I will probably always feel like an outsider. But I'm here to find the love in it.

Does Everyone Feel Like an Outsider Sometimes?

As an adoptee, it feels like a permanent state that I’m learning to live with

Sweet Italian Jesus but its a right old mess over here in the land of the adoptee fog

Family here and there, blood related and not, different cultures and lands…but touching little similarities in the way the old religion seeps through the newer one in the little roadside shrines to Mary in both the countries of my biological origin and my adoptive family’s origin.

I am by DNA 100% Irish, but bought up in England in Italian first generation immigrant and Cockney families.

My Irish birth mother and father are long gone. But five years ago, after 54 years of wondering, of not knowing, my brother found me out of the blue and was able to give me information I’d never had. I saw our parents’ photographs for the first time, and I found out their full, proper names and the counties and little villages where they were both from.

It felt like a miracle.

I discovered the truth about my siblings. Growing up as an only child, I had three imaginary friends, who I thought of and referred to as my brother and two sisters. I always felt that I was one of four, but my adoptive parents didn’t know about my older sister at the time of my adoption. If they had known that three years after they adopted me, a little brother came along and needed a home, they would have adopted him, too.

I am in touch with my brother who found me, but after five years we still haven’t met and I honestly wonder if we ever will. I don’t even know where in the force-field between our hearts the reluctance on my behalf meets the reluctance on his.

Another sibling I missed by just seven years, she passed eleven years ago at the young age of 42, a beautiful woman. And the older one still missing. No name, date or exact place of birth (Eire)

My adoptive mum and dad are long gone too, and very much missed. They adopted me late in life to the astonishment and disapproval of most of their family members. The one aunt who did love me is dead. The others disappeared from my life with the loss of my parents. Dad missed the arrival of my firstborn by a matter of weeks and mum missed my fourth by a few months.

My beautiful babies’ lives have unfolded like flowers, and they’ve grown, and flown and have babies of their own.

I want to give my children and their children, my lovely grandbabies, so much more than this. I have on offer a confused muddle of strands and fragments and faces in photographs, people who bought me up, and people whose faces I didn’t see until my fifth decade, but who are blood of my blood. On top of this, a ridiculous number of Ancestry dot com ‘4th-6th cousins’…so called ‘matches’ who don’t answer my messages, but not the one I’m waiting for, the hope of meeting whom keeps me forking out the monthly subscription; my older sister.

Inside my heart the little version of me stamps a foot and blinks back tears and between gritted teeth says,

‘I don’t want ‘DNA matches’. I want people, I want kitchen tables, I want cups of tea. I want phone calls, messages and the sharing of laughter and tears with people who are of me as I am of them.’

I want real live people, the presence and acceptance from whom will give me my place in the world in the eyes of myself, for my children. For them to know that I am a person who belongs.

I know we all have the propensity for that longing inside of us, adopted or not. For some of us it’s a yearning that may never have the possibility of being realised, a true saudade, because it’s the yearning for something that may not, and may never have existed for us. So us adoptees hold hands together across the void of cyberspace as we each find the way to come home to ourselves.

I believe that I chose this contract to come in to earthly existence on. I chose to come down into this and to learn to see the love in it. To reach beyond the earthly story and to make a meaningful life. To be the first of my line for thousands of years to be born outside of Ireland, to take that deeply concentrated magic over the sea to a land that needs it.

To learn to live alongside the massive missing pieces and entire absent system of my people, my language, my culture, and to learn to live with the profound, unnatural and stressful feeling of always being ‘outside’.

To remember where I was loved.

And to love.

Adoptee dysregulation

I was adopted at 9 days old into a stable and loving home, and I had a great childhood.  It wasn't without it's challenges, but things could have been a lot worse.  I am blessed with a loving partner and family, and a good life.  So when the tidal wave that is my nervous system dysregulation drowns me in it's swell, it can seem to come from nowhere, and seem to have no root cause.  

Dysregulation, also known as emotional dysregulation, refers to a physiological and emotional state in which it becomes difficult to manage responses and to keep emotional reactions within a typical acceptable range.  The sufferer can be triggered into dysregulation by a varying and personal range of seemingly innocuous situations.  The nervous system is upset, with heart rate and breathing becoming erratic, and the fight or flight response flooding the system with adrenaline that has nowhere to go.  This state can last for some hours, maybe even into the next day, although for me, a good sleep seems to even things out for my system.

