Monday, November 17, 2014

Addiction to a thought pattern? #flipthescript #adoption

By Trace (Adoptee-Author-Blogger)

There is a language of adoption, not just medical jargon and terminology. I am not a medical doctor but I know what I did and what happened to me over a long period of time.

The majority of adoptees have difficulty with foggy thoughts well into adulthood. (Some adoptees call this ADOPTION FOG.)

Taking control of your thoughts is difficult. Once I did see clearly what happened to me, without blocking it, without drugs and medication, change did occur. It took counseling in my case. In Seattle I did co-counseling for over two years. You tell your life story, as much as you can remember. The truth, all of it. For me it was like a powder keg exploded! Emotions trapped in the body were released. (Google EFT too.)

There was a workshop in Vermont in 2009 that explained about a person’s destructive emotions.

These emotions are thought of as an “auto-immune” disease of the mind. Tibetan Buddhists, much like the Navajo, call them “obscuring emotions” because they cloud the healthy, luminous quality of the natural mind.

The intensity of the dark emotions will arise as if in response to a survival threat, but it is actually an addiction to a thought pattern.

Using mental antidotes, what I call rewiring my brain, it is possible to train the mind out of suffering and ending these habits or thought patterns.

For centuries, medicine people have studied the true nature of the mind over body. If you read Buddhist teachings, neuroscience, and Native American spirituality, each is more alike than different.

One who faces their trauma faces the enemy. This cure is available to all adoptees. Train the mind out of suffering.

(This is adapted from my memoir ONE SMALL SACRIFICE...Trace)

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Living with Guilt, Ceremony for Adoptees #flipthscript #adoption

By Trace (Lost Bird Adoptee)

I am not a medical professional, or a doctor, or lawyer…and I am not offering a magic pill or legal advice or any medicine… I just know what I did.

Adoptees do heal - even without all the answers they desperately want. It is possible. Tell your guilt you are not looking for parents - just looking for answers, for truth.

I’ve heard this from other adoptees: Help as many adoptees as you can with their guilt. (Yes, guilt)

Adoptees can release damaging emotions in a safe way, in a ceremony, in a church, or in a prayer. It could possibly take years, not a few sessions of talk-therapy. For Split Feathers, get to a ceremony.

I tell my adoptee friends, “You may never find all the answers but you can wake up. You can tell your side of the story. You need ceremony. Get support. Laws need to be changed. History will never change the facts you were let go or taken away from your parents. The government did what it did....”

In my situation, I had a reunion with my dad almost 20 years ago. I never met my mother. I have been to ceremonies.

My advice to those going into reunion is: “A reunion doesn’t guarantee you’ll hear what you expect or feel all better. Many adoptive parents and natural parents can’t handle it. They have no idea the pain adoption caused you and they do not want to take responsibility for it. Once you meet your birth family, mother, father, siblings, you decide what to keep and what to leave behind. You have the opportunity to make your own decisions for the first time in your life. You create a safe zone and safe home for yourself. You become your own parent. You decide who to let in and who to let go. In other words, you heal.”

I'll also share this advice given to me: “Living in a state of consciousness of love keeps you balanced, no matter what life throws at you. The ego’s consciousness is cloudy (foggy) and keeps you out of your heart. The ego also keeps you in a state of procrastination. Being in the center of your chest brings energy to your being in the now, thus stopping procrastination.”

Love yourself. Drop the Guilt. Find the Truth.

(Adoptees who are interested in attending ceremony in 2017, email me: laratrace@outlook.com)

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Adoption Myths, Adoption Records #flipthescript

By Trace (Lost Bird Adoptee)

NANCY VERRIER M.A., PSYCHOTHERAPIST
"The chosen child and the grateful child myths are two beliefs that die hard. Although made to feel as if it were the case, most adoptees do not feel chosen so much as they feel unchosen by their birth mothers. To be chosen by anyone else after that is anticlimactic. So far as being grateful, it is the adoptive parents who should be grateful. They are the ones pursuing the adoption. They are the ones who got what they wanted. No child would choose to be separated from his biological mother. That he may have to be separated from her is a different thing altogether. That is an intellectual, adult decision, not an emotional/sensual baby experience. Although grateful for many things his parents may have done for him, no child should be obligated to feel grateful for having a loving set of parents. That should be his right."
That is an extract from Nancy Newton Verrier MA in her concluding chapter 2o called Adoption Myths, from her book called Coming Home To Self, published by Gateway in '03 and available on Amazon, much consulted and recommended by both adoptees and the ivf-made.

