Latest / The Resilience Project / Adopted Therapist Melissa LaCour on Why a "Good Adoption Story" Still Needs Healing

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Adopted Therapist Melissa LaCour on Why a "Good Adoption Story" Still Needs Healing · The Resilience Project

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Hi y'all, I'm Julie.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a trauma-informed adoptee coach and somatic healing guide.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_03: After overcoming deep abandonment wounds, I now help adult adoptees move from feeling lost and disconnected to experiencing profound self-belonging.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: I know what it is like to carry the weight of abandonment, to feel stuck in patterns of longing, adapting, and searching for belonging.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: To have tried every healing modality available and come up empty.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: My own healing has taught me this.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: The answers aren't out there.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: They're buried within me.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm here to guide you home to yourself.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: The Resilience Project Podcast brings voice, visibility, and validation to the parts of adoption society rarely names, but all of us feel.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: Through an trauma-informed somatic lens, I explore the lived experiences of the entire adoption constellation with a tender emphasis on the adoptee experience.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: This podcast goes beyond storytelling into soul telling.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: It offers embodied insight, compassionate education, and a path towards awareness, hope, and strength.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_03: Each episode invites listeners to understand adoption more deeply, not just with the mind, but with the nervous system.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: And to reconnect with the truth, identity, and belonging that were always yours to come home to.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: She is a licensed professional counselor.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: And about 15 minutes into the call, I got full body chills.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: The good kind.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: The kind you get when you know you've found somebody who is about to say the thing this whole community has been trying to name for years.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: Melissa is a therapist, but more specifically, she's an adopted therapist who works with adoptees and adoptive parents.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_03: And she'll tell you plainly, there aren't many of those, as we all know who have been trained in this field, not in the adoptee field, in the therapy field, by the way.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: She has what she calls a wonderful adoption story, an incredible relationship with her birth mother, parents she describes as role models for how to do this well.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: And she still carries the identity issues, the abandonment fears, the quiet drive to be so good, so accomplished, so easy that her parents would never for one second regret adopting her.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: We talked about what she calls the oldest daughter adoptee energy, the layered weight of being the responsible one and the adopted one at the same time.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: We talked about growing up as one of two adopted kids in a family that went on to have four biological children and what that dynamic does to a person over a lifetime.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: We talked about faith, friendship, and community and how there can be some really tough things that happen within all of those.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: And some of these biggest triggers happened to her in her 20s.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about her decision this year to stop hiding behind no self-disclosure.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: That was a big one for me as we were talking about therapy and counseling.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_03: And start telling clients and now the internet that she's adopted too.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: Because it turns out that's exactly what people were asking for.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: Melissa just released a workbook for adult adoptees called Belonging: A Guided Journey Through Adoption Wounds and Wisdom.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: She applied to speak at the NAP conference next year, so stay tuned.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: And 20 years ago, she was sitting on adoption panels as a teenager telling her story to prospective adoptive and birth parents with no idea she was training for the career she has now.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_03: This is a conversation about permission, permission to be grateful and still hurt, to have a good story and still grieve, to finally stop pretending gratitude is the whole truth.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: So let's get into it.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_03: Melissa, welcome.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: It is so good to have you.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to be here.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: So happy to have you.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: So for anyone meeting you for the first time, who are you and what does your work, even though I just described a lot of it, and what does your work look like day to day right now?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so Melissa, I grew up in the deep south part of Louisiana on a farm.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: My dad farms rice and crawfish and soybeans.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I grew up in the country.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I I often laugh with people.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't get his first son till number five.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I was the the one who worked on the farm when I was little.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: I drove tractors, helped with rice harvest every year.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I I was born and raised in South Louisiana, went to school down here, have lived down here my whole life.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a wonderful culture of food, music, faith, family.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very culturally dense, which is really cool.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: But um my work now, day to day, it's uh no day looks the same, as I think a lot of therapists might tell you.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And in particular, me who is not one to do one thing only at any given time.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I I see clients.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: I am actively working on just building this uh work around adoption and trying to hold space and be what I feel like I needed as a kid and a teenager and a woman in her 20s.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of where I keep coming back to all the time is be the answer of what you could have used, because there weren't a lot of adoption therapists, true specialists in adoption, especially in a community.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the town I grew up in is really is pretty small, and even the nearest city is not massive.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's not one of the biggest cities in Louisiana.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: So there wasn't, there's there was great resources, there was great support, but there wasn't necessarily um specific therapists that was like, you bring your kid or your team to this person because they are an adoption specialist.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So my work looks really different.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've been exploring, doing things like this, being on podcasts.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: I've been working on my book for the last year.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm working on a couple of companion versions of that right now for a younger audience.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but every day looks a little bit different, and I like it that way because I never get bored.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you never get bored, isn't that the truth?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: So you started out your career, basically, as a teacher.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: You worked in ministry, you studied mass communication before that, you had a radio show, you were on TV.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_03: So, how did you end up in this chair instead as a therapist?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a wild uh roller coaster uh with all the different, all the different parts.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I often tell people every single thing I've done in adulthood led me one step closer to becoming a therapist.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: I just had no idea at the time that it was happening.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: So my undergraduate degree, as you said, is in broadcasting.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I studied radio and television.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I worked in Houston at a television station there.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Media was really different at the time I was in college, as I think a lot of people could understand.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: There wasn't really YouTube yet.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: There weren't podcasts, there wasn't an opportunity to platform yourself the way that it is now.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it was you go on TV, you go on the radio, and that's that.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a fairly cutthroat industry in the early 2000s.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I have a soft heart and I'm sensitive a lot of times.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't feel like I wanted to constantly have to step over or beat people to get where I wanted to go.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to get somewhere because I was good at what I did, and it made it really hard to stay in a field as a female, as a woman in that time to want to just really push forward.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And my dream was to work for ESPN, that's all I wanted to do.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to be a sideline reporter or a host sports center.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, sports is probably a top three passion in life for me.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that was my dream, and it was just a lot different of a world back then.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I came back home to Louisiana and I started working in youth ministry.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been a musician my whole life.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've played piano in church since I was 14.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: I still do.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's something I I haven't been able to quit.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: But being in music ministry led to youth ministry, and I worked at a a big church in in my community and ran the youth program and the young adult program, and that led to teaching.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so then I taught high school for a little while.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And every job that I had, I realized that my connection was to people.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't necessarily the job or the work, it was the people.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was the youth, it was the teens, it was the kids.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was teaching, I recognized that I was limited.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: I could only do so much for them as a teacher, right?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: They come in, you teach them, you form these connections, and they move on.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have the training, the skills, the understanding to show up for them the way that I felt like I wanted to or that I could.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I made the decision at 28.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: I said, you know what?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Three people that I trust and love dearly told me in the same two-week span, have you ever thought about becoming a counselor?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever thought being a therapist?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're just really good at holding space for people and showing up for them.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I never thought about that as a career.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not one of those therapists who's going to undergrad for psych and then I got my master's, and that's that.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was 28 and had been out of school for six years.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, why not?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I applied to some grad schools, I got in, I did it, and and every single step of that journey was closer and closer and closer.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really only in the past year that I realized I don't want to be a generalist.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to be a therapist who says, I can work with 18 different things, 18 different topics.