The Adoptee's Healing Journey

Many Hands: An Adoptee's Healing Journey: Wendy once explained to me that you don't get to get what you never got. You only get to feel how bad it feels, and that's when you heal. "It's already gone, it's already lost, and the only thing that you can do in therapy to heal is feel the loss. There's nothing to fill that hole--there's no man, there's no sex, there's no drugs, there's no house, there's no money, because it's already a loss. People hate that, because they want a therapist to fix it. But all you can do is bring them to that empty hole, and let them look in again, and scream at the emptiness."
It took many years, and many hands to guide me to that empty hole, to help me find the strength to look in without turning away again, and to hold me while I quaked. It took many hands, along with my own, to deliver me my real, true life. Bless them all.
Most of you will probably have read Jennifer Lauck's book 'Found' by now and taken from her journey what relates to your own. We read so often of the pain and loss of adoptees who have not yet come to that later stage when healing can begin and take us to a new phase of life where acceptance is possible and we find our 'real, true life'.
 It is encouraging to see adoptees beginning to write of that place where our adoption is just part of who we are but does not define us, categorise us or keep us in the box so many like to place us in for convenience, lack of interest in or ease of understanding. We are who we are, adoption has contributed to that through loss, trauma and abuse and the many other things we experience that go with it - stigma, inequality, discrimination, stereotyping, racism, bullying, misunderstanding and so on.
The more of us who involve ourselves in that personal process, write, blog, talk about it, make videos and films and in other ways challenge the myths, the attitudes and misconceptions of non-adoptees and tell it as it really is, calmly, with authority, confidence and certainty of the ground we stand on, the better it will be for our future and that of the young adoptees who will benefit from that groundwork, the foundations for a better future for them and their lives as adult adoptees.
Normalising the adoption experience is not where it's at. It is important for the future to have all aspects of adoption freely discussed, understood as far as possible, as real, valid and part of adoption for all adoptees whatever their age. It takes many hands........