Adoption, ADHD, and EMDR - a personal journey on the path to self
“After most sessions, as challenging and painful as they were, I slowly shed the layers of trauma,” by Carole Dwelly
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
Adoption Impacts - Rejection and People Pleasing - by Gilli Bruce
New blog post from the popular adoptee author and therapist Gilli Bruce
The 1982 study by Kaplan and Silverstein highlighted 7 Lifelong Impacts of Adoption – one of the impacts identified was a fear of rejection that endures beyond the family into adult life. This is the subject of this piece where we will look at this impact of adoption and how we might come to recognise it operating as an adult.
As our recovery deepens, we start to notice more of the subtle triggers within the body – the body bracing, tensing and alerting the nervous system to a perceived threat on any number of the 7 impacts identified. The messages that become embedded in the body can feel so normal that it can be hard to sift them out from other feelings.
Internal reactions such as ‘Stay Safe’ / ‘I’m not Enough’ messages that we formulated in childhood can run the show into adulthood, so our challenge is to catch them in the act and learn to respond from an adult position – rather than a vulnerable child’s position. We may have interpreted our adoption story in distorted ways, typically our younger self made meaning of what we were told - and we have interpreted our relinquishment as meaning one, two or all of these:
We are not safe and secure - and our needs may not be met, so we operate from a position of fear and anxiety.
We are not enough, we are faulty in some way – or there must have been something wrong with us, so we operate from a position of shame and anxiety.
We were powerless, we have no say in things, we weren’t considered and had no control or autonomy, so we operate from a position of resistance or anger.
Rejection
We may become vigilant for a hint of rejection and feel sensitive, angry or hurt around perceived rejection cues such as these examples:
Not receiving contact at the usual level
Not getting eye contact or other body language cues we can interpret negatively
Not feeling included enough
Friends or close others making new choices such as moving away or making plans that don’t include us or result in distance
Being excluded or cancelled on for unknown reasons
Mood fluctuations of others that may have nothing to do with us
Not being selected for things being perceived as ‘not good enough’
Not being enquired about – or other interpretations that others are not interested in us
Or many other behaviours that our sensitive systems interpret as rejection
Rejection can be a core issue for adoptees, and our systems all adopt different leading strategies for managing this triggering fear:
Some may get angry and operate from the ‘Fight’ response that leaps into action to perceived threat of rejection.
Some may use the ‘Flight’ response and just leave the scene, rejecting others before they reject them.
Some ‘Freeze’ and find themselves unable to respond in any meaningful way when perceived rejection is registered.
Others – go into ‘Freeze– then fawn’ as the nervous system registers the freeze response, then drops automatically into the less know ‘Fawn’ response, also known as ‘Please and Appease’.
Most of us will experience some of these operating on their own or in a combination. These automatic reactions are created by the body – we don’t decide to do them - and we may feel powerless over them – awareness is the key in starting to manage these reactions.
The Freeze – Fawn Response / Please & Appease / People Pleasing / The Please Others Driver
Whichever label we use The Freeze – Fawn response / Please & appease responses can be known to us - as the need to please others, to nurture or rescue others as an almost compulsive reaction rather than simply a kind gesture from the heart.
The difference lies in the motivation behind our actions. Pleasing others may have been the response our body chose as its preferred way to manage the fear of rejection. Naturally, we can all act from a kind heart too, but the Fawn / Please others drive comes from a different motivation.
The ‘Please Others’ driver can be linked to adverse childhood experiences or traumatic events. People pleasing can form to protect us from negative things that happened OR around the positive conditions for secure attachment that didn’t happen – which we now know to be equally as damaging.
Maybe we were relinquished as a baby and the maternal bond was lost.
Maybe our parents weren’t attuned to our emotional needs and connection felt weak of non-existent, this is common in adoptees as adopting parents had no idea that we needed to talk about our adoption and be seen heard, understood and soothed.
Maybe there was a lack of loving affection, touch and hugs that every child needs to feel securely attached and bonded.
Maybe we never got listened to or never felt heard so we tried harder to earn the right to a voice.
Maybe there was a deficit in attention, and we were left alone a lot, even if parents are just busy – the child felt the lack.
Maybe there was neglect - so we didn’t feel cared for or cared about.
Maybe we never got to feel that we belonged in our family - we felt different and we looked different, we had different talents and we had different voices.
Or other needs that weren’t met that we felt the lack of – and thought we could maybe earn if we were pleasing enough.
And of course, negative experiences that happened could create a need to attempt to stay safe and secure by earning this too.
A ‘Please Others’ driver
This doesn’t usually operate alone – we can imagine it as the head of a team that all serve to please others and avoid displeasing, such as:
Don’t argue / create conflict/ don’t be any trouble – it’s too risky.