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's that's burnout city to me, right?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to be a therapist who's burnout and is not able to do the best work.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I remembered at some point in the past year my experience when I was a teenager with the adoption panels.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: But that's when I remembered I thought then I need to work in a way that connects to adoption.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I had that thought as a teenager and I lost it.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: I forgot about it.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And in the past year, after doing this work for seven years, I've recognized hold on, I can do that because no one else here is doing that.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of how the long story evolution of how I ended up becoming an adoption specialist.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: But every single job that I've had was like one step closer to the right thing.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm super tickled that I found it and I'm and I'm loving the work that I get to do now.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: Ugh, I love it so much.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: And the journey is part of the goal in our life is to be able to really enjoy that.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: So there's two things that stood out to me, and this is gonna sound like a really funny question, but you said sports was really important to you.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: So tell me more about that.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: I'm curious.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: Tell me more about Melissa and the team she likes and the sports she loves to watch.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, Melissa's not anti-any sport really.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know a ton about all the sports.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in, as I said, South Louisiana.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's similar to, I think the South in general is like this.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's Friday night lights, everybody loves football.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up playing basketball.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: That was my preferred sport.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: I went to camps.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: I played a lot in the summer when I was younger.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I have always, as an athlete myself, I love playing basketball.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: In adulthood, I've gotten really, really into tennis and used to play almost every day.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Tennis.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I played tennis.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Used to play almost every day a couple years ago.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit harder now with scheduling and stuff like that, but I love tennis.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: I watch tennis all the time.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I love football.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I love basketball, I love tennis, and the Olympics are on.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm tempted to take two weeks off every time the Olympics are on.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: I absolutely love competition.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I love the excitement of all that.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: My team, and you can ask anyone that knows me, my team is the New Orleans Saints, which for my whole entire childhood was pain because people wore paper bags on their head and we were called the Aints and we were terrible.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then Drew Brees came and saved everyone in Louisiana.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: I like to joke that I mean he saved Louisiana.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then we were really, really good, and then he left, and it's been really a season of poverty for us for a while, but I'm really hopeful.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: We were down by 21 on Sunday and almost came back to overtime and almost won.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: I feel really good about it.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm an eternal optimist.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think every single year we're gonna win the Super Bowl, even if there's absolutely no chance.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I just it's my favorite season of the year right now because you've got lots of sports going on.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I love it.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: My sons um are totally into all of it too, and it's fun to watch them or hear them really.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_03: They'll be like, it's football season, and they're so freaking excited, it totally cracks me up.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_03: And you know what's interesting?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: Before Drew Brees was where you are, he was in San Diego, and I actually ran into him in a Costco.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, oh hi, it's the weirdest experience.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, it was pretty awesome.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So Drew's in Louisiana.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, he's a saint.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Him going into the Hall of Fame made everyone so happy.
• 13:29
  unknown: Yeah.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Katrina was one of the most devastating things, Hurricane Katrina to happen in Louisiana.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: So to see him and Sean Payton come in at that time and you saw you felt and you saw the resurrection of New Orleans just from sport, right?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a cool reminder that sports is so human.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: I love Drew.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd be I'm super jealous you met him at Costco because I love Costco.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he won't remember me, obviously, because it's not like I introduced myself and we had a conversation, but I like literally was at the same line with him in Costco.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: It was pretty cool.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: Very cool.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: The second thing that I wanted to ask you about was music, was piano.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_03: I did that as well.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's something I did not realize.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_03: We both I played.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I actually have a piano in my storage unit right now that was handed down to three different I'm adopted, right?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: So we know this generations of my adopted family.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_03: My mom played on it first, then it was handed down to me.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I am missing having that available to me to play.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's a fun, it's a fun release music.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh piano, my piano is always the first thing I consider when I've moved in my adulthood.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: This this piano I have, I found it.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody was just trying to get rid of it and it was super cheap, and I bought it.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it has come with me to probably four different houses or apartments in the time I've been an adult, and it I'm so happy to have it.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's in my living room.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'll sit down and just tinker around all the time.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: But piano, it's funny that these are the two things that stuck out to you because these are usually my first two examples when I talk about nature and nurture, because sports and athletics and being an athlete is completely related to my genetics and my birth family because they are sports freaks.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: I had a a cousin that played professional baseball.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: They were very much an athletic family.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: They are LSU people all the way.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: They have season tickets, they don't miss a football game.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's passion, right?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And my parent, my daddy that I grew up with loves to watch the Saints as much as I do, but sports wasn't a pillar in the family that I had growing up, but arts and education was.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And my my maternal grandmother and my paternal grandmother were both pianists.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: One was an organist, one was a pianist.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: My mom and her siblings learned to play, and so it was really important that she raised us that way.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And five out of the six of us were classically trained pianists.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I hated it growing up because I don't feel like it came as naturally to me as it maybe did to uh some of my siblings.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: But every year of adulthood, I have more and more gratitude for having been forced to take piano lessons because I laugh with friends.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great party trick.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's a piano and you can just sit down and entertain people.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great party trick.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that's I wouldn't be a pianist if I wasn't raised by the parents who raised me.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a really cool I love that so much, Melissa, because I think these things are kind of important to understand that we have stuff that is within us cellularly that we don't even realize.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: But we know a lot of times from especially the work that we do, where it comes from, we're not dumb.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so being able to really look at both, I think every single child should be raised with sports and art.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: I just do.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: I think they I just think it's important.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's a well-rounded yeah, exactly.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: It teaches them how to compete.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: It teaches them whether or not they're creative.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: I just think it's important to explore.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I love that you had both sides of that.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: So kind of a cool little segue in this conversation.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: So let me go back to where I was actually going, which is your spouse is actually a therapist too.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm curious if that makes your house a place where you're always processing, or do you two know how to leave it at the door?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really good question.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yes to both.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yes to both.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, we're processing a lot, and yes, we know how to leave it at the door.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Our work innately is very different.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't do the same type of work, um, which makes it a little easier, right?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to be really, really mindful of of good communication and good boundaries because Yeah.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: As as you're familiar with, doing the work of therapy is is hard just because it's difficult.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: But what makes it sometimes even harder is that you have nowhere to go with it because you can't talk about it.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's, you know, privacy and and confidentiality is so important that I can't come home and talk about every single client I saw that day or what all their struggles are.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so my therap, my my clients are often surprised if they hear that I go to therapy.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, why do you need to go to therapy?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, well, I need somewhere to kind of go with my stuff, and no one is ever beyond the need of therapy, right?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: So having my own space of therapy to process is helpful so that we don't always have to, we both see our own therapists, and that kind of gives us place to process that.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: But both being therapists can be really helpful in the sense of um we know each other's tendencies and triggers and wounds, and we have a shared language with how we communicate through different things.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: We use a we use a lot of Renee Brown language in our house.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: As far as the story I'm making up right now is such and such and such, and overcoming shame and talking through things.