Severance speaks with Gina Daniel, DSW, LCSW, whose personal experience—her discovery that she’s an NPE (not-parent-expected)—has redirected her professional goals, putting the spotlight on the challenges and needs of individuals with misattributed parentage experiences. She recently earned her doctorate, her dissertation a study of the NPE experience, and she’s working to help create awareness among mental health professionals and improve their knowledge about the specific needs of people who’ve discovered misattributed parentage.Did your upbringing influence your desire to be a social worker and if so, in what way?

I expected to become an elementary teacher growing up and had no idea what social work was until I was in my 20s. However, once I discovered social work, I knew that was what I needed to do. My upbringing was full of moments when I was a little social worker (counseling, advocating, and educating) but I did not know it until later. I was raised by a single father who worked hard to be sure we could pay the rent. All the moms in the neighborhood helped to raise me.

You were already a social worker and well into your doctoral studies when you decided to change the topic of your dissertation. Can you explain why you chose to align your scholarly interests with your NPE experience?

I was. That was quite the detour. I trust my gut with most everything I do. I could not find a way to study school social work (my profession) in a way that felt interesting to me. Once the NPE event happened, I brought it to my committee and they helped me determine that this was the path that fit better for me. Knowing there was little to no scholarly research at that time was a huge attraction to me as well. I agreed and was willing to do the extra work.

How, specifically, did you design your thesis—what were you looking to discover and how did you propose to accomplish that?

I knew I would do interviews for qualitative research. The idea of secrets kept was fascinating. Also, the impact that this discovery had on me and how off balance I felt at middle age got me interested in the impact on identity. The obvious path was discussing the impact on family of origin relationships—living or deceased and on the new family relationships—living or deceased.

You interviewed 51 people. Can you describe those interviews—how you selected subjects and what the interviews involved?

I was a part of one of the private NPE Facebook groups that agreed to work with me then backed out. Another Facebook group offered assistance then stalled. Finally, a woman who was starting another NPE Facebook group offered to assist. I was a member but did not participate for a long time. The process was an advertisement of the study and a link for those interested. The criteria for interviews included having discovered paternity through a direct-to-consumer DNA Ancestry test, living in North America, being over 18.

The first round of interviews was in the fall of 2019, the second round of interviews was in the fall of 2020. Unfortunately, the first round interviews were not used in the final study. It’s a complicated story but every one of those interviews mattered significantly to me and, interestingly, my findings were the same. The interviews were incredible. People were so willing to share their personal stories, so interested in helping other NPEs, and were so vulnerable and lovely. I feel incredibly lucky to have shared some time with all of these amazing individuals.

Can you summarize your overall findings?

To summarize my research, there appears to be a significant psychological blow to participants discovering paternity/family secrets through a direct-to consumer (DTC) DNA ancestry test. There’s a struggle to incorporate the new information. Half of the participants in my research sought mental health counseling in order to cope. Personal identity is changed as a result (incorporating new family, concerns with previous family, health issues, and ethnicity changes); resemblance to family is a significant component within this experience; participants prefer the truth over not having the truth (despite the emotional difficulty); and social supports (e.g. Facebook groups) are helpful and after a certain point appear to become a ‘pay it forward’ place. In my research I called this ‘healing through helping.’

You’d already had an NPE experience, and although it was relatively new, you’d had some time to process your emotions. Was there anything revealed in the interviews that surprised you?

I had time to process and discussed with a therapist as well. The similarities in the emotions that most people shared mirrored my experience. I was surprised at the sense that some of this felt universal—deception, lies, shock/surprise, understanding, hurt—and all mostly at middle age.

What, if anything, would you describe as universal in the experience of your interviewees?

Similar emotions that erupt suddenly when the discovery is learned and then occasional eruptions of the same emotions, maybe less intensely, over time. Also, the idea that almost everyone feels alone at the beginning of this process—as if they are the only ones going through this.

If you had to choose the top three most difficult challenges or most difficult emotional issues experienced by NPEs what would they be?

Shock/surprise, anger, and feeling alone. Also the rejections from new family that happen for many.

Can you give an overview of the kinds of issues NPEs have with respect to identity and what are some strategies for dealing with them?

To be completely honest, I don’t feel I went as deeply as I should have for the identity questions. When I asked questions about if identity changed, the vast majority said yes. When I pressed the “yes” responses further with “how,” I was often met with pause in thought. However, ethnicity and health information were the most often described areas where identity shifts occurred. Seeking information about new family was necessary in order to understand more about self. I included resemblance into this section as this topic came up so often in interviews as related to not looking like family of origin, then looking like new family, children looking like new grandfathers, etc.

As far as strategies, I don’t think I have any to offer based on what was provided through the research outside of have a professional genetic counselor or mental health professional to talk with while processing these complex shifts.

This is a complex, multi-part question. I’ve noticed that for many NPEs, this experience seems to become central, becoming almost the centerpiece of their identity and front and center in their lives in an ongoing way. Is there a danger in that—in lives being overtaken in a sense by this experience?

Like with many things, it depends on how much it impacts your functioning in your typical life. I’m not sure how it can not become a central feature of a life when so much of what you’ve known about yourself is upended while doing a recreational activity. For some, how do you reconcile trust again after this occurs?

What can individuals do to help integrate the experience so it’s not overwhelming and doesn’t come ultimately to define them?

So, it can be overwhelming and create a new definition of themselves. However, the idea is that it is now an expanded definition. You are what you were and what you now know. It’s realizing that piece, I think, that’s helpful as people process the losses and grievances along the way with this experience.

Is there an end goal of assimilating this experience, or will it always be front and center? 

In my opinion, assimilating is the goal. What we cannot control, we cannot control. People may not choose to have us in their lives, and we have no option but to accept that. People may be deceased, and we get no answers to the questions we have about our existence. We again have to find a way to accept that. These are not easy tasks, but to remain in a place of anger and sadness only steals your life from you.

Many NPEs belong to support groups on Facebook and perhaps elsewhere. Can you comment on the benefits and also the limitations?

There are significant benefits belonging to a healthy group of people sharing similar experiences with something brilliant to offer us in the way of hope, support, or suggestion when needed. This is what it is to be a social human finding your ‘tribe.’ However, the limitations are when professional help is needed and people use Facebook—or when people on Facebook want to be professional mental health professionals doling out advice and are not qualified.