So why is adoption records access important?

It’s about identity! Adoptees grow up with questions about identity. Questions that affect their psycho-social development, sometimes in negative ways. Like all humans, adoptees seek to answer the questions “who am I?” and “why am I here?”

Adoptees are legally prohibited from obtaining information that is critical to answering that question. But it is a necessary tool for most adoptees to answer those nagging questions about our origins. Knowing is better than not knowing. Knowing the truth is healing for most of us. But fear of discovery, not as you might imagine for parents who surrendered a child to adoption, but for adoption professionals who misrepresented the facts to vulnerable women or couples wishing to adopt, makes for a powerful motive to keep the truth hidden.

When access to one’s original birth certificate (OBC) is forbidden, the only substitute is to search for one’s family of origin.

If state officials are intent on protecting the identity of parents who were persuaded to relinquish a child to adoption the surest method is to provide answers to the questions asked.

Many adoptees would be satisfied just to know the truth. Contact is a different matter and no reasonable person on either point of the adoption triangle expects a relationship to automatically develop with strangers, even strangers who are biologically related.

Adoptees, generally, are not seeking a family, but themselves.

Friday, November 14, 2014

Cast Off by CUB mother Lee Campbell #flipthescript #adoption

NEW BOOK CAST OFF in 2014

“Cast Off” exposes the roots of adoption reform and offers a blueprint for the wings that adoption reform still needs.

“Cast Off” also offers a personal postscript. My work in adoption reform revealed the real Lee Campbell’s thirst for knowledge. After I earned a doctorate, I taught social sciences at the college level for 30 years. When I retired, I returned to CUB as its Curator. I reassembled CUB’s history.

Now, here’s something else you may not know: “Cast Off” and its prequel “Stow Away: They told me to forget. And I did. Now my memory has mutiny in mind” are far more than memoirs. They narrate my collection of CUB history. And after 2015 — drum roll —my books and the CUB collection will become permanent fixtures of history . . . at Harvard University! More good news is, you won’t have to travel to Cambridge to appreciate these works. CUB has advanced a chunk of change to digitize 4,000 pages of the collection for its website (www.cubirthparents.org). As for my two books, both of these are now available, too.

For print copies, visit www.createspace.com/406829 (“Cast Off”) and www.createspace.com/4147943 (“Stow Away”).

EXCERPT:

During a freezing winter rain in 1963, adoption banned me from my baby. He needed to go to a “better” family and I needed to get lost. If I didn’t “do the right thing” and surrender Michael, I was told I would owe a shitload of money to a list of people my social worker, Carole, rattled off. But if I “let him go,” all those costs would disappear. At the same time — and on my own, without help from Carole or anyone else — I needed to find a job (Fine! I learn fast! Sign me up!). I would also need to somehow find housing and someone to watch my child while I worked (there was no such thing as daycare then). But I balked. I couldn't grasp that Carole and my family were really going to allow me to give up my son. I kept hoping they would give me a jumpstart in the right direction, if I waited them out. Meanwhile, my social worker put her “convincing” machine on “high.” It was like the drip, drip, drip of water torture. After three months, I was as eroded as a dune after a hurricane. Then Carole told me Michael’s new family had already seen him and loved him. I was in the way. With the ink of my signature still wet on my Surrender, I woodenly turned away from my social worker. Only then did she offer me some advice: “Forget,” she told me. “Make a new life.” I grabbed her lifeline. I stuffed my memories deep in the core of the innermost atom of my smallest toe. By coiling my memories teeny-tiny, somehow I made them fit, like a circus tent in a duffle bag. The drone of “Forget. Move on” was a new kind of relentless drip – like anesthesia into a carotid artery.

