Adoption, ADHD, and EMDR - a personal journey on the path to self 

Adoption, ADHD, and EMDR - a personal journey on the path to self 

By Carole Dwelly

‘I understand now that I’m not a mess but a deeply  feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when  someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, ‘For the same  reason I laugh so often, because I’m paying attention.’ 

Glennon Doyle Melton 

At a particularly low point in my life, I was introduced to two unknown acronyms - one I didn’t  think existed and the other I had never heard of before. Running concurrently, I had found myself  juggling life-changing events and significant losses. I felt static, depleted, and numb. 

It was as if the rest of the world continued spinning and mine had ground to a halt, with not  even a brief global respite to honour and acknowledge how wonderful the people and animals who were no longer with us were. There was nothing to soften the blow, only the persistent waves of emotional grief that would arrive any time it liked.

From a ripple to a tsunami, and sometimes occurring in a very public place. 

Even my partner began to show signs of gratuitous  impatience. Off-the-cuff remarks enquiring why I was still grieving the loss of my mother (6 months on) and, ‘There must be something wrong with you,’ 

became her default comment, summarizing the insufferable time she had endured with me in seven words! Naturally, it should have set off alarm bells, but the numbness I was feeling overshadowed any hint of rational coherence in her caustic tone of voice. I simply didn’t have the energy to deal with  further emotional turmoil and confrontation but  instead made a mental note of the glaring red flag. 

Denial heightened my myopic view of the bigger  picture. To accept and believe that the person I  chose to spend the rest of my days with, and fellow  adoptee, would not understand my plight seemed  grossly absurd. 

As I stumbled through the fog of grief, there was  another issue unfolding. The possibility that ‘there  wasn’t anything wrong with me,’ only undiagnosed ADHD and an obstacle of denial, on my part, to  break down.

They say truth can be stranger than fiction, and following the loss of my adopted mother, I thought  things couldn’t get much lower. My mother had been  the foundation stone that had held the rest of the  misfit family in place. She was compassionate and  kind and always brought us together, even as  reluctant as I was at times I did so out of respect  and the love I had for her. When she passed away, the whole dynamics of our dysfunctional family  went, for want of a better expression, arse about face. 

Utterly overwhelmed and under-supported for  months following the loss of my adopted mother and a year later my long-time canine companion; when  my relationship finally ended, I just remember feeling a slight flicker of relief. Even as I grappled  with this incongruent emotion, my world, as I had  known it, finally all came crashing down around me. 

When the dust finally settled, I was left with one objective.  

Healing and recovery.  

I had always held a certain scepticism about the  validity of ADHD (Attention, Deficit, Hyperactivity, Disorder), and I can’t fully explain the resistance. It ran deeper than struggling to recall the sequence of letters, let alone what they stood for! (It’s also,  quite possibly, the worst description of all time!) 

But that wasn’t the only reason. I also, as an  adoptee, had a deep-rooted aversion to being  different. Fitting in or blending in was all I yearned  for growing up in a world that felt to me like I was  anything but. My adoption had occurred last  century, in the 1960s, when closed adoptions were  the only legal option. Up until the Adoption Act in  1976, adoptees had no access to their birth certificates, and even adopted parents were often  advised against sharing information about the  adoption with the adopted child! 

It was a puzzling time growing up, not seeing any traits, looks, or other similarities mirroring my own  between myself and my family. At age 8, I was sat  down and told I was different, I was special, and I  had been chosen, as if that would make all of the  niggling questions be answered and everything okay.  Perhaps as a way of affirming their narrative, I’d  also get told how much I looked like my dad. It  didn’t, no matter how hard I tried, I just didn’t feel  grateful for being special or chosen. And I had a  bully for an elder brother (their biological son). It  all just felt wrong. (In today’s world it would be  called gaslighting.)

Unsurprisingly, I became the adoptee who acted out. I felt like I was always trying to put a square  peg in a round hole. 

In my formative years, I had struggled to understand my emotional limitations and fears of  rejection, which had affected most of my intimate  relationships, and subconsciously nurtured my  resilience to remain tough to the outside world, yet  remaining completely vulnerable within. All the  accumulative trauma I had deposited in a place so  deeply hidden, it would take the most expert  navigator to even reach the securely fastened door. Right or wrong, it enabled me to move forward with  my life and not be swamped by all the emotional  trauma I wasn’t yet ready to deal with. 

