catching the flow

I heard that this woman who is an acquaintance of mine is a musician--when she looks at notes on paper, she can hear the music in her head. She said that sometimes just looking at sheet music makes her cry; I assume she can hear the music in her heart. I was thinking about that and was trying to imagine what it must be like to play in an orchestra, totally feeling the music, not thinking about it at all, just completely feeling it together with all the other people playing.
I am such a solitary person. I want to know what its like to share beyond mind with a group. My closest experience was being at grateful dead shows as a young woman, dancing within the crowd, feeling the music move my body around the others who were sharing the experience with me.
I ran yesterday for longer than I ever have. I felt like my breath was slipping and I disengaged from my mind and let the thoughts go and broke through the fear of not having enough breath...and ran (actually jogged). It was good. I thought about what it would be like to run in a group, or to run in a marathon and be surrounded by others running, experiencing their version of the same.

Sometimes yoga is like that for me. One of the things I like the best about my class is that there are always at least 15-20 people who show up. We are a group, we flow through the movements together. I definitely feel the combined energy and I draw on it to push me through when my mind says its too hard. I draw on the power to disengage my mind and just let my body flow.

I want to know how to catch the flow in general in life...

tgiving fallout

I'm realizing bit by bit what makes me numb out.
Abundance of sensory stimuli is a big one.
Emotional expectations from people (family!) is another big one.

I just start feeling disconnected and I don't feel emotion, I'm like on autopilot.
I realized the day before thanksgiving until now when everyone left my house that I was in that zone, being super productive but emotionally shut down.

Thanksgiving is such a complex social/emotional environment--there are so many people operating mostly unconsciously from their childhood experiences superimposing their expectations on everyone else. An intricate web of wants and needs paralleled by active playing out of the satisfaction or un-satisfaction of those wants and needs, with a layer of 'nice-ness' on top of everything.
In those situations I only know how to go mostly inside and be outwardly good and nice but actually not feel. Its fucked up, I don't know how to be genuine when I feel such expectation.

It feels scary to admit not being genuine. I know alot of people hold high expectations for me, but I do for myself more than anyone else does of me. What happens when I let myself down? Is that where the split happens and I detach and retreat into my inside world?

That world inside of me is vast--I have lived there for alot of my life.

trying on family = good

Today I was talking to an adopted person and she mentioned that meeting another adult adoptee is like meeting someone from the same town you are from. I totally get it. There's an underlying feeling of familiarity that is based not in personality, nor currently shared interests, but in root circumstance that has lifelong implications.

I see my work in understanding and working through the whole is-ness of being adopted as an essential process in my parenting to my own children. I do feel that my attempts at awareness are for my kids' benefit.

I'm working on actively connecting with people in my new community, and although it doesn't exactly come naturally, it is flowing in some sense. Every once in a while I experience the feeling of being integral to the environment and needed, and that feels good. I suspect that I feel flashes of disloyalty to my old life, my old home upstate that streak through me and make it difficult to just be here and really be myself. The necessity of doing life here with kids forces me, though. I feel like I need to do it for them. I stepped outside my front door tonight and saw the moon--it is so amazing! Its cut in half and has a rainbowy ring of light around it. My first thought was that although it looked so cool, it would be such a different experience seeing it upstate. The air is crisper, clearer, the land is much more open up there and the stars SHINE at night.
But its good here. I'm making this house into our home, and the active doing that is surprisingly making me feel way more grounded.
As thanksgiving approaches, I'm trying to conceptualize family as 'good' and nourishing. I'm trying to reconfigure some of those neural pathways that were burned deeply around family being dangerous and imminently painful. I hope to pass on family=good to my kids. I desperately hope I do.

disclaimer: i am not all whine

I've had several people who've read blog posts of mine respond with the commentary going something like "adopted people are not the only ones with fucked up families...fucked up families can happen to anyone."
I agree. I acknowledge that. I'm not special because I happen to be adopted; I'm just special :)