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it's incredible.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: 10 for 10 would recommend having a spouse that's a therapist, as long as you're both really boundaried and good at communicating with each other.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because even though, yes, we are therapists, we're still human and we're not always our best selves.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it takes just a lot of really good communication and and making sure those lines and those boundaries are always clear because they're always evolving.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it's cool.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: Oh girl, Brene Brown is what I call my spirit animal, even though she's not an animal.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: I love that I have to show you this.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: My God, you guys, if you are not watching on camera, she literally has a Catholic Brene Brown candle sitting on her desk.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: So watch because that's hilarious.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: That was a game.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was a gag gift for my spouse's birthday from some coworkers that we just died laughing at.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's hilarious.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Keep it on the desk.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's in the office here and this yeah, at home.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't let me see if it's been burned.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't look like it's been burned.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to go, we don't want to ruin it.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's just there for guidance, you know.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh, that's the best ever.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: Shifting gears for a second here.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: And you you don't have to say what you don't feel comfortable to say about this, but I'd love to know about your birth mother and what you know about the circumstances you were actually born into.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes that's not known by a lot of people, so I'm just curious.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm super fortunate that I was always able to have information that I I didn't have one of those stories that I was constantly wondering things I couldn't have answers to.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm sure that I have versions of the truth because we all kind of we make up kind of our own stories in our head too of what we think was true.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: But what I have been told by my parents, by my birth mother, by members of my birth mother's family, is she was raised in a family very similar to mine, very tight-knit, very cultural, very faith-filled.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: She was the youngest by a lot of years from her siblings.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and her and my birth father, I from what I've been told, were high school sweethearts and dated pretty much all four years of school.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: And after right after graduation, that there was that season of I'm leaving to go to away to college and you're not, and this isn't gonna work.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: And and they broke up.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think sometime after that, again, I don't know if this is the exact story.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I I believe I've heard.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: She found out she was pregnant and she was a teenager, right?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in that time in the 80s, in that community, in that culture, we can kind of assume what that must have been like into experience.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so, with I think consultation with the pastor at her church and and family and and close people, I think the decision was made at that point that I was gonna be adopted and that she was gonna choose placement as as the option.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: And she went through a local adoption agency in a city near where I grew up, which actually is not where she grew up.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: So she was not from this area, from Louisiana, but not from the same part of the state, probably a few hours away.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And uh my parents were on the list at that point.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think my parents have said that they were had been waiting a couple years at that point, a year or two at that point.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there was kind of a boom of babies adopted in this agency in the same year that I was born.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And um I believe that it was initially maybe meant to be closed because the information that I have from the very beginning is a letter written from her to me, basically explaining why that decision was made and how much I was loved despite that decision being made.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And a biography sheet definitely typed on a typewriter of the birth mother is this year, this age, this ethnicity.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: These are basically a full bio, just paragraph on her, paragraph on my birth father and the circumstances.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what my parents received, if I re if I understand that correctly.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: Probably, yeah.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: My mom's talked about now.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think you see a lot more of the potential adoptive parents making these big binders and these whole presentation type things.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: My mom and dad describe it as basically like a couple page thing where they had some some pictures that they took a couple pictures at my grandmother's house posing on the wall and wrote up a little bio about themselves, and that was kind of it.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I was born and at the time, and maybe this was just the nature of my particular story, or this was the norm back then, but I was placed in a foster home temporarily for about eight days until my parents were contacted or chosen at that point.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so the first couple years of my life, the communication with my birth mother was three-way.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it was between the agency.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: They were kind of the intermediary there with navigating communication.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And at some point when I was maybe two or three, I think my parents and my birth mother made the decision we can do this ourselves.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: My parents met with her, form started to form a relationship there.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think around the maybe when I was three or four, I met her.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a, I don't want to say like inconsistent or consistent.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was just, it was a few times a year, I would say, connection where we would get together, go eat at a restaurant.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I met her mother, I met her sister, I got cards every year for my birthday for Christmas that my mom kept every single one.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: I have this really cool binder she put together, every single card and picture that they ever see.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I was about six, communication just dropped off.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: And growing up, I didn't understand that.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: As an adult, I'm thinking if I were six, you're in your mid, your early 20s, you're finishing school, you're starting a career, you're starting your adult life.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: It makes sense now to me why that happened.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a period for 10 years where there was no contact.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to say no, very, very minimal contact.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: A letter here, a letter there.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's the original evolution of how my story started.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it was one of those really, I guess you could say, classic, just a teen pregnancy and and not in a place or already to parent.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: And and that decision was made then.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how my story started.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's interesting to me because a lot of people think, well, that's really only the story for the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: 80s, we were so much more enlightened.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, no.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's important for people to understand.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a lot of, a lot of, I grew up around a lot of adoptees.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: The the the huge benefit to being in an agency setting, especially at that point, was the sense of community and support.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a a big group, big group of adoptive parents and kids that the agency fostered these events every year.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: We had a big potluck.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: We had these big National Adoption Month celebrations, and we had a special service and all this stuff.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so all the kids were able to be in this.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: They they had a support group that one of the social workers started, and it was called God's Adopted Kids, Yak.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a t-shirt and everything.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And they had a competition one year for designing poster kind of thing to represent National Adoption Month.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I drew this thing and I won this contest, and so my design got put on a t-shirt, and we still have them somewhere in my parents' house, but I was seven.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I was raised around a lot of adoptees, and yeah, they had very similar stories to me open adoptions, teen pregnancies, very it's it's not something that was gone by the 80s, and I still think that that exists more than people want to believe it does.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I can see that evidenced in my work and the types of clients that I get.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: I do have a really cool story to tell you that happened since we first talked.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: So two weekends ago, I was in Iowa for my a wedding for someone related to my in-laws, and never been to Iowa.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: I've been in Nebraska, but never been to Iowa.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm just like, okay, cool.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm here to I'm gonna see the corn.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna see farm life out here.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I go to this wedding.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I find out that the bride, so she's marrying an extended uh family member of my uh spouse, and he's from Louisiana, but he works up there because he's a crop duster, and that's how he ended up meeting her.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I found out that she had a sister that was also married to a man who was from Louisiana.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what are the odds of that?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Two girls from Iowa marrying boys from Louisiana who didn't know each other.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so we get there and we're standing in the back, and I pick up a program, and I'm just looking at the names, and I see this one name on the program that I realize is the sister's husband.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a it's not a name you would hear a ton in Louisiana.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's not one of those last names where it's, oh yeah, a bunch of A-bears, or you know, a bunch of Tronhalls, or you know, a bunch of boudros.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't one of those.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I look at the name and the way that it was spelled, and it was different than a typical spelling of this person's name.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, that is so weird.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in my adoption support group with a kid that had that name.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, it's not an it wouldn't be impossible that it would be someone else.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: But that's so weird.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we're standing in the back of my if I see, I don't even know if I would recognize him, right?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: I probably haven't seen a lot of those kids since I was 10 or 11, I would guess.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: But if I see him and I recognize him, then it's gotta be the same guy.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as we're standing there, just chit-chatting in the back with family, this woman walks in and I instantly recognize her as that boy's mom.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: And she looked at me and I looked at her and she was like, Melissa?
