A therapist's personal experience informs her practice and fuels a desire to train and certify other therapists to address the needs of NPEs.
How did you discover you were an NPE (non-parental event or not parent expected)?
In 2014, I decided to do a 23andMe test to learn about my father’s family and feel closer to him. I had lost him to a heart attack in 1996, and his family had not been warm with me since his death. When the results came back, they showed none of the Russian and German heritage I expected from his family, but instead indicated I was 50% Scottish.
Had you had any idea prior to that that something was amiss in your life?
Yes, this was not the first NPE revelation I had. To start, when I was born, my mother was married to her second husband. They were very unhappily married and she began a series of affairs. Because of her marriage and very Catholic parents, she created the ruse that I was the product of the marriage, so his name is on my birth certificate. I had weekly Saturday visits with him for 11 years, until mom disclosed he wasn’t my father and that my step-father since I was 2 years old was really my biological father. About 12 or 13 years ago, a DNA test proved my birth certificate father was not biological, and my step-father adopted me. I changed my name to Klugman and lived very happily with my step-father as my father all that time until his sudden death from a heart attack. I had never felt like I fit into my father’s side of the family: I shared no physical resemblance or mannerisms. I’d always felt like an outsider that they put up with. So in essence I was primed to deal with this issue already because of my early life story.
What was your initial emotional reaction? And how did it change over time?
Even though I had something similar in the past, I was still shocked. I had completely identified with my dad (step-dad), even though his family was clearly not having it. In film, there’s a shot in which the foreground and background move simultaneously, but the center image remains fixed, creating an illusion of surreality. That’s what I felt immediately and in spurts for months afterward — like aftershocks.
Did your training as a therapist help you in any way to absorb this shock, or was it different than anything your training prepared you for?
I think my training did help. I specialize in trauma, so I was immediately aware of the effects of trauma on my functioning, and I got back into therapy with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). I knew I was experiencing grief and had some compassion for myself.
Had you ever known anyone (or even heard of anyone) who’d been through something similar?
No. It was completely foreign until I hired a genealogist, Christina Bryan Fitzgibbons. Once she explained it, I learned this was a thing after all.
What did you do once you knew your father wasn’t your father? Did you look for information or support and find there was little available?
I freaked out for a few months, but in the back of my mind I knew I needed answers. I asked my dad’s sister to test, assuming it would come back with no match, and I was right. Originally I had assumed it was the birth certificate father since he was of British ancestry, so I hired the genealogist only to confirm that. She knew immediately without doing any research that was wrong and found the real bio dad within two months.
Did you experience what’s often called genealogical bewilderment and can you describe, from a therapist’s perspective, what that means?
In hindsight I did, although I had no idea what that was until learning about NPEs. The crux of my professional focus in the NPE area has been the effect of surprise DNA revelations to identity. It’s a foundational issue that’s necessary to have us feel affiliation and value with our groups, tribes, communities.
Did you have any difficulty (or moral dilemmas) when deciding whether you wanted to search for biological family?
No. It was an easy choice for me, more like a compulsion. When I made the decision to go forward, it couldn’t happen fast enough.
Did you turn to the genealogist right away or did you first attempt to find family on your own?
I turned to her right away because I did not believe I understood how to go about the search. Some people find everything themselves, but I don’t think it would have been that easy for me. I didn’t understand about centimorgans or how to triangulate relationships in family trees when they were distant. Christina knows all the intricacies and was able to find my biological dad based on his second cousin’s tree posted on Ancestry.com. That was not something I would have put together.
What emotions did you have as you were searching, while the genealogist was doing what she did?
Impatience, wonder, fear of rejection, anger.
In what way did meeting your father, and later your brother, change your feelings? That is, did it ease distress or create a new sort of distress?
Once I had the initial meeting with my bio-dad, I was in the most indescribable turmoil that I can’t explain. I was uncomfortable in my own skin and I wanted to kill my mother (figuratively), but within a day or two, all the pain I had felt from my dad’s family not accepting me was fitting into place and sort of melted away. I had answers to lifelong issues that then made sense and I didn’t have to struggle with the pain of not knowing anymore. There was a sort of relief that allowed me to move on.
At what point did you connect this experience to your professional life – when did it strike you that there’s a dearth of much-needed services/support for NPEs and that you wanted to explore that?
Immediately upon identifying my bio dad, my husband challenged me to do something about this professionally. As a therapist, I’m very comfortable listening behind the scenes. I would never have put this out so publicly, but innately I knew I had to in order to heal. I was 100% correct.
Did you need to research and study, or did your training already equip you to understand and work with people’s experiences and difficulties related to the revelation of a family secret? If you researched, where did you turn and what did you find helpful?
Because I’m an EMDR expert and have training in grief, I used those two pieces to formulate the bones of it. I’ve been doing research ever since, really focusing on identity. I’m developing a certificate curriculum to train clinicians for continuing education units (CEUs) on how to work with the NPE population since it’s a specialty approach.
What are the most pressing and common emotional needs of NPEs?
Identity is big, followed closely by connection in the form of support, acceptance, or lack thereof, namely rejection. Because of the nature of our conceptions, others (namely the mothers) feel they have ownership of the story and can control the dissemination of the information. Being seen and understood is a basic component of therapy and being a human being.
It seems there are so many ways to respond to discovering one is an NPE. Are there any universal aspects?
Absolutely! In my blog I write about the seven key characteristics of NPEs I’ve discovered from collecting stories from clients, my podcast interviews, my own story, and those on the secret Facebook group for NPEs I’m part of. They include feeling a stranger within the family, discovery, grief, identity confusion, intuitive knowing, managing family relationships, and being in reunion with new family. Not every NPE experiences each characteristic in the same way, but there are unmistakable commonalities that thread them together.
In what ways are the needs and emotions of NPEs similar to those of adoptees and in what ways are they different?
They’re almost the same, just the paths to get there veer off slightly. Usually adoptees discover their stories “when they’re old enough,” and NPE stories are often taken to the grave. There’s no right time to tell your child you’ve been lying to them about who their parent is. However, adoptive parents usually understand from the beginning they will have to tell their child their origin story at some point and just wait for that point to present itself. NPE mothers typically have no intention of ever telling, and until the advent of commercial DNA tests, there was no risk of people learning the truth.
And similarly, how, if at all, might the issues be different for donor conceived people, late-discovery adoptees, and those who were conceived as a result of infidelity?
I don’t think they are that different. If you take Dani Shapiro’s latest book, “Inheritance,” she describes my story, but with one less father. She had no idea, like I had no idea. There are several ways to be an NPE — donor conceived, adoptions, surrogates, and others all technically are NPEs. The major difference besides their conception is in how the individuals find out.
What services do you offer now to NPEs?
I offer a podcast, Sex, Lies & The Truth, for NPEs and their families to feel connected to a larger community and learn about aspects they felt alone with but can now relate to others, learning about themselves as they go. Same with my Finding Family blog on “Psychology Today,” where I write about the unique aspects of being an NPE, what I now call Parental Identity Discovery.™ I coined the term to be more inclusive of mothers who are unknown parents from adoptions, surrogates, etc. and will now use the term to title my certificate curriculum. I am a licensed marriage and family therapist and licensed professional counselor in California and see NPEs in person in my private practice or via tele-therapy throughout the state. I also offer virtual coaching for those living outside California, including a virtual support group for NPEs.