Hurry Up – don’t annoy anyone by keeping them waiting – anxiety if going to be late.
Minimise difficult feelings – stuff them down and carry on - don’t express them.
Try hard - become indispensable - be there whenever they need you.
Do everything you can to earn approval, loyalty, admiration or to be valued – being a helper e.g. the one helping to clear up at parties, offering lifts or favours.
Be perfect so that there’s no reason to be rejected.
Open / porous boundaries, weak boundaries or no boundaries with others – holding boundaries = risky.
Say ‘Yes’ when we’d rather say ‘NO’.
Not stating clearly or asking for what we want, need or desire.
Many other ways in which we may strive to please and avoid displeasing.
These are Normal Responses to Abnormal Situations. These behaviours happen due to unmet needs in childhood. We may have experienced unmet needs around felt safety, so please to feel safe and secure and to avoid rejection. We may have had unmet needs around our value or worth and carry a sense of shame, so we please others to earn the right to feel we belong, to feel loved and valued. We may have unmet needs around autonomy and control and carry underlying anger, so we may please others to earn the right to self-agency, control or to do things the way we want to.
As adoptees we may or may not use a strategy of pleasing others but if we do – we are likely to people please or attend to others to soothe our anxiety around not really belonging, or not really being loved for ourselves, there may be other subconscious reasons too.
A feature of a Please Others driver is that we may not notice red flags – whether with partners, colleagues or friends we may disregard negative behaviours, or we do notice them – but take red flag behaviours as an indication that we need to try harder or do better. We may even up our game to be what others want / need as a result of red-flag behaviours, and become more determined to win over the person we want to impress or wish to keep on board.
If we had adverse childhood experiences or trauma this can be our subconscious attempt to correct the past and to earn the loving care we needed, this time. Subconsciously we are trying to correct the former hurts or deficits of childhood. If care givers were ambivalent or even avoidant in their attachment style – we will seek out people like this - so that the past can be ‘fixed’ - the trouble is, what we are seeking is dysfunctional love, that whilst it feels familiar, isn’t what we actually want!
Often people pleasing starts in childhood when we didn’t get the loving attunement, attention or loving cues we needed. If a child feels unseen or unheard and their needs are not fully met, we may try to nurture, rescue or please to get it back. We are likely to either avoid displeasing in equal measures.
People pleasing is exhausting – we may be trying our hardest to be good and caring when we feel an inner loneliness or emptiness that needs to be filled up.
How to make some shifts
Reflect on the past using a journal, record in two ways:
What were the bad things that happened? Events, memories, feelings around things that felt hurtful, unloving, difficult, abusive or traumatic (if there are traumatic memories record these without detail for now until you can work with a trained professional). What was hard for you?
What good things should have happened but didn’t? In what ways did you feel a sense of lack or absence? Which deficits in your childhood did you experience? Maybe you became aware that friends had parenting that seemed different, richer or more loving than your own? What was missing for you?
Be aware we won’t have memories of things that didn’t happen – because nothing happened!
Build self-awareness – start to develop awareness of what happens just before the pleasing thoughts and behaviours.
You might notice a slight tension in the tummy, tension in the jaw, shoulders or somewhere else. You might notice a slight anxiety which is so familiar you barely spot it.
You might notice a need to move or shift, a restlessness or a fidgety feeling that could be the start of a mini-Flight response.
You might notice emotions such as shame, anger, anxiety or panic – these may be so familiar that they seem ‘normal’.
You might notice thoughts that you could write down in a sentence to return to later and reflect upon – were they the thoughts of an adult with a solid sense of self – or do they feel ‘young’? E.g. ‘I’d better go along tonight, he’ll be annoyed if I don’t’ – is that even true?
Notice habitual behaviours and patterns that you feel obliged to follow even if you don’t really want to. This includes things you do because internal ‘rules’ that say you ‘Should’, ‘Ought to’, or ‘Must’.
Identify the part of you that feels the need to please / not displease – how old is that part of you?
Having identified the younger part of you that drives people pleasing - bring compassion to that part. Ensure that you avoid criticising or berating this younger part and treat this younger part with the loving care and compassion that a loving parent would.
Remind that part that you are now aged xyz and can now make different strategies.
Remind the younger part that only babies, infants or young children can be abandoned (which could potentially be life-threatening) – at this adult age now, you can only be left, and it won’t be life threatening if you are left.
Practice – new behaviours may feel uncomfortable but are doable! We all have the right to; say ‘No’, assert our needs, wants, opinions and desires and we can learn the skills to do this effectively.
You could look into exploring, for example:
A programme of Co-dependency recovery such as CODA UK’s 12 step fellowship programme.