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Yeah.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it was this, it was that boy who was adopted only months after I was.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: We grew up in the same support group together.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Our parents were very good friends when we were young.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: And of all the places to we live in the same city, but of all the places to see him again for the first time in almost 30 years was a wedding in Iowa.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the crazy thing is when I was visiting with him and his mom, this couple walked up and they were his birth parents.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And his adoption had always been open.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like they ended up getting married and having a family, and they're just one his mom described it to me as we're just one big family.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: We do holidays together, we're always together.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I got really emotional about that because I forget that other people have good stories too.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because I often feel really guilty that I have a great relationship with my birth mother, that I don't have these overt traumas in a way that a lot of a lot of people that I work with do.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I often feel guilty sometimes for the privilege of having what other people don't get.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so it made me incredibly emotional to see this boy who's a man with kids now have this beautiful relationship.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just the wildest experience of all places and times and seasons right now in this season of life where I'm really knee deep in adoption work to run into this person that I grew up with that lived life in a very similar way to me.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really cool.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to share that with you.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what a story.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for sharing it here.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: I I love that too.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: You and I talked about the good stories.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: I I have one too.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: So and it I feel similarly.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: Both sides.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: My my birth father's side has been just wonderful.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I just think you you can feel the guilt for sure.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's odd as an adopted person.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: There's an oddity to and it's hard to even put into words.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: I know your parents, kind of switching gears a little bit, were married nearly eight years before they were told that they likely could not have biological children before they actually pursued adoption.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember you telling me this when we talked first.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_03: What made you want to ask your mom directly?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: I did the same thing actually, this past June, whether adoption had been a band-aid for infertility.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_03: What what made you ask?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I had never thought about that before growing up.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't, it wasn't one of those questions that I had burning inside of me my entire adult life, teen life, childhood.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: No, it wasn't one of those.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: But in getting even more invested and and deep into this work, I hear a lot of language from couples who are looking to adopt that speaks as if adoption will fix infertility, as if adoption will minimize or eliminate the grief or the pain of infertility, which hits as an adoptee like a band-aid.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, all of this pressure of being of feeling better, of not being sad, of not getting what you want or what you are or what you feel like should be happening.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now all of that pressure is being put on this child to make that not there.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something that I just became a lot more in tune with hearing it, just hearing potential adoptive parents speak or people on the internet that are looking for a a birth mother or a baby that they can adopt privately and and kind of the language around that.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, ooh, okay, that's probably not maybe not the best way to go about it if there's still other unresolved things.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it just started sitting on me really heavily.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: And um, my spouse and I went on vacation with my parents.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: We went to the beach in June, and we were sitting at the island in the in the house rolling grape leaves, which is something she learned from my birth family and their culture.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're rolling grape leaves and we're just talking, and she was just sharing about how how proud she was that I was doing this work and how I was able to use my story in order to to work with other people.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: And she's a huge cheerleader, and I love her for that.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it it just came in that moment.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, mom, you know, you and dad were not able to have children.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was six years before they started the process of looking into adoption.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it was about eight years by the time they became parents that they had been married.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: And my parents have been together since they were very young teenagers, and to my understanding, waited to get married till my mom was finishing college so they could have children right away.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it made that even more, I think, painful to navigate like, what am I doing wrong?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: All I've ever wanted to do was be a wife and a mother, and what does this mean?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't understand.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and it was a lot of years.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and so I asked her, I said, was adoption a band-aid to infertility?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Was it something that you thought, well, I don't care how we become parents, we're gonna do any we're gonna become parents any way that we can, and this will make it all feel better.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: And she was very surprised by that question and immediately said, Absolutely not.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: We believed in our hearts that we were meant to parent children.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously we tried for a long time to make that happen the old-fashioned way, but then it's like this part of your heart starts to morph a little bit where you realize I have the capacity for love outside of something that came from me.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they started exploring adoption and they talked to a lot of people and they did a lot of work with the agency and the social workers there on the front end.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that was one thing that I I I give a lot of credit to some of these agencies for, not all, but some, of how well they provide that understanding and education on the front end.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think to really make sure you understand that this isn't just a big happy story because society views adoption as this problem-solving event that is filled with joy.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: I saw a quote that said that once.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: But really truly understanding on the very front end of the whole thing that adoption begins with loss for everyone involved.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: The birth mother and the birth father lose a child, the child loses the origin parents.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of times for adoptive couples, they're losing this idea and this dream of what they thought it would look like to become parents through whether it's infertility or illness or something else.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: So she immediately quelled that fear that I had, and it it led to this really beautiful conversation between the two of us.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it made me feel seen and wanted and chosen and like I belonged in that moment.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a really cool experience, and I'm really glad that I decided to ask her that.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I love that it's so beautiful.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_03: I wish all adoptive parents could be as vulnerable and authentic as your mom, you know?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_03: So 22 months after they adopted you, they adopted your sister, and then they had four biological children, which happens all the time.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's so interesting.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_03: So, what was it like learning as you got older how your family actually came together?
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny you say learning, but it's I don't remember learning.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: It just was.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: I never people ask all the time, what was it like when you found out you were adopted?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know because I don't remember not knowing.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Ton of credit I'll give to my parents every time that comes up because it was never a question.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was a very normalized part of my upbringing in my life.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was as normal to me as the fact that I'm left-handed, right?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we prayed for our birth parents by name every night in family prayers.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was a very, very normalized thing.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't think anything of the fact that after my sister and I were we were two and four, that a baby came and then another baby, and then another baby, and then another baby.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: It never dawned on me growing up, wait, I thought she couldn't have kids, and now we're having kids.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I never thought about that as something that wasn't normal because it just was what was happening.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: But it it it creates a a really interesting dynamic, right?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because even though I do have a sister who is also adopted, we are not bod biologically related and we have very different stories and very different circumstances, and we also look very different because I have this dark curly hair and she's a redhead.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so it made a lot of interesting dynamics within the family, but um it's it's not something that I ever thought about having to figure out because it's just this is my family, and I loved my brothers and sisters, still do, and it was really fun to grow up in a a big family with with lots of kids, and it was chaotic, it was super chaotic, but our family wouldn't be the same if even one of those four at the end hadn't hadn't right.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it's cool.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: I can't imagine it any other way because I don't I don't know what it's like to be the only adoptee in a family, the only child in a family, and that's an experience I see people have all the time.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: So to be in a family with multiple adoptees, but also biological children, that's a dynamic you don't hear and see a ton in my work, especially.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see that a lot.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm like, okay, that's really unique.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of the adoptee friends that I have have a similar dynamic, not as many biological.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_03: Well, actually, there is one friend that I have that had quite a few biologicals after her, and she was the first adopted person.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_03: And uh a lot of people, like me, I didn't I didn't experience that.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: I had an adopted brother.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: That's it, you know?
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's interesting how you describe the dynamic because there's usually that description from a parent that says, I love you just like my biological children.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: And that can be really ick to a lot of adopted people.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm just curious if you ever experienced anything like that.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think whether there's absolutely no difference or no favoritism whatsoever, an adoptee is more than likely going to create something that makes it feel that way, right?
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not in a malicious type of way, but I absolutely had the thoughts and the feelings at different seasons of life.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this wasn't even when I was young, young.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: This is teens and twenties.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: I remember feeling this a lot around there's just no way you could love me the way you love them.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: You made them, you grew them, you birthed them.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: No way it's the same.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and my parents have done so, so many things well.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And like you said in the beginning, I I consider them role models for a lot of adopted parents.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's still always going to be those things that we say and we mean well when we say them, and we think that they're innocent, but it lands a certain way when you're one of the adoptees in the room.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: And one of those statements is we love all our children the same.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: We love you the same as our biological children.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: And what that ends up doing is you're highlighting that there's a there could be a difference, right?
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Even acknowledging that highlights that there could be a difference, and in some families, there is a difference, and there is situations where where people experience being treated differently or poorly for being not a biological child.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I know that the intentions there were always really good on my parents' part, and they did the absolute best that they could with what they knew to try to make sure that none of us felt different, loved any less, wanted any less, that they belonged any less, didn't stop those things from being experienced and felt.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: And thankfully, through supportive therapy and working through a lot of those deep-rooted fears and and concerns, I feel like I've come out on the other side of that.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: It it'll it'll creep up every so often as as those things do in every different season of life.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: But it it's hard because I know the intention there is really good of trying to reassure that adopted child that they are loved no differently or no less.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you don't always know how that's gonna land because of those deep, deep, deep wounds, like that primal wound, that thing that we feel that we don't even know, but our nervous system knows.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: So um it was it was interesting.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure it was.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_03: You you described that well.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_03: I know what what's interesting to me about it is how you said you grew them, you birthed them, they're from you.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_03: They may love just as intensely their biological child with their adoptee child, yes.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: But I really do believe it is different.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe it's hard, but not different in a way that's bad unless they make it bad, right?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's it can be something that is important to actually have a conversation about.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, of course it's different.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_03: Of course I birthed them, grew them.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: I I was longing for that experience, and then I got it after two of you.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_03: So the fact that your mom, your your adoptive mom can have those conversations, can hear all of that, I think is really crucial.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: It is something that can be very healing for us.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_03: Because what there's that dichotomy of the both and that we hold all the time.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so that being validated, it I think it helps the relationship.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: What are your thoughts?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the different doesn't mean bad.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's an important thing to hold as truth.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because it has to be different and and not less or more, but different, and like you said, not bad.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the things I think that made that dynamic trickier for me was the four younger siblings all look like siblings, and they all look like my parents, and they look like my extended family, and that makes those identity questions start to creep up.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: The more and more and more and more you hear people on the street or in the grocery store or at church say, like, gosh, they just look so much like you, but you and your other sister are the two just standing there, right?
