Tag: ADOPTEE IDENTITY TRAUMA

Ep. 13 – A Series of Unrelated Thoughts

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There isn’t yet a central theme to my life, there’s no grand thread to pull at, other than this–the worst that could have happened never did, and the strangest situations have all resolved themselves. All I did was ask the right questions for a long enough period of time, and I have had more than my share of luck along the way. I’m deeply grateful to everyone I’ve named, and thankful that you, as an audience and readership, have taken the time to listen and share my story.

Ep. 12 – Okay, Okay Already

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I realize that much of what I felt was displaced rage, an unending scream, buried behind my silent, infant mask I assumed at birth. As an adoptee, I feel I have always had a life-long infection, a buried, festering sore, at the breaking point where identity and the self in relation to the world index, the nexus where I meet others. Bridging that chasm means having a vision of what is possible. The bridge must be precise, but the chasm is itself un-chart-able. Adoptees are all left, more or less, with this bridge to construct, on their own, from their side of the canyon.

Ep. 11 – Fatherhood

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There is a phrase that I first encountered in Betty Jean Lifton’s book Journey of the Adopted Self, the term “genetic bewilderment” and “cumulative adoption trauma.” Becoming a father, meeting someone, finally, who looked like me, even if it took a few years to really become apparent, was a kind of anchor.

Ep. 10 – Warlock III (1999)

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You probably have not seen Warlock III: The End of Innocence (1999). Not a lot of people have. It was an outlier to a franchise that had marginal popularity in the 1980s and – to be clear – it was direct to video. It neither fits with the previous films from the Warlock franchise, nor is it particularly remarkable as a stand-alone horror film. It is, one might say, a “deep cut.” Unless you were looking for it, you likely have not seen this film. Yet, as an adoptee film, Warlock III does some remarkable things.

Ep. 9 – Co-Sign

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I do not think that I am an experiment, like the adoptee triplets Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman who were literally experimented on in the seventies and eighties, or that there has been a preponderance of surveillance of me… more than any other person in today’s society. But a life-long anxiety about my place in the world was made worse, not better, by the circumstances of my closed adoption.

Ep. 2 – Adoptee Identity Trauma

There are millions of adoptees “in circulation” in the United States, and nearly all of them live with their biological histories erased and sealed away by the states in which they were adopted, at least during their formative adolescent and teenaged years. This episode is a narrow slice of one very particular example of that experience.