I appreciate my life. I have four beautiful kids and a husband who loves me and tries to deal with my amazingness/instability. I've been really realizing how good I have it. I don't want to whine poor me. I don't know if this blog comes across as one big whine, I'm just trying to put whats inside of my head onto the screen in as real a way as I know how.

default settings

Women are scary to me.
Not usually consciously, though. Like, I really need to think about it to get to what its really like for me, to admit and be aware of what it is like to relate to women. I realize that it is very hard to trust them, much much harder for me than to trust men. There seems to be an opening with men, and I do not feel the imminent threat of being blown off, the way I do with women (though this is totally repressed and I really don't realize it within the interaction).
It makes sense, I can pretty much understand it. But to look back and see how I've lived my life adapting around the fear; its amazing to see how the adaptation took on such a life of its own. I've had a best friend that's a woman at almost every stage of my life, and my other relationships with women fell outside the sacredness of that inner circle.
My mother in law was overtaken by a feeling of closeness and came up to me and hugged me and expressed her love and it was a close moment but underlying it I had a terrified screaming person inside my head thinking 'oh-my-god-let-me-go-i-just-need-to-get-out-of-her-grip-i-need-to-have-my-own-space-breathe-nicole-until-you-can-have-your-space-back-to-yourself.
My marriage therapist stepped over and sat next to me on the couch I was on, and read me correctly and acknowledged that she knew it was probably hard for me to have her so close to me saying what she was about to say.
Physical closeness with women feels...unsafe. implicitly dangerous. threatening. uncomfortable!

Its very different with men; I don't feel like I'm about to get hurt just by mere contact the way I do with women. My (other) therapist is a man, my yoga teacher is a man, my chiropractor is a man. I feel a level of safety with them that seems almost like a default setting.

I'm running on default setting with women, too. I wonder if that will change if I develop more of a relationship with my first mother.

Its weird to realize that there's so much of how I live that is so unconscious and not aware, even in the face of making such a huge effort to be aware. I guess there are many levels of awareness--I tend to want to be super successful in what I apply myself to, so becoming aware of my lack-of-awareness gives me a slight sense of hopelessness. Life feels hard, and then I fall into appreciation.

how do i break free?

"The issues of trust and intimacy are closely related to those of abandonment and rejection. There is such a fluid movement among these issues that it is difficult to separate them. The adoptee's lack of trust in the permanency of relationships brings about a distrust of closeness or intimacy and a need for distanceing. At the same time there is a yearning for the very thing which is feared." (Nancy Newton Verrier; The Primal Wound)

I feel more cursed by this issue than most since my adoptive mother died. In a way it is freeing, yet my residual pain and ensuing fear of abandonment perpetually bind me. Its so unconscious. Built in to the heart of my relationships is a seed with a tough outer shell of 'survival mentality' protecting the inside, the baby that lost not only her first mother, but her second, too. It is so difficult to break down the survivor and not instantly refer to it when my abandonment fear is activated (usually unconsciously). What a predicament! How to change that pattern if I don't even realize that it is happening when it is happening?

Do people live like this for their whole lives? How do I break free?

seeing one in anyone

I took a train into nyc last night and I was struck by how much i loved the feeling of being around so many people at the same time in close proximity. When I got off the train and we all had to squeeze into a narrow staircase to get up to ground level at the station, I felt everyone's...vulnerability. Someone could fall and it would make everyone else fall. I felt the boundaries dissolve as we were all pushed and squished together through the staircase tube until we got out into the great expanse of the station. I suppose this is something new yorkers take for granted and probably don't even think about, but its novel to me, and really struck me. Plus I am super sensitive to things like that, such as where my body ends and the space around me begins. I live a very suburban life, and am not usually in such physical closeness to strangers. I liked it alot and realized at the same time that I have a limited tolerance--I can only be in a city for a few hours before I feel sensationally overloaded. I think last night I remembered that I love people. I walked down the street and looked into as many faces as I could and tried to project my awareness that we are all connected. We are all different bodies living out our own specific version of the same thing, the One.

michael.

