On Saturday November 4, 2023, The Benevolent Society, Post Adoption Resource Centre presents the Adoption Literary Festival to showcase a range of adoption stories in an Australian context.

The presentations will amplify the voices of lived experience and highlight the lifelong nature and complexities of adoption.

The first Adoption Literary Festival took place in the United States in February 2022. This will be the first of its kind in Australia.

The online event takes place from 9:30 am to 2:30 pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (15 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.) Click here for more information and to book free tickets.

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Update: The study has closed and is no longer actively recruiting participants.

Two women in the DNA surprise community are offering a healing retreat for people who have experienced DNA surprises, May 4-7 in Tucson, Arizona. The inaugural DNA Surprise Retreat was created to increase community and support for people who have uncovered shocking information about their families after taking a DNA test.

Co-founder Alexis Hourselt, host of the DNA Surprises podcast, experienced her DNA surprise (also known as an NPE or non-paternal event) in 2021 when she learned that the man who raised her is not her biological father. In addition, she discovered that she is white and African American instead of white and Mexican, as she’d once believed.

“My DNA surprise caused a complete upheaval of my identity,” says Hourselt. “I was navigating these new family relationships, feeling betrayed by my raised parents, and discovering an entirely new part of myself. It was very isolating, but this is actually quite common.”

DNA surprise facts

• It’s estimated that 1 in 20 people have misattributed parentage.
• 82 percent of DNA test takers learned the identity of at least one genetic relative.
• It’s estimated that 3 percent of adoptees do not know they are adopted.

After Hourselt met co-founder Debbie Olson, owner of DNA Surprise Network, at a retreat for adoptees, donor-conceived people, and NPEs, they decided to create a retreat specifically for people who have experienced DNA surprises.

“The DNA surprise experience is so unique,” says Olson, who experienced her DNA surprise in 2019 when she learned that her estranged father was alive after being told he died. “We’re excited about increasing opportunities for people who have been through these shocking events to come together and heal.”

About DNA Surprise Retreat

The DNA Surprise Retreat is for adults experiencing the grief and shock that can only be felt following a DNA discovery. The four-day event offers expert-led sessions and community for NPEs, conceived people, and adoptees who have experienced a DNA surprise. The retreat will feature six sessions led by experts on trauma, grief, self-compassion, and more. All meals are included. Attendees can opt to stay on site at a local retreat center or register for the retreat-only portion.

Hourselt and Olson hope to continue offering DNA surprise retreats in the future. “No one imagines that their world will be turned upside down when they send off a DNA test kit,” said Hourselt. “People need to know that they aren’t alone and there is help.”

Learn more at dnasurpriseretreat.com.

HBO is developing a new documentary about unexpected DNA discoveries and is seeking participants willing to share their stories.

The film is to be produced by an award-winning team and directed by an Emmy-nominated filmmaker who is herself an NPE.

Described as “a deeply humane exploration of the seismic shocks that home genetic testing has brought to so many families, and how people are navigating these emotionally-charged journeys of self-discovery,” the project intends to “give voice to people whose lives have been upended by these long hidden truths, and to de-stigmatize some of the shame associated with them.”

If you are interested in participating or finding out more, please visit their website.

By Shane Bouel

Estranged Australian adoptee in reunion

The Faces of NPE Project was created by Carmen Dixon to help NPEs (not parent expected) know they’re not alone and to bring awareness to individuals outside the community. While reflecting on her own NPE journey, she remembered that it took time at first to find information and support. She did ultimately find many support communities and great resources, each with something different to offer. Now, she’s brought something new into the mix—The Faces of NPE Project.

The idea, she says, is simple. The project amasses images of the faces of NPEs. “Every year, we’ll keep adding new submissions to the existing project, and as the number of faces get added, eventually viewers won’t see specific individual portraits but just a sea of faces—and that’s the point, to emphasize how many NPEs exist worldwide.” The images, Dixon says, will be released yearly in June through social media as a public shareable tool that can be used to help generate awareness.