You wish to help educate mental health professionals about how to better treat NPEs. What are the biggest needs in that education?

Awareness of this experience to start with.

Therapists are trained to work with clients with issues related to grief, loss, shame. What are they lacking that prevents them from being able to better help NPEs?

We all hope the therapists we work with understand how to work with grief, loss, and shame, but judging from my research, many NPEs seeking mental health help were met with flippant comments minimizing their experiences. That tells me that perhaps they are not viewing this experience from the lens of grief, loss, and shame. The impact of secrets on families is an area to understand more, as well as all the ways an individual can become an NPE. This isn’t as simple as ‘mom had an affair’ in a lot of situations. I also think we are still learning the best ways to help NPEs therapeutically, so I am not in any way indicating this answer as a full and complete response to your question.

Until therapists are better trained or until there’s truly a network of therapists specializing in these issues, what advice do you have for individuals who are seeking mental health care?

Just meet with a professional you’re comfortable talking to, who is listening and seeking to understand and help. If the first one doesn’t fit, move on until you find one that clicks for you.

What should people look for in a therapist and how might they be able to tell when a therapist will not be right for them?

Someone who is not minimizing your experience. It’s completely ok to interview a therapist prior to meeting them. Ask them if they have heard of NPEs, ask if they have worked with someone who has been adopted, ask about their experience with family therapy and family secrets in therapy. If you don’t like them on the phone, move on. I suggest if you’re on the fence with a therapist (after meeting once), try them three times. If after three times it’s not helping anything, move on.

I understand you’re interested in doing research on siblings who are discovered by NPEs. I’m wondering if you have a sense yet of what reasons might keep those siblings from being accepting of NPEs?

So this is personal. I did not indicate my interest in this in my research study and am not 100% I am going to do this, but I think about it a lot. Siblings, at this age, are typically peers and have information that can help us better understand the new parent and health information. We can potentially grow old with them and have that extra layer of familial connection. However, they’re not always willing to accept the new sibling no matter what the situation was, and this can be very difficult for an NPE to cope with. Inheritances, sibling positions within the family, and loyalties to other family appear to be reasons to keep away. Like I said, this is a personal one for me so I will tread lightly as I move forward. It may also be a challenge to find siblings willing to open up unless I were to go through an NPE, so I imagine the information would be skewed toward acceptance. Still, it could be interesting to get their perspective. Maybe I am totally off base and am taking my rejection of two younger siblings too hard!

 Can you tell me about the support guide you’re working on and your hopes for it?

Well, it’s currently evolving into a blog I believe. Perhaps the blog will develop into the support guide in paper form one day. Another NPE and I are working on it currently. Our hope is that it is a helpful tool for everyone—NPEs new and existing, family members, mental health professionals. You’ll hopefully be hearing about it soon. We hope to get it really moving this summer.

 What are the most important aspects of this experience that researchers need to explore?

Well, I just completed someone’s study questionnaire from West Chester University in Pennsylvania that looks like quantitative research, so that makes me excited thinking we can get some of that info out there. Within my study, I suggest future research considerations to include qualitative research with biological mothers, longitudinal studies with NPEs, and consideration of if/how the new medical information changes behavior once misattributed paternity is uncovered.

What haven’t I asked you that you think people should know either about the NPE experience or about the work you’ve done related to it?

This experience has a spectrum of response. NPEs are many in our world, always have been, and will continue to occur. Learning about your NPE status through a direct-to-consumer DNA ancestry test is perhaps an unintended consequence to a recreational test for a most popular hobby. This is also a first world issue accessed primarily by Caucasian individuals who can afford to test for fun. The impact on identity is significant.Gina Daniel is a licensed clinical social worker. She has worked in public education as a school social worker for more than twenty years and also works in her private practice in central Pennsylvania primarily focused on individual and family work. Daniel discovered her NPE status in June 2018 and subsequently completed her doctoral dissertation with a focus on unexpected paternity discoveries through direct-to-consumer DNA ancestry testing.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.
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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.

• 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 Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFTLife changing events such as grief and trauma have a way of changing relationships, too. Discovering a DNA surprise known as non-paternal event or not parent expected (NPE)—such as an adoption not previously disclosed, donor conception, or misattributed or falsified paternity—has been shown to have serious effects on family relationships, often pitting families against one another as secrets are uncovered and motives are questioned. The prevalence of commercial DNA testing in the last ten years has made possible the revelation of these secrets and contributed to a surge in grief, identity crises, and conflicts within families. Psychotherapy is catching up to this phenomenon, poised to be a source of support and skill building as clinicians gain training on the unique constellation of conditions these discoveries present. However, recently I heard this play out in the worst way imaginable on a podcast I never listen to. It was forwarded to me by a shocked friend who wondered what my response would be given my own experience and expertise on the subject.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a radio personality well-known for her “no nonsense” style, per her marketing. She’s been dispensing advice in a sensational manner for decades, touting her ability to save marriages. But surprisingly, her professional help is delivered in a style akin to that of Gordon Ramsey or Simon Cowell. The last time I listened to anything from Dr. Laura I was in college 20 years ago; it was a curious foray with a friend into one of her local presentations. We were intrigued by her “tell it like it is” style, which, at the time, didn’t seem bullying or hostile. This episode, however, is shockingly abusive and appallingly unprofessional, reflecting poorly on the mental health care field.

In an episode of her podcast “Call of the Day” that aired July 7, 2020, Dr. Laura took a call from Torri, who stated she was unsure how to carry on a relationship with her mom after she discovered her NPE status in the fall of 2019. Before Torrie had spoken more than three sentences to describe her problem, Dr. Laura shut her down with rude, demeaning assumptions about the case and commentary about her as a person, telling Torrie “I would rather smack you across the head than anything else right now, you ungrateful little twit.” It was difficult to listen to this five-minute podcast, let alone imagine how Torri felt after hanging up.

There are many stereotypes of therapists, and there are many types of therapists spanning the spectrum of good vs. bad. I’m a marriage and family therapist (LMFT) licensed by the State of California and I have also discovered my own NPE status, also now being referred to as “not parent expected,” an attempt to soften the title. Even if I weren’t able to relate to this life-changing experience Torri has had, I still could have responded as a compassionate and ethical clinician, something Dr. Laura didn’t do. Unfortunately, Torri is not protected by the traditional terms of the therapeutic relationship because she willingly gave up that privilege when she applied to be a caller on the show. Worse, she may never feel safe to seek professional mental health help again because she, like others, may mistake her experience with Dr. Laura for real therapy.