Me and my husband saw This IS It tonight and I am basking in the glow of the powerful story of Michael. As I was watching it, the sociologist in me was wondering what it was like to be him. How do we know who we are? We create our identity either by default or by choice, or a combination. It seems the creation by choice is where the power is.
I came away with the idea that this life is all about story. We live and breathe story--it is the context of us, who we perceive ourselves and others and the world around us to be.

Nothing is objective. Everything is a story, and we assign values and definitions to all the different parts.

I self reflect and wonder who I am and how much who I perceive myself to be is reliant upon my assumptions of others' perceptions of me. I found pictures of my trip 12 years ago to France to visit my birth mother and her other children, and I was studying them last night. I see my resemblance in her. Then by chance I found pictures she sent me of my birth father and it was haunting to recognize myself in him, him whom I know nothing about. How strange it is to look at my likeness in these people, these people whom more than just my body is made from. What other qualities besides physical traits do I share with them?

I look forward to finding the answers and integrating them into myself.

creating the possibility of a choice

I am becoming more aware of how quickly I fall into my default 'survivor' mode. That place is one of stoic independence, in which I am strong and can take care of myself, need to take care of myself, don't have any choice but to take care of myself and I won't fail and I won't be beaten down so I will take care of myself even though its so hard I will do it. When I feel left, when anything happens that hints at disconnection I automatically find myself in that place, in that survivor mode. Its like I just snap into it. I'm trying to figure out how to slow down the process so that I have a choice about moving into it or not. I don't know how to do that but I know it would be useful, beneficial to my life and my people.

abandonment as a theme, part II

Could many adoptees be diagnosed with bpd (borderline personality disorder)? I've never been into consciously incorporating diagnoses into my identity structure, but I've been thinking about how I relate to this group of characteristics which describe this 'personality disorder'. I wasn't just adopted, I was adopted into a highly dysfunctional family; I'm not sure how these independently effect me, but combined they have been powerful shaping forces. I'm assuming many other adoptees could see similarities...? Abandonment early on in personality formation is apparently a common precursor to bpd, and so I am wondering what this means for adoptees in general. ?

Following is the DSM IV criteria for bpd. I've bolded what I can see in myself, and bolded and italicized my own comments.

DSM-IV criteria

The DSM-IV gives these nine criteria; a diagnosis requires that the subject present with at least five of these. In I Hate You -- Don't Leave Me! Jerold Kriesman and Hal Straus refer to BPD as "emotional hemophilia; [a borderline] lacks the clotting mechanism needed to moderate his spurts of feeling. Stimulate a passion, and the borderline emotionally bleeds to death."

Traits involving emotions:

Quite frequently people with BPD have a very hard time controlling their emotions. They may feel ruled by them. One researcher (Marsha Linehan) said, "People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement."

1. Shifts in mood lasting only a few hours.  (I have the ability to feel things VERY strongly, yet am often surprised by how the extremes roll away somewhat quickly, replaced by more neutral, moderate feelings).

2. Anger that is inappropriate, intense or uncontrollable.

Traits involving behavior:

3. Self-destructive acts, such as self-mutilation or suicidal threats and gestures that happen more than once

4. Two potentially self-damaging impulsive behaviors. These could include alcohol and other drug abuse, compulsive spending, gambling, eating disorders, shoplifting, reckless driving, compulsive sexual behavior.

(yes)

Traits involving identity

5. Marked, persistent identity disturbance shown by uncertainty in at least two areas. These areas can include self-image, sexual orientation, career choice or other long-term goals, friendships, values. People with BPD may not feel like they know who they are, or what they think, or what their opinions are, or what religion they should be. Instead, they may try to be what they think other people want them to be.

6. Chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom. Someone with BPD said, "I remember describing the feeling of having a deep hole in my stomach. An emptiness that I didn't know how to fill. My therapist told me that was from almost a "lack of a life". The more things you get into your life, the more relationships you get involved in, all of that fills that hole. As a borderline, I had no life. There were times when I couldn't stay in the same room with other people. It almost felt like what I think a panic attack would feel like."  (Much of the time being around people is excruciatingly painful for me; I am SO sensitive to them, I have adapted by creating a lifestyle in which I am alone alot of the time.  I like people, and can get into moods where I love being around people, yet only for a short amount of time before I feel burned out and totally overwhelmed.  Usually when I am around people for a sustained period of time, I need a recuperation period of being by myself--I almost feel like I've absorbed their energy and I need it to dissipate from me back into the world).

Traits involving relationships

7. Unstable, chaotic intense relationships characterized by splitting (Totally).(see below).

8. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment

• Splitting: the self and others are viewed as "all good" or "all bad." Someone with BPD said, "One day I would think my doctor was the best and I loved her, but if she challenged me in any way I hated her. There was no middle ground as in like. In my world, people were either the best or the worst. I couldn't understand the concept of middle ground." (This describes basically all of the relationships I've had with men in my life).
• Alternating clinging and distancing behaviors (I Hate You, Don't Leave Me). Sometimes you want to be close to someone. But when you get close it feels TOO close and you feel like you have to get some space. This happens often.
• ***Great difficulty trusting people and themselves. Early trust may have been shattered by people who were close to you.***
• Sensitivity to criticism or rejection. (Its almost impossible for me to experience criticism without feeling completely annihilated and utterly rejected).
• Feeling of "needing" someone else to survive
• Heavy need for affection and reassurance
• Some people with BPD may have an unusually high degree of interpersonal sensitivity, insight and empathy 

9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms

This means feeling "out of it," or not being able to remember what you said or did. This mostly happens in times of severe stress.

Miscellaneous attributes of people with BPD:

• People with BPD are often bright, witty, funny, life of the party.
• They may have problems with object constancy. When a person leaves (even temporarily), they may have a problem recreating or remembering feelings of love that were present between themselves and the other. Often, BPD patients want to keep something belonging to the loved one around during separations.
• They frequently have difficulty tolerating aloneness, even for short periods of time. (Its weird because I feel the urgency to get away from people alot of the time, but when alone, I usually feel really out of it, not connected to anything, floating).
• Their lives may be a chaotic landscape of job losses, interrupted educational pursuits, broken engagements, hospitalizations.
• Many have a background of childhood physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or physical/emotional neglect. (I'm trying to gather the hidden, forgotten pieces and understand this part).

adoption and abortion v. class

I'm ruminating on the connections between class and adoption, and the connection between that and abortion policy.  Class and abortion policy, and the implication on adoption.  Blatant observation and guess: poor women tend to give their babies up for adoption, middle class and wealthy women tend to have abortions.  Middle class and wealthy women adopt poor women's babies that they give up.

I have so many questions.  My mind is racing.

i was surrounded by hunters.