If you would like to be a part of this project, send your photo submission to facesofnpeproject@outlook.com.

Photos submitted between June 24, 2022 and May 14, 2023 will appear in 2023. Find the project on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

matthew charles is a poet, podcast host, and educator. We talk to him about the experience of being a transracial adoptee (TRA), his emergence as a poet and activist, and the importance of self-expression.

In your bio, you use the phrase “racially marooned.” Can you talk about what that choice of words means to you and how it describes the experience of being a transracial adoptee?

The popular term I’ve heard other transracial adoptees use is “racially isolated” but I coined “racially marooned” because I feel it more viscerally evokes a sense of void in regard to lack of racial mirrors. I have a poem I wrote called “Closed Transracial Adoption is | God’s Gift” where I write, “i’m the first landmass that drifted from Pangea / you don’t understand how alone i feel.”

You’ve written that as a child you experienced life as if a veil covered your eyes. What did you mean by that and what happened to cause the veil to drop?

As a transracial adoptee whose body was raised racially marooned, I was acculturated into whiteness, made to believe that there were my kin, and my allegiances. Yet I was also rejected daily by whiteness through micro and macro aggressions. Realizing that even though my body was literally purchased by whiteness I had no purchase in whiteness was an apocalypse, of sorts. It freed me to practice Sankofa—a Ghanaian symbol that means, “to retrieve.” I had to retrieve the Black essence of who I am in order to reorient myself in the world—not as a(n adopted) child of whiteness but as a doubly displaced African.

Hip-Hop was formative for you as an adolescent and you were a performer. What happened that caused you to shift to poetry?

I’d always practiced writing Haikus to sharpen my ability to say a lot with not many words, so in some senses I was already interdisciplinary. However, at 17 when I was recording music in Saint Louis I lost my voice. I’d end up not able to speak for three years. This vocal disability still affects me to this day. It was in that purgatory that I more consciously altered my craft to poetry because I was afraid I’d never be able to perform or tour again.

When you began to express yourself—first in Hip-Hop and later in poetry—did you immediately take transracial adoption as your subject, or did that happen later?

No, I didn’t use rap to talk about myself. I used rap to project a false image. One of the reasons I shifted to poetry was because how I engaged with the genre of Rap felt constricting. I’d felt like I couldn’t be vulnerable. Themes of adoption began appearing in my work as early as 2018 but I didn’t set out to create a body of work with adoption as the central theme until my newest and as of yet unpublished book of poetry, meet me in the clearing.

Did you ever study formally or was Hip-Hop all the education you needed?

I taught myself all of the forms of Creativity that I practice—poetry, rap, essay, memoir.

Is poetry as much a means of survival as an artistic expression?

I wouldn’t be alive today if I didn’t have my art practice. As i write in “To Pimp An Adopted Butterfly,” art is one of my most enduring and longstanding relationships, and it has helped me know myself, and in the process of knowing myself it has saved my life countless times.

Similarly, are poetry and activism synonymous for you? Do you see your artistry as a form of activism?

While I don’t see them as synonymous, my artistry often is laced with activist intent. But the first goal in my creative process is to create something meaningful to me.

In art and in activism, who are your influences? Who are the most important voices among transracial adoptees—poets or otherwise? Who do you listen to? Who do you admire?

When it comes to art I like Lucille Clifton, Hafiz, Jay Electronica, and Joy Oladukun. But I’m not sure who the most important voices are for TRAs. Voices I’ve been most impacted by are Daniel Drennan ElAwar, Rebecca Carroll, and Hannah Jackson Matthews.

Can you tell us about your first book, You Can Not Burn the Sun, and the series of books you have planned?

You Can Not Burn The Sun is a self-published book of poetry I wrote during the 2020 Uprisings about my involvement in the Movement for Black Lives in Madison, Wisconsin. The follow-up is meet me in the clearing, a collection of poems about my life as a transracial adoptee raised racially marooned in Roseburg, Oregon. And book3 is in the works, it’s a memoir. Can’t tell ya the title yet, tho.