Emotional dysregulation is characterised by anxiety, extreme tearfulness, outbursts of anger that include aggression towards self and others, throwing objects, destroying things and suicidal threats. It can be a feature of many psychiatric conditions, as well as disorders like ADHD. It can be the result of complex PTSD also known as childhood trauma and traumatic brain injury.  It is thought to be more common in women, due to our more intense experience of our emotions and increased lack of external validation of ourselves in society generally.

Through my life, my tendency to dysregulation has been exacerbated by PMT and PMDD.  PMDD stands for pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder, and is a very extreme form of PMT.  Thankfully my extreme symptoms rarely lasted more than 24 hours, but those hours were very similar to the hours I have spent in dysregulation.  I could predict the day when my PMDD would strike, but that foresight made no difference to my inability to prevent myself from sliding down the steep slope into the darkness.

And PMDD episodes, like periods of emotional dysregulation, can be dark. Very dark. So dark that they can be mistaken for rapid cycling depressive episode bipolar disorder.  The sadness and crying are extreme.  The pessimism, hopelessness, guilt and worthlessness are all-consuming.  They block out the light.  Even the most tender, loving care, although very much appreciated in retrospect, cannot penetrate the darkness or turn the tide. It just has to run its course.

Close relationships can be damaged beyond repair by this sucking, toxic tide. Even the most patient, compassionate support is rejected during the episode, although it is exactly that which is needed.  From somewhere behind myself, unable to control what I'm thinking, feeling or doing, I have watched as relationships drowned in the flood tide.  Some could have the life breathed back into them, but others were not receptive to resuscitation.

My own experience of dysregulation is that, unlike my migraines, it's not affected by being tired, hungry or anything I've consumed, other than alcohol.  In the days when I had a menstrual cycle, I was very susceptible the week prior to my period.  Two or three glasses of wine a night over the weekend would render me more susceptible to an episode, so now I live without the beautiful, terrible daemon that is booze.

And my own personal triggers?  They seem so ridiculous that it feels awkward to admit them, but a light needs to be shone into this dark recess to increase awareness among those who tread warily around their own minefields.  Birthdays can be really difficult somatic reminders of trauma for adopted people and probably deserve their own blog post.  Until I bought this to my conscious awareness, shared it with my loved ones, and accepted some healing around it, the day was more for dysregulation than celebration.  

A lot of my dysregulation happens between me and my partner, rather than to me in isolation, although it can happen in group situations at work as well.  Its safe to say that it is personal interaction with a person or people that opens me to the possibility of dysregulation.  If we've arranged to meet at a certain time and my partner is late (which he often is due similar challenges of his own) I find my anxiety creeping on.  If we're out and I lose sight of him the same thing happens.  It's ridiculous.  There's nowhere we go together that I couldn't go to by myself with complete ease, but something happens to me when we are together - it defies logic.  Similarly, I need to say goodbye to him properly, and then I have to watch him go until I can physically no longer see him. 

There's more, as you can probably imagine.  Stuff that has damaged our relationship and from which, to my eternal gratitude, we have recovered.  But I recently walked out on a job, for a reason I couldn't, and haven't explained to my very sweet and kind ex-boss.  Emotional dysregulation does damage. The fear of an episode being triggered has stopped me from doing things, many times. 

There is a resource for managing dysregulation that has helped me, and I want to share it with you here. It consists of a short daily practice of a very specific style of journalling, combined with meditation, and it works. It hasn't 'cured' me, but a big improvement has been made.  I think the 'brain dump' element of the process has a lot to do with it, because this style of journalling allows for the expression of everything that's going on in my brain, however trivial, negative, non-productive, shameful and private. We all have these negative internal monologues, and these stories fuel dysregulation.  Meditation allows the body to experience a calm and regulated state, which may make it easier to access this state at will.

Chicken Soup for the Adopted Soul

 There's no shortcut, and there really is no other way. 'Love' can be a contentious word, like the word 'god'.  Don't let any one define or spoil these concepts for you. Yes in your past, in the name of 'Love' or 'God' someone may have frightened you, persuaded you, tricked you.  Those people had no authority over those words, or those concepts.  Don't let some ignoramus from the past control your present experience. 