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's honestly kind of funny because a lot of people throughout my life have told me that I look like my parents, which cracks me up.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: I get that all the time, and we just have a giggle about it, right?
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I see that my siblings look like each other.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: I see that my siblings look like my mom and dad.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so, if unchecked, that can create this emotion inside that can get out of control.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're making up these narratives and these stories about you don't look like anyone, you're not wanted by anyone, you don't fit anywhere, you don't belong anywhere.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it can get out of hand really easily if you're not really grounded in in the emotion of that.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: And people make com people make a lot of comments that make that worse.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's not even coming from within the home.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: We went to the library one time and and someone that was an old relative of my parents, an older guy, asked my mom, we were all standing there, all six of us, and my mom, and asked her to her face, now which one of these are homemade?
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: Which of these are the homemade ones?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And my sister and I were like, and it was a story that was referenced every now and then, like after that, as like, oh, that was so funny that he used that term.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was so funny.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember in my 20s telling my mom, I still think about that.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: That really bothered me because it implied that homemade is good, but store-bought is bad, and I must be store-bought if I'm not homemade, and and all this narrative that had gone in my head, and she had no idea that I had thought of it that way, or that it had continued to sit with me, right?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think a lot of times adoptive parents, my point being is they don't recognize the way things land and the experiences that we have.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of adoptive parents are scared, their own fear of rejection.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or their own fear of losing that connection leads to silence or to not creating space where adoptees feel safe to have those conversations and ask those questions.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the thing I will forever give my parents credit for is they might not have always said everything perfectly because nobody does, but they definitely always made sure that that space felt safe to where if I had a question or I had a concern or I was feeling something big that I could go and talk about it.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I'd ground a lot of the work that I'd end up doing with adoptive parents is it's not about you and if you're uncomfortable.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: You chose this, you don't get to choose how it plays out or what comes up for your kid or what they need or the questions that they have.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Your job here is to create as safe of a space for your child to be able to explore all these questions and these feelings.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about how you feel and not to be rude about it.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's just this is about them and their story and their emotions.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that's something my parents did, I think better than most was create that space to be able to talk about it, even if it was awkward or even if it wasn't comfortable here.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's extremely important.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_03: Create the space, adoptive adoptive parents.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: We need to do that.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_03: So you have talked about your oldest daughter adoptee energy, and your parents are aging right now, and you are the one that lives close to them.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: Now, this is interesting.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_03: So I would love for you to unpack some of that for the listeners and the viewers, if you could.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I just randomly said that phrase one day, oldest daughter adoptee energy in a session with a client.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, wait, that's a thing.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because I have several clients who are oldest daughter.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oldest daughter energy is a thing for anyone that's the oldest in their family.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's especially for millennials like myself.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's that oldest daughter energy of achieving and and being good enough.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: And every single oldest daughter I work with, adoptee or not, has some form of self-worth issue.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I know it's a very common thing, but the added layer of also being an adoptee, right?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes it's hard for me to differentiate what would have been what is straight up adoptee stuff and what is because I'm the oldest, and how much of that is overlapping.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because there is that oldest daughter achievement thing of I have to overachieve and I have to be a perfectionist, and I have to be a people pleaser, and I need to I represent my family, I represent my parents, I represent my siblings, and that is definitely the oldest daughter stuff.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: But the why those things happen, I think, is where the adoption plays in of why did I feel the need to overachieve or try to be perfect or be easy or not mess up or be very well liked, be the entertainer.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: My spouse and I joke that my role in my family oftentimes is the performer to be entertaining and to be joyful and to be wanted in the space, because then I never have to doubt it.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's gotten better as I've gotten older, but now I see it and I recognize that.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and like I said in the beginning, you know, we we grew up in this small agriculture community where people don't really leave.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: People don't move away.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd have told me 10 years ago that right now, five, all five of my siblings would live away and I would be the only one here, I'd have been like, you're lying.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because the real story is I moved away and they all stayed here.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: I always thought I might be the one that would leave, right?
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm that adventurer and I like to see and explore and do new things.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: And for whatever reason, the way the universe shook it out, all my siblings live elsewhere and and across two, three, four different states.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it's different now confronting what that means on a on a larger scale.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm fortunate that I had all four of my grandparents till my early 30s, which never, I feel like never happens for people.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I never really came to terms with the idea of the fact that my parents are gonna get old at some point.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because I had my grandparents for so long.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: And now thinking as they approach 70 and hopefully retirement age at some point in the my mom's retired, my dad's not, hopefully in the next few years is what does that look like?
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: I have the ringleader mentality in the family, for better or worse.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that's a great thing that I can be the leader in that, and sometimes it unintentionally becomes an accusation that I I riled everybody up about something.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it it makes it really interesting because I do feel like out of all of my siblings, I'm one of the more comfortable ones with having hard conversations and asking questions.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that is my personality, and some of that's just being a therapist.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I do feel like I don't want to be a set of six kids who none of us ever talk to my parents about aging or about plans or about what that looks like.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then it happens and we're all just sitting here with our hands up, not knowing what to do.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have started thinking more about logistically, I am the only one here.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: I am the closest physically to them, but I'll probably have to be the one to do a lot of those things and ask a lot of those questions and make a lot of those plans.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm okay with it because it comes with the territory in a way of being the oldest daughter.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and there we go, right back to that whole trope that you experience as the oldest daughter.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: I became the oldest daughter when I found my birth family, but I am the youngest daughter in my adoptive family.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_03: So there is an interesting dynamic there that I have explored.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's fascinating for a whole other conversation.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_03: But switching gears a little, I'm curious what you would say to someone who assumes a good adoption story, I'm putting ear quotes for those who are not watching on screen, means there's nothing underneath it to work through.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: I would say that they just don't have all the information.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: That often tell people clear as kind, and all behavior makes sense in context.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you're seeing or witnessing or experiencing behavior that doesn't make sense, then you don't have all the information.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so even someone knowing that I have a good adoption story tells me so that I that must mean I don't have any any feelings outside of good and positive.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: That tells me you don't have all the information, not necessarily about me or my story, but about what it means to be adopted, what adoption actually looks like.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a huge part of of what I'm trying to do in my work, psychoeducation, community education, of teaching people.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: Even adoptees themselves will share that they feel if I have a good story and I don't have a big trauma, then I I can't go to therapy for that.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: I I must not something else is wrong if I feel like I need to go to therapy or I want to go to therapy or I want to talk to someone about that because I don't have anything bad to talk about.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of education that I have to do with actual adoptees too, not just the larger population.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: But hey, you're talking about the loss of identity, belonging, culture at some times, connection, all of these things for a lot of us at birth, you don't remember it, but your nervous system does.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when your nervous system remembers something, it creates patterns and it creates beliefs and it creates behaviors that you might not have a conscious idea of where they're coming from, but I'm gonna tell you where they're coming from.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're coming from that experience that you don't even remember.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's a false assumption, just rooted unfortunately in ignorance.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not even just coming from people who don't understand adoption or aren't connected to it.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's coming from within the adoption world too.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: We feel like if we have a good story, then we feel guilty if we if something I felt guilty for wanting to work through my abandonment fears.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: I felt guilty for wanting to ask questions because I didn't want to hurt my parents' feelings.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that I have a great story.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: I tell people all the time in my personal life, I have an exception to the rules story.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I struggled tremendously with integrating my identity with vulnerability and real connection because of fear of abandonment, with holding on too tight in friendship, because if they had other friends and they wouldn't want to be my friend anymore, with and that affects intimacy and then affecting um just rejection and loss and grief.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: And do I feel grief?