You created a podcast, little did u know, to “center the lived experiences, learned and inherited wisdom of transracial adoptees.”  Can you say more about how this came about? Did you start this to fill a void in the conversation about adoption?

In January 2021, my big homie Charles Payne told me I should do a podcast for You Can Not Burn The Sun but I was too insecure to pursue that. That was the genesis of the idea of me podcasting. Around August 2021, I realized what I would love to do is create a media platform for transracial adoptees because I wasn’t hearing the kinds of conversations I wanted to hear via podcast. My hope is to make more accessible conversations of race, class, gender, colony, and displacement from a critical adoptee lens.

So far, you’ve posted three episodes with fascinating guests, but you haven’t had a new episode recently. Do you plan to continue and if so, do you have new guests lined up?

Yeah, the next guest is Dr. Daniel ElAwar. I’m very excited about that. Hoping to get Susan Devan Harness on the show too, but we’ll see.

In your introduction to one of your podcast guests, identity reclamation coach Hannah Jackson Matthews, you say that as a result of the reaction to a poem you shared on her platform you realized you weren’t alone in your experience and that it was the first place you felt seen in ways “I’d never dared to show myself.” Can you talk about why it’s important for adoptees to share their voices and tell their stories?

As Black people in the US, we have historically had to explain our existence as oppressed peoples living in a racist society. After 2020, this is happening less so. Yet, as adoptees, the truth of our lived experiences is not as ingrained in the public imagination because the public’s imagination of us is shaped by adoption industry propaganda. First and foremost, sharing our voices is a liberatory act for ourselves because as adoptees we’re often taught not to be critical of adoption—bucking off this expectation empowers us to be more honest with ourselves about ourselves and the world around us. In sharing our voices, we find resonance among other displaced and dispersed peoples, and in that way, sharing our voice becomes an act of building radical community. It is invaluable to be seen and known by the communities we partake in.matthew charles is the host of little did u know, a podcast that centers the lived experiences—the learned and inherited wisdom—of transracial adoptees. He is also a poet, and his debut poetry collection, You Can Not Burn The Sun (2020), is sold out, so you can’t buy a copy. But you can eagerly anticipate book2. And you should definitely listen to his podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @CantBurnTheSun or Instagram @matthewcharlespoet.

On Venmo @matthewcharlespoet

It was a movement waiting to happen. It only needed a catalyst. Enter Dr. Laura Schlessinger, an unapologetic bully and “infotainment” therapist masquerading as a helping professional. Host of the Dr. Laura program, heard daily on SiriusXM Radio, Schlessinger bills herself as a “talk radio and podcast host offering no-nonsense advice infused with a strong sense of ethics, accountability and personal responsibility.” A Los Angeles marriage and family therapist, she’s no stranger to controversy. For example, there was criticism when it became known that in the early days of her television program her staff posed as guests, and outrage when two decades ago she declared that homosexuality was “a biological error” and made racist comments that temporarily derailed her radio career. Now, her SiriusXM program, with an audience of eight million listeners, doesn’t shy away from the sensationalism that ratchets up the ratings.

Recently, she directed her venom at NPEs (not parent expected.)

In the program’s July 7 Call of the Day, “My Mom Never Told Me the Truth,” Torri, the caller seeking Dr. Laura’s help, stated she wasn’t sure how to continue on in her relationship with her mother after recently learning her dad wasn’t her biological father. Schlessinger asked if the man who raised her was nice. After Torri responded that he was, Schlessinger launched into an assumption-filled toxic diatribe. She berated Torri, asking “What in the hell is wrong with you?” When Torri tried to explain she was upset by her mother’s lying, Schlessinger responded by saying, “So what? So what? Who gives a shit?” She continued to defend Torri’s mother while dismissing and disparaging the vulnerable caller, leaving Torri barely able to speak. “I seriously would rather smack you across the head than anything else right now, you ungrateful little twit. You insensitive, ungrateful twit.” When Torri, after a stunned silence, tried to respond, Schlessinger interrupted. “You’re a twit for saying that. You’re a twit for repeating it.” She continued for several excruciating minutes to bully and berate her caller.

