Out of the fog, into the body: how breathwork helped me finally come home
A personal journey through adoption healing, from narrative and language to embodied transformation by adoptee Nicole.
For nine years, I sat in therapy sessions, talking in circles, trying to figure out what was wrong with me, barely touching on my adoption experience. Nine years of exploring my life, my perceived failings, trying to understand my patterns and analysing my relationships. Yet despite all this important work, I remained fundamentally disconnected from myself, a 'head on a stick,' as I came to think of it, floating through life without truly inhabiting my body.
I was caught between two impossible states: complete emotional numbness where I felt nothing at all, or overwhelming floods of sensation that felt like drowning. There was no middle ground, no way to titrate or regulate. It was either everything all at once, or nothing at all.
The Fog and the Awakening
Like many adopted people, I spent decades 'in the fog', minimising my adoption experience, telling myself and others that it wasn't a big deal, that I was fine. After years of struggling with relationships, identity, and a persistent sense of not belonging anywhere, I began to wake up to the profound impact adoption had on my development.
The initial breakthrough came through discovering resources that finally gave me language for my experience, those adoption bibles, The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier and You Don't Look Adopted by Anne Heffron. For the first time, I had words for the complex emotions and patterns I'd been carrying. This led me to work with Anne, spending a year writing my adoption story, then another year in community with other adopted people through Flourish, the therapeutic writing group run by Pam Cordano and Anne.
This narrative work was essential. I needed to understand my story, to be witnessed and validated by others who shared similar experiences. Yet even after all this important processing, something remained unresolved. In fact, I seemed to be getting worse.
The Overwhelm Paradox
When I tried to access my feelings genuinely, I was flooded with overwhelm. Everything made me cry. My therapist flagged to me that there were two types of crying: one where we are genuinely moved by something and the other where we are overwhelmed by whatever is going on either internally or externally. In the former, you can make eye contact or connect with the source of the distress, but in the latter, it is impossible to look at anyone, impossible to connect, everything is unsafe. Sometimes I cried when I was truly feeling my emotions in a connected way but often, crying had become a mechanism to deflect whatever was actually taking place.
Throughout the process of coming out of the fog and learning to tell my story, I still went to therapy where I would spend 40 of my 50 therapeutic minutes crying. It took about six months of this, before my therapist and I agreed to take a therapeutic break. The crying wasn't healing; it was another form of hiding.
Being seen felt profoundly unsafe and whilst being alone felt safer, I was desperately lonely. I was caught between my need for connection and my terror of being truly witnessed. Separated from my birth mother before I could learn where I ended and she began, I'd never developed a clear sense of self, only the unconscious need to be what my adoptive parents required. Being truly witnessed requires expansion, vulnerability, the willingness to show our deepest self, but adoption had wired me for contraction, and my body had learned that survival meant keeping that deepest self protected at all costs.
The Body Remembers What Words Cannot
What I didn't fully understand at the time was that my earliest trauma of maternal separation had occurred before I had language. This pre-verbal experience lived in my body, in patterns of breath-holding and hypervigilance that began in infancy. My newfound language and story simply couldn't touch whatever lived in this pre-verbal space.
Imagine living in a house with an angry tiger prowling somewhere inside. You move carefully through the rooms, hyperaware that behind one of the closed doors lurks something dangerous and unpredictable. You don't know which door it's behind, but you can sense its presence, so you tiptoe through your own home, never fully relaxing, always listening, always ready to run. The house looks normal from the outside and you can describe every room in detail, but that knowledge doesn't help you feel safe when you know the tiger is still there, waiting.
This hypervigilant state didn't appear from nowhere. There's an armouring that takes place when mother abandonment occurs, a pre-verbal response of constriction in the body, a defence mechanism activated by the primal understanding that without the mother nearby, the body is not safe. Because the mother never returns, we stay this way: hypervigilant, tense, listening for danger and for our mother to return to signal that we can relax.