The ethical obligations of practitioners in the mental health field exist to protect consumers from ill-trained and harmful clinicians, the worst example of which is the reckless sort of abuse presented as help from Dr. Laura, who’s listed as an licensed marriage and family therapist in various websites but who doesn’t list the licensing state. Rather than displaying a professional demeanor consistent with the ethics of our field, Dr. Laura’s unbelievable behavior toward Torri is equivalent to the sort of disgust with which family members often treat NPEs, using shame, extreme defensiveness, and threats to protect their secrets. I can imagine if Torri had been allowed to speak, she might have described a situation where her mom responded as Dr. Laura did, confusing her about her rights and the validity of her feelings, which triggered her need for advice to begin with. The reason for this reaction from the mothers of NPEs is a narcissistic shame many of them feel for offending cultural or religious dictates, especially if their pregnancies were the result of sexual assaults. What was confusing was why Dr. Laura reacted with such hostility; did the severity of her reaction suggest she was hiding something herself?

Wikipedia suggests that before her mother’s death, Dr. Laura had been estranged from her for 18 to 20 years. If true, it might help explain her unforgivable lashing out at Torri. Could she have been projecting her own issues onto a caller and used them to act out her own frustrations about unresolved personal issues?

I discovered my own NPE story in 2017 and it has played out in both good and bad ways, a fact I have been very forthcoming about in my journey. I utilized my professional knowledge to build a first of its kind curriculum especially for the DNA discovery population, but as a therapist I didn’t need the personal experience with it in order to access my compassion and ethical training. I use my personal experience to help train other clinicians on how to combine skills to appropriately treat this unique population—an approach I call Parental Identity Discovery™. 

The overwhelming majority of therapists are skilled, ethical, supportive professionals who could never imagine harming a person the way Dr. Laura harmed Torri.

NPEs and adoptees can learn how to make sense of their overwhelming feelings and their grief and discover how to rebuild their identities. They can learn communication skills to work with family dynamics and create a plan of action as their journeys continue. There will be people to support them—new and existing family as well as friends they haven’t met in person but who are there in support groups to listen and lift them up.

If you or someone you know has discovered a surprise DNA, help is available. If your life has changed, please seek help and be assured you are valued. See the sidebar for sources for help in coping with DNA discoveries.Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and licensed professional counselor in California. She sees NPEs in person in her private practice and via teletherapy throughout the state. She also offers virtual coaching for those living outside California, including a virtual support group for NPEs. She cohosts a podcast, Sex, Lies & The Truth, for NPEs and their families so they can feel connected to a larger community and learn about themselves as they go. In her Finding Family blog on Psychology Today, she writes about the unique aspects of being an NPE—what she now calls Parental Identity Discovery,™  the term she uses to title her certificate curriculum.RESOURCES

Adoptees, NPEs, Donor Conceived & Other Genetic Identity Seekers

Adoptees Only: Found/Reunion The Next Chapter

DNA NPE Fellowship 

Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFT

NPE Only: After the Discovery

Right To Know 

Severance MagazineBEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page https://severancemag.comfor more articles about the NPE experience

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
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• 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 athttps://www.facebook.com/groups/402792990448461
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Any surprise can be traumatic, but a DNA surprise raises one of life’s most fundamental questions: Who am I? Your very identity is made up of your memories, your shared stories, and experiences with family and friends. When you find out that something is not true, or not exactly true, it is a major shock to your emotional system.It is easy to tell yourself, “This is no big deal. I should be able to handle this.” But “handling something” is a process. And that process may involve feeling upset and expressing various emotions. Like any trauma, the emotional reactions can come in waves and when you least expect them. You and your family members both may minimize your experience by emphasizing you had good parents, you shouldn’t be upset, or even that you’re being selfish by looking for answers. I tell people that I don’t know what qualifies as an overreaction to news that changes your understanding of your world. Your reaction is not a sign of emotional weakness—it’s a sign that you are in touch with reality enough that you react when reality changes. I suggest you accept your reactions, your feelings, as being there. Accept that they are what you need to feel in the moment. There’s no need to try changing them—that doesn’t work anyway. You need to work through the process.There can be depression, with low mood and irritability, loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, poor concentration, and an inability to focus on work. There might be anger. Part of what makes this kind of trauma so difficult is that you might think it’s not really that big of a deal—others have it worse. And it’s true, others have it worse. But trauma is not a contest—you can have all the emotions anyway. You are not weak.Yes. Sometimes you just can’t process everything at once and you will feel disoriented and unable to concentrate. The news can be so big that it’s like your circuits are overloaded.Yes. Research has shown for many years that stressful life events (both good stress and bad stress) have an impact on our health. It is important that you allow yourself to experience your emotions and not waste energy on fighting them. You might look at the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory.It’s important to accept our reactions as normal. The more we fight them or argue that there’s something wrong with us for reacting, the longer it will take to move forward, the longer it will take to heal. Journaling can be immensely helpful. Write down what you’re feeling, even if it seems extreme or overly dramatic. It isn’t. It’s the reality of what you are feeling in the moment. Meditation can be helpful, but if you can’t slow your mind down, that’s ok. Notice and accept that your mind is racing. If you’re able to exercise, that’s a great way of dealing with stress and clearing the mind. Reaching out to understanding friends is important. And there’s a large community online going through similar things. (Use the Resources tab on the Severance home page to find some of these.)I encourage people to move slowly in the process—think of yourself as writing a novel. What information do you need to make the characters more interesting, to make them sympathetic. Is there a way that you can make their behavior understandable? For example, a teenage girl that became pregnant in the past may not have been allowed much say in whether or not to keep the baby or put the child up for adoption. Going back even further in time, a single female may not have had the opportunity to earn a living wage and therefore couldn’t provide for a child. A father may not have known of a child’s existence. There are many more examples I can give. On the other hand, what you learn now becomes part of your story and, if you’re someone reading this, you’re likely the kind of person that wants to know your whole story. Being understanding and sympathetic toward others doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to experience your own emotions, though.