So here I was, many moons later and on the cusp of realizing my brain was wired differently, my long term relationship defunct, my best canine friend  deceased, and my mother gone, brought about something that could only be described as a  sh*tstorm. My mooring brutally broken, I found  myself adrift in a rapidly, uninviting, and  unpredictable ocean. The stored trauma inside seemed to be rising like a spring tide as I  instinctively tapped into the calmer waters of my brain as I had done in the past during my sailing 

adventures. I usually became calm and quick thinking in an emergency event on board, and I  would be able to think with clarity, abating rising panic that would usually affect other crew  members. I drew from those strengths and walked  towards what some may call the dark night of the soul to seek answers, solutions, and direction.  

The dark night increased to days, nights, and weeks, of soul-searching and processing. I spent  night after night in monologues with myself. As  insane as it sounds, it was a bizarre mix of self critique on one side and praise and encouragement  on the other. The encouragement monologue  gradually began to gain traction as I continued the  self-talk into the hot and sticky nights during the waning summer. The darkness and the clear Milky  Way hovering above, seemingly close enough to touch, setting my mind on an immeasurable journey  into the cosmic past while I tried to sort out my  present predicament. The first step seemed clear – obtain a diagnosis. 

As anyone with ADHD, or who knows anyone with the condition, getting a diagnosis can be an arduous  and possibly expensive task, or both. I felt my  problem-solving skills were really being challenged  to the hilt as this particular journey commenced. As 

I made a snail’s progress in one department, the  door was firmly slammed in another. I swiftly  realized getting a diagnosis wasn’t going to be as straightforward as I first imagined. After  exhausting all the contact numbers I had collated,  mainly therapists and psychiatrists, it appeared the  only way forward through the health system was  starting with a GP appointment.  

That seemed easy enough, but soon enough I found  my patience tested when I had to watch the GP use  one finger to type up some forms to start the ball  rolling. After what seemed like an eternity, the  forms were for a series of blood tests. I can’t  recall if I used an expletive at this stage, but the GP seemed to take great pleasure in informing me  of the protocol involved and something about how long the whole process could take. But I didn’t want  to wait. Feeling a little dejected and devoid of  focus, halting the impulse to screw the pages up, I  asked a simple question that, unbeknown to me,  would lead me to fruition. 

“So, is there a private clinic that is able to carry out the diagnosis?” (Keeping the rising frustration  from my voice).

The answer made me undecided whether I should  include a second expletive here or shake his hand.  According to his knowledge, I could enquire at the 

private health clinic that was a 15 minute drive  from my house! Like me, I guess one does tend to  wonder why this information wasn’t proffered at  the beginning of the consultation, and like so many  other rhetorical moments, I thought it best to leave the health centre with haste while I was ahead. 

I know others who are still on a waiting list face  huge delays, sometimes years before they can get  diagnosed. I felt exceedingly grateful for  discovering the local, private clinic (I have no health  insurance), and the fact that I was able to afford  the consultancy fee to finally get a clinical diagnosis was a huge validating relief for me. (Where I live, in  Portugal, for now, it’s actually very affordable).  

It basically highlights that all the online sites advertising assessments at inflated costs (not  recommended) and the broken health care system  in the UK, which has been helpless in the face of  greedy politics, have allowed profit to surpass the  importance of mental health care. The 

neurodivergent population deserves better. It should be a basic human right to obtain the care 

and attention that they need to be able to have the validation of a diagnosis and, more importantly,  access to much-needed medication for those who  require it. 

It was the same psychiatrist who carried out my ADHD assessment suggested I may benefit from  EMDR therapy. Divulging a small percent of who I  am and my past seemed to be enough for the doc to suggest I had C-PTSD (I actually had to ask what  the C stood for). And on my way out of the clinic, I had already booked my first consultation with the  next doc to begin my EMDR treatment, even though  I didn’t know the first thing about it. And so my  first experience on my healing journey with the help  of the other acronym was about to begin. 