 Even if you can't say the word, if you can't call it 'love', if that word is too loaded with pain, call it something else, but start thinking it. Change some behaviours, take a fucking step in that direction.  It can be as hard as hell, but let's face it, NOT taking that step is going to be just as painful too.

Today I am choosing to believe that I am whole.  (Of course it's still just me, little old broken, wounded, grieving, struggling, never-feel-right-in-my-own-skin me.)  But honestly, fuck all that, because just for now, I am choosing to sit in a different belief.

I am choosing a belief that empowers me (god I hate that word) nourishes me, HONOURS ME.

I don't care that I'm not feeling it, yet.  I don't care that I'm still scared, unsure, full of doubt, because that is just life.  All those non-adopted folks feel all that stuff too.  I don't know how long I can make this belief last... I don't even care.

Because just for now, I'm going to believe that I'm whole. I am loved. I am lovable, I'm OK, fine just as I am.

It's a start.

I'm adopted, so I'm 'different'. And that's OK.

I'm 58 years old...I have a wonderful husband, family and a fun social life, and some great friends. I struggle with real close friendships outside of my family circle, but I think that's about those unhealed parts of the adopted me, not about the nice people around me.  

I'm different.  And that's OK.

Mostly, I feel too happy, lucky, stable, settled and frankly, too old, to be affected by abandonment triggers. Naturally that's the time when the odd one comes along and catches me out, which it did last week, big time, and I'll share those details when I can.  The speed and iron-hard certainty of my reaction took me by surprise, and I took some time to unravel the threads of it. 

Deep inside, or maybe not so deep inside the woman, is the little person who faced abandonment even before her very first breath had been drawn.  As my embryonic being was in construction inside the physiological environment of a person facing the most desperate of situations, challenging to her own physical survival, my unborn self could not avoid incorporation of my mother's distress into my own newly-forming structure. Stress hormones flooding her, or rather, our, system, the sound of her tears, her voice, her raised heartbeat making the safe and warm environment of the womb into a fragile stopover before the desertion we both anticipated with dread, and my uncertain future.  Or maybe, to a mammalian baby's hard wiring, a certain future, for being without the mother in the natural world means death.

 Alongside this certainty is another knowing.  The knowledge that her distress, her fear and her tears have one cause, which is the existence of me.  That my own existence is unwelcome is literally written onto and inside of the very wall of my physical being.  It was stitched into my system as I was being made. Abandonment is me. Cell by cell I built myself and destroyed my host.  That's quite an energy to come in on.

 Is that primal wound too much a part of my being to ever properly heal?  I'm sure that forgiveness and understanding of both ourselves and others brings about so much healing through a life, but the abandonment wound is unique.  As a tiny helpless being, we know with bone-deep certainty that the separation of ourselves from our mother will result in our death.  Her body is our world, the environment we need to survive, and without it, we quite literally, lose hope.  When a mother is deprived of her baby, her body registers their absence as their death.  This is nature's way.  Somewhere inside myself, I believe myself to have died. 

A human baby is a mammal, that is, a creature fed on its mother's milk after being born from her body.  The baby's every biological, physical, physiological, emotional and spiritual system expects that following the extreme and most intense priming that is birth, a precise environment will support their transition from fetus to individual human.  There is nothing random or casual about this, it is programming for survival.

Separate now, physically, but not physiologically, emotionally, or biologically, the mother and her baby need one another so much that they are known by the collective term: 'dyad', meaning 'something that consists of two elements or parts'. They are one.  

Following a physiological birth, (a birth where the mother has expelled her baby from her body, sometimes with the 'fetal ejection reflex' so no hours of pushing, no medication or interference from medical and or other people, where her physiology is allowed to work uninterrupted as nature intended) there is often a moment of pause.

The mother returns into herself, after being away in 'labour-land'. Labour land can be described as a trance-like state where the intellectual fore-brain, stimulated by language and cognition, is switched off, to allow the older hind-brain which controls physiological processes, to work unhindered. (This is why her eyes are closed in advanced labour and why you don't try to engage her in conversation. If anyone does, she will experience an interruption in the flow of endorphins and with that, intense pain)  Returning to herself, she looks at her baby, often before touching them.  She looks into her baby's eyes, and the baby looks back.  Often this happens before the mother has even looked to see what sex her baby is.  