The most important thing is to take care of yourself. Ask yourself what you, yourself, need. Try to find a way to meet that need, but keep in mind you can’t control other people.

Therapy can be very helpful at any point in the process. A good therapist helps you reflect on who you are and who you want to be. Ultimately, you are the author of your story, no matter how many plot twists get added to that story. I would consider therapy necessary and would encourage you to seek help if you’re having symptoms of depression or trauma—low mood, irritability, sleep or appetite problems, inability to concentrate, relationship problems.Searching for answers can be all-consuming. We live in an age in which we can binge-watch on Netflix and learn the answer to a mystery on a television show within hours. When it comes to family mysteries, we have search engines, DNA, and genealogy services. There’s a lot we can learn quickly. But definitive answers can take a long time. Others may not understand our obsession—even others affected by the discovery of a family secret may not care like you do. It’s a very personal thing. It’s important to keep in mind that we can’t necessarily find answers quicker by working harder. As an example, I have spent two years searching for my grandfather’s birth parents. I found his likely father fairly quickly, but could find nothing on his mother. I gave up for a while and came back to the search and found I had earlier ruled out a group of people for some reason. This group has turned out to offer my best leads in my search. It’s important to take care of yourself. Meditate, exercise, sleep, stay in touch with your friends, get out of the house. All of these things will make your search more efficient. Taking care of yourself helps you think more clearly. All of these strategies are part of accepting our humanity, accepting that we don’t control how our bodies and minds react. This includes accepting that other people may be doing their best—we just don’t always know their stories, why they react the way they do. We need to take care of ourselves so we don’t lose ourselves in the process.Keep in mind that what you find in the search will trigger all kinds of emotions. You may find people who share DNA with you, but nothing else. A newfound relative may have no interest in a relationship, or on the other hand, may want more of your time and energy than you want to give. It’s a process, and you may not know what you want until you start finding answers to the secret, until you find these relatives. Don’t assume they’ll want the same things you do. Also, it’s important to keep asking yourself: “What is it I really want? What am I searching for? What values of mine will this search, and its possible answers, satisfy?”We are all ultimately seeking connection and belonging. Unfortunately, life is not clean. We don’t all fit into perfectly designed family trees. It’s estimated that 7% of Americans are adopted or in foster care. Add on top of that all the individuals who grew up in a “nuclear” family but were conceived outside of the marriage or through donors. That’s a huge percentage of us. It is important that we work to remove the stigma of this. We didn’t choose how we came into this world. It’s important that we not stigmatize ourselves. We are just as legitimate as anyone else.

We also need to keep in mind that we may be rejected by newfound biological parents. We need to keep our fantasies in check. These biological relatives are human beings, with strengths and with flaws, just like everyone else. Other people may not understand our need to search and they may have no desire to know the answers themselves. We need to accept that.

Greg Markway, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in St. Louis, Missouri. He became interested in genetic genealogy while searching for the roots of his grandfather, who came to Missouri from New York on an orphan train in 1896.

Read more about shock and trauma related to DNA surprises here and here, and return to the home page for more articles about genetic identity.

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Learning about family secrets that fracture your sense of identity can be profoundly shocking and destabilizing. If you’ve experienced a powerful emotional blow that’s left you feeling bruised, battered, and off balance, though you may not recognize it as such, what you’re experiencing is trauma. If you’ve been told or you suspect you’re overacting, be assured that feeling traumatized is a completely normal response to an exceedingly distressing event. While many around you may not understand or take seriously your feelings and expect you to brush it off and get over it—trauma isn’t something you just get over. It needs to be acknowledged and addressed, and it may be useful or even necessary to seek professional help that will allow you to move forward with less distress and integrate the experience into your life

Jamie Marich, PhD, a clinical trauma specialist, talks with us about recognizing trauma, understanding its consequences, and helpful strategies. She’s founder of the Institute for Creative Mindfulness and the author of seven books on trauma healing and recovery. Among the approaches she uses with clients are EMDR therapy, mindfulness, yoga, dance, reiki, and expressive arts. She’s led trauma recovery retreats at the Kripalu School for Yoga & Health in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains and at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Her most recent book, published this year, is Process Not Perfection: Expressive Arts Solutions for Trauma Recovery.Trauma comes from the Greek word meaning wound, and in its most general sense, trauma means any unhealed wound. These wounds can be physical, emotional, social, sexual, spiritual. So yes, the revelations of these secrets can certainly be wounding to the individual hearing them, and if they do not receive the proper support and/or treatment to heal the wound, the impact can fester. We are increasingly understanding that trauma is a subjective experience, so what may be traumatic or a shock on the system to one person may be rather innocuous to another person. So it’s important that we validate the individual’s experience of the wounding and address accordingly.I don’t use the term shock as much as I use the word trauma, and yes, it’s plentiful. Just take a look at the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) which is popular for the most cursory example of this.The symptoms can manifest differently for different folks. You may notice that your emotions are clouding your intellectual abilities, which can make it hard to focus at work, school, in life. You may notice extreme displays of emotion, like tears you feel will never stop, or, on the other end of the spectrum, a sense of emotional shutdown and numbness. Sometimes people go into high alert over what else could happen and may have a hard time falling asleep. Some people may sleep excessively. Dissociation or feeling checked out or otherwise “zoned out” can also be a part of this phenomenon.Fun fact: Rollo May published this and is generally credited with the teaching, not Viktor Frankl, although Frankl was May’s friend and contemporary. Most people recognize the Viktor Frankl name and connection more.

