How I Started Healing from the Anger for My Birth Mother

My parents told me I was adopted from the beginning. Early. The social worker suggested it. By the time I was a toddler, I was running through the K-mart declaring, "I'm adopted! I'm adopted!" At the time, my parents thought it was cute. Until my 20s, I thought so too.

But by the age of 27, I started to wonder where Momma Bird was, for real. It wasn't just a childhood fantasy anymore that "one day I would find." The time was now and I was ready, or so I thought.

Photo by Patty Maher http://bit.ly/1UO9M1K

One thing about adoptees, for me anyway: we have no trouble telling others we are adopted. It seems to be a regular part of conversation. My pastor suggested I work with an intern in her ministry working toward her graduate degree in Psychology.

This graduate student at Winthrop wanted to work with me for six weeks using therapies to specifically talk about my adoption. She videotaped these sessions for her thesis. She used a technique called Gestalt Therapy, which is talking to an empty chair.

I just stared at it. I didn't know what she looked like. Just staring into that space and began mumbling. Before long I was screaming at the chair with the questions that had been at the back of my mind for years: "Why couldn't you keep me?" "Did you ever think about me?" "Do you miss me at all?" I could hear my voice start to shrill and get louder and louder with tears and snot flying before expressing my full anger with 

"Why couldn't you keep your legs together?" 

I sounded like every mother of a teenager trying to shame her into being a "good girl." I shocked myself at the judgements and the words flying from within me. Supreme anger at this person for leaving me, for having me, for making mistakes, but mainly for leaving me behind.

I cannot remember the rest of the session. But I can tell you that my inner healing advanced that day and within the 6 weeks of sessions with Leslie. God was interested in my inner healing as much as I was in "figuring out my life."

I didn't know it then, but I was about to move to Nashville, which put me three hours from my birthplace. I was sctually traveling the road to find my birth mother/family and grateful for every step of healing along the way.

Screaming at that empty chair worked. It showed me that having a chance to express all the pent up anger is vital to healing the mental and emotional cancer and torment of being adopted. In a safe place with someone I trusted, I was free to release all that had been stuffed down inside. It was the beginning of a lifelong healing journey which continues every day.

What methods have you experienced that brought healing into your psyche and heart?

Please share your experience with me.

I Made It, Dammit!

A thought for the day:

At times (not often now, but earlier in life, before finding) I and other adoptees may sink into self-pity declaring, "I didn't ask to be born."

For that matter, any one born can easily use this as a reason to be mad at their life, their circumstances any day of the week; adoptees don't have the monopoly on this depressing and faulty logic.

My pastor shared this on Sunday, "You fought to get here. Out of all the sperm cells that made its way to the egg, YOU are the one who made it. So you DID fight to live and to get here." 

This accurate word encouraged me deeply. I smiled with inner joy!  The act of fighting for my own life from the beginning empowers me to continue the fight and to stop the self-pity talk that springs up when it does.

We hear and share the injustice of our lives (which is true enough), but this preceding truth empowers me beyond the defeated and pessimistic viewpoint that Self-Pity likes to voice over and over.

I am free to be happy! I made it, dammit. smile emoticon

Photo credit: from the Live Science article, Sexy Swimmers: 7 Facts About Sperm http://www.livescience.com/23845-sexy-swimmers-sperm-facts.html

The Many Profiles of An Adoptee - Proof

Someone out of the blue LIKED this today on Facebook. I do not remember writing this; I am not surprised.

During 2011-2012, "early facebook" for me, I created multiple profiles to separate my politics and views from my "regular" profile. As an adoptee, I wanted to post without any of my a- or b-family members seeing my posts. At this point, I don't care. This is who I am and my intention is not to harm, but to help the many, many millions of adoptees who are angry and searching for help.

If you want to follow one of my personalities, here are a couple to date: click through to see the post on facebook.

If anyone is interested in following any one of my facebook alteregos, you are welcome to try Strawberri Ju-Ju or Joel...
Posted by Jeannie Bluemel on Thursday, January 5, 2012

Thank you for reading. 

