Adoption Secrecy and Truths #flipthescript #NAAM2014

“My problem is secrecy. I believe that perpetually secret adoptions assure un-accountability and lack of transparency. And secret adoptions are only the tip of the iceberg. The secrecy permeates the process: secret identities, secret parents, secret records, secret foster care providers, secret social workers, secret judges and lawyers (all their identities are sealed, typically), secret physicians, secret statistics and, in the case of some adoption-oriented organizations, secret budgets and secret boards of directors. In any social practice, when people in positions of power hide behind masks, one can be pretty sure that they have something to hide.”

-        Albert S. Wei,

-        Special Advisor to the Bastard Nation Executive Committee

“Everyone has a right to knowledge about their lineage, genealogy and identity. And if they don’t, then it will lead to cases of incest...”

-Lord David Alton quoted after married adoptee twins were granted annulment in Great Britain (January 2008)

“Storytelling is an important aspect of Ojibwe culture. My ability to tell a good tale can be used as a tool for teaching and connecting. Even though I grew up outside of my Native community and culture, my stories helped me to become a part of the community that I had lost. Adoption is part of the contemporary tales that Native people need to tell…”

- Tamara Buffalo, published author-poet-visual artist

…Adoption professionals who believed in making adoption work believed that it was a “social crime” to place inferior children with parents who expected — and deserved — normal children. Agencies sometimes required parents to return children if and when abnormal characteristics appeared and laws, such as the Minnesota Adoption Law of 1917, treated feeble-mindedness as cause for annulment.  Medical writers in the popular press warned parents to “be careful whom you adopt.” Adopters faced frightening risks because children unlucky enough to need new parents were also unlucky enough to be genetic lemons.

             [Read about Eugenics: www.darkwing.uoregon.edu]

Excerpt from One Small Sacrifice

Danger was an enduring theme in modern adoption history. The genetic lemon theory was heard around the world, I guess.  I read about eugenics.      

Feeling “adopted” made it seem like they did me a great big favor! How heroic for them to adopt - when I could be dangerous or the “bad seed” of immoral unintelligent people.

I never heard, “Tracy was illegitimate or she is someone’s dirty little secret!” but I knew it’s what people were thinking. Obviously my parents were wildly happy to get us as babies, praised for doing such a selfless act. They hid any uneasiness. Since my adopted sibling and I were not biological offspring, if we didn’t turn out ok, then it can’t totally be their fault. 

Funny, I always seemed to know who was adopted. Our parents usually introduced us or we introduced ourselves as adopted. I had two friends named Kim and another friend Lisa who knew they were adopted. This became our bond, our shared identity.

No "orphaned child" can escape this– it is fact, a heart broken too often turns to stone.

- Trace L Hentz (formerly DeMeyer)

"Get out of the way" & Aboriginal suicide rates will drophttp://thestringer.com.au/get-out-of-the-way-aboriginal-suicide-rates-wi...

16 Nov 14: "Please return our son because my wife cannot go on without him, she will suicide, please return our son," wrote a Noongar father and husband to the Western Australian Government's Chief Protector in 1905.
"The fundamental issues which underpin suicide rates nationally vary from cultural group to cultural group, geopolitically and demographically. The fundamentals that underpin suicide rates of some First Peoples communities are vastly different to those of non-Aboriginal communities. The Western Australian Government’s recent statements that 100 to 150 remote Aboriginal communities should be closed makes it clear that lessons from the past have not been learned. ... " By The Stringer
"Declaration of conflict of interest - the author of this article, Gerry Georgatos is a suicide prevention researcher and a senior national consultant to the ATSISPEP (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention Evaluation Project)"

 

 

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)

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, email me: larahentz@yahoo.com)

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.

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.”