Anything that helps you to expand that space is always a good idea. For many it’s taking one breath or several, for others it’s taking a walk, exercising, making art, or engaging in other practices that help them be more mindful and manage stress. Mindfulness practice expands the space of which May and Frankl speak. Embodied practices can also do the same thing for people. Sometimes, though, the impact of unhealed trauma/stress can make it difficult to even access the practices, which is where professional therapeutic interventions may be needed and can help.Yes is the short answer. As long as the practices are taught in a way that meets the person where they are and do not become one more way that the person beats up on themselves. For instance, some perfectionists feel they have to do meditation “perfectly” and this defeats the purpose.Attending to the wounding (trauma) that can result from shocking family information is similar to what is needed after any physical injury—care. The best care is holistic—attending to all aspects of self. In addition to some of the emotional first aid that we discussed previously, getting enough rest, drinking enough water, eating well, and steering clear of numbing activities like drinking alcohol/doing drugs is advised. While these numbing strategies may help short-term, they can complicate the healing process in the long run.It totally depends on the person and the nature of the relationships they have with friends and family. If friends are healthy and supportive, absolutely. If the family members involved in the family secrets do not feel safe, at least in the short term, it may be appropriate to take some time and space away from them while the person heals themselves—even if their intention long-term is to heal the family relationship.In addition to what I said earlier, I always encourage people with a strong network of friends to consider what the term ‘family of choice” means to them. For many people with toxic or strained family relationships, it may become more helpful to lean in to those friends who have more adaptive/healthy qualities that they wish of their family.Professional therapy with someone who understands trauma and the dynamics of development, betrayal, and family dynamics could be extremely helpful. Don’t be afraid to ask questions of potential providers beforehand. Some people also find learning something new, even if this is taking up new hobby, as a constructive way to be open to new things—which can be a useful adjunct in the healing process.

When you have tried everything that seems healthy outside of therapy to cope and move through the information and you are still feeling stuck in life; although as a therapist I feel that professional therapy can always be appropriate during times of adjustment and transition. [Editor’s note: Not all practitioners are equipped to help clients with trauma, and not all therapeutic approaches are effective. As Marich advised, look for a therapist with extensive training and specialization in trauma.]Learn more about Marich, her books, online courses, and resources at her website and at The Institute for Creative Mindfulness. And look for videos on her online resources portal that teach content in an accessible style. 

Look  for more articles about aspects of trauma and various therapeutic approaches upcoming in Severance.

By B.K. JacksonIn our society, we engage in age-old rituals that help share the burden of grief after a loss. We hold the hands of the bereaved through services and at gravesites. We send cards and flowers, make donations, and create meal chains. We stand in solidarity and share stories about the lost loved ones to buoy the spirits of those who mourn them. We offer practical and spiritual succor, shoulders to cry on, and a promise of being there for the bereaved when they need us.

Only sometimes we don’t. For losses that fall outside of society’s norms—particularly those linked with something perceived as shameful or socially embarrassing—the rituals are often absent or ignored, the grievers left alone to tend to their wounds, without empathy and support.

Kenneth Doka, PhD, formerly a professor of gerontology and now senior consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America and author of numerous books about grief, coined the term disenfranchised grief in 1987 to describe the sorrow associated with these situations that stand outside society’s norms of “legitimate” loss. It refers to the emotional aftermath of losses that are not acknowledged or validated by others—a solitary state in which individuals are unable to mourn openly and may suffer in silence. They believe—or are made to feel—that they’re not entitled to the ministrations typically provided when bereavement is socially sanctioned, that their losses aren’t worthy of grief, or that their feelings are inappropriate.

Although there are many contexts in which disenfranchised grief may arise, among the most common, as conceptualized by Doka, are when others:

• don’t recognize relationships (such as those involving ex-spouses, same sex partners, or individuals who’d had an extramarital affair);
• don’t acknowledge the loss as being significant (a divorce; the death of an adult sibling; the loss of a child in a stillbirth or a fetus in an abortion or a miscarriage; or the loss of a pet, a job, or one’s health); and
• view the loss as being socially stigmatized (such as suicide, AIDs, substance abuse).

In each case, the grievers have lost a significant relationship as well as the comfort of shared or public mourning and the social embrace that facilitates grieving and helps shoulder the pain.

Grief may be disenfranchised, Doka explains, not only by society but by oneself. People who are suffering may keep their feelings inside, self-disenfranchising themselves. “Sometimes people don’t feel they have a right to grieve. There may be shame or they don’t understand the legitimacy of their own losses,” he says.We recently spoke to Doka about how disenfranchised grief may be experienced by individuals with losses related to genetic identity, family separation, and family secrets. You may be vulnerable to it, he says, if, for example, you:

• find out that a family member is not genetically connected to you;
• discover the identity of your biological father only to find that he’s deceased;
• search for and find biological family members but are rejected by them; or
• you learn of the death of a biological family member who refused contact with you

In each of these cases, Doka observes, you’ve lost a relationship. “It may not be a relationship that you ever had, but you may have lost a fantasy of a relationship you wanted to have.” And when kinship roles are not recognized, he adds, the right to grieve is also not recognized.

Disenfranchised grief also comes into play when secrets prevent open communication, observes Kathleen R. Gilbert, PhD, professor emerita in the department of applied health science, Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington and an Association for Death Education and Counseling Fellow in Thanatology (FT). Furthermore, adoptees, donor conceived people, and NPEs (not parent expected or nonparental event) individuals often have fantasies of reconciliation and a desire to understand their origin stories. When they search and find that their biological parents have died or they contact living relatives who are nonresponsive, there’s a lot of grief involved. “A piece of what they need to know is not available,” says Doka. “We like to create stories about ourselves. We want to know where we were born and who raised us, but in some situations the narrative is incomplete.” When you don’t know how you began, he adds, it influences your sense of self, and there’s grief over the loss of identity.

For all these types of losses, it’s a good bet that few will stand with you in any rituals of mourning, because in many cases there are no such rituals. And when there are, such as the funeral of a birthparent with whom you had not reunited—the man who, while married, had an affair with your mother and later ignored your attempt to connect—you may be excluded or made to feel unwelcome. And if the birthfather you never had the opportunity to meet died, it’s not likely friends will acknowledge that you have cause to mourn, let alone send Hallmark cards or drop by with casseroles. It’s even less likely if you’ve only just discovered—at the same time you learned who your birthfather was—that he died some time ago. And there are no rituals for adoptees who mourn the parents they’ve never known and may never know or for donor conceived individuals who can’t locate their donors. In all of these situations, others may never understand your sadness and your sense of loss over someone you didn’t know and something that happened long ago.

You—and those around you—may not believe you have the need or right to grieve for a relationship that never existed, but the loss of the idea, the wish, the hope for a relationship is as painful as the actual loss of a loved one.