After ten years, the prescription petered out. Then my memories began to unfurl, taking up more and more space in my mind. They threatened my new life, my only compensation for my loss. My husband, our two boys, our standing in our small Cape Cod village — all were at the mercy of my memories. But my memories won their mutiny. I decided to fight the real culprits. A retort and a comeback were overdue. Defying the mandate to cross the street if I ever came face-to-face with any other mother like me, I began to search and find them. I invited them to trust my vision. In there was a mission, an organization, a movement — the first of its kind in the world. My first steps were tentative. I used a phony name and was in shadow for my first TV show. I called myself a biological (ugh) mother, even though I now knew there was so much more to me than bones, organs and DNA.

Nine months later, I finally gave birth to the real "Lee Campbell." My unique band of mothers began to use our words, our stories, and our emerging research to do our own convincing. Some professionals began to “get it,” some even crossing the dark side of adoption to do the real right thing for us and with us. Along the way, I invented honorable language and new ways of being “Lee Campbell.” I became a presidential appointee. My amazing mothers, our supporters and I were interviewed on local and national television. Countless and varied print media carried news of our work. Together, we battered the gates of closed adoption. Of course, the keepers-of-the-way-things-are recruited more money and might to turn us away. We gained and lost ground.

After thirty-seven years, the fight goes on. Meanwhile, I returned to the educational system that had kicked me out when I was pregnant. I made up for the interruption. After earning a doctorate, I taught social sciences at the college level for thirty years. And . . . Michael and I recently celebrated 35 years of reunion. This is my story of triumph after surrender. If I could make a difference, so can you.

My books “Stow Away” and, now “Cast off,” are ready. Let them reveal how, you too, can do what you “have to do.”

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Adoptee Blogs #flipthescript #NAAM1014

http://www.thelostdaughters.com/

Can only read JUST one?? Here it is: Lost Daughters (where I contribute too)

SOURCE: Musings of the Lame

And we are changing the WORLD! ...Trace (my LARA blog is also focused on adoption)

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Demons of Adoption Award for 2014 #flipthescript #NAAM2014

demon award 2014 adoption by gentle care

The Pound Pup Legacy Annual Demons of Adoption Award
Upon a successful 2nd nomination and upon election within the Adoption community for rightfully pointed out the wrongdoings and condemned the practices Pound Pup Legacy hereby thus denounces the dubious honor of receiving the Eighth Annual Demons of Adoption Award in 2014 to:

Adoption by Gentle Care of Columbus, Ohio
Who shall now receive the most critical recognition in Adoption including the scorn, disgust, and public flogging pertaining hereto this most infamous recognition in the city of AdoptionLand, in the state of the Internet, on this tenth day of November in the year two thousand and fourteen.

Adoption by Gentle Care; Repeat Offenders who Never Learned their Lessons

Oh yes, I am giddy with the joy knowing that Adoption by Gentle Care has won the 2014 Pound Pup Legacy’s Demon in Adoption Award. For one, I am proud to say that this was, no surprise, my nomination though it is worth it to toe that it is actually AGC’s second nomination. They were in the 5th Annual Demons of Adoption Awards 2011 nominations for their involvement as the placing agency in the failed adoption Thad Wyrembek aka Grayson Vaughn or as the original nomination statement can be quoted:

I nominate Adoption by Gentle Care. They were responsible for keeping a young boy(Thad Wyrembek aka Grayson Vaughn) from his biological father (Ben Wyrembek) for over three years. According to court documents Adoption by Gentle Care knew the husband of the mother was not the biological father even though he signed the surrender. It was apparent thatuire her to share that information. They call themselves non-profit, but it is obviously all about the bottom line. It appears the vast majority of their profits go into marketing to find more babies to “help”.

Wisconsin ICWA: best outcomes? #flipthescript #adoptees #lostbirds

By Trace

This always gets me: "improve outcomes" or "best outcomes." What does that mean - that First Nations and American Indian children who are put into a non-Indian home, who lose language, culture, contact with their elders, do they mean improve that? How? Do academics and social workers embrace an adoptee's tremendous loss of culture and contact? Do they work for family preservation and eradicate poverty that still plagues many reservations? Hardly.