Who knows what this first gaze into the eyes of the only one you have ever known, primes in a baby person. Does her loving regard call the spirit wholly into the physical being?  Does it confirm for the small human that they exist? Does it convey some degree of loving safety and a welcome?  An assurance that all is well, that the baby can survive?  To be held in that gaze is to know hope.

The mother picks up her baby.  And if that baby is lucky, she doesn't put them down again until much, much later, when the child becomes ready to leave her arms for a short time.  Her body is the baby's environment.  Their skin, touching (so many nerve endings on both humans firing on contact with the other) stimulates physiological responses in both.  Oxytocin, the hormone of bonding and love, pulses from the mother's posterior pituitary gland. The baby's immature systems are regulated by skin-to-skin contact with their mother.  Temperature, heart-rate, breathing depth and rate, blood sugar levels, stress-hormone release, all are soothed and calmed and balanced by this contact with her.  

These first moments, hours, days and weeks are not just any old time in the life of a human person.  These are the first 60 minutes when the mother's oxytocin levels soar to the highest they are capable of in a lifetime.  This equals extreme ecstatic bonding, unequalled in any other area of human existence, a golden treasure for them both, for their lives.  These are the hours when systems are primed, trajectories set.  Birth is the most extreme experience of our lives and it happens almost at the beginning of our lives and is when the brand new person takes in (that first inspiration is just exactly that, and every emotion in that room is taken in with that first breath and understood) their situation and makes up their mind about their safety or otherwise in this new place, and so we go forward.

Loving gaze, skin to skin, closeness with the familiar body they grew in, with all they have ever known, day and night, for many months. This is the baby's birthright. We don't question it with any other mammalian species.  We know instinctively that we mustn't take a baby from it's mother.  From having this most basic of needs met, we as helpless little beings gain the confidence in our lives, our needs will be met, the faith that we can survive, that our prayers will be answered.  Trust in this existence, and the joy of it is unquestioned when held in her loving space.

Forgiveness and understanding, of self and of others is intrinsic to healing emotional wounds. But the adopted person has no pre-trauma personality, little or no sense of wholeness to which to return.  To survive abandonment from mother, family, tribe is, in nature, so unlikely as to be little short of a miracle.  May the Goddess bless those of us who don't survive it, for adoptees are four times more likely than non-adoptees to commit suicide.

Those first hours and days of life are critical, fast-moving developmental stages, where unique and never-to-be-repeated physiological conditions exist, briefly. Babies know their mother's voice, they know her smell. They've listened to her heart from inside her for their whole life.  Coupled with the pre-birth priming for separation, I believe that relinquishment creates a wound is so intrinsic to self that it is us, and in this way, we become different. An unnatural separation from a part of self, occurs.  I believe this separation is perceptible to others, and they sense our 'difference' and draw away from the chilly breath exuding from the unnatural chasm that they don't understand.  We recognise the look, we've seen it before.  So we withdraw, to protect ourselves, and thus is created the feedback loop, a howlback that echoes on and keeps us separate.

So is to be an adoptee to be without hope of a return to wholeness, of healing?  I used to think so.  I used to believe that I was literally made of this mess so I was never whole to begin with.  That was before I came to an understanding that I am not just this body, this life. There is more, much more, and that part is already whole and always was and always will be.

I am exactly who I am meant to be.  I'm different.  And yes, some other people can perceive that difference, but mostly it's mine to languish or anguish or thrive in.  I'm choosing to thrive in it.  Some days I make that choice literally thousands of times, which is a kind of meditation.  I grow as strong as I can around the friable skin of my wound.  I tend to it with love, and give it time and care when life rips it open again. 

Just as we grew in the womb, division and proliferation continue in an unbroken outpouring of life, our cells have never stopped their renewal and replacement. Essentially we are completely rebuilt every seven years, except for the cells in the middle of the lenses of the eyes.  Those cells that were primed for her gaze are still there inside me.  Maybe they're still looking for her face.  

My prayer for each and every one of my new cells is one of welcome. I am here, from which I must conclude that I am meant to be here, (and because I believe in equality of opportunity) I belong just as much as the next person who may have been wanted and loved the way they needed to be from the beginning. So I welcome my body, cell by cell, stitching a new message of acceptance and joy at my existence into my walls, and I care daily for the thin skin that covers that deep schism with diligence and focus and the understanding of it that the world around me mostly lacks.