“There are losses here,” Gilbert agrees. If you were adopted, for example, she says, “You didn’t have just one loss, you had layer upon layer of losses.” About this grief you experience over not having known your biological family, she says, “You own it, you know it, you feel it. And then you have this social surround—all the people around you looking at you and saying, ‘I know it’s hard, but you should be grateful for everything you have, for having the knowledge you have.” While there’s no reason for adopted individuals to feel gratitude, it’s not only expected but is also believed to erase any pain associated with the adoption experience. “And the thing is,” says Gilbert, “you may be very grateful, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t have a loss.”

Adoptees, furthermore, “are often told how lucky they were to get adopted, so they may feel disenfranchised from being able to mourn the loss of their birth/first parents,” adds JaeRan Kim, PhD, MSW, assistant professor of  social work at the University of Washington Tacoma. And the feelings of donor conceived individuals may similarly be disrespected by those who suggest they not only should not feel loss but should consider themselves fortunate merely to exist.

What does it matter if others don’t understand? Social acknowledgement of losses is important, Gilbert says, because as social animals we require it. “It may be hard-wired into us to have those who support and care for us confirm the reality we’re trying to construct.” We don’t make sense of things ourselves, she explains. “We make sense in a social context. We play off of other people. We think about things and look at other people and see how they react to us.”People experiencing disenfranchised grief, says Doka, “often have manifestations of grief, anger, and guilt and they don’t identify it as such.” To cope with disenfranchised grief, it’s necessary to recognize it. Acknowledge your feelings and understand that they are legitimate—you own them and are entitled to them—and identify them as grief. After this first step, there are no silver bullets, Doka observes, but there are a few self-help strategies that can be useful.When helping clients with disenfranchised grief or other issues, Doka often asks them to examine their own coping abilities. He asks, “’How have you coped with losses in the past? What’s been helpful and what has not?’ My message would be to analyze your historic strength and utilize it, and that’s going to be different for everyone.”Rituals of mourning play a role in helping individuals mourn and integrate the experience of loss into their lives. If you’ve been excluded or prohibited from participating in these rituals and have not been supported in your sorrow, it might be helpful to create what Doka calls a therapeutic ritual. Even If the loss occurred in the past but there wasn’t an opportunity to mourn, it’s not too late to create these healing rituals.

There are several questions you’ll need to ask yourself when devising a ritual, Doka says. First, what is the message associated with the ritual you want to create? For someone who was rejected by a birth parent, “It may be a message of affirmation, just saying, ‘I don’t know why you didn’t have contact with me but thank you for giving me a piece of life, being part of my life.’ Or it may be a ritual of continuity, in which you say, ‘I acknowledge that I’m part of you even if you didn’t acknowledge me.’ It might be a ritual of transition in which you say, “I don’t need your approval or recognition any more. I am who I am and that’s fine.’”

The second question is, what are the elements of your healing ritual—what form will it take? And last, ask yourself whether anyone needs to witness the ritual, and if so, who? In some cases, Doka says, you may want to involve your siblings or your significant other, and in others you might want a broader audience of friends and family.

According to Gilbert, these don’t have to be “rituals with a capital R, but just acts that take you outside of the mundane, give greater meaning, and help you deal with something.” It might be as simple as lighting a candle and saying the name of the person you lost,” she says. It can be done privately or in a group, but it has to be something that’s meaningful to you. “It acknowledges that it was a loss, it was real, there’s emotion associated with it, and that that’s okay.” Gilbert remembers when she assigned a class of students to create loss rituals. One student, she recalls, wrote a letter to her father, who had died when she was very young. She went with a friend to a fire pit and burned the sealed letter. As the smoke was rising into the sky she said, “Dad I’m sending this letter to you and it’s coming to you on this smoke.” Another student cooked and enjoyed the favorite meal of someone associated with a loss. It doesn’t necessarily require an audience, says Gilbert, just a sincere intention to create a meaningful acknowledgement.

After you develop and carry out your ritual, it’s helpful, Doka says, to find someone, perhaps a therapist, “who can help you unpack the experience.” Together, he suggests, you can explore how the ritual worked for you and whether it met your needs or whether you need to do something else.Experiencing grief isn’t reason alone to need help. You needn’t seek help because others think you need to “get over it.” People can be uncomfortable with others’ grief, even more so when it’s disenfranchised. When they want you to get over it, what they’re really saying, Gilbert observes, is “‘Stop behaving in a way that makes me uncomfortable. I want you to go back to what I see as normal.’ But your normal is never going to be that normal anymore because you’ve had this loss and its changed reality.”

While others may want to rush you through your grief, you don’t have to operate on any timeline but your own. “Grieving is normal and can take a long time,” says Gilbert. “It can be like a river you fall into. Sometimes you’re drowning and sometimes you’re paddling along with it. It’s not that bad, the water is warm, and you can almost touch the bottom. And that’s okay.”

“Grief is its own being,” agrees Beth Kane, LCSW, a private practitioner in New Jersey. “It’s not something you get over. It’s something you learn to live with, a companion you learn to integrate into your life.” It changes you, she says, “but you learn not to let it define you. That takes whatever time it takes as long as you don’t get swallowed by it.” Healing, she says, no matter what kind, is never a linear process. “It’s a slip and slide, up and down, back and forth, two steps up and one back. We get there eventually, but processing and integration don’t work like a stepladder.” And with grief, “the only two fixed points are the shock and the resolution.” Resolution, she adds, doesn’t mean the pain goes away. It just means we have integrated it and it isn’t as acute as often.”

We’re complex creatures, Gilbert says. “We can’t be happy all the time. That’s okay. That’s where empathy and caring about other people comes from.” According to Kim, “Individuals who experience disenfranchised grief need to be supported by those who acknowledge the great emotional and psychological costs of trying to be ‘strong,’ rather than allowing themselves to mourn.”Disenfranchised grief, because its burden isn’t relieved through the support of others, may be internalized, resulting in what psychologists call complicated grief, or grief that has no resolution. “When we are invalidated, we often suppress our real feelings for fear of being judged, says Kane. This interference with the bereavement process, and disenfranchised grief, she says, can lead to complicated grief, which can cause symptoms such as difficulty with normal daily activities, a sense of purposelessness, longing for the object of the loss, and intense focus on the loss. It also can instigate or exacerbate mental health issues including anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and even PTSD. Worse, those who experience disenfranchised grief may be less likely than others to seek help for fear of being further stigmatized. But a therapist can help individuals get past these fears and dispel the attitudes that prevent them from working through their grief. Kane works with her clients to avoid labeling feelings and emotions as “good, bad, positive, or negative.” “It’s through awareness, acceptance, and support that we can work through them.”