Word of the episode spread quickly among adoptees, donor-conceived people, NPEs, and others affected by separation from biological family. As more and more people listened to the podcast, outrage surged from one Facebook group to another like jolts of electricity. Soon, members responded to Schlessinger on her website and on social media, many demanding an apology, some clamoring for a boycott of her program, and others calling for the radio host to be stripped of her license to practice psychotherapy. The complaints appeared to fall on deaf ears as the complainers were quickly blocked from Schlessinger’s social media accounts. A post on her Facebook page overrun with comments about the episode, however, was quickly shut down.

Therapists soon weighed in as well. Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFT, wrote an article about Schlessinger’s breach of provider ethics, and Eve Sturges, LMFT and host of a podcast, “Everything’s Relative,” released an “emergency” episode to bring awareness to the issue.

I grew angrier by the day, says DNAngels’ search angel Ashley Frazier, “and on July 1, I put out a call in all the groups I’m in that it was time to speak up and let our voices be heard. Torri’s call was a rallying cry for members of our communities, who are often faced with rejection and the judgment of people in their lives who share the views of Dr. Laura, simply for wanting to know the truth about their genetic identity.”

When a friend shared with her a link to the show, Erin Cosentino, of the Facebook group NPE Only: After the Discovery, couldn’t bring herself to listen at first. “It took me a few hours to work up the courage,” she says. Reading the comments first inspired her to move ahead. “So many people were in support of Dr. Laura’s comments, and I was sickened by that, so I listened.” She and her friends spent days discussing the podcast and debating about what to do and how to educate the people who supported Dr. Laura. Then she saw the post written by Ashley Frazier. “It was so in line with everything my friends and I had been discussing that I asked permission to share it. I was meant to see it. It was meant to be. Within minutes we were planning.”

“We spent the evening messaging about strategy,” says Frazier. “Our plans quickly evolved into the two of us starting a group together, and by morning we had a group chat with more than 30 people discussing bigger plans than we could ever have imagined. Within 24 hours, we had our own private group formed with nearly 100 members brainstorming and offering to help achieve our mission.”

What they created that evening is the Coalition for Genetic Truth, which has united 27 NPE, adoptee, late discovery adoptee (LDA), search angel, and donor/surrogacy conceived support groups with combined memberships totaling more than 105,000 people.

The coalition now has both a public and a private group on Facebook whose 400 members include individuals from the various communities as well as their allies. Frazier and Cosentino quickly assembled a team of friends and fellow advocates to moderate the groups and represent all of the various communities with a stake in issues related to genetic identity—Laura Leslie, Emily Ripper, Kayla Branch, Annie Persico, Cindy Olson McQuay, Cassandra Adams, and Kathleen Shea Kirstein.

“The initial goal of the coalition was to raise our voices to speak out against Schlessinger’s abusive treatment of Torri,” says Frazier. “But we very quickly realized there were more effective ways to spread our mission in a positive manner,” adds Cosentino.

At first they focused on sending email messages, making phone calls, issuing a press release, and creating a petition that’s now been signed by more than 1,300 people calling for an apology from Schlessinger. “Realistically, we know we’re not going to get an apology. This step was simply a springboard to get to our greater mission, which is to be a united voice that gets the community and the public talking and recognizing that there’s a need for education about the importance of knowing one’s genetic identity,” she adds. It’s important, she says, for the burgeoning population of identity-disenfranchised people to be able to find their way to these communities “and know that there are tens of thousands of people in our support groups who can truly understand what they’re going through, give advice based on experience, and support them without judgment. As hard as our friends and families try to be supportive, they can’t put themselves in our shoes and often make hurtful and dismissive comments, such as ‘This doesn’t change anything,’ or ‘Your dad’s still your dad.”