Adoptee Blogs #flipthescript #NAAM1014

http://www.thelostdaughters.com/

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

• 1966 Maryland Adoptee
• 73 Adoptee
• A Birth Project
• A Cup of Ambiguity
• Adoptee Restoration
• Adopted in the UK
• Adoption Find
• Adoption; My Truth
• A Different Outcome
• A Moment in Thought
• A Search for Survivors
• According to Addie
• Adopted and Abused
• Adopted Jane
• Adopted The Movie
• Adoptee in Recovery 
• Adoptee Journal
• Adoptee Path
• Adoptee Rights New York
• Adoptee Rights Reform
• Adopting my Identity
• Adoption Animal House
• Adoption Beat
• Adoption My Truth
• Adoption Survivor
• Adoption Unplugged
• Amazon Adoptee
• American Indian Adoptees
• Amy
• Amy Adoptee
• Antholo
• Anti-Adoption
• Asiatic Fish
• Austin Holistic
• B is for Bastard
• Bastard Corner
• Beirut Diary Online
• Bijou’s Bastardized Odyssey
• Bitch, You Left Me
• Biologically Speaking
• Black Sheep Sweet Dreams
• Bleatings of a Sacrifical Lamb
• Blog On
• Blue Moon
• Blueyesw’s Blog
• Born Today
• Borrowed Notes
• Boston Uncommon
• Brown Angels
• Bunnytude
• Cancer Distraction
• Caramel Galore
• Casper Andersen
• Child of a Stranger
• Clueless in Carolina
• Coleman Moms and Babes
• Communities don’t get built
• Confessions of a Cyrokid
• Crazy Rants of An Adoptee
• Cricket’s Drivel
• Daniel Ibn Zayd
• Declassifed Adoptee
• Diary of an Abandoned Abandoner
• Die, Commie Bastard!
• DNA Diaries
• Donor Conceived
• Eilujion
• Elaine’s Blog
• Empty Cereal Box
• Ethnically Incorrect Daughter
• Everyone Shut Up But Me
• Exile of Xingnan
• Faith and Illusions
• Family Secrets Unleashed
• Fayrie Tales
• Finding Jane Doe
• Flying the Void
• Forbidden Family
• Freedom 451
• Fumbling Toward Divinity
• Get More Abortions
• Green Mountain Country Mama
• Growing Up Doyle
• Grumppopotamus
• Harlow’s Monkey
• Having Been Adopted
• Heart, Mind and Seoul
• Hearts Wide Open
• Hello Korea!
• Holt Babies
• Holt Survivor
• I Have to Find My Sanity Somewhere!
• I, Cartographer
• iBastard
• Indiana Open
• Infant Atwell
• Involuntary Adoptee Immigrant
• Irrevocably Adopted
• It Came From the Cabbage Patch
• It’s Really Me
• Jane’s Blog
• Joanne’s Space
• John
• John Raible Online
• Joy’s Division
• Julia’s JAM
• KangSunLee1991
• Kimette
• Korean Adoptee
• Korean War Baby
• L’enfant du peche
• Land of the Not-So-Calm
• Letters from Kimberly
• Lex-B
• Lightning Crashes
• Lisa Talks
• Living the Dash
• Living, Laughing, Whining
• Lizard Chronicles
• Lonesome Dove
• Madame Compassionateless
• Marilee
• Mary Gauthier
• May 4, 1985
• May Adoptee
• May I Have a Word?
• Mia’s Saving Grace
• Misplaced Baggage
• My Birth is Not a Crime
• My Birth Name is Allison
• My Adoptive Life
• My Name is Simon Bell
• Neil’s Blog
• Neither Here Nor There
• Newly Orphaned
• Ninoska Andrea
• No Greater Act of Love
• No Matter How Small
• Once Upon A Time My Name Was Kimberly
• Once Was Von
• One Lucky Bastard
• Only an Adoptee
• Opening the Door
• Orphan Daughter
• Our Life in the Desert
• Out of the Fog
• Outlandish Remarks
• Persona Ingrata
• Possum’s Place
• Pushpa’s Blog
• Rant and Rave and Rant and Rave
• Real Daughter
• Reading, Writing, Living
• Revelations
• Reunion Journey
• Rhonda’s Ruminations
• Ruth Mary Celeste
• Sea Glass and Other Fragments
• Searching for Umma
• Secret Sons and Daughters
• Shadow Between Two Worlds
• Silenced Adoptee No More
• Sister Wish
• Sixth Sister
• Solim’s Walk in the Park
• Soy Adoptado
• Tasha’s Tale
• Tennessee Adoptees Rights
• The Adopted Feminist
• The Blur
• The Creepy Adoptee
• The Daily Bastardette
• The Door to Understanding
• The Little KAD Prince
• The Missing Piece
• The Original Heping
• The Queen of Denial
• The Sought After
• The Thriving Child
• The Transracial Korean Adoptee Nexus
• Thin Pink Line
• Third Cat Productions / Going Home
• The Warrior Princess Diaries
• This Adopted Life
• Through devastation to redemption
• Tigger Story
• Tribe Interrupted
• True of Voice
• Twice the Rice
• Umbilicly_Challenged
• Unknown Indy Baby Girl
• vietK
• Voices in Adoption
• Wes Unruh
• What do I do now?
• Without a Tribe
• World Citizens Blog
• Wraith’s Wrealm
• Your Blood is My Blood
• 안녕습니다!

SOURCE: Musings of the Lame

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