The Power of Thought, The Gut, and Adoption

When I think about being born and my mother disappearing, my body releases chemicals to match the sadness and distress and fear contained in the thought. My stomach twists. My heart rate speeds up. I get anxious, distracted, cranky.

I have this thought probably once a day, maybe fifty, maybe more. The thought has become a habit, something that easily comes to the surface. I see a baby at the grocery store, the thought bubbles up. I see the sun rise, the thought also rises.

I have been reading and listening to a lot of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work in the last few years, but it wasn't until yesterday that I really started to understand one of Dr. Joe’s fundamental teachings: my body is a living record of my thoughts, and because most of my thoughts focus on the past, my body is my past, more worry than hope.

I have been trying to figure out why I and so many other adopted people have gut issues. (I would estimate that 8 out of 10 of the people I ask say they have stomach problems, I.B.S., chronic gut distress, all sorts of digestive issues.)

What if part of it is the thought: What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t she keep me? What if these questions are the ones that daily, hourly, minute by minute, flick the switch in our nervous systems to something is wrong! to which the brain does its work and releases the chemicals to get our bodies ready for fight or flight, overloading our system, bringing fatigue, depression, illness, issues in the gut—our second brain.

What if these chemicals are eating us alive from the inside out?

What if we as a culture re-thought the stories we tell children who have been relinquished (because clearly the ones we tell now are not working)? What if we get to the core issue of what happens to the brain when a child is separated from their mother and address the issue on a level where the nervous system will feel supported? Any adoptee who is reading this was held enough at birth and afterwards to survive. We made it. We are here. How can we have future adoptees get to this same point without having also dragged the grief of their past all the way into their adulthood?

How can we create rituals to address the grief of loss in order to help the brain process and release the past?

We can live in tantrum and refusal: Mothers should not give up their babies. We have to change this. We have to keep all children with their parents! but while this is true and we can find ways to support women who want to keep their children but for economic reasons feel they can’t, as sweeping statements they fail because they are not reasonable. Sometimes women have babies and the women can’t or won’t raise the child. The miracle is that there are other people who want to step in and cradle the baby home. Yes, it’s awful that the mother and child are separated, but if I focus on the tearing asunder, my brain does its chemical dump, and there I am yet again, in a body that is more past than present, more ill than well.

I have one shot at this life. I want to focus on what’s working more than I want to focus on what didn’t work because I want a body that hums instead of one that crumples when an ill wind blows. The adoptee culture wants me to suffer along with them because our loss is what connects us, so healing is complicated. How can you both allow for space to grieve and for grieving to take a backseat to living?

I am not obligated to think about the past, but part of me thinks I am. Part of me thinks that if I let go of my questions, let go of her, I will lose her forever. Ha! That’s so funny! I did lose her forever! I’m the woman standing over the bathroom sink sobbing because her wedding ring went down the drain as if the tears will somehow connect me to the ring and bring it back. It’s gone! It’s not that it’s wrong to cry about loss, but if I am still crying about it years and years after it happened, I’m in the place of stuck, and something needs to change so I can better enjoy the day and more wholeheartedly show up for those I love.

When as a society do we best acknowledge loss, grief, the terrible, and then provide constructive ways of moving forward in a way where all parts of the grieving person feel acknowledged and supported? (Yikes! Do we?)

I’m still grieving my dog that died when I was 18 because there was no ritual attached to what to do when a pet you love dies. I still feel really, really bad about the gold heart I lost when I was 8: what to do when you lose something that means a great deal to you. I still am processing the moment my first love told me he couldn’t be with me any more because he liked someone else: what to do when you feel your heart disappeared.

I took so many classes in school for which I have retained what feels like zero information. Even more than math or history or French, I needed instructions on how to manage having a body that had a nervous system and feelings. How can you give a little kid a book like Are You My Mother? and not have a back-up curriculum?

The world, my parents, my friends, my relatives, tried to tell me I was okay, that being adopted didn’t matter, but clearly that kind of support didn’t put out the fire that was in my brain.

So what else could have happened? How do we calm our children’s systems so that, as adults, they have bodies that represent their hopes for the future more than the weighted questions of their past?

Anyone?

Bueller?