Why Feeling Gratitude as an Adopted Person Could be Linked with Shame

I’ve started a daily 6-minute gratitude practice with Aimee Sones because a life coach I love, Joe Hudson, said his and his wife’s life shifted for the better after weeks of sitting across from each other and gratituding.

Here’s Joe talking his talk: https://youtu.be/Nwh2AVkBa_8?si=7ICpEDZXibmVHTk3

In the adopted person’s world, the word gratitude is often a sour thing. A thing stemming from should feel and should be. It’s bad enough when you should on yourself—when someone else shoulds on you, it’s heavier, grosser, meaner, less aware. When someone who isn’t adopted tells an adopted person they should be grateful for the life they have, bad things happen. Connection is disrupted. How can you have a true connection with someone when they are poking at your burn, saying you are so lucky to still have bone under that melted skin? The mind and guts of the adopted person generally go into a twist when someone shoulds on us about adoption.

You should be our child because paperwork says you are. You should be this new person because that’s how adoption works. You should be able to make this transition without making a fuss because you have a good life now. Even—in the dark cases—if we abuse you, you would have been left for dead if we hadn’t adopted you, so you should be grateful.

Then there’s the conversation an adopted person can have with themselves about gratitude. The confusion over, perhaps, their inability to truly be thankful for what they do have. Why can’t they feel it in their soul? What’s wrong with them? I mean, yes, they lost their home world and landed in another world, but why can’t they make the best of it and be happy all the way down to their guts?

Uh.

What if we (adopted poeple) are biologically programmed not to feel gratitude in some situations? What if when a baby or child goes from one mother to a woman who is now a mother because we have arrived in her arms (or to a father who is now a father when we arrive in his arms), we are wired to have an internal (spell check changed “internal” to “eternal”) alarm that screams in every cell of our body NO because this is called STRANGER DANGER? What if nature programmed the human body to go into a state of alarm when someone other than the mother holds the child to keep the child safe?

This morning before my call with Aimee, I listened to the latest episode of the podcast We Can Do Hard Things because the loving and curious intentionality of the three women on that show almost always makes me feel grateful. This episode was a replay with Dr. Yaba Blay, a hero of mine. If you want to feel flooded with positive life force energy, listen to anything this woman has to say. As I listened, I paid attention to how my body opened up to her voice, and I noted what I experienced as gratitude in my physical self. There was a tingling in my hands. My arms felt light. My head, neck, torso, head, pelvis, legs, and feet felt spacious, like a sky filled with stars. I didn’t feel made of parts. I felt dissolved. When I am not heavy with being, there is no sickness or fear in my body, just room to feel connected to everything.

I can’t find a difference in my body between gratitude and awe.

When I tried to transfer that feeling to being grateful I was alive, to being grateful for adoption—something that lets me have this life as I have it, something happened, like a catch in my throat. I really, really want to be grateful because I think gratitude is possibly the most powerful elixir that can run through a human being’s system, cleaning, strengthening, purifying. It bothers me that I can’t more often than not wholeheartedly feel thank you for all I have. I think I should. I do have a nice life. I am lucky.

And yet something often hardens in me when I look to feel the wholehearted grateful yes to what is. It doesn’t even feel like I’m the one doing the hardening. It’s something in me. I feel like something ancient in me is telling me I should be ashamed of being grateful for living a life away from my first mother. That somehow, if I am able to experience full gratitude for this life, I am disrespecting and harming her.

Feeling wholehearted gratitude then makes me bad.

Holy moly.

Here’s the thing: I want to die with the belief I was fully myself. I want, as Mary Oliver wrote in her poem When Death Comes:

When it's over, I want to say: all my life 
I was a bride married to amazement. 
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder 
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

I want to die in a body that floods with gratitude when it contemplates the opportunity it had to experience life. I don’t want to die a piano that never had its highest notes played. My mind, I know, is doing its best to protect me and keep me alive, but there is so much parts of my mind don’t know. They don’t know I’m not a baby in the bardo any more. They don’t know I am safe. They don’t know that the stress hormones they flood my body with are corroding the quality of my life. Those parts create body armor for me, a rigidity of flesh that impedes the softening force of gratitude.

As an adopted person, I think a gratitude practice is one of the most rebellious, self-claiming acts I can have. So, Aimee, I’ll see you tomorrow at 8 AM.

So namaste and thank you. (But I also reserve the right to say fuck you very much if that feels appropriate to me.)

Amen.

and

Awomen.

The cover photo is 16-year-old me with my dog Polly who got hit by a car and died after I left for college. I think Bird is my chance to have part of Polly back. This thought tears me up, makes my body weightless. This dose of dog love is a quick trip to Gratitude City. I can not believe I get to touch Polly again, in whatever strange way offers itself up to me.

The photo below is of me with my daughter and Bird. This photo leads me to a star full of stars in my body, no shame, only wonder.

And so I have hope.

If you want to experience the delight and gratitude gateway drug of Aimee’s meditation practices and see the gratitude sessions we do together, check her out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sayhellomeditation/ and on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@meditationforadoptees