Loss of Sleep - An Adoptee's Perspective on How to Avoid the Light

I feel the need to enter my fb alter ego, Joel, [pronounced JO-el], to be able to share my thoughts tonight... that which I cannot say in my primary/fake world. You know the one; the one where you put your best face forward.

WHY? Two reasons, mainly, but there are always more. One, I am bold, but don't want to overexpose the people to the fiery hot topics I discuss as an adoptee (before its time), and two, because when one deeply exposes thought and truth of personal thought to the public, it can potentially be ugly, confessional, nasty, base. The world may snub, sneer, judge, pity, one's "report" of things (feelings and observations, really). Even what I think of as "non-adoptee" human thoughts and feelings. But when I break it down, even now, to say what I want without fear of repulsion and public self-humiliation, it all works 'round to the circumstances of my birth, the subsequent perspective of my self through and in this life... and I still always come back to.. adoption.

Here it is..

I try to escape life and all its details. It is too painful to lose people.

As an adult, as in now, and a friend loses a father, and I, as friend, am affected, and cry genuinely and feel the loss, but only slightly to what they must be feeling, I can only IMAGINE what I must have felt as a baby, being torn from the only thing that I knew, my Mother, my flesh and blood Mother unit. The only relation that I had. Was gone. Instantly. In the blink of an eye.

The 1st weekend I met her, as she drove away from the parking lot--me watching from the 9th floor. Cloudy day and staring through droplets on the window, I watched the path of the car. My eyes desperately followed, searching and looking, as Momma Bird disappeared. A deep gasp and shuddering child-like cry started to rise up in me, jerking and unable to catch my breath; but then a phrase, a phrase came out of me over and over soothing my little resurrected baby soul. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. It was the baby self-talk I sensed had happened pre-verbally, but here it was replaying out loud in my life at age 27. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. The moment took me back to a place of no conscious memory, but I knew I'd had this conversation with myself before.

I found. She left. There's more. There's always more.

Which brings me back to my confession.

Here we are a people with a history of LOSS. Loss from birth. Loss of relation. Loss of comfort. Loss of communication. Loss of natural connection. Loss of personal identity. Loss of family. Loss of foundation. Loss of knowledge. Loss of heritage. Loss of history.

Quite a foundation of Loss.

And maybe, we are one of the *lucky* ones that finds, even, the Source of All Goodness in Life, and find many things to help us--tools that we did not have before. I could not imagine living or handling ANY of this adoption revelation and evolution without Someone to lean on. My God led me through My Life's Mysterious Path - The Journey of Adoption and Finding my Birthfamily AND BEYOND.

Yet, STILL, the consequences of adoption/separation from mother are deep and wide.

The act of abandonment, no matter the cause or reason, molds the logical thought processes of the infant and certainly, must have been a heartbreak of sorts. Supreme grief.

As a baby, I slept for long periods of time, longer than usual. So much so, my parents took me to the doctor thinking I had a (their words) "sleeping disease". All I did was sleep, wake up, eat, and go back to sleep. My mother says she wanted to play with me, but all I wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and eat. Eat and sleep.

So here I am grieving and must have been trying to get back to the womb. The place of darkness, the place of safety and knowledge that I was connected to something. A place of warmth. The place to sleep and rest.

I was a baby depressed. And I slept.

So through my life, often times, I sleep to escape. Bad news. Deaths. No work. No money. Bill collectors. Family. Lack of family interaction. Unorganized life and house around me. Clutter. Friends. Making friends. Dinner. Kids. I cannot do it all successfully. I feel like that very thing I needed to learn to be successful in life, I missed. I do not own.

So I hide from life.

Life is filled with ugly clutter and the only way to turn it off is to sleep, to dream, to trance, to transcend out of my reality. ***Mind you, this is only a partial list of all that is skewed because of my placement in life.

And tonight, with the loss of a friend's Father, I am petrified that I am going to die too soon, or someone I love will. That I won't have time to tell and say to everyone that I love that I love them and really show them that I love them.. so I stare at the TV, staying awake as long as possible, so tomorrow, during the day, I may sleep.

Originally posted August 24, 2011 @ 12:20 A.M.

