Rupture/Rapture/The Primal Wound

Recently it has occurred to me that some of the most powerful, most life-changing events of the last four years have had to do with fights/falling outs/misunderstandings I’ve had with other adoptees: Pam Cordano, Tim Treweek, and Amy Geller come to mind first. Luckily for me, two of the three are therapists and the other is as driven to heal and change as I am. In the past, the kind of relationship ruptures I had with these three would have meant our relationship was over.

What happened with the three people I listed was that through misunderstanding or disagreement in one form or another, one or both of us was hurt because of something the other said or did. In general, I live in terror of disappointing people. It’s not that I’m afraid I’ll be lonely if they leave: it’s that I think I will die. Or, if not die, live like a serpent with my belly close to the ground for the rest of my life.

The other day a long-time friend said to me, “Did it ever occur to you that biological mothers and daughters have the same issues that you claim are adoptee-related?” Number one, I am a biological mother of a child, so I’ve been in that world. Number two, Yes. Number three, I want to hang up the phone and never talk to you again because your tone is condescending and I think you and I can’t have a discussion about this issue since for you to say something like that means you are on square one of understanding the primal wound and I’m so far past that it’s exhausting to think of the energy it will take to trudge backwards and try to help you forward.

Instead of hanging up, I told her she was the problem, that comments like that were what adoptees battled every day, and that I didn’t want to talk about it. I was frustrated, but instead of going to the place where my head was full of white noise and I was nearly passing out, I was just super annoyed and eager to talk about something else, like almost anything. I was also aware that my thinking might be extreme and not necessarily all the way right, but I didn’t want to go there. I was still riding the wave of I know everything about this: it’s a fairly new wave to me, so I let myself just go there until I learn new tools and react differently.

We moved on, and I could tell she was nervous. I could tell she didn’t know what to do with the fact that I’d displayed anger but was also moving on. Were we really okay? Were we suddenly fake friends and after this call we’d never talk again?

I was trying something new. It was called don’t run. It was called sit there and feel your feelings. We talked about old times. We talked about her dating life. I told her about the chickens. The boat steadied.

When we hung up, it felt like a miracle. I had not burned a bridge just because I’d gotten triggered. I hadn’t let my own judgement and emotions ruin another friendship. I saw that I could feel uncomfortable, feel angry even, and still stay.

What I learned from having ruptures in my relationships with Pam and Tim and Amy was that if I hung in and lived in my truth but also lived in relationship, the repaired relationship felt like gold. Like, really, a miracle. Scar tissue in the body is a funny, disorganized thing that sticks around long after the healing has happened and actually can cause limited range of movement and other problems down the line, but scar tissue in meaningful relationships, I am finding, can morph into light pouring through an open door.

I did not know I could damage a relationship and still be a good person in that relationship. I thought, in general, relationships were one and done. What I have found is that I have permission to be human, and, with that, I can also give other people permission. They or I don’t have to be perfect. We just have to care for both ourselves and the other.

What I am learning from Pam in our Flourish classes is that to really live into our humanity, the best thing we can do is celebrate and honor the we rather than rigidly defending the I.

When you live with the often unconscious fear that if you do something wrong, your parents who adopted you will give you away just as your first mother did, making mistakes can be so scary. When you learn, at 56, with one parent dead and one alive, that maybe they really are going to keep you, the world shifts. You are not as much as a visitor as you imagined.

Maybe you are here to stay. And maybe you get to stay in loving and true relationship with others.

There’s the rapture.