I walked into the room late, a workshop with the title that included 'the birthmother's voice'.  I had an expectation.  There was one seat left in the front so I took it.  There was a social worker from an adoption agency that arranges (brokers) open adoptions.  She looked like she was 28 years old and was not a mother herself.  I listened for a few minutes, every once in a while turning around in my seat when someone behind me would ask a question; I wanted to see who was in the room with me.  It took a while for me to realize that most of the women were there to strategize about their future adoption plans.  They looked like me.  It freaked me out.  Women in their mid to late 30's through mid 40's, mostly long brown hair in ponytails, styley jackets and very cool boots, just a touch of makeup.  Intelligent, thinking women.  Upper middle class.  Jersey.  Seeing my likeness in this setting horrified me and intrigued me at the same time.
The social worker 'girl' talked and talked about what these expectant pre-adoptive women could write in their profile packages to effectively win the birthmother over, to be chosen.  And they in turn asked question after question, lapping up all the answers.  They were like hungry cats.  They asked in all different ways the same question: how can I convince another woman to give me her baby?
When I looked back I noticed that many of these women were looking at me with competition in their eyes--they didn't know who I was or what my position at the conference was.  I was anonymously witnessing their desperation, and it hit a nerve within me.   I don't feel like I have worked through nearly enough of my shit around adoption to feel anywhere near objective in my perception of the women in that room.  I wanted to feel empathic towards their situations, yet I couldn't stop myself from seeing them as being unfairly needy.  It was like I was seeing them through the eyes of a child who was thinking "why does she get to have another woman's baby?  Why is that fair? Its not.  Its unfair."  I feel like I'm five years old when I think of them.
The social worker was outlining profiles of actual past birthmothers she had worked with.  She talked about four or five girls, and gave a snapshot in a story for each one; it was a sociology lesson to me.  I realized what was happening was that she was teaching this group of well educated, middle upper class women how to span social class.  Desperation linking with desperation.  The women in the room asked the social worker if the birthmother will care what school they went to, what kind of work they do?  The social worker taught a mini review of Maslow's heirarchy and said that many of the birthmothers are not even sure of their next meal.  They want to know that the child is going to celebrate Thanksgiving every year.  A picture of a Halloween costume of a character with some historical significance to her.  Food, clothes.  Some exoskeleton of tradition, basics  This is what they don't have, what they hope their child will have.
I left the session with the gut-wrenching thought that everyone in that room was thinking of birthmother as commodity, or at least the birthmother's decision as commodity.   It felt dirty.  An acknowledgment of their need would have cleaned it up a bit for me, I would guess.  But I was just privy to 45 minutes of their lives.

I feel somewhat guilty for writing this.  I don't want to be in judgment of these women.  I am not an adoptee who rails against the continued existence of adoption as an institution.  I am actually much relieved when I meet adoptive parents who include an acknowledgment of the birth mother within their family's and their child's identities.  It seems that this is the case on a wide scale these days, and I think that is amazing.  I know it is integral to a healthier post-adoption outcome for the child, so its good to know there has been an evolution in the social understanding of what makes up adoption and how it works.  But the idea that a large percentage of adoptions are facilitated by private agencies is suspect to me.  It doesn't seem possible to be impartial or hold both parties interests as equally valuable when you are getting paid by one of them.  The social worker was explaining how her agency educates the birthmothers by showing them an expense list of how costly raising a child is.  To me, this seems obviously directed and leading, and it strikes that place of out-of-controlness I feel about the fact that I grew up within one family with significant problems instead of another.  I don't have the sense that I was spared suffering by being adopted.  The specific type of suffering was chosen for me, in a way.  Jewish family, mental illness, drug abuse, emotional instability, denial in many forms, suburban america instead of ...teenage single mother, germany, stifling german family?...    who knows? I don't.
I suppose it doesn't matter except that it does matter when I'm reminded of the sadness of losing my first mother.  Maybe it was divinely engineered?  I am open to there being an element of exact perfect placement that is beyond any of our control or understanding.

I want to get to a place someday of feeling the ability to be connected to women planning to adopt without feeling threatened by them, without construing their need as unjustified or unworthy.  Without seeing them as hunters.
I want to be less affected by my expectations.  I hope I can work through my stuff enough to get through limiting myself and my connection to people.

The night of the day of the conference, I got home, had dinner with my family.  I walked into the living room with a cup of hot tea in my hand and walked over and turned off the lamp.  I went to walk out of the then-dark room and fell over the coffee table.  I walked into it and my hot tea spilled and I fell onto the floor and I started crying.  I cried for a while--it took over me, I cried without restraint, from a place deep within me.  It overtook me; it was from a depth I usually cannot get to, like the cry when my mother died.