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: Should I feel grief if I'm grateful for the parents I have?
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: So even in the picture perfect, which doesn't exist, but picture perfect adoption story, no, no amount of good loving and good parenting eliminates and and gets rid of the fact that we all are born with some of these struggles and giving ourselves space to process and work through them is how that good story becomes even better.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I totally agree.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's important to have these conversations.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_03: And honestly, that right there was a soundbite for me because you know me, I'm a nervous system practitioner, so I absolutely love talking about that.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_03: So I think I want to talk about this just a little.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_03: I want to touch on this.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_03: Your sister was adopted too.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_03: You brought it up, she looks different than you.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_03: So obviously.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_03: So her circumstances were a little bit more complicated than yours, if my memory serves right.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_03: So, how much of that did you understand growing up?
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_03: And did that really affect you at all in your relationship with her?
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was a couple months shy of my second birthday when she was adopted.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: And my parents will even joke about how different that season of infancy was for the two of us, where I was just kind of always hanging out, and I was very easily, I'm still very easily entertained, and she came home crying and didn't stop, is how it was described, right?
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so And we know why.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: Immediately we can talk about nervous system disruptment and attachment disruption and all of those things too, but her adoption was open from the beginning, similar to mine, and and it was one of those opposite stories where it starts open and then gets closed.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I was very perceptive and I feel like observant as a kid.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_00: So around the time where that would have been happening, I was about ten, and I recognized what was going on.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not the I didn't have the details, I didn't have the logistics, but I sensed from what was going on with my parents that something was shifting in her story, and she asked a lot of questions, and she was one of those kids that would try to a few times run away to go find them, or run away meaning a little down the road with a wagon kind of thing.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: But um struggled a lot with with identity integration and a lot with feeling as though she belonged in the family, is how I perceived it.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: And especially as we navigated our teen years, right?
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because we both had no contact in a lot of that adolescence period.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I was 16 and she's 14 at that point, my story starts to shift again.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: And as overjoyed and scared and excited, and all the things that I was feeling at that point, there was always this feeling in the back of my mind that was this isn't fair.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel nervous that it's gonna hurt her.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: And my parents probably had to navigate a lot of that for her.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I was 16, I'm in my own world at that point.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: But there was there's a little more evolution to her story around the time where she was 18, and then since then, and you know, a lot of up and down, and it's one thing that I I it's one of those both ends where I hold so much gratitude and appreciation for the relationship I have now, and so much sadness for the fact that she will never have that.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something that I probably should be a little braver about talking to her about, if we're gonna be honest, because I it's not something we've had a a r a real conversation about because I I I I guess part of me is scared of what that feels like for her and being sad about that and holding those conflicting emotions.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it was really hard to watch that and to hold space for the same experience of being grateful and excited of what was going on in mine and just sad that it wasn't gonna happen for her in the same way if ever.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's it's it's tricky.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: And again, credit to mom and dad because they've had to navigate that more than anyone of holding space for the excited teen and then the sad teen.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then in adulthood, my my birth mother was part of my wedding.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: She was involved in that, and my sister, when she one day gets married, won't have that.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard, but she also has never said or done anything to me to make me feel like she's never taken that pain out on me.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: Which which is great, incredible, because it would be really easy to to project that, right?
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: To project that pain and that it's not fair, it's not, it's not fair, but I think that experience has helped me a lot, especially with my work and understanding that we're in the same family, raised by the same exact parents, is and our experiences in life and adoption and adulthood could not be more different.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of those you can't out-parent heredity, you can't love out love or love those early experiences away completely.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: Love can help some of them, but you can't love them away.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's been a really, a really hard thing to navigate for sure.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I bet.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I I think you being a therapist probably helps with that some.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_03: I think uh I'd I'd like to shift gears.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um I want to talk a little bit about faith because I know you were adopted through Catholic charities, and there's a lot of people who have been harmed by the years of that organization of doing this work, if you will.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_03: And with that, I think your family was embedded in church.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_03: You talked about it.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_03: Music ministry, youth ministry.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so what did faith mean to you and what is it like for you now?
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was again one of those just it's a normal part of life.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: And and one thing that I think is really unique and worth mentioning is that I'm almost certain that the area of Louisiana where I grew up, which we call Acadiana, which was um formed when all of the Cajuns were exiled from Canada and were sent down here, and that's how Cajun culture was formed.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think we might be one of the largest populations per capita of Catholicism in the country.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: Just wow.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: I could be wrong on that.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's up there.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um you have the joke about how there's like dollar generals everywhere all the time.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: You have a Catholic church, like there's a dollar general here.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: I live right now, I live in a really small town of 1,200 people.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a new area that's growing right now, and we have two Catholic churches in this town of 1,200.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's as normal to be involved in church and in faith as it is to play sports and to be uh take piano lessons.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's what you do.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: You go to school, you go home, you do your homework on Sunday, you go to church, and and that's just that.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really important in the sense that it was something that was an expected normal part of life.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think that I I never was able to admit or sit too heavy in the fact that I'm a I'm a question asker, I'm a why girl.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: I always wanted to know why.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: I love rationale, I like to make sense of things.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: So there were things a lot of times growing up that I would want to ask, well, why?
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't because I said so or because it's in the Bible or because it's in the catechism of the Catholic Church.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I never felt in some areas I could was given great rationale for certain things, but I was taught that having faith meant you don't question.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a lot of cognitive dissonance for me.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: And and there were a series of events in my mid to late 20s that I think really shifted that for me.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it was some of it was rooted politically, some of it was rooted in my education journey, and and there was just so much that you're seeing one thing and hearing one thing, but it's not aligning with what you were raised to believe.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: And cognitive dissonance was kicking when I was in my my late 20s.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I started graduate school, and one thing about going to graduate school for counseling is it's gonna stretch and pull and change you in every way you think it won't.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: In my first class of grad school, a professor said, if you don't already have your own therapist, get one because this isn't the place to work your stuff out, right?
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I had one, so that was good.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're learning about this many different mental health challenges and multicultural experiences and poverty and just all the different things that can encompass working as a therapist, I started to realize my worldview was this big, but the actual world was so much bigger.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: And whether it's being raised in a small town, in one religion, not really going too far to go to school, I had never allowed my worldview to be stretched because I was raised in a black and white thinking family and realizing for the first time in my life that not I see the entire world in gray.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that experience of being pulled and stretched and changed really made me question a lot of things and seeing what was going on in the larger political sphere and the way faith communities handled a lot of things that were going on in the world, and it was hard because I felt like there was a lot of hypocrisy in the church, and there was a lot of just we're gonna say this but do this, and we're gonna, and and and I started feeling comfortable for the first time being okay with how it felt.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember going to therapists, my therapist, and crying about I don't know what this means that I have these things that now I believe in my core to be true, and they're in direct conflict with what I was taught to believe.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: And she at that point in my life looked at me and she said, you know, God's not Catholic.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: Stop putting him in a box.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's God, he's bigger than that.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that led to this journey in my own therapy of exploring spirituality versus religion and detangling and deconstructing a lot of things so that I could put it back together in a way that felt authentic to this version of myself that I was becoming that I really loved.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so faith has changed and morphed a lot, right?