The best outcome: a child is never taken from their first parents and their tribes. Period.

Scholarship on the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act

by Matthew L.M. Fletcher on Turtle Talk

Loa Porter (Department of Children and Families, State of Wisconsin), Patina Park Zink, Angela R. Gebhardt (University of Nebraska at Lincoln - Center on Children, Families, and the Law), Mark Ells (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Michelle I. Graef, Ph.D. (University of Nebraska at Lincoln - Center on Children, Families, and the Law) have posted "Best Outcomes for Indian Children" on SSRN. It was previously published in Child Welfare.

Here is the abstract:

The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and the Midwest Child Welfare Implementation Center are collaborating with Wisconsin’s tribes and county child welfare agencies to improve outcomes for Indian children by systemically implementing the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act (WICWA). This groundbreaking collaboration will increase practitioners’ understanding of the requirements of WICWA and the need for those requirements, enhance communication and coordination between all stakeholders responsible for the welfare of Indian children in Wisconsin; it is designed to effect the systemic integration of the philosophical underpinnings of WICWA.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

OBC Access #flipthescript #adoption

New York State Adoptee Equality on Facebook

This IS Adoptee Rights:
"I look at it as a human rights issue. Why should people who, to no fault of their own, happen to be adopted, have less rights to their existence?" David Weprin said. "It's really a piece of the puzzle people should be entitled to. In this day and age, there is no reason why there should be a restriction to an adoptee having access to their original birth certificate (OBC)."

By Lara Trace

This article sums it up...

No Wonder Adoption Agencies are Nervous About OBC Access!

by Jo Swanson on Monday, October 25, 2010

I was looking for a quote in my 1989 'mini-book' The Adoption Machine and came across something I had forgotten about. It fortifies what we've known all along about why agencies fight so hard to keep adoptees and birth families from locating one another. The agency is in Michigan - it's the one my daughter was placed through. I'll quote directly from the book:

A birthmother who placed her child through our same "Christian" agency contacted me for search help. She had kept in touch with her social worker throughout the years, even after the woman retired, as a way of somehow staying connected to her child. In recent visits, the former social worker had become quite upset about the birthmother's desire to be reunited with her daughter. "Give it up," she admonished her, suggesting that she was merely having a "bad day." "Cheer up! You have another family now! Besides, I checked the phone book recently, and the family isn't living in the area anymore."

Mother and daughter did meet, however, and upon comparing information provided to each by the agency at time of placement and later with the real story, found:

Claim: Birthmother was told by her social worker at time of relinquishment that her infant was perfectly normal and healthy.

Fact: Records indicated the child was diagnosed in the hospital, right after birth, as having a severe hearing impairment (95% loss), possibly due to exposure of mother, unknowingly, to German measles during pregnancy.

Claim: One year after relinquishment, birthmother was sent a letter by the agency, informing her that her child was "in a happy home" and that the adoption was finalized.

Fact: At the time the social worker wrote that letter, this child was back in foster care after a failed adoption. "The adoptive mother was having a nervous breakdown and couldn't handle a handicapped child." A second placement had been made at thirteen months, and fortunately it was a very good placement.

Claim: The adoptive family no longer lived in the area.

Fact: Adoptive father was deceased, but the mother still lived in the same home as at the time of adoption, and was still listed in phone directory. (Adoptive mother was supportive of her daughter's desire to meet her birth family.)

Claim: The adoptive couple had been told by the agency social worker after placement that the child's birthmother had died subsequent to the birth! (Common practice, we now know, as was telling birthmothers their infants died before or after birth.)

Fact: This agency social worker had spun so many lies that she was in a virtual panic that the two parties might actually meet one day and learn the truth!

++++++++++

We're getting the truth out drop by drop. But we've been doing it for so many decades - when will legislators begin to "get it" and realize how power has been abused by adoption brokers at the expense of children and their mothers?...Trace

Indigenous Adoptees

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