fantasy & reality

Yesterday I heard a fellow adult adoptee say something about living in fantasy being a common experience that we adoptees share.  I've been thinking alot about this today; this is very me.  My mind simultaneously lives in another realm alot of the time; I wonder how much this is connected to the fact that I gravitate mainly towards non-fiction media....? Its almost like I have enough imagination inside my head and I don't really have room for more.
Going to school and reading academic level material is FUN for me, and I feel my mind shifting gears and processing more.  I am reading so much and listening to public radio and thinking so much that I am noticing how overwhelmed my mind feels on a regular basis.  I then try to take a deep breath and stop thinking and let it settle a bit before I fire up again.
I went to the Rutgers annual adoption conference yesterday and my experience was so different from my expectations of what it would be like.  I have so much to think about and so much to feel.  I was overwhelmed by a catalog of emotions that kind of shut me down and I can see how it all went to my head and created a cluster of confusion.  I had a long drive today and I just tried to let the thoughts and feelings separate a bit so they could form into some sort of pattern in which I can start to identity pieces and begin to make sense of them.

the structure of control

I'm becoming increasingly aware of how I control the people in my life so that I can feel safe.  If I keep them in a restricted box, I can know what to expect and most importantly, I can keep a distance so they can't hurt me.  This is not even by choice anymore, this is just how I live and relate.  I can see how  it must be more than difficult to relate to me.  I keep on flashing back to my dad telling me over and over again while I was growing up that I was a most selfish person.  Its a theme.  I have always chosen men to primarily relate to who in some way agree to the control, and end up seeing themselves as my victim.
I want to, need to change this.  I think I move from such a deeply rooted place of alone-ness, the only thing that feels safe is to make boundaries and keep distance.  Being close is beyond scary.  I don't really know how to change--logically it makes sense but I can't see myself being another way. Maybe because how I see myself is primarily as self-protected; that comes first before anything else.  Again I heard today feelings are key to this. ....????

being in control, giving it up...can I?

My therapist told me today that borderline people often choose narcissists as their partners...ahhh, its making sense.

I have a hard time with feelings. I tend to either not feel them or feel them so strongly that I am overwhelmed by them. Feelings seem dangerous, both my own and others'.  Apparently becoming aware of what I'm feeling is the first step to change my reactionary patterns...even just thinking about that and typing it makes me feel ANXIOUS.   If I don't feel I can be in control.  Does feeling mean giving up control?
that is interesting but scary to contemplate.

encompassing 'immigrant' into my identity

When I was at Omega a few weeks ago, I fell into a deep conversation with a woman I met there and we spoke about adoption, jewishness, relationships, etc...  I told her the abridged version of my story, including my german origins segueing (sp?) into an american family; she commented that I am an immigrant.  I responded back, "yes, that is true."
I'm thinking about that today, that I am a first generation immigrant to america.  I have to think about it more in order to write about it more, but I wanted to just state it, and see what that does.  Its strange, to say the least, to have this realization only now at 35, to never have had conceptualized that before.
  more later...

bernie, the archetype

Ok, so I am totally intrigued by Bernie Madoff.  Not by the scandal as a whole, but by WHO he is, like Bernie Madoff: the person.   I don't see him as evil, I see him more as the supreme embodied modern archetype of 'in it for me at the expense of others'.   I think in some way, at some level I relate to him and that is why I wonder about him so much.  The fundamental question I have about him is if he actually has the ability to have the awareness that what he did was play out the collective greed of our society through his personal life.  Could he get that? I don't think he's a bad person.  I think he's a HUGE person who opened himself up and became a channel for something much much bigger than himself and he let go and immersed himself in that.  I think he justified getting for himself at everyone else's expense, but its so not about him--he LIVED out society's dark wantings.  Its so interesting to me that he supposedly knew and was expecting to get caught by the early 2000's, and at that point he was just in WAY too deep to turn back.  He realized he didn't have any choice but to keep on going....I find that concept and all of its implications horrifying and completely fascinating.

I grew up watching people totally self destruct.  Its so familiar.

i've always been repulsed by the idea of learning a foreign language but my mind is opening

I'm thinking about re-learning french. !

my birth mother speaks french and her (other) children, too.  and i think it will develop the rewiring and expansion of my brain i am experiencing now that i'm in school. i feel like something's opening up...