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: I said earlier, I still play music in the church, but it it feels more to me like it's something that I go and I do on the weekend.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's not ministry in the way that it used to feel for me.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the people that have been in my personal life and experience the most harsh and the most judgmental and the least loving are the most religious.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that is really hard to reconcile when I work in a world that calls me to be open-minded and loving and non-judgmental always.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that caused a lot of that cognitive dissonance.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, through uh experiences and things that happened, I lost a lot of my faith community because a huge part of my friendship and my friend community was rooted in church, was rooted in ministry, was rooted in music ministry and all those things.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: And going through all of that and feeling like, oh, if I don't show up as this exact version that you approve of, then I'm not worthy or good enough to be your friend.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: If you disapprove of things in my life or choices in my life, or who I want to be or how I want to love, you're gonna remove me from it.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a really, really triggering experience in my late 20s for loss that I had not really connected at the time at all to overlapping or paralleling with adoption.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: And and as I continued doing 30 therapy into my 30s, recognized that's why that was so much heavier for me than maybe it would have been for someone else.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just the idea of like faith doesn't look different, community doesn't look different, friendship does looks different, doesn't look the same.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's that I was abandoned.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_00: At least that's how my nervous system felt it and experienced it.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: Whether there's evidence for that or not is a whole different conversation, but it felt as though I have to be and perform and live and exist in exactly this way in order to be worthy of belonging.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that completely shifted the way I approached people and relationships and and my own sense of self-worth, right?
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: And to have have having gone through that in my late 20s, more than 10 years ago now, was so impactful on how I was able to live and show up in my 30s.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm honestly now I look back and I'm like, I needed that, I'm grateful for that.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: At the time I would have wished for anything to be different, but now I'm like, man, that was a really formative experience at that age in that season to go through that and to and to come to these realizations and these understandings because it's allowed me to show up in in life with friends and family and even with clients as a way more authentic version of myself.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I would have never even found that version of myself if I were stuck in that same pattern before.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been a journey, and faith for me is now in how I show up for people.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I always break it down to just am I loving people well?
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: Am I loving people well today?
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: And am I being a little bit better version of myself today than I was yesterday?
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the root of where my faith lives now is is looking out for the the marginalized and the people who are hurting and holding space for people and being kind and being compassionate and having empathy and a lot of things that are just lacking in the larger world, I feel like at this point.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_00: But To me, that's being more of a good Christian or a good Catholic than some people who are Let's Hey the Rosary every single day.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but how do you love people?
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I try really hard to be comfortable just existing there.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: I still, you know, I still believe in God.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: I still believe in higher power.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm way more connected to nature and the universe than I feel like I used to be.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a big multicultural idea now.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a lot more all-encompassing than it ever was before, and I'm comfortable there now.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I think bringing it back even to Brene, she talks a lot about wholehearted living and wholehearted people have two pieces.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_03: One is gratitude and one is spirituality.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_03: And those two practices are so necessary and important for us.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_03: And you have those.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think that was beautifully described.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I I really appreciate how you did so.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_03: So I want to touch on this too.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_03: We've been we've been going, girl, and I I need to wind this up.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_03: But graduate training definitely, myself included, the standard rule was you don't self-disclose.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_03: What made you start pushing back on that, specifically with adoption work?
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've always felt a little about that in general because we're human beings and we're asking somebody to trust us with sometimes the most difficult, hardest thing they've ever been through, but they have to tell us everything and we tell them nothing.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there's almost to it, it feels like to an extent, sometimes a power differential of unfairness.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's unfair in a way that we have to say absolutely nothing.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's always been something that I've not particularly loved as a idea.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not something that I'm 100%, I've ever 100% done.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm never, in my entire career, never self-disclosed.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's just when it knowing when and where and is it therapeutic in that moment.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: I started doing some market research this summer to better understand what was going on in the community where I live in and in Louisiana, as far as adoptive parents and adoptees and seeing where are your your struggles or issues or challenges?
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: What are you basically wanting to understand what do we not have that we need in this community?
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you were looking to go to therapy for any of these things, what would you be looking for?
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: And over and over and over it came back that the thing they would want to hear first from me was that I was also adopted.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that really stuck out to me because I said, well, that goes against that entire self-disclosure principle.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: But my spouse and I have talked about this a lot with there are a lot of topics in therapy that you don't have to have experience or gone through to be able to effectively work with.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: If I haven't lost my parents, I can still do grief work with someone who has because I've under I've experienced a lot of loss and death and grief in other areas, and I can use that emotion to empathize and understand there's a lot, that's just one example.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or if I'm not struggling with a particular diagnosis like ADHD or anxiety, but I understand it clinically enough to be able to meet that person where they are, I can do great work with that.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_00: Adoption has always felt to me like it is not one of those topics because understanding it clinically, logistically, intellectually doesn't even remotely connect to the experience of having been adopted.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of those things that are there are there therapists out there who are doing adoption work that are probably really good at what they do and making a huge impact?
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_00: I never want to imply otherwise.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: But there's something super unique about the experience of navigating this work as someone who's felt those seven core issues in adoption, as someone who's experienced reunion, as someone who has asked these hard questions or held these hard questions or been confused about grief and gratitude coexisting.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_00: I know what all of those things feel like.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't just need to understand them logistically, clinically, educationally, intellectually.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_00: I can immediately get into the emotion of that with people, which I think allows them to feel seen and heard and understood in a way that maybe another therapist who wasn't adopted maybe would never fully be able to get to.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that's why I said I'm not gonna self-disclose about everything all the time.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's not relevant or therapeutic.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's necessary in this particular work for people to know, hey, it is I'm here, I've done it, I'm I'm living it too.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, totally.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for sharing that because it's so important to me.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like people need to know that we're wounded healers too.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_03: So very much appreciate that.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_03: So I want to move into telling me a little bit about belonging, a guided journey through adoption, wounds and wisdom.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_03: So, what made you want to write a workbook instead of say a memoir?