What makes grief complicated and problematic, Gilbert says, is if you can’t function. “If you can’t carry out your day to day functions, if you socially isolate yourself, if you’re using drugs or alcohol to deaden your interaction with the world, if you feel ending your own life would be the best way to deal with what’s ongoing in your life at this time, that’s significant and a point at which you need to be working with someone who’s professional to help you find your way back.”You may find all the care and empathy you need by participating in a support group run by a trained professional. But when grieving is more complicated, professional help may be necessary. It’s important, Gilbert says, to seek help from an expert. Many people who consider themselves grief therapists may not be adequately trained, she says, and may believe helping individuals cope with grief is a matter of educating them about the five stages of grief—a largely discredited concept that’s not research-based and was never intended to apply to loss of loved ones. Look for a therapist, she advises, who’s certified in thanatology (the scientific study of death and practices associated with it) and credentialed by the Association for Death Education and Counseling.

“When people are grieving, they often feel that they’re crazy,” says Gilbert. “It’s helpful to have someone who can tell you that your crazy is normal.” When you think about it, she adds, “If something horrific happens and it knocks you off kilter, if you feel normal you’re kind of crazy.”

By B.K. JacksonMost of the losses we experience in life require little explanation and are universally recognized and understood, such as the death of our loved ones. They were among us — and then they weren’t. We may have witnessed their transition from life to death, from breathing to not breathing. We may have seen their bodies lowered to the ground and have attended ceremonies acknowledging the gravity of our losses. We miss the dead, mourn for them, and are comforted by others who understand and may grieve with us. Over time, the sadness over their absence, while it may never evaporate, dissipates.

But some loss is less clear, even more distressing, and may last forever. Ambiguous loss is the traumatic loss of a person, a relationship, or even the desire for a relationship, for which there is no possibility of closure. The term may also pertain to a problem that can’t be solved or a situation that has no resolution. Pauline Boss, a family therapist, educator, and researcher who coined the term ambiguous loss in the late 1970s, describes it as a type “that has no validation and no body to bury. It’s a situation that leads to disenfranchised grief — grief that society doesn’t know what to do with or discriminates against.”

There are two types of ambiguous loss. One arises in situations where there is a physical presence but a lack of psychological presence, for example, when a loved one has dementia or is emotionally unavailable. The other type, conversely, emerges when there’s a psychological presence but a physical absence, such as when a death is presumed to have occurred but there’s no body, as was the case for many of the individuals with whom Boss has worked — loved ones of pilots missing in action in Vietnam, victims of 9/11 who were never identified, and individuals presumed dead after the catastrophic tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. The ambiguity is caused by a lack of information about the loss.

It’s this second type of ambiguous loss that’s commonly experienced by individuals who’ve been stripped of information about their genetic identities, whether as a result of adoption, donor conception, or other circumstances of misattributed parentage.

According to JaeRan Kim, PhD, MSW, assistant professor of social work at the University of Washington Tacoma, also falling under the umbrella of ambiguous losses are “any circumstances where what you think you understand about a relationship turns out to be unclear, misleading, or unknown.”  Adoptees who find out later in life they were adopted, for example, “often feel a sense of betrayal by their parents and may question everything about their relationship,” she says. “They may also experience the loss and uncertainty about their birth/first parents — who they were and what became of them.” The same is true for NPEs (non-parental events or not parent expected) and donor conceived people. Ambiguous loss, Kim adds, is also about the inability or failure of others to acknowledge that there’s sadness or grief over the loss.

More important to consider for adoptees, says Kim, “is whether they have specific information about the adoption circumstances, the reasons for their relinquishment, and the knowledge that their birth/first families are okay, and if there’s been some sort of sense of peace about that loss. It’s also necessary to consider if the adoptive parents were open about including the birth/first parents and families in their lives, even if only in symbolic ways.” Ambiguous loss, she says, “is more difficult to manage if adoptees feel it is not safe to voice their thoughts and feelings about wanting to know more about the circumstances that led to their adoptions and if they are shamed or shut down if they question or mourn the loss of their birthparents.”

For adoptees and NPEs, the lack of information about their origins creates ambiguity when they can’t identify a birth parent, can’t locate a biological family member they have identified, or learn that a biological family member they’ve never met has died, shattering the dream that one day they will connect. In each case, there’s a loss of the promise of a relationship that doesn’t yet — and may never — exist. It’s heartbreaking in these cases of lack of information about genetic identity, Boss says, because there are multiple layers of loss and ambiguity. Individuals may feel shattered by the death of birthparents they’ve never met, feelings further complicated when they’ve been rejected or shamed by their birth or social families.

These losses, Boss writes in her 2000 book, “Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief,” are “always stressful and often tormenting.” They’re the most devastating and traumatizing of losses because sufferers must live with ambiguity that might stay with them throughout their lives. She illustrates her point, quoting from an old English nursery rhyme, with an example certain to resonate with anyone who grieves an absent parent:

As I was walking up the stair,

I met a man who was not there

He was not there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away

While some people have higher thresholds of tolerance than others for ambiguity, most people find it deeply disturbing and stress-inducing. It’s difficult to move forward when you don’t know for certain if the loss is permanent and when there are no rituals for mourning the loss. Those who’ve never experienced an ambiguous loss may not understand the depth of the pain or the level of stress it arouses.

Boss observes that among the many potential consequences people suffering ambiguous losses may experience are:

• a freezing of the grief process
• a sense of being stuck in limbo
• an inability to make sense of the situation or to make decisions
• depression, anxiety, and substance abuse
• feeling immobilized
• exhaustion, hopelessness, and helplessness.

These symptoms are similar to those of complicated grief but are the result of ambiguity, not death.If you’re struggling with an ambiguous loss, you may consider seeing a therapist. But, according to Boss, that’s not always helpful. Therapists, she explains — particularly psychologists and psychiatrists — often focus on inner psychiatric issues, but in the case of ambiguous loss, there are none. She characterizes ambiguous loss as a stress-based problem and uses a non-medical approach to distinguish it from a pathology. “It’s not like you have a mental illness such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. You don’t have to adjust to a disease that’s inside you,” she explains. “The pathology lies in the situation, not in your psyche. If you experience distress over an ambiguous loss, there’s nothing wrong with you, but there is something wrong with what happened to you,” she says. “The problem is that you’ve been dealt a card that was not your fault, and now you have to try to figure it out, but there may be no answer.”