This tension doesn't just live in our minds, it becomes encoded in our muscles, our fascia, the very tissues of our bodies. Our cells hold these memories of abandonment, storing the fear and vigilance in places our conscious minds can't reach. I believe this is where my breath-holding comes from, an unconscious habit of holding my breath, remaining ever so still, listening for any sound of danger or for any sound that she might be coming back. When the mother doesn't return, this pattern becomes our normal - a state of perpetual bracing that our bodies mistake for safety, even though it keeps us trapped in a prison of our own protective responses.
Our breathing patterns are formed through both inherited genetic templates and early learned experiences. These genetic blueprints help our breath naturally adjust to our body's changing needs throughout the day. Our learned breathing patterns begin even before birth as we float in the womb, our developing nervous systems already synchronising with our mother's breathing rhythms. After birth, this attunement deepens through countless moments of being held, fed, and comforted, our tiny bodies pressed against our caregivers, absorbing their breath patterns along our entire length as they become the external regulators of our still-developing nervous systems.
Yet what happens when the mother herself is struggling emotionally beyond the normal physical constraints of pregnancy? During any pregnancy, the growing baby naturally limits diaphragmatic movement as the uterus expands, pushing the diaphragm upward by as much as four centimetres and reducing lung capacity. This is a normal physiological adaptation that all pregnant women experience to varying degrees.
The reasons for mothers relinquishing their babies are varied and complex and in many, if not most instances, pregnancy becomes a period of chronic stress rather than peaceful anticipation. Research shows that chronic stress during pregnancy affects the mother's entire physiological system, flooding her body with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that keeps her nervous system in survival mode.
While we know that stress typically causes people to breathe in shallow, rapid patterns using the upper chest rather than the diaphragm, the specific breathing patterns of emotionally distressed pregnant women haven't been extensively studied. What we do know is that the developing baby's nervous system is learning regulation patterns from the earliest experiences in the womb. The baby experiences every fluctuation in the mother's nervous system through shared blood flow, hormone levels, and the physical rhythms of her body.
If the mother's nervous system is consistently activated by trauma, grief, or the knowledge that she will relinquish her child, the baby's developing nervous system will likely calibrate to this heightened state as normal. The child's earliest template for nervous system regulation may be shaped not only by the normal constraints of pregnancy, but by the sustained emotional dysregulation that occurs when a mother cannot find safety or peace in her circumstances.
For adopted people, these early breathing patterns are disrupted on multiple levels, first in utero through maternal stress and trauma, then through the actual separation at birth, and finally through the absence of the original regulatory system the baby's nervous system was designed to attune to. This leaves us with nervous systems that never learned to fully relax, carrying within our bodies not only our own birth trauma but potentially the respiratory patterns of our birth mothers' distress during pregnancy.
This disruption manifests in various ways: chronic breath-holding as I experienced, shallow breathing confined to the upper chest using accessory muscles rather than the diaphragm, or mouth breathing, which activates the sympathetic nervous system's fight-or-flight response rather than the calming parasympathetic system. When we breathe through our mouths, we're essentially signalling to our bodies that we're in danger, preparing for rapid action with quick, shallow breaths that only stimulate the upper lung areas. This creates a cycle where chronic stress leads to dysfunctional breathing patterns, which in turn keep the body in a state of hypervigilance. The body becomes locked in survival mode, with breathing patterns that reinforce rather than soothe our underlying nervous system activation.
Discovering Breathwork: A New Language
I had no language for interoception, the ability to sense what was happening inside my body. I had to slowly develop the vocabulary to describe my inner landscape. Learning to name these sensations was the first step towards being able to inhabit my body rather than existing as purely a thinking brain. It was as if my body wasn't even there and I was just cognition without form, thoughts without flesh. Each sensation I could identify and then name became an anchor point, a way to ground myself in the present moment and remember that I had a physical existence.