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_00: I do want to write a memoir.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I just haven't gotten there yet.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've always I've always said that I wanted to write a story, write a novel, write a book, not a novel, but like a biography or a memoir at some point.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I realized in a lot of the um research that I had been doing and learning and understanding that there weren't a lot of great resource materials out there for adoptees.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's some, there's some great stuff, and there's a lot of books, but they're very niched and very specific about specific things.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to create something that felt like it could be used as a framework.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so I ground a lot of the work that I do in the seven core issues and adoption that was created years and years ago.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_00: That has guided a ton of the work that I do.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And even working right now on um adoption competency certification through case, I'm doing that.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we spent a whole entire day just talking about the seven core issues and adoption.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm like, okay, that is a good framework to have here.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so I use that as the underbelly of the whole thing.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what I really was trying to go for here was creating a therapeutic tool that could be used either independently or in conjunction with therapy, not as a replacement for therapy, but just as an opportunity to start asking those questions and letting those feelings and emotions that exist bubble up a little bit.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately it was about creating a resource that I needed when I was younger.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_00: I remember as a teenager going to Barnes and Noble, driving myself when I got my license to Barnes and Noble to look for books on adoption, and the section was this big.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was that big.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And nothing was relevant to me as a 16 and 17-year-old adoptee.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was for adoptive parents or raising your adopted child.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was nothing that felt relevant to me.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's and I didn't I don't love to journal.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_00: I never have.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_00: I used to threaten to fire my therapist every time she brought it up because I don't want to journal.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: My brain goes too fast, and I have I want to write me, and it's a whole thing.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I I thought a guided workbook would have been so helpful for me then because it's journaling in some parts, but it's not right down to you how you feel, it's guided.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's and so I I really wanted to create something that felt like something I could have used at 16, at 25, in my 30s, even still.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so I rooted the whole thing in the seven core issues of adoption.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Each chapter covers one of those topics, provides some psychoeducation on it, provides some guided reflections, some space for journaling, some um somatic practice and grounding to do in that time.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_00: I have a full appendix in the back full of resources, full of other exercises you can do, other activities you can do.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really just to see what comes up.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think that for some people, we think a lot of those things have resolved themselves and a lot of our issues or our concerns or our challenges have.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_00: But in some of those chapters, as I was thinking of questions and and and writing this stuff out, I thought, oh, maybe that will bring something up for someone that then maybe they'll have a space to go process it.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it will provide words to the way someone's feeling that they haven't been able to identify yet.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's something that has been on my radar for a while and and I I worked really hard and and got that out August 1st, and I'm super excited and proud of it.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And now it is available on Amazon.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's also available as a digital download.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm really excited, and I'm I'm currently in the works on creating companion versions for littles, adolescents, and teens.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that's something that hopefully will be coming in in the coming months, maybe like a new year.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_03: Very, very exciting.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I would love to have you back on even to talk about what happens if you end up speaking at Nap.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_03: Would love to hear about that.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_03: I would love to just be able to talk more about the work that you're doing.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's important.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason why you stood out to me was because of what I do.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_03: That my whole plan is to help people realize that belonging is not found outside of themselves, it's found within themselves.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_03: And the work that you're doing, that's the reason why you just called to me.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I love that we can overlap in that way.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I think one one really interesting to me before we close is you've been professionally anti-social media for a long time.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_03: But you only recently started putting yourself out there, and that's obviously how we found each other.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_03: So, what has that shift been like for you?
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's been a lot.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I love social media generally, right?
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Generally speaking, on a personal level, but I've always struggled with the idea of doing it professionally because I don't want to be a salesperson, or self-marketing and self-promotion has always been something I've struggled with a little bit.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_00: And also it's kind of a job to to post and to think of content and to create content in it's a lot.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I've been it's not kind of a job, girlfriend.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's not kind of a job, it is a job.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I just yeah, I have other jobs too.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a lot, but yeah.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_00: I I really started thinking about the uniqueness of being an adoptee and a therapist, and just started researching and learning and understanding how Instagram works now versus how Facebook works, and also wanting to use my degree a little bit.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that I have this create creative streak in me that I have not really had space to use for a long time in my career.
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_00: The book helped with that of putting together this book, but I would love, we were talking about this on in the in earlier, but I would love to have a podcast one day.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to do something that utilizes that background in media, but in a way that is really authentic to the work that I'm doing.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so I really wanted to just create a voice and and even a brand around the type of work that I'm doing and connect with other professionals.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we found each other and get more, really more involved in the world of adoption and what that looks like and how that looks on social media.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_00: I love public speaking, I love podcasts, I love all these types of things.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I'm gonna start trying to speak at conferences more because I've done that a few times in the last couple of years, and it's been really fun for me.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_00: I said, but you can't not exist on the internet.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_00: If somebody looks you up and you don't exist on the internet, then they're gonna think you're not real.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to get on the internet and you need to be involved and you need to connect with this community.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it took a lot of bravery and vulnerability, and I'm it still does almost every single week to like, all right, let's do it again.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let's post something else.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_00: What are we gonna talk about this week?
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I use a lot of that market research that I did over the summer to create content, right?
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because I want to speak to what things people are telling me they want to hear more about.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: So totally.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's cool, it's been fun.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_00: I still feel like I have a ton to learn.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not an influencer by any means, nor do I want to be or plan to be, but it's been really cool to like make professional connections, to have people make comments on things like yes, I feel the same way, or even the people who disagree vehemently with some of the things that I say, it's okay.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that just shows me how much of a different perspective is also out there.
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I dropped my anti-social media stance.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying it for a while.
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've been on for a couple months and it's been it's been fun.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a challenge in a new way for me for sure.
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I hear you.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_03: It definitely is.
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_03: But I love that we found each other.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_03: So is that where people should find you now?
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_03: Follow your work, all of that is on your Instagram or is or get their hands on belonging.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, you said it's on Amazon.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_03: What would you like my audience to know about you?
• 1:18:24
  SPEAKER_03: How can they find you?
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my Instagram handle is MelissaLacore LPC.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to post content there three to four times a week if I can, at least just consistently, at least a few times a week.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_00: You can also find me on my website.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_00: I have a lot of information and a lot of stuff on my website.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's MelissaLacour.com.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Belonging has its own page on there, so you can read more about the book itself, the different links to order it, all the different places that I offer therapy, because I I live in Louisiana, but I also see clients in um Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, and Minnesota.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if you live in one of those states and you're look looking for a therapist who does adoption work, I can see you in those states.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_00: But my website is where I blog every week.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_00: I post a lot of content there as far as educational and how to find a good therapist or what should you be looking for and all these different questions that I hear people asking all the time.
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_00: So Instagram for reels and emotion and yeah, day-to-day type content.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're looking for resources, if you're looking for belonging, if you're looking for therapy, if you're looking for more information about me in general, my website, MelissaLacour.com, has everything there.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_03: Great.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I will obviously put all of that in the show notes.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_03: So as we close today, something Melissa said keeps circling back for me that having a great adoption story doesn't cancel out the fear, doesn't cancel out the abandonment worry, the sense that you have to earn your place.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_03: Those two things can exist together at the same time, and neither one is a lie.
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_03: Don't let people tell you that.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's the thread running through so many of these conversations that I have.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_03: Belonging doesn't ask you to pick a side.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_03: Grateful or grieving, connected, or still figuring it out.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_03: It just asks you to be honest about all of it.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_03: Melissa is doing something that I don't see very often though, showing up as both the adopted person and the person in the therapist chair, and refusing to treat those as separate.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_03: She's building something for a community that hasn't had many of us in quotes leading the conversation, and she's doing it while she's doing her own work too, because she sees therapists as we all do that do this work.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm really glad that you've been here.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_03: I'm really glad that everybody that is listening and viewing is here as well.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_03: If this one landed for you, sit with it for a minute before you move on to whatever is next in your day.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_03: And Melissa, once belonging has had a little bit more time in the world and once that conference talk happens and you have more books out there, there's a seat for you to come back and tell us how it's landing.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_03: So, so grateful.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_03: So if all of you find this episode helpful to you, so so grateful that you came.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_03: Don't forget to leave a five-star review or to write one if that feels comfortable for you.
• 1:21:12
  SPEAKER_03: Would love that.
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_03: You can also connect with me on there.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_03: My link will be there to connect.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_03: A couple of reminders the unmothered retreat that Dr.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_03: Liz DeVeta and I have created is happening December 4th through 6th in Highland, Michigan.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_03: And we'll be talking about it tomorrow night on the nap happy hour if you'd like to hear more.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I'll add the link to register for that in the show notes.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_03: And the fourth iteration of Revelation Live is starting this upcoming Monday, September 21st, the seven-day results discovery journey that dips your toe into my seventh phase belonging blueprint with other adoptees in a WhatsApp community.
• 1:21:45
  SPEAKER_03: So the link will also be in the show notes.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_03: And if you're curious about any of this, again, just schedule a call with me.
• 1:21:50
  SPEAKER_03: And remember, belonging was never something you were supposed to go out and find in someone else's approval, someone else's family, someone else's definition of you.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_03: So stop outsourcing it and insource it.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_03: And Melissa, thanks for being with us.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for having me.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'll see all y'all next week.