both positively and negatively.

Suppose, for example, there had been a time you felt unsafe during your infancy and that period of danger coincided with a terrible windstorm. Those experiences were encoded in your implicit memory. Now, when a strong wind blows, you may feel your heart rate rise, your palms sweat, and your breath quicken — reactions that may make you afraid of going outside. You don’t remember the inciting event or the windstorm. All you know is that when the wind kicks up, it stirs strong emotions. Or perhaps you were terribly frightened in infancy by a man with a big bushy moustache. Even now, without knowing why, you may recoil from anyone with similar facial hair. These implicit memories can be triggered by any sensory information — a scent, a color, a sound, or anything felt or observed.Infants and babies taken from their birthmothers tend to perceive that severance as a danger, a threat to their well-being. The physical sensations associated with being removed from their mothers and the consequent feelings of being unsafe are stored in the body and the mind as implicit memories — remnants of trauma that remain and can cause distress throughout life. But because individuals don’t understand these as memories — that is, as narratives they can express — they may not identify their experiences as traumatic or link their distress symptoms to these early preverbal experiences.

The loss of a primary care person, Lopez explains, is significant, and deprives a child of mirroring (when a parent reflects a baby’s emotions as expressed by voice or expression) and attunement (a sense of safety that develops when parents are responsive to an infant’s needs). Often, those who didn’t have those primal experiences have symptoms of anxiety related to friendships and intimate relationships. “That struggle can look like any part of the classic symptoms for PTSD,” says Lopez. “It doesn’t mean they meet the diagnostic criteria, but they’ll exhibit avoidance of things associated with vulnerability in relationships.” Other symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares, dissociation (a sense of separation or disconnection from oneself), anxiety, and depression. They may rely on coping strategies to avoid having to be close, such as excessive drug or alcohol use or other types of behavioral addictions that help them avoid what they see as threatening.

“There may be codes that are put in our brains that tell us the way to get through life is not to attach to people, because when you really attach, you get hurt,” says Lopez. Many people who’ve had great losses in their lives or in relationships, she adds, have had those types of codes embedded without being consciously aware of it. She’s worked with clients who say they want a relationship, yet their behavior tells a different story because of those codes. Thus, for reasons they can’t understand, adoptees may fear being abandoned, be unable or afraid to securely attach to others, or find it difficult to trust people.

Similarly, those who were not raised by their genetic parents, even though they may not have been aware of that fact until adulthood — NPEs (non-paternal events or not parent expected), donor conceived people, late-discovery adoptees — also are likely to have been imprinted with memories about which they have no conscious awareness and which may cause dis-ease. They may react in ways they don’t understand to people, places, sights, sounds, smells, or other sensations associated with childhood experiences.

NPEs and others also may have stored sensory data from subtle or outright signals they observed that indicated they didn’t belong, were unwanted, or were a source of conflict between their parents — sensations that may stimulate feelings of disconnect, alienation, and inauthenticity. “When a child grows up without genetic mirroring and in situations in which there is deception — when the parents are actually sitting on a secret — the child picks up on data energetically, in a nonverbal way, and those pieces of information can be stored in implicit memory,” says Lopez.

Furthermore, she adds, “There are some physical and visceral experiences that go along with being disconnected from people that you’re related to.” Although in her practice she most often sees clients with expressions of anxiety, others may present with feelings of hopelessness and despair. There may be uncomfortable bodily sensations and symptoms such as those associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, “where they have a compulsive drive to put things where they belong or keep things in order or a difficulty handling stress either personally or professionally. They may have overly controlling behavior because it feels scary to loosen the reins on relationships.”

They don’t grasp that they’re being triggered by unconscious memories. It’s as if they’re being sent signals that they can’t  see, hear, or understand. So the feelings their memories engender may seem to make no sense and to be incongruous to the situations in which they arise. And when symptoms occur, clients have no reason to suspect they’re linked to past experiences. But, says Lopez, symptoms are always telling a story. The question, she adds, isn’t what’s wrong with you, but what happened to you? When they don’t know the answer — when they’re unable to peg their symptoms to something in their past that was destructive — they may feel there’s something wrong with them, that they’re broken or defective.Lopez is dedicated to changing these destructive patterns and helping individuals realize that symptoms occur for a reason. Since traditional talk therapies are typically ineffective for treating issues arising from memories for which one has no words, she sees it as her mission to help people use more pinpointed techniques that have been advancing in the last 30 years. In “Live Empowered!” she describes three brain-based therapies — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Brainspotting, and Neurofeedback — through which therapists can access the mind’s hidden control panel, explore the root causes of obstacles, and reprogram responses and behaviors.

Developed by clinical psychologist Francine Shapiro to mitigate symptoms linked to traumatic memories, EMDR is an evidence-based therapeutic method that relies on bilateral brain stimulation, whether through eye movements, sound, or touch, to target and process memories stored in the nervous system and manage maladaptive behaviors that stem from them.

David Grand, PhD, who discovered Brainspotting, describes a brain spot as a “a point in visual space that a client has a strong reaction to.” With his technique, a therapist uses a pointer to guide clients’ eye movements across their fields of vision to help identify those points, which, Lopez writes, “hold an active memory (explicit and implicit) tied to an undesired symptom or corresponding to the neural pathway you want to modify.” Brainspotting helps them process and let go of the stored emotions.

Neurofeedback, or electroencephalogram biofeedback, is a therapeutic strategy that that tracks brainwave activity and teaches clients to modify their brainwaves. When those modifications move in a direction that influences the brain to function more efficiently, clients receive visual, auditory, or other types of feedback that reinforce their efforts.

Each of these techniques is effective due to neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to adapt, reorganize, and form new neural connections. These aren’t the only approaches to accessing implicit memory and treating trauma. Other approaches falling under the umbrella of somatic therapy are used by some therapists to target the encoded memories through the body rather than the mind. And therapists can use many additional nonverbal approaches outlined in “Live Empowered!” to decode implicit memory.

Working with implicit memory, Lopez observes, is a great opportunity to clear troubles or roadblocks that might otherwise impede individuals for the rest of their lives. “It’s about changing the codes that are driving what’s going on now so that people can live more productive lives, be successful, and feel good about themselves.”

Check back for more in-depth explorations of these individual brain-based therapies as well as somatic therapies that may also be helpful for problems arising from trauma stored in implicit memory.In addition to reading her book, you can learn more about Lopez and the techniques she uses at her website and in this episode of the Adoptees On podcast.