But there was something deeper at play here. For many adopted people, our bodies don't feel like they belong to us. There's often an unconscious sense that our bodies were somehow transactional, part of an exchange we had no say in. Without connection to our biological lineage, we can feel like strangers in our own skin. This disconnection runs so deep that even when we begin to notice bodily sensations, trusting them can feel foreign and unsafe.
Each named sensation became more than just vocabulary, it became a tentative step towards trusting that it was safe to be present in my body, present to what was happening within me, and to what my body was trying to tell me. This wasn't just about feeling; it was about learning to believe that my body's messages were worth listening to, that I had the right to inhabit this physical form fully, and that the wisdom held within my tissues was mine to access and trust.
Breathwork offered direct access to these pre-verbal experiences stored in my body, something that years of talk therapy hadn’t been able to do, but accessing these experiences needed to be approached carefully.
Learning Titration and Pendulation
Breathwork can be overwhelming for adopted people. As we induce altered states and old feelings come online, it's easy to retraumatise someone. For those of us who have been dissociated for years, jumping straight into intense breathwork can be harmful and simply too much.
However, when done gently and with a trauma-informed facilitator, we learn titration and pendulation, the ability to move to our edge of comfort, dip our toe into discomfort, and move back to safety. Each breathwork session becomes a foray into stepping a little further forward.
The breath becomes our guide, leading us gently into our bodies in a way that feels safe. We learn to follow the breath in and out, noticing the body, the sensations and feelings, and bringing the breath to those areas of tightness, discomfort, or resistance. Rather than forcing or pushing through, we use the breath as a gentle invitation to explore what's present, always maintaining the option to slow down or step back when needed.
Through careful practice, I learned pendulation, how to move in and out of emotional arousal without losing myself. Instead of throwing myself off the cliff into the sea of overwhelm, I learned to build resilience and flexibility, to experience big feelings without drowning in them.
We build this capacity gradually through learning to recognise body sensations without judgement. This isn't about fixing or changing anything, but simply about developing the ability to notice what's present without immediately moving to make it different. We develop tools for self-soothing and regulation that work specifically for our nervous systems, creating coherence between head, heart, and gut. Over time, we build trust in our innate body wisdom and finally feel safe enough to inhabit our bodies fully.
Coming Home to the Body
Ultimately, through regular breathwork practice, I've learned skills and tools that enable me to safely feel my feelings, understand the sensations of my body, trust my gut instincts and my heart. I've begun to feel safe in my body, to finally come home.
This transformation led me to train as a breathwork facilitator and a significant percentage of my individual work since then has been with adopted individuals. I understand intimately the unique challenges we face: the body dissociation, the emotional overwhelm, the complex relationship with our physical selves.
Breathing the Body Home
Through my programme 'Breathing the Body Home,' I guide other adopted people through this gentle process back to embodiment. We work slowly and carefully, respecting each person's pace and capacity, building skills for nervous system regulation and emotional resilience.
This isn't about replacing narrative work, that remains essential, but for those ready to explore beyond their stories, breathwork offers a pathway to healing that doesn't require continuously retelling difficult experiences. It allows us to access and process pre-verbal trauma while building new patterns of safety and connection in the body.
The path from fog to embodiment isn't linear, much like life. There are spirals and setbacks, breakthroughs and integrations, but through the simple act of conscious breathing, we can begin to transform our relationship with our bodies and ourselves.
For adopted people ready to explore this path, breathwork offers a way to finally feel at home in your own skin, to trust your body's wisdom, and to experience the profound peace that comes from true embodied presence.
If you're interested in learning more about breathwork for adopted people, visit https://www.thisbeautifulbreath.com or connect with me on Instagram @thisbeautifulbreath or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61575083052286
1 Christine Caldwell and Himmat K Victoria (2011) Breathwork in body psychotherapy: Towards a
more unified theory and practice
Photo by Ratanjot Singh on Unsplash