Loss of Sleep - An Adoptee's Perspective on How to Avoid the Light

I feel the need to enter my fb alter ego, Joel, [pronounced JO-el], to be able to share my thoughts tonight... that which I cannot say in my primary/fake world. You know the one; the one where you put your best face forward.

WHY? Two reasons, mainly, but there are always more. One, I am bold, but don't want to overexpose the people to the firery hot topics I discuss as an adoptee (before its time), and two, because when one deeply exposes thought and truth of personal thought to the public, it can potentially be ugly, confessional, nasty, base. The world may snub, sneer, judge, pity, one's "report" of things (feelings and observations, really). Even what I think of as "non-adoptee" human thoughts and feelings. But when I break it down, even now, to say what I want without fear of repulsion and public self-humiliation, it all works 'round to the circumstances of my birth, the subsequent perspective of my self through and in this life... and I still always come back to.. adoption.

Here it is..

I try to escape life and all its details. It is too painful to lose people.

As an adult, as in now, and a friend loses a father, and I, as friend, am affected, and cry genuinely and feel the loss, but only slightly to what they must be feeling, I can only IMAGINE what I must have felt as a baby, being torn from the only thing that I knew, my Mother, my flesh and blood Mother unit. The only relation that I had. Was gone. Instantly. In the blink of an eye.

The 1st weekend I met her, as she drove away from the parking lot--me watching from the 9th floor. Cloudy day and staring through droplets on the window, I watched the path of the car. My eyes deperately followed, searching and looking, as Momma Bird disappeared. A deep gasp and shuddering child-like cry started to rise up in me, jerking and unable to catch my breath; but then a phrase, a phrase came out of me over and over soothing my little resurrected baby soul. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. It was the baby self-talk I sensed had happened pre-verbally, but here it was replaying out loud in my life at age 27. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. The moment took me back to a place of no conscious memory, but I knew I'd had this conversation with myself before.

I found. She left. There's more. There's always more.

Which brings me back to my confession.

Here we are a people with a history of LOSS. Loss from birth. Loss of relation. Loss of comfort. Loss of communication. Loss of natural connection. Loss of personal identity. Loss of family. Loss of foundation. Loss of knowledge. Loss of heritage. Loss of history.

Quite a foundation of Loss.

And maybe, we are one of the *lucky* ones that finds, even, the Source of All Goodness in Life, and find many things to help us--tools that we did not have before. I could not imagine living or handling ANY of this adoption revelation and evolution without Someone to lean on. My God led me through My Life's Mysterious Path - The Journey of Adoption and Finding my Birthfamily AND BEYOND.

Yet, STILL, the consequences of adoption/separation from mother are deep and wide.

The act of abandonment, no matter the cause or reason, molds the logical thought processes of the infant and certainly, must have been a heartbreak of sorts. Supreme grief.

As a baby, I slept for long periods of time, longer than usual. So much so, my parents took me to the doctor thinking I had a (their words) "sleeping deisease". All I did was sleep, wake up, eat, and go back to sleep. My mother says she wanted to play with me, but all I wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and eat. Eat and sleep.

So here I am grieving and must have been trying to get back to the womb. The place of darkness, the place of safety and knowledge that I was connected to something. A place of warmth. The place to sleep and rest.

I was a baby depressed. And I slept.

So through my life, often times, I sleep to escape. Bad news. Deaths. No work. No money. Bill collectors. Family. Lack of family interaction. Unorganized life and house around me. Clutter. Friends. Making friends. Dinner. Kids. I cannot do it all successfully. I feel like that very thing I needed to learn to be successful in life, I missed. I do not own.

So I hide from life.

Life is filled with ugly clutter and the only way to turn it off is to sleep, to dream, to trance, to transcend out of my reality. ***Mind you, this is only a partial list of all that is skewed because of my placement in life.

And tonight, with the loss of a friend's Father, I am petrified that I am going to die too soon, or someone I love will. That I won't have time to tell and say to everyone that I love that I love them and really show them that I love them.. so I stare at the TV, staying awake as long as possible, so tomorrow, during the day, I may sleep.