Equally important as connecting community members to resources, says Frazier, “is to educate our known and newfound family members and friends about how they can better support us during this difficult time. There’s also a huge need to educate mental health professionals about this important issue and enable them to provide resources to their clients.”

Join the public or private Facebook group and follow the coalition on Twitter @GeneticTruth and on Instagram at #coalitionforgenetictruth.Among the members of the Coalition for Genetic Truth are the following.*

ADVOCACY

Right To Know On Twitter and Instagram @righttoknowus and on Facebook 

COUNSELING/THERAPY

Eve Sturges, LMFT: a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles. On Twitter and Instagram: @evesturges

NPE Counseling Collective: group of therapists specializing in best therapeutic practices for the NPE community.

Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFT: a licensed marriage and family therapist and creator of Parental Identity Discovery (see NPE Counseling Training below). On Twitter @JodiRabb, Instagram @jkrabbmft, and Facebook

FACEBOOK GROUPS

Note: Not all groups are open to everyone. Check the “About” section of each group for restrictions and to determine whether you are eligible to become a member.

Adoptees, NPEs, Donor Conceived & Other Genetic Identity Seekers

Adoptees Only: Found/Reunion The Next Chapter On Instagram @adopteesonly

Adoption Search & Support by DNAngels — Adoptee/LDA

DNAngels Search & Support — NPE/DC

DNA Surprises

Donor Conceived People

Donor Conceived People in/Around NY

Friends of Donor Conceived Individuals

Hiraeth Only: Longing for Home

The Mindful NPE On Twitter and Instagram @TheMindfulNPE

MPE Cross Cultural Connections

MPE Jewish Identity Surprise

NPE Counseling Collective

NPE Only: After the Discovery On Twitter @NPEsOnly1

Pacific NW MPE Life

GENETIC GENEALOGISTS/SEARCH ANGELS

DNAngels On Twitter @DNAngels4 and Instagram @DNAngelsorg

Enlighten DNA: Email: Truth@enlightenDNA.org

MEDIA

Severance Magazine On Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag and Facebook

NPE COUNSELING TRAINING

Parental Identity Discovery

PODCASTS

NPE Stories, hosted by Lily Wood

Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges

Sex, Lies & the Truth, hosted by Jodi Klugman-Rabb and Christina Bryan Fitzgibbons

Find more resources about adoptees, NPEs, donor-conceived people, and others with genetic identity concerns in the “Resources” tab top right here.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, LMFTThe DNA discovery situation is unique in several ways. It’s unique to our time because of our access to science, and it’s unique in mental health because of the combination of issues triggered throughout the experience. Those who experience an unexpected DNA discovery may include adoptees, NPEs (not parent expected), and donor conceived individuals. Although they take different paths to their DNA discoveries, the emotional issues they experience along the way are quite related and, in some cases, identical. Yet, the mental health community isn’t at all well-prepared to deal with the DNA discovery experience.

Astonishingly, there are practicing therapists who cannot engage their empathy when facing a DNA discovery client. I hear stories of NPEs leaving sessions feeling worse than they did going in because the therapists dismissed their pain, just as their known families did. After seeking help to sort out their feelings and cope with their confusion, these clients leave with guilt added to the cornucopia of emotional turmoil, being told by therapists “he’s still your dad” or “it really hasn’t changed anything about you.”

In fact, much has changed for NPEs, but as in any case of grief, it often isn’t apparent to the outside observer. I counsel as many bereaved clients on how to engage support from loved ones as I do NPEs, and that’s because we as a species are not good at dealing with emotional pain. We want it to go away, to be as short lived as possible and be something someone else deals with. The DNA discovery experience rivals most traumas—with sudden grief and loss, unwanted changes in family dynamics, and profound identity confusion, all condensed in a short period of time.