That’s not to say that a therapist isn’t ever necessary or can’t help. If you need a high degree of control in your life, you might spend all your time digging and digging for answers and not living your life, Boss says. A therapist can help you change course, but you must choose one who understands that the problem lies in the context of the situation, not in the inner workings of your mind. Perhaps surprisingly, grief therapists might not be the best choice, because they’re trained to deal with loved ones who are dead — with the certainty of death. But you may not have that. Further, unless they’ve specifically been trained in this particular kind of loss, Boss says, therapists may try to put a timeline on your grief, but with ambiguous loss, “there is no timeline. It’s a forever thing.” Look for a family therapist or a social worker, she advises, because they’re trained to look systemically at your environment, at the context, and at what happened to you.

And don’t look for comfort in knowledge of the five stages of grief, Boss adds. It’s a concept that’s been widely misunderstood, taken out of its original context, and generally accepted even though there’s no evidence that it has merit. Society, and especially American society, loves the idea of these stages, she says, because they promise a way to get over it, to gain what she calls the myth of closure. “It’s an ugly word, closure. I don’t believe in it. It doesn’t exist, and why should it? It’s not needed.” The idea that we need to get over loss and move on is cruel, she says, because we now know that we need to learn to live with grief, even when there is a death.If your loss remains in your thoughts, that’s understandable, but it shouldn’t control your mind, Boss says, because then it becomes an obsession.

In her 2006 book, “Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss,” she lays out guidelines therapists can use to help individuals suffering ambiguous losses. But there are a number of things you can do on your own. Not that there’s a simple fix. Or even any fix. The solution is a matter of increasing your tolerance for, and comfort with, unanswered questions.

Once you acknowledge the losses and recognize they’re ambiguous, there are two key goals: learning to accept the ambiguities instead of struggling against them, and mitigating the stress the losses cause. The challenge is not to get over ambiguous loss, because that’s impossible, but to get used to it, to increase your resilience and learn to be able to live without knowing and move forward despite an ongoing mystery.

Accepting ambiguity, Boss admits, isn’t easy. “We live in a society that’s mastery-oriented. We want the answers, otherwise it’s as if we’ve failed. We have to fight that societal pressure for certainty, for answer to all questions.” She likes the idea that we’re a can-do society, but there are some questions that have no answers and may never have answers.

The way forward isn’t controlling and overcoming, it’s surrendering. “It’s sort of a mind game to live with unanswered questions, but it helps to lower the stress or anxiety associated with the ambiguity,” Boss says. One method she recommends is meditation. “It’s always good, but it’s especially helpful when you’re faced with questions you can’t find an answer to. It helps you lower the need to control and find answers.” Searching for certainty has a lot to do with a need for control and mastery, which often serves us well, but when there are no answers it’s self-defeating. “I think we have to consciously, mindfully, say, ‘I will not be able to find the answer to this,’ or maybe, ‘I found the answer and I don’t like it, but I have to be able to make that less important so it doesn’t control my life.’”

Part of the solution is deciding to accept the ambiguity using both/and thinking, which Boss describes as holding two opposing ideas in one’s mind at the same time. It’s a way of acknowledging that there may be more than one way to look at something, and though the views may be contradictory, they are both true. A woman who was abandoned by her mother, for example, might say, “I both will never know my mother, and I have loving mother figures in my life.” Another example, Boss says, is, “I am both sad about my lost hopes and dreams, and happy about some new ones.”

In large part it’s a matter of “learning to live in the now, of acknowledging and recognizing for yourself that there’s a part of your past that you’ll never claim, and although that’s not okay, it’s something you can live with,” according to Kathleen R. Gilbert, PhD, professor emerita in the Department of Applied Health Science, Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington and an Association for Death Education and Counseling Fellow in Thanatology (FT).

If you’re in the grip of an ambiguous loss, these coping strategies may sound either far too difficult or much too simplistic, too paradoxical. It might be hard to hear that the solution to ambiguity is acceptance. But, as the experts indicate, there’s no way to create certainty in an inherently and invariably ambiguous situation. Continuing to obsessively question and wonder about things that can’t be known, says Gilbert, “trying and trying to find answers when there are none is like a fool’s errand.” It’s frustrating to hear, she admits, that the answer may be “mindfulness, centering, accepting, and giving yourself permission to be okay in this present moment with where you are and what you know.”  It may make you want to throw up your hands and scream, she says, but the only way to ease the suffering is to learn to react differently.

It’s also helpful to find creative outlets, both to reduce stress and help make meaning when meaning is difficult to grasp. Boss recommends arts-related activities and storytelling. Journaling and creative writing are extremely helpful, she says, as are painting and physical activity. “Movement is exceedingly important to work out stress. It’s a Western idea that you need to sit in a chair and face a therapist. It’s not always the best thing to do.” Sitting in a therapist’s office, for people who have been traumatized, may be less useful than if the therapist would go for a walk with them. You can explore these activities on your own or look for an arts, music, or movement therapist to guide you.

These activities, says Gilbert, may be among the ways you can make meaning when there seems to be no meaning, to make sense when things don’t seem to make sense. It’s about coming up with an explanation you can live with. “It’s not about a broader, deeper, more philosophical meaning — that’s what a lot of people think when they use the term meaning.” Instead, she says, “You’re looking for something that can help calm you and let you live your life in the world with the information you have. The question is, how can you reframe everything in a way that makes sense to you and that lets you go forward?”

Talking to other people who’ve had a similar experience is helpful as well, says Gilbert, “not necessarily to look for advice or direction, but just to toss around ideas and hear what other people have done, how they’ve made sense of things, and how they’ve functioned.” And in return, being able to help others is another way of making meaning.

Grieving, Gilbert concludes, “is really an external expression of an internal process of trying to get to be where you can live with the reality you’re in now.” When you boil it down, Boss agrees, adapting to ambiguous losses comes down to this: “We can’t always have what we want, and we can learn to live with that. Hopefully you get 90% of what you want, and I think we can adjust our coping style and build our resistance to live with even that 10% we can’t have.”

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.