Why I Did Not Sleep Much after Flourishing with Pam Cordano and Over Fifty Adopted People (or Addiction and Adoption)

I didn’t sleep a lot last night. 

This was not a surprise, but it was a drag. I was both tired and amped and my eyes were dry from the air that still carries smoke. 

I was too tired to read or listen to podcasts but not tired enough to sleep; my brain was processing, changing, doing its thing, and it wanted to be up. 

So I clipped my Heart Math monitor on my ear, put one hand on my chest, and tried to get the higher beeping tone that signals I am in green, coherence, and not blue or red. If you don’t know about heart rate variability, it’s worth a little research. I got this monitor after reading an interview Tim Ferris did with the creator of the Princeton Review who said the best thing he’d bought that year that was one hundred dollars or cheaper had been about one hundred and fifty dollars and was this device that helped him feel calm and grounded on a daily basis. 

When you are in the red, the beeping tone is low. It sounds like failure. I hate that noise. The uncertain middle tone of blue is not wonderful, but the singsong of the green is happiness. It’s worth breathing through the reds and the blues just to hear the green ding.

Anyway.

As I lay there trying to beep green--inhale, exhale, focus on the slow beat of your heart--I thought about the things Pam Cordano had talked about that afternoon in Flourish, our class for adoptees. I had already known basically what she was going to say because we’d gone over the content a number of times, but hearing something alone and then hearing it when you are on a Zoom call with over fifty other adopted people is a different experience. Sort of like the difference between getting hit by a bat and getting run over by a truck.

In class, Pam talked about liminal space, and in this class, because we were talking about addiction, Pam talked about the liminal space between trauma and whatever addiction we might have. In that space, we are caterpillar soup. It’s the place of transformation.

It’s also a place of terror. 

I imagine what it was like for me to be born and for the body that I felt was my body to disappear. I can’t imagine the grief and shock and terror I experienced as a newborn. My body and mind still won’t let me go there, but they tell me those feelings are still buried in my self because I can’t breathe or think right when I bring them into consciousness. I am on high alert at a candy store, essentially. I’m panicking in a bubble of safety, the bubble which is my life. No one is about to kill me. I am here, encased in skin, presumably fine, and I can barely breathe. 

I’m fine.

 When the mother left the room, she took her energy with her, and because our energy was tied in with her energy, she also took part of us. That leaves us with a core that now contains a dangerous aloneness. Hopeless loneliness. Life threatening aloneness.  

Grabbing at addictions is a natural response to this type of experience—anything to keep us afloat and away from that core trauma. In class we talked about how people would feel if they had to extend the time between experiencing a craving and satisfying the addiction.  

Imagine if you have been at the desert so long that you now have only .02 seconds left before you will die of dehydration. Imagine that suddenly someone shows up with a bottle of water and holds it close to your lips, and just as you go from a drink, they yank the bottle away and it disappears. 

You die.

Now imagine that somehow you have a new life, but your brain is constantly replaying the disappearance of the water and the subsequent knowledge that you are completely alone and are going to die.

Even when you are standing in a crystal clear lake with a cold glass of water in your hand. 

You are always on the edge of dying, and you are always, when it comes right down to it, alone. 

This type of terror is a constant drain on the bodymind. Who wouldn’t want to numb out, speed up, slow down, sleep? Who wouldn’t want to check out? 

Just one more cigarette. Just one more beer. Just one more credit card swipe at Nordstrom’s. Just one more cookie. Just one more hour of porn. Just one more cut. Just one more hair pulled. Just one more night on Tinder. Please. God. Just let me breathe. 

The dead space we carry inside is the space that died when our mother who was also our self walked away. We died a little from a lack of relationship, and so, Pam taught us last night, the terrible truth is we need each other THERE in the dead space with us as we navigate the liminal space. But letting people in is super scary and threatening. It feels life-threatening. Like, uh, not a good idea.

Lie on the floor and grip all your muscles: the bottoms of your feet to your face. Grip it all. Squeeze your eyes shut and clench your fists. If I had to draw an adoptee for an anatomy class, this is what I would draw. (I know not every single adopted person is like this—and so I’m speaking in gross generalizations, but this is my blog post and I can do what I want in my efforts of finding out the truth of what it is like to be relinquished and adopted.) We are trying to hang on. We are trying to keep ourselves safe. If our mothers wouldn’t hold us, then we will hold ourselves. 

 Exhausting!

To let others in, we have to liquify, but all our alarms tell us NO!!!! We believe that if we let someone in there, we’ll die. We reach for a cigarette, a drink, anything rather than risking more loss.  

So next week Pam and I are going to talk about love, about how it’s the thing we need in order to come through and butterfly, and yet how it feels so dangerous, like it’s going to hurt or kill us. 

I better sleep now, tonight, while I can.

(Pam and I are holding these Wednesday afternoon Zoom classes from 4-6 PM PST, and we are repeating the class Sunday mornings from 6:30-8:30 PST. To sign up, read my August 31 blog post for instructions.)