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, I’m trained in all the areas triggered by the DNA discovery so I know to treat the discovery as a trauma that’s complicated with grief, identity crises, and the breakdown of interpersonal relationships. As a therapist, I’m skilled at the techniques and have the ability to recognize when something has crossed the threshold of normal to become clinically significant, and I have cultivated empathy as a general rule in the art of my field, because that’s the most important quality.

I recognized the need for a curriculum to organize how mental health professionals would respond to our fast-growing DNA discovery population, to help them access the skills they already had but didn’t know how to combine, so I created Parental Identity Discovery,™ a first of its kind treatment protocol dedicated to DNA discoveries. In more than 18 years of clinical practice, I’ve cultivated expertise needed for informed treatment of DNA discoveries: EMDR for trauma, grief counseling, and family systems and cognitive-behavioral theories. Living through the NPE discovery showed me how little I knew about identity, so I’ve set out to research everything my field has to offer and include it in the protocol, finding space for me to contribute to filling the gaps. Each aspect of the treatment relies on proven techniques to inform a new way of addressing generally individual issues.

Peer support is important in our large cohort to help people feel less alone and provide a more tolerant ear. But some people need more than peer support can offer, and for them, therapy can make all the difference. But it requires proper training and licensure. Finding a good therapist is harder than it needs to be, but they’re out there, and hopefully those who get adequate training specifically in the needs of NPEs will combine that special knowledge with the skills they most likely already have so they can truly be of service to people affected by DNA discoveries.Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFT practices in California. She writes about the NPE experience in the “Finding Family” blog for Psychology Today and hosts and produces the “Sex, Lies & the Truth” podcast. For more information on her work with DNA discovery go to her website or register for the training through Eventbrite.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page https://severancemag.comfor more articles about the experience of NPEs, adoptees, and donor-conceived individuals.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message tobkjax@icloud.com
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines athttps://severancemag.com/submission-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 athttps://www.facebook.com/groups/402792990448461
• And like us on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/severancemag and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag

Our fellow adoptees are in need. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted many aspects of life across the world. Many people are struggling to obtain basic necessities while countless others are hurting due to lack of job security. During these hard times, we want to recognize and support our community members who are without citizenship, and thus have limited/no access to unemployment benefits, healthcare, housing, food, COVID-19 testing/treatment and will not receive a stimulus check. 

Cindy’s story: Cindy is an adoptee, and like many of us, she is struggling because of COVID-19. She doesn’t have support from her adoptive family, and as a single mom, she has to take care of her young daughter while still working to pay for basic necessities like food and utilities. Because of Cindy’s current situation, she can’t receive any type of benefits. 

Cindy: “As a single mother, working minimum wage 7 days a week is difficult, but you have to survive.”

But Cindy is one out of what is estimated to be thousands of adoptees without citizenship. Many who would most likely be excluded from relief packages like the CARES Act even though she would otherwise be eligible. In response, Adoptees For Justice has established the A4J COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund to provide financial assistance to adoptees without citizenship.

Will you join us and help support adoptees like Cindy? Support fellow adoptees. Donate to the A4J COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund now.

Are you an adoptee without citizenship who needs financial assistance? Apply NOW

**100% of donations given to the A4J COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund will go to adoptees without citizenship

Complex feelings and experiences—like those associated with genetic identity—may be difficult to share through words alone. But art can get to the heart of the matter and communicate more compellingly the tangled emotions and nuances of experiences that arise from grappling with genetic identity issues. There are myriad benefits of artistic expression. Not surprisingly, art is widely known to be a therapeutic strategy, both healing the creators and engendering understanding and empathy in those exposed to it.

If you’re donor conceived and have a creative spirit and a point of view to share, there’s a new platform for your expressive projects. Donor-Conceived Voices is a website created to exhibit artistic works that express “both the joy of discovery and the hardship of rejection, the truth of our complex existence exposed in many forms for all to witness.”