Assertiveness training, setting and holding boundaries. Developing effective communication skills can be empowering at any age – it is never too late to change and grow.
Disclaimer: The inforamation contained within How To Be Adopted is not a replacement for medical or psychological advice. Always seek personalised guidance from a professional.
Photo by whoislimos on Unsplash
What is EMDR and why can it be helpful for adopted people? guest blog from David Benjamin
Therapist and adoptee David Benjamin explains all about EMDR and how it can help with adoption trauma
David Benjamin was adopted at six weeks old in the North East of England in 1972. His journey to finding his birth family is complete, this has given him the passion and experience to help others in his work. He is a qualified therapist and has sat on adoption and foster panels for the local authority for the past 10 years. He regularly tells his story to prospective adopters.
So what is EMDR and how can it help adoptees?
In the 1980s, American psychologist Francine Shapiro became interested in the connection between eye movement and the affect of persistent traumatic memories. She assumed that eye movements had a desensitizing effect on traumatic memories, and when she experimented with this she found that others also had the same response. She began a lifelong study developing what is now commonly known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. EMDR therapy is designed to resolve unprocessed traumatic memories in the brain.
According to Laurel Parnell, (who developed ‘Attachment focused EMDR’), “A trauma is an experience that causes one to develop erroneous beliefs about oneself or the world and to behave in ways that are not skillful”. For example, a child who is abused may come to believe that the world isn’t safe. They may have difficulty thriving in intimate relationships.
Trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk explains in his book ‘The Body Keeps The Score’, “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on the mind, brain, and body.”
Our brains have a natural way to recover from traumatic memories and events. This process involves communication between the amygdala (the switch triggered by stressful events), the hippocampus (which assists with learning, including memories about safety vs danger), and the prefrontal cortex (which regulates our behaviour and emotion). While many times traumatic experiences can be managed and resolved spontaneously, or with a talking therapy, sometimes the ‘stickiness’ may need to be processed with a therapy such as EMDR - which moves the trauma information from being dysfunctional to functional; it allows the cognitive and emotional parts of the brain to be online at the same time which speeds up processing. Often talking therapies may not work as they can take the person too deeply back into the trauma thus creating even more distress.
Stress responses are part of our natural instincts. When distress from a disturbing event remains, the upsetting images, thoughts, and emotions may create an overwhelming feeling of being back in that moment, or a perception of not being safe in the present. EMDR therapy helps the brain process these memories, and allows normal healing to resume. If the therapy is successful, the experience can still be remembered, but the fight, flight, or freeze response from the original event is resolved. Many people I’ve worked with describe it like they are trying to remember the feelings around the incident but it feels distant, like it’s behind them and they can no longer grasp it, and the triggers that once controlled their day-to-day lives have disappeared.
The trauma that adoptees have experienced is beyond huge. The adoption of a child is a single event, fixed in time, with a beginning and an end. However, the impact is far-reaching—a process that continues throughout the life of the adoptee. Removed, often as a very small child, from their mother, the safety-inducing sounds and smells which the infant responds to in that supernatural attachment between a mother and child is brutally broken. That baby or child must feel terror beyond words, given away to strangers, experiencing unfamiliar sounds and smells, the child will perceive this to be a dangerous situation. Even as adults we struggle with too much change, but this early relinquishment catapults things far into the severe trauma realm in an infant brain that is years from full development and resilience. For many adoptees, the trauma happened before we developed the language to explain the events, so our memories are primarily somatic, stored in our nervous system.
These experiences become fixed in the body and mind in the form of ‘irrational’ emotions and physical symptoms, taken forward into adulthood. Children can’t process these feelings on their own in the absence of therapeutic interventions, and post-adoption services are lacking, at best, outside of the private therapy sector.
The affect of trauma is sticky, like the static when a balloon is rubbed on your clothes and it attaches to you. When the static is discharged the balloon falls to the floor, it is just a balloon…when the affect of trauma is gone, it is just a memory that can be thought about without the woosh of emotion or panic, the triggers disappear and a new freedom can be lived. That’s what EMDR does. I imagine our brain as if it has lots of little filing cabinet drawers that slam shut full of whatever trauma we have experienced, EMDR teases open a specific drawer and allows the effect of the trauma to escape our brain.
I would recommend EMDR therapy to adoptees and anyone who has experienced trauma that is affecting them in the present day. Make sure you find a therapist you click with - a good therapeutic relationship is essential as trust between the two parties needs to be strong. In my opinion, the client should never be allowed to leave the therapy room in a distressed state, so I normally use visualisation resourcing exercises to calm emotions.
