Tag: ADOPTION INDUSTRY

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. 7 – Private and Occulted Pains

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The experiences I had as a child were damaging, and happened at the hands of specific individuals, but the construct of abuse that I experienced came about through institutional forces and ideological pressures that we were all constrained by… I was raised in a world that no longer exists, only the ghosts and bones of it remain.

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.