The site’s curator seeks all types of submissions: photographs, paintings, drawings, cartoons, essays, textiles, ceramics, videos, music, and more. The first work showcased is a song by musician Chloe Allworthy, “The Missing Piece,” about frustrations of attempting to hurdle obstacles to locating a sperm donor.

Learn more about how to submit to DCV here.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Center for Health and Coping Studies in the department of psychology are exploring individuals’ motivations for taking DNA tests and the impact of the results.

People take DNA tests for a host of reasons, from wanting to know their ethnic backgrounds to a desire to augment their genealogical research. Increasingly often, however, individuals take direct-to-consumer DNA tests as part of an effort to discover and connect with their biological families. With these discoveries and connections often come emotional repercussions and significant challenges.

Adoptees, donor-conceived individuals, and other NPEs (not parent expected) rarely have an opportunity to contribute to research about issues that matter to them, but now they can make a difference. Researchers are seeking individuals who will participate in the UBC Genetic Connections Study by taking a survey. Although the survey is not limited to NPEs, with their contributions it could help shed light on the reverberations of learning about family secrets and increase awareness about the difficulties that can arise after one takes a DNA test. It might also answer a question that dogs virtually all testers who reach out to their DNA matches: “Why don’t they answer?” Becoming aware of others’ motivations for testing may go a long way toward understanding their behavior.

According to the study’s website, “The UBC Genetic Connection study is looking for individuals who are considering purchasing or have already purchased but not yet seen the results of a genetic test kit. The study involves completing two anonymous surveys, one before and one after receiving your genetic test results.” And if you’ve already taken a DNA test and received results, it’s still possible to contribute. While the study focuses on those in the process of testing, there’s an option in the survey to indicate that you’ve already received results.

Dr. Anita DeLongis is principal investigator of the study and Talia Morstead and Jason Zheng are co-investigators. The goal of their research is to “capture the numerous social and individual factors that go into the decision to pursue at-home genetic testing as well as the impact of receiving genetic test results.” According to Morstead, who’s also the study coordinator, one of her main interests is to look at how DNA test findings affect personal relationships.

If you meet the study criteria and would like to participate, you can find more information and a link to the first survey at the study’s website.  Share your experience!

Has rejection by family members hurt your feelings? Neuroscience suggests that the language we use to describe emotional distress is more accurate than we imagine.

If you’ve learned that a parent isn’t a biological parent, there are multiple points at which you might be vulnerable to feeling rejected. Perhaps you search for and reach out to biological family, full of hope and enthusiasm, only to be disavowed. You find that your family doesn’t wish to communicate with you at all, let alone to have a relationship with you. Or you may enter into reunion, only later to be rebuffed. Even if you haven’t been rejected in these ways, you might be preoccupied with the fear that you will. And if you have experienced early life trauma, as may occur with adoption or other disconnections from biological family, you may have lived your entire life with feelings of being unvalued or cast out.

Everyone knows rejection hurts. If you were ever chosen last for a team in grade school you remember that being excluded is painful. But most of us believe the pain is in our head. It turns out it is, but not in the way we think. Hurt feelings isn’t a figure of speech. Scientists have theorized that the pain of rejection, also called social pain, travels on the same neural pathways in the brain as does physical pain and produces the same release of endogenous brain opioids — natural painkillers.

When she was a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, psychologist Naomi Eisenberger was inspired by the language we use to describe rejection, such as having hurt feelings or being brokenhearted. She wondered if it were more than a matter of linguistics. In a now famous experiment known as Cyberball, she and her research team had participants play a virtual ball tossing game at the same time their brain activity was being measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). When participants perceived that they were being excluded — that other players were failing to toss them the ball — the regions of the brain where physical pain is processed lit up on their MRIs, indicating that the neural circuits that cause injury to be perceived as pain are the same circuits that cause social rejection to feel like physical injury. It appears our brains process emotional and physical pain in the same way.