What also made the treatment so appealing was that it was a practice leaning more towards  interactive psychotherapy as opposed to the talking  therapy I had only previously had experience with. I  had already lived decades with undiagnosed ADHD,  the challenges I experienced I took for the long term effects of childhood/early adult abandonment  trauma, I know I hadn’t fully dealt with. It all  merged together in the murky, traumatic waters of  time. It was impossible to separate one adopted  emotion from an ADHD one. Presented as a work of art, the piece would have resembled a web spun by a  spider on caffeine. In a word, chaotic. (We’ve all  seen the images, right?!) 

Directly after my ADHD diagnosis, the psychiatrist  promptly wrote a prescription for medication that I  was reluctant to take. 

I needed an organic healing process to formulate, and the idea of taking a pill to supposedly improve  my ADHD struggles just seemed like a ludicrous cop-out and a win for big Pharma. After all, I had made it this far having lived my entire life with  ADHD, so I wasn’t about to start now. To appease  the psychiatrist, I took one tablet, reluctantly, and  endured a sleepless night. It was all I needed to  confirm what I instinctively knew all along, and I’m sure my told-you-so attitude was picked up by the  specialist.  

(While I can safely say my views, opinions, and  experiences are uniquely mine, I do not wish to undermine others who rely on and thrive off ADHD medication.) 

Famed for her abundant idioms, my adopted mother regularly recited, I drew comfort from her words:

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and, no time like the present, I set to making the EMDR therapy my  lightsaber in confronting and conquering the final  ‘chapter’ to reclaim my psychological liberation and  healing.  

Years previously I had been gifted the book, The Primal Wound, written by the amazing Nancy  Verrier. Barely had I made any headway into the book when I found myself in floods of tears after  reading the following sentence, ‘Dear Mum, please  come and get me.’ This was in reply to the question  Nancy had asked a group of adoptees: if you could  write to your birth mother, what would you say? The sentence evoked something primal within me. A  visceral and almost indescribable pain that I only  wanted to flee from. Each time I picked up the  book, the repeated emotion would rise to the  surface, and each time I would place the book back  in the bookshelf, choosing the next bookshelf up, to  place it further from my reach, as if by doing so I  could distance myself from my own emotional  reaction.  

Eventually, and after countless attempts, I successfully read the book, bought the sequel Coming Home to Self, and devoured that in the  process. I was relieved that I had finally managed  to finish both publications, and my gratitude,  holding no bounds, reached out to the author,  praising her for her life-changing work.  

There is no doubt in my mind the mental and  physical impact being adopted has sometimes overshadowed and affected my life, but there was  one event that I wanted to address and pen to my  birth mother, not to be posted as I had no  forwarding address or knew if she was still alive. It was more about an instinctual urge, yearning to  transcribe all those suppressed emotions. 

Fresh from the encouragement and empowerment  I’d gained after reading the books, I set to to write  that long-awaited letter I had promised to myself.  

I will spare you the amount of false starts that I notched up. When I did manage to get the words  flowing, they got angrier and angrier and angrier, and the momentum and articulation were lost in the rage. It left me feeling defeated and stuck. 

_________________________

My first, introductory consultation for the EMDR  treatment instantly put my frenetic mind to rest, as  my psychotherapist was one of the most empathetic  professionals I had ever met. The instant rapport  was reflected in my effortless ability to talk  nonstop. It was as if I had been passed the key,  albeit rusty, to unlocking the door to all of my  traumatic memories I had kept hidden within my body and mind. 

After a handful of sessions, the power of the  EMDR therapy allowed me to visit that memory  from my early 20s, the second and most devastating  rejection from my birth mother, threatening me  with legal action if I stepped one foot closer into  her world.  

 With the flow of the lateral beam of light in front  of my view, my safe location at hand in my  imagination, the deep breathing and the light, the  soothing and sometimes exhausting light, and the constant support and care from my psychotherapist, Inês, (pronounced Inesh), I edged  closer to my goal. 

A horizontal metre-long tube with LED lights sits on  a tripod at eye level, allowing the lights to move laterally and also at different speeds when  required. Keeping your head static and only your eyes to follow the light, it stimulates areas of the  brain we typically use during REM sleep. (Also where  we process new memories). It also lights up the  frontal cortex, the rational thinking part of the  brain that can override the amygdala, the flight-or fight response to a given traumatic event or a  current situation. It also reconnects the left and  right sides of the brain, helping our memories to  become unstuck, allowing a peaceful resolution for the memories to slowly manifest. 