EMDR therapy does not require talking in detail about the distressing issue, in fact a person embarking on EMDR therapy doesn’t have to actually remember the specific incident. Indeed, how can we remember what happened in the early days of life? ‘Floating’ back in our minds to the earliest memory of whatever feeling we are experiencing and focusing on that as the ‘target’ memory is enough for EMDR therapy to be successful. EMDR targets the unprocessed memory at the same time as the emotions, beliefs about ourselves, and associated body sensations. Bilateral stimulation (left and right movements - generally eye movements or tapping) activates the brain’s information processing system, allowing the old memories to be digested or reprocessed and stored in an adaptive way. I often use buzzers that the client holds one in each hand that pulse left and right, any bilateral stimulation is effective. Subjective Units of Distress (SUDS) are scored at the beginning and the end of the therapy and the goal is to see a shift in the bodily feelings and the overall levels of disturbance to a more adaptive state.
I hope this has been helpful and debunked EMDR somewhat!
David Benjamin
Photo by Marina Vitale on Unsplash
Six things I've learned since coming out of the adoption fog
Since I had my children I’ve been slowly emerging from the adoptee “fog”. It’s been a hell of a ride, with new revelations coming thick and fast. Here’s what I now know…
Wow it’s been a tough year. Coming out of the fog started slowly in my early thirties, then it accelerated massively when I had children. If you don’t know what the fog is, it’s a term used to describe how you feel about being adopted.
Here are six things I’ve learned since coming out of the fog:
1. I’ve been lying all my life
But I didn’t know I was lying – at least not consciously. Every time I told someone I didn’t feel any different, or agreed with them that as I was adopted as a baby it “didn’t count”, I was lying.
If you had asked me at any point up until my early thirties how I felt about being adopted I would have said “absolutely fine!” then gone out and drank three bottles of wine and slept with a random.
Even post-reunion I was still in the fog. Yep. It’s pretty foggy in there.
2. You can’t force anyone out of the fog
The first rule of adoptee fog club is: people only come out when they’re ready. You cannot force another adoptee out of the fog, however gently.
My own journey out of the adoption fog went something like this:
have my own children
read the Primal Wound
start listening to Adoptees On and other podcasts
join a local support group for adoptees
wake up one day shouting “Holy sh*t!”
At the point everything hit home, I wanted to gather all other adoptees in my arms for a communal cry and a big cuddle. But it doesn’t work that way; people are only ready when they’re ready.
3. I hold adoption trauma in my body
What are you talking about? What trauma? You were adopted as a baby! Even I subscribed to this attitude until recently, but now that I know differently I can literally feel it. And it’s always been there.
My adrenal system has always worked overtime but I didn’t know why or how to calm it down (apart from the aforementioned wine and bad sex).
The burden of being adopted weighs heavy. I hold it in my heart, but also in my hips and my throat. It may never go away, but things that have worked for me include:
yoga
massage
therapy
meditation
Things still to try include:
reiki
Anne Heffron has talked about the vagus nerve with some tips on what worked for her. I’d love to hear about what worked for you.
4. Being adopted has made everything harder
As much as my close friends joke that I have ‘special needs’ because I’m adopted, I really do. From what I know about the way adoption is currently supported in the UK, adopted children do now have a protected status at school and can access additional support. (If this is not the case, please get in touch so I can amend my article!)
Because this wasn’t in place when I was growing up, I struggle to allow myself any additional concessions, when actually sometimes I need to give myself a break, or ask others to be more sensitive and/or supportive. I know there is a school of thought that says by being brought up this way I’m now more resilient, but I’m starting to disagree.
5. Being adopted doesn’t get better with age
I wish with all my heart I could say it did, but I’ve found these ‘middle years’ so far the hardest. That’s not to say it just gets progressively worse, it definitely fluctuates and I hope I’m simply in a trough rather than a peak right now due to my recent emergence from the fog. Did I mention the fog? Man it’s good to be out, but I do sometimes miss that comfy blanket of ignorance.
I do however know that being an adoptee is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life, rather than something that eases off and eventually vanishes.
6. The adoptee community is awesome!
Oh how I wish I’d found them sooner. But better late than never. The online adoptee community is fantastic, so supportive of one another and encouraging us in our baby steps to speak out and cope with the daily strains of adoption, search and reunion, etc. Thank you so much to you all.
And the support group I attend has been so powerful for me in my journey. There are adoptees from many walks of life, with different stories to tell but one fundamental thing in common. I look into their faces and I see acknowledgment of the primal wound, and that is something I didn’t know I needed so badly. I heartily recommend other adoptees to seek out an adoption support group near you, or start one of your own!
There are some people doing incredible work both online and IRL including:
Six-word adoption memoir project
Anne Heffron's blog and book You Don't Look Adopted