These effects were replicated by other research. In one study, for example, when individuals who had a recent romantic breakup were shown photos of their former lovers, the regions of their brains associated with pain fired up. In addition, the mere memory of rejection also activates those neural circuits — a phenomenon that doesn’t occur when we remember physical pain. When study participants were asked to recall an experience of having been rejected, the same pain processing centers of the brain fired up, as shown by MRI.

If rejection causes actual pain, Eisenberger and her colleagues wondered if it could be treated in similar ways. In a follow-up experiment, they gave one group of participants Tylenol twice a day for three weeks and gave another group a placebo. Participants recorded their feelings in daily self-reports during the test period, and those taking Tylenol noted fewer feelings of rejection than did those taking a placebo. Their brains showed less activity in the pain centers as recorded by MRI.

Eisenberger and other researchers theorize emotional pain due to rejection is a holdover from evolution. Individuals, like most animals, have always depended on social relationships for safety and survival. Being cast out of one’s tribe left a hunter-gatherer vulnerable. Experiencing emotional pain came to serve as an alert that one was drifting from the tribe, a warning to do what was necessary to stay within the fold and survive. At all times in history, individuals have depended on others to meet their needs, and even today, those who lack a social safety net struggle for survival and those who lack adequate social connections experience depression and negative health outcomes.

Because the need to belong is fundamental and foundational to our existence and ability to thrive, it drives a great deal of our behavior. The need for inclusion is inextricably linked to many of our aspirations. We seek love and acceptance. We join clubs, teams, and fraternities. We network. But for many people, the family is the primal source of a sense of belonging.

Wanting to be received, valued, and accepted by our biological families is a natural desire driven by this universal need to belong. It’s little wonder, then, that meeting an immovable obstacle to the fulfillment of such a primal, fundamental need — being spurned by family, for example — may lead to especially acute feelings of rejection.

This vestige of evolution affects our neurobiology and can have a detrimental effect on our health. Just as physical injury results in inflammation, so too, it appears, do psychic injuries. Eisenberger and colleagues, studying neural sensitivity to social rejection, observed a significant rise in markers of inflammatory activity in response to exposure to laboratory-based social stressors. Their research suggests that social pain may make individuals more susceptible to the development of diseases to which inflammation contributes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic pain, certain cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Rejection has also been shown to increase such negative emotions as anger, sadness, and jealousy. It can result in aggression, lack of concentration, impaired decision-making ability, and diminished thinking performance. Social pain erodes self-esteem and self-perception, which can negatively affect other relationships. When we experience social pain, it seems we can’t think straight, and research has shown that, in fact, we can’t. Participants in a study at Case Western Reserve University demonstrated a significant drop in both IQ and the ability to reason after being subjected to rejection.

When rejection continues — as when, for example, months and years go by when you don’t get a response from biological family or you feel ostracized by your social family — your ability to recover from the emotional pain may diminish, and not only may you be at increased risk of illness, but you also may feel depressed, isolated, even helpless. And, counterintuitively, for some it results in an emotional numbness, as if the mind’s ability to cope simply shuts down.

Further, when we experience rejection we tend to blame ourselves, even when at some level we know we’ve done nothing wrong. Still, we take rejection as a personal failure and believe it’s a response to our behavior or to some inner flaw in our character. And while that may sometimes be true, in many cases — as when a birthparent refuses contact —it has nothing at all to do with who we are or how we behaved. Nonetheless, we may internalize it, which only intensifies the pain and depletes our ability to withstand it.

If this weren’t challenging enough, others may not offer the same empathy and compassion for your social pain as they would if you suffered from a broken leg, possibly leading you to feel still more isolated.

If this paints a grim picture, consider this. Understanding the very real nature of pain that results from rejection and the potential detrimental influence it may have on your health can motivate you to take steps to eliminate or minimize the pain, just as you would with the pain from a physical injury. It’s not necessary to live with acute pain from rejection. Look for articles coming soon on a variety of strategies, including self-compassion and mobilizing resilience, that can help soothe social pain.