After most sessions, as challenging and painful as  they were, I slowly shed the layers of trauma, and after being advised to do nothing for the duration of the day, I drove myself straight home, knowing  that I would capitulate to the rapid wave of  exhaustion that would find me already relaxing on  the sofa. Never having experienced anything quite  like it, I was pleasantly surprised, upon awakening, how refreshed and calmer I felt. 

I wondered how I will know when I’m healed. How  will it present itself? Will it be a eureka moment, or  will I just wake up to a different me? The answer  for me was more subtle and gradual. Our brains are amazing and incredibly resilient, and for me, the  moment presented itself when I found I was able to  finally let go and forgive my birth mother and, more  importantly, forgive myself. It’s not just voicing the words, it’s a profound, all-tangible, physical, and  mental state of knowing. Sensing the shift, a  transformation. A response as opposed to a  reaction. 

Revisiting those old memories will occur time by  time but the huge difference is there’s no snowball  effect. That’s all but melted away. My nervous  system isn’t triggered as before. I can express the emotions in a more rational and liberating way, and knowing that they won’t send me into an emotional free fall is enough to bring a tear to the eye! It’s  also about acknowledging that there is also strength  in sensitivity, emotion and empathy, not weakness.  To know that I am enough is really more than  enough! 

The significant triumph was prevailing and penning ‘that letter’ (it became an epic, 7 A4 pages long). Something that I never before thought possible. With poise, articulation, and empathy, I was able to  pen my whole experience and explain how her  actions had impacted my life. It was cathartic and  allowed me to reach a sense of closure, even though  I had known for decades that I would never sit  face-to-face with my birth mother or know that her  eyes would never absorb my words. To quote a few  lines from the seven-page missive:

‘Perhaps there will always be things left unwritten or unsaid for the time that has passed is a lifetime, and we all must  have our say, directly or not; time to let go, time to have closure, even if it is not played out the way we would have  wished. Not craving for what-ifs and should-haves, but  embracing peace and love. To be understood by the ones  that matter is enough and to leave all the heartache from  the ones that were never able to feel empathy behind. Not  to forget, but to forgive.’  

It’s been a life-changing process for me to find  something resembling peace and more of a balance  within myself. I am grateful I took the necessary  steps and allowed the rest to unfold. From the  burnout and overwhelm prior to my ADHD diagnosis,  it’s been an evolutionary process in moving forward  in a more mindful way, allowing gratitude into my  world, nurturing self-care and love while the guilt,  shame, and blame diminished. I’m at ease with the  person who I always knew I was, the masks long  since discarded, not defined by my pre-verbal  trauma, adoption, ADHD, and someone who was  repeatedly told in the past, you’re too sensitive and too emotional or too angry, yadda, yadda. More  importantly, it’s about how we see ourselves and  accepting and embracing everything that makes us,  us. We are all beautiful souls, warts and battle  scars and all! 

In retrospect, I always believed that if I could  overcome my physical fears, everything else would  be okay. It would create a foundation of strength  and resilience. I thrived off a life of excitement  and living on the edge, feeding hungrily off the  adrenaline. Pushing myself to the absolute edge, especially during my time sailing and delivering  boats. I did overcome my physical fears while facing  the harsh and unpredictable elements of the sea,  oceans, and weather.  

The irony wasn’t lost on me as I was finally able to  acknowledge and deal with facing the far greater  challenge that my emotional fears and everything  else encompassed.  

There exists a real sense of accomplishment now, plus not only realizing one of my favourite mottos  but also being able to say with conviction I was the  woman who felt the emotional fear and did it  anyway! 

by Carole Dwelly

https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/ 

While I can only account for my personal  experience with EMDR, in general, this form of  therapy has extremely positive results. However, the process I have heard can also be very testing  for some, evoking and reliving the traumatic events  during the treatment. I would welcome and be very  interested to hear of other people’s experiences with regard to this psychotherapeutic treatment. Please feel free to get in touch via the email below. 

After studying and researching everything I could  find on ADHD, the natural path led me to becoming  an ADHD coach, accredited through the Association  for Coaching, and I now spend my time helping fellow ADHD brains navigate through their own  challenges. You can contact me at: coachingwithadhd@gmail.com

Photo: Javardh on Unsplash

Adoptees have been gaslit on a grand scale - by Gilli Bruce

Adoptees have been gaslit on a